The Longest Night: Three Generations of Chinese Trotskyists in Defeat, Jail, Exile and Diaspora [329, 1 ed.] 9004709932, 9789004709935

Citation preview

The Longest Night

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Loren Balhorn (Berlin) David Broder (Rome) Sebastian Budgen (Paris) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London) Gavin Walker (New York)

volume 329

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

The Longest Night Three Generations of Chinese Trotskyists in Defeat, Jail, Exile, and Diaspora

Edited and translated by

Gregor Benton Yang Yang

With contributions by Au Loong-yu – Cheng Ling-fang – Walter Daum – Duan Yue – Leslie Evans – Huang Ting – Sean James – Lam Chi-leung – Jabez Lam – Lau Shan-ching – Promise Li – Nagahori Yūzō – Alexander Pantsov – Andrew Pollack – Pierre Rousset – Tang Yuen Ching – Wang Yanqi – Louisa Wei – Xu Dingming – Xu Wuzhi – Xue Feng – Larry Yao – Zhang Shaoming

leiden | boston

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024037764

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 1570-1522 isbn 978-90-04-70993-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-70994-2 (e-book) Copyright 2025 by Gregor Benton and Yang Yang. Published by Koninklijke Brill bv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill bv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill bv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill bv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements xvii Abbreviations xviii Introduction 1 Gregor Benton

part 1 The Fourth International and Chinese Trotskyist Organisations section a The Fourth International and Chinese Trotskyism, 1949–1979 Documents Sent to the usfi by Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua (1973) 66 Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua (a) Our Statement – To Be Submitted to the 10th Congress of the fi 66 (b) A Preliminary Proposal for the Formation of a “Preparatory Committee” for the Re-building of the Chinese Section of the Fourth International 68 (c) It Is Still Necessary to Draw Lessons from the Failure of Chinese T’s 70 A Letter from Wang Fanxi to the Leadership of the usfi (1975) Wang Fanxi

80

Concerns regarding the Released Chinese Trotskyists (1979) 85 (a) Chinese Trotskyists Released 85 Chinese Trotskyists Overseas (b) Statement by the 11th World Congress of the fi on the Release of the Chinese Trotskyists 87 A Comment on the Chinese Trotskyist Movement in the 1970s and the Wu Zhongxian (Ng Chung Yin) Affair (2024) 88 Pierre Rousset Chinese Trotskyists in Exile, Contacts with the Fourth International, and Efforts to Achieve Organisational Unification, 1949–1978 (2022) 91 Yang Yang

vi

contents

section b Trotskyist Organisations Starting in the 1950s Discussions on the Nature of the Chinese Revolution Led by the ccp Raised by Members of the rcp in the Early 1950s (1951) 114 (a) The Third Chinese Revolution and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist Party 114 Editors of the rcp’s Organ (b) Why Is This Civil War Called a Revolution and the Importance of This Recognition? – A Point of Departure for the Re-appraisal of the Chinese Events 126 Maki [Xiang Qing] A Letter from the rcp’s Leadership to the usfi (1974) Provisional National Committee of the rcp

137

A Proposal for the Fusion of All Trotskyists in Hong Kong Area, a Joint Proposal Submitted by Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua to the usfi (1975) Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua Why We Want Unification with the Revolutionary Marxist League (1978) 144 Unity Faction of the rcp Principles of Organisation (1979) 147 Gu He [Lou Guohua], ed. (a) How to Understand the Organisational Question? 147 Lian’gen [Wang Fanxi] and Gu He (b) Views on the Solidarity Movement of Trotskyists Abroad 154 Lian’gen and Gu He (c) Ou [Peng Shuzhi], Yun [Chen Bilan], and Their Idea of Organisation 159 Gu He (d) A Brief Comment on Organisational Principles and Methods 160 Lian’gen (e) Letter to the Seven Members of the Provisional Committee 163 Lian’gen, Gu He, Bo Chen [Sun Liangsi], and Wang Guoquan The Radical 70’s Biweekly Magazine That Shaped the Hong Kong Left (2020) 168 Promise Li

142

vii

contents

Trotskyism and the Early Pro-democracy Movement in Hong Kong, 1979–99 (2022) 177 Promise Li The Postwar Generations of Hong Kong Trotskyists and Local Social Movements (2022) 201 Au Loong-yu

section c Trotskyists on Hong Kong’s Future, 1973–1984 My Position on Hong Kong (1973) Wang Fanxi

218

Radical Alternatives in the Hong Kong Crisis (1983) Gregor Benton

224

A Revolutionary Socialist Approach to the Solution of the Hong Kong Problem (1983) 235 Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua On the Question of Hong Kong People (Especially Those with British Nationality) Staying or Leaving – Our Attitude (1984) 239 Shuang Shan [Wang Fanxi]

section d The Wu Zhongxian Case What Should a Revolutionary Do When Arrested? (1981) Wang Fanxi

246

Public Statement concerning My Illegal Arrest by the Chinese Government (1981) 255 Ng Chung-yin [Wu Zhongxian] The rcp’s Position on Wu Zhongxian’s “Fake Surrender” (1981) 261 Report on the Wu Affair (1981) 261 Lee See Appendix: A Protest Letter against the rcp’s Report on the Wu Affair from Roman [Pierre Rousset] 269

viii

contents

A Letter from the USec Bureau to rml regarding the Wu [Ng] Zhongxian Affair (1981) 272 Report on Hong Kong, International Executive Committee (iec) of the Fourth International (usfi) (1982) 276 Roman [Pierre Rousset] A Letter from Roman [Pierre Rousset] to the rml (Revolutionary Marxist League) in Hong Kong (1981) 282 Pierre Rousset A Letter from Pierre Rousset to Wu Zhongxian (1981) Pierre Rousset

284

section e Trotskyist Activities in Wenzhou and Elsewhere, 1941–1952 A Short History of the Wenzhou Trotskyist Groups, 1941–1946 (2001) Zhou Rensheng

292

Overview of Local Trotskyist Activities and Our Preliminary Suggestions on Handling the Wenzhou Trotskyists Submitted by the Wenzhou Regional Committee of the ccp (1952) 299 Wenzhou Regional Committee of the ccp Summary Report regarding Anti-Trotskyist Work in Wenzhou, Work Committee for the Round-up of the Trotskyists (1953) 308 A Report Submitted by the Ministry of Public Security regarding the Roundup of Trotskyists and Asking for Further Instructions from the Central Government (1953) 316 Introduction to the Situation of the Chinese Trotskyite Bandits (1954) The Destruction of the Wenzhou Trotskyists, 1949–1952 (2014) Xu Wuzhi

334

323

ix

contents

section f Trotskyism in Taiwan Our Views on the Taiwan Revolution (Outline for Discussion) (1977) Wang Fanxi Trotskyism and Taiwan (2022) Cheng Ling-fang

352

365

section g Chinese Trotskyists in the UK Our Proposal for the Unification of Hong Kong’s Revolutionary Marxist Movement (1978) 390 The Re-awakening Group A Conversation between Jabez Lam and Zhang Shaoming “Remembering Genshu [Wang Fanxi] and Events in the Chinese Community in the UK” (2022) 392 Jabez Lam and Zhang Shaoming

part 2 Selected Writings by Chinese and Other Trotskyists regarding China section a Frank Glass (Li Furen) and Chinese Trotskyism Frank Glass’s Selected Articles Written for the Trotskyist Press between the Late 1930s and the Early 1950s 418 Edited by Yang Yang (a) Frank Glass: Obituary 419 Baruch Hirson and Prometheus Research Library, New York (b) New Stalinist Frame-up Hits China “Trotskyists”: Chinese Bolshevik-Leninist Exposes Lies in Daily Worker Dispatch (1937) 428 Li Fu-jen [Frank Glass] (c) The Communist League of China (1940) 430 Frank Glass (d) Memory of Trotsky (1940) 437 Li Fu-jen

x

contents

(e) American Intervention in China: Resolution Adopted by the Executive Committee of the Fourth International (1941) 440 (f) Chen Duxiu: Chinese Revolutionist (1942) 444 Li Fu-jen (g) In Memoriam: Chen Qichang (1946) 451 Li Fu-jen (h) The Kuomintang Faces Its Doom (1949) 452 Li Fu-jen (i) China: A World Power (1951) 465 Li Fu-jen

section b Livio Maitan on Maoism and China The Sino-Soviet Conflict and the Crisis of the International Communist Movement (1965) 480 Livio Maitan Report on the “Cultural Revolution” in China (1969) Livio Maitan The Social Nature of China (1976) Livio Maitan

505

526

section c Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan An Interview with Chen Bilan on the Cultural Revolution (1967) Return to the Road of Trotskyism (1969) Peng Shuzhi

555

Two Purged Leaders of Early Chinese Communism (1985) Gregor Benton Remembering Peng Shuzhi (2022) Leslie Evans

587

567

540

xi

contents

section d Wang Fanxi on Bureaucratic Collectivism and Max Shachtman’s Commentary and Response, 1950–1953 Introduction 610 Walter Daum The Stalinist State in China: The Social Meaning of Mao Zedong’s Victory (1950) 618 Wang Fanxi Correspondence between Wang Fanxi and Max Shachtman, 1951–1953 631 (a) Letter from Wang Fanxi [M.Y. Wang] to Max Shachtman (1951) 631 (b) Letter from Shachtman to Wang (1952) 632 (c) Letter from Shachtman to Wang (1953) 635

section e Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin’s Selected Writings on Marxism and Trotskyism On the Twentieth Anniversary of the Transitional Programme (1957) S.Y. Wang [Wang Fanxi] The Crisis of Marxism (1985) Zheng Chaolin

661

A Selection from Wang Fanxi’s Diary, 1989–1993

688

Statement on the Tian’anmen Massacre of June 1989 Wang Fanxi

709

part 3 Memoirs and Recollections section a Jiang Junyang An Intransigent Man: In Memory of My Old Comrade Jiang Junyang (1921–2006) and Our Thirty Years in Prison (2006) 717 Li Yongjue

640

xii

contents

section b Liu Pingmei The Chinese Trotskyists at Risk, 1946–1952: The Communist Army Defeats the Kuomintang, the Trotskyist Centre Misjudges the Situation (2005) 723 Liu Pingmei Forever Persevering: A Tribute to Liu Pingmei (2008) Duan Yue

734

section c Sun Liangsi Memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986) Sun Liangsi

745

A Comment on a Book by Bo Chen [Sun Liangsi] (2011) Xu Dingming

841

Remembering Uncle Tai Leung [Da Liang, Leon, Sun Liangsi] (2022) Tang Yuen Ching

section d Wang Fanxi Remembering Wang Fanxi (2007, 2009) 847 Wang Yanqi Remembering My Father Wang Fanxi 847 Fenggang 850 Remembering Wang Fanxi (2022) Lau Shan-ching

853

Remembering Mr Wang Fanxi, “Uncle Gen” (2022) Tang Yuen Ching

856

842

xiii

contents

section e Xiong Andong Memoirs (2006) 861 Xiong Andong Tributes to Trotskyist Comrades (2007, 2014) Xiong Andong Remembering Liu Pingmei 965 A Tribute to Chen Daotong 967

965

section f Yin Kuan Remembering Yin Kuan (1983) Zheng Chaolin

971

section g Zheng Chaolin Remembering Zheng Lao [Zheng Chaolin] (2007) Li Yongjue

987

An Account of Some Events Surrounding Zheng Chaolin’s Death and Funeral 993 Zheng Hiu-fong

part 4 Correspondence and Interviews section a Correspondence between Veteran Chinese Trotskyists, Comrades, and Friends Correspondence between Eiichi Yamanishi and Wang Fanxi, 1960–1967 1003 (a) From Yamanishi to Wang (1960) 1003 (b) From Wang to Yamanishi (1961) 1006 (c) From Wang to Yamanishi (1966) 1009 (d) From Yamanishi to Wang (1967) 1010

xiv

contents

Two Letters to the Leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, Asking for the Rehabilitation of the Trotskyists (1980, 1982) 1011 Zheng Chaolin Preface: Wang Fanxi’s Letter to the Bureau of the usfi (1983) 1011 First Letter (1980) 1013 Second Letter (1982) 1015 Correspondence between Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin concerning Zheng’s Huilongwu Daifanglu (1986) 1020 (a) Letter to Zheng Chaolin 1020 Wang Fanxi (b) Letter to Wang Fanxi 1029 Zheng Chaolin Correspondence between Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi on “Late Capitalism” (1990, 1992) 1034 (a) A Letter to Wang Fanxi (1990) 1034 Zheng Chaolin (b) A Reply to Zheng Chaolin (1992) 1036 Wang Fanxi Zheng Chaolin’s Letters to Friends, 1989–1998 1040 Zheng Chaolin (a) To Huang Wen (1991) 1040 (b) To Mr Qian Bocheng (1997) 1041 (c) To Brother Qun (1997) 1042 (d) Eight Letters to Fan Yong, 1989–1998 1044 Correspondence between Chinese Intellectuals and Wang Fanxi (1990, 2000) 1052 (a) Letters between Liu Binyan and Wang Fanxi (1990) 1052 (b) Letters between Gao Fang and Wang Fanxi (2000, 2001) 1058

section b Interviews Interview with Hu Luoqing, 3 June 2011 Louisa Wei

1064

Interview with John Shum, 8 June 2011 Louisa Wei

1073

xv

contents

Interview with Xiang Qing, 17 August 2014, regarding the Hong Kong Trotskyists 1081 Yang Yang Interview with Long Hair, 27 October 2015 Yang Yang

1097

part 5 Epilogue: Revolutionary Socialist Writings in China and the Diaspora in the 2020s Introduction 1107 Au Loong-yu Courage at Sitong Bridge: The Call for Mass Action in China (2022) Ruo Yan

1113

One-Man Show Disrupted by a Nobody: On the 20th Congress of the ccp (2022) 1121 Au Loong-yu From Ürümchi to Shanghai: Demands from Chinese and Hong Kong Socialists – A Letter on Strategy and Solidarity with Uyghur Struggle (2022) 1127 Chinese and Hong Kong Socialists Solidarity with the Mass Protests Demanding the Lifting of Lockdown Restrictions and for an Anti-pandemic Effort That Is Scientific, Democratic and for the People! (2022) 1131 “Some Revolutionary Communists in China” Socialists Should Support the Popular Resistance in China (2022) Julian Yin

1137

Appendix 1: Bibliographies 1145 Chinese Research on Trotskyism in China since the 1980s 1145 Yang Yang and Gregor Benton English Language Sources on Chinese Trotskyism since 1969 1158 Sean James

xvi

contents

Articles and Books Relevant to Chinese Trotskyism and Translations into Japanese of Writings by Chinese Trotskyists Published since 1980 1161 Nagahori Yūzō Publications in Russian on Chinese Trotskyism 1167 Alexander Pantsov Papers of Leon Trotsky on China, Writings of Chinese Trotskyists in English, and English Articles on Chinese Trotskyism Collected in the Marxist Internet Archive (mia) 1169 Andrew Pollack Appendix 2: Key Organisations 1172 Appendix 3: Biographical List 1174 References 1188 Index 1206

Acknowledgements Sebastian Budgen and Bart Nijsten at hm steered this book through to publication. Au Loong-yu, Cheng Ling-fang, Walter Daum, Duan Yue, Leslie Evans, Huang Ting, Jabez Lam, members of the Lausan Collective, Lau Shan-ching, Promise Li, Tang Yuen Ching, Xu Dingming, Xue Feng, Larry Yao, and Zhang Shaoming provided invaluable contributions as well as comments and suggestions. Alexander Pantsov, Nagahori Yūzō, Sean A. James, and Andrew Pollack (a good friend, who sadly died in March 2023) helped to create the bibliographies placed at the end of the volume. The editors owe a debt of gratitude to Penelope Duggan, Daniel Gaido, Pierre Rousset, John Shum, Louisa Wei, Rebecca Urai Ayon, and Xu Wuzhi for their help and support. They are particularly indebted to Xue Feng, Wang Fanxi’s grandson, for helping to design the volume, and to him and his mother Wang Yanqi for giving their permission to publish some of Wang’s unpublished writings. Thanks also to the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, where Wang Fanxi conducted the last years of his research starting in 1975. Lastly, the editors would like to thank Lam Chi-leung and his team of volunteers in the Chinese section of the Marxist Internet Archive, without whose efforts this volume would have been a lot harder to assemble.

Abbreviations Baodiao ccp cdm ciac cic clc clb cpgb cpsu cy fi ftu gpu hkaspdmc hkctu hkfs hksar icfi iec img imt isfi iwp iysa jcpdg jrcl kmt lcr LegCo ltf mia my nkvd pla pnc prc

“The Protection of the Diaoyutai Islands” Chinese Communist Party Chinese Democracy Movement Chinese Information and Advice Centre Christian Industrial Committee Communist League of China China Labour Bulletin Communist Party of Great Britain Communist Party of the Soviet Union Communist Youth League Fourth International Hong Kong and Kowloon Federation of Trade Unions State Political Directorate (Soviet Union) Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions Hong Kong Federation of Students Hong Kong Special Administrative Region International Committee of the Fourth International International Executive Committee (of the usfi) International Marxist Group (UK) International Majority Tendency International Secretariat of the Fourth International Internationalist Workers Party International Young Socialist Alliance Joint Committee on the Promotion of Democratic Government Japanese Revolutionary Communist League Kuomintang La Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire Hong Kong Legislative Council Leninist-Trotskyist Faction Marxist Internet Archive Marxist Youth League People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs People’s Liberation Army Provisional National Committee (of rcp) People’s Republic of China

abbreviations

rcp rcy ril rml roc swp sy ty Usec usfi ysg

Revolutionary Communist Party Revolutionary Communist Youth Revolutionary Internationalist League Revolutionary Marxist League Republic of China Socialist Workers’ Party (Untied States) Socialist Youth League Trotskyist Youth League United Secretariat United Secretariat of the Fourth International Young Socialist Group

xix

Introduction Gregor Benton

Chinese Trotskyism was born in 1929 in the Soviet Union, among Communists sent to Moscow to study Marxism and military science after the defeat of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) in the towns in 1927 and the start of the ccp’s flight to the villages.1 This defeat was made even worse by Stalin’s insistence that the revolution was still on a rising tide and that the ccp should throw its remaining urban forces into suicidal insurrections, whose crushing led to the almost total annihilation of the party’s working-class base in the cities. Several hundred Chinese students sent to Moscow after the defeat were quickly convinced by Trotsky’s denunciation of the cross-class alliance with the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang (or Nationalist Party) foisted on the ccp by Moscow in 1925, in which the ccp was made to play a junior and deferential role. The ccp’s alliance with the Kuomintang was part of Stalin’s search in Asia for allies “on which to blunt the hostile pressures of the Western powers”. At the time of the alliance, Trotsky opposed Stalin and insisted on the need in China for communist independence and class struggle.2 In 1931, Chinese Trotskyists held a turbulent first congress in Shanghai that was to be their last.3 Most of them disappeared almost immediately into jail under Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. They played little part in the Japanese War (1937–1945), and even after 1945 their movement was beset by a chain of violent headwinds. Then in December 1952, at the winter equinox, twenty-one years after their founding congress, hundreds of their members and dozens of their leaders disappeared into prison under the newly founded Mao regime. Some remained behind bars for the next twenty-seven years. Critical Chinese communists in Moscow accepted Trotsky’s view that Stalin’s sacrifice of the ccp to the Kuomintang had made the party’s defeat in China inevitable. The creation in Russia of a secret Chinese branch of the Left Opposition, formed by Trotsky in 1923 to counter the “bureaucratic degeneration” of the Soviet party under Stalin, was followed by the Opposition’s importa-

1 This introduction benefited from comments by Au Loong-yu, Paul Hampton, Pierre Rousset, and Zhang Shaoming. 2 Isaacs 1961. 3 In February 1949, Peng Shuzhi staged the founding conference of his Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp), but by that time the Chinese Trotskyists had split into two probably more or less equal halves.

© Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_002

2

benton

tion into China, where Russia-returned Trotskyists showed disaffected communists Trotsky’s writings, smuggled home from Moscow. This China-based Opposition began as a supporting section of the international Left Opposition, set up by Trotsky in 1930 to win the Third International (or Comintern, formed under Lenin and Trotsky in 1919 but captured by Stalin in the 1920s) to a programme of permanent revolution. In 1938, after concluding that Stalinism could no longer be defeated by acting within organs of the Third International and its national sections, the Trotskyists founded the Fourth International (fi) in Paris. The Chinese Trotskyists were formally among its constituents, but their links to it were fragile and intermittent and for long stretches dormant. Its tie with Trotskyists inside China was definitively broken by their arrest and jailing in 1952, although remnants clung on in Hong Kong and parts of the diaspora.

… The Historical Materialism series aims to celebrate the variety of world Marxism in practice and theory, yet its coverage of Asian and particularly Chinese Marxism was thin before the appearance in 2014 of Prophets Unarmed. That monumental work of well over one thousand pages of original sources and critical analyses, the first sourcebook on Chinese Trotskyism, reignited interest in this original and creative movement of dissent. Its story had first begun to emerge from the shadows in 1980 with the publication by Oxford University Press of a translation of a memoir by the Trotskyist leader Wang Fanxi.4 Wang’s book was followed by another Trotskyist memoir (by Zheng Chaolin),5 a compendium of letters by the Trotskyist leader Chen Duxiu,6 and other similar books and articles. In the late twentieth century, the start of a revival by a new generation of young Chinese activists of the tradition of radical socialism and critical Marxism pioneered by the Trotskyists added to the appreciation outside China of the richness, depth, and relevance (faint but enduring) of that tradition. The writings of China’s Trotskyist leaders excerpted in Prophets Unarmed, frank, truthful, self-critical, and revelatory, put in poor light publications by leaders of the ccp before and since 1949, which are unswervingly loyal to its elite, turn a blind eye where necessary to the truth, and rarely if ever depart from the cliches of state ideology and the official line, seen as sacrosanct and 4 Wang Fan-hsi 1980. 5 Benton (ed.), 1997. 6 Benton (ed.), 1998.

3

introduction

central to their maintenance of power. This is why the autobiographies of early Trotskyist leaders like Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin have had an allure in China far greater than might have been expected given their authors’ scant political achievements. The appearance in Japan, Europe, and North America of translations of Chinese Trotskyist books has had a retroactive impact in China itself, where their publication had long been unthinkable. Their publication overseas helped draw attention to them and speeded their release to a wider domestic public, and may also have helped speed the release in 1979 of the final batch of Trotskyist prisoners.

… This sourcebook carries memoirs and biographical and other writings of the Chinese Trotskyists, mainly focused on events since 1945 and theoretical essays written since 1949 concerning more recent developments in China, the Soviet Union, and the world communist movement. At some points, it extends to writings about events and activities from earlier years, where these were unavailable for inclusion in the earlier volume. The Longest Night is a sequel to Prophets Unarmed, in that it takes the story of Chinese Trotskyism beyond 1949, the year of Mao Zedong’s victory at national level and of the Trotskyists’ imminent destruction. The title of the earlier volume borrows Niccolò Machiavelli’s distinction between prophets unarmed (like the Chinese Trotskyists), doomed to ruin however much admired, and prophets armed (like Mao), who “always conquer”.7 The title of the present volume draws on a line from a poem by the Chinese Trotskyist leader Zheng Chaolin conceived in prison in 1959, the seventh anniversary of the Trotskyists’ arrest in December 1952. The poem pictures the jailed Trotskyists in darkness at the time of the winter solstice, “the longest night”, the exact day of their netting up. Each stanza ends with a reference to Zheng’s separation both from his party and from his beloved wife Wu Jingru, who lived out her last couple of decades in poverty and isolation, blind (even more so than Zheng Chaolin in his old age) and left crippled by rampaging Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The poem also asserts Zheng’s belief in the inevitability of socialism, inexorable as the changing of seasons: The light today dies soonest, tonight’s the longest night.

7 This distinction was first made in a Trotskyist context by Isaac Deutscher.

4

benton

Looking back across these seven years, I recall the night that broke our hearts in two. When yin attains its limit, yang begins to grow, and heat and cold eventually swap places. The years spin round at ever greater speed, while I pursue my lonely, dreary course. The subtitle, Three Generations of Chinese Trotskyists in Defeat, Jail, Exile, and Diaspora, refers to the three ages of Chinese Trotskyism: the founding generation around Chen Duxiu, Zheng Chaolin, Wang Fanxi, and Peng Shuzhi, who joined the Opposition after their expulsion from the Chinese Communist Party (ccp); the first generation of those who (after 1931) did not first pass through the ranks of the ccp before becoming Trotskyists; and those who joined the Trotskyist movement after 1949, mainly in Hong Kong. But the “generations” are mere age cohorts that overlap and interact. Surviving members of the first two generations helped bring the third into being and maintained close links with it, until their eventual passing away. Exile refers to the Trotskyists who left China around 1949, either for Hong Kong and Macao or for abroad. Exile and diaspora became interlinked, as Trotskyist refugees sank roots outside the Chinese mainland and Trotskyism began to make minute inroads into settled communities of migrant and ethnic Chinese. Prophets Unarmed included major excerpts from the memoirs of Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin, which have become established classics of the Chinese Revolution. Nearly all the memoirs in the present volume are by less-known or unknown members of the second and third generations, but they occasionally include recollections by and about members of the first. The volume also includes a small number of letters, a tiny sample of the huge volume of correspondence that passed between Chinese Trotskyists scattered across the globe after the 1952 clampdown. The three-way correspondence that started up after Zheng Chaolin’s release from prison in 1979 between him and Wang Fanxi (in Leeds) and Lou Guohua (in Hong Kong) includes hundreds of archived letters sent to Wang by Zheng and Lou, while Zheng’s niece in Shanghai has control of hundreds of letters from Wang and Lou to Zheng. The fate of Wang and Lou’s letters to Shanghai is unclear, for Wang was not in the habit of keeping copies. In recent years, some of Zheng’s letters have been put up for sale on the internet, it is unclear by whom. Wang’s letters to Shanghai and to his hometown in Zhejiang also seem to have become “collectibles” in China.8 8 Philately remains popular in China. Chinese philatelists collect not just stamps and “covers”

introduction

5

Together, this and the previous volume tell the tragic story of Chinese Trotskyism. The sources include original documents of the movement, hostile Chinese and Russian government reports, memoirs by first- and secondgeneration Chinese Trotskyists, statements by Chinese Trotskyist leaders, correspondence among those leaders and with Trotskyists in other countries, eyewitness commentary by friends and enemies, retrospective commentary by specialist historians, and recollections by sympathetic observers and members of the Trotskyists’ present-day progeny. Most of the writings included in Prophets Unarmed are memoirs and post-1949 reflections by early leaders and founders of Chinese Trotskyism, including Chen Duxiu, Zheng Chaolin, Wang Fanxi, and Peng Shuzhi. They deal chiefly with the movement’s early history, in the two decades between its birth in 1929 and its destruction starting in 1949, and reflect on the course of their movement during the civil wars between the Kuomintang and the ccp (1927–1937 and 1946–1949) and the Resistance War against Japan (1937–1945). They encroach only occasionally on developments after 1949. The present volume focuses on Chinese Trotskyism in the postwar years and after 1949. Its contents are more or less equally divided between memoirs and documents by veteran survivors of the founding generation not included in the first volume and others by younger Trotskyists of the second and third generations, as well as essays by historians of Chinese Trotskyism. The veterans had begun their revolutionary careers in the ccp and joined the Opposition as a result of their direct experience of the ccp’s defeat in 1927. Their writings excerpted in Prophets Unarmed talk chiefly about the revolution in the 1920s and the founding and early years of Chinese Trotskyism, in the Soviet Union and in China, in the 1930s. Members of the second and third generations, on the other hand, were Trotskyists from the start. Another difference between the two volumes is that the veteran leaders whose work is covered by the prequel were active (when out of prison) mainly in Shanghai, whereas the membership of the second generation (before its own jailing) was more widely spread, in Wenzhou, Chongqing, and other provincial cities. Their memoirs deal in part with activities during the Japanese War and the civil war of 1946–1949. They thus cover a wider geographical area than the first volume and a different time-span. The main difference is that only the second volume systematically covers Trotskyism under the People’s Republic of China (prc) and in the immediate run-up to it. As a token of hope, it concludes with a brief

but their contents. This may account for the interest in Zheng’s and Wang’s letters, which have philatelic as well as historic value.

6

benton

survey of a number of present-day movements in China, some of which have at least a slender lineal or lateral tie to Trotskyism.

… As part of a movement that aspired to resurrect the communist vision of international revolution led by disciplined professionals, the Chinese Trotskyists based their thinking on Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution, his main contribution to Marxist theoretical debate. Trotsky summarised his theory in 1929 as “a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to socialist measures and to war against reaction from without; that is, a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in complete liquidation”. At the same time, it would “give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution”, for only its victorious passage to the West could “protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism”.9 The Chinese Revolution featured centrally in the debate about permanent revolution, of which Trotsky saw it as a major practical test. Permanent revolution was the underlying principle of Chinese Trotskyist strategy, but its tactical focus changed according to circumstance. The early history of the movement, until the 1952 crackdown, can be found in the memoirs excerpted in Prophets Unarmed. At the time of their unification conference in Shanghai in 1931, marking the formal creation of the Chinese Left Opposition, Trotsky’s Chinese followers rejected the ccp’s pursuit of an imminent “revolutionary high tide”, a wrong strategy that they attributed to Stalin’s unwillingness to face up to the reality of the defeat of 1927 as a result of his own misdirection of it. Instead, they resolved to campaign for a National (i.e., Constituent) Assembly as a step towards rebuilding the shattered trade unions and the urban party in China, while insisting (with Trotsky) that the future Chinese revolution would be socialist in character from the outset. But their plans got nowhere, for within months almost their entire leadership was imprisoned under emergency laws proclaimed by the Kuomintang in 1931. Even so, their focus on a democratic assembly became their main badge of identification. In 1937, the start of Japan’s full-scale invasion of China led to the disintegration of the Kuomintang government in Nanjing and the release of its remaining political prisoners, including Trotskyists (some had been freed a little earlier).

9 From the introduction to The Permanent Revolution, published in Berlin in November 1929.

introduction

7

During the Resistance War (1937–1945) and its continuation in the Pacific War (1941–1945), two political issues occupied the Chinese Trotskyists. One was the practical role they should play in the war. In 1938, Chen Duxiu, the leader of the Chinese Trotskyists in 1931, expressed his dissatisfaction with what he saw as his comrades’ failure to engage in new forms of political and military activity in the new context of the war. He proposed a campaign to unite all political tendencies independent of both the Kuomintang and the ccp on a broad programme of freedom, democracy, and land reform and to infiltrate Nationalist armed forces active in the resistance, among whose generals Chen could count on friends and supporters from his pre-communist past. A handful of Trotskyists around Wang Fanxi tried to implement Chen’s plan but were thwarted when Chen’s main contact among the generals was relieved of his command, probably because of his tie to Chen. So the Trotskyists played no real part in the resistance apart from scattered attempts here and there to set up guerrilla forces in some rural areas. A second issue uppermost in their minds was the nature of China’s resistance war. One faction (around Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin) argued that once the Pacific War broke out, America would become the dominant power and the Trotskyists’ attitude towards the Kuomintang-led war should “lay more stress on the victory of the revolution than of the war”, a policy they called victoryism, in an allusion to Lenin’s policy of defeatism. (This issue is discussed in greater detail later in this introduction.) Another faction, around Peng Shuzhi and Liu Jialiang, which ended up as the majority, argued a less radical position, that the war would remain progressive unless British or American troops fought Japan on Chinese soil.10 The resulting controversy was of no practical account, since the Trotskyists were too marginal to influence the course of the resistance, but it led to new and separate problems within the Trotskyist party, regarding the status and rights of minorities. The Wang-Zheng minority requested a continuation of the debate on the war in the party’s paper and its internal bulletin, but their request was refused and the movement split. The Wang-Zheng group continued to argue for greater internal democracy, whereas the Peng-Liu group favoured a more centralised internal regime. The split, which started in 1941, was never mended. Even after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the two Trotskyist factions remained few in number and weakened by the split, but both resumed their publishing and organising activities and made new recruits. The WangZheng group formed a Marxist Youth League in Shanghai that claimed to be a

10

Wang Fan-hsi 1980, p. 234.

8

benton

main force behind the student movement in Shanghai in 1946–1948. They also worked in industry, where they formed trade unions and led strikes. They could see in 1945 that a revolution in China was imminent, but Wang later conceded that he and his comrades were “ideologically and organisationally unprepared for it when it actually broke out”.11 The Peng-Liu group set up similar organisations and extended its influence in schools and factories. However, both groups remained tiny, with just a couple of hundred core members between them and a few hundred more sympathisers (and no prospect of reunification), at a time when Mao commanded millions. Each group started to move at more or less the same time towards setting up a party, the Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp) in late 1948, in Peng’s case, and the Internationalist Workers Party (iwp) in April 1949, in Wang and Zheng’s. However, by that time the People’s Liberation Army under Mao was on the brink of seizing power at the national level, so neither of the two new parties ever came to anything. The iwp under Zheng Chaolin resolved to stay in China under ccp rule, and sent Wang Fanxi to Hong Kong to set up a supposedly safe coordinating centre, after dissolving horizontal links. But Wang was deported almost immediately to Macao by the British colonial authorities, anxious to avoid upsetting the Communists in charge across the border. The rcp took a different course. Its main leadership, including Peng and Liu Jialiang, fled to Hong Kong. Peng and his wife Chen Bilan eventually ended up in Paris by way of Vietnam, where Liu Jialiang was assassinated by Vietnamese Communists. Peng and Chen stayed in Paris from 1951 to 1972. They then moved to Los Angeles, where they lived until Peng’s death in 1983. In late 1949 and early 1950, members of the Zheng-Wang group in Shanghai continued to publish a journal, Marxist Youth, and to lead strikes and other campaigns. Zheng (in Shanghai) and Wang (in Macao) wrote about Stalinism and the Soviet Union in light of events in China and about the causes of Mao’s victory. Topics included the nature of the state Mao and his followers had established, the reasons for the Trotskyists’ failure, and the nature of Maoism and its tie to Stalinism. Peng and Liu also wrote from their places of exile criticising the Maoists and defending the Trotskyist legacy. Some of those writings are contained in the prequel, others here. In December 1952, the net fell on the Trotskyist movement in China, putting an immediate end to the debate within the country, although both Wang and Peng continued their thinking and writing in solitude and exile.

11

Wang Fan-hsi 1980, p. 246.

introduction

9

Chinese Trotskyism and the Peasants The social strata from which the Chinese Trotskyist leadership came was much the same as that of the top leadership of the early ccp, which provided its first recruits. In the highest bodies of the official party, Mao was the sole peasant among largely urban intellectuals and the occasional worker. The Trotskyists had no peasant leaders whatsoever and little presence in the villages. What kept the Trotskyists in the towns when the ccp ended up mainly in the countryside? The ccp’s rural transfer was not, at first, the outcome of a strategic decision, as Wang Fanxi points out in his book on Mao.12 The role played by the Soviet Union in training the Kuomintang, Stalin’s downplaying of the workers’ movement in favour of a focus on deals with bourgeois nationalist forces, and the Comintern’s turn towards peasant work and armed peasant uprisings even before the April 1927 massacre naturally drove the ccp in the direction of a policy based on peasant mobilisations. However, its peasant line began, in Wang’s words, “as a method, not a principle”. Only gradually, in the course of a ten-year evolution, did it acquire an explicitly strategic form. This transition was forced on the communists by the Kuomintang’s military ascendancy, especially in the towns, where it retained power almost to the end of China’s on-off civil war. Given the chance, the ccp would have kept the urban workers as its chief tactical and strategic focus. It even pretended in its propaganda that it continued to be rooted in the proletariat, as Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy prescribed. However, an urban focus became impossible, as a result of the defeat in the towns in 1927 and then the Japanese occupation, which was chiefly citybased. In the late 1930s, the old strategy was shelved and the new method became a principle. The Chinese Trotskyists, for their part, faced the same dangers as the official party in the cities, where the Kuomintang made no distinction between them and it. However, unlike the Maoists they made no attempt to stake out a lasting presence in the countryside, which for them was a place of great danger, a patchwork of territories ruled by government militias, local forces, units of Chiang Kai-shek’s National Armed Forces, landlord forces, private armies, sectarian armed forces, and regular and irregular units of the Chinese Red Army. Here and there, they established rudimentary rural bases, but these were quickly destroyed by local reactionaries, communists, Japanese security forces, or the government. In Russia, the Chinese Trotskyists were at even greater risk. Their hundreds of supporters among the Chinese communists sent

12

Wang Fanxi 2019.

10

benton

to study in the Soviet Union were easy prey for the Russian nkvd and the ccp’s own fledgling intelligence agency in Moscow. Uniquely among revolutionaries worldwide, with the possible exception of Vietnam, these Trotskyists in China faced not one big enemy but two. They were systematically hunted down not just by the Kuomintang but also, in the villages and on the exceedingly rare occasions that Trotskyist nuclei emerged in the Chinese Red Army, by the ccp. The Chinese Trotskyists faced an array of enemies deadlier at the time than any revolutionary movement anywhere. As for the two main enemies, the Kuomintang and the communists, it is hard to say which inflicted the greater damage.

Chinese Trotskyism and Democracy Trotskyism is usually portrayed by its rightwing critics as violent and extremist and by its Stalinist enemies in the 1930s as the twin of fascism. However, Trotsky made the struggle for democracy a main plank in his political platform, alongside and as part of the strategy of permanent revolution and a direct prelude to socialist revolution, to which it was bound “by an unbroken chain”. He defined the Stalinist regime in Russia as a degenerated workers’ state precisely because democratic control of the state and industry by workers’ soviets had been overthrown by a dictatorship exercised by an unaccountable bureaucratic clique. After Trotsky’s death in 1940 and the postwar extension of Stalinist rule to Eastern Europe and ultimately to China and elsewhere in Asia (in those cases by leaders partly independent of Stalin), leaders of the fi coined the term “deformed workers’ state” to describe states created in the image of Stalinist Russia. In such states, the means of production were collectively owned (by the state) but the working class had never held political power. Rather than lapse as a result of adverse circumstances into bureaucratic dictatorship, as happened in Russia because of the revolution’s failure to spread, they were disfigured from the start, the product not of revolution but of conquest by a Russian or (in China’s case) indigenous army. In Russia, according to this analysis, Trotskyists should fight for the restoration of workers’ democracy; in deformed workers’ states, for its establishment. Chinese Trotskyism was practically synonymous with this commitment to democracy, which became extinct in the world communist movement under Stalin. Its association with democracy started with Chen Duxiu, the founding giant of first the ccp and then of the Chinese Left Opposition. Chen Duxiu was throughout his life a symbol of China’s democratic revolution, which he personified. He was a revolutionary democrat long before he became a com-

introduction

11

munist, and remained one even after he began, towards the end of his life, to question some fundamental tenets of Leninism – democracy was, according to Wang Fanxi, his first and last love. As we have seen, Chen and the Chinese Trotskyists campaigned from the very start of their emergence as a political organisation on a platform calling for a democratic assembly, at a time when the official Party was embarked on a putschist campaign that led to its expulsion from the towns and, in 1934, its temporary defeat even in the villages. Both factions of Chinese Trotskyism continued to campaign right up to the destruction of their movement by the Mao regime on a platform calling for the restoration in China of democracy, in the form of a constituent assembly. Even after the 1941 split in Chinese Trotskyism, the Wang-Zheng group maintained their attachment to pluralism and democratic debate within their party, and although the internal regime of Peng’s group was more centralist, it too retained its public attachment to socialism with democracy. After 1949, one of the main targets of criticism by Trotskyists of all stripes was the Mao regime’s authoritarian and even totalitarian system, a root source in their view of most of its other failings. So democracy was the thread that connected all phases of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. Members of the ccp took their political line directly from the party centre which took it in turn from the Comintern in Moscow, acting by the mid 1920s on the orders of Stalin and his allies. In the 1920s, Moscow created a network in the ccp of loyal and unquestioning transmitters of its line. Given the awe in which the young party held the Soviet Union, as the homeland of the first and only successful proletarian revolution, its Mecca, questioning the Comintern was tantamount to treason. Even a famously independent-minded veteran like Chen Duxiu was for a long time unable to withstand the pressure from Moscow, despite his strong misgivings about the alliance with the Kuomintang. The relationship between the Chinese Trotskyists and Trotsky was, for obvious reasons, quite different from that between the ccp and Moscow, for Trotsky’s authority over them was of another kind. It is true that the idea of pursuing the tactic of a constituent assembly after the ccp’s defeat in 1927 came from Trotsky, who saw it as the best way of leading the ccp out of isolation. However, Trotsky provided only the broad outlines of a strategy. This light touch was inevitable given Trotsky’s inability to intervene directly and in detail in the Chinese Trotskyists’ debate, but it was also Trotsky’s style. Thus members of the different Chinese Trotskyist factions that merged in 1931 welcomed his proposal but interpreted it in different ways. Peng Shuzhi, for example, attacked the idea that in China the (coming) third revolution would “be proletarian from the very start” and “bourgeois-democratic tasks would be achieved as a by-product of proletarian revolution”. Chen Duxiu too had his own opinions. Peng, Chen, and

12

benton

others later fleshed out their views, which soon developed along different lines. Unhampered by the strict controls to which the official Party was subjected, including the presence in China of Comintern plenipotentiaries authorised to impose Stalin’s view, the Trotskyists had to work out their own programme and how to implement it. The fact that they had to develop their arguments on not one but three fronts, against the Chinese government and its communist opposition and under the critical gaze of their own comrades, made them doubly disputatious.

Fractious and Fissiparous The Trotskyist movement in China was inclined from the start to factionalism, a familiar feature of revolutionary communism everywhere and always. Set up under the name Communist League of China at a three-day Unification Conference that began in Shanghai on 1 May 1931, its initial constituents were four warring factions that might never have united but for Trotsky’s order, issued on 8 January 1931, to fuse “this very day!” Wang Fanxi said the leaders of the four groups were a mixed bunch, driven mostly by sincere commitment but in some cases by “trivial and petty issues” as well as “personal ambition and factional prejudice”.13 The factional fighting was at its worst in the run-up to the congress, which was accompanied by a succession of splits and regroupments. It died down after Trotsky’s intervention and support for Chen Duxiu but revived in the mid 1930s, among those Trotskyists who had evaded arrest in 1931–1932 or been released. At first, Chen Duxiu was a main target of the factional sniping. Many younger Trotskyists found it hard to accept him as their leader, blaming him (unfairly, in Trotsky’s view) for the policies that had led to the ccp’s defeat in 1927. Chen Duxiu’s most vocal critic was Liu Renjing, who was older than most of the Trotskyists and could boast of having actually met with Trotsky (in Prinkipo in Turkey in 1929). This in Liu’s view made him the Chinese Trotskyists’ natural leader. In the mid 1930s, after the first destruction of the movement (by Chiang Kai-shek), Liu and his supporters set up a provisional anti-Chen Central Committee composed of Trotskyists still at large, who expelled Chen for refusing to criticise his own earlier “opportunism”. However, the new body soon collapsed. Liu himself recanted to the authorities (first to the Kuomintang in 1934 after his arrest, but a second time in 1949, to the ccp, with a statement denouncing

13

Wang Fan-hsi 1980, pp. 132–135.

introduction

13

Trotskyism). A further ground for instability was Chen Duxiu’s strong antipathy towards the British-born Trotskyist Frank Glass (Li Furen), who was working at the time for the Trotskyists in Shanghai, and whose role (as a foreigner) reminded Chen of the part played by Russian interference in the 1927 defeat. Chen, a patriot and a man of strong emotions, found the role of non-Chinese in the movement harmful and demeaning. He also felt bitter towards Peng Shuzhi, whom he blamed for trying to sabotage unification in 1931. The animosity continued in prison, after Chen and Peng’s arrest in 1932 and after their subsequent release, for the two were quite different not just in politics but in character. It is not difficult to understand the Chinese Trotskyists’ proneness to splits. Its main cause was the Trotskyists’ lack of a mass base. Small organisations without a mass following tend more than big ones to reflect and magnify the leader’s role. Irrelevant in wider politics, they easily degenerate into regimes of petty quarrels and miniature power grabs, whereas big organisations have gravitational mass (solidified in bureaucracy and hierarchy) that sustains cohesion and can hold centrifugal ambitions in check.14 Between 1927 and 1937, the ccp too was riven by factions and internecine rivalries, fuelled by “localism” (i.e., regional interests) and Moscow’s meddling. This factionalism led to outbreaks of mass fratricide. By 1938, however, after the chemical fusion wrought on the ccp leadership by the Long March, the wish for party unity in the Japanese War won out over the tendency to split. Obstacles to unity were removed by purges. Unlike the Trotskyists, the ccp was cemented by the material and financial resources it received from Moscow and taxes raised from its rural soviets. The importation of a State Security Bureau, copying Stalin’s State Political Directorate,15 and the ccp’s extreme militarisation starting in 1927 made dissent from the top command even more dangerous and helped hold the ccp to a steady course after Mao’s capture of its leadership in the mid to late 1930s. The minuscule Trotskyist factions had no such foreign supports and nothing other than moral persuasion with which to discipline their ranks. 14

15

Stalin played a minor part in the revolution and owed his rise to power in the dictatorship not to any qualities he displayed as leader but to the Soviet political machine feeling him out and spotting his natural affinity for the job. His role, as Trotsky explained, in The Revolution Betrayed (ch. 5), was less a summing up of his record than a reflection of Russia’s transition to bureaucratic rule. Even Mao, famous for his intractability, was frustrated by his Party’s bureaucratic intransigence and reluctance to reflect in all respects his bold schemes and romantic vision, despite its tactical deification of him. He fought hard in the 1960s to bring the Party apparatus to heel but was never able to impose a lasting stamp on it. Wang, Yuhua, 2014.

14

benton

The split that happened in Chinese Trotskyism in May 1941 focused at one level on the question of how to characterise China’s war against Japan. However, it also concerned, as we have seen, the issue of inner-party democracy. In 1945, the Trotskyists’ differences on the nature of the war were consigned to history by the Japanese surrender, but the dispute about inner-party democracy refused to go away. The split started at the height of the Japanese War, when the Chinese Trotskyists were no less isolated (in Shanghai) than they had been in prison in the 1930s. Advice from Trotsky and exposure to broader debates in the world Trotskyist movement might have helped prevent their descent into internal wrangling. However, the split happened after the assassination of Trotsky (in August 1940), with whom ties had in any case been cut by the war. Chen Duxiu might also have been able to play a role in restoring unity if his and Peng’s mutual antagonism could have been overcome, but Chen’s illness and his death in 1942 removed that possibility. As for the fi, the attention of its European sections was focused on the nazi threat.

Three Chinese Trotskyist Leaders A look at the character and early political formation of the three main leaders of Chinese Trotskyism, Peng Shuzhi, Wang Fanxi, and Zheng Chaolin, is essential for an understanding of the 1941 split. The age gap between the three men was relatively small (Peng was born in 1895, Zheng in 1901, and Wang in 1907), but each belonged to a different social and political generation. Peng Shuzhi’s induction into politics was different from that of both Zheng and Wang. In the following brief sketches, the particular qualities of each are considered comparatively, in an attempt to explain their different roles in Chinese Trotskyism. Peng Shuzhi (1895–1983) Peng Shuzhi was a member of the ccp’s Central Committee after 1925 and chief editor of its organ during the 1925–1927 revolution, after his return from Moscow. He was expelled as a Trotskyist in 1929, together with Chen Duxiu. After going into exile in 1949, he lived first in Paris and then in Los Angeles. Peng’s early political career has been likened by his communist critics, starting with the ccp martyr Cai Hesen in 1927 and later by the renegade Zhang Guotao, to that of the ccp leader Wang Ming (aka Chen Shaoyu), who reached Moscow in 1925.16 Wang Ming rose into the ccp leadership precipitously, as its

16

See the three documents collected in Benton, “Two Purged Leaders”, in this volume.

introduction

15

best-known “helicopter” and Moscow’s protege. He later became Mao’s main rival in the leadership before his defeat in the inner-party struggle in the early 1940s. The Trotskyist Zheng Chaolin repeated Cai and Zhang’s characterisation of Peng as a “Wang Ming before Wang Ming”, not just Wang Ming’s double but his forerunner and archetype. This equating of Peng and Wang Ming is at first sight implausible, for Wang was the leader of the ccp’s extreme Stalinist faction whereas Peng joined the Trotskyists. However, the analogy highlights undeniable parallels between the two men. Their political positions ended up diametrically opposed on fundamental counts. However, their commonalities help explain Peng’s political character, in particular his attitude to inner-party democracy, and the inevitability of his falling out with Chen Duxiu (in 1931) and with Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi (in 1941). Like Wang Ming, Peng started his career in the ccp not in China but in Moscow, where he arrived in 1921, four years before Wang. His early experience of politics before the age of twenty was minimal, although in his memoir he recalled supporting patriotic protests against the warlord ruler Yuan Shikai in 1915. Like most educated Chinese of his generation, including Zheng Chaolin, the young Peng was schooled in Confucianism. Indeed, Confucius was his nickname among Chinese in Moscow and later in the Chinese Trotskyist movement, a nickname he gained on account of his bookish ways, schoolmasterly style, and projection of an aura of infallible authority. Zheng Chaolin remembered him in the late 1990s as “a typical old Confucian gentleman, very learned”, who had “read lots of Marxist books, and could quote them readily. He had written quite a lot too, and … loved to hold forth”.17 Peng remained in his native village in Hunan, as teacher in an old-style school, until February 1920, ten months after the start of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and the birth of mass politics in China. In the village, he made a brief acquaintance with the thinking of Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Hu Shi, and other contributors to New Youth, the journal most associated with May Fourth.18 It was not until September 1920 that he arrived in Shanghai, where he briefly enrolled in the Chinese Socialist Youth League, a predecessor of the ccp. He left a little over four months later, in February 1921, for Russia, at the age of twenty-six, to join the Comintern’s University for the Toilers of the East.19 Along

17 18

19

Quoted in Wu Jimin 2008, 77. May Fourth, which took its name from student demonstrations against China’s warlord government, revitalised Chinese political life and paved the way for the founding of the ccp. It rejected Confucianism in favour of a modern humanistic, democratic, scientific outlook. Bianco 1985, p. 512.

16

benton

with Liu Shaoqi and other subsequently famous revolutionaries, he joined the ccp in Moscow and helped lead its Russian branch. He therefore played little part in the revolutionary struggle in China before taking up his Moscow job. He returned to China in the summer of 1924. Wang Ming followed a similar path. He joined the ccp shortly before leaving China in 1925. Neither he nor Peng had any exposure before their departure for Moscow to militant action of the sort that Zheng Chaolin experienced in France, let alone the baptism of fire that communist exiles of Wang Fanxi’s generation underwent. Before their Moscow recruitment, neither Peng nor Wang Ming had more than a smattering of Marxist political theory, or for that matter of politics or philosophy of any description. They learned Soviet-style “Marxism” in Moscow, in a hothouse world of power struggles, bureaucratic deals, and Stalinist-style intrigues. Both enjoyed the exclusive privilege in Russia (shared in Peng’s case with Luo Yinong, to whom he played second fiddle) of being members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (cpsu), in receipt of a salary and better fed and clothed than the Chinese student masses. The latter, in contrast, remained second-class communists, members of the ccp’s Russian branch, although in principle communists of whatever nationality were supposed to join the party not of their nationality but of their place of residence. Many Chinese students resented their overlookers’ privileged position. After Peng and Wang Ming’s repatriation to China, their job was to impose the Comintern line on the ccp. Both managed because of their Soviet link (Grigori Voitinsky in Peng’s case, Pavel Mif in Wang Ming’s) to shoot straight into the top leadership of the ccp, untried and unelected. Both took back to China a loyal clique, through which to impose their line. Both were charged by Moscow with “Bolshevising” the ccp, i.e., clamping it into a frame of “iron discipline” and extreme centralisation. In Moscow, both picked up Stalinist attitudes, habits, and connections, and they made their name in China by mouthing Russian theories. Both rejected the idea of informed debate and the affirmation of political diversity. So the Peng-Wang Ming equation was true in most fundamental senses in their early communist careers. However, the analogy should not be stretched too far, for in time Peng became an Oppositionist and remained a Trotskyist throughout his life, whereas Wang Ming was the ccp’s best-known Stalinist. Wang Fanxi (1907–2002) Wang Fanxi was a thinker and creative writer who under other circumstances might have achieved intellectual and political renown. He started his literary career in 1925 with a contribution to the influential literary journal Yusi, founded in 1924 by a circle of luminaries of modern Chinese literature that included

introduction

17

Lu Xun and his younger brother Zhou Zuoren.20 Peng, in contrast, was a onedimensional political figure with fewer strings to his intellectual bow than other Trotskyist leaders, notably Chen Duxiu and Peng’s two younger rivals, Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin. In the years during which Trotskyism had an organised presence in China, Wang abandoned his independent writing, although he continued his translation work, both for the party (he and Zheng Chaolin translated Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and other books in Japanese-occupied Shanghai) and as a much needed source of income. However, he returned to independent literary activities after his journey in 1949 into enforced exile. On the one hand, he kept up a commentary from a revolutionary socialist standpoint on Chinese and world affairs and joined in the debates within the fi, to the extent that it was physically possible for him to acquire fi documents and stay in touch across oceans. He saw his study on Mao Zedong Thought as his most important achievement while in exile. At the same time, he resumed his creative writing. He wrote plays and film scripts while in Macao, and introduced and translated a wide range of books on literary and political themes, including Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, Che Guevara’s diaries, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poetry.21 He called this writing “mercenary”, for he had no other source of income apart from a pittance derived from teaching. He needed the money he earned from writing both for himself and in order to make clandestine remittances to his family in China. Among the pen-names he used when publishing non-political work was Hui Quan, a rendering in his native Zhejiang dialect of Mandarin wei qian, “for money”. Wang was not absolutely hostile to Mao in the same unrelenting way as Peng. On the contrary, he was well aware of Mao’s accomplishments and not afraid to pay tribute to them. He gave his view on Mao, comparing him with Liu Shaoqi,22 Mao’s practical antithesis, in an essay written during the Cultural Revolution in 1967 (and republished in 1974): In many respects, Mao and Liu represent two opposing types. Mao tends towards revolutionary “romanticism”, Liu towards revolutionary “realism”. Mao has the air of both a Chinese peasant and an old-style Chinese scholar, while Liu represents the new-style intellectuals, who are closer

20 21 22

Schwarcz 1986. Yusi, literally “threads of talk”, had the English name Tattler. Zhu Zheng (ed.), 2018, 3 vols. Wang Fanxi’s archive is held in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University. Liu Shaoqi, together with his fellow “rightist” Deng Xiaoping, was denounced during the Cultural Revolution as a “capitalist roader” who had betrayed socialism.

18

benton

to the modern workers. Mao’s learning is mainly Chinese, while Liu’s knowledge of Chinese classical scholarship is quite shallow. Mao began delving into Marxism-Leninism only after establishing a political presence, whereas Liu had received an education in Marxism overseas, before joining the revolution. Mao has great talent and a bold vision, worships heroes, and is deeply imbued with kingly and imperial attitudes, while Liu is cautious and meticulous, close to the common people, and more in tune with democracy. Mao is bold and decisive in action and a courageous innovator, and he emphasises subjective initiative, while Liu is sober, conforms to conventions, and keeps an eye on objective circumstances. Mao has little patience, and considers that the end justifies the means. “Dogmas” cannot constrain him. Liu advances steadily and sees the connection between ends and tactics – principles have a certain hold on him. Mao has all along worked among students, peasants, and soldiers and followed a martial path, while Liu has focused on the workers’ movement, Party affairs, and planning and organising the Party machine. In a word, the two differ greatly in their strengths and weaknesses. They are not of the same type, but are of opposite types. […] Compared to Mao’s nationalist perspective, Liu is an internationalist. […] [However,] without Mao’s “nationalism”, Liu’s “internationalism” could never take root in China’s backward soil. […] Mao manifests the naïve egalitarianism of the peasantry; the wild imagination and impractical ideals of the old scholar-gentry; datong, “a world for all”, an idea subscribed to by many, from Confucius to Sun Yat-sen; the belief in “Communism in one country”, an idea borrowed from Stalin but further refined by Mao. Practising and implementing such policies reveals Mao’s courage, his great talent, and his innovative will. […] Mao has been an outstanding tactician, an artful and cunning manipulator who is prepared to give up principles for temporary tactical gain.23 Although Wang never expressed an explicit preference for either of the ccp leaders, he leant more towards the intrepid Mao than towards the cautious Liu. However, he did not see the difference between the two men as fundamental, and argued instead that Mao stood for the radical, Liu for the conservative wing of the ccp bureaucracy.24 Wang admired Mao’s fighting spirit and welcomed 23 24

Shuang Shan (Wang Fanxi) 1967, reproduced in Shuang Shan 1974. For a rough English translation, see W.F.H. (Wang Fanxi) 1967, pp. 76–80. Peng Shuzhi, in the United States, backed Liu Shaoqi and argued that “Liu’s victory [over Mao in the 1960s] could be a first phase in the development of a real revolutionary struggle

introduction

19

his mobilisation of youthful energy against bureaucratic privilege in the late 1960s, which he hoped might – unintentionally rather than by design – whip up a great wind to spread the seeds of revolt more widely and open the way by accident to a “true anti-bureaucratic, democratic revolution”. Yet he also recommended supporting parts of Liu’s programme and engaging in united action with his faction if the chance arose, for although Liu and Deng Xiaoping were too timid to spark a revolution, stood for the status quo in China, and were more obviously Stalinist than Mao, Wang felt that on some issues (particularly democracy) their programme was closer than Mao’s to that of the Trotskyists.25 As I wrote in my introduction to Wang’s Mao Zedong Thought, Wang’s view on Mao was characteristic of his entire style of commentary: measured, generous, and void of invective, despite Mao’s imprisoning and murder of Wang’s close friends and relatives. Peng, on the other hand, bore grudges that spoiled his judgment and betrayed a vindictive streak. Here I am thinking of his denunciation of Chen Duxiu in the years before Chen’s death, as a revolutionary who “lost his integrity in his later years”, whereas not just Wang but Trotsky continued to view Chen as a comrade and leader; and of his and Chen Bilan’s attacks on the integrity of the communist martyr Qu Qiubai, who ousted Peng from the party’s standing committee in 1927. Trotsky did not share Peng’s contempt for Qu, whose ideas he said in 1928 were “worthy of consideration”. In 1930, the ccp’s arch-Stalinist Wang Ming denounced Qu as a “semi-Trotskyist”, and later he was again denounced for “semi-Trotskyism”, sacked from his political posts, and demoted to working for the ccp in the League of Left-Wing Writers. In 1935, he was left behind in Jiangxi at the start of the Long March, ostensibly because he was gravely ill with tuberculosis but perhaps in part to get rid of him (he was soon caught and executed). Wang Fanxi, unlike Peng, was not prepared to join in vilifying Qu, a serious and independent-minded thinker who could never have pleased Stalin. As for Peng, he could never have written a book like Wang’s Mao, which saluted Mao’s strengths while recognising his weaknesses: his creativity and originality on the one hand and his undisguised plagiarism – of Stalin’s ideas and practices – on the other. Why could Peng not write such a study? Because he despised Mao as an impostor who came to power at the head of “nothing more than an ‘oriental’ national revolution led by the urban petit bourgeoisie with the support of the peasantry”, and was thus unworthy of serious atten-

25

for socialist democracy” (Peng Shuzhi 1982, p. 284); for an English translation, see Peng Shuzhi 1968. Shuang Shan 1967, pp. 29, 34, and 37, rough translation in W.F.H., “On the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, pp. 94, 98, and 100.

20

benton

tion.26 Where Wang found creativity and originality, Peng found heresy. But mixed with the sectarian contempt is, one suspects, a note of rivalry. Why else would Peng’s “selected works” appear in Hong Kong in a four-volume format that exactly mimicked the original edition of Mao’s selected works?27 Zheng Chaolin (1901–1998) Zheng too has left behind a literary and political legacy that marks him out as a creative and independent thinker. At a certain point, he rejected the standard Trotskyist view of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state, and of its descendent states in the postwar years, including China, as workers’ states deformed from birth. Instead, he regarded them as a mutant form of capitalism. Later, in prison under Mao, he developed the theory of cadreism, his unique contribution to the Trotskyist debate about bureaucracy and a view to which he stuck for the rest of his life. (The imprisoned Trotskyists were encouraged, during periods of political relaxation in the outside world, to write down their thoughts about politics and theory. Zheng Chaolin took full advantage of these interludes to write frankly and at great length about the Chinese Revolution. But most of his writings on cadreism were either confiscated or destroyed.) Zheng wrote on a far wider range of Marxist topics than other Chinese Trotskyists, including the theory of alienation and, in 1985, the “crisis of Marxism”. He was also a gifted poet, the best of China’s Communist poets, far better than Mao, whose poetry reveals a man of “brash self-regarding, grandiosity, and sense of personal uniqueness and superiority, swollen with arrogance and wilfulness”. Zheng, in contrast, “was by nature a more modest and compassionate man than Mao, and his poetry reflects this difference”.28 Zheng Chaolin’s road to revolution was strikingly different from both Peng’s and Wang Fanxi’s. Born in 1901, with the century, he was eighteen when the May Fourth Movement broke out. Open and receptive to the new-style “democracy and science” promulgated by Chen Duxiu, his conversion to Marxism started in 1920, while at sea on his way to France. Peng, in contrast, was already twentyfive at the time of his encounter with modern thought. Both Peng and Zheng, like many Chinese of their time (and like Mao) had been avid readers as boys of

26 27

28

Cadart and Cheng 1998. The four volumes of Peng’s Xuanji (Selected works) were published by Shiyue chuban she (a press associated with Peng’s rcp) between 1983 and 2010. Mao’s first four volumes were published in Beijing between 1951 and 1960 (in 1977, a fifth was added). Kim Il Sung also attempted to match up to the Beijing prototype by publishing four volumes of his selected works before the 1970s. Their number has since ballooned, into the dozens. Benton and Feng (eds) 2019.

introduction

21

the classical vernacular novels, which added an element of Buddhist and Taoist counterculture to the Confucianism that comprised their bedrock learning. However, Zheng was by character, and perhaps by generation, more instinctively iconoclastic than Peng, who subconsciously retained Confucian habits. Zheng was throughout his life stubborn and rebellious. Fonder than Peng of the spontaneity and freedom of Laozi and Zhuangzi, deemed by China’s twentiethcentury anarchists to be their precursors, he was a more obvious opponent of Confucian morality and rites and a keener devotee of the vernacular novels that turned him against “the sacred tradition of the classics”.29 In November 1919, Zheng left China not for Moscow but for France, sponsored by the anarchists Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui. In France, he took part in a gruelling programme that embodied the anarchist ideal of hard work and frugal study. In June 1922, he joined an organisation known as Communist Youth in France, along with Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, and revelled in “new thought”. After coming across a Chinese translation of the Manifesto of Independence of Spirit signed by Romain Rolland, H. Barbusse, and Bertrand Russell, he hurried to seek out Barbusse’s Society of Light in Paris and took out a subscription to Clarté, its journal. He helped set up a Self-Enlightenment Society among his fellow-students and joined in violent factional disputes and rowdy protests against the French authorities. After his transfer by party agents to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1923, he found that the ccp in Moscow was led by “worshippers of authority, … dull, narrow-minded, and superficially informed”. Among these people was Peng Shuzhi, who in Zheng’s eyes looked very much like “an old-style middle school supervisor”.30 Compared with his time in France, Zheng found the Moscow regime (presided over by Peng) of “commanding, submitting, and criticising” others’ weaknesses insufferable. Censured by Peng and his like for studying too many things and learning too much Russian (a resource that they preferred to keep to themselves), Zheng found the classes “crude and superficial”. A marker of Zheng’s cosmopolitanism, and the cause of what was among his earliest confrontations with Peng, was his interest in Esperanto. Backed by anarchists like the writer Ba Jin at the start of the twentieth century (and promoted for a while after 1949 by the prc authorities as a symbol of communist internationalism), in the 1920s the Esperanto movement developed a radical wing (sat, Sennacieca Asocio Tutmoda, World Non-National Association) that split away from the mainstream and supported the Soviet Union. Zheng joined 29 30

Benton (ed.), 1997. On Peng’s relationship to vernacular and classical writings, see the first chapter of Cadart and Cheng 1983. Benton (ed.), 1997, p. 56.

22

benton

this organisation and, as a virtuoso linguist, became fluent in the language. He was apparently the sole Esperantist in his group in France and again in Moscow. In the 1920s, sat was viewed with suspicion by communist bureaucrats in Moscow. Zheng was attacked at criticism meetings for his Esperantism, and Peng Shuzhi warned him at a private meeting that his commitment to the language “put him on a dangerous political course” and told him to drop it, but he refused.31 This clash between the idealistic and open-minded Zheng and the censorious Peng, acting on behalf of the Soviet authorities to suppress any hint of individuality, foreshadows the later deterioration of their relationship in Shanghai. Although the issue of Esperanto was peripheral, the clash reflected their different approaches to life and politics. The young Zheng started out in many ways a Bohemian, during his time in France. It is not surprising that he disliked the study regime in Moscow. His Esperantism, which he stuck to despite Peng’s warning, stigmatised him and delayed his promotion in Moscow from the Chinese Communist Youth League to the ccp. Peng and Zheng, born in 1896 and 1901, belonged to the generation of Chinese radicals that entered politics and adulthood before the May Fourth movement had fully permeated the consciousness of Chinese youth and laid the basis for the radical transformation of Chinese culture. Although touched and stirred by May Fourth, for a while neither of them had much knowledge of Western thought, let alone of socialist or Marxist thought. In later life, Peng presented himself as a founder of the ccp, but actually he left China more than a year before its First Congress (in July 1921).32 He made a fleeting acquaintance with the new thinking in Beijing in 1919 but had little to do with radical politics before reaching Moscow. Zheng was even less familiar with modern political and socialist thought than Peng before setting out for France, and frankly admitted that he was still committed at the time to the Confucian idea of “national essence”. In France, however, Zheng quickly came to recognise the superiority of Western rational philosophy over Confucian ethicism. Zheng and others in Paris were tempered by their experience of revolutionary struggle and intellectual debate in France, and this experience inclined Zheng to a more critical stance than Peng. So the Trotskyists who came together under Chen Duxiu in 1931 had two main provenances that roughly coincided with their two main cohorts or generations in the 1920s, one that became Trotskyist in Russia and another in China. Most of the former (who included Wang Fanxi) were younger than the latter. 31 32

Benton (ed.), 1997, p. 56. For Peng’s overblown account of his role in early Chinese Communism, see ch. 7 of Cadart 2016, vol. 1.

introduction

23

Most of the latter, including Zheng Chaolin, had been in Moscow, but earlier than Wang, and they had returned home to help staff the fledgling ccp. They became acquainted with Trotsky’s ideas only after their repatriation. Many of them belonged to a group known at the time as the Chen Duxiu-ites, loyal followers of Chen Duxiu, all of whom are said (by Zheng) to have become Trotskyists. Peng Shuzhi was for a while an associate of the Chen Duxiu group, but he and Chen fell out in the course of the unification of the four groups that eventually came together in the Chinese Left Opposition and their relations subsequently worsened. What distinguished Chen Duxiu’s loyal supporters in the run-up to unification in 1931 is that many of them had experienced not just Moscow but also Paris, where they acquired qualities other than bowing to authority and eagerness to please. Because of their greater exposure to critical thinking and their development of a stronger sense of individualism, they experienced the Soviet Union in a different way from Trotskyists like Peng, who knew only Russia and its regime of nascent Stalinism. This is true of a majority of the Chen Duxiu-ite Trotskyists and Trotskyist sympathisers that I have succeeded in identifying. Those who lived for a while in both France and Russia included Zheng Chaolin, Yin Kuan, Chen Qiaonian, Wang Zekai, Ma Yufu, Wang Ruofei, and Liu Bozhuang, a list that is probably incomplete.33 Wang Fanxi, unlike both Peng and Zheng, arrived in Moscow fresh from battle. Like Zheng, he was by nature independent-minded and creative. He and Zheng had a strong affinity and became lifelong friends as well as political co-thinkers. Although Wang’s early schooling was inevitably Confucian, he embraced the new politics and thinking of May Fourth at an earlier age than most. He consumed an enormous number of “modern books”, ranging from Socrates and Plato to John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Henry Bergson, and Rabindranath Tagore. After gaining entrance to Peking University, a radical hotbed, at the age of eighteen, he at first aimed to live the life of a “Bohemian scribbler”, and contributed articles to famous literary journals of the time. However, within weeks of arriving, he became a communist. He threw his studies and literary activities aside and pitched into the thick of revolutionary work, in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Wuhan. After the defeat of the revolution in 1927 he was sent by the party to Moscow, where like hundreds of other Chinese he became a Trotskyist. Stalinism was by then full-blown, as was the opposition to it among hundreds of Chinese in Moscow, unlike the vague discontents and grievances of Zheng’s cohort. Working underground in the Soviet capital, Wang and his comrades pitted their newly acquired Trotskyist beliefs against the the-

33

These identifications are mainly based on materials collected in Prophets Unarmed.

24

benton

ories spoonfed to them in class, so that they became skilled in political analysis and self-confident in secretly arguing their case. Peng, in contrast, was by character and training an establishment type, a mindset he carried over into Trotskyism. Where Zheng and Wang had a lively and engaging style, Peng’s manner of writing and speaking was famously stilted and long-winded, of the sort affected by those used to addressing a Moscowstyle captive audience. His pontifical mentality is one reason why his relationship with Chen Duxiu collapsed so quickly after Chen’s Trotskyist conversion, for Chen was an “oppositionist for life” to all constituted authority. Peng accused Chen of having “the political morality of an Oriental”. Chen denounced Peng as a “rotten watermelon”.34 Zheng and Wang, on the other hand, respected Chen for his courage and his political and tactical skills while tolerating though disputing what they saw as his temporary idiosyncrasies and departures from the right path, to which they hoped he would soon return. By character and through their experience in Russia, they could not but share Chen’s hostility to authority of the sort Peng embodied. This difference between them and Peng was there from the start of their Trotskyism, but was at first suppressed by their urge to obey Trotsky’s order to close ranks. Their toleration of Chen Duxiu’s views on bourgeois democracy and Stalinism and of his refusal to give critical support (like Trotsky) to the Soviet Union as a “workers’ state” (even before the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939) was consistent with their dedication to the idea of free debate among revolutionaries. Peng Shuzhi’s role in Moscow, on the other hand, had been to inculcate his youthful charges with the orthodox line. In Moscow, Peng espoused the idea of natural authority, a notion resonant with that of the Confucian leader, the personification of traditional morality. His views on organisation were the opposite of the democratic and collective leadership that Wang and Zheng favoured. Wedded to discipline and hostile to pluralism, in 1933 he urged Chen Duxiu (the two men shared a prison cell) to “stand firm” and act as a “natural leader”, a position that Chen rejected as “a world apart” from Lenin’s idea of leadership. In 1941, he again insisted on the “establishment of authority” in the Trotskyist party and the rejection of “pettybourgeois concepts of organisation”. In 1948, his follower Liu Jialing criticised the “extreme liberal tendency” in the Trotskyist movement and argued that “freedom and democracy are counterposed to the centralist mechanism”.35 All of these ideas contradicted the Trotskyist view of leadership, and can be traced directly to the authoritarian politics Peng had imbibed in Moscow. 34 35

Benton (ed.), 1997, 199 and 247. Benton 2015a, “Editor’s Introduction”, in Benton (ed.), 2015, 18–19; and Benton 2015b, “Editor’s Introduction”, in Benton (ed.), 2015, 697–708.

introduction

25

In exile, in the 1970s, the dispute between the rcp and the iwp regarding inner-party democracy continued along the same lines as in the 1940s, even though the protagonists had, in the meantime, become little more than a few ageing diehards. In 1978, when Trotskyists in Hong Kong tried, in league with Wang Fanxi in Leeds, to build a new Chinese Trotskyist movement by unifying all those outside China claiming to be Trotskyists, Peng’s supporters in Hong Kong republished Liu Jialiang’s 1948 resolution. Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua (in Hong Kong) “countered by arguing that Lenin’s model of organisation had been developed to meet the specific needs of early twentieth-century Russia, that the Leninist formula of democratic centralism did not mean that the proportion of democracy to centralism should not vary with circumstances, that inner-party democracy should never be suppressed entirely even under conditions of extreme state repression, that the party press should present a spread of opinions (including those of minorities), and that ‘the leadership of a revolutionary party must be formed and established from the bottom up, naturally and gradually, in the course of the revolutionary struggle’. Not surprisingly, the unification-campaign stalled”.36

Chinese Trotskyism in Wenzhou Trotskyism rarely features in studies on the Chinese Revolution. Where it does, it is at best as a minor splinter of Chinese socialism geographically confined to one or two big cities, or as negative proof of the superiority of Maoism. Otherwise, it has been almost entirely overlooked, even by radical historians, as a barely relevant footnote to the Chinese Revolution, isolated from the world socialist movement and expunged forever in 1949. However, as this volume shows, Chinese Trotskyism was more widely spread than generally assumed, with a presence not just in Shanghai but in Hong Kong, Chongqing, Qingdao, Beijing, and other towns and cities. One particularly well documented example of its postwar expansion beyond the main urban centres and provincial capitals was its relatively strong base in the 1940s in Wenzhou, a seaport and industrial centre in Zhejiang Province, considered culturally and geographically remote at the time. Wenzhou’s Trotskyist cell was planted by the Communist veteran Zeng Meng after his return from studying in Moscow and his expulsion from the ccp, where he had worked for a while (like Wang Fanxi) as an aide to Zhou Enlai. Because of the role played by Wenzhou in the development of Chinese

36

Benton 2015a, “Editor’s Introduction”, in Benton (ed.), 2015, 19–20.

26

benton

Trotskyism and its relatively rich documentation, this collection devotes a special section to articles and reports on Trotskyist activities in the city in the years before and at around the time of the 1952 round-up. The Trotskyists’ Wenzhou branch was mainly active in high schools and teachers’ training colleges, and it also had members in Zhejiang University and Hangzhou University. Its base extended not just to students but to primaryschool teachers and “artisans”. It occasionally led workers’ strikes and ran reading clubs that pasted up wall newspapers around the city. The Wenzhou Trotskyists coordinated where possible with the Trotskyist headquarters in Shanghai. Through overseas connections, they established a Trotskyist outpost in Taiwan after the overthrow of Japanese rule on the island in 1945, but the branch was destroyed by the Kuomintang secret police a year after its founding in 1947. Other towns near Wenzhou and in provinces adjacent to Zhejiang were also seeded by Trotskyists from Wenzhou. These branches are listed in the Wenzhou pages of this study. It is therefore not surprising that local ccp agents in Wenzhou issued intelligence reports suggesting that “unlike counterrevolutionary agents in general, the Trotskyists are organised systematically throughout the country”. One episode in Wenzhou Trotskyism before its destruction is so extraordinary that it deserves special mention. It concerns the relationship between Trotskyists jailed in Wenzhou in 1949–1951 and one of their communist jailers. In 1980, I lived for several months in the home of the Trotskyist seafarer Sun Liangsi in Hong Kong. Through him, I got to know another seafarer, from Wenzhou. This man, known as Little Wang (his real name was Zheng Guosheng),37 lived in one of Hong Kong’s so-called cage homes. Typically, there were sets of a dozen or so of these coffin-shaped cage homes cramped together honeycombstyle in small apartments in tenements in workers’ areas, with barely enough room to turn round and minimal ventilation, sanitation, or dignity.38 In 1950, at the age of sixteen and as a new recruit to the party’s public security organ in Wenzhou, Little Wang had been among those guarding the arrested Trotskyists. The prisoners included Ap Chai, real name Cao Jiaji, whose later alias was Little Zhou. Ap Chai won his young jailer Little Wang to Trotskyism, and together they and another Trotskyist, Huang Zheng, fled Wenzhou and eventually ended up in Hong Kong. The original plan had been to spring six prisoners, funded with 700,000 yuan provided by another secret Trotskyist sympathiser (there were 37

38

Another name associated with him, according to Tang Yuen Ching, was Wang Guoquan. On the escape, see also Wang Fanxi’s letter to Zhou Lüqiang (https://www.marxists.org/​ chinese/reference‑books/zhoulvqiang/10.htm). There are still quarter of a million cage homes in Hong Kong (Wong 2022).

introduction

27

several such) in the ccp’s local security apparatus. In the event, Little Wang was only able to help two prisoners abscond together with him. The Trotskyist Liu Pingmei described the escape as follows: The [Wenzhou] Trotskyists sent Ke Xiangwen to Shanghai and asked the Trotskyist [central] organisation to help organise a rescue. The organisation sent Ke Xiangwen back to Wenzhou [with instructions]. Ke Xiangwen contacted Zheng Guosheng, an investigator from the city’s Public Security Bureau, who had been influenced by Trotskyist thinking. On the night of 8 January 1951, Zheng Guosheng stole an “arraignment document” carrying the seal of the Public Security Bureau Director Sun Qiuping and rescued the Trotskyists Cao Jiaji and Huang Zheng from prison. He had intended to rescue Lian Zhengxiang as well, but Cao and Huang didn’t initially believe that Zheng intended to save them, and it took a long time to convince them. Because of the delay, Lian could not be saved. The escape shook the Communist authorities in Wenzhou. After they had been sprung from prison, Ke Xiangwen and five others fled to Shanghai on a junk. […] On 24 January 1951, Lian Zhengxiang was tied up [by the Maoists] and taken to the execution ground. On the way to his execution, he shouted “Long live socialist revolution! Long live Trotskyism! Long live the Fourth International!” He was 19 years old. One can confirm some of these details through reports issued internally at the time by the ccp’s security police. Ap Chai later withdrew from politics and became a rich and successful entrepreneur. Although he occasionally subsidised exiled Trotskyists and the relatives of Trotskyists jailed in China, his political role had essentially ended. Little Wang, however, his former jailer, stayed true to the Trotskyist cause to the end of his life. Later, Little Wang got cancer, and the ex-Trotskyist millionaire Ap Chai paid a female comrade to look after him in his dying years. Ap Chai also bought Little Wang a small flat, so that he could vacate his cage home.

Chinese Trotskyism and the Diaspora Where diasporas become political, the attachments they form are often to their countries of origin. In the case of the Chinese diaspora, ethnic and migrant Chinese threatened by sinophobic nativists in their new homelands and attached by still vibrant ties to their ancestral places find a prc identification attractive (some identified historically with Taiwan). Sun Yat-sen’s nationalists,

28

benton

isolated and with their backs against the wall in China, looked successfully in the early twentieth century for support abroad, where they created new bases from which to plot their return. The ccp too nurtured bases among Chinese in Southeast Asia as a second line of support for its wars in China. Were the Chinese Trotskyists also able to use their expulsion into the diaspora after 1949 to switch fields? In principle yes, but they hardly ever did so. This was mainly because of the tiny numbers of Trotskyists in exile but also because of the inaction of Peng Shuzhi. Peng lived for more than a decade in both France and the US. He had access in both places to fi allies and resources. However, he had no impact on the diaspora throughout his sojourn overseas. On the contrary, he stayed noticeably aloof from it. This lack of attention to diasporic affairs was a permanent feature of his politics. Shortly after the massacre of thousands of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1965–1966, his concern in an “open letter” to the ccp published in 1967 was to criticise Chinese foreign policy and the Maoists’ general strategy of revolution. The letter made no mention of the massive ethnic-Chinese dimension of the Indonesian crisis.39 On more than one occasion in the 1960s and the 1970s, radical political movements took hold among diasporic Chinese youth that Peng can hardly have missed. When he and Chen Bilan moved to the US in 1972, the Yellow Power movement, set up by young Asian American revolutionaries (including Chinese, Japanese, and others), was still active. The I Wor Kuen (Yihequan, Fists of Righteous Harmony, iwk, named in tribute to the anti-imperialist “Boxer” movement of 1899–1901 and formed on the model of Black Power) drew inspiration not just from Mao’s Cultural Revolution but from Guevarism and Vietnam’s liberation war.40 However, there is no sign that Peng tried to engage with it, although its supporters included members of the swp. Peng also seems to have 39

40

Peng Shuzhi 1967. Wang Fanxi, writing about a previous massacre Indonesia, in 1946, put “the fate of the overseas Chinese” at the centre of his analysis: “What about the masses? The bourgeoisie, with a little manoeuvring, turned their resentment on the equally miserable masses of the Chinese, and things like the Tangerang tragedy [the massacre of Chinese in Tangerang in 1945–1946]. What the real cause of this tragedy was is difficult to ascertain, but that is not important to us. What is important to us is the realisation that the fate of the overseas Chinese and that of Indonesia – and indeed of all of Southeast Asia – is one in which unity is beneficial but separation is detrimental. To circle the wagons on narrow racial concepts, whether Chinese or Indonesians, is to be exploited by all reactionaries” (Feng Gang [Wang Fanxi] 1946). Peng’s aide Zhu Yunlong (1946) wrote an article about Indonesia at more or less the same time, but its main focus is the Indonesian independence movement. Strangely, it says “the Overseas Chinese received the same treatment as local people”. The iwk’s Red Guard Community News (vol. 1, no. 2) of 8 April 1969 including a “recommended reading list” of eighteen titles only two of which concerned Maoism.

introduction

29

formed no direct tie to the revolutionary groups that emerged in the late 1960s from a split in the swp and whose members included Asian American and Chinese American women Trotskyists. The split gave rise to the Freedom Socialist Party (fsp), which continues to exist even now, and was distinguished by its special sympathy for the Chinese Revolution and the anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam in the 1970s.41 Wang’s supporters too failed to win a significant following among Chinese overseas, but in their case not for lack of trying. For the first twenty-five years of his exile, Wang was cut off from the wider Trotskyist movement and from world events by his deportation to Macao. Across the Pearl River estuary in Hong Kong, a glimmer of Trotskyism survived, but it was entirely absent from the Chinese diaspora. However, a Trotskyist presence did arise here and there among diasporic Chinese in the 1960 and the 1970s, not only in the US, as we have seen, but also in Britain. Chinese Trotskyism in Britain developed mainly as a branch of British Trotskyism, but it was also an outcome of the export to Britain of a Trotskyist influence from Hong Kong, which was at the time (and is again now) the main source of Chinese emigration to Britain. The rise of a group influenced by Chinese Trotskyism in Britain followed Wang Fanxi’s move to Leeds in 1975, after his enforced departure from Macao. (He left to escape the increasingly threatening environment in the colony after the weakening of Portuguese sovereignty in 1966.) In Britain, Wang made contact with radical youngsters in London and other cities. He paid frequent visits to the London Chinatown, where he helped set up a journal (Fuxing) and a movement that consolidated existing ties with Trotskyists in Hong Kong. The Chinese Trotskyists in London influenced by Wang were active both in the labour movement, where they tried to create a base among Chinese restaurant workers, and on immigration and welfare issues. Wang Fanxi’s writings in exile starting in 1949 did not stop at contributions to fi debates. He was interested not only in political developments in China and Hong Kong but also in the wider Sinophone. In the late 1970s, he devoted much of his time at one point to analysing the political situation in Taiwan, after befriending a small group of radical Taiwanese studying at Leeds University. Together with his Taiwanese friends, in 1977 he wrote and published a Trotskyist manifesto (included in this volume) on the political situation in Taiwan in which he defended the idea of Taiwanese independence, generally anathema on the wider Chinese left.

41

Ho (ed.), 2001. Thanks to Promise Li for this reference.

30

benton

I have found no evidence that Peng showed any interest in movements of this sort.42 Instead, he concentrated on the internal politics of Chinese and world Trotskyism, of which he saw himself as a main “theoretician”, preserver of the faith and a bulwark of the “orthodox” tradition of Marxism and Trotskyism. When new ideas arose in Trotskyism, it was as if he instinctively opposed them, sticking instead to what he saw as old and tested formulae. His rallying call in the fi in 1969 was “Return to the Road of Trotskyism” (included in this volume). The selection of writings from 1966 to 1980 included in volume 3 of his selected works43 shows that their main outlet was the internal bulletin of the swp. His apparent lack of interest in political developments in the diaspora is of a piece with his sectarian and bureaucratic approach to any movement that he could not be sure of controlling.44 In time he became a marginal figure in the fi, but to the extent that he continued to play a role in the internal politics of its so-called “Chinese section”, he continued to apply factional skills of the sort he had learned in Moscow. It is hard to imagine that Peng opposed the principle of national selfdetermination, a staple of Marxism and Leninism that Mao and Stalin repeatedly violated for reasons of “great power chauvinism”. However, he seems not to have explored its relevance to Taiwan, despite the growing debate about it in Taiwan’s democracy movement in the late 1970s and in overseas Chinese circles. Wang, in line with Leninist theory, accepted his young Taiwanese friends’ arguments in favour of independence in the course of his discussions with them, but I have been unable to track down any statements by Peng on this important issue in Chinese politics. His silence is puzzling.

Chinese Trotskyism and the fi in the prc Years The government crackdown on the Trotskyists who remained in China culminated in December 1952 in their arrest and imprisonment. Most were released sometime in the 1950s and put under “mass supervision”, but such supervision could be as bad as or even worse than jail, where inmates could at least be 42

43 44

Promise Li (personal communication) knows of no “tangible influence of Chinese Trotskyism on the Chinese diaspora” in the US, where left-wing organising among Chinese was practically monopolised by Maoists. Regarding Yellow Power, Joe Miller writes as follows: “I am not aware of any interaction with, or writings about, the yp movement [by Peng]. [….] Peng was mainly concerned with international issues in my discussions and letters with him and Bilan” (personal communication, 12 November 2022). Peng Shuzhi 1982, vol. 3. Volume 3 of Peng Shuzhi’s selected works (covering the years 1951–1980) includes 19

introduction

31

sure of food and a minimum of medical care and were usually free from mob attacks during mass movements. Some Trotskyist leaders remained locked up until 1979, when they were released after the Cultural Revolution, along with tens of thousands of other Chinese banished to remote regions. In jail, many had kept up their defiance, Zheng Chaolin in particular. In 1961, in a poem, Zheng secretly celebrated Trotsky’s imagined rehabilitation after reading in a Chinese newspaper that the Fourth International had called on Moscow to carve Trotsky’s name “in gold letters” on a memorial to him.45 After his release, he continued to write on political issues from a defiant and often original Trotskyist slant. The Trotskyists still at large outside the Mainland after 1952 did not give up the struggle, as we have seen. Both Peng and Wang continued to identify with the fi, in their different ways. Of the two, Peng was far better placed to influence the world movement in what, at the time, were its two main centres, Western Europe and North America. As residents first of Paris and then of Los Angeles, Peng and Chen Bilan were able to stay in direct and continuous contact with other Trotskyists. Wang’s contact, on the other hand, was remote and intermittent. Peng intervened in debates within the world Trotskyist movement; Wang mainly in debates and activities in Hong Kong. The rcp and iwp continued to exist, but in exile and in negligible numbers. Peng Shuzhi’s rcp had been recognised at some point as the fi’s “Chinese section”, so Peng was able to project himself as the section’s leader. However, “section” was a sadly inflated title for an organisation with no active presence whatsoever in China outside Hong Kong, and even there its surviving branches had shrivelled to a husk. Peng did his best to hold sway over them from afar, but not always with complete success, as the story of the Hong Kong branch of his rcp in the 1970s (told in this volume) shows. After reaching France in 1951, Peng took part in the Third World Congress of the fi held in Switzerland and in the Ninth held in Italy in 1969, and a Chinese delegate is said to have attended the Tenth World Congress in 1974.46 The fi’s ties with the iwp, on the other hand, represented in Macao by Wang Fanxi and in Hong Kong by Lou Guohua, were no more than tenuous. Wang received most of his news from Chinese Trotskyist seafarers and at one point from a British Trotskyist soldier stationed in Hong Kong.

45 46

articles by Peng, all but one published in internal discussion bulletins. Volume 4 (1953– 1980) has 32 articles by Peng, including three concerning internal debates with Chinese comrades and 23 concerning internal debates within the fi. Benton 1997, “Editor’s Introduction”, in Benton (ed.), 1997, ix–xxi, at xix. Au Loong-yu, personal communication.

32

benton

In time, Peng lost sympathy on both sides of the Atlantic, starting in Paris. His European hosts found his political views repellent, to judge by comments made by those he had dealings with. His own response was similarly hostile. For example, he said that Ernest Mandel, leader of the Fourth International, “reminds me of Bukharin” and “often wavers between revolutionary conscience and the momentary consideration of power”.47 He and his family had little money while in Paris, apart from what friends in Hong Kong and members of the swp sent them, and they were generally lonely and without support. Trotskyist leaders in Europe saw Peng as a self-promoter with an inflated view of his role in the Chinese Revolution.48 Livio Maitan (responsible in the fi for following developments in China and author of a well-received book on the Cultural Revolution)49 described Peng’s performance at the Ninth Congress as follows: “After arriving at the commission some two hours after it had started, I asked one of the attendees if [Peng’s] report was over yet, and was told that Peng was still talking about the 1920s and was still a long way off what had been happening in recent years. In the evening, in the villa near Paris where the plenary sessions were being held, we waited for the commission (held elsewhere) to return, with a certain apprehension. Finally, the participants arrived, exhausted – after five hours, Peng had still not finished. One juicy detail: Peng protested the following day because his intervention had been subjected to a time limit! [Michel] Pablo turned it into a joke: ‘Peng is speaking in the name of hundreds of millions of Chinese and is entitled to more time than the others!’”50 While Peng was in effect one of the fi’s senior veterans, younger Trotskyists were deeply alienated by his politics and haughtiness. In the view of Tariq Ali and others recruited into the Trotskyist movement in the late 1960s, at the time of escalating protests and rebellions influenced to some extent by China’s Cultural Revolution, Peng was a “fugitive from the revolution” stuck in entrenched positions. The French Trotskyist leader Gérard Berbizier (Verjeat), supported by Tariq Ali, even tried to get him thrown off the fi’s International Executive Committee (iec) in 1969, although the proposal was withdrawn after interventions by Maitan and others. According to Tariq Ali, he and the French Trotskyist Gerard de Verbizier (Verjeat) loathed Peng as “sectarian and selfregarding”, an “unbearable monster and the worst that Trotskyism had to offer”, a laughing stock. “Can you imagine”, he asked, “trying to win over intelligent 47 48 49 50

Peng Shuzhi 1954. See the description of Peng in Maitan 2019. Maitan 1976. Maitan 2019.

introduction

33

Maoists with this albatross weighing us down? In 1969, I was elected to the iec. In private we both said to Ernest [Mandel], Livio [Maitan], and Pierre Frank that having Peng on the iec was to slap the Chinese revolution in the face. No doubt we were intemperate, but I’ve never regretted that intervention. My punishment was that I had to translate Peng’s pidgin English that the US swp leaders couldn’t understand nor anyone else except me. I insisted on taking up a posture below him on the floor so I didn’t have to see his face as I translated him into English. At one of these torture excursuses, his sectarian rage reached such a level that he began to splutter. His false teeth fell on my head. The young comrades (including Peter Camejo) had to leave the room to laugh outside. I asked for a short break so I could go and shampoo”.51 Peng’s reputation as a sectarian hardliner was widely shared on the European far left during his lifetime and is unlikely to be shaken off even as the memory of him dims. However, it should not blind us to some truths he insisted on making public. One concerned Mandel’s analysis of the Vietnamese revolution. Given the evidence, it is hard to dismiss Peng’s charge that Mandel temporarily forgot his principles in his accommodation to guerrillaism starting in the 1950s.52 In May 1953, six months after the crackdown on the Chinese Trotskyists, Peng submitted a statement to the iec regarding the persecution of the Trotskyists, which he asked the fi to publish. Pablo and Pierre Frank, members of the iec, at first agreed, but according to Peng a planned Open Letter was subsequently suppressed on the grounds that it would have endangered the fi’s then “entrist” tactic. (Trotskyists in different countries had been instructed to enter mass communist and other workers’ parties for the purpose of undermining Stalinism and reformism.) According to Peng, the fi’s plan was not to ignore the jailing of the Chinese Trotskyists entirely but to prioritise the issue of support for China. Playing down the jailings was said to be crucial given that a group of Vietnamese Trotskyists were due to return to Vietnam as entrists. In July, Ernest Mandel spoke with Peng about the letter, which he criticised for failing to foreground “total support for the movement under the leadership of Mao’s party [and] praising its revolutionary achievements” rather than highlighting the persecution of the Trotskyists. Mandel is said to have ended up

51 52

Personal communication, 17 November 2022. Paul Hampton argues, in a personal communication, that most of the fi (with few exceptions) thought that China was capable of reform. Mandel continued to think so until 1967. Some in this camp, for example, Arne Swabeck in 1967, became Maoists and left the swp. Hampton believes that this explains the failure to agitate for the release of the Chinese Trotskyists.

34

benton

denouncing Peng as a “hopeless sectarian”, and refused to inform the different sections of the fi about the Open Letter. But Peng’s insistence on raising the question of the jailed Trotskyists was doubly justified, given that Trotskyists who joined Ho Chi-minh’s liberation army ended up in jail or executed, like the Trotskyists in China.53 Later, Peng launched a campaign on this issue with the help of the swp, while Wang Fanxi and I launched a similar campaign in Europe (supported by major newspapers in several countries) through Amnesty International.54 Peng’s account of this episode shows that Mandel was, at least for a while, prepared to play down the plight of the Chinese Trotskyists in favour of a strategy that could end up consigning their Vietnamese counterparts to the same fate. It is not clear whether the plan to send Vietnamese Trotskyists home from France was ever realised, though it would seem that it was not.55 During Peng’s final decade, in Los Angeles,56 the swp not only provided him with a stipend and secretarial assistance but had his speeches and articles translated into English. At first, he was treated by the swp as a luminary of the movement, but the relationship later deteriorated and Peng denounced 53 54 55

56

Ngo Van 1995 and 2010. Benton 1977. Peng Shuzhi 1954. In the event, it seems that the Vietnamese Trotskyists in France stayed where they were, probably (says Simon Pirani) because they had a more realistic assessment of the Vietminh than Mandel, who failed in 1975 to answer their request for clarification as to whether a Trotskyist organisation was needed at all in Vietnam. In February 1949, eight months before Mao’s victory, Vietnamese Trotskyists went to China to attend the founding conference of Peng’s rcp, which resolved to establish with them a Far Eastern Secretariat of the Fourth International and a joint cadre school, but obviously nothing could come of the plan (Pirani 1987, made available on the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line [marxists.org] in 2013). In a personal communication, Pirani says that Chau Tran, the daughter of Tran Van Thach, one of the leaders of the group in Vietnam murdered on Ho Chi Minh’s orders in 1945, has written a biography of her father (Trần Mỹ Chau and Phan Thị Trọng Tuyến. 2015) that was published in French translation in 2020. Pirani says that Ngo Van’s work is widely circulated both in Vietnam and overseas. Pierre Rousset, a leader of the fi and an expert on the Vietnamese Revolution, has written to me concerning the assassinations of Trotskyists in Vietnam, starting in 1945–1947. He argues that after the start of the French reconquest of Indochina in the late 1940s, one Trotskyist group in Vietnam was denouncing the communist Vietminh as Stalinist agents of Soviet imperialism, and there were several instances of assassinations of Trotskyists in those pivotal years. Some but not necessarily all those assassinations were carried out by the Vietminh – other possible assassins included the French, bandits, anticommunist nationalists, and fake as well as real Vietminhs. Afterwards, “there was no systematic policy of liquidating Trotskyists”. Rousset discussed these and other issues in Rousset 1986. Gao Dayue (Claude Cadart) and Cheng Yingxiang 2016, vol. 2, pp. 405–447.

introduction

35

the swp’s support for Cuba, which he said was too uncritical. For a while, however, the swp was for him a more congenial political environment than was its European counterpart. Given his presence first in Paris and then in Los Angeles, Peng Shuzhi was in direct contact with the fi and sections of it throughout his exile. As we have seen, most of his interventions concerned international issues under debate in the fi, reflecting his view of himself as a major figure in the history of international Trotskyism and among its top theoreticians. (He also commented regularly on events in China.) When Wang Fanxi sent the fi a paper on the lessons to be learned from the victory of the ccp in China and the Trotskyist defeat, Peng delegated Chen Bilan to write a reply denouncing it. Wang said the reply was actually written by Peng, and saw the delegation of the job to Chen Bilan as a deliberate attempt by Peng to belittle his Trotskyist critic. Unlike Peng, Wang was ready to take new political trends and unorthodox opinions seriously and to seek to reconcile them with his own thinking. His political approach was non-sectarian, and he welcomed debate and dialogue with other currents of thought, including anarchists and Maoists in Hong Kong. The difference between the two men is best illustrated by their relationship with the independent socialist and radical movements that began emerging in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s. Wang characterised the ten years from 1958 to 1968 as a decade of “hibernation” during which the two surviving branches of Chinese Trotskyism were reduced to handfuls, with “no organisation, no activity, and no voice”. Their “winter sleep” ended with the political awakening among Hong Kong students, as part of the radicalisation of young people in many countries in those years. Although generally cut off from debates in world Trotskyism until the 1960s, Wang responded with an open mind to new developments whenever the chance arose. His relationship with Hong Kong radicals in the 1960s and the 1970s was close, from the very beginning of their movement. He engaged in debates with them, either face to face in Macao or by submitting articles to their publications. After his move to Britain in 1975, he continued his correspondence with them and worked hard to influence their radical outpost in London’s Chinatown, where he helped create a tiny nucleus of revolutionary socialists that still survives. Wang Fanxi, leader in exile of the iwp, received none of the attention bestowed by the Americans on Peng Shuzhi. He and the iwp were neglected and largely ignored by comrades in other countries. He received no material support from the fi during his exile after 1949, and earned his living by teaching, writing, and translating. Other members and former members of his party, including the Trotskyist publisher Lou Guohua and Trotskyists who had

36

benton

become inactive and in some cases gone into business and become rich, supported him where possible. Although Peng was in direct touch with Trotskyist leaders in Europe and the US, he was often at odds with them. His first falling out, as we have seen, was with Pablo and Mandel, leaders of the Trotskyist movement in Europe. Pablo believed that Stalinism could, under the pressure of mass movements, be propelled in a revolutionary direction and undergo self-reform, while Mandel said the ccp’s military victory over Chiang Kai-shek was the result of mass pressure and an act of conscious disobedience to Stalin. American Trotskyists headed by James P. Cannon, opposed to this “Pabloite revisionism”, launched a struggle against it that led to a split in the fi, essentially between the swp and the European Trotskyists. The split lasted from 1953 to 1963, after which a temporary reunification was achieved. Peng and his Chinese followers sided during the split with the more orthodox swp against the less conventional Pablo and Mandel. After reunification, Peng was not inclined to let bygones be bygones, and in 1969 he published “Return to the Road of Trotskyism”, a denunciation of Mandel and Maitan’s wing of the fi.57 As we have seen, however, Peng disagreed with the swp’s position on the Cuban question. In the early years of the Castro regime, Peng claimed to have persuaded swp leaders to oppose guerrilla warfare. Later, he criticised them for exaggerating Cuba’s revolutionary role and for their ever-growing identification with Castroism in the 1970s.58 To its credit, the swp continued to support Peng financially despite these differences. After his death, however, it crossed swords with his widow Chen Bilan, who refused to hand over Peng’s papers to the swp archive. As a result, the “subsidy” stopped. Regarding Wang Fanxi, the fi was not necessarily aware of the exact nature of his analysis of the Chinese Revolution. However, it is also possible that they turned a deaf ear – a pity, for if they had listened, they might have avoided some mistakes in their attitude to the “colonial revolution”. The fi’s deafness, and its failure to offer Wang support of the sort Peng got from the swp, can be explained partly by Wang’s marooning in Macao, where he remained largely out of touch for more than twenty years. But political differences may also have played a role. In postwar world Trotskyism, swp supporters cannot have liked Wang’s view on the Chinese Revolution, which in their eyes must have looked a lot like the “guerrillaism” that they associated with the fi majority in Europe and Latin America. To some extent, Wang shared the fi majority’s view on the importance of guerrilla war in poor countries of the global South, including

57 58

John Holmes, personal communication. Peng Shuzhi 1982.

introduction

37

the role that it had played in China. As a result, Chen Bilan denounced him as a supporter of the “adventurist policy of armed struggle” that had brought the ccp to power.59 Peng and Chen’s denunciation helps to explain Wang’s coldshouldering by the US Trotskyists, who for a while took their cue from Peng. In reality, however, Wang had a more critical view of guerrillaism than the fi majority. His reservations set him potentially at odds with both of the fi’s main factions, so he fell between two stools. For the swp, he was “soft” on Maoism. (In fact he likened Mao to Hitler and Mao’s Red Guards to Hitler’s stormtroopers.60) As for the Trotskyists in Europe, Wang’s more nuanced view of the guerrilla tactic was not in all respects compatible with their expectation of a “new rise of world revolution” in the Tricontinent, and they might have seen it as a potential obstacle to their planned collaboration with guerrillaist factions in South America. For some mainstream Trotskyists, the failure of Chinese Trotskyists of either faction, the rcp or the iwp, to play even a marginal role in defeating the Kuomintang in 1949 was proof enough that they had taken the wrong path. Zheng Chaolin, of course, had even less opportunity than Wang to participate directly in these debates, not just during his years in prison but even after his release in 1979, when he remained under supervision. Wang Fanxi, both in Macao and in England, also had little direct contact with the swp or the fi and played little part in the international Trotskyist debate. He and his comrades, in particular Lou Guohua, submitted papers to the fi, but their submissions from exile do not seem to have received the same attention as Peng’s from Los Angeles. This was partly because Wang was less well-known in international Trotskyist circles. But it was also because for a while the wing of Trotskyism with which he had greatest affinity had an ambiguous relationship with Maoiststyle guerrillaism and at times saw the defeated Trotskyist remnants at best as irrelevant and at worst as an embarrassment. Both Peng and Wang kept a close eye on factional developments within the ccp during their exile. As we have seen, neither of them welcomed the support that some European and North American leftists, including some Trotskyists, gave to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. However, they differed in their assessment of the Cultural Revolution. Although both despised Mao’s tactics in it, only Peng went so far as to express support for Mao’s opponents Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. In so doing, he alienated the Trotskyists not only in Europe but in America. The difference between Peng and others in the fi arose on the eve of the 1969 Congress, in the discussion regarding China. According to Peng, “the

59 60

Chen Bilan 2015, p. 997. Wang 2019, pp. 293–299.

38

benton

Chinese delegate” (Peng was talking of himself) said that the “best positions” were those held by Peng Dehuai,61 Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping. Peng praised the anti-Mao opposition and called the charge that it was anti-socialist “slanderous and absurd”. He even argued that “Liu’s victory over Mao [in the 1960s] could be a first phase in the development of a real revolutionary struggle for socialist democracy”62 – a suggestion demolished by the evolution of Chinese politics under Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death. In contrast, the majority position at the Congress (drafted by Maitan) lay more in the direction of critical support for the Maoists.63 So despite their shared hostility to Maoist politics, on many issues concerning the ccp Peng and Wang drew contrary conclusions. In the Cultural Revolution, Peng recommended “critical support for the opposition [in the ccp] against Mao’s faction and his personal dictatorship”.64 Wang Fanxi, on the other hand, supported neither side in the conflict, although he welcomed the emergence among the Red Guards of independent mass movements critical of the ccp leaders. After the Cultural Revolution, when the faction around Deng Xiaoping was toying for a while with the idea of democratic reform, Wang noted its potential, but he had no expectations of a renewal of the party from the top. On the whole, he believed that Mao and Liu complemented rather than negated one another.

Communications How did the Chinese Trotskyists manage under successive dictatorships to correspond and have dealings with each other and with their co-thinkers in the world Trotskyist movement? This was a crucial issue for them, as internationalists who aspired to align their political stance with that of the rest of the fi. However, maintaining contact under Chiang Kai-shek, and especially

61 62 63

64

Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), a military leader, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1970 and he died in prison in 1974. Quoted in Benton, “Editor’s Introduction”, Wang Fanxi 2019, 18, fn. 26. Au Loong Yu, a newcomer to the Chinese Trotskyist movement in 1976, points out (in a personal communication) that despite their many differences, both Peng and Wang, and their comrade-in-exile Xiang Qing, believed that the Cultural Revolution was far from revolutionary and that Mao’s mobilising of the student Red Guards played a reactionary role and was quite different in intent from what many Western leftists thought. But Au adds that how to evaluate the huge variety of Red Guards is another matter – not all of them kept to the Maoist script, a fact that Wang (but apparently not Peng) was prepared to recognise. Peng Shuzhi 1968.

introduction

39

under Japanese occupation and ccp rule, was difficult not to say impossible. Throughout their existence as an organised group (1930–1952), the Trotskyists found it hard to stay in touch with the fi because of the general chaos in China (caused by national and civil wars). Confined to their own small circles, even after 1945 they were far less informed than Trotskyists in other places about developments in the broader movement, parts of which, in the US, Britain, and other countries, had been rejuvenated by the war.65 Most Chinese Trotskyists worked out of Shanghai, where in the prewar years they were able to benefit (at least in this one respect) from the existence of the International Settlement run by British, American, and other foreign interests. The Settlement authorities assisted the Chinese authorities in capturing and imprisoning communists, Trotskyists, and members of other parties seen as a danger to political stability. However, the day-to-day running of the Settlement remained in the hands of the municipal administration, staffed by nonChinese, and life was usually safer for Chinese political dissidents under their rule than in Chinese-ruled areas. This was especially important for the Trotskyists, who lacked the ccp’s safe bases in the countryside. Communication in China outside Shanghai was risky, given the spy systems run by both the Kuomintang and the ccp, and links within China and internationally were therefore easier to maintain from within the Settlement. In 1945, after the Japanese defeat, the extraterritorial privileges of Britons and Americans came to an end, but Shanghai remained relatively open to the world. The foreign presence in the former colony and visits by sympathetic seafarers able to smuggle in political materials and letters made it easier for Trotskyists to communicate with the fi in other countries. In Shanghai, the journalists Frank Glass (Chinese name Li Furen) and the better-known Harold Isaacs (Yi Luosheng) worked with the Trotskyists in the 1930s, as did the photographer Alex Buchman. The writer and journalist Jack Belden also helped them at one point in the postwar years. Direct communications with the fi were maintained through Glass. But despite these various lines of contact, exchanges were never easy. The Chinese Trotskyists were cut off from the US Trotskyists in the swp and in Max Shachtman’s Workers Party (wp) from 1942 to January 1946. Even before the war cut ties completely, there had been few direct contacts between the fi and its Chinese section. After the war, however, the Chinese Trotskyists renewed contact with both US parties with the help of US soldiers or sailors stationed in China.66 Between June and October 1947, the two US Trotskyist

65 66

Broué 1985, pp. 35–60. “Chinese Trotskyist Party Survives Japanese Terror”, The Militant, vol. 10, no. 7, 16 February

40

benton

groups began publishing reports and documents of the Chinese Trotskyists.67 At the fi’s Second World Congress, held in Paris in 1948, the wartime split in Chinese Trotskyism was briefly mentioned, but no Chinese attended.68 A short-lived tie developed in the late 1940s between Wang Fanxi and Shachtman, which led to the publication of some articles by Wang in Shachtman’s magazine, The New International.69 It is not clear who initiated the contact.70 Whatever the case, the two men were able to exchange letters and ideas. At first, Wang accepted Shachtman’s view of the Soviet Union as bureaucratic collectivist. This view chimed in some ways with Zheng Chaolin’s long-held (and never relinquished) view of the Soviet Union, and of Mao’s New China, as “cadreist”, Zheng’s own term, invented later, meaning ruled by cadres. This coincidence may have persuaded Wang to accept Shachtman’s analysis. As we have seen, however, Wang dropped the Shachtmanite characterisation when he saw the radical changes that started to take place in China almost from the start of the new regime under Mao. Instead, he returned to the view of the su as a degenerated workers’ state and began (like the fi) to see Mao’s China as a congenitally “deformed” workers’ state.71

67

68

69

70

71

1946; G., “A Report from Shanghai on Chinese Labor Movement (24 January 1946)”, Labor Action, vol. 10, no. 13, 1 April 1946, p. 4-M. “Heroic Record of Chinese Trotskyists during the War”, Militant, vol. 11, no. 23, 7 June 1947; “Trotskyism in China. A Report”, Fourth International, July–August 1947, vol. 8, no. 7, pp. 211–5; “Colonial Questions Today. Resolution of the Chinese Trotskyists”, New International, vol. 13, no. 8, October 1947, pp. 253–4. Report on the Fourth International since the Outbreak of War, 1939–48, Fourth International, New York, vol. 9, no. 8, December 1948, pp. 251–257, and vol. 10, no. 1, January 1949, pp. 28–31. Quite apart from insuperable impediments to travel at the time, China’s rival Trotskyist leaders were busy preparing to launch their movements as political parties (Au Loong-yu, personal communication). Max Shachtman (1904–1972) was an American Trotskyist who came to believe that the ussr was ruled by a new bureaucratic class and that the concept of “defence of the ussr” was no longer applicable. He went on to become a social democrat. Paul Hampton (in a personal communication) speculates that the contact might have been established through swp members sympathetic to the wp. They would probably have included Felix Morrow, Jean van Heijenoort, Albert Goldman, and Carlos Hudson. Peter Drucker, an expert on Shachtman, in a personal communication, wrote as follows regarding Shachtman’s conception of bureaucratic collectivism (at least from November 1943 on): Shachtman characterised these states “as both radically anti-working class and radically anti-capitalist. He applied this analysis to Yugoslavia from 1948 on and anticipated applying it to China. He therefore predicted from the start that the prc would take radical anti-capitalist measures, and was dismissive of other Trotskyists’ criticisms of the Chinese Communists as insufficiently anti-capitalist. It doesn’t make sense therefore for Wang to have dropped the theory of bureaucratic collectivism in response to the regime’s radical measures. Perhaps Wang, when he briefly used the term, gave it a different content

introduction

41

After the final victory of Mao’s revolution in 1949, Wang’s job in Hong Kong was in theory to act as a liaison point or link-person for the party left behind in mainland China and to keep up its international ties. As we know, however, the British colonial authorities Kong arrested him and deported him to Macao, so he was silenced even earlier than his comrades in Shanghai. Peng Shuzhi, who left for Hong Kong in 1949, in his case with a group of fellow leaders of the rcp, found it similarly difficult to maintain communication with Trotskyists in China after his transfer into exile. Even so, both Wang and Peng managed to stay in touch in various ways with at least some of the handful of Trotskyists in China and Hong Kong still at large. I am most familiar with the case of Wang. Even after his move to the UK in 1975, he was usually able to keep abreast of events in China through his old comrade Lou Guohua, a book seller and publisher of Trotskyist literature in Hong Kong (including of Lou’s own book on Lu Xun and several works by Wang). Lou Guohua’s cousin Lou Shiyi, a distinguished poet and writer and a member of Beijing’s literary establishment, received information that he passed on to Lou Guohua in Hong Kong who in turn passed it on to Wang Fanxi. Wang managed to get letters to Zheng Chaolin after Zheng’s release from labour camp in 1979, again with Lou Guohua’s help. So Wang, Lou, and Zheng were able to maintain a prolific three-way correspondence. Peng too had channels to China through Hong Kong, where his supporters published a long-lived journal, Shiyue pinglun, together with collections of articles by him and Chen Bilan.

The Struggle to Rehabilitate the Chinese Trotskyists Political rehabilitation (pingfan) is a concept mainly associated with communist states, where out-of-favour individuals and groups subjected to criminal prosecution or disgraced are restored to political acceptability after a change of regime or an eventual capitulation by the losers in inner-Party struggles. Rehabilitation in its full sense is a complex process with several stages, and can be posthumous or prehumous. The practice started in the Soviet Union after Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism in his famous 1956 speech. Tens of thousands of victims, dead or alive, and even entire ethnic groups that than Shachtman did? Or perhaps Wang dropped the theory because he concluded that the regime’s anti-capitalist measures had progressive features (which Shachtman denied, at least from 1943, though not in the initial version of his theory in 1941)?” Evidently, Drucker’s second theory makes greatest sense.

42

benton

had suffered discrimination and persecution under Stalin were rehabilitated. The practice spread to China, where it happened on a wide scale, particularly after the arrest of the “Gang of Four” at the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Large numbers of Chinese who had suffered in the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated over a period of several years. Rehabilitation was officially pictured as a measure of the magnanimity of socialism. In China, it usually followed an appeal to a rehabilitation committee under the Central Committee of the ccp. In some cases, it happened as a result of a petition from below. Rehabilitation in both China and the Soviet Union was highly selective. In Russia, Trotsky was never rehabilitated, although members of the Trotskyist “counterrevolutionary centre” like Radek, Bukharin, and Rykov were (in 1988), probably because Gorbachev saw them as “patriotic” and compatible with his reformist project. So was Nicholas ii, renowned as a cruel tyrant and antiSemite but reinvented in 2008 as a “victim of political repression”. In China, whether or not to rehabilitate the Chinese Trotskyists is a question that has never been properly resolved. Under the ccp, hundreds of Japanese and Kuomintang war criminals and even the “Last Emperor” Pu Yi are deemed rehabilitated, but none of the Chinese Trotskyist leaders received a formal pardon, not even Chen Duxiu. This might be because Chen was never formally arraigned before a court of the prc (he died of illness before the prc came into being). The failure to rehabilitate Zheng Chaolin could be similarly explained, for he was imprisoned in 1953 without ever having formally stood trial. However, there has been no official statement in China even regarding the rehabilitation of Trotskyist leaders sentenced by regularly constituted courts. Both Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi campaigned for a blanket rehabilitation of the Trotskyists, in letters and petitions. Before Wang’s departure into exile in 1949, he and Zheng had agreed to implement a strategy of liying waihe (coordinating from inside and outside [China]), which resumed after Zheng’s release in 1979. In the 1990s, not long before Zheng’s death, Mainland officials secretly contacted Wang and urged him to return to China, to live out his last years with his family in Shanghai. Wang said yes, but only if his old comrades in China were fully rehabilitated. That did not happen, so he died in exile. Although Chen Duxiu headed the ccp’s Trotskyist offshoot in 1931, it was impossible in the post-Mao years to continue to deny his stellar and pioneering role in the Chinese Revolution. Several historians and some political leaders have argued in vain for Chen’s full rehabilitation. Probably the first senior leader to hint at the possibility of rehabilitating Chen and other previously reviled Trotskyists was the veteran communist General Xiao Ke, who in August

introduction

43

1981 likened Chen to Russia’s Plekhanov and recalled that Mao had once called him “the Commander-in-Chief of the May Fourth Movement”.72 Xiao not only defended Chen but called for a reassessment of “China’s Trotsky-Chen liquidationist faction”.73 Besides Xiao Ke, a not insignificant number of other Chinese, including scholars, writers, and political leaders, some of senior stature, have spoken with appreciation and even warmth of the Trotskyists. They include Wang Ruowang, Liu Binyan, Zhu Zheng, Zheng Yifan (the main translator of Trotsky’s writings into Chinese), Jin Shupeng, Wu Jimin, and Zhou Meisen.74 All, it seems, agree with Jin Shupeng that the Trotskyists were “undoubtedly” revolutionaries. Even Tang Baolin, an academic placeman and author of dubious archival studies on Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists that try to cast doubt on their revolutionary and patriotic integrity, now says his earlier assessment was unfair75 and has agreed to recategorise them as “unswerving Marxists”.76 Chen Sihe, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and associate dean of the Humanities School at Fudan University, an expert on the Chinese anarchist writer Ba Jin, concluded (regarding the ccp’s treatment of the Trotskyists) as follows: “An independent, vital Marxist party would face up squarely to its own history and rectify prejudices and errors, treat generously those who have opposed it, and unite with all possible forces. Then and only then could such a party serve as a mainstay of Marxist ideology in the complex conditions of today’s world. In so doing, it would – to quote the Trotskyist Lou Guohua, in his Preface to Wang Fanxi’s Memoirs – ‘let the broad working masses know that the collapse of Stalinism [in Russia] is in no way equivalent to the bankruptcy of socialism and communism’”. Chen added that if the ccp rehabilitated the Trotskyists, “some honour would be redeemed”.77 These and other assessments of Chinese Trotskyism by leading figures in many fields suggest that an even broader sympathetic consensus might still emerge regarding the Chinese Trotskyists. The most explicit call yet by a member of the Chinese communist establishment for the Trotskyists’ rehabilitation came in 2003 from the senior Marxist theorist Gao Fang, a major figure in the historiography of the international 72

73 74 75 76 77

In 1972, General Xiao Ke was appointed Principal of the University of Military and Political Studies. In 1989, he protested against the enforcement of martial law in Tian’anmen Square. He played a central role in 1991 in setting up the influential liberal journal Yanhuang chunqiu (China Through the Ages). Xiao Ke 2015. The writings of some of these people are included or referenced in Prophets Unarmed. Yang Yang, interview with Tang Baolin, 14 March 2014. Tang Baolin no date. Chen Site 2015.

44

benton

communist movement and a leading professor at Beijing’s famous Renmin (People’s) University. In an essay on Trotskyism, Gao explained that in August 1988 the Supreme Court of the ussr, after reopening the case of the so-called “Trotsky counterrevolutionary parallel headquarters” in the 1930s, had found the accusations against them to be “groundless” and had therefore decided to quash the original verdict and rehabilitate most of them. Gao went on to describe the Fourth International in extremely positive terms. Here is a slightly abridged translation of his commentary: “The Trotskyists are a small, independent and distinctive party in the international communist movement. After the dissolution of the Third International in 1943, the Trotskyist Fourth International gained new momentum. There was democratic freedom within the Fourth International, but there were often differences of opinion, factions and even splits in the organisation. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (cpsu) dissolved itself in August 1991, but national Trotskyist organisations have become more active in recent years. There are five main reasons for this. (1) Trotsky’s spiritual legacy has a strong cohesive power. (2) The [early] Trotskyists were succeeded by people who were able to innovate in theory. The most accomplished was the Belgian Trotskyist theorist Ernest Mandel (1923–1995). The writings of Mandel and others became spiritual pillars that united the new Trotskyists. (3) The death of the Soviet Union and the cpsu reinforced the dynamism of the Trotskyist Fourth International and the various Trotskyist organisations. The Trotskyists of today believe that it was Trotsky who first foresaw the inevitable demise of the Soviet Union and the cpsu. As early as 1924 Trotsky stated that ‘socialism cannot be established in one country’ and in 1936 he decided that the Soviet Union was ‘a country run by a new privileged class of people who have betrayed it’. At the same time he predicted that for the Soviet Union to move towards socialism would require a violent workers’ political revolution to overthrow the degenerating bureaucracy, and that a return to capitalism would require a social counterrevolution to overthrow state ownership of the means of production and land and to restore private ownership. (4) Capitalist globalisation since the 1980s has intensified the polarisation of rich and poor within the developed capitalist countries and the polarisation of the North and South internationally. The various contradictions of capitalism have deepened, which has also provided social conditions for the activities of the Trotskyist Fourth International and the various Trotskyist organisations. (5) The Trotskyist organisations also had a group of political activists who had fought long and hard on the front line to establish, consolidate, and develop Trotskyist organisations and even to die for them, so that they could flourish and survive from generation to generation. It is for these five reas-

introduction

45

ons – historical, theoretical and practical, leadership and mass, internal and external, international and national – that Trotskyist organisations have continued to operate from the 1930s to the present day. The influence of Trotskyist organisations in some countries has even surpassed that of the Communist Party”.78 So although the ccp has been generally silent on the Trotskyists, a small number of Chinese Marxists have rehabilitated them in all but name. Gao Fang wrote in 2000 to Wang Fanxi in Leeds, praising publications by Wang that he had managed to acquire through Hong Kong (see this volume for the correspondence). So did Liu Binyan and Wang Ruowang. The lack of an all-embracing rehabilitation of China’s Trotskyist leaders does not mean that the official view of them has remained the same as in Mao’s day. In nearly all respects, Chen Duxiu and Zheng Chaolin’s posthumous restoration to respectability is complete. Their writings are publicly on sale, and Chen Duxiu’s tomb in his hometown in Anqing in Anhui Province has been officially restored. Zheng Chaolin was appointed after his release from prison in 1979 to the prestigious People’s Political Consultative Conference of the Municipality of Shanghai and granted an apartment in Shanghai. As one of just a few survivors of the first years of the ccp, he was regularly consulted before his death in 1998 by historians, including Deng Xiaoping’s daughter Deng Rong, in the course of researching her book on her father’s life. (Deng and Zheng worked together in the Communist movement in France in the early 1920s.) Sadly, however, this rehabilitation has never been officially proclaimed and is now unlikely to be, given its fading relevance with the passage of time and the extinction of the first generation. But although none of the Trotskyist leaders has been formally rehabilitated, lower-ranking Trotskyists have been, explicitly and openly. In their case, the rehabilitation can probably better be called civic rather than political. Civic rehabilitation was essential for a group of people who were unemployable, advanced in age, and in declining health, after long years in prison. Rehabilitation meant that they could receive a small income and be given accommodation. It improved not only their own material lives but those of their relatives and dependants, for whom association with a convicted Trotskyist had been an extreme stigma.

78

Gao Fang 2003. Gao Fang, born in 1927, died in Beijing on May 31, 2018, aged 91 (Beijing wanbao, 31 May 2018).

46

benton

The Rebirth of Critical Socialism in China Prophets Outcast had as part of its subtitle Chinese Trotskyism and the Return from Limbo, implying that the Trotskyists would one day be harrowed from the Maoist Hell, like Dante’s virtuous pagans. The Chinese scholar Wu Jimin called his 2008 study on the Trotskyists “purgatory” (lianyu), the first stage in their delivery from ante-purgatory or limbo. Sceptics make light of this idea, but changes over time in the official view of Chinese Trotskyism and the growth of an extra-party left may prove them wrong. A critical socialist movement in some ways analogous to Trotskyism is today spreading from the outmost fringe of Chinese politics to a small but growing audience. Although the student protests in China in May–June 1989 did not come out of the blue, few would have predicted them a couple of years earlier. Today, however, smallscale protests are less uncommon than in the past and a new explosion would not come as a complete surprise. Trotskyists have played little role in this dissent, which is led by rebel groups of other political persuasions. In the background, however, is the spirit of Chen Duxiu, whose salute to “Mr Science and Mr Democracy” is still remembered and repeated. Several new-left organisations, some inspired by the legacy of Maoism and a smaller number by that of Trotskyism and anarchism, have sprung up in recent years among students in China, global Chinatown, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.79 The setting up in mainland China of Trotskyist study associations is already a reality. In the diaspora, groups of Chinese young people calling themselves “revolutionary communists” have started to get into touch with local anarchists and Trotskyists. In many Chinese cities, Marxist reading groups now meet on university campuses, including groups dedicated to the study of Chen Duxiu; student societies calling themselves “Maoist Marxist”;80 specifically Trotskyist societies; a New Left Society based among students in Hong Kong; the Left Chinese Student Association, active in the UK and elsewhere; and the China Deviants, a collective of mainland Chinese international students formed in November 2022, active both in China and abroad.81 Other groups operate under different names, although it is hard to keep track. 79

80 81

On the various movements that were initially inspired by Maoism in the first three decades of the prc but then partly broke with it, see Ruckus 2023. Manifestos and analyses of these movements can be found in Benton and Hunter (eds) 1995. Yuan Yang 2018. What next for China’s politicised youth? An Interview with China Deviants by China Deviants and Lausan Collective, 19 January 2023. See also Ian Liujia Tian 2022. Upping the Anti, the journal in which this article appeared, is a volunteer-run movement journal based in Toronto. Ian Liujia Tian is a feminist ethnographer who focuses on labour, queer and feminist culture and politics in post-Cold War China.

introduction

47

In the diaspora and China, repression of pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong and of Uyghurs in Xinjiang has become a focus of attention and given rise to protests. Just a few years ago, Han-ethnic supremacy in minority-ethnic parts of China and Beijing’s policies in Hong Kong usually went unchallenged, but today Han Chinese students and migrants as well as minority-ethnic Chinese can be found protesting against state crackdowns. In these movements, ethnic and migrant Chinese, chiefly students, have here and there linked up with local solidarity campaigns. The hydra-headed opposition to the ccp in the twenty-first century has little of the political sophistication or ideological coherence of the original twentieth-century Opposition under Chen Duxiu in 1931 or of its unity of purpose, stamped on it by the circumstances in which it was forced to operate and by its direct tie to Trotsky. Instead, the new opposition is a jumble of political tendencies. Even so, it is inspired by a common conviction, that the “hegemonic” state in China uses the word socialism as rhetoric to cover up the growing inequalities created by state-led marketisation and privatisation and by the alliance between capital and China’s “red bourgeoisie”. Most leftwing oppositionists are determined to bring real socialism back into the “everyday struggle” for workers’ power in the factories and the migrant villages. However, not all the opposition’s many components are headed in the same direction. They include mutant varieties of Maoism, supporters of the new left (as distinct from the old Maoist left), self-declared liberals, and even New Confucians.82 All see inequality as “post-socialist” China’s most pressing problem but differ on how to solve it – by a return to Maoism, by working to reform the party-state, by introducing a market free from the “gangster logic” of government regulation, by a Confucian restoration (as in capitalist Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew in the 1990s), and so on.83 Among the earliest post-1989 opposition groups was the China Labour Bulletin (clb), a Hong Kong-based ngo that supported and engaged with the workers’ movement in China, where it tried to hold the official trade unions accountable to their members and make them truly representative. Founded by Han Dongfang, a onetime railway worker in Beijing who helped set up the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation during the Tian’anmen Square protests of 1989,84 clb was never strictly part of the new radical movement,

82

83 84

An “ethical model of modernity” based upon a renewed version of supposedly traditional Chinese values aimed at generating a non-individualistic version of modernity (Rošker 2020). Ian Liujia Tian 2022. Froissart 2015.

48

benton

but it served for a while as a source of information on developments in the labour movement that is a focus of most opposition groups. The Hong Kong campaigner Au Loong-yu, a veteran defender of labour rights with a history of Trotskyist activism, divides Han’s political evolution into three stages. During the first stage after 1989, Han and the clb promoted the idea of building independent trade unions. In the latter half of the 2000s, Han switched to advocating reform of the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions (acftu) by means of lobbying the ccp. In later years, however, Han changed his view and denied his earlier involvement in promoting independent unions in China. After Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, Han praised Xi at meetings and seminars for supposedly supporting the acftu’s reform, a claim that shocked and dismayed international union representatives. Finally, in 2021, as a member of the Democratic Party of Hong Kong, he tried to win official endorsement for his own electoral campaign even after Beijing had smashed the entire opposition.85 Even more important than the clb in its early years for the gathering and spread of information about socialist and opposition movements in China, in its case from a largely historical point of view, is the Marxists Internet Archive (mia, www.marxists.org), one of the oldest collaborative archive projects on the Internet. The present volume would have been a lot thinner but for the sources made available by the Chinese-language version of mia.86 Today, the archive includes tens of thousands of pages of text and other files. At one point, its Chinese section came under attack, almost certainly by a group acting on behalf of the Chinese government. Beijing tried to ban the archive, and its agents are suspected of masterminding hundreds of “denial of service attacks” aimed at the site. However, volunteers managed to thwart the attacks by creating a system of “mirror sites” around the world that deflected the harassment. The attacks made it hard for the keepers of the archive to safeguard and update their collection, but they overcame these difficulties and today the archive thrives more than ever.87 Although the mia started mainly as a Trotskyist project, its Chinese-language edition has since blossomed under the direction of its editor Lam Chi-leung into an archive that aims to erase the boundaries that separate different groups of revolutionary socialists in China, Hong Kong, and

85

86 87

On Han Dongfang, see Au Loong-yu 2012, 2020, and 2021. This paragraph also benefits from comments in personal communications to me from Zhang Shaoming and a Hong Kong activist who needs to remain anonymous. The archive started up in 1987 (under the name Marx-Engels Internet Archive) as an effort to distribute Marxist information on arapnet, and migrated to the Web in 1993. Cohen 2007.

introduction

49

the diaspora. These groups include some who trace their lineage to political traditions that in the past were the Trotskyists’ sworn enemies. Lam sent me the following brief description of the activities of the archive’s volunteers: “I have been managing the Chinese version of the internet library since 2003. Although I am a Trotskyist, the editorial policy of the website is to affirm the orthodoxy of Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism and to preserve the historical literature of all schools of Marxism. Over the years, I have come into contact with a new generation of Marxist youth in China through this Chinese-language library, as well as other young volunteers, including Maoists. The website is first and foremost a working platform, a collaborative effort to collate literature, and does not take part in any real political activity”. Among the most cohesive and ideologically uncompromising of the new groups is Chuang, which argues that China has completed the transition “from an isolated state-planned economy into an integrated hub of capitalist production”. Chuang describes itself as “anti-state communist” and has anarchist resonances. Its website calls on those who farm, cook, clean, and otherwise work for China’s billionaires to batter down the gates into the banquet hall, whereupon “the possibilities for a new world” will emerge “beyond the bounds of the slaughterhouse called capitalism”. Chuang uses the ideographic image of a horse breaking through a gate as in the Chinese character chuang, in all its meanings: to break free, to attack, to break through, to force one’s way in or out, to act impetuously, to attend a feast without being invited.88 Few of the new groups have political positions as settled as those of Chuang. Others see themselves as broadly based, loosely organised, and relatively open. Typical of them is Lausan, a collective of writers, translators, artists, and organisers that “has no founders, only members”, and sees its role as campaigning “across the world” for “transnational left solidarity and struggling for ways of life beyond the dictates of capital and the state”. Even more loosely organised and politically eclectic are the China Deviants, who also have a small international presence. Lausan says of them: “The politics of China Deviants, as with others in this new generation of democracy activists, are still developing and will doubtless be in flux as the movement grows. Though we cannot predict the course of the movement’s development, we hope to see a space for a new Chinese left to flourish in it”.89 For obvious historical reasons, in the twenty-first century Maoists are China’s deepest-rooted far-left tendency. Dissident Maoist organisations that reflect 88 89

http://chuangcn.org/about/. What next for China’s politicised youth? An Interview with China Deviants by China Deviants and Lausan Collective, 19 January 2023. See also Ian Liujia Tian 2022.

50

benton

the legacy of mass organising of the Cultural Revolution have been active for years in China, particularly among students. Au Loong-yu distinguishes between Maoism “within the system” (tizhinei), which has become obsolete in recent times, and the various Maoist organisations that have emerged again and again in China since the turn of the twenty-first century, when groups of young revolutionary workers and students gave up expecting self reform by the ccp and began to argue with ever greater confidence and conviction for an overthrow of the system.90 Since its founding in 2003, China’s best-known Maoist internet forum has been Utopia (Wuyouzhixiang), which supported, Bo Xilai, the left-leaning leader of the ccp in Chongqing before his downfall in 2013 and backed the Jasic strikers. Utopia also advocated a new Cultural Revolution.91 China Workers’ Website (Zhongguo gongren yanjiu wang), renamed Red China Network (Hongse yanjiu wang) after its closure by the authorities and its transfer abroad, has taken a more radical stance than Utopia. It has campaigned in state-owned enterprises against privatisation and accused “moderate” Maoists of actually being “Dengists”, supporters of Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist reforms after the death of Mao. Its main intellectual leader is Li Mingqi, professor of economics at the University of Utah. In recent times, however, a new generation of Chinese Maoists has grown impatient with Li Mingqi’s faction. The best-known and the most successful Maoist group, which shot into prominence in China in 2018 when a group of labour activists in Huizhou, Guangdong, launched a drive to unionise the Shenzhen Jasic Technology factory, was the Jasic Workers Solidarity Group. Its leading members included a MeToo activist, former and present Jasic workers, a worker-poet, and other activists who characterised themselves as Marxists and Maoists. The struggle became known as the Jasic Incident. The Jasic campaign, which was around a decade in the making, was influenced by the campaign waged in the official sphere by the populist ccp leader Bo Xilai, whose “Chongqing Model” promoted ostensibly egalitarian values. This model became popular with a New Left angry at China’s market-based reforms and the growth in inequality. Maoists acting as a self-proclaimed Leninist vanguard recruited disaffected students and persuaded them to give up the prospect of a middle-class career and become factory workers, as the seedbed of a new leftwing underground. The plan was to move in groups from factory to factory, organising workers’ 90

91

Au, a leading global justice campaigner, is author of Au Loong-yu 2012 and 2020. He is also a founder of Globalization Monitor, a Hong Kong based group that monitors China’s labour conditions. Marquis and Qiao 2022.

introduction

51

resistance to poor pay and bad conditions. In the end, the movement failed and its activists fell foul of a state crackdown. During their struggle and after subsequent mass detentions, dozens of leftwing students and Maoist activists staged actions in solidarity with them, and many of those were arrested too. Other crackdowns followed at universities across many parts of China, including at Peking (Beijing) University, where the students’ Marxist Studies Society was disbanded. The attacks continued throughout 2019, and extended to activists with no ties to the Jasic struggle. This Maoist strand in China’s present-day far left, including the Jasic activists, differs in many ways from the broader new left that has recently begun to emerge in China. It is modelled, as the Berkeley sociologist Zhang Yueran notes, on a version of the Leninist vanguard party in which “petty-bourgeois” intellectuals equipped with revolutionary theory combine with and lead “the most politically ‘advanced’ elements of the working class”. Writing about the Jasic Incident,92 Zhang points out that, despite its tragic ending, “the very fact that this sophisticated and multi-layered labour organising strategy had been devised and implemented over more than a decade is in itself an extraordinary accomplishment, and cause for great respect for China’s young generation of leftists”. In the end, however, the activists were unable to develop “a long-term vision of a working-class revolution”. The veteran Hong Kong activist Au Loong-yu also published an article questioning the strategy pursued by the Jasic campaign. After stressing the need to stand alongside the rebel students and defend them against insinuations that they were being manipulated by “foreign forces”, he went on to criticise them for inserting young people into factories to “indoctrinate” worker activists with theories learned from books or copied from the experience of labour movements in the West or in Korea and Taiwan. He also blamed them for refusing to cooperate with other leftist groups, which were expected to obey the Jasic leaders “unconditionally”. He added that the Solidarity Group had greatly overestimated the extent of the workers’ resistance and had set progressive students throughout China on an adventurist course that ended in a demoralising defeat.93 Other groups on the Chinese new left have also criticised the Maoist students as elitist. A big barrier to a broadly based democratic opposition has been the Maoists’ refusal, in general, to discuss political issues with non-Maoists or join with them in campaigns. The newest Maoist organisation to emerge in

92 93

Zhang Yueran 2018 and 2020; and Au Loong-yu 2018. Au Loong-yu’s criticisms appeared in Mingbao ribao on 30 August 2018.

52

benton

China is the Revolutionary Socialist Front (Geming shehui zhuyi zhendi, rsf), which has ties to revolutionary groups outside China that translate and publish its articles. The first issue of its recently established journal runs to several hundred pages.94 Non-Maoist groups active in Hong Kong include the New Left Society, which seeks ties with the European New Left and with Chinese and other Trotskyists. It describes itself as follows: “New Left Society […] aims to provide a platform for academic discussion for […] students to explore theories, and reflect upon the international New Left ideas and practices since the radical movement of the Long Sixties in Hong Kong and around the world. […] While under the wing of conservative liberalism, universities today enjoy more or less autonomy and monopoly over the pursuit of truth, and at the same time higher education is fully integrated into the corporate-state network of capitalism. Knowledge, as a tool of liberation and creation, has now ossified into serving markets and technocrats. Overlooking this fact, lecturing on justice and the humanities in the university will only become the ethical narrative of Ivory Tower, or serve to embellish the culture resume of technical talents rebranded as ‘global citizens’. Narrowing the focus on this fact, the so-called critical theory will only end up as a kind of disillusioned scepticism regarding the power-knowledge collusion. […] New Left Society hopes to restore the Jacobin tradition and the ideals of practice, criticise the bureaucratism of academic industrialisation, as well as provide an anticipatory outline for the future. […] The Global Leftists need to revive the languages of internationalist solidarity and socialist hope. […] When the Bastille was overrun and Louis xvi said, ‘This is a rebellion!’, each of us should remind him [as the progressive minded Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt did in 1789], ‘No, Your Majesty, this is a revolution.’”95 A new development in Chinese politics since the emergence of a socialist opposition has been the start of a dialogue between Chinese socialists and the international far left. Although born under the star of socialist internationalism, after the Stalinisation of the Communist International the ccp remained stuck for decades in nationalist mode, indoctrinated in superpatri-

94

95

The Australian Maoist newspaper Vanguard (no issue no. given) has translated the rsf’s “History Project of the Republic” as well as the introduction to the rsf’s new journal and an article titled “Clandestine Development is Currently Our Main Line of Work”, which looks at the potential for the development of revolutionary organisation under China’s current “bourgeois dictatorship”. The latter two translations, together with the rsf journal’s Chinese text, can be found at bannedthought.net. Zhongda xinzuo xueshe, 2022.

introduction

53

otic and even anti-foreign sentiment. The internationalism that the Communist International was created to uphold was abandoned after the rise under Stalin of greater Russian chauvinism, and the epigonous nationalisation of the Chinese Revolution that followed. Even before 1949, the international ties of the Chinese revolutionary movement were tightly controlled by the Communist International and its successor bodies, acting out of Moscow. Although Beijing promoted political movements among ethnic and overseas Chinese in the 1960s, again they were closely monitored and fashioned in a strictly Maoist image. After Mao’s death and the second rise to power of Deng Xiaoping, China’s further embrace of capitalism put a stop to even a semblance of internationalism, especially after Xi Jinping’s espousal of still uglier forms of flag-waving in the new century. As for the Chinese Trotskyists, they had no real contact with the world labour movement or other sections of the Fourth International in the years in which they were most active, in their case because of language barriers, wars, political turmoil, and surveillance by Chinese and colonial authorities. Now, however, the internationalist tradition pioneered by the generation of Chen Duxiu has started to revive. Members of new-left groups in China and the diaspora fluent in languages other than Chinese, better educated and with a broader vision than in the past, are increasingly open to the idea of cooperating with non-Chinese socialists overseas. Economic globalisation and Beijing’s embrace of full-blown capitalism mean that solidarity across international frontiers is more pertinent and urgent now than ever. Socialists everywhere can now solidarise with China’s resurgent opposition and help to protect it where possible against foreign employers and the Chinese state. But although the political reawakening of young Chinese at home and overseas is potentially important, it is only the beginning of the beginning. Au Loong-yu writes as follows: “The reawakening of young people now is of course a great thing. It is good that some of them are beginning to reach out to different leftist traditions, including the Trotskyists. But for now and for us, we are engaged chiefly in a dialogue. The road ahead is likely to be long. The lack of continuity on the Chinese left and of an enduring independent left current has made the consolidation of a new left organisation among young leftists difficult. The tone we set must be one of ‘prudent optimism’ ”.

Conclusions What do the materials collected in this sourcebook tell us about Chinese Trotskyism that we did not know before? Previously published memoirs by

54

benton

Wang, Zheng, and Peng concentrated mainly on political and theoretical issues as seen from the Chinese Trotskyist centre, which usually meant Shanghai, and on the years leading up to Mao’s victory in 1949, before the clampdown. They alluded only incidentally to activities in places outside Shanghai such as Guangzhou, Chongqing, Zhejiang, and Shandong. The memoirs in this volume, in contrast, reveal their movement’s greater spread and deeper roots in the 1930s and the 1940s, for example in wartime Sichuan and postwar Wenzhou – even, fleetingly, in postwar Taiwan. They also provide information about quixotic attempts by Trotskyists to create rural and military bases in the Japanese War, and about their activities in schools and factories. The section of documents on the crackdown by Mao’s new government on Trotskyism in Wenzhou and elsewhere in Zhejiang starting in 1949 shows that in some Chinese cities Trotskyism was strong enough to pose a brief threat to the stability of the new authorities, as their internal documents from the period admit. Few Western scholars have engaged seriously with the ideas and practice of Chinese Trotskyism. Many Western observers, even on the left, wonder at it as romantic and impractical, deride it as armchair commentary, or at best salute it as a martyrology. In China, the Trotskyists were vilified in all respects until Mao’s death, and even now the number of substantiated Chinese studies on them remains paltry. Most of the “academic” discussions of Trotskyism permitted by the ccp are a travesty of scholarship, the product not of fair inquiry but of ignorance, prejudice, or malice. In reality, though, viewed dispassionately, the Chinese Trotskyists represented a credible and original political movement. Wherever they got the chance, they developed programmes of action and went all out to realise them. Imprisoned in the 1930s, they were prevented from putting into practice the schemes they came up with at the end of the discussions before their inaugural congress. Some tried to play a military role in the anti-Japanese resistance, but Chen Duxiu and Wang Fanxi’s efforts to influence anti-Chiang generals in Wuhan failed and the anti-Japanese resistance forces set up by Trotskyists in scattered villages in Shandong and Guangdong collapsed in the face of massive odds on all sides. In the second half of the 1940s, however, the Trotskyists made every effort to create a movement of urban workers, students, youth, and women. Over the twenty years of their existence as an organised force, thousands can be said to have joined their ranks at one time or another, and at their peak in the late 1940s they matched in size the early ccp, before its explosive growth starting in 1925. Their social profile at that time was very much like that of the ccp before its rural turn. A few sought to sway the official party away from Stalinism by infiltrating its armed forces. Most of the “Trotskyists” that the ccp claimed to have flushed from its ranks in the 1930s and the 1940s were in fact supporters of out-of-favour regional factions

introduction

55

of communism that it sought to stigmatise and destroy, but some represented a real Trotskyist presence. (An obvious example is Wang Shiwei in Yan’an in 1942.)96 What is the legacy of the Chinese Trotskyists, beyond as a model of loyalty to a seemingly lost cause and of perseverance come what may? The Chinese Trotskyists saw themselves as preserving orthodoxy rather than enriching Marxism with new ideas, but the circumstances in which they found themselves were in some ways novel and elicited a novel response. Trotskyists everywhere are usually distinguished by their focus, inherited from Trotsky, on the democratic aspect of socialist revolution. For Trotsky and other Marxists, the democratic struggle was not just a crucial moment in the unfolding of permanent revolution but a tried tactic of communists in periods between revolutions or of counterrevolution like that in China in the 1930s – a means of unifying scattered peasant risings, linking them with the workers’ struggle for democracy and national independence in the towns, and preparing the way in conditions of defeat to a new upswing. Democracy was an even stronger ingredient in the Trotskyism of Chen Duxiu, the indispensable complement and bedrock of his socialism. Chen’s commitment to democracy was so deep that it led him at the start of the Japanese War to break with Trotsky and the Chinese Trotskyists on the issue of the defence of the Soviet Union, which Chen opposed as wrong, although Wang Fanxi and others hoped at the time that Chen’s continuing commitment to socialism would facilitate a mending of the break. (Chen died before that could happen.) The ccp, on the other hand, set up by thinkers like Chen inspired by the enlightenment-style ideals of May Fourth, was torn away from its attachment to democracy by Stalinism and its own exit from urban culture in 1927. The Trotskyists survived as the sole repositories on the revolutionary left in China of the democratic legacy of May Fourth, to which the Maoists merely mouthed attachment. Another new issue in revolutionary strategy to which the Chinese Trotskyists sought a solution was, as noted earlier, the role of revolutionary defeatism in colonial and semi-colonial countries. In Lenin’s formulation of the strategy, in wars between imperialist countries revolutionaries should seek the defeat of their “own” ruling class and turn external war into civil war. In the Second World War, Trotskyists in democratic countries occupied by the Nazis tried to apply revolutionary defeatism differently from in the past, by stressing the continuation of class struggle as part of a revolutionary war of liberation under proletarian leadership. In semi-colonial China after the outbreak of the Pacific

96

Benton 1982.

56

benton

War in 1941, the Trotskyists around Wang and Zheng proposed a related policy, of support for the anti-Japanese resistance but not for the corrupt and compromised government of Chiang Kai-shek, given that war under US leadership would no longer be progressive. This strategy was, in Wang and Zheng’s view, “defeatist” in essence but could be more appropriately terms “victoryist”. In the event, however, it was never put to the test, for the Chinese Trotskyists were able to play little or no part in the anti-Japanese resistance. The parallel between their position and that of the Trotskyists in wartime Europe is hard to explain, for communication was impossible. Their thinking was influenced to some extent by Trotsky’s pronouncements on China’s war, but they probably arrived independently at the idea of “victoryism”. On both questions, democracy and national defence, Peng took a different approach. Like Wang and Zheng, he supported fighting for a democratic national assembly, but he showed no sympathy for Chen Duxiu’s ultra-democratic stance and Chen’s rejection of Trotsky’s view that Russia under Stalin, though a tyranny, was nevertheless a workers’ state. Wang and Zheng, in contrast, were prepared to tolerate Chen’s unorthodox position, in the belief that the difference was not decisive and a reconciliation could be achieved through comradely debate. Peng also rejected Wang and Zheng’s arguments in favour of democracy within the Trotskyist party, which led to an irrevocable split in 1941. The difference between the two factions on the question of defeatism was consigned to history by the Japanese surrender, but the disagreement on the role of democracy and minority rights continued even after 1949. It ended up in the late 1970s preventing the full reunification of the Chinese Trotskyists. The Chinese Trotskyists had little or no lasting impact on the communist movement from which they sprang, as they themselves readily conceded. Although their founding core was drawn from the ccp, which was initially shaken by the transfer of the allegiance of some of its leaders (including its founder) to the Opposition, their long-term legacy for Chinese communism amounted to next to nothing. Their consignment to near oblivion was a tragic blow from which they could not recover. Today, however, tiny echoes of Trotskyist ideas can be heard in China’s growing hubbub of dissent, especially in the universities. For a long time, Trotskyist leaders like Peng and Wang believed in the possibility of a split in the leadership of the ccp that might gain them a chance to speak out. Peng tried to open a way back into Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution by praising Liu Shaoqi and his followers as democrats: Wang hoped that the churn of dissident currents thrown up by the Red Guard movement starting in 1966 might open the way to a Trotskyist intervention. After the Cultural Revolution, both Wang and Peng hoped at one point that Deng Xiaoping might bring in democratic reforms that would pave the way

introduction

57

to the Trotskyists’ full political rehabilitation. But all these expectations were dashed, most decisively by Deng’s bloody crackdown in June 1989 on the mass movement for democracy. Right up to the end of their lives, Wang, Zheng, and Peng continued to look in their different ways to the future, and to draw lessons from their own failure that they hoped might afford a new generation of critical socialists a hearing. For all their unrelenting optimism, they died unfulfilled and disappointed. Today, the prospect of a revival of Chinese Trotskyism is vanishingly small. Will the emergence in China in the twenty-first century of a radical socialist opposition to capitalism inject new life into it? So far, the Chinese far left has mostly harked back to the still vibrant Maoist tradition and the varieties of it generated by crises like the Cultural Revolution. Chinese Trotskyism remains where it always was, obscure and unexplored, a mere cussword in the mouths of unreconstructed Maoists. The few Trotskyists still active in China and the Sinophone have begun in recent years to speculate that the proletarianisation of China since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms97 and the revival of forms of workers’ collective action98 might rescue them from obscurity, yet there are few signs of that happening. The upswell in workers’ consciousness and critical socialism is still at an early stage, small as the biblical cloud that Elijah’s servant saw rising from the sea, no bigger than a hand.99 Even so, optimists see in it, like Elijah in the cloud, the beginning of a hailstorm and an end to the years of drought. The many and deep changes in Chinese society – the appearance of an independent workers’ movement, of feminism, of a generation of youth angered by the shrinking of opportunities, the mounting wave of protests against one-party rule, censorship, human rights abuses, corruption, environmental degradation, ethnic oppression, government land-grabs in the countryside, and the countless ills thrown up by China’s state of tyranny – all this shows that the will for change endures, different in form and size from the volcanic eruption of 1989 but the same in essence. For although recent protests lack the “collective goal”, scope, and planning of the student-led protests that spread across the whole of China in the 1989 democracy movement, they show that Chinese citizens, “despite facing greater risks and likely having to pay heavier prices for their actions, have not completely lost their will and instincts to protest oppression”.100

97 98 99 100

Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin 2010. According to China Labour Bulletin, wildcat strikes grew throughout the early 2010s, peaking at almost 2,800 in 2015 (Yuan Yang 2023). William Morris first used this metaphor in the context of socialist revolution. Wasserstrom and Yang 2023.

58

benton

However, the main beneficiaries up to now of the revival of left-wing politics in China have been the Maoists, though their credentials are deeply tarnished for many by their top-down politics and their historical association with Maoist chaos and tyranny. On the Chinese far left today, the membership of organisations like the Trotskyists explicitly committed to socialism with democracy is tiny, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Yet not all China’s Maoist groups are hardcore and unreformed. Some, one might hope, will navigate the transition to a politics scented with the new democratic essence of the age. In the early 1950s, Wang Fanxi noted with rueful satisfaction that Mao’s then recently formed government in Beijing, threatened with economic disaster, unexpectedly appropriated (though in mangled form) the theory and even the name of permanent revolution, associated up to then solely with Trotskyism. Could an analogous transfer of ownership happen now, in the small but growing world of China’s far-left politics? Decades before anyone in China, Chen Duxiu and his Trotskyist supporters addressed the issue of socialism with democracy. Will their commitment to it spill over into the radical mainstream, as a remedy for the ills of a society in which, because of changes in the structure of China’s economy and population, the classic Trotskyist notion of urban proletarian revolution is more relevant than ever? The Chinese Trotskyists believe that the idea of democratic revolution, terra incognita for historical Maoism, cannot be ignored by any up-and-coming revolutionary organisation fighting to extend its influence. The Maoists’ inattention to democracy massively limits their appeal to urban residents ever more liberal and democratic than their government, ever less supportive of its authoritarianism, statism, and populist nationalism.101 So an assimilation of the old Trotskyist-inflected democratic strategy by a new generation of non-Trotskyists is not out of the question. Whether in the course of such a transfer a hint of its Trotskyist ancestry might bob back into sight is another matter.

101

Mazzocco and Kennedy 2022.

part 1 The Fourth International and Chinese Trotskyist Organisations

∵

Introduction to Part 1 The Fourth International (fi) is a revolutionary socialist organisation of followers of Leon Trotsky, dedicated to overthrowing global capitalism and setting up world socialism through international revolution. It was formed at an international conference held in France in 1938, at a time when Trotsky and his supporters saw the Communist International under Stalin as no longer capable of bringing the international working class to power. Today, there is no longer just one international Trotskyist organisation, as a result of damaging splits over the years in many countries and internationally. The fi never achieved real influence in any country (except perhaps Ceylon, renamed Sri Lanka in 1972). However, Trotskyism in China was stronger at one point than in most other countries, and Trotsky saw it as one of his most promising potential bases of support. The world Trotskyist movement has had throughout its life to contend with many powerful enemies, led in the Soviet Union by the nkvd and elsewhere by agents of capitalist states. Chinese Trotskyism was also dealt powerful blows from several directions – the nationalist regime under Chiang Kai-shek that saw it along with the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) as a revolutionary menace, the ccp regime under Mao that saw it as counterrevolutionary, and colonial and imperialist forces in Shanghai and Hong Kong that were also opposed to its presence. At the international level, the Trotskyists suffered major splits in 1940 and 1953 from which their movement never properly recovered. Even so, the tradition that they established in the 1930s and later decades persists, and significant thinkers continue to insist that Trotsky’s insights and predictions remain valid. Today, the fi that reunified in 1963, often called the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and abbreviated to usfi or Usec (after its leading committee at that time), has its headquarters in Paris and a presence in five continents and more than forty countries, with research centres and working archives in several countries. It no longer has a committee called the united secretariat. It defined itself in 2010 as ecosocialist. It held its most recent World Congress in 2018.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_003

section a The Fourth International and Chinese Trotskyism, 1949–1979

∵

Introduction to Part 1, Section A This section includes documents, including statements, letters, and an article, showing communications between the fi and the Chinese Trotskyists, chiefly in Hong Kong. The documents and correspondence concern Trotskyist activities and political projects, including the plans (which ultimately failed) for the fusion of the small Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong in a single body and the arrest and subsequent release of Trotskyists in mainland China.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_004

Documents Sent to the usfi by Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua (1973) Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua

These three documents sent to the 10th Congress of the Fourth International (usfi) in 1973 were drafted by Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua on behalf of their own party, the Internationalist Workers Party (iwp), in English. They draw a general picture of the state of the iwp after 1949, and reveal some of Wang and Lou’s thoughts on the failure of the Chinese Trotskyist movement before 1949, on the Maoist regime, and on the fi’s internal struggle at the time. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms1709 11, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

(a)

Our Statement – To Be Submitted to the 10th Congress of the fi Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua

We were two members of the Central Committee of the former Communist League of China (Chinese section of the Fourth International), which was split in 1941 into two groups: the Majority led by Peng Shu-tse [Peng Shuzhi] and the Minority which we belonged to. The majority was re-organised in the end of 1948 into a party called the Revolutionary Communist Party of China, while the Minority, our group, was also re-organised into a party called the Internationalist Workers Party of China in April 1949. Shortly after the founding of the rcp, its leading committee decided to move itself and a number of responsible members to Hong Kong because of the imminent capture of Shanghai by the Communist Liberation Army. On the other hand, our party, the Internationalist Workers Party, decided to remain there, preparing to continue our underground activities when the ccp took power all over the country. Our activities under the Communist regime during the period between May 1949 and December 1952 were very successful in giving criticism to the policies of the new government on the one hand and in winning the rapidly disillusioned youth to the programme of the Fourth International on the other. It was mainly because of our ever-growing influence among the youth that the Maoist secret police decided to arrest all Trotskyists with Cde Cheng Chao-lin and others as their leaders in a nation-wide raid made on the 21st December 1952. The

© Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_005

documents sent to the usfi by wang fanxi and lou guohua

67

number of the arrested was estimated at about three hundred (most of them were members of the Internationalist Workers Party). Having received that crushing blow, unfortunately, the Chinese section of the Fourth International ceased to exist. However, those arrested and persecuted Chinese Trotskyists, so far as we know, remain up to this time faithful to the standard and the programme of the Fourth International. None of them had made any cheap declaration to denounce Trotskyism with the aim to change for their own freedom. Most leading members have so far suffered in Mao’s prison or labour camps for over twenty years! Their efforts and militant examples obviously have retained influence among the masses, at least two instances of which we came across in Maoist publications during the “cultural revolution” that certain rebellious youth in Shanghai and Kwangsi [Guangxi] province[s] really “Trotskyist agents”. On the occasion of the gathering of the most authoritative fighters of the world Trotskyists, we hope that these persecuted yet unbending Chinese comrades will be remembered and honoured at the Congress. At the same time, on behalf of all these comrades and especially those of the Internationalist Workers Party, we should like to pay our respect and extend our greetings to the Congress, sincerely wishing that it will be round off and the two contending tendencies [The imt and ltf – i.e., the Majority and Minority factions within the usfi] will remain in a unified world organisation. Regarding the problems which are going to be discussed at the Congress, we are sorry to say that owing to the late receipt of the main documents we cannot make any more contribution than the thesis entitled “It is still necessary to draw lessons from the failure of Chinese Trotskyists”, which was drafted by us and had been sent to the US in last September. It is our hope that our thesis will draw attention of the delegates and it will be discussed either during or after the Congress. Having closely studied some documents of both tendencies, however, we will declare right now that in general line we support the draft political resolution proposed by the international majority tendency (imt) but with some reservations of secondary importance. One of the reservations is about the trend of the policy of the People’s Republic of China. About Maoism we agree with such a view: while it is a variant of Stalinism, it should be more precisely understood and designated as a bureaucratic centrism. As a special type of centrists, Maoists have been usually proceeding along a zigzag path and they will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Thus we think it is not correct to pass a judgement in the sense that with the end of the “cultural revolution”, Maoists will irreversibly turn to the right. It is very probable

68

wang and lou

that when the internal and external circumstances change to some extent, Maoists may once again turn to the “left”. So we hope that before the political resolution being finally adopted, some amendments will be made in this respect. To conclude our statement, we are rather glad to say that after a long slumber, Chinese T[Trotskyist] movement, with the recruitment of some young revolutionaries, is beginning to show signs of revival. 28 December 1973

(b)

1.

2.

3.

A Preliminary Proposal for the Formation of a “Preparatory Committee” for the Re-building of the Chinese Section of the Fourth International Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua (Two surviving members of the Central Committee of the iwp) 15 June 1973 The present internal and external conditions of the People’s Republic of China and the objectively favourable situation in the areas with Hong Kong as the centre necessitate more and more genuinely revolutionary socialist organisation based in this British colony. The Chinese Trotskyists, who have been spared the crushing blow dealt at all Trotskyists in China by Maoists in 1952 thanks to their living in this area, must break away now immediately from the state of disintegration, inactivity and fictitious existence which has lasted till now for about twenty years. They must embark at once on the preparation for the re-building of the Chinese section of the Fourth International. In order that no time will be squandered on those long-dragged and fruitless old discussions on political and organisational questions, and in order that real activities can be begun immediately, we propose that a Preparatory Committee for the re-building of our combat party should be formed right away of three representatives: one from the remainders of the ex-majority of the Communist League of China (later renamed as the Revolutionary Communist Party of China), another from the survivors of the ex-minority of the same League (later renamed as the Internationalist Workers Party of China) and third from the young friends newly accepted Trotskyism. The tasks of the “Three Person Preparatory Committee” shall be as follows:

documents sent to the usfi by wang fanxi and lou guohua

a.

69

To get into contact with all those people who once belonged to our organisations, asking (at the same time examining) them about their opinions about the re-building of our party. Those who are willing from now on to actively participate in the party work and to perform the duties of a member should be registered as members of the future party; otherwise as sympathisers. b. To lead immediately the work which has already been carried on by some individual comrades among the youth and take the lead of other day-to-day work. c. To set up a special commission to draw the necessary documents: 1. a political resolution; 2. a plan for our activities in hk areas; 3. a document concerning the old controversies among Chinese Trotskyists; and … d. To make contacts and keep up a correspondence with the leadership of the Fourth International and other fraternal sections. (From now on, all personal contacts should be made known to the Committee and the contents of their correspondence should be informed to it.) e. To prepare in a shortest possible time (at most not longer than a year) to convene a meeting of representatives of this area to officially set up the new section of the Fourth International and to give a new name to the new organisation. 4. During the period prior to the draft and passage of the documents concerned, all and any official declamations the Committee may have to make should be based on the general line formulated in our fundamental Programme and other chief resolutions adopted at the last World Congress of the Fourth International. If some disagreements arise among members of the Committee, they should be decided by voting, let the minority submit to the majority. It is our hope that all our old controversies will be solved and new correct positions be established not only by discussions of arguments, but through our common revolutionary activities. We should in no way allow the old controversies (real or fictitious) prevent us from taking our first steps on the road of setting up a new Chinese section of the Fourth International.

70

wang and lou

(c)

It Is Still Necessary to Draw Lessons from the Failure of Chinese T[rotskyist]’s (A Thesis Submitted to the Coming Congress of the Fourth International for Consideration) Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua September 1973

1.

From the third Chinese Revolution, the Communist Party of China (cpc), notwithstanding their wrong Stalinist doctrine, emerged as a victor, while we, the Chinese Trotskyists, who had been all the time pursuing the correct strategical line of Trotsky, came out as failures, nay, we suffered defeats even before we had any chance to be seriously engaged in battle. This is a fact which requires serious consideration. In 1949 when the Revolution under the leadership or control of the cpc triumphed throughout the country and for a long time after that, we, Chinese Trotskyists denied that it was the triumph of a revolution and at the same time we refused to recognise the new state founded by the cpc as a workers state in any sense. This fact too requires a careful examination. Not only for the sake of correctly understanding the past, but also for the benefit of the future (which is much more important), the whole International, in our opinion, should consider and examine the experiences of Chinese Trotskyists’ defeat and draw lessons from them so that the Trotskyists of other countries (mainly the backward ones) might not repeat the same mistakes and achieve success in their future revolution. Among Chinese comrades there are a few (represented by Peng Shu-tse) who consider that both strategically and tactically we were “consistently correct” either before or during the Revolution. The only reason they gave to explain why Stalinists triumphed and we failed is the “exceptional historical circumstances created as a result of the Japanese invasion of China and World War 2” were favourable to the cpc but unfavourable to us. Thus they refused to make any deep-going and comprehensive study of the two questions we raised above. Such an attitude, in our opinion, is not only ridiculous and wrong, but means a sabotage to the cause of revolution. That the triumph of the third Chinese Revolution has proved objectively the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution has been recognised not only by Trotskyists of the world, but admitted shamefacedly and half-heartedly even by the leadership of the cpc. The characteristics of our times in general and the specific class relationships formed in colonial and semi-colonial countries in particular have

2.

documents sent to the usfi by wang fanxi and lou guohua

3.

71

left only two alternatives to the developments of the revolutions in these countries: either in accordance with the theory of permanent revolution (to seize power by the proletariat in a democratic revolution and thereby to accomplish the democratic tasks and initiate the socialist revolution), and that will certainly bring victory; or in accordance with the Stalinist theory of “revolution by stages” (to accomplish democratic revolution through a “democratic power” first and then to start the socialist revolution by a proletarian dictatorship) and that will be definitely heading for tragic defeats. This question, however, we will not elaborate further in this thesis, as about it there has not been any difference among our ranks. Neither will such questions as the following be touched upon: To what extent can we say that the cpc has been compelled to proceed along the line of permanent revolution? Why did not Maoists become conscious followers of the theory of permanent revolution after they had objectively and unconsciously carried out part of the same theory? Why do they still remain uncompromising opponents of Trotskyism? And why should we, Trotskyists of colonial and semi-colonial countries, continue to exist independently and to struggle for the strategy of permanent revolution, when the revolutionists of these countries had shown in fact that they might unconsciously take the course of permanent revolution, be it partially and unsatisfactorily? Questions like these are of course very important and about them there might be controversies among our comrades. But for the sake of brevity, we will not tackle them here, either. We wish to concentrate our discussion on the two questions raised above only. To the first question the shortest answer is: Under the pressure of the developments of the revolution, the Chinese Stalinists succeeded to some extent in abandoning (in practice not in theory) some aspects of Stalinism; while we, Chinese Trotskyists, under the same pressure did not succeed in changing our pre-conceived form of struggle to deal effectively with the real situation. That is the main reason why the theoretically bankrupted Stalinists triumphed and the strategically correct Trotskyists failed. Chinese Trotskyists undoubtedly had a correct strategy with regard to the Chinese revolution; but we did not find appropriate ways and means to carry it out. Speaking concretely, things were like the following: Basing on our fundamental strategy, Chinese Trotskyists had formulated and all the time stuck to such a course of revolutionary work: To con-

72

4.

wang and lou

centrate our forces in big industrial cities with the aim to educate and organise the working class by participating in and taking the lead of their economic and political struggles on the basis of a programme of democratic demands. Thus we hoped to build a strong proletarian party and through which to lead all the oppressed and exploited masses of the country onto the road of revolution and to overthrow the counterrevolutionary regime of the Kuomintang. In accordance with this course, our attitude towards the struggle of poor peasants was: only through the revolutionary struggle of the urban workers can we give the peasants political influence and leadership; and only at the time when the working class had resorted to arms could the peasants be engaged in armed struggle with a hope of success. Therefore we decided not to leave the city no matter what might happen. We decided to work among the workers at any cost. And we were decidedly against the idea of directly working among the peasants, not to speak of participating or leading their armed struggle. Such an orientation of revolutionary work, which was obviously in conformity with our strategic conception, had not been called in question until that time when the circumstances created under the Kuomintang counterrevolutionary regime rendered our pre-conceived form of struggle inappropriate, unable to bear any fruit. Since the early thirties, the military dictatorship of the reactionary Kuomintang, with the support of the British and American imperialists, had achieved a more or less stability both politically and economically. And that enabled it to organise and launch a campaign of terror against the underground revolutionary activities. The secret police of Kuomintang was an imitation of the gpu at first and then reorganised on the model of the gestapo, an organisation of very grand scale, penetrating widely into the masses and was “scientifically” organised and functioned. Their activities were also centred at industrial cities, especially in Shanghai. This counterrevolutionary repression machine, along with the deepening of the reactionary situation, worked much harder and harder and became much more effective until it almost succeeded in uprooting all clandestine revolutionary organisations in the middle of 30’s. The unified organisation of Chinese Trotskyists (the Communist League of China) came into existence on the 1st of May 1931, only to be crushed twenty days later. Since then no sooner had a new Central Committee been elected and begun to resume work than it was discovered and arrested. During the years between 1931 and 1937, our organisation received annihilating blows approximately every six months, and as a result, our underground organ-

documents sent to the usfi by wang fanxi and lou guohua

5.

6.

73

isation, despite the most heroic efforts made by our comrades, became weaker and weaker, with no hope of growth, still less of developing it into a party of masses. Meanwhile, the struggle of the poor peasants was active and the counterrevolutionary repression in the village was not so effective as in the cities. We might have gone there and opened up a new battlefield in the countryside, if we had not been bound tightly by our pre-conceived course of revolutionary work. We stubbornly refused to make a change in the method of struggle, although most of us did try to find some other form of struggle when we found ourselves in such a predicament. The fate of the cpc in the big cities was the same as ours. They suffered even more serious repression than we. And in principle they too determined to work among the workers as we did (the so-called strategy of “encircling the cities with villages” was to be invented by Mao much later). But unlike us, they were not principled theoreticians, but empirical activists. Being not so much bound by their doctrine, they were involuntarily involved themselves more and more in the work among the poor peasants, when they found that the clandestine work in urban centres could no longer carry on. Making advantage of the more favourable conditions in the countryside, they vigorously launched an agrarian revolution, which in turn forced its leaders to plunge into armed struggles from the very beginning. Thus in spite of Stalin’s fundamentally wrong estimate of the situation in China after the defeat of the Second Revolution and regardless of the countless heavy defeats they suffered because of the ultra-left and now ultra-right political lines imposed upon them by the Kremlin, the Chinese Communists at the long last managed to build and preserve a massive party of strict discipline and vigorous action; at the same time they managed to build and maintain a well-trained army with much higher political consciousness than that of the Kuomintang. It was these two levers that enabled Chinese Stalinists to make good use of the two “exceptional conditions” (as Peng called), i.e., China’s resistance war against the Japanese invasion and the World War 2 and finally made themselves victorious. It was exactly the lack of these two levers that prevented Chinese Trotskyists from making use of the same “exceptional conditions” and from achieving success though they had been armed with a much more correct political programme. The fact that the Chinese Trotskyists decided to work among workers at any cost and refused to reconsider the course of our work during the

74

7.

wang and lou

year 1931–37 might still be regarded as correct in principle and we might say that such a state of affairs was inevitable. Anyhow there had not yet been any experience of revolutionary practice in modern times which might show us that a revolution of workers and peasants could triumph through means other than that we had learned from the Russian Revolution. Besides, our organisation was a small group of propaganda which was quite inadequate and very difficult indeed for it to start an armed struggle. The same thing, however, cannot be said after August of 1937 when the war resisting the Japanese aggression broke out and the situation of the whole country radically changed: on the one hand, all industrial cities of the coastal provinces were occupied by the Japanese army, most industry paralysed and consequently the working class was greatly disorganised; on the other hand, the political centre had been moved to the interior, the political life of the nation revolved entirely around the pivot of war, and all social contradictions were reflected through the problems in connection with the war. It was such a time, in which the armed struggle had become the only practical struggle, that is to say, whoever abandoned this kind of struggle was equal to the abandoning of any struggle at all, and in which to get access to arms was comparatively easy for revolutionaries. Yet we, Chinese Trotskyists, still decided to have our organisation remained in Shanghai, taking refuge in its foreign settlements encircled by the Japanese occupation army, with no plan whatsoever of participating in actual fighting so that to have our cadres armed on the one hand and to build a combat party to accumulate our strength during the war on the other hand, which, in retrospect, we should admit to be a grave mistake. Of course, one may raise objections like that: First, at that time our strength was still weak and unlike the cpc we had no hope of getting any foreign aid, so we were just in no position to be engaged in armed struggle. Secondly, even if we were strong enough to take actual part in the fighting of the war, say, to organise guerrilla units in the occupied areas, it would be no benefit to the revolution either, because according to our conviction, without the leadership of the urban working class, the anti-Japanese guerrilla detachments had no other prospect but degeneration. And even if the detachments under our command had grown into big forces and on their top stood a strong party like the cpc, still it would not mean an achievement for the revolution, because the armed forces we built would be an army representing peasant interests and the party we created only a petty-bourgeois peasant party.

documents sent to the usfi by wang fanxi and lou guohua

75

These objections, in our opinion, have been disproved by facts. First, during the war times and under the pressure of internal and international struggles, there were a few Trotskyists (most illustrious among them were Cde. Wang Changyao in Shandong Province and Cde. Chen Zhongxi in Guangdong) who defied our official position by organising and leading anti-Japanese guerrilla units in their respective provinces, which lasted for a long time and left some influence among the masses. True, their efforts were at last frustrated and their detachments were annihilated by enemies (the former by Stalinists and the latter by Japanese), but their activities had anyhow demonstrated that it was not absolutely impossible for us to be engaged in armed struggle at that time if only we were determined to do so. Needless to say, it was extremely difficult for revolutionaries to wage independent anti-Japanese guerrilla war under the triple oppression of the Japanese imperialism, the Kuomintang and the cpc; nevertheless it did not mean that such efforts were doomed to failure. What is more important was the fact at that time (especially after the outbreak of the Pacific War), remaining in the Japanese occupied areas, we not only had nothing to do, but even could not maintain our barest living (for example, Cde. Han Chung [Han Jun], one of our best comrades, was literally starved to death in Hong Kong), to say nothing of other revolutionary activities. In such circumstances, it would be naturally much better to “take a risk” of participating in the armed struggle in the countryside than to sit and wait for death of starvation in the city. As a matter of fact, it could not be called “adventurism” and it would have had some chance of success if it had been planned and directed by our organisation with determination. To substantiate our assumption, we would like to point out two episodes: the Communist Eastern River Column (in Kwangtung Province) and an independent detachment active in the Siming Mountain area of Zhejiang Province, both were created during the War from nil and without any direct material aid from Yan’an yet neither of them had been annihilated throughout the War. Secondly, the assertion that in the heat of the armed struggle of poor peasants, revolutionaries can never build a party, still less a party more or less representing the working class interests and being able to lead the peasant army onto a revolutionary road – should not be understood in a mechanistic way. Especially now, having witnessed the experiences of a series of revolutions after the World War 2, we should say that though the same assertion is still correct in essence, it is no longer absolutely so. In certain countries and under certain circumstances, we did see revolution-

76

8.

9.

wang and lou

ary parties more or less representing workers interests having been built during the peasant wars, and we did see also that parties thus built and tempered were not necessarily of peasant character, and therefore they were not inevitably unable to win triumph for the revolution. Our persistent refusal to recognise the triumph of the cpc as the triumph of a revolution is mainly due to our long held appraisal of the cpc as a petty bourgeois peasant party. Basing on the theory of permanent revolution, we were of the opinion that a peasant party could never lead a revolution, still less a revolution of socialist character, to victory. It was the following facts that led us to assess the cpc as a peasant party: since the early thirties the cpc had been forced to part with the working class of big cities and transfer its scene of activities to the countryside, where the cpc had built up its strength by recruiting a great number of poor peasants, who before long had become the overwhelming majority of its membership. Then, in the year of 1935, the policy of the cpc underwent a radical change, from ultra-left to ultra-right, which made us more firmly believe that the cpc had finally degenerated into a peasant party.1 Not only should we admit the mistake, but also we have to recognise such a fact from the mistake: In colonial and semi-colonial countries, a revolutionary working class organisation with a somewhat long revolutionary tradition does not necessarily lose its class character by carrying on its work during a considerable period of time in places other than urban centres and recruiting its members from the poor people other

1 Authors’ notes: According to Peng Shu-tse [Peng Shuzhi], it was Trotsky who for the first time designated the cpc as a peasant party. To uphold his statement, Peng referred us to ld’s letter to Chinese Left-Oppositionists dated 22 September 1932. As a matter of fact, Peng misunderstood what Trotsky really meant, which, however, we will not deal with here except for pointing out a fact: the cited letter was written at the time when the international Trotskyist movement still considered itself a faction within the communist movement. How could then Trotsky designate one of these parties as a peasant one? Our appraisal of the cpc as a peasant party took its origin from our orientation towards the working class. Therefore, this appraisal could not be considered wrong theoretically at that time. It had been usual with Marxists to assess the class character of a political party from two standards: the social composition of the membership and its political platform. In retrospect, however, we should admit that when we made the theoretical assessment of the class nature of the cpc, we had not painstakingly checked it up with the actual activities of the cpc same party. And now when we have seen the real developments of the cpc and have extracted the experience from Yugoslavian, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions, we have to admit that we were wrong when we called and took the cpc as a peasant party.

documents sent to the usfi by wang fanxi and lou guohua

77

than industrial workers, if only it maintains a revolutionary programme, engages in genuinely revolutionary activities, keeps a close fraternal contacts with revolutionary workers parties of the world, and holds fast to the organisational orientation towards working class in the sense that it is ever ready to reverse the peasant tendency by recruiting workers on a grand scale when there is a possibility. Under favourable circumstances, in which we enjoy full freedom to arrange and plan our revolutionary work, of course, we must lay the foundation of our party deep in the working class districts and we should make every effort to recruit best workers to be the cadres and leaders of our party. If the circumstances are extremely unfavourable, however, such as those prevailed in China in the early thirties and are prevailing now in some countries of Latin America, in which revolutionary activities in big cities become practicably impossible, revolutionaries of these most reactionary countries are compelled to (even it is the only possible way for them to) build their party by opening up a new scene of battle in the countryside (without abandoning the urban work in principle), waging a prolonged guerrilla war and recruiting its members from the semi-proletarian village labourers and poor peasants. In so doing, they are not against the correct line of building a proletarian party. 10. To conclude the thesis, we should like to summarise what we have said above as follows: (1) Despite all the merits of most Chinese Trotskyists, such as the firmness in holding out the principles, the loyalty to the revolutionary ideals and the readiness to sacrifice their lives to the cause, we were incompetent with regard to the selection and application of the forms of struggle. We failed to do as Lenin once advised: “Marxism positively does not reject any form of struggle”, and “Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle”. Our weakness manifested itself most evidently on two questions: a. When the Kuomintang repression of terror went on the rampage in the industrial cities and made the clandestine revolutionary work among workers entirely impossible, we would not send even a part of our strength to those places (either smaller provincial cities or countryside) where the repression was less harsh and conditions for revolutionary struggles were better to build a party organisation and to keep our activities going on.

78

wang and lou

b.

We took an entirely negative attitude towards the armed struggle of poor peasants in the early thirties and we refused to participate in any anti-Japanese guerrilla war during the war time. These two mistakes condemned us to stand aloof from the revolutionary struggle during the War and to be shut out of the political life of the nation in the post-war period and finally brought us complete failure. That was the main reason why we, Chinese Trotskyists and the conscious followers of the theory of permanent revolution, failed to achieve success in the revolution which hade been objectively materialising the very same theory. (2) Out of the conviction that a proletarian party could only be built through the struggle of industrial workers and in the working class districts of big cities, we would not on the one hand consider any change of the form of struggle as the circumstances required, while on the other hand we failed correctly to recognise the class character of the cpc when the latter had changed its form of struggle and its battlefield. As a matter of fact, this is two sides of the same coin. Our sincere fear that our organisation would inevitably degenerate into a peasant party if we should change the form of our struggle and the scene of our activity made us believe at the same time that the cpc had definitely become a peasant party because of the very change. From this erroneous judgement stemmed a series of mistakes, of which the most striking one was the failure of Chinese Trotskyists to recognise the triumph of the revolution long after it had been achieved under the leadership of the “petty bourgeois peasant party”. (3) From the negative experience of Chinese Trotskyists in this respect, we should draw such a lesson: Revolutionary groups of colonial and semi-colonial countries, in case they are compelled to part with the working class and industrial cities under the pressure of the circumstances and therefore compelled to work among poor peasant masses, endeavouring to organise and lead them to carry on revolutionary democratic struggle by resorting to arms, are still possible (of course not certainly so) to build a proletarian revolutionary party if only they could firmly adhere to revolutionary proletarian class line politically and organisationally. Under the leadership of such a party, the armed struggle of poor peasants is not without a hope of victory.

documents sent to the usfi by wang fanxi and lou guohua

79

(4) From this lesson the following theoretical generalisation should also be established: The problem of the formation of a proletarian party in a backward country as well as that of the objective guarantee for the correctness of its political orientation have not been posed and cannot be solved solely by the class relationships of the particular country. These problems, like the whole cause of the socialist revolution in backward countries, must be primarily viewed in the light of the growth, the maturity and the radicalisation of the proletariat of the world. Just as the historical pre-requisite of the formation of the cpc did not consist merely in the emergence of a modern working class in China, the proletarian consciousness of a Chinese workers party is determined and guaranteed not only by the class consciousness of Chinese proletariat, but also by revolutionary struggles and the consciousness of the Soviet, American, French, English, German and Japanese brothers. Thus in case the revolutionaries of a colonial and semi-colonial country are forced to quit temporarily the working class circumstances, they are not necessarily to lose their proletarian consciousness. If in the new scene of battle they adopt a new form of struggle which is not directly basing on the strength of workers (such as the guerrilla war of poor peasants), they are not necessarily working against the interests of the working class.

A Letter from Wang Fanxi to the Leadership of the usfi (1975) Wang Fanxi

This letter was written shortly after Wang emigrated to the UK with the help of his Trotskyist comrades and other friends in Europe. In the letter, he briefly reports to the usfi about the terrible state of the Chinese Trotskyist organisations and his personal hardships before settling down in the UK. He also delivers a personal account of the re-building of the Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong starting in the mid-1970s. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 11, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

Dear Comrades, I came to Europe five months ago. Apart from a talk with Cde Sak [Yoshichi Sakai], another with ta [Tariq Ali] and some brief messages to Cde pf [Pierre Frank], I have not made a formal report to you. As now I can at least stay here for some length of time, I think I should report to you on why and how I came, how our comrades are in hk and China and what I wish to do here.1 First of all, a word about my part in the Chinese Trotskyist movement. I will not go back as far as 1928, when the first Chinese Trotskyist organisation was formed in Moscow, nor will I go back to 1931, when the unified organisation Ts of China was founded in Shanghai. I would rather just begin with the split of the League [the Chinese Communist League] on the eve of the Pacific War in 1941.2 After the split, I belonged to the Minority, which was re-organised into the Internationalist Workers Party in 1949; while the Majority, with Peng [Shuzhi] as its head, was re-organised into the Revolutionary Communist Party at the end of 1948. Both parties claimed to be the [Chinese] section of the 4th International. When the iwp was founded in Shanghai, the army of the ccp had crossed the Yangtze River and was advancing on the city. Communist rule was immin-

1 See Biographical List for the identity of these people. 2 In fact, the split took place in 1942.

© Wang Fanxi, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_006

a letter from wang fanxi to the leadership of the usfi (1975)

81

ent. Should we continue our activities under the new regime or evacuate to a safer place? That was a question carefully considered at the Founding Congress of the iwp. The decision reached was: to stay. This decision was contrary to the rcp’s, they decided to move their leadership and some high level members to hk and had actually gone there half a year earlier. Being assigned the task to maintain contacts with the international comrades and to coordinate the activities of our comrades in the different provinces of China, I was sent to hk. Unfortunately, it was only four months after I arrived at the Colony that I was arrested and deported to the port of M [Macao], where I was to live for twenty five years. At first, from 1950 to 1952, we had a lot of work to do. Comrades in China and in the hk area discussed heatedly among themselves about a wide range of political and theoretical problems in connection with the triumph of the ccp. Our organisation and influence were growing, both in China and in hk. Particularly in Shanghai, the influence of the iwp rapidly increased and was widely felt. Under the party, a youth organisation was established and its organ Marxist Youth became rather popular among the young workers and students who had been quickly disillusioned with the new regime. This seemed to be the direct reason why the Maoists decided to destroy us in a nation-wide raid on the night of December 23, 1952. A total of nearly three hundred Trotskyists, most of whom were members of the iwp, were arrested and thrown into prison. From that time on, there has been no Chinese section of the 4th International. Two branches of it survived in hk [Hong Kong], a bigger one belonging to the rcp, and a smaller one belonging to the iwp. After a few years of activity, however, both surviving branches were reduced to a handful of individuals who still considered themselves Trotskyists. But there was no organisation, no activity and no voice. This “winter sleep” of the Trotskyists in hk area lasted for nearly ten years (approximately from 1958 to 1968). In 1968, as a result of the radicalisation of the youth of the world, there was political awakening among the hk students. Only by then, we, especially Cde Lau [Lou Guohua], an old member of the iwp, began to publish ld’s [Leon Trotsky’s] writings (at the Sincere Publishers) and tried to get into contact with the radicalised students. To a certain extent, we have done our best to win them from their vaguely anarchist inclination to the position of Trotskyism. How these young revolutionaries (with Wu [Zhongxian] and Johnny [Shum] as their leaders) educated themselves and later became mature Trotskyists in Europe, especially in France, and then in hk, I would not say any more, because these facts are well known to you.

82

wang

Now I would like to say something about my own life after the arrest of all Trotskyists in China. During the raid, they arrested my wife (who was nonpolitical) and my two nephews (who were members of the iwp). My wife was released soon but was ordered to divorce me. My son and my daughter, who was only nine years old, were ordered to “draw a clear line” with their “counterrevolutionary” father. One of my nephews died in prison only two months after his arrest while the other is still being kept in a labour camp. In 1957, probably as a gesture of the liberal turn in ccp policy (“Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom”), they told my wife that she needn’t divorce me and even sent her out to the port of M trying to persuade me to return to Shanghai. She did come abroad and lived with me for two months. When she went back alone, I let her transmit an oral message to the authorities that I would very much like to go back if only all my comrades in China were set free. In June 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, my wife was for the second time ordered to divorce me and since then all relations with my family in China have been cut. Since the spring of 1967, when the P[ortuguese] colonial authorities capitulated before the local communist representatives as a result of the Red Guards rebellion in M, I had been lived under the constant danger of being arrested and delivered to the ccp authorities. That this did not happen could, in my opinion, mainly be explained by the complete annihilation of our organisation in China and the absolute inactivity of the Trotskyists in the hk area. Thus, since the revival of the youth movement in hk in 1968 and the re-appearance of Trotskyist literature in this area, the ccp agents in the port of M had taken an ever increasing hostile attitude to me. In the summer of 1972, they had me dismissed from a middle school where I had taught for twelve years by exercising their influence on the principal. They cut the sources of my living and thereby wished to give me a warning. Obviously I had to leave the town. As a stateless refugee, however, I had no travelling document. I could go nowhere. After several fruitless attempts to leave, it was the help from the comrades in the International, especially the British and Japanese comrades, that at last made it possible for me to leave my “warm Siberia”. That is why and how I came here. I will not report in detail on the situation of our hk comrades. During the past three years, many comrades of the International had been to that area. Cdes Sak of Japan, bs [Barry Sheppard] of the States, V [Gerard de Verbizier, also known by his pseudonyms Verjat, or, Vergeat], Sterne [Pierre Rousset] of France, and ta [Tariq Ali] of England visited there and had very extensive contacts with Trotskyists of different groups, both old and young generations. I do not have to report what they have reported. Here now I would like only to give you some of my own observation as follows:

a letter from wang fanxi to the leadership of the usfi (1975)

1.

83

In fact, only two groups of young men are really doing work: one organised around the Combat Bulletin and the other around October Review. 2. Politically the two groups represent the two tendencies in our International: the former supports the imt [International Majority Tendency], while the latter supports the ltf [Leninist-Trotskyist Faction]; on Chinese questions, we might say, the former was comparatively sympathetic or close to the iwp, while the latter supports the rcp. 3. Both groups have resumed the publication of their magazines since May. The political physiognomy: the Combat Bulletin takes an openly Trotskyist position, while the latter would rather take a revolutionary position in general, or we may say, a Trotskyist position more or less under cover. 4. On the part of the older [Trotskyists]: the so-called “Chinese section” (with 3 important members as an exception) supports October, while the comrades of the iwp actively participate in the work of Combat. 5. The publication of books and pamphlets is as usual being undertaken by Cde Lau of the iwp, with some financial support from several comrades of the rcp. As I know, Cdes Sak and bs will go to hk to facilitate the unification of friends now living in that area. I was the earliest advocator and one of the most ardent advocators of unification. But after the rather disagreeable experience of the past two years, I begin to realise that it is perhaps impossible to achieve it in the nearest future. In 1931, the four Chinese Trotskyist groups were unified at the urge and under the great authority of the Old Man [Trotsky]. Now without such an authority, I am afraid it will take a somewhat different form and much longer time to achieve the same goal. The only thing which I think is feasible is that: let Combat and October agree to cooperate immediately in a Coordinating Committee, so that the activities of the two groups among the masses can be coordinated. If possible, let the Coordinating Committee publish a united organ instead of the present two separate organs. Our connections with comrades in Shanghai have been completely cut since 1973. The last news I got concerning our comrades in Mao’s prison was in April 1973, when Cde Zheng Chaolin’s wife, who had been released on parole in 1957 because of her complete paralysis after she had spent five years in prison, wrote a letter saying that from then on she would not [need to] receive any money from hk as she would live together with her husband, which as we guessed might mean that Cde Zheng had been released from the prison but still under police surveillance [as was indeed the case]. Other comrades, such as the four about whom our international publications have made some publicity: Cdes He Zishen, Jiang Zhendong, and Lin Huanhua (three cc [Central Committee]

84

wang

members of the iwp) and Cde Yin Kuan (one of the leaders of the rcp), we have heard nothing of them. I guess they either have been treated like Zheng Chaolin or had died in prison. I nevertheless succeeded in maintaining correspondence with a comrade in South China. From his letters, I was very glad to know that our comrades in China, despite being cruelly persecuted and treated as “counterrevolutionaries”, were in high spirits. Especially after the end of the Cultural Revolution, many persecuted and disillusioned former Red Guards are secretly expressing their sympathy towards us. We were their yesterday’s “enemies” – during the Cultural Revolution, our comrades who had been released but were still under surveillance were repeatedly dragged out to the public and persecuted because the Red Guards had been told by the Maoists that Trotskyists were the worst enemy of the revolution. Today, they are increasingly ready to lend us an ear. What can I do in the nearest future? As a man of advanced age, I am afraid that the only thing I can do is writing, by means of which I hope to help the friends living in hk and if possible those in China, to know better the situation of the [fi] Centre and other Sections, and at the same time to help non-Chinese friends know more about what has happened in [East Asia]. In the past, I was usually the organiser of the translation work of ld’s works and the documents of the International. For the time being, I wish to train some young comrades to be my successors in this respect and in the nearest future, I hope I can get some young men here to translate the documents passed at the last Congress. (Up until now, only a very few Chinese comrades have seen the final English text of the Political Resolution!) I have deliberately left political questions untackled in this letter. Because my positions concerning the international and Chinese problems have already been stated in a few articles and statements. I have sent a copy of each of them to you through Cde pf. It would be too long and too much to repeat them here. My hope is that these articles, especially my reply to Comrade Peng, which I titled “On the Causes of the Triumph of the ccp and the Failure of Chinese Trotskyists in the 3rd Chinese Revolution” (written in August 1973),3 will be published in the “International Internal Discussion Bulletin”. As Peng’s and Chen Pi-lan’s articles have long been published and widely distributed in our world movement, I think I should be given a chance to have my reply made known to all comrades. Greetings F.H. W [Wang Fanxi] August 1975 3 See Benton 2015, pp. 1001–1024.

Concerns regarding the Released Chinese Trotskyists (1979) After 27 years of suffering, Zheng Chaolin and other Chinese Trotskyists were released from communist prison in 1979. The two documents below, issued by Chinese Trotskyists overseas and the Fourth International, explain the circumstances of the Trotskyists’ release and express their solidarity with them.

(a)

Chinese Trotskyists Released By Chinese Trotskyists overseas

Source: Socialist Challenge, the organ (1977–83) of the International Marxist Group, the UK section of the usfi, 23 August 1979, p. 8. According to reliable and confirmed reports, 8 Chinese Trotskyists – among them Zheng Chaolin, a founder member of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) – were released by the Chinese authorities and restored to full citizenship on 5 June this year. These 8 people (apart from Zheng, the only other names we know for sure are those of Wu Jingru, Zheng’s wife, and Jiang Zhengdong, a leader of the Shanghai workers’ insurrection in 1927) were arrested along with over two hundred others on the night of 22 December 1952 by the ccp secret police. They have spent the entire period since then in prisons and labour camps, despite the fact that they were never publicly tried or sentenced. As far as we know, over the last 27 years some of those arrested have been released under strict surveillance and returned to their places of origin, where they were forced under conditions of great hardship to participate in unpaid or badly paid manual labour, after spending 5 or more years in detention. Others died as a result of their sufferings in prison. Zheng Chaolin and the other 7 now released probably represent the last batch of those fortunate enough to have survived this experience. The Chinese Trotskyists originally constituted, and for many years remained, the Left Opposition of the ccp. This Left Opposition was originally formed around Chen Duxiu, founder of the ccp, who was elected or re-elected general secretary at each of the first five congresses of the party. The Chinese Left Opposition, basing itself on the experience of the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27 and the theories of internationalism and permanent

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_007

86

concerns regarding the released chinese trotskyists (1979)

revolution, directed its energies towards freeing the ccp from the grip of Stalinist nationalism and bureaucratism. After the defeat of the revolution, we advanced a revolutionary democratic programme and actively opposed the ccp’s Moscow-inspired adventurist line. During the Sino-Japanese war of 1937–45, we resolved to support and actively participated in the anti-Japanese resistance, but we did not abandon our revolutionary position, and after the victory of the resistance we called for immediate implementation of agrarian revolution as a means of countering Kuomintang repression, and eventually of completely overthrowing the reactionary rule of Kuomintang. During the period of the civil war (1946–49) we participated in the struggle on all fronts, and played a special role in the big cities of east and south China, where we led struggles in workers’ districts. After the victory of the revolution our main contribution was in the struggle for the democratisation of the new organs of government and for further advances along the road of socialist revolution. All this, far from being a crime, was positively in the interests both of the Chinese workers and peasants and of the revolution itself. However, the ccp leaders, especially the Moscow-controlled Wang Ming faction, all along saw us as their main enemy, and attacked us mercilessly. Their first step was to expel us from the party. Later they slandered and persecuted our supporters. They took all sorts of unscrupulous measures against us, not stopping short of murder. Finally, in December 1952, they crushed our entire organisation by arresting all our comrades throughout China. The ccp’s treatment of the Chinese Trotskyists over the past 50 years is the most flagrant of the “false charges”, “frame-ups” and “mistaken verdicts” currently being denounced by the Beijing leaders. If the latter are sincere in the resolve to “rectify” such abuses, then they should start by reversing the verdicts wrongfully passed on the Trotskyists, and completely rehabilitate them. They should not only restore their freedom and their right to work, declare their innocence of any crime and restore their good name as revolutionaries, but also grant the Chinese Trotskyist tendency full legal rights. Will the ccp authorities grant these demands? This depends on the struggle carried on by socialist revolutionaries both inside and outside China. In the past, not only did Trotskyists on a world scale protest on behalf of the comrades in China, but even the human rights organisation Amnesty International expressed its concern. These protests and expressions of concern played at least some role in the recent release of Zheng Chaolin and the other comrades. We are grateful to these people for their past help, and hope that they will continue to give us support in our future struggles.

concerns regarding the released chinese trotskyists (1979)

(b)

87

Statement by the 11th World Congress [of the fi, 1979] on the Release of the Chinese Trotskyists

Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 17, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. The 11th World Congress of the Fourth International hails the release of 12 Trotskyists imprisoned for 27 years in the People’s Republic of China. It salutes the memory of the revolutionary militant Wu Jingru, who died recently at the age of 72. She was freed on 5 June 1979, together with her husband, Zheng Chaolin, aged 78, a member of the first generation of Chinese Communists. He was imprisoned for 7 years by the Kuomintang regime and rearrested in 1952, despite having dedicated his entire life to the revolution. The 11th World Congress demands a full clarification of the situation of the many Trotskyists who were arrested in the early 1950s, and who have not been heard from for a long time. Many of them have surely died in prison. The Chinese bureaucracy continues to keep silent about their fate. The full truth about them must be made public! The 11th World Congress demands the lifting of the slanderous charges of “counterrevolutionary” that were used to justify the arbitrary arrest of the Trotskyists. All restrictions on the activities of those who have just been freed must also be lifted. This twofold battle for the political rehabilitation of revolutionary Marxists and for their right to be active and to defend their political ideas and programme is part of the overall fight of the Chinese working masses to regain possession of the real history of the Communist movement and the revolution in China, and to establish genuine socialist democracy.

A Comment on the Chinese Trotskyist Movement in the 1970s and the Wu Zhongxian (Ng Chung Yin) Affair (2024) Pierre Rousset

Pierre Rousset belongs to the political generation formed in France in the mid1960s. As a student, he participated in the formation of the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist Youth) in 1965 and joined the Fourth International, of which he is still a member. He became involved in Vietnam solidarity and, after May 68, co-founded the Front Solidarité Indochine (Indochina Solidarity Front), as well as various smaller solidarity committees. He then travelled regularly in Asia, notably to Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. He has written extensively on Asian revolutions and social movements. He is presently co-editor of the bilingual website Europe solidaire sans frontières (essf) and continues his solidarity activities.

I started travelling in Asia for our movement in 1974. My duty was to build or strengthen links in various countries and with various organisations. This included Thailand (after the overthrow of the dictatorship) and later the Philippines. My role was not to pass on “directives” or play “leader” in countries I knew little about. I came to learn, to forge links of solidarity and to work together as part of the many wide-ranging international activities that were taking place at the time. What was special about Hong Kong was that we had groups and representatives of the diversity of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. The group I was personally closest to (in terms of generation and political identification) was the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml). At that time (which is no longer the case today and that’s fine), debates between tendencies were very “structuring” in the International.1 The rml belonged to the major-

1 In the 1960s and the 1970s, the fi was polarised, politically and organisationally, into two tendencies, the majority and the minority led by the US swp, or three tendencies if one includes the tendency led by the Argentinian Partido Socialista de Trabajadores (pst). Most national groups were aligned with one tendency (often with a minority linked to opposite tendencies). International debates were always shaped by the tendencies, and the discussion was structured by representative of international tendencies. By contrast, the fi today operates very

© Pierre Rousset, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_008

a comment on the chinese trotskyist movement in the 1970s

89

ity tendency (like me). However, after a number of years it ceased to exist as an organisation, although many of its members remained active (the best known being Long Hair [mentioned elsewhere in this volume]). The leadership of the October Review group (so known after its journal, October Review) obviously belonged to a much older generation, exiled in hk (and not born there). They belonged to the minority tendency of the international, linked to the American swp. I was far too young to have any “authority” in their eyes (a particularly sensitive issue in Confucian countries, at least that’s how I perceived it). It could have been different if we had been able to collaborate on common activities, particularly in terms of international campaigns. October Review’s leadership led a very clandestine existence and didn’t get involved in these areas. I quickly left the responsibility of relations with the October Review leadership to our elders (Ernest Mandel, Livio Maitan, Joe Hansen), who knew those in exile (Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan). Among the issues I had to deal with was that concerning the Hong Kong Trotskyist leader Wu Zhongxian (Ng Chung Yin), who had been arrested in China and was released after pretending to “capitulate” to his captors. [Wu’s case is dealt with elsewhere in this volume.] When I met Wu, I was conscious that I myself had never been in his situation – he had been facing a possible 20-year jail sentence in China. Sure, I had been jailed in France three times, but for much shorter periods. The last time, I was condemned to 2 months in prison and one year suspended. That was why I had initially been sent away from France, to work in the fi bureau (in Belgium). If I had been condemned a fourth time, it would have been for more than a year. In France, there was then no way to be sure to avoid arrest. But it was peanuts compared to being arrested in China. Sanctions had to be taken against Wu, but what shocked me was that he continued to pretend, back in Hong Kong, that he had done the right thing and that he had manipulated the Chinese police officers during the interrogation. Was it intellectual arrogance or simply to cover himself? Did he really think that highly trained interrogators could be tricked so easily? At the time, I did not have all the details we obtained afterwards. Later, another comrade, Lau San-ching, from the rml went to the mainland to apologise to the Chinese democracy activists [for Wu’s behaviour]. He was

differently. International debates are “open”. There is no “majority tendency”. There are still one or two international tendencies, but they represent a very small part of the fi membership. I must say I now deeply dislike faction fights. Though sometimes unavoidable, they often become power struggles – within an organisation without power! For some, faction fights are their very way of life and thinking.

90

rousset

arrested, did not bend and was jailed for many years. After his release, he came to Paris, hoping to see me. I was then in Amsterdam, at a session of the Institute for Research and Education [the iire, which Rousset founded and helped direct], which I could not leave at the time. I proposed that he come to Amsterdam (we would pay) so he could also meet all the international participants in this session of the iire. He did not want to do it and seemed demoralised. It was very sad. I made excellent contact while in Hong Kong [in 1974] with Wang Fanxi, then exiled in Macao, who was also an “old hand”, a member of the very first generation of Chinese Trotskyists. I was very touched by his personality and his political intelligence. I saw the richness and diversity of the Chinese Trotskyist cadres of his generation (many of whom were in prison in China), whose history remains too often unknown in our movement. Wang Fanxi eventually emigrated to Britain [in 1975], with the help of Gregor Benton. Of course, I also met Au Loong-yu [again, see elsewhere in this volume]. He was then a member of October Review and of the Young Socialist Group (ysg).2 We were not on the same fractional side, yet it was with him and his group that relationships were maintained and renewed over the decades. I had the time to appreciate his qualities, the continuity of his commitment (there aren’t that many of us who have maintained our militancy to this day), his contribution and that of other members of his group (particularly in the defence of workers). I’d done a lot of work on the Chinese revolution (although I don’t read or speak Chinese) and I’d developed my own analysis of it. There were areas in common with Au’s, as well as differences. Gradually, I took more account of his point of view and his knowledge. When the question of the relationship between bureaucratic counter-revolution and capitalist counter-revolution arose, Au’s contribution was, I would say, decisive. This was not self-evident, so different is Chinese history from Russian. One of Au’s qualities is his ability to think about what is new in relation to history (including long history) and to link political and theoretical thought.

2 The ysg split from the rml in 1980. It changed its name to Pioneers in 1982 and became a section of the fi at the fi’s most recent World Congress.

Chinese Trotskyists in Exile, Contacts with the Fourth International, and Efforts to Achieve Organisational Unification, 1949–1978 (2022) Yang Yang

This article focuses on the political connections between the Chinese Trotskyists in exile and the Fourth International after 1949 and the efforts to rebuild and unify the Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong in the 1970s.

Communication between the Exiled Chinese Trotskyists and the Fourth International, 1949–1974 As an integral part of international Trotskyism, there had been a long history of communication between the Chinese Trotskyist groups and their international counterparts, ever since the start of the organisation. The early emergence of Chinese Trotskyist groups in the late 1920s and early 1930s was little more than a “foreign transplant”, created in the Soviet Union with assistance from the Chinese Trotskyists’ Russian counterparts.1 Before the founding of the Fourth International (fi) in 1938, Chinese Trotskyists had established direct contact with Leon Trotsky and the international movement. In 1929, for example, Liu Renjing, a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) who became a Trotskyist as a student in Moscow, visited Trotsky in Istanbul, which can count as an early direct connection between Trotsky and his Chinese followers. It was as a result of an appeal by Trotsky that the various Chinese Trotskyist groups that had formed in China finally came together, in May 1931, as a unified organisation, the Left Opposition of the Chinese Communist Party (later renamed the Communist League of China, clc).2 In the mid-1930s, after the leadership of the Chinese Trotskyists had been constantly

1 Benton 1996, p. 109. For the early formation of Chinese Trotskyism in the Soviet Union, see Pantsov 2000, pp. 161–208. 2 Trotsky 1976, p. 498. Regarding the 1931 unification of the Chinese Trotskyists, see “Report No. 1” on the Unification Congress of Chinese Trotskyists, a copy of a letter from the LeftOpposition of the Chinese Communist Party to Trotsky and the Left Opposition’s International Secretariat, 9 May 1931, Wang Fanxi Archive, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds (hereafter ms 1709) 11; and documents collected and edited in Benton 2015, pp. 399–506.

© Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_009

92

yang

raided by the Kuomintang, Frank Glass, a South African Trotskyist of British origin, Harold Isaacs, at the time an American journalist and Trotskyist in China, and several Chinese directly reached out to Trotsky and the Trotskyist international, informing them of the political situation and organisational development of Trotskyism in China.3 In 1942, during a fierce internal discussion regarding the nature of the antiJapanese resistance after the start of the Pacific War and another regarding organisational principles, the unified Trotskyist organisation (i.e., the clc) split into two separate groups, a majority faction led by Peng Shuzhi and a minority represented by Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi.4 In 1948, Peng’s majority faction formed a new Trotskyist organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp), while the minority faction set up its Internationalist Workers Party (iwp) in 1949. Each saw itself as a Chinese section affiliated to the Fourth International. On the eve of the ccp’s seizure of state power in 1949, a small number of leading Chinese Trotskyists from both groups, including Peng Shuzhi and Wang Fanxi, were forced to retreat to colonial Hong Kong. As “enemies” of both the ccp and the Kuomintang, the Trotskyists were unable to preserve their own political organisation either on the mainland or in Taiwan. Ever since its formation, the Chinese Trotskyists had run their own branches in Hong Kong, and in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the rcp’s Hong Kong branch was one of their largest nationwide. Hong Kong could therefore provide them with a political bolthole. After their retreat to Hong Kong, the Trotskyists tried hard to stay in contact with the fi, quite a dangerous course given the threats to their safety and freedom. On 14 September 1949, letterboxes rented by local contacts of the Trotskyists through which to receive bulletins, letters, and other important documents from the fi were detected and confiscated by the British-Hong Kong colonial police. A handful of Trotskyists including Wang Fanxi were arrested and soon deported to Macao.5 Other leading Trotskyists, including Peng Shuzhi and his wife Chen Bilan, were harried by local agents and police.6 Eventually, Peng decided to flee to Vietnam, whence in late June 1951 to Paris, where he and Chen 3 In the early 1930s, Trotsky switched his attention to events in Germany. He lacked information about China until establishing contacts with Glass and Isaacs. See Hirson 2003, pp. 128–129. 4 On the 1942 clc’s split, see Wang Fanxi, “The Pacific War and a New Split in the Organisation”, in Benton 2015, pp. 557–567. As Benton points out, the differences between these two factions within the clc on the nature of the war against Japan “meant nothing in practice, for neither was ever in a position to try its strategy out” (Benton 1996, p. 87). 5 Hu 2009, pp. 35–38, and Chen 2010, p. 507. 6 Chen 2010, pp. 507–9. Peng 2016, Vol. 2, pp. 421–22, 426.

chinese trotskyists in exile

93

attended the Third Congress of the fi, ostensibly as delegates of the Chinese section. During a meeting of a special commission on China, Peng spoke tediously about the political situation in China starting in the 1920s, and continued speaking for around five hours.7 In his speech, he stressed that the ccp’s seizure of national power was the historic result of “a combination of various intricate and exceptional conditions emerging from the Second World War”. He continued to point to the “Stalinist” character of the ccp, which relied “exclusively on the peasant armed forces that destroyed the old regime and seized power”.8 Before Peng left Hong Kong, a political resolution he had drafted on the new China regime had been adopted in January 1950 by the remnants of the rcp. This resolution described the ccp’s rule on the mainland as a “Bonapartist military dictatorship” with a “bourgeois character”.9 However, not all Peng’s comrades in Hong Kong agreed with this depiction of the ccp as static and degenerate, having witnessed the socio-economic reforms promoted by the ccp in the early 1950s. In March 1951, a small number of experienced cadres led by another key Trotskyist, Xiang Qing (writing under the pen name Maki) published their own views on China under the Communists, in the name of the editors of the rcp’s organ. These views were different from those expressed in the 1950 resolution. The “dissidents” concluded that the ccp would not maintain its “bourgeois character” in the long run, and that the ccp’s victory might be “a prelude to proletarian revolution”, i.e., “the first stage of the permanent revolution” in a Trotskyist sense.10 According to Livio Maitan, the fi leadership did not learn of any Chinese Trotskyist positions on the ccp’s victory other than Peng’s until early in 1952. In May 1952, the International Executive Committee (iec) of the fi adopted a resolution on the Chinese Revolution that intimated support for Xiang Qing and his Hong Kong comrades’ position – that ccp rule would “only be a short, transitory stage along the road to a dictatorship of the proletariat, towards which the dynamics of the national and international situation is more and more propelling it”.11 Peng strongly opposed this resolution. Later, in a personal letter to James P. Cannon, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party (US), he bluntly expressed his discontent: “The worst thing is that nobody can find a perspective for the Chinese Trotskyists in this resolution”.12 7 8 9 10 11 12

Maitan 2019, p. 37. swp 1952a, pp. 2–44. This text is also in Benton 2015, pp. 949–966 (950). “Bonapartist dictatorship” was a Trotskyist term generally used to criticise the Soviet regime under Stalin. See Peng 1950. swp 1952b, pp. 1–11. Xiang Qing also published an article expressing a similar view. See swp 1952b, pp. 12–20 (see both in Part 1, Section B). Maitan 2019, pp. 37, 366. swp 1954, pp. 1–16.

94

yang

Peng was so unhappy with the fi’s resolution on China that he apparently participated in a “coup” orchestrated in 1953 by James Canon of the swp (US), Gerry Healy of the Club (UK), and Pierre Lambert of the Internationalist Communist Party (France) against the iec led by Michel Pablo, focusing on Pablo’s “entryist” strategy, i.e., entering Social Democratic and Communist parties, as well as other issues. As a result, in late 1953 the fi split into two main tendencies, the International Secretariat of the fi (isfi) and the International Committee of the fi (icfi). As an “anti-Pabloist” alongside his swp (US) allies, Peng joined the newly established icfi.13 However, Peng’s Trotskyist comrades in China were unable to express their views on the fi’s internal conflicts, for a year earlier, up to one thousand Trotskyists and their sympathisers on the mainland had been rounded up by the ccp.14 These arrests and the fi split had an enormous impact on the morale of the Trotskyists in Hong Kong. Starting in 1955, the rcp became fragmented and inactive. According to a veteran Trotskyist, You Xiangming, “[t]hroughout the 1950s and the 1960s, there were no regular meetings, no attempts to involve the [rcp] in the labour movement”; partly as a result, the rcp became an “intellectual society”, mainly writing articles about “what was happening in China”.15 In 1965, there were no more than 80 Trotskyists in the rcp.16 Wang Fanxi, who was in the iwp, confirmed this trend towards inactivity. Later, in a letter to the International Secretariat (to which Wang remained affiliated), he described the Chinese Trotskyist movement in Hong Kong [and Macao] as having fallen into a state of “hibernation”, which lasted from around 1958 to 1968. The handful of Trotskyists in both Wang’s iwp and the surviving branch of the rcp had “no organisation, no activity and no voice”, either in mainland China or in Hong Kong.17 For the iwp, only Wang Fanxi, Lou Guohua, and a few other members escaped from the mainland on the eve of the ccp’s victory in 1949. Wang Fanxi’s personal calvary epitomised the fate of the entire iwp. Shortly after arriving in Hong Kong, he was arrested by the British-Hong Kong police and deported to Macao, partly because of his suspected implication in the “letterbox incident”. Nevertheless, Wang survived and started work as a middle school 13 14 15 16 17

See Peng’s criticism of Pablo in ibid. Peng’s life in France as an “anti-Pabloist” is described in Chen 2010, pp. 519–26. The figure of 1,000 is given by Zheng Chaolin, a prominent Trotskyist, who was jailed for some 27 years, in a letter from Zheng to Wang Fanxi [cited in Benton 1996, p. 235]. Miller 1976, p. 31. Tang 1994, p. 344. This figure might be exaggerated. “A Letter from Wang Fanxi to is”, August 1975, p. 2, ms 1709 11 (i.e., “A Letter from Wang Fanxi to the Leadership of the usfi” in Part 1, Section A). In 1963, the is (International Secretariat) changed its name to United Secretariat.

chinese trotskyists in exile

95

teacher in Macao in late 1949. During his exile in Macao right through until 1975, he tried to stay in touch with overseas Trotskyists to discuss the fate of the Trotskyist movement in China, the nature of the ccp’s victory, the current Chinese situation under ccp rule, the political development of the fi and its affiliated sections, and Wang’s own appeal for justice for his fellow Trotskyists held in Communist prisons since 1952. In the 1960s, in correspondence with Frank Glass and Eiichi Yamanishi, a Japanese Trotskyist leader, while reflecting on the Chinese Revolution, Wang expressed his concerns about jailed comrades from both the rcp and the iwp and called on foreign Trotskyists to raise the issue with the fi. In the letters, Wang also spoke of his personal isolation and difficulties. He referred to Macao as his “warm Siberia” and noted that he had been living in a place where he was “actually within the power of the ccp” (14 August 1966, letter to Eiichi Yamanishi), and that because of his isolation he was “quite ignorant of the discussions and regroupments [that had] happened within the fi” (15 January 1961, letter to Eiichi Yamanishi).18 Most Trotskyist survivors in Hong Kong and Macao felt isolated and depressed, and were in constant risk of capture either by the colonial police or by agents of the ccp. After the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the threats increased, particularly in Macao. On 3 December 1966, pro-Beijing leftists provoked the Portuguese authorities in Macao, and street violence left 8 dead and many injured.19 Under political pressure from the prc, the Portuguese were forced to expel Kuomintang representatives, so that Macao ceased to be “an exit point for dissidents fleeing [mainland] China”.20 After that, Macao was under de facto control of the Chinese Communists. Trotskyists like Wang were in great danger. Wang later recalled: I had been living under the constant danger of being arrested and delivered to the ccp authorities …. The ccp agents in the port of [Macao] had taken an increasingly hostile attitude to me. In the summer of 1972, they had me dismissed from [my job in] a middle school, where I had taught for twelve years, by putting pressure on the principal. They cut the sources of my living and thereby wished to give me a warning.21

18 19 20 21

Hirson 2003, pp. 193, 207. Letters to Eiichi Yamanishi from Wang Fanxi, 15 January 1961, 14 August 1966, ms 1709 11 (see Part 4, Section A). See also Cathryn Clayton, “The Hapless Imperialist? Portuguese Rule in 1960s Macao”, in David and Bryna Goodman (eds.) 2012, pp. 216–19. Jiang 2012, pp. 199–205. Maxwell 2003, p. 279. “A letter from Wang Fanxi to the is”, August 1975, p. 3.

96

yang

Eiichi Yamanishi had suggested in January 1967 that Wang resettle in Japan with the assistance of Japanese Trotskyists.22 But his efforts led nowhere. In 1963, a large majority of the international Trotskyist sections affiliated to both the icfi and the isfi reunified.23 A new international body, the United Secretariat of the fi (usfi), emerged. The usfi hoped to rebuild the Trotskyist movement in East Asia. Barry Sheppard of the swp (US) paid a visit to Wang and other exiles in Macao in July 1969.24 In 1972 and 1973, several Trotskyists from the Japanese Revolutionary Communist League (jrcl), the Japanese section of the usfi, visited Hong Kong and Macao, where they met members of both the rcp and the iwp. Yoshichi Sakai , a key figure in the jrcl and the usfi leadership, reported to its office in Brussels about the situation of the Chinese Trotskyists in exile.25 In 1973 and 1974, the usfi sent liaison people from various affiliated national sections, including Tariq Ali from the UK and Gerard Verbizier (Verjat) and Pierre Rousset from France, to Hong Kong and Macao, to establish organisational contacts and collect more details about the dangers facing the Chinese Trotskyist groups in those colonies. In 1974, Tariq Ali, a leader of the International Marxist Group (img, the British section of the usfi) visited Wang Fanxi in person in Macao. Learning of Wang’s twentyfive years of hardship and danger in exile in Macao, Ali discussed with Wang if there was a possibility of getting Wang out of a colony that was in reality under ccp supervision.26 Back in Europe, Ali reported on Wang’s exile to the usfi leadership and relayed this information to Gregor Benton, a British Trotskyist and a China expert at the Department of Chinese Studies in the University of Leeds.27 Benton wrote to Wang and organised an international aid operation to bring Wang to the UK. Through Benton’s efforts, Edward Boyle, a former Conservative mp and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds in the 1970s, Ralph Miliband, a prominent Marxist thinker and professor at the University of 22 23 24 25 26

27

Letter from Eiichi Yamanishi to Wang Fanxi, 28 January 1967, ms 1709 11 (see Part 4, Section A). Peng favoured this re-unification of the icfi and the isfi. He and his swp allies witnessed the whole process of the re-unification. Peng 2010, vol. 4, pp. 294–304. Wang Fanxi, letter to Frank Glass, 31 July 1969, ms 1709 11, p. 1. Sakai 2015. Interview with Tariq Ali, 11 September 2017. In a letter to Ali written on 4 September 1974, Wang wrote: “I have to seriously consider the possibility of my leaving this port [Macao] now. Circumstances are becoming more and more difficult for me to live”. Wang therefore asked Ali to help bring him to England or another European country. A Letter from Wang Fanxi to Tariq Ali, 4 September 1974, ms 1709 10. Interview with Tariq Ali, 11 September 2017; letter from Tariq Ali to Wang Fanxi, 18 September 1974; letter from Gregor Benton to Wang, no date (probably Benton’s first letter to Wang), ms 1709 10.

chinese trotskyists in exile

97

Leeds, and Graeme Moodie, a politics professor at the University of York were all drawn into the efforts to “rescue” Wang.28 Wang moved to the UK in the spring of 1975. Later, Lord Boyle praised him as a “mobile library of the Chinese Revolution”.29

Chinese Trotskyists and the fi Factional Debates, 1969–1974 In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, key figures among the veteran Chinese Trotskyists such as Peng Shuzhi and Wang Fanxi became once again involved in the fi’s internal disputes. At the fi’s Ninth World Congress in 1969, a majority of delegates voted in favour of a guerrilla war focus in Latin America. The leadership of the United Secretariat subsequently adopted this orientation and began supporting its Latin American sections’ guerrilla operations against the “bourgeois” governments in their own countries. Meanwhile, a minority at the congress rejected the guerrilla turn because they thought that it did not adequately take the different situations in different Latin American countries into account. In late 1972, the majority stuck by its guerrilla-war position. Factional struggles within the usfi were inevitable. A minority led by the American swp, which had consistently opposed the usfi’s guerrilla-war line, formed the Leninist-Trotskyist Faction (ltf). The majority organised an International Majority Tendency (imt). These two factions remained until 1978.30 In ensuing debates, Peng Shuzhi, now back in the usfi, sided with his old swp allies in the ltf and opposed the imt’s stand on Latin America and China. Although Peng did not reject guerrilla war as a temporary tactic in the Latin American Trotskyist movement, he refused to accept that the orientation advocated by the imt could be adopted as a revolutionary strategy. From Peng’s perspective, there was not necessarily a revolutionary situation in Latin America, and if guerrilla war were pursued in such a situation, it might lead to “disastrous results” for the international Trotskyist movement.31 In 1974, Peng sent a letter of protest

28

29 30 31

On the efforts to bring Wang to Britain, see Interview with Tariq Ali, 11 September, 2017; letter from Gregor Benton to Wang Fanxi, 16 September 1974, no date, letter from Wang Fanxi to Ralph Miliband, 9 November, 1974, letter from Wang Fanxi to Graeme Moodie, 24 November 1974, and application letter from Wang Fanxi to the UK Home Office, 23 September 1976, ms 1709 10. Interview with Jabez Lam, 4 May 2014. Sheppard 2005, vol. 2, pp. 36–42. See also the minutes, voting records and statements of the imt and ltf at the Tenth World Congress in swp 1974, pp. 3–28. swp 1969a, pp. 19–20 (see Part 2, Section C).

98

yang

to the Tenth World Congress in which he reiterated his longstanding rejection of the guerrilla war orientation adopted by the usfi majority.32 Beyond the debate on Latin America, the usfi’s internal discussions on China in the Cultural Revolution mattered even more to Peng. In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution erupted, the usfi leadership recognised it as an important new phenomenon and kept a close eye on its dynamics. In early 1969, the fi majority (later the imt) proposed a draft resolution on the Cultural Revolution in which it argued that the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong and his faction was designed to “eliminate the most irritating and persistent critics of his domestic and foreign policy, to give a free hand to his pared-down faction in the top leadership”. The majority believed that the mass movement in the Cultural Revolution had started up from below and showed that the young rebels “resented haughty and uncontrolled bureaucratic authority; they wanted greater democracy; they wanted a political revolution to open the road to socialist democracy”. However, this draft also noted that “when the masses started to intervene autonomously in the struggle and thereby threatened the whole bureaucratic rule”, this “revolution” had been halted in “an attempt to stop the mass movement and to restore a new form of bureaucratic rule”. The majority refused to support either Mao’s faction or its opponents, i.e., Liu Shaoqi’s group, in the Cultural Revolution, for neither faction “can be judged to be more progressive than the other”.33 Peng was sharply critical of the imt’s stand on China. From 1967 onwards, he criticised its “neutralist” position towards the Cultural Revolution, i.e., its refusal to support either faction. He said at one point: “Standing by and regarding the events as a spectator can only be described as the most irresponsible position for revolutionaries”.34 Rather, Peng regarded the anti-Mao faction under Liu Shaoqi as the more progressive, and favoured critical support for the anti-Mao group in the ccp in order to defeat Mao’s faction and his “personal dictatorship”.35 Despite the fact that the majority denounced the ccp’s “bureaucracy”, and argued that it preserved a “Stalinist heritage”,36 Peng remained dissatisfied with the majority position on the ccp. From his point of view, it was essential to characterise the ccp as a “Stalinist” party, and the same should be said in fi resolutions on China. He consistently urged the usfi to do so, and wanted Communist China to be classed as a “bureaucratic dictator-

32 33 34 35 36

swp 1974, p. 17. swp 1969a, p. 13,14,16. swp 1968a, p. 13. See also ibid., pp. 15–18, and swp 1969b, pp. 8–11. swp 1968a, pp. 1–18. swp 1969a, pp. 10–17.

chinese trotskyists in exile

99

ship”. However, the fi majority avoided taking such a stance in its resolutions.37 Between 1969 and 1974, Peng repeated his criticisms of the fi majority position regarding China, and condemned the majority for refusing to define the ccp as “Stalinist”.38 On the other hand, surviving members of the iwp like Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua, who regarded the iwp as a section of the usfi, were inclined to support the imt stand. In a statement submitted to the Tenth World Congress in December 1973, they confirmed that “in general line we support the draft political resolution proposed by the [imt]”. At the same time, however, they had their reservations: they were keen to insist that Maoism in the Cultural Revolution was “a variant of Stalinism”. They disagreed with the imt’s view that after the Cultural Revolution the Maoists would “irreversibly turn to the right”; on the contrary, they believed that under certain circumstances, the Maoists might turn to the left, and they hoped that the imt would amend their resolution on China along those lines.39 Wang Fanxi also occasionally criticised the imt’s guerrilla war orientation in Latin America. In a letter to Frank Glass, he said that the fi majority’s support for the Latin American Trotskyists’ guerrilla strategy failed to “emphasise the importance of the mobilisation of the masses, of patient work among the masses and political educational work among them. It attaches undue importance to the role of guerrilla warfare in the revolution, so that in action it might isolate us from the broad masses and lead to military putschism”.40 In the early 1970s, a small group of Hong Kong youngsters influenced by new-left ideas were attracted to Trotskyism. Most were members of the 70’s Biweekly Group, a local new-left youth collective that had started publishing a youth magazine under the same name in January 1970. Between 1972 and 1973, some travelled to Europe and established direct contact with the Ligue Communiste, the French section of the usfi.41 Through the Ligue, several visitors from the 70’s Biweekly Group learned a lot about the Fourth International and the Trotskyist movement. Wu Zhongxian (Ng Chung-yin), a founding member of the 70’s Biweekly Group and later a leading figure in Hong Kong Trotskyist

37 38 39 40 41

swp 1969b, pp. 8–11. See, for example, swp 1974, p. 17. Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua, “Our Statement – to be Submitted to the Tenth Congress of the fi”, 28 December 1973, ms 1709 11 (see Part 1, Section A). A Letter from Wang to Frank Glass, 31 July 1969, ms 1709 11, pp. 1–5. The Ligue Communiste was banned by the French government in June 1973 but reestablished itself in 1974 as the Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire (lcr). See Fields 1988, pp. 49–64.

100

yang

movement, spent most of his time with French Trotskyists from the Ligue during his stay in France from January to May 1973.42 Through Wu, some meetings were arranged between his Hong Kong comrades and leading Trotskyists from the usfi, including Pierre Frank.43 Also in the early 1970s, Peng Shuzhi in Paris was a delegate of the usfi’s Chinese section. Like the French Trotskyists, Peng played a crucial role in persuading the Hong Kong rebels to embrace Trotskyism. Before leaving France for Hong Kong in May 1973, three of them, including Wu and John Shum, joined the rcp on Peng’s recommendation.44 Wu and other young rebels from Hong Kong joined in the debate between the imt and the ltf while in France. Wu and some of his comrades were more sympathetic than Peng to the imt, given their personal ties to the French Trotskyists, who were imt. In a later interview, Wu said that his views on China were “no different from those of Mandel, Maitan, etc.”, who supported the imt’s position during the debates.45 Due to his strong disagreement with the imt, Peng was reluctant to arrange meetings between the French Trotskyists and the proTrotskyist Hong Kongers during their stay in France.46 When Peng learned of Wu’s contact with the French usfi section, he became disappointed with his behaviour.47 As a result, their personal relationship deteriorated. Later, in a personal letter, Peng criticised Wu’s pro-imt position as “mistaken”, and said that it would end up “destroy[ing] the Chinese Trotskyists”.48 In 1973, before returning to Hong Kong from Europe, Wu stopped off in Tokyo and contacted the jrcl, the largest usfi national section in East Asia, 42 43

44

45 46 47

48

For an interview with Ng Chung-yin, see Miller 1976, p. 27. He 1978, p. 1. Pierre Frank (1905–1984) was a leading French Trotskyist. In the 1970s, he served as a member of the usfi leadership. Wu Zhongxian told his comrades in the 70’s Biweekly Group that he hoped to meet Ernest Mandel in Belgium in late May 1972, further evidence of his connection with the usfi. See “Wu Zhongxian zhi youren xinhao” (A Letter from Wu Zhongxian to His Comrades), 25 May 1972, The 70’s Biweekly and People’s Theatre: A Private Archive of Mok Chiu-yu Augustine and Friends, Hong Kong Baptist University. Peng recalled that the three young radicals “asked that we sponsor them for membership in the rcp”; A Letter from Peng Shuzhi to Joseph Miller, 29 June 1977, translated into English by Miller. However, according to John Shum, another leading Hong Kong Trotskyist in the 1970s, they had not asked to join the rcp; instead, Peng had suggested they join. He 1978, pp. 1, 3. Miller 1976, p. 30. He 1978, p. 1. In Miller’s interview with Wu, Wu mentioned that he had also kept in touch with Wang Fanxi. In a letter to Wu from Wang, Wang was highly critical of Peng. This is perhaps why Wu did not keep Peng informed of his doings. Miller 1976, p. 27. A Letter from Peng to Miller, 29 June 1977, p. 3.

chinese trotskyists in exile

101

which also supported the imt.49 When Wu reached Hong Kong later in 1973, he realised that the rcp was more or less inactive, and that because of Peng’s influence, they were unwilling to cooperate with the new generation of young rebels in Hong Kong in order to organise and develop Trotskyist youth work in local student and social movements.50 Shortly after his return, Wu therefore decided to withdraw from the rcp and established a new Trotskyist youth group in Hong Kong, the Revolutionary Internationalist League (ril, which changed its name to Revolutionary Marxist League [rml] in 1974).51 The Peng-Wu animosity and the founding of the ril later hindered the unification of the Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong.

Efforts by Foreign and Chinese Trotskyists to Achieve Organisational Unification, 1973–1977 The founding of the ril by Wu Zhongxian and other young rebels led to a resumption of Trotskyist activity in Hong Kong in mid-1973. Although the ril was not one of the fi’s Chinese sections, it had established an organisational tie to the United Secretariat in Brussels, while keeping in close touch with the jrcl.52 These ties soon attracted the attention of Hong Kong’s colonial author-

49 50

51

52

Sakai 2015. In an interview, Miller said that “the fact of non-activity on the part of the rcp had created an unfavourable impression upon Wu”, while Wu complained to him that the rcp leadership was “fearful of any attempts to intervene in labour struggles in Hong Kong. This fear developed out of the long period of inactivity [of the rcp] between the early 1950s and 1974.” In another interview with Hong Kong Trotskyists in 1976, the old Trotskyist You Xiangming told Miller that “[t]he rcp, for a very long time, was unwilling to have any connection with this [student] movement”. So it is true that the rcp was inactive and at least to some extent unwilling to engage in local social movements. Miller 1976, pp. 26, 30, 32; see also Sakai 2015, He 1978, pp. 1, 3. In September 1973, another Trotskyist youth group, the International Young Socialist Alliance (iysa), was founded. In mid-1974, the ril and a few iysa members built a unified group, the Socialist League, which soon changed its name to Revolutionary Marxist League (rml), publicly known as the Daily Combat Bulletin group. According to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (scmp), the Socialist League changed its name in October 1974, but Miller thought the change was made in March 1975. See South China Morning Post, 2 October 1974, newspaper cuttings, Hong Kong Public Records Office, hkrs 70-6-390-1 and Miller 1976, p. 29. Between 1973 and 1977, Sakai visited the ril (later the rml) and other small Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong every year. When he attempted to enter Hong Kong in December 1979, he was refused entry by the immigration office. The rml sent members such as Anita Chan, who later became an outstanding scholar in the field of labour studies in Australia,

102

yang

ities, who were convinced that this new Trotskyist youth group had received some form of financial support from foreign Trotskyist organisations.53 The rcp also resumed political activity, and a handful of older and younger Chinese Trotskyists proposed that in order to advance the Trotskyist movement in Hong Kong and prepare to rebuild the movement in mainland China, the various Trotskyist groups should unite. In June 1973, Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua of the iwp proposed that exiled Trotskyists both from the ex-majority (i.e., the rcp) and their own ex-minority should work together with the new young Hong Kong converts to set up a “preparatory committee” as a first step towards establishing a new unified Chinese section of the fi in Hong Kong.54 According to John Shum, then a key figure in the Hong Kong Trotskyist movement, before the start of the Tenth World Congress in 1974, he, Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua of the iwp, Xiang Qing of the rcp, and Wu Zhongxian of the ril/rml jointly proposed that the fi should send a delegation to Hong Kong to investigate the current status of the Chinese Trotskyist organisation and urge all the Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong to unify.55 The fi leadership welcomed and supported this move. On 16 March, the United Secretariat had already decided to send Yoshichi Sakai and Barry Sheppard to Hong Kong to “assist in unifying all our [Trotskyist] forces there”.56 Nevertheless, unification was not as easy as expected. On 3 July 1974, the Provisional National Committee (pnc), the current leadership body of the rcp, which was under Peng Shuzhi’s influence, issued a statement opposing unification, on the grounds that it was not centred on the rcp.57 First, the rcp blamed the fi leaders for not providing concrete guidelines for the unification, and for disrespecting the rcp as its “official” Chinese section by intervening in unification “merely [on account of its] authority”. Second, the rcp accused Wu Zhongxian and his young comrades in the ril as well as Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua of the iwp and Xiang Qing of the rcp of standing in the way of a unification centred on the rcp. On the one hand, the rcp disreg-

53 54

55 56 57

to attend Trotskyist events in Japan, including the jrcl’s 1975 National Congress. See Sakai 2015, letters from Sakai to Wang Fanxi, 18 June 1976; 2 April 1977, and 23 November and 24 December 1979, ms 1709 23; and Chan 1975. “The New Left in Hong Kong”, 10 January 1975, p. 7, hkrs 890-2-36. Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua, “A Preliminary Proposal for the Formation of A ‘Preparatory Committee’ for the Re-building of the Chinese Section of the Fourth International”, 15 June 1973, ms 1709 11 (see Part 1, Section A). He 1978, p. 5. “A Letter from the rcp’s Leadership to the usfi”, 3 July 1974 (see Part 1, Section B). The pnc was the leadership body of the rcp in Hong Kong from 1954 to 1977.

chinese trotskyists in exile

103

arded the ril as a political force, since “most of its members still do not clearly understand the basic principles of Trotskyism”; on the other hand, the rcp considered that several Trotskyists from the older generation, such as Wang, Lou, and Xiang, should be held responsible for creating an internal obstacle to cooperation between the rcp and the younger Trotskyists. The rcp argued that these people had encouraged “Wu to leave the Chinese section and stir up those who affiliate with the Chinese section to form another centre outside of the pnc”. Third, the rcp denounced Sakai, the fi representative, for conniving in divisive activities organised by a handful of young Trotskyists. In the eyes of the rcp leaders, Sakai’s “irrational” intervention suggested that elements in the fi wanted to prevent the unification of overseas Chinese Trotskyists.58 This statement was by implication authoritarian, for from the rcp’s viewpoint, unification outside mainland China would have to be carried out by the fi’s sole Chinese section in Hong Kong, i.e., the rcp, and foreign Trotskyists should not be allowed to interfere. Given that the rcp opposed the unification advocated by other Chinese Trotskyists and the fi, there was no further progress in 1974. In January 1975, Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua re-submitted a short proposal to the fi and suggested that a “coordinating committee” should be formed consisting of all Chinese Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong, to “pave the way for unification”.59 In August 1975, Wang Fanxi again wrote to the fi to explain the general differences between the rml and the rcp, differences that might lead to disagreements concerning unification. Wang observed, first, that the young Hong Kong Trotskyists in the rml took a pro-imt position, while the rcp supported Peng’s pro-ltf stance; second, regarding China questions, the former’s position was “comparatively sympathetic and close to that of the iwp”, while the latter always supported Peng’s point of view; third, in political practice, the rml preferred to appear openly in Hong Kong social and political movements, while the rcp insisted on working underground.60 Nevertheless, such differences were not the main obstacle to unification. The main obstacle was the Chinese section itself, i.e., the rcp. Founded by Peng Shuzhi and with just a handful of dissidents within (like Xiang Qing), the rcp drew most of its members from the older generation of Chinese Trotskyists, who were exceedingly loyal to Peng. Peng’s views were the rcp’s views. Opposition to Peng, either from rml leaders like Wu Zhongxian 58 59 60

“A Letter from the rcp’s Leadership to the usfi.” Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua, “A Proposal for the Fusion of all Trotskyists in the Hong Kong Area”, 19 January 1975 (see Part 1, Section B). “A Letter from Wang Fanxi to is”, August 1975, p. 3.

104

yang

concerning the fi’s new strategies or from individual iwp members like Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua regarding the old questions left over from the 1942 split, was intolerable.61 Some Peng loyalists in the rcp even argued that “public criticism of the ‘traditional’ Chinese Trotskyist movement in the person of Peng Shuzhi was uncalled for”.62 Rejecting unification would demonstrate the rcp’s exclusive legitimacy as the fi’s Chinese section. As the 1974 rcp statement shows, the rcp was only prepared to consider a unification centred on the rcp, any other form of unification was unacceptable. “Those Trotskyist elements outside the rcp do not want unification. On the contrary, they attack the Chinese section in order to justify their aim of setting up another [Trotskyist] centre”.63 To defend its exclusive legitimacy, the rcp therefore refused to accept the rml, founded by the younger generation in Hong Kong, as a Trotskyist organisation until the rcp’s Second Congress in 1977.64 A few rcp members stubbornly continued to deny that the rml was a Trotskyist organisation on the grounds that it had no definite political programme and did not observe strict organisational discipline.65 During the rcp congress, Lee See, a party leader, bluntly argued that “the main problem in the course of unification is the sectarianism of the rml”.66 For those Trotskyists from the iwp, the rml, and other fi representatives, the hindrances to unification not only included the rcp’s opposition to the fi leadership, which firmly supported the imt position, but also included the rcp’s animosity towards Peng’s opponents such as Wang Fanxi and Wu Zhongxian and its authoritarianism and sectarianism. According to Wu Zhongxian, the rcp did not have a fraternal attitude towards unification with the rml but wanted “to wield maximum control over the [Hong Kong Trotskyist] movement as a whole”. Moreover, You Xiangming, an rcp member who worked closely with the rml in 1976, confirmed that he and another old RCPer, Chen Bing, were assigned by their party in early 1975 to infiltrate the rml in order to “pull

61 62 63 64 65 66

See Wang Fanxi’s criticism of Peng regarding problems of the Chinese Revolution in Benton 2015, pp. 1001–1024. Miller 1976, p. 26. “A Letter from the rcp’s Leadership to the usfi.” On 10 and 11 April 1977, the rcp convened its second national congress in Hong Kong since its 1948 founding congress in Shanghai. Yoshichi Sakai, “Hong Kong Report on the Congress of the rcp”, 24 April 1977, pp. 3–4, 11, ms 1709 27. Ibid., p. 17. In the same report, Lee See’s view on the rml seems contradictory. On the one hand, he said that the rml’s “sectarianism” impeded the unification, which might indicate that the rcp organisationally knew the rml very well; on the other, he also admitted that “we [the rcp members] cannot know it [the rml] so well”. Ibid., p. 2.

chinese trotskyists in exile

105

rml members into the sphere of the rcp”.67 These efforts did not succeed in the long run. Ironically, some rcp leaders such as Lee See condemned You and Chen’s close connection with the rml and tried to apply disciplinary sanctions against them.68 Due to the rcp’s authoritarianism and sectarianism, in September 1975 Wang Fanxi wrote to tell Yoshichi Sakai that he believed that “it is now too clear that the rml [is the] only possibility … [for a] real T[rotskyist] organisation”, and that international Trotskyists “cannot be ‘neutral’ between the rml and the pnc/rcp” and the rml must receive “our full support”.69 According to Sakai, he, Wang Fanxi, Xiang Qing (of the rcp), and Gerard Verbizier and Pierre Rousset of the lcr agreed that “a united, autonomous, self-sustaining, pro-fi organisation should be formed in Hong Kong, based on its newly emerging young militants, independent of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which we considered ossified”.70 In April 1977, the rcp and the rml agreed in principle to exchange internal documents and representatives to attend each other’s discussions at rank-andfile level.71 Later in the same year, negotiations on the integration of the two groups started, and a joint internal bulletin began publication, as a forum for discussions regarding unification. However, there was no further progress. Negotiations proved far more difficult than the pro-unification Trotskyists thought. 67 68

69

70 71

Miller 1976, pp. 30–31. Regarding the “disciplinary sanction” against them launched by some rcp leaders, such as Lee See, You Xiangming and Chen Bing wrote an open letter to all the rcp members to justify that their activities in the rml had been authorised by the rcp on the one hand, and to vehemently condemn the rcp leadership’s authoritarianism on the other. In this open letter, they also mentioned and denounced Lee See’s “unprincipled” attacks against John Shum and Xiang Qing. They supposed that the reason Shum was under Lee’s attack was Shum’s connection with Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua who politically and organisationally stood in opposition to the rcp within the Trotskyist movement. They revealed that Lee accused Xiang Qing of being a “Communist spy” on private occasions, which from their viewpoint, was absolutely a defamation of Xiang’s character as a revolutionary. See rml 1978a, pp. 9–14. A Letter from Sakai to Wang, 4 September 1975, pp. 1–2, ms 1709 23. In an interview with Yoshichi Sakai by the author concerning the rcp’s authoritarianism, Sakai pointed out that Peng Shuzhi, the founder of the rcp, had an authoritarian personality, and the rcp was “kind of Peng’s pocket-group”. Interview with Yoshichi Sakai, 1 September 2017. Sakai 2015. See the minutes of the 12 April liaison meeting between the executive committee of the rml and the foreign representatives, and of the April 14 liaison meeting between the central committee of the rcp and the foreign representatives, in Sakai, “Hong Kong Report on the Congress of the rcp”, pp. 16–17.

106

yang

The 1978 Unification and the rcp In spite of the difficulties, several foreign Trotskyists and a majority of the Chinese Trotskyists both from the older and younger generations were unwilling to give up their efforts. In his report to the fi of 10 May 1978 on the fusion of the Hong Kong Trotskyist movement, Pierre Rousset suggested that disbanding the imt and the ltf within the fi and re-integrating some of the Trotskyist organisations in 1978 would help Trotskyist unification in Hong Kong, and added that since the rcp and the rml had recognised each other in April 1977 as legitimate Trotskyist organisations, there should be no further barriers to unification.72 In February 1978, a struggle within the rcp concerning partyleague relations revived Rousset and other pro-unification Trotskyists’ hope for unity. In mid-1974, a small group of young Hong Kong Trotskyists who had not fused with Wu Zhongxian’s ril organised a youth group led by Li Huaiming named October Youth, which later became an rcp front in the local youth movement, known as the Young Socialist Group (ysg). In the mid-1970s, the ysg also set up a youth league for the rcp, known as Revolutionary Communist Youth (rcy).73 In February 1978, the ysg (which had no more than 20 members) decided at a general meeting to dissolve the rcy into the ysg.74 In a draft resolution, it argued that the ysg should not be a mere adjunct of the rcp but should enjoy greater organisational autonomy.75 The re-organisation of the ysg led to a political earthquake within the rcp. A majority in the rcp’s central committee, elected at the 1977 party congress, opposed the re-organisation, on the grounds that it might escape rcp control and split the party.76 Before the February ysg general meeting, the rcp central committee told rcp members working in the ysg that the re-structuring of ysg that had not been authorised by the party and threatened to discipline rcp members in the ysg. On 26 February, a week after the re-organisation of the ysg, the rcp central committee decided to issue a “serious warning” to eight 72 73 74 75

76

Rousset 1978, pp. 1–3. He 1978, p. 6. According to the 1977 rcp congress report, all the rcy members were ysg members. Sakai, “Hong Kong Report on the Congress of the rcp”, p. 9. Executive Committee of the ysg no date (but before February 1978). In the same document, the ysg declared that it would recognise both the rcp and the rml as Trotskyist centres, collaborate with both groups, and assist them in unifying. This point of view within the rcp leadership is reflected in Central Committee of the rcp April 1978; Central Committee of the rcp 1978a; Rousset 1978, pp. 1–3; Xiang and Li 1978; Xiang no date.

chinese trotskyists in exile

107

rcp members for their participation in the ysg re-organisation.77 Peng Shuzhi and the majority in the central committee declared that the rcp, as the Chinese section of the fi, would not tolerate the ysg establishing an “independent kingdom” outside the party in the name of Trotskyism.78 Faced with disciplinary threats from the rcp central committee, the young rcp members in the ysg decided to fight back. Au Loong-yu, then a leading figure in the ysg and also an rcp member, denounced the rcp’s attitude towards the ysg as “utterly sectarian”. He added: “It seems that when others become the revolutionaries, it is not an achievement, but a disaster in [the rcp’s] eyes”. The ysg dissidents emphasised that organisational autonomy was essential in building a Trotskyist youth group and working among the masses. Au also insisted that based on a common ground of Trotskyism, the ysg should preserve its organisational autonomy and pursue a policy of self-determination outside the rcp, or it would eventually become a unit of the party rather than an autonomous league.79 The ysg dissidents received support from both inside and outside the rcp. According to Au, in a ysg meeting on 21 April, the rml representative agreed with the ysg that it was not right that “the party should completely supervise the league”. Even within the rcp, a minority expressed their solidarity with the ysg and demanded its organisational autonomy.80 Xiang Qing and Li Huaiming warned the rcp leadership to stop trying to manipulate the ysg, or “outsiders would think that the socialist democracy advocated by our party is fundamentally a fiction, and our party would forfeit the moral high ground [in the struggle] against Stalinism and Maoism”.81 The rcp soon divided into a majority faction that objected to the ysg’s organisational autonomy and a minority that stood with the ysg. Paradoxically, this division hastened unification. On 25 July, the minority organised a Unity Faction of 11 rcp members,82 which drafted a unification proposal. It stated

77 78

79 80 81 82

Central Committee of the rcp 1978b. Central Committee of the rcp 1978c; and Peng and Chen 1978. In the latter, Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan accepted the dissolution of the rcy into the ysg. However, he said it must not be allowed to become an “independent kingdom” within the Chinese section of the fi, and must obey the rcp rather than decide things for itself; its contacts with other political groups must be first authorised by the party. Au no date. See Xiang 1978, Xiang no date; Bao and Zhang no date. Xiang and Li 1978. According to the report on the second congress of the rcp, in 1977, the rcp had 33 members, so the Unity Faction represented one third of the rcp’s membership (Sakai, “Hong Kong Report on the Congress of the rcp”, p. 9).

108

yang

that there was no fundamental difference between the rcp and the rml, so these two Trotskyist groups should immediately announce their unification.83 On 10 September 1978, an rcp special congress was convened to discuss the ysg problem. A majority voted down the Unity Faction’s proposal for unification and rejected unification with the rml. It also insisted that the ysg must “explicitly ‘accept the political leadership of the rcp’ ”, and that a disciplinary sanction should be applied to eight members of the ysg opposition. These decisions angered the Unity Faction and the ysg, which condemned the majority for adopting “a sectarian position towards dissent within the party” and being “ready to trample on inner-democracy in order to avoid challenges to its misdeeds”. They were convinced that the rcp “has degenerated organisationally into a highly reclusive sectarian clique”. On 14 September the Unity Faction decided to integrate immediately with the rml.84 On 16–17 September 1978, the rml’s Fifth Congress became a unification conference. Participants announced the unification of four Trotskyist groups, the rml, the rcp’s Unity Faction, the remnants of the iwp, and the Re-Awakening Group (a small Chinese Trotskyist youth collective established in Britain and led by John Shum). The new unified organisation would continue to be called the Revolutionary Marxist League; the ysg, which united with Progressive Students, the youth section of the rml, retained the ysg appellation.85 Although a complete fusion of the rcp and the rml failed to happen, a large part of the Chinese Trotskyist movement outside the Chinese mainland had been unified. The Chinese Trotskyist movement in the twentieth century has lived through its longest night. Despite the re-emergence of Trotskyist activity in Hong Kong in the 1970s, mainly in the form of a small group of young activists, its ideological influence remained intermittent and its organisation small in scale. Disagreements and animosities impeded its development. Foreign Trotskyists did their best to support their Chinese comrades, but the Fourth International’s role was chiefly that of an advisor. In the end, it was a factional struggle within the ossified rcp that unexpectedly led to the unification of the majority of Chinese Trotskyists outside China, but the unification was over-hasty and two years later there was a further split. So the course of the late-twentieth-

83 84 85

Unity Faction no date. Unity Faction 1978 (see Part 1, Section B). See the internal minutes of the unification conference in rml 1978b. On 14 September 1978, the Re-awakening Group also submitted its own proposal for unification, Our Proposal for the Unification of Hong Kong’s Revolutionary Marxist Movement (see Part 1, Section G).

chinese trotskyists in exile

109

century reunification of Chinese Trotskyism, while a demonstration of their determination to rebuild the movement for the future, was also a continuation of its past tragedy.

Appendix: The Membership of Hong Kong’s Trotskyist Groups There are several different estimates of the membership of Hong Kong’s various Trotskyist groups. According to the Hong Kong Standard, a local newspaper, the rml led by Wu had 65 members in October 1974, but this might be an exaggeration.86 Joseph Miller estimated that there were nearly 100 Trotskyists and Trotskyist sympathisers in four different Hong Kong Trotskyist groups in late 1976: 40 in the rcp, 10 in the rcy, 30 in the rml, and 20 in the ysg.87 According to Yoshichi Sakai’s 1977 report on the rcp, the rcp had 33 members, and everyone in the rcy was also in the rcp and the ysg.88 According to a private letter from Au Loong-yu and Yu Chun-li to Wang Fanxi, after the 1978 unification congress the newly unified rml had 43 members, perhaps including eleven members of the rcp’s Unity Faction.89 On that basis, we can perhaps assume that the rcp and the rml had an overall membership of around 70–80. Even if one includes Trotskyist sympathisers who had become disillusioned or inactive, the total would be no more than 100.

86 87 88 89

Hong Kong Standard, 1 October 1974, newspaper cuttings, hkrs 70-6-390-1. Miller 1976, appendix i. It is worth noting that Miller did not calculate the figures of the iwp and the Re-Awakening Group. Sakai, “Hong Kong Report on the Congress of the rcp”, p. 9. A Letter from Au Loong-yu and Yu Chun-li to Wang Fanxi, 4 January 1981, p. 2, ms 1709, 27.

section b Trotskyist Organisations Starting in the 1950s

∵

Introduction to Part 1, Section B Even after the destruction of Trotskyist organisation in China in 1952, Hong Kong remained a base for organising Trotskyist activities and a refuge sheltering remnants of the surviving Trotskyist forces. On the eve of the ccp’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang in 1949, the rcp built by Peng Shuzhi hands retreated to Hong Kong to continue its underground activities, and a few surviving members of the iwp also straggled into the colony, where new Trotskyist youth groups emerged in the early 1970s. At one point, a majority of veteran Chinese Trotskyists in exile called for the unification of Peng’s rcp and other small groups such as the rml, but the project ended in failure. The documents and essays in this section illustrate the Chinese Trotskyists’ internal discussions regarding the ccp’s victory, their own organisational unification, the key principles of organisation, and the emergence of a political movement influenced or organised by newer generation of Trotskyists in the 1970s.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_010

Discussions on the Nature of the Chinese Revolution Led by the ccp Raised by Members of the rcp in the Early 1950s (1951) In January 1950, a political resolution drafted by Peng Shuzhi on the new Communist regime in China was adopted by the rcp. It described Communist rule in China as a Bonapartist dictatorship “bourgeois” in character. Not all Peng’s comrades in Hong Kong agreed with this resolution. In the early 1950s, a small number of members of the rcp, including Xiang Qing and his allies, published their own views on the new Chinese regime. They concluded that the Chinese Communists would not maintain its “bourgeois character” in the long run, and that their military victory might be the prelude to proletarian revolution. In 1952, the Fourth International adopted a resolution on China that intimated support for these rcp dissidents’ view.1 The following two articles by the editors of the rcp’s organ and by Maki (i.e., Xiang Qing) explain their views on the Chinese Revolution. Both pieces are extracted from the International Information Bulletin, March 1952, published by the Socialist Workers Party (US), New York.

(a)

The Third Chinese Revolution and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist Party Submitted by the Editors of the Party’s Organ as a Basis for Discussion March 1951

Source: International Information Bulletin, March 1952, pp. 1–11. The Third Chinese Revolution in Its Development The collapse of the Kuomintang regime, which was founded on the butchery of the people and ruled over China for 22 years, closed the historical period beginning with the defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution, and opened a new chapter in the history of China. This is the first victory of the Third Chinese revolution.

1 See also Yang Yang, “Chinese Trotskyist Trotskyists in Exile, Contacts with the Fourth International, and Efforts to Achieve Organisation, 1949–1978” (Part 1, Section A), and Xiang Qing Interview (Part 4, Section B) in this volume.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_011

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

115

The civil war, which resulted in the overthrow of the Kuomintang regime and which enabled the Chinese Communist Party to conquer power, originated from the profound class contradictions of Chinese society. In the Resistance War against Japan, the rank and file masses who rose spontaneously to resist the enemy were mainly composed of the peasants, organised by the remaining cadres and veterans of the peasant war from 1927 to 1937 as the nuclei. Under the leadership and control of the Communist Party, they organised and grew into the people’s resistance guerrillas and established their own power in the regions of the vast countryside. These guerrillas and their district organs never envisaged a revolutionary perspective or posed a revolutionary programme, but, driven by the logic of the class struggle, inevitably came into opposition and collision with the native landlord-bourgeoisie and the official power of Japanese imperialism, After the conclusion of the Resistance War, the aggravated oppression imposed on the people by the landlord-bourgeoisie and the reactionary measures taken by the Kuomintang regime in order to annihilate by force the existing dual power provoked the civil war which was largely suppressed for a certain period only to break out ferociously afterward on a nationwide scale. In the course of this civil war, the leaders of the peasant armies, pressed by the situation, gave up the policy of land reform and appealed to the peasants to expropriate the land of the landlords. They abandoned illusions of reconciliation with the Kuomintang regime, and transformed the peasant guerrilla war which was still partial and obscure in its objectives into a revolution to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie and landlords at home and foreign imperialism abroad. But this revolution is not a normal revolution. It is a distorted revolution. This kind of distortion is characterised by the uneven development and insufficiency of the mass movement, and the absence of a free and expanding class struggle. The whole working class has not exercised any positive role in this revolution, and the closer the transfer of power approached, the weaker became the workers’ movement. The agrarian struggle in the countryside always came in the wake of the military action of the overthrow of the Kuomintang regime, and became its supplement. The areas south of the Yangtze River were liberated purely by military force from the north. All forms of mass struggle were subordinated to the military activities of the peasant army. It is only due to the general decline of world capitalism and the over-rottenness of the Chinese bourgeoisie that this distorted revolution, assuming the principal form of a peasant war, could achieve the first stage of its victory. The establishment of the new regime does not mean that the revolution has reached an end. A purely military campaign can overthrow a reactionary power which has become an obstacle in the path of the revolution, but it

116

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

can never carry through the revolutionary tasks. Since this revolution broke out as the result of profound social contradictions, it is absolutely necessary to mobilize a mass movement to make up for the deficiency of the military struggle. Despite its attempt to blunt the revolutionary aspirations of the masses, the Chinese cp is still not able to replace the mass actions by purely bureaucratic administrative measures; it can only limit and delay the movement. The struggles for the reduction of rent and interest, the liquidation of the vicious gentry class, and the equal distribution of the land carried on in the vast countryside are precisely the expressions of this mass movement. The struggle of the urban workers has far from arrived at a development parallel to that in the countryside, and has not yet passed beyond the policy of “equal concern for both the state and the private enterprises; equal share of profits between capital and labour”. However, the working class is relatively more active than in the past. Their interest in politics has been promoted, and their impulse to intervene in social life is kindled anew. These provide the preconditions for the workers to move forward to positive actions. The remnants of the old regime – the reactionary bureaucrats, the secret agents of the Kuomintang, and the notorious military officers – are being liquidated by the new regime. The anti-imperialist struggles, appearing mainly in the form of the campaign against American aid to South Korea, have been and are still unfolding. These struggles are constantly rallying the masses, especially the intellectuals, to participate in the fight. All these signs indicate that the revolution still exists, and is developing. What direction it will take and what its final form will be depends on the living process of the class struggle in the days to come. This revolution was engendered by the contradiction between the capitalist productive forces and the pre-capitalist obstructions. Its immediate tasks are to realise national independence and solve the agrarian problem. Therefore, this revolution is a bourgeois-democratic revolution. The chief motive force of this revolution is the huge exploited lower layers of the urban and village petty-bourgeoisie. Due to the complete corruption of the bourgeoisie today and the inevitability of a social revolution, this revolution which depends on the petty-bourgeoisie for its major dynamic force cannot possibly open the road for bourgeois democracy. On the contrary, this revolution actually won its first victory through the mortal struggle of the toiling masses against the bourgeoisie and its policy. Henceforth, in order to assure the fruits of victory, it is not only possible but also necessary for this movement to become the prelude to the proletarian socialist revolution. Hence, this revolution is the first stage of the victory of the permanent revolution.

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

117

The Chinese Communist Party The Chinese Communist Party has a long tradition of organisation, and at the same time, it has been supported by the Soviet bureaucracy which, for the past twenty years, has safeguarded itself with the prestige of the October Revolution. Since the defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution, the Chinese cp threw all its strength into the countryside to engage in guerrilla war, and has derived its deep traditions and rich experiences from the peasants and its military struggles. The members and ranks of this party have made numerous sacrifices in the struggles against the expedition of the Kuomintang army and the invasion of Japanese imperialism. For that reason, it could build up its prestige in various degrees among the huge masses, especially among the peasants and intellectuals. Since this revolution was launched from among the peasants and assumed the principal form of military activities, the Communist Party was enabled without difficulty to seize the leadership in the first stage of the revolution. The peasantry, being secluded in the countryside, is not able to concentrate its strength, and therefore lacks political independence. Before the movement of the urban proletariat arose and could give the peasants leadership in time, the sporadic and intermittent peasant revolts were not adequate to shake the rule of the bourgeoisie. But during the past twenty years, especially under the conditions of the Resistance War against Japan, through the efforts of the Chinese cp as their organiser, the peasants, though dispersed, yet hungry for the land and bitterly hostile towards the imperialist aggressors, have formed into an army. From the moment of its appearance, it not only became the chief weapon of the peasant revolt, but in turn became the leading force to manipulate the peasant revolts. In the beginning, the leaders of this peasant army were revolutionary intellectuals and workers from the cities. All of them were members of the Communist Party. This party, depending upon the peasants, organised them into armies as the instruments of the peasant revolt. But through a long period of guerrilla warfare which has become a kind of vocation, and at the same time under the influence of the ideology of the Soviet bureaucracy, this party has been brought up on a tradition of empiricism and bureaucratic centralism. By virtue of this tradition, the Chinese cp held the fate of the peasant army in its hands, used this army as a tool, to ride on the shoulders of the peasants, and thus became the omnipotent commander of the peasant struggle, exercising a strict rule over the process of this struggle, and regulating its physiognomy from time to time. When this army emerged from the stage of scattered guerrilla wars and plunged into a nationwide struggle for power, the Communist Party, again with this huge army, drawing behind it the bulk of the peasant masses, suffoc-

118

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

ated or suppressed the free unfolding of the already enfeebled struggle of the urban working class, and dragged all forms of the mass struggle into the channel of its military struggle. After its ascent to power, it reigned over the whole nation with the same weapons. Due to the intricate historical relations among the elements of the peasant struggle, the peasant army, the working class movement, and the Communist Party, this revolution has suffered a serious distortion – the distortion of Stalinism. In the whole course of the civil war, the Communist Party hindered the complete class awakening of the masses, prevented them from recognising the precise objects of their struggles and the final goal, while it deluded the masses with rotten “theories” of class collaboration and revolution by stages, and forbade them to crush once for all the power of the exploiting class. At the time when the bourgeoisie was already corrupt to the core and utterly impotent, the ccp still tolerated it, and established a government together with it. Yet, in spite of all these things, the Communist Party is not a bourgeois party. The elements comprising this party are neither of bourgeois birth nor under the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie nor being bribed by the bourgeoisie. It is a petty-bourgeois peasant party. In the past ten years, under an unfavourable relation of forces, it made several attempts to compromise and even submit to the big bourgeoisie in order to gain certain social reforms and democratic rights. The complete decay of the bourgeoisie deprived this reformism of its foundation, and hence forced the cp to retain its armed troops, its local administrations, and its basis among the peasants, even at the time of its most shameful political capitulations. Its party composition, social roots, its origin, its historical tradition and its international background, all pushed the cp to the crossroad of “march on, or die”, and finally to the ascent to power. It is also due to the above elements that fourteen months after its conquest of power, it has not yet assimilated itself into the bourgeoisie, even though in ideology and above all in living conditions, it has been deeply affected by the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, the cp has been consciously seeking a social basis among the working class, and looks upon the bourgeoisie as “alien”. After the seizure of power, the cp will not be able to maintain its pettybourgeois basis in the long run. It is obliged to seek its basis either in the bourgeoisie or in the proletariat. If eventually it chooses the former, it would lose all its “revolutionary” colour. If it chooses the latter, then it must (since it is already in power) cut off all ties with the bourgeoisie and liquidate it as a class. And since it has come to power and if it has transformed itself into a proletarian party under conditions of a rising and not an ebbing tide (as was the

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

119

case with Stalin’s bureaucracy), as the ruling party the cp will then be obliged to concede proletarian democracy and hence will be further obliged to break away from the reactionary traditions of international Stalinism. At the turning point of this transformation, the cp will be compelled to purge the opposite section inside the party. Which of these two classes the Communist Party will “choose” is a question which will be determined less by the objective will of its leadership than by the social struggles and the influence of this leadership in relation to the masses. The Character of the New Regime and Its Internal Contradictions The old state apparatus (the army, police and bureaucracy, etc.) was destroyed in the civil war; the new state apparatus is based on the leadership of the peasant army as its trunk, and is being created anew by absorbing a small part of the remaining elements of the old state apparatus. Since the new regime was established immediately upon the military victory of the peasant army and after its establishment permitted the peasants to enter upon land reform in various degrees, it naturally relies on the peasant armed forces as the major prop of its power, and in the last analysis, also reflects the demands of the peasants, and has won direct and indirect support from the latter. In the cities, it attempts to get support from the working class, and is consciously strengthening its originally very weak relations with the working masses. Its social reforms have begun to remove the past dissatisfactions of the urban workers and poor masses. The broad layers of intellectuals, inspired by revolutionary enthusiasm, claim to be the advocates of the interests of the workers and peasants, gathered around the Communist Party, and participate ardently in the work of social reform. The bourgeoisie has a few representatives participating in the government (mainly in the provincial governments and the higher organs), and still maintains certain weak connections with the former bureaucrats, the Kuomintang army, and the police. But it can exert influence on the policy of the new regime only through its weight in property relations, but has no power of control or determination. The bourgeoisie by participating in this coalition government, aims solely at maintaining their traitor’s role in the highest ranks, in order to usurp power from within by taking advantage of the insufficient awakening of the masses and the compromising policy of the cp. Therefore, viewed from the angle of its class basis, the new regime is principally based on the masses of peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie, but owing to the lack of a complete awakening of class consciousness among the masses and of a full development of the struggle of the working class, the Chinese cp is still able to carry out its compromising policy towards the bourgeoisie, to tolerate and to make concessions to it.

120

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

Just because this revolution, from its very beginning, has suffered serious Stalinist distortion, and the initiative of the masses has been suffocated, especially because the consciousness and actions of the class struggle of the working class have been weakened, and the mass movement has not been able to enjoy the opportunity of free development, this revolution, although having arrived at the stage of overthrowing the old regime, has not yet brought to birth the unified organisation of mass struggle – the soviets. Therefore, viewed from the angle of the form of administrative power, the new regime created by this revolution is clothed in Bonapartism. This Bonapartist power raises itself up above the whole nation and conceives of itself as a non-class supervisor of the historical process. It attempts to follow the schema of historical development set forth in the so-called “New Democracy”. On the one hand, this theory aims to carry out anti-feudalist social reform under the iron control of the bureaucracy; on the other hand, to co-ordinate and mitigate the contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and to dream of developing into Socialism “peacefully” after several decades. Under such conditions, the position taken by the new regime of not transgressing the property rights of the bourgeoisie in general has special importance. Since the new regime is not directly based on the mass organisations of the toiling masses, since the vast masses have not even the most elementary class democracy, and are not allowed to intervene directly in social life; since the working class cannot exercise a universal and close supervision and control over the state and the means of production, this regime will be constantly submitted to the powerful influences of the material and ideological sway of the bourgeoisie, and will thus give the bourgeoisie a possibility of restoring its rule by peaceful means. In fact, the question at issue here is not one of determining the temporary strategy of a worker and peasant power and its stages of revolution against capitalist property, but rather one of using these facts to make a final estimate of the class nature of the new regime. From the social point of view, the new regime is a bourgeois regime. From all these characteristics, it is clear that the regime is in itself full of explosive contradictions, and contains two absolutely incompatible tendencies. It will feel the ever-intensifying pressure from both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and find that the room for the oscillation of its policies is constantly shrinking. The contradiction between the revolutionary origin of the class foundation of this regime and its social and economic basis and the conflicts among the different class origins of the diverse elements composing it demand a thoroughgoing solution. Either it will be overthrown by one of the two major opposing classes in order to “solve” the internal contradictions

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

121

within the regime, or it must completely lean to one side. And this solution will at the same time put an end to the present petty-bourgeois Bonapartism. The Economic Situation The collapse of the Kuomintang regime and all the subsequent political and social reforms have not yet given rise to a fundamental qualitative change in Chinese society. Since this new regime is by no means a proletarian power, it follows that its policy cannot consciously suppress the growth of capitalism. In fact, private property is generally maintained at present, and the state enterprises as well as private enterprises cannot escape the domination of the law of profits. The land, both in the new and old liberated areas, is still in the hands of individuals, and it can be disposed of through the right of free purchase. Exchanges in the market, in the cities or in the countryside, unfold according to the capitalist law of supply and demand. All these fundamental factors clearly indicate that China is still a backward capitalist country. The first victory of the Third Chinese Revolution has won political independence for this nation, and opened the road for the solution of the agrarian problem. But it has not created sufficient conditions to complete these two historical tasks, and to assure Chinese society a rapid development of its productive forces. The problems confronting industrial production in China are not the problems of breaking through barriers preventing its expansion, but how to expand its own productive forces to satisfy the demands of the swiftly swelling market, that is, how to proceed immediately with capital construction. But this capital construction will require accumulation outside the process of industrial production. Under the policy of maintaining private ownership of the land and encouraging “thrift and prosperity” of the peasants, the capital accumulation resulting from small-scale agricultural production, on the one hand, will create new class differentiations in the countryside, and even the formation of a new landlord class, and will also restrict continuous increase in agricultural production and capital accumulation. On the other hand, since this capital accumulation stays in the hands of the kulaks, under unstable conditions of society, it will be transformed into commercial speculation. Instead of being transformed into industrial capital, it will on the contrary, relatively weaken the accumulation of industrial capital, and threaten industrial development. Private capital absorbs a great amount of surplus value, a part of which is exhausted in luxury, consumption and commercial speculation, and the other part, being invested in the process of industrial production, due to the blind control of the law of profits, will tend to burden light industry. This planless distribution of surplus value is not only unable to harmonise with the develop-

122

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

ment of heavy industry on a national scale, but will also deepen the competition between the state enterprises and private enterprises, weaken the capital accumulation of the latter, and at the same time aggravate the disequilibrium in national economic development. At present, the ominous symptom of the “scissors” has already appeared in the disparity of prices between industrial commodities and agricultural products. Should the agrarian reform be completed, the rural economy secure stability and rehabilitation, and the productive potentiality of the original industrial equipment be consummated, then the gap between the two parts of the scissors would be enlarged and result in a serious economic crisis. The city and the countryside would be placed in opposition to each other. The rich peasants would store up farm products and boycott industrial goods. Industry would collapse in the absence of raw materials and a market. The capitalists would join the rich peasants in demanding free foreign trade by all means, the restoration of private operation of state industry and commerce, and would call upon the state to withdraw its superintendence and control over the market. This would be the time for a thoroughgoing solution of the contradictions and the conclusion of the transitional situation. Either capitalism would restore its control over the whole nation and swallow up all the first conquests of the revolution; or private property would be expropriated, the free purchase of land prohibited, the properties of the rich peasants be limited and confiscated, the state monopoly over foreign trade be thoroughly carried out, and control and supervision of the working class over the industry be realised. Either of these two alternatives would simultaneously bring about a corresponding change in class relationship and the structure of power. Perspectives of This Revolution The economic and political conditions and class relations all reveal the contradictions and transitory character of the entire present situation. This situation cannot last for a historical period but is only an episode in the course of historical development. In the next stage, the probable perspectives for China will be as follows: (1) Under conditions of the suppression and decline of the mass movement, the bourgeoisie would utilise its property influence and its ideological sway to corrupt the greater part and the leadership of the Chinese cp, transform it into a party which would consciously serve the interests of the bourgeoisie, and this new party would in turn reorganise the government and readjust all social and political measures according to the will of the bourgeoisie. This means that the bourgeoisie would restore its rule by peaceful means, and that today’s revolution would become an abor-

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

123

ted revolution. In sociological analysis, this perspective is possible. But under the conditions of the general decline of capitalism, this perspective is merely probable. (2) The bourgeoisie has still another road to pursue to reinstate its whole power, that is, with direct military and economic aid from imperialism, the different sections of the bourgeoisie would form into an allied force exploiting the diverse difficulties of the new regime, overthrow the Chinese cp in power by joint forces at home and abroad, and re-establish the brutal rule of the bourgeoisie. In order to accomplish this bloody business, the bourgeoisie must not only smash the military resistance of the Chinese cp and the new regime, but must also crush the mass movement of the workers and peasants which would rise spontaneously or be initiated by the Communist Party. There would have to be a bloodbath on the battlefield of the class struggle. If the bourgeoisie does unfortunately succeed, the Chinese workers and peasants would pay for this with countless victims, and China would once again be thrown back into a long period of chaos. Then this revolution would once again be a defeated revolution. (3) Under more favourable conditions, the working class movement could rise again at the opportune time, and respond immediately to the peasants’ struggle for the expropriation of land. On the one hand, it would intervene directly against the property rights of the capitalists; on the other hand, it would revolt against the Bonapartist rule of the Chinese cp. Under the leadership of a revolutionary Trotskyist party, this mass movement would be able to push the revolution to the stage of completion, i.e., overthrow the present regime of the Chinese cp (if this party stands on the side opposing the mass movement), build up a proletarian dictatorship, and achieve the transmutation of China into a worker’s state. In the course of this broadening and deepening of the revolution, differentiation would inevitably appear in the Chinese cp. The revolutionary sector would stand at the side of the workers and peasants and struggle for the completion of the socialist revolution. This perspective will also require bloodshed but it will open the highway to the ultimate liberation of the Chinese people. (4) Under the stimulus of the intensified differentiation inside the international class struggle and Stalinism, the ever-increasing menace from part of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, and the pressure from the worker and peasant movement, the Chinese cp would come to purge the right wing within the party, tolerate or even mobilise the workers’ and peasants’ mass movement, gradually concede class democracy to the people, exclude ele-

124

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

ments representing the bourgeoisie in the government, expropriate the properties of the bourgeoisie, and eventually transmute this country into a worker’s state. This road will cost less bloodshed, yet it would not be a peaceful quantitative transformation, but a qualitative change. In this case, it would indicate that the Chinese cp had begun to break away from the yoke of international Stalinism and its ideology. It would also show that under indomitable historical laws, even the Chinese cp would be forced step by step to take the road already pointed out by Trotsky, if it is still unwilling to be isolated from the masses and to ruin itself. In such a situation the Chinese party of the Fourth International would fight together with this party if it shows willingness to take the road of proletarian dictatorship, and would complete the revolutionary tasks in joint action, while criticising and correcting its mistakes in the course of this fight. Which of these will be the most probable perspective of the Chinese revolution is not clear yet. It will be determined by the evolution of the class struggle on the international plane, the conflicts between the US and the Soviet Union, the conditions inside the Stalinist camp, the relationship of China towards imperialism, the process of the struggle between the workers and peasants and the bourgeoisie, economic conditions in China, and the inner development of the Chinese cp. The Essential Traits of the Situation and the Tasks of Our Party The present stage is a transitional stage between two revolutionary upsurges. It is mainly characterised by the following features: (1) The landlords are or will be fundamentally liquidated as a class; the bourgeoisie has suffered a tremendous defeat on the political arena and its economic system is at stake. The power has been transferred from the big bourgeoisie into the hands of the poor peasants, especially the leadership of the peasant revolt based on the peasant armed forces. (2) In relation to imperialism, China has gained its political independence; the agrarian reform is still in operation; and the revolution is in development. (3) The development of the mass struggle is very inadequate and uneven; the struggles carried on by the peasants for agrarian reform have not yet broken out of the orbit marked out by the Chinese cp, and the “steps” fixed for them. The struggle of the urban workers has not yet been coordinated with the peasant struggle to reach the level of sharp class struggle. It is still limited within the framework of “an equal share of profits between capital and labour”. The masses of the country have not yet passed bey-

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

125

ond the ideological realm of Mao Tse-tung’s “New Democracy” and have not accepted or consciously taken the road of proletarian revolution. (4) In the course of the revolution up to now, the mass movement has lacked the opportunity of free development. The masses have had no class democracy nor even broad civil rights. There has not yet been created a unified national organisation of struggle of real mass character and internal democracy for the workers, peasants, and soldiers. (5) The Chinese cp and its new regime can still control the masses and hold the initiative in its hands by using the halfway, illusory, and reactionary scheme of “New Democracy” as its guide. It regulates every concrete step of the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggle of the masses, it impedes and suppresses the struggle of the urban working class against the bourgeoisie. It rules over the whole nation by its Bonapartism, and does not grant even the least democracy to the masses. Yet in the process of development, it will inevitably be submitted to pressure from two opposite sides – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – and must eventually surrender to one side or the other. (6) The most revolutionary party, the Chinese rcp, is still very weak in numbers and suffering the cruellest persecution. It has not a deep foundation in the masses and so it not yet able to play a decisive role. In view of the above-stated traits, the main tasks of the Chinese Revolutionary Communist Party should be the following: to promote the consciousness of the masses, to initiate and guide the class struggle of the proletariat to a higher level, to enable the masses to extricate themselves from the ideological trap of “New Democracy”, and push the masses forward to complete the revolution, that is, to root out the already bankrupt political influence and crumbling economic power of the landlord-bourgeoisie, to establish the proletarian dictatorship, to transform the distorted bourgeois revolution into a socialist revolution, and to transmute China into an independent and unified Soviet state. The preliminary conditions for accomplishing these tasks are as follows: to secure class democracy for the worker and peasant masses, which will open the way to free development of their struggle against feudalism, the bourgeoisie and imperialism; to demand for them freedom of speech, assembly, publication, organisation, residence, employment, strike, demonstration and the right to arms; to advocate the legal existence and the freedom to win mass support for all parties which base themselves on and speak in the name of the workers and peasants; to link every step in the political and economic struggle with the slogan of organising workers, peasants, and soldiers’ committees, and to link this central slogan with all the individual demands. The appearance of workers,

126

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

peasants, and soldiers’ committees will signify that the revolution has reached its climax. The establishment of the workers and peasants’ government would then become the most urgent task. Today, the Chinese rcp has not yet sufficient strength to intervene in events, and is still an underground organisation, the object of persecutions by the new regime. Yet our party will resolutely and boldly engage in all existing antifeudal, anti-bourgeois, and anti-imperialist struggles (despite the weakness of these struggles and the form they take) in order to push the mass movement to a new upsurge, and to win the confidence of the masses. In the meanwhile, if the Chinese cp mobilises or supports this struggle, our party would fight side by side with it, while maintaining our political criticism; if the cp stands on the side of the bourgeoisie, or opposes this struggle in order to protect its Bonapartist rule, our party would unite with the worker and peasant masses against the interference by the cp and its regime. The policy of the Chinese rcp has not yet been understood or accepted by the general masses so our present task is to explain patiently and flexibly to the masses, including the rank and file of the Chinese cp. We believe that all real revolutionists and the huge masses of workers and peasants will accept our programme, because our programme is the conscious expression of the objective necessity of the historical development and the class interests of the worker and peasant masses. In the following, we propose a series of demands and slogans around the slogan of workers, peasants, and soldiers’ committees, which form our central political slogan (as the programme to unite the mass struggle in the present period). (The central part of the programme is finished, and the individual demands and slogans will be put forward afterwards).

(b)

Why Is This Civil War Called a Revolution and the Importance of This Recognition? – A Point of Departure for the Re-appraisal of the Chinese Events Maki (Xiang Qing) 17 May 1951

Source: International Information Bulletin, March 1952, pp. 12–20. Almost one year ago when the Special Committee of Kwangtung [Guangdong] Province initiated the discussion on the programme of action, I wrote a thesis entitled “A Review of the Chinese Events and the Tactics of Our Action” in which I stated my opinions. At that time I expected that an enthusiastic dis-

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

127

cussion would rapidly unfold in order to arrive at a profound understanding of the Chinese events, to draw rich lessons in regard to tactics, and thus to formulate the programme of action of our party for the immediate present. But this discussion has not been broadly opened and did not even go very deep in the Special Committee itself (since nobody had any mature ideas). Afterwards, on the grounds of the need for action, without a thorough examination of the events in their entirety and the present situation, a series of concrete demands were roughly worked out. These demands were designed as the programme to guide action. As a result, they not only failed to influence the action of the party, but even the programme itself was not completed! In this regard, I myself was responsible; but after a moment of reflection today, in view of the fundamental mistakes made in the manner of applying this programme, it would have had no value for practical action even if it had been completed. Now the discussion of the programme of action is set forth once again, and the Editors’ Board of the Party Organ has already presented a draft resolution as the basis for discussion. This time the discussion should not be so fruitless as the former one. Moreover, a set of new ideas are being posed by this draft which should help all comrades re-evaluate the Chinese events. Whatever the results, this discussion will be an epoch-making landmark in the history of the ideological development of our party. On this question, my views have also changed much recently. My new ideas have already been published in my personal draft: “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution”, and now I am going to explain the essential points of my views. The present article will deal especially with the first point, which is also the point of departure for my view as a whole. In the process of elucidating my point of view, it will be inevitable to criticise the past conceptions which I consider to be wrong, and this criticism might even appear to be severe. In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I state in advance that my criticism is not aimed at justifying my own point of view, and even less at attacking certain individual comrades. In fact, the whole party is responsible for most of the important errors, and I myself was sometimes at the extreme of these erroneous positions. A Fundamental Conception The victory of the “people’s Liberation War” not only demonstrates that we have committed serious errors in political evaluation, but also reveals lack of sensitivity on our part to the actual development of events. We have been too absorbed in abstract theories, and have paid too little attention to the objective development of these events. We have not sufficiently taken into account the peculiar combination of the concrete conditions, nor have we measured the subjective and objective significance of the existing movement in the present

128

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

situation, nor made a scrupulous analysis of the relative weight of the diverse tendencies in the present movement. We have only sketchily applied one or two abstract principles to the concrete events. As the movement does not conform to our idealised norms, we shrug at it with contempt. Despite the fact that the sky and earth have been turned upside down, we disdainfully remark, “No way out”, and turn our heads back to work in a small circle, quietly awaiting another revolutionary storm which would burst forth outside of this existing movement. Until the Kuomintang regime was overthrown by the mass movement under the cp leadership, we still did not proceed to a thorough examination and reappraisal of the events in order to push the revolution to the end by adjusting ourselves to the tempo of the march of the masses. On the contrary, all we did was to condemn the movement as being “halfway”, “reactionary”, “paralysed”, and “hysterical”, and predicted from day to day the collapse of the new regime. We were delighted by the disappointment of the masses and dejected when the masses cheered. This complacent, abstentionist mood, however, cannot resist the pressure of the masses. Blinded by the dazzling light of events, some of our comrades have begun to waver, others are more than ever tending to shrink into a solitary corner in order to maintain their own inner equilibrium and avoid contact with the outside world. We have paid a heavy price for this fault of sectarianism. When we re-examine the Chinese events and review our tactics, we must first of all clear away this harmful heritage of dogmatism and sectarianism. The supreme merit of Marxism is its application of dialectical logic to understanding objective reality in its development. That is why Marxism is everyoung and ever-developing. Whoever conceives Marxist theory as a neverchanging dogma already violates the fundamental spirit of Marxism. In fact, every important historical event adds something new to Marxism or renovates a part of the old. Since a world-shaking event has occurred in China today, this event will naturally more or less modify the contents of Marxism. The most important part of Marxism is the comprehension of the transitional period between capitalism and communism, i.e., the understanding of the process of the proletarian revolution. The most prominent feature is the continuous development of this comprehension. In the epoch of Marx and Engels, this part of their theory had only a few essentials. They pointed out only that this transitional period would definitely give rise to the proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship, and when the dictatorship had gradually accomplished its tasks of economic reconstruction, it would also gradually wither away, and eventually enter into the epoch of communism, without class

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

129

and without state power. They affirmed at the same time that though the beginning of this transitional period would differ from nation to nation, the ultimate completion must be simultaneous among all the countries in the world. As to the question of the time of the outbreak of the proletarian revolution in different countries, their reciprocal influences, and the relations between the democratic revolution and socialist revolution, they have given only a few simple indications. Not until the imperialist epoch, the time of the actual realisation of the proletarian revolution, were the fully developed theories of the law of uneven and combined development and the Permanent Revolution presented by Lenin and Trotsky. Moreover, Trotsky, after the experience of the ussr, posed the question of the inevitable degeneration of an isolated workers’ state, and studied the reactionary role of this degenerated workers’ state in the whole process of the world revolution. But as for this last part, there were only some preliminary suggestions in the time of Trotsky. The maturity of this theory had to wait until the conclusion of the World War 2. The recent fruits of the discussion in the Fourth International on the “People’s Democracies” of Eastern Europe, and especially Yugoslavia, have added new content to this part of the Marxist theory. We, the revolutionists who live in this transition epoch, who undertake this task of social transformation, must constantly enrich our understanding of the concrete process in this transition epoch through revolutionary practice, and guide the revolutionary work of the next stage with this new comprehension. Only then are we qualified to be called real revolutionists. If we are content with understanding only a general orientation and measure living events mechanically by abstract criteria, and with the attitude of “being unchangeable before all events”, wait passively and fatalistically instead of applying flexible tactics of action, then we are not revolutionists but only bigoted pedants. When the fragile door of the pedant’s study is unable to withstand the billows of the mass movement, he will shake his head pessimistically, go crazy or even end in betrayal. The development of the world revolutionary movement, especially that of the Yugoslav revolution, enables us to more adequately recognise the important influence of the Soviet bureaucracy on the world revolution. Stalinism, under the mask of Bolshevism, has seriously affected the revolution in various countries of the world. The proletarian revolutionary movement in many countries, up to the moment of the seizure of power and even in the first period after the seizure of power, continues to suffer from the distortions of Stalinism. Formerly, we assumed that only under the leadership of a genuine Marxist revolutionary party and united around the soviets of the broadest democracy could the proletariat seize power. Now historical events tell us that in the first

130

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

period of the world proletarian revolution, not everything is worked out in such a perfect manner, but on the contrary contains certain distortions. To study once again the Chinese events, we must take into consideration the important influence of Stalinism as an objective factor in the totality of the events. In China, as in many other countries, Stalinism (the material force of the Soviet bureaucracy and its serious usurpation of revision of Bolshevism) has hampered the process and the speed of the mass movement, distorted its form and the ideology and political line of the Communist Party, and the form and composition of the revolutionary organisations. But the Stalinist parties are not a social force independent of all classes; they do not have material interests independent of all the classes. They can only distort or hinder the revolutionary movement, but they are unable to undermine the fundamental laws of the development of the revolution. When a Communist Party leads the mass movement, it nevertheless represents a certain class and carries out a certain social role, and does not simply exploit the masses from a superior position above all classes. In the last analysis, it is not the Stalinist party which dominates the destiny of the movement under its leadership, but it is on the contrary the development of the movement which will determine the fate of the Stalinist party. Therefore, in regard to the movement directed by the Stalinist party, besides understanding and criticising the mistakes of this party, we must (the most important of all) comprehend the objective significance of this movement, and especially its class significance. We must recognise, criticise and attempt to correct all the distortions, but we should not neglect the essential features by stressing the subordinate traits, or deny the nature of things due to certain distorted phenomena. The “People’s Liberation War” Is the Third Chinese Revolution The extreme erroneous expression of our dogmatism in the past was in obstinately denying that this “People’s Liberation War” was a revolution. At first, we considered that in modern Chinese society, it is absolutely impossible to conquer the power of the whole nation unless there is a movement of the workers leading the peasants. We still insist that these events are not to be called a revolution because they contain all kinds of defects. This attitude is simply to deny the facts which do not conform to our theory. This dogmatism of theory and complete disregard of the real conditions has come to its climax. The events happening in China are a progressive mass movement which overthrew the old regime by violence from below. These events have already embodied in them the essential characteristics of a revolution. We can give no other name to it except revolution. We have traditionally admitted that the war between the cp and the Kuomintang is a real civil war which is entirely differ-

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

131

ent from the strife among the warlords. A civil war, so to speak, is a class struggle which has developed into an open armed struggle. Today the consequence of this civil war has been the transfer of power to the whole nation. If this is not a revolution, what else is it? To my view, the revolutionary situation2 has already existed in China since the end of the Resistance War against Japan. Although the mass movement suffered a temporary and partial retreat during the latter half of 1946 and the beginning of 1947 due to the opportunist mistakes of the cp (the line of the Political Consultative Conference), the general revolutionary situation did not subside. Beginning in October 1947, on one hand a huge wave of agrarian revolution was aroused under the appeal of the “Programme of Land Reform” of the cp, while on the other hand the “Liberation Army” published its declaration of the overthrow of the Chiang Kai-shek regime. Thus, the civil war was transformed into an ordinary revolution. Criticism of the Opposing Argument Some would say that, since there was no broad mobilisation of the masses in this event, we cannot call it a revolution. This opposition is not able to justify itself. Never has a revolution mobilised the entire population. The definition of revolution does not offer any fixed idea about what percentage of the population should be mobilised. For example, in China’s Revolution of 1911, only a very tiny number of revolutionaries and members of the “New Army”, etc., participated, while the people in general were quite ignorant of what happened. But everyone admits this was a revolution. If we take only the number of masses mobilised as a criterion, then the present revolution is even more normal than the Second Revolution, because the masses organised in the latter numbered only about ten million, whereas before the “Liberation Army” crossed the Yangtze River there were already more than a hundred million peasants who rose to distribute the land. Still others would argue: the overthrow of the Kuomintang regime was achieved simply by military power instead of the power of the mass movement. It is therefore not a revolution. This kind of argument also does not merit 2 Author’s note: Here we apply the term “revolutionary situation” in the sense of a situation in which the revolution is about to but has not yet broken out; when the rulers are not able to execute their power normally and peacefully, while on the other hand, the “mass movement” has become vigorous. This revolutionary situation is in the sense of Lenin’s comment that “No revolution will break out without a revolutionary situation”; it should not be interpreted as meaning a situation in which the revolution has already broken out. Some people call this situation a “pre-revolutionary situation”. I make this remark in order to avoid any misunderstanding.

132

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

refutation. The mass struggle takes various forms, and the military struggle is only one of them. The “Liberation Army” grows up through the armed revolts, land struggles, reduction of rents and interest, people’s self-defence against the Japanese imperialists and through the other mass movements; it is the armed power to secure and to protect certain interests of the people, hence it is itself undoubtedly one of the forces of the mass movement. Some people would finally argue: that in this event, the urban population, particularly the workers, played no role at all. It is true that the workers played a very insignificant role. But this argument only demonstrates that this is not a proletarian revolution, and does not prove that fundamentally it is not a revolution. If it is presumed that only a proletarian revolution can be called a revolution, the Permanent Revolution would become meaningless. That would be the same as saying: since only the proletarian revolution is a revolution, therefore, all the revolutionary tasks in the backward countries must be accomplished only under the leadership of the proletariat. What a caricature this is of the theory of Trotsky! To consider this revolution as only a peasant war and not a revolution is to commit a twofold mistake. First, though the peasantry constitutes the major dynamic in this movement led by the cp, this is not a peasant war. During the years of the post-war period, the mass movement broke out in the cities time after time. The programme of the whole movement included the demands of the industrialisation of China on a grand scale and there were many other demands of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. It is not possible for a pure peasant war to propose such a programme. The cp and a great number of cadres of intellectuals who participated in the movement did not consider the land reform as the sole and final goal, but on the contrary, took it as a means to modernise China (to develop capitalism in China). It is therefore wrong to look on this movement of the cp leadership as merely a peasant war. Secondly, even if it is a pure peasant war, when it has become a broad movement embracing the whole nation, we may call it a revolution. A simple peasant war however, while it may not become a social revolution, nevertheless might become a political revolution. That is why Engels did not hesitate to call the German peasant war in 1525 a revolution. The Real Causes for Refusing to Call This Civil War a Revolution in the Past In the past, most of our comrades asserted that this “Liberation War” was not a revolution, that, in fact, there was no serious reason for calling it so. This conception originated on the one hand from our prejudices against the cp and the peasant movement; and, on the other hand, from the fact that we

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

133

were too far removed from this movement, and understood too little about its actual conditions. We asserted that the cp was an opportunist party, and for more than twenty years we engaged in an incessant struggle against its opportunism. Consequently, we have unconsciously nourished an excessive contempt and hostility towards the cp. At the same time, we conceived the revolution as something sacred. It was therefore very difficult for us to liken the sacred concept of “revolution” to the dirty idea of the Communist Party. We felt that it would be an insult to revolution, if we called the movement led by the cp a revolution. This could never be tolerated by our feelings. We cast the same contempt on the movement which supported itself on the peasantry as its major power, and thought that it is not qualified to enjoy such glory. Further, as the base of our party in the “New Liberated Areas” is completely limited, and in the first period of the “liberation” the new regime did not make a good impression on the people (who gave a nickname to the cp, “The Party of More Misery”3). We have been tending to under-estimate the mass potentiality and the revolutionary character of this movement, and could not recognise it as a revolution even after its victory. But if we first sweep away this narrowmindedness and then proceed further to carefully examine the course of the concrete development of this movement led by the cp, we would then have no reason to despise it so extremely or to deny that it is a revolution. The Cause and Seriousness of the Mistake in Our Tactics on the Civil War Since for a long period in the past we did not realise that a revolutionary situation existed and the existence of the revolution itself, we committed a series of tactical errors. At present, many comrades (perhaps the majority) have admitted that the spectator’s attitude and the passive criticism which we adopted in the past towards the peasant movement was wrong, and that our proposal of the slogan of an unconditional peace to both sides was equally wrong. We also consider this attitude not conforming to the official attitude in the “Resolution on the Civil War”. But to my view, the mistake lies not only in the deviation in executing the policy, but in the absence of a correct analysis of the situation as the premise for this policy. It is precisely the fact that this policy had become something hanging in the air that made us feel it difficult to hold tightly to this policy in practical work. We did not realise that China was in a revolutionary situation after the war, and we did not count on the peasant movement

3 Author’s note: In Chinese, this nickname “the party of more misery” sounds almost the same as “Communist Party”.

134

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

under the cp leadership as a strong revolutionary force in this revolutionary situation. We erroneously identified the post-war peasant movement with the former peasant “Soviets” movement in Jiangxi, and thought it too was a desperate adventurist action. We did not understand that the peasant insurrections of 1927–35 occurred in a period in which the revolutionary situation seemed hopeless. The peasant insurrections, after the war, broke out in the midst of a revolutionary situation, and were therefore not adventures but on the contrary had great possibilities for victory. As a result of this error in analysis, our sympathies towards the peasant movement as formulated in the “Resolution on the Civil War” turned out to be quite reluctant and merely a demonstration. Who would offer his ardent sympathy and positive support to a distant movement destined to be without perspective? Therefore, we bore a constant contempt towards this movement. We neither paid close attention to it, nor have we been objective. When the force of the cp and its influence on the mass were increased, we arbitrarily assumed that this was temporary and would inevitably tend to decline. When it suffered defeats, we exaggerated the gravity of these defeats. The most ridiculous thing is to affirm that the cp would at any time abandon the policy of equal distribution of land in order to resume compromises with Chiang Kai-shek, without reflecting that the capitulation of the cp in 1936 was the consequence of the defeat of an isolated struggle, while the whole situation of today is very favourable to the peasant movement under its leadership. It had no reason to capitulate, and even if it did so, the peasant masses would not have compliantly followed it.4 Superficially, it seems that our mistakes are unconscious sectarian errors (I say unconscious, because our official resolutions are not sectarian. However, the daily propaganda and agitation were full of sectarian colours): to identify the movement with the leadership (the cp), and condemn this movement without perspective because the policy of the cp was in a blind alley. In fact, the real cause of this mistake is that we did not recognise that China was then already in a revolutionary situation, so we overlooked the profound basis of the movement itself and the possibility of its tremendous development. We thought that this movement was simply manufactured by the cp who would

4 Author’s note: In 1948 we took the temporary interruption of agrarian reform in the “New Areas” as a sign that the cp was abandoning the land reform, and we thus exaggerated its significance. In reality, the cp intended to carry out land reform “by gradual steps”. Generally, in the past, it had never begun land reform in the regions where its rule had not yet been stabilised.

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

135

give it up at any time. As to our inability to recognise the existing revolutionary situation, it is because we stubbornly held the notion that only a colossal uprising of the workers’ movement would be able to create the Third Revolution. Therefore, our sectarian mistake is based upon the wrong dogmatic conceptions. Due to this mistake in understanding, we often did not put the appropriate emphasis in our criticism of the cp on criticising the adventurism in its policy, and thus gave rise to such a wrong slogan as “unconditional peace on both sides”. But in fact, when we say that the cp policy was an adventurist one, it is simply because the cp attempted to rely on a programme of collaboration with the bourgeoisie in order to overthrow a bourgeois power – hence the adventurism in its policy was based on compromise. Therefore, at that time we should have placed our stress on the criticism of its compromising attitude, and appealed to the peasants to carry on a firm and thorough-going struggle. Since we did not recognise a revolutionary situation and the existence of the revolution itself, naturally we could not point out these facts to the workers, or take the opportunity to awaken the revolutionary consciousness and will of the working class, and were far from able to apply a strategy of “United Front” with the cp. After the revolution broke out, we did not try to enlarge it, and to raise it to a higher level, but dreamt that another independent revolution would rise up under our own leadership. As a result, our party not only lost a good opportunity for development, but afterwards the confidence of the masses was greatly diminished and the faith of a part of the comrades was also shaken. Moreover, the rise of the workers’ movement at that time war more or less hindered. All these mistakes derive from the wrong appreciation of the situation which, however, is not a mistake in principle. But we must admit this was a very serious mistake, or we might even say that it is the greatest political mistake ever committed in the history of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. The Importance of an Analysis of the Situation Not having been able to recognise the revolutionary situation and the existence of the revolution in the past, we have paid too dearly. “The past is already far behind, the future is yet to be pursued”. We should now seriously examine the matter, and draw the lessons from the mistakes in the past, and seriously analyse the present situation and estimate its possible perspectives. Trotsky often quoted the saying of Spinoza, “Not to weep, nor to laugh, but to understand”, to encourage us. Now this is what we should do. We Trotskyists have persisted in the revolutionary line for more than twenty years, but we could not even recognise the revolution before our own eyes, and lost an important historical

136

discussions on the nature of the chinese revolution

conjuncture. To think about this really deserves our tears. But the question is not whether we should cry or not, but to be able to comprehend profoundly and correct the errors thoroughly. If we refuse to admit mistakes, i.e., refuse to recognise the reality under the mask of “being loyal to our consistent views” and “soberness”, we would become hard stones or wooden puppets, not able to weep, to laugh or to understand. Then, it would confirm the accusation thrown at us by the renegade Chen Duxiu: “Their head is already fossilised, and the organisation in ruin”. A correct analysis of the situation is an important part of the art of revolution. This analysis has its own logic. The different analyses will eventually lead to differences in practical tactics, but only from a correct analysis of the situation can one logically derive a correct tactic. If the analysis of the situation is wrong, even though we might draw a correct tactic accidentally, since this tactic lacks the necessary premises and inner cohesive logic, it is not possible to carry it out efficiently. The failure of our tactics on the Civil War is a great lesson for us. In the analysis of the situation, the fundamental judgment is to distinguish a revolutionary situation from a non-revolutionary situation. There lies the great difference between the tactics under a revolutionary situation and that under a non-revolutionary situation. Thus, our discussion on the question whether this civil war is a revolution or not is not merely dispute on terms. This question will be the point of departure in the entire coming discussion. Only through a clear comprehension of this event as a revolution or not can we correctly understand the nature of the present situation, the power of the mass movement and the internal logic of the events (including the direction of the change in the mass psychology, and the possible perspectives of the whole event, etc.). And only through this premise can we orient our line of agitation.

A Letter from the rcp’s Leadership to the usfi (1974) Provisional National Committee of the rcp 3 July 1974

This document (in its original English form) was provided by Joseph Miller. It demonstrates that the Revolutionary Communist Party, a remnant of Peng Shuzhi’s Majority Faction in Hong Kong, was reluctant to unite with various small Chinese Trotskyist groups (including the ex-minority faction – the Internationalist Workers Party) with the fi’s help, unless such unification happened under the direction of the rcp. For veteran Trotskyists in the iwp, younger Trotskyists in Hong Kong, and fi representatives, the main obstacle to the organisational unification of Trotskyism in Hong Kong starting in the mid-1970s was the rcp’s sectarian attitude.

Dear comrades, We recently received a copy of letter from Comrade Hansen to Comrade Sakai, date 10 May 1974. From this letter, we first know that, in the 16 March United Secretariat meeting, the organisational question of the Chinese section was discussed. After the meeting, Comrade Walter1 wrote a letter to Comrade Sakai that “…… at the United Secretariat meeting of 16 March, it was decided that the proposal for a trip to H [i.e., Hong Kong] to try to assist in unifying all our forces there should be by you and cde bs.2 Please contact New York directly and propose a date to the American comrades for this mission. Let us know what agreement you could finally reach in that respect”. That is from this indirect way that we can first time know fragments of the whole matter. Indeed, neither Comrade Walter nor Sakai, who are supposed to carry out the decision of the United Secretariat, have ever informed the Chinese section about the decision of the United Secretariat. This reflects an unreasonable predisposition: the International leadership, when handles the affair of its section, does not face it but turn[s] away from it. 1 Walter was Mandel’s party name. 2 bs is Barry Sheppard, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States.

© Provisional National Committee of the rcp, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_012

138

a letter from the rcp’s leadership to the usfi (1974)

What mostly concerns us is that, in tackling of the problems in H, the decision and discussions of the United Secretariat were not based on concrete situation in H. As in Comrade Hansen’s letter: the discussion of the 16 March u.s [United Secretariat] meeting was “centred on helping the H comrades in a general way, within the broad framework of the world congress agreement on seeking to unite our forces, but without anything specific in mind”. Comrade Hansen also considers that “… the only proposal … considered at the United Secretariat meeting was the rather general one made by Walter …”. But the minutes of the 16 March meeting records: “… a mission of 2 comrades (Sakai and bs) be sent to H for assisting in a unification of forces there”. That is to say, while “nothing concrete was taken up” (Hansen’s letter to Sakai), the International leadership had already decided to send its responsible comrades to carry out a specific mission. And the United Secretariat does not determine any precise decision as a guideline for the comrades who will be sent to H. In this way, these comrades would merely act with their own individual reasoning, if not become puzzled. Or, they would merely repeat the investigative job which had already been done by many comrades many times before. To use this kind of method to resolve the organisational problems in H indicates negatively the existence of an effective leadership but exposes the unhealthiness within the International leading body. It seems that the International leadership tries to intervene in the affairs of its section merely by authority. Let us say seriously but frankly: this is not a good method but a bad one. In fact, many leading comrades of the International had visited H in these few years. The Chinese section had equally presented to them all the information about the situation in H, no matter what the position these comrades stand on in the current International debate. At the same time, we had done our best to arrange for them to discuss with the friends who do not affiliate with the rcp but claim themselves as Trotskyists. The investigation of these comrades and their opinions on unifying the forces in H should have been reported to the International leadership. Have the International leadership ever discussed, based on these reports, the situation in H? If the answer is no, why have they not discussed it? If yes, what is the conclusion? Why the United Secretariat have not informed it to the Chinese section? Why was it not cited in the 16 March United Secretariat meeting? In order to let comrades understand concretely the basic situation we face in H, we would like to present the following precise report: (1) As the official section of the Fourth International, although the rcp is now very weak, it is the only organised Trotskyist force in H which functions under the tradition of Bolshevism.

a letter from the rcp’s leadership to the usfi (1974)

139

(2) The Trotskyists outside of the rcp are practically active only as individuals. They are W [Wang Fanxi], L [Lou Guohua] of the former iwp [Internationalist Workers Party], and Wu Zhongxian of the former ril [Revolutionary Internationalist League] (Leung3 [Leung Chung-kwong] never joined any Chinese Trotskyist organisation. But he claims himself as Trotskyist. He is an active organiser in the mass movement and the element who may be won to our movement). After the iwp proclaimed its dissolution in H, some of its former members joined the rcp. In fact, the iwp had long time ago proclaimed itself no longer in existence. According to the description of Wu and Leung themselves and the appraisal of all forces in H, the ril is merely one of the forces outside of the Trotskyist movement. Most of its members still do not clearly understand the basic principles of Trotskyism. Therefore, the ril itself cannot have a clear Trotskyist programme. As we had reported to the United Secretariat before, Wu joined the Chinese section first, but he left the section right after he came back [to] H, without any clear reason. Moreover, he announced his resignation from the International as a whole openly to the masses. Although Wu never explained to the Chinese section his reason to leave the section (no reply even when we formally asked him), the fact is that: Wu told some former members of the 70’s Group [i.e., 70’s Biweekly Group], a mass youth organisation in H, that he himself was the organisational secretary of the Chinese section and could represent the section to recruit new members. He also promised to these 70’s Group members that he could provide fulltime jobs in the movement for some of them and could offer to send them to Japan for training. When his manoeuvre was exposed, Wu resigned from the section in utter disgrace.4 (3) As early as 1970, the pnc [Provisional National Committee] of the Chinese section have taken up the initiative to cooperate with W and L, to take part in the propaganda work by publishing books and pamphlets. From that time onward, the pnc have adopted a method to assemble the dispersed Trotskyist forces in H, in spite of their attack on the Chinese section. Up to now, we have not abandoned our effort towards this direction. Practically, the pnc have long before presented its basic method to resolve the differences among the Trotskyists in H: Before the unification will 3 Leung Chung-kwong was a young Trotskyist from Wu’s Revolutionary Internationalist League (ril). 4 See 70’s Group in Promise Li’s “The Radical 70’s Biweekly Magazine that shaped the Hong Kong Left” (Part 1, Section B).

140

a letter from the rcp’s leadership to the usfi (1974)

be achieved, all the Trotskyists should cooperate through common work. After a thorough discussion on political and organisational questions, to clarify all the differences and to seek a common foundation for unification, a convention inclusive of all Trotskyist elements will be called. But all those taking part in the discussion and the convention should comply with the decisions of the convention. The convention will be prepared and called by the pnc (in the 30 June 1974 pnc meeting, concrete steps have been determined for organising the discussion). But the attitudes of W, L, Wu and Leung are completely opposite to that of the pnc. In fact, the grounds for Wu’s resignation from and Leung’s standing outside of the Chinese section, besides their individual reasoning, are mainly based on the influence of the attack on the Chinese section from W, L, and Comrade So Ta [i.e., Xiang Qing]. These three comrades completely sweep away the effort of the pnc in the past few years and in the present moment. They objectively encourage Wu to leave the Chinese section and stir up those who affiliate with the Chinese section to form another centre outside of the pnc. Obstacles for unification and cooperation have thus been produced. As events indicate, L even openly told some others, who were in no way claiming themselves Trotskyists, about the current internal conflict. So unprincipled that he slanders the Chinese section. Wu and Leung, on the one hand, transformed the Trotskyist journal, financed and supported by the Chinese section, into the official organ of two mass organisations – the ril and the iysa [International Young Socialist Alliance].5 On the other hand, they rejected the demand from the members of the Chinese section to join the editorial committee of this journal. All these events point towards a single fact: those Trotskyist elements outside of the rcp, strive not for a unification. On the contrary, they attack the Chinese section in order to justify their aim to set up another centre. For the sake of maintaining the cooperation, the rcp tolerate all these provocations. Patiently and positively, we seek for cooperation with them through common work. In the other case, Comrade Sakai, as a member of the International Executive Committee and a leader of the Japanese section, after having acknowledged Wu’s split from the Chinese section and the International as a whole, not only did not criticise Wu, but also never clarified Wu’s pro-

5 These two small Trotskyist youth groups fused into a new Trotskyist organisation, the Socialist League, in mid-1974. It later changed its name to Revolutionary Marxist League.

a letter from the rcp’s leadership to the usfi (1974)

141

clamation to the masses that the Japanese section would finance members of the 70’s Group to Japan. On the contrary, he reinforces his direct communication with Wu and Leung, and never tells the Chinese section about the relation between the Japanese section or Comrade Sakai himself with them. Nor had the Chinese section had ever been informed about this. The fact that Comrade Sakai places himself on such a position only may mean that if he is not consciously stirring up Wu and Leung to build another organisation outside of the Chinese section, then at least he encourages Wu and Leung’s split action objectively. This implies there is an irrational intervention into the affairs of the Chinese organisation from the international forces, indicates that the efforts for unifying the Trotskyist forces in H would face not only internal obstacles, but also hindrance from outside. Therefore, we formally request: (1) The United Secretariat should correct its attitude of disregard to the Chinese section, respect the rcp’s status as the Chinese section of the Fourth International. This status was recognised by every world congress, including the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International. The United Secretariat should inform the Chinese section in time of all its information and decisions which are related to the Chinese section. (2) The United Secretariat should immediately discuss the concrete method for unifying the Trotskyist forces in H and make a decision. The decision should be informed to the Chinese section. (3) The Japanese section and Comrade Sakai should clarify their position. Hereafter, all the information and material of their communication and correspondence with the Chinese Trotskyists in H should be given to the Chinese section. And if there is financial or material aid to anybody or any other organisation in H, this should be carried out through and with the consent of the Chinese section. Trotskyist greetings, The Provisional National Committee (pnc) of the Revolutionary Communist Party, The Chinese Section of the Fourth International cc. Hansen, Peng, Sakai6 6 Joseph Hansen was an American Trotskyist and a leading figure of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States.

A Proposal for the Fusion of All Trotskyists in Hong Kong Area, A Joint Proposal Submitted by Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua to the usfi (1975) Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua 19 January 1975

This short proposal, enclosed in a letter from Wang Fanxi to Pierre Rousset, then the fi’s representative in East Asia, raises further concerns on the part of Wang and Lou regarding the progress of unification of the Trotskyists in Hong Kong.1 Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 23, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

In view of our unsuccessful attempts during the past one year and a half to unify the independent Trotskyist groups and individuals in hk area, we, the undersigned, propose the following more practical measures to pave the way for unification: 1) A Coordinating Committee should be formed before or during the presence of the usfi delegates (Cdes Sakai and bs [Barry Sheppard]) in Hong Kong; 2) The Coordinating Committee should be formed from representatives of the following five categories: a. those rcp members who have joined the ltf [Leninist-Trotskyist Faction]; b. those rcp members who stand outside the ltf; c. members of the iwp; d. the matured members of the Daily Combat Bulletin Group [the rml]; e. the matured members of the Revolutionary Communist Youth [the youth section of the rcp]; 3) The main tasks of the Coordinating Committee are: a. to publish a monthly or bi-weekly, open to and representing all hk Trotskyists; b. to give leadership to or at least to coordinate the day-to-day activities of various

1 See more details concerning the unification of Hong Kong Trotskyist groups in Yang Yang’s “Chinese Trotskyists in Exile, Contacts with the Fourth International, and Efforts to Achieve Organisational Unification, 1949–1978” (Part 1, Section A).

© Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_013

a proposal for the fusion of all trotskyists

4)

143

groups; c. to set up a special committee to draft necessary documents and make technical preparations for the unification conference which should be held in six months. The Coordinating Committee should be in very close contact with the us[fi] and a monthly report of its activities towards the unification must be made to the two delegates of the US.

Why We Want Unification with the Revolutionary Marxist League (1978) Adopted by the Oppositionists who attended the Plenary of the Unity Faction of the Revolutionary Communist Party, 14 September 1978 Translated by Yang Yang

Concerned by the rcp’s relations with its youth section and its sectarianism and authoritarianism, in July 1978, 11 rcp members organised a Unity Faction to express their frustration with the rcp leadership and demand immediate unification between the rcp and the rml. However, the rcp majority rejected their proposal. On 14 September 1978, the Unity Faction therefore drafted the following proposal. This internal document was provided by Au Loong-yu, a veteran Hong Kong Trotskyist. It condemns the rcp’s sectarianism and demands unity with immediate effect.1

(1) At a Special Congress of the rcp held on September 10, the rcp adopted the following positions towards the unification of the Chinese Trotskyist movement: A. The majority accepted a resolution regarding unification drafted by the majority of the rcp Central Committee (cc). B. This majority unequivocally rejected the view that a political basis for unification between the rcp and the rml had been formed. C. It decided to convene a party congress to discuss whether to fuse with the rml organisationally by next April. The above positions mean that the rcp has staged a major retreat on the issue of the unification. They have, de facto, overturned the rcp’s previous stance, at its congress last April, that it recognised the rml as a Trotskyist organisation and would thus try to unite with it. The positions adopted at the special congress fundamentally deny the necessity for unification of the Chinese Trotskyist movement, while they even suggest that the rcp denies that the rml is a Trotskyist organisation capable of reaching an agreement with the rcp on the basis of Trotskyist principles.

1 See also Yang Yang, “Chinese Trotskyists in Exile, Contacts with the Fourth International, and Efforts to Achieve Organisational Unification, 1949–1978” (Part 1, Section A).

© Translated by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_014

why we want unification

145

(2) On the question of its relations with its youth group, the League, the rcp majority insisted that the Young Socialist Group (ysg) needs to explicitly “accept the political leadership of the rcp” as a prerequisite for building a close cooperation between itself and the party. It attempted to achieve its goal of controlling the ysg by organisational means by getting the inactive majority of the party to order the overwhelming majority of the ysg to carry out this wrong decision. This sectarian attitude towards a Trotskyist youth organisation is contrary to the tradition of the Leninist-Trotskyist movement regarding the building of a socialist youth league, and will only stifle its healthy development, and thus the healthy development of the Party as a whole. (3) This special congress itself was more a congress to suppress the oppositionist faction (i.e., the unity faction) within the rcp than a congress to allow for an equal expression of differences of opinion within the party and to make democratic decisions on behalf of the whole party. This is because: (a) Before the pre-congress discussion, the majority of Central Committee (cc) of the rcp in the other non-ysg party branches had, as representatives of the rcp Standing Committee (sc), already revealed their stance on the ysg debate. They argued against the minority views in the rcp’s sc and refused to let the minority report their views in the party branch meetings. (b) During the pre-congress discussion, the right of the cc’s minority or oppositionist faction to report to party branches and to be present at branch discussions (without voting rights) was again not fully respected. The cc itself, as an assembly of elected party delegates, had no formal pre-congress discussion. (c) The cc’s majority refused to convene a plenary meeting when technical conditions permitted. Meanwhile, they set an unnecessary time limit to the special congress, which [they said] had to be completed within a day (from 8am to 1.30am the following day). (d) At a meeting, the rcp majority adopted the work report submitted by the cc majority, which placed all the blame for the failures of its revolutionary work over several years on the inner-party struggle, while accusing the opposition of being an “unprincipled bloc”, though without presenting any actual evidence. This report, which made serious accusations against the dissident faction, was not included in the pre-congress agenda. At the congress, it was given only an hour and fifteen minutes discussion time. (e) At the special congress, a disciplinary sanction was applied to eight members of the ysg opposition. However, the party neither filed a

146

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

trans. yang

specific written charge nor did it launch a formal investigation (it merely justified its sanction by arguing that the eight had violated party discipline at the February ysg meeting). So the rcp majority adopted a sectarian position towards dissent within the party and was ready to trample on inner-party democracy in order to avoid challenges to its misdeeds. The sectarian positions adopted by the rcp majority in relation to various Chinese Trotskyist groups – the rml, the ysg, and the oppositionist faction (within the rcp) – indicate that the rcp majority has started out on a new stage of degeneration – it has degenerated organisationally into a highly reclusive sectarian clique. Nevertheless, its members still agree with fundamental Trotskyist positions, and have not come out in political opposition to Trotskyist principles. The rcp majority therefore remains part of the Trotskyist movement. However, from our point of view, an irreconcilable struggle against the extreme sectarianism of the rcp majority will be necessary. Because of the rcp’s organisational extreme insularity and the urgent need for unification of the active forces of the Trotskyist movement in order to move it forward, we have decided to unite immediately with the rml. In order to carry out the most effective fusion of the political experience represented by the two sides, we have also decided to dissolve all factional organisation immediately after unification. We call on comrades from the rcp majority to abandon their current sectarian positions as soon as possible and to embrace the unification of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. If the rcp majority insists on its present sectarian positions, any further progress in the course of its degeneration will eventually bring it into conflict with the political principles of Trotskyism and it will no longer be tolerated by the Fourth International. Finally, we call on other Trotskyist comrades not affiliated either to the rml or to the rcp to support this unification and join the unified Trotskyist organisation in order to pursue our common end – the struggle to build a vital revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat.

Principles of Organisation (1979) Gu He [Lou Guohua], ed., translated by Gregor Benton

This pamphlet, jointly drafted by Lou Guohua and Wang Fanxi, suggests that the key organisational principle for guiding the Trotskyists and revolutionary socialists, i.e., “democratic centralism” be followed by the younger generation of the Trotskyists in Hong Kong in the late 1970s. It urges them to maintain internal democracy in the party and to guarantee members’ individual rights in a new unified body. They should also reflect critically on the organisational failure of the older generation of Chinese Trotskyists. However, Lou and Wang’s suggestions and efforts led nowhere. The Hong Kong Trotskyists split in December 1980 after just two years of unification. The original Chinese text translated here was transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive. Missing parts of the manuscript were found in the Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 12, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

Before the reunification of the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml) with the other organisations, I was deeply worried at the way in which the main leaders of the rml understood the organisational issue and I wrote to Comrade Lian’gen [Wang Fanxi] to seek his opinion. He not only agreed with me but asked to co-sign the resulting document. I feel that the views of the Standing Committee are in fact the organisational views of the majority, led by Peng Shuzhi at the time of the Trotskyists’ split in May 1942. I hope that they will draw conclusions from our theoretical and practical experience and fight for the realisation of the organising principles of the Fourth International! Gu He, 14 November 1979

(a)

How to Understand the Organisational Question? Lian’gen [Wang Fanxi] and Gu He

If a reunited Trotskyist organisation lacks a constitution that accords with the provisions of the Fourth International, and if it continues to pay lip service to “democratic centralism”, it will inevitably remain divided. The split between the two factions in China began in early 1940 with the debate on the nature of the war against Japan and ended in 1948 with the

© Gu He [Lou Guohua], ed., translated by G. Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/978900470994

148

ed. lou, trans. benton

establishment of separate Trotskyist organisations. The majority wrote a resolution and a set of Principles and Methods of Organisation but immediately fled Shanghai [for Hong Kong], leaving their members and revolutionary work in a fix. The minority leadership, in contrast, insisted on continuing the struggle in China and sent Lian’gen to Hong Kong to maintain external contacts. The organisation in China was maintained until the arrest of the whole group in the late hours of December 21, 1952. If we talk about the Trotskyist tradition, then the minority comrades can be said to have upheld the banner of Chinese Trotskyism and to have done their duty to the last. We do not wish to criticise here the political mistakes made by the majority (Comrade Lian’gen has already done this at length, elsewhere) but merely to discuss the organisational violations of the constitution of the Fourth International and the recent reintroduction by the majority in Hong Kong, the Chinese Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp), of the Principles and Methods of Organisation drafted by Liu Jialiang in 1948, as the basis for a common organisational programme. The Principles and Methods themselves are the product of a political struggle between the majority and the minority and are full of criticism of the minority, particularly regarding the question of democratic centralism. Democratic centralism was the organising principle of Lenin’s party – so said Stalin, so said Mao, so said the Fourth International, and certainly so said the Chinese Trotskyists. Let us not talk at this point about Stalin’s and Mao’s understanding and application of democratic centralism and confine ourselves instead to the rcp’s understanding and application of democratic centralism. According to Principles and Methods: “First, a revolutionary proletarian party grows up in the present society and cannot but constantly reflect, in the course of all kinds of class struggles, the pressure of the various classes or components of the proletariat, and this pressure is always expressed through the party – each member of the party is the tentacle through which the party reaches into society. The party can therefore only allow every member a full degree of freedom of discussion and expression if it allows the proletarian tendencies and revolutionary traditions in the party the opportunity to develop, if it strengthens its education and raises the theoretical level of every member, if it is able to overcome crises in the party when emergencies arise (which are in turn an unmistakable reflection of acute social and political crises), and if it improves the [class] composition of the party. Last but not least, only full internal party democracy can correct mistakes in time and form a correct political leadership, as we know from the terrible and tragic lessons taught us by Stalinist bureaucratic experiments over the past 20 years or so. Second, intra-party democracy is only possible if it is organically linked to

principles of organisation (1979)

149

the notion of action so as to “quickly concentrate the majority view and put it into practice”. A democracy that never concentrates opinion, that has no limits to freedom of discussion, can only turn the party into a lifeless discussion club, deprived of all opportunity to fight and act. The tendency to emphasise democracy and despise centralised leadership in a fledgling proletarian party has its main roots in the prejudices of the declining petty bourgeoisie. Its main effect is a refusal to act, and its only consequence is to drive the party into chaos and disintegration”. This passage teems with errors, Stalinist in nature. First, it assumes that the views of the minority in the theoretical struggle must be a reflection of alien class consciousness within the Party and must be corrected by “internal democracy”, and that after the correction, the leadership must represent the proletariat. This is to overlook the fact that Lenin was often in the minority in theoretical and political struggles within the Party, and that Lenin’s programme in April 1917 did not immediately win a majority. It denounces Stalin, but the leadership in the wake of the correction of the majority of which Stalin boasted was also a result of “internal party democracy”. Everyone knows that this “intraparty democracy” is one of the “organisational tools”; second, the restriction of the minority’s “freedom of discussion” and the emphasis on “centralisation” are a result of bureaucratic arbitrariness in the name of “democratic centralism”. This “majority” is not necessarily right, and there are countless historical proofs that right is often on the side of the defeated minority. The Left Opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a clear example of this. Given the control of Stalin’s agents, Trotsky’s correct views were never able to win a majority in the party. Before the rcp was formed, it was part of the Chinese Communist League, along with the “minority”, and when political arguments developed there was no distinction between the majority and the minority, except when Peng Shuzhi and Liu Jialiang tried to resolve them by organisational means. The young comrades who joined the Trotskyists had no experience of such struggles and were not theoretically prepared for how to carry out their work after the War against Japan and what tactics should be adopted once the War against Japan became entangled in the Pacific War. There had been no theoretical preparations for this eventuality. The “majority” used young comrades from Guangxi, Wenzhou, Shandong, and Hong Kong who had come to Shanghai to study to appoint delegates to a second national congress in the summer of 1941. As a result, the congress arranged by Peng and Liu was able to take place. At the time, four out of six of the leading comrades – Zheng Chaolin, Lian’gen, Chen Qichang, and Gu He, as well as other comrades – disagreed with such a hasty convening of the congress, believing that it was simply a case of using Stalin-

150

ed. lou, trans. benton

ist organisational tactics to curb political discussion. They therefore decided to boycott the meeting. As a result, the congress was arranged by Peng and Liu. The Guangdong delegate Jiao Lifu voted to elect Comrade Lian’gen to the new Central Committee but was reprimanded by Peng and Liu, who believed that comrades holding “wrong opinions” could not sit on leading organs. Comrade Jiao is still in Hong Kong and can testify to this. Among the five people elected to the new Central Committee, Mao Hongjian, the Guangxi representative, and Jiang Zhendong, the Shanghai representative, resigned immediately and joined the minority faction.1 The majority then declared that the minority did not abide by democratic centralism and had abandoned the organisation. In the intervening years, as a result of big events in history such as the Japanese surrender, the civil war in China, and the seizure of power by the ccp, the secret Trotskyist work led by the minority in China was wiped out in the dead of night on December 21, 1952. The Principles and Methods statement shut the door on the (formal) minority on the pretext of prohibiting “unrestricted freedom of discussion”. The author of Principles and Methods, written in 1948, knew that this tactic was incompatible with the constitution of the Fourth International but tried to justify it with the following words: “A faction with a serious position rooted in political principle, if it is still in the minority, should on the one hand submit to discipline and act in unison with the party majority externally and, on the other hand, engage in patient persuasion within the party, and should never use the pretext of a political difference to undermine party discipline and internal harmony (e.g., by refusal to work, refusal to pay party dues, etc.), so as to bring about a crisis of division. Similarly, the majority cannot expel or otherwise suppress and exclude minority tendencies” (Principles and Methods, p. ix). Having said all that, it then restricted the minority to speaking only in the party bulletin and advised it to take into account the material conditions and objective circumstances of the party and not to make excessive demands at will. The practical significance of the statement was that the party organisation under the control of the majority, after the start of the war in the Pacific, not only had no “party bulletin” but even discontinued the organ Struggle, founded in 1936. The authors of Principles and Methods do not, of course, note this fact, they are too busy denouncing the minority. “Petty-bourgeois liberals often try to dissolve the party organ into an allembracing liberal publication, and thus end up going ‘over the party’s head’

1 See the Biographical List.

151

principles of organisation (1979)

by publishing an independent organ parallel to the party organ, reducing the party to an all-embracing Menshevik organisation, with the result that a split ensues. On this issue, the Fourth International in China resolutely rejects the petty-bourgeois anarchist organisational style that Shachtman,2 Yiyin [Zheng Chaolin], and Lian’gen represent and will completely purge all those centrifugal, unprincipled separatists who have failed the Party” (Principles and Methods, p. x). The best proof of who represents the real proletariat and who is faithful to the revolutionary cause of the Trotskyists came after the establishment of the rcp. While the pla was still fighting the Huaihai campaign, the “majority” leaders, who talked so winningly, had already been in Hong Kong for more than a year and had then gone to Paris by way of Vietnam, to continue their “revolution”.

… Leaving aside the disintegration of the rcp, which claims to represent China, in Hong Kong, now that a unification movement is underway [among Trotskyists] and new young revolutionary cadres are emerging, we believe that the future Trotskyist organisation must absolutely abide by the provisions of the constitution of the Fourth International, especially with regard to the possible formation of political minorities, which must be dealt with in accordance with that constitution. The international Trotskyist organisation, headed by Comrade Trotsky, proposed the following paragraph in the constitution of the Fourth International, which we believe must be adopted in the constitution of the Hong Kong Trotskyist organisation: “The Fourth International truly believes in and practises proletarian democracy. Its internal life is in stark contrast to that of the Stalinist or socialist bureaucratic parties, where all ideological or sectarian organisation is forbidden – except for the faction that controls the party organisation. The Fourth International encourages and teaches its members to take a critical stand and to observe developments in other organisations without prejudice. In the Fourth International, freedom of thought has a very practical purpose – it helps to ensure that cadres reach the highest possible level of ability and wisdom. It 2 Max Shachtman (1904–1972), a former Trotskyist leader in the USA. He had abandoned Trotsky’s “degenerated workers’ state” theory and argued the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union had become a new ruling class in a “bureaucratic collectivist” society. His “bureaucraticcollectivist” theory attracted Wang Fanxi for a while in the early 1950s. See also Part 2, Section D, of this volume.

152

ed. lou, trans. benton

helps prevent the party from sclerotic hardening and facilitates keeping abreast of new trends and developments. It is also the most effective way of pooling ideas. “The Fourth International holds regular world congresses to define its political positions in a democratic manner. Decisions are taken on the basis of a majority. Delegates to world congresses are democratically elected by the national branches after a free and democratic discussion based on documents, in which every member of the party has the right to participate and is guaranteed the right to form factions. “Resolutions are adopted by a majority vote. The minority is obliged to carry out the decisions of the majority. However, the minority has the indisputable right to form ideological factions on the basis of a defined programme and enjoys various democratic rights, such as the right to discuss issues before the National Congress and to present its views to the national party membership “To be given seats in the leading bodies, as appropriate, according to their political and numerical importance. This does not mean that every minority, however small, is entitled to a seat on the governing body. Nor is it to say that minorities enjoy the right to proportional representation. The Fourth International observes majority leadership, and this includes the right of the majority to guarantee an unobstructed majority when sharp differences are at stake. But the majority also has an obligation to safeguard the rights of the minority, and this means that the minority is not penalised for holding a minority view”. The rcp’s misunderstanding of democratic centralism and its contempt for minority rights can only result in a split. Such situations have become commonplace, sometimes manifesting themselves in individual breakaways from the party, all linked to their Stalinist party system. Take for example the party constitution adopted at the most recent congress. Chapter 10, “Enforcement of Party Discipline”, section 1 states that “All subordinate organs of the party and members of the party shall abide by all decisions of the higher organs and shall be subject to disciplinary action if they violate them without permission”. This is no different from the constitution laid down at the Tenth Congress of the ccp, which states that “the whole Party must submit to a unified discipline: the individual to the organisation, the minority to the majority, the subordinate to the superior, and the whole Party to the Central Committee”. Mao’s personal dictatorship was born of this, as was the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the dictatorship of the Communist Party. But the ccp at least managed to respect the views of the minority in its party constitution, which states that “Party members are allowed to reserve their views on resolutions and instructions of the party organisation if they disagree with them and have the right to report them to the Central Committee

principles of organisation (1979)

153

and its Chairperson. Suppression of criticism and retaliation are not allowed. It is necessary to create a political situation in which there is both centralisation and democracy, discipline and freedom, a unified will while at the same time individuals can feel at ease, and a lively atmosphere”. The rcp, on the other hand, simply states (Chapter 10, Section 7, of the Party Constitution) that “major issues already resolved by the Party Congress may be re-initiated for discussion by the whole Party only with the formal approval of the Central Committee, or at the request of more than one-third of Party members, or during the period of discussion before the next Congress”. In such a situation, the Central Committee is bound to suppress dissent or criticism from individuals or minorities, i.e., there is only concentration and no democracy. It is significant that the rcp has placed a special emphasis in its constitution on “the enforcement of party discipline”, in greater detail than in the constitution of the ccp and more harshly than in the constitution of the Fourth International. But it is not good to try to unite party members simply by imposing discipline at every turn. Another clear violation of the constitution of the Fourth International, and an extremely serious one, is the dominance of Peng Shuzhi over the rcp, his ability to remove leaders at will, his ability to appoint people to speak on his behalf at delegates’ meetings and to vote by a show of hands, and the fact that since he left Hong Kong in 1948 he has been presenting himself at the international level as a representative of China. However, the Constitution of the Fourth International states that “A member of a branch of a country who has resided in another country for more than six months while a branch exists in that country must be transferred to that branch”. Even though Peng Shuzhi’s revolutionary history may perpetuate his spiritual connection with the Chinese Trotskyists and even allow him to retain his membership of the Chinese Trotskyist organisation, he should not lead the Chinese Trotskyist organisation from afar, let alone represent it, given his long absence from practical work [in China]. Another point is that while the bourgeois states may have governments in exile, the Fourth International cannot have a branch in exile, and the rcp has so far appointed itself as national representative, in a similar way to the Kuomintang. The future unified Trotskyist organisation can only be an organisation of the Hong Kong region. Trotsky repeatedly instructed us to call things by their real names, and we absolutely abjure organisational approaches that create only sectarianism and speed the sclerotic hardening of the party. Lian’gen and Gu He, 9 February 1978.

154 (b)

ed. lou, trans. benton

Views on the Solidarity Movement of Trotskyists Abroad Lian’gen and Gu He

The Chinese Trotskyist movement began in 1928 and its national organisation was founded in 1931. It split in 1942 and was finally eliminated by the Chinese Communist regime in 1952. After 1952, the Trotskyist movement in China remained active in Hong Kong for a while, but gradually died out. By the end of the 1950s, the movement had effectively ceased to exist organisationally, apart from a tiny seedbed of ideas. In the late 1960s and 1970s, with the new crisis of world capitalism and the serious contradictions of Chinese Communist rule exposed by the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong’s youth gradually became politicised and radicalised, and their most advanced sector finally started to move in the direction of Trotskyism. As a result, the Trotskyist movement in the Hong Kong region was revitalised and there were signs of a revival. At the same time, the question arose as to how Trotskyists in Hong Kong could reorganise themselves and carry out their activities. At the time, we had proposed that a common body be set up with the remnants of the two factions (or rather the two parties) together with the new forces, with the latter as the main force, but unfortunately, mainly because the conditions were not ripe but also because of the excessive orthodoxy of some comrades in the rcp, this did not happen. As a result, for five or six years the Trotskyists in Hong Kong were scattered, each fighting his or her own battles. Although there have been good times since then (e.g., in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the deaths of Mao and Zhou, the downfall of the Gang of Four, etc.), they have resulted in little political or organisational development on the part of our movement. In the past, the Chinese Trotskyists, and Trotskyists worldwide, despite having a good programme, have never been able to intervene effectively in events, let alone lead them. One of the main reasons, if we look at it from a subjective point of view, is that there is “quality but not quantity”, i.e., we have too few people. Nowhere in the world (with the exception of Ceylon for a time) have Trotskyists ever been able to build a mass party. Why is that? There are many reasons, but one of the most important subjective reasons is, externally, sectarianism and, internally, excessive divisiveness, too many petty disputes, and an organisation still not free from Stalin’s misinterpretation of Lenin’s idea of democratic centralism. But in recent years, the Fourth International has noticed this problem and has been promoting a unified movement of socialist forces in many countries.

principles of organisation (1979)

155

The movement now underway in Hong Kong is a reflection of the attempt by the Fourth International as a whole to unite the revolutionary forces and build a mass Trotskyist party. We wholeheartedly support this movement, but in order for it to succeed and to prevent it from becoming an endlessly fruitless quarrel, we feel it necessary to present our views on the various questions to facilitate an exchange of views with our comrades. First of all, we would like to address the question of who should preside over unification and who is to be united. The document “The basis of the unity of the Trotskyist movement in China” presented by the rml gives a clear answer to this question. It says: “In essence, the unification of the Chinese Trotskyist movement means the political and organisational reunification of a number of comrades belonging to the rcp, the rml, etc., and a number of comrades representing the political tradition of the Internationalist Workers Party (iwp), as well as other individual Trotskyist comrades. But as far as the concrete form of the unification movement is concerned, it will be expressed mainly in the form of a merger of the rcp with the rml and other alliances”. This answer is a great advance on the orthodox attitude consistently represented by the rcp in the past and we welcome it. However, we feel that it still leaves things to be desired. For example, there is a contradiction between “substantive meaning” and “concrete form”. In essence there are four categories of Trotskyist comrades to be reunited, but only two categories are to be specifically merged. What about the other two? Also, there is one Trotskyist organisation, the Fuxing Society [in Britain], which has existed and been active for nearly three years, and although not active in Hong Kong, is a powerful organisation in respect of the unification and expansion of Chinese Trotskyists overseas. These shortcomings should be remedied in due time. First, we believe that, given objective difficulties, it is not necessary to include members of the old iwp and representatives of the Fuxing Society in specific meetings on unity at present, but it is important to seek out and incorporate their views as far as possible. Second, the future unity congress should not be a congress of only the rcp and the rml but of all overseas Trotskyists and other activists. On the second point, a little more detail is necessary. A congress or national congress is normally a meeting of delegates elected from the bottom up by all levels of the organisation on a national scale. The only such congress in the history of Chinese Trotskyism is, strictly speaking, the Unification Congress of the Four Factions held in 1931. Since then, whenever the organisation has been destroyed, some of the surviving comrades, in order to re-establish the leadership and restore the organisation, have convened extraordinary meet-

156

ed. lou, trans. benton

ings of activists, by sending (or inviting) delegates only from among the active comrades available locally at the time, to set up a temporary national leadership organ. In so doing, we have always “called things by their real name” and never wished to call such an organisation a “national congress” or a “national central committee”. This tradition was terminated by the so-called “Second National Congress” held by Peng Shuzhi in 1941 and took an extreme form with the “Fourth National Congress” staged by the rcp in 1977. (How can a conference convened by a handful of Trotskyists in Hong Kong be said to represent the whole of China? If it doesn’t represent the whole country, how can it be called the Fourth Congress?) This style is by no means a trivial problem: it is ultimately a major point of disagreement between practitioners of (a) bureaucratic formalism and (b) anti-bureaucratism. We mention this now, not in order to settle old scores and impede unity, but simply in the hope that the next unity conference will restore the Chinese Trotskyist tradition of honesty and avoid artificiality in terms of how it is convened, how it is styled, and how the new leaders are perceived. We would now like to turn to another question: when and on what basis should we unite? The rcp’s answer is that unity cannot be achieved immediately and that they are opposed to allowing too many opinions to be discussed within the same organisation. They want “the two sides to first put forward an outline for discussion on the political and organisational questions and current issues relating to the ‘programmatic position’, which should be submitted to the two organisations for simultaneous and comprehensive discussion, leading to a summary of the common conclusions or differences in the discussion. […] If the differences between the two sides do not extend to questions of principle”, then “on the basis of the common conclusions, the two sides will draft the political programme, the constitution, and the direction of the current line of work and hold regular unified congresses”. “If differences of principle are found in the course of the discussions and neither side can guarantee compliance with the resolutions of the congress”, a decision would be needed to extend the discussions. This attitude is in fact only an echo of certain arguments against “immediate unification” put in advance of the original four Chinese Trotskyist groups unified forty-seven years ago. This apparently high-sounding argument was, in fact, merely an excuse for not wanting to unite at all or for delaying unification. At the time, Trotsky was adamantly opposed to such an approach. In a letter to the Chinese Left Opposition dated January 8, 1931, he told his followers in China: “Some of the letters from Shanghai pose the question: Should we carry out a complete unification in the individual localities, fuse the press of all the groups, and convoke a conference on the basis of the unification that

principles of organisation (1979)

157

has already been achieved, or should we permit separate groups to continue within the united Opposition until all the tactical problems have been solved? In such organisational matters, it is difficult to offer advice from afar. It is even possible that the advice would arrive too late. Still, I cannot refrain from saying this to you: Dear friends, fuse your organisations and your press definitively this very day! We must not drag out the preparations for the unification a long time, because in that way, without wanting to, we can create artificial differences. By this I do not mean to say that all the questions have already been settled and that you (or more correctly, we) are assured that no differences will arise in the future. No, there is no doubt that the day after tomorrow and the day after that, new tasks will arise, and with them new differences. Without this the development of a revolutionary party is impossible. But the new differences will create new groupings in the framework of the united organisation. We must not tarry too long over the past. We must not mark time. We must go onward towards the future”. Do these words of Trotsky, which at the time contributed directly to the completion of the unification of the four factions in China, also apply to the present unity movement of Trotskyists overseas? Our opponents will surely say that they do not, that the situation in 1931 was radically different from that in 1978. Trotsky’s advice, which was correct at the time, cannot be applied today. Are they right? Let’s see. The situation of Chinese Trotskyists overseas in 1978 is of course very different from that of the Trotskyists in China in 1931. First, a difference in numbers. When the four Chinese Trotskyist groups merged in 1931, the total number was estimated at 380 (150 in our case, 120 in the case of the Proletarian Society, 80 in the case of the October Society, and 30 in the case of Militant). Chinese Trotskyists abroad today, including the remnants of the rcp, the rml, the Fuxing Society, and the iwp, can hardly number more than 50 or 60 (and even fewer if membership were determined by strict ideological criteria and organisational statutes). But if the four factions, numbering nearly 400, could be united “this very day”, how come an organisation one seventh or even one-ninth of the size must wait? Second, there are far fewer debates on principle today than there were then. In 1931, the four opposition groups debated six important issues, including the Communist Party’s membership of the Kuomintang, whether or not the “dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasants” was the same as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the question of “proletarian dictatorship” and “democratic dictatorship”, the Red Army, the National Assembly and the Soviets, and the future of Chinese capitalism. And now? Questions that have been debated for years among Trotskyists are: the reasons for the victory of the ccp,

158

ed. lou, trans. benton

the class nature of the ccp, and the class nature of the People’s Republic of China. Some of these questions have been resolved (e.g., the nature of the Chinese state, which today no Chinese Trotskyist would claim is state capitalist or bureaucratic collectivist). Others, though not resolved, e.g., the reasons for the victory of the ccp, can be discussed within a unified organisation. There is still much disagreement today in the Fourth International, and in the international socialist movement as a whole, regarding Maoism, but these disagreements do not and should not stand in the way of unity and solidarity. The “basis” proposed by the rml summarised the issues on which agreement is required as follows: (1) recognition that the third revolution in China has basically completed the tasks of bourgeois democracy and that it is moving forward in accordance with the idea of continuous [permanent] revolution; (2) identification of the new regime in China as a bureaucratically deformed workers’ state; (3) recognition of the need for a future political revolution in China; (4) description of the main elements of the political revolution, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to extend democratic rights; (5) and the role and tasks of the Fourth International in the future political revolution. These issues, although not necessarily presented with absolute clarity, are basically in line with the majority position represented by Trotsky and the Fourth International. We trust that among Chinese Trotskyists overseas there are no diametrically opposed views. For example, no one says that today’s Chinese Communist state is a healthy workers’ state and there is no need for a political revolution. As for other questions raised, e.g., regarding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, we see no difference of principle, though there may be some of degree. So Trotsky’s advice to the Chinese comrades in 1931 is also appropriate today, in 1978, and perhaps even more appropriate. Finally, the work currently underway in Hong Kong should be seen as a movement not for the unification of a party and a faction in China but for the unification of Chinese Trotskyists overseas [including, in this case, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan]. Any new organisation should be called not the “China xxx Party (formerly the Chinese section of the International)” but, more honestly and truthfully, the “Overseas Chinese Trotskyist Group (or League)”. This is not a quibble but an attempt to correct past errors. The new organisation will, in every sense of the word, be nothing more than a small force put together by the remnants of Chinese Trotskyism of the past and the forerunners of Chinese Trotskyism of the future. It may form the basis for a future revolutionary Marxist party in China, the Chinese section of the Fourth International, but today it is not such an organisation.

principles of organisation (1979)

159

After the elimination of the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union, Trotsky stopped using the name “Soviet Branch of the International Left Opposition”. That was not just a matter of style but of major importance. Here we see a clear distinction between the revolutionary spirit of seeking truth from the facts and the bluffing and puffery of bureaucratic politicians. We are Trotskyists and must above all live up to the ethic that Trotsky demands of every revolutionary: “Call things by their true names!” Lian’gen and Gu He, 20 February 1978

(c)

Ou [Peng Shuzhi], Yun [Chen Bilan], and Their Idea of Organisation Gu He

The “unification” of the Trotskyists in Hong Kong needs, first of all, unanimity on political issues (which does not prevent some comrades from holding different views); and, secondly, an organisational perspective in line with the constitution of the Fourth International, about which Comrade Lian’gen and I have written various articles [including the above two]. The rcp’s view on organisation, expressed in Liu Jialiang’s resolution on Principles and Methods, is repeated in a recent letter from Ou and Yun to Kui, written on March 26 and now published by the rcp.3 The letter shows that the rcp has changed its attitude on the question of unification: “If someone in a revolutionary organisation makes mistakes in politics, organisation, and work, even serious mistakes, we are still in favour of giving him or her a ‘chance’ to put things right through discussion and criticism or self-examination”. The “we” referred to here are Emperors Ou and Yun and the rcp’s Central Committee, who are in the position of infallible judges who deign to allow people the “chance” to correct their “mistakes” but never allow them to state their political and organisational disagreements, and who absolutely do not allow them the rights accorded to minorities in the constitution of the Fourth International. Instead, they use the stick of “party discipline” against comrades holding different views: “You have gone too far […] in the name of ‘Chinese Trotskyist unity’ and have in fact split from the rcp. […] You have violated party discipline. There is absolutely no future in unprincipled ‘unification’ or ‘merger.’ 3 Kui, i.e., Zhang Kui, was one of Peng Shuzhi’s loyal supporter in the rcp.

160

ed. lou, trans. benton

“Anyone who is faithful and responsible to the revolution must be very careful when taking a stand on organisational issues, especially when it comes to taking action. It is very difficult to recover after leaving the party or being expelled from it on the grounds of organisational mistakes, for revolutionary organisations are not clubs to be entered and left at will. “[…] Some frivolous young people, especially those of an anarchist disposition, despise the Party and think they can join or leave it at any point, or drag other people into it, or pull in other small organisations to form a ‘unified’ party. However, such a course of action will never succeed”. Such is the main point of Ou and Yun’s letter. However, they have completely failed to understand that the people to whom they are writing are young people who grew up in the rcp, whose political maturity exceeded that of the leadership, and whose attitude to unification was based solely on the perceived need to go beyond the organisation. […] It is not helpful to use Stalinist methods of party discipline to clamp down on their demand for unity. […] 13 July 1978

(d)

A Brief Comment on Organisational Principles and Methods Lian’gen

Anyone who talks about the Bolshevik party system must consider the question of “democratic centralism”. However, this principle is, in itself, an abstraction and cannot be seen as a Leninist invention. The method of discussing before deciding and the subordination of the minority to the majority after discussion is already an established practice in bourgeois parliaments. In the socialist movement, too, this principle was recognized – at least verbally – by almost every school of thought. Kautsky and Martov would not have opposed it on principle, and Stalin and Mao were even more likely to [pretend to] embrace it. Why, then, did things turn out so differently in the event? The main reason is the subordination of the organisational line to the political line – the latter determining the former rather then the former determining the latter. Second, the benefits bestowed by the principle of democratic centralism on proletarian revolution depend on its specific interpretation and application. To say that a correct party system is equal to full democracy plus a high degree of centralisation is an abstract algebraic formulation. For it to have real

principles of organisation (1979)

161

meaning, X and Y must acquire concrete form. In other words, it is necessary to specify how much democracy and how much concentration, i.e., when to veer towards democracy and when to favour concentration, and what specific methods must be used to realise full democracy or strict concentration. Without such specification, mere talk about the need for both democracy and concentration are not only meaningless but, worse still, can be used as a pretext by ambitious people like Stalin and Mao to exercise a personal dictatorship. Lenin did not snatch the correct organisational principles and methods for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in the early twentieth century from thin air. In response to the objective circumstances of the Russian [Tsarist] dictatorship and in view of the backwardness of the scattered “artisans” on the side of the revolutionaries, he proposed an organisation and a nationally united party of revolutionary professionals capable of waging a real struggle against the dictatorship. To achieve this end, he did not simply propose “democratic centralism”, as is commonly claimed. Instead, he proposed extreme centralisation, which in his view perfectly suited the needs of the time. And he set out in great detail (even down to the most trivial of details) how this centralisation was to be implemented. So Lenin never advocated democratic centralism as a vague and general concept. From 1904 until his death, his view on organisational principles and methods was always specific, leaning this way or that, between democracy and centralisation, as conditions required. So for Leninists today, the most important question regarding organisation is to specify how this democratic centralism is to be realised, to benefit the proletarian revolution. I do not wish to go into detail on this question here, but I would like to make a few brief points. First, in the present international situation (and in China too), one of the major reasons why workers and the toiling masses are suspicious of socialist and communist movements, and thus reluctant to embrace them and even ready to oppose them, is the bureaucratic dictatorship that Stalin practised for decades in the name of Leninism. Under this bureaucratic dictatorship, in the countries where the Communist Party was in power, “democratic centralism” meant above all an absence of factions within the Party and of other parties without the Party. As a result, for the sake of world revolution and the future revolution in China, the future revolutionary party in China must, in general, give priority to democracy in its organisational principles and methods, i.e., in its formulation of democratic centralism.

162

ed. lou, trans. benton

This would entail the following three things: (1) Differences of opinion are allowed within the party and those who hold different views may form factions. (2) The faction in the minority must act in obedience to the majority. (3) The majority must respect the rights of the minority, including allowing it to be properly represented on the governing bodies. The author of Principles and Methods did not dare to come out openly against factions within the party, but he opposed “factions which lack a political and principled basis”, which “can only be petty, unprincipled, and conspiratorial”. But which minority factions were declared in the past in the internal struggles of Communist Parties to be “petty unprincipled, and conspiratorial organisations” by the powers that be, and therefore combated, eliminated, and subjected to organisational and physical destruction? Principles and Methods goes on to say: “Since unprincipled petty organisational struggles are constantly taking place […] with the invariable result that they […] open the door to unreliable elements and even to enemy spies, the [early Trotskyist] Chinese Communist League suffered enemy destruction, mainly as a direct consequence of unprincipled petty organisational struggles”. This pronouncement is not only untrue but carries a whiff of the murderous aura of the Moscow trials and of the trials held by the People’s Court in China. Principles and Methods openly opposes my third point. It says: “The leading organ is simply the concentration of the majority political and organisational opinion of the party, and is therefore the embodiment of revolutionary centralism”. Having made this affirmation, the congress that adopted it, when electing its leadership, denied re-election to any of the majority of the old leadership (which formed 80 per cent of its membership) and severely rebuked those who voted for the minority. This is a violation of Bolshevik tradition and of the constitution of the Fourth International. According to the constitution of the Fourth International, minority factions should “be given seats on the governing bodies, in accord with their political and numerical weight”. The future organisation of Chinese Trotskyists must clearly follow the same principles and methods. Second, I would like to address the question of the party organ. Should a Party newspaper only represent the majority (or even its General Secretary)? Must every word published in it be that of the majority, like Pravda in the Soviet Union and the People’s Daily in China? I don’t think so. This was not the case with [the Trotskyists’ early newspaper] Spark, nor was it the case with Pravda in Lenin’s time. Such a press is one of the clearest signs of Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration.

principles of organisation (1979)

163

But does that mean that the party organ must represent divergent opinions and disagreements? Certainly not. What then should it be? I think we have already have an answer in the policy routinely followed by the main publications of the Fourth International. That policy is: “Where an article is signed, it does not necessarily represent the official opinion of the journal”. In other words, only unsigned editorials and articles definitely represent the official majority opinion of the journal (and of the party). The implication is that the journal carries both individual and collective opinions. It is broadly true that factional opinion within the party tends to reflect, to some extent, opinions other than those held by the working class in society. But in applying such an analysis we must beware that it is not taken to mean that the faction that is in the majority necessarily represents the proletariat, and that the minority represents the petty bourgeoisie or even the bourgeoisie. Such a simplistic “class analysis” is in fact merely an echo of the old Chinese saw that “the winner is a king, the loser is a bandit”. It is in no way conducive to “competition” of different viewpoints within the party. Instead, it leads to the poisoning of otherwise healthy relations between the various factions. Second, the authority of a revolutionary party and its leaders must be built up naturally and gradually in the course of the actual revolutionary struggle. Attempts to artificially cultivate “party love” can only result in extreme sectarianism at best, while the deliberate inculcation of leadership authority, even if it eventually succeeds, can only result in an ugly Mao-style “cult of the personality”. These things should have no place in the new organisation. 22 May 1978

(e)

Letter to the Seven Members of the Provisional Committee4 Lian’gen, Gu He, Bo Chen [Sun Liangsi], and Wang Guoquan

Dear Comrades. At a time when the Chinese Trotskyists’ solidarity movement is reaping its first fruits, we – the undersigned, veteran members of the former Chinese Internationalist Workers Party (iwp) – offer you our heartfelt congratulations, and give a brief account of the attitude we have always taken towards the solidarity movement and of our future aspirations. 4 This Provisional Committee was the leadership of the Revolutionary Marxist League led in the 1970s by Wu Zhongxian in Hong Kong.

164

ed. lou, trans. benton

Some facts are already known to you. For example, you know how the iwp came into being, how the minority in its predecessor organisation, the Chinese Communist League (ccl), disagreed with the majority (later the Revolutionary Communist Party, rcp.), whereafter the two then split. But however much all this has to do with the present unification movement, we do not wish to discuss it here. Since December 1952, when our party (which then had some 200 members) was destroyed by ccp agents in China, the weak organisation we had left overseas (about a dozen people in total), after continuing for a short period, finally gave up its organisational form in the mid-1950s. However, although we ceased to operate under the name of the Party, individual comrades (reduced to six or seven in the intervening years) continued to work on all fronts, mainly among workers and students, where they disseminated revolutionary Marxist ideas and researched and criticised the Chinese Communist regime. We did so because we were convinced that the ccp, which was still essentially Stalinist, would not be able to solve the tasks of China’s socialist revolution and would never automatically come to adopt a revolutionary Marxist position. With a similar degree of confidence, the comrades left behind in China, led by Zheng Chaolin, He Zishen, Jiang Zhendong, Lin Huanhua, and others, were determined to continue the struggle for the positions of the Fourth International, even though they laboured under particularly difficult circumstances.5 As far as we know, none succumbed to the cruel persecution of the Maoist regime.6 This period of decline lasted for more than a decade. It was not until the late 1960s that the situation began to change. As the international environment became more favourable to socialist revolution, and as internal contradictions within the ccp continued to erupt, a new interest in revolutionary Marxism emerged among some young Chinese living outside the Mainland, especially in Hong Kong. By the 1970s, such people were even more determined to move from thought to action. The question arose of how to unite the old and new Trotskyists. From the very beginning, there were differences of opinion between us and the surviving comrades of the rcp on this question. The rcp’s only concern was how to preserve their own orthodoxy and gain control over others. No matter that their Hong Kong organisation has not existed for years (or, to put it more politely, “exists in name only”), and that its few leaders have been disengaged 5 See the Biographical List. 6 This was written several months before the release of the Trotskyists in the summer of 1979, when they were able to give an account of their prison years.

principles of organisation (1979)

165

from the actual struggle, when the Trotskyist movement began to revive, they were keen to reconstruct the old “legal system” [according to which they were the true leaders] and to manipulate the newcomers. However, they were willing to see Chinese Trotskyism weak and fragmented if necessary. Our attitude is the exact opposite of theirs. We believe that after the old Trotskyist organisations in China had ceased to exist or even to operate at all, the new Trotskyist movement, which had emerged under new conditions, would have to start all over again. Put simply, we argued that all the Chinese Trotskyist organisations in Hong Kong should reform on the basis of the remnants of the old majority and the old minority, without distinction, together with the new comrades, and that [in this equation] the new forces should have priority. Unfortunately, our ideas were opposed by the rcp and did not receive the attention they deserved from the new comrades. As a result, our goal of unity was, for a while, thwarted. But we did not change our approach. We have never wanted (and will never try) to revive the iwp in order to go it alone. We have always insisted on the unity of old and new and continued to call for equality and unity. To achieve this end, we have sought out every opportunity to work with all parties (e.g., by publishing books together with the rcp and participating in the activities of the rml) and to try to help any group or individual willing to accept the positions of the Fourth International. We are not doing this because we are unable to knock together a handful of members of the old minority in order to create our own small mountain stronghold. We do so because we have always despised the bad habit of fighting for power and neglecting hard work; because we have always believed that preserving and spreading revolutionary ideas is infinitely more important than creating and controlling a power base; and, thirdly, because we have always stood for unity, so there is no reason (and no need) to create yet another faction and yet another obstacle to unity. The rcp’s extreme orthodoxy and its high-handedness, especially that of Peng and his wife Chen Bilan, who see the revolutionary movement as a Peng family enterprise, has greatly hindered unification for more than fifty years, but now they have finally been defeated by international pressure and the opposition of the majority of comrades. Instead of achieving their aim of monopolising the organisation, they have allowed themselves to be plunged into isolation, in an act of self-extinction. The tentative unity now on the point of being reached, mainly by the rml, a minority of the rcp, the Young Socialist Group (ysg),7 and other comrades, old 7 The Young Socialist Group (ysg) was a Trotskyist youth group of around 20 members in Hong Kong in the 1970s. Initially, it was affiliated to the rcp, as the rcp’s “mass” youth organisation. In September 1978, the ysg split from the rcp and combined with the rml’s youth group, the

166

ed. lou, trans. benton

and new, who do not belong to any of those three organisations is fully in line with the interests of the revolution and the unity that we have always advocated. We express this support not only in our personal capacity, but also in the name of all those veterans of the iwp currently being held in the ccp’s prisons and labour camps. We would like to solemnly declare that this fledgling overseas Chinese Trotskyist organisation will carry on the true traditions of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. While critically accepting its failures, we are confident that it will make a significant contribution to the future development of China’s proletarian socialist revolution. But this present unity, valuable as it is, must not lead to complacency. We must be clear that this is only one step on a long march; there are still countless dangers and enormous difficulties ahead. We must prepare carefully if we are to ensure the sound development of the organisation in future. We would therefore like to make the following proposals. (1) Immediately organise a committee (of four or five people) to draw up the following documents: (1) a party programme, or the principles of one; (2) political resolutions; (3) organisational resolutions; and (4) an outline of overseas work. These documents must be approved by a majority and then issued for discussion by all the comrades and submitted for adoption at a Party Congress (the date of which should be determined by the progress of the drafting). (2) Immediately start publishing a regular and comprehensive theoretical journal, in order to make avail of the Maoist ideological crisis, to win over the masses, and to educate the members. (3) Work should start immediately on translating important documents of the Fourth International, including documents currently being drafted for presentation to its Eleventh Congress. (4) We are few in number and should beware of organisational pomposity and empty titles. Our meagre strength should be concentrated rather than dispersed. It is therefore better to organise our existing forces as a party and not to set up a separate youth league, at least for the time being. The original Youth League should be organised more broadly and “downgraded” to a “peripheral organisation”, in order to reach out to a broader public. Progressive Students. After the organisational unification, the ysg became the youth league of the rml. In December 1980, 7 ysg members were expelled from the group (and one resigned). The expelled Trotskyists and others established the Pioneer Group in early 1982. It was active in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s.

principles of organisation (1979)

167

(5) The most important internal task at present should be to educate existing comrades and quickly raise their awareness, so that they can understand in what ways we differ from the Maoists politically and organisationally, and that we are at odds with the intransigent faction within the rcp. (Needless to say, the internal education of a fighting organisation is not the same as static study and research, it must achieve its goals through actual revolutionary struggle.) (6) In future, we believe that our attitude towards the hard-core of the rcp should be mainly one of theoretical struggle, in order to win over its less hard-core members. As for the demand that the International revoke the rcp’s status as the official representatives of the “Chinese section”, we fully agree with this; but at the same time we must point out that the group of Chinese Trotskyists now reorganised abroad is merely a forerunner of the real Chinese section, and that until our organisation is able to exist and operate openly or secretly in China itself, it cannot be considered as such a section. We must be realistic and call things by their real names. We ask you to consider the above proposals and we hope that they will be implemented as far as possible. Trotskyist greetings! Lian’gen, Gu He, Bo Chen [Sun Liangsi], Wang Guoquan, 4 October 1978.8

8 See Bo Chen and Wang Guoquan in the Biographical List.

The Radical 70’s Biweekly Magazine That Shaped the Hong Kong Left (2020) Promise Li

This article, written by a US-based Hong Kong scholar, depicts the role of 70’s Biweekly, a radical magazine and political platform, in shaping the resurgence of Trotskyist activities and of other leftist and social movements in Hong Kong. Source: The Nation Magazine, 17 April 2020

When Ng Chung-yin [Wu Zhongxian] met Augustine Mok Chiu-yu [Mo Zhaoru], they were doing a sit-in protest on the steps of Chu Hai College in Hong Kong. It was August 1969, and 12 students had just been expelled from the college for criticising the administration – namely, its censorship of student newspapers, corruption, and ties to the Nationalist Party in Taiwan. Ng, then 23, was a former student leader who had just graduated from Chu Hai. Mok, 22, had recently returned to the city after studying in Australia. “I was a youth [social] worker then”, says Mok now, “basically looking for people with whom I could work to develop a ‘revolutionary’ movement”. The Chu Hai protests were the first in Hong Kong history in which student unions from schools across the city took to the streets together. The protests ended in failure, and local newspapers smeared the students, claiming they were disrupting public order. Nonetheless, the short-lived movement marked the beginning of a new generation of activism. It had politicised young Hong Kongers, getting them ready for a larger fight. That’s when Ng and Mok – influenced by their exposure to leftist publications from Australia and the United States – decided to launch a publication that could support a revolutionary upsurge. On January 1, 1970, the two activists and a group of other like-minded leftists published the first issue of a magazine called The 70’s Biweekly (70 niandai shuangzhou kan). Filled with political essays, book and film reviews, and reportage – mostly written in Chinese, with some English – and illustrated with photographs, drawings, and collage, The 70’s Biweekly was a profoundly diy operation. It was only published for a few years. But its radical politics, and the networks of students and workers it helped to form, had an outsized impact that survives to this day. The collective’s members and those inspired by the magazine have helped to define what the Hong Kong left could be. © Promise Li, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_016

the radical 70’s biweekly magazine

169

Last June, a controversial bill that would’ve allowed mainland China to extradite people from Hong Kong triggered perhaps the biggest social movement the city has ever seen. Although there have been few protest actions since the outbreak of Covid-19, the resistance has nonetheless continued for more than ten months – including an upsurge of new unions, formed as an anti-establishment tactic by rank-and-file workers. With the left’s history of activism in Hong Kong, one might expect that it would take a big part in the protest movement. But aside from the interest in unionisation, traditional leftist groups have mostly been unable to make their mark. Looking back at The 70’s Biweekly – both its rise, and its fall – helps us understand why that might be. When the collective was founded, Hong Kong was a British colony, and leftist discourse was dominated by pro-Chinese Communist Party Maoists. But The 70’s Biweekly did not support the ccp. Instead, its ranks were split between Trotskyists and anarchists, committed to a left internationalism that centred on local issues. Members of the collective played an important role in the campaign for Chinese to be adopted as an official language, at a time when the British colonial government only recognised English; they became a central force during other anti-imperial protests, too. Even after the magazine became defunct, its members and readers continued to participate in activism through the 1980s and 1990s, from advocating for Hong Kongers’ right to participate in the handover negotiations, to solidarity actions with dissidents in mainland China. Hong Kong activists have been waging the battle of their lives for selfdetermination. Yet structural, economic critiques against the system have been largely delinked from the current movement’s legitimate demands for human rights. Since the days of The 70’s Biweekly, China has joined the United States as one of the world’s most inequitable and exploitative economies, and Hong Kong has become one of the most expensive cities in the world. The ChinaUS trade war has put extra pressure on Hong Kongers, making them feel as if they need to choose between global superpowers. The city’s residents desperately need a radical, working-class-centred movement against globalization and class inequality – especially as the small, localist right, with its USflag-waving and anti-mainland Chinese sentiments, threatens to grow in influence. Fifty years after it first hit newsstands, The 70’s Biweekly’s fight against structural oppression and state power – whether it comes from Beijing, Washington, or Hong Kong itself – feels newly relevant. Hong Kong was a much smaller place before 1949. At the close of the Chinese Civil War, a large influx of working-class refugees and immigrants from the mainland entered the city, more than tripling its population between 1945 and

170

li

1951. Hong Kong had been a British colony since the middle of the 19th century, and its ruling class was made up of both British and Hong Kong business elites. But low wages, poor working conditions, racism, and a lack of civil liberties stimulated a new political opposition to British rule – split between the left-leaning Communists and the Nationalists, or Kuomintang. Maoism quickly became the key political framework for many Hong Kong leftists. And, like many Third World movements emerging around the world, the Hong Kong left’s local struggles were bound up in the larger struggle of anticolonialism – one that pitted the People’s Republic of China against Western imperialism. The Cultural Revolution was underway on the mainland, and ccp sympathisers in Hong Kong attempted to extend this struggle into the city. Maoists established a presence in Hong Kong schools and factories, and in 1967, a small labour dispute ballooned – with the ccp’s encouragement – into citywide anticolonial demonstrations. Much like today, police violence against protesters was rampant. But ccp supporters also planted bombs around the city in an attempt to murder some of the movement’s critics, and ended up hurting uninvolved civilians. By the time the protests ended after six months, more than 50 people had died, and more than 800 had been injured – both by the Hong Kong police and by Communists’ bombs. By the time Ng and Mok launched The 70’s Biweekly in 1970, the left’s reputation was in tatters, and Hong Kong was still struggling to find its own identity. Nonetheless, Ng, Mok, and the other founders managed to fund the first issue of their magazine with a generous donation from a young monk, one of the 12 students who had been expelled from Chu Hai. Ng was the only paid staff member, while Mok worked as a social worker. The others supported themselves playing music in nightclubs, processing herbs as assistants to Chinese herbal doctors, and selling cheap shoes and slippers in small shops. From the beginning, The 70’s Biweekly covered a wide range of subjects, including everything from reviews of translations of Bertolt Brecht’s poetry to a special edition on the struggles of the newly independent country of Bangladesh against what was then called West Pakistan. In that 1971 issue, pseudonymous writers called out the ccp’s complicity in the genocide of Bengalis the year before. “The ccp’s support of West Pakistan is counterrevolutionary!” wrote one, above a kitschy reproduction of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s letter to West Pakistani president Yahya Khan. The collective members printed and distributed the publication themselves from the beginning, delivering it to newsstands around the city on foot. (Confusingly, there was also a publication called The Seventies Monthly founded around the same time, but that magazine was then aligned with the ccp.)

the radical 70’s biweekly magazine

171

Beyond publishing a magazine, members of The 70’s Biweekly helped organise public actions and assemblies. By late 1970, its members had formed an organising network called the Worker-Student Alliance, drawn from the publication’s readership and divided into local political dialogue and action committees. The collective’s members hoped that these committees would help connect the campaign to make Chinese an official language with other Hong Kong issues. “These platforms saw workers as agents of revolutionary change”, says Mok. (One prominent organiser at the time was Lau Chin-shek, who later helped found and became president of the prominent, pro-democracy labour group the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.) Then, in August 1970, the Japanese government reiterated its claim over the Diaoyutai or Senkaku Islands, granting Western oil companies and its own government the right to defend the island chain from foreign encroachment. These uninhabited islands had been governed by the United States since the end of World War ii, but their sovereignty has long been disputed by China, Japan, and Taiwan. (The discovery of oil reserves near the islands had made their ownership even more contentious.) The struggle over Diaoyutai reignited nationalistic, anticolonial sentiments among everyone from Chinese and Taiwanese nationalists to American student groups. The 70’s Biweekly played an integral part in what Hong Kongers called the Baodiao (short for Baowei Diaoyutai, or “Protect Diaoyutai”) movement, building on the Chu Hai youth movement of the year before. Members of the collective sympathised with the outrage aimed at Japan and organised one of the first Baodiao rallies to take place in Hong Kong, as well as many others later that year. But instead of supporting the Kuomintang or the ccp, both of which laid claim to the islands, The 70’s Biweekly emphasised how imperialist forces exploited local communities – no matter which nation-state was in charge. Their actions included a rally on July 7, 1971, that marked a turning point in public sentiment: Police violently cracked down on a group congregated at Victoria Park, which included over 3,000 leftists, student organisers, and journalists. Meanwhile, the collective began corresponding with leftists from mainland China who had been exiled after 1949, such as Chinese Trotskyist Wang Fanxi in Macao. Starting in 1970, members including Ng, Mok, and now-eminent film director John Shum took several trips to Paris, a hub for Chinese Trotskyist exiles such as former ccp member Peng Shuzhi. Some also visited the UK, where they met with staff of the New Left Review and members of the Socialist Workers Party. And yet, despite its successes, The 70’s Biweekly collective was plagued by internal disagreements between its Trotskyist and anarchist elements. It was

172

li

also having financial issues; the publication had been supported only by its sales, Mok’s salary as a social worker, and some occasional donations from allies. The Baodiao movement was imploding around them, crumbling under the tensions between those who supported the ccp and those who did not. After July 1973, The 70’s Biweekly stopped regular publication. Some members departed for personal or political reasons; others shifted their activism to other issues. The publication would later start up again for a few issues in 1975, then again in 1978, before being completely discontinued. The same loose structure that allowed for vibrant debate and participation had also made it difficult for the collective’s members to keep the energy going long-term. However, The 70’s Biweekly’s brief appearance had already woken up many young readers – including some who would play foundational roles in the Hong Kong left. Au Loong-yu was a teenager when the Baodiao movement kicked off. He has said that those protests changed his life; and he was radicalised due largely to 70’s Biweekly. “A majority of the key themes of today’s political debates came up before, in the 1970s”, said Au, who is still an activist organising around Chinese labour and local Hong Kong issues, in a recent interview with the Hong Kong magazine The Initium. “The problem of Hong Kongers’ identity, the need for an anti-colonial movement, how to perceive the politics of the prc, and how to negotiate China-Hong Kong relations”. Au started to feel some vague sense of wanting to act against injustices imposed by the colonial regime after he had experienced a number of disturbing events, including the humiliation and oppression he suffered as a member of an underprivileged group and what he saw as his brainwashing at the hands of the colonial education system. One year after the repression of the 7 July protests at Victoria Park,1 Au’s life was changed. He started pitching articles to a student magazine, Chinese Student Weekly, criticising aspects of his school life and various members of its administration. Au became a leftist after graduating from secondary school. He was always more interested in social issues and the problem of inequality than in Chinese nationalism, although, after Baodiao, nationalism became the dominant ideological strain among the universities’ student organisations. Around 1972, Au discovered 70s Biweekly, which was central in radicalising him in the direction of the left. He chose to be a member of the dwindling group of young leftists not swayed by ccp nationalism, after he had finally under-

1 The 7 July Incident refers to the Japanese attack on the Chinese army in 1937, at the Lugou Bridge near Beijing. The incident was seen as the beginning of the Japanese invasion of China.

the radical 70’s biweekly magazine

173

stood that the ccp was instructing the nationalists under its influence to put up with the colonial government’s oppression and to focus merely on recognising and accommodating the ccp’s sovereignty over China. To quote the local ccp, “Hong Kong compatriots should quietly await their liberation”, i.e., “stop the anti-colonial movement”. Au believed that when Baodiao started, young people were – like those during the 2019 anti-extradition bill movement – for the most part newly politicised. Thus, after the movement had got underway, clear ideological divisions became apparent. A few years later, the politics of the youth movement and the mass movement had divided into three factions: the Maoists, the liberals, and the leftists. Many of the young Maoists later became founders and leaders of the pro-Beijing camp before and after the handover of Hong Kong; many in the liberal faction later became the cornerstone of the pan-democratic opposition; and the left split into various smaller groups, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, Trotskyists, and so on. Au stressed that Baodiao’s key meaning was that it was the first time a mass anti-colonial resistance in Hong Kong had been able, at least in its first phase, to develop outside the influence of the ccp. Since the 1980s, it has become very difficult for the ccp to establish a base among young people of later generations. After Baodiao, the general sentiment among young people in the late 1970’s was to downplay the long-standing identification with Mainland China and to focus on local issues. However, the liberal leaders of the movement were very weak politically. They failed to defend even their own limited political principles, those of liberalism, and this inevitably led to the rise of right-wing militant elements of the sort that have come to dominate the localist movement in recent years. Moreover, the left became progressively weaker. The 70’s Biweekly had operated on the idea that colonial exploitation transcended borders, and resistance should be led by the masses – not by paid revolutionaries and union bureaucrats. By the time Au entered the scene, former members of the magazine collective had turned their attention to activism. One former 70’s editor, Fu Loo-bing, led factory workers in a hunger strike over low wage. He was arrested for causing a public disturbance and held for a few days, then released after more than a thousand people surrounded the police station. Others got involved in a mass campaign against a former Royal Hong Kong Police superintendent who had been accused of corruption. In 1975, Ng, Au, and some former 70’s Biweekly members formed a Trotskyist collective called the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml) and turned towards workers’ organising.

174

li

Then, in 1976, Mao Zedong died. Within two years, Deng Xiaoping was leader of China. As Deng consolidated power, he began to undo many Mao-era job protections, such as the right to strike and guaranteed lifetime employment for workers at state-owned enterprises. China’s economy was thrust into rapid, free-market liberalisation, lifting millions of working-class people out of extreme poverty but entrenching them in class antagonism and deeper exploitation. Solidarity with workers in China soon became a natural avenue for former 70’s Biweekly members, readers, and their respective organisations. In 1980, Au and other organisers formed a grassroots collective called the Pioneer Group; they became one of the earliest organisations to publish leftist writing about China’s capitalist development, and they advocated for Hong Kongers’ right to be involved in handover negotiations. Other Hong Kong activists were arrested in China and forced to confess to doing underground organising work there. Meanwhile, other individuals associated with The 70’s Biweekly, including John Shum and Leung Yiu-chung, helped build “big-tent” networks and organisations to support dissidents and workers in mainland China. Leung (later imprisoned for his part in holding an illegal assembly in 2020) cofounded an organisation that would eventually become the Neighbourhood and Workers’ Service Centre, now a small but influential left-wing political force.2 The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China was another such group, albeit one dominated by liberal democrats; it helped launch underground operations after the Tian’anmen massacre on 4 June 1989, rescuing mainland dissidents by bringing them to Hong Kong. Despite these initiatives, leftist ideas weren’t resonating with the public the way they had in the past. Working and living conditions were becoming more precarious; manufacturing jobs sharply declined, while real estate prices skyrocketed. Hong Kong – which had industrialised just a couple of decades before – was becoming a global financial hub, just in time for the handover in 1997. As the city transformed, the left struggled to reach an audience. Leung “Long Hair” Kwok-hung is a long-time activist and former member of Hong Kong’s law-making body, the Legislative Council. His penchant for direct action and Che Guevara shirts has made him a recognisable figure on the anti-authoritarian left. As a young teenager growing up in a lower-class family, Long Hair read The 70’s Biweekly and participated in some of the actions it organised. He credits

2 Ng, along with some of his leftist friends, was among the first to advocate building such an alliance at the height of the 1989 democratic movement in China.

the radical 70’s biweekly magazine

175

the publication and its members with making him abandon his former Maoist ideology, and with framing a commitment to local, grassroots causes that still inspires him to this day. But he’s not sure it would convince many Hong Kongers now. “It was easier to capture people with a left and Marxist analysis then”, says Long Hair. “While you can talk about it now, the language wouldn’t resonate with many”. Since the 1980s, most leftist movements in Hong Kong have failed to attract mass participation, or imploded soon after appearing. When Au’s Pioneer Group tried to rally Hong Kongers to demand a say during Sino-British handover talks, they were actively shut out by liberal democrats; the latter preferred a more conciliatory approach to negotiating with China, rather than demanding universal suffrage right away. In 2005, thousands of Hong Kongers and international allies protested against a World Trade Organisation conference held in the city, opposing the policies of neoliberal globalization – but the momentum didn’t extend beyond the conference. In 2013, there was a dockworkers’ strike, supported by many students and workers’ organisations, but internal strife and attacks from the right shattered hopes for a mass movement. Then, in 2014, the Umbrella Revolution began, in response to electoral reform that increased Beijing’s power in Hong Kong’s election process. Soon, over 200,000 people were participating in protests. But the reform was upheld, and again, momentum dissipated; some key protest leaders were later jailed. Many were still debating Umbrella’s legacy when protests began in the summer of 2019 – especially because of the localist right-wing factions that grew in its aftermath. These groups, while still small, have become more influential in promoting pro-United States views and xenophobic anti-mainland sentiments. Long Hair’s political party, the League of Social Democrats (lsd), has perhaps been the most visible and effective left-leaning force in the Legislative Council since its inception in the mid-2000s. Long Hair himself lost his seat in 2017, when he and other elected officials were disqualified for protesting against the ccp’s authority. But lsd was nonetheless pivotal in organising against the extradition bill last summer, as protesters rallied around what they call the “Five Demands”. When pro-democracy candidates swept Hong Kong’s district council elections in November, it was seen as a clear show of support for the protesters. Still, Long Hair and other lsd leaders see less of an opening to politicise people around deeper structural issues such as class exploitation. “The Hong Kong left’s biggest problem isn’t determining whether capitalism has any fatal problems”, says Long Hair, “but how to build an effective socialist movement anew”. The Hong Kong left is still experimenting. Last August, protesters called for a general strike to pressure the government over the Five Demands; the Hong

176

li

Kong Confederation of Trade Unions reports that over 350,000 workers from more than 20 sectors participated. This triggered a new, ongoing interest in unionisation and political strikes, and dozens of small-scale unions have since been organised by everyone from theatre professionals to workers who manufacture medical equipment. Pro-strike messaging channels on the encrypted app Telegram now have tens of thousands of subscribers. The outbreak of Covid-19 saw the quick mobilisation of thousands of unionised medical workers, demonstrating the growing willingness of rank-and-file workers to use labour tactics to directly challenge the government. “Resist tyranny, join a union”, is now a protest slogan. The people who founded The 70’s Biweekly are no longer on the front lines. After his arrest by the Beijing government in 1981, Ng worked as a journalist; he died of cancer in 1994. Mok is now an artist working in film and underground theatre. He eventually created a theatrical production based on his late friend’s life. The collective they cofounded may not have been able to sustain a mass movement. Nonetheless, The 70’s Biweekly’s dedication to organising students and workers, its demands for new kinds of engagement, informed the Hong Kong political scene far beyond the publication’s brief lifetime. Its most enduring lesson may be that the model for liberation can only be found in solidarity with all marginalised people – that no single dogma or past experience can show us how to do that best. In a fight that involves millions, the Hong Kong left is still finding its way forward.

Trotskyism and the Early Pro-Democracy Movement in Hong Kong, 1979–99 (2022) Promise Li

This article, especially written for this volume, describes how, after the decline of Trotskyist politics and the organisational split in Hong Kong in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Sun Miu (i.e., Pioneer) Group and April Fifth Action participated in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and other social movements calling for electoral reforms, solidarity campaigns with the Tian’anmen protests, district council elections, and anti-globalisation and anti-privatisation movements in the 1980s and the 1990s. Though the Trotskyists remained marginal figures in the mainstream pro-democracy movement, their participation in Hong Kong’s opposition meant that they were able to offer radical perspectives and alternatives for local social movements, and they continue to do so even now.

In 1983, as the British and Chinese governments began entering into negotiations about Hong Kong’s future, a small group of socialists released a pamphlet detailing the most programmatic and radical vision of democratic selfgovernance yet.1 Rather than choose between two regimes, they wrote that “neither the Chinese nor the British regime recognises that the Hong Kong people have the right to self-determination; they clash and also collude with one another, either way setting the terms of Hong Kong’s future behind the backs of the Hong Kong people”. Though they accepted that Hong Kong’s sovereignty should be returned to China, they argued that “the Chinese people do not genuinely have control over their own sovereignty at all”, since “China’s sovereignty is in the hands of a tiny, totalitarian clique of Communist bureaucrats”. The imminent Handover, to these writers, necessitated a political revolution not just in Hong Kong but in all of China, to build a new society instead of the capitalist structure that the British had built and that the Chinese were keen to uphold. These words, written by the Hong Kong Trotskyist Sun Miu Group, represent one of the clearest expositions of the most politically radical approach towards the Hong Kong question in the 1980s. This came not as a develop-

1 Sun Miu Group 1983.

© Promise Li, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_017

178

li

ment from what we now know as the pro-democracy opposition to Beijing’s rule but preceded its existence – in the form of the small and independent Marxist movement in Hong Kong that developed after the anti-imperialist upsurge of the early 1970s.2 But Sun Miu’s emergence in the early 1980s did not signal the flowering of Marxist traditions in Hong Kong: on the contrary, it came on the heels of the last wave of independent socialist organisation seen in Hong Kong. With the Maoists’ retreat from grassroots organising, the Trotskyists became the most organised socialists active in Hong Kong’s social movements in the 1970s.3 As Hong Kong entered an era of financialisation and de-industrialisation, the space for radical politics – following the downturn of the global left – rapidly narrowed. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the question of Hong Kong’s sovereign future occupied the central stage preceding the Handover, as other modes of political identity were relegated to the margins. As the two regimes bargained away the democratic rights of Hong Kongers, two main political camps emerged: the business elites allied with pro-Chinese civilsociety organisations to form a conservative bloc keen on preserving a smooth Handover with minimal changes to the city’s political composition, against a diverse coalition of independent civil-society organisations for reforms.4 Why break from this conventional narrative and retrace the history of this era through the lens of the socialist left? This article argues that explaining the history of Hong Kong’s socialists in relation to the emerging pro-democracy movement reveals that mainstream democrats have sought to contain massmovement politics from the beginning, thus necessitating the Trotskyists’ exclusion from their ranks. The Trotskyists’ early marginalisation became the precondition for the formation of Hong Kong’s central political divide, between a liberal “pro-democracy” opposition – whose leadership remained anathema to organising mass politics – and the rise of Beijing’s conservative establishment coalition in Hong Kong, which maintained the city’s status quo in collusion with Hong Kong’s departing British sovereign at every turn in the years of transition. Thus, Hong Kong socialists’ fortunes in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated the difficulties of building an independent mass movement that could challenge the city’s capitalist machinery at its core – an important record of political experience increasingly relevant to our contemporary world of multipolar imperialisms. The Trotskyists’ legacy in Hong Kong diverged along two paths:

2 For an overview of Hong Kong’s 1970s movement, see Law 2017, vol. 161, pp. 71–83. See also Eng 2017, vol. 15, issue 22, no. 2; Li 2020; Pan 2022, 48.5, pp. 1080–1112. 3 Yang, Lau, Yee 2022, Issue 22, pp. 14–46. 4 See Ming Sing, “Mobilisation for Political Change: The Pro-democracy Movement in Hong Kong (1980s–1994)”, in Chiu and Lui (eds) 2000, pp. 21–54.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

179

while one milieu, associated with Sun Miu/Pioneer, called for programmatic clarity grounded in strengthening principles of socialist democracy with those they organised, though gaining little public traction, another (represented by April Fifth Action) developed a confrontational militant politics that had mass appeal but did not build a cohesive socialist movement or cultivate a sustainable mass organisation. The paradox is that the former was unable to build a mass base for its politics while the latter sacrificed building an independent left movement for sharpening the militant edge of the mainstream pro-democracy camp.

The Decline of Revolutionary Parties The decline of the anti-imperialist movement in the 1970s led to a gradual splintering of the left. The anarchist 70s Biweekly collective had been crucially responsible for the mobilisation and politicisation of a new generation of young leftists who went down onto the streets during the movement against the US-backed Japanese territorial claims over the Diaoyutai Islands, but it began to split as the movement dissipated. Around the same time, the pro-Beijing Maoists, who had played a central role in student organising, began retreating from the grassroots and began building organisations and study groups in support of pro-ccp campaigns.5 A key faction of the 70’s Biweekly, led by Ng Chung-yin, Li Huai-ming, and others, became Trotskyists after encountering Fourth International (fi) members in France and Britain and Chinese Trotskyists in exile like Wang Fanxi and Peng Shuzhi, and they affiliated with the official Chinese section of the Fourth International (in exile in Hong Kong), the Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp), after returning home. In 1973, Ng Chung-yin and other younger members quickly became dissatisfied with the rcp’s reticence about organising publicly and formed their own group, the Revolutionary Internationalist League, which became the Socialist League in the following year, and then the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml). Months after Ng’s departure from the rcp, another group of younger rcp members, led by Li Huai-ming, began a semi-independent youth organisation named October Youth, later the Young Socialist Group (ysg), which managed a publication named New Current, separate from the rcp’s official organ and public front, October Review.6

5 Mok, Law, and Au 2021. 6 Li’s nom de guerre in the party was Yip Ning.

180

li

While the two Trotskyist milieus remained functionally distinct for much of the 1970s, due to political and tactical disagreements, which was to the Fourth International’s chagrin, elements of both became closer as the youth members and a minority faction of the rcp became increasingly dissatisfied with their party. By 1978, the ysg voted to merge with the youth caucus of the rml (though the former’s magazine continued to have an independent existence), while a faction of non-youth rcp members joined the rml directly. The reenergised rml fought to become a separate independent Chinese section of the Fourth International in its own right, against the wishes of the remaining rcp members, and participated in the 1979 World Congress of the Fourth International in this capacity.7 With the financial and political support of rcp members, ysg members centred on the development of political analysis and education, while rml members – mostly young workers – generally came out of street organising with minimal training and interest in the finer points of Marxist political theory.8 A key event at the fi’s 1979 World Congress was that the majority of the fi’s affiliates voted to encourage members to take industrial jobs to build a militant revolutionary movement grounded in workplace agitation.9 Ng, Li, and most rml members agreed with this approach and attempted to apply the strategy in Hong Kong. rml members had already tried their hand at organising factory workers several years previously, as the ril and Socialist League. When an economic depression hit Hong Kong in 1974, Ng and his rml comrades tried to pass out socialist propaganda leaflets and stir up protests at a local factory, which nearly turned into a riot overnight and swiftly led to a few arrests. At the time, the rml met in a To Kwa Wan service centre, and its members were slow to develop their internal political education among members – mostly working-class youth in their 20s. Instead, they were eager to build a revolutionary movement starting in the factories. Ng wrote many of the rml’s articles under different pseudonyms and developed its politics, but, as Law Wing Sang notes, was yet to develop a clear and viable political programme and strategy.10 The former rml member Lau San-ching, reflecting later on the rml’s political style, described it as a kind of “adventurism” that signalled the belief that “the effects are larger if the actions are more militant, but without realising that

7 8 9 10

Preparatory Committee for a Trotskyist Organisation 1981, p. 8. Lau 1992, Chapter 4. Jack Barnes, “The Turn to Industry and the Tasks off the Fourth International”, in usfi 1980, pp. 43–50. Anita Chan, interview with the author, February 2021. Chan was a friend and comrade of Ng. See Mok, Law, and Au 2021. Ng Chung-yin’s writings can be found in Ng 1997.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

181

without a mass base, without the right subjective and objective conditions, the effect of ‘adventurism’ would simply be political isolation and setback”.11 Ng’s movement was driven by youthful militancy, though without a clear programme for base-building and political development, and the fi’s decision to “turn to industry” only reinforced the limitations of the rml’s political vision. Criticism of the rml’s intention to funnel its members into industry emerged from within its ranks in 1979, and this division set the scene for the divergent paths of Hong Kong socialism for years to come. After the Congress, Au Loong-yu, a ysg member who became a key coordinator of the rml’s youth caucus after the merger, wrote an internal document criticising Li’s endorsement of the World Congress decision.12 Au, who had first been radicalised in the ysg before the merger, had experimented with industrial workplace organising in his previous organisation and come to the conclusion that much more internal political education was needed before such an organised turn towards industrial work might prove to be sustainable. Au argued that rml members should not be rushed into industry, and that they should instead first focus on developing organisational democracy and political education.13 He criticised some of the rml’s methods, such as sending only small groups to conduct risky public actions. Au pointed out that on one occasion two rml members sent to start a rally later counted mere bystanders as “participants” in order to exaggerate the size of the action to the leadership.14 Another comrade, Mo Qi, commented that the party had not managed to provide any coherent strategy after the turn to industry discussions.15 This internal tension within the rml was exacerbated by a majority decision to refuse to adopt another key World Congress resolution titled “Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, which called for a socialist defence of a democratic multi-party system.16 The reasoning behind adopting the “turn to industry” resolution and not the socialist democracy one was unclear, but for old mainland-born Trotskyists like Xiang Qing and youth members like Au and Yu Chun-li, this further revealed the party’s refusal to take socialist democracy seriously. In a later document sent to the fi, the rml and ysg members who disagreed with the party’s refusal to adopt the socialist

11 12 13 14 15 16

Lau 1992, Chapter 4. Au 1979. Au Loong-yu, interview with the author, June 2022. Preparatory Committee 1981, p. 8. Mo 1982, p. 2, quoted from Yang 2018, p. 315. usfi 1980, pp. 210–225.

182

li

democracy resolution argued that it undermined its opposition to one-party rule.17 Au, Yu, and their sympathisers, concentrated within the youth caucus, began organising study groups and political discussions on such topics. Li and other rml leaders accused them of illegally organising sectarian activities in a party meeting, and voted that these proceedings should not be shared with other ysg members until a decision has been reached in later meetings. When Au shared some details of the ongoing trial with another ysg member, Li and others accused Au and Yu of circumventing democratic centralist party discipline and asked them to resign from the ysg. Au acknowledged his responsibility in violating the group’s privacy, but disagreed with the logic of arguing that this information had ever needed to be kept from other members. Yu echoed his comments.18 Shortly afterwards, the rml’s youth caucus – around 20 members – held a vote on whether to follow rml’s lead in expelling them, and won it only by a narrow margin. Eleven people, around half of the youth caucus – joined by a minority of rml members like Xiang – left the rml to form a preparatory committee and continued meeting for the next year to discuss strategy and organisation.19 The remaining rml members continued, unsuccessfully, to attempt to turn to industry, with members like Lau Tse-lim, who quit his teaching job to work as an mtr transit worker alongside Ng, participating in a short-lived industrial action in 1980. The rml expanded its focus in the early 1980s to sending activists on clandestine missions to China to provide support to dissidents and smuggle in Trotskyist writings.20 On his first mission, Ng was arrested and quickly released after being forced to confess and provide information about his comrades, while Lau, who made more than 14 trips between 1978 and 1981, ended up in prison for the rest of the decade.21 Ng’s confession led to his expulsion from the party, and the rml, losing its longtime leader and buckling under the weight of an underdeveloped organisational structure with a lack of politicallydeveloped leaders, quickly declined. This split in the Trotskyist camp marked the beginning of two different political paths for the socialists. Around 1982, the departed rml members, mostly young workers and students, formed the Sun Miu Group (i.e., the Pioneer Group). It was mentored by veteran Trotskyists like Xiang Qing, after a year of privately gathering together to strengthen political education in Marx-

17 18 19 20 21

Preparatory Committee 1981, pp. 9–10. Ibid., pp. 1–2. Au Loong-yu, interview with the author, June 2022. Lau San-ching, interview with the author, July 2022. Lau 1992, Chapter 2.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

183

ist principles.22 Immediately after leaving the rml and the ysg, they continued the study groups, recruiting five other friends. They read texts from The Communist Manifesto and Ernest Mandel’s From Class Society to Communism.23 While Wang Fanxi and some fi leaders were sympathetic to the departed minority, they did not give official support to the new organisation, fearing the crystallisation of another split in the Hong Kong Trotskyist movement. The organisation remained small and gathered some allies and new members throughout the 1980s, but it was deeply committed to developing a coherent socialist political vision for Hong Kong while remaining active in the social movement. Some remnants of the rml and other radicals later continued to develop a new strategy of confrontational action against the colonial state, though they gave up on maintaining a formal Trotskyist organisation and principles, as I later mention, while Sun Miu cultivated a less ambitious political vision. By then, Au had returned to college and joined the Hong Kong Federation of Students (hkfs), meeting some other future members of Sun Miu while on a hkfs student delegation to Beijing.24 During this trip, the visitors experienced the bureaucratic and deeply depoliticised nature of student and other organisations in China and became aware of China’s political backwardness under the Communists. From these experiences, Sun Miu continued to develop earlier socialist critiques of China’s economy as it quickened its turn to capitalism. Sun Miu was not yet a regular publication, but it published pamphlets and set up community forums to encourage Hong Kongers to discuss the ongoing Sino-British talks, which completely excluded the voices of everyday Hong Kongers.25 Members met once every two weeks in general meetings, on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, while a smaller executive committee convened in the mornings before the general meetings. However, Sun Miu’s ideals received minimal support from an emerging cohort of liberal leaders that later formed the backbone of an emerging prodemocracy camp. The Sino-British joint discussions saw the beginning of a convergence of Hong Kong civil society and movement leaders, like the former ccp member and teachers’ union leader Szeto Wah and the barrister Martin Lee, who were eager to speed electoral reform. Lau San-ching’s arrest in late 1981 proved to be an early defining moment in the relationship between the

22 23 24 25

Au Loong-yu, interview with the author, June 2022. Regarding the Pioneer group, see also Xiang Qing, interview with Yang Yang, August 2014. Preparatory Committee 1981, p. 12. Preparatory Committee 1981, p. 14. Au Loong-yu, interview with the author, June 2022. J, interview with the author, July 2022. Au Loong-yu, interview with the author, June 2022.

184

li

Trotskyist left and the pro-democracy camp. The rml and the rcp gathered some independent unions, Christian civil-society groups, and other grassroots groups to form a Committee for the Rescue of Lau San-ching, circulating petitions and holding protests throughout the 1980s.26 Notably missing from this support were leaders like Szeto and Szeto’s protege Cheung Man-kwong, who saw Lau and his sort as overly radical in their ideology and their opposition to the prc. The campaign failed to take off, and Lau was not released until almost a decade later, in 1991. (Cheung later wrote an apology for Hong Kong Economic Journal regretting his and his allies’ neglect of Lau’s plight.) This rift signalled an ideological difference that foreshadowed later clashes between the mainline democrats and the leftists: how militantly should Hong Kongers fight for their basic democratic freedoms in this transitional period between rule by London and by Beijing? These ideas were as sensible as they were ignored or rejected by most others in the civil-society movement, which was beginning to formulate and organise around much more conservative demands. Around the same time as the socialists’ joint statement and the Sino-British Joint Declaration, another group of liberal activists formed Meeting Point in 1983 – one of the earliest “prodemocracy” organisations. Unlike Sun Miu and the rcp’s October Review, Meeting Point’s idea of Hong Kong’s democracy rested on prioritising Chinese sovereignty and treating democracy as a gradual process to be negotiated by political elites in the grey space between Britain and China. As Gregor Benton wrote in 1988, Meeting Point’s “programme of political and economic reform would never go beyond the limits that Beijing sets. [It] has made a point of stating its objectives in ways that are acceptable to Beijing … it seems reluctant to do anything to win popular support for its policies”.27 In other words, Meeting Point packaged the “democratic return” of Hong Kong to China as another kind of custodial politics, in which Hong Kongers’ democratic rights would be negotiated by pro-democracy experts, not by Hong Kongers themselves, acting in their own political interests. Members of Meeting Point later formed the conservative wing of the pro-democracy camp (with some even becoming pro-Beijing loyalists), but its core liberal framework was left essentially unchallenged.

26 27

“Petition to free student”, South China Morning Post (scmp), 21 December 1985. Benton 1983, p. 43.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

185

The Trotskyists and the Early Pro-democracy Movement By the second half of the 1980s, the main political issue in Hong Kong was electoral reform. The 1985 electoral reforms introduced the first-ever (indirect) elections to the Legislative Council (LegCo). Szeto, Lee, and others were elected as part of the functional constituencies (representing professional and special interest groups, and widely criticised as undemocratic). Many of the same individuals served on the Basic Law Drafting Committee. The indirect elections helped bring Hong Kong’s civil-society organisations and activists together, and the pro-democracy movement was born from an alliance of those who sought to demand more seats for direct elections leading up to the Handover. Lee, Szeto, and others formed the Joint Committee on the Promotion of Democratic Government (jcpdg), gathering over 190 political organisations in October 1986 to push for more direct elections in the second round of elections and electoral reform in 1988. The forming of the jcpdg solidified a new oppositional alliance that has been years in the making. Many of the jcpdg’s subsidiary groups – various independent civil-society groups, from student and labour organisations to professional associations – have managed to collaborate with one another on issues beyond that of electoral reform, like the campaign to curb the rising prices in public utilities in 1985.28 While the jcpdg provided basic political education on the importance of direct elections, its political vision was limited and it continued to draw on only a small mass base, capable of organising actions of no more than a few thousand.29 The jcpdg’s leadership, in the face of public inaction and the colonial government and pro-ccp forces’ pressure, demanded that only 25 per cent of LegCo seats be put up for direct election in 1988, building up to 50 per cent by the time of the Handover. In a joint statement in 1984, the rml and the rcp’s October Review were the only ones calling not only for full direct elections immediately but for the “reform of the entire political structure”, in order to address the public-private “appropriation of public wealth”.30 October Review called for “the democratic establishment of a fully empowered congress”, accompanied by “a general mobilisation of the people to participate in politics through general elections and the outlining of the people’s right to participate in decision-making, supervision, and the recall of government officials”.31 Unlike the jcpdg, the Trotskyists called for an overhaul of the system 28 29 30 31

Ming Sing in Chiu and Lui (eds) 2000, pp. 26–27. Ibid., p. 35. usfi 1984, vol. 22, no. 23, p. 743. Ibid.

186

li

that privileged the interests of Hong Kong’s capitalists. Sun Miu argued that Hong Kongers should not only rally around a compromised demand regarding the number of directly-elected seats but should also try to develop mass democratic organisations. In other words, they needed to learn how to exercise power on their own terms. An organised movement with a democratic rather than a top-down and nationalist programme for decolonisation would provide the most effective means of promoting Hong Kong’s autonomy. As Sun Miu had already suggested in 1983, such a vision would not come easily: it required “the masses to wage a long-term and persistent struggle, unceasingly drawing power from different aspects of society”.32 These conflicting political attitudes came to head in the civil-society opposition to the construction of a nuclear power plant in Daya Bay in 1986 (when Sun Miu first began publishing regularly). Sun Miu and some other Trotskyists were active in the same coalition as the other pro-democracy organisations before the Tian’anmen Square massacre and leading right up to the formation of the jcpdg. Sun Miu was not an organised Trotskyist party in the technical sense, but the actual Trotskyist parties – the rml and the rcp/October Review – were explicitly forbidden to join the newly-formed anti-Daya Bay coalition, convened by liberal pro-democracy leaders.33 The fear of pollution and radiation, especially after the Chernobyl disaster, created widespread public feeling and led to one fifth of Hong Kong residents signing a petition opposing the plant. The campaign ultimately failed, as the ccp and other local pro-Beijing allies insisted on the plant’s construction, against the wishes of the coalition and the Hong Kong community. Throughout the movement, liberal pro-democracy leaders like Cheung (representing Szeto and the teachers’ union) insisted on a non-confrontational dialogue with Beijing. While the Trotskyists and others were organising for a mass rally at Victoria Park on the day that the deal for the power plant was to be signed, Cheung threatened to withdraw the teachers’ union from the coalition if such a proposal passed and called instead for a rally more than a week after the deal was signed, to be held at the smaller Morse Park. The Morse Park proposal won out, and the leaders of the coalition ended up forbidding anyone from disseminating political materials at the rally without the approval of the coalition leadership. Later, Au accused the pro-democracy leaders of “conspiring to minimise the mass movement”.34 Daya Bay had shown the mainstream pro-democracy leaders’ antipathy to radical politics. Not surprisingly, they were keen to ensure that groups like Sun 32 33 34

Sun Miu Group 1983. Au 2016. Ibid.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

187

Miu were unable to gain admission to the jcpdg. Szeto, Lee, and other liberals’ sense of “democracy” was democratic only to the extent that the Hong Kong masses beyond the activists’ close circles were unable to determine the framework of demands. Sun Miu’s demand throughout the 1980s was for all LegCo seats to be directly elected. This was cited as a reason for Sun Miu’s exclusion from the jcpdg’s in November, when the jcpdg was pushing for elections for half of LegCo seats at most, for fear of damaging its relationship with Beijing.35 After the failure of the push for direct elections in 1988, tensions between the pro-democracy movement and the ccp began to grow, even though many prodemocrats still favoured a more diplomatic relationship with Beijing. Popular discontent in the Mainland was also brewing, fuelled by the effects of market reforms and students’ glimpses of liberal democracy beyond one-party rule. Beijing had just quelled a round of student mobilisations in 1986–7, sparked by economic woes due to inflation, government cronyism, and the general lack of civil rights. While all these issues would soon come to head, in 1989, the jcpdg had shown minimal interest in supporting dissidents in the Mainland and had prevented a direct confrontation with ccp rule in the year before, focusing instead on winning the upcoming 1991 elections.36 Hong Kong’s solidarity with the Chinese democracy movement was mainly championed by the Trotskyists, among student groups and other small grassroots organisations.37 In 1988, some Trotskyists and other left-wing activists formed April Fifth Action (named after the date of the first Tian’anmen Incident more than a decade earlier, in 1976), to continue a more agitational approach towards Beijing. April Fifth Action followed the direct-action tradition of their forebears in the 1970s, and promoted militant actions against the ccp regime, unlike the jcpdg. April Fifth Action popularised the rml’s militant political style while illustrating its limitations. It was not the rml’s direct organisational and ideological heir, but it carried with it the Trotskyist party’s confrontational spirit. April Fifth Action’s political programme was much looser, focused on a vaguely anticapitalist programme, and it directly targeted the government in Beijing, gathering a host of left-wing activists from among former rml members like Lai Siu-ching, Lau Tze-lim, and Tang Yuen-ching, including libertarian socialists like Raymond Lau Wing-kam.38 The group was later joined by another former rml member Leung Kwok-hung, Long Hair, who became perhaps the most

35 36 37 38

Ibid. Pik Man Wong, “The Pro-Chinese Democracy Movement in Hong Kong”, in Chiu and Lui (eds) 2000, p. 63. Ibid., p. 64. Lau 2015. Lau San-ching, interview with the author, July 2022.

188

li

prominent left-wing activist in Hong Kong history. It had no defined membership, regular meeting structure, or coordinating committee.39 April Fifth Action quickly adopted a militant, confrontational approach: like the rml, its base was always small, but its members were keen on militant actions. Now with even less of a coherently socialist programme, like the rml under the fi’s industrial strategy, April Fifth Action engaged in street actions to stir up mass awareness. As the Hong Kong public began growing ever more uneasy with the Handover, the rml’s actions started earning them a larger audience. The divisions within the rml were reflected in the differences between it and Sun Miu. While both groups worked together to organise a commemorative protest on 5 April 1989, they broke over whether or not to apply for a legal permit. Sun Miu favoured applying, to prevent needless arrests, but most of April Fifth Action did not. Raymond Lau derided Sun Miu as “legal Marxists” and “Mensheviks”, acting as reformists unwilling to challenge state authority, while Sun Miu members argued that their mass base was too small to escalate in this fashion and said April Fifth Action’s strategy could lead to needless arrests.40 Wang Fanxi, writing in exile from Leeds, sent letters to both Leung and Au urging their groups to find common ground, but to no avail.41 Such divisions proved to be relatively unimportant in the short term: no one was prepared for the massive mobilisation that was to come. From February to April, April Fifth Action and Sun Miu, together with some scattered student groups, had already organised signature campaigns and other actions to put pressure on pro-democracy politicians and the general public to oppose the ccp’s one-party rule and the jailing of pro-democracy political figures.42 They warned that this was not an abstract solidarity campaign and emphasised the need to build a democratic mass movement in Hong Kong capable of challenging ccp authoritarianism, in order to prevent the same fate befalling Hong Kong. The socialists and student groups’ pleas were little heeded by the public for weeks, though they built an important base for the Tian’anmen solidarity movement that was to erupt in just weeks. The death of the former Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang on 15 April triggered an explosive mass movement that re-energised Chinese students and workers and finally connected with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Within days, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students had occupied Tian’anmen Square. hkfs led the fight to continue to wage campaigns, and even sent delegations (which included some 39 40 41 42

Lau San-ching, interview with the author, July 2022. Lau 2015; Au 2015b. Wang 2004b, p. 5. Wong in Chiu and Lui (eds) 2000, p. 64.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

189

April Fifth Action members) to Tian’anmen Square.43 Some organisations in the jcpdg publicised their first statement in support of the Chinese students on 4 May, followed by the first jcpdg solidarity rally at Xinhua News Agency on 16 May – a few days after the Tian’anmen and Hong Kong students’ hunger strike. However, the jcpdg leadership refused to work with April Fifth Action. A district councillor said that they feared the group might gain in popularity in the upcoming 1991 elections. They ended up marching to Xinhua along different routes.44 Ng, disgraced in 1982 on the radical left for confessing to Beijing authorities, had stayed in touch with April Fifth Action ever since its formation. He encouraged a key jcpdg leader to develop a separate organisation devoted to organising solidarity with Chinese dissidents.45 The result was the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (“the Alliance”), a jcpdg-led project. Despite Ng’s contribution, the formation of the Alliance was shrouded in secrecy. Wong Wai-hung, then-chair of the independent government workers’ union and a member of the jcpdg’s executive committee, found out about the Alliance only when it was announced at the rally. Wong, who had previously voiced concerns about other jcpdg members’ exclusion of Sun Miu during the push for direct elections in 1987, was privately informed about the appointed first executive committee of the Alliance before its public announcement – a list that left out Ng due to Szeto’s refusal to work with radical leftists.46 After breaking with April Fifth Action, Sun Miu members shifted their focus to convening the Society for Democratic Struggle.47 Sun Miu members hoped to gather sympathisers through the Society to foster a sense of “revolutionary democracy”, centring on connecting democratic movements in Hong Kong and China to counter the ccp’s “crisis of ‘bureaucratic socialism’”.48 While its members were integral to the Society’s organising committee, the goal was not simply recruitment for Sun Miu but to help foster a bottom-up and participatory approach. The Society encouraged participants to hold democratic debates and organise actions. It gathered 50–80 people fairly regularly, reaching nearly 200 attendees at its height, including blue-collar workers and young academ-

43 44 45 46 47 48

Chan 2019. Lau 2015. Wong 1989, 12, p. 28. Ibid. M., interview with the author, March 2021. Society for Democratic Struggle 1990, Fendou tongxun, vol. 1. Fendou tongxun was a shortlived publication started by the Society for Democratic Struggle.

190

li

ics. Internal friction over strategy and lack of clarity caused its eventual decline. Still, Sun Miu’s ideals were consistent with its belief that Hong Kongers’ capacity for mass democratic decision-making must be strengthened. In the weeks leading up to the massacre, the solidarity movement ballooned into the biggest mass movement the city had seen yet. More than one million people marched on 21 May, when the Alliance was formed. Beijing declared martial law and Chinese workers fought the police on the streets for days while the students continued their occupation. People poured out into the streets in mourning on 4 June, when the first shots were fired. But the jcpdg’s topdown politics were only strengthened by the Alliance’s operations, now managed by Szeto, leaving behind other jcpdg duties to his allies like Martin Lee and Albert Ho. The Alliance was at the centre of this political upsurge, and its consequences for Hong Kong were immense, starting with Szeto’s unilateral decision to cancel a planned general strike in solidarity on 7 June, to the Trotskyists’ chagrin. After some pressure from Baroness Lydia Dunn, the former bank director, who proposed an even more moderate alternative to the prodemocracy camp’s demand for direct elections, and news of some minor disturbances affecting Chinese banks on that morning, Szeto cancelled a planned strike.49 Hundreds of thousands still marched to Xinhua, but the Alliance continued to curtail any radically disruptive mobilisations, holding back in the final moment what might have been Hong Kong’s largest general strike. What followed was a quiet sidelining of the radical left in the Alliance’s membership. On 9 June, Wong suggested opening up the Alliance’s board election proceedings to other community organisations, but he was ignored. The leadership’s favourites for the board election were moved to the top of the list. Sun Miu was prevented by the Alliance from disseminating its positions at its meetings. Articles in mainstream outlets like Hong Kong Economic Journal and Ming Pao accused the Trotskyists of being unduly “aggressive” during the Alliance meetings.50 Wong later quit the Alliance, frustrated by its increasingly undemocratic leadership. Cheung Ka-man, formerly chair of the Hong Kong University Students’ Union, said that “we must never work with the ‘Trotskyites’, or else we would have no room to negotiate with the ccp”.51 It was not until a few years later that former rml members like Long Hair and Leung Yiu-chung were invited to join the leadership of the Alliance. They included Lau San-ching, after having served his ten years’ prison sentence on the Mainland.52 49 50 51 52

Au 2015c. Wong 1989, 12, p. 28. 8. Au 2015a. “Lau San-ching neidi beibu, weishi yuanshou” (The Arrest of Lau San-ching in Mainland China), Apple Daily, 3 January 2011.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

191

Accusations of “Trotskyism” became a tool for sidelining critics. Activists, in particular those who advocated a harder line against the ccp and were for greater democratic participation in the movement, were a particular target. Sun Miu saw the Tian’anmen protests as an opportunity to push the mass movement beyond the conservative limits set by pro-democracy leaders, centred around reform within the purview of the Basic Law. The Alliance’s key demands were echoed by the pro-democracy movement for decades, and were taken directly from an April Fifth Action leaflet.53 Later in the year, April Fifth Action was again thrust into the spotlight. Xinhua hosted a reception on 29 September, celebrating the prc’s anniversary. April Fifth Action led a protest by students demanding accountability for the Tian’anmen Massacre. The colonial authorities dispatched hundreds of riot police and surrounded the protestors. The police refused to let the protestors march forward, and protestors were beaten. Raymond Lau Wing-kam recalled being dragged into a nearby building and beaten.54 Eight protestors were arrested (seven being April Fifth Action members), and Lau’s left eye suffered permanent injuries.55 The group spent the next months gathering legal support for these people. Footage of the police brutality was publicised by a reporter, and the government wanted to press charges. At the end of October, the South China Morning Post released a private letter to Xinhua from a political advisor to the Hong Kong governor, arguing that the colonial government “has no intention of allowing Hong Kong to be used as a base for subversive activities against the People’s Republic of China”.56 People’s fears were confirmed: the colonial government was willing to resort to violent methods to appease Beijing. Despite public sympathy for the April Fifth Action members, the request for solidarity from the Alliance and other leaders was largely ignored. Only a few organisations publicly supported April Fifth Action at its public trial, while the Alliance and other leaders refused to issue even a statement of support. On the night of the rally, Martin Lee said in a television interview with tvb that the police’s methods were appropriate.57 After the incident, April Fifth Action imploded and became less active until around the Handover. The rml disbanded in 1990.

53

54 55 56 57

Mo Jianxuan and Lam Junqian, “Zhilianhui gangling, yuanzi Changmao chuandan” (The Programme of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China: Source from a Leaflet Preserved by Long Hair), Apple Daily, 4 June 1989. Lau 2015. Ibid., and “April 5th in Protest at Court”, scmp, 22 November 1989. Fanny Wong, scmp, 26 October 1989. tvb News, 30 September 1989.

192

li

The decline of such groups also signalled the end of collective mass resistance before the Handover. In November, the Society for Democratic Struggle and Sun Miu called on Hong Kongers in the wake of the Tian’anmen movement’s defeat to “continue to fight for political democratisation during the transitional period before 1997, going beyond the limitations of the political system set by the Basic Law”.58 The demand to radically rewrite the Basic Law to guarantee full direct elections was a necessary tactic to deepen China’s internal political crisis by reconnecting with the mass movement in China. But the movement had already lost momentum, and Sun Miu members continued participating in ever smaller-scale upsurges, like the short-lived solidarity coalition for the 1993 Cathay Pacific airline workers’ strike and the renewed Baodiao movement in 1996. Sun Miu also began deepening its relationship with student Trotskyists from Taiwan, like Yang Wei-chung, organising political exchanges in both Hong Kong and Taiwan.59 For a few years after 1995, it organised a community service centre in the Kwai Chung and Tsuen Wan area.60 This service centre helped promote political education around climate justice through youth weekend camps.61 The former rml member Leung Yiu-chung formed a Neighbourhood and Workers’ Service Centre and served as a pro-labour voice on the Legislative Council beginning in 1995. In the early 1990s, the Liberals pushed for electoral reform instead of strengthening the mass movement. Most of their reforms were overturned after the Handover.

After the Handover In the early 1990s, the Trotskyists were marginalised in mainstream pro-democracy coalitional politics. Sun Miu and rcp members ran small-scale independent campaigns for the district council. The rcp member Chan Cheong, who later ran under a variety of party affiliations, served as a district council member from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, although he had little to do with party work. Another Sun Miu member unsuccessfully ran for district council in Tuen Mun in 1991, followed by two other failed bids by a new young member, Lam Chi-leung. In 1993, Sun Miu publicly renamed itself “Pioneer”. The Trotskyists’ organisational decline showed that early pro-democracy leaders had no intention of accommodating more radical voices calling for decolonisation, and 58 59 60 61

Society for Democratic Struggle and Sun Miu Group 1989, 13. J, interview with the author, July 2022. Lam Chi-leung, interview with the author, July 2022. J, interview with the author, September 2022.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

193

those leaders were content to ally with the colonial and Beijing governments to marginalise the Trotskyists. Sun Miu and April Fifth Action both favoured political solutions that were unacceptable to pro-democracy leaders: a massled democracy to transform the structure of Hong Kong society, or militant provocations to challenge the police. The shift of sovereignty in 1997 did not represent a significant break in Hong Kong’s trajectory. The neo-liberalisation of the city’s public services continued, especially after the stock market crisis of the same year. A key site for the global financial order, Hong Kong was as ever the playground for financial speculation. The growing power of the imf, wto, and the World Bank meant that economic deregulation was crucially shaping Hong Kong’s identity, now in the hands of Beijing.62 Through the 1990s, Hong Kong saw unprecedented changes in its labour base, powered by these international developments. Various Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia and Thailand, had followed the Philippines’s lead by relying on privatised labour export to boost domestic economies, and the loosening of labour laws in Hong Kong led to an explosive growth in labour migration from these regions.63 Public sectors saw widespread privatisation.64 The Government increasingly limited the supply of public housing. Sun Miu and April Fifth Action continued along different paths, while still collaborating occasionally in various campaigns. Sun Miu members built the early infrastructure for an anti-globalisation movement while supporting labour struggles from below; April Fifth Action, under the auspices of Long Hair and his comrades’ confrontational tactics, gained popularity within the pro-democracy camp. Both strands had to contend with the neo-liberalisation of Hong Kong’s economy while struggling to articulate the role of left-wing activism under ccp rule. The pro-democracy camp became more coherent as an organised coalition in the early 1990s and channelled political energies towards building an electoral opposition. But these efforts met with external challenges and internal conflicts, leading to structural instability in the pro-democracy camp. Governor Chris Patten’s last-minute electoral reform helped propel a sizeable base of pro-democracy activists into office. These people hoped for an automatic transition of this government into the Handover, but Beijing did not recog-

62 63

64

Ho-Fung Hung, “Chinese State Capitalism in Hong Kong” in Lui, Chiu, Yep (eds) 2018, pp. 230–48. Skeldon 1998, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 201–18; Jones and Findlay 1998, vol. 29, issue 1, pp. 87–104; Vivienne Wen and Amy Sim, “Transnational Labour Networks in Female Labour Migration”, in Ananta and Arifin (eds) 2004, pp. 166–98. Globalisation Monitor Editors 2000, 5, p. 1.

194

li

nise the colonial government’s final expansion of the number of elected offices. The National People’s Congress unilaterally imposed an unelected “Provisional Legislative Council” as the transitional ruling body until the 1998 LegCo elections, and the pro-democracy camp held demonstrations at least every other month for several months. Sun Miu participated in a coalition calling for fully direct elections, started by former members of the Democratic Party and other allies dissatisfied with the party’s conservatism, but later resigned. A “United Front against the Provisional Legislature” led to April Fifth Action organising rallies with more mainstream pro-democracy figures. An action in November 1996 saw multiple arrests.65 Political life outside LegCo took a path that only occasionally aligned with electoral politics. De-industrialisation shifted the battlefield for left-wing and workers’ struggles: as manufacturing moved north into the Mainland, service and care work skyrocketed in Hong Kong, while public-sector workers faced job threats that accelerated after the Handover. Left-wing organisations worked together on certain campaigns, but the foci became more dispersed. Sometimes moments of collaboration emerged. While electoral dramas raged right up to the Handover, members of the Hong Kong Federation of Students and socialist groups ranging from Pioneer to April Fifth Action formed the “Solidarity Against the World Bank and imf” coalition. Mainstream opinion predicted the protest’s repression, which is what happened.66 This convergence of students and workers was small and short-lived, but it laid the groundwork for further anti-globalisation movements in the following year. The differences between Pioneer and April Fifth Action’s allies persisted. Au, writing under a pseudonym, criticised what he saw as a “Culture of Confrontation”. In his view, reflecting on the historic failures of such provocations, the overemphasis on direct action with minimal mass participation hampered the development of “the difficult work of political education and organising to secure mass organising work”.67 The student activist Ng Gongshao retorted that direct action was an important strategy, not to “rush into the convention hall but to resist political law, using non-violent methods to combat police power”. Ng disagreed with Au’s characterisation of organisations like April Fifth Action, and said that it retained its reputation among the people and raised large amounts of financial support for events commemorating Tian’anmen.68 April Fifth Action’s successor, the League of Social Demo65 66 67 68

Emily Lau, scmp, 12 December 1996. Olivier Poole, scmp, 22 September 1997. Au 1997. Ng 1997.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

195

crats, continued using provocative actions as part of its organising, while Au’s camp failed to gain popular momentum. On the other hand, the League’s reliance on such tactics neglected to build enough infrastructure to support mass organising. April Fifth Action, though not strictly an organisational successor to the rml, intensified a crucial aspect of the rml’s political work: sacrificing the political substance of strengthening party-building to prioritise direct action. But all these nuances were invisible to the public eye. An anonymous student activist criticised mainstream media for “bastardising the movement’s original aims by diverting attention from a movement against the World Bank and imf’s exploitation of people in China to viewing it as a preliminary test of the possibility of public protests after the first mass rally on the day of the Handover”.69 People were not interested in such ideological differences in an opposition movement still in formation. They wanted to know if independent assembly or freedom of speech was even possible under the new rulers – and the direct action wing of the left eventually came to discover that it could claim militant street action as its key domain to build the radical wing of the pro-democracy camp. The long-term trade-off of this strategy was that the left lacked an independent identity. Militant social movement struggles therefore only occasionally meshed with the interests of mainstream pro-democracy leaders. Pioneer members, following the Trotskyists’ legacy of promoting solidarity with the opposition in China, also thought Hong Kongers must do even more now to organise with mainland Chinese in the face of the city’s rapid neo-liberalisation and the imminent Handover. In response to Hong Kong’s role in facilitating financial globalisation, they helped develop organisations and campaigns to make Hong Kong an important base for anti-globalisation. The 1993 Zhili incident, when a massive fire in a factory in Shenzhen killed 87 people, brought together trade unions, Christian labour groups, and Trotskyists and was seen as a symptom of China’s turn to foreign investments and capitalist deregulation. Labour protection weakened as workers’ “iron rice bowls” shattered. The price of Beijing’s campaign to eradicate extreme poverty by promoting economic development was the massive expansion of a precarious, impoverished proletariat. Hong Kong, as a facilitating site for capitalist investment, also provided an organising opportunity for the left and labour activists in China. Left-leaning ngo s, migrant unions, and anti-globalisation groups in Hong Kong began to become much more organised. The anti-imf coalition

69

Ding 1997.

196

li

continued to convene as a new group, “New Social Forum” (including some Pioneer members), formed Globalisation Monitor as a way to build community awareness of neoliberal globalisation. These developments in globalisation accelerated as part of the neoliberal hksar regime’s measures to combat the effects of the 1998 financial crisis. The stock market crashed. Hong Kong’s handling of the financial crisis has been touted as part of the “Asian economic miracle”, during which speculators were thwarted by the mass-buying of stocks in various companies to cushion the effects of the crisis.70 The government began reselling these shares as part of a large-scale effort to restore market confidence. As in many other countries, this led to a new austerity campaign that reshaped many sectors of Hong Kong society. As Chen Yun-chung and Pun Ngai explain, “Cutting the deficit became a reason for the government to accelerate the privatisation of public assets so as to stimulate private investment and buttress the profit margins of the private market. The rationale for privatisation through the cheap transfer of public assets to private control was that it would prevent a government deficit and boost private confidence in Hong Kong after the crisis”.71 From May to August of 1998, numerous workers faced pay cuts, while workers’ actions continue to grow. The government responded by rejecting proposed legislation to protect striking workers in January 1999, in order to discourage “any drastic action that intensifies conflicts will have a negative impact on society, hit public confidence and, in the end, affect economic recovery”.72 Over a thousand Telecom workers started a strike on 1 November. Other strikes followed. A planned government wage cut of 35 per cent for all migrant domestic workers brought about the most significant political response yet from migrant workers’ organisations: various workers’ organisations of different ethnic minorities organised a 6,000-person rally (the largest migrant workers’ protest ever at the time in the city), forcing the government to reduce the wage cut to five per cent. Pioneer had just emerged from an unsuccessful LegCo campaign in 1998, where Lam Chi-leung ran a campaign against privatisation in the midst of the labour upsurge. The former rml member Lau San-ching, who was assisting efforts in support of the mainland opposition at the time, had helped organise the social workers’ association after his ten years in prison in mainland China.73 He passed on the leadership role to Lam and another Sun Miu member, Tam 70 71 72 73

Ray Bashford and Enoch Yiu, scmp, 15 August 1998. Chen and Pun 2007, vol. 7, no. 2 p. 75. Cheung Yi, scmp, 21 January 1999. Lau San-ching, interview with the author, July 2022.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

197

Leung-ying, who had become radicalised earlier in the decade. Tam and Lam began organising the union, now renamed as the Frontline Welfare Employees Union, against the government’s planned privatisation cuts. While fellow social workers were at first more interested in relatively conservative demands, Sun Miu members helped to introduce ideas of workers’ democracy and pushed their union members towards a broader anti-privatisation programme. As the threat of privatisation spread, they were able to make links to other government workers, and an informal coalition of government workers’ unions emerged.74 The Department of Housing Authority workers also faced “restructuring” layoffs. The authority’s chairperson, Rosanna Wong Yick-ming, declared that the department might lay off as much as 14 per cent of its 12,000 staff over the course of two years as well as cutting wages.75 The 10,000-strong Alliance of the Housing Department Unions, formed in June 1997, mobilised workers from 29 unions to resist the government plan, beginning with a rally and sit-in on 9 January 1999.76 Lam Man-cheuk, a rank-and-file organiser, eventually emerged as a vocal leader of the 1999–2000 Housing Authority workers’ movement. Pioneer members like Lam and Tam were known for their efforts within civil servants’ unions in opposition to privatisation, and Lam Mancheuk reached out to them for support. With Pioneer members as organising strategists, Lam’s affiliate unions continued to build their movement. They even supported other public sector unions’ organising, and were supported by some pro-democracy legislators. Pioneer members like Lam and Tam participated in a mass civil servants’ union alliance, while Lam, Au, and Xiang continued to advise Lam Man-cheuk on strategy.77 More than 9000 Housing Authority workers marched en masse on 18 April.78 More than 20,000 civil servants marched on 23 May, followed by a Water Department workers’ march on 6 June.79 Tenants also organised to support the Housing Authority workers, and vice versa. Hua Fu residents turned out on the April march, while Housing Authority workers vowed not to pursue tenants for unpaid rent.80 However, the Housing Authority workers’ movement began to decline in the following year. The government released a “redundancy” retirement plan that promised each worker with more than 20 years of experience a lump

74 75 76 77 78 79 80

Tam Leung Ying, interview with the author, February 2022. Ng Kang-Chung, scmp, 1 January 1999. Alex Lo, scmp, 19 January 1999. Lam Chi-leung, interview with the author, July 2022. Chloe Lai, scmp, 30 April 1999. Tam 1999, vol. 1, p. 11. Chloe Lai, scmp, 7 May 1999.

198

li

sum of $2.59 million and a $11,600 monthly pension in exchange for forfeiting their jobs in favour of privatisation.81 At first, Lam Man-cheuk and others in the union resisted the compromise, but in the end, the government proposal successfully split the unions’ ranks, and many chose to accept the package and retire. Lam Man-cheuk himself later accepted the package and left organising in July 2001, despite initially publicly encouraging his colleagues to reject the deal.82 But the government retirement ploy turned out to be too good to be true. South China Morning Post reported that although more than 3500 workers applied, only around 900 benefited from the deal.83 Lam Chi-leung commented that he and other Pioneer organisers had made the mistake of depending too much on their relationship to a tiny minority of the rank-andfile leadership, so that when Lam Man-cheuk gave in and ceased organising “nearly overnight”, they had lost much of their link to the Housing Authority workers, and they should instead have devoted more resources to developing other rank-and-file leaders.84 Au also pointed out that Sun Miu was too small to build a relationship of trust with rank-and-file members, especially since this was one of the first times that the various sides had cooperated directly.85 The Housing Authority workers’ struggle was only one of many public sector struggles in response to the privatisation of government departments. Lam Chi-leung’s own union rallied against welfare changes in November 1999, especially after a funding package that threatened pay cuts in April of the following year. The social workers’ union later confronted Carrie Lam, then Director of Social Services, in opposition to new wage cuts and other policies.86 These struggles were united against the government’s Enhanced Productivity Programme (epp).87 Cheng Ching-fat, leader of the homecare workers’ union, told Lam Chi-leung that the struggle across public sectors against privatisation should be grounded in the “long and difficult work of organising low-income workers … in order to empower the workers to recognise that only through collective power can they fight for their rights”.88 81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88

Chloe Lai, scmp, 12 January 2000. Leung Ri-sheng, “Fangshu gonghui daqishou yeshi ‘feijican’” (The Flagbearer of the Housing Authority Workers’ Union also gives in to Retirement Deal), Sintao Daily News, 21 July, 2001. Ng Kang-chung, scmp, 21 November 2000. Lam Chi-leung, interview with the author, December 2021. Au Loong-yu, interview with the author, July 2022. Chan Ying 2000, p. 3. See more detail about the epp in Lam 2003, 27, no. 1, pp. 53–70. Cheng 2000, vol. 5, p. 13.

trotskyism and the early pro-democracy movement

199

These movements, following the two large-scale civil servants’ rallies in 1999, ultimately fizzled out. However, although this groundswell of activism did not fully coalesce into a movement to challenge state power, it brought fresh attention to grassroots issues even among LegCo politicians. Different civil servants’ unions came together to organise an “anti-reform” rally on 9 July 2000, forcing Tung Chee-hwa, the Chief Executive, to meet with the activists.89 Representatives from public sector unions formed the Joint Committee on Public Service Policy to pressure candidates in the LegCo election to oppose “privatisation, corporatisation, contracting-out of services and the lump-sum grant policy for public bodies”.90 Many candidates asked the civil servants’ unions for endorsement, and Lam Man-cheuk noted that no LegCo candidates had approached them for support in 1998. The civil servants’ movement against privatisation reached its peak, supported by hkctu’s newly-formed civil servants’ organising support team and other movement allies, in the 35,000-strong rally against wage cuts in July 2002 – one of the largest of its kind in Hong Kong since the 1989 solidarity rally with the students on Tiananmen Square.

… By the turn of the century, the remaining Pioneer and April Fifth Action members slowly began to concentrate on other organisations. Pioneer members became more deeply embedded in Hong Kong and China labour and antiglobalisation mobilising. The movement against Article 23 and Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa in 2003 failed to produce new, lasting mass organisations and campaigns, but it created a focus on new possibilities and helped bring a new generation of leftists into being. Globalisation Monitor continued to develop its base, joined by more and more labour ngo s in support of workers’ rights on the Mainland, while some Pioneer members, in individual or other capacities, helped build an anti-globalisation movement around the time of the World Trade Organisation’s meeting in Hong Kong in 2004. Globalisation Monitor and Pioneer’s role in helping to convene the anti-wto movement marked their most important intervention in Hong Kong politics, but it was also their last, and therefore lies beyond the scope of this article. Long Hair, on the other hand, became his very own tour de force: after campaigning unsuccessfully in 2000 for a LegCo seat, he won one in 2004 with a large mandate, paving the way for a new political force in the pro-democracy camp. Building on his electoral vic-

89 90

May Sin-mi Hon, scmp, 10 July 2000. Kong Lai-fan, scmp, 22 July 2000 and May Sin-mi Hon, scmp, 31 August 2000.

200

li

tory, Long Hair and other former rml members like Lau and Tang formed the League of Social Democrats in 2006 in coalition with a diverse array of movement figures that reached beyond the traditional left. The decline of organised Trotskyist parties in the late 1970s did not mark the end of the Trotskyists’ legacy. The political debates and differences within and between the rml and the rcp paved the way for different visions that would continue to shape left-wing formations well past the Handover. Former individual members of two increasingly-defunct Trotskyist parties were often sidelined during the rise of the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s and 1990s, but their participation in the city’s opposition offered radical perspectives for the social movements. Ultimately, the Trotskyists’ direct impact and legacy in Hong Kong politics remained marginal, but their political thought and work pointed to the possibility of building militant movements against the capitalism that most other allies and critics of both the British and Chinese regimes sought to maintain. Hong Kongers, of course, have been no stranger to mass militant struggle, but their many uprisings, in 1989, 2003, 2014, or 2019, have all been largely spontaneous, with no clear ideological programme or vision. In today’s unprecedented period of political repression, we must re-examine every aspect of our own history to learn how to rebuild the movement. The Trotskyists’ legacy is more than ever relevant today, for it shows us the difficulties of building an independent, organised, and democratic mass movement for selfdetermination in Hong Kong.

The Postwar Generations of Hong Kong Trotskyists and Local Social Movements (2022) Au Loong-yu

Au is a leading Hong Kong socialist who joined the Trotskyists in 1976 and cofounded the Pioneer Group in the early 1980s. This article, written specially for this volume, reviews the long-term efforts of the Trotskyists in Hong Kong to influence the movements for democratic self-determination and a minimum wage.

In 1952, the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) secretly arrested all the Trotskyists (of both the majority and the minority1) in China. As a result, a mere slither of the independent Chinese left remained, chiefly in Hong Kong. Most of its members were in branches of the majority Trotskyist faction in the colony. As soon as the colonial government discovered the Trotskyists, they were arrested and deported. Those expelled in this way included Wang Fanxi (minority) and Xiang Qing (majority). From the 1970s onwards, young people born since 1950, influenced by world youth radicalisation, themselves became radical and launched the Chinese Language Movement2 and the Baowei Diaoyutai Movement (“Baodiao Movement” for short).3 However, they soon became politically divided. Once the climax of the movement was over, liberal youth retreated from it (it made a comeback in the late 1970s but less radical), while young Maoists tried to channel its afterglow into identification with the ccp, thus effectively abandoning social protest against the colonial government.4 Only the anarchists and Trotskyists remained in the increasingly isolated social

1 The Communist League of China (China’s Trotskyist party) split in 1942 over the issue of the nature of China’s resistance war against Japan after Pearl Harbor. The central leader of the majority was Peng Shuzhi, while Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi led the minority. 2 This movement, which started in 1970, demanded that the Chinese language be accepted as one of Hong Kong’s official languages. 3 This movement, which began in Hong Kong in 1971, aimed at pressuring the Chinese governments (in both Beijing and Taipei) to stop the US government handing over the Diaoyutai Islands (called the Senkaku in Japanese) to Japan, on the grounds that they belonged to China. 4 After the Cultural Revolution and especially starting with the death of Lin Biao in 1971, Beijing instructed the Hong Kong Communist party to stop fighting the colonial government (as for instance in 1967, when it launched a revolt and a “general strike”) and “quietly await the future emancipation by Beijing” instead.

© Au Loong-yu, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_018

202

au

movement, ready to engage in civil disobedience. I joined the Trotskyists in 1976, after the movement had begun to ebb. I was 19 at the time. I had joined the Baodiao Movement in 1971, but it took me five years to figure out a way forward.

The New Culture Movement and the Chinese Trotskyists What was the intellectual legacy of the two generations of postwar Trotskyism in Hong Kong and how does it relate to Hong Kong’s future? In the past, whenever the newspapers Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao5 talked about the Trotskyists, which they sometimes did, they labelled them “anti-Chinese, antiCommunist, and anti-people”. What attracted me to the Trotskyists was a youth journal they brought out, called Xin sichao (“New thought”). I read it for a year before I decided to join. It had three antis of its own, but they were “anticapitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-bureaucratic”. It paired “fighting for socialist democracy” with an active struggle against ccp bureaucracy, a stance that summarised their platform. Coming to this position was a natural evolution from my youthful acceptance of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the broader New Culture Movement that gave birth to it, especially the democracy and science preached in the 1910s by Chen Duxiu, the future founder of the ccp. I attended a Catholic secondary school in Hong Kong, which was very conservative. The curriculum was positively colonial – I never saw any of Chen Duxiu’s writings even in my Chinese class. My Chinese teacher was fond of attacking the New Culture Movement, which he described as deviant. I still remember him calling Chen Duxiu a “poisonous beast” (Chen “Dushou”, a Cantonese pun on Chen’s given name). Later, this brought to mind Lu Xun’s famous “method of spiritual victory”, by which a self-deceiving individual rationalises actual failure into psychological triumph. The teacher’s attack on Chen Duxiu stimulated me to look for answers, and I often went to the bookstores in Mongkok to seek out books on the New Culture Movement, which I devoured hungrily. At the time, I became an avid reader of the Chinese Students’ Weekly, which I felt was the embodiment of the New Culture Movement. Later I learned that the publisher, Union Press (Youlian), was part of the so-called Third Force (originally under the Kuomintang, but later somewhat critical of the Kuomintang, and a recipient of US aid). When China and the United States started dealing with each other in 1971, the US aid ceased and so did the publication. Not surprisingly, despite

5 Newspapers published by the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong.

the postwar generations of hong kong trotskyists

203

its ostensible commitment to the heritage of May Fourth, it never talked about Chen Duxiu or his fellow Communist leader Li Dazhao,6 and only minimally about the radical author Lu Xun. Although originally inspired by the weekly, I did not become a liberal or a third force thinker, since I read many of Lu Xun’s writings, as well as others by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. I mention this not only to illustrate my development but because it relates to the relationship between liberalism and socialism. I have always believed that the Maoist school, which completely dismisses political liberalism, is wrong and not truly socialist. I received my primary education in this respect from the journal New Thought.

The Past and Present of the National Assembly and Democratic Self-Determination Soon after joining New Thought (in the form of the Young Socialist Group), I realised that there was a group of veteran Trotskyists behind it, and that they published the journal October Review. These people were organised underground. Besides their own organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party, they also ran a secret working group for young people that traced its roots back to the early Trotskyist youth group.7 I soon joined this youth group and helped to distribute a leaflet calling for a “Hong Kong and Kowloon People’s Assembly”. This was soon followed by the arrest of Li Huaiming, a key member of both the New Thought group and October Review. By that time, the colonial government, which had undergone a slight reform, charged him with the least serious offence (of distributing a leaflet without permission), after which the judge issued him with a fine. The “Hong Kong and Kowloon People’s Assembly” aimed at overthrowing the colonial government by mean of a campaign of democratic self-determination. The young Trotskyists deduced this from the old Trotskyists’ traditional idea of a “National Assembly”.8 The place of the National Assembly in the history of the modern Chinese revolution is a reflection of the twists and turns of

6 Li Dazhao (1889–1926) was, alongside Chen Duxiu, a co-founder of the ccp. He was hanged by the warlords. 7 I.e., Revolutionary Communist Youth (rcy). 8 After the defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution in 1927, Trotsky argued that in a period of reaction the Left Oppositionists in the ccp should retreat from the previous offensive strategy and instead call for the convening of a national assembly to revive the morale of the masses. After much debate, the Chinese Trotskyists accepted his advice.

204

au

China’s democratic and socialist revolutions. Historians nowadays claim that Dr Sun Yat-sen advocated a National Assembly in the years before his death, but in fact the ccp beat him to it. I do not know the extent to which the ccp’s advocacy of a National Assembly resulted from advice given by Soviet representatives in China in the early years of the nationalist movement, in the 1920s. However, from the perspective of the history of socialist movements in Europe, the labour movement in countries where the bourgeois-democratic revolution had not yet been completed should aim to bring about a democratic revolution and convene a constituent assembly before moving on to the stage of socialist revolution. This was also a central slogan of Russia’s October Revolution. So the ccp’s proposal in 1922 was simply following the strategy pioneered by European socialist revolutionaries. The Soviet representatives in China must have more or less endorsed or tacitly approved of the ccp’s promotion of the slogan. The young Trotskyists in Hong Kong were taking quite a risk in agitating for a National Assembly and popular self-determination, but there was no response to their campaign. By the early 1980s, the better-known group of young Trotskyists, the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml, whose main leader was Ng Chung-yin),9 had disbanded, leaving only the lesser known Xin Miao group (later renamed the Xianqu she [Pioneer]). The Xin Miao group had its origins in the New Thought group. The Sino-British negotiations on the future of Hong Kong had just begun. We had many internal discussions and finally asked an old-timer, Xiang Qing, to write a pamphlet advocating “the struggle for democracy and the recovery of [Chinese] sovereignty [over Hong Kong]”, at the core of which would be “the convening of a Hong Kong people’s assembly with full powers and elected on the basis of universal suffrage”, through which to implement democratic self-determination. This was followed by a transitional programme in the direction of socialism. We went to great efforts to publish the pamphlet, but the result was a cry in the wilderness. Four or five years later, in open agitation we retreated to the second-best option and proposed full universal suffrage for the colony’s official Legislative Council, in opposition to the old Pan-Democrats’ platform10 of a partially direct election, but our 9

10

Ng Chung-yin (1946–94) was a student leader in 1969. He co-founded the radical youth journal 70’s Biweekly in 1970. He later founded a Trotskyist organisation. He was arrested by the Chinese authorities in 1981 when he met up with dissidents in Mainland China. He was released after repenting. He became a journalist and then editor in chief of the Sing Tao Evening News before his early death. In 1986, the pan-democrats demanded a legislature with half the seats directly elected. (Under the colonial government, all the seats were appointed by the governor.) In 1989, when the Basic Law was being drafted, they further retreated to demanding that only 40 per cent of seats be directly elected.

the postwar generations of hong kong trotskyists

205

proposal received only minimal support. Then, in 2003, the ccp, testing the water, asked the Hong Kong government to introduce a national security law (Article 23 of the Basic Law). However, the measure was blocked by a massive demonstration of half a million people. From then on, the feeble demands of the Pan-Democrats gradually faded away, whereupon the struggle for universal suffrage gradually became the norm. This brief sketch shows that the democratic movement initiated by the post-war generation in the 1980s actually had a very low starting point. It was only after 2003 that the pace of politicisation in Hong Kong took off. Ten years later, the call for democratic self-determination was raised, and the Umbrella Movement emerged in 2014.11 The Hong Kong Federation of Students (hkfs) put forward the idea of self-determination. They were the precursors of a new generation of supporters of democratic self-determination. Chung Yiu-wah [Zhong Yaohua], the then Executive Secretary of the hkfs and a reporter for the Initium media, came to interview me after the Umbrella movement about the democratic self-determination advocated by the Pioneer Group in the 1980s.12 It seemed that many young people were interested in this idea. I also organised several workshops on liberal and socialist democracy at the time. Then, in 2016, several candidates advocating democratic self-determination were elected to the Legislative Council. There is nothing arcane about the idea of democratic self-determination. The idea is quite simple. All it needs is for the masses to have an adequate understanding of the meaning of democracy and it will easily surface. Its emergence in Hong Kong is not necessarily related to revolutionaries’ advocacy of it. In fact, the idea that sovereignty lies with the people and that of “a constituent assembly based on universal suffrage” originated with liberals in the West. However, the bourgeoisie and liberals in backward countries are always weak and fear the freedom of the proletarian masses. The Kuomintang in China, for example, advocated a national assembly only half-heartedly, and later became even more thoroughly reactionary. Russia’s October Revolution represented a new historical period in the twentieth century, when the tasks of the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution in economically backward countries fell on the shoulders of the labour movement. Paradoxically, once the labour movement started to shoulder the burden of the democratic revolution, it alarmed the bourgeoisie and the liberals even more, and many of them turned to the old ruling class to resist the revolutionary labour movement. Such was the case in China. In the 11

12

The Umbrella movement of 2014, which lasted for 79 days in Hong Kong’s main streets (September 26 to December 15), demanded universal suffrage in the case of both the legislature and the chief executive. Au 2015c.

206

au

post-war period, however, the labour movement in Hong Kong has been too weak to threaten the bourgeoisie or the petty bourgeoisie, none of whose representatives had the slightest intention of stepping up as the vanguard of the democratic movement and who preferred to collaborate with the colonial government. Only the Trotskyists stuck to these basic democratic positions and were often denounced as left extremists by the liberals. As I mentioned earlier, we were agitating for full universal suffrage in the absence of any support for the idea of democratic self-determination. On the date of Hong Kong formally reverting to Chinese rule, 1 July 1997, an alliance of the younger democrats staged a civil disobedience march to demand “sovereignty to the people” – and we were part of the alliance. This signified an increase in support for the demand for both self-determination and then for universal suffrage. We can hardly claim that this was a result of our previous agitation. Rather, it came about because of the unveiling of the ccp’s evil face. Only at that point did the Pan-Democrats change their stance, under pressure from several sides, and cease resisting the call for universal suffrage. However, they were scarcely enthusiastic about the policy and ever ready to compromise. Even so, the demand for universal suffrage gradually became the consensus in the pro-democracy yellow camp13 and one of the five demands of the 2019 resistance movement.14

Fighting for a Guaranteed Minimum Wage The Trotskyists of the post-war generation in Hong Kong were the left wing of the democratic camp, but not ultra-left. Our call for self-determination and democracy in the face of the status quo was merely an insistence on the historical platform that the liberals had abandoned. As for the demand for universal suffrage, initially we were one of the few groups to put forward such a demand.

13 14

In Hong Kong, yellow came to represent the pro-democracy faction, while blue represented the pro-establishment faction. The Hong Kong 2019–20 revolt originated in resistance to the government’s Extradition Bill, which democrats believed was part of a more general move to replace the Hong Kong legal system with the Mainland Chinese one. The campaign kicked off in the spring. The resistance attracted two million protesters at its height in June. It soon began raising demands that far exceeded the original objective (withdrawal of the Extradition Bill) and later consolidated into the five demands. The movement continued even when the government announced the withdrawal of the bill, in September, and only died down after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in Hong Kong further in February 2020, followed by the introduction of the National DSecurity Law imposed by Beijing.

the postwar generations of hong kong trotskyists

207

Although the Hong Kong Trotskyists were not influential, they were worthy of their predecessors in the revolutionary movement in China. Although the post-war world capitalist boom had definitely ended by the early 1980s, Hong Kong’s economy rose to even greater heights by taking advantage of the departure of capital from the Chinese Mainland and upgrading itself to the status of a financial hub between the Mainland and the international market after Deng Xiaoping came to power. In such times, there was no prospect of a left revival. Only October Review and Xin Miao (Pioneer) remained. The former continued more or less underground, and had been in existence for another several decades, although it had become less active as the years wore on. The Pioneer Group was also very marginalised, but had always been involved to a greater or lesser extent in various social movements. Even in the 1990s, when the left was at its lowest ebb and without any real influence, we did make a difference in some respects, and in 1994–1995 we launched a signature campaign at street-level in favour of a guaranteed minimum wage. The leaders of both the ctu and the nwsc15 opposed this idea – in terms not of tactics or timing, but of principle, for according to them, a guaranteed minimum wage would become a maximum wage and might suggest a “planned economy” that would represent a violation of Hong Kong’s “free market”. It was not until a decade or so later that they abandoned this conservative and naive view and went on to fight for a minimum wage (finally achieved in 2011). If the Pan-Democratic unions had been bold enough to advocate universal suffrage and a minimum wage in the 1990s, they would at least have educated the general public in advance of the soon-to-be born democratic movement. The 20-year transition between Chinese and British rule was actually the most favourable time to strengthen the democratic movement. Unfortunately, the Pan-Democrats chose to compromise with the ccp. By the time they had lost faith in the ccp and sponsored or acquiesced in the youth resistance movement in 2019, it was too late. The Hong Kong Trotskyists also advocated “anti-capitalism” and “socialist democracy”, which was even more bound to repel the middle and upper classes in Hong Kong. But these ideas had little or no appeal among the general public

15

The Confederation of Trade Unions (ctu) was founded by leaders of the Christian Industrial Committee and various other union leaders in 1990 to compete with the ccp-supported Federation of Trade Unions. It was eventually forced to disband in 2021 in the face of accusations of breaking the newly imposed National Security law. The Neighbourhood and Workers’ Service Centre (nwsc) was a small confederation of trade unions associated with the pan-democrats founded by Leung Yiu-Chung, at one point a member of the Trotskyist organisation. It too disbanded in March 2022.

208

au

either. After decades of abuse carried out in China under the banner of socialism, the prospect of extending that banner to Hong Kong was hardly appealing to Mainland immigrants or refugees – Hong Kong capitalism was fine, was it not after all one of the Four Small Dragons?16 Those who criticised the Trotskyists as utopians were, in the circumstances, paying them a compliment – at least they weren’t being accused of supporting tyranny. However, although we were socialists, we were by no means utopians. We had no intention of trying to achieve our ultimate goal in one step. Our aim was to bring about as much social change as possible, in accordance with the level of understanding and actual power of ordinary people. Socialism was our general direction, but there is no timetable for its implementation. Even during the downturn, the public had little understanding of the meaning of socialism, but they did know what the minimum wage was, and they more or less acted on their understanding. The implementation of a minimum wage may not seem a particularly big step to outsiders, but in a so-called free-market centre of international financial that had enjoyed a long period of prosperity and where even the masses were conservative, fighting for and implementing a minimum wage was necessary for promoting people’s livelihood and class consciousness. The Hong Kong Trotskyists have shown themselves, in this regard at least, to be relatively long-sighted.

Practising Democracy When I joined the Trotskyists, I learned a lesson that will stay with me for the rest of my life: how to hold a meeting. The first meeting of the Young Socialist Group (ysg)17 that I attended was an eye-opener. A group of young people slightly older than me meeting in a lively and egalitarian setting. Debates, motions, amendments, votes – it was so different from what I experienced in other social movements later on. In other settings, decisions were made by the “big man” and democracy consisted at most of prior consultation with the members. There were people who were disgusted with these authoritarian 16

17

The Four Asian Dragons are the economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, a term designed to depict the exceptional growth achieved in these places between the early 1960s and 1990. The ysg was founded in 1973 or 1974. Initially, the group was affiliated to the rcp as its “mass” youth organisation. In September 1978, the ysg split from the rcp and combined with the rml whose youth wing it became. In December 1980, Au and another 6 ysg members were expelled from this group. They later established another small Trotskyist group under the name “Pioneer”. The ysg disappeared along with the rml, in the 1980s.

the postwar generations of hong kong trotskyists

209

practices, but they might go to the other extreme where no proper procedure was followed, allowing discussions to go on endlessly and for decisions to be taken in a disorderly fashion, setting the stage for endless disputes at a later date. Many people came to dread meetings that seemed to go on forever. I once heard a trade-union leader talking about the “contradiction” between saving face and voting. In his opinion, “It’s impossible to hold a vote, because once you do, it’s as if the meeting splits into factions and everyone’s afraid of losing face. On one occasion, a leader lost a vote and created a scene, leading to an unfortunate break-up. As a result, in later meetings, we tended to strive for consensus. However, if everyone had to agree to say the same thing, it was often difficult to take things forward”. After 1989, I attended meetings of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (hkaspdmc). Again, there were motions, amendments, and votes, and the procedures were orderly, but genuine democratic deliberation and decisions was absent. When the hkaspdmc was first established, the Pan-Democratic groups rushed in advance of the meeting to set up groups that had no real content or membership, so that they could join and vote in the new body. Even insiders were offended by this blatant vote-rigging. Leaders like Addy Wong Wai-hung of the Hong Kong Federation of Civil Service Unions issued a statement at the time exposing the dictatorial style of the hkaspdmc leader Szeto Wah and others.18 Leaders such as Cheung Man-kwong19 were not afraid to say publicly that those who did not agree with them should leave the Alliance without further ado. If we look at how Hong Kong’s community groups treat their own constitutions, we can better understand that the habit of democratic self-governance has not yet taken proper shape among Chinese. Many civil-society organisations draw up constitutions for the sole purpose of registering, and then forget the constitution once it has served that purpose. A political party or a civic organisation is a body sharing a given set of aims. To operate democratically, it must at least respect its own platform, constitution, and rules of procedure. Obviously, this should first apply to prodemocracy groups. But in Hong Kong, the constitutions and regulations of organisations are mere window dressing or are hidden away on the top shelf. It is very rare for groups to be able to promote internal democracy. What usually happens is that decisions are left to the powerful. A few years ago, one 18 19

Wong wrote an open letter to hkaspdmc on 20 June 1989 titled “Preventing a dictatorial path”. These included legislators between 1991 to 2012. Cheung led the Democratic Party, the hkaspdmc, and the teachers’ union.

210

au

trade-union leader was “expelled forever”, but it was later revealed that the constitution did not permit such an action. If a group fighting for democracy does not practise democracy internally, how can it be democratic if it succeeds in taking power? My observations over the years remind me of what Wang Fanxi once told me: “We Chinese, even some left-wingers, are like that: when we don’t have power, we shout for democracy; when we have power, we shout for centralisation”. Soon after joining the Young Socialists and then the October Review group, I realised that the two organisations were in fact very close and that October Review was the Chinese section of the Fourth International. With the help of these old comrades, I got to read the internal documents left by the veterans. They included a speech by Mei Erduan20 on organisational issues. Mei was a long-standing and highly qualified member of the ccp before joining the Trotskyists, and he knew a lot about the old party traditions of the 1920s. I realised that the organisational methods used by the Young Socialists, i.e., “democracy in discussions and decision making, unanimity in action”, came from the early ccp, whose members had learned them from the Russian Revolution, in the same way as they had adopted the idea of a National Assembly. Later, I realised that democratic centralism came not from the Bolsheviks but from the German Social Democratic Party set up in 1863. This concept included freedom of the opposition within the party, and was fundamentally different in spirit from the deformed variants of centralism promoted by Stalin and Mao Zedong, i.e., all centralism and no democracy. I remember Mei ridiculed the documents drafted by the ccp Central Committee for simply ordering party members to “learn”, while forgetting that their true job was to participate in debates and decisionmaking. China lacks a democratic tradition and therefore does not have the habit of holding meetings in a democratic manner. Sun Yat-sen was the first to realise that the Chinese did not know how to hold meetings. His writing on people’s rights (Minquan chubu) was essential a Chinese rendering of the famous American Robert’s Rules of Order, a manual of parliamentary procedure. Sun argued that because the Chinese people had been under autocratic rule for hundreds of years, “the natural instinct to assemble has been lost, so that the principles of assembly, the rules of assembly, the habits of assembly, and the experience of assembly are all wanting”. The Chinese were “ropes of sand”. It was not easy for the people to be masters of their own country, or even to manage the civil societies they belonged to.

20

I.e., Yu Shouyi. See Biographical List.

the postwar generations of hong kong trotskyists

211

On the whole, therefore, this was a sad reflection of the lack of a tradition of democratic self-governance in China. Right-wing commentators also see this, but attribute it to the natural shortcomings of the “Chinese race” and its so-called “peasant dna”. In my view, this is an idealist approach, and one should seek an explanation instead in the specific history of China’s democratic revolution over the past century. Yes, China lacks a democratic tradition, yet May Fourth gave birth to China’s first democratic enlightenment and leftwing democratic labour movement. If we consider how the newly formed ccp practised democratic revolution and party building, it is easy to see that the outcome would have been very different if the democratic momentum and its budding radical democracy had not been brought to a halt by the destruction of the Chinese Revolution at the hands of the kmt (with the help of Stalin’s policy of making the ccp stay in the kmt during the revolution), the qualitative changes that came about after the Party’s flight into the countryside, and so on. Since then, the ccp has acted as the ruling party, and although there have been several democratic movements in China since 1949, they have been quickly stifled, so that there has been no amassing of a democratic heritage. The people of Hong Kong were fortunate to witness a movement of social resistance that was more or less unbroken over a half-century, from 1970 to 2020. However, its internal functioning is far from democratic. The authoritarian element in the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement is very strong. This was evident in the January revolt of 2019 despite its “leaderless” feature. However, the democratic element, though small, has been preserved and passed on from one generation to the next. Here, at least, the Trotskyists played a small part. Little did I know, as a youngster, that I would not only be agitating for democratic self-determination for the people of Hong Kong people as a relatively old man but that I would also be running classes for young people to pass on our understanding of democracy and the culture of meetings. However, none of what I have learned came from school: all of it was passed down to us by China’s veteran Trotskyists or international left-wing movements, for which I am deeply grateful. One further aspect of the Hong Kong Trotskyist movement is worth mentioning. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, liberals saw advocating unity between the democratic movements in Mainland China and Hong Kong as a “hallmark” of Trotskyism. The liberals accepted Beijing’s demand that they must respect the principle that “a river should not interfere with water from the well”, meaning that the Hong Kong democratic movement should not harbour any thoughts of intervening in Mainland affairs. We knew that Hong Kong was too small to fight the ccp on its own and that we needed allies in Mainland China, so we chose to think otherwise. The rml was the first organisation in the Hong

212

au

Kong democratic movement to try to link up practically with the activists of the pro-democracy Beijing Spring, the name of a movement that emerged in China in 1979. The rml’s Liu Shanqing (Lau Shan-ching) was sentenced to ten years jail in 1981 for his work in this regard, while the liberals did not even bother to join the campaign calling for his release. However, the 1989 democratic movement had proved that the Trotskyists’ perspective was not impossible. The liberals only changed course belatedly, in the last stages of the movement, when they founded the hkaspdmc. After Beijing’s suppression of the movement in China, the liberals ensured that the hkaspdmc would do little beyond holding an annual memorial to the 1989 June Fourth massacre, an event that regularly drew hundreds of thousands of participants. Originally, commemorating the June Fourth Incident was the only thing the liberals dared do in support of the Chinese democratic movement. They did so because it turned out to be their biggest electoral asset. Little did they imagine that 25 years later, it would become a negative asset, when rightists attacked them for being more interested in “Greater China” issues than in the interests of the Hong Kong people. Ironically, after the defeat of the Hong Kong 2019 revolt, certain well known right wing “localists”21 in exile in the US suddenly changed course and agreed that the Hong Kong democratic movement did require a Mainland counterpart after all. Despite their lack of influence, the Hong Kong Trotskyists had shown themselves to be principled and far-sighted over the issue of Hong Kong people’s ally in Mainland. Although we remained tactically flexible, we refused to abandon our principles to match the environment.

Permanent Revolution and the Trotskyists The Chinese Trotskyists and the international Trotskyists were, of course, first and foremost revolutionary socialists. However, true socialism is nothing more than a radical extension of the ancient Greek concept of democracy, which seeks to abolish the machinery of state and achieve society’s self-rule. It is also the moment when Marxism split with liberalism – however minimal the state

21

In March 2021, eight well known participants in the 2019 revolt, who had gone into exile or had been living abroad by then, initiated a 2021 Hong Kong Charter (2021hkcharter.com,) which argued that the Hong Kong people should join hands with Mainland Chinese to fight for democracy. The eight initiators included localists (people who concentrated on Hong Kong issues) like Baggio Leung and Ray Wong, who had at one point argued that Hong Kong people should not bother to support Mainland China’s democratic movement and should simply mind their own business.

the postwar generations of hong kong trotskyists

213

project they pursue they are still consolidating a repressive and permanent state machinery. A few decades ago, there were many proponents of revolutionary socialism in the world. However, the Trotskyists, including those in China and Hong Kong, were characterised by their advocacy of the theory of permanent or uninterrupted revolution. Starting in the 1930s, Stalin and the ccp used this as evidence for their denunciation of the Chinese and other Trotskyists as “ultra-left”, because of their supposed “skipping of the stage of democratic revolution” and so on. When Mao Zedong veered to the far left in his economic policy, in 1957, he himself suddenly became a “permanent revolutionary”, while the Trotskyists whose theory he had usurped (with inevitable contortions) stayed locked in their prison cells. The theory of permanent revolution laid bare the complex class relations in economically backward countries. The national bourgeoisie, under domestic and external pressures (from the domestic working class and foreign competitors), was no longer able to perform the historical tasks of the democratic revolution and to modernise China. Only a revolutionary workers’ party could do that, but in so doing such a party would have to round up all its enemies in one fell swoop, including the already reactionary bourgeoisie, and to embark on the road to socialism without pausing at a democratic stage. Such a task, however, would be impossible in an economically backward country unless that country’s national revolution acted in concert with the wider world revolution. It was clearly not easy to meet all these domestic and external conditions in one historical moment. All these difficulties stemmed in large part from the twists and turns of modernisation in a backward country. Eighty years ago, people thought that the victory of the ccp meant that China’s democratisation had brilliant prospects. Little did people know that even though the country had finally set out on the path to economic modernisation, China was regressing politically and socially to the imperial system of dynastic times and working people were still being trampled under the iron heel of the ruling class. “Socialism in one country” is a pipe dream, as was predicted by Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. One cannot help but admire Trotsky’s historical vision and the relevance of his theory of permanent revolution to class relations and interactions in backward countries, which can provide an effective explanation for China’s vicissitudes, a matter that requires separate treatment. Providing a decent explanation will also help to restore the reputation of socialism and build a solid theoretical basis upon which future generations can continue to fight for socialism. The Chinese Trotskyists’ idea of a “national assembly with universal suffrage” has never been realised not to mention achieving socialism. Similarly,

214

au

their application of democratic methods to organisational questions has never been put into practice by mainstream democrats. However, these legacies have much intellectual relevance for Hong Kong’s democratic movements in the 1990s and beyond, with people now beginning to re-discover the way forward after the failure of Hong Kong’s 2019 revolt. If Chen Duxiu was an “oppositionist for life”,22 so too were the Chinese Trotskyists – “lifelong opponents” of class exploitation and dictatorship and lifelong proponents of political democracy. Although they never achieved real influence and many sacrificed decades of freedom and even their lives, they can at least look history and the people in the face.

22

This description of Chen Duxiu was first made by Hu Shi (1891–1962), a famous liberal scholar, who also figured alongside Chen as a leader of the New Culture Movement in the late 1910s.

section c Trotskyists on Hong Kong’s Future, 1973–1984

∵

Introduction to Part 1, Section C Chinese Trotskyists, including Wang Fanxi, discussed and campaigned for the decolonisation of Hong Kong and the struggle for its autonomy, to be achieved by a strategy of mass organising and a campaign for revolutionary socialism.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_019

My Position on Hong Kong (1973) Wang Fanxi

This paper was written by Wang just as Trotskyism was quickly gaining new ground among young people in Hong Kong in the early 1970s. It was aimed at influencing the young Trotskyist organisation, later renamed the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml),1 in advance of the expiry of Britain’s 99-year lease on Hong Kong’s New Territories, at a time when the future of Hong Kong was on the agenda.

1.

2.

Hong Kong is a British colony. China however does not recognise it as a colony, for two reasons: a) It is a part of China – even though it has been a British colony for more than 100 years, the prc does not accept the outcome of an unequal treaty imposed by British imperialism b) The prc government currently tolerates British rule over this territory, but when the time is ripe it intends through negotiation to reclaim the territory. Regardless of whether this prc rationale is correct,2 one cannot avoid facing the reality that Hong Kong has been and remains to this day a British colony. Therefore, in discussing the policy of our work in Hong Kong, we must be focused on this reality. Since Hong Kong is a British colony, the main struggle of Hong Kong’s proletariat and labouring masses is against the colonial authorities. Their biggest objective must be to liberate Hong Kong from colonial rule, so that Chinese people who make up more than 99 per cent of Hong Kong’s population change their position from being slaves to masters. From whatever standpoint, we are against British Imperialism continuing as rulers of Hong Kong. British rule is absolutely not to benefit but

1 The rml was founded in October 1974. 2 Wang’s footnote: For economic and political reasons, the ccp currently does not wish to reclaim Hong Kong. On this issue, we do not and should not criticise the ccp. When a revolutionary government implements its policies, it has the right and the need to actively decide on its strategy and tactics. However, on this and on many other such issues, if the ccp abandons revolutionary principles for tactical reasons, including joining with the Hong Kong colonial authorities against revolutionaries, then it must be opposed and exposed.

© Wang Fanxi, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_020

my position on hong kong (1973)

3.

4.

5.

219

to squeeze and exploit Hong Kong residents, in order to ameliorate the crises and death agony of British imperialism, whose empire is falling apart. To break Hong Kong away from its colonial status, does this mean we should demand that the ccp uses the pla3 to liberate Hong Kong, or does it mean advocating that Hong Kong should become an independent country? We advocate neither. If the ccp has already decided to reclaim Hong Kong through military force, it does not need our invitation. If it considers that the time is not yet ripe, our demands are of no use. Besides, if Hong Kong is truly liberated, i.e., a Hong Kong governed by Chinese people themselves and a Hong Kong that is politically and economically democratic and socialist, then this cannot be achieved by a pla takeover, because the ccp’s rule in mainland China has shown that it is authoritarian and heavily bureaucratic. We must therefore declare that the liberation of Hong Kong is first and foremost the task of the Hong Kong proletariat and all labouring masses. We must keep this task distinct from the prc’s reclaiming of Hong Kong. Does that mean we advocate an “independent Hong Kong state”? Definitely not. From the viewpoint of its people, or of concrete politics, or from the perspective of the Chinese Revolution, a call for “Independence for Hong Kong” is baseless and unrealistic. Objectively, it could only serve as a false pretence for the continuation of British imperialism’s colonial rule. The “nation of Hong Kong” is 10 times more false than “the nation of Singapore” and 100 times more reactionary than “Taiwan the independent nation”. Our view of the future of Hong Kong (and Macao) is as follows: The Hong Kong proletariat must lead the labouring masses and those petty-bourgeois who do not want to be slaves to oppose and be liberated from colonial rule and establish a socialist, non-bureaucratic provincial government. As for the relationship between this entity and the rest of China is concerned, whether it would straight away become part of the prc or strive to maintain its autonomy, would be decided by concrete circumstances when the time comes. Beijing, before its decision to reclaim Hong Kong, would clearly prefer Hong Kong to remain under imperialist rule rather than be liberated by Hong Kong’s working masses. Not only would such a liberation of Hong

3 I.e., People’s Liberation Army.

220

6.

7.

8.

wang

Kong interfere with the ccp’s friendly diplomatic relations with the USA and the UK and damage its economic policy of deploying Hong Kong to earn foreign currency, but more importantly it would awaken the whole country’s proletariat, particularly those in Guangdong province, which would adversely affect the ccp’s bureaucratic rule. So if a genuine antiBritish mass revolutionary movement occurs in Hong Kong, Beijing would most likely, through its direct agents in Hong Kong, unite with the British authorities to destroy the revolutionaries. The revolution in Hong Kong itself is therefore inseparable from the political revolution of Chinese workers and peasants against bureaucratic rule. The two are closely related and affect each other intimately. An anticolonial socialist revolution in Hong Kong would promote the advance of the anti-bureaucratic revolution in China; conversely, only under the conditions of the rise and success of an anti-bureaucratic political revolution will a socialist revolution in Hong Kong, triggered by a nationalist movement, be successfully completed, leading to a liberated Hong Kong that voluntarily becomes a part of a socialist China, so that the fruits of its victory would not be swallowed by the autocratic rule of the bureaucracy. Based on this knowledge, we consider that the most important task of Hong Kong revolutionaries is to make full use of the very special context of Hong Kong: a) first, to educate and organise workers and the toiling masses according to the needs of the objective conditions, to lead them along an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist socialist revolutionary road; and b) second, to pay close attention to the struggle inside China between revolution and counter-revolution, to the anti-bureaucratic struggles of workers, peasants and revolutionaries, and to strive to develop and maintain forms of liaison, to draw a rational and political conclusion from such a massive experience of change, in order to make specific propaganda about the need for and the methods of conducting a revolution against the rule of the ccp, and to closely link these two issues. In conducting this two-in-one struggle, we must insist upon one fundamental point: we are advocating a political revolution inside China, but we completely support socialist changes that have already been brought about in the country, particularly the nationalisation of the means of production, the cancellation of private ownership of land, etc. Not only do we affirm these achievements but we will defend them resolutely. So when

my position on hong kong (1973)

221

we campaign for a political revolution against bureaucratic rule, we must never stand on the side of the dying Kuomintang and imperialist Britain, but on the platform of a thoroughly socialist and democratic workers’ revolution. In our view, the anti-bureaucratic revolution in China is how the fruits and future of the socialist revolution can be secured from inside the country. Starting from this stance, we can derive our attitude towards the defence of the prc in the event of war. This attitude specifically applies to Hong Kong, in other words, should there be war between China and a Britishcontrolled Hong Kong, we stand unconditionally on the side of China. (Unless the question concerns a self-governing Hong Kong born through a revolution and China remains totally under bureaucratic rule and its armed invasion is intended to crush the revolution, in which case we would clearly defend revolutionary Hong Kong.) 9. To actively implement the above policy, to complete all these tasks, Hong Kong’s revolutionary socialists must firstly organise ourselves and steel ourselves in thought and through action. This organisation cannot be confined to Hong Kong but it must target the whole of China, and see the mission of the revolution in the whole of China as its aim. The current organisation in Hong Kong should only be a part of a Chinese revolutionary socialist political party. Needless to say, if this organisation is to become strong and secure, rooted in the masses and effective in the struggle for change, it must learn to avoid empty slogans about the grand and distant future and face up to the current reality of Hong Kong and stand side by side with Hong Kong’s masses, especially its toilers, patiently and concretely struggling alongside them and growing with them through struggle. To depart from this starting point would render all distant ideals regarding China and Hong Kong abstract and impossible to realise. 10. So whether forwarding the political revolution in China or preparing for the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist socialist revolution in Hong Kong, we must stipulate a correct and practical transitional programme. Such a programme clearly cannot be drafted by an individual; it must draw together the wisdom and experience of many, and be developed through continual struggle and experience before it can be completed. Here I only wish to put forward various proposals to serve as a reference and basis for comrades to discuss. We hope that discussion over a period of time (ideally, several months) would produce a transitional programme that Hong Kong revolutionary socialists can defend and strive to implement.

222

wang

11. For the sake of brevity, I do not wish to elaborate all the changes in Hong Kong since China’s liberation by the ccp in 1949, nor changes in thinking and political attitudes of Hong Kong people. Generally speaking, the victory of the ccp has changed Hong Kong’s population from less than a million to more than 4 million, and its economy into that of a highly developed manufacturing and commercial international city. This change in Hong Kong’s status has meant a massive increase in its revolutionary potential and its revolutionary influence in neighbouring areas (particularly China). The change in Hong Kong people’s thinking and political attitudes can be broadly divided into three periods: a) From 1949 to the early 1950s was a period in which popular sentiment was in support of the ccp, and the struggles of workers against the British authorities was at its height. b) Between the late 1950s and 1968, as a result of the ccp’s implementation of the Three Red Flags, the People’s Communes, and the Cultural Revolution, a whole series of ultra-left adventurous policies, Hong Kong people inclined to the right, with some switching to support the Kuomintang or becoming loyal supporters of British colonial rule, while the vast majority, including a majority of workers and students, became politically numbed and apathetic. c) From 1968 to the present can be seen as a third period, during which there have been sharp changes in China and globally, especially in connection with the worldwide campaign against the Vietnam War and student-led revolutions in various countries, Hong Kong’s students and workers have also started to break away from political apathy and, gradually, to follow a path of struggle. This process is still accelerating and intensifying. For the coming period our central task is how to help those who have become awakened to follow the path of struggle we have outlined above and move towards the targets of struggle that we have proposed. 12. For this purpose and for the requirements of the specific struggles ahead, I only wish to point to a few issues, and to invite you to contribute your opinions, so that our collective efforts can bring about a completed programme. Such a programme in my view should include the following points: a) Regarding workers: to demand democratic elections involving the entire membership of all trade unions; to change the mechanism for electing their leadership; to oppose the bureaucratic control of trade unions; for workers to devise a cost of living index, and to demand

my position on hong kong (1973)

b)

c)

d)

223

monthly wage adjustments to match the index; to protect jobs; to implement a retirement pension system; and equal pay for men and women. Regarding students: to oppose (colonial) slavish education; oppose the determination of textbooks by government education officials; and demand equal treatment for all schools. For ordinary citizens: oppose the extortion of street hawkers [by the authorities]; protect housing rights; and implement interest-free loans. In general: to campaign for Chinese to become the prime legal language; oppose high land prices; oppose land price compensation; organise residents’ associations, which will decide on rental levels; oppose the use of remittances by Hong Kong people to bail out UK finances; oppose fake elections; implement universal franchise (18+); establish a Legislative Council that is truly representative of the people and has real powers; oppose the use of Hong Kong as a base for the US navy’s military aggression (in the region); demand the rights of free speech, press, assembly and demonstration; and oppose legislation to “deport foreigners”. As we struggle for the above demands, and work to educate the working masses and students and to build our organisation, needless to say we must liaise frequently with international revolutionary movements, especially with those in Japan and East Asia. Never for a moment should we forget that the victorious future of Hong Kong’s revolution must first be linked in all respects to China’s workers’ and peasants’ victorious revolution against the bureaucracy.

Radical Alternatives in the Hong Kong Crisis (1983) Gregor Benton

This essay concerning Hong Kong’s political future is excerpted from Gregor Benton, The Hongkong Crisis, London: Pluto Press, 1983, pp. 50–64. Wang Fanxi commented copiously on the original draft of this book. It suggests that the Hong Kong socialists’ anti-capitalist and anti-colonial agendas were by that time “inextricably intertwined” with China’s struggle for democracy, so an alliance was needed between Hong Kong’s struggle for social justice and the abolition of British colonial rule on the one hand and China’s pursuit of full democracy on the other. For the Hong Kong working class to master its own destiny, there would have to be a strong mass movement led by the “revitalised and democratised” trade unions, supported by the anti-colonial British left.

The choices before the people of Hong Kong are not restricted to the official positions of the Chinese and British governments and the various interest groups that have associated themselves with them. There are also the positions of the exiled mainland dissidents; of the colony’s own radical dissidents, the Trotskyist socialists, who trace their political descent back to Chen Duxiu, Chinese communism’s first and greatest dissident, founder of the Party and anti-Stalinist; and of the popular and highly successful radical Christian activists. The positions of these various groups overlap, but there is no organisational tie between them. After the suppression of the democracy movement in China, its Chinese supporters in North America set up the China Spring movement in solidarity with those arrested on the mainland. In November 1982 Dr. Wang Bingzhang, a Beijing-sponsored medical student in New York, announced that he was giving up medicine to join the democracy movement, “for medicine can save only a few, but cannot save a country”. The movement’s monthly journal, China Spring, claims editors both inside and outside China. China Spring has chosen Hong Kong as the site of its second launching, because of the colony’s important ties and proximity to the mainland. Its representative Li Lin said at a press conference in Hong Kong: “Our workplace is China. But we need a few people to stand up and hold the China democratic movement flag. In China, we must remain an underground movement.” China Spring has yet to announce a detailed policy on the colony, but its “Letter to all compatriots overseas” said that the fact that even patriots there feared

© Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_021

radical alternatives in the hong kong crisis (1983)

225

1997 was “the clearest historical proof of the rottenness of China” and that “only when there is democracy, legality, freedom and human rights on Chinese soil can there be talk of national unity and of the return of Hong Kong.” Li Lin said: “Hong Kong is part of China, and the people here should have the right to choose the system they want. It will have a bright future only if China has a bright future.”1 One of the failings of the original democracy movement in China was that it tended, at least in its earlier phases, to look for protection to patrons in the Party establishment, and turned only when all else failed to ordinary Chinese for support. But the inaugural issue of China Spring put forward a radically new perspective when it called on the movement to learn from Poland’s Solidarność and to unite with the workers, the intellectuals, the students and the people. In Hong Kong too, Li Lin proposed a similar policy of mass-based political struggle: “If Hong Kong people unite to fight for democracy, freedom and the rule of law and human rights, what can the Chinese Communist Party do, put five and a half million people in jail?”2 On this point the democracy movement exiles have a more radical perspective than the politicians of Huidian,3 and it is not surprising that they decisively distanced themselves from Huidian’s policies. The Hong Kong revolutionary socialists have a similar starting point to China Spring, yet they develop it differently.4 They believe that any proposal for a solution to the problem must begin by recognising that no solution is possible independent of China, that the liberation of Hong Kong is an unfinished part of the revolution of 1949, that the interests of the people of the colony cannot be pursued separately from those of Chinese people either side of the Taiwan Straits and in Macao, and that political developments in all four of these Chinese territories will strongly influence and interact with one another. Moreover, no solution that is in the interests of the people of Hong Kong can be achieved through secret, confidential talks between Beijing and London. On the contrary, the people must not only be fully consulted about the negotiations but they must be aroused to play a decisive role in the colony’s liberation.

1 Quoted in Mary Lee, Far Eastern Economic Review (feer), 10 March 1983. 2 Lee, feer, 10 March 1983. 3 Huidian, i.e., “Meeting Point”, was a radical group formed in Hong Kong to discuss the colony’s politics and economy. 4 Their views are reflected in the monthly journals Zhanxun (Combat Bulletin) and Shiyue pinglun (October Review).

226

benton

Chinese leaders have said in the past that imperialism will always find ways of “leaving a tail” unless it is forced out of its colonies by a popular struggle, and there is no reason why Hong Kong should be an exception here. If such a struggle starts, it will develop according to its own rhythm, and cannot be artificially constrained within diplomatic timetables. (As Mao said, “Straw sandals have no pattern: they shape themselves in the making.”) Hong Kong socialists argue that the colonial status of the territory should be ended as soon as possible, and not allowed to persist until 1997; and that the people of the colony should act right away to achieve this rather than wait for the Beijing government to do it for them. They believe that, if Beijing defers the departure of the British administration until 1997, de facto it will be recognising treatises that it has rightly denounced as unequal, illegal, invalid and unacceptable. The people of Hong Kong understandably have grave doubts about immediate reunification with the mainland, and although few would be sorry to see the British go, in other respects they want to keep the status quo. This is largely because the Beijing leaders have alienated them by their failed policies and their tyrannical rule. As a result, a simple call to “expel the British and unite with China” would get scant support in the colony. This is why the struggle for Hong Kong cannot be separated from the struggle of Chinese everywhere against political oppression, especially that of the dissident democracy movement, which is now being terribly suppressed in China. This is the true meaning of the proposition that the future of the people of the colony cannot be seen apart from the future of the Chinese people as a whole. How can the problem be resolved in such a way that the interests of the working people of Hong Kong are best served? Even Beijing accepts that the territory need not be reintegrated immediately into the motherland, and that Hong Kongers will rule it for the foreseeable future. There are two main reasons why the Beijing leaders have put forward the proposal gangren zhigang (“Let Hong Kongers rule Hong Kong”). First, they are well aware of their unpopularity in the colony, so they want to soothe the anxieties of the Chinese there. They fear the embarrassment of a popular campaign against the “communist threat”, and they fear that the present rates of emigration from the colony will peak in a catastrophic brain-drain (the number of applicants tripled in January– February 1983, and Guanchashe’s 1982 survey showed that 22 per cent would “try every means to leave” if Hong Kong reverted to China). Second, they plan to collaborate with the Hong Kong bourgeoisie to form a transitional administration when the colony detaches from Britain. They have made no attempt to disguise the fact that for them “let Hong Kongers rule Hong Kong” means “let the capitalists rule Hong Kong”. Even the corrupt and brutal Royal Hong Kong Police and the exclusive Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club would stay – all

radical alternatives in the hong kong crisis (1983)

227

they would lose is their royal prefix.5 “Let Hong Kongers rule Hong Kong” is a formula not for democracy and social justice but for stitching the oppressive features of the Chinese Constitution – including, no doubt, the ban on strikes – onto capitalist, colonial oppression. Still, seen differently it could be the starting point for a passage towards greater freedom. “Hong Kongers” are not some monolithic bloc, but fall into classes, each with it own distinct interests and aspirations. The socialists propose that Hong Kong should be ruled not by a coalition of tycoons, “reformed” colonial bureaucrats, and tame politicians organised in a mainland-style “people’s congress” and responsible to Beijing, but by an all-powerful municipal assembly all of whose members would be elected by the people on the basis of universal, direct, equal, and secret voting. Self-rule thus understood would guarantee the freedoms of speech, press, movement, association, and demonstration, and the freedoms to strike and to form political parties. This proposal harks back to the Chinese Trotskyist policy of the 1930s and 1940s, which called for a National (or Constituent) Assembly as a focus around which to bring together the country’s disparate economic and political struggles. At that time this strategy failed, for the workers to whom it was mainly addressed were politically neutralised as a cumulative result of the labour movement’s 1927 defeat, the ensuing Kuomintang repression, and the Japanese occupation of most of China’s main cities. But in today’s Hong Kong, where the workers are the majority, there has been no such defeat, and if there is a turn to politics by the people of the colony, the Constituent Assembly idea may still have its day. Such an assembly would not come meekly into being only after Britain’s departure, but would be a vital part of the process whereby the British are expelled and Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong is restored. It would anchor itself in a mass movement at the heart of which would be the revitalised, democratised trade unions. Its powers would include the power to determine the future of the territory and the pace of its reintegration into China. It would play a decisive role alongside Beijing in negotiating the withdrawal of the British colonial administration. The advantage of such an assembly is that it would be the most reliable barometer of “when the time is right” for Hong Kong’s reintegration into China. Moreover, it would be the teaspoonful of yeast through which Chinese politics are brought into a lively new democratic and socialist ferment, and so it 5 feer, 17 March 1983. In Hong Kong, it is said that the colony is “run by the Jockey Club, the Hong Kong Bank, Jardines [the prominent local conglomerate], and the Governor – in that order.”

228

benton

would itself contribute to creating in China those very freedoms that are the preconditions for its voluntary return to Chinese administration. How much power such an assembly acquired would depend on the vigour of the movement that supports it. That is why social and – in a colony like Hong Kong – cultural issues would need to be a central part of the fight for it, for only then would large numbers of people be awakened to the need for political action. A determined struggle on the issues of anti-colonialism and national, cultural identity is inseparable from a social struggle against capitalist exploitation. The “national” factor must be linked to the “economic” factor if British influence is to be thoroughly expunged; otherwise “sovereignty” will be an empty form while in reality the old colonial exploitation continues. The majority pro-Beijing trade unions value their links with the colonial government and the employers too much to launch such a campaign for social justice and against cultural imperialism, and the socialists lack the influence to do so. But since 1978 there has been a strong rise in worker activism in Hong Kong as a result of the efforts of radical Chinese Christian networks. The dynamic nucleus of this movement is formed by the Christian Industrial Committee (cic), which has links to the more internationally orientated Centre for the Progress of Peoples and to the Christian Conference of Asia. In 1978, cic activists formed a committee of labour organisations, law students and workers, and campaigned through marches, demonstrations, lobbying and petitioning for industrial safety and workers’ compensation for death and disability. These campaigns attracted the support of labour organisations representing between 100,000 and 200,000 members, and a later campaign against a planned increase in bus fares mobilised a coalition of more than forty unions and 280 social organisations representing altogether more than a million people. Some of these campaigns forced concessions from the colonial government. Others for more comprehensive welfare, including paid maternity leave, have since followed. Many cic activists have gone into the factories, where – in the absence of assertive trade unions – they organise young workers’ groups to promote solidarity and set up workers’ night schools to give workers greater self-confidence and to broaden their political and spiritual vision (a process they call ‘conscientisation’). Gradually, a layer of young worker militants skilled in counselling, organising, and struggling is being formed through the activities of these groups. cic’s spokesperson Lau Chin-shek has said: “We shall keep on challenging the present power structure to create a more just society in Hong Kong. Regardless of who is in power, we will always stand on the side of the workers. Our goal is to make Hong Kong more pleasing to God’s will.” On some issues cic has worked together with the trade unions but the pro-Beijing trade

radical alternatives in the hong kong crisis (1983)

229

unions, like the pro-Taiwan ones, have withheld public support from it. “cic’s methods vary from ours”, one pro-Beijing trade union leader said. “[We have] many common points with the government in improving the livelihood of Hong Kong’s workers.”6 Within the cic milieu are some who defended the mainland democracy movement before it was finally crushed in 1981; others now believe that realism dictates the need for compromise with Beijing. When Deng Xiaoping was still “liberalising”, many of these Christians looked forward to a democratic unification of Hong Kong with China. Now, with “liberalisation” on the wane and 1997 rushing ever closer, they are confronted with the choice either of accepting Beijing’s perspective and campaigning, like organisations such as Huidian (“Meeting Point”), for some mild form of “social capitalism”; or of embracing the political perspectives of the exiled democracy movement, in which case they will be free to pursue to the limit the social implications of their liberationist theology, regardless of entrenched interests. Thus far they have organised only on day-to-day issues, and have avoided taking clear-cut positions on broader political questions like the future of Hong Kong. In that sense, they are a pressure group and not a political movement. The strength of the mass movement in the colony is also important from another point of view. If the struggle to free Hong Kong takes a radically democratic form, it will undoubtedly be opposed by the Beijing government, which will fear the erosion of its own monopoly on political decision in China itself as a result of that example. But if the movement comes to encompass the great mass of the people of Hong Kong, Beijing will think twice before intervening, and while it is thinking, its own political rule will – with luck – become so weakened by like movements that intervention is no longer an option. A linking of the “national”, “social”, and “economic” factors (which are in reality one) in a political movement in Hong Kong will be difficult, but it is not entirely impossible to achieve. The main obstacles are the colony’s widespread apathy and fatalism. The refugee mentality is strongly rooted among the older generations, and the first reaction of many of them to the prospect of reunification with the mainland is to try to flee abroad. But in reality this choice is open to only a tiny minority of the rich and well-connected: most have nowhere that will take them. Another barrier to politics in Hong Kong is the idea that the future of the territory will be decided between London and Beijing, and that it is futile for Hong Kongers to try to influence that decision. The number of people who think like this is very large. Their fatalism should not be confused

6 Phil Kurata, feer, 13 March 1981.

230

benton

with indifference. According to Guanchashe’s opinion poll, 95 per cent of the people felt that they should be consulted about the future of the colony; but only 38 per cent thought that they would be able to influence any decision on it.7 Such people tend to take a short-term view and to seek individual rather than collective solutions, either in hard work and business or – where emigration is not possible – by coming to terms with Beijing. On the other hand, a large proportion of the present population of Hong Kong were born in the colony. Most of them have grown up during a period of rapid economic development, so they are less volatile and explosive than the restless newcomers of the 1950s and 1960s. But by the same token they lack the political inhibitions of a refugee background. Most have had a better schooling than their parents, and are therefore more articulate and have higher expectations. Even new immigrants have different expectations from the older waves, and are less likely to stay positive – one study suggests that by the 1970s many were leaving China not to escape “communism” but to simply get a city job, and that had they been able to, they would sooner have gone to Guangzhou.8 The inhibitions created by small-scale, traditional industry and the particularistic, familial-type loyalties that it often engenders have also been weakened in recent years as labour scarcity made particularistic recruiting difficult and as trade slumps led to dismissals and thus to an end to the rhetoric of “paternalism”.9 cic’s success in mobilising large numbers of workers, especially young ones, for political goals shows that the potential exists for a change towards assertive popular movements. Socialists in Britain could contribute to resolving the Hong Kong problem by fighting to win the sympathy and support of the British labour movement for the anti-colonial struggle of its people. The official British labour movement has long been complicit in the exploitation of the colony, and has never adopted a distinct, principled position on it. The nearest it got to one was the draft statement submitted to the Labour Party’s international; committee in November 1982, which recognised China’s sovereignty over the whole of the region and sought to commit a future Labour government to introduce universal adult suffrage, political parties and stricter government accountability in the colony – but unfortunately this statement was quietly shelved. Few Labour politicians have done much to fight for an end to colonial rule in Hong Kong, and the main burden of providing critical information about the colony has been borne not by them buy by the tiny London-based Hong Kong Research Project, which 7 Mary Lee, feer, 22 August 1982. 8 Parish and Whyte (eds) 1978, p. 53. 9 England and Rear 1981, pp. 133–134.

radical alternatives in the hong kong crisis (1983)

231

is run independently and on a shoestring. The small parties to Labour’s left oppose colonialism in Hong Kong, but they lack the power to make their opposition felt. As for the British trade-union leaders, most of them are interested in the colony’s workers only in so far as they them as a “threat” to the interests of their own members. In fact the best way of removing this “threat” would be to help the Hong Kong workers in their fight for social security and higher wages. Thatcher, of course, sees the question the other way round. For her, the colony’s low wages and poor social security are not a threat but a promise: a model of cut-throat competition of the sort that she – like her mentor Milton Friedman – would like to see adopted by Britain and the West. For her, Hong Kong’s laissezfaire, monetarist economy is the music of the future. Still, the emergence during the Falklands/Malvinas war of a vocal radical opposition to Thatcher shows that many in Britain are prepared to take a stand against colonialism, and see that it is in their own best interests to do so. The Falklands showed clearly how the British establishment makes use of foreign wars to strengthen its internal rule. It is highly unlikely that any British government would send a task force to the South China Sea to “protect” Hong Kong. But the loss of the colony would be a far harsher blow to British capitalism than the loss of the Falklands, and right-wing Conservatives would use all sorts of high-sounding rhetoric – “moral responsibility”, “defence of democracy and human rights”, “self-determination”, “international law” – to try to create a “Hong Kong factor” that would play a similar poisonous role in British politics to Thatcher’s “Falklands factor” (though without the ultimate poison of “kith and kin”). There are two main ways in which the British labour movement can help the people of Hong Kong to end colonial rule and achieve conditions in which they are free to determine their own political future. First, it should campaign to get the army out of the colony. There are some 7,000 Gurkha and British troops there whose presence is paid for mainly by the Hong Kong people. If they were removed, British rule would be greatly weakened, and the colonial authorities would have no choice but to negotiate their own withdrawal. Second, the British labour movement should do all in its power to help strengthen the Hong Kong trade unions, which are flimsily organised and poorly supported. True, many of these trade unions are more concerned with tailoring their activities to suit the interests of established governments than with defending workers’ interests, but they are the main form of working-class organisation in the colony, and it is essential that their voice is heard in the negotiations towards a settlement. Moreover, their political weight depends ultimately on the strength of their base, and to keep this from slipping away entirely, they must represent at least some of their members’ interests. When Sir Edward Youde was about

232

benton

to take over as governor of Hong Kong in May 1982, union leaders demanded from him a “comprehensive social security system”, including unemployment and sick pay and a pension plan.10 British trade unionists should support this and other demands of the colony’s trade unions. They should also support any steps to democratise these unions, which are at present highly centralised and not democratically accountable. At the same time as helping the people of Hong Kong to negotiate an end to colonial rule, the British labour movement should fight to end all restrictions on the free movement of Hong Kong’s unskilled labour migrants to Britain. Such people go overseas only because they cannot find work at home that will afford them a reasonably comfortable living. Such is their right, and socialists everywhere should support it. Hong Kong has a history of revolutionary struggle stretching back to the early 1920s, and although much has changed since then, a strong potential base exists for working-class radicalism in the colony. The number of industrial workers is now not far short of estimates for the whole of China at the time of the revolution. That they are now mainly quiet does not mean that they have all come to terms with capitalism or that potential causes of disaffection have been removed. Now their conditions are worsening daily, and the colony’s poor areas are smouldering with a discontent that could burst suddenly into flames. Though it is unlikely that the present trade union leaders will give a shape and focus to this discontent (on the contrary, they will try to smother it), in its flames a new radicalism can be tempered. What is essential is that this radicalism distinguishes itself on all fronts from the politics and practices of the mainland leaders, who forfeited all credit and credibility in the colony. In the past one of the main reasons why radical movements in Hong Kong failed to get support from the people of the colony was that they were seen as simply another, lesser variant of the “communism” that most Hong Kongers had learned to fear and hate. But today a distinction will be easier to achieve, now that the mainland authorities are retreating ever further from the original goals of the revolution, are openly preparing to collaborate with the colony’s capitalists, and have driven the revolution’s true heirs – the dissident democrats of 1978–81 – into jail, illegality, or foreign exile. What is crucial is that Hong Kong’s socialists do not compromise even one inch in their pursuit of full democracy. Only then can there be hope of a new alliance between them and the movement of democratic dissent inside and outside China. This social struggle will aim to infuse the Hong Kong workers’ desire for “stability and prosperity” with a new radical meaning. All parties to the crisis 10

The Economist, 8 May 1982; feer Asia 1983 Economic Yearbook, p. 148.

radical alternatives in the hong kong crisis (1983)

233

subscribe to this slogan, but each puts its own gloss on it. To Beijing it means the peaceful transference of sovereignty and the maintenance of social order and the present social system. To Whitehall it means de facto retention of the colony. To the Hong Kong bourgeoisie it means retention of the present social order – with or without the Red Flag. To the workers and small traders it means the continuance of a dull, hard but comparatively peaceful existence and the prospect of a continuing rise in living standards. But this last interpretation is quite incompatible with the rest. A rotten compromise between Beijing and London to ensure the survival of capitalism in Hong Kong will not ensure the stability and prosperity of the colony’s workers. The pro-Beijing bourgeoisie would like less, not more, social security than today. Their Chinese General Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong has even criticised the ‘excessive welfare’ – in reality a pittance – of the present colonial government, which they claim has helped to reduce the competitiveness of the colony’s export prices.11 So a struggle for the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong’s workers will of necessity be a struggle against its millionaires and colonial bureaucrats. This struggle will aim to bring medical care and pensions up to the level of urban mainland society, to introduce unemployment benefit, to set a minimum wage and to guarantee job security, reasonable housing and freedom from eviction. All these are problems that could be resolved if part of Hong Kong’s huge reserve fund, greater than China’s entire foreign currency reserves, were spent to alleviate poverty and improve social services. Such a struggle would also aim to overthrow all present restrictions on labour organisation, together with the 1967 “public order” legislation. At the same time it would work to eradicate the colonial influence in education and to replace English – now dominant throughout the official world – by Cantonese (and, as a step towards the future integration of Hong Kong into the mainland, to popularise putonghua or standard Chinese, and to introduce the simplified written characters now used in China). Finally, it would campaign to abolish all the political and economic privileges that British officials have arrogated to themselves in the colony. Such a transition would not be without its trials and crises, including international pressures and outflows of money and skills. But its great advantage over all other strategies (hidden or proclaimed) is that it sees the active intervention of the people of Hong Kong not as an embarrassment or a danger, but as necessary and desirable. A change in the colony’s political and social system would have profound consequences for its world economic role. A liberated Hong Kong could no longer stay tied to the fluctuations of the world

11

David Bonavia, feer, 20 January 1983.

234

benton

market, and its economy would have to be reconverted to serve the needs of China’s development. There can be no doubt that China desperately needs and wants Hong Kong’s capital, expertise and high-quality goods. Even now, at a time when most of the world’s big economies are in recession, China’s expanding market has provided a major new outlet for Hong Kong’s producers, and Hong Kong’s economy is becoming increasingly integrated into that of nearby Guangdong province. This mutual interaction and development will continue and intensify in future years. Hong Kong’s workers, managers and technicians are renowned for their adaptability and initiative. Given the choice, they would no doubt sooner make goods useful to China’s modernisation drive than plastic toys and video games for the rich countries. Of the various proposals put on the question of Hong Kong’s future, only those of the dissidents and radicals are free of established interests and oppressive systems, and only they are in the interests of the people not only of Hong Kong but of all China. If the people of the colony organise to extend their control over its administration and economy, it can be transformed eventually from a paradise for capitalist adventurers into a reasonably comfortable place for working people: from a “stinking harbour” fouled by capitalism into a “fragrant harbour”12 that with time will perfume the air above China and Taiwan. At same time, Hong Kong’s economic strength will turn into a factor to further China’s socialist construction, rather than one to corrupt its very foundations. Thus the different strands of the Chinese people’s struggle for emancipation – from colonialism (the national struggle), from capitalism (the social struggle in Hong Kong), and from bureaucracy (the political struggle in China) – are inextricably intertwined and mutually reinforcing.

12

This is the meaning in Chinese of the name Hong Kong (Xianggang).

A Revolutionary Socialist Approach to the Solution of the Hong Kong Problem (1983) Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua January 1983

This document offered a Chinese Trotskyist perspective on the negotiations between Britain and Hong Kong on the ending of colonial rule. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 27, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

1.

2.

End the colonial status of Hong Kong as soon as possible. It should not be deferred to 1997.1 Oppose the secret diplomacy through which Peking and London are trying to “resolve” the problem. A real solution of the problem and to achieve it in a peaceful and smooth way can only be obtained by not only fully consulting the hk people but also calling them to rise and fight for the liberation of hk. British imperialism will never abandon the Crown Colony unless it is forced to do so by the action of hk people. As a result of a series of wrong policies, either ultra-left or extremely right, carried out by the Peking government over the past more than thirty years, the people of China including those living in hk have actually lost any confidence in the ccp. Consequently, in resolving the hk problem, just as in their efforts to resolve other problems, the Peking authorities dare not rely on the strength of the toiling masses and dare not follow a determinedly revolutionary policy. They prefer an absolutely secret diplomacy with the British on the one hand and ingratiate themselves with the British and Chinese bourgeoisie in hk on the other. In so doing, the Peking government claims that sovereignty over hk can be recovered and at the same time the prosperity and stability of the present hk can be maintained. In fact it is a completely wrong and reactionary policy. For the sake of maintaining “prosperity and stability” Peking is likely to make humiliating

1 According to one of the three unequal treaties imposed by the British upon the Manchu imperial court in the nineteenth century the so-called New Territories, more than 90 per cent of Hong Kong’s territory, was leased for 99 years – the lease will expire in 1997.

© Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_022

236

3.

4.

wang and lou

concessions to Britain, on the question of sovereignty; while to maintain “prosperity and stability” under a formal or fake rule of China would quite probably threaten politically and economically the achievements so far secured by the Chinese revolution. “One country, two systems” – Peking’s formula to be applied to the future of hk – can only result in one of two alternatives if it is put into practice at all; either to repeat the old story of the ccp’s “perfidy” or to put the socialist construction of the whole country at risk. On coming to power over thirty years ago, the ccp promised the “national” bourgeoisie “a long, long period of co-existence”. In fact, however, the “long period” only lasted for less than two years, from the end of 1949 till the end of 1951. During the first six months of 1952 the bourgeoisie as a class was eliminated and nearly all capitalists were punished as criminals. The open “breach of faith” on the side of the ccp cost dear; it was the first serious crisis of the ccp’s credibility. If this time the Peking government is prepared to honour its promise: let hk exist for a long, long time as special zone of capitalism, hk would quite probably become a sort of beachhead through which world capitalism would launch economic and political attacks against China with the aim to restore capitalism throughout the country. Such a perspective is by no means groundless considering the more and more rightward orientation taken by the present leaders of the Peking government and the increasingly corrupted cadres at all levels. To resolve the hk problem both in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the hk people and in that of the socialist construction of China as a whole requires not only a determined national struggle, with the toiling masses of hk as its main forces, against British imperialism, but also a social struggle against the capitalist system in hk. And furthermore it takes an anti-bureaucratic struggle against the ccp regime for the democratisation of the country to succeed. The solution of the hk problem represents on the one hand a step further on the road of the development of the Chinese socialist revolution, and on the other hand a component part of the common struggle of the Chinese toiling masses against all oppressions (imperialism, capitalism and bureaucracy). Thus the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles in hk must be waged in close connection with the anti-bureaucratic struggle in mainland China, and especially with those democratic movements which are now undergoing terrible suppression. People in hk will never be happy to be restored to Chinese jurisdiction unless there is real improvement both in democratic rights and in livelihood in the “motherland”.

a revolutionary socialist approach to the solution

5.

6.

237

The anti-colonial struggle of hk people has to win the sympathy and support of the working class of Britain, the most effective and powerful among the forces which can defeat British imperialism. And we believe it can be won; there are more and more working people and revolutionary socialists now in Britain realising that their own interests are identical with that of the hk people fighting against colonialism. The recent Malvinas/Falklands war has demonstrated how the ruling class could make use of a war against an external enemy in order to subjugate their own people; how they could poison the political atmosphere with jingoism and thereby launch an all-out offensive against their own working class. The British working class must not let their ruling class create a sort of “hk factor” which would play an immeasurably more poisonous role than the “Falklands factor” has done now. The hk working people and revolutionary socialists should act right away in line with the above-mentioned principles, without waiting for the Peking government, to resolve the problem of hk. They should propose the following measures and try to put them into practice. a. Let the 2,400,000 wage labourers, half the population of hk, be organised into democratically elected trade unions. (At present only one seventh of them have been loosely and inadequately unionised.) In addition, the toiling masses of hk should be allowed to create their own district councils, representative institutions directly elected by the working people as the basic organs of the democratic political structure of hk. These district councils should take care of the political and economic interests of all labourers and poor people. b. Campaign for the convocation of an all-powerful constituent assembly elected by all hk people on the basis of universal, direct, equal and secret voting, for the solution of all fundamental questions facing hk, which can be reduced to the following: 1. Politically, to declare the end of British rule over hk and to resolve upon a system of administration by which hk will be integrated into the whole of China and that will be in the interests of the democratisation of the country. 2. Economically, to decide how to transform hk from a paradise of capitalist adventurers into a reasonably comfortable place for all toiling people. At the same time to make the economic power of the new hk a factor to further the socialist cause, not the capitalist tendencies, in China.

238

wang and lou

Postscript Among the measures so far proposed by the Peking government and “leaked” through some of its official and unofficial spokespersons in connection with the solution of the Hong Kong problem there is one, most interesting in our opinion, called “let hk people rule hk”. This slogan shows two things: (1) being well aware of the unpopularity of their own regime with the hk people, they have to “soothe the hk compatriots” by promising them a sort of “self-rule”. (2) Peking intend to collaborate with the hk Chinese bourgeoisie to form a transitional government after the Colony detaches from Britain. We should disclose the real motives behind this proposed measure and point out its falsehood and error. However, we do not oppose this measure in principle. On the contrary, we support the slogan if “let hk people rule hk” means let all toiling masses of hk rule the liberated colony through their democratically elected local government based on councils elected by hk workers and all poor people. It is precisely such a prospect we should fight for and have fought for in hk. As to how such councils and government could be brought into being and how they would relate to the fight for the establishment of a hk people’s Assembly – we cannot say anything definite now. They can only be decided by the actual course of events. What we can and must do right now is to make every effort to facilitate the emergence of districts of hk Island, Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territory. In carrying on the campaign for it, we might even utilise to a certain extent the election campaign for the government sponsored [by] the District Assembly.

On the Question of Hong Kong People (Especially Those with British Nationality) Staying or Leaving – Our Attitude (1984) Shuang Shan [Wang Fanxi] 20 September 1984

This document was drafted six days before the drafting of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 12, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

1.

2.

As Chinese socialists living in Hong Kong and overseas, we do not advocate nor encourage Hong Kong Chinese leaving as a result [of Hong Kong’s sovereignty and administration] returning to China. We have always demanded the end of Hong Kong’s colonial status; we have struggled for China to reclaim Hong Kong. We are thus one hundred per cent in favour of the eventual reclamation of Hong Kong from British imperialist rule. As a consequence of the ccp’s bureaucratic and oppressive policies over the past thirty-odd years, Hong Kong people are apprehensive about the extension of its rule into the territory. Some are even planning to leave; this is entirely understandable. Yet we must say to those seeking to escape from this feared change of status: your thinking is too pessimistic; your plans are impractical. If you insist on thinking and acting in this way, it will not only harm Hong Kong’s future, and harm the interests of the vast majority of people there, it will not benefit you either. You, in other words we, have no reason whatsoever for pessimism. For internal reasons (Peking’s gestures towards “freedom” and “democracy”), as well as external reasons (Britain’s parting gamble of playing the “democracy” card to prolong its political and economic influence), our struggle for democracy in Hong Kong take[s] place under favourable objective conditions. If only Hong Kong people, especially the workers who constitute a large majority, could unite and organise, then we believe that their fight for democratic rights, first under British and later under Chinese Communist rule, would achieve real results. Our democratic demands should not, and will not be limited to the norms of bourgeois society; they cannot be separated from the socialist trans-

© Shuang Shan [Wang Fanxi], 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_023

240

3.

4.

wang

formation of Hong Kong itself. Here we would certainly encounter the combined opposition and repression of British imperialism and the ccp. However, we believe deeply that our socialist struggle can succeed. On the one hand, it will certainly be closely interlinked with, and be mutually supportive of, the Chinese proletarian and peasant masses’ struggle against bureaucratism, privilege and capitalism. On the other hand it will be reinforced by the movement for socialism in Britain. Our struggle will not be isolated; total victory is entirely possible. For these reasons, Hong Kong people should not pessimistically seek exile and evade our responsibility. We should stand up forcefully as the true masters of Hong Kong, and struggle for democratic and socialist changes in Hong Kong and in China. Our view that escape from Hong Kong is unrealistic is based on the fact that at present all the advanced capitalist countries are plunged in a deep economic crisis. Hong Kong’s colonial master, Britain, is particularly badly affected, with 4–5 million unemployed. It is shutting its doors firmly to immigrants. In fact, only Hong Kong’s very small number of super-rich tycoons have the qualifications to go abroad. The wealth needed to support their life of luxury overseas is extracted from the labouring masses of Hong Kong. It is simply impossible for Hong Kong people to live overseas for good; the small minority who obtain permission to do so, will experience racial discrimination and suffer a great deal materially and spiritually. Rather than suffer the insults, indignity and hardship of being refugees, why not stay in Hong Kong with our heads held high? Let us fight for democracy and socialism, for ourselves, for all Hong Kong people and for all Chinese. At present about half the population in Hong Kong carry a British passport. As Chinese of British nationality, they should have the right to reside in any territory belonging to Britain. However, they have submitted to obligations of British citizenship while being denied their rights – they have no automatic right of abode in the UK. This unjust situation is the result of British colonialism’s deliberate policy. The British colonial government (especially after the “disturbances” of 1967) sought to consolidate its rule by encouraging people to have a socalled “sense of belonging”. Desperate measures were taken to urge Hong Kong people to take up British citizenship. They wanted more and more Hong Kong people, especially those born there, to feel that they are “British”, in order that they remain loyal to the colonial government, and to Britain. But as the future destiny of Hong Kong became more and more

on the question of hong kong people

5.

6.

241

apparent, even the most diehard imperialist[s] finally understood that they could not retain Hong Kong, by force or by any other means. Hong Kong had to be returned to China by 1997 at the very latest. There was the possibility of massive numbers of British Chinese rushing into Britain. Westminster thus quickly acted, through the Nationality Act and Immigration Rules, to exclude 2 million Hong Kong “British citizens” from entering the UK. Hong Kong’s “British Chinese” felt totally cheated by this unprincipled policy of British colonialism; they are extremely angry and discontented. We, of course, share their anger and understand their plight. Together, we will work to expose British colonialism’s treacherous swindle. However, we do not consider that the objective of our campaign is the acceptance of those passports as “British”, i.e., allowing us to escape from Hong Kong at any time to settle in Britain. As we have explained above, we are urging everyone to stay and to forget that fake passport. We wish to assert our status as Hong Kong Chinese, to campaign for the bright future of Hong Kong and of China. Our happy life can be secured only through our own efforts. Do not have illusions about an enjoyable life abroad; in fact, no one will welcome us. As for the British working class and socialist movement, apart from pointing out to them the crimes of British imperialism and its attempts even now to prolong its colonial rule, we have also to expose the heinous trickery of the Hong Kong Government and Westminster regarding the “nationality” question affecting Hong Kong residents. We demand that they oppose this shameless colonialist swindle. We demand that the British labour and socialist movement oppose the racism inflicted on Hong Kong’s “British citizens”. They should take up this struggle against racism and demand for all Hong Kong British passport holders the right of abode in the UK. However, as we have explained above, we Chinese socialists do not advocate that Hong Kong Chinese (“British” or otherwise) should leave as a result of China reclaiming Hong Kong. For us to oppose the reactionary immigration controls of British imperialism is one thing; whether to support people taking flight from Hong Kong is another question altogether. Is our attitude contradictory? Would it not turn the anti-racist fight into an empty slogan? Absolutely not. Our basic principle is not to fight for Hong Kong people as a whole, not even those with British nationality, to gain the right of residence in Britain. However, if certain individuals or families who need

242

wang

to live permanently in Britain for personal reasons face obstacles created by racist immigration policies, then we should give them every support. Furthermore, we have every right to expect our British comrades to help them gain those rights to which they are justly entitled.

section d The Wu Zhongxian Case

∵

Introduction to Part 1, Section D Wu Zhongxian was key leader of Hong Kong’s Revolutionary Marxist League (rml) in the 1970s and the early 1980s. In 1981, he went to Mainland China to promote and consolidate ties between the Hong Kong Trotskyists and activists of the Chinese Democracy Movement. However, he was arrested by the ccp’s national security force on 28 March 1981. According to Wu, on being threatened with severe sanctions by China’s secret police, he decided to make a “fake surrender”. He returned to Hong Kong on 8 April and told the rml leadership about his “capitulation”. His behaviour while in the custody of the ccp’s secret police angered both the Chinese Trotskyist forces in Hong Kong and the Fourth International in Paris. On 30 November 1981, under orders from Paris, Wu was officially expelled from the Trotskyist group in Hong Kong. This section contains various public and internal documents issued by Trotskyists in different places regarding the Wu Zhongxian case.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_024

What Should a Revolutionary Do When Arrested? (1981) Wang Fanxi, translated by Gregor Benton 16 August 1981

After hearing in late March 1981 of the arrest and confession in China of the Hong Kong Trotskyist leader Wu Zhongxian, at a time when Wu was trying to link up with activists of the Chinese Democracy Movement (cdm), the veteran Chinese Trotskyist leader Wang Fanxi wrote this response, based in part on his own experience in prison under the kmt in the 1930s. He explained that revolutionaries and Marxists should, if arrested, behave with integrity and should not shirk the consequences of their imprisonment. It is noteworthy that following Wu’s arrest, another rml activist, Liu Shanqing (Lau Shan-ching), kept up his contacts with the cdm. In December 1981, he went to Guangzhou from Hong Kong to visit the families of cdm activists and was arrested. Unlike Wu, Liu refused to compromise, and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He was eventually released in 1991 and in 1992 he visited Wang in Leeds. The original Chinese text of this document can be found in the Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 28, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

The Inevitable Fate of a Revolutionary How should a revolutionary socialist or communist behave when arrested? With my limited knowledge, it seems to me that this is a crucial question for any serious revolutionary, for whom arrest is more an inevitable fact of life than an exception. But it has rarely been discussed in writing. The main reason for this is, I think, because it has never been seen as a problem, given that any revolutionary must be unconditionally loyal to his or her cause and display a spirit of self-sacrifice in the face of persecution of whatever sort. However, such an attitude is never completely realistic or applicable to all circumstances. Yes, the spirit of absolute loyalty and refusal to surrender even in the face of death is fundamental for any revolutionary subjected to repression. […] Yet spirit alone is far from capable of providing an effective counter to reactionary humiliation. Even less so is death an end in itself for a revolutionary. Death is worth striving for only when its realisation will bring a crucial advance for revolution. No revolutionary should strive for death in the hands of reaction-

© Wang Fanxi, translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_025

what should a revolutionary do when arrested? (1981)

247

aries. Even more important is to strive to stay alive. A revolutionary should not only strive to become free in order to continue his or her revolutionary work but should exploit what happens in the wake of arrest – in jail or before a court, etc. – to develop the struggle in a new form. How, in enemy’s hands, can one strive for survival and freedom in order to continue to serve the revolution while at the same time bringing no harm to (and striving with every sinew to achieve the maximum positive effect for) the revolutionary party or the revolution? It is a lesson that every real revolutionary must learn, and to which leaders of revolutionary parties must pay close attention. In order to instruct party members how to behave under arrest, party leaders must consider the conditions of reactionary rule, study the experience of revolutionaries in countering repression over the past half century in various countries in order to understand the rules to be observed, and lay down certain dos and don’ts as guidelines. Although less important than training in ideology and character, it is nevertheless an indispensable lesson to learn. I can only conduct a preliminary exploration of this issue in this short essay, given my poor physical health. A more comprehensive study awaits the efforts of comrades. Here I would like to talk briefly about three questions: 1. whether or not it is right to admit to being a revolutionary; 2. whether or not it is right to give information about the party organs and comrades; and 3. how to deal with compulsory ideological reform [at the captor’s hand].

Different Experiences under Three Different Types of Regime In terms of their treatment of revolutionary communists, regimes today can be roughly divided into three types: (1) those that are full bourgeois democracies, like Britain, the United States, France, etc.; (2) those that are openly fascist or semi-fascist, such as various countries in South America, Asia, and elsewhere, together with bourgeois or semi-feudal regimes under various types of military dictatorship; and (3) degenerated workers states like the ussr, China, etc. Generally speaking, type (1) does not have political prisoners, at least in a superficial understanding of the term. Even those who oppose the existing regime are entitled to immunity from arrest (although they may well suffer some other form of persecution) as long as they do not act outside the law as defined by the government (for example, by engaging in armed struggle). Bourgeois democracies naturally have their own ways of dealing with revolutionaries. Ideology cannot rationally be classed as illegal. Freedom of speech, press, association, and demonstration widely obtain. Regarding type (2) coun-

248

wang, trans. benton

tries, opposition groups and parties and all forms of “dissidence” are subject to severe repression, to a degree that might vary from one place and time to time. In type (3) countries, political imprisonment is commonplace. In them, the ruling sector will crack down on actual counterrevolutionaries, but it will also crush dissident revolutionaries. The way in which reactionary rulers deal with revolutionaries varies from one political system to the next, and so should the way in which revolutionaries respond. Can revolutionaries deny being revolutionaries at the time of their arrest? If released as a reward, can they continue to deny their status as a revolutionary, conceal their position, and claim (for example) to have realised their mistake? This problem does not exist in type (1) countries, where people can proclaim themselves to be revolutionary socialists or revolutionary communists freely and openly. Denying it or admitting it has nothing to do with the tactics employed in the struggle against persecution. This is not the case, however, in type (2) countries, for example, China under the Kuomintang. In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the Kuomintang’s treatment of captured revolutionaries was at once both cruel and incompetent. Its agents rushed in blindly and caught and killed people indiscriminately. In the midst of this, ordinary nonCommunists were arrested and killed, while a few genuine Communists were saved or released for lack of evidence or perhaps after payment of a ransom. Revolutionaries arrested under a false name would deny that they were Communists. As a result, there was a period in which those arrested demonstrated their steadfastness by refusing to admit that they were Communists and their weakness by admitting that they were. This was the opposite of the situation in pre-revolutionary Russia. In Tsarist Russia, a revolutionary who was arrested and denied being a revolutionary was seen as reneging on his beliefs. Why the difference? Mainly because Russia at the time, although overrun with police, in which sense it was close to our second category, had nevertheless adopted a more or less Western-style legal system. Arrested revolutionaries were dealt with, at least formally, through the courts. Revolutionaries often got the chance to defend themselves, and therefore to defend the revolution. In such circumstances, anyone who denied his or her identity was certainly not trying to deceive the enemy but was reneging on his or her beliefs. Even in China at the time, and in countries where secret agents were generally prevalent, deceiving the enemy by denying one’s political identity could be done within very narrow limits and only for a short while. Specifically, only if your membership of the party is secret, only if the enemy could not determine who you are, can you adopt such a tactic. When the enemy finally proves that you are a communist revolutionary on the basis of evidence from traitors and physical

what should a revolutionary do when arrested? (1981)

249

evidence (party documents, etc.), you must bravely admit who you are, defend your position adamantly, and be prepared for any sacrifice. If at this point you continue to deny who you are or declare that you renounce your revolutionary stance, whether in good faith or bad, you will have dishonoured yourself as a revolutionary and done serious damage to the revolutionary party and the revolutionary cause. However, is it admissible to confess to being a revolutionary and to tell the enemy the secrets of the organisation and names and addresses of comrades? This is the second of my questions. Needless to say, this question, like the previous one, is basically irrelevant under the first type of regime. It only arises where all opposition parties are outlawed and all revolutionaries are treated as criminals. So should revolutionaries deal with this question in the same way as the first, i.e., by keeping quiet in some cases but speaking out in others? Absolutely not! The revolutionary’s attitude should be clear and straightforward: he or she should never reveal information about the revolutionary organisation or the addresses of comrades, lest the organisation be destroyed and the comrades arrested. To do otherwise would be to betray the Party and the revolution, to become a traitor. Revolutionary stances and ideas can be frankly admitted and, when the opportunity arises, such as in a court of law, should be loudly proclaimed. Doing so will not harm the revolution but help it greatly. The revolutionary party needs people to know what it stands for. The enemies of the revolution, in all countries (even in the first category), are always trying to suppress, ban, or distort the positions of revolutionaries, by all means possible. Information about the revolutionary organisation and the names and addresses of its members must be kept secret for as long as the party remains illegal. It is the minimum duty of every member of the party not to reveal these secrets to the enemy, however great the persecution. Now to the third question: how to deal with compulsory ideological reform. By rights, all should be free to think and believe what they like, whether under bourgeois democracy or under socialism. Ideas cannot be criminalised; beliefs should be free, and no one has the right to force others to change their thinking. Thoughts and ideologies can be made crimes, and those in power can use state or secret agent tactics to force those who fall into their hands as dissidents to change their ideas and beliefs. To do so not only violates human rights and democracy but is an ultimate form of barbarism. In the West, it would amount to a resurrection of the medieval Inquisition; in China, of absolute monarchical despotism. Since the late 1920s, because of the death agony of capitalism and the repeated failure of world revolution, the brutal persecution of ideologies has featured not only in capitalist countries but also in the degenerate or

250

wang, trans. benton

deformed workers’ states that have overthrown capitalism. Such things must be rejected not only by socialists and communists but also by committed democrats. How can they be countered? I am not addressing this question in its generality, just one aspect of it, namely: when a revolutionary is captured by the enemy and forced to abandon or change his or her ideas (mainly political), what should he or she do so as not to endanger the revolution?

What Happened under Kuomintang Rule? To answer this question, I would like to say a few words about the experience of Chinese revolutionaries in the Kuomintang era. The Kuomintang’s way of suppressing revolutionaries changed and “improved” considerably starting in the years in which it became openly anticommunist: in the summer and autumn of 1927 through to the early 1930s. In those early years, Kuomintang agents waged a stormy and violent campaign aimed at physically destroying revolutionaries. Later, however, the focus shifted to long-term persecution, as if simmering or frying over a gentle fire, in order to destroy the revolutionaries spiritually and ideologically. This shift more or less reflected the stabilisation of Kuomintang rule, indicating the achievement on its part of a greater degree of self-confidence. In the previous period, revolutionaries were first tortured and made to confess and then, in most cases, sentenced to death or imprisonment, according to the seriousness of their cases. The jailers did not ask the revolutionaries to give up their ideas: they were not interested in “ideological reform”. In the latter period, however, once the special agents had become more tightly organised and the techniques they employed more sophisticated, whenever a revolutionary organisation was uncovered, the destruction was generally root and branch, so there was less need for torture and in most cases the focus was on “ideological reform” after arrest. The first step in rehabilitation was to demand that you “surrender”: “voluntarily” reveal your affiliation with the organisation and write about your “ideological repentance”. If the information you give about the organisation provides something for your inquisitors to act on and thus proves that you have collaborated with them, you will most likely soon be freed and given a “job” – in their secret service. In this case, of course, your mind will have been “reformed” and there will be no more problems. If you refuse (as most revolutionaries did in the past) to “turn yourself in”, and if their methods, hot and cold, fail to work, then they will move on to the second step. They won’t kill you (except in the case of a very small number of people with a high profile), and they won’t give you a long prison sentence. Instead, they will send you to an institution designed for

what should a revolutionary do when arrested? (1981)

251

“brainwashing” (so-called “reflection centres”), where you are subjected to an elaborate series of psychological attacks over an indefinite period of time, carried out by sadists. You are told to “study, research, think, and reflect”. You are asked to write about your study, present “reports” on it, and talk to the “teachers”. Finally, you will be asked to issue a “statement of repentance” or a “letter of repentance”, and then they will let you go. If you refuse to do as they ask, you will be required to “reflect” indefinitely until you die a “natural” death or an artificially accelerated one. What to do when you are trapped in such a purgatory? The answer is in principle quite simple: revolutionaries should be loyal and never surrender ideologically or politically to the enemy. It all depends on your ideological firmness, on your dedication to the revolution. As to how to achieve such an ideological firmness and spirit of self-sacrifice, the answer will not emerge immediately after your arrest but is an outcome of the self-education and moral development that you have undergone from the moment that you joined the revolution, a matter that is beyond the scope of this article. I would like to talk briefly here about the general attitude adopted by those revolutionaries who had the misfortune to be imprisoned under the Kuomintang. As far as I know, following a period of non-cooperation, either long or short, most made fake deals with the enemy and wrote some unfortunate socalled “insights” and “reports”. Finally, they signed a sweeping “letter of repentance” and were released. Does that constitute a betrayal? The revolutionary parties of the time (the ccp and the Trotskyists) dealt with this question differently from case to case. The ccp did not express a blanket condemnation (at least as far as I know) against party members released in this way. For example, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, and Li Jingquan were freed from prison in Beijing at the outbreak of the war, but the ccp’s Central Committee decided that they should be treated under the usual procedures and released. The Trotskyists also had a number of comrades sent off for reform. Most of them behaved admirably. Although they, like others, used various methods to avoid out-and-out confrontation, they resisted the pressure to submit to “ideological reform” (in the case, for example, of Yin Kuan).1 These comrades were, of course, forced to undergo the usual formalities after their release from prison, but the organisation did not discriminate against them in any way, and they were reinstated in the organisation soon afterwards. (Comrade Han Jun was even elected to the leadership.) Almost without exception, these comrades dedicated their lives to the revolution. But others misbehaved, including

1 Also in Wang Fanxi’s own case – see his memoir in Wang Fan-hsi [Wang Fanxi] 1991.

252

wang, trans. benton

Liu Renjing.2 He actively collaborated with the enemy and wrote a long essay on [Sun Yat-sen’s] Three People’s Principles. The Trotskyist Central Committee expelled him for that very reason. Later, he went to work for the Kuomintang. This is a case-by-case way of looking at revolutionaries’ resistance to ideological persecution by reactionaries. I think it is reasonable and in line with the practical realities of the struggle to conclude that in some cases such behaviour is harmless while in others it must be regarded as a betrayal. Some people, like [Mao’s wife] Jiang Qing, who have enjoyed the fruits of the revolution, profess to believe that once revolutionaries fall into the hands of counterrevolutionaries, they should play the role of “positive characters” in “model operas”,3 defying the enemy and shouting slogans until they die a heroic death. Anyone who does otherwise is a traitor to the revolution. In fact, such “instructions” would be quite out of touch with the reality of the struggle in prison; they were a mere product of bureaucratic imagination and the sort of nonsense spouted by the “spoiled children” of the revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, the Central Committee even took the signing by Liu Lantao of documents at the time of his release from prison as evidence of betrayal, actually an instance of Maostyle treachery. It is not easy to walk gracefully to the execution ground; but it is equally difficult to deal with “scientific” torture day and night, year after year, without being ground down. The attitude of revolutionary leaders towards these unfortunate comrades should lie not in issuing “instructions” but in helping them to cope with their difficulties. If, as was widely argued by “leftists” during the Cultural Revolution, all arrested Party members were unreliable and all those subjected to reform were traitors, the reactionaries can only rejoice! For what they had failed to accomplish despite all their best efforts – to turn their victims into “traitors” – was instead done for them by the leadership of the revolutionary party itself.

What Has Happened under ccp Rule? The ccp (like other Communist Parties poisoned by Stalinism) persecuted its opponents, especially those on the left (including the Trotskyists), more systematically and effectively than did the Kuomintang.

2 See Biographical List. 3 Jiang Qing was the chief advocate of transforming traditional Chinese operas into revolutionary operas.

what should a revolutionary do when arrested? (1981)

253

What should revolutionary Marxists do if they fall into the hands of this group of “ideological reformers”? Is it legitimate to play “tricks” on them, as revolutionaries did on Kuomintang agents in the past, in order to cheat their way to freedom? I don’t think so, and it is anyway impossible. The only thing we can rely on in this situation is our ideas: we can withstand the wrong ideas of others by maintaining our own correct ideas. In the first place, as I have already argued, the main thing in dealing with the Kuomintang’s ideological persecution was to stick to what we believe in. If “techniques” and “tactics” were of avail, it was only because (1) the Kuomintang had no ideology to speak of and (2) because the Kuomintang, being itself corrupt, had in the end failed to establish an uncorrupted and truly effective secret service. A sincere communist, even one without a deep knowledge of communist theory, would not – or at least would not easily – be convinced by the Kuomintang’s “theoreticians”. But the situation is very different in the case of Stalinism and Maoism. First, both belong in the same category of communism as revolutionary Marxism, not only in name but also, at least in part, in substance. Second, both Stalinism and Maoism benefit from an unprecedented reservoir of material support, and both seem to have contributed to the continuation or completion of the revolution. It is much more difficult for a revolutionary Marxist to hold his ground in the face of such an ideology. He cannot do so unless he truly understands the essence of Marxism, unless he truly grasps the history of the Russian Revolution, unless he is truly aware of the causes of the transformation and degeneration of the Soviet state and the Communist Party, and unless he truly values the theory and practice of Marxism and Leninism concerning the permanent revolution in backward countries. In other words, in addition to mastering the basic doctrines of Marxism, a revolutionary must clearly and resolutely comprehend the internationalist nature of the revolutions of the present age in all countries, have a deep understanding of the reactionary and illusory nature of “socialism in one country”, and fully recognise that the bureaucratic degeneration that is bound to take place especially in backward countries will inevitably jeopardise the gains of socialist revolution – only when armed with such thinking can revolutionary Marxists stand up to the ideological pressure of the Stalinists and Maoists and continue to fight for an internationalist programme, against national socialism and against bureaucratic dictatorship. Otherwise, when you are arrested and subjected to intimidation and bullying by the enemy – even if you are free and safe from persecution – you will be susceptible to the arguments of “Marxists” bolstered by their “victories and successes”. Even worse, you might fall foul of the most reactionary imperialist ideas, accepting capitalism because you are disillusioned by “socialism” as practised by the Stalinists and Maoists.

254

wang, trans. benton

There is no “technical” way of dealing with the ccp’s ideological onslaught, for its agents are far better organised and more effective than those of the Kuomintang. There are no set “rules” regarding whether or not they will release you. They will force you to “review” your detention and to “give an account” of yourself even when released. So there is no room for fake surrenders: to surrender is to surrender, not to surrender is not to surrender. There can only be an open and frank ideological debate, a theoretical struggle in all its glory, with absolutely no lip service or chicanery. The practical experience of the Chinese revolutionary Marxists (Trotskyists) over the last thirty years has taught us this. Under the influence of the ccp’s glorious victories, in the past some of our comrades surrendered ideologically even before their arrest. At the end of 1951 [sic], all were arrested by ccp agents and subjected to ideological persecution. Many were unable to withstand the onslaught and either pretended to change their minds or did so sincerely, but stronger comrades demonstrated unparalleled perseverance and managed to survive 27 years of torment before finally regaining their freedom with a clear conscience [in 1979]. These comrades serve as a model of how revolutionaries should behave once arrested. At the same time, their example demonstrates that only a deep comprehension of and devotion to revolutionary Marxism can ensure that revolutionaries can surmount and overcome such difficulties. The victory of the Chinese Trotskyist comrades over their Stalinist and Maoist persecutors is an honourable example. In that sense, it is proof that the theory of permanent revolution has stood the test of time and is one of the best guarantees of a glorious future.

Public Statement concerning My Illegal Arrest by the Chinese Government (1981) Ng Chung-yin [Wu Zhongxian], translated by Yang Yang 17 August 1981

In December 1980, the rml split, just two years after its unification in 1978. In order to boost its remaining members’ morale and expand the Trotskyist influence on the Chinese Democracy Movement (cdm, 1978–1981), Ng, a leader of the rml, decided to go to China to make more connections between the Hong Kong Trotskyists and cdm activists. Seventeen days after his arrival in Beijing, on 28 March, he was arrested by the ccp’s national security. He decided to confess to supporting the cdm, after being threatened with the death penalty. He was released on 1 April, after which he continued to visit cdm activists. He returned to Hong Kong on 8 April, and told the rml leadership about his “capitulation”. However, no disciplinary action was taken against Ng. Other Trotskyists, however, in Hong Kong, overseas, and in the fi, responded with alarm on hearing the news. In response to their criticisms, Ng drafted the following statement in August 1981, in an attempt to justify his actions and demonstrate that he had betrayed neither Trotskyism nor the cdm. In the same statement, he declared his resignation from the rml. Eventually, under the fi leadership’s instruction, Ng was officially expelled from the rml, on 30 November 1981. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 28, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

On 20 March 1981, while travelling by train from Beijing to Nanjing, I was secretly arrested by China’s National Security Bureau at Tianjin railway station on suspicion of engaging in counterrevolutionary activities.1 On 8 April 1981, I was finally released and left China [for Hong Kong] on condition that I would henceforth collect information on Hong Kong’s social movements for the Chinese government. I think it necessary to publicly clarify and disclose the relevant issues of my arrest and its aftermath.

1 Ng’s memory gets the wrong date of his arrest. He was arrested by the ccp’s national security people on 28 March 1981.

© Ng Chung-yin, transl. by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_026

256

wu, trans. yang

On the basis of three key allegations, the Chinese government accused me of involvement in counterrevolutionary activities. First, I was accused of having obtained state secrets, on the grounds that I had been informed by Chinese pro-democracy activists that the Chinese government had issued Document No. 9, which specifically targeted suppressing the pro-democracy movement. The truth is that although Document No. 9 was classed as an internal document of the Chinese Communist Party, it was also passed on to all production units and thus became a “secret” known to everyone. It is important to add that this document was decisive for the future of the pro-democracy movement and the Chinese government’s final decision to promote or suppress democracy. It was therefore in no way a “state secret”. Those who have talked about it are certainly not guilty, and those who have come to know about are also innocent. Second, after reading Document No. 9, I continued to express my support for the Chinese Democracy Movement. In the messages I sent back to Hong Kong, I clearly stated the pluses and minuses [of the pro-democracy movement], so I was accused of knowingly disobeying the official decree and charged with engaging in counterrevolutionary activities. This accusation was untenable. On the one hand, China’s constitution guarantees freedom of speech. Personal opinions cannot be criminalised. On the other hand, Document No. 9 outlaws the pro-democracy movement. This means that no one concerned about the future of Chinese democracy can keep quiet about it. Third, the Chinese government accused me of engaging in espionage because of my contacts with a foreign correspondent in Beijing. It is easy for the government to blame or trump up charges against a person. In fact, I have been acquainted with that foreign journalist for many years – we first met in Hong Kong. There is no reason I should not catch up with him when we meet in another city. As for why I asked this friend to take back a small range of minkan [pamphlets and journals privately published by the pro-democracy activist network] to Hong Kong, it was in response to the Chinese government’s unreasonable suppression of minkan. If delivering minkan to Hong Kong constitutes “espionage”, I guess a large number of people have committed the crime of espionage over the past three years without ever realising it. Anyway, I truly believe that the Chinese government had no reasonable grounds to arrest me. Not only do I feel this way today, but I also made the same point during my custody. But why should a government that claims to be the legal representative of one billion people carry out this unwise move against me despite knowing that it was unjustifiable? It seems to me that it was not so much that the Chinese government had overestimated what I said or I did but that it has a deeply rooted fear of China’s Democracy Movement and of the Hong Kong Trotskyist movement.

public statement concerning my illegal arrest

257

While large in neither scale nor influence, the Chinese Democracy Movement has, since late 1978, encountered great difficulties as a result of its continuous suppression by the Chinese government. However, the Chinese government is equally aware that the pro-democracy movement is an outcome of the 5 April Tian’anmen Square Incident [of 1976],2 which represented a new future for the Chinese masses, heralded a new epoch, and marked a new historical trend on China’s road to the future. What the Chinese government fears is not today’s pro-democracy movement but the democratic current symbolised and represented by the pro-democracy movement. Precisely because of this, and because the government is well aware that “a single spark can start a prairie fire”, it seeks to persecute and quash the pro-democracy movement at any cost. It not only targets the mainland’s pro-democracy movement but also keeps an eye on its overseas supporters. This is why Document No. 9 particularly emphasises “overseas connections”, as a pretext for isolating the pro-democracy movement internationally. My arrest was unlucky, in that it took place at a time when Document No. 9 had just been released. It suggests that I represent some sort of “overseas connection” that actively supports the pro-democracy movement. The Chinese government has no immediate cause to fear today’s Trotskyist movement in Hong Kong, which is small and lacking in influence. Nevertheless, the government is not so shortsighted as the vulgar anti-Trotskyists of Maoist origin [in the colony]. It understands that the Trotskyists too should be feared on the grounds that their movement could constitute an important force in any future advance towards socialist democracy in China. So the Chinese government’s thinking is not groundless. Long before today’s activists began to deplore and reassess China’s current political system, the Trotskyists had scientifically analysed the existence of [a Stalinist] bureaucracy in China. Long before Li Yi Zhe’s big-character poster and Chen Erjin’s criticism of privilege appeared,3 the Trotskyists had explicitly insisted that socialist democracy was the only way out for Chinese socialism. And long before the outbreak of the 5 April Tian’anmen Incident, the Trotskyists argued that the increase in conflicts within the bur2 The 5 April Tian’anmen Incident in 1976 was a mass protest, with spontaneous features, that expressed people’s discontent with the Cultural Revolution. The incident was triggered by the death of Zhou Enlai earlier that year. The resulting protests were labelled counterrevolutionary and suppressed by the army. In late 1978, the 5 April protestors were officially rehabilitated. 3 Li Yi Zhe, “On Socialist Democracy and the Legal System”, in Benton and Hunter 1995, pp. 134– 45; and Chen 1984. The former was written by four activists in Guangzhou, Wang Xizhe, Li Zhengtian, Chen Yiyang, and Guo Hongzhi. Chen Erjin was a pro-democracy activist and writer.

258

wu, trans. yang

eaucracy would, together with the resistance of the masses in Chinese society, make the struggle for democracy a key feature of the coming period. The accusations [that we are] “anti-China, anti-communist, and anti-people”, which the Maoists maliciously propagated in past slanders and distortions, have today been proved false by the course of history. Why is the Chinese government afraid? Because it knows that the Trotskyists are right in terms of their judgements, theories, and positions. As soon as the Chinese masses are mobilised in a massive struggle for democracy, [the Trotskyists’] correct views will be swiftly transformed into a huge political force. The Trotskyists have been the most loyal, unreserved, and consistent supporters of China’s democratic movement. It is no accident that the Chinese government exploited a favourable situation to arrest me, given my modest contribution to the Hong Kong Trotskyist movement. This was perfectly clear at the time of my arrest. By rights, I should therefore have gone all out to defend myself rather than admit the fabricated crime. The bureaucratic apparatus of repression was not open to reason. The choice I had was either to allow the bureaucrats to sentence me in secret and thus strip me of my freedom or to pretend to surrender and thus seek a way out. If I managed to get an open trial and the chance of a public debate, I would have readily taken my place in the dock. In the event, I chose the latter less honourable option. Certainly, I would have to pay a price for my fake surrender. That price was a promise to work for China’s National Security Bureau and to “cop a plea”, which I did between 30 March and 1 April. The information I provided during these days was partially true, but other parts of my confessions were false. Frankly speaking, I was trying to protect the pro-democracy movement and the Trotskyist movement, by trying to conceal the connection and communication between the two. I can’t say that my confession was completely harmless in their regard, but any harm it did was on the low scale. I had to admit that the Trotskyist position was wrong and that the pro-democracy movement had no prospects, etc. In both these respects, I must here solemnly declare that the confessions I was forced to make while in custody must be annulled. I continue to support and endorse the pro-democracy movement as well as the Fourth International, just as I did before. Honestly speaking, I have never betrayed my convictions and have never entertained the slightest thought of betrayal. As for my promise to work for the Chinese government, I have no intention of acting on it. Yes, on 30 April I did return to China and provided several Trotskyist internal documents [to the Chinese police], but I informed the relevant organisations before doing so. This was merely a delaying tactic. I had learnt during my custody of the existence of a blacklist of Hong Kong activists who had been

public statement concerning my illegal arrest

259

in contact with the mainland pro-democracy movement. I needed time to let them know and enable them to take counter-measures. With regard to my arrest, some ridiculous rumours have started to circulate. It is being rumoured that the Chinese government’s crackdown on the prodemocracy movement was a consequence of Trotskyist involvement. I don’t want to say much about who might be behind such rumours, except that they are a bunch of parrots who merely repeat what the Chinese government says. In the early 1970s, these people helped the pro-Beijing “leftists” sabotage the Hong Kong student movement, at whatever cost. Why is the Chinese government suppressing the pro-democracy movement? Because it is a challenge to the bureaucracy on behalf of the masses. Why is the government so displeased with the Trotskyists? Because the challenge to the bureaucracy is a legacy of revolutionary Marxism. So even if the Trotskyists had not been involved in the pro-democracy movement, the government would probably have launched a crackdown on it. The Trotskyist involvement is a perfect pretext for the government. The question is, do we support China’s move towards socialist democracy, do we oppose it, do we adopt a compromising stance, or do we adopt a sectarian attitude so that we alone are allowed to support it and others are not allowed to work with it? One of the indispensable reforms regarding socialist democracy that must be implemented in China is the toleration of diverse opinions and political parties. In order to defend the pro-democracy movement and promote democracy, we must stand up for democratic ideas while at the same time opposing unjustified bureaucratic repression. In the past, this is the position we adopted in defence of Wei Jingsheng.4 Today, we call on the masses to do the same in regard to both China’s pro-democracy activists and the Trotskyists suppressed by the Chinese government. On this matter of principle, any concession must take account of the principle of socialist democracy. As for those who claim that they will be deterred from supporting the pro-democracy movement because the Trotskyists oppose the Chinese government, the true reason that such people give up supporting the pro-democracy movement is that they are afraid of provoking a confrontation with the Chinese government. If this is the case, they should stop pretending to be on the side of progress, for the pro-democracy movement is already irreconcilable with bureaucracy and will become increasingly so in the near future. Although my fake surrender has met with understanding and forgiveness on the part of dozens of friends and comrades, it has also been met with reproach 4 Wei Jingsheng was a pioneer activist of the Chinese Democracy Movement between 1978 and 1981. See his big-character poster “Democracy or a New Dictatorship”, in Benton and Hunter 1995, pp. 180–184.

260

wu, trans. yang

and disdain on the part of other friends, which I suppose comes as no surprise. I have nothing more to say other than to thank those friends who understand me for their encouragement and their basic confidence in me. The last word should belong to others. In the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml), I have received the toughest disciplinary punishment. Nevertheless, the internal condemnation, the disdain, and the disciplinary punishment have not shaken my fundamental confidence in the struggle for China’s future socialist democracy. Objectively speaking, however, my present situation does not allow me to remain a member of the rml – to do so would bring dishonour and humiliation on myself and the organisation, and it might sow seeds of suspicion and mistrust. While proclaiming that I will never give up the struggle for socialist democracy despite the Chinese government’s pressure on me, I must therefore sadly declare that, due to my special present circumstances rather than for any political or organisational reasons, I have decided to resign from the rml. This is a decision that I am most reluctant to take. One might call it a small victory for the Chinese government as a consequence of my arrest. However, if the government continues to believe that might is right, it will at some future point be proved spectacularly wrong. The emergence of the pro-democracy movement and of the pro-democracy activists has tolled the death knell for China’s bureaucratic regime. This is a historical trend not subject to the will of human beings.

The rcp’s Position on Wu Zhongxian’s “Fake Surrender” (1981) In late March 1981, when Wu Zhongxian, a leading rml member, tried to forge ties between the Hong Kong Trotskyists and the activists of the Chinese Democracy Movement in mainland China, he was arrested and pretended to “surrender” to the ccp’s national security officers. This led to a controversy among the Hong Kong Trotskyists. On 20 September 1981, the rcp submitted a report to the fi condemning Wu’s behaviour as a betrayal of the movement, while condemning the rml leadership and Roman, i.e., Pierre Rousset, the fi representative, for tolerating Wu’s action. In response to the rcp’s accusation, Rousset protested that the rcp had distorted his position on the Wu affair. This statement was circulated by its authors in English. The English is at many points faulty or unidiomatic. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 28, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

Report on the Wu Affair Lee See From the rcp to the usfi 20 September 1981 Three months ago, we wrote our opinion on the Wu affair and the English translation was forwarded to you through Comrade Roman. That document was our initial opinion based on the limited information we could obtain at that time. On our repeated demands, an abridged photocopy of Wu’s written report to the rml was given to us at the beginning of this month. Apart from revealing that Wu had written a “letter of resolution to have one’s crime absolved by gaining merits” and other confession letters, the report also supplied other information that we had not been told of previously. Since the problems it revealed are serious and the rml has not handled them appropriately up to now, we find it necessary to make this report. (1) Facts of Wu’s So-called “Pretended Surrender” According to Wu’s report, the following main points can be established: 1. Wu was reportedly arrested on the afternoon of 28 March. That night, he at once “hoped that the best way is to pretend to surrender and

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_027

262

2.

3.

4.

5.

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

gain release under the condition of not paying a high price”, and so he took the initiative to express to ccp agents that he “felt that something seems to be wrong concerning some basic questions of the Trotskyists (in fact it revealed sincerely the feeling that something is wrong concerning extreme dogmatic positions among Trotskyists)” (Note: the words in parenthesis are taken from Wu’s report). On the night of the 29, “both parties finally agreed on the conditions in exchange for my release”. This means that: after he was arrested, he at once decided to “pretend to surrender”, and was ready to express his vacillation on basic political positions in order to win the “trust” of ccp agents, and he quickly arrived at agreement with ccp agents. He widely satisfied the demands of ccp agents. “From 30 March to the afternoon of 1 April, primarily I wrote down materials that they wanted”; that is, he spent almost three days on the writing, and so the materials must be very rich. Wu’s report, basing on his “memory”, briefly listed 15 issues, which include descriptions of the democratic movement, the development of the rml, the listing of the names and concrete information (such as their background) of many members, the situation of the rcp, of activists in Hong Kong, etc. (two and a half pages are here deleted in the photocopy of the report that they gave to us, and so it is not known what the other half of the questions are.) According to the report, the 15th question that he wrote about was: “ ‘the letter of resolution to have one’s crime absolved by gaining merits’ was brief in its content, which said that the Trotskyists are counterrevolutionary and that I would devote my loyalty to the ccp, etc”. (According to Yip Ning’s [Li Huai-ming] 18 August letter to Comrade Wang [Wang Fanxi], Wu had also written “confessions” admitting that he “was conducting ‘subversive activities’ and ‘counterrevolutionary activities’ ” in China and all this was done “without torture”.) From 2 April to 7, in the company and under the instructions of ccp agents, Wu had contacts and discussions with democratic movement elements in Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. At this time, the tasks he originally shouldered for our movement had turned into tasks shouldered for ccp agents but were still being conducted in the name of our movement. Besides these, the above quoted letter of Yip Ning also revealed: “Wu had proposed to ccp agents … that he should be allowed to continue, as usual, to communicate with the democratic movement, and the reply of the agents was that it was no problem at all, and they later added that this had obtained the approval of the Central”. (This proposal of Wu was not

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

263

to “gain release” by deceiving ccp agents, but was to continue even after he had “gained release”.) Yip’s letter continued to reveal that: Wu “was very certain that his performance in the ‘pretended surrender’ had made the agents trust him very much”, and so Wu thought he “should make use of this ‘trust’ in turn to help our China work”. And “if this ‘counterspy’ work has to be conducted, naturally the ‘pretended surrender’ has to continue, and at least to a certain extent the demands that the agents made of Wu must be satisfied. I believe it was with this plan that Wu sent out a batch of documents”. This batch of documents included internal documents of the rml and of the International. They were, with Yip Ning’s agreement and assistance, given to ccp agents by Wu several days after he returned to Hong Kong. When Yip did this, he had not informed the matter to other Standing Committee members of the rml, and so the latter at that time knew nothing at all about the whole matter. (2) The Nature of Wu’s Deeds We once again make the following evaluations: 1. Wu’s performance this time was immediate surrender to the ccp without any fight. To gain release, he cared not what price he had to pay: to vilify the cause he had believed in and the organisation he had participated as “counterrevolutionary” and thus seriously blemish the banner of the Fourth International. This is betrayal of the Fourth International and of the revolutionary cause. 2. Part of the root of this betrayal in his different ideas on “some basic questions of the Trotskyists” (Wu admitted that this “revealed sincerely his true thoughts”). This is not “pretended surrender”, but is, in front of enemies, politically abandoning and negating the Fourth International’s basic positions. And his making use of this political vacillation in exchange for the “trust” of ccp agents is in essence extreme political opportunism. 3. This has done actual harm to democratic movement elements. Ten days before his arrest, Wu had discovered that he was being followed by agents, but he still carried with him a list of names and addresses of democratic movement activists of different parts of China, and tapes and records of his discussions with some of them; they all fell into the hands of the ccp. His confession letter after he was arrested involved democratic movement elements, and he visited them under the instructions of the agents. These inevitably did harm to them. We must not deny that harm has been done simply because we cannot be certain of the extent of harm. Unless we denounce Wu and draw a distinct demarcation from him, democratic movement militants will think the Trotskyists have betrayed them.

264

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

4.

The extent to which Wu’s “pretended surrender” seemed genuine would convince Wu that “the agents trust him very much”. Such a deed shows that he had totally abandoned all hope of winning the trust of the revolutionary masses. It is easy to understand that any performance that can win the trust of agents inevitably causes extreme distrust among revolutionaries. 5. That Wu continued to carry out his “pretended surrender” even after he had returned to Hong Kong fundamentally refuted the idea that his socalled “pretended surrender” was being forced on him. What is more serious is that regardless of what Wu’s subjective wish had been, this led the rml to destruction. (Fortunately, according to Yip’s letter, the rml Standing Committee disagreed with Wu’s “view”, and they considered that “the ccp’s agreement for Wu to continue to send documents and remittance to the democratic movement was a trap”; they decided that Wu should at one stop all contact with the agents.) In summary, as a serious and responsible revolutionary organisation, the rml must at once entirely dissociate themselves from Wu’s treacherous behaviour, politically, organisationally and in work; the rml should discipline Wu by expulsion (or at least in terms of “voluntary withdrawal”), and announce it both within and outside the organisation, and explain it to democratic movement militants and their overseas supporters, so that their own banner is upheld and their members and the masses close to them can be educated. (3) The Mistakes Committed by the rml Leadership In our document stating our opinion three month ago, we already made our criticisms of the mistakes committed by the rml leadership. We have the following additional comments here: 1. In the beginning, the rml leadership not only did not take seriously the graveness of the matter but instead made a lot of cover-ups and defended Wu, such as saying that Wu’s deeds had not yet constituted actual harm to the organisation or to the democratic movement; the chief leader Yip Ning even said that it was “nothing really” bad. 2. Not only did they not inform the rcp leadership of this matter after it had happened, it is said that they had not of their own accord informed the International leadership. Comrade Roman apparently learned of this matter from Comrade Wang’s letter and then came to Hong Kong to handle this. Even more ridiculous is that he had come to Hong Kong for many days and had not yet been told of many facts (for example, in his first meeting with us, Comrade Roman said that he did not know such important details like Wu had written a “letter of resolution to have

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

3.

4.

265

one’s crime absolved by gaining merits” and had vilified the Trotskyists as “counterrevolutionary”). Thus, if we had not told Comrade Roman, he might have continued to be kept in the dark, and have caused the International leadership to be kept in the dark. When Comrade Roman said that the matter was grave and organisational should be imposed on Wu, according to the above quoted letter of Yip, in mid-July, “not long before (he) left Hong Kong, at a plenary meeting, the majority of the members decided to suspend Wu”; but there was no concrete revelation on how Wu’s behaviour and performance were “inspected” (perhaps no decision whatever has been made on this). Under such circumstances, what can be “inspected” in three months? But even such half-hearted handling met with the disagreement of a minority of comrades. From this can be seen that under the wrong guidance of the leadership, the rml at present has fallen into a state of paralysis. According to the analysis of Yip’s letter, the different views now existing in the rml on this matter “are not totally opposing. From my point of view, the difference lies in the angle of viewing the matter. One starts off more from an abstract principle, and another thinks that the principle should be considered in coordination with the facts and the objective environment”. This means that four months after the incident, Yip Ning was still defending Wu’s deeds, and thought that the “objective environment” that Wu was in at that time should be considered and whether the Trotskyists are “counterrevolutionary” is only a question of “abstract principle”! The majority of rml comrades resolved to publish, in the name of the rml, an open statement (the title is “Concerning the ccp’s persecution of a dissident”). In explaining Wu’s deeds, the document is full of selfcontradictions. On the one hand, it stresses that revolutionists waging anti-bureaucratic struggles should be “staunchly uncompromising” and says that they must gain credibility by this attitude; but on the other hand, after it has pointed out that Wu had signed a so-called “letter of resolution to have one’s crime absolved by gaining merits”, it still describes Wu as “a militant who has staunchly fought bureaucratism from beginning to end”. On the one hand, it stresses that Wu “has persisted in (the position of) socialist democracy against the ccp bureaucratic politics”, but on the other hand it thinks that Wu “admitted ‘subversive activities’ and ‘counterrevolutionary activities’” “which do not correspond to our political programme and usual revolutionary tactics”. The document is dated July 8th, but up to now, for over two months, it has not yet been “openly” published.

266

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

5.

Wu’s written report also revealed an astounding information: under the ccp’s detailed interrogation on the rml’s China work, Wu “provided the following information: … No. 4, Yip Ning had revealed the use of ‘negative tactics’, i.e., people engaging in China work would appear with an antiTrotskyist pose”. In our contact meetings with the rml to discuss the Wu affair, we enquired about this “news” from representatives of the rml, and the answer was that this was true. Without doubt, the rml must clarify details concerning this so-called “negative tactic”. Nevertheless, so long as Yip Ning had indeed proposed and practised such a “tactic”, he has committed an unforgivable mistake (more accurately, unforgivable crime). 6. Yip Ning’s “negative tactics” is a development and practice of his many years of “double-dealing” manoeuvres, now applied to China work. Since he is in favour of such a method of work, no wonder from the very beginning he has sympathised with Wu’s “pretended surrender”, and aided Wu to continue to conduct the so-called “pretended surrender”; since, in a certain sense, Wu’s deed was exactly a realisation of Yip’s proposal! Concerning his grave mistake of arbitrarily acquiescing to Wu’s continuous contact with ccp agents, Yip has not conducted self-criticism or asked for discipline; on the contrary, when the Wu issue urgently demanded settlement, and “internal difficulties (demoralisation and also slackness of the organisation)” urgently needed to be overcome, such an important leader abandoned things as they were (for over two months now) and went abroad to develop his international relations! If the above mistakes are not promptly corrected, worse consequences will inevitably result, causing greater damage to our whole movement. If the unprincipled wrong concepts espoused by many leaders and comrades of the rml are not thoroughly corrected, and lessons are drawn from the Wu affair, there is no guarantee that similar tragedies of betrayal and surrender to enemies will not happen in the future. (4) Lessons and Proposals 1. In our previous document, our criticisms of Wu and the rml were rather restrained (e.g., although from the very beginning we have characterised Wu’s deeds after his arrest as betrayal, we only said that “this is a deed totally forsaking the political and organisational position and principles of a revolutionary, and staining the political banner of the Fourth International”). At the same time, our proposals for the measures to be taken were the minimum that should be done (e.g., we proposed that Wu should of his own accord withdraw from the rml, and the rml should at the same time draw a clear line with Wu in order to achieve the effect of

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

2.

267

expulsion in disguised form). The main aim was by way of sincere and not too abrasive attitude, and ways easier for them to accept, to win the rml comrades to turn from a wrong position to a correct one. But even such mild opinions were stubbornly rejected by the rml leadership. This once again reflects the differences between the two sides on basic principles. These differences are exactly the continuation of several years of differences on political and organisational principled questions. Wu’s betrayal of his position is also the tragic development of his previous disagreement with some of our (i.e., the Fourth International’s) basic political positions, and his harbouring some illusions in the ccp. This lesson proves that our persistent insistence on clarification and overcoming differences on basic positions before unification is absolutely necessary. As representative of the International leadership, Comrade Roman came here three months ago and said he only came to collect information to take back to the United Secretariat for discussion and for it to make decisions. He did not use the authority of the International leadership to handle this matter. He only, in the capacity of a leading comrade of the International, expressed his own views on the Wu issue and thus influenced our movement here. We do not intend to discuss Comrade Roman’s ideas here in full, but we will stress the similarities and differences between his views and those of the rml leadership at that time. Comrade Roman pointed out that Wu had committed very grave mistakes, but the rml leadership at that time merely covered up for Wu. He thought that Wu’s mistakes did damage to the democratic movement and our China work, but the rml leadership at that time strongly denied this. He proposed organisational measures on Wu (such as removing Wu from his work on the democratic movement among others), but the rml leadership had decisively rejected our similar proposals (we had proposed that Wu’s capacity as publisher of the party organ “Battle News [Combat Bulletin]” be at once cancelled but the rml decisively rejected this). However, Comrade Roman at the same time considered that Wu had only committed mistakes but had not betrayed our cause, that Wu’s mistakes were grave but not principled. He also explained that the organisational measures he proposed were not disciplinary measures and would not affect Wu’s status and capacity as a party member. And so, although Comrade Roman had found the matter grave and had considered ways to eliminate or diminish the damage done to the movement, his views were basically in support of the wrong positions of the rml leadership.

268 3.

4.

5.

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

It has been three months since Comrade Roman left here, but we have not yet heard any decision or directive from the International leadership on the Wu issue. Since the rml, up to now, has not had any practicable and effective methods and has postponed issuing that statement, one is led to doubt that any directive has been made by the International leadership. If really so, we again urge the USec to make a prompt, definitive decision in order to redress the damage done by Wu’s slander etc and to help the rml to overcome its present crisis. We particularly request the International to denounce Wu’s act of betrayal, to consign the rml to totally disown Wu politically and organisationally, and to inform national sections and sympathising organisations of the International. The various performances of the rml for these three years since it conducted an unprincipled fusion in September 1978 also provide important lessons. Politically, it has refused to clarify or try to overcome differences and mistakes on basic positions (for example it has avoided expressing its opinion on our document that summarises political differences between the two sides), it has not been keen on carrying out external political propaganda work, and it has not drafted a political programme or at least a political resolution on China. Organisationally, the leaders have been arbitrary and autocratic and lacking in democratic spirit; among the leadership and between the upper and lower echelons there have been incessant disputes; large numbers of comrades have become increasingly demoralised and one by one announced their withdrawal; some comrades have been unnecessarily channelled into acute opposition and even expulsion, thus causing unprincipled splits. Concerning all these important matters which are unfavourable to advocators of unprincipled fusions, apart from our reports to the International, according to Comrade Roman, no other documents have reported on them. This shows that some people try their best to cover up the bad consequences of unprincipled fusion. This also once again proves the mistakes of leading comrades of the International in their opinion and practice on the unification question in China. Several years ago, they slighted (and even denied) the differences on principled positions existing between the two organisations, did not help the differences to be overcome, but instead encouraged an unprincipled split within the rcp, and caused an unprincipled fusion between the splittists and the rml. Even worse was that they misled the World Congress to approve, in a disguised form, of these mistakes, and in violation of organisational principles, tradition and statutes, recognise the rml as “a wing of the section” (in fact two entirely separate “sections”).

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

269

These mistakes further fostered the rml’s later mistakes and shortcomings. Therefore, the International leadership should now draw lessons from the Wu issue and from the rml’s performances during the past few years; seriously review the question of whether an organisation like the rml which deviated from political and organisational principles, paralysed politically and lax and slack organisationally, should continue to be a “wing” of the Chinese section; send to all iec members for study the three documents we sent to United Secretariat 8 months ago (up to now they have been “frozen”, and the USec Bureau has in all that time sent us no reply) and the several opinion documents and letters on organisational questions that we sent afterwards; and have the matter discussed and decided at the next iec meeting. Lee See, for the rcp Central Committee Postscript on 22 September 1981: After the above report was written, we received further news that Wu had presented a statement to the rml, saying that since some comrades did not trust him, he had decided to withdraw from the rml but he still considered himself an element of the Fourth International and he still believed in the Fourth International’s theories, etc. We still do not know the rml’s attitude towards this statement of Wu. And although we asked for the statement from the rml, we have not been able to read it. So we can only send the news to you basing on limited oral information.

Appendix: A Protest Letter against the rcp’s Report on the Wu Affair from Roman [Pierre Rousset] To rcp (hk) from Roman 8 October 1981 Dear Cdes, I want to make a strong protest against what you have written in your 20 September 1981 report on the Wu affair concerning the positions I presented during my stay in Hong Kong in June 1981. You have written: “(Comrade Roman) proposed organisational measures on Wu (such as removing Wu from his work regarding the democratic movement, among others) (…). However (…) he also explained that the organisational measures he proposed were not disciplinary measures and would not affect

270

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

Wu’s status and capacity as a party member” (point 2 of part (4), p. 5 of the English translation). “Measures” could perhaps be translated from the Chinese as “sanctions”. Nevertheless, there is a very grave straight falsification of what I said at the time. I not only never said that Wu’s status and capacity as a party member should not be affected, but I explicitly said that disciplinary measures should be taken against him. After my report on what I was told on what happened before, during and after Wu’s arrest, I said that on the one hand, because he was exposed to big pressures, Wu should be immediately removed from any “sensitive” organisational area of work, especially from the China work. On the other hand I said that, because the facts were very grave (elementary and basic mistakes before being arrested, an attitude under arrest which will gravely endanger cdm [Chinese Democracy Movement] activists and might be used against our movement) that disciplinary sanctions should be taken against Wu. I pinpointed the first aspect (security organisational measures) because some rml leaders were against taking sanctions against Wu and I was anxious that at least such elementary moves be taken. But I never used this question to downgrade the need to take proper disciplinary sanctions. And I have always been very clear on this question. There has been no possibility of misunderstanding between us on this point, not only because I was myself quite clear on it, but also because you directly questioned me on this. I reaffirmed at that time that I was for disciplinary measures against Wu and that, since the facts were grave, the sanctions should be grave. You yourselves incidentally confirmed what I am saying here when you wrote in another part of the report (point 3 of part (3), p. 3 of the English translation): “When Comrade Roman said the matter was grave and there should be organisational discipline on Wu …” The only thing I did not spell out, during our discussions, was what type of disciplinary sanctions should be taken against Wu. I explained to you then why I did not want to do so at that time: I could not discuss the matter with the Bureau because we heard about the affair only two days before my departure for Asia and even then we had received only indirect and short notice of it. So, I could speak only in my own capacity on this matter. But I had to touch on this question, when I discussed with rml leaders, because they were the ones directly faced with the need to take a decision and they were asking for my opinion. I then told them that, in my own view, among the different measures to be taken, there should be the expulsion of Wu from the organisation (combined or not with his own resignation). I said that such a decision should be taken all the more because Wu was an old leader and a

the rcp’s position on wu zhongxian’s “fake surrender” (1981)

271

central figure of the rml. I said that the rml could continue to work with Wu, after its expulsion, on specific projects (like some writings) but that at least they should wait for a year before reviewing the case (and after a year there should be no automatic re-entry of Wu into the rml: there should be a general discussion on his future status, based on new information on the case, evolution of Wu’s position on what happened, his political activity, etc.) So, not only did I not exclude the need to take disciplinary sanctions against Wu, but I told you several times that such sanctions were needed and, while discussing with rml leaders, I explained the need to expel him from the organisation (even if some political work could be maintained with him). I find it all the more sad that you distorted in such a way the positions I expressed then, during our discussions. I tried my best to push aside all other issues which were not directly related to the Wu affair (for example I decided, as I told you then, not to raise at that time the question of the accusations you made against me in your reports to the USec, accusations which I judge completely unfounded). I wanted the ground to be cleared for us to deal with the grave matter of the Wu affair independently of other problems. When, before my departure, you asked for a common meeting to be organised between the rml comrades, the rcp and myself, I agreed. During this last meeting I asked you and rml comrades if you wanted me to present again my own point of view (I thought it could be useful, because then everybody could have checked that I presented the same positions to both the rcp and the rml). One member of your delegation asked at that time if I had changed in any way my previous positions. I said no, and he said that it was then not necessary for me to go back over my point of view, it was already clear. This is a confirmation that at that time you did not feel there were ambiguities in what I had previously discussed with you. I found the way you distorted my positions on such a grave matter especially damaging due to the nature of the questions we were confronted with. I would like you to correct the record on this matter. Also I ask you to circulate my present letter to all those who got your report. I feel that a clarification of the record on this grave question is indispensable. Comradely greetings, Roman

A Letter from the USec Bureau to rml regarding the Wu [Ng] Zhongxian Affair (1981) 19 October 1981

On 28 March 1981, Wu Zhongxian, a leading figure in the Hong Kong Trotskyist movement since 1973, was arrested in mainland China for linking up with activists in the democracy movement (1978–1981). Wu decided to try to fool the ccp security forces by making a “fake capitulation” to avoid going to prison. His so-called “fake capitulation” led to a fierce debate in Trotskyist circles. Leaders of the Fourth International in Paris were shocked by Wu’s “confession” and launched an investigation. On 19 October, Paris concluded that Wu’s action was unacceptable and urged the rml to expel Wu. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 28, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

Dear comrades of the rml (hk) We have read an English translation of your declaration dated September 11 on the arrest of Wu Zhongxian and we wish to make known our disagreement with the measures you recommend in relation to Wu. You are right to protest, in your declaration, against the arrest of Wu by the Chinese secret police and against the blackmail to which he was submitted. Furthermore, you point out yourselves that Wu’s behaviour during his detention and after his liberation, while he was still in China, was not that of a revolutionary militant and he seriously prejudiced militants of the Democracy Movement and the Fourth International. You note that this relates to questions of principle and such behaviour cannot be authorised, neither politically nor tactically, in a revolutionary organisation. Nevertheless, your only proposal as an organisational sanction is a “suspension of his membership status for observation”, combined with an interruption of his contacts with the members of the Democracy Movement in order to observe future developments. Such a “suspension” is not in itself an effective sanction: it is a temporary measure so that an inquiry can take place. You furthermore take a stand against Wu’s decision to leave the organisation and declare that you refused to expel him. You state that his place was still inside the rml. We think that you are making a serious error on this and you should have expelled Wu, and that you still should do so.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_028

a letter from the usec bureau to rml

273

First of all we must insist on the extreme gravity of the acts committed by Wu during and immediately after his detention. The wrong done to the militants of the Democracy Movement is considerable. Certain of the documents written by Wu during his detention can be directly used to fuel “staged” trials against Democracy Movement militants and even if it is true that he tried to mix up the true and the false in his confessions one can be sure that the Chinese secret police will know how to profit from the information he provided. Now the first duty of a militant in the situation in which Wu found himself is to protect as best he/she can those people with whom we are in solidarity and who are carrying out a very difficult struggle against bureaucratic discretionary punishment and repression. Through the information that he agreed to give, Wu furthermore exposed at least certain of the militants who, in Hong Kong, are carrying out solidarity work with the Democracy Movement. Due to his attitude and the declarations he signed (notably his “repentance” statement where he defines Trotskyism as counterrevolutionary), Wu has given the bureaucracy effective weapons with which to attack our movement and he has discredited the Fourth International. Finally, Wu, after his liberation, neglected to put militants of the Democracy Movement on their guard. He even agreed to meet them without warning them that he had been arrested and that they were under surveillance. It is true that as soon as he returned to Hong Kong, Wu informed a leader of the rml and then gave a report to the rml on his detention – all that we know, we know through him. You must take that into account. But that is not sufficient to wipe out the seriousness of the acts committed in China by Wu, which represent a real political capitulation faced with the threat of lengthy imprisonment. Wu forgot the duty of revolutionaries, of militants who are in solidarity with the members of the Democracy Movement and of members of the Fourth International. You can try and understand how it was possible for a militant with Wu’s record to do such a thing. You should look to see whether the way in which the whole organisation had prepared itself for its solidarity tasks with Chinese Democracy Movement militants had facilitated this capitulation. But the militant record of Wu and the dominant role he played for a long time in your organisation must not be invoked to moderate the sanctions you take against him – in fact the opposite should be the case. You must not limit yourselves to moral considerations – you must take a political decision when faced with a major political question. Wu committed acts of extreme seriousness. That requires a sanction which, if it is to be in proportion to the incriminating evidence, can only be expulsion. To justify your refusal to expel him you bring up the necessity of maintaining Wu in an organised revolutionary framework so that he can once again prove

274

a letter from the usec bureau to rml

himself as a militant. In a general way this argument is false. Frequently after a serious fault has been committed a militant must prove himself again first of all outside the revolutionary organisation – this should be even more the case given such a political capitulation after arrest. This argument is also particularly false since in the case that concerns us today Wu has shown through his whole attitude that he does not want to admit the gravity of the acts committed. In his report to the organisation, he justifies his attitude as a necessary tactic in the case of secret arrests. After his liberation and return to Hong Kong, he thought that it was sufficient to inform people of his arrest and then continue his activities, making absurd and dangerous proposals concerning the possible use by the rml of his relations with the Chinese secret police. For a long time, he defended the idea that he had succeeded in deceiving the Chinese secret police on the main questions. It is in fact clear that the opposite took place. Finally in his statement of resignation from the organisation he declares that he was not doing it out of political or organisational principle but only because a certain number of rml militants no longer had confidence in him. Certainly, he had to resign from the organisation, but on no account for such a reason. How can one hope that Wu will again prove himself as a revolutionary militant when, after having capitulated in the face of repression, he still refuses even to recognise the gravity of the facts. Wu still declares his attachment to his revolutionary ideals and the Fourth International but this declaration is not enough. To not expel Wu after what he did in China, to propose to keep him in the organisation, even while he refuses to squarely face up to the facts, is to act as if the actions committed were not after all particularly serious, it is to give up a real education of our movement on this essential question. It is also to insult the militants of the Chinese Democracy Movement, who often behave in an admirable way when faced with bureaucratic repression. This is even more serious since we have put these militants in danger. It appears to us extremely important that the rml understand why it is indispensable to expel Wu from the organisation. We are ready to discuss this question further with you – it is a question that relates to the basic principles of revolutionary activity. The duty of any detained militant is above all to defend all other militants and the movement as such. This essential rule of conduct is valid under all circumstances. It is precisely that rule that Wu has broken – even without having undergone ill treatment or having undergone prolonged physical or moral trials. More fundamentally, our attitude faced with repression must demonstrate in an exemplary manner our attachment to the cause of the workers and peasants and the seriousness with which we commit ourselves to the struggle against the bureaucracy in China.

a letter from the usec bureau to rml

275

If you maintain the position that you express in your September 11 resolution, we will be obliged to ask you to make the position of the Fourth International on this affair public in Hong Kong. This letter is the result of a meeting of the United Secretariat where all the participants had declared themselves in principle in favour of expelling Wu. It was later edited by the USec Bureau. The decision is up to you but we would appreciate it if you could re-discuss the measures to be taken, taking into account the advice of the International. Revolutionary greetings, USec Bureau

Report on Hong Kong, International Executive Committee (iec) of the Fourth International (usfi) (1982) Roman [Pierre Rousset] May 1982

This report submitted by a veteran French Trotskyist describes the organisational chaos within the Hong Kong Trotskyist groups in 1980 and 1981 – the handling and controversy of Wu Zhongxian’s capitulation to the ccp, the rml-ysg split, the founding of the Pioneer Group, the failure of the rml and the rcp to unify, and the general deterioration at the time of Trotskyist activity in Hong Kong. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 28, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

At the last meeting of the International Executive Committee (May 1981), a resolution was adopted which noted the absence of progress in the unification of our section in Hong Kong. The iec consequently decided that a delegation must be sent as soon as possible to inquire about the situation, particularly concerning the implementation of the conclusions of the report on Hong Kong adopted at the 11th World Congress. I went to Hong Kong in June 1981 with this aim but most of my stay was taken up with immediate urgent matters, due essentially to the “Wu affair”. Since my trip to Hong Kong the situation has continued to evolve and here today it is impossible to give a complete, serious report. The written reports that we have received from Hong Kong are too succinct to do this and other trips will be necessary between now and the World Congress to discuss in more depth the best ways of helping our movement in Hong Kong. Without going back over the political tasks we are confronted with in Hong Kong and vis-à-vis the Chinese Democracy Movement I would like to simply present some of the latest developments.

© Roman [Pierre Rousset], 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_029

report on hong kong, international executive committee (iec)

277

The Wu Affair Wu was an rml leader who was arrested during a trip to China organised to discuss with militants of the Chinese Democracy Movement. To gain release he agreed, among other things, to write a certain number of documents (including a declaration denouncing Trotskyism as counterrevolutionary and a report on the aims of his trip to China which could be used by the bureaucracy to cover its unjustified repression). On this subject I refer comrades to the USec [United Secretariat] Bureau circular of the 22 October 1981 and to the Bureau letter to the rml dated 19 October 1981. The USec Bureau learnt of Wu’s arrest and subsequent liberation after a week’s detention (he had been freed for several months) in a very indirect, and succinct way and only two days before I left Europe. Consequently we were not able to collectively discuss the affair and the measures to be taken. Now the rml leadership at the time of my arrival in Hong Kong were not convinced that Wu’s attitude (capitulation faced with repression) deserved a serious sanction, that is expulsion from the organisation. Most of my stay in Hong Kong was given over to looking into this affair (including several discussions with Wu) and to discussing it with the rml and the rcp. It was also this question that the USec Bureau had to discuss as a priority in relation to Hong Kong after my return to Europe in September 1981. Hence the letter from the Bureau to the rml dated the 19 October 1981 – a copy of which you have received. In a first period it appeared that the Wu affair would not have a negative influence on relations between the rcp and the rml and on the possibilities of reunifying the Chinese section of the fi in Hong Kong. While it protested against the delay with which it had been officially informed by the rml of the Wu affair, and while it criticised the hesitations of the rml leadership faced with the necessity of taking political and organisational measures, the rcp leadership first of all tried to avoid poisoning the atmosphere, as a resolution adopted by the rcp Central Committee and date 20 June 1981 testified. The relationship I had with the rcp leadership concerning the Wu affair during my stay in Hong Kong was a correct one. The USec Bureau received a few months later a new report on the Wu affair dated the 20 September and signed by Lee See for the rcp cc [Central Committee]. This report contained new and violent attacks against the rml and some of its leaders (Yip Ning1) and very much distorted what I 1 Yip Ning, i.e., Li Huaiming, was a leading Hong Kong Trotskyist in the 1970s and the 1980s, and a leader of the rml. See more in Biographical List.

278

rousset

said and did during my stay in Hong Kong (which provoked an exchange of letters – a protest letter from me, dated 8 October 1981, followed by a halfcorrection from the rcp in the form of a “postscriptum” dated 12 October to their 20 September report and then there was a further letter from me putting the record straight dated 3 November). Wu finally resigned from the organisation, invoking the fact that he could not remain inside the rml while members did not have confidence in him. Since then he has published articles in the bourgeois press defending his attitude during his detention, explaining that it was justified in this case of “secret arrest”. As for the rml leadership it finally registered its agreement with the positions expressed in the USec Bureau letter and with the necessity of expelling Wu. These latter developments took place after my departure from Hong Kong: the changing of the rcp’s position in a sectarian direction, the continuation of the debate inside the rml and the adoption of a position similar to that of the Bureau, the expulsion of Wu from the rml. Since then the affair has also become public with the appearance of various press articles on the question in the Chinese language press of Hong Kong. The USec Bureau has not received much information on these developments and the consequences of the Wu affair on our work in Hong Kong and vis-à-vis the Chinese Democracy Movement.

The Formation of the “Preparatory Committee” and the “Pioneer Group” Tensions were expressed inside the rml and the ysg (the youth organisation of the rml, today fused with the rml) in 1980, in particular over the relation between the two organisations, which resulted in expulsions and a split. The “split” from the rml and the ysg first of all set up the “Preparatory Committee for a Trotskyist organisation” and a “Study Group” before recently founding the “Pioneer Group”. On this also the USec Bureau was only informed with some delay. The first report that we received (mid-1981) came from the rcp leadership. For the rml, Wu was mandated to write a report for the United Secretariat. His arrest and the aftermath mean that no report was written. During my stay in Hong Kong, I was able to discuss this problem with leaders of the rml but I was not able to get a collective report from the rml leadership. The first written report received from the rml, presented by a member of the leadership, was dated 1 February 1982.

report on hong kong, international executive committee (iec)

279

Furthermore for a long time the USec Bureau did not have any contacts with the split from the rml-ysg (the “Preparatory Committee”). During my (brief) stay in Hong Kong, I was not able to meet its leaders. The first document received by the Bureau of the Preparatory Committee was a report on the Wu affair dated 15 September 1981. We received a report on the split at the end of 1980 with a letter dated 18 March 1982. The Bureau does not want to give a judgement here, regarding who was responsible for this split. But it had to take up the characterisations made by the Preparatory Committee (today the Pioneer Group) of the rml (and the rcp), described as “incurable” and worse. These types of characterisation make any perspective of reunifying the forces identifying with the fi in Hong Kong more distant. In the same way the decision of the Preparatory Committee to not appeal against the expulsions and to immediately advance the perspective of setting up a new organisation and then formally founding one (the Pioneer Group), goes against the spirit of the resolution adopted at the 11th World Congress. By doing this the Pioneer Group seems to have placed itself outside of the organised framework of the Chinese section of the fi in Hong Kong. The Bureau wrote on two occasions about this to the Preparatory Committee/Pioneer Group. Furthermore the Preparatory Committee in Autumn 1981 took the decision to publish in its press the Bureau letter to the rml concerning the Wu affair, without previously consulting the rml or the USec Bureau. This letter was not destined for publication. The relationship between the USec Bureau and the Pioneer Group is for the moment limited to this exchange of documents and letters. The Bureau has asked the rcp and the rml to let us know what sort of relations they think the Bureau should maintain with the Pioneer Group (which has specifically asked to receive the International Internal Bulletins). On this too in order to get a clear report on the situation it is necessary to make new trips before the next World Congress.

The Absence of Progress in the Reunification Discussions Since the 11th World Congress the rcp leadership has made known its disagreements with the conclusions of the report on Hong Kong. The rml considered at the time and still does, during my trip to Hong Kong, that the conclusions were fundamentally valid: the general political bases for a unification of the section existed and there were no principled differences (not even of orientation) which justified the existence of two organisations. However, the rml leaders told me, during my stay, that they did not think that a process of rapid

280

rousset

unification could take place to the extent the rcp was not convinced of its viability. They declared themselves ready to restart a longer term process of preliminary discussions. Since then a document presented in the internal debate of the rml on the tasks of the organisation in the coming period takes up this problem. Furthermore in its last document sent to the USec Bureau the rcp presents its analysis of the situation in China, in Hong Kong and the tasks of our movement. Before being able to report on the various positions being put forward, both in terms of the analysis of the situation and the tasks of our movement, we need to wait for the rml to conclude its discussion based on the first draft of an overall resolution.

Conclusions One can see that due to many aspects of the situation it is impossible to give a seriously worked out report at this iec: the ultimate consequences of the Wu affair (both in Hong Kong and in relation to the Chinese Democracy Movement) are not yet clear (contacts with the Chinese Democracy Movement have furthermore been made extremely difficult due to the repression that has hit militants since April 1981). It is the same problem with the consequences of the split at the end of 1980 and the way in which the Pioneer Group in practice situates itself in relation to the necessity of building a unified section of the fi in Hong Kong. More fundamentally it is indispensable to further discuss with the Hong Kong comrades the articulation of the tasks of our movement in Hong Kong itself with developments in China. The rml obviously emerged organisationally shaken and weakened by the double shock it went through last year (the split at the end of 1980 and the Wu affair). That has opened up very difficult debates in the organisation. But that seems also to have been the occasion for a real effort at rethinking: the functioning of the organisation (that began with the fusion of the rml and the ysg); on the qualities needed by our movement to be able to respond to the solidarity tasks with the anti-bureaucratic struggles in China; and on a more realistic evaluation of the tasks our movement given its present weakness is able to fulfil in Hong Kong in the coming period. Given this overall situation, the United Secretariat of January 1982 asked the rml and the rcp to present their point of view on the present situation and the tasks of our movement. The USec Bureau furthermore proposed that the rcp refrain from distributing to iec members documents criticising the report adopted at the 11th World Congress. These documents have in fact been writ-

report on hong kong, international executive committee (iec)

281

ten in a context very different in many respects from the present one. Given the occasionally serious and unfounded accusations they contain they merit a reply. But to start a debate on the basis of these documents would make it consequently more difficult to have a discussion centred on the situation and the present possibilities. The Bureau therefore proposed to the rcp that it present its proposals on the basis of a new document – being free to reintroduce of course in the framework what it still wants to say on the past period. We still have not received a response from the rml, which is in the process of discussing its analysis of the situation and the perspectives of its work. We have received just before the iec a report from the rcp, dated 1 May 1982. This report presents the positions and proposals of the rcp. In this report the rcp insists that the documents that it has previously sent to the Bureau be distributed at this iec – despite the arguments advanced by the Bureau in its letter of 4 March. The Bureau has therefore prepared for this iec a dossier including four documents from the rcp and two letters from the Bureau to the rcp. A more complete dossier and above all a more precise analysis of the situation of our movement in Hong Kong should be prepared before the next World Congress.

A Letter from Roman [Pierre Rousset] to the rml (Revolutionary Marxist League) in Hong Kong (1981) Pierre Rousset 18 December 1981

Dear comrades, I am writing to ask you to send us some information concerning the present stand of the rml in relation to the Wu Zhongxian [Ng Chung Yin] affair and the discussions in the rml. More than a month ago, I was told, in a phone call to Hong Kong, that a majority of the rml leadership agreed with the position expressed by the [fi’s] Usec and the bureau. But since then, we have received no written confirmation of that, nor any letter or documents. Not only would we like to know more about the present stand of the rml, but we would be ready to contribute more to the discussion you may have on this question. For this, we would need to know from you what debates have been and are going on, in your organisation, around this issue. More generally, we would like to know your opinion on the documents we received from the rcp and the new group, documents of which we sent you copies. Also, could you send us a report on what is now happening in relation to the Chinese Democracy Movement (cdm), after both the Wu affair and the wave of repression? Have we been able to reestablish some links? Is it still too early? How grave has been the blow to the cdm in regard to its capacity for functioning (I speak of the arrests)? Can you already present some assessments about the developments of the cdm in the near future? Do you have suggestions about what could be done by the fi internationally? Do you know what is known in China, among cdm activists, about the Wu affair and what are their reactions? Finally, I would like some clarifications on one point in relation to what Wu did after his trip to China. I know that he immediately reported the story (or part of the story, at least) to some members of the rml leadership and that the question was later reported to broader bodies. This fact is important for me, in that I hope that Wu will finally face up to the reality of what he did in China. I felt it was a first step, possibly, towards recognising the extreme gravity of what he did, towards accepting his expulsion from the organisation and towards his

© Pierre Rousset, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_030

a letter from roman [pierre rousset] to the rml

283

own resignation. But even then, Wu practically refused to discuss this matter with me and, since then, his resignation statement and the letter he sent me prove that he was absolutely not ready to face up to such a reality. The question is the following: what did Wu exactly said politically about what happened in China, when he came back to Hong Kong? When I was finally able to read the written report he gave to the rml, I was shocked by some formulas and its general tone, justifying what he did even more crudely than I thought. And I heard that, in fact, he presented his attitude as quite successful, and his trip as quite an achievement for our work! If all this is true, it gives quite a different picture about the meaning of the fact that Wu immediately reported to the organisation after he returned to Hong Kong. Rather than being a first step towards actually recognising his own capitulation in the face of repression, it looks now (to me) as the first step towards the political justification of his own behaviour. And this is as grave as what he did while arrested in China! And it is repellent! I should have asked you, when I was in Hong Kong, for a much more detailed report on what he said, politically, after his return. But could you complement my information now, and tell us what you think of this specific aspect of the question? Thanks in advance. Hoping the best for your work, fraternally, Roman

A Letter from Pierre Rousset to Wu Zhongxian (1981) Pierre Rousset 14 October 1981

Dear Wu, I received your letter dated 23 September 1981. I feel now the need to come back on some questions I tried to raise several times with you when I was in Hong Kong. Because your letter confirms to me that you have not understood (or do not want to understand) the principled character of the questions involved in your “affair” and the gravity of what you did (and of the possible consequences both for the cdm activists and for the fi). Several times when I was in Hong Kong, I tried to discuss these questions with you, but you were never eager to pursue such a discussion. Your entire attitude – and the explanations you gave when you came back to Hong Kong – were implying that you thought that what you did was as a whole justified, even if you might have made some secondary mistakes. And when I said I did not think so, you just stopped the discussion, saying you would wait for our formal position to be known. Since then, you have resigned from the rml. You know I was both in favour of your resignation and of your expulsion from the organisation. But the reason you gave for your resignation is politically very bad. The matter is too grave and the political questions too essential, so I decided to write down here my opinion on them. It is because of our long political collaboration and personal friendship that I want to put down this letter in black and white. I do not want any ambiguity to persist on such questions, between us. And because of the nature of the matter, I will show this letter to [our] comrades. I want to concentrate, here, on what are for me the most essential political issues and the principles we are defending. I shall not come back here, then, on other questions such as the security mistakes you made, even if they have been quite basic and grave (keeping with you all you had at the time of the arrest, especially while you knew you were being watched). I shall mainly deal with the attitude you had while in jail. First of all, you simply forgot about the main principle that must be followed by any revolutionary under arrest: to protect others (especially to protect all

© Pierre Rousset, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_031

a letter from pierre rousset to wu zhongxian (1981)

285

those who are faced with reactionary repression) and to protect the movement as a whole (both the cdm itself and our own movement). What happened is that you decided to protect first yourself (which meant finding a way to get out of jail) and then try to pay the “lowest possible political price” to do so. You have been very explicit on this. You even tried to give a theoretical justification for this choice: when the arrest is public, one should fight politically; when the arrest is secret, one should adopt a tactic of false capitulation to get out of jail by nearly any means whatsoever. This argument has of course absolutely no value! There is no such difference between “public” and “secret” arrest, to begin with. Even if the arrest has been done secretly, if the police ask you to write documents and confessions, it is to be in a position to utilise them one day, more or less publicly. In all situations, the attitude of a revolutionary in jail must be in accordance with his basic political convictions: to fight alongside the workers and peasants, to defend everywhere their interests. And the fact that the arrest has been done secretly does not allow an activist to endanger others! Because this is very concretely the problem: when you decided to “negotiate” your liberation, you had to pay a price, and the price has been very high, as one could have expected. Even if you tried to mix true and false information, the ccp’s political police can make good use of all that you wrote down, and said, when you were in jail. And this is probably true for both democratic activists in China and solidarity activists in Hong Kong. It is easy to understand why the police agents were so happy about what you wrote in your first (I think) document on the so-called “subversive” nature of the work you were supposed to have done in China. You know that democratic activists in China are fighting in the framework of the freedoms officially guaranteed by the Constitution of the prc, and which are not respected by the bureaucracy. Such a document, presented in courts as testimony, can be used to (falsely) “justify” heavy jail sentences against people whose only “fault” was to fight for their constitutional rights. To put things simply: perhaps you have escaped ten years of jail. But you might equally have helped to condemn others to thirty years of jail through fake trials. It is true that when you reached Hong Kong you immediately told comrades about your arrest. But when you were in China and when you had the occasion to warn some cdm activists that you had been arrested, that you had written such testimony, that you and they were under surveillance, you did not do so. You left them defenceless against this new bureaucratic threat. The latest statement of repentance that you signed, as well as your general attitude while in jail, can be very easily utilised against the fi and to discredit

286

rousset

the ideas we and others are defending regarding democratic socialism. This is of course all the more damaging because of who you are: the role you have played, how you are known, what you represent. Because you tried afterwards to justify your attitude, you contributed to miseducate our militants on such a key issue. You now give as the only reason for your resignation from the rml a personal one: that you feel you cannot stay in the organisation because some people in the rml still distrust you, while you have already spoken about everything that happened in China. I do not know to what extent members of the rml distrust you or not, now. But frankly, it is normal that questions are still asked. It is true that we can know what happened in China only through yourself and that there is therefore no way to be sure that we know 100 per cent of the truth. This is the objective and subjective situation in which you put yourself, and you should not blame others for it. I already touched on this question with you when I was in Hong Kong. I find especially worrying the fact that you do not want to face the facts and recognise the gravity of what you did in China, because without doing so, there is no possibility of you recovering. Looking at the price you accepted to pay to get out of jail, the only conclusion one can draw, speaking frankly, is that you have politically capitulated in the face of the bureaucracy’s police. You were threatened with 10 years in jail. You could ask me: “How would others have faced such a situation?” But this question would be wrong to raise. Nobody can be sure of the answer before experiencing concretely such a situation. But we all know that when we make contacts with activists in a country of severe repression, we must accept sharing the same risks as them, even if we are normally working in a country where repression is much lighter. It might be hard to do so, but it is a precondition for any work of this type. If one is not ready to take the risk, one should not begin such direct solidarity contacts. To do the contrary is to act in a completely irresponsible way. I think you well knew this. And it is sad to see that you capitulated so easily (because you decided to “negotiate” nearly immediately), while many old Trotskyist cadres never did so in spite of decades of suffering, and while many cdm activists are presently showing great moral and political strength, refusing to bend under repression and bureaucratic pressures. I do not want to come back in this letter to what could now be done. A collective position has to be taken on this question. But I want to insist on one key point: you yourself cannot hope to resume meaningful political activity if you do not first face up to the reality of what you did: a political capitulation which can be very well used both against the cdm, against the militants who are fighting for a democratic socialism, against our own movement as well as against all those who defend similar ideas to ours.

a letter from pierre rousset to wu zhongxian (1981)

287

Without recognising this, I frankly do not see what you can hope to do for these ideas that you say you continue to share and wish to defend. I tried to tell you this when I was in Hong Kong. You refused then to discuss it really and I should have insisted more brutally on this point. Since then, you seem to maintain essentially the same attitude: a justification of what you did, in spite of one or two unclear sentences in your letter about your regrets. I would like you to clarify this question. Pierre

section e Trotskyist Activities in Wenzhou and Elsewhere, 1941–1952

∵

Introduction to Part 1, Section E Wenzhou was a hotspot of Chinese Trotskyist activity in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. This section contains accounts by witnesses and participants in the Wenzhou Trotskyist movement in the late 1940s up to and including the December 1952 round-up, as well as an excerpt from an academic study of the suppression of the movement and the round-up (and occasional killings) of its members, sympathisers, and relatives of members. The materials include “anti-Trotskyite” materials found in local archives showing the crackdown was organised and executed.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_033

A Short History of the Wenzhou Trotskyist Groups, 1941–1946 (2001) Zhou Rensheng, translated by Yang Yang

This article by Zhou Rensheng, a veteran Wenzhou Trotskyist, also known as Zhou Renxin, describes the activities of Wenzhou Trotskyists in local schools and in other cities (including Taiwan) in the final years of China’s War against Japan and the early years of the Chinese Civil War. This article is extracted from Zhou Renxin ji (Zhou Renxin’s collected essays), 2018. The Chinese text was transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive (mia). Most of the individuals mentioned by Zhou were rounded up by the ccp in December 1952. It is published on mia with the url: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/zhourensheng/collection/​ index.htm.

After the textile strike was defeated by the Kuomintang in 1939, Zeng Meng and Wang Guolong [leading Trotskyists in Wenzhou] were arrested, while Qian Chuan and others went underground and temporarily ceased political activity. During this period [1939–41], there was virtually no Trotskyist activity in Wenzhou. In the autumn of 1941, Zhou Rensheng came to Wenzhou and began teaching at the Model Primary School. Lin Songqi and Zhang Hongye also got teaching jobs in the same school in the following spring. Later, Huang Yushi replaced Yu Liefu1 as headmaster at the school. So we Trotskyists were able to organise a reading club called “Farewell”, which consisted of Hu Zhendong, Qiu Jilong, Ye Zhengqing, Hu Dayong, Chen Hemei, Xi Shijia, Shen Yanfang, and others. All of them were youngsters aged 13–14. The members of the club sometimes pasted up “Farewell” wallposters [at the school]. We recommended them to read more fiction and write more wallposters. We decided not to exert a direct Trotskyist influence on them for a while. Even so, some later became core cadres of the local Trotskyist student organisation. The seven mentioned above joined the Chinese Socialist Youth League [the youth section of the Chinese Trotskyists, sy]. After 1946, they organised Trotskyist activities in Wenzhou High School, Ouhai High School, and Yongjia High School, among other

1 Yu Liefu was a Wenzhou intellectual and headmaster of Wenzhou Model Primary School in the early 1940s.

© Zhou Rensheng, translated by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_034

a short history of the wenzhou trotskyist groups

293

schools. Wenzhou High School was the centre of the local Trotskyist movement. Hu Zhendong and Qiu Jilong joined the Association for Student Autonomy [the local students’ union] and became its activists. They recruited Ye Zhengqing from Ouhai High School to the local Trotskyist student group. In Yongjia High School, young Trotskyists such as Ye Chunhua were among the key leaders of its students’ union. In 1942, the Model Primary School closed down. Zhou Rensheng, Lin Songqi, and Zhang Hongye all went on to study at Longquan, part of Zhejiang University. A professor at Longquan named An Mingbo had returned from studying in the Soviet Union. He was Du Cangbai’s classmate at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. An was no longer a Trotskyist by then, but his Trotskyist thinking influenced all of us. From 1942 to 1944, under An’s mentorship, we held a weekly discussion forum on current affairs. Participants such as Zhou Rensheng, Lin Songqi, Zhang Hongye, and Zhao Yangxing were key members. All of them later joined the Trotskyist organisation. Others who attended became Trotskyist sympathisers. One pro-ccp student, Chen Jianxin, also joined in our discussions (he was not officially a member of the ccp). This was the starting point for the sowing of the seeds of Trotskyism at Zhejiang University.

The Marxist Marching Squad During the spring vacation of 1946, An Mingbo switched his professorship to the National Yingshi University in Wenzhou, while Zhou Rensheng was teaching English at Yueqing High School and Lin Songqi became a teacher at Yueqing Normal School. The three often discussed politics at An’s home. In the meantime, the Trotskyist leader Liu Jialiang returned to Shanghai from Wenzhou. Liu went to Wenzhou to receive medical treatment. The three of us often visited him. Under Liu’s influence, we began to think seriously about establishing a Trotskyist organisation locally, and shortly afterwards we realised our vision. In April 1946, An Mingbo, Zhou Rensheng, Lin Songqi, and Zhang Hongye got together at An’s home in Wenzhou for a meeting, at which we agreed to set up a local Trotskyist branch. […] After a discussion, we chose the Marxist Marching Squad as our name. An Mingbo was elected leader of the squad. Zhou Rensheng was responsible for propaganda work and Zhang Hongye for organisation. The programme and constitution were drafted by Zhou and Zhang. These two draft documents were adopted the following day. We had not been in contact with Wang Guolong for quite a while.

294

zhou, trans. yang

A few days later, Wang Guolong, Chen Youdong, and Xie Xunhuan came to my home one evening (these three had joined the Trotskyist organisation in Wenzhou much earlier than the rest of us). We held a meeting in my home, where I told them about the Marxist Marching Squad. They agreed to contact the Shanghai headquarters and get our new branch recognised as a local section of the Chinese Trotskyist organisation. In July of that same year, An Mingbo and Zhou Rensheng went to Shanghai. A few young Trotskyists left behind in Wenzhou later changed the branch’s name to the Society for the Advancement of Marxism. However, after the Trotskyist headquarter in Shanghai officially recognised the newly founded Wenzhou group, local Trotskyists stopped using that name. In late 1946 or early 1947, after the Wenzhou group had been recognised by the Shanghai headquarters [i.e., the majority faction led by Peng Shuzhi], the group renamed itself the Wenzhou Branch of the Chinese Communist League. It organised a central leadership team headed by Wang Guolong, with Xie Xunhuan, Lin Songqi, and later Zhao Yangxing among branch members. Lin and Zhao were in charge of the student section (the sy, established after the summer break in 1947). The student section consisted of groups from Wenzhou High School, Yongjia County High School, Ouhai High School, and other places. Local Trotskyists also included primary school teachers and artisans.

Trotskyist Activities in Wenzhou’s High Schools and Normal Schools (1) The Third Temporary High School While teaching at the Third Temporary Provincial High School in Daxue in Rui’an (now Wencheng County), Zhou Rensheng did his best to organise student activities. In just six months, between February and March 1945, he had managed to set up a student reading group called Yangshao Reading Society. It consisted of a dozen students, including Xu Minglie, Wu Zutang, Lang Qixiu, Pan Gongyi, Zhu Mianhua, Zhu Jingxia, Zhao Gaofeng, and Zhao Yifang. Xu, Wu, and Lang were later recruited by Zhou to the Trotskyists’ Socialist Youth League, while others continued to varying degrees under Zhou’s influence. At school, Zhou also influenced Zhuge Xia, Zhao Qingyin, Zhao Yilu, Wu Gongsheng, and Huang Jinbiao, who all later joined the sy. [Through Zhou’s efforts], there were a dozen or more Trotskyist sympathisers among the students. Some had participated in the Yangshao Reading Society, while others became sympathisers after talking with Zhou.

a short history of the wenzhou trotskyist groups

295

(2) Wenzhou Normal School After the summer break in 1945, Zhou Rensheng transferred from the Third High School to Wenzhou Normal School in Zhenglou, Pingyang, together with three other Trotskyists, Qian Sijing, Lin Songqi, and Liang Ting. No reading group was formed in this normal school. Within six months, the four had managed to influence Ye Youyang, Zheng Shujie, Wang Xinshu, Bai Subing, and Li Shuhe, all of whom became sympathisers of sy. […] At one point, Bai Subing led a student protest against the school authorities and was detained by the local Kuomintang government on a trumped-up charge. (3) Yueqing High School In the first half of 1949, Zhou Rensheng was teaching at Hongqiao County High School, Yueqing, while Lin Songqi was teaching at Yongjia Jishi High School. Both took part in organising student activities at their schools, but they had only limited success. Zhou set up a basketball team. Gen Liyuan, Gen Lixuan, Wang Kexun, and Wang Keli were among the team players. Gen Jiyuan and Wang Kexun were the most sympathetic towards Trotskyism. (4) The sy Branch at Rui’an High School Rui’an was a key stronghold of Trotskyist organisation and activity. In the 1930s, the Trotskyists He Zhizheng (He Afang) and He Shufen were both from Rui’an. Although their influence was not great, they played a modest role in organising political activities. Liang Ting was also active while teaching at Rui’an Normal School in the first half of 1946. An sy branch was active between early 1949 and 1952 at Rui’an High School. Zheng Shujie and Yu Zhentang were among the Trotskyists who liaised with this branch. The branch remained intact after the establishment of the prc, but it was smashed apart [during the nationwide roundup of Trotskyists] on December 22, 1952. At least three people, including Yu Zhentang, were arrested, while sympathisers were sent off for re-education.

Trotskyist Sections with Strong Connections to Wenzhou (1) The Taiwan Branch After the summer break of 1947, three Trotskyists were sent from Wenzhou to Kaohsiung, Keelung, and Taipei [to carry out covert Trotskyist activities in Taiwan]: Xia Yanfan worked at Keelung Customs, Hong Xiurong got a job in a chemical plant in Taipei or Kaohsiung, and Ling Songmin was employed by a motor transport company in Taipei. Also in 1947, the Shanghai headquarters sent Su Tao (originally from Shandong) to Taiwan. So a Trotskyist branch

296

zhou, trans. yang

with nine members was established in Taiwan. These people began printing mimeographed pamphlets. Su Tao was in charge of the branch, which also made contact with some Wenzhounese in Taiwan, including Bai Changsheng (Bai Subing’s elder brother), Zhang Mingqian (originally from Yongqiang), and Mr Fang, a native of Yueqing. However, in the first half of 1948, the Kuomintang’s secret service closed down the Trotskyists’ printing press and seized the mimeographed pamphlets as well as documents and publications received from Shanghai. Su Tao and some of his comrades were arrested. Su was sentenced to life imprisonment, Hong Xiurong to 5 years, and Xia Yanfan to 15 years.2 Only Ling Songmin managed to escape, first to Wenzhou and then to Shanghai. After the arrests, the Kuomintang put out a warrant for the arrest of Zhou Abao (an alias of Zhou Rensheng). My cousin Shen Yunfang once told me that he had met a Trotskyist contact from Hong Kong at the Zhonghui Building in Shanghai. On that day, after arriving at the Zhonghui Building half an hour early, I discovered that the supposed Hong Kong contact did not know my pseudonym, Zhou Abao, and only knew me as Zhou Yasheng. It looked suspicious, so I left immediately. Fifteen minutes later, my cousin was taken away by Kuomintang agents, although he managed to escape by means of a ruse. He took the agents to a company where a Wenzhou chef named Zhou Hongbao was working, and told them that the chef was Zhou Abao. The chef was arrested and tortured, but it was soon discovered that he was an illiterate worker and his company was allowed to bail him out. This was a moment of peril for me. I was in great danger of arrest by Kuomintang agents. Another two Trotskyists [from our Wenzhou group], Pan Jiaowen (a student from Jiaotong University) and Chen Wei, also moved to Taiwan after 1948. Pan was living with his uncle Yu Yifu’s family in Taipei. This uncle was a business man and ran the Dingtai Shipping Company. Not long after Pan’s arrival in Taipei, Lin Yixin (an alias of Chen Daiqing, a leader of the Taiwan Trotskyist branch) was arrested by the Kuomintang leader Chiang Ching-kuo. As a result, Pan had to give up his Trotskyist activity. Otherwise, he would have been arrested and sent to prison (Pan Jiaowen may have written about this). TheTrotskyists Zhang Hongye and Wu Zutang went to Hong Kong and settled down there after getting jobs.

2 According to the verdicts, no one was sentenced to life imprisonment. The three were charged with subversion. Xia Yanfan was sentenced to four years and Hong and Su to two and a half years. See Taiwan Supreme Court, Verdict (38)18, 19 December 1949, Transitional Justice Commission of Taiwan: https://twtjcdb.tjc.gov.tw/Search/Detail/21438.

a short history of the wenzhou trotskyist groups

297

(2) The Jinhua Branch In 1947, the National Ying Shi University moved [from Wenzhou] to Jinhua. Lin Jinfang and Xi Shijia (a female member of the sy) of Ying Shi University together with Lang Qixiu, who was working at Jinghua Post and Telecommunications Office, founded a Trotskyist branch in Jinhua. Lin was in charge of it. The members held group meetings every month, sometimes irregularly. They also formed a university branch at Ying Shi, but it soon lapsed into passivity and failed to expand Trotskyist influence on campus. (3) Quzhou High School In 1948, the Wenzhou Trotskyist Zhou Chaolin taught at Quzhou High School, in Quzhou, Zhejiang, for about a year. He spread Trotskyist ideas among the students, including Liu Jia, Ruan Yuanwei, and Wang Guangling. They had read the Trotskyist journals Youth and Women, New Voices, and School Life, as well as Trotsky’s Problems of the Chinese Revolution, etc. Liu Jia was admitted to study at Fudan University in 1950. When Kang Xi returned to Shanghai from Hong Kong by way of Quzhou, he met with Zhou and Liu. They had a long talk in Zhou’s flat with some of the students influenced by the Trotskyists. (4) Kaihua High School In 1945, Chen Yuqi taught for a while at Kaihua High School in Kaihua County, Zhejiang. Zhou Chaolin introduced Chen to Zhao Xingzhen, another teacher at Kaihua High School, and the two became close politically. However, Chen’s influence at the school did not last long. (5) Trotskyist Activities in Hangzhou, Zhejiang The Trotskyists in Hangzhou focused primarily on Zhejiang University and Hangzhou Normal College. In Zhejiang University, there was a unified Trotskyist branch, consisting of members of both Peng’s majority faction and the minority faction. Cao Yulin was its secretary. Zhuge Xia and Bai Subing (from Hangzhou Normal College) were among its members. The minority also had its own branch in Hangzhou, of which Cao Yulin was also secretary. Bai Subing organised a Trotskyist group and a reading club at Hangzhou Normal College. Its members included Chen Xuecheng. Bai also established contacts at Hangzhou High School, where students such as Wang Gaolin were particularly influenced by Trotskyist ideas. Tian Yuying, a teacher from Fenglin Primary School in Hangzhou, was in frequent touch with Bai. Between July and August 1947, Peng Shuzhi visited Hangzhou to give a lecture at which the Trotskyists and their sympathisers discussed and analysed current affairs. In 1947–1948, the Trotskyists at Zhejiang University and Hangzhou Normal College took an active part

298

zhou, trans. yang

in the [nationwide] student protests against starvation and civil war. Among the Trotskyist sympathisers in Hangzhou were Zhou Huifang, Wang Zhicui, and Zhong Yulin. Wang Xu, a female student from the College of Agriculture at Zhejiang University, read journals and pamphlets published by the Trotskyists. (6) The Trotskyists in Jingjiang County, Jiangsu In August 1946, Peng Shuzhi was asked by Sheng Yibai, the headmaster of the Northern Jiangsu Secondary School in Jingjiang County, to recommend an English teacher from Shanghai to fill a vacancy. Peng suggested Zhou Rensheng. From August 1946 to January 1947, Zhou taught English at the school. He influenced three of his students – Sun Yuhua, Jin Jian, and Chen Qidong. Zhan Minglun, a member of administrative staff, was also influenced by Zhou. From October to November 1946, they formed a Party-League group that met at Sun Yuhua’s home, three miles from the county centre. Zhan was a party member, while the other three were in the sy. They elected Sun as their leader. Sun was a loyal and highly active member of the sy. He later attracted a number of students at the school to join a reading group that he organised. He won them round to sympathise with the Trotskyist cause. Among the sympathisers in Jingjiang were Fan Guangyu, Fan Chengqiu, and Zhu Lihua (?). In 1950, Sun won a place at Fudan University. He was arrested in 1952. In 1947 and 1948, Zhan Minglun was teaching at a school located in a Nanjing suburb. He made contact with the Trotskyist Xiong Andong and another Mr Xiong (a native of Jingjiang), who were both studying at National Central University.

Overview of Local Trotskyist Activities and Our Preliminary Suggestions on Handling the Wenzhou Trotskyists Submitted by the Wenzhou Regional Committee of the ccp (1952) Translated by Yang Yang 10 March 1952

This report by the Wenzhou Regional Committee of the ccp describes Trotskyist activities in Wenzhou from a ccp point of view. It also describes the local ccp’s preparations for its crackdown on the Trotskyists in December 1952. This report is extracted from an unpublished collection of documents concerning the Wenzhou Regional Committee of the ccp.

Tables of Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

1

Trotskyist activities in Wenzhou Anti-Trotskyist tasks in Wenzhou Our estimation of the scale of Trotskyist activities in Wenzhou Suggestions and recommendations for future work Eleven statistical tables

Overview of Trotskyist Activities in Wenzhou

(1) The Trotskyist bandits began organising in Wenzhou in 1933. In 1938, the Trotskyist headquarters [in Shanghai] sent Li Xu to Wenzhou and instructed him to found a Wenzhou District Bureau, in order to strengthen activities locally. During the Anti-Japanese Resistance War, some Trotskyist organisers defected to the Kuomintang, after which activities slumped. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Wang Guolong of the Trotskyist Majority Faction organised the Socialist Youth League (sy) and its front organisations, including a reading club, youth choirs, etc., in Wenzhou High School, Ouhai High School, and Yongjia High School, all located in Wenzhou district. By the end of 1948, there were 8 branches of the sy with more than 70 members, while its front organisation, the reading club, had a membership of more than 20, a considerable force

© Translated by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_035

300

trans. yang

among the student masses. On the one hand, they were competing with our Party for mass support; on the other, they sabotaged our underground organisations. Having successfully developed sy branches in the locality, the Trotskyist bandits’ activities mainly took the form of the sy, and their party organisation thus became more covert. On the eve of Liberation, more than 20 Trotskyists fled to Hong Kong. We arrested a few leading Trotskyists immediately after Liberation, including Zeng Meng and Yang Suliu, and no Trotskyist-party organisation has been found since. In March 1948, we detected the existence of the Trotskyist Minority Faction in Wenzhou. By that time, a Minority group, the Marxist Youth League (my), had been founded by Xiang Peiyao and Wang Xinshu. After that, a dispute flared up between the Majority and the Minority of the Wenzhou Trotskyist bandits. Not long after Liberation, Xiang voluntarily surrendered to us and the my was disbanded. In August of the same year, the sy secretary, Ye Zhengqing also surrendered, in Shanghai. As a consequence, the Wenzhou Trotskyists set up a preparatory committee and established a new Trotskyist Youth League (ty), led by neither the Majority nor the Minority. Huang Zhaoyu was elected general secretary of its committee (its leading body). In January 1950, a league congress was convened and Lian Zhengxiang was elected general secretary. It had 14 affiliated branches and more than 40 members. By that time, ty was rampant. In June of the same year, a movement to counteract the Trotskyists was launched in various schools in Wenzhou. In early July, Yan Ruiluo, a member of the ty committee, and Dai Yubiao, the secretary of a ty group, were both arrested. Consequently, dozens of Trotskyists were forced to flee, and the ty’s committee was disbanded. The Trotskyists left behind in Wenzhou held an emergency meeting, while cancelling all branch activities and switching to individual-toindividual links. In August, a [Trotskyist] Communist Youth League (cy) was again founded, with Li Xiaoming as its general secretary. It had 7 branches with some 30 members. In October, we continued to suppress the Trotskyists by staging a public confession by Yan Ruiluo. In the meantime, the factional struggle between the Trotskyists’ Majority and Minority intensified. Cao Jiaji, a member of the Minority, was appointed by the central committee of the Minority’s youth league as its Wenzhou representative. Cao tried to convince Lian Zhengxiang, Shen Songqing, Li Yi, and others to establish an Emergency Committee of the Communist Youth League and to scrutinise its membership. More than half its members were expelled as a result of the scrutiny, which met with the disapproval of the Majority. As a result, Cao and his followers organised a new Marxist Youth League [belonging to the Minority], while the cy expelled Lian Zhengxiang and others. In the end, it boiled down to an organisational split

overview of local trotskyist activities

301

between local Majority and Minority factions. In November, when we launched a registration of members of reactionary parties, youth leagues, and organisations out to sabotage the Kuomintang, we also registered that Trotskyist bandits were active in local schools. More than 140 people had been registered as the members of Trotskyist front organisations. We arrested [the Trotskyist] Sha Mingxin, who tried to sabotage the registration. [Not long afterwards,] the cy was disbanded and the Emergency Committee led by Lu Changyou organised a retreat. In November, the cy was re-organised and tried to evacuate its members to factories and villages, but it failed and the majority of its members fled. In March 1951, the cy merged with the Marxist Youth League. When the Minority’s Marxist Youth League was founded on 20 October 1950, with two branches, we arrested Lian Zhengxiang the same evening (he was executed on 4 January 1951). In November, a Preparatory Committee of the Wenzhou Regional Committee of the Marxist Youth League was formed, with Shen Songqing as secretary. In December, Cao Jiaji left Wenzhou. The fake central committee1 of the Marxist Youth League sent Fang Zezheng to Wenzhou and appointed him as its political commissioner, with Shen Songqing as secretary and Ye Guoxing as a committee member. In 1951, Shen left Wenzhou for Shanghai. Tong Yiming replaced him as secretary and set up a “Youth Guard Army”, with Weng Zhongda as its commander, with the intention of assassinating our public security comrades in charge of Trotskyist-bandit cases and Trotskyists who had confessed to us. Wu Wenqin, a league member, was arrested, thus putting an end to their assassination plans. Five Trotskyists, including Fang Zezheng and Tong Yiming, fled to Shanghai, while Qin Jingyao and Zhu Shaoyun became leaders [of Wenzhou’s Minority group]. In March, Ye Guoxing returned to Wenzhou and re-organised the Minority group. In May, Tong Yiming also returned. By that time, the local Majority and Minority youth groups were calling for organisational unification. The Minority’s Marxist Youth League merged with the Majority’s Revolutionary Communist Youth, with Tong as secretary, Li Wenbin as commissioner, and Ye Guoxing as committee member. […] [Later, Ye] and Li Wenbin were arrested. Xue Liquan and Cao Jialiu replaced them on the committee. In November, we tried to locate and capture Tong Yiming. In December, after Tong found himself exposed, the Trotskyists planned to flee and set up a covert group under Chen Cong’s leadership, which remains in existence to this day. (2) The Trotskyists’ main bases in Wenzhou were in our schools and government bodies (there were also Trotskyist activities in factories, but no material 1 “Fake” (wei) was a term applied by the ccp to its opponents.

302

trans. yang

is available at present. We will return to this later). According to incomplete information, we uncovered a total of 68 people in municipal government bodies who were either party or league members of the Trotskyists or who had at some point joined their front organisations. […] Seven had become members of our Party [the ccp] and 24 had infiltrated our Youth League [the youth section of the ccp]. Five secondary school teachers and 21 primary school teachers [had at some time or another joined in local Trotskyist activities]. Among students, there were 154 members of Trotskyist front organisations […]. The worst case was in Rui’an High School, where our Party and Youth League organisations had been usurped by the Trotskyists. Before Liberation, Huang Shengwen and Zhang Qiguang, members of the Trotskyists’ sy, were active at this school, where they had recruited Zheng Shuzhong, Li Jingxia, Yang Fengxiong, and others to help set up sy branches. On the eve of Liberation, Huang Shengwen fled. Zhang Qiguang replaced him as secretary of the local sy [in Rui’an]. In August 1949, a local branch of the ty was founded. In August 1950, it became a branch of the cy. At the start of Liberation in Rui’an, Yang Fengxiong infiltrated Wenzhou’s Municipal Public Security Bureau and Zheng Shuzhong served as [the ccp’s] branch secretary at Rui’an High School. Xu Lixiang and Jiang Dengyun, former underground members of our Party working in the urban area of Rui’an, were also Trotskyist bandits. While branch secretary of our Party [i.e., of the ccp branch at Rui’an High School], Zheng Shuzhong recruited a dozen Trotskyists to our Party. As a consequence, Li Jingxia, a Trotskyist, was appointed branch secretary of our Youth League and the Trotskyist Pan Zhongqian became president of the students’ union. The key student bodies at Rui’an High School were all seized by the Trotskyists, and a total of 25 Trotskyists infiltrated our Party and League organisations. The Trotskyist Zhang Qiguang also infiltrated our Party’s urban district council in Rui’an (he was put in charge of propaganda) until he was uncovered in May 1950, when he tried to recruit one of our Party members, Comrade Jiang Wancheng. However, we did not know that Zheng Shuzhong was also a Trotskyist and that he had learned of Zhang’s exposure. Zhang was therefore able to escape after hearing from Zheng. We were unaware of the Trotskyist activities [in Rui’an] until May 1951, when Dai Yongzhen, the leader of the Trotskyist youth league’s organising committee, surrendered to us. However, we took no further actions against the Trotskyists. At the beginning of November [1951], Zheng Shuzhong and Li Jingxia were sent to a cadre training school. […] (3) We had not planned any anti-Trotskyist activity in those two years, so the Trotskyists did not suffer a fatal blow – on the contrary, they were further emboldened and remained highly active in Wenzhou. They mainly organised

overview of local trotskyist activities

303

through various front organisations led by their youth league. They infiltrated schools, where they sought to take control of student bodies and disseminate their poisonous ideology. They used local schools as bridges, so that the Trotskyists could penetrate our Party and Youth League and other groups at different social levels and carry out counterrevolutionary activities. According to incomplete information, the Trotskyists established a dozen or so front organisations in Wenzhou, including groups and reading clubs. They circulated and disseminated between 60 and 70 books and documents. They not only infiltrated our government bodies and schools, spreading rumours and developing their organisation, but openly encouraged student strikes, distributed leaflets, organised underground armies and attempted to assassinate our public security officers. For example, in June 1950, at the Provincial Senior Industrial Vocational School [in Wenzhou], on the pretext of opposing a merger of part of the junior high school with Wenzhou High School and of a reduction in student grants, the Trotskyists incited a strike and removed desks, chairs, and other school equipment. They said that if they did not receive a satisfactory answer, they would stage a one-day strike. They raised the slogan “Proletarian students, swiftly turn your anger into strength”. The Trotskyists at Ouhai High School, Wenzhou Municipal School, and a local medical school acted in concert by instigating a students’ strike. In January 1951, after Lian Zhengxiang was executed, they distributed propaganda leaflets and published a special commemorative magazine under the title “Stand up! Fight the enemy unto death”. We raided them continuously, but even so, at 6 p.m. on 21 February this year, they put up a large poster titled “Our Proposals” (two sheets in newspaper format). On it, they wrote “we want food” and “we demand democracy”. They demanded the right to form a “Lian Zhengxiang Platoon of the AntiAmerican Volunteer Force” [named after the local Trotskyist martyr]. Moreover, they smeared our policies, spread rumours about us, and sabotaged our administrative work.

2

A Few Problems of Our Anti-Trotskyist Tasks in Wenzhou

(1) The work team leadership The central problem in Wenzhou’s anti-Trotskyist work is that of leadership. After these two years of struggle against the Trotskyists, despite the considerable amount of work that has been done, more is needed. Our anti-Trotskyist work was poorly planned and lacked focus at the level of local leadership. As a consequence, when we started registering the Trotskyist-bandits active in schools in the winter of 1950, policy violations took place. These included beat-

304

trans. yang

ing and cursing the Trotskyists and forcing them to kneel down. The central government’s guidelines for tackling the Trotskyists were not observed. (2) Investigating the Trotskyists After Liberation, our comrades in Wenzhou adopted repressive methods in handling the Trotskyists, by arresting and suppressing them, even in cases not scheduled for special investigation. As a result of our struggle to counteract Trotskyist activities in the second half of 1950, dozens were arrested. Once we became aware of the existence of the Trotskyist organisations and learned about their activities, in the spring of 1951, we began to set up a special intelligence group. […] In the course of the past year, we have established contacts with 10 informants by either arresting or secretly recruiting them. Because of the lack of clear guidance and inadequate methods, 3 of our 10 informants were exposed, 3 defected, and another 3 were transferred to Shanghai. Only one remains in Wenzhou, and his role is minimal. As a result, our struggle against the Trotskyists has encountered big difficulties. (3) Internal consolidation of government organs According to incomplete information, as many as 90 members of Trotskyist front organisations have infiltrated organs of our regional Party committee, special administrative department, municipal Party committee, and municipal government […]. Even some individual leading comrades are suspected of being Trotskyists. For example, Chen Xianlei, the deputy secretary of the municipal section of the [official] Communist Youth League in Wenzhou, was reported to be a Trotskyist leader, while at one point Li Guangxun, deputy head of the cadre section of the organisation department of the regional Party committee, was in contact with the Trotskyists (this information has not been verified). In the worst case, 13 Trotskyists were discovered in the Municipal Public Security Bureau […]. On 8 January 1951, Zheng Guosheng, an investigator in Section One, defected to the Trotskyists with a weapon. He released two detained Trotskyists, Huang Zheng and Cao Jiaji, without authorisation (he originally intended to release 6 detainees, but the attempt failed due to a change in circumstances). Zhu Fang of Section Four delivered information to the detained Trotskyists and provided them with more than 700,000 yuan to fund their escape. Yang Fengxiong, who interrogated the Trotskyists, told the detainees not to confess. Zhang Meizhu of Section Three stole ten official pass-permits to help the Trotskyists flee, and showed them a list of the Trotskyists in our possession. [The female Trotskyist] Chen Aizhen flirted with one of our communication officers to get him to show her confidential documents. All of these cases greatly damaged our campaign against the Trotskyists. Currently, there is still one member

overview of local trotskyist activities

305

of a Trotskyist front organisation in the Municipal Bureau as well as two Trotskyist suspects. The harm done shows how serious the Trotskyists’ infiltration of our government organs has become. If we do not maintain full control over these organs, especially the leadership organs, our struggle against the Trotskyists will suffer further setbacks. (4) Co-ordination between the public security department and the culture and education department One big problem in our struggle against the Trotskyists over the past two years has been the lack of co-ordination between the public security department and the culture and education department. As a result, our work in the field of ideology has gone awry. For example, during the registration of the Trotskyist bandits in November 1950, when the Trotskyists began vacillating, dozens of members of the Trotskyists’ front organisations began to express doubts about Trotskyist theory. However, Trotskyist members of their League refused to confess and told us that “to sacrifice oneself for the truth is glorious”. After the execution of Lian Zhengxiang, a few Trotskyist League members capitulated, but they had not purged Trotskyist ideas from their minds. Even after capitulating, the great majority continued to express doubts and to vacillate, to suffer mentally, and to hanker after the fallacies of Trotskyism. The main reason for this is that we failed to make a proper assessment of the extent of Trotskyist ideological poisoning and therefore failed to expose it adequately. […]

3

Our Estimation of the Scale of Trotskyist Activities in Wenzhou

Our current knowledge of Trotskyist activity in Wenzhou remains incomplete. According to the information we have gathered, there are 53 members of the Trotskyist party-league in and around Wenzhou: 31 in the city itself and 22 outside the city. Only four of these Trotskyists are members of their party, the rest are in their youth league. As for their front organisations, there are no accurate statistics for the time being. […] A total of 174 Trotskyists have escaped or transferred to other places (including 133 people who escaped from Wenzhou – 71 to Shanghai, 21 to Northeast China, 5 to Nanjing, 5 to Beijing, 8 to Hangzhou, etc.). Our conclusion regarding the Wenzhou Trotskyists: (1) To judge by the total number of Trotskyists in Wenzhou who have either escaped or been arrested, it is clear that Trotskyism has grown considerably as an organisation in Wenzhou since Liberation, and that Trotskyist organisation has spread across the country, to northeast China and to

306

trans. yang

Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and other major cities. The Trotskyists have become a counterrevolutionary force that we cannot neglect. (2) We must look beyond the number of members of the Trotskyist partyleague to that of their front organisations. These front organisations have played a major role. Most of their members identify themselves ideologically as Trotskyists, and they deeply hate us. Among them are dozens of activists who have worked hard for the Trotskyist cause. […] To take just one example: Qin Yanyan, who was detained on suspicion of theft and arson, belonged to a front group and held firm to his counterrevolutionary position, while doing his utmost to raise funds for the Trotskyists. […] (3) The Trotskyists are very good at infiltrating the masses. Under certain circumstances, their programme and ideology can still be deceptively convincing, and we should be very wary of them. Our anti-Trotskyist work should not be confined to mere suppression. It must be complemented by an all-out effort to expose the crimes of the Trotskyist-bandits and to carry out ideological education among the masses. Otherwise, our efforts will be limited and we will only scratch the surface.

4

Suggestions and Recommendations for Future Work

In future, we must continue to follow the Central Government’s policy in handling Trotskyist cases, while gaining intelligence by way of informants. […] In that way, we can act punctually and in concert under the direction of the Central Government and annihilate the bandits in one fell swoop. To that end, we should try to get the enemy to drop their guard and set up further reconnaissance, in order to prepare unified action [against the Trotskyists] in the near future. In response to the present situation in Wenzhou, the following work should be done immediately: A. The intelligence group organised by local authorities has gathered information about Trotskyist activities, including a large range of investigatory materials regarding the Trotskyists during the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries [a political campaign aiming at suppressing anti-ccp forces in 1950–1952]. […] We should immediately compile and collate these materials, while verifying and clarifying their authenticity. Front-group members other than members of the Trotskyist party-league should be scrutinised carefully, so as not to categorise front-group members whose connections with true Trotskyists are weak as actual Trotskyists.

overview of local trotskyist activities

B.

C.

D.

E.

F.

5

307

The culture and education department should proceed to investigate Trotskyist activities in a number of secondary and high schools in Wenzhou, and an ideological campaign should be launched under our political leadership. Any Trotskyist suspects among the teaching staff should be removed from their posts and sent immediately for ideological training. The Trotskyists currently brought together in the cadre-training school organised by our regional party committee should have their training extended for the purposes of scrutiny, and their political education must be strengthened. Only when they have truly transformed their ideology [from Trotskyism to real communism] should they be assigned jobs. We should strengthen investigatory work regarding Trotskyists. The current staffing levels at the Municipal Bureau are insufficient and not up to undertaking the necessary anti-Trotskyist tasks. Our Public Security Division should be reinforced. Co-ordination between the Municipal Bureau and the Public Security Division should be promoted. Although our antiTrotskyist campaign is being implemented separately on different sites, a regular exchange of intelligence is of the essence. Currently, we have virtually no informants. We should study and identify targets to recruit and implement Central Government directives. In addition, long-term planning should be deployed. We must work hard to infiltrate the Trotskyist organisation. We should strengthen security work in our government organs. The security sections should collate and study materials regarding Trotskyist infiltration, while sorting out what we already know about Trotskyist suspects and seeking intelligence regarding particular targets. Information about Trotskyist activities in Wenzhou’s affiliated counties is so far lacking. Such information should be gathered together once the Three-Antis Campaign is over. […]

Eleven Statistical Tables Are Attached: B12, B13

[omitted] The Wenzhou Regional Committee of the ccp

Summary Report regarding Anti-Trotskyist Work in Wenzhou, Work Committee for the Round-up of the Trotskyists (1953) Translated by Yang Yang April 1953

This report by Wenzhou’s local ccp work committee concerns the 1952 round-up of Trotskyists in the region. It forms part of an unpublished collection of documents of the ccp’s Wenzhou Regional Committee.

The round-up of the Trotskyists in Wenzhou, conducted after learning the lessons of the anti-Trotskyist struggle in 1950, followed correct instructions, unified deployments, and uniform actions of the Party’s Central Committee, as well as specific guidance and assistance from the East China Bureau and the [Zhejiang] Provincial Government. After four months of intensive work (devoting a total of 13 months to the round-up, including preparations for the investigation), the round-up of the Trotskyists has been a great victory. Based on the material we have at our disposal, our anti-Trotskyist work has fulfilled the objective and subjective conditions and various possibilities, and the demands raised by the Central Committee have been met. The achievements and shortcomings as well as the experience of the anti-Trotskyist work as set out in the report submitted by the work committee are fundamentally and factually accurate. The achievements of the round-up of the Trotskyists in Wenzhou are extraordinary. However, due to a lack of in-depth examination by regional and municipal party committees and the careless actions of specific individuals, some of the information remains inaccurate. During the operation, one person was mistakenly put under surveillance, 16 were wrongly arrested, and two were registered by mistake. The lack of seriousness [on the part of our cadres] regarding the [anti-Trotskyist] policies has caused unnecessary damage to the political prestige of our Party. Though the faults and errors have been promptly corrected, such violations of our policies and our sometimes crass and incautious style of work are particularly unacceptable in regard to the Party’s security work. This lesson must be learned. In the meantime, […] the regional and municipal party committees reckon that based on the available materials and possibilities, it can be said that we have achieved the aim of “eliminating them all”. Nevertheless, we should not forget that since Wenzhou is one of the main

© Translated by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_036

summary report regarding anti-trotskyist work in wenzhou

309

sources of Trotskyist activity and a coastal trade-hub connecting Hong Kong and Taiwan, it is also possible that Trotskyists will turn up from elsewhere and that local Trotskyists will therefore become resurgent. Due to the current constraints of objective and subjective conditions as well as the remnants of the problematic minority in our Party and government organs, no final conclusion [on our anti-Trotskyist work] has yet been drawn. We should remain highly vigilant and cautious. In other words, we have won the fight against the Trotskyists this time, but the task of a new, long-term, and covert struggle against them is in the offing. It is important for us to learn from our previous operation, in order not to drop our guard and to continue to act in concert. […] Wenzhou is a stronghold of the Trotskyist bandits. The cases of local Trotskyists are complicated. They are many and can be found in various social layers. Their rampant activities have a long history and much ideological influence locally. The crimes they have committed are extremely damaging and have stoked up the masses’ hatred. There are 1,094 Trotskyist-bandits in this region, 552 of them in Wenzhou, including 20 members of the Trotskyist party, 34 members of the Trotskyist youth league, 384 front organisation members, 94 under a Trotskyist influence, and 20 Trotskyist suspects. [This compares with] 542 Trotskyists who have been found throughout the whole country, including 29 party members, 111 youth league members, 346 front organisation members, 52 under the Trotskyist influence, and 4 suspects. After Liberation, despite the fact that we solved several cases and carried out an anti-Trotskyist struggle in 1950, we did not at the time realise the exact nature of the Trotskyist [threat]. We wrongly adopted a piecemeal approach and arrested them at the first sign of trouble. As a result, not only were we unable to wipe them out completely but they became more secretive and better at improvising. The Trotskyists changed their local tactics rapidly and soon fled elsewhere. […] In March 1952, the Central Committee framed guidelines [for handling Trotskyists] – “longterm planning, reconnaissance by way of informers, and netting them up in one fell swoop”. After settling on this policy, a special group of cadres was deployed […] to target the Trotskyists. After nine months of reconnaissance and investigation, preparations were complete. Under the unified command of the Ministry of Public Security, the anti-Trotskyist operations were successfully carried out at dawn on December 23, 1952. […] The round-up was successful and achieved the following goals: First, we have uncovered and cracked all the Trotskyist cases in Wenzhou. We obtained full information regarding the organisation, personnel, and activities of the Trotskyists. In accordance with the instructions given by the Ministry of Public Security, all the Trotskyists in Wenzhou have been convicted or subjected to re-education, and their organisation has been completely destroyed. The

310

trans. yang

core-cadres affiliated to the party and the youth league of the Trotskyist-bandits have been arrested and convicted without exception. The ordinary members of their party or league and core members of their front organisations have all been subjected to centralised control and regulation. The ordinary members of the front organisations have been registered and have repented their mistakes. Those who at one time were under Trotskyist influence have been educated by way of individual conversations. Among ordinary members, those who confessed early or performed meritoriously to atone for their crimes have been granted exceptional leniency. Here is the outcome: 50 people (9 %) have been arrested; 58 (10.5%) have been subjected to centralised control; 141 (25.5 %) have been put under regulation (except for 16 whose cases have been closed); 138 (25%) have been registered; 59 (10.7%) have been educated through individual conversations; 59 (10.7%) have been granted leniency; another 27 who have submitted complaints will be given a probation period once we receive further instructions; 20 will remain subject to an identification process. Based on clues provided as a result of the crackdown on their organisations in Shanghai, Fujian, and other places, we now know all about the Wenzhou organisation. Although 94 new cases have been added since the start of the operation, most of the information is now available. Several cases cannot be identified, given that their whereabouts remain unknown. Others cannot be easily convicted due to insufficient evidence. Nevertheless, the Trotskyist bandits have suffered a heavy defeat and our crackdown on their organisations is complete. Second, since the reactionary fallacies of the Trotskyists have now been thoroughly exposed politically, the Trotskyists have disintegrated ideologically. Before the crackdown, the Trotskyists were stubborn and hostile, refusing to make confessions, insisting that they were not in the wrong, and openly cursing us. Now, however, the vast majority have admitted that the Trotskyists are counterrevolutionaries. They bow their heads and admit their guilt, while handing over information about their organisation and repenting their errors. Dozens of members of front organisation have expressed regret at having taken wrong paths in the past and have wept bitter tears. The majority of the Trotskyists who have been subjected to centralisation criticise themselves, saying: “What we said about the nature of Chinese society in the past was treacherous”, “shouting nonsense along with the Trotskyists meant that we did not stand together with the Chinese masses”. They are all determined to study the works of Chairman Mao and to reform themselves. Zheng Ruizhen, who started out as very stubborn, now says: “In the past, we only called him Mao Zedong, now we should call him Chairman Mao”. Zhao Gongnan realises that “when I previously saw pictures of Stalin, I was disgusted. Now I feel guilty about that, and see it as a criminal act”. Since their release, many have written letters of thanks to the

summary report regarding anti-trotskyist work in wenzhou

311

government. Trotskyists subjected to registration have received collective education, and now loathe themselves for having let themselves be cheated. Third, the space within which Trotskyists were active in Wenzhou has basically been closed down, and their social base has been greatly weakened. The Wenzhou Trotskyists have ideologically contaminated more than 1,000 young students in the course of more than a decade, and have had a degree of influence among other sections of the masses. [Now], their counterrevolutionary visage has been bared to the masses, who have been educated. Through systematic education in government organs, schools, and the organised masses, the fallacies disseminated by the Trotskyists have been refuted, thus reversing the wrong view that the Trotskyists are merely a “political faction” or stand for a “different political line” [from the ccp], or are an “ideological problem”, or show sympathy for the youths, or represent a criticism of the current policies, etc. These condemnations have raised the level of political vigilance and the masses’ hatred for the Trotskyists. In cultural and educational circles, it is often said that the Trotskyists “present vinegar as wine”, and that while “the Kuomintang are armed agents, the Trotskyists are scholarly agents”. The Trotskyists are everywhere isolated and under the supervision of the masses. A total of 1,960 books, journals, and documents published by the Trotskyists have been confiscated. The Trotskyists can no longer be active in Wenzhou, having become notorious among the masses. This creates favourable conditions for our future struggle for the ideological eradication of the Trotskyist contamination of young people. Why such a great victory? First, because of the correctness of the instructions and policies regarding anti-Trotskyist work set out by the Central Committee; second, because of the concerns and direct assistance of the Ministry of Public Security, the Provincial Public Security Bureau, and senior party committees as well as the mobilisation at all levels of the Party and our mutual efforts; third, because of our resolute implementation of the tasks set us, our prompt and thorough preparations, and our well-planned and swiftly executed operations. However, many shortcomings and errors remain. They are: 1. [Our work] lacks precision in terms of its implementation of our policies. A total of 19 people have been wrongly accused of being Trotskyists, including one sent for concentration, 16 put under regulation, and 2 who were mistakenly registered. This has damaged the political prestige of our Party and government. There are three main reasons that lead to such errors: first, Trotskyists are present in large numbers in the Wenzhou region and in various social layers. It is difficult to deal with them in absolute secrecy, especially when false and chaotic confessions were

312

2.

3.

trans. yang

rampant during campaigns (the Three-antis and the purge of middlelevel cadres) in which it was difficult to distinguish right from wrong. Due to lack of scrutiny, bureaucratism, and credulous acceptance of confessions, 12 people who submitted false confessions during the campaigns were wrongly accused. Second, careless use of materials led to wrong verdicts. For example, the cases involving people with the same name were not verified beforehand. Third, we were sometimes too rigid. We took it that it was better if Trotskyists “were detained a little longer for scrutiny than for them to be wrongly released”, an approach that was impractical. Some detainees who should have been granted leniency received heavy punishments, and 5 suspects whose identities had not been verified were subjected to concentration. Once the leaders of the regional and municipal committees considered these cases seriously, the errors were swiftly corrected. Appropriate explanations were given, which salvaged our political reputation. Our propaganda and education work are out of kilter: such work in government organs, schools, and the fields of culture and education is proceeding well, but not in factories and among ordinary citizens, and it is being implemented better in the city of Wenzhou than in associated counties. Initially, there was some disconnection between action and propaganda, which led to confusion among our cadres and the masses. Study sessions were organised repeatedly for Party cadres and the masses. We also organised [anti-Trotskyist] exhibitions, confessions by repentant Trotskyists, and some symposia, so that the masses could learn about the crimes committed by the Trotskyists. Consequently, our goals were eventually met. […] (1) The Trotskyists are organised internationally. Unlike counterrevolutionary agents in general, the Trotskyists are organised systematically throughout the country. The complete destruction of the Trotskyist organisation depends mainly on our established guiding principles, i.e., long-term preparations, reconnaissance by way of informers, mastery of enemy intelligence, strict secrecy, unified action, and resolute implementation [of guidelines]. In so doing, we have achieved a sweeping victory. This demonstrates that the guidelines and instructions given by the Central Committee for cracking down on the Trotskyists are completely correct. Reality shows that a piecemeal approach – arresting Trotskyists at the first sign of trouble-emerging and launching individual raids, as we did in the past in Wenzhou – is wrong. The anti-Trotskyist struggle is long-

summary report regarding anti-trotskyist work in wenzhou

313

term. It is essential that we adhere to long-term planning and policies. We must not proceed blindly. We must obey a unified command. (2) Acquiring intelligence through informers has played a major role in cracking down on the Trotskyists. Given, however, that the Trotskyists are extremely stubborn in their reactionary thinking, we ought not to be proceed blindly with our special intelligence operations. Only after the Trotskyists have capitulated completely from a political point of view and made a full confession and provided full information about their organisation can they be recruited as our informers. In the past, we did not realise this, and recruited blindly, which led to much damage. For example, when we recruited Li Peiji and Tong Yiming, two members of the Trotskyist youth league, they responded with duplicitous tactics. They secretly rearranged their contacts and redistributed their Trotskyist pamphlets and journals, while advising leading cadres to flee Wenzhou. After June 1950, we were more careful. We recruited Huang Zhaoxiong (a member of the Trotskyist youth league). As a result, we became thoroughly familiar with the organisational life of the rcy [Revolutionary Communist Youth] and also obtained some inside information regarding the my [Marxist Youth] group. Recruiting Zhu Zhaohe helped us build up a clear picture of the internal situation of the my in its final days and its connections with its superiors in Shanghai. Recruiting Hu Youlan and others also played an important role in our investigation. The contrast is clear, and the lessons must be learned. (3) The fallacies of Trotskyist political ideology are dressed up as Marxism-Leninism. The Trotskyists must be eliminated not just organisationally but in terms of their counterrevolutionary fallacies and ideological poisoning. It is essential to refute Trotskyist fallacies among the organised masses, and to expose their counterrevolutionary nature. In so doing, [we will ensure that] the masses receive ideological education and can distinguish between right and the wrong, while our [correct] ideological positions will be consolidated and the remnants of Trotskyist influence will be eliminated. In the near future, we should strictly guard against the reemergence of Trotskyist ideological influence. In our struggles against the Trotskyists, we must force them to surrender politically and purge their ideologies. We should continue to be highly vigilant and to supervise the Trotskyist remnants, so as to prevent their resurgence.

314

trans. yang

(4) We must deal with the Trotskyists individually in order to divide and disintegrate them. The Trotskyists in Wenzhou are large in number. The severity of their crimes and the degree of ideological contamination among them vary from case to case. Different forms of punishment, including arrests and interrogation, control and supervision, concentration, registration, and re-education through individual talks have been applied to different individuals, in accordance with their “rank”, “crimes”, “degree of confession”, and “degree of contamination”. It is absolutely correct to do so. For example, the vast majority brought together for training are members of front organisations, most of them youngsters who have not been ideologically contaminated by the Trotskyists in general and who have not taken part in Trotskyist activities for long. The methods we have adopted, combining scrutiny with education, and the guiding policy of concentrating on purging ideologies, are appropriate, correct, and capable of solving such problems. During the training sessions, all have confessed their problems and expressed their repentance and gratitude to our government. This work method divides and disintegrates the enemy. However, if all of them were to be put under regulation and supervision, confrontation would result and it would be difficult to achieve our goal. (5) We must be extremely careful and meticulous in dealing with intelligence. We must absolutely guarantee its accuracy. Otherwise, serious errors may arise. The Wenzhou cases are complicated, involving 41 suspected organisations and more than 1,600 people. Our investigations show that most are study groups and recreational organisations spontaneously organised by the masses. Despite the fact that a few Trotskyists might at some point have infiltrated the activities organised by these mass groups, de facto they are not front organisations established by the Trotskyists. Such cases should be dealt with accordingly. Now only one group (of 7 people) has yet to be clarified (it has been reported to the Ministry of Public Security). After the operations, based on substantiated evidence, 205 suspects came under our control (a further 100 unsubstantiated cases were not included). As a result of our investigations, 115 suspects were verified (including 21 from outside Wenzhou), and 66 individual cases were closed. Experience shows that the best way of getting intelligence on the Trotskyist organisation is through investigations, as opposed to launching a mass movement. For example, most of the confession material produced during the Three-antis and the purge

summary report regarding anti-trotskyist work in wenzhou

315

of middle-level cadres was false and fabricated. Dozens of people were fooled by the Trotskyist front organisations and were not aware of their reactionary nature, but they neither joined in criminal activities nor were they deeply contaminated by Trotskyist ideology. So they should not be regarded as true Trotskyists. The cases against those less influenced by Trotskyist ideology can be closed accordingly. (6) Victory in the round-up and purge of the Trotskyists does not mean that our anti-Trotskyist struggle is over. A small number of bandits who are long-standing Trotskyists, Trotskyist infiltrators in Wenzhou from elsewhere in China or enemies organised in single-line contacts, may have escaped the round-up. In the meantime, [we must remember that] Wenzhou is an important base for the Trotskyists. Although all the Trotskyists have been punished, there remains the possibility of their resurgence. Henceforth, we should be highly vigilant, to prevent a continuation of their activity. It is therefore our long-term duty to continue eliminating the Trotskyists root and branch, in order to prevent their resurgence and eradicate their activities […]. We must maintain a special anti-Trotskyist squad consisting of four or five officers, and continue our anti-Trotskyist work by collecting special intelligence, undertaking reconnaissance, and keeping a track on them. (7) When handling the Trotskyist cases within our organisations, we should carefully and appropriately deal with every single one according to his or her rank and specific criminal activities. After all the cases have been clarified, we should draw the matter to a conclusion. Disciplinary measures should start with those Trotskyists who at one point infiltrated our Party and youth league. Journals, pamphlets, and books published by the Trotskyists must all be confiscated in order to avoid future trouble. We must pay proper attention to follow-up work, in the aftermath to the round-up.

A Report Submitted by the Ministry of Public Security regarding the Roundup of Trotskyists and Asking for Further Instructions from the Central Government (1953) Translated by Yang Yang

This report by the ccp’s national security service, issued in August 1953, describes measures taken by the ccp to destroy the Chinese Trotskyists’ organisation in the cities, following the ccp’s capture of power at national level in 1949 and the Trotskyists’ subsequent arrest. Source: Dangnei tongxun (Internal Party Bulletin), 1953, no. 141, pp. 23–25.

(This report has been ratified by the Central Government. It is abridged.) In December last year, we launched a nationwide crackdown on the Trotskyists and arrested a number of Trotskyists, including dozens of key Trotskyist cadres at the provincial and municipal levels and above, as well as members of the Trotskyist Central Committee: Zheng Chaolin, He Zhiyu, Lin Huayuan, Yu Shuoyi, Huang Jiantong, Cao Yulin, Yu Shouyi, Yin Kuan, and Jiang Zhendong; members of its provincial committee – Wang Guolong, Xiong Andong, Yang Shouyuan (Provisional Committee of Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Lu Ji (Guangdong Provincial Committee), Liu Fang, Liu Xunan, Jiang Junyang (Guangzhou Municipal Committee), etc.; members of the central committee of the Trotskyists’ youth league – Ye Chunhe, Zheng Liang; and other leading Trotskyists in various places, such as Zhou Rensheng, Zeng Meng, Wei Kuan, Ji Yunlong, and Li Pei. Dozens of rank-and-file Trotskyists have been put under centralised control, while the majority put under regulation are in Zhejiang Province. As a result of the round-up and the imposition of centralised control, the covert groups of Trotskyists have fundamentally been eliminated. Thus the arrogance of the Trotskyists has been effectively countered. In the districts and units concerned, propaganda actions are being undertaken in order to expose the crimes of the Trotskyists, so that the party cadres and the masses can be educated in a more profound way. After the round-up, interrogations swiftly ensued. During the interrogations, there were differences between rank-and-file Trotskyists and the more © Translated by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_037

a report submitted by the ministry of public security

317

stubborn senior Trotskyists. The senior Trotskyists were better at conspiring and faking their attitudes. They were also better at concentrating on trivial rather than important issues, at cunning denial, and at refusing to admit guilt. Most adamantly refused to tell the truth during interrogations. For example, the leader of the Minority Faction of Shanghai Trotskyists,1 Zheng Chaolin, described his lifelong counterrevolutionary conspiring as “playing with words”. Yu Shouyi, the secretary of the Central Organisation Bureau of the Majority Faction, [who was arrested] in Hankou, falsely described his return to China from Hong Kong as “in contradiction to the Trotskyists’ [strategy], [implying] that he had broken from them”. Liu Fang, the secretary of the Guangzhou Trotskyists’ municipal committee, only gave a general account of the Trotskyists’ organisational activities, while avoiding all mention of his hidden conspiring, the Trotskyist leadership body in Hong Kong, and the connection between the Chinese Trotskyists and the Fourth International. These are all obvious examples. However, some of the young people deceived into joining Trotskyist organisations are a different matter. Although they were deceived into supporting the Trotskyists, they have not yet degenerated to the level of deceit and shamelessness displayed by the senior Trotskyists. [However,] some of them claimed to be loyal Trotskyists and directly defied us during interrogations, and others wrote while in prison that “we may well be beheaded, but our will is indomitable”, to display their resolute commitment to counterrevolutionary positions. Most members of the Trotskyist youth league are educated youth. Until the point that we defeated and disarmed them ideologically, after the start of their imprisonment, they fiercely defied us. For example, members of the Trotskyist youth league from Shanghai caused a scene in prison by singing the Internationale and shouting out reactionary slogans such as “Down with Stalin” and “Long live the Fourth International”, continuously and for as long as eight hours. At the beginning of the interrogations, some openly hurled invective at our investigators, while others thought that “being imprisoned is a test of our honour”, and insisted that “one should be loyal to the revolution and stand up for the truth”. Nevertheless, after we had patiently educated them and, during interrogations, exposed the counterrevolutionary nature of Trotskyism and of the Trotskyists’ conspiring to deceive and brainwash young people, they eventually questioned their own activities, surrendered, and confessed.

1 Note in the original document: In 1941, due to internal conflicts, the Trotskyists split into two factions: one led by Peng Shuzhi, called the Chinese Revolutionary Communist Party, also known as the Majority Faction; the other led by Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin, called the Chinese Internationalist Workers Party, also known as the Minority Faction. Editors’ note: in fact, the internal conflict happened in 1942.

318

trans. yang

In the course of the round-up and interrogations, a large number of incriminating documents were confiscated. Many were discovered in Shanghai, and the so-called “20 years of heart and blood”2 secretly kept by Zheng Chaolin was also discovered, along with important documents of the Sparks Group, Trotskyist materials dating back to the Trotskyists’ founding congress, and Trotskyist correspondence with Trotsky, the Fourth International, Trotskyist organisations in other parts of the world, and Chinese Trotskyists across the country. All these documents confirm that the Chinese Trotskyists have long acted as imperialist pawns under the command of the Fourth International and have engaged in conspiracies in order to sabotage the Chinese Revolution. New leads and newly organised covert groups are also being uncovered. The evidence obtained helps to further the interrogations and clarify cases. Regarding those put under centralised control, a policy of rigorous scrutiny and ideological reform has been adopted. Although brainwashed ideologically, after we had worked on them by exposing the crimes of the Trotskyists, explaining our policies, pointing out the future road, persuading them to deliver accounts [of their activities], refuting their fallacies, and providing them with positive education, most of those who had been deceived into joining Trotskyist organisations due to their own immaturity came to recognise that the Trotskyists are counterrevolutionaries and quickly began confessing. Those who are relatively young and whose political problems are minor in extent and who have thoroughly confessed and shown remorse have been released early, in order to gain sympathy for them from society.3 The centralised control teams are now entering the final stages of their work. After the round-up, the Executive Committee of the Fourth International sent out a “letter of protest” from Paris, remonstrating against the arrests. Standing its ground, the Trotskyist leading body in Hong Kong instructed the remnants of the Trotskyists on the mainland to cut all horizontal ties [to one another] and to try to slip underground. Meanwhile, it constantly infiltrated its members into the mainland under the pretext of pursuing further studies or employment in China. The Trotskyists’ aim is to infiltrate our party and mass organisations and to take control of those institutions by usurping them, while pretending to represent a progressive force. Such is the Trotskyists’ vile tactic – to pretend two-faced “critical support” [for our new regime] in order to achieve their counterrevolutionary aims. Our covert struggle against the Trotskyists must therefore remain in place. It must not be relaxed.

2 The “20 years of heart and blood” refers to basic Trotskyist materials and archives. 3 Presumably, to preclude their ostracisation, which might stand in the way of their reform.

a report submitted by the ministry of public security

319

After six months of interrogations, scrutiny, and investigation across the whole of China, most Trotskyists have gradually come to realise that the Fourth International and the Chinese Trotskyist organisations under its command are merely imperialist pawns in the guise of “progressive political parties”, and they have repented and confessed. The main exceptions are a few senior Trotskyist leading figures who cunningly refuse to deliver a full confession. The Trotskyists’ organisational development and conspiring have been clearly investigated. The conditions are now ripe for verdicts. In accordance with the Central Government’s policy of punishing the top leaders but winning over their accomplices; treating the leading Trotskyist cadres with severity and the deceived youths with leniency; treating with severity those who have concealed information from us and defied us and with leniency those who have fully confessed their repentance, the Trotskyists should now be subjected to the following measures: 1. Leading cadres among the arrested Trotskyists who have committed serious crimes and who persist in their reactionary stance without sincerely repenting should be sentenced to imprisonment. The criteria for sentencing are: (a) The handful of senior Trotskyists who betrayed the revolution or served the Kuomintang and its secret services over a period of years and who have thus committed grave crimes, as well as those leading Trotskyist criminals who have been actively organising Trotskyist activities, plotting counterrevolutionary conspiracies, systematically spreading reactionary fallacies, and ideologically brainwashing young people should be sentenced to death or life imprisonment. (b) Middle and higher Trotskyist cadres who have organised counterrevolutionary activities and engaged in counterrevolutionary sabotage while refusing to repent should be sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment or more, depending on the seriousness of their crimes. The above two categories of Trotskyists constitute a minority of those arrested. (c) As for those lower-level Trotskyist cadres (including group secretaries, branch committee members, branch secretaries, etc.) who have been deeply brainwashed ideologically and who have engaged in rampant Trotskyist activities but failed to repent their past mistakes, but whose counterrevolutionary crimes are less severe in extent and fewer in number, they should be imprisoned for nine years at most, depending on the seriousness of their crimes. 2. Trotskyist cadres at the lower levels (i.e., activists of various Trotskyist affiliated and front organisations) who have been deeply brainwashed

320

3.

4.

trans. yang

and who engaged in Trotskyist activities in the past as well as other rank-and-file Trotskyists can be released if they resolve their problems and show repentance. Even some Trotskyist individuals who have not sincerely repented but have committed only minor crimes can also be released, [as long as] continuous attention is paid to their post-release performance. Most of the criminals in this category are educated youths. Such an approach will facilitate our efforts to reform them and will help them gain the sympathy of their families, kin, and friends within society. If they resume their counterrevolutionary activities, they will be arrested and sentenced. Overall, releasing this category of Trotskyists is now recommended. All centralised control teams established by local authorities should be terminated on schedule. Centralised control should be immediately abandoned, except in the case of those who have committed grave crimes, been sentenced to imprisonment, or have shown no repentance. Those who have been released or discharged from centralised control should be educated both collectively and individually before they are finally dealt with. The education should concentrate on the historical crimes of the Trotskyist clique, the intrinsic nature of bandits and spies, and the political conspiracies in which they engage. This refers, in particular, to their habit of disguising themselves as progressive political parties in order to lure young people into their trap, their betrayal of the motherland, and their spying for the imperialists and the Kuomintang gangsters. All this should be systematically and thoroughly denounced, while at the same time explaining and reminding those involved of what is at stake and showing them the way forward. We must warn them to desist from further participation in Trotskyist counterrevolutionary activities. If they do not fully repent, they will be severely punished. The families of the Trotskyists who are released and the masses in the workplaces and schools where they once worked or studied should also be educated in regard to the counterrevolutionary nature and crimes of the Trotskyists in order to confirm our policy towards the Trotskyists of “punishing the leaders while winning over their followers”, while at the same time raising the masses’ awareness and reminding them to be vigilant. The Central Government’s directive of 12 November 1952, stated that “articles by key Trotskyist cadres who have thoroughly confessed and exposed the Trotskyists’ crimes should be published in newspapers or journals with the approval of the Central Government”. Local authorities should gather together such confessions when cases against Trotskyists are closed. After obtaining permission from the Central Government,

a report submitted by the ministry of public security

5.

6.

7.

321

some of these materials can be published in newspapers or journals, in order to help expose the counterrevolutionary nature of the Trotskyists and the crimes they have committed. Rank-and-file Trotskyists who have fully confessed and repented can be selected to make speeches confessing [their crimes] to the masses in the workplaces or schools with which they are affiliated. This can also be a way of exposing the Trotskyists’ crimes. In order to facilitate control and continued education and reform, as well as to gain society’s sympathy for those Trotskyists who have been released early or freed from control, they should be offered the chance to work or study to the best of their ability. In that way, there will be less chance of their roaming around and endangering society. However, they should under no circumstances be given work in key departments of the state or of the economy, where confidential information might be easily obtained. Meanwhile, the families and the workplaces and schools with which such people are affiliated should be given responsibility for their continuing education. The public security authorities should keep a watch on them, but should not resort to open control or surveillance, for that might hinder ideological reform. We have now fundamentally uprooted Trotskyist organisations at the domestic level. Nevertheless, Trotskyists are cunning bandits adept at wearing a false face, so our struggle against them must be long-term task and a key component in our covert struggle against imperialism. It is crucial that we recognise that the Fourth International, spurred on by imperialism, is still plotting to send Trotskyists into China in order to re-build connections and re-establish its organisation. Some of the more deeply brainwashed released Trotskyists cannot be fully reformed in the short term and will not fully abandon their counterrevolutionary stance. Some will be seen by the enemy as targets for its activity. Public security departments at all levels must maintain a long-term mindset and deployments in the anti-Trotskyist struggle. We cannot relax our vigilance. With regard to provisions for dealing with the Trotskyists, all death sentences should be approved by the Central Government after first being submitted to the Ministry of Public Security. All sentences of life imprisonment and fixed-term imprisonment should be reported to the Ministry of Public Security for approval. All other sentences should be reported to the Central Bureau4 by the Regional Public Security Bureau for approval and to the Ministry of Public Security for the record.

4 It is not absolutely clear what this refers to. Given the context, it might refer to the Central Bureau of the East China Region of the ccp.

322 8.

trans. yang

From inception to-closure, the round-up of the Trotskyists was an important campaign that was successfully coordinated across the entire country. All regions should learn lessons from the experience of the round-up and conduct comprehensive reviews to educate our cadres, so that the effectiveness of our struggle against the enemy is enhanced. The East China region was the site of the Trotskyists’ headquarters and of their key organisations. Our comrades in this region have done a rather good job at all stages, of reconnaissance and round-up, and have thus gained a rather rich experience in actual struggle. That makes a further detailed report all the more necessary. This document can be published in our party journals. August, 1953

An Introduction to the Situation of the Chinese Trotskyite Bandits (1954) Edited by Zhongyang renmin gong’an xueyuan, printed by the Security Office of the People’s Government in Jiangxi Province, April 1954 Translated by Zhang Shaoming

This document is dated April 1954 but first appeared in September 1953 or even earlier. It was issued as a top secret internal ccp document “for information” only, i.e., not for debate. It followed the arrest of more than one thousand Chinese Trotskyists (known as Trotskyites to Stalinists and Maoists) on 22 December 1952. The document was perhaps aimed at forestalling dissidence within the ranks of the ccp itself. None of the imprisoned Trotskyists had a public trial. Not until Deng Xiaoping resumed power after Mao’s death in 1976 were the Trotskyist survivors given their civil liberties and released, in 1979. Although the ccp has refused time and again to review their case, in effect they are no longer labelled as “counterrevolutionaries”. The best-known Trotskyist, Zheng Chaolin, adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience, had spent a total of 34 years of his life in prison, first under Chiang Kai-shek and then under the Mao regime. The document slanders the Trotskyists as “ bandits”, “gangsters”, and agents and lackeys of US imperialism, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, and the Japanese secret service agencies. It repeats Stalinist slanders against Trotsky as a paid agent of German imperialism and of the British secret service. Ironically, however, it also portrays them as defenders of workers’ rights and land reform and critics of corruption, waste, and bureaucracy. Its account of the origins of Chinese Trotskyism, the unification of the four groups in 1931, their regroupment after their release by the Kuomintang, and the split into Majority and Minority factions in 1942, as well as the lists of names, largely concur with what we know from the writings of Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi. Clearly the ccp took the Trotskyists seriously despite their small numbers, studying their policies and strategies and keeping a close watch on them. While claiming that the Trotskyists had no political strategy and were unprincipled, the document notes that the split into factions in the early 1940s, around the time the USA was entering the war against Japan, concerned whether to take a defencist or defeatist position in the war. The document provides a vivid picture of the audacity, resilience, and effectiveness of the Chinese Trotskyists working underground in Mao’s China to rally workers, students, and intellectuals to the banner of revolutionary Marxism. Their penetration even after 1949 of sectors of the working class and even of the ccp is worthy of note.

© Translated by Zhang Shaoming, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_038

324

trans. zhang

Chapter 1 – The Nature of the Trotskyites and Their International Organisation To understand the nature of the Trotskyites we must begin with the Trotskyites in the Soviet Union. Trotsky and his partisans first appeared as a political faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Later, during the October Revolution of 1917. They stole their way into the Bolshevik Party and in 1927 were exposed and expelled from the Party. Trotsky fled abroad. What did Trotsky’s group do? We can see from the public trials of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and other counterrevolutionary gangsters by the Soviet military tribunal in Moscow from 1936 to 1938 that these gangsters had been agents and spies of the imperialist agencies from a very early stage. Trotsky himself, for example, had been in the service of the German spy agency since 1921, receiving 250,000 marks a year for his activities, and later served as a spy for the British secret services. So Trotsky’s entire activities were carried out on the instructions of the imperialists. After Trotsky was expelled from the Party and fled abroad, he continued his counterrevolutionary activities and, on the instructions of the imperialists, drew in revolutionary traitors and counterrevolutionaries from all over the world and set up an international spy organisation, the so-called “Fourth International”. Its aim is to continue to appear in the world as a “political party”; in reality, it seeks to deceive the masses under the signboard of Marxism-Leninism and in the garb of revolution, and to use the Fourth International to direct the Trotskyites to sabotage revolutionary movements in various countries. In his report “On the shortcomings of the work of the Party and the methods of eliminating Trotsky’s and other duplicitous elements” to the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1937, Comrade Stalin said: “The present Trotskyism is not a political party of the working class, but a criminal gang of unprincipled and thoughtless assassins, saboteurs, spies and murderers, a gang operating in the employ of foreign secret services as a deadly enemy of the working class”. It is thus clear that the Trotskyites are imperialist lackeys in the service of the imperialist spy apparatus under the banner of the revolution; they are a gang of bandits who have made it their profession to fight against the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. What distinguishes them from other counterrevolutionaries is that they often disguise themselves as “revolutionaries” and use ultra-left revolutionary rhetoric as a cover to infiltrate the revolution and carry out sabotage.

situation of the chinese trotskyite bandits

325

Introduction to the “Fourth International” According to available information, the Fourth International was officially founded in Switzerland in 1938. It was called the “World Party of Socialist Revolution”. Branches of the so-called “Fourth International” were established in various countries. During the Second World War, its “Political Bureau” was based in Belgium. In April 1948 the Fourth International held its Second World Congress in Paris. It was attended by nineteen countries, including Britain, France, Belgium, Ceylon, the Netherlands, Vietnam, India, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, representing twenty-two organisations of the Fourth International. China was not represented at that time and the [China] report and proposals to the Congress were submitted by the American Glass [Frank Glass, also known as Li Furen], after the meeting. At the conference, members of the Politburo were elected and the main leader was Gilman (a Belgian). This organisation still exists today. Its highest organ is now the Executive Committee of the Fourth International, based in Paris. From its inception to the present day, The Chinese Trotskyites have been working under the direct leadership of Trotsky and the Fourth International to undermine the Chinese revolution.

Chapter 2 – The Organisation and Evolution of the Chinese Trotskyites The Chinese Trotskyite bandits originated in 1928. They originated among some of the international students who returned to China from Moscow and the traitors led by Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi. Most of the returned international students were members of the Communist Party. Having been influenced by the Trotskyites during their studies, they rebelled against the Party and engaged in Trotskyite activities upon their return to China. There were several small factions among the international students. Together with Chen Duxiu’s group, there were four factions. These were: 1. “Our Word Society”: headed by Liang Ganqiao, Chen Yimou and Au Fang. 2. “Combat Society”: led by Wang Pingyi, Lai Yimin, Zhao Ji, etc. 3. “October Society”: headed by Liu Renjing and Wang Fanxi 4. “Proletarian Society”: headed by Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi. Although all these people called themselves Trotskyites, they often attacked each other and quarrelled, because they were a group of bandits without ideas or principles. By the end of 1929, the Chinese Trotskyite bandit groups were fermenting a unification and each group separately sent documents to Trotsky

326

trans. zhang

in the hope that he would recognise them as orthodox. In August 1930 Trotsky’s letter of instruction to the Chinese Trotskyites (Letter to Chinese Comrades) stated that “there are no programmatic or strategic differences among the Chinese Trotskyists and they should become a unified organisation”. The letter designated Chen Duxiu as convenor, and as secretary after the unification. After the Chinese Trotskyites received these instructions, discussions were held among the various factions, but due to differences of opinion, it was not until 1 May 1931 that a formal unification conference was held in Shanghai. It adopted the name “Left Opposition of the Chinese Communist Party” (later also called the “Chinese Bolshevik Leninists”). At the congress, an executive committee was elected, with Chen Duxiu, Wang Fanxi, Song Fengchun, Chen Yimou, and Zheng Chaolin as official members, and Song Jingxiu and Peng Shuzhi as alternate members. Within a month of the establishment of the “Centre”, Ma Yufu (a member of the Proletarian Society) became dissatisfied with unification and informed on the organisation to the Kuomintang, while he himself surrendered to the Kuomintang. As a result, members of the “Central Committee” were arrested and the organisation disintegrated. In 1932, the American Trotskyite Li Furen arrived in China and re-organised the Trotskyites that had not been arrested and set up a “Provisional Central Committee”. The organisation was renamed the “Chinese Communist League” in January 1935. The General Secretary was first Chen Qichang and then Peng Shuzhi.

The War of Resistance against Japan After the war began, the arrested Trotskyites were released and began to operate again in Shanghai; others set up organisations in Guangxi, Chongqing, Wenzhou, and Guangzhou, to sabotage the anti-Japanese resistance. After the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, the Trotskyites held a national congress in Shanghai, at which they split into two factions because of differences of opinion on the “nature of the war against Japan”: 1. The “Majority” (known as “New Struggle”), led by Peng Shuzhi 2. The “Minority” (known as the “Internationalist” faction), led by Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin. The differences between these two factions were: the Majority believed that the war against Japan still had progressive significance and that a “defencist” line should be adopted; the Minority believed that the war against Japan was “a war between Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese Emperor” and that it had no progressive significance and that a defeatist strategy should be adopted.

situation of the chinese trotskyite bandits

327

After the split, the two factions set up their own “Central Committees” and often attacked and abused each other, intensifying their internal quarrels. On the face of it, the split seems to have been caused by differences of opinion on the “nature of the war against Japan”. But from their actual actions and nature, they were not “political factions” but groups of bandits without principles or ideas, so they could not possibly have a unified organisation. Peng Shuzhi had negotiated with the Japanese secret services, who gave him money. He was responsible for collecting information for them. It is clear that these people actually served the Kuomintang and the Japanese secret service organs. The difference of opinion between the two factions was therefore not theoretical; rather, it was used to deceive their own lower strata and the masses. After the split, the “Majority” set up a provisional “Central Committee” with five members, Peng Shuzhi, Liu Yaoru, Jiang Zhendong, Chen Zhongxi and Chen Qichang. As Chen Qichang and Jiang Zhendong joined the Minority and Chen Zhongxi was in Hong Kong, the actual leaders of the Central Committee were Liu Yaoru and Peng Shuzhi. The “Minority” set up an “International Editorial Department” with six members – Wang Fanxi, Zheng Chaolin, Chen Qichang, Jiang Zhendong, Lou Zichun, and Mao Hongjian. Later, after the death of Chen Qichang (who was shot by the Japanese for engaging in intelligence work for the Kuomintang), Mao Hongjian returned to Guangzhou, and the actual leaders of the “Central Committee” were Wang Fanxi, Zheng Chaolin, Jiang Zhendong, Lou Zichun, and four others. They published “Internationalist”, “New Flag”, etc.

During and after the Liberation War (1945–49) After the Japanese surrender, the Trotskyites took advantage of the upsurge in the democratic movement and became active, deceiving some naive youths. Their organisation developed during the Liberation War, especially in the Wenzhou area, where it was most prominent. 1. The Majority Faction In 1946, the “Central Provisional Committee” of the Majority faction included Chen Biyun and organised a temporary “Central Standing Committee” to lead the “Local Committee” in Shanghai and the activities of bandits in various areas. After the Japanese surrender, the Majority actively prepared for the establishment of a [formal] Party by organising training courses and lectures, with Peng Shuzhi and others in charge of giving lectures and spreading their poison. In August 1948, a “Party Building Conference” was held in Shanghai and

328

trans. zhang

the name was changed to the “Chinese Revolutionary Communist Party”. Nine members were elected to its committee; Peng Shuzhi, Liu Shaoyan, Yin Kuan, Jiao Li Fu, Yu Shouyi, Chen Bi Yun, Dai Yan, Zheng Zegan (alternate), and Liu Yi (alternate). It was responsible for leading the six branches in Shanghai and the ten branches of the “Socialist Youth League”, as well as liaising with the Trotskyites in Sichuan (local committee), Wuhan, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Wenzhou (local committee), Zhongshan (county committee), Guangxi, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The “Socialist Youth League” was led by the Majority faction. In 1947, the National Provisional Preparatory Committee of the Socialist Youth League (known as S-Y) was set up in Shanghai with six members, including Yu Jia, Zhang Tao, Lu Ji, Kang Xi, Ding Yi, and Zhou Rensheng. The committee was responsible for leading the activities of the Shanghai “Municipal Committee” (nine branches), as well as those in Sichuan, Jiangsu, Jingjiang, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wenzhou, Zhongshan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In November 1948, the “Majority” decided to move the “Centre” to Hong Kong and set up an underground group in Shanghai – the “Provisional Committee of the Party League of Jiangsu and Zhejiang”, comprising Secretary Qian Chuan and members Liu Yi, Ding Yi, Wang Guolong, Yang Bo, and Xiong Andong, who were responsible for leading the activities of the Trotskyite bandits in Shanghai, Nanjing, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, and Qingdao. After Liberation, the Trotskyite bandits divided Shanghai into four districts and set up four central branches (under each of which were three or four branches, making a total of sixteen branches); the organisation was completely secret. In 1949, we broke up this organisation and arrested all its committee members except Yang Bo and Xiong Andong. As we had not yet determined the nature of this organisation, soon afterwards we released them. Now Liu, Ding, Qian, and others have fled to Hong Kong. The organisation had not established a new committee, and only Yang Shouyuan and Xiong Andong were responsible for individual contacts and activities. In addition, there were organisations of Trotskyite bandits in Guangdong (Zhongshan), Guangzhou, Guilin (Guangxi), Nanning, Beijing, Fujian, and Hankou. Most of these organisations were in direct contact with Shanghai or Hong Kong. After the Majority’s “Centre” moved to Hong Kong, it was divided into two bureaus, namely the “Central Political Bureau” and the “Central Organisation Bureau”. The “Central Political Bureau” was headed by Peng Shuzhi, Liu Shaoyan and Chen Biyun, while the “Central Organisation Bureau” was headed by Yu Shouyi, who returned to China in 1950, and was now headed by Jiao Liwei. Its “Centre” was responsible for leading the local activities of the Hong Kong Trotskyites on the one hand, and for leading the activities of the mainland Trotskyites and liaising with the “Fourth International” on the other.

situation of the chinese trotskyite bandits

329

2. The Minority In the summer of 1947, a “Working Committee” was set up; in April 1948, it was renamed the “Local Committee” and was responsible for leading the six branches in Shanghai. In April 1949, the Minority held a “Unification Party Conference” in Shanghai, using the name “Chinese Internationalist Workers Party”. Seven members of the “Central Committee” were elected: Wang Fanxi, Zheng Chaolin, He Zhiyu, Yu Shuoshu, Lin Huayuan, Huang Jiantong (alternate), and Cao Yulin (alternate). It arranged “emergency” work and decided that Wang Fanxi should flee to Hong Kong, while the other six members of the Central Committee would go underground in Shanghai. So the Minority “Central Committee” was actually in Shanghai. In order to keep its organisation hidden, a “three-person group” was set up consisting of Zheng Chaolin, Yu Shuohuo, and Huang Jiantong, responsible for leading the three branches in Shanghai and one in Suzhou. The Minority’s mass organisation was called the “Marxist Youth League”. The “Preparatory Committee of the Marxist Youth League” was set up in 1948. It was initially small in number and led by Yan Xicheng, Li Pei, and Xu Minglie. In 1950, Yan Xicheng was arrested and shot by us for organising armed activity by the “Workers’ and Peasants’ Self-Defence Army”, with a Kuomintang pseudomilitary officer, and the league’s organisation disintegrated. Later, the “Central Provisional Committee” (known as M-Y) was re-formed by Huang Jiantong (alternate member), Ye Chunhe, and Zheng Liang. In March 1950, the Marxist Youth League merged with the Communist Youth League in Wenzhou and formed the Provisional Central Committee of the Marxist Youth League. (The Communist Youth League was a Trotskyite group in Wenzhou. Initially it was neither Majority nor Minority. Later, when some members of the Communist Youth League fled to Shanghai, they were drawn by the Minority into the Marxist Youth League.) The secretary was Huang Jiantong, with Ye Chunhe and Chen Hesen as organising committee members and Zheng Liang as political commissar. An “Organising Committee” and a “Political Committee” were set up under it. The “Organising Committee” was headed by Ye Chunhe and Chen Hesen, while the “Political Committee” was headed by Zheng Liang, Cao Jiacong, Fang Zezheng, and others. The organisation was responsible for leading the six local branches in Shanghai and the branches in Nanjing, Shanxi, Dalian, and Beijing, as well as individual Trotskyites scattered in Shenyang, Changchun, Harbin, Liaoxi, Anshan, Dihua, Xian, Xi’an, Changsha, Jinan, Zichuan, and Wenzhou. Wang Fanxi, the Minority’s “Central Committee” member in Hong Kong, has not yet been shown to have a tangible organisation, but there are a number of Minority Trotskyites operating. Wang Fanxi’s main task in Hong Kong was to direct the mainland Trotskyites and to liaise with the “Fourth International”.

330

trans. zhang

The Minority was mainly responsible for leading the activities of the “Marxist Youth League”. This “M-Y” was a large organisation and it was active on quite a wide scale (the Trotskyites often sent out documents and notices). After Liberation, the Minority faction, which we had not yet dismantled, was more active than the Majority faction and its core organisation was more secretive.

Chapter 3 – Policies, Characteristics, and Methods On the eve of the Liberation of Shanghai, both the Majority and Minority factions held so-called “Emergency Meetings”. At these meetings the form of organisation and the methods of activity after Liberation were determined. The general policy was to “conduct propaganda and educate” the workers, peasants, soldiers and students, to organise and develop in secret, to penetrate our schools, factories, and military and political organs, to find gaps and to make use of opportunities to carry out “legal” struggles. The aim was to wait for the right moment to “seize power”. They attempted to infiltrate our party and league organisations by putting on a positive and progressive face, and to turn them into their own organisations. In their actions, they used the tactic of “critical support” for us. “Critical support” meant that they supported our Party’s policies and decrees but criticised certain issues. During land reform, we wanted to protect the property of rich peasants, but they criticised this and advocated that the property of rich peasants should be given to poor peasants. They “criticised” our united front as a surrender to the bourgeoisie. They propagated the false theory of the Trotskyites, acted in secret, infiltrated our party and groups under a progressive disguise, usurped the leadership, seized organisations, and sabotaged us by duplicitous means. 1. Under the guise of “leftist” revolutionary rhetoric, they carried out antiMarxist-Leninist propaganda. Petty-bourgeois “ultraleft” sentiments and egalitarian ideas were used to incite and deceive the masses. They often distorted fragments of Marxist-Leninist texts to give play to their extreme anti-Marxist absurdities and extend their influence among the masses. For example, Peng Shuzhi, Wang Fanxi, and Zheng Chaolin had translated many writings of Trotskyite bandits and printed Trotsky’s writings and their own counterrevolutionary fallacies in magazines and pamphlets for distribution among young students. They set up outfits under various names – a “Reading Club” and “S Group” in Wenzhou, a “Sea Society” in Guangzhou, and the “Mountain Eagle Society” at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University. Lectures and school magazines were used to inculcate the young masses with Trotskyite poison.

situation of the chinese trotskyite bandits

2.

3.

4.

331

They opposed our party policies and central tasks, through distortion, criticism, spreading fake rumours, and sabotage. In their documents and statements, they said that our plans to increase production were meant “to make up for the huge military budget and to transfer frontline war losses to working people” [in the Korean War]. Competition by producers was slandered as “a new form of exploitation at the expense of workers and peasants”. Our rewarding of model workers and labour protection regulations were distorted as “stabilising rule and dividing the working class”. Our resistance to the US and support for Korea was “a predatory war between finance capitalism and state capitalism”. During our “ThreeAntis” campaign [against corruption, waste, and bureaucracy], a secret publication of the Trotskyite group “M-Y” called on the Trotskyites “to support the Three Antis movement and push it further to the left”; on the other hand, it claimed that the Three Antis movement aimed to “consolidate the nationalised economy held by the state capitalist regime”, and that “the blood and sweat of the people have been embezzled by the Communists”. They actively infiltrated our organs, schools, factories, and enterprises, taking advantage of various openings to sow discord and stir up trouble. In Shanghai and southwest China, the Trotskyite bandits who infiltrated our factories used ultra-left slogans and put forward unrealistically high demands such as “increase wages and reduce working hours” to hinder production and sabotage our campaign. Taking advantage of the death through illness of Ding Shan, a professor at Shandong University in Qingdao, the Trotskyite Li Dingjun claimed that “Ding was driven to death by the school”, and stopped the coffin for an autopsy in an attempt to instigate a campaign to sabotage the school’s ideological reform movement. The Wenzhou Trotskyite bandits used the demand for bursaries to encourage schools to go on strike, and to wreck school desks and chairs. Trotskyites who had infiltrated the Wenzhou Public Security Bureau stole anti-Trotskyite information from us and helped two detained Trotskyites escape under the guise of arraignment. The Guangzhou Trotskyite Lu Ji infiltrated one of our military shoe factories. When we closed down the factory, he encouraged workers to oppose the lockout, and was praised by the Trotskyite organisation. Chen Baoxiong, a Guangzhou-based Trotskyite bandit, took the opportunity while participating in land reform as a group leader to classify three poor and middle peasants as landlords, causing them to commit suicide and causing peasants to attack our leaders. By feigning enthusiasm, they gained our trust and infiltrated our party in an attempt to steal leadership positions. Twenty-five Trotskyites from

332

trans. zhang

Rui’an Middle School in Zhejiang infiltrated our Party and League organisation, and at one time the secretary of the school’s Party branch was a Trotskyite; the politics instructor at Wende Middle School in Qingdao and the tutor of our Youth League were members of the Trotskyite Majority. The Trotskyite Zhou Rensheng (a member of their Central Committee) was always active in schools, spreading poison and developing their organisations. After Liberation, Zhou fled to Haicheng County, Fujian, where he deceived the county committee with Marxist-Leninist rhetoric. As a result, the county committee called him a “Marxist outside the Party”. They appointed him to various committees, including the “Anti America and Support Korea subcommittee”, and made him principal of Hai Cheng Secondary School. 5. The duplicitous tactics of false confessions and false surrenders were commonly used. In general, the group opposed confessing to us, but after a few major nationwide campaigns, they were forced to confess when they knew that we had information on them or that they could not transfer elsewhere. However, the Trotskyite organisations ordered their bandits to “confess only to possessing Trotskyite ideology, to deny there is any organisation, and to confess only about the past but not the present”. They tried to paralyse us with false surrenders and confessions, so that they could gain legal status and continue their activities. In summary, the main characteristics of the activities of the Trotskyites were: appearing in the guise of “political factions”, disguising themselves as “revolutionaries”, and being good at revolutionary rhetoric in order to deceive the masses. They had long experience of underground activities, were cunning in words and actions, and were good at inciting the masses, especially in schools. This is how they differed from other counterrevolutionaries.

Targets 1.

2. 3.

Taking advantage of young students of petty-bourgeois origin who are unclear about politics: many young students are very enthusiastic about joining the revolution and, because of the propaganda of the Trotskyites, mistake them for “revolutionaries” and join their organisations. Taking advantage of backward workers or discontented intellectuals of degenerate class origins to create targets for their development. Using siblings, relatives, and friends. For example, the group in Dalian included four sisters, all of them brigands. There are many such.

situation of the chinese trotskyite bandits

333

Methods The more common method is to first get close to their targets emotionally, organise book clubs and societies and, under the pretext of studying MarxistLeninist works, spread falsehoods and inculcate Trotskyite ideas and get people to join Trotskyite organisations. Another method was for Trotskyites bandits who were school teachers to use their teaching to spread fallacies or introduce Marxist-Leninist works to their close contacts. When they read books and ask questions, the Trotskyites introduce them directly to Trotskyite books, and then get them to join their organisation.

Liaison There are two methods of communication: one is to use friends and relatives to pass on information and documents; the other (the main method) is to correspond in secret writing and code. For example: “Third Uncle has been very good to me” means that the people’s government or party trusts him. “Fourth Uncle’s business is prospering” means that the “Fourth International” is very active. “xx is in hospital” means that someone has been arrested. “xx has caught pneumonia (or a bad cold)” means someone has been detected. “Family”, “shop”, and “company” refer to groups of bandits; “elder uncle” refers to Peng Shuzhi; “brothers and sisters” refers to fellow bandits. After Liberation, most Trotskyites continued their activities in China, while those in Hong Kong continued to send gangsters to the Mainland for clandestine activities. Those sent were mainly skilled workers, students, and returned overseas Chinese. They arrive on the pretext of applying to schools, recruiting unemployed workers, or seeking employment through friends or relatives. Before dispatch, they are mostly interviewed. On arrival, they contact local Trotskyite bandits or remain in direct contact with the bandits in Hong Kong. Their activities are directed towards factories and schools, through which they infiltrate our institutions and factories. They want to “be close to the workers and operate among them”. Note: The organisations of the Trotskyites bandits have grand names – district committees, branches, etc. – but few members. For example, some have only three people in a branch (one secretary, one political commissar, and one group committee member).

The Destruction of the Wenzhou Trotskyists, 1949–1952 (2014) Xu Wuzhi, translated by Gregor Benton

This article is extracted from Chapter 4 of Xu Wuzhi, Yanmo de geming zhe: Wenzhou Tuopai de xingqi yu fumie, 1933–1952 (The rise and fall of the Wenzhou Trotskyists, 1933–1952), East China Normal University, ma thesis, Shanghai, 2014. The translation happened with the consent of the author. Using local archives, Xu provides a uniquely detailed account of the “final struggles” of the Wenzhou Trotskyists after the ccp came to power at the national level in 1949.

The End Is near The rapid victory of the ccp in the civil war was unexpected by the Trotskyists. For a long while, neither the “majority” nor the “minority” faction had made a correct analysis and estimate of the war situation. Even at the start of 1949, during the talks between the Nationalists and the ccp, the Trotskyists still believed that the Communists would divide China at the Yangtze and that “China would be dragged into the catastrophe of a Third World War between the US and the Soviet Union”. In areas ruled by the Kuomintang, the Trotskyists proposed “overthrowing the national government”; in areas ruled by the ccp, they “carried out systematic propaganda and agitation”. An even more serious mistake was that the Trotskyists failed to learn from past anti-Trotskyist incidents and purges and believed that they could operate under Communist rule. Luckily, despite the slowness and confusion, the Trotskyists did take a few countermeasures. The “majority” centre[or rcp] was moved to a new location in January 1949. The Central Committee moved to Guangzhou in January 1949 and later to Hong Kong. The “minority” centre moved to Hong Kong in April of the same year after hastily establishing [its own] party [the iwp]. After the Communist Party crossed the Yangtze and marched further south, the Trotskyists devised a series of contingency measures in June: they would (1) support the Communist forces in their pursuit of the Kuomintang; (2) support all progressive Communist measures after Liberation,1 while criticising erroneous meas-

1 The official Communist term for the victory that culminated in October 1949.

© Xu Wuzhi, translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_039

the destruction of the wenzhou trotskyists, 1949–1952 (2014)

335

ures; (4) stop external Trotskyist activities; (5) stop recruiting new members; (6) organise members in a system of single-line contacts and eschew horizontal relations; and (7) merge their party and their youth organisation. In mid-October 1949, the Shanghai-based Jiangsu-Zhejiang Provisional Committee of the majority faction was destroyed by the Communist Party, and Qian Chuan, the secretary of the provisional committee, Liu Yi, Ding Yi, and Wang Guolong, as well as Shen Yunfang, Hu Zhendong, Zhao Yangshi, and Zhou Cuiqiang, were all arrested, although they were released a few days later. The ccp warned them to stop their Trotskyist activities. After that, the sole remaining temporary leadership of the Trotskyists on the mainland, the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Provisional Committee, also collapsed. Qian Chuan, Zhang Hongye, Ding Yi, and others fled to Hong Kong, and the Wenzhou District Committee of the ccp later mentioned that “on the eve of the Liberation of Wenzhou, more than twenty Trotskyists fled to Hong Kong”. But only a few left the mainland; most of the Wenzhou Trotskyists remained. The Trotskyists on the mainland were in effect leaderless. The various organisations and members were all going their own ways. Some persisted in their activities, while others left the organisation altogether. Some even fell directly into the embrace of the ccp. Wang Wenyuan [Wang Fanxi] afterwards said: “Certainly some people were dazzled by the victory of the ccp and surrendered to the ccp. These conversions led to a number of breakdowns in the organisation starting in the early 1950s (especially in Shanghai and Wenzhou)”. In the face of this severe existential crisis, some Trotskyists in Wenzhou, especially the more senior members, in fact ceased activity. As early as the winter of 1948, Zhou Rensheng and his wife and Lin Songqi left Shanghai to join An Mingbo, who was teaching at Xiamen University. An Mingbo got a job teaching at Haisheng Middle School in Fujian through connections. At the end of 1949, after the collapse of the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Provisional Committee, Zhou Rensheng and his wife, Zhao Yangxian, and Huang Yushi also fled to Fujian, where they continued to teach until their arrest in 1952 during the purge. I have not found any record of these men being involved in Trotskyist activities while in Fujian. At the time, most of the Trotskyists still “working against the current” were young people. On 15 November 1949, the local Trotskyist youth group in Wenzhou published a mimeographed publication, Panyizhe (The Rebel), the first issue of which carried an article titled “The Conclusion of the Civil War” and proposing a “defeatist” slogan in the Chinese civil war and declaring that the liberation war had “degenerated” after the crossing of the Yangtze due to the ccp’s policy of protecting capitalist industry and commerce and shielding the rich peasants. The Communist Party had changed from a “peasant party” to

336

xu, trans. benton

a “bourgeois party”, and the army had changed from a “peasant army” to a “bourgeois mercenary army”. The civil war was now no longer a peasant movement from the point of view of the Communist Party but a war waged by a new bourgeois group, and the civil war had changed from a historically progressive war to a war waged by the bourgeoisie. It lost its objective progressiveness and became a reactionary war. Because of this change in nature, the Trotskyists’ attitude also changed, they no longer supported the civil war and adopted a defeatist attitude. It should be noted, however, promoting defeatism regarding the Communist Party was not in order to promote a Kuomintang victory. The emergence of this bizarre argument not only reflected the confusion in Trotskyist ideology before and after the establishment of the prc but also demonstrated the theoretical naïveté of the members of the Wenzhou Trotskyist League. Pronouncements of this sort were used by the ccp to show that the Trotskyists were “anti-communist and counterrevolutionary”. In the face of the Communist victory, the Wenzhou Trotskyists took some measures to “adapt” to the revolution, including contingency actions and the transfer of responsibilities within the organisation, mainly by removing from leadership positions in Wenzhou some of those who had already made their Trotskyist identity public and sending them away from the city. According to a report by the Public Security Office of the Wenzhou District Special Administration Office, “the exposed upper-level leaders, except for those arrested by me, all left Wenzhou and fled to Shanghai, Jinhua, and Hong Kong. The remnants who remained in Wenzhou were mostly young students and elementary school teachers, who accepted the leadership of the Shanghai headquarters and secretly organised a Socialist Youth League and a ‘ty’ [Trotskyist Youth League] to continue their activities”. Mainly by using contacts in the four schools of central Wenzhou, they secretly developed a peripheral organisation in the form of “reading clubs”. Around 200 students joined the reading clubs, which became the main arena of Trotskyist activities in the city. Later investigations suggest that about half of the Wenzhou Trotskyists remained in the Wenzhou area and another half scattered to other places. Other figures suggest, however, that the number of Trotskyists outside Wenzhou was significantly higher than in Wenzhou itself, about three times as many. In the early 1950s, the Trotskyist youth groups in Wenzhou’s high schools and the Trotskyist teachers were still trying to be “both legal and covert”. A Communist Party report revealed that “the main centres of Trotskyist activity are in our schools and organs”. According to incomplete information, 68 Trotskyists and their sympathisers have been found in the municipal organs alone. As for schools, 5 secondary school teachers and 21 elementary school teachers

the destruction of the wenzhou trotskyists, 1949–1952 (2014)

337

have been found in Wenzhou, and 154 students have been found in the three schools in Wenzhou. The most serious case was Rui’an High School, where all the Party and League organisations had been taken over by Trotskyists. In addition to their activities on campus, individual members of the Wenzhou Trotskyist League continued to work in the community despite the dangers they ran. They also worked hard on spreading their propaganda. For example, in August 1950, the Trotskyist Qin Jinyao wrote a letter to his compatriots in Wenzhou City, signed on behalf of the Wenzhou Branch of the Trotskyist Youth League, and posted it in the city centre. The Trotskyists Ye Guoguang, Zhou Xiren, Cao Jiaji, and others put up posters in various parts of the city, propagated Trotskyist ideas, and demanded democracy and the release of arrested Trotskyists. The ccp acknowledged that the main form of Trotskyist activity during this period was to “organise various peripheral groups under the leadership of the League”. They used the schools as a bridge to infiltrate the Party, the League, and other social strata to carry out counterrevolutionary activities, spread rumours, develop organisations, openly encourage strikes, and distribute leaflets. Despite repeated blows delivered by the ccp, the Wenzhou Trotskyist League still managed to rebuild many times. The Wenzhou Trotskyists also criticised and attacked the policies and measures adopted by the ccp after the establishment of its government. Regarding land reform, the Trotskyists argued that “the ccp is a peasant political party. The peasants were given land, so why were the workers not given factories and machines? Land reform protects the rich-peasant economy. It obviously represents a rich-peasant line and peaceful land reform of a sort that cares only for the interests of the peasants and does nothing for the working class”. During the anti-American war, when the war reached the Yalu River, the Trotskyists shouted that “World War iii has broken out”. They said that by intervening in the war, the ccp was cheating the people. During the movement to suppress counterrevolutionaries, the Trotskyists put up slogans openly expressing their “opposition to democratic dictatorship” and demanding the release of political prisoners. With regard to the economic policy of New Democracy, the Trotskyists believed that “patriotic emulation by producers served only to increase profits for the capitalists, not for the workers”. […] In 1950, the Trotskyists claimed that the policy of subsidising both labour and capital was a “demonstration of the Communist Party’s capitulation to the capitalist class” and that “the Communist Party is a traitor to the working class”. During the Three-Antis and Five-Antis campaigns, the Trotskyists put forward slogans such as “fight against the corrupt, wasteful, and bureaucratic Communist Party” and “give the proletariat the democratic right to elect, supervise and remove officials”.

338

xu, trans. benton

I am afraid it is hard to say whether the above comments expressed the ideas of the Trotskyist Central Committee or were simply personal views. However, such criticisms were not entirely invented by the ccp to frame the Trotskyists. From the various duplicated publications put out by the Trotskyists at the time, it is clear that such views existed. It is important to note that most of the Trotskyists then active on the mainland were young people of a passionate disposition, radical in their behaviour and immature in regard to their theories. Their pointless arguments were used by the ccp as powerful “evidence” of the Trotskyists’ “anti-Communist and counterrevolutionary” activities, “incriminating evidence” that greatly accelerated the pace of the ccp’s purge of the Trotskyists.

The Trotskyists Are Netted up On 7 May 1949, the ccp peacefully took over the city of Wenzhou. At the start of the new regime, the ccp arrested the Trotskyists, although the main arrests were of people with close ties to the Kuomintang. The ccp’s understanding of the Trotskyist organisations took time. On 8 May, the Wenzhou Military Control Council closed down the local newspaper, of which Wang Guolong had been editor-in-chief, and arrested some of the Trotskyists. Zeng Meng2 was also arrested, but he was soon released and placed under supervision. In March 1950, the ccp’s Central Committee issued an “Instruction on the Suppression of Counterrevolutionary Activities” and began a nationwide “Suppression of Counterrevolutionary Activities”. All kinds of “counterrevolutionaries” were subjected to an intensive investigation. In October of the same year, a fire broke out in Qin Santai’s brassware store in Tiejingban, Wenzhou, which the Public Security Bureau attributed to the Trotskyists. The Public Security Bureau concluded that the fire was the work of the Trotskyists and launched a comprehensive campaign against them. On 20 October 1950, the Public Security Bureau searched the house of Wang Xiumei, a Trotskyist organiser at Ouhai Middle School, and obtained a list of some of the Trotskyists. That night, they arrested Lian Zhengxiang, Li Xi, Wang Xiumei, and many others. In mid-November of the same year, the Public Security Division of the Special Administration Office launched a large-scale political offensive against the Trotskyists, focusing on schools, as a result of which 2 Zeng Meng (1904–?58) became a Trotskyist while studying in Moscow. He worked under Zhou Enlai before his expulsion from the Party. He founded the Trotskyist movement in Wenzhou. He was arrested and died in prison.

the destruction of the wenzhou trotskyists, 1949–1952 (2014)

339

“almost all of the 200 peripheral elements [sympathisers] who had participated in the study group confessed, to varying degrees, that they were reactionaries”. However, in the early years of the Communist regime, the treatment of the Trotskyists was mainly a matter of arrest and suppression, and the Trotskyists were not yet investigated as a special category. After several struggles in the latter half of 1950, some of the Trotskyists in Wenzhou were arrested, but it was not until the spring of 1951 that a special investigation of the Trotskyists began. The results were unsatisfactory. The Wenzhou Public Security Bureau ran ten special intelligence operators among the Trotskyists, but “three of them were exposed, three defected, and three moved to Shanghai, and now only one remains. This has hampered the struggle against the Trotskyists”. The ccp also admitted afterwards that “due to a lack of understanding of the nature of the Trotskyist bandits at the time, we adopted a piecemeal approach. As a result, not only did we fail to completely destroy the enemy but we drove them further into hiding, so that they absconded across the country and we were put on the defensive”. Apart from the setbacks in terms of reconnaissance, the ccp also admitted that one of the shortcomings of the two-year struggle against the Trotskyists was the lack of cooperation between public security and the cultural and educational departments, so there was a lack of appropriate work in the ideological arena. Even more fatal was the fact that the Wenzhou Communist Party was facing problems of Trotskyist infiltration within its own organs. The ccp archives show that at the time as many as ninety members of the local Party committee, the special commission, the municipal Party committee, and the municipal government, and even some leading comrades, were suspected of being Trotskyists. […] The most serious case was the Municipal Public Security Bureau, where thirteen Trotskyist bandits were discovered. “This was not a deliberate exaggeration on the part of the ccp”. In June 1950, when the Wenzhou Public Security Bureau arrested the leading Trotskyists, some Trotskyists in Wenzhou began to infiltrate the ccp’s public security organs, stealing a secret list of Trotskyists held by the Public Security Bureau. Then, acting in concert from inside and outside the bureau, Trotskyist members of the public security organs stole six passes and relocation permits. This problem was highlighted by a subsequent Trotskyist jailbreak. Several important leaders of the Wenzhou Trotskyist Youth League were among those arrested, so the Trotskyists launched a rescue effort. They managed to contact Zheng Guosheng, an investigator with the city’s Public Security Bureau who had been influenced by Trotskyist ideology, through an inside connection. Zheng Guosheng stole a “document of arraignment” and rescued the Trotskyists Cao Jiaji and Huang Zheng from prison on the pretext of their

340

xu, trans. benton

arraignment on the night of 8 January 1951, and fled to Hong Kong with them. Zheng Guosheng’s superior, Zhang Huang, recalled afterwards: Detective Zheng Guosheng, the youngest member of my unit (sixteen years old), had been introduced to the Public Security Bureau by me. […] One night, Zheng Guosheng did not come back. […] Section Four informed us that Zheng Guosheng had turned up at the detention centre carrying “documents of arraignment” concerning two prisoners. These prisoners, Trotskyists, had still not returned. A thunderbolt! My intuition was that something was very wrong! Our official had fled with the enemies, who were leading Trotskyist criminals (at the time, Trotskyists were classified as “counterrevolutionaries” in China)! Before Liberation, I had been the president of the Lianchi Students Union, and there were Trotskyists in the union. There were also Trotskyists in Wenzhou’s only swimming team, of which I was also leader. Zheng Guosheng was my subordinate. If Zheng Guosheng had escaped with two top Trotskyists, then I, Zhang Huang, would find it impossible to explain even if I had ten mouths!3 The Trotskyists’ escape shook the whole of Wenzhou. The ccp was furious, and it was keen to redeem itself, restore its reputation, and at the same time warn the rest of the Trotskyists [to behave appropriately]. They decided to make an example of Lian Zhengxiang, who had attempted to join in the escape, by shooting him. On 24 January 1951, the Trotskyists and their sympathisers in Wenzhou were gathered together in a cinema and Lian Zhengxiang was sentenced to death and sent off for execution, after which the fact of it was announced in the cinema. Lian Zhengxiang was the only Trotskyist to be publicly sentenced to death after the founding of the Communist government.4 In my view, the escape was a reaction to the unprecedented intensification of the conflict between the Wenzhou Trotskyists and the ccp. It was extremely unfortunate, not just for Lian Zhengxiang personally but for the Trotskyists as a whole. It greatly increased the ccp’s determination to eliminate the Trotskyists. The anti-Trotskyist struggle in Wenzhou was strengthened and the Trotskyist resistance became more and more radical. Immediately after the ccp decided to make a move, the Trotskyists began distributing leaflets and published a special commemorative issue calling on people to “stand up and struggle to the 3 Cheng 2006. Zhang Huang was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment and was kept in prison until 1979. 4 This assertion is mistaken.

the destruction of the wenzhou trotskyists, 1949–1952 (2014)

341

death against the enemy!” They issued a list of proposals including demands for “food to eat”, “democracy”, and the organisation of an “anti-American volunteer combat group”. They even went so far as to call for an assault on public security leaders. On 17 May of the same year, in order to eliminate the influence of the Trotskyists in the schools and to build momentum in the struggle against the Trotskyists, the ccp organised a huge conference at which it accused the Trotskyists of various crimes. The conference was attended by more than 800 people from cultural and educational circles and the student community in Wenzhou. An audience of 8,662 people was mobilised. The Wenzhou Municipal Committee, responding to the influence of the Trotskyists in schools, asked the schools to organise political studies for teachers, purge Trotskyist ideology, investigate the Trotskyists and their peripheral organisations, raise ideological awareness, and draw clear lines. The Wenzhou Trotskyists’ situation had further deteriorated. In 1952, the Central Committee of the ccp made up its mind to eliminate the Trotskyists, and “stipulated that preparatory work [for such a measure] should be completed by the end of July, and that personnel would be dispatched to various places in August to inspect preparations”. In March, in accordance with the Central Committee’s instruction to carry out “long-term planning and reconnaissance and to [prepare to] net up [the Trotskyists] in one fell swoop”, the Wenzhou authorities deployed a number of full-time cadres to set up a purge office under the unified leadership of the local and municipal committees, which was to be responsible for purge work. The net carefully laid out by the ccp was slowly closing. On 13 June, the Department of Public Security of the Zhejiang Provincial People’s Government5 reported to the ccp’s Zhejiang Provincial Committee on the purging of the bandits: “According to reports, the bandit situation in Zhejiang is serious, in the following senses: they are numerous and widely distributed, they have penetrated deep into our ranks, and they are behaving very arrogantly. During the [ccp’s] Three-Antis and the Five-Antis campaigns [to rid China of corruption and “enemies of the state”], the upper echelons of the Trotskyist bandits, although their resources were under strain, “continued to take advantage of the opportunity to cause harm; to draw in the backward masses in the countryside to attack the leadership and resist grain levies and taxes; to paste up reactionary slogans and distribute leaflets in Wenzhou; and even to commit arson and theft, thereby disrupting social security and undermining our Three-Antis and Five-Antis campaigns. They have definitely become a

5 Wenzhou is in Zhejiang.

342

xu, trans. benton

major problem that we cannot ignore”. On 18 August, the Zhejiang Provincial Committee forwarded to the provincial government a “Report by the Department of Public Security” requesting comrades everywhere to organise study in accordance with local conditions in regard to the purge and to do so without delay”. The Department of Public Security also considered that “if [the Trotskyists] are not destroyed in time, [the Party] would suffer serious damage at the hands of the bandits in the future course of large-scale construction”. The local and municipal governments in Wenzhou set up a joint “Committee to purge the Trotskyists”, led by the local and municipal party secretaries and the head of the public security department. The Wenzhou public security department and the city public security bureau were responsible for carrying out tasks such as reconnaissance, arrest, interrogation, supervision, concentration [of those arrested], and registration. The purge of the schools was combined with the “registration of reactionary [Trotskyist] agents” and the formulation of work plans. At the same time, the ccp conducted visits to the families of Trotskyist students and strove for cooperation between the families and the schools, so that [the students] might recognise their “mistakes” and confess and explain their problems to the organisation in a timely manner. […] The actual purges in Wenzhou began as early as November and were carefully planned and carried out on five consecutive days, with different requirements for different targets – this provides a glimpse into the meticulous and detailed nature of the purge. On 19 December 1952, the ccp’s Central Committee issued an “Outline of Propaganda in Opposition to the Trotskyists”. The document was to be studied by all cadres at county level and above. In places where bandits were active, anti-bandit propaganda and education should be provided for the cadres and the masses. The outline should be published in party publications, but it should not be distributed among the masses. The outline specifically noted that “the Wenzhou Trotskyists, following a plan issued by the Trotskyist ‘Central Committee’ for organising a ‘South Gate Assassination Squad’ and a so-called ‘Youth Defence Army’, planned to assassinate our military and political leaders”. On the night of 22 December 1952, the net, which had been carefully set by the ccp in the course of the previous nine months, began to close. The public security authorities conducted a unified operation to arrest the Trotskyists, including people who had left the Trotskyist movement as well as sympathisers and others. In accordance with the instructions, Wenzhou accorded different treatment or education to Trotskyists of different sorts, depending on their “status”, “criminal activities”, “the extent of their confession”, and “the depth to which they had been poisoned”. The different methods of treatment concerned arrests, interrogation, control, training, registration, and education. The

the destruction of the wenzhou trotskyists, 1949–1952 (2014)

343

core members of the Trotskyist party and its [youth] league were arrested and brought to justice for their “crimes”; the general membership of the Trotskyist party and league and core sympathisers were subjected to control and training; general sympathisers were registered as repentant; influential members were given talks and education; and general members who repented early and made amends were treated leniently.6 The Wenzhou purge mostly took the form of education and registration, which together accounted for half of the total. Fewer than one in ten of the Trotskyists were arrested. Compared with the national purge, Wenzhou accounted for one-eighth of the total number of Trotskyists arrested and subjected to training. This does not include Wenzhou Trotskyists arrested in other parts of China. If we include the latter, then the number of Wenzhounese arrested and disciplined accounted for one in four of those arrested and disciplined in the [anti-Trotskyist] purges nationwide. By this time, the Wenzhou Trotskyists, along with other Trotskyists on the mainland, had been destroyed by the ccp, which netted them up in their entirety.

The Aftermath After the establishment of the prc, the “Regulations on Punishing Counterrevolutionaries” promulgated on 20 February 1951, stipulated that “all counterrevolutionary crimes aimed at overthrowing the people’s democratic regime and undermining the cause of democracy shall be punished in accordance with these regulations”. This law formed the basis for the Trotskyists’ arrest and sentencing. Whichever way you look at it, the purge of the Trotskyists after the establishment of the prc was inevitable, it was only a matter of time. Given the situation in Wenzhou and the effect of the purge, the Trotskyists were completely under the control of the ccp, which had planned and arranged the operation for a long time. Why was 22 December 1952, chosen as the date of the arrests? Because it was Stalin’s birthday, and in the midst of the Korean War. Trotskyists and some scholars have speculated that the Chinese Communists intended the purge as a birthday gift to Stalin in exchange for the trust, support, and assistance rendered by the Soviet Union. Although this is a plausible theory, it cannot be confirmed unless the relevant archives are declassified and released.

6 The document lists a total of 552 Wenzhou Trotskyists who were subjected to several different forms of treatment.

344

xu, trans. benton

As far as the national situation in 1952 is concerned, the high tide of the “campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries” was already over, and the ThreeAntis and Five-Antis were in full swing. Compared to other political movements, the 1952 Winter Solstice purge extended to relatively few people. Fewer than one thousand Trotskyists were left on the mainland, even fewer than in the case of the Hu Feng counterrevolutionary clique7 and almost negligible in the sense that China at the time had a population of 400 million. Moreover, unlike other political campaigns and cases, which were conducted with great fanfare and fervour, everything was done in absolute secrecy. It was in no way necessary to arrest [the Wenzhou Trotskyists], for most of them were unarmed men and women of letters, some of whom had left the organisation much earlier and were not engaged in Trotskyist activity of any sort. Even those who were still active had no adverse effect on “socialist revolution and construction” under the leadership of the ccp. Their arrest and imprisonment was merely symbolic. Yet they were arrested anyway. More importantly, the arrests were carried out secretly and not advertised in the press. The trial was also secret, and the whole affair was wrapped in layers of confusion. The final outcome for the Chinese Trotskyists was completely hidden from the eyes of the general public. The sole redeeming feature was that the ccp was “merciful” in dealing with the jailed Trotskyists. Unlike the Soviet government [in Russia], the ccp did not set out to physically eliminate them but rather to educate and rehabilitate them, with special emphasis on their future education and employment, “so as not to poison society”. The Ministry of Public Security submitted a report to the cpc Central Committee on 27 June 1953, titled “Principles and Standards for the Handling of the Cases of the Trotskyist Bandits”. Its main contents were as follows: 1. The leaders and backbone cadres of the arrested “Trotskyists”, those who had committed serious crimes and persevered in their reactionary stance without any element of repentance and sincerity, should be sentenced separately. 2. Those core members of the lower echelons of the “Trotskyists” and “Trotskyists” in general who were deeply poisoned in the past should, if they have confessed and shown repentance, be released, except for veteran “Trotskyists”. 3. The “Trotskyist” training teams set up in various places should be wound up on schedule. 7 Hu Feng (1902–1985) was a Chinese Marxist writer and literary theorist framed and persecuted as the supposed head of the Hu Feng Counterrevolutionary Clique. He was first rehabilitated in 1980 and fully rehabilitated posthumously, in 1988.

the destruction of the wenzhou trotskyists, 1949–1952 (2014)

345

4.

“Trotskyists” who are released or discharged should be educated collectively and individually before being dealt with. They should, where possible, be given the chance to engage in employment and schooling. 5. As for veteran “Trotskyists” who have not been dealt with elsewhere, it would be wise to collect more information and report to the Ministry of Public Security in order to unify findings before dealing with them. 6. Anyone sentenced to death should be reported to the Ministry of Public Security for review and approval; anyone sentenced to life imprisonment or fixed-term imprisonment should be reported to the Ministry of Public Security. In line with the above principles and sentencing standards, some young Trotskyists members and their sympathisers were released after education. The leaders and cadres were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three years to life. Among them were Zheng Chaolin, Yin Kuan, Yu Shouyi, and Huang Jiantong, who were described as “extremely evil”; Liu Pingmei, Ji Yunlong, Jiang Zhendong, Li Pei, Xiong Andong, Zhou Rensheng, Wang Guolong, Ye Chunhua, and others were sentenced to life imprisonment;8 other members of the Wenzhou Trotskyists were sentenced to life imprisonment. Zeng Meng was detained without being sentenced, Huang Yushi was sentenced to 15 years, Zhao Yangsheng was sentenced to 8 years, Lin Songqi was sentenced to 7 years, and Zhou Lüqiang was sentenced to 7 years. Although only about 500 Trotskyists were arrested, the number implicated was not negligible. According to the ccp’s files on the purge of the Trotskyists, there were 41 suspected Trotskyist organisations in Wenzhou implicating more than 1,600 people. Among those implicated were relatives, classmates, and colleagues of the Trotskyists, including some who were deliberately framed and falsely accused. The Wenzhou Committee for Purging the Trotskyists admitted that “one person was mistakenly disciplined, 16 were mistakenly sentenced to training, and two were mistakenly registered; most of these people were implicated as a result of false confessions and chaotic confessions during the Three-Antis and the purge of the middle stratum”. These people, who may have had nothing at all to do with the Trotskyists, faced the same harsh test. Recalling the 1952 purge, Wang Fanxi said The number of people implicated in that operation was very large. […] As far as my personal connections are concerned, the manner in which they were implicated was quite frightening. Two of my nephews and one

8 These people were Trotskyists from elsewhere.

346

xu, trans. benton

of my brothers-in-law, who had no organisational ties to the Trotskyists other than having read some of our publications, were arrested at the same time at the dead of night. Even more sadly, some of their friends, who had not even read New Banner, were caught in the net. My wife, who had nothing at all to do with politics, was also detained for a short while.9 The charge of Trotskyism was not necessarily terminally damaging at the time [in every case], but the experience pursued them throughout their lives like a spectre, in all subsequent political movements. Even if they had previously been cleared, the charge could never be erased. There are numerous examples of this in the Wenzhou area. The well-known philosopher Zhang Liwen was a member of the so-called Vienna Choir in his middle school days, but because the group was at one point after the establishment of the prc characterised as a “Trotskyist organisation”, Mr Zhang was sent to a cadre school during the anticorruption campaign, where he was required to study and “confess”.10 It was not until 1953 that the Wenzhou Military Revolutionary Committee issued a document clarifying that the charge was in fact false. [Even so, Zhang remained in prison.] Wenzhou High School’s Cheng Cheng Reading Club was also declared to be a Trotskyist organisation or an organisation with Trotskyists in it. Its members were subjected to prolonged interrogation, transferred away from key departments, put under control, and publicly denounced at “struggle meetings”, causing them to lose their freedom. Some individuals were even sent to prison. Zhou Mengjiang, an expert on the history of the Southern Song Dynasty, was sent to a cadre school for two years because of his “Trotskyist” involvement. The experience of Shi Changdong, a Wenzhou student at Fudan University, was even more unbelievable: he was arrested by the public security authorities simply because he had the same name as a Wenzhou Trotskyist, only for the authorities to find out a year later that the arrest was a mistake. Yu Shine of Beijing University, Pan Zhongjian of Beijing Normal University, Pan Guocun of the Wenzhou Library, and others all suffered as a result of the Trotskyist problem in the course of subsequent political movements. […]. 9 10

Wang 2004a, p. 289. Translator’s note: In a memoir, Zhang Liwen explained: Later, cadres said that when studying at Ouhai Middle School, I had joined the school’s Trotskyist organisation, so I was treated as a counterrevolutionary and confessed my problems. The actual situation is that I had joined the “Vienna Choir”, an organisation actually under the leadership of the ccp’s Ouhai Middle School branch, set up to fight against the Trotskyist organisation in Ouhai Middle School. Because the Trotskyist organisation had taken control of the student union at that time, the Party organisation united the students to fight against the Trotskyists in the supposed form of the “Vienna Choir” (https://news.ruc.edu.cn/archives/48691).

the destruction of the wenzhou trotskyists, 1949–1952 (2014)

347

The charge of “Trotskyism” served as a deadly “hat” to be slapped on the heads of targets of the ccp’s campaigns. Because of the long-term presence of Trotskyists in Wenzhou, “Trotskyism” became a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Communist cadres in Wenzhou, and the “Trotskyist” label was a constant threat to those caught making careless mistakes in political matters. During the Cultural Revolution in Wenzhou, this phenomenon reached its highest peak. On 28 January 1969, at a meeting held in Zhejiang Province to “purge the ranks of the class” and rectify the work of the Party, three “nets” were cast over southern Zhejiang, which was said to have “too many traitors, too many secret service agents [i.e., spies], too many armed bandits, too many fake party members, and too many Trotskyist bandits”. It was announced that “there were 35,000 members of traitor groups in southern Zhejiang before Liberation”, and that “they should be dug out, thoroughly investigated, and eliminated”. According to statistics, 9,878 people were investigated in Wenzhou, 3,600 of them by the provincial revolutionary committee. The old cadres of the former Southern Zhejiang Special Committee were branded as “traitors”, “agents”, “defectors who had surrendered”, and “bandits”. They were detained for a long time. More than 500 were severely tortured, more than 900 were injured and left disabled, and 21 were persecuted to the point of death. Among those persecuted were veteran cadres and even revolutionary martyrs falsely accused of being “traitors”, “collaborators”, “defectors who had surrendered”, “fake party members”, “fake martyrs”, and “traitors”. “The graves of martyrs were dug up and their families were implicated”. Members of the ccp who had actively opposed the Trotskyists in the revolutionary struggle in Wenzhou were now persecuted for the crimes of the Trotskyists. They could never have imagined that history would play such a joke on them. After 1979, the imprisoned Trotskyists were freed, and after their release from prison they began to demand the rehabilitation of the Chinese Trotskyists. They insisted that the Trotskyists were not “counterrevolutionaries”. Some scholars raised the issue of re-examining and reviewing the Trotskyists’ cases. In 1988, the Soviet Union reviewed the issue of the “Trotskyists”. Three major wrongs committed against the Trotskyists tried in Moscow in the 1930s were reversed. The victims were rehabilitated and all the “hats” placed on the Trotskyists were removed. In China, however, the “Trotskyist” issue has never been officially confronted, except in footnotes to new editions of Mao Zedong’s Selected Works and Collected Works and Deng Xiaoping’s Selected Works, where the notes on “Trotskyism” have been revised. […] But while some scholars are therefore optimistic that the Trotskyists will be rehabilitated, I believe that the issue is likely to be left unresolved. For the ccp, the sensitivity of the Trotskyist issue has long since diminished, but that does

348

xu, trans. benton

not mean that their legitimacy is recognised. In the current political environment on the mainland, any political theory antithetical to the official ideology of the ccp cannot be tolerated, even if the ccp and Trotskyism were “born of the selfsame root”. With the death of the Trotskyists, the issue of the Trotskyists’ rehabilitation has long since lost its meaning. As Pan Mengbu said [in tribute to his father Pan Guocun, who was associated with the Trotskyist movement in Wenzhou, see above], “It is not necessary for them to be rehabilitated. These tragedies can be used to instruct later generations not to repeat the same mistakes. The charges honour them greatly”.

section f Trotskyism in Taiwan

∵

Introduction to Part 1, Section F Wang Fanxi influenced a small group of Taiwanese students studying in the UK after he settled there in 1975. Together, he and these people drew up a programme for a revolutionary movement in Taiwan organised along Trotskyist lines. This section contains a translation of that programme and a wider account of Trotskyism in Taiwan past and present, reflection on the possible future of the revolutionary movement in Taiwan, and a memoir of Wang Fanxi’s encounter in the UK with students from Taiwan.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_040

Our Views on the Taiwan Revolution (Outline for Discussion) (1977) Drafted by a group of expatriate Marxists in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, September 1977 Edited by Wang Fanxi, translated by Gregor Benton

This pamphlet was written in the late 1970s by Wang Fanxi, a Trotskyist exiled from Mainland China, together with some socialists from Taiwan and others in Hong Kong.1 Although the article was written nearly thirty years ago and much of the information is outdated, some of the analyses are still interesting, especially those concerning the question of Taiwan’s “nationality” (and the question of unification and independence) and the nature of the Taiwan independence movement. The article points out that many of the ccp’s mistakes regarding the Taiwan issue were rooted in its theory of “socialism in one country”. The pamphlet also refuted the “two-stages theory” promoted by some overseas Taiwanese leftists at the time, following the ccp’s New Democracy theory of first carrying out an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal bourgeois democratic revolution in alliance with the bourgeoisie and only then carrying out a socialist revolution. In the course of the last two years, there has been a succession of debates in Taiwan’s left-wing intellectual circles on the nature of Taiwan society, the nature of the ccp regime, and the question of unification and independence, and it is important that Taiwan’s left-wing clarify its views on the path to social change in Taiwan. We are now republishing this document, retaining terms used at the time (such as “Gaoshan people”), as a point of reference for readers. After participating in the student movement as early as 1925, Wang Fanxi joined the revolution, studied in Moscow in 1927, and became a Trotskyist after experiencing first-hand the debate over the party line in the Soviet Union and reflecting on the failed experience of the Chinese Revolution. He lived in Britain at the time of the publication of this pamphlet. Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 12, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. The original Chinese text was also transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive. 1 This short introduction is written by Zheng Guyu for Taiwanese readers. Zheng is a pseudonym of Yang Wei-chung (1971–2018), a student activist and a former Taiwanese Trotskyist. He later became an official spokesperson of the kmt.

© Edited by Wang Fanxi, translated by G. Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_0

our views on the taiwan revolution

353

(a) The issue of the Taiwan revolution deserves the attention of revolutionary Marxists across the world. It is relevant not only to the people of Taiwan but also to the future progress of the revolution in Mainland China. The Taiwan revolution not only has deep potential but also has the potential to break out at any moment. (b) At the end of the Second World War, the Kuomintang bourgeoisie came to Taiwan as conqueror. It grafted its usual greed and corruption onto the ruling institutions left behind by Japanese imperialism and viciously oppressed and robbed the people of Taiwan. The result was an islandwide uprising on February 28, 1947. The Kuomintang replied to this resistance by drowning large numbers of people on the island in blood, thereby committing a great crime. The workers and peasants on the Mainland overthrew the Kuomintang in 1949. Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, taking refuge under the umbrella of American imperialism, and transferring the entire weight of his reactionary rule onto the backs of the 6.5 million Taiwanese. (c) The people of Taiwan, under the influence of the revolution on the Mainland, had a good chance of destroying the remnants of the Kuomintang after the latter’s retreat to Taiwan. However, they were unable to do so, mainly because the US imperialists provided both direct military support (especially after the outbreak of the Korean War) and systematic economic support, while at the same time engineering a series of social changes. In this respect, the following were the main points. 1. The US imperialists authorised and assisted the implementation by the Kuomintang of its so-called land reforms. 2. The US transfused large amounts of money into the Kuomintang’s moribund political and economic institutions by means of grants and loans. (US aid amounted to US$ 100 million a year from 1951 to 1965.) 3. Even after the termination of US aid in 1965, the US continued to support Chiang by means of various agencies and encouraged private capital to invest in Taiwan. 4. Also starting around 1965, Japanese monopoly capital has actively returned to Japan’s old colony to serve as both a competitor and assistant to American capital. All this has helped to keep the corrupt rule of the Kuomintang alive, by providing temporary stability and even a false sense of prosperity. But in fact, it has done absolutely nothing to defuse any of the problems that might lead to a revolution in Taiwan. On the contrary, it has only

354

ed. wang, trans. benton

sharpened and deepened the conflicts. The Taiwan revolution will not only break out more forcefully but will take on a more visibly socialist character. (d) The so-called “land reform” (the 37.5% Rent Reduction Act and “land to the tiller”), which the Kuomintang has widely vaunted, cannot solve the profound contradictions that beset rural Taiwan, apart from slightly changing their form. An official Taiwan publication2 admits that “Taiwan’s countryside is on the verge of collapse”. New tenancy relations prevail, and “the cultivator no longer has his own land”. The government swaps fertiliser for grain, which costs the peasants dear, so that they suffer throughout the year and earn too little to pay their taxes. As a result, their grievances are no less than those of peasants on the Mainland. The only difference is that the direct enemy of most of peasants in Taiwan is no longer the big landlords but the government and its agents at all levels. The only thing that can be said about “land reform” so far is that a considerable number of landowners have been transformed to some extent into industrialists and businesspeople, as a result of land “expropriation”. (e) By importing large amounts of US and Japanese capital, Taiwan has industrialised very rapidly in the last decade or so. From the late 1960s onwards, the structure of Taiwan’s economy has changed markedly. What was once predominantly agricultural has since become predominantly industrial. In crude figures, the number of factories registered in 1952 was 9,966; at the end of 1968, it was 33,057; and this year (1977), it has risen to 45,000. This is a four-and-a-half-fold increase in twenty-five years – a veritable “great leap forward”. But if we look at the various types of industry, the owners of the factories, the distribution and utilisation of industrial profits, etc., the problem is equally clear: this industrialisation is not in any way conducive to the well-being of the nation but only to imperialism. It only benefits international monopoly capital and its associates in the Taiwanese bourgeoisie. (f) The industrialisation of Taiwan is very different in nature from that on the Mainland. On the Mainland, no matter how serious the problem of bureaucracy, industrialisation has, at least so far, basically and in the long term, been geared mainly towards improving the national productive forces and, by implication, the livelihood of the workers and peasants, and for the consolidation of the independence and autonomy of the nation. Taiwan’s industrialisation, however, has been mainly for the benefit of for-

2 Chen 1969.

our views on the taiwan revolution

355

eign monopoly capital and at the expense of the workers and peasants and the nation. In other words, the industrial boom has been at the cost of complete colonisation. The Chiang regime, by virtue of its comprador nature, and even more so by virtue of the irreconcilable contradictions between it and the people of Taiwan, has shamelessly and unscrupulously taken the initiative in facilitating this colonisation. The so-called “processing and exporting” zones under construction since 1966 have created concessions for the imperialists, allowing foreign monopoly capitalists to do whatever they want in Taiwan – thus provoking growing discontent among the Taiwanese people. (g) The industrialisation of Taiwan took place first and foremost because of the expenditure of the blood and sweat of Taiwan’s workers. According to statistics, the wages of Taiwanese workers are only one-fifteenth of those of their American counterparts and about two-thirds of those of Hong Kong workers. This industrialisation was also at the cost of Taiwan’s peasants. Chiang’s regime, in its capacity as chief slave-master, robbed or purchased the peasants’ produce, plunging them into abject poverty. It held wages down and lowered the price of raw materials, thus allowing international capital to reap huge profits. This industrialisation was at the expense of small and medium-sized Taiwanese industrialists: under the control of a large industrial and commercial establishment, tightly integrated with the imperialist, bureaucratic, and business sectors, there was little room for small businesspeople to survive. (h) The real gravedigger of this system, however, will be the emerging working class in Taiwan. In the early 1950s, the working class in Taiwan (including in industry, mining, and transport) numbered some 300,000. By now, according to some estimates, it numbers 1.8 million. The weight of the workers is highly favourable to the people of Taiwan, as they seek their liberation. When the revolution was in progress on the Mainland, the industrial working class in China never exceeded four million,3 out of a total population of 600 million. Yet today Taiwan’s industrial workers account for 1.8 million out of 16 million,4 more than one tenth of the population. Moreover, the working class on the Mainland used to be scattered throughout the country, except for a few major cities, whereas 3 “Speech at the Zhengzhou Conference”, in Long Live Mao Zedong Thought. 4 According to a survey conducted by the Civil Affairs Bureau of the Kuomintang in Taiwan in 1957, the population of Taiwan in 1947 was 6,497,734, and has been increasing year by year ever since.

356

(i)

(j)

ed. wang, trans. benton

in Taiwan, with its compact geography, it is much more concentrated. Although the ccp claims to represent the proletariat, it has never had many workers among its members. This explains the somewhat tortuous path of the Chinese Revolution and the particular style of the ccp both before and after its victory, a style both bureaucratic and degenerate. In this respect, the future proletarian revolutionary party in Taiwan already enjoys a head start. The Kuomintang government, with its long experience of counter-revolution, will be aware of the potential threat that this poses to its rule. It has long been wary of the growing working class in Taiwan. Solidarity actions and strikes are forbidden. The Kuomintang has done everything possible to prevent the workers of Taiwan from becoming more conscious and revolutionary. But the history of the international workers’ movement tells us that these measures of the Kuomintang will in the end be a waste of time. The revolution in Taiwan is inevitable, and potentially explosive, not only for the social reasons given above but also for “national” reasons. Originally, from the point of view of history, culture, and “blood”, the 16 million inhabitants of Taiwan (with the exception of 200,000 to 300,000 indigenous people) are not ethnically different from the Han Chinese who form the majority on the Mainland. Most Taiwanese are the descendants of Fujianese and Hakkas who migrated to Taiwan in the course of the last three or four centuries. Their languages and customs have remained more or less as they were. Their social, economic, and even political structures were closely linked to those of Mainland China before the occupation of Taiwan by the Japanese imperialists in 1895. Fifty years of Japanese imperial rule did not transform the population of Taiwan culturally. In political and economic terms, the people of Taiwan instead strongly demanded national liberation from Japanese colonial oppression. Japanese rule only served to foster in the people of Taiwan a strong sense of nationalism – a sense of nationalism that opposed Japan but identified with Mainland China. So the insistence of some Taiwanese bourgeois and petty-bourgeois scholars that the Taiwanese are a special people is inconsistent with the historical facts. But that does not mean that the Taiwanese people did not develop a special “sense of nationality” during their long struggle against foreign rule (including Dutch occupation, the Manchu conquest, separation from the Mainland under the Japanese, and Kuomintang rule). They have developed a common feeling during four hundred years of suffering as a

our views on the taiwan revolution

357

result of oppression and exploitation by foreign rulers. They demanded that Taiwanese should take control of their own destiny. This anti-Mainlander regionalism on the part of Taiwanese is different from the localism that characterises provinces on the Mainland. It is far stronger and more grounded. It reflects progressive defiance rather than reactionary backwardness. (k) The return of Taiwan to China after the Pacific War was, for a while, widely greeted. The older generation of Taiwanese was happy to see the “reunification of the country”, while the lower classes and younger people, especially the more politically aware among them, were willing to join forces with their Mainland brothers and sisters and to work together for the unification and liberation of China. (This was the attitude adopted by the Taiwanese Communist Party at the time.) However, this attitude soon weakened as a result of the absolute corruption and arbitrariness of the Kuomintang carpetbaggers. This change in attitude was originally much the same as the feeling of disillusionment and resistance shown by people on the Mainland after economic recovery in the early 1950s. However, there was a difference: the people of Taiwan opposed Kuomintang repression with an additional layer of “national” hatred, in addition to class hostility. After 1949, the Kuomintang used Taiwan as a burial ground in the period of its death throes. It put the entire island under a regime of terror and deprived the vast majority of people of their basic rights,5 while at the same time practising a policy of extreme racial discrimination (against indigenous people) and provincial discrimination (e.g., by banning the Minnan [Southern Fujianese] language), so that Taiwanese not only came to resent the Kuomintang as a direct agent of oppression but also reacted against the sudden influx of people from the Mainland [in the wake of Chiang Kai-shek’s decampment to Taiwan]. They saw the two million new immigrants from the Mainland as oppressors. Influenced by the struggle of the Taiwanese people “against foreign oppression”, a section of the Taiwanese bourgeoisie (especially those that had previous ties with the Japanese or who had new links with American imperialism) and the petty bourgeoisie promoted a Taiwan independence movement and advocated Taiwanese “nationalism”.

5 According to afp Tokyo, 24 September 1977, “The total number of political prisoners held in Kuomintang prisons is over 8,000, all of whom were arrested without summons and have never been tried in public” (Singtao Daily News, Hong Kong, 26 September 1977).

358 (l)

ed. wang, trans. benton

Revolutionary Marxists fully understand this struggle against “national” oppression carried out by the masses in Taiwan. We not only largely recognise its legitimacy but absolutely value its revolutionary potential when combined with the effect of general social tensions in Taiwan. Based on the experience of past mass movements in Taiwan, the future rekindling of the revolutionary movement there will most likely continue to be fuelled by anti-incomer sentiment. If proletarian revolutionaries ignore, belittle, or oppose such struggles, they will certainly isolate themselves completely and be rejected by the rising masses, thus preventing them from participating in and leading the revolution in Taiwan. How to deal with the “national struggle” of the Taiwanese people is therefore a major strategic issue for revolutionary Marxists in Taiwan and on the Mainland. First of all, we must relentlessly point out to the toiling masses of Taiwan, in the context of current events, big or small, that, as a result of the deliberate measures taken in concert by the Kuomintang and American imperialism over the past thirty years, and as a natural consequence of Taiwan’s economic development over the same period, a large part (and the most important part) of the big bourgeoisie and landowners, formerly of Taiwanese origin, have already become closely integrated, politically and economically, with the same classes that have immigrated from the Mainland and form an inseparable part of the ruling class in Taiwan. Moreover, the 2 million or so “expatriates” who arrived in Taiwan on the coat-tails of the Kuomintang (most of them forced to do so – their numbers have increased considerably over the last thirty years), especially the soldiers, minor civil servants, and other civilians, who make up the majority, were excluded by the ruling groups and mostly fell into poverty. They were no less persecuted by the Kuomintang than indigenous Taiwanese of the same class. Under these circumstances, if the revolution in Taiwan is aimed generally at defeating the incomers, it will weaken the revolutionary forces on the one hand and, on the other, bestow the fruits of the revolution on the Taiwanese ruling group (which will help the Kuomintang as a whole) or on the extreme right-wing of the Taiwan independence movement. (m) Second, we must make it clear to ourselves and to the general public in Taiwan that the movement for Taiwanese independence advocated by a section of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie in Taiwan is not only very different from the movement to oppose the oppression of the Taiwanese people in class terms but also in terms of the direction of the movement and its possible objective effects.

our views on the taiwan revolution

359

The two movements are not the same, and we should do our utmost to make that clear. The opposition of the masses to national oppression is directed first and foremost against the Kuomintang and its backer, US imperialism. In the development of the struggle, the class meaning of such a movement will inevitably overtake its national meaning and its anti-capitalist character will break through the capitalist framework. Objectively, the conduct and implementation of such a struggle must weaken imperialism and fuel revolutionary forces outside the island – above all, it must rekindle the anger of the Mainland working class against bureaucratic rule and stimulate the rise of workers’ struggles in Japan. Conversely, the rightist Taiwan independence movement run by the Taiwanese bourgeoisie can only consolidate imperialist rule in Asia, for it will not hesitate to count on the assistance of American or Japanese imperialism at the cost of further colonisation in order to get rid of the “ethnically alien” Kuomintang (or even merely to wrest greater concessions from the Kuomintang). It will prevent the masses of workers and peasants in Taiwan from rising up and changing the existing social system, and would be extremely hostile to any new regime that arose on the Mainland, as well as to any anticapitalist revolution that might take place in Japan or any other country. So revolutionary Marxists in Taiwan must be good at distinguishing between movements for Taiwanese independence advocated by sections of the bourgeoisie and movements to oppose the oppression of the Taiwanese people that are formulated in class terms. (n) But what if the masses themselves actively propose and embrace independence? Would Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries oppose them? No. On the basis of Lenin’s Marxist nationalities policy, and in the light of positive and negative experiences regarding this policy accumulated over more than half a century, we believe that the majority of the people of Taiwan, though not in themselves another nationality, have every right to demand self-determination on the road to liberation (as happened in the American colonies’ struggle for independence from Britain). If the vast majority of the people of Taiwan demand self-determination and separation from China and the establishment of an independent state, we would support them sincerely and resolutely. Why? Because the right to selfdetermination is, firstly, inseparable from democracy, which proletarian revolutionaries also support; second, such a movement, provided it has a broad mass base, would have the immediate effect of overthrowing reactionary Kuomintang rule; third, the question of whether independence

360

ed. wang, trans. benton

would be beneficial to the people of Taiwan and the Taiwanese revolution should be left to the mass of the people in Taiwan to determine, in the course of their struggle. Needless to say, revolutionary Marxism in Mainland China or Taiwan must go far beyond the narrow prejudices of nationalism and must educate the Taiwanese working class in a thoroughly internationalist spirit, so that they can unite with the working class of the world, first in Mainland China and second in Japan and the United States, in order to carry the “national” democratic revolution in Taiwan forward towards the victory of socialist revolution. Such a victory would make Taiwan not only self-reliant in relation to China but united with it from a socialist point of view – not just with China but with the world, initially as one part of a socialist federation in Asia and then as one part of a global socialist federation. (o) The ccp’s error in regard to Taiwan lies, first, in its fundamental denial of the profound feelings of the people in Taiwan against foreign domination and its equation of such feelings with the rightwing “independence movement” run by an elite minority in Taiwan who have capitulated to imperialism. Second, it denies outright the possibility that the Taiwanese people will resolve the Taiwan question through their own revolution, and therefore completely ignores, or is even unwilling to understand, any demands made by the Taiwanese people. The two slogans consistently put forward by the ccp are: “Taiwan has been Chinese territory since ancient times” and “the people of Taiwan are flesh-and-blood compatriots of the Chinese people”. Such slogans are completely powerless in the face of the Taiwanese people’s demand for self-determination or independence. They do not contribute in any way to the real liberation of Taiwan, but simply reinforce the regional stereotypes of the Taiwanese people, help the extreme right-wing movement for Taiwan independence, and even help the Kuomintang to carry out its deceitful policy of “renewing and protecting of Taiwan”. The ccp has always claimed that the Taiwan issue is an issue between it and the Kuomintang, or between China and the United States. This suggests that the Taiwan issue does not need to be resolved through a revolution carried out by the people of Taiwan and can even happen without the participation of the people of Taiwan – that their fate can be arranged by the two parties or by China and the United States. This position is wrong and highly reactionary. It is indeed (as some Taiwanese revolutionaries have insisted) a case of “Great Han chauvinism”, “another form of national oppression”.

our views on the taiwan revolution

361

(p) Viewed in the context of the Chinese Revolution as a whole, the Taiwan revolution can be said to be its continuation, as part of the unfinished revolutionary democratic tasks of national unification. But the more important question is how to continue this revolution and how to complete this task in order to benefit the whole of China and the revolution in Taiwan. The ccp’s approach is to depend chiefly on military pressure, supplemented by a political and diplomatic offensive, in order to restore the territory and people of Taiwan to the embrace of the motherland. This “solution” from outside and from above to oppression has been all along the position of Maoism and Stalinism. As a result, even though social reforms, large or small, were introduced in conquered areas, the real revolution of the local masses was destroyed, leading to intense social conflict. Such was the case when the ccp liberated most of China, and even more so when it liberated areas dominated by ethnic minorities. In Taiwan, because of the special “national feeling” we have already noted, if such liberation were to take place, the tension would become extreme. So for the liberation of Taiwan to be truly beneficial to the revolution in China as a whole, the workers and the masses in Taiwan must be allowed to take affairs into their own hands. The first task of revolutionary Marxists on the Mainland would be to help and facilitate such a revolution in every way possible, not to replace it with an external force. They would be bound to support any genuine revolutionary demand made by the workers and peasants of Taiwan, including for self-determination. The issue must also be seen in the context of improving the existing political system on the Mainland. If the workers and peasants in Taiwan were to make a complete revolution, it would inspire their brothers on the Mainland to rise up and start an anti-bureaucratic political revolution and a bottom-up “cultural revolution” waged, in this instance, from below. Whereas if Taiwan were to be liberated by force alone, the result would be to consolidate bureaucratic rule in Beijing, a rule mired inevitably in nationalism. (q) The wrong policy adopted by the ccp in Taiwan has now been recognised and denounced by many Taiwanese revolutionaries. But they are unaware of its causes. In fact, the mistakes made by the ccp on the national question, like those that it has made on so many other issues, are fundamentally due to its inheritance of Stalin’s idea of socialism in one country. Starting from the idea of socialism in one country, it is impossible not to be in thrall to “Great Russian chauvinism” and “Great Han chauvinism”. Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries in Taiwan must fundamentally reject the

362

(r)

ed. wang, trans. benton

idea of socialism in one country propagated by Stalin and Mao in order to avoid repeating in Taiwan the same mistakes as the ccp in China. Only by fundamentally clarifying this issue (socialism on one island) can we correctly establish tasks and guidelines for the workers’ and peasants’ revolution in Taiwan. In light of the above, we believe that the future revolution in Taiwan will be socialist in nature, whether in terms of its social contradictions, revolutionary dynamics, or revolutionary future. In the early stages, it will certainly pass through a “national” and democratic stage, and there will be a period of seeming supra-class nationalism, but during this same period the class struggle will inevitably begin almost at once. As soon as the revolution acquires a true mass base, it will be redirected onto the bourgeoisie, which is closely allied to imperialism and whose interests are represented by the Kuomintang regime. At the same time, in order for the revolution to be truly victorious, and for victory to be secured, it must move resolutely in the direction of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat can solve the democratic “national” tasks of the revolution. Once established, such a dictatorship of the proletariat will confine itself to the framework of bourgeois democracy. At present, some revolutionaries in Taiwan oppose this view. According to them, Taiwan today is a semi-colonial and semi-feudal place, just like the Mainland before 1949. Its revolutionary task is anti-imperialist and anti-feudal, so its driving force must be an alliance of the four classes [workers, peasants, and petty bourgeois], including the “revolutionary” or “national” bourgeoisie, and its nature must be bourgeois democratic, i.e., [Mao-style] New Democracy, with as its goal the establishment of a people’s democratic dictatorship. In short, they want to transfer the whole set of theories designed by the ccp for revolution on the Mainland to the Taiwan revolution. This is wrong and dangerous. The real process of the Mainland revolution long ago proved that the ccp’s new-democratic theory is incompatible with the facts. One of the major reasons for the ccp’s victory was precisely that it abandoned its vaunted new democracy under the pressure of revolutionary events and unconsciously implemented the theory of continuous [permanent] revolution, which it had always seemed to reject. If the ccp had been truly consistent, matching words and deeds and implementing New Democracy all along the line, i.e., never opposing the urban and rural bourgeoisie in the democratic revolution; if it had never dared to mobilise the poor peasants, and to establish a de facto one-

our views on the taiwan revolution

(s)

363

party dictatorship after victory in the civil war (a dictatorship that was, in a sense, the dictatorship of the proletariat), if it had continued to share power with the bourgeoisie in good faith and developed capitalism over a long period of time under the “people’s democratic dictatorship” – if all that had happened, victory would either have been inconceivable or, if achieved, would have immediately stalled. This has not only been pointed out by some Marxists but has even been admitted by ccp leaders themselves (Liu Shaoqi in terms of theory, Mao Zedong in terms of action). The Taiwan revolution today is even less semi-feudal in nature than was revolution on the Mainland before 1949. Taiwan is fully capitalist. Does Taiwan’s semi-colonial status make its bourgeoisie resolutely anti-imperialist and eager to join the revolution? The bourgeoisie in China and other semi- and fully colonial states has been telling us clearly over the last fifty years that it will not hesitate to side with imperialism whenever it feels even slightly threatened by the revolutionary masses in its own country. In order to prepare for and hasten the advent of the Taiwan revolution, here we draw up a number of demands. 1. The immediate abolition of all existing decrees that infringe upon human rights, freedom, and democracy, and of the secret-service system in its entirety. The immediate release of all political prisoners. The right of all people to freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and strike. 2. A guarantee, in substance as well as form, of the absolute equality of all people in Taiwan in the fields of education, employment, and political participation. The interests of the indigenous people in particular must be taken into account. They should benefit from the same rights as the rest of the population. 3. Opposition to all racial and inter-provincial discrimination and to the forced introduction of the so-called “national language” and the banning of “dialects”. 4. Overthrow of the official trade unions and the election of tradeunion leaders by the workers themselves. Thorough reform of workers’ lives and the creation of a workers’ welfare system. Abolition of surveillance and of the persecution of workers by secret agents, and a guarantee of the workers’ right to strike. Unity of the working class and the toiling masses of Taiwan, regardless of provincial origin. 5. Immediate abolition of government-run peasant associations and water conservancy associations, which exploit the peasants, and the right of all poor peasants to elect their own peasant associations

364

ed. wang, trans. benton

to take charge of production, transportation, and marketing and to govern the countryside. The cancelling of all public and private debts and the redistribution of land without compensation. 6. The establishment of urban neighbourhood committees to organise the poor and the needy in a system of mutual aid. 7. An end to crackdowns on free thought and the overthrow of partybased education and of the control of culture and education by secret agents. A guarantee of full freedom of information, thought, and creation. 8. Opposition to the policy of “rewarding foreign investment” by selling out to US and Japanese imperialists. Confiscation of the big factories and institutions linked to imperialist and bureaucratic capital and their subjection to workers’ control. 9. The cancelling all economic, political, and military treaties concluded between the Kuomintang and the US and Japanese imperialists. The immediate withdrawal from Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait of all US troops. 10. The replacement of the reactionary and corrupt Kuomintang government with a National Assembly with full powers elected by universal suffrage on an equal footing and by secret ballot. The complete implementation of the above revolutionary demands and the settling of Taiwan’s status and its relations with the People’s Republic of China. 11. Unity with the working class of the world, especially on the Mainland, and with the working class of the United States and Japan, in order to resist the inevitable attacks of imperialist reactionaries on the revolution in Taiwan.

Trotskyism and Taiwan (2022) Cheng Ling-fang

Cheng Ling-fang, a retired professor of gender studies at Kaohsiung Medical University, introduces past and present Trotskyist activities in Taiwan as well as the influence of Chinese Trotskyists, prominently Wang Fanxi, on a small number of Taiwanese individuals and some local leftist groups.1

Taiwan once had a history of active leftist thought and organisational activities, but after 50 years of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) and nearly 40 years of high-handed martial law under the Nationalist government following the Second World War, between 1949 and 1987, the island’s active leftists were either imprisoned or died or went into exile. Publishing and freedom of speech were strictly monitored and the people were silenced. It was not until the 1990s, after the lifting of martial law, that the island’s young generation began once again to quietly spread the leftist message. During the Japanese colonisation of Taiwan, many of Taiwan’s elite went to Japan to study and were influenced by the vibrant leftist thinking in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. Upon their return to Taiwan, in the 1921 these elites founded the Cultural Association, which spread left-wing literary and artistic ideas. They also organised the peasants and workers to form unions, and paved the way for the flourishing communist movement in 1928–1931. The Communist Party of Taiwan advocated both the leading roles of peasants and workers and Taiwan nationalism against Japanese colonialism, in order to win the support of the peasant’s and worker’s unions and of artists and writers in the Cultural Association.2 In 1931, the Communist Party of Taiwan was suppressed by the Japanese colonial government and its leaders were either imprisoned or fled to China, resulting in its collapse. Subsequently, its advocacy of Taiwanese national selfdetermination disappeared from the programme of the ccp. The number of people, both members of the elite and ordinary citizens killed by the Kuomintang in the February 28th Incident in 1947 is unknown and

1 The author would like to thank Paul Crook for his help in translating this article and Gregor Benton for editing it. On a personal note, Wang Fanxi changed my life. He became my intellectual and political mentor and a wise guide at a time when I was lost in life. I am deeply grateful for this blessing. 2 Hsiao and Sullivan 1983, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 269–89, and Chien 1997.

© Cheng Ling-fang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_042

366

cheng

difficult to estimate. In 1949, when the Kuomintang was defeated by the ccp in China and fled to Taiwan, its leaders feared that there were many Communist fellow travellers and sympathisers on the Island and sent out a large number of secret agents to hunt them down. “According to a report of 21 June 1989, submitted by the Ministry of Justice to the Legislative Yuan, 29,407 political cases were heard by the military courts during the martial law period, and the most conservative official estimate of innocent victims was about 140,000. According to the Judicial Yuan, there were around 60,000 to 70,000 political cases, and if the average number of people in each case was three, the number of political victims of military trials would have been over 200,000. They were the most direct victims of martial law. In 1960, 120,875 people were listed by the regime as ‘untraceable’. This suggests that the number of people who died as a result of persecution must have been very high”.3 From then on, Taiwan remained devoid of left-wing thinking for many years, until the lifting of martial law. From the mid-1960s onwards, Taiwan began to join the economic industrial chain created in the West. The textile and handicraft industries developed, promoting the vigorous growth of small and medium-sized private enterprises. As a result of the accumulation of capital through exports, Taiwan became one of Asia’s four tigers. Starting in the early 1990s, however, many of these traditional enterprises relocated to China and Southeast Asia in pursuit of cheaper labour, causing a large number of workers in Taiwan to lose their jobs. The cruel reality of capitalist globalisation became apparent and the seeds of leftist thinking gradually sprouted on the island. Starting in the mid-1970s, Taiwan gradually developed its electronics industry along the technology foundry model, and became a technology island. by 2020, Taiwan’s chip manufacturing had become an indispensable key link in the global economic chain. Taiwan’s solid economic power in science and technology created the illusion of prosperity, weakening the appeal of critical leftwing thinking. Even though trade union regulations have been revised, improving labour rights over the past 10 years, progress has been slow. Only 7 per cent of Taiwan’s enterprises and professional organisations have labour unions. The unions are weak. When sporadic strikes occur, there is little media coverage. In the mid-1980s, dangwai (outside the Kuomintang) political groups started to emerge. However, these were not leftists but liberals, fighting for bourgeois democracy. The dangwai movement later developed into the Democratic Progressive Party (dpp), the current ruling party. The “Wild Lily student movement”, which developed in the early 1990s, prompted the Taiwanisation of the

3 Wei 1997.

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

367

Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) and paved the way for President Lee Teng-hui’s quiet revolution. In 2014 came the Sunflower Student Movement, a protest against the increasingly close economic and trade relations with China. More than 30 years after the lifting of martial law, soil that might nourish left-wing ideology remained largely infertile. The only difference was that bourgeois democracy had gradually become established. It introduced laws protecting freedom of speech, so Marxist books and websites were no longer suppressed and left-wing activists were no longer jailed. Given this context, how did Trotskyism fare in Taiwan? This article tells the story of Trotskyist activity in Taiwan in four periods. It starts with the Kuomintang’s white terror in the early 1950s, goes on to look at the influence of the Trotskyist leader Wang Fanxi on Taiwanese students in the UK in the 1970s, explores the rise of leftist ideas and activities before and after the Wild Lily student movement in the 1990s, and concludes by noting the emergence of Trotskyist/Marxist groups after the Sunflower student movement of 2014.

The White Terror of the Kuomintang In 1947, the February 28 Incident took place in Taiwan. The Kuomintang army killed innocent people across the island, not just local Taiwanese gentry and local leaders but also many migrants from the Chinese mainland suspected of links with the ccp. Among the migrants, a handful of Trotskyists were arrested in 1948. The story of the Trotskyists is told in two books: A History of the Chinese Trotskyist Party by Liu Pingmei, a veteran Trotskyist, published in Hong Kong in 2005; and A Short History of the Wenzhou Trotskyist Group, 1941–1946, published in April 2001 by Zhou Rensheng.4 Zhou Rensheng wrote as follows: After the summer break of 1947, three Trotskyists were sent from Wenzhou to Kaohsiung, Keelung, and Taipei [to carry out covert Trotskyist activities in Taiwan]: Xia Tingfan worked at Keelung Customs, Hong Xiur-

4 Liu Pingmei was arrested by the Chinese Communists in December 1952 along with Zheng Chaolin and others. They were released in 1979 and Liu returned to Guangzhou, where he started to research his book. Liu 2005, Chapter 7; Zhou Rensheng, 1941nian zhi 1946nian de Wenzhou Tuopai jiankuang (A Short History of the Wenzhou Trotskyist Group, 1941–1946) is also in this volume (Part 1, Section E).

368

cheng

ong got a job in a chemical plant in Taipei or Kaohsiung, and Ling Songmin was employed by a motor transport company in Taipei. Also in 1947, the Shanghai headquarters sent Su Tao (originally from Shandong) to Taiwan. So a Trotskyist branch with 9 members was established in Taiwan. These people began mimeographing pamphlets. Su Tao was in charge of the branch, which also made contact with some Wenzhounese in Taiwan, including Bai Changsheng (Bai Subing’s elder brother), Zhang Mingqian originally from Yongqiang, and Mr Fang, a native of Yueqing. However, in the first half of 1948, the Kuomintang’s secret service destroyed the Trotskyists’ printing press and seized the mimeographed pamphlets as well as documents and publications received from Shanghai. Su Tao and some of his comrades were arrested. Su was sentenced to life imprisonment, Hong Xiurong for 5 years, and Xia Tingfan for 15 years. Only Ling Songmin managed to escape, first to Wenzhou and then to Shanghai. After the arrests, the Kuomintang put out a warrant for the arrest of Zhou Abao (an alias of Zhou Rensheng). My cousin Shen Yunfang once told me that he had met a Trotskyist contact from Hong Kong at the Zhonghui Building in Shanghai. On that day, after arriving at the Zhonghui Building half an hour early, I discovered that the supposed Hong Kong contact did not know my pseudonym, Zhou Abao, and only knew me as Zhou Yasheng. It looked suspicious, so I left immediately. Fifteen minutes later, my cousin was taken away by Kuomintang agents, although he managed to escape by means of a ruse. He took the agents to a company where a Wenzhou chef named Zhou Hongbao was working, and told them that the chef was Zhou Abao. The chef was arrested and tortured, but it was soon discovered that he was an illiterate worker and his company was allowed to bail him out. This was a moment of peril for me. I was in great danger of arrest by Kuomintang agents. Another two Trotskyists [from our Wenzhou group], Pan Jiaowen (a student from Jiaotong University) and Chen Wei, also moved to Taiwan after 1948. Pan was living with his uncle Yu Yifu’s family in Taipei. This uncle was a businessperson and ran the Dingtai Shipping Company. Not long after Pan’s arrival in Taipei, Lin Yixin (an alias of Chen Daiqing, a leader of the Taiwan Trotskyist branch) was arrested by [Chiang Kai-shek’s son] Chiang Ching-kuo. As a result, Pan had to give up his Trotskyist activity. Otherwise, he would have been arrested and sent to prison. (Pan Jiaowen may have written about this.) The Trotskyists Zhang Hongye and Wu Zutang went to Hong Kong and settled down there after getting jobs.

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

369

There are some mistakes in the above information. When Taiwan began to promote Transitional Justice in 2018, some documents from the White Terror period were released. The fate of the Trotskyists who came to Taiwan in those years finally came to light. By comparing the Taiwan High Court Criminal Verdict of November 20, 1948, with Liu Pingmei and Zhou Rensheng’s accounts, it seems that after the February 28 Incident in 1947, the Kuomintang secret service became particularly active in pursuing ccp spies. The Trotskyist organisation was probably active in Taiwan for less than a year before it was wound up by the Kuomintang secret service, in 1948. According to the Taiwan High Court Criminal Verdict, no one was actually sentenced to life imprisonment. The three arrested were charged with subversion. Xia Tingfan was sentenced to four years in prison, while Su Xuechang (also known as Su Tao) and Hong Xiurong were each sentenced to two and a half years.5 They were young men in their early twenties, classmates at Wenzhou High School in Zhejiang Province. In 1947, Hong went to Taiwan to work as a technician in the Forestry Laboratory, and in 1948, Su arrived to work as an instructor at Shulin Middle School in Taipei County. They were all members of the Chinese Communist League founded by Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi, under the Fourth International. In the verdict, five other people were named as members of the Taiwan branch. Their activities included organising book clubs and recruiting teachers and students from various schools. Some developed connections with Peasants’ associations and automobile workers. These people were not arrested. They probably went into hiding. At least one, Lin Songren (an alias of Ling Songmin), fled back to Wenzhou. The verdict gives a glimpse of the Trotskyists in those days. During his trial, Su said: “I think the government should start reforming in a big way, and corruption and incompetence need to be removed”. Even though he was arrested, he commented confidently and assuredly on current affairs. Xia Tingfan, leader of the Taiwan branch, said that he “wanted to fight for a seat for the Taiwan branch at the upcoming Trotskyist congress in Shanghai”, showing that the Trotskyists attached great importance to democratic elections. Evidence shows that the materials sent from Shanghai contained comments critical of both the Kuomintang and the ccp, leading the prosecutor to conclude that “there were no

5 Guojia fazhan weiyuanhui dang’an guanliju (National Archives Administration, National Development Council), Archive no. A504000000F/0039/youbu/24/1/016.

370

cheng

active atrocities and the Party’s doctrine was different from that of the ccp currently occupying the country”.6 The prosecutor seems to have understood from the evidence and confessions that these three were not “typical” Communist spies, so they were sentenced to only a few years, unlike the ten to twenty years handed out to Communists at the time. By now, the bones of those young and enthusiastic Trotskyists have probably turned cold. What were their lives like after they were released from prison, having been labeled political prisoners? Those who escaped prosecution would have gone into hiding and started their own families in Taiwan. Those who escaped to China may not have been so lucky, and would probably have faced the same fate as Zheng Chaolin and Liu Pingmei.

Wang Fanxi on Taiwan National Self-Determination In September 1975, in our mid-twenties, Qian Yongxiang [now an eminent Taiwanese scholar] and I arrived from Taiwan at Leeds University. Qian was studying philosophy and I was studying sociology. There were only a handful of Taiwanese students in the UK, at a time when most Taiwanese students went to the United States. The British student movement was very active. There were many discussions of Marxist and leftist ideas among members of staff and students. There was a vast collection of Chinese books in the library, many of them forbidden in Taiwan. They gave us an entirely new perspective on the world. The arrest of the Gang of Four on 6 October 1976, was a bolt from the blue. Having read a lot about the history of the ccp and the Cultural Revolution, including in the Hong Kong leftist magazine The Seventies, we were confused. What had happened to the Chinese Revolution? How could even Mao’s line be criticised? What had gone wrong with the Chinese “Worker-Peasant-Soldier” socialist regime? Qian immediately sought clarification from Gregor Benton, who taught in the Department of Chinese Studies and was openly leftist, but Greg thought that the most appropriate person to explain all this was Wang Fanxi (known to his Hong Kong friends as Uncle Gen), who lived with Greg’s family in Leeds. So on a sunny weekend in October 1976, with a slight autumn chill in the air, Qian and I went to Greg’s house to meet Uncle Gen, who spoke in a gentle voice with a slight southern accent. This encounter changed our lives.

6 Ibid.

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

371

Uncle Gen was a professional revolutionary whose life centred on the Chinese proletarian revolution, and world revolution in general. The most fundamental concern of revolutionaries is how to change society so that the next generation can live a better life, reform the unjust system, and let working people live with dignity. In line with this belief, he wrote and translated works on the Marxist-Trotskyist thinking he espoused, offered commentaries on history and current events, and turned out one book after another. The revolutionary faction of the ccp in which Uncle Gen had participated in the 1920s was suppressed by the Chinese Communist regime because its strategic position was different from that of Mao’s mainstream faction, which did not allow dissent or democratic debate. After the founding of the prc, Mao Zedong followed the Stalinist line and arrested the Trotskyists, in 1952. He later carried out the Great Leap Forward, which caused a famine that took tens of millions of lives. Mao’s promotion of the cult of the individual, his suppression of internal dissent, and his replacement of workers’ democracy as advocated by Marx and Lenin with dictatorial rule deepened the bureaucratisation of his regime and further divorced it from the masses. The Trotskyist view of the “degeneration of the revolution” led by the ccp made me realise there was another, more appealing kind of socialism. We regularly visited Uncle Gen and listened to his touching personal stories and critical views. He sought information about Taiwan from us, including about the Kuomintang’s ideological surveillance inside Taiwan and the activities of those advocating Taiwan independence in Europe and the United States. We also introduced a musician, Lin Longxiong, to him. Lin strongly favoured Taiwan independence. He was very critical of the Kuomintang and composed a Taiwan version of the March of the Volunteers [i.e., the prc’s national anthem]. He later went to New York with his British wife. As a professional revolutionary, Uncle Gen kept a keen eye on the Taiwan political situation. Within a few months of meeting us, he wrote a pamphlet (translated in this volume) titled “Our Views on the Question of Revolution in Taiwan (Outline for Discussion)”. This came out in September 1977, described as written by “a group of Marxists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China living abroad” (hereafter Outline for Discussion). Personally, I was still immersed in reading historical materials on the ccp and Trotskyist literature, and had given little thought to the issue of Taiwan’s right to national self-determination. In Outline for Discussion, Uncle Gen argued that the rapid increase of the working-class in Taiwan due to industrialisation would speed the Taiwan people’s search for liberation. He singled out the role of the “national” factor in Taiwan’s revolution. Uncle Gen was one of very few Marxists who showed an understanding of the potential of this issue in Taiwan. (The issue of Taiwan’s

372

cheng

right to national self-determination had first been raised by the Communist Party of Taiwan in 1928–1931.) Uncle Gen had never been to Taiwan, but the fact that he had such a profound understanding of the direction of Taiwan’s reform and development shows how sensitive he was to social change. Uncle Gen identified the primacy in the revolutionary struggle in Taiwan of nationalism. This was prophetic. Two years later, in 10 December 1979, the Formosa Incident7 erupted, setting off the Taiwanese people’s struggle against the one-party dictatorship of the Kuomintang. In the following years, a group of activists known as the dangwai began to publish magazines advocating freedom of speech, assembly, and association. In September 1986, the dpp was established, with Taiwan independence as part of its agenda. The ddp eventually broke the Kuomintang’s one-party rule and launched Taiwan on the path to a bourgeois democracy. Uncle Gen’s views on the Taiwan revolution were completely different from the ccp’s. He attached importance to the Taiwanese people’s sense of nationality and said that “the Taiwanese people should rise up and take control of their own destiny”. He even predicted that the rekindling of the revolutionary movement in Taiwan would most likely be sparked by the struggle against outsiders from the Mainland. This struggle led to opposition, espoused by the “Sunflower Movement” in 2014 and in the 2020 general election, to the ccp’s plans for Taiwan’s “reunification” with the mainland. Trotskyists believe that socialist revolution should take account of local particularities and the wishes of local people, whereas the Stalinists advocates that the Soviet revolutionary model should be extended to other countries, oneparty dictatorship should be implemented from the top down, and dissenters should be imprisoned or killed In Outline for Discussion, Uncle Gen asks: But what if the masses themselves actively propose and embrace independence? Would Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries oppose them? No. On the basis of Lenin’s Marxist nationalities policy, and in the light of positive and negative experiences regarding this policy accumulated over

7 The Formosa Incidence (Meilidao shijian) started out as a rally on International Human Rights Day by Meilidao zazhi (Formosa magazine) in Kaohsiung city. Tens of thousands of people gathered, and riot police fired tear gas at the crowds. A total of 152 people were arrested and dozens were imprisoned. One received a life imprisonment and seven were sentenced to 12 years, among them two who were elected president and vice-president in the general election of 2000. This marked the first planned civil movement in modern Taiwan history and sparked the movement for a fight for Taiwanese identity. See Li 1987.

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

373

more than half a century, we believe that the majority of the people of Taiwan, though not in themselves another nationality, have every right to demand self-determination on the road to liberation (as happened in the American colonies’ struggle for independence from Britain). If the vast majority of the people of Taiwan demand self-determination and separation from China and the establishment of an independent state, we would support them sincerely and resolutely. Why? Because the right to selfdetermination is, firstly, inseparable from democracy, which proletarian revolutionaries also support; second, such a movement, provided it has a broad mass base, would have the immediate effect of overthrowing reactionary Kuomintang rule; third, the question of whether independence would be beneficial to the people of Taiwan and the Taiwanese revolution should be left to the greatest people in Taiwan to determine, in the course of their struggle.8 Uncle Gen criticised the ccp for ignoring the Taiwanese people’s opposition to incomers and its sense of nationality and for treating the Taiwan question as an issue between the ccp and Kuomintang or between China and the United States, by opposing the Taiwan people’s right to decide their own destiny. He criticised this as “another form of national oppression”. He also criticised the ccp’s idea of “socialism in one country” and its “Great-Han chauvinism”.9 When Qian Yongxiang returned to Taiwan in 1982, more than two years after the Formosa Incident (December 1979), the island was still under martial law. Ideological controls were so severe that young people’s understanding of Marxism was virtually nil. But although the Formosa Incident resulted in the sentencing of dozens of activists, supporters of the dangwai movement remained active in the underground. When Qian met with his dangwai friends, he was warned by a concerned colleague to avoid getting into trouble. The intelligence service was monitoring political activists and their friends. According to Qian, those intellectuals opposed to the Kuomintang had not the slightest interest in Marxist or Trotskyist criticisms of the Communist revolution. They were primarily interested in how to break the Kuomintang’s one-party dictatorship and how to avoid detection by is intelligence agency. In July 1987, after the lifting of martial law, leftist political groups began springing up in Taiwan. Groups such as the Labour Party and the Association

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.

374

cheng

for Taiwan Social Studies, including its publication A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies,10 attempted to organise workers and build a critical discourse. Qian participated in the Radical Quarterly. Later, his research interests turned to the development of liberalism in Taiwan, mainly by Professor Yin Haiguang, and he was labeled as a liberal scholar by his friends, although he himself rejected this label. While studying in England, Qian had translated Ernest Mandel’s Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory (1973) into Chinese. Uncle Gen edited his translation, which was published by the Hong Kong Trotskyist Xinda Press. It was not until 1998 that the book reappeared in Taiwan, at Taipei’s Tangshan Press and published under the pen name Chang Nailie. Clearly the political climate at the time was not yet conducive to the spread of Marxism. The book was considered a classic in Europe and the United States, but in Taiwan it received little or no attention. I myself returned to Taiwan in 1995. Given my association since 1982 with the feminist organisation Awakening11 and my research interest in the sociology of gender, I chose to engage in gender studies as a starting point for my re-entry after almost two decades abroad into Taiwanese society. As for my research on the history of the ccp and my study of Marxism and Trotskyism, I was unable to find anyone in Taiwan with whom to discuss such issues, so I practised my leftism by participating in the women’s movement and working in gender education.

The Social Movement before and after the Wild Lily Student Movement After the lifting of martial law, Taiwan saw an explosion of new social forces. Since the mid-1970s, some left-wing groups and trade unions had been advocating Marxism. They included the Labour Party, which remains a left-wing party even now, and two now defunct magazines, China Tide and The Human World.12 10

11 12

These leftist groups were known as Laodong Dang (the Labour Party), and Taiwan shehui yanjiu xuehui (Association for Taiwan Social Studies). The former, established in March 1989, advocated socialism and unification with China. Funü xizhi (Women’s awakening), Taiwan’s first feminist organisation, was established in 1982. Xiachao zazhi (China Tide) was published in February 1976, formed Xiachao United Association in 1990 and was preparing to establish a political party in 2020. Renjian zazhi (The Human World) was published in November 1985 and closed in September 1989. Both of them criticised Taiwan independence and advocated Marxism and Chinese nationalism, that is unification with China.

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

375

These put forward leftist arguments to irrigate the barren ideological soil created by the strict control exercised by the Kuomintang in the course of its fiftyyear rule, despite government suppression and exclusion and fear and indifference on the part of the general public. Even given the many arguments and splits, their efforts to sow the seeds of socialist thought should not be forgotten. Because of their opposition to the Kuomintang and US-Japanese imperialism, these leftist groups and parties regarded Mao Zedong and the ccp regime as the true practitioners of Marxism. Their identification with the ccp, coupled with Chinese nationalist sentiments, led them to believe that China was the leftists’ motherland. Their logic was understandable. Unfortunately, they did not know that in the early days of the ccp’s consolidation of power, the Trotskyists had been imprisoned simply because they had different ideas about the revolution. The prc’s one-party dictatorship and constant intra-party struggles also led to the Mao cult and Great Han chauvinism. After 26 years in prison, the Trotskyists’ voices had been silenced in China, and only a few had left the country before 1949 and gone into exile in Hong Kong, Macao and Paris, where they continued to issue publications. In the 1990s, one young person in Taiwan, who had been influenced by Marxism, had the opportunity to contact the Hong Kong Trotskyists. As a result, he entered on a different path from other leftists in Taiwan. His name was Yang Weizhong [i.e., Yang Wei-chung]. Yang was a knowledgeable and charismatic leader. Unfortunately, while on vacation with his family in New Zealand in 2018, he drowned while trying to save his daughter. According to Qian, Yang identified as a Trotskyist. He established the only Trotskyist organisation active in Taiwan between the 1990s and 2006. Yang’s interest in critical thinking began at high school, with the reading of banned books such as Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q and Diary of a Madman. He sought out banned books and read much left-wing literature. In March 1990, he was the first high school student to attend the Taiwan’s first student movement, Wild Lily.13 By that time, he was already active in a high school association and in organising book clubs.14 13

14

Yebaihe xueyun (The Wild Lily Student Movement) was a series of student movements between 16 and 22 March 1990. At the height of the movement, nearly 6,000 students from all over Taiwan gathered at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial square (now Liberty Square) to stage a sit-in. They put forward four major demands, including Dissolution of the National Assembly, Abolition of the Provisional Articles, and Convening of a National Assembly, and also demanded a timetable for political and economic reform. This was the first largescale student protest in Taiwan, and it had a considerable impact on democratic politics. See Lin (ed.) 1990. Hong 2011.

376

cheng

According to a participant in the student movement, Yang “had a sincere look and spoke in a low voice. […] He spoke with extreme clarity about the need for revolution”. In the late 1990s, most Wild Lily activists joined the dpp, while the labour movement declined as industries relocated to China and Southeast Asia. However, Yang continued to advocate leftwing ideas among “small groups of people” interested in social justice. He continued to work in university student groups and to seek out and nurture seedlings for reform, to participate in promoting [Taiwan’s] first autonomous national trade union, and to organise trade union activists from all over Taiwan. He even traveled to Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and Europe to exchange and learn from the leftists in other countries. He and his comrades founded several left-wing groups and publications, including Lianjie (Link) and Hong Yanshu (Red mole), and the first organisation in Taiwan to reflect on capitalist globalisation, Guanzhu quanqiuhua zixun zhongxin (Globalisation Information Centre). His aim was to proclaim that “another better world is possible”.15 Wan Yuze, a student at National Taiwan University who participated in Yang’s book club in 1999–2006, recalled that, “Yang would start not by talking about left-wing theories but by leading us to participate in social movements, so that we slowly came to understand class oppression, and only then would he introduce relevant articles in the book club. The first work I read was by Ernest Mandel. Later, I read books related to the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin in the Communist Party of Soviet Union (cpsu), and Chinese Trotskyists criticism of the ccp”. Yang also engaged in the labour movement. He served as director of the Publicity Department and a researcher at the National Federation of Industrial Unions, convened an action group formed by members of the Taiwan Railway Union, and was a leader of the National Independent Labour Union. In 1999, he founded the Workers’ Democracy Association. Reflecting on her participation in the Workers’ Democracy Association as a student, Qiu Yufan said: At the time, we didn’t call ourselves Trotskyists. We simply felt that we cared about social issues. The group was very active. We went down onto the streets to protest, and we read relevant articles or books to deepen our understanding. We discussed Marxist works in the context of our actions. We participated in the anti-nuclear movement, opposed high tuition fees,

15

Ibid.

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

377

staged sit-ins in front of the Jiancha Yuan (The Control Yuan)16 for a week, and supported railway union in its struggle against privatisation. The two concepts I learned in this organisation that I still find useful today were internationalism and international ties, and workers’ democracy. According to the Workers’ Democracy Association, reform had to start at the grassroots. […] We spent a lot of time communicating with the workers, trying to understand their grievances and needs, and organising and participating in union meetings to engage them in discussion. In order to oppose the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, some of us joined the Taiwan Automobile Union and the Taiwan Railway Union. […] Pursuing grassroots democracy meant respecting each other’s opinions, discussing our different views, and reading books to clarify our ideas. […] Even Yang, our senior organiser, eschewed the style of a leader giving orders. He was one of us, not our leader. We all spoke and argued freely, which made me feel that I could learn and grow. I had a woman friend who joined another group that was also very influential in the labour movement at the time, but she later quit, because she couldn’t stand the pressure to follow the leader and was constantly criticised for expressing doubts. In 2002, Yang and the activist Sun Qiongli set up a Globalisation Information Centre to promote the anti-globalisation movement in Taiwan and to understand the impact the World Trade Organisation (wto) on Taiwan. Qiu recalled: Some of us were not attracted by Trotskyism itself. However, given the many social problems Taiwan faced, we found Marxist explanations very convincing. For example, imperialism was a capitalist way of continuing to colonise us. That’s why we started to oppose globalisation. In 2002, we held a three-day camp to promote the anti-globalisation movement in Taiwan, and to understand the impact of globalisation after Taiwan’s accession to the wto. On 27 October 2001, several members of the Workers’ Democratic Association and leaders of the labour movement went to Hong Kong to participate in the Anti-Global Poverty Front. However, Yang Weizhong, Sun Qiongli, Lin Houjun,

16

Jiancha Yuan (The Control Yuan) is the highest supervisory authority in the Republic of China.

378

cheng

Hong Jianing, and others were sent back to Taiwan as soon as they landed in Hong Kong. Only Qiu and Wan were lucky enough to get through immigration. In Hong Kong, Qiu and Wan met with So Tat (aka Xiang Qing), a veteran leader of the Trotskyist Pioneer Group, Au Loong Yu (aka Lau Yu Fan), and Lam Chi Leung, a member of the younger generation of Trotskyists. Xiang Qing was a veteran Trotskyist leader, and he and Lau Yu Fan translated many works by Trotsky and written many articles on the history of the Chinese Trotskyists and the Communist movement. They had some influence on the younger generation in Hong Kong. Lam Chi Leung’s establishment of the online database Chinese Marxist Internet Archive (marxists.org) opened a window for young people in the Chinese-speaking world who thirsty for knowledge about the left. Between 2000 and 2005, Link and New Seedlings (Hong Kong) co-published Mandel’s From Class Society to Communism: An Introduction to Marxism (2002), Robert Went’s Globalisation: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses (2002), translated by Yuze Wan, and Wang Fanxi’s book on Mao Zedong Thought (2003), as well as a selection of short articles by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and Mandel (2005). These books are still in print. The anti-globalisation movement continued for four or five years, and the Workers’ Democratic Association gradually expanded. Its core activists at that time numbered around a dozen, and it could mobilise more than 100 people in its heyday in 2005. The hosting of a wto conference in Hong Kong in December 2005 attracted many anti-globalisation activists. Comrades from Taiwan joined the more than 4,000 protesters from various countries. This time, they were not prevented from entering Hong Kong. In 1998, Yang planned to visit the Chinese Trotskyist leader Zheng Chaolin, a member of the Shanghai Political Consultative Conference, but learned after boarding his plane that Zheng Chaolin had died. In early 2003, Yang was about to go to the UK to visit Wang Fanxi, but again he received news of Wang Fanxi’s death shortly before he left. Yang deeply regretted not being able to meet with the two Trotskyist leaders. The activism of the Workers’ Democratic Association in Taiwan attracted the attention of the UK-based Committee for a Workers’ International (cwi) in Hong Kong, with which it had been in contact for some time. According to Wan, Some of them came to Taiwan and held meetings with our group. They wanted to incorporate us as the Taiwan branch of cwi. But their working style was very brutal and authoritarian. When discussing issues with the cwi, they used words like “control” to describe their relationship with

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

379

local sections. They were typical white Europeans, treating us as uncivilised Asians and adopting the superior posture of “Marxist expert”. The cwi criticised comrades of the Workers’ Democratic Association for making approaches to ngo s and for not “sticking to the workers’ line”, and alienated them with their attitude and style. Why did the Workers’ Democratic Association come to an end? According to Wan, Yang’s decision in 2006 to marry Chen Yizhen, the daughter of the leader of a capitalist consortium, came as a shock to observers. Comrades thought that labour and capital were antagonistic to one another, and some left the organisation. Another factor was that in 2007 Yang allowed the Disan shehuidang (Third society party)17 to nominate him as a candidate for the parliamentary elections. The organisation soon folded. Although the Workers’ Democratic Association lasted for no more than five or six years, the seeds it planted then blossomed 20 years later. Qiu Yufan became one of the few professors of labour law in Taiwan. Wan Yuze also became a professor, who interpreted and promoted Marxism in Taiwan. Lin Houjun became a labour rights lawyer and Hong Jianing became an awardwinning journalist. Wan devoted much time and effort to Marxist studies. Besides translating some anti-globalisation books, he has published many books and articles on Marxism in the course of the last decade. He recalls why he was attracted to Trotskyist ideas: My earliest contacts with the left were with China Tide and the Labour Party, not the Trotskyists. […] I was relatively close to them. Later, I could not accept the Labour Party’s strong sense of Chinese nationalism. It was uncritical of the ccp and very disparaging of liberal values. The concerns I had in regard to the Labour Party were answered in Trotskyist literature. What I read about the development of Trotskyism in the Soviet Union and China, including Wang Fanxi’s book on Mao Zedong Thought, had a big influence on me. The Trotskyists believe that liberalism is something to inherit and transcend. I think that this was also Marx’s view. Marx did not deny liberalism, but many leftists in Taiwan do. […] Since 2001, I have been read intensively, including Trotskyist and Chinese Trotskyist historical documents as well as some more theoretical literature. The ma disser17

The Disan shehuidang was established in 2007 and forced to closure in 2008. The party stated that there were two major groups in Taiwan society: those who lived in Taiwan before 1945 and those who immigrated to Taiwan between 1945 and 1949. See Chou 2007.

380

cheng

tation I wrote in 2004 was based on Mandel’s theoretical framework. I was more influenced by Trotskyism at the time. Trotsky emphasises class analysis, attaches importance to workers’ democracy, and is uncompromising in his criticism of the state and bureaucracy. I attribute this to the spirit of classical Marxism. Many label Trotskyism negatively, as sectarian. We have to explain this. Actually, Trotskyism was a label invented by the Stalinists. I therefore prefer the term classical Marxism. The influence of Wang Fanxi on the Workers’ Democracy Association is clear from Wan Yuze’s preface to three volumes of Wang Fanxi’s selected works published by City University of Hong Kong Press in 2018. He wrote: For those of my generation baptised into left-wing thinking, Wang Fanxi has an irreplaceable meaning. Because of the long absence of left-wing thought from Taiwan, many Taiwanese concerned about the future of democracy and social reform were naturally influenced by the liberalism represented by Yin Haiguang and others. I, too, grew up following this intellectual trajectory. As I grew older and participated in various social movements, I became more and more attracted to left-wing thinking and tried to understand the development of Marxism in Taiwan and China. However, the official ideology and historical writings of the ccp or the Soviet Union have never really convinced me. It was against this background that I came across and learned about the Chinese Trotskyist movement in which Wang Fanxi and others were active. I immediately found it refreshing. For me at the time, Wang’s work (and indeed the entire international Trotskyist tradition), although a “minor narrative” that had long been suppressed, seemed to open a window that allowed me to re-explore the history of modern China and the history of international communism in the midst of the suffocating “Communist civil war” and to rethink the relationship between Taiwan, China, and East Asia. Later, together with some like-minded friends, I republished Wang Fanxi’s book on Mao Zedong Thought in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as a contribution to the dissemination of his ideas. The almost endless internal disputes and divisions of international Trotskyism are often demoralising, and it may no longer be so important to stick to the Trotskyist label. However, the Trotskyists’ intellectual legacy remains rich in practical implications. Taking my current academic and political concerns as an example, what I am most concerned about is how

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

381

to break through what I call the “mirror construction of the Cold War” (where both sides are apparently incompatible but in reality, each needs the other to authenticate itself, and each accepts certain core premises, including the premise that “socialism” equals one-party dictatorship, statism, and centralised planned economy), and to put an end to Cold War thinking. This “mirror construction” did not disappear with the Cold War but continued to dominate and shape the cognitive structure of many, thus shutting down political imagination. For me, the socialist tradition that the Trotskyists (or at least some of them) represent or participate in is precisely the ‘bottom-up socialism’ (to borrow Hal Draper’s phrase) that was suppressed in the conditions of the Cold War. Such socialism will not uncritically embrace the “rise of great powers” but is always wary of the state and statism; its core value is not that a few elites or party leaders should take charge of the revolutionary cause but that it does not forget Marx’s point that “the emancipation of the working class must be fought for by the working class itself”. Instead of strengthening the power of the bureaucracy in the name of revolution, we should establish universal autonomy and realise the “association of free people”, as Marx put it. I have always believed that such a socialist tradition provides valuable intellectual resources that make it possible for us to break through rigid Cold War structures and discover multiple paths to liberation. Karl Korsch once said that “socialism, in both its ends and its means, is a struggle to achieve freedom”. Wang Fanxi’s words and deeds throughout his life vividly embodied this spirit. Now, we have finally seen the release of Wang’s Collected Works, which will allow his thoughts to be passed on from generation to generation. I hope that through this anthology, younger generations of readers in the Chinese world will be able, independently and critically, to re-evaluate the rights and wrongs of Wang Fanxi, the Chinese Trotskyists, and the international left, and to explore the dynamics of social change by way of them.18

The Younger Generation of the Post-Sunflower Movement The Sunflower Movement began on March 18, 2014, when a group of students occupied the Legislative Yuan (or Parliament), but soon many concerned civic groups and individuals joined in. Tens of thousands gathered daily outside the Legislative Yuan to hold discussions, stage sit-ins, and sleep on the streets 18

Wan Yuze, “Xu 3”, (Preface 3) in Wang 2018, vol. 3, pp. xiii–xiv.

382

cheng

in solidarity with the students. The occupation lasted 585 hours and was the largest act of civil disobedience since the 1980s. The flashpoint came when Kuomintang legislators tried to force through a more open trade agreement with China. The agreement, if signed, would have opened up 64 sectors of the Taiwanese economy, from financial services to barbershops, to Chinese capital. In return, China would have opened up more than 80 industries to Taiwanese investment. The agreement would have brought great benefits to both Taiwanese and Chinese capitalists, but would at the same time have seriously impacted Taiwanese small businesses. The general public was outraged by the prospect of such an agreement happening without a proper democratic process, and felt that they were being sold out by the government. The public’s anger at that time was compounded by years of accumulated dissatisfaction with the economic inequality brought about by the effects of globalisation in Taiwan. When the students rose up in protest, most of the population woke up to the fact that Taiwan’s future would be doomed if Chinese capital were allowed to dominate the economy. This was especially true people under 40, who even feared that they would be forced in future to emigrate to China to find work. As a result of the Sunflower Movement, the Kuomintang lost the general election in 2016 and the trust and support of the younger generation. Awareness of the issue of Taiwan’s national sovereignty reached new heights. A survey showed that 58.2 per cent of people identified as Taiwanese in 2016 and 64.3 per cent in 2020. During the Sunflower Movement, I encountered a group from Socialist Action (sa) handing out leaflets among the protesters. They turned out to be the Hong Kong branch of the cwi. In the following years, Taiwan’s political landscape changed greatly. Several small parties emerged on the political scene. Several small progressive parties emerged on the political scene. They included the Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, the New Power Party, the Taiwan State-building Party and Taiwan Obasan Political Equality Party. One former member of Workers’ Democratic Association, Qiu Yufan had participated while studying in Germany in the German trade-union movement, where she met some cwi members, and was initially impressed by their high degree of internal democracy. Back in Taiwan, she met up with other cwi supporters who had been attracted to the cwi’s politics as a result of their participation in the Sunflower Movement. Despite her initial enthusiasm, Qiu later recalled that: when members of the organisation in Taiwan wanted to hold a meeting, they had to invite a superior from Hong Kong to be the main speaker. The

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

383

branch in Taiwan had no decision-making power on important issues and had to obey the leadership in Hong Kong. Funds received in Taiwan had to be paid over to Hong Kong. I was particularly surprised that they were still discussing such outdated issues as whether or not women should have the right to have an abortion. Later, Qiu gave up her ties to the group. In the final section of this article, I would like to introduce three Marxist or Trotskyist groups currently active in Taiwan. I conducted online interviews with leaders and members of the three organisations.

A. International Socialist Road (isa, Taiwan) After the Sunflower Movement, the Hong Kong branch of cwi, Socialist Action (sa), gradually accumulated supporters in Taiwan, and in 2016 they formally established International Socialist Forward (isf), the cwi’s section in Taiwan. Three years later, in July 2019, the cwi split, and in February 2020 the majority faction changed its name to International Socialist Alternative (isa). The Taiwan section followed suit and adopted the same name, International Socialist Road (isa) Taiwan. In its founding manifesto, the isa argued that the cwi “represents a conservative trend that has long ignored ‘emerging’ social movements and other important Marxist issues (such as climate change, environmental issues, women’s movements, and anti-racism). Although it claims to focus on the workers’ and trade-union movements, they are actually divorced from them”.19 Why did the Taiwan cwi branch join the isa in 2020? According to the people I interviewed, the Taiwan section had long been dissatisfied with the leadership style of the cwi International Secretariat: Its international leadership [in the UK] was not democratic, and the Taiwan section had to obtain approval to post on Facebook. It expelled Taiwan cadres who held dissenting views and labelled them as “reactionaries”. The International Secretariat valued only the workers’ movement and ignored and even opposed “identity politics” of the sort that had emerged in Taiwan.

19

Gong guo wei zhengshi gengming wei isa (cwi was formally renamed International Socialist Alternative [isa]).

384

cheng

B. International Socialist Forward (isf) By the end of 2020, the isa branch in Taiwan, which had about 30 members, had split due to internal disputes. The group that split away reverted to its old name from 2016, International Socialist Forward (isf). They cut their tie to the international headquarters and became an independent and autonomous Taiwanese political group. The isa’s and the isf’s official lines or more or less the same.20 Both organisations oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the corporatisation of Taiwan’s railways. Both are concerned about the climate crisis, support gender equality and gay marriage, criticise the high cost of housing, criticise the ccp’s “Zerocovid” policy, and agree on the issue of the Taiwanese right to national selfdetermination. The people I interviewed provided information about the debates between the two factions in late 2020. It seems that the split in the Taiwan isa was less about politics than about the cwi’s style of leadership and decision-making process, which some thought insufficiently democratic. The split was the result of dissatisfaction that had accumulated over time. isf members interviewed agreed with me that there was no political disagreements between the isa and the isf.

C. International Marxist Tendency (imt) More recently, a new Trotskyist organisation, the Taiwan branch of the International Marxist Tendency (imt), emerged, and in October 2020 it launched a Chinese website, Huaohua (Spark). Its website carried translations of the writings of Ted Grant and Alan Woods, who founded the imt. It also published a youth magazine. The current membership is very small, and focuses on political education and trade-union work. Members of these three Trotskyist organisations told me that they learned about Trotskyism from the Chinese section of the Marxist Internet Archive (mia) created by Lam Chi Leung in Hong Kong. A small number said they had known about Wang Fanxi, including Wang’s book on Mao Zedong Thought. The members of these three organisations view the question of the Taiwanese right to national self-determination differently from the older generation

20

isa’s official magazine is Shehui zhuyizhe (The socialists), isf’s is Daohuozhe (Prometheus).

trotskyism and taiwan (2022)

385

of leftists, who were more favourable to the Chinese Communist regime. They had a different concept of national identity. The following article, “Communists and the Taiwan Independence Movement”, was published on April 5, 2022 on imt Taiwan’s Spark website.21 Members of the two other organisations seemed not to disagree with its positions. This new direction is consistent with Wang Fanxi’s ideas about Taiwan’s future revolution, as expressed in the pamphlet published in 1977. If we look at the material basis for Taiwan’s independence from a historical angle, we can observe that in Taiwan’s more than 120 years of separation from China, its ethnic groups formed an autonomous entity against a background of constant oppression. Because the target of the confrontation was nationalist Japanese imperialism and the Greater China ideology of the [Kuomintang’s] Republic of China (roc), the Taiwan independence movement became a mass movement based on the issue of transclass national self-determination. Precisely because of the diverse class nature of the independence movement, the left has managed to establish a foothold in it. If Taiwan’s nationhood is not decided by its residents, proletarian political primacy will not be possible. In other words, the vague political goal of Taiwan independence can only be accomplished through social revolution, since Taiwan is already an independent bourgeois political entity. Social revolution in Taiwan will never create a “proletarian Republic of China” but only a “workers’ democratic Republic of Taiwan”. […] Our organisation follows in the Marxist tradition defended by Trotsky: socialist revolution is a worldwide, global revolution from which no nation can extricate itself [by remaining within] a national framework. However, in the course of this struggle that small nations can achieve liberation and freedom from imperialist oppression. We believe that it is within this framework that the goal of self-determination of the Taiwanese working class can be realised. An independent socialist republic of Taiwan must establish close ties with the world revolution, and only liberation of the entire region can guarantee the liberation of Taiwan as a small nation. We therefore believe that a transnational Socialist Alliance

21

Gongchan zhuyizhe yu Taiwan duli yundong (Communists and Taiwan Independent Movement), Huohua, 25 April 2022.

386

cheng

should be formed on the basis of Asian revolution and equal and free dialogue among nations, in order to advance the socialist revolution against the imperialist countries.

Conclusion In Macao in the third quarter of the twentieth century, after the failure of his political plans in China and the imprisonment of his comrades, and after his move to Leeds in 1975, Wang Fanxi continued tirelessly to maintain a commentary on current affair, translate Trotsky’s writings, and write an influential and widely circulated memoir and a study on Mao Zedong Thought. Through his articles and books, he helped to arouse the enthusiasm of a younger generation for revolution. His article on Taiwan, long neglected, was actually an important contribution to the discussion of Taiwan’s political and social development, and his emphasis on Taiwan’s national autonomy was a good example of leftist wisdom. Today, in 2022, after a series of political struggles on the part of the Taiwanese people, Taiwan has developed and stabilised as a bourgeois democracy, and leftist ideas are no longer taboo. The debate about Taiwan’s national identity and autonomy also reached a new consensus in the course of the previous twenty years. Although few Taiwanese have a deep understanding of Marxism, it is no longer regarded as a scourge. For the left, the soil is more fertile than ever. Some of the demands raised by Marxist critics have been partly implemented under bourgeois democracy in Taiwan, but the scope of reform is naturally limited by the capitalist economic structure and social relations. If Wang Fanxi were alive, I have no doubt that he would want socialist education to continue, so that the working people can rise up against the Kuomintang and the ccp and the chauvinist idea of Han-Chinese unification to which they subscribe, leading to the transformation of capitalism in the direction of socialism. He would also expect the revolution in Taiwan to encourage the Chinese workers to rise up against the Communist bureaucracy. Such is also the expectation of international Marxists.

section g Chinese Trotskyists in the UK

∵

Introduction to Part 1, Section G In the mid-1970s, the Re-awakening Group, a small UK-based Chinese Trotskyist organisation, was established and led by John Shum and others originally from Hong Kong. In 1978, urged on by Wang Fanxi, it called for the organisational unification of all Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong. This section shows this group’s efforts to promote such unification. It also notes the role played by members of the British-Chinese community influenced by Wang Fanxi in far-left politics in the UK starting in the 1970s.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_043

Our Proposal for the Unification of Hong Kong’s Revolutionary Marxist Movement (1978) The Re-awakening Group, translated by Yang Yang 14 September 1978

This proposal by the Fuxing (Re-awakening) Group, a UK-based Trotskyist youth collective organised by John Shum [a leading Hong Kong Trotskyist in the 1970s] and other young overseas Chinese radicals originally from Hong Kong, urges the unification of the three Hong Kong Trotskyist groups (the rcp, the rml, and the ysg). Source: Neibu ziliao (Internal Material [of the rml]), vol. 1, no. 1, 13 October 1978, p. 8 (supplied by Au Loong-yu).

(1) In order to be able to take full advantage of the current political situation in Hong Kong and China, to restore our revolutionary movement and shift it in a positive direction as well as to regain influence, we consider it necessary that the handful of weak Trotskyist groups active in Hong Kong up to now should immediately merge. (2) Politically, the new organisation should embrace the programme of the Fourth International (fi) and, organisationally, endorse the principle of democratic centralism set out in the fi’s constitution. This is essential and a necessary condition for participating in the future unified organisation. All Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong should unite on these grounds, given that they claim to support the fi. Secondary differences should be resolved within the unified organisation in the course of the actual struggle and events. Given the present weakness of our organisation and movement, to try to resolve all differences immediately will only delay unification, or even prevent it altogether. (3) Political and organisational differences among the Chinese Trotskyists left over from the past should be studied and discussed and the lessons drawn. However, we firmly oppose making such a review a condition for unification. We believe that these questions should be discussed and resolved after unification. (4) We have heard that each of you is preparing to convene special conferences to discuss the question of unification. We earnestly hope that the

© The Re-awakening Group, transl. by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_0

our proposal for the unification

391

goal of launching these conferences is not to reinforce your organisational independence but is aimed at working towards a unified movement. We propose that each group allow representatives of the other groups to attend their conference and discuss how to promote the unification. (5) We are a Chinese youth group in the UK. In the three years since our founding, we have studied revolutionary Marxism and taken part in the revolutionary struggles of the British working class, from which we have also learned some lessons. Moreover, we have done some educational work and established a solidarity network among Chinese workers and students currently in the UK. In the course of these three years, we cannot claim any great achievements, but at least we have chosen revolutionary Marxism as our political orientation and we have gathered together a group of comrades who are determined to devote themselves to the cause of the Chinese revolution and world revolution. We will endeavour to continue this in future years. (6) Though we are currently working in Europe, we will eventually return to Hong Kong and China to serve the resurgent Chinese revolution. Because of this, we are deeply saddened when we view the current weakness of the Chinese Trotskyist movement in Hong Kong, which is becoming ever weaker due to its fragmentation. We hope that the three separate Hong Kong Trotskyist organisations and other individual comrades who are not affiliated to any of those three groups will unite as soon as possible, so that as an overseas group we can join the unified organisation and be led by it. We would like to submit the above recommendations to the Revolutionary Marxist League, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the Young Socialist Group.1 Please consider them and send us your reply. The standing committee of the Re-awakening Group

1 See Appendix 2: Key Organisations.

A Conversation between Jabez Lam and Zhang Shaoming “Remembering Genshu [Wang Fanxi] and Events in the Chinese Community in the UK” (2022) Jabez Lam and Zhang Shaoming April 2022

This dialogue between Jabez Lam (jl), a London-based Chinese community leader, and Zhang Shaoming (zsm), an ex-member of a British Trotskyist group, recalls Wang Fanxi’s later years in exile in the UK, and discusses their activities in the British-Chinese community and the part they played in British far-left politics starting in the 1970s.

zsm Before we started recording you spoke about the framework of East and Southeast Asian identity. Yes, this is an important emerging issue, which was not around when we were active in the Chinese community. jl from the 1970s until 2018, my work has been centred around “the Chinese community”. Moving to an East and Southeast Asian perspective has, for me, been a big journey after these forty-odd years. I’ve come to the realisation, looking back, that the concept of “the Chinese community”, especially in anti-racist work, has, especially over the last twenty-odd years, been hijacked by the Chinese Communist Party (ccp). Agents of the ccp have exploited the UK Chinese experience of discrimination to build their influence, perpetuate their distance from the experience of other oppressed ethnic minorities and small countries, and monopolised their identity.1 zsm Yes, the ccp has used UK Chinese people’s attachment to China’s ancient civilization and cultural traditions as a fishing net to capture them as “descendants of the dragon”, to align them with “Great Han” [Chinese] nationalism and its ethnocentric culture, as well as to legitimise the ccp itself as a promoter and custodian of that culture. zsm You and I both grew up in Hong Kong and then came over to the UK as students. I came a bit earlier than you, in the late 1960s. After three years

1 See Jabez Lam’s UK track record in Ed Sheridan, Hackney Citizen, 9 June 2020.

© Jabez Lam and Zhang Shaoming, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_045

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

393

of secondary school, I went to university and then became a teacher here in the UK. When I entered university in 1968, I knew very little about the People’s Republic and had not been exposed to politics at all. I had merely read a little about a Cultural Revolution in China in the UK newspapers and in magazines like The Economist. In my first week at Bristol University, the student union occupied the Senate House, the university’s administration building, in protest against the Vietnam War, I learnt afterwards. Such a baptism of fire! I still knew next to nothing, but thinking back, this was the time that the older generation of the British Far Left (people like Tony Cliff, Gerry Healy, etc.) was breaking through the traditional influence of the British Communist Party (cpgb) and making contact with many students radicalised by the Vietnam War. That was the era of then youthful leaders like Tariq Ali, etc. When did you first come to the UK? jl I first came to the UK in 1973, when the miners were on strike. zsm Yes, the miners had just won a big strike in 1972. They used mass pickets at Saltley Gate. jl I remember [then Prime Minister] Ted Heath imposing a three-day week in the winter of 1973/4. When Ted Heath was brought down in 1974, it made me wonder how it was possible for a trade union to bring down a government. zsm It was impossible for even someone so shy and sheltered from world affairs as I not to become affected by such a powerful tide of political turmoil. I remember Madame Binh from the National Liberation Front coming to address the student union as part of her European tour.2 She was a diminutive figure but awesome. Even so, I did not join any far-left organisation until after leaving university and starting to teach in a small town outside London. It was quite an isolated place, and I felt that if I did not make a decision to join, I would just probably drift away from politics. So I joined a small group called Workers Fight, through friends I knew. I empathised with their plight of being unfairly expelled from the International Socialists [is, now the Socialist Workers Party, swp].3

2 Madame Binh, i.e., Nguyen Thi Binh (1927–) is a Vietnamese revolutionary leader, diplomat, and politician. She signed the 1973 peace accords that eventually led to the end of the US intervention in Vietnam. 3 Workers Fight joined is in 1968 as a Trotskyist Tendency and was expelled in 1971, when it opposed the is’s opportunist turn to follow the cpgb’s stand against the UK joining the eec [European Economic Community], on the grounds that they wanted to win over militant shop stewards under the cpgb’s influence.

394

lam and zhang

jl

Din Wong (Huang Zihong)’s4 Workers Power (wp) group was also in is, wasn’t it? zsm They took up similar issues in is, regarding political left/right zigzags and internal democracy, before they too were expelled. The far left had a position of campaigning for a Socialist United States of Europe, in or out, while the cpgb was anti-eec. wf and then the Left Faction/Workers Power took up the lack of an internal discussion of the sudden change of position regarding Europe, an opportunistic turn aimed at shop stewards aligned with the cpgb. is also had a vacillating position over Ireland.5 Both groups were summarily expelled from the is as troublemakers. wf approached wp for discussions and the two groups fused in 1975 to form the International Communist League (icl). Up to that point, the British Far Left had kept on splitting. This was the first time two groups fused. I got to know Din around 1976, after the fusion. By then, both she and I had learned about Genshu,6 but I can’t remember exactly how we knew about him being in the UK. We both wanted to meet him. jl I think Genshu himself had learned from us that there were two UK Chinese comrades in different organisations, in other words, you and Din. Later, at the end of 1974, before Genshu’s arrival in Leeds, Johnny Shum came over from Hong Kong to the UK after visiting Paris to meet with Peng Shuzhi. Like us, he had been told as a child by his parents during the 1967 protests in Hong Kong not to kick tin cans and stay away from trouble. Johnny was politically active in Hong Kong around 1968/9, campaigning together with Ng Chung Yin [Wu Zhongxian] for Cantonese Chinese to be established as a second official language in Hong Kong

4 Din Wong came from Hong Kong to study in the UK in 1967, and became a teacher In Newham, London, in 1973. She was a founding member of Workers Power, formerly the Left Faction in the is (swp) from 1972–75. She was a trade union militant, feminist, revolutionary socialist and close friend of jl and zsm. On her retirement, she planned to undertake PhD research at Leeds University on Genshu’s legacy but became terminally ill and sadly passed away before she could do so. Her partner Steve McSweeney explained that her parents gave her the name Christina but she chose her own Chinese name when she was seven. Her nickname Din stemmed from her mother calling her Tina and her brothers saying she was always a noisy child. 5 is did not really appreciate the emerging issue of Irish nationalism, back in 1969. Steve explained that having later given unconditional and critical support to the republican struggle, they then labeled the ira campaign as “individual terrorism” in 1972, which triggered the formation of the Left Faction/wp. 6 Most young Trotskyists knew Wang Fanxi as Genshu (Uncle Gen), a name derived from one of Wang’s aliases, Lian’gen.

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

395

and against poverty, etc. They launched the 70’s Biweekly magazine. This campaign, which led to Chinese becoming Hong Kong’s second official language,7 radicalised a group of Hong Kong youths. Johnny recalled that Genshu and Uncle Lau (Lou Guohua) sought them out, came up to the magazine’s office in Wanchai, and brought several big bags of political literature for them to read. That’s how he met Genshu. The 70’s group had big political discussions between two broad tendencies, anarchism and Trotskyism. While Mok Chiu Yu [Mo Zhaoru] maintained his anarchist stance, Shum and Ng inclined more and more towards Trotskyism. Johnny’s trip to Paris was specifically to seek out Peng, a renowned Chinese veteran Trotskyist. Shum then moved to London and decided to stay on when he heard Genshu was coming to the UK. He worked part-time in the Wet Market in Golders Green, together with a bunch of other Hong Kong youths like Bobby Chan, Ah Chu, and Franko. Leung Yiu Chung came later. When Genshu first came, he stayed briefly with Johnny in London, before going up to Leeds. zsm I remember that when Genshu applied to come to the UK, the Home Secretary allowed him in on condition that he did not get involved with politics. jl Greg Benton in Leeds had written to Genshu in Macao to ask if he was interested in coming to the UK. Greg then applied for him to come to Leeds University as a guest lecturer. Genshu told me that he was keen to come because he could then be in better contact with Amnesty International, to campaign for Chinese comrades imprisoned inside China, particularly Zheng Chaolin, to be adopted as Prisoners of Conscience. He said he was supposed to deliver three lectures at Leeds but actually delivered only two, including one in York. Greg had arranged for Genshu to live with him in Leeds. In 1974, the Tory government has been replaced by Labour, so it was Merlyn Rees, the Labour Home Secretary who subsequently granted him leave to remain – Greg will be much clearer about this.8 I recall that he was only in London for a matter of weeks, but Johnny arranged for many young people from Hong Kong to meet him.

7 The Hong Kong Government declared Chinese as the second official language. This was not simplified script and Putonghua, but traditional script and Cantonese, which was the mother tongue of most of Hong Kong’s population. 8 Merlyn Rees was appointed Home Secretary in 1976 and remained in this post until Labour’s electoral defeat in 1979.

396

lam and zhang

zsm I did not move to live and work in London until 1976, but I seem to remember coming up to Johnny’s place in North West London. jl Very soon after Genshu arrived, a comrade called Sakai from the Japanese section of the Fourth International (fi) came over to Europe, probably to attend a conference of the fi. The two of them had a lot of political matters to discuss, but the youth around then did not have much understanding of these discussions and asked really elementary questions. In response, they delivered talks in the form of a short summer school, about the basics of Marxism, in a room in Royal Holloway College booked for a week. Topics included what is socialism, what is the social nature of the Chinese regime – capitalism or the remnants of feudalism. I remember the title but not the content. Afterward he moved up to Leeds to live with Greg and I went up to visit him. Not long after that, he vomited more than a pint of blood after a meal. Everyone was extremely worried, and Greg had him taken by ambulance to hospital, where he stayed for several weeks. Genshu told me that ever since his thirties, he had this stomach problem, and vomiting blood was nothing new to him. Of course, Greg and Dora Benton had never witnessed such a severe ailment. Genshu said that one real benefit in coming to the UK was that his illness (most probably a stomach ulcer) was fully cured and did not recur for many years, [until his last days.] He also said that his stay in hospital had affected him in another way – when he became older and less able to manage living by himself alone, it was suggested that he should move to a residential home. He strenuously refused to do so, giving as his reason the racism, he had experienced during his stay in hospital, where he was the only non-white person on the ward. The other patients swore at him and abused him with racist comments. This deeply engrained racism among these white workingclass elderly patients made a very deep impression on him. While he understood everything they were saying, his way of dealing with it was to pretend not to understand English, rather than get into pointless arguments. zsm Well that was in the 1970s, but after so many decades, even today the London police have not changed much as far as racism is concerned. jl His health was quite good in those earlier years and he travelled down to London once or twice a year. He would only stay for a short while, never more than a couple of weeks, as he was keen to return to Leeds, where he was getting letters from overseas. zsm I became a sympathiser and then a member of a far-left group without once reflecting on my Chinese identity or rather on my background as

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

397

a Chinese person from Hong Kong. Of course, fellow students and comrades knew I was from Hong Kong, but we just got on with the work. As wf at that stage was somewhat closer to the politics of the American swp,9 my first readings about the Chinese Revolution were Peng’s writings in US-swp bulletins and the book Trotsky on China, which he edited. These were my only sources, and as they were from an authoritative veteran of the Trotskyist movement, I accepted Peng’s views rather uncritically and learned very little about other Chinese Trotskyists. Peng tended to write all about himself and hardly ever mentioned anyone else, other than to be quite dismissive of Chen Duxiu, as someone who had abandoned and dropped out of revolutionary politics. So you can imagine how shaken up I was on learning of Genshu’s existence and then actually reading his memoirs. Through his memoirs, I saw how perceptive, generous, and fair he was in his portrayal of others in the movement and how modest he was about himself. His deep reflections on the Chinese Revolution and the fate of the Chinese Trotskyist movement were in complete contrast to Peng’s writings, which were all about him having been correct about everything all the time. I was very deeply moved. zsm Din and I drove up in my old Beetle to visit Genshu quite a few times in those three to four years in the late 1970s. By that time, Workers Fight and Workers Power had split and we were in different political organisations. wp held a position that China was state capitalist and wf held that China was a deformed workers’ state. I don’t recall us discussing anything heavily political with Genshu, probably because of that. We just spent time with him, keeping him company, as if visiting an elderly uncle. We listened to him recollecting past events and were introduced to various texts by him, but we were not sufficiently advanced politically to ask him key questions about the social nature of the regime or how China was changing after Mao’s death. Genshu said to me that his most important work was not his memoirs but his study of Mao Zedong Thought. He told me how much he would like to see it translated into English.10 I did have a go, but I soon found it too challenging. I realised quickly that I did not have a sufficient background in reading Marx and Lenin, so when their writings were cited in Genshu’s critique, in Chinese, I had great difficulty locating them and 9 10

The US-swp was more critical of Maoism than the usfi majority, for example. Mao Zedong Thought has since been translated by Gregor Benton and was published in 2020. See Wang 2020.

398

lam and zhang

putting them into context. I did learn from reading his critique that Mao was strongly influenced by his reading of Chinese classics but had hardly read any works by Marx or Lenin, and often just studied Stalin’s works. Mao for me remained a puzzle – as a novice member of a Trotskyist organisation I just assumed that Mao, as a follower of Stalin, was simply wrong. I had no idea how he managed to lead the ccp to victory, except by accident (that was Peng Shuzhi’s initial explanation of how Maoism conquered China). jl After the summer school workshops Genshu and his Japanese comrade Sakai gave, I thought about what we should be doing as socialists. In 1976/77 we set up a centre in Kilburn, with a small Gestetner printer, and churned out various leaflets and a magazine initially called Fuxing (“Reawakening”). The Hong Kong Government office produced a news bulletin. We Chinese Trotskyists produced Reawakening as a counter to this publication We produced several hundred copies of each monthly edition, covering labour-movement and political issues in the UK, e.g., opposing the National Front, the 1980 Nationality Act, the Abortion Bill, etc., as well as labour news from Hong Kong and China. jl In the late 1970s we were certainly very active, not just in community work but also in anti-racist work. We all took part in the 1978 Battle of Lewisham, through the various left organisations that we belonged to.11 The National Front was quite active then. zsm Din and I were both active through our political organisations and our respective nut [National Union of Teachers] branches (Newham and Lambeth), campaigning against the far-right National Front. The swp had set up the Anti-Nazi League (anl). I remember a big demonstration in April 1979 when the Left mobilised to stop the National Front marching, with police protection, through Southall in West London. Blair Peach, President of East London National Union of Teachers and an active member of the anl and the swp, was killed by the Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group on that day. jl in 1979–80, after Greg left Leeds and went to Amsterdam, Genshu rented a small room in a housing association in Leeds. He received housing benefit and social security. He had quite a secure and stable life, largely looking after himself, with Ima from Taiwan helping out and also us visiting him occasionally. Dora Benton cared for him, and gave up her own

11

A number of Chinese leftists joined the International Socialists (later the swp), the International Marxist Group (the UK section of the usfi), Workers’ Fight, Workers’ Power, etc.

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

399

job towards the end of his life so that she could visit him every day. At the time, we were organising the Hong Kong student fees campaign. Fung Kin-kee12 was president of the UK Federation of Hong Kong Students and was active in Bradford, quite close to Leeds, so we went across to see him quite often. It was during one of these visits that Genshu happily shared his good news with me – the UK Government had granted him indefinite leave to remain. His original visa was for one year. He became known to many academics in Leeds, who were very impressed with him and regarded him as a reliable source of reference, giving them clear answers to questions regarding the Chinese Revolution. When Greg and these academics planned to apply for his visa to be extended, he scoffed at the idea and said they should not waste their energy or have any illusions that a government of a capitalist country, knowing his background as a revolutionary, a Trotskyist, would permit him to stay. They suggested getting Lord Edward Boyle, Vice Chancellor of Leeds University, to write a supporting letter. Again, Genshu said that since the Vice Chancellor was a rightwinger, an ex-leading member of the Tory Party, he would never write such a letter. He was therefore surprised when the Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, a rightwinger in the Labour Party, agreed to extend his visa on a yearly basis provided that Leeds University would write a supporting letter each time, and that after four years, he would be able to apply for indefinite leave to remain in the UK. So eventually he was able to share his good news with me, after living for five years in Leeds. zsm Yes the traditional British establishment in those days was usually keen to show its tolerance for academic freedom. jl He had poured cold water on the idea for a long time, but when the decision eventually came through, he told me that their tolerance of him as an avowed revolutionary showed the maturity of the British ruling class. jl Given that he could now claim income support and housing benefit, he used to joke that he was now quite rich, for ever since leaving home as a teenager he had never had a steady monthly income. He had relied on writing to earn meagre sums, and on the party to sustain him when he was a fulltime revolutionary. Receiving weekly UK state benefits represented the most financially stable period of his entire life! 12

Frederick Fung Kin-kee is a former member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, from 1991 to 1997 and 2000 to 2016 and the former chairman of the pro-democracy Hong Kong Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood (adpl), from 1989 to 2007.

400

lam and zhang

zsm Let’s talk more about your work in the Chinese community. Towards the end of the 1970s, didn’t most of the UK Chinese community come from Hong Kong? Weren’t there some from Malaysia and Singapore? Britain had already recognised the prc, so there must have been an embassy, but there was also the Hong Kong Government Office, which offered textbooks to Chinese weekend schools. jl Before the 1980s, there were seafarers in British ports left over from the Second World War, but most migrants were from the New Territories. jl New Territories migrants were subsistence farmers whose marginal economic existence in Hong Kong was undermined in the postwar years by the Hong Kong’s government’s import of agricultural produce from Southeast Asia, to meet the needs of a much-expanded urban population including refugees from China. zsm So a strong push factor to leave Hong Kong rather than a big pull factor on the UK side? jl They took advantage of Hong Kong’s colonial status and became economic migrants, seeking to make more money in UK to send back to their wives and children in the villages, and thinking of returning after saving up enough money. They had little urban working experience in Hong Kong, and were not employed in mainstream sectors of UK society. They worked mainly in take-aways and small restaurants, teaming up with fellow relatives and clan members, living and working together. Much of what occurred in the community was through various self-help organisations, – Gung Wo (gonghe, “Republican”), Gung Tuan (gongtuan, “Syndicate”), Chi gung tong (zhi gong tang “Chinese Freemasons”), Tung Heung Hui (tongxiang hui “Home Village Association”), Ching Yee gung sheng hui (zhengyi gongshang hui “Justice Chamber of Industry & Commerce”) – and depended mainly on self-reliance, with little contact with mainstream UK society.13 The Chinese community was therefore very unlike the Windrush generation of black Caribbean migrants, specifically recruited after the war to fill vacancies on the buses, in the nhs, etc. Likewise, unlike Asians from East Africa (of Indian ancestry), who were also engaged in mainstream industries like transport and manufacturing.

13

Zhi Gongtang, or Hongmen, is also referred to as the Chinese Freemasons, whose headquarters today are in Nelson Street in Liverpool. Other community associations date back to previous centuries.

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

401

zsm Few must have joined UK trade unions then – even the relatively well organised Chinese seafarers experienced racism in the broader labour movement. Working long hours and socially isolated from each other (restaurants needed to be dispersed for economic reasons), our community lacked the cohesion and solidarity of other ethnic minorities. jl It might sound good to be running your own business, but in reality such employment was in many ways self-exploitation. Chinese in the UK ran largely cash-based businesses that remitted money back to their home villages, engaged in tax avoidance, and failed to contribute to their own social security (few paid National Insurance). The prewar London Chinatown in Limehouse was largely destroyed by bombing, and the current Chinatown was not established until the late 1960s and the early 1970s. zsm Later the restaurant owners got together to establish their Chinatown Association but they did little community welfare work. jl They merely sought to promote Chinatown as a commercial tourist business area. jl We stopped producing Reawakening after about two years. We reorganised as the Chinese Workers Group14 and produced Wah Yun Gong Yau (Huaren gongyou, Chinese Workmates). At the time, the Immigration Act of 1971 offered various paths for people from overseas to come to the UK, as either patrials or non-patrials. Many of the Chinese who came to the UK in the 1960s from the New Territories in Hong Kong had wives and children under 18 still in Hong Kong, and after the passing of this Act, most of them wanted to bring their families over rather than go back to Hong Kong to retire. Many New Territories families came to the UK in the mid 1970s, often with very little command of English and no understanding of their welfare rights. We started to produce Wah Yun Gong Yau to promote their rights as workers, because the UK welfare system did not cater to their needs. Was that a conscious directive from Genshu? Well, we simply became more aware after those workshops that as socialists we should work to address problems faced by the working class. zsm By the early 1980s, the trade union movement was under increasing attack from the Tory Government headed by Thatcher. The struggles

14

For Jabez’ work in the Chinese Workers Group and generally in the Chinese community: https://britishchineseheritagecentre.org.uk/en_uk/ph/interviews/bcwh_lamjabez.html

402

lam and zhang

were coming to a head. I also experienced a new awakening, during the 1981 Brixton protests.15 At a meeting of black community activists, I met and became a friend with Ann Chan, who was a locally rooted activist with a much stronger grasp of racism and black politics than myself. She was a supporter of a Maoist group, which had been quite influential in the 1960s but had faded away by the late 1970s. The leading figure in the group was Manu Manchanda, the first cpgb member expelled for siding with Mao in the Sino-Soviet split; his partner was Claudia Jones, the black activist deported from the USA in 1955 as a communist. Through Ann, I got to know him and we discussed politics quite a few times – by then he was elderly and rather ill, and Maoism in China was being eclipsed by the return of Deng Xiaoping to the leadership. He was dismissive of Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League (sll) and Tony Cliff’s is but was interested to learn that I was in a different group. While our discussions did not fundamentally change each other’s political stances, I learnt about his political struggles inside the cpgb and against racism in Britain, and he heard for the first time an account of the Chinese Revolution from a different perspective. He also did not know about the Chinese Trotskyists imprisoned by Mao. Ann and I joined up with you and others to establish The Chinese Information and Advice Centre (ciac). jl As a result of the Chinese Workers Group merging in 1981 with the Chinese Action Group (run by Ann Chan, Jim Lim, etc.), who were doing similar things, this evolved naturally in the direction of the formation of the Chinese Information and Advice Centre (ciac). zsm You became one of the centre’s founding staff, and Ann and I were on the management committee. We got Greater London Council (glc) funding16 a bit later on, didn’t we? jl Yes, in 1983. Before 1983, our funding applications were unsuccessful. There was little ethnic monitoring, and we could not provide data or answer questions about Chinese people in the London area. We had to demonstrate to the funding bodies how many beneficiaries there would be if our application was successful, but we were not in a position to

15 16

This refers to a series of clashes between mainly British-African youths and the Metropolitan Police in Brixton, London, between 10 and 12 April 1981. The Greater London Council (glc) was the top-tier local government administrative body for Greater London from 1965 to 1986. It invited grassroots organisations to apply for community development funding.

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

403

do so at that time. However, that changed quickly as a result of the revolt of Black youth in 1980–1 and the establishment of the Scarman Inquiry.17 zsm Yes, the Brixton riots and then the Scarman Report. jl Scarman acknowledged the existence of racial discrimination, which led to black youth feeling they had no stake in society. The report recommended that local authorities reach out and listen to ethnic minorities. Against such a background, the glc and other local councils established Ethnic Minority Units. zsm I remember Ansel Wong in particular, from the glc’s emu [Ethnic Minorities Unit].18 He came to speak at that big conference we organised in response to the Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee report on the Chinese Community in the UK.19 jl As we were getting on with our work with the Chinese diaspora here in the UK, Genshu showed an interest, but not at the level of the individual cases we tackled. jl So a small number of Chinese intellectuals, students, etc. engaged in community work. The first generation, in the early 1970s, were people like Ming Tsow (later the ilea inspector for bilingualism)20 and Shu Pao Lim,21 who worked for Camden social services and the Camden Chinese Community. We were the second wave of community activists. jl in the 1980s many centres opened – not just the ciac but four more centres initiated by us, in Islington, Haringey, and Newham and the Chinese Health Resource centre. In Camden too – the Chinatown centre (Dr Abraham Liu) and in Greenwich and Tower Hamlets. We benefited from the black struggle – the post-Scarman report favoured this development. 17 18

19

20 21

The Scarman Inquiry and Report was commissioned by the UK Government after the 1981 Brixton riots. Ansel Wong is a veteran political and cultural activist, a key influence in many black organisations, with an illustrious public sector career in the UK. He was Head of the glc’s Ethnic Minorities Unit and a co-founder of the UK’s Black History Month. G.B. Parliament 1985a. – a major two year Select Committee investigation into the Chinese population of Britain. The report made 77 recommendations, focusing on the need for more bilingual staff in Section 11 posts, improving English language teaching and ensuring sufficient Chinese language translation of social services information. It received a feeble and non-committal response. G.B. Parliament 1985b. Tsow Ming, “Chinese Mother Tongue Classes”, Corner and Johnson (eds) 1984, pp. 22–28; Tsow 1983. Lim, Shu Pao (1938–2008), ref: lma/4504, London Metropolitan Archives Collections Catalogue.

404

lam and zhang

zsm As the youthful voice of the Chinese community, we argued that, politically, we were also black, in the sense of being discriminated against as an ethnic minority. Other groups were not as politically active as us. In that context, we as the ciac were in quite an influential position. zsm Looking back, the eventual defeat of the National Union of Miners’ strike in 1984 by Thatcher’s government was the climax and the key turning point. After that, the trade union movement and the Left was on the defensive, and we knew our struggle was going to be tough and uphill. While ciac was not revolutionary activity, it did provide us with a platform to reach out politically to many people in the Chinese community. So we were in quite a good position to launch the Chinese Solidarity Campaign after the Tian’anmen Square massacre in June 1989. zsm Genshu had various conversations with us at the time of the protest movement in Tian’anmen Square and elsewhere in China in May–June 1989. You and I were quite active then setting up the Chinese Solidarity Campaign (csc), which organised a big London demonstration with over 10,000 people, as well as a national conference and picket and vigil outside the Chinese Embassy. jl Things developed quickly. I went up to visit him in Leeds just before the June 4 massacre in Beijing, and told him about the csc. He knew that some others in the campaign saw the struggle for democracy as about overthrowing the regime, which was deemed to be socialist. zsm At that time, we and the mainstream Trotskyist left still considered China to be a deformed workers’ state, despite Deng’s ascent to power and his implementation of economic reforms. We opposed the idea that the Beijing regime should be replaced by a form of capitalist democracy as in the West, although this thought was prevalent among students and academics from China stranded in the UK. jl Actually, such sentiments had already been expressed in 1979 and 1980, through the publication Zhongguo zhi chun (“China Spring”) that had emerged from the Democracy Wall movement and had its main presence in the US. I remember someone called Wang Bingzhang22 who came over from US to London and met us in our office in Goodge Street in Fitzrovia, from where we walked down to Chinatown for dinner. He kept counting the number of cars in the streets, guessing how much each

22

A democracy activist who escaped from China to the USA.

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

405

would cost, and kept saying that there were so few cars in Beijing and even people with bicycles were scared of other people stealing them. He seemed obsessed by the wealth he saw in London. jl When Zhou Enlai died in 1976, Genshu wrote an article on him. Like you, I was listening to his accounts of those years working in the ccp with Zhou, but I did not know enough to ask him meaningful questions. (In his memoirs he indicated how much effort Zhou had put into trying to persuade him to remain in the ccp.) I gained a deep impression of how passionately revolutionaries of his generation had dedicated their whole lives to the struggle, and how much comrades cared for each other, to the extent that their relationships were closer than with their own siblings. Decades later, his comrades, such as Uncle Bosun [Sun Liangsi] and Uncle Lau, who at time were in Hong Kong, continued to support him and, when necessary, to take care of his living expenses. Sun Liangsi had been a seaman (hence his nickname Bosun23) and he visited London a number of times, each time meeting up with Genshu, who would come down from Leeds. This lifelong comradeship between them is very moving for me. zsm I have an impression that Zhou and Deng and the other leading ccp cadres took the Chinese Trotskyists very seriously, and not just Chen Duxiu; they recognised and respected them as revolutionaries. Although they were in a different organisation with different politics, they were on the same side in the struggle against Chiang Kai-shek and the reactionaries. These other ccp leaders probably did not subscribe to Stalin’s slanders against the Left Opposition as counterrevolutionaries, although they would never have admitted this. Mao rounded up all the Chinese Trotskyists and imprisoned them, on the eve of Stalin’s birthday in 1952, to impress Stalin with his loyalty. jl I learned that during the Cultural Revolution, Zhou took measures to protect the imprisoned Trotskyists from being harassed. After Deng came to power, he reached out to Genshu to invite him to come home, to return to China to enjoy his remaining years, on account of his frailty and old age, but of course Genshu refused to do so unless Deng set the record straight about the decades of slanders and honoured the wrongly imprisoned Trotskyists as revolutionaries. Deng would not do so. It is remarkable that Deng was not that dogmatic and made this effort to look after a former comrade.

23

A bosun is a ship’s officer in charge of equipment and crew.

406

lam and zhang

jl

Around 1979, a group of us, including Johnny Shum and Kitty,24 were at Gavin MacFadyen’s place – Gavin was a producer for Granada tv’s World in Action (who later founded the Centre for Investigative Journalism). Genshu came down to stay, and we were all late getting up. We found him that morning, excited and agitated, pointing to a letter from Zheng Chaolin, his very first letter after his release from prison, after regaining his citizenship with freedom of movement (after 27 years). When we saw how incredibly happy he was, we were all moved. Their personal bond as comrades was so strong. Genshu really appreciated and admired Zheng, his energy in his 80s, his ability to look after himself, cook for himself, go sight-seeing, and lead an active life. In his early days in Leeds, Genshu frequently visited the Leeds University library, which has a big Chinese collection, and did lots of reading and writing. He later became quite despondent, as he became more and more frail and no longer had the energy to do what he wanted. He felt he was just wasting society’s resources, and he once told me that euthanasia was a good thing, that it gave people the right to decide and to retain their dignity. He said he dreaded entering a home for the elderly, which he saw as a real punishment, given his previous experience in hospital in Leeds. He even contemplated suicide and must have shared this with Zheng. Zheng wrote back and admonished him like a child, saying that a revolutionary must treasure life. How could you call yourself a revolutionary when you don’t even treasure your own life? This abruptly stopped Genshu from feeling sorry for himself. jl One evening, at a meeting at the Central London Law Centre, I received a phone call from Genshu. This was highly unusual – he hardly ever used the phone, let alone to ring me at my workplace. He broke the news – Bosun had died in a traffic accident. After that it was Uncle Lau’s turn to die. Genshu was very sad to lose these two comrades, people who had shared so much of their lives with him. He felt that he had already done everything he wanted to do in this life. Only Chaolin was still there. When eventually Chaolin passed away, he said, “All the comrades thought that I would be the first to go, and now I have outlived all of them, watching each one of them leave”. zsm After Deng’s return to power and the switch to using market forces in China in the 1980s, do you recall Genshu discussing this with us? I don’t recall having any discussion. It’s such a pity we didn’t bring up

24

Kitty Au was Johnny Shum’s first wife.

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

407

these questions at the time. Before long, it was Tian’anmen, and this led to us being very busy, once again without the time or opportunity to seek his views. In those intervening eleven years, China was being managed by the ccp in quite a different way, along capitalist lines. If it was still a deformed workers’ state, how could such changes be possible? If it was no longer a deformed workers’ state, had it ever been one? We focused our work on solidarity with the democracy movement and regrettably did not take time to discuss these deeper questions with him. zsm What was your recollection of Ng Chung Yin’s arrest by the ccp in 1981?25 jl I think he must have contacted you and Din before his first trip to China. As soon as he was released, he gave a press conference declaring that he had secured his release by deceiving the ccp, by pretending to cooperate with them to track down dissidents. Genshu was furious, and wrote an essay explaining that revolutionaries should behave with integrity when arrested by the enemy and should not shirk the consequences of imprisonment.26 The background appeared to be that leading figures in the ccp had bragged to Zheng Chaolin about Ng’s arrest and had made dismissive remarks about Chinese Trotskyists lacking resilience and backbone, kowtowing and capitulating right away. This incident created a major division in the ranks of the Hong Kong Trotskyists, regarding whether to condemn or support Ng. Some considered his tactic of feigning cooperation in order to secure freedom acceptable, as he could now resume his work as an oppositionist. They argued that if he had really capitulated, he could have said nothing and insidiously undermined the whole organisation in Hong Kong. Others agreed with Genshu’s stance. As we know, Ng was expelled from the rml and the organisation was badly split and weakened, having lost a key leader. zsm This is not surprising, since Ng was the most prominent leader of the rml. How did Peng’s supporters react to the news, and did the rml contact the Fourth International for advice? jl The October Review group, which consisted of more elderly supporters of Peng, had developed a youth section too. But because of the ccp’s success, the whole Trotskyist movement in Hong Kong entered a low ebb. 25

26

Ng Chung-Yin (Wu Zhongxian) was a leader of the Revolutionary Marxist League. The League published periodicals such as Combat Bulletin and aligned themselves with the International Majority Tendency of the United Secretariat. This refers to Wang’s article “What Should a Revolutionary Do When Arrested?”, included in this volume (Part 1, Section D).

408

lam and zhang

zsm This was a crisis of revolutionary politics. We were both in the UK at the time. The British Left had rarely experienced such a severe confrontation with the forces of the state. It had never achieved a level of influence such as to prompt the UK state to repress and arrest left activists in such a manner. sl The Chinese Stalinists had themselves preached that “a single spark can light a prairie fire”, so they were not going to allow even very small numbers of their political opponents the freedom to operate. This was quite different from a mature capitalist state like that in the UK. Eventually, the movement in Hong Kong survived this serious setback and reorganised around the Xin miao (“New Sprouts”) publication. A leading comrade from this group (Au Loong-yu) is now in the UK. sl Very soon after that, Lau Shan-ching27 (Liu Shanqing) went up to China to continue to reach out to Democracy Wall dissidents, and he was also arrested. He, however, refused to divulge any information or give up on his political views, and he served a full ten-year sentence. On his release, he was invited to speak in different parts of the world – the US, Australia, etc – and he came over to the UK specifically to meet with Genshu, in 1992. I drove him up to Leeds. They had a lengthy conversation. jl Fourth International comrades from France, Japan, and continental Europe kept coming to visit Genshu, but relatively few from the UK itself. zsm At the time, the Trotskyist Left in the UK was not as focused on China as it is today. Their attention was on the class struggle in the UK, e.g., the miners’ strike, or on the Soviet Union and its eventual collapse. After Tian’anmen Square and the collapse of the ussr in 1989, Genshu must have written articles and letters to the usfi, but I have had no access to them. The disintegration of the Eastern bloc was so rapid and the Yeltsin period so chaotic that it was a confusing period for the Left. It would have been a historic opportunity for the anti-Stalinist Left to intervene, if only it had been able to mount a clear and united response. Did we visit Genshu to discuss these events? jl I visited him a number of times, but we didn’t get to discuss these issues directly. The events must have been a vindication for him – Stalinism, having betrayed the cause of communism and ruined its name, was responsible for the rapid collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe that claimed to be socialist. I don’t recall him writing any long articles, because he was quite frail by then.

27

Gary Libman, Los Angeles Times, 22 April 1992.

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

jl

jl jl

jl

409

In the 1990s, he was getting very frail. After Uncle Lau passed away, Genshu said quite a few times that when he could no longer care for himself, he did not want to live in a residential home, because of his previous experience of racism in hospital. I mentioned earlier that he said euthanasia was a good idea, but Zheng Chaolin told him that a revolutionary should always remain optimistic. Genshu said that his big regret was that he had not been able to be a good father. He had four children – his eldest son entered business, while his youngest child, his daughter, lived with his wife; Genshu was a Trotskyist, his wife was not involved in politics. As his daughter grew up, she had experienced discrimination as the offspring of a “counterrevolutionary”. After obtaining leave to remain in the UK, and by that time in receipt of income support, he said that he had so much money that he felt rich and was unable to spend it all! He regularly remitted money to his family in Shanghai. He had only carried his daughter in his arms once, when she was a baby. His daughter’s son did well at school and won a place at university in China, and Genshu’s daughter asked Genshu to use his influence at Leeds University to secure admission for his grandson. He realised that she would be very disappointed, since she clearly failed to realise that things like guanxi (social relationships) do not operate in the UK in the same way as in China. Even if he had been a prominent university professor and tried to use his influence, it would not have worked. Eventually, his grandson did get a place studying Public Health at Leeds University in September 2001, through a regular admission route. This grandson, Xue Feng, was in Leeds and York during the final two years of Genshu’s life, and they spent a lot of time together. When Genshu passed away, it was therefore in the presence of a member of his family. Xue Feng then completed his studies and moved to Hong Kong, where we met him. Genshu said that throughout his life he never had any money, but was fortunate to have met and befriended many people. As an example, he told me that his health had been poor ever since his thirties, and that when he fell ill in Macao, he had been treated by a Dr Lau. They discovered in the course of conversation that both of them were passionate about Peking Opera. Dr Lau learned that Genshu was destitute and invited him to stay as a house guest. He ended up staying for many years, and Dr Lau valued his friendship with Genshu, never knowing or asking about his background. Only when Genshu arrived in the UK and mailed Dr Lau a copy of the English translation of his memoirs did Dr

410

lam and zhang

Lau know that his special friend, with whom he had lived for so many years, was such an extraordinary person. After Dr Lau emigrated to Germany, Genshu went over to visit him. This is just one of many examples of people touched by Genshu’s human warmth. zsm Genshu certainly touched a lot of people’s lives. jl After Uncle Lau passed away, his papers were sent over from Hong Kong to Genshu. He kept saying he is too tired to write anymore and that he must spend time tidying up his papers to give to Leeds University, rather than leave a mess for others to clear up. zsm But he did write Zheng Chaolin’s obituary in late 1998?28 jl I took time out to go up to Leeds to stay with him for a couple of months, to sort out and file his papers under his direction, so that he could be at ease once the job was done. sl My deepest impression of Genshu? When I first met him, he was about 68. His sincerity and optimism, especially in regard to young people, stood out. He was remarkably non-judgmental in his discussions with people younger and far less knowledgeable than himself. zsm My deepest regret is that I was insufficiently aware and was therefore unable to understand and learn more from his vast experience. He was so familiar with ccp politics and how they operated; he and his comrades had to survive and struggle through extremely acute crises, yet I failed to take the opportunity to ask him further questions. Perhaps we ourselves were still under the influence of traditional Chinese culture, respecting and revering Genshu as an elderly revolutionary leader and lacking the confidence to discuss with him. I think other leftists who were not Chinese would not have had this inhibition. I have very recently read his initial analysis in 1950–1 of the nature of the new Chinese state under the ccp. It is crystal clear and sharply critical.29 He posed the question – has the Chinese working class actively participated in or even led this seizure of state power? What was its role in this revolution? He posed these questions from the point of view of the proletariat. When the ccp overthrew the Kuomintang regime and entered Shanghai and the cities, it kept the industrial workers down. If this was a proletarian revolution, then how come the workers played no role and had no power or status? Given such a revolution, how could this be called a workers’ state of any kind, deformed or otherwise? Such 28 29

Reprinted in Benton 2015, pp. 1178–1182. A reference to Wang’s “The Stalinist State in China, The Social Meaning of Mao Zedong’s Victory”, included in this volume (Part 2, Section E).

a conversation between jabez lam and zhang shaoming

411

a label was unhelpful, when all political power and control over society resided in a political party in which the working class had no active role. If this was not a new type of ruling class, then what else could it be? I never knew of the existence of this essay until I read it two months ago. Such an incisive analysis. All I knew, from reading his memoir, was that he had briefly explored a bureaucratic collectivist position before aligning with the mainstream “deformed workers’ state” position of the Fourth International. As I said, my biggest regret was not asking him why. I would also have loved to hear what he would have to say about the collapse of the ussr. jl We have both read some of his writings on Hong Kong and Taiwan. As I recall, his short pieces and his correspondence with Hong Kong comrades were condensed into a position paper. jl I consider myself very fortunate to have known him and to have been very close to him for such a long time. Through him, I have learnt so much about how to be a good person, how to stand firm on one’s principles even when one is in a very small minority, and how to persevere in one’s work when one knows one is in the right. zsm Certainly, your track record of struggle in our community for workers’ rights, and your current work in the Hackney Chinese Community Centre, especially in assisting refugees over the decades,30 is a testament to your political commitment. Genshu would be proud of you if he were still with us today.

30

Holly Chant, Hackney Gazette, 9 March 2022.

part 2 Selected Writings by Chinese and Other Trotskyists regarding China

∵

section a Articles Written by Frank Glass (Li Furen) for the Trotskyist Press, 1930s–1950s

∵

Introduction to Part 2, Section A Frank Glass (Li Fu-jen or Li Furen, 1901–1988), a British-born South African Trotskyist revolutionary who moved to China in 1930, was a key figure in the early history of Chinese Trotskyism. During his long stay in Shanghai in the 1930s, Glass witnessed and assisted in the early development of the Trotskyist movement.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_046

Frank Glass’s Selected Articles Written for the Trotskyist Press between the Late 1930s and the Early 1950s Edited by Yang Yang

Frank Glass (Li Fu-jen or Li Furen), a British-born South African Trotskyist revolutionary who moved to China in 1930, was a key figure in the early history of Chinese Trotskyism. During his long stay in Shanghai in the 1930s, Glass witnessed and assisted in the early development of the Trotskyist movement. Given his role, we have selected eight pieces of his own writings and two obituaries cum biographies of him. These texts were transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive. The first section of these selected writings presents Glass’s personal account of the Communist League of China (clc) in the 1930s and his appraisals of important individuals in the Chinese movement, notably Chen Duxiu. In 1934 and 1935, along with Harold Issacs, Glass was estranged from Chen Duxiu, as a result of sectarian misguidance by Liu Renjing and his partisans. Likewise, after his negative experience with foreign representatives from the Comintern in the 1920s, Chen later was unwilling even after his Trotskyist conversion to stay in direct contact with foreign Trotskyists like Glass and kept his distance from them. In his obituary of Chen, Glass praised him as “an honoured figure in the gallery of revolutionary fighters”, but he did not see Chen as China’s Plekhanov (as Wang Fanxi did). Rather, he thought of Chen as an inconsistent Marxist who lacked “knowledge of foreign languages” (necessary for a proper understanding of Marxism) and “personal knowledge of the outside world”. The second section shows that Glass was not merely observing what was going on in the Chinese Trotskyist movement from the outside but was an active participant in it. On the one hand, he helped his Chinese comrades counteract the false accusations levelled against Trotskyism by Chinese and Russian Stalinists. On the other, he drafted important internal documents for the Chinese group and the Fourth International. In 1941, a resolution on possible American intervention in China during the Resistance War against Japan, jointly drafted by Glass and Issacs, was adopted by the leadership of the Fourth International. In China, it aroused a controversy among the Trotskyists and later became a catalyst for the Trotskyists’ 1942 split. This resolution argued that the direct intervention of US armed forces on China’s battlefield would be a reactionary imperialist act that would have to be condemned by the Chinese Trotskyists, who would need to mobil-

© Edited by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_047

frank glass’s selected articles

419

ise the Chinese masses to oppose it. But the resolution also predicted that “any major military defeat that Japan suffers as a consequence of American intervention in the Far East will create revolutionary movements of the masses in Japan and the Japanese colonies of Manchukuo, Korea, and Formosa, and will stimulate a revolutionary revival in China”. According to Wang Fanxi, this resolution was close to Peng Shuzhi’s position, which held that the War of Resistance remained progressive unless foreign imperialist troops other than Japan landed in China. Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin opposed Peng’s position and insisted that the war would not be progressive if China’s own War of Resistance became part of the world imperialist war; the Trotskyists should in that case hold to Lenin’s policy of “revolutionary defeatism” in the First World War.1 So this resolution helped deepen the differences within the Trotskyist group in China and later accelerated the organisational divide. Glass left China for America on the eve of the Pacific War, but he remained a key China watcher within the Fourth International. He continued to contribute to the analysis in the international Trotskyist press of trends in Chinese politics during the civil war and thereafter. Concerning the course of China’s civil war 1946–49, most of Glass’s predictions were inaccurate. The third section shows that Glass, like many of his Chinese Trotskyist comrades, defined the struggle led by the ccp as a peasant war. While unconditionally supporting the destruction of the Kuomintang’s regime, he had no confidence that the Chinese Stalinists would fundamentally change bourgeois property relations unless the Chinese proletariat compelled them to. However, in the very early of the 1950s, unlike Peng Shuzhi, Glass thought that the establishment of a New China would be a prelude to the Third Chinese Revolution and that such a Revolution was still brewing. He expected the Chinese proletariat and the Chinese masses to continue to push the revolution forward towards yet another upsurge and turn China into a new centre for world socialist revolution. But Glass’s dream of a brighter socialist China was, of course, never realised.

(a)

Frank Glass: Obituary

Source: Revolutionary History, vol. 1, no. 2, summer 1988, pp. 1–4.

1 Wang Fanxi, “The Pacific War and a New Split in the Organisation”, in Benton 2015, pp. 557– 559.

420

ed. yang

Part 1: In South Africa Baruch Hirson Frank Glass, a revolutionary activist, writer, and scholar, born in Birmingham, England in 1901, died in Los Angeles on 21 March 1988, just before his 87th birthday. Better known to international audiences as Li Fu-jen (Li Furen), Frank Graves, or John Liang, he worked in three continents, and in each played a central revolutionary role. He was a founding member of the Communist Party of South Africa (cpsa), a Left Oppositionist in South Africa and China, and the editor of the premier Trotskyist paper, the Militant, in the USA. A lifelong revolutionary, he lived three full lives: as pioneer and militant in South Africa, as publicist and organiser in China, and as writer and teacher in America. This article deals with the first part of his life. Frank Glass is barely remembered in South Africa, where he has been ignored and largely expunged from histories of the working-class movement. Yet during his stay in South Africa (where he arrived from England as a boy in 1911) he played a leading role in founding and organising the Communist Party and then in the first black trade union in the country, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa, or icu. One of the first revolutionaries in South Africa to join the ranks of the Left Opposition, he left for China in 1930, where he helped establish the Communist League of China (Trotskyist). Finding details of Frank Glass’s activities is not easy. He preferred not to talk about himself, claiming that his own personal doings were not relevant for an understanding of the workers’ struggle. There is little written about Glass in South African labour histories, and the accounts by Stalinists dismiss him, or indeed twist facts in order to present him in the worst possible light. Yet, Glass was the youngest delegate at the conference in 1921 at which it was decided to launch the cpsa, and he was on the Central Executive before he left the party. But even the factors that led to his resignation are fudged, and this conceals a little-known episode in the history of the Communist movement. Like many early pioneers, and not a few who followed, Glass had to make difficult decisions on the nature of the working class in South Africa, and following from this, he had to decide on where best a revolutionary could work in South Africa. In the process he made mistakes, and he erred with most early Socialists on several issues. But they pale into insignificance when balanced against his achievements, and in presenting this appraisal I think he would have preferred to have the record as it was, and not sanitised to make him a superman. Frank Glass was a revolutionary, and worked through the problems he faced, making the necessary corrections, as he proceeded.

frank glass’s selected articles

421

Glass was a member of the Industrial Socialist League (InSL) in Cape Town, a group which published the Bolshevik, and the first to adopt the name Communist Party of South Africa (cpsa). The InSL called for the class struggle, the complete overthrow of capitalism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, a soviet system, affiliation to the Communist International, and mass action by the workers as a means of seizing power. The InSL had established close links with the Johannesburg-based International Socialist League (isl), led by David Ivon Jones, S.P. Bunting and W.H. Andrews,2 but were opposed to participation in electoral politics. In this they found allies in Johannesburg, with whom to launch their cpsa. The party (like the isl) was non-racist, and called for the organisation of all workers in one unified movement. After a period of negotiations several groups agreed to accept the 21 Points of the Communist International, and joined together to form the united Communist Party of South Africa. The one point that proved to be contentious was the provision that the party participate in political (i.e., electoral) activity, and Frank Glass and four others, opposed to this clause, broke away to form the Communist Propaganda Group in April 1921. This was still a hangover from the strong Syndicalist tendency of the pre-war days, and was not at that time based on opposition to participation in all-white government institutions. That decision to boycott such bodies only emerged in South Africa during the early 1940s, and was accepted then only by groups that had some connection with the Trotskyist movement. In May 1921, 190 Israelites (the name chosen by a chiliastic black church group), were massacred by troops at Bulhoek, near Queenstown in the eastern Cape. It was an unpardonable action perpetrated by the Smuts government, and when four members of the united cpsa protested, they were arrested and charged. Members of the Propaganda Group showed their solidarity by participating in joint meetings, and dissolving their group. Union followed, and when the small groups merged to form the official cpsa in August 1921, Frank was one of the four Cape delegates at the conference. Frank Glass soon emerged as a leading member of the cpsa, and was secretary of the Cape Town branch in 1922. That was the year of the miners’ strike on the Witwatersrand, which erupted into revolt, and only ended when Smuts used aeroplanes to bomb the main mining areas. Caught in the dilemma of supporting workers who were in conflict with the mineowners, and the anti-black action of a sizeable part of the white working class, he sided with the majority

2 They were all British-born South African communists and founding members of the Communist Party of South Africa.

422

ed. yang

(near-unanimous) view of the party which claimed that the miners were striking in defence of living standards and not for the colour bar. This was a move to the right and Glass erred with the party. The rightward swing in the cpsa was extended in 1923 when the cpsa, in conformity with Comintern policy, accepted the need for the United Front tactic, and applied for affiliation to the South African Labour Party (salp). Although rejected, the cpsa supported the salp, then in alliance with the Nationalist Party in the 1924 general election, and again discussed affiliation at its conference that year. Frank was now a full time organiser in the cpsa, and its business administrator, and he voted to renew the application to affiliate. This time the resolution was narrowly defeated and a number of leading members resigned from the party. There appear to be three factors that led to the decision to join the salp. The first arose from Lenin’s advice to the British Communists that they should find a place in their Labour Party in order to win the organised working class away from the Social Democrats. The small Communist groups in Australia and South Africa (and possibly elsewhere) debated the issue to see whether this tactic could be applied in their own countries. Secondly, the isolation of these small groups, and in South Africa this was particularly the case after the disastrous conclusion of the (white) minework’s strike, left the small Socialist group even more isolated than before. The third factor that influenced some Communists arose from the letter written by Ivon Jones to W.H. Andrews, the former dying in a sanatorium in Yalta, suggesting that the cpsa be dissolved, and that the party reduce its function to publishing a journal and protecting the interests of the black workers. Glass, in one of his last reminiscences (just a few weeks before his death) remarked on the fact that Andrews used to read Jones’ letters to him. In February 1925 Glass resigned from the Central Executive, and then the party, declaring that the cpsa had become a sect, and was regarded with some justification as being anti-white. He threw himself into the white trade union movement (he was already treasurer of the sa Association of Employees’ Organisations) and became secretary of the Tailors Union. He also joined the salp, which was now in the Pact government, in alliance with the Nationalist Party. His stay in the salp was short-lived. At the party conference in March 1925, he opposed the proposed Emergency Powers Bill, tabled by Creswell, the party leader and Minister of Labour, repudiated the proposed legislation, and moved the resolution against it. Once again Glass was in a minority, and it is doubtful whether he could have stayed much longer. We have no information on his next step, but he must have rethought his position, and moved from a po-

frank glass’s selected articles

423

sition of leadership in the white trade unions to a precarious position in the major African trade union movement – the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa. With a black union The industrialisation of South Africa had barely begun in the early 1920s when the icu was launched. After participating in a dock strike the new union spread out to become a broad general workers union under Clements Kadalie,3 with an enrolment that was said to have reached 150,000. Members were recruited mainly in the African townships, and also in the countryside. Many of its organisers joined the cpsa and officials of the party (including some of the leading whites) spoke at its meetings. At the end of 1926 the Communists were arbitrarily expelled, and although the reasons are still unclear, it seems that this was partly because the icu leadership feared an impending criticism of financial irregularities, and partly because white liberals exerted pressure on the leaders to remove all Communists from office. There were also accusations that the icu leaders were resorting to a crude racism in their attacks on the white Communists. The icu leaders’ claim was that Communists were overbearing and were prying into the internal affairs of the organisation. It consequently came as a surprise when Glass (later the liberal’s bête noire) was asked to audit the union’s accounts, and prepare a financial statement, as required by the Department of Labour. Kadalie also wanted Glass appointed as financial secretary of the icu, but there was opposition to a white occupying the post, and he was only appointed in a temporary capacity until an English adviser (himself obviously white) arrived. It has also been suggested that Glass was not appointed because of liberal pressure. History is not made of “ifs” and “ands”, but had he secured this post the history of black workers’ organisation might have been very different. On 28 March, Frank Glass, together with W.H. Andrews (who had not left the cpsa but maintained only nominal membership, and worked almost exclusively in the white trade union movement) spoke on an icu platform in Johannesburg. The gathering had been called to protest against a new Native Administration Act, that provided the legislation for the government to cripple all black organisation. The newspaper report placed the audience at some 2,000 Africans, and a small group of whites, Indians, and Chinese. Frank’s address was interpreted by the police as

3 Clements Kadalie (1896–1951) was a black trade unionist and political activist. He founded the icu in 1919 and became South Africa’s first black national trade union leader.

424

ed. yang

being potentially illegal, and the issue was raised in the South African parliament. We only have the newspaper report (in the Rand Daily Mail, 28 March 1927) of what he said, but it is enough to show why his words were so bitterly denounced in parliament: If you will do what the Russian workers have done and what the Chinese workers are doing now you – all the workers of this country, black and white – will be able to secure freedom. We don’t know at the moment how far the government is going in its attempt to restrict the freedom of the native workers; but this we do know, that all capitalist governments in their dealings with the workers act precisely alike. Therefore we have got to be prepared, not merely with demonstrations, but also – if it proves to be necessary – with far more drastic action. It also seems most likely that the remarkable introduction to the icu Economic and Political Programme for 1928 was written by Glass. Nobody else could have phrased the sentiments so cogently: Opponents of the icu have frequently asserted that the organisation is not a trade union in the sense that the term is generally understood in South Africa, but that it is a kind of pseudo-political body … The new constitution … definitely establishes the icu as a trade union, albeit one of native workers … at the same time it must be clearly understood that we have no intention of copying the stupid and futile “nonpolitical” attitude of our white contemporaries. As Karl Marx said, every economic question is, in the last analysis, a political question also, and we must recognise that in neglecting to concern ourselves with current politics, in leaving the political machine to the unchallenged control of our class enemies, we are rendering a disservice to those tens of thousands of our members who are groaning under oppressive laws … At the present stage of our development it is inevitable that our activities should be almost of an agitational character, for we are not recognised as citizens in our own country, being almost entirely disenfranchised and debarred from exercising a say in state affairs closely affecting our lives and welfare. To the Left Opposition There is no further information about Frank Glass in secondary sources. In 1928 he married Fanny Klennerman, a veteran member of the cpsa who had organised waitresses and other women workers in the 1920s. Together they started the Vanguard bookshop that was to become the most important source for Marx-

frank glass’s selected articles

425

ist and Trotskyist books in the Transvaal, and a focus for people searching for books or pamphlets on Fascism, on Russia, Spain, and China, and on the coming war. Precisely when Glass first moved to the ranks of the Left Opposition is unknown – but he was one of the first Marxists to support Trotsky in South Africa, and the first to write a letter of support to the American oppositionist paper, the Militant, of 29 March 1930. He provided a brief overview of the racism that divided the country, and the working class, for those who knew little about South Africa. White workers would not work with blacks in certain jobs, and debarred them from their trade unions. The high wages of whites, he said, were possible because of the low wages paid to black workers, and he added, the blacks had started organising their own trade unions. His major criticism of the cpsa was its use of the “Black Republic” slogan, coined by the Comintern in its “Third Period”, when it directed every Communist party to prepare for the revolutionary overturn of their governments. Amongst the points Glass made against the slogan was that: Racial animosity on the part of the native [black] members towards the European members has grown and is developing to an almost incredible degree, the native members logically interpreting the slogan as implying superiority for themselves over the hated oppressor (white Communists are included here). He also maintained that there had been a “wholesale desertion of the white proletarian members who would not subscribe to the abandonment of the Marxian slogan ‘Workers of all lands, unite!’”. He did not seem to have had much success in building a group in South Africa, and it was two years later (on 4 June 1932) that a letter from “four Africans” in the Transvaal appeared in the Militant. There were also small groups in Cape Town, one of which included one of Glass’s close friends, Manuel Lopes (who later moved to the right). Details of that period are not readily available: none to indicate what happened to Glass’s connections with the icu, or within the cpsa. Fanny Glass, who had remained in the cpsa, was expelled with other dissidents (including Andrews and Bunting) in 1931. Fanny worked with members of the Left Opposition, but men like Bunting and Andrews did not make the crucial break with Stalinism, and the latter returned during the war as chairman of the cpsa. The history of the left groups in the Transvaal during the 1930s is only now being rediscovered. Later generations of Trotskyists in Johannesburg knew of Glass because of his one time association with Fanny Klennerman, but all we knew was that he had gone to China, had been involved there in the work of

426

ed. yang

the Trotskyist groups, and (we suspected, correctly) wrote under the name of Li Fu-jen. We read his articles in the journals that came through to Johannesburg. It is only now, after Glass’s death, that details have become generally known about his remarkable career. Glass went to China soon after writing his letter to the Militant, and there he met with the American journalist Harold Isaacs. Together they saw the brutal executions of suspected Communists by the Kuomintang more than three years after the blood bath in Shanghai in 1927, and the extermination of most of the Chinese Communist Party. And when Isaacs wrote his classic Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution Glass read the manuscript and suggested changes and additions to the text. This work became the main source of information for several decades on the nature of Comintern policies that led to the defeat of the Chinese revolution. Glass worked briefly for the Soviet Tass news agency in China, but quit “… because of the meaningless content of Tass news”. He then worked as a correspondent for the Anglo-Asiatic Telegraphic Agency. For the remainder of the 1930s Glass worked for several newspapers, edited the China Weekly Review, was a political commentator on radio, and was a member of the Provisional Central Committee, of the Communist League of China (Trotskyists) in the mid-1930s. He wrote the section on China for the programme of the Fourth International. Glass had now entered the select group that worked with Trotsky, visiting him in 1937, edited some of his English articles, and returned to China, where he was able to find some refuge in the Shanghai French Concession. However, he was compelled to maintain a low profile, fearing betrayal, and persecution from the Stalinists, the French Concession police, and Kuomintang agents. He fled Shanghai a few days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941) and the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. After a circuitous and dangerous route he returned to New York, and established a home with Grace Simons. A serious appraisal of Frank Glass’s writings will be the most appropriate memorial for a man who devoted so much of his life to the overthrow of capitalism in three continents. There the account must rest for now. He was a living legend. We must not allow that legend to die.4 April 1988

4 A note from Baruch Hirson: The more easily accessible sources in which Glass is mentioned in the South African context are: Johns 1976, ix, 2; Wickens 1978; and H.J. and R.E. Simons 1969.

frank glass’s selected articles

427

Part 2: In China and the USA Prometheus Research Library, New York Frank Glass, veteran of the communist movement on three continents, died in Los Angeles on 21 March, three days before his 87th birthday. Glass moved to China in 1930, earning his living as a journalist in Shanghai (where he once met Richard Sorge, the German journalist and heroic Soviet spy later executed by the Japanese government). While in China Glass recruited Harold Isaacs to Trotskyism. Isaacs, also a journalist, later wrote, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. These years in China were the most important of Glass’s political career. In 1934, after a trip to New York where he met with the American Trotskyists, Glass was able to make contact with the Chinese Left Opposition. He was elected to their Provisional Central Committee in 1935. Wang Fanxi, who worked with Glass at this time, noted in his book Chinese Revolutionary that this Committee “… occupied an important position in the history of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. It was the most enduring and productive of all the bodies we established, reviving and expanding the organisation, both in Shanghai and nationally”. Glass served for a number of years as the secretary and treasurer of the Chinese organisation. Under the name Li Fu-jen Glass corresponded periodically with the International Secretariat in Europe and with Martin Abern5 in New York. Glass also performed important courier work for the section and the leading committee of the Shanghai organisation often met in Glass’s apartment. Glass played a crucial role in the publication of the section’s monthly newspaper, Struggle (Doh Tseng), which was financed by Glass donating one half of his journalist’s salary. The regular publication of this voice of Chinese Trotskyism was a remarkable accomplishment given the fierce repression and debilitating underground conditions in which the section was forced to function. In 1937 Glass again visited the US and made a national speaking tour. In August he visited Trotsky in Mexico to discuss the current political situation in China (the transcript of his discussion with Trotsky is printed as “A Discussion on China” in Pathfinder Press’s Leon Trotsky on China). In New York Glass began writing articles on China for New International, and he was a fraternal delegate to the founding convention of the Socialist Workers Party (swp) in Chicago in 1938. Glass returned to China in 1938 to continue his organisational and literary work but the impending Pacific War soon made it impossible for him to 5 Martin Abern (1898–1949) was a Romanian Jewish-born American communist and a founder of the American Trotskyist movement.

428

ed. yang

function politically in Asia. He left China a few weeks before Pearl Harbor and spent most of the Second World War years in New York where, still using the pen name Li Fu-jen, he contributed articles on China, Japan and the Far East to the Fourth International. After the war Glass moved to Los Angeles and spent a number of years as a leading member of the la Branch and swp national committee. The 1960s, however, found him succumbing along with other leading members of the swp, to the political disease of Pabloist impressionism. Under the name of John Liang he co-wrote a number of internal discussion documents with Arne Swabeck,6 abandoning the Trotskyist perspective of political revolution against the Stalinist regime in Beijing. Ironically, some of the best arguments against Swabeck/Liang’s liquidationism can be found in the powerful Li Fu-jen articles written for the Trotskyist press in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Swabeck was expelled from the swp in 1967 but Glass was not, and indeed Glass never formally quit the Socialist Workers Party, now led by the cynical anti-Trotskyist Jack Barnes7 clique. In the last year of his life Frank Glass granted two sets of interviews with a representative of the Prometheus Research Library. On 14 April 1987, Comrade Glass told us: “I have been a revolutionary since I was 18 and have no regrets. I wouldn’t change a thing. All one can do is put your oar in the water and stroke as hard as you can for life’s most important task – social revolution”. Frank Glass will be remembered as part of the founding generation of Trotskyist cadres, and especially for his courageous work as one of the leaders of the early Chinese Trotskyist movement. Prometheus Research Library, New York

(b)

New Stalinist Frame-up Hits China “Trotskyists”: Chinese Bolshevik-Leninist Exposes Lies in Daily Worker Dispatch Li Fu-jen October 1937

Source: Socialist Appeal, vol. 1, no. 10, 16 October 1937, p. 5.

6 Arne Swabeck (1890–1986) was a Danish-born American communist and later became a Trotskyist in the late 1920s. In 1967, he was expelled from the Trotskyists’ Socialist Workers’ Party (US). 7 Jack Barnes (1940–) is an American Trotskyist and has been national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party since 1972.

frank glass’s selected articles

429

According to what purports to be a cable dispatch from Shanghai printed in the Daily Worker of 5 October, the hand of Stalin’s gpu., dripping with the blood of murdered revolutionists in the Soviet Union and in Spain, has now reached into China. The dispatch reports the uncovering of “a Trotskyist plot to knife the Chinese defence against Japanese imperialism in the back by a putsch in Guangxi province”. Police, it is stated, nipped the alleged plot in the bud by arresting “the entire membership of the local Trotskyist group”, which, in familiar language, is declared to be “made up principally of bandits and other shady elements”. Frame-up Apparent That we are confronted here with another gpu. frame-up is apparent from the entire text of the Daily Worker story. We are told that the Trotskyists were headed by Wang Kun-tuh, “who had wormed his way into the executive committee of the Kuomintang organisation in Guangxi during the period of antiCommunist terror that swept China after 1929”. No person named Wang Kun-tuh is or ever has been a member of the Communist League of China (Bolshevik-Leninists). Nor has any member of the League ever been a member of the Guangxi executive committee of the Kuomintang or any other Kuomintang organ. I state these facts as one having personal knowledge of the League’s membership and activity. Even more decisive is the fact that there is no organisation of the Communist League in Guangxi province and there never has been. The Stalinist practice of dubbing sundry persons (especially its own agents provocateurs) “Trotskyists” is sufficiently well-known in China and other countries. If “Wang” exists at all, the inquisitors of the Kuomintang, with the help of gpu. agents (for the Stalinists and the Kuomintang are “allied” again) will doubtless secure from him a “confession” implicating the Chinese Bolshevik-Leninists in a plot to sabotage China’s defence against Japan. The methods of the gpu. are so stereotyped as to be easily recognisable. The supposed Wang, moreover, would have had no need to “worm his way” into a Kuomintang organ in the period between 1929 and 1937. For it is admitted even by the Stalinists that the Kuomintang regime at that time pursued what in effect was a pro-Japanese policy. A pro-Japanese plotter could have joined Kuomintang bodies easily and pursued openly the Kuomintang’s own pro-Japanese policy within the party ranks without any fear of evil consequences. “The Leading Newspaper” Step by step, the Daily Worker reveals the Stalinist frame-up, or attempted frame-up of the Chinese revolutionists. “The leading Shanghai newspaper, Hsin Ching Jih Pao”, it declares, “called for the rooting out of the Trotskyist traitors”.

430

ed. yang

“At a time when the entire nation is united in war against our mortal foe”, the paper is quoted as saying, “this despicable gang of Chinese Trotskyists are taking advantage of the sending of troops to the battlefronts to organise a plot in the rear. Is it not clear at whose orders these Trotskyists perform their deeds … In the name of our country’s future, in the interests of resistance to the aggressor, the Trotskyist spies and traitors must be destroyed”. The first fact to be noted here is that until the middle of April this year there was no newspaper in Shanghai known as the Hsin Ching Jih Pao. If such an organ has since appeared, it can be nothing else but the organ of the new Popular Front in China, that is, of the Stalinist-Kuomintang coalition. This supposition is borne out by the language quoted above. No bourgeois newspaper, much less a leading bourgeois organ, uses the canned language of Stalinism to castigate the “Trotskyists”. The language is unmistakable as that of a Stalinist or Stalinistcontrolled paper. It may well be, however, that the Daily Worker story foreshadows a frame-up against the organisation of the Bolshevik-Leninists in Shanghai. Just as in Spain the Bolshevik-Leninists have been in the forefront of the fight against fascism, so in China the Communist League has been the consistent advocate of intransigent struggle against Japanese imperialism for China’s national liberation. And just as in Spain our comrades are framed up by the gpu on charges of “conspiring with Franco”, so in China the Bolshevik-Leninists are accused of being “agents of Japanese imperialism”. In both instances the Stalinists lie. And they know that they lie.

(c)

The Communist League of China8 Frank Glass January 1940

Source: Revolutionary History, vol. 2, no. 4, Spring 1990.

8 This piece reproduces pages 9–20 of a report by Frank Glass that was found in the Trotsky Archive in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, where it bears the number T2.16872. The Niel Sih mentioned in the report is the pseudonym of Liu Renjing, Frank Glass’s main ally inside the Trotskyist movement, who was broken by torture under the Nationalists in 1937 and joined the Kuomintang, subsequently making his peace with Mao in 1949. The text was written after consultation with Harold Isaacs towards the end of 1937, and according to the correspondence in the Houghton archive, was sent to Trotsky on 21 January 1940.

frank glass’s selected articles

431

And now to our movement in China. My information is valid only up to 1 September when I left Shanghai. Again, all factual information concerning our organisation is at best approximate. Even our own comrades vary considerably concerning such factual information as the number of comrades, etc. The Communist League of China was founded in 1931, about four years following the Shanghai coup d’etat of Chiang Kai-Shek in April 1927. Subsequent to the coup, revolutionaries who disassociated themselves from Stalinism formed several different groups. These groups were united and consolidated, thanks mainly to Comrade Graves [Frank Glass] who arrived from South Africa, in 1931 when the League was formally founded. The present strength of our party is approximately 500 members throughout the country, of whom approximately half are active. The distribution is approximately as follows: 100 members at Shanghai, 100 members at Fuzhou, a port half-way between Shanghai and the British Crown Colony at Hong Kong,9 100 members at Hong Kong and Kowloon, which are adjacent, 100 members in the Zhongshan district, which is in the Pearl River Delta in South China, and the balance scattered throughout China. Comrades differ in their estimation of our strength. Some put the figure at 500, others state that 200 is more accurate. The war has made it impossible to ascertain the correct picture. The number of comrades does not give a precise indication of the influence of the movement. We have in China close sympathisers in many quarters, particularly in student and intellectual circles. This is reflected somewhat by references in various publications to the Communist League and to the Fourth International. The leaders of our party are all veteran revolutionists, many of whom were in the movement in China since 1921. Save for one member, I believe all members of the Central Committee have been in Kuomintang jails. Among outstanding active comrades one might mention Comrade Wang Ming-yuan [Wang Fanxi], who was a Left Oppositionist from the very beginning in Moscow, Comrade Peng Shuzhi, an original member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Comrade Chen [Zheng Chaolin] another original member of Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Comrades Chen Qichang, and Luo Han. About 60 per cent of all comrades are workers; others are intellectuals or white-collar workers.

9 Glass might be wrong. There was a strong Trotskyist branch in Wenzhou rather than in Fuzhou.

432

ed. yang

With minor exceptions, all the work of the party is illegal. Prior to August 1937, some 50 of our comrades, including Comrade Chen Duxiu, were in jail. All were released at various intervals up to the fall of Nanjing in December 1937. Prior to the war, our comrades were arrested on sight; two Central Committees were arrested en masse. These arrests were all made by the Kuomintang or with the cooperation of the British or French Police, as the case might be. In general, the Kuomintang at present takes no active steps against our comrades unless they are participating in legal activity. The Kuomintang threat against our comrades has for the time being abated. In the two foreign areas of Shanghai, our comrades now have relative safety, but the British or French police will turn them over to the Japanese hangmen upon the demand of the latter without trial. Up to the time I left, none of our comrades had been arrested in Shanghai since the two preceding years. The greatest danger in Shanghai, and elsewhere in China for that matter, at present lies in the gpu [i.e., the Soviet’s State Political Directorate] and Stalinists. Several of our comrades, including Comrades Peng and Graves, have been sent black-hand letters and warnings of one kind or another showing beyond any doubt a Stalinist or a gpu source. By linking the names in their press of our comrades with Japanese puppets, the Stalinists have in reality invited their assassination. Naturally in Shanghai our comrades take the greatest of precautions. Several, through fear of being recognised by Stalinists, live in complete hiding. Recently the Stalinists in Shanghai published a leaflet in Chinese entitled The Crimes of the Trotskyists. These “crimes” included the usual stock charges, which have been rather well discredited by our Party in bourgeois papers friendly to us. Unable to find any “crimes”, the Stalinists have resorted to personal slander and the pamphlet states, for example, that “almost all Trotskyites are homosexuals and hold orgies in bathhouses”. Another “crime” is the accusation that Comrade Graves wrote a favourable review of Comrade Isaacs’s Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. These slanders appear from time to time in Stalinist papers as well. But the Stalinists have not been completely successful. In Chongqing they stated that Comrade Chen Duxiu was working with the Japanese and was a “counterrevolutionary Trotskyite”. About 30 leading Chinese liberals, many of them very well-known public figures, wrote a vigorous denunciation of this statement. This denunciation, with the signatures of the writers, was widely published. Since then the Stalinists have said nothing publicly about Chen Duxiu. Chen also answered the accusation in a statement, widely printed, exposing with devastation the Stalinist accusation.

frank glass’s selected articles

433

In Shanghai, our party through its sympathisers forced a Stalinist-controlled sheet to publish a retraction that Comrade Peng Shuzhi was working with Japanese puppets. These two examples show that the Stalinists must tread carefully in their slander campaign against us in China. In Hong Kong, up to the time that I left, the British government had given the Stalinists carte blanche to do whatsoever they wished. But not our comrades. Several of our comrades led a strike against work on a Japanese boat. They were arrested and spent several weeks in jail. The arrests, our comrades learned from the British police officers, came about as a result of betrayals of our comrades by Stalinists. Subsequently, and probably as a direct result, the Hong Kong Government passed laws providing for the arrest, imprisonment, or banishment without trial of any Chinese. Several of our comrades were forced to leave Hong Kong. In areas under Kuomintang control, work is likewise difficult. The death penalty has been decreed for strikes “or any other activities prejudicial to the interests of the state”. Early in 1938 two of our comrades, assisted by Neil Sih [Liu Renjing], published a legal magazine entitled The Path of Struggle. This magazine was suppressed after the second issue. Comrade Chen Duxiu has written numerous articles on the war. The government has banned publication of at least half of them. One of these articles consisted of an appeal to Japanese troops. As far as is known, none of our comrades has been arrested in areas under Kuomintang control since the start of the war. At least one of them, however – Comrade Luo Han, a veteran revolutionist – met his death in Chongqing during a Japanese air raid. Some time ago in Hankou students organised an anti-Japanese demonstration. Our comrades were active in this demonstration. The police, however, prohibited the demonstration while it was in progress. They succeeded in stopping the demonstration only by firing at the students, killing one of them. Enraged, the students attacked a guilty plainclothes man. Tearing his clothes away, the students found the man to be a member of the Blue Shirts, Chiang Kai-Shek’s terrorist gang. Not a word of this incident appeared in any papers in China, including the Stalinist press. Partisan In areas under Japanese control, there are but few of our comrades, with the exception of the Zhongshan district in South China near Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta. Here some five to 12 of our comrades have been leading a guerrilla partisan band of some 100 to 200 fighters under the flag of the Fourth International since the fall of Guangzhou in the Autumn of 1938. Reportedly our comrades have engaged in several skirmishes with the Japanese with suc-

434

ed. yang

cess. These comrades are led by a veteran of the Hong Kong Strike. In the Japanese-controlled areas, the Japanese usually kill any Chinese found engaged in what is termed anti-Japanese work, under which charge comes anything from not having a cigarette for a Japanese soldier, incorrect bowing to sentries, and possession of a Kuomintang newspaper. In these areas the Japanese terror is directed not only against revolutionists, but against the entire population. Countless villages thought by the Japanese to have been assisting guerrilla forces have been wiped out by fire, the Japanese machine-gunning fleeing inhabitants. These stories are by no means fanciful. They have been corroborated time and time again. The result of this terror has been that the peasants who attempted to return to their farms in Japanese-occupied areas have, for the most part, sought the safety of foreign areas, or of cities, or have gone to the interior. It is estimated that the war in China has produced no less than 60 million refugees. The work of the party at the present stage is centred upon translations and publications, in strengthening the leadership, in building up the membership. There is relatively little agitational work at present, as such attempts as have been made have proved fruitless because of the passivity of the workers. Leaflets, however, are issued with frequency as special occasions arise, in both Chinese and Japanese. Our party publishes two newspapers regularly. Doh Tseng (Struggle) is issued once or twice a month in 1,000 copies, in tabloid format, of four to eight pages, with a circulation nationwide. Doh Tseng is published in Shanghai, and has appeared regularly since 1936, though it appeared irregularly some two years previously. Iskra has been published regularly in Hong Kong since 1937. It is issued once or twice a month, of four to eight pages, in tabloid size, in 1000 copies, with a circulation nationwide. These papers are printed on presses designed and built by our comrades, and the press work is done by our comrades. The presses are practically silent, and are very ingenious. Presses are also used for various pamphlets, leaflets, internal bulletins, etc. All our material in China is printed; workers will not look at a mimeographed page. Our comrades stole most of the type from newspaper offices, printshops, etc. Originally our comrades had a sympathiser do the printing. This sympathiser gradually raised his prices. A crisis was reached. Finally, Comrade Graves and other comrades posed as foreign police officers and in a “raid” seized the press and type. It was quite a task, but was successfully done. From then on, the organisation operated its own press. The distribution of our papers presents numerous problems. But thanks to sympathisers in the Post Office, numerous copies go successfully through the

frank glass’s selected articles

435

mails. Others are distributed by our comrades and sympathisers in factories, among refugees, etc. Our comrades estimate that each copy of our paper has at least four readers. With the disappearance of Kuomintang influence in Shanghai in the past two years, our comrades have found it possible for the first time to publish legally, in the foreign areas of Shanghai, several Marxist and other books. In this the comrades have been greatly assisted by a sympathiser who is a publisher, and by a foreign comrade enjoying foreign protection who has set up a publishing concern, especially for this purpose. Our comrades now edit and publish a legal monthly (though not in the name of the party) which is the first legal publication of our party other than books. This monthly, called Tung Shan, or in English, The Living Age, had a first print of 1,000 copies, almost all of which were sold. The only magazine in China to predict the Moscow-Berlin Pact, the magazine has gained great prestige and, provided it is not banned, may be of great importance … Sympathisers edit and publish a daily legal newspaper for children, with a circulation of 3,000 copies. Recently numerous books by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky have been published legally, in addition to numerous pamphlets. Other books include V.’s Serge From Lenin to Stalin, Andre Gide’s Retour and Retouches, Malraux’s Les Conquerants, and Silone’s Fontamara. These translations mean a tremendous amount of work, the average requiring two comrades working from three to six months full time. At present our comrades are translating The Stalin School of Falsification and The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. Since relatively few of our comrades know foreign languages well, translation work goes very slowly. These comrades must also support themselves by doing translations for bourgeois concerns. Release As far as is known, there have been no betrayals of any of our arrested or other comrades since the founding of our organisation. There have been about five defections, three prior to 1936. In March 1937, four months prior to his scheduled release from prison, Comrade Niel Sih capitulated to the Kuomintang, but did not betray. Niel Sih was expelled from the organisation, and claimed he was unfairly treated. For a time he was in close touch with some of our comrades, and assisted them with some legal work, but later joined the Publicity Section of the National Military Council of the Kuomintang … Comrade Shi [Shi Chaosheng], an exceptionally capable and brilliant comrade, was released from prison in December 1937. He is now mentally deranged, and has become a Buddhist Monk. He claims to have discovered a new theory, and insisted that I send to Comrade Trotsky several huge volumes of Buddhist literature – in Chinese – for Comrade Trotsky’s perusal.

436

ed. yang

Comrade Chen Duxiu was released from prison in August 1937. He went subsequently to Hankou, where he wrote for several legal publications. When denounced as a Trotskyist by Stalinists, Chen stated publicly that he wrote in his own name only and was not associated with any party or group. Later, a correspondent of the New York Times, who is a close sympathiser, interviewed Comrade Chen. Perhaps because of language difficulties, the interview was very unfortunate and Comrade Chen is said to have expressed the opinion that it would be best if Japan succeed in conquering China, because only this would give any perspective to the revolutionary movement. Fortunately, the correspondent mentioned this interview to no one save our comrades. Comrade Chen’s statement that he belonged to no group drew great fire from our younger comrades. Finally, a comrade was sent to visit Chen and reported as follows: Chen stands 100 per cent with the Fourth International, but publicly disavows any party allegiance. In essence, the comrades decide neither to avow nor disavow, publicly, Comrade Chen, as long as in the net balance he proved helpful to the movement as a whole. This is, I believe, the situation at present. At present Chen, who is in his seventies, is exceedingly ill. He is now living near Chongqing, and is said to be too ill now even to write. Concerted attempts were made to persuade Comrade Chen to go to the United States. When, finally, he agreed, it was too late: permission to travel was refused by the Kuomintang, and also, his health now makes travelling impossible. Both because of his relative inactivity and his tremendous prestige, I do not personally believe Comrade Chen is in any danger from the Kuomintang or gpu. He does, however, take precautions. Aside from the case of Chen Duxiu, there have been no serious factional disputes for the past three years. There have been some minor disputes. One, as to whether our comrades should play an active role in forming anti-Japanese organisations, disappeared with the onslaught of the war. The other, concerning Chen Duxiu, has been practically liquidated. Up to the time I left, there had been no differences whatsoever concerning “unconditional” defence or “conditional” defence of the Soviet Union. The party stood unanimously for unconditional defence. In general, one may say that the Chinese organisation is at present free from any serious factional disputes. It is a closely-knit, wellgrounded organisation. There is an almost complete absence of petty jealousies and politics. From 1931 to 1937, there were indeed severe disputes and factional fights. These resulted mainly from carry-overs from Stalinism. In these years of dispute, the party was set on a firm basis, its leaders schooled, and its programme was made clear and firm. Shanghai is a complex city, but consists, briefly, of two foreign areas surrounded by Chinese areas. These latter areas are now in the hands of the Japanese.

frank glass’s selected articles

437

At least half of the Chinese industries were situated in these Chinese districts. Both at Shanghai and throughout China where the Japanese have conquered, industry has been completely smashed and there has been no revival whatsoever. Industries are flourishing, however, within the foreign areas of Shanghai and at Hong Kong. The cost of living in the past two years has increased tremendously. Rents alone are 150 per cent up, while food is up at least 50 per cent. The depreciation of the Chinese currency has also severely lowered the standard of living. Wages have been raised about 15 per cent in big industries, but in actuality real wages are much less than before hostilities started. The average wage in a cotton mill, for example, is 15 Shanghai dollars a month for a 12-hour day with one holiday per month. In American currency, this would be about $1.15. These conditions, plus the oversupply of labour caused by the war, plus the complete passivity of the workers and peasants towards the war, have made it exceedingly difficult for our organisation to gain new members. Nevertheless, there are several new comrades, most of them being workers and students, especially the latter. For the first time, there are several women comrades. It is significant that in the single city under Kuomintang control which has enjoyed “prosperity”, that is, in Fuzhou, the only remaining open coastal port, our strength has grown tremendously.10 The same is true to a lesser extent in such cities in the Southwest such as Guilin, Yunnanfu [Kunming], and other now important transport and industrial centres.

(d)

Memory of Trotsky11 23 August 1940

Source: Socialist Appeal, vol. 4, no. 39, 29 September 1940, p. 3. [Part 1:] The Central Executive Committee of the Communist League of China Issued the following Statement on the Death of Leon Trotsky The Communist League of China, section of the Fourth International, deeply mourns the passing of Leon Trotsky, who met his death at the hands of a brutal

10 11

See Ibid. Both the statement and letter concerning the death of Trotsky were drafted by Frank Glass in the name of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist League of China.

438

ed. yang

assassin employed by Stalin’s international Mafia. To Natalia, his devoted wife and comrade, we send all our sympathy in this irreparable loss which we so sadly share. After several unsuccessful attempts, the Borgia of the Kremlin has finally succeeded in stilling the voice of the greatest leader of the revolutionary socialist movement. Trotsky was murdered because, as the legitimate bearer of the traditions of the October Revolution in Russia and the preeminent leader of the worldwide movement of the revolutionary proletariat and the oppressed masses, he represented the greatest menace to the totalitarian bureaucracy which, with Stalin at its head, dominates the Soviet Union and crushes the masses under the weight of its lucrative privileges and the violent rule by which it maintains them. The murder of Trotsky was also an act of personal vengeance by Stalin, the foul crowning deed in a series of murders which has claimed the lives of Trotsky’s two sons and two daughters and thousands of his devoted followers in Russia. By the death of Leon Trotsky, the workers and oppressed peoples of all the world, including China, have lost their most gifted and ardent champion. Tirelessly and selflessly and without thought for his personal welfare or safety, he battled for more than forty years in the cause of the downtrodden and oppressed. To this great liberating struggle he brought a diversity of talents rarely given to a single man. Together with Lenin he led the Russian Revolution to victory and created the Red Army which fought off its enemies. Despite the later degeneration of the Soviet state, he continued its most able revolutionary defender and laboured indefatigably for its revival by promoting the cause of the international socialist revolution. He kept undeviatingly to this course in the face of streams of slander, monstrous frame-ups and continual threats against his life by the Kremlin clique and their hired agents. The hand of Stalin, guiding the hand of the assassin who encompassed his death, has brought the career of the great revolutionist to a premature end. In his writings and labours, as well as by his exemplary life as a man and a revolutionist, Leon Trotsky has bequeathed a rich heritage to the international proletariat and all the oppressed. Under the banner which he unfurled and so bravely upheld until his last breath – the banner of the Fourth International – his great work will reach fruition. This will be an imperishable monument to Leon Trotsky, who lived and died for the emancipation of mankind. Central Executive Committee, Communist League of China, Shanghai, 23 August 1940

frank glass’s selected articles

439

[Part 2:] The following Letter Was Sent to Comrade Natalia Trotsky by the Executive Committee of the Communist League of China The Chinese comrades send you these few words in the hope of comforting you in the dark days of sorrow which you are now passing through because of the loss of our beloved Comrade Trotsky. We wanted to send you a cable or radiogram, but circumstances here are such that we must write instead. We had always hoped that you and we would be spared the grief which has now fallen upon us, but it was not to be. Despite all the precautions which were taken, an assassin employed by Stalin succeeded in carrying out his vile task. We had hoped that Comrade Trotsky would live many more years to continue his great work in the cause of the socialist revolution. Now we can only take comfort – and we ask you to take comfort – in the thought that before he died Comrade Trotsky had already performed enormous labour for our cause. This work must now be carried to completion by others, less fitted for the task, but inspired by his selfless and gifted devotion to the cause of the downtrodden and the oppressed. We recall with especial gratitude the great contributions which Comrade Trotsky has made to the revolutionary movement in China. His labours have armed us with a programme which in the end will triumph. When the masses of China, marching under the banner of the Fourth International, throw off the chains of imperialism and step forward on the road to socialism, they will learn of the great part that Comrade Trotsky played in assuring their triumph, and they will appropriately honour his memory. Dear Comrade Natalia: we grieve with you in this terrible bereavement and we honour you as the beloved wife and comrade of our departed leader. Please accept our fraternal love and sympathy. We shall continue to uphold the banner of international socialism, the banner of the Fourth International under which Comrade Trotsky lived and died. Executive Committee, Communist League of China (Section of the Fourth International), Li Fu-jen Shanghai, 23 August 1940

440 (e)

ed. yang

American Intervention in China: Resolution Adopted by the Executive Committee of the Fourth International12 31 March 1941

Source: Fourth International, New York, vol. 2, no. 4, May 1941, pp. 105–07. i The task of China’s emancipation from the yoke of imperialism rests with the Chinese proletariat, supported by the peasant masses. Just as the national bourgeoisie is unable to pull the country out of stagnation, so it cannot conduct a successful struggle against a single imperialist power (Japan), much less make a consistent fight for China’s liberation from foreign domination. Its struggle against one imperialist power only leads it into the orbit of another. For a number of years the national bourgeoisie, personified in Chiang Kaishek, employed the policy of “non-resistance” in face of Japan’s banditry, preferring to turn its forces against the Chinese workers and peasants. Having embarked on war against Japan when no other possibility remained open, Chiang Kai-shek has never forgotten the struggle against the Chinese people (opposition to even the most modest social reforms, the crushing of every independent movement of the masses). Chiang’s recent attacks on the New Fourth and Eighth Route armies show that his reactionary policy cannot tolerate even the timid democratic reforms introduced by these Stalinist-controlled forces. If, in spite of this policy of social reaction, the Japanese advance could be halted and the war brought to a stalemate, it can be said with assurance that Japanese imperialism would long ago have been forced to abandon the scorching earth of China if only the agrarian revolution had set the country aflame. The fact that today Chiang Kai-shek is forced more and more to turn towards American (and British) imperialism, thus preparing a new oppression for China, is the direct consequence of the fear of the national bourgeoisie before its own people and the impossibility for it to mobilise the revolutionary forces of the nation against the Japanese invaders. ii American imperialism, pursuing its “manifest destiny”, is preparing to take over British Empire positions in the Far East, including China, and to bring about the defeat of its Japanese rival in the Pacific. Washington plans to subdue Japan in

12

This resolution was jointly drafted by Frank Glass and Harold Isaacs.

frank glass’s selected articles

441

war, to expel the Japanese imperialists from China, and to assume the overlordship of the Chinese people. Preparatory steps in this direction are the military, naval and aerial moves in the Pacific and the increased “aid” given to Chiang Kai-shek in the form of loans and war supplies. The revolutionists, while recognising the necessity for China to accept American material aid in the war against Japan, cannot ignore the dangers hidden behind it. They must combat all suggestions that American imperialism is actuated by benevolence towards China and explain to the broad masses the real motive of this aid – the preparation of a new slavery for tomorrow. If the “friendly” imperialists demand payment for their aid with preferential economic rights, concessions, military bases, etc., the revolutionists must oppose such transactions, which in the end would mean the displacement in China of one imperialism by another, the change being paid for in the blood of the Chinese masses. Should the Chinese bourgeoisie make any such bargains, revolutionists must denounce them as a betrayal of China’s struggle for emancipation. But they will not “punish” Chiang Kai-shek by declaring themselves “defeatists” in China’s war against Japan. They will continue to stand for the defence of China in spite of, and against, the Chinese bourgeoisie. iii Imperialist rivalries in the Pacific are leading directly to an armed clash. When, and possibly before, the United States makes war upon Japan, a military alliance between Washington (and London) and Chongqing will be on the order of the day. However, the fact that the war between Japanese and American imperialism (in which Chiang Kai-shek will be a subordinate ally of the latter) will possess a purely imperialist character, does not wipe out the problems of China’s struggle to expel the Japanese invaders. Revolutionists must explain to the Chinese masses that the alliance of their national bourgeoisie with American imperialism is the inevitable consequence of Chiang Kai-shek’s reactionary conduct of the war against Japan; that the crushing of every independent move for social reforms, and later the alliance with Washington, are two sides of a single policy; that this policy is neither able to assure the emancipation of the country nor to push forward the social liberation of the Chinese people. Countering official enthusiasm for the American imperialist “liberators” and their mission, the revolutionists must expose the real aims of dollar imperialism and show the great danger that is in store for China, the danger of a new enslavement. To the reactionary policy of Chiang Kai-shek, they will oppose the programme of a revolutionary war based on drastic social changes (land to the peasants, workers’ control of production, etc.).

442

ed. yang

This, however, will not prevent the revolutionists from continuing to stand for the victory of the Chinese armies over the Japanese invaders. The Washington-Chongqing alliance and the flood of American material assistance to the Chiang Kai-shek regime will not erase the task of driving the Japanese imperialists from Chinese soil. But alongside this task it becomes increasingly important to explain to the Chinese masses the real character of American intervention and to show them that the eventual outcome of the war against Japan will depend upon the means by which victory is gained. Victory obtained by selling to another imperialist power the riches of the country can only prepare new forms of oppression for the Chinese people. The growing collaboration between Chiang Kai-shek and the American imperialists has already had repercussions in the attacks by Chiang Kai-shek on the Stalinist-controlled peasant armies. While condemning the class-collaborationist policy of the Chinese Stalinist leaders which facilitated these attacks, the revolutionists proclaim their solidarity with the brave peasant fighters under Stalinist leadership and their readiness to join with them in resisting the counterrevolutionary moves of Chiang Kai-shek. iv Washington’s alliance with Chongqing for war against Japan will afford the American imperialists the opportunity of covering their enterprise in China with democratic and liberationist phrases. But the American workers cannot entrust to their exploiters – the most powerful imperialists in the world – the task of liberating China from the clutches of imperialist Japan. The “defence” of China by American imperialism is in reality the preparation of a new slavery for that country. A “sacred union” of the American proletariat with its bourgeoisie in the name of China’s defence, and the abandonment of the proletarian struggle for power, would mean that tomorrow China would be plundered by Wall Street. American imperialism would be strengthened at the expense of the Chinese masses and the American working class. The surest guarantee of China’s independence, of her emancipation from social backwardness, and of her development towards socialism, is the Soviet United States of America. To prepare for this, the class struggle cannot be halted for a single minute. v If even with greatly increased American material aid the Chinese armies should prove unable speedily to expel the Japanese invaders, the American imperialists will seek to land their own troops in China and to take over China’s struggle against Japan through the creation of a single command under their own control. It will be the duty of the Chinese revolutionists to oppose the subordina-

frank glass’s selected articles

443

tion of Chinese military operations to the strategy and war aims of American imperialism. China, moreover, is in no need of additional manpower to expel the Japanese invaders. The landing of American armed forces in China must therefore be condemned by the Chinese revolutionists as a purely imperialist enterprise and they must mobilise the Chinese masses in opposition thereto. In this they must receive the support of the revolutionists in the United States, who must oppose with the greatest vigour the sending of American armed forces to China and demand the withdrawal of those already in the country. If American forces are sent to China, the revolutionists must strive to unite the Chinese and American soldiers against the reactionary imperialists and their Chinese bourgeois allies. vi The tendency for increased American control over China’s struggle is bound to be accompanied by an intensification of all the political and social antagonisms inside the Chinese armies as well as throughout the country. Centres of anti-imperialist resistance, in the armies and among the workers and peasants, will spring up to confront Chiang Kai-shek and his gang, who have led the war against Japan in order to sell themselves to Wall Street on more advantageous terms. In these conditions, the revolutionary programme of defence for China – workers’ and peasants’ militias based on serious social reforms in town and village – will become more and more a reality. vii Any major military defeat which Japan suffers as a consequence of American intervention in the Far East will create revolutionary movements of the masses in Japan and the Japanese colonies of Manchukuo, Korea and Formosa, and will stimulate a revolutionary revival in China. The American imperialists, confronted with this spreading revolutionary upsurge, will grow less concerned about the struggle against Japan than with crushing the independent movement of the masses which will threaten their entire position. Just as the war against Japan has led Chiang Kai-shek to become a tool of American imperialism, so the masses of China, in alliance with their class brothers in the Japanese Empire, will be led to the social revolution.

444 (f)

ed. yang

Chen Duxiu: Chinese Revolutionist Li Fu-jen August 1942

Source: Fourth International, August 1942, pp. 238–241. (obituary) Chen Duxiu, a founder of the Trotskyist movement in China and before that of the Chinese Communist Party, is dead. With his passing there has disappeared an important political figure, one of the few remaining revolutionary veterans who survived the turbulent period that succeeded World War i. According to a United Press dispatch which the metropolitan newspapers did not consider worthy of publication and which appeared in a mid-western sheet, the veteran revolutionist, 62 years old, passed away at Jiangjin, a small village in Sichuan province, not far from the present Chinese capital of Chongqing, on May 24 of this year. The cause of his death was not stated in the dispatch, but Chen had been seriously ill of a heart ailment for a considerable time and this, it may be presumed, finally brought him to the end of his career. Though not widely known abroad, Chen Duxiu was a national figure in China, not only because of his prominence as a revolutionist but also because of his great contributions to China’s modern cultural advance. The last ten years of his life were spent in comparative obscurity. From 1932 to 1937 he was in prison in Nanjing, serving a 13-year sentence for “endangering the safety of the State”. Shortly after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war he was released with other political prisoners. Broken in health, he lived in virtual retirement until his death, but continued his attachment to the Chinese section of the Fourth International. The reactionary Kuomintang government denied him the right to engage even in literary work. The bourgeoisie feared him until the last. Born into a wealthy Mandarin family in the central China province of Anhui, Chen Duxiu rose to prominence in the troubled years that set in with China’s first revolution, the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty and the establishment of the republic in 1911. With a group of radical intellectuals he published at Peking a magazine, New Youth, which fought against the decayed ideology of Confucianism and sought to project China’s youth along new and revolutionary paths. Chen’s Road to Revolutionary Politics The essence of the Confucian doctrine, which has a distinct counterpart in the Christianity of the western world (and which, like Christianity, represents

frank glass’s selected articles

445

an important prop of the social status quo), is that social advance must be achieved through individual regeneration. Chen, while instinctively rejecting this reactionary concept of a bygone age, was nevertheless clearly under its influence in his early activities. He observed the ossification of Chinese society with its cultured, leisured Mandarinate and its illiterate, enslaved and povertystricken masses. It seemed to him that enlightenment of the masses was the prerequisite to social progress. He proclaimed the need to substitute “science and democracy” for the way of life then buttressed by Confucian philosophy and ethics. And the immediate task, he believed, was to wrest culture from the palsied hands of an outworn social class and make it the possession of the broad masses. In the Chinese language itself Chen saw the greatest obstacle to the cultural advance of the masses. With its thousands of intricate characters and arbitrary construction, it required years of intensive study for its mastery. How could the son of a poor family ever hope to acquire more than the barest rudiments for everyday intercourse? Chen set himself the task of simplifying China’s written language so that it might become accessible to the common people. After years of devoted labour he produced the pei hua and popularised it in North China, where he was a professor at the Peking National University. Pei hua means, literally, “northern language”, and it derived that name from the fact that it was in the north that it first took hold. Through the medium of the pei hua reading and writing and the general understanding of the language were enormously simplified. It invaded the newer schools, was used by the newspapers and became the choice of popular writers. It looked as if a long step forward had been taken in opening a cultural avenue for the masses. But Chen was soon to discover that he had merely created the vehicle for a broader culture without giving the masses opportunity for boarding the vehicle. How could the son of a poor peasant family hope to attend school and learn even the simplified language if his parents were just eking out a bare existence on the land and unable to pay for his education? How could a youth born into the home of a poor working artisan ever reach the portals of even an elementary school (all schools were fee-paying)? What hope of mass cultural development was there in a backward country like China, where almost universal poverty was the rule, where tens of thousands of villages and towns had not a single library or newspaper, often no school, and where the vast majority of families existed on such slender budgets that provision for the purchase of a newspaper, even if one were available, was utterly out of the question? Posing these questions to himself, Chen Duxiu was drawn into the realm of political ideas and struggles. The October revolution in 1917 exerted its inevit-

446

ed. yang

able influence on the idealistic Chen and hastened his development. In backward Russia he saw the European counterpart of China. He came to understand that new life, social progress, cultural advancement could become possible only by overthrowing the landlords and capitalists and establishing the rule of the people. The Russian Bolsheviks had blazed a trail which China must follow. World War i had brought into being the Chinese proletariat, but it was still immature, its first fiery struggles still lay ahead. By 1919, however, the political ideas unleashed by the Russian Bolsheviks had made their way into the ranks of China’s radical intelligentsia and a number of socialist groups had been formed. Their growth and coalescence were given impetus by the great student uprisings in Peking that year, which have gone into Chinese history as the May Fourth Movement. One of the leading figures in that movement, which was directed against the rotten Peking government of those days, was Chen Duxiu. In 1920, together with other leading figures among China’s rebellious intellectuals, Chen joined in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. In July 1921 the party held its first national conference at Shanghai. Six years later, in April 1927, Chiang Kaishek, political and military representative of the bourgeoisie, slew the Chinese revolution and gave the revolutionary movement its first blood bath. The Communist Party was outlawed and many of its best leaders were captured and executed. Thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants were slaughtered. Chen Duxiu became a fugitive in hiding. The story of how the fatal opportunist policies of Stalin-Bukharin led to the terrible defeat of the Chinese revolution has been told many times and there is no occasion to repeat it here. The executive committee of the Comintern sought, as it had done earlier in the case of the abortive German revolution, to saddle the exclusive responsibility for the disaster on the national leaders of the revolution, principally Chen Duxiu, although it was the Stalin-Bukharin policy, faithfully executed by him, which had brought on the debacle. At the conference of the Chinese party in August 1927 Chen was deposed from leadership to the accompaniment of loud condemnations of his leadership from Moscow. He retired from active work while the new, and part of the old, leadership switched under Moscow orders from the previous policy of opportunism to the equally disastrous course of adventurism whose high point was marked by the abortive Guangzhou insurrection in December 1927. Chen wrote several letters to the central committee of the party, opposing the new adventuristic course. In August 1929 he reiterated his opposition in a lengthy letter to the central committee and demanded a re-examination of its policies. Shortly thereafter he and about 100 others were expelled as Oppositionists.

frank glass’s selected articles

447

In February 1930 the Comintern invited him to Moscow, where many political penitents, under pressure of Stalin’s machine, had confessed their “errors”. Chen, to his everlasting credit, refused the “invitation” and demanded that the issues of the defeated revolution be thrown open to full discussion within the Comintern and the Chinese party. That refusal and demand severed the tenuous thread still holding Chen to the Stalinists. He solidarised himself with one of several groups of Left Oppositionists which subsequently united to form the Communist League of China, section of the Fourth International, and was a leading figure in Oppositionist activity – all conducted from the underground – until his arrest by the Kuomintang in 1932. On trial before a military court in Nanjing, Chen defended his revolutionary Trotskyist views and generally conducted himself in the best traditions of the revolutionary movement, becoming the accuser, he hurled defiance at the Kuomintang military regime, condemned its frightful terrorism against the people. The picture of this slight figure of a man in his faded Chinese gown, surrounded by gendarmes in a heavily guarded courtroom, a possible death penalty in the offing, yet hurling defiance at his captors in the name of the persecuted and downtrodden masses, is one which can inspire our comrades everywhere as they prepare to face the great ordeals which revolutionary activity exacts in these terrible times. Chen’s Political Limitations Chen Duxiu embodied in his political personality a remarkable, though by no means unique, contradiction which set the severest limitations on his career as a revolutionist – the fact that he became a revolutionary fighter and leader, a champion of the oppressed, a Communist, without ever becoming a Marxist. Chen’s life, particularly the closing years of it, should serve as an object lesson and a warning to would-be revolutionary leaders who sneer at dialectics and consider themselves amply educated politically after they have read a few popular pamphlets on Marxism. He had absorbed some Marxist ideas piecemeal, without consistency, on the wing so to speak, while engaged in the tasks of the revolutionary movement, but he never became a consistent Marxist. The fact that he so readily accepted the opportunist policies of Stalin-Bukharin in the 1925–27 revolutionary period – though admittedly with occasional misgivings and sometimes contrary to his own better judgment – was due in large part to the deficiency of his Marxist education. As a thinker he was inclined to be empirical, and bourgeois philosophy, against which he rebelled while a professor but which he nevertheless had absorbed into his system (largely via John Dewey), stood as an obstacle

448

ed. yang

to the further development of his mental powers. It was his misfortune, too, that he did not have the opportunity to study the lessons of the Russian revolution, for these were suppressed by the Moscow bureaucracy and Trotsky had not yet written his monumental history of the great upheaval. Chen was limited, moreover, by his lack of knowledge of foreign languages and few of the Marxist classics were available in Chinese. Charged with “endangering the safety of the State”, Chen demanded of the prosecutor (I paraphrase his remarks, not having the text available): “How can I be accused of endangering the State? Is not the State the people? In what way am I endangering the State when I fight for the rights of the people?” It was evident that Chen had either not read, or had failed to understand, the writings of Marx on the question of the state or even Lenin’s The State and Revolution. The Marxist conception of the state as a political instrument of the ruling class was to Chen a seemingly unknown idea. At the beginning of his political career, Chen had proclaimed “science and democracy” as the needed substitute for Confucianism if China were to advance. Democracy was here posed, not from the point of view of the struggle of social classes, not in the political context of revolutionary materialism, but as a more or less abstract concept, a non-class “ideal” to be striven for by people of good will. That, of course, was in the days of Chen’s political immaturity. It is doubtful, however, whether in his thinking Chen ever really envisaged his “ideal” democracy – a subject to which he returned over and over again in the later years of his life – in the political form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, even if he accepted that idea formally. To Chen, democracy was something of a fetish. His early life as a liberal-radical professor who had to oppose a dictatorship (the old Peking government) in order to disseminate his new cultural ideas; the later consolidation of the Kuomintang regime which systematically polluted the libertarian atmosphere which had developed during the revolutionary years; finally, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist suppression of all democratic liberties – all these factors contributed to Chen’s fetishistic conception of democracy. The circumstances of his life, as well as the factors already named, played their part in stopping short the development of Chen Duxiu as a revolutionary leader. I have mentioned his lack of knowledge of foreign languages, especially serious in a country like China. This he tried to make good during his five years of imprisonment and I know that he made sufficient progress in English to be able to read some of Trotsky’s more important works. The five years spent in prison, however, had the corresponding disadvantage that Chen was denied close contact with his comrades in one of the most crucial periods of mod-

frank glass’s selected articles

449

ern revolutionary history: the final decline and degeneration of the Communist International and the rise of the Fourth International. Such isolation from the live current of events is always unfortunate, but particularly in the case of a revolutionist well past middle age who has not had the benefit of a thorough grounding in Marxism. Chen’s knowledge of the international movement was sketchy, gleaned from books, pamphlets and articles. Unlike most of the outstanding revolutionists, he had never gone abroad. His entire life was spent within the borders of China and his only contact with comrades from foreign lands was during the Chinese revolution when functionaries of the Comintern (Borodin, Roy, et al.) were in China to give commands to the central committee of the Chinese cp. Lack of any personal knowledge of the outside world had limiting effects on Chen’s mental horizons and bred in him a certain provincialism. His contacts with the Comintern functionaries, incidentally, engendered in him an ill-concealed and quite irrational hostility and suspicion towards revolutionists from other lands. Two years after his release from prison the second imperialist world war broke out to reveal the reactionary content of Chen’s democratic concept. As an advocate of democracy “in general” without reference to social classes, he rapidly developed his thought to the point at which he considered it necessary for revolutionists to support the “democratic” imperialist camp against the fascist camp and urged this policy upon the Chinese section of the Fourth International. A lengthy polemic ensued in which Chen even went to the length of declaring that India should at least postpone its struggle for freedom in order not to jeopardise a “democratic” victory by hampering Britain’s war effort. This polemic, which was carried on by correspondence between the remote Sichuan village where Chen lived and the central committee in Shanghai, left Chen in a minority of one. The polemic was often interrupted or suspended by Chen’s more and more frequent lapses into illness. His views never became publicly known, since the discussion was confined within the organisation. He did not break with the organisation, and the latter, for its part, saw no reason to use harsh measures against an illustrious comrade who took no public stand against its policies. In Chinese intellectual circles Chen throughout his life was the object of great esteem – not because of his politics but because of his scholarly attainments and his impeccable integrity. While Chen hewed to the hard revolutionary path, most of his former academic associates and likewise most of his former pupils went the way of most petty-bourgeois flesh, preferring to feed at the troughs put out by the ruling regime. Among them was Dr. Hu Shi, the present Chinese ambassador in Washington, who liked to consider himself a

450

ed. yang

disciple of Chen Duxiu, but spoke not one public word for Chen when he was jailed by Chiang Kai-shek.13 Among the intellectuals Chen was esteemed mainly as a philosopher and as a rare master of the Chinese language. He was renowned as a calligrapher and specimens of his writing, exquisitely executed with deft strokes of the brush or pen, are the prized possessions of many of his comrades, friends and acquaintances. Some of his former academic friends who through all the phases of his life continued to hold him in high esteem came to his defence in Hankou in 1938 when the Communist Party, shortly after Chen’s release from prison, conducted a slander campaign against the aging man, accusing him and the rest of the Trotskyists of being agents of Japan. They published a statement recalling Chen’s career as a fighter for social justice, his record in the long battle for China’s emancipation from imperialist control; they cited his incorruptibility, as evidenced by his readiness to suffer persecution for his ideas, to prove it was impossible that such a man could be an agent of Japan. This defence was not political, but it sufficed for a time to put the Stalinists to such public shame as to silence their slander campaign. Chen’s failure to mature politically was a reflection, in its way, of the backwardness of China. He came to the revolutionary movement as a man of mature years. The younger comrades had many advantages denied to Chen, among them the opportunity to devote themselves to the study of Marxism and the works of its most distinguished continuator, Leon Trotsky. How far the Chinese revolutionary movement has advanced beyond the political level which Chen represented is evidenced most strikingly in the fact that he could not find in the Chinese organisation a single supporter for his later political ideas. Personal regard for Chen because of his high integrity the comrades kept until his death, but they never allowed his personal prestige to influence their political judgment. Despite his serious limitations, Chen Duxiu displayed most of the personal qualities of a great revolutionist. His single-minded devotion to the cause of the oppressed could not be questioned. He abandoned a comfortable and honoured academic career for the life of a revolutionist and never looked backward. With his comrades he shared all the vicissitudes of that life, including drab poverty and the dangers of under-ground activity. Never was he known to flinch or complain. His entire political life was one of personal renunciation. Before the court of the hangman Chiang Kai-shek he bore himself heroically. Had he 13

Hu Shi was not a disciple but an old friend of Chen Duxiu. Hu supported Chen when he was arrested by Chiang Kai-shek, and along with other intellectuals asked for a “special amnesty” for Chen. See Zhang 2004.

frank glass’s selected articles

451

been prepared, like many of the Stalinist capitulators in the worst period of the Kuomintang terror, to disown his revolutionary views and bend the knee to the ruling despot, he could have had almost anything within the despot’s gift. He preferred prison – death, if need be to such dishonour and he remained an exemplar of revolutionary conduct. For his steadfastness Chen Duxiu will always remain an honoured figure in the gallery of revolutionary fighters. The revolutionary youth of present-day China will make good his deficiencies in preparing themselves for their own revolutionary roles. They will carry to fruition the great work in which he strove with a valiance that overshadowed his short-comings.

(g)

In Memoriam: Chen Qichang Li Fu-jen 16 February 1946

Source: The Militant, vol. 10, no. 7, 16 February 1946, p. 3. With the arrival of the first word from our Chinese comrades in more than four years, comes the tragic news of the death of Comrade Chen Qichang, veteran revolutionist and a leading member of the Chinese Trotskyist organisation from its inception. I came to know Comrade Chen well during the many years I spent in China. He was the authentic type of professional revolutionist who devoted his entire life, all his energies, to the emancipating struggle for socialism. Perpetual, grinding poverty and the need to provide for a wife and five young children – did not deter him. He gave part of his time to translation work from English to Chinese in order to gain a bare livelihood and the rest of his time was given to the movement. I never knew him to complain of his personal difficulties. Revolutionary Fighter Like his comrades, Chen lived the life of an underground revolutionary fighter, always in the shadow of capture by the bloodhounds of Chiang Kai-shek’s police. He developed special skill in the multifarious activities of an illegal political organisation. It was largely due to his ingenuity and never-flagging vigilance that the underground Trotskyist printing press was maintained without interruption during the years before Pearl Harbor to bring out the party organ Doh Tseng (Struggle) and other publications. This press was operated under the very noses of the Kuomintang and British imperialist police.

452

ed. yang

Often it became necessary to move the printing apparatus with great speed from one hiding place to another. It was Comrade Chen Qichang who made arrangements and saw that they were carried through. He not only guarded the printing apparatus but also wrote for the party press. At intervals he engaged in transporting Trotskyist literature from the centre to branch organisations in Hong Kong and elsewhere – one of the most hazardous undertakings. A Grievous Loss Comrade Chen managed by great vigilance and caution to evade the everspread dragnet laid for the Trotskyists by the Kuomintang and imperialist police. As a member of the Central Committee he was especially sought after by the authorities. Only now do we learn of his death at the hands of the vicious gendarmes of Japanese imperialism. The Trotskyist movement has suffered a grievous loss in the death of Comrade Chen. His name is added to the roll of honour of Trotskyist martyrs. We salute his memory!

(h)

The Kuomintang Faces Its Doom Li Fu-jen February 1949

Source: Fourth International, vol. 10, no. 2, February 1949, pp. 35–40. Twenty-two years ago Chiang Kai-shek seized power through the sanguinary smashing of the Chinese revolution. Today he stands face to face with his political doom. Amid vast economic chaos, social upheaval and military defeats by the Stalinist “Red” armies the Kuomintang regime totters on the brink of destruction. It is now totally on the defensive, weakly trying to stave off the final catastrophe. This situation, developing at an accelerated pace over a period of three years, signifies a tremendous change in the relationship of forces as between the Kuomintang regime and its capitalist-landlord backers, on the one hand, and the Stalinist party, leading the rural masses, on the other. As a necessary preliminary to an understanding of what has happened, and why, let us establish the broad sequence of events leading up to the present situation. In the last days of the Second World War Stalin moved Red Army troops into Manchuria. These disarmed the Japanese army of some 750,000 men and prepared the way for the Chinese Stalinist, to take over when they withdrew. Under the Japanese occupation there were already sizeable formations

frank glass’s selected articles

453

of Chinese peasant guerrillas under Stalinist leadership which engaged Japan’s Manchurian army in partisan warfare. When the Soviet troops entered the country, more of these peasant guerrillas swept in from the Mongolian borderlands. The surrender of the Japanese army in North China gate renewed mobility to additional large numbers of these fighters who had been isolated in the north-west hinterland of China proper. These began moving north-eastward, swarming across the Great Wall to reinforce their comrades in Manchuria. There is no doubt that but for the intervention of American imperialism the whole of Manchuria would immediately have come under the domination of the Chinese Stalinists The Struggle for Manchuria At Yalta, Stalin had agreed to turn over Manchuria, with the exception of Dalian and Port Arthur [Lüshunkou], to the “legal government” of China after the Japanese had been disarmed Chiang, however, did not possess the means of occupying the country with the necessary rapidity. The American imperialists obligingly placed at his disposal a large number of transport planes. With these Chiang was able to fly in troops to the principal cities – Harbin, Changchun, Mukden [Shenyang], etc. – and also take over the connecting railroads. But the surrounding countryside, was in the hands of the Chinese Stalinists and the cities became isolated pockets of Kuomintang rule. Equipped with weapons such as they had never possessed before – virtually all the military equipment surrendered by the Japanese – the Stalinists made short work of the isolated Kuomintang garrisons, whom Chiang found it increasingly difficult to supply. Manchurian city dwellers, who had welcomed Chiang’s troops were quickly disillusioned in their “liberators” and transferred their sympathies to the “Reds” – all, that is, but the capitalists and big landlords who fled south of the Great Wall as the Stalinist forces tightened their encirclement of the cities. It soon became obvious that the Kuomintang possessed not even the shadow of a social base for its rule in Manchuria. Chiang’s troops were bombarded with “Red” propaganda The Stalinist slogan of “Land to the Peasants” had a strong appeal for soldiers who were also peasants. They hated the Kuomintang regime. They hated their officers. In large numbers they went over to the other side, taking their American weapons with them. Chiang lost 300,000 of his Manchurian troops, three-fifths of the total. The remaining 200,000 were withdrawn inside the Great Wall. Now, with all Manchuria as a solid bastion at their backs, and after time out for regroupment, assault troops of the “Red” armies wheeled southward and in the space of a few months, operating among people friendly to their cause,

454

ed. yang

conquered practically all of North China except for isolated enclaves, represented by such cities as Peiping [Beijing] and Tianjin, and the Shandong port of Qingdao which is held by the American imperialists as a naval base. At this writing, Peiping and Tianjin are under siege and the tide of battle has flowed to within less than 100 miles of Nanjing, Chiang’s capital on the south hank of the Yangtze. The decimated Kuomintang armies are falling back on the river for a “final stand”. Disintegration of the Kuomintang As with all reactionary regimes upon which history has pronounced the sentence of death, the Kuomintang finds itself in the hour of mortal peril without reliable props or supports. Discord and treachery invade even the top levels of government. The armed forces dissolve. In the great battles around Suzhou14 on the North China plain, and again in the battles at the Huai River, Kuomintang troops again deserted in droves to the “Red” armies. The Stalinist land programme proves more potent than military discipline. In many instances Kuomintang commanders were killed by their men when they refused to surrender with their units. Chiang’s officers in the field seeing the hand-writing on the wall, are less and less inclined to carry out operational commands which commit them in the eyes of their men to a last-ditch defence of the Kuomintang regime. They withdraw from battle if they can. If withdrawal is too risky, they stay put and await the opportunity to surrender. Chiang’s armies are literally melting away. In Nanjing, the frightened coterie of politicians and generals which comprises the government has split into two factions, those favouring an attempt to negotiate peace with the Stalinists, and those favouring a fight to the finish. There is talk of jettisoning Chiang Kai-shek and replacing him with a more “liberal” figure. The Kuomintang clique and the nervous bourgeoisie view the Generalissimo in a dual role – as the source of all their troubles and at the some time their only possible sheet-anchor in the angry storm now swirling around them. Frantic appeals to US imperialism to come to the rescue have produced no results. There are proposals for moving the government south – to Changsha, to Hangzhou, to Fuzhou, to Guangzhou. But these cities, like the Manchurian cities before them, are isolated in a surging sea of rebellion. Stalinist guerrillas surround all the key points. There is also talk of moving the government to the island of Formosa. But here, too, there is seething hatred for the Kuo-

14

The county of Suzhou is today located in Anhui Province.

frank glass’s selected articles

455

mintang regime. Just little more than a year ago the garrison there carried out a savage campaign of repression in putting down a rebellion brought on by the corruption and oppression of Chiang’s deputies. There is no safety here either. Thus, 22 years after its ascent to power, the party of the Chinese landlords and capitalists finds itself isolated without a sure point of support anywhere. Floundering impotently, exuding decay from every pore, it can now scarcely fight back. What is the meaning of the dramatic events now unfolding on the Chinese scene? Are we confronted here with just a pure and simple case of Stalinist expansionism, or, as the imperialists would phrase it, “Soviet imperialism”? We can readily admit, as one press commentator put it, that Mao Zedong and his leading henchmen are “stooges” of Moscow. With scrupulous fidelity they have geared their policies to every twist and turn of the Kremlin line for twenty years and more. In doing so, they have not hesitated to violate and betray the most elementary interests of the Chinese workers and peasants, not to speak of the fundamental interests of the Chinese revolution. But when you have designated these dyed-in-the-wool Stalinists as stooges of the Kremlin. you have disclosed only a part of their political physiognomy, and not the most important part at that. In addition to being Stalin’s agents, Mao and his cohorts are the leaders of a mighty, indigenous mass movement, the rebellious peasantry which constitutes more than 80 per cent of the Chinese nation. This movement is no concoction of secretive plotters. It springs from the social soil of the country. It is this gigantic mass of rural toilers which is the source of the impressive power which the Stalinists have been translating into massive military victories. The changed relationship of class forces which characterise the present situation is marked in the political sphere by the fact that in the space of three years the Stalinists have passed from the policy of a People’s Fronts with the Kuomintang, and class collaboration with the exploiters, to a policy which calls for the overthrow of the Kuomintang and the expropriation of the landlords. If we probe into the reasons – both internal and international – for this political about-face, we shall be able to discover the basic causes for the present developments. Evolution of Stalinist Policy The wartime People’s Front was forged by the Stalinists in 1936, on the eve of Japan’s all-out attack on China. Chiang Kai-shek had up to then been pursuing a policy of “appeasement” towards the Japanese imperialists and this had alarmed the Kremlin. If Japan could extricate herself from the “China incident” by an agreement with Chiang, then her hands would be freed for an attack on

456

ed. yang

the ussr. The Chinese Stalinists, then pursuing their programme of agrarian revolution, were ordered to make an abrupt political turn – to abandon land expropriations and their aim of overthrowing the Kuomintang, and on that basis to seek an agreement with Chiang for China’s defence against any further attacks by Japanese imperialism. Stalin wanted China to fight Japan, so that Japan would be tied down and unable to make war on the ussr. In a programmatic statement, the Chinese Communist Party declared resistance to Japan to be the primary task to which everything else must be subordinated. They did not, at course, mean revolutionary resistance, but resistance based on the People’s Front type of class collaboration. They asserted that “only Chiang Kai-shek” could lead a successful war of resistance. Chiang, under growing popular pressure because of his attitude towards Japan (also pressure exerted by his bourgeois supporters who had become fearful that Japan would swallow the whole country), had every reason to accept the Stalinists’ proposals – in reality their political surrender. And so the “People’s Anti-Japanese United Front” was born. Chiang did not share power with the Stalinists. All they got was a few seats in the impotent People’s Political Council. The developing movement of opposition to the Kuomintang was canalised into a patriotic war movement. Thus the “bloc of four classes” which led to the destruction of the Chinese revolution ten years earlier was revived in the form of a new bloc of all “patriotic elements” for the “sacred war of resistance”. How effectively Chiang led the war against Japan is now a matter of historical record. One military disaster followed upon another until almost all of eastern China was under Japan’s domination. It is true that Japan did not succeed in conquering China. But neither did Chiang succeed in expelling the Japanese invaders. China’s ultimate “victory” was won by the armed might of American imperialism. In this fact alone is revealed the enormity of the crime which the Stalinists committed against the Chinese masses when they made this – their second – compact with the hangman of the Chinese revolution. What the Chinese agents of the Kremlin actually did to slow down the disintegration of the Kuomintang regime and rescue it from the wrath of the people at a time when the conditions for its overthrow were rapidly maturing. This was at crime, not only against the Chinese masses and the Chinese revolution, but against the world proletariat and the world socialist revolution. How different would have been the course of world events these past few yews if China’s defence against Japan had been revolutionary defence in the authentic tradition of Bolshevism, a defence resting on the revolutionary initiative and lighting courage of the exploited masses, in alliance with the Japanese and world proletariat!

frank glass’s selected articles

457

The Class Struggle Undermines the Coalition The wartime class-collaborationist programme of the Stalinists cut sharply across the objective realities of class. social and political relationships. Mao Zedong could and did proclaim the end of land seizure, but the rural toilers did not because of that cease hating the landlords. Mao could and did make the Communist Party the guardian of capitalist private property. But workers did not because of that become reconciled to capitalist exploitation. Mao could and did make a “united front” with the murderous Chiang. But that in no stay lessened the gulf which separated the masses from the Kuomintang regime. Mao and Chiang could and did enter into a compact whose aim was to exorcise the class struggle in the alleged interests of the war against Japan, but the class struggle, even though muted, continued nevertheless. During the war years peasant uprisings, accompanied by land seizures, flared in hundreds of villages. Kuomintang officers, trying impress the peasant youth into the army, encountered fierce resistance everywhere. Savage repressions ensued, only to be followed by more rebellious outbreaks. In the cities workers went on strike. All the conditions of daily life were going from bad to worse as far as the masses were concerned, feeding ever fresh fuel to the fire of the class struggle. As the War drew to a close, the tide of class struggle flowed more and more strongly against the political dikes of class collaboration. The sharpening of class antagonism and the growing movement of opposition to the Kuomintang compelled the Stalinists to make a show of opposition to Chiang and his government in the form of cautious criticism. But they continued in the “united front” and their representatives remained in Chiang’s fake parliament, the People’s Political Council. Chiang, for his part, accused the Stalinists of fomenting peasant revolt, thereby violating the “united front”. It was plain that the wartime policy of class collaboration must be shipwrecked on the jagged rocks of the class struggle. Chiang virtually ceased fighting the Japanese and began making troop dispositions in preparation for future battle against the Stalinists. Stalin’s agents responded by expanding their territorial hold wherever possible. Actual battles between Chiang’s troops and the Stalinist guerrilla forces were taking place with increasing frequency as Imperial Japan went down in defeat. The internal dynamics of Chinese political life, on the morrow of Japan’s surrender drew together with developments in the sphere of international relationships The outstanding new fact in these relationships was the confrontation of the Soviet Union by the arrogant might of a victorious American imperialism, in a world where international rivalries had been narrowed down, in the main, to the antagonism between these two powers. The third world war was already on the agenda. Little effort has been made by the American imperial-

458

ed. yang

ists to conceal the fact that they are converting the Japanese bourgeoisie into a future war alley, and Japan itself, together with southern Korea and the Philippines, into a base for war against the Soviet Union. Stalin responded in characteristic fashion. Having long since abandoned Lenin’s concept of the defence of the Soviet Union through the extension of the socialist revolution, Stalin is replying to the American threat in kind. Between America’s Far Eastern bases and the Soviet borders he plans to interpose a Stalinist-dominated China. The conjuncture of the Kremlin’s strategic plans and the internal dynamics of Chinese political development furnishes the basic explanation for the current Stalinist policy in China, for the shift of the people’s Frontism to renewed class struggle. Stalin’s Aims in China What does Stalin need in China? A limited, “controlled” revolution which, while making China a bulwark against American imperialism, will not develop into a prairie fire of socialist revolution and thus endanger the rule of the Soviet bureaucracy. After a long-drawn-out series of negotiations between Chiang and the Stalinists which followed the war – negotiations which found Chiang unyielding to Stalinist demands – efforts to end the growing civil war and establish a Stalinist-Kuomintang coalition were abandoned. Chiang would not and could not agree to those concessions which for the Stalinists were the irreducible minimum without which their own influence must inevitably wane – namely, “democracy” (meaning full legality for themselves) and extensive land reforms. Chiang demanded what he had always demanded before – the political and military surrender of his adversaries. Even the US mediator in these negotiations, General Marshall, thought it unrealistic to demand that the Chinese Stalinists commit political suicide at a time when their power was growing. Mao Zedong and company formalised the rupture in a series of policy declarations. Explicitly, or implicitly these meant: Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang must go. The Communist Party would proceed to overthrow this regime by military means. It would bring “democracy” to China, founded upon a coalition of anti-Kuomintang elements. “Feudalism” must be destroyed and the land transferred to the peasants. Since China is backward and povertystricken, all talk of socialism is “unrealistic”.15 Hence there would be no attempt 15

A note written by Glass: “This is a revealing commentary on Stalin’s theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’. According to Stalin it was entirely possible to construct a socialist society in backward Russia. According to Mao it is entirely impossible to construct socialism in backward China. In reality, it is not a question of the compatibility of backwardness with

frank glass’s selected articles

459

to upset capitalist property relations. The peasants would get the land, but the workers must be content with their lot as wage-slaves, though they may have a few bones of reform thrown to them. The Stalinist Agrarian Programme for China On 10 October 1947 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party promulgated its Basic Programme on Chinese Agrarian Law. Thus, bringing formally to an end the policy of class collaboration in the village which it had instituted eleven years earlier. It is necessary to quote this law at some length in order to make clear the basis for the support which the Stalinists now enjoy in rural China. Article 1: The agrarian system of feudal and semi-feudal exploitation is abolished and the agrarian system of “Land to the Tiller” is to be realised. Article 2: Land ownership rights of all landlords are abolished. Article 3: Land ownership of all ancestral shrines, temples, monasteries, schools, institutions and organisations are abolished. Article 4: All debts incurred prior to the reform of the agrarian system are cancelled. Article 6: Except as provided in Article 9, Section B (referring to forests, mines, lakes; etc. – Li Fu-jen) all land in villages owned by landlords, and all public land, shall be taken over by the village peasants’ unions, and together with all other village land, in accordance with the total population of the village irrespective of sex or age, shall be unified and equally distributed; with regard to quantity, surplus land shall her taken to relieve dearths, and with regard to quality, fertile land shall be taken to supplement infertile, so that all village inhabitants shall equally share the land, and it shall be the individual property of each person. Article 10, Section D: Landlords and their families shall be given land and properties equivalent to that of the peasants. Section E: All families of Kuomintang military officers and soldiers, government officials and personnel, party members and other enemy personnel, whose homes are in rural areas, shall be given land and properties equivalent to that of the peasant. socialism – an obvious absurdity: In China today, as in the Russia of 1917, the continuance of capitalist property relations dooms the country to backwardness and decay. The proletariat must take power and must destroy bourgeois property relations if China is to strike out along a new path, which can only be the path of socialism. Underlying the stupidity of Stalin and Mao alike is their criminal opposition to Trotsky’s conception of the permanent and international character of all revolutionary struggles in the contemporary world.”

460

ed. yang

Article 11: The government shall issue to the people deeds of ownership of the land, end moreover, recognise their rights to free management, trading, and under specially determined conditions, to renting their land. All land deeds and all notes on debts contracted prior to the reform of the agrarian system shall be turned in and shall be declared null and void. Article 12: The property and legal operation of industrial and commercial elements shall be protected from encroachment. The attractive power of this programme scarcely needs emphasis. To the rural toilers it is a veritable Magna Carta. Millions of landless peasants and tenant farmers have the prospect of planting their feet firmly in the soil. Debtburdened peasants see in it liberation from their oppressive woes. For all this vast mass of humanity it seems to hold promise of a better life. The plight of these teeming multitudes under the rule of the Kuomintang is revealed, in part, by pre-war figures of land ownership. These show that the bigger landlords, representing only 4 per cent of the total population, own about 50 per cent of the land. Rich peasants who form 6 per cent of the population, hold 26 per cent of the land. The remaining 90 per cent of the population possess only 24 per cent of the land. The great bulk of the land population carries on what is known as “subsistence farming” on tiny plots that more and more become uneconomic units. These plots can be made to produce no surplus over and above bare living requirements. In years of poor harvest they are worked at a deficit which increases the ever-growing burden of peasant debt. The Limits of the Land Reform As it concerns the land problem, the Stalinist programme is clearly revolutionary. It represents an abrupt break with an outworn past and will effect a sharp change in class relationships. The transfer of the land to those who till it is an indispensable preliminary to the thorough-going reorganisation of agriculture on higher levels and the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society. Being viewed in the context of the Chinese social and political scene as a whole, it is conservative, one-sided, opportunistic and illusory. Despite the huge preponderance of the peasantry in the population, and the great weight of agriculture in the economy, the agrarian problem is not an independent problem that can be solved separately and apart from the country’s economic problems as a whole. The small plot of land continues to be a small plot, an uneconomic unit, even when it is firmly in the hands of the peasant. The expropriation of the landlords will furnish land for the landless, but the plots must remain small. As long as there is subsistence farming there will be a function for the village usurer. Landlordism could easily be reborn.

frank glass’s selected articles

461

It will be impossible to raise the level of agriculture with a continuance of small-scale ownership and primitive farming methods. For that large-scale farming, possible only with machinery, is necessary. This implies a great industrial development. Moreover, there are too many people on the land. The surplus population can be drawn away from the land only when alternative means of livelihood are available. This will become possible only through all-sided development of the economy – industry, transportation, communications, etc. The feeble, historically belated bourgeoisie can contribute nothing to such a development. It can only hinder it. Yet the Stalinists propose to leave bourgeois property intact, as witness Article 2 of their Agrarian Law which proclaims that “the property and legal operation of industrial and commercial elements shall be protected from encroachment”. What the Stalinists aim to do is to establish their political rule on the social base of peasantry freed from “feudal and semi-feudal exploitation” (Article I of the agrarian Law). They direct their attack at “feudalism” – not capitalism – as if the feudal remnants possessed an independent social and political significance. According to the theory behind this programmatic aim, the destruction of “feudalism” will clear a path for capitalist development. When a sturdy capitalism has grown up, that will be the time to talk of the socialist revolution. In this classic Menshevik conception the historical process is chopped up into arbitrary, predetermined stages which ignore actual class relations and the laws of social development. If the world market extended its sway over the Chinese economy, then the Chinese bourgeoisie unquestionably established its hegemony in that economy. Property relations in China, in the countryside as in the city, are bourgeois property relations. This is true despite the weighty feudal remains. To tilt at “feudalism” as the main object of revolutionary attack is to throw the whole picture of class relations out of focus and the revolutionary struggle off its true axis. The French Revolution – and the Chinese It is necessary to pursue this subject a little further in order to make crystalclear the falsity and opportunism of the Stalinist programme. In France, in the eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie moved to destroy the mighty remains of feudalism which blocked its advance as a rising revolutionary class. The revolution of 1789, freeing the peasantry from the burdensome encrustations of the feudal past, created a great internal market on the basis of which capitalist industry and commerce could develop. The French Revolution cleared the road for capitalist development, not only in France but all Western Europe. The Stalinists seem to be intent on repeating on the soil of China the essential developments of the French Revolution, with comparable economic and social results.

462

ed. yang

But the Chinese bourgeoisie of the twentieth century bears little resemblance to the French bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century. It appeared on the scene in the era of the twilight of world capitalism, not as an independent social formation with a progressive historic mission, but as the handmaiden of imperialism. It did not and could not proceed to smash the powerful remains of feudalism as did its revolutionary forerunners in France. That required a mighty social upheaval which would have doomed the bourgeoisie and all class rule and exploitation. The ferocity with which the Chinese bourgeoisie slew the revolution of 1923–27 is ample proof that they understood this well, In the “feudal remnants”, the Chinese bourgeoisie saw useful props for its own class rule and its own class interests. It embraced them, adapted them to its own special needs, intertwined its interests with them, became their ardent defenders. The regime of Chiang Kai-shek expresses in the sphere of politics this fact of the fusion of the “feudal remnants” with the system of capitalist exploitation. The reorganisation of Chinese society requires the destruction of the whole existing pattern of class relationships. What was revolutionary in France 160 years ago, is in essence reformist in China today. This political definition of the Stalinist land programme is not invalidated by the huge scale of the agrarian reform, the area and the number of people affected. The methods of the Stalinists are naturally tailored to the character of their programmatic am. They are accomplishing their agrarian reform by military-bureaucratic means. If it is permissible at all to use the term “revolution” to describe the current events in China, we would have to designate it as a “cold” revolution, one in which the broad masses play a minor and passive role assigned to them in advance by their leaders. The Stalinists undoubtedly enjoy the support of huge masses of the peasantry. However, they not only do not encourage, but actively discourage the peasants from taking any revolutionary initiative. There are no flaming appeals to the peasants to rise against the landlords. Instead, the Stalinists enjoin the peasants to await the arrival of the “Red” army. It is evident that Stalin and his Chinese henchmen want the “revolution” kept within safe limits. This is apparent, again, in their contemptuous indifference towards the proletariat. The Stalinist programme offers the workers nothing but a continuation of their wage-slavery. The Chinese proletariat is small. It would be hard to call a roll of three million in a population of more than 450 million. Yet the cities in which these workers live and toil are the strategic centres of Chiang Kai-shek’s rule and the nerve centres of the whole system of landlord-capitalist exploitation. If the proletariat were armed with a revolutionary programme and given its rightful place in the current developments as leader of all the exploited and oppressed, it would give short shrift

frank glass’s selected articles

463

to the bourgeoisie. What is left of Kuomintang power would quickly be destroyed and the civil war immeasurably shortened. But the Stalinists fear the proletariat – and with good reason – much more than they do the tottering Kuomintang regime. They are determined to keep their “cold” revolution cold. Why is it possible for the Stalinists to pursue a conservative, half-way, reformist policy in a situation pregnant wilt the greatest revolutionary possibilities? The explanation is not hard to find. For twenty years and more, since the defeat of the Chinese revolution, the Stalinists have based their programme and their activity almost exclusively on the peasantry. In part this was deliberate (in keeping with their theory that the problem is the fight against feudalism), in part due to the relative passivity of the proletariat. The peasant, for all his revolutionary hatred of the landlords, represents a conservative social formation. As Trotsky once wrote, the worker wants to socialise industry, but the peasant merely wants to possess the land. The conservatism of the peasant is nourished by economic backwardness, by the persistence of medieval social traditions and customs, by the isolation of rural communities, by the almost universal illiteracy. The social and political horizon of the peasant hardly extends beyond the boundaries of his own village. With this conservative mass at their backs, the Stalinists think they can afford to be contemptuous of the workers and their needs. And if the proletariat should become a threat to Stalinism, it is not at all inconceivable that the peasants could be pitted against the proletariat. Having characterised the Stalinist programme as in essence conservative and reformist, it is now necessary to add that the social change it will bring about, the transformation of social relations which it will effect, can become the starting point of new developments of a revolutionary character. The proletariat has not yet been heard from. Viewing the vast shake-up of land relations, the workers, we may be sure, will not be satisfied with just a few crumbs of reform. The economic situation, which even a Stalinist regime will not be able quickly to improve, will provide spurs to revolutionary action. The workers, finding their path blocked by the Stalinist misleaders, will turn to a new revolutionary leadership. They will find it in the Trotskyists and nowhere else. Meanwhile, the civil war is by no means ended. If the proletariat is kept passive and the Kuomintang with or without Chiang Kai-shek decides on a last-ditch resistance, the civil war could drag on for another year or two. To speed the end it is not inconceivable that the Stalinists might take the risk of summoning the workers to action, although their first move would he an attempt to behead the most conscious and revolutionary elements, as recent events have so grimly demonstrated.

464

ed. yang

The victory of the Stalinists, whenever it is achieved, will at once raise questions of international relations. Whether the Stalinists will rule openly in their own name, or form some sort of coalition regime with “anti-Kuomintang” bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements, remains to be seen. Certain it is that on the morrow of military triumph Mao Zedong, like Tito, will be confronted with the need for economic relations with the outside capitalist world. A coalition with the Chinese bourgeoisie, or a section of it, would undoubtedly facilitate contact with the world market. If this variant should develop, Stalin is going to have greater trouble with Mao than he is having with Tito. The incompatibility of the Kremlin’s interests and demands with the needs of Chinese economy can provoke greater resistance from the Chinese Stalinists who are conquering power by force of arms in their own right with little outside assistance. The American imperialists have already emitted cautious hints that they might be ready to do business with a Stalinist-bourgeois coalition in China. For them this would yield both economic and political advantages – trade, and perhaps profitable investments for the contracting American economy, a weakening of the Soviet Union on the international field. On the other hand, the social forces they have set in motion and the further needs of the still unconcluded struggle against the Kuomintang, may compel the Chinese Stalinists to go beyond their present programme and move against the property of the bourgeoisie. This variant could be stimulated by a hostile American imperialism. The American imperialists are impaled on the horns of a dilemma. Having fed lush financial and military aid to Chiang Kai-shek for more than three years, they have watched with dismay the passage of this aid to the Chinese Stalinists. If additional help is now refused the Generalissimo, it is because of this fact. Military intervention on the fullest scale – and nothing short of that could possibly save Chiang Kai-shek – is clearly out of the question. For one thing, American troops could not be relied upon in such a clearly counterrevolutionary undertaking. For another, full-scale intervention in China would cut across the main strategy of American imperialism in the international field, which is to prepare the third world war against the Soviet Union, first of all upon the staging ground of Europe, by means of such vehicles as the Marshall Plan. The grand strategy is to slay the Stalinist octopus by striking at its heart and nerve centre – the Soviet Union – not to fritter away strength by attacking the separate tentacles. Even the attempt to “contain” the tentacles and prevent them from extending further has been costly and largely ineffectual, as Truman admitted when he said that his programme of “aid to Greece” had proved a sorry flop.

frank glass’s selected articles

465

The American imperialists would like to “contain” Stalinism in China – better still, destroy it utterly now – but even the resources of this richest of capitalist powers are not sufficient to effectuate its reactionary purposes everywhere. It must select its courses of action carefully, with an eye always on the main strategic goal. Military intervention in China is strategically impossible. That, and not any lessening of desire for the perpetuation of the Kuomintang regime, is the explanation for Washington’s reported “coolness” to the frantic cry for help brought here by Chiang’s wife. What should be the attitude of revolutionary Marxists towards the present developments in China? Where the genuine movements of the masses are concerned, Marxists are never abstentionists. There is no question but that the upheaval in China, despite the limits bureaucratically imposed upon it by the Stalinists, is a genuine mass movement containing great revolutionary potentialities. The tremendous military and political effort required to reach even the limited objectives set by the Stalinists will surely, even if with some delay, set in motion forces of a revolutionary character which Stalin’s Chinese agents will find it impossible to control and which will open up avenues for the building of a genuinely revolutionary mass party which will carry to completion all the great tasks of the Chinese revolution. The first cadres of this party have already been assembled and are playing their part as revolutionary participants in the struggle to end the foul rule of the Kuomintang. The destruction of this regime is an essential and progressive task to which Marxists will give their unconditional support. To the Stalinist leaders of the Chinese masses, however, we give not an ounce of political support or confidence. This is a leadership of perfidy and betrayal. Our place is with the masses – against the Kuomintang and against the Stalinist traitors and misleaders.

(i)

China: A World Power Li Fu-jen January 1951

Source: Fourth International, vol. 12, no. 1, January–February 1951, pp. 8–12. When Wu Xiuquan, representative of the Chinese government at Peiping, looked blustering Warren Austin calmly in the eye at a United Nations meeting, and said coldly: “I must tell you, we are not frightened by your threats”, his statement was a dramatic emphasis of the fact that a whole epoch in relations between China and Western imperialism had come to a close and that a new

466

ed. yang

epoch had begun.16 It denoted the fact that the old semi-colonial China, victim of imperialist appetites for more than a century, had gone from the scene and that in its place had come a mighty, independent China, a new world power. Ever since the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, when newly-risen Japan delivered a smashing defeat to the empire of the Tsars – the first time in history that a “superior” white power had been beaten in war by “inferior” Orientals – a frightening spectre had haunted the chancelleries of the West: the spectre of an awakened, powerful and unsubmissive China. In story and cartoon China was depicted as a slumbering giant who might one day awake to challenge his imperialist tormentors. The Hearst section of the American press harped endlessly on the theme of the “Yellow Peril”. The Slumbering Giant Rises Today, the spectre has taken on flesh and blood. Grim foreboding has become alarming reality. The giant has arisen and smashed his fist in the face of the greatest imperialist power on earth. Never before had the arrogant, bullying representatives of Wall Street been spoken to in the tone Wu used to Austin. They were accustomed to the obsequious and servile “Yes, sir” of Chiang Kai-shek or the Manchu government whenever they made complaints or demands – the proper mode of address by the slave to the master. Here was something strange and disturbing: “We are not frightened by your threats”. Wu was not using empty words. Eight thousand miles away across the Pacific, Chinese troops in alliance with the Koreans were hurling back an American offensive that was to have ended the Korean war by Christmas. A victorious American advance was suddenly converted into panicky retreat. Involved was the bulk of America’s armed forces, using every weapon in the arsenal of war except the atom bomb. The imperialists, used for so long to having their own way with China, were stunned by the blow. It seemed incredible. Clearly, a great change had occurred. To appreciate its scope and depth, it is necessary to recall some of the past, especially since a century of imperialist domination became an essential ingredient of the revolutionary present.

16

Wu Xiuquan (Wu Hsiu-chuan, 1908–1997) was a Chinese communist revolutionary and diplomat. After the founding of the prc, he was appointed head of the Soviet and Eastern Europe Department of the Foreign Ministry. He attended the November 1950 United Nations Security Council meeting as a prc representative and told Warren Austin (1877– 1962), then US ambassador to the United Nations, about the prc’s firm stance on “China questions” and the Korean War. See “Speeches by Warren Austin and Wu Hsiu-chuan of Red China in Security Council”, New York Times, 29 November 1950, p. 14.

frank glass’s selected articles

467

A Review of the past Century In the Opium War of 1840–42, the British blasted open China’s ports with their naval guns and forced surrender on the weak Manchu government at Peking. By the “peace” treaty of Nanjing, China was reduced, in reality if not formally, to the status of a colony. In this and subsequent treaties, which the Manchus signed on the dotted line with all the major powers because they had no means to resist, treaty foreigners were exempt from Chinese laws and taxes (extraterritoriality), China’s Customs were placed under foreign control (repayment of foreign loans and indemnities becoming first charges on the Customs revenues), an indemnity of some $10,000,000 was imposed, Hong Kong was ceded to Britain, territorial concessions were carved out of the principal cities and placed under foreign control, and the imperialists secured the right of free navigation in Chinese coastal waters and rivers. The precipitating incident in the war of 1840–42 was the action of the Chinese authorities in Guangzhou in burning a British cargo of opium brought from India. Britain was forcing opium on China against laws enacted by the Manchu government – a cheap means of evading payment in silver (then a scarce and valuable metal) for the teas, silks and spices which the British bought from China. In the indemnity which Britain imposed at the end of the war, there was included a sum of $3,000,000 for the destroyed opium, the remainder being to cover Britain’s war costs. It would be difficult to imagine a greater humiliation visited on a great nation by a foreign invader. But the Chinese were compelled to stomach it. There were no means of resistance. For more than a century thereafter the humiliation was multiplied and intensified. Warships of the Western powers cruised menacingly in Chinese waters. Among them were American vessels, for the US imperialists were not slow in demanding “most favoured nation” treatment in their treaties with China, insisting on all the “rights and privileges” accorded to others. When the anti-imperialist hatred of the Chinese exploded in some violent incident, as it did quite frequently (often it was some missionary who was the victim of Chinese anger), the warships would bombard towns or villages. There would be a demand for an indemnity and an apology, invariably granted. The Chinese government would be compelled to execute the “culprits” if it could find them. And new concessions would be wrung from the helpless country.

468

ed. yang

“Jim Crow” in the Big Cities17 In the great cities where the imperialists went about their business of sucking out China’s wealth, foreign soldiers, sailors and marines were privileged to kick, cuff and curse Chinese citizens with impunity. These military forces had the task of guarding the concessions. If the Chinese could be humiliated further and made to feel inferior and helpless, the task became that much simpler. The methods were many. Notices in office and apartment buildings owned by foreigners forbade Chinese to ride in the elevators. “Jim Crow” sections were set aside for them in the streetcars. Shanghai’s only downtown park once had this sign at its entrance: “Dogs, bicycles and Chinese not admitted”. Moreover, the imperialists hung the sign “inferior” on the superstitious customs of the nation. Flocks of Christian missionaries came from a score of Western lands to impress upon the Chinese the superiority of Western superstitions. Let no one say that the American imperialists were better than the older colonial powers. This writer observed, first-hand, hundreds if not thousands of incidents over a period of years showing the contempt in which Wall Street’s representatives held the “Chinks”. Acts of brutality were as common with them as with all the others. The only discernible difference between the British and the Americans was that while the British, for the most part, matched their words with their attitude and deeds, making no attempt to disguise their contempt for the Chinese, the Americans spoke unctuously about “equality” and assumed an air of “fraternisation” that was but an ill-concealed condescension. (The American Club in Shanghai was the first to admit Chinese members). As a matter of fact, the seemingly more “liberal” American attitude was merely a weapon in the competition between the powers for China’s trade. Anti-imperialist Feeling Mounts Chinese hatred of the imperialist freebooters crystallised in the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century. Although directed in the first place against the effete Manchu rulers, the anti-imperialist undertones were unmistakable. The Chinese people were alarmed by the endless concessions to imperialism of the court at Peking. The rebellion lasted 15 years (1850–65) and ended with the crushing of the Taipings by forces organised and led by an American, Frederick Townsend Ward. Anti-imperialist feeling simmered beneath the surface, with only occasional outward flashes, until the beginning of the present century when it crystallised 17

“Jim Crow” refers to the Jim Crow laws, enacted to enforce racial segregation in the Southern United States from the 1870s until 1965. In this article, Glass implies discrimination against Chinese by Western imperialists.

frank glass’s selected articles

469

once more in the Boxer Rebellion. The Manchu Empress Dowager, sensing the rising anti-imperialist sentiment of the people, had given notice that China would not consider granting any further concessions to the foreign powers. As a defence against renewed imperialist aggression, she decreed the reestablishment of the old local militia. Militia bands were encouraged to organise. By the summer of 1899, many of these bands had assumed the name of I Ho Chuan [Yihequan] or “Fists of Righteous Harmony”. The foreigners promptly gave them the name “Boxers”. At the end of the year, the movement had assumed sizeable proportions and the foreign powers demanded that the government dissolve it. But the Manchu regime, fearful of overthrow, dared not accede to the demand. In June of 1900, Marines were put ashore from foreign warships to “protect” the legation quarter in Peking. The Chinese government ordered the diplomats to leave the city within 24 hours. This was a signal for action by the Boxers, who laid siege to the quarter. The imperialists mustered a force of 2,000 men and marched them from Tianjin. Eight weeks of fighting in which many Chinese were killed ended in the lifting of the siege. The imperialists then proceeded to mete out vicious retribution. The foreign army, in which Americans participated, sacked the ancient Chinese capital and subjected its citizens to cruel humiliations. Outstanding among their acts of savage vandalism was the looting of the beautiful Yuen Ming Yuen [Yuan Ming Yuan] summer palace of the emperors on the outskirts of the city. After taking all they could, the standard-bearers of Western civilisation put the palace to the torch and burned it to the ground.18 But this was only the initial vengeance. Under the Boxer Protocol, signed by China and the foreign powers on 7 September 1901, China was required to execute the leaders of the Boxer movement, to permit the permanent stationing of foreign troops in Peking and, naturally, to grant additional trade concessions. To cap it all, China was saddled with a huge indemnity of $738,000,000. These episodes in the relations of China with the imperialists were thoroughly characteristic and illustrate graphically the cruelty, contempt and arrogance of the imperialists towards the Chinese and the searing humiliations to which they subjected this vast nation. But the long night of oppression did not end with the Boxer outbreak and its suppression. The next half century witnessed much more of the same thing.

18

Surviving buildings of the Yuan Ming Yuan Summer Palace were destroyed in 1900 when the forces of the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Peking, but its major destruction happened in 1860, during the Second Opium War.

470

ed. yang

The Aborted Revolution of 1911 In 1911, the Manchu dynasty was overthrown by a revolutionary movement with distinct anti-imperialist antecedents and foundations. But because there was no new, strong class to grasp the helm of power, the revolution stopped where it began, with the liquidation of the monarchy. The native bourgeoisie was then only a class in embryo. It consisted of brokers and agents (compradors) of the foreign capitalists and traders. The proletariat was practically non-existent in a land where handicrafts were still almost the sole form of industry. The national power which slipped from the hands of the Manchus fell apart and passed in segments to local satraps who lost no time in making their arrangements with the imperialists. China was as far away as ever from independence and the formal national unity of the dynastic era disappeared. Moreover, all the acute contradictions of an outmoded social and economic life, exacerbated by foreign domination, remained unsolved. Thus was the stage set for the stormy revolutionary uprisings which swept the country in 1925–27. Before that, however, World War i intervened. After sampling imperialist brutality and oppression for so long, China was now to taste the perfidy of the foreign powers. Placing faith in Woodrow Wilson’s talk about freedom and democracy, and the “inalienable right of self-determination” of all nations, the Chinese government entered the war against the Central Powers on 4 August 1917, hoping at the end of the war to achieve complete independence. Characteristically, the only participation China was permitted in the war was the contribution of thousands of labourers for “coolie” work behind the lines in Western Europe. The payoff came in the Treaty of Versailles, when, over China’s outraged protest, the large Chinese province of Shandong was transferred by the Allies from Germany to Japan! China refused to sign the peace of Versailles and negotiated an independent treaty with Germany. World War i had one more important consequence for China in the emergence of a modern proletariat. Preoccupation of the Allies with the war in Europe, and the tremendous world demand for goods of all kinds, stimulated a growth of large-scale Chinese industry and therewith brought into being an industrial working class. This was to have a decisive influence on the revolutionary events which shaped up less than a decade later. Second Revolution Crushed by Chiang Kai-Shek The first strong winds of the gathering revolutionary storm were felt in 1925 when British warships bombarded the Yangtze river port of Wanxian, killing and maiming numerous peaceful civilians.19 The action was taken to compel 19

The Wanxian Incident occurred in 1926 not in 1925.

frank glass’s selected articles

471

the local warlord, Yang Sen, to release a British vessel carrying a cargo of arms to Yang’s rival. In Guangzhou, far to the south, seat of the rising revolutionary movement, a gigantic protest demonstration took place against the bombardment. The British huddled in fear on their island concession of Shamian in the Pearl River, a stone’s throw from the city, and mounted machine guns on the bridges leading to it. As the demonstrators approached, they raked them with a murderous fire. The “Shaji massacre” roused anti-imperialist hatred to fever pitch. The next day, British Hong Kong was paralysed by a general strike and the British ladies were faced with the tragedy of having to do their own washing and cooking. The protest movement spread to Shanghai, which was likewise paralysed by a general strike.20 But the great revolutionary movement, which rose to magnificent heights in the ensuing months, embracing both workers and peasants, went down to crushing defeat when in April 1927 it was drowned in blood by Chiang Kai-shek, who led the nationalist movement only in order to betray it to China’s imperialist enemies. We have recited the salient facts of China’s modern history only in order to indicate the weightiness of the past in the events of more recent times. When Wu Xiuquan hurled the defy in the face of American imperialism, there hovered in the background the memory of a century of wrong, a long trail of bloody repression and galling humiliation. Are we, perhaps, giving undue weight to the subjective factor of righteous outrage? Let us remember that, considered dialectically, not only is there no absolute dividing line between the subjective and objective, but also there always exists an interrelation between them. Marxism rejects the notion of fixed and immutable categories. The subjective anger of a people against its imperialist oppressors becomes one of the objective ingredients of the colonial revolution. A People’s Anger Explodes Like the revolution of 1911, the great upheaval of 1925–27 left all of China’s urgent problems unsolved. Chiang Kai-shek’s bloody march to power paved the way for the subsequent Japanese invasion of the country. But it also placed on the calendar of the future – the Third Chinese Revolution! All the explosive material lodged in class and international relationships remained, ready to be touched off when circumstances favoured. The explosion came after World War ii had run its course. 20

Workers in Guangzhou and Hong Kong went on strike in solidarity with the 1925 antiimperialist May Thirtieth Movement in Shanghai. The protests in Guangzhou were not against the British bombardment of Wanxian, which happened a year later.

472

ed. yang

It is not necessary to our purpose – which is to explain the reasons for China’s rise to the status of a world power – to trace Chinese events of the post-war years. This has been done fairly recently in these pages. The question we must answer is this: what were the main factors which in the space of a couple of years converted China from a land of nearly 500,000,000 colonial slaves into an independent world power? The Manchus, the warlords and the Kuomintang regime all bowed down or were forced into submission by the imperialists. Chiang Kai-shek never dared to summon the people to resist imperialism, for a great mass movement would have gone beyond his control and sealed the doom of his regime as the representative of the landlords and capitalists. Chiang preferred a junior partnership with imperialism. But imperialist domination, allied with archaic social relationships within the country, which plunged the masses into ever deeper poverty and misery, lit fires of revolt which flared continuously for twenty years before the great upheaval which followed World War ii. The Communist Party placed itself at the head of the revolting peasantry and built a mighty army which in the end smashed the Kuomintang regime and thereby ended China’s subjection by imperialism. During the war, hoping thereby to bolster Chiang and preserve their economic positions in China, the powers “voluntarily” relinquished their extraterritorial rights and turned back the foreign concessions to China. What remained of imperialist privilege was liquidated automatically with the overthrow of the Kuomintang. Had 1948 been 1848, the foreign powers would have sent their armies and navies to smash the insurrectionary movement. But the termination of the war with Japan saw the whole colonial world, including China, aflame. The victorious powers emerged weakened from the war. Their soldiers wanted no more war, and demanded to be sent home. World capitalism was in crisis. After fruitless efforts to mediate the civil war in China and keep Chiang Kai-shek in power, the powers were obliged to watch helplessly while the armies of Mao Zedong swept the country. Source of Mao’s Power The source of Mao’s power was and is the great mass of the people of China; above all the peasantry. Stirred into action by abysmal suffering, fired by visions of freedom and a tangible stake in the land of their birth – “the land to the peasantry” – they pounded their way irresistibly to victory. It was the great flood-tide of revolutionary mass ardour and determination, still far from receding, that stood back of the defiant words used by Wu Xiuquan at the United Nations. In the past, if the masses had any programme at all, it was the programme of suffering and submission preached by reactionary rulers. Today they have a pro-

frank glass’s selected articles

473

gramme of their own. Limited it may be, but in it they can readily discern their own interests. The fact of the mass entry of the Chinese people on to the political arena, with the corresponding class pressures, should be pondered by those who contend that Mao Zedong is just a “puppet” of Moscow and the Peiping government merely a creature of the Kremlin. Such a view ignores the reciprocal relationship between party and class. It must be recognised that in recent times Mao has manifestly acted more in response to the pressure of his own popular support than in obedience to any Kremlin directives. The potency of mass pressure caused him to execute an about-face on the land question towards the end of the war, leading the movement of agrarian expropriation when the peasants would no longer wait for the land. Moscow’s line was to preserve the “united front” with Chiang Kai-shek at almost any cost and, to that end, not to encourage social conflicts. Again, when the war was over, Moscow’s policy was to engineer a coalition government between Chiang and the Chinese Communists on the basis of a few democratic concessions by Chiang. But the intense hatred of Chiang’s regime and the flaming agrarian revolt compelled Mao to break off negotiations and declare all-out war against the Kuomintang. These weighty, incontestable facts should give pause to those who declare that Mao is simply a push-button stooge of the Kremlin. China’s Third Revolution Roars The China that now speaks to the world is a revolutionary China. It is this dynamic quality that imparts such tremendous power to China’s moves and pronouncements in world politics. In this connection, it is also of interest to note that the present-day leaders of China, despite long years of Stalinist corruption, have not forgotten the elementary principles of socialist internationalism. At a press conference in New York, Wu Xiuquan was careful to distinguish between American imperialism and the American people when charging the United States with moving towards the abyss of a new war. When we speak of China as being revolutionary, we are not by any means suggesting a completed revolution, but rather a revolution in progress. Properly defined, the overthrow of the Kuomintang, the winning of national independence, the setting up of the Peiping regime, and the partial shake-up of agrarian relations, represent the completion only of a first stage of the unfolding Third Chinese Revolution. That the revolution has not advanced beyond this stage and been deepened in the sense of a fundamental change of property relations in all spheres – above all in industry – is very largely due to the half-way, semi-reformist programme within the confines of which the Communist leaders have tried to keep the movement of the masses.

474

ed. yang

Mao’s programme of a “New Democracy” has appeared as a road-block in the path of revolutionary advance. It has slowed down the logical course of development by its insistence, among other things, on the inviolability of capitalist private property, thus preventing a fundamental solution of pressing economic and social problems. This programme is destined to collide more and more with the needs of life and with the onward urge of the masses. The Communist Party, under popular pressure, will then either swing to the left or prepare the way for its own replacement by a new revolutionary leadership. It was the masses who pushed Mao to the pinnacle. They can push him off, too. Pressures on Mao In considering the factors which will make for a resumption of the interrupted course of revolutionary development in China, we should not overlook the pressures from outside. There are two main factors: (1) Mao’s programme calls, among other things, for the protection of foreign business enterprises in China, together with those of the Chinese capitalists. But the economic blockade of China which the US imperialists have imposed in connection with the Korean war may force the Peiping government to seize the numerous and large American industrial enterprises and make them serve the Chinese people instead of the Wall Street moneybags.21 Thus Mao would be going considerably beyond his own proclaimed programme. Nor would imperialist pressure necessarily mean that the Peiping regime would draw closer, politically, to the Kremlin. Beset by external threats and driven forward by the masses, it could take a swing away from its narrow nationalism and towards genuine socialist internationalism, staking its fate on the sympathy and aid of the world proletariat. (2) The whole colonial world in Eastern Asia is being swept by the flames of revolution – Korea, Indochina, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines. China is the vast powerhouse of this movement. Today the peoples 21

A note written by Glass: “Shortly after this article was written the Chinese government ordered (28 December) immediate seizure of all United States property and all private and commercial American bank deposits, in retaliation for similar US action 16 December on Chinese assets in the US. The principal American enterprises in China are: (1) The Shanghai Power Co., largest electric power company in the Far East that burns coal. (2) The Shanghai Telephone Co., subsidiary of at&t. (3) Numerous Standard Oil and Texas Oil installations throughout the country. (4) Even more numerous missionary properties: hospitals, schools, churches, etc. (5) National City Bank of NY [New York] (6) Extensive properties of the US diplomatic establishment. Total value is variously estimated at between one and two hundred million dollars, US currency.”

frank glass’s selected articles

475

of these lands look to China, much more than to the Soviet Union, as the great leader in their fight for liberation. There can be no doubt that geographical proximity and racial affinity, common burdens and problems, and like aspirations, make for a deep reciprocal sympathy and solidarity. China’s masses, feeling far from alone in their fight for a better life, are lifted and inspired by the great movements on their borders. Here is an additional assurance that the present period of marking time in China will be followed by a fresh revolutionary upsurge, one in which the working class may be expected to play the leading role, that will carry the revolution to another and higher stage. Resources for Revolutionary Victory China, the powerhouse of the colonial revolution? This is no rhetorical exaggeration. This ancient land with an enviable culture reaching back into the dim ages is the habitat of almost 500,000,000 people. In area it is larger than the United States. The factors of population and area alone are sufficient to place China in the forefront of the colonial revolution. We can add to those immense natural riches and an enormous economic potential. The country’s economic and social backwardness is merely the legacy of foreign domination now ended. In the three northeastern provinces of Manchuria, despite considerable looting by Stalin’s armies during the 1945–46 occupation, there is a great industrial complex built by the Japanese which draws its raw materials from on-the-spot deposits. This can serve as a basis for elevating the whole country economically while giving needed assistance to neighbouring countries. Socialism in one country? Not at all. The socialist revolution begins on national grounds but can reach completion only on the international arena. Nevertheless, China’s industrial resources guarantee that she will not be strangled into submission by imperialist blockade. By the same token, revolutionary China presents itself to its neighbours as a powerful ally and source of strength in the battles they are waging for national liberation and social advance. Their courage is buttressed, their fighting spirit enhanced as they march towards great and resounding victories.

section b Livio Maitan on Maoism and China

∵

Introduction to Part 2, Section B Livio Maitan (1923–2004), an Italian leading Trotskyist and a central member of the fi leadership, maintained a lively interest in China throughout his revolutionary career. In the late 1960s, when Trotskyism was thriving in the Italian youth movement, chiefly through Livio’s influence, the Trotsky wave was met by a countering Mao wave. As his contribution to the ensuing debate, Livio wrote his book on China, Party, Army, and Masses, which combined criticism of the Chinese Revolution with support for it. Although Livio did not know Chinese, he used sources published daily by Beijing’s English-language Xinhua News Agency. His book (which we excerpt here) was widely praised as an account that combined both socialist principle and scholarly rigour. Had he wanted, Livio could have shone as a top professor at a leading university and enjoyed a stellar academic career. Instead, apart from a spell lecturing at Rome University, he worked on a shoestring to overthrow capitalism. He was described by the veteran Spanish revolutionary Pepe Gutiérrez-Álvarez, in an article in Kaos en la Red, as “a living embodiment of Communist integrity, of innate and ardent internationalism, a Marxist for whom theory is valid only to the extent that it helps us understand a reality with which to engage, … no exegete but an inventor of big themes”. There is no evidence that Livio ever corresponded with Wang Fanxi, even after Wang’s move to the UK in 1975. Although he probably read Wang’s memoir, it is possible that he never read the important final chapter, “Thinking in solitude”, for Oxford University Press excised it from the first English edition (in 1980). It is true that Columbia University Press restored the chapter in the edition it published in 1991, but by that time the revolutionary movement in Italy and Europe was in decline. If Livio had read the excised chapter, which voiced Wang’s reflections on the nature of the Chinese Revolution and of the regime to which it gave birth, he would have seen that his and Wang’s thinking coincided in many respects. However, Wang was more critical of Mao and Maoism than Livio and his comrades in the fi’s European and Latin American wings, and exposure to Wang’s ideas might have saved the fi from some of its excesses in the 1970s.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_048

The Sino-Soviet Conflict and the Crisis of the International Communist Movement (1965) Livio Maitan

This is a report on the Sino-Soviet conflict in the 1960s drafted and submitted by Livio Maitan to the 8th World Congress of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International held in Germany in December 1965. Source: International Socialist Review, New York, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring 1966, pp. 76–85.

In taking a position on the Sine-Soviet conflict in June 1963, the Reunification Congress of the Fourth International considered the differences between Peking and Moscow under four headings: (1) “Peaceful coexistence” and the struggle against war. (2) The revolutionary struggle in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. (3) The “peaceful roads to socialism” concept which was made official at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and which places in question in particular the Marxist-Leninist concept of the state. (4) The passage to socialism on a world scale (the Kremlin holding it will be assured mainly by the Soviet Union pulling ahead of imperialism economically, Peking holding that the fundamental role will be played by the revolutionary forces on an international scale). In May 1964 the plenum of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International brought the subsequent development of the Chinese position up to date, noting the following: (1) Peking stepped up and brought out more clearly its attack on the sub ordination of Communist parties in other countries to the Soviet cp. (2) In line with this, Peking attacked the idea that a pact between the Soviet state and a capitalist state implies that the Communist party in the country involved should make an unprincipled compromise with the capitalist class and its government. (3) The Chinese contended that behind the ideological argument used by the Kremlin about international socialist cooperation, an exploitive relationship is involved; namely the subordination of certain primary interests of the less developed workers states to the Soviet Union. © Livio Maitan, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_049

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

481

(4) The Moscow treaty came under heavy attack as an unprincipled effort to maintain the status quo in monopoly of nuclear weapons, the aim being to exclude China from nuclear armament, thus assuring the ussr a leading role at this decisive military level. (5) The rightist line imposed by the Soviet leaders on a whole series of Communist parties (Iraq, France, Algeria, Cuba, India, etc.) was cited to prove the damaging consequences of Khrushchevism. Peking demanded that the document issued by the conference of 81 parties with regard to the roads to socialism be corrected. (6) The right of majorities and minorities to exist in the international movement was upheld, Peking arguing that a correct position can sometimes be advanced by a minority. In noting these new developments, the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International reasserted its strong disagreement with Peking’s position on a number of points: (1) Peking’s campaign to rehabilitate Stalin. (2) Peking’s concept that it is necessary to reinforce the repressive apparatus in order to handle conflicts arising from continuous intensification of the class struggle during the transition from capitalism to socialism. (3) The one-sided interpretation of the Twentieth Congress in which Peking singled out only the outright revisionist aspects. (4) The rigid bureaucratic conception of the role of art and culture in general maintained by Peking. (5) The erroneous view that capitalism has been restored in Yugoslavia and that a “bureaucratic comprador bourgeoisie” now rules there. By way of analogy, Peking offers an erroneous characterisation of the Soviet Union, Khrushchevism being considered as the expression of bourgeois layers headed towards capitalist restoration. The Sine-Soviet dispute continued to develop in numerous fields. On the general ideological and political level, the Chinese leaders criticised the social differences in the ussr and the degeneration of the Soviet economy and society. They affirmed the need for equalitarian principles and norms in order to avoid the development of a gulf between the leaders and the masses. They brought up problems of an economic nature, as, for example, criteria in industrial management, fixing of prices, etc. On current political questions, a frontier dispute flared between China and the Soviet Union; the events in Vietnam in the early summer of 1964 became a subject of sharp dispute as did the Soviet attitude in the Congolese question, and several issues involving the United Nations (assessments, a joint “peace” force, Indonesia’s withdrawal).

482

maitan

The downfall of Khrushchev led to a temporary suspension of polemics; and the two sides opened new negotiations. But the decision of the cpsu to convoke a consultative conference in Moscow, the disapproving Soviet attitude on the Chinese test of an atomic bomb, the continuation of relations with capitalist India without modification, the incidents in Moscow during the antiAmerican demonstration of the Asian students, and particularly the flaring up of the international crisis over Vietnam, ended with the Chinese resuming their attacks. They have even gone so far as to accuse the Kremlin of being in collusion with the imperialists. Despite hot replies and massive propaganda, the Soviet leaders have found themselves mostly on the defensive. Even when they have sought to shift from merely replying to the Chinese attacks and to open a counterattack, the defensive aim has been quite evident. Leaving aside the details and the mass of particular arguments, of examples and quotations, the Kremlin’s polemicists have developed their position along the following lines: (1) They accuse the Chinese of irresponsibility, of playing into the hands of the extremists in the imperialist camp on the question of war and particularly the possibility of a nuclear conflict. (2) They hit at certain weak points in the international concepts of the Chinese, among other things their idea of a so-called “intermediate zone”. (In reality the idea of an “intermediate zone”, including countries like France, is only ideological camouflage for certain Chinese diplomatic transactions aimed at avoiding isolation and establishing economic relations with the weaker imperialist countries.) (3) They accuse the Chinese of autarchy and of nationalist and racist tendencies in foreign policy. (4) They criticize as revisionist the Chinese thesis about the most explosive contradictions at this stage being those which oppose the colonial peoples to imperialism on the ground that the Chinese thereby wipe out the fundamental class contradiction between the workers states and imperialism on the one hand and between the proletariat and the capitalist class of the industrialised countries on the other. They maintain that in practice the economic and military aid granted by the ussr to the newly independent countries and to the colonial freedom movements is much greater than granted by China. (5) They attack the Chinese for their bureaucratic concepts of the workers state, for their cult of the personality of Mao and defence of the cult of the personality of Stalin, for “adventurism” in their economic policies as they go from one extreme to the other, for their bureaucratic concepts in the field of culture, for the bureaucratic internal regime in their party and

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

483

their violations of statutory norms such as failing to hold congresses, for their wrong theories of the character of the Chinese state following the revolutionary victory and for their subsequent empirical course. In order to refute certain accusations as slanderous, and to maintain or to gain influence in some sectors of the Communist or revolutionary movement in the colonial countries, the Soviet leaders have sometimes shifted away from their rightist positions, offering “centrist” or “leftist” interpretations of their line. At the same time they have sharpened their tone in certain international disputes, including those in the diplomatic field. A notable shift has been their criticisms of the extreme rightist positions expressed in some Communist parties. Even more, with regard to the dynamics of certain colonial revolutions, while holding basically to the formulas of the conference of the 81 parties, they have talked about socialism being under construction in countries like Algeria and Egypt (which does not prevent them from continuing to flirt with the conservative Indian bourgeoisie, with the aim among other things of countering Peking). It is clear, in addition, that on some key questions in domestic policy, the Chinese have had to take some blows, often without replying to the Soviet accusations.

Balance Sheet From the over-all balance sheet of the dispute for the past five years it is clear that up to this point the Soviet leadership has been hit the hardest in a conflict in which it stood to lose in view of the leading position held by the ussr and the cpsu at the beginning. The downfall of Khrushchev constituted a considerable success for the Chinese even if his role in the conflict was only one of the factors that led to his forced resignation. The failure of the campaign for a new world conference of the Communist parties was still more obviously a victory for Peking. Only a limited number of parties showed up at the preparatory meeting and some of them did not hide their disagreement. The end result was indefinite postponement of the showdown meeting that Khrushchev had aimed at. The international crisis over Vietnam provides an acid test of positions in the dispute. The Chinese leaders accuse the Soviet leadership in brief of not having granted the People’s Republic of Vietnam the necessary political and military aid and of having continued to seek a compromise solution with the imperialists in the face of their criminal aggression. In stressing Moscow’s failure to react

484

maitan

at the time of the imperialist provocations in the Gulf of Tonkin and its failure to consider the attack against any workers state as an attack against the ussr itself, they lay bare one of the things that has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in the current international crisis. But no matter how correct the criticisms and general proclamations of the Chinese are, the practical possibilities open to them are something else again. Even if it were true that Chinese military aid in the first months of the American aggression was limited by the desires of the North Vietnamese themselves, who stated they did not need more aid at the moment, the fact remains that China is threatened with a nuclear attack while still lacking sufficient nuclear arms to deter the Pentagon. Consequently, if the Kremlin has not done what it could have done in order to dissuade the imperialists from their aggression (thus facilitating the outbreak and escalation of a tragic crisis), China is in no position to follow up its declarations in a consistent way. At bottom this is an expression of the fact that despite everything, the ussr retains its preponderance among the workers states. And just as in the economic field, Cuba, for example, could count at first only on Soviet support, so in the decisive military field, the Kremlin leaders hold a power which the Chinese have no possibility of gaining in the near future. Peking is trying to a certain extent to escape from this reality in an unrealistic way. Correctly rejecting the illusions about “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, the Chinese at the same time project questionable prognoses, taking as the most probable variants those that are most favourable to their resources and concepts. They give the impression, in fact, not only of forecasting but even desiring escalation of the American aggression, including massive landings of troops in North Vietnam and China itself. They go so far as to talk about a war between China and the United States that would not involve the ussr and would not lead to a general nuclear conflict. A variant of this kind would have the result of exhausting the United States in an endless ground war on the continent of Asia in which China’s defensive capacity could come into full play. The Mao team would thus emerge as the genuine opponents of imperialism, the Soviet Union would be shoved to the side, losing all chance of playing the key role in the Asian movement and the colonial and semicolonial countries in general. All that is wrong with this perspective is that Washington will scarcely choose such a disastrous road; and a Sino-American conflict, which in any case would involve terrible blows for China, could not be limited to the use of classic arms. Moreover, the war itself could not be limited; failure of Moscow to intervene on China’s side would place the Soviet Union in mortal danger, a situation its leaders could scarcely fail to recognise and to act upon.

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

485

Peking Factionalism In line with its unreal perspective, Peking has sought to turn the American aggression to factional advantage in the Sine-Soviet conflict, thus weakening the defence. Its own responses to Johnson’s escalation of the attack gave the impression throughout the crucial first period of being largely verbal. The charge that it even blocked or slowed down Soviet military aid was not effectively refuted. Its rejection of Soviet overtures (even if they were insincere) to form a united governmental front in meeting the American attack was sectarian and highly damaging. Its failure to consider the suggestions of the Cubans with regard to a vigorous and quick response further disrupted the kind of defence that could have compelled the Americans to hesitate and draw back before they became still more deeply committed. Peking’s course thus served to help encourage the Americans. If in events like those in Vietnam and Santo Domingo the appraisal held by the Chinese leaders of the tendencies of imperialism and their criticism of “peaceful coexistence” have enabled them to make an impression even among sectors inclined in the Khrushchevist direction, their perspective in Southeast Asia reveals the holes in their concepts and the relative weakness of their position. In reality it is impossible at the present stage to conceive an effective reply to major imperialist military aggression without the support of the ussr, which remains the key power in the anti-capitalist camp. In any case, the factors at the bottom of the evolution of the position of the Chinese leaders in the conflict remain absolutely clear. The Soviet bureaucracy now has an economic base sufficiently solid for them to envisage competing with the advanced capitalist countries. They possess a mighty armament justifying a predominantly military view of the country’s defence. Their bureaucracy is highly developed in size and in function, with privileges on an accompanying scale. Their outlook is extremely conservative. At the same time, due to the development of the productive forces, the growth of the working class and the considerable improvement in its cultural level, along with the formation of a more and more demanding layer of intellectuals, the Soviet bureaucrats cannot escape complex economic and social problems that constantly compel them to seek empiric adjustments in all fields and to deviate from the forms of economic management and political domination in force under Stalin’s rule. The Chinese bureaucracy, on the other hand, cannot seriously conceive of victory in economic competition with the advanced capitalist countries for an indefinite period and it is thus driven, even in selfdefence, to weigh the possibility of extending the revolutionary struggle of the masses in the colonial countries where it is aware of the revolutionary pressures, especially in Asia.

486

maitan

The extremely difficult situation in which the Mao leadership found themselves led to an increase in such phenomena as intensification of the cult of Mao.

A Stalinist Cycle? Due to the hardening of Peking’s bureaucratism, and the campaign for the rehabilitation of Stalin, certain theorists have come to hold that China is going through a Stalinist cycle such as overtook the Russian revolution and from which the Soviet Union is still suffering. The idea has even been advanced that this cycle is inevitable, something inherent in every revolution in a backward country. It is undeniable that bureaucratism is one of the evils that every successful revolution must face, particularly in countries of low economic and cultural level. Widespread poverty and want tend to give the bureaucracy an inordinate role, thus opening the door to special privileges which the bureaucracy then seeks to consolidate through political means. The appreciation of this phenomenon held by revolutionary Marxists today began with Lenin and was developed by Trotsky. The experience of recent years has only confirmed their contributions in this field. The development of the Chinese revolution following the seizure of power in 1949 has provided its own body of evidence. The growth of bureaucracy in China, with its concomitant expressions in the sphere of ideology, is due in the final analysis to the poverty of the country and the impossibility of linking up adequately with an economically advanced centresuch as Japan, Western Europe or the United States until socialist revolutions occur there. The primary tendency towards bureaucratism has been reinforced by the fact that the Maoist group lacks a Leninist-Trotskyist appreciation of this phenomenon and its dangers, even going so far on the contrary as to elevate the very incarnation of bureaucratism, Stalin himself, into a key place in the official state iconography. Peking’s opposition to the de-Stalinisation process and its campaign to rehabilitate the figure of Stalin testify eloquently enough to the bureaucratic tendencies and mentality of the Maoist top leadership. Can it then be said that China is undergoing the same experience as the Soviet Union, with all the logical consequences flowing from this, and that there is a universal necessity for a stage of Stalinism, no matter how reprehensible and morally objectionable this may be? The facts speak to the contrary. First of all, the international relationship of forces which fostered and fed Stalinism and which was ultimately responsible for its victory, has changed unalterably. The new China was born in a constellation of already existing

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

487

workers states from which much could be learned, including the need to avoid what the Chinese themselves call “Stalin’s errors”. More importantly, this existing system of workers states was a source of material aid unavailable to the young Soviet state in the supremely difficult days of Lenin and Trotsky. This alone made a decisive difference in establishing the foundations for a much more rapid rate of economic growth in China than was possible in the early days of the ussr no matter what the subsequent vicissitudes in Sino-Soviet relations. China’s capacity to produce nuclear weapons is the most decisive proof of this. Still more important, the Chinese people look out at a world charged with revolutionary unrest and constantly upset by uprisings and elemental outbursts. The perspective of more revolutions that can come to their aid appears wholly realistic in contrast to the outlook facing the Russian people, particularly after the defeat of the Chinese revolution of 1925–27. The Cuban victory came only ten years after the Chinese victory as a payment on account. This success alone can be considered to be of decisive significance, having something of the impact that a successful Chinese revolution might have had internationally ten years after the October victory in Russia. On top of this, world capitalism – despite the monstrous economic and military power of the United States – stands on much narrower and obviously weaker foundations than in the decades before World War ii. The importance of all this, so far as the theory of an inevitable period of Stalinism is concerned, is that the material forces that gave rise to such a hardened and fully crystallised bureaucratic caste as appeared in the Soviet Union no longer exist anywhere in the world. The final proof of this is the growing instability of the Soviet bureaucracy itself and the efforts of the heads of the bureaucratic caste in the Soviet Union to gain time by such concessions as “de-Stalinisation”. One of the consequences of this new relationship of forces on a world scale is that the Maoist group itself, however fixed its bureaucratic pattern of thinking and practice may be, is not at all merely repeating the policies and views of Stalin. They display a decisive difference with Stalin, for example, in the key concept of building “socialism in one country”, advancing instead the idea of “uninterrupted revolution”. Particularly since the disastrous experience of the “great leap forward” when Mao set out to build “communism in one country” – and at a faster rate than either Stalin or Khrushchev – the Chinese leaders have been emphasising the need for socialism to triumph in other countries. Likewise in the field of economic policy, the Mao group for all its rigidity, its incapacity up to now to achieve harmonious planning, and its empirical zigzagging which did grave injury to China in the “great leap forward”, proved capable of undertaking a fundamental re-orientation (a turn helped by the appearance of strong undercurrents of political opposition in China going right up to the

488

maitan

top circles), and giving up the Stalinist pattern of putting excessive emphasis on the expansion of heavy industry at no matter what cost. Again in relations with the masses, while political opposition other than the token existence of remnants of petty-bourgeois parties is banned, the Mao leadership has not engaged in gross crimes on a mass scale such as featured Stalin’s rule in its worst days. Even if this may be ascribable in part to the absence of a massive, stubborn and experienced Leninist political opposition such as Stalin had to face in usurping power and establishing his authoritarian rule, the fact remains that the Mao group has sought to prevent the bureaucracy from differentiating out in a too glaring way, doing this under the banner of equalitarianism. (Stalin ended by branding equalitarianism as a pettybourgeois concept.) The Chinese Communist Party cannot be considered to have been a Stalinist party in the strict sense of the term; that is, subordinated since the twenties to the bureaucratic leadership of the Kremlin. The Mao leadership had its own personality; and its policies, although often marked in practice by compromises with the Moscow leadership which led to the gravest deviations, had a generally centrist character leaning towards the left. The Mao leadership was also shaped by long years of difficult struggles and it underwent the impact of the great popular revolution that brought it to power. Thus in the light of the international relationship of forces, the dynamics of the Chinese revolution, and the special features of the Maoist leadership, it can be concluded that the bureaucratism in China, bad as it is in and of itself, is not the same as the bureaucratism that developed in the Soviet Union into a powerfully consolidated caste. It was Trotsky’s view that the Stalinist experience, viewed in all its concreteness, was due to a completely special combination of forces and circumstances. His forecast that it would never be repeated still holds. The differences between Stalinism and Maoism are involved in the SinoSoviet conflict and are an important element for revolutionary Marxists in determining which side it is better to offer critical support in the interest of advancing the world revolution. But to insist on the differences between Maoism does not imply that the bureaucratic nature of the Chinese regime can be forgotten or that criticism of the persistent cult of Mao can in any way be attenuated. The world Trotskyist movement maintains its independence from all bureaucratic formations. In all the workers states it stands against bureaucratic rule and for proletarian democracy. In China the struggle against the bureaucracy and its regime, and for proletarian democracy, cannot be won except through an anti-bureaucratic struggle on a scale massive enough to bring about a qualitative change in the political form of government.

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

489

Pro-Peking Tendencies The developments in the past five years and particularly the splits that occurred in 1964 have led to an international pro-Peking tendency composed at present of the following: (1) The Communist Parties of the two Asian “people’s democracies” (Korea and Vietnam). (2) The Albanian Workers Party. (3) A group of Asian parties of which the Indonesian, Japanese and Malayan Communist Parties are the most important. (4) The left-wing Communist Party of India which was formed as the result of a split in the cp in 1964 and which starts out with a considerable mass base. (5) A group of parties in colonial and semicolonial countries resulting from splits, some of which have a certain influence, but most of which are very small organisations; and some small organisations in some of the West European countries. (6) Groups and members in favour of the Chinese positions who still remain inside Communist parties controlled by pro-Moscow leaderships. (7) Nuclei and cadres working in revolutionary movements in the colonial countries, particularly Africa.

Heterogeneity The mere classification itself shows that the pro-Peking bloc, despite its relative homogeneity on the issues in the international dispute, is rather heterogeneous in composition. This is due in the first place to differences among the various parties, secondly to differentiations within each party, despite the facade of monolithic unity, and, most important of all, to the different objective roles played by the parties or groups in their own countries or in a sector of the international workers movement. Among the parties in the people’s democracies, the one in North Vietnam is both the most important and the most independent; different tendencies have always existed in it. It could not help but be critical of the attitude of the Soviet bureaucracy, especially during the summer of 1964. Thus it shares the Peking line to a considerable extent (even sometimes reaching more consistent theoretical conclusions with regard to uninterrupted revolution). But at the same time, it cannot reject aid which only the ussr is able to assure it; and on the other hand it is legitimately concerned that China should not gain too determining a weight in the country – hence its hesitation in asking for volunteers.

490

maitan

As for the Albanians, they are correctly considered to be the extreme Stalinist wing of the pro-Peking front, their outlook being determined by the background of the leading group and the forms through which they gained control of the party, by the absence of popular support and the isolation of the country in the European context. The refusal of the Hodja group to bow to the will of the Soviet bureaucracy constitutes the only real claim that can find favour in the eyes of the masses. Among the Asian parties, the left-wing Indian cp represents a special case, particularly because of the existence of a pro-Moscow party in the same country that presents a major political problem due not only to its influence among the masses but to the fact that differences within it were not at all ended by the split. Thanks to its mass base, especially in several areas of the country, to the capacity of some of its leaders, to its long continuity as a left wing (going back some years) and to its variegated composition (the centrist wing went with the left wing in the break), the left-wing Indian cp stands more as an ally than a partisan of Peking. And the fact is that it has already shown its independence, even on the international issues in the dispute. As for its own line, it combines analyses and criticisms that are correct, by and large, on the nature of the state in India and the character of the politics of the Congress Party, with formulas that are in part mistaken, in part completely centrist (for example, in relation to the “democratic front of the people” and the “democratic state of the people”.) The limits of the bloc between the centrists and the left within the left-wing cp were nevertheless manifested when the main centrist leader of the party, Namboodiripad, came out in favour of defending India during the recent Indo-Pakistan war. He at once ran into resistance from the left elements in his own ranks. The Japanese Communist Party is the only pro-Chinese party in an advanced capitalist country with a mass base. Its orientation thus has special significance as a test case. The fact that the party almost as a whole, including the great majority of its leaders and cadres and the entire national apparatus and local organisations, lined up with the Chinese constitutes in itself an indication that its politics in Japan has not changed fundamentally. In fact, the party has limited itself to supporting the Chinese leaders in their international polemics without translating this into the slightest move towards the left. Such tests as the strikes in the spring of 1964 and again in 1965 revealed a deep opportunism and an orientation, expressed in the most recent documents (aside from the propagandistic proclamations of loyalty to Marxism-Leninism, etc.), that is only a particular application of the well-known line centring on the struggle against American imperialism and not on an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle. The main slogan is for a united front of all the so-

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

491

called democratic forces for a coalition government, against the Moscow treaty, against revision of the constitution and for improvement of the standard of living of the masses. The Indonesian Communist Party, which acquired its present physiognomy during prolonged struggles lasting up to the recent period, and which without doubt still has many internal differences, has been collaborating for some years up to the governmental level with the wing of the national bourgeoisie represented by Sukarno. Such a policy, inspired by the concept of a democratic stage of the revolution in which it will be necessary to collaborate with the socalled national bourgeoisie, has resulted in the party deliberately not trying to take advantage of the revolutionary crisis that have flared up in the country. Instead it has sought to hold back the mass movement and to get it to retreat from certain positions already gained. It did this even before the beginning of the Sino-Soviet conflict, in agreement just as much with the Soviet leadership as the Chinese, both of which were eager to reach an alliance with Sukarno.

Indonesian Disaster However, despite this opportunist line, the Indonesian masses, in the absence of an effective alternative organisation, remained under the influence of the Communist Party which in 1965 had the broadest base in its history. This fact, coupled with an extreme tension in social relations (due to a precipitous decline in the standard of living caused primarily by worsening inflation and shortages) led inexorably to a test of strength between the Communist Party and the reactionary forces headed by the generals. The leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party appear to have sensed this in their own way and to have shifted their line some months before the military coup d’etat. They called for the arming of the workers and peasants; they appealed to the masses to seize the plants. But such propaganda, unaccompanied by any genuine revolutionary anti-capitalist perspective and genuine organisation of the masses for action, could only precipitate a violent reactionary move, against which the leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party could find no other solution than to support an attempted putsch by leftist officers. Thus its rightist opportunism was complemented at the decisive moment by a left opportunism which was all the more disastrous when, even after the anti-Communist offensive of the generals was unleashed, the leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party refrained from calling upon the masses for an

492

maitan

all-out reply and continued to bank on Sukarno although he was becoming an outright captive of the army. Overwhelmed by the repression, confronted with a choice between political suicide and a turn towards guerrilla warfare, the leading faction of the Indonesian Communist Party, at least those who survived the October 1965 disaster, seem to have chosen the latter alternative. This choice was facilitated by the fact that parallel to its line of class collaboration, an opposite tendency existed in the ideology of the Indonesian cp. Some of its concepts are rather close to the Chinese concepts on the uninterrupted revolution; the Indonesian cp constantly explained that the peasants are the fundamental revolutionary force, that even in the democratic revolution the leading role belongs to the workers and peasants, and that the formation of a government of the people’s democracy type constituted its immediate aim. But these contradictions were confined within a strategic line of “revolution by stages”, within a policy of coalition with the national bourgeoisie headed by Sukarno. This led the Aidit leadership to put brakes on the mass movement, to hold the masses prisoner to “Nasakom” – the “national front” of the three main political groupings (the Sukarno nationalists, the Moslem Religious Teachers and the Communist Party). This paved the way to the bitter defeat suffered by the biggest Communist party in the capitalist world. To promote its diplomatic manoeuvres with the Sukarno government, Peking approved the opportunist policies of the Aidit group which were not essentially different from the line of the French and Italian Communist Parties condemned by Peking because of the support these parties give Moscow. The crushing of the Indonesian Communist Party represents an even greater victory for imperialism and setback to the colonial revolution than the counterrevolutionary coup d’etat in Brazil in April 1964. Nevertheless this victory of the reactionary forces in Indonesia can turn out to be only provisional. In face of the mounting difficulties and the social unrest which these engender, the situation in Indonesia can take a new revolutionary turn in the relatively near future. The struggle of the Indonesian masses will continue until the most conscious and critical Communist militants, united with the Indonesian Trotskyist cadres, forge a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class and peasantry upon the only road to victory – the road to the conquest of power.

Latin America In Latin America the pro-Peking tendency remains very limited. Castroism is by far the most powerful catalyser of the Communist and revolutionary left in this

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

493

area of the world. Even in the case of Venezuela, if the Sine-Soviet conflict has had unquestionable influence and the Venezuelan left is more inclined to Peking’s line rather than Moscow’s, it is the Cuban revolution that has played the main role in its evolution towards armed struggle. As for the Pro-Peking Communist Party of Brazil, helped along by the extreme opportunism of the Prestes leadership, it was formed before the Sino-Soviet conflict broke into the open. Its influence remains very limited and its line on questions of such primary importance as the nature of the Brazilian revolution and the social forces which should lead it is completely incorrect. In Peru, the pro-Peking cp, while inspired by criticism of the rightist line of the old leadership, has not developed consistent revolutionary concepts, has shown Stalinist features and, despite a certain influence in the peasant area, is far from playing an important role in the workers and peasants movement of the country. In Bolivia the split is more recent and the differences are centred much more around national problems than international issues, the Peking faction appearing to have grown stronger in recent months. In other LatinAmerican countries, the pro-Peking groups are very small, often divided, and incapable of going beyond the domain of general propaganda for the Peking theses among narrow circles. The same holds for North America. In Western Europe, too, the pro-Peking groups are primarily propagandistic without much to show in the way of gains. The Grippist cp in Belgium, the only one which had any base, has shown its sectarian traits and bureaucratic concepts in various fields. The failure to understand either the nature or need of a transition program has condemned the Grippists to oscillating between abstract proclamations of final aims and immediate demands that are insufficient in themselves to initiate a genuinely revolutionary action. The resistance of the Chinese leaders to the destalinisation process has negative effects here as in many other fields. As part of the justification for their own bureaucratic internal regime, they uphold Stalin, even alienating the antibureaucratic currents among the masses in the Soviet Union and blocking an alliance with them against the Soviet bureaucracy on the basis of their own more militant international line. Among the groups and parties supporting Peking as against Moscow the cost is even heavier. For some of them, it means political suicide to attempt to refurbish the image of Stalin. Something even more significant is involved. The fact that the Maoist leadership would deliberately seek to inject the poison of Stalinism into the minds of millions of youth-even if that is done with admissions about the “errors” of the despot who butchered Lenin’s generation, and even if contradicted by advocacy of policies that are not Stalinist – says much about the kind of international movement that Peking is assembling together. It is

494

maitan

dominated from its inception by bureaucratic concepts having nothing in common with respect for truth and independent-minded internationalism.

Pro-Moscow Tendencies As many events during the past year have shown, particularly the polemics around the projected conference of Communist parties, the publication of Togliatti’s testament, the commentaries around the downfall of Khrushchev, and attitudes in face of the crisis over Vietnam, the Khrushchevist tendencies are still more differentiated and centrifugally inclined than the pro-Peking tendencies. At the present point the following broad list can be made of the forces that reject the Chinese theses in favour of the general concepts of the Soviet leadership: (1) The majority of the parties in the European “people’s democracies”. (2) Almost all the Communist parties of Western Europe. (3) Some of the Asian parties, most of them weakened by splits, and some Latin-American parties, likewise affected by splits. (4) Tendencies or groups either within parties where the majority is proPeking or expelled from such parties (Japan). (5) Groups working in the revolutionary movements of the colonial and semicolonial countries. Holding power in countries located between the Soviet Union and the capitalist states of Western Europe, still largely under Soviet domination in the economic as well as military field, the Communist parties in the people’s democracies constitute the most solid rampart of the Khrushchevist tendency outside of the ussr, despite the considerable range between the absolutely conservative positions of the Bulgarian party and those of the Czech party, which is now coming close to some of the Yugoslav concepts. If in youth circles, certain Chinese positions arouse some interest and sympathy, the Chinese attitude on “destalinisation” drives them away. Only if the Soviet bureaucracy were to make grave compromises with imperialism at the expense of a “people’s democracy” would the Chinese have any serious chance to reverse the present relationship of forces, including those at the level of the ruling groups. The main point is that the bureaucratic leaderships of the “people’s democracies” and doubtless the cadres at different levels, too, are much less under the influence of the colonial revolution than their Asian homologies, and for a whole series of obvious reasons (geographical location, relationship of forces, etc.) rely essentially on the “Soviet shield” in their defence against imperialism.

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

495

The problems that have given rise to tension, friction and conflicts are those connected with their own economic development and with economic relations in the comecon, especially relations with the ussr (questions of prices, of the socialist division of labour, the tendency to widen relations with the advanced capitalist countries, etc.). The existence of a workers state like China provides the leaderships of the “people’s democracies” with greater room for manoeuvre and some aspects of the Chinese arguments also find an audience (such as those exposing the Soviet contentions about socialist cooperation and those defending demands pertaining to less developed workers states). However, a possible evolution of a people’s democracy away from the Soviet bureaucracy is much more likely at this stage to follow the “logic” of Yugoslavia than China. The example of Rumania can be taken as typical. In 1964 this country stepped up its moves towards “independence”, virtually making it official by not sending a Rumanian delegation to the Moscow conference. It is undeniable that at the root of Rumania’s attitude are elements analogous to those in the Yugoslav affair. It was fundamentally problems of economic growth and economic relations with the ussr and the comecon that pushed the Bucharest leaders, objectively favoured and encouraged by the Sine-Soviet conflict, to back away and make overtures to the capitalist countries. The Rumanian bureaucracy is thus trying to assure expansion of the economy in accordance with models which it considers best tit its own interests, without major concessions to the ussr or to the other comecon countries. At the same time it wishes to exploit its “independence” in relation to the ussr – matching it with several measures of prudent liberalisation – with the aim of improving its relation with the masses. As for Yugoslavia, which is going through a new phase of rather considerable structural changes, it has not ceased to occupy a relatively autonomous and original place, being rather an ally than a genuinely integral part of the proMoscow tendency. This position has been concretised by a series of reforms and measures, especially in economic reorganisation, which have converted the Yugoslav Communists in a certain sense into the very spearhead of both de-stalinisation and Khrushchev-ism. The experiments with workers councils remain by far the most positive feature, whatever their limitations; and there is no doubt that the councils and certain measures aiming at counteracting bureaucratism are to be credited for the considerable rate of economic growth recently experienced by the country. However, this progress has been accompanied on the one hand by grave distortions in the economy and on the other hand by deepening social differentiations that have strengthened the bureaucratic layers.

496

maitan

By virtue of their economic links with the capitalist countries and their relations with the bourgeoisie of the third world and in accordance with the logic of an anti-revolutionary foreign policy already coming to the fore at the time of the Korean war, the Yugoslav Communists stand at the extreme right, appearing as an out-and-out opportunist current. Even during the recent period they continued to sow absurd illusions about the peaceful role of the UN, took impermissible attitudes against the Cuban revolutionists, and, finally, advanced proposals for “negotiations” at the time of the imperialist aggression in Vietnam. There are signs that the Rumanians might follow their example even in this field. In the final analysis this is to be explained by the role of bureaucracies seeking to establish a policy of rule that is relatively moderate in relation to the masses and autonomous in relation to the Kremlin. They can hope for success in this course only if the international situation is relatively quiescent and does not call for immediate and difficult decisions. The bureaucracies of the Communist parties in the advanced capitalist countries could react in only a negative way to Peking’s positions as a whole. In a social and political context in which they are compelled to operate in most cases against powerful Social Democratic parties, Peking’s theses on war, on the methods of anti-imperialist struggle, on the role of the colonial revolution were not very attractive. At the same time, particularly where they have a relatively broad base, these bureaucracies could not favour the Maoist attitude towards de-stalinisation. But it was especially Peking’s criticism on the “peaceful roads to socialism” and the Chinese defence of the Leninist concept of the state which the overwhelming majority of the Communist leaders of the West felt they necessarily had to reject. In fact, their rightist evolution goes back to the period of the popular fronts and the experience of collaboration with the bourgeoisie during the war and immediately afterward. This, together with the ultrarightist impulse given by the Khrushchevist theories at the Twentieth Congress and the supplementary pressures rising almost constantly during the sixties, led to a profound neo-reformist degeneration of the Communist parties. These parties have come to a reformist strategy that is fundamentally gradualist as a whole, which envisages as its strategic objective a social structure in which the monopolies are eliminated or limited and capitalism continues with its logic of profits and its basic economic laws, a strategy which affirms the possibility of a peaceful, democratic road to socialism and the conquest of the state apparatus from within, with the aim of gradually transforming it. These bureaucracies seek alliances even with capitalist layers. What is involved is a series of common concepts which the Italians have expressed in

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

497

the most clear and systematic way. Recently, during the presidential campaign, the French Communist Party took a new step towards neo-reformism by backing the “left” bourgeois candidate Mitterand, partisan of the Atlantic pact, as a variant to Moscow’s policy of supporting de Gaulle.

Italian Communist Party The evolution of the Italian Communist Party remains significant not only because it concerns a party with a very big mass base in which de-stalinisation has gone much further than in any of the other parties, but also because tendencies have emerged or are emerging which will likely appear else where and which have serious implications for the entire workers movement of the advanced capitalist countries. If the Chinese arguments have not given rise to a big pro-Peking current up to now (the response being limited to old circles with nostalgic memories of the Stalinist period and to youth of little political education), the Sine-Soviet dispute itself has stimulated the maturing of broad layers of militants and cadres to a considerable degree and compelled the leaders themselves to develop the course they adopted at the time of the Twentieth Congress. Thus these leaders have now reached the point of renouncing monolithic concepts of the Communist movement, of considering internal conflicts or differences as normal, of accepting the idea that decisive victories over imperialism and even the overthrow of capitalist power can be won by non-communist parties and leaderships, and of permitting political conflicts within the party to be expressed, including the presentation of different or opposing documents and the formation of temporary and unorganised tendencies. The internal vicissitudes at the end of 1964, and the beginning of 1965, against the background of a certain evolution of the Italian situation, of growing difficulties for the party particularly in maintaining organised and stable ties with industrial workers, and the decline in authority caused by the death of Togliatti, have ended in much more marked differences than in any other period since the end of the twenties. However, this evolution has been concretised in a more and more clearly marked opportunist line, which will have a tendency to persist and even to worsen, at least until a possible turn occurs in the objective situation in Italy and Western Europe and has gone along with a pronounced alteration of the party into an electoral formation incapable of assuring an active political life to the extensive sectors it influences. In fact, if the Italian cp has gone further than its sister parties in theoretically expressing neo-reformist concepts, the

498

maitan

practical application of this line is objectively still further to the right, not being qualitatively different in the domestic field from the traditional activity of the big Social Democratic parties of worker composition. In face of such concepts and concrete orientations, inspiring not only the apparatus but also wide layers of cadres and militants, the nuclei of the left are only at the beginning of their battle, and for a long time they will not have much chance to counteract the rightist course. It should also be added that a right wing of the apparatus, represented at the level of the Secretariat, too, has expressed still more extreme ideas, going so far as to propose liquidating the party or diluting it in a united socialist organisation. Under the pressure of this right wing and certain events of the Italian labour movement, and in accordance with the logic itself of the general concepts accepted by the party, a very big majority of the Central Committee came out in June 1965 in favour of forming a new united socialist party on the basis of a political and ideological platform adapted to the needs of certain sectors of the Italian Socialist Party which have collaborated with Nenni up to the governmental level and which continue to reaffirm their positions favouring an alliance with the left centre in principle. In Italy a phenomenon is openly visible that is less clear but nonetheless present in the other Communist parties outside the workers states and which is profoundly affecting their structure and even character. In Stalin’s time, the line of the Communist parties was determined mainly by the needs of the policies of the Soviet bureaucracy, while the needs of the mass movement in each country and the needs of the “national” bureaucracy played an absolutely secondary role. Today the tendency is to reverse the order, and in the Italian case this has already been achieved while it is only beginning in France. The demands of the indigenous bureaucracy – often “embarrassed” by the decisions and turns of the Soviet bureaucracy, and driven by the nature of its domestic strategy to present itself as independent from any state or party guide – are becoming more and more preponderant. Despite everything, the complete “Social-Democratising” of the Communist parties should prove to be difficult – even the Italian Communist Party continues to be fundamentally linked, if only by ties of a bureaucratic nature, to the workers states and the anti-capitalist camp – because of the fact that these parties are operating in a world context constantly upset by revolutionary crises that tend to counteract the social and political pressure of the bourgeoisie. Among almost all the countries of Latin America, the Communist parties have less chance than ever to play a decisive role in the revolutionary rise of the masses (the exceptional case of Venezuela has already been mentioned). The

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

499

development of Castroism together with the Sino-Soviet conflict have further weakened them, condemning them to repeated crises. The Chilean cp itself, the only one still having broad mass influence, under the combined circumstances of a setback to its platform of a “peaceful” road to socialism, the pressure of the Cuban experience and the guerrilla struggle in several countries of the continent, was finally caught up in internal conflicts and grave crises, which will ultimately prove decisive for the reorganisation and reorientation of the Chilean labour movement. A complete panorama of the Communist party movement should also include sectors that have given up an autonomous existence in recent years, both organisational and political, in order to integrate themselves in mass movements of non-Communist origin. The policy of dissolution has involved parties of mainly rightist and pro-Moscow orientation up to now. In the case of Cuba, the entry into the united party under Castroist leadership was objectively correct because it was a question of a revolutionary leadership to be supported and strengthened in the Marxist direction in which it was evolving. (The correctness of this decision was however counteracted by the policies practiced by the leading cadres of the former Partido Socialist Popular after the unification which played in with the tendency towards crystallisation of a hardened bureaucracy.) In the case of Algeria, the tactic of seeking integration in the Front de Liberation Nationale was also correct, but what was involved in the case of the Algerian cp was a deeply opportunist outlook that signified complete political and ideological liquidation. This holds all the more so in the case of the Egyptian cp.

Castroism By participating in the last Moscow conference, the Cuban Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista (now the Communist Party of Cuba) was virtually officially included in the Communist party movement. Despite the independent attitude of the delegation, a concession to the Soviet leadership was clearly involved, since parties with a pro-Moscow orientation criticised the initiative and the Rumanian Party even stayed away. The attitude of the Fidelista leadership with regard to the Sine-Soviet conflict has been confirmed since the conference. Inasmuch as the ideological dispute, carried to bitter extremes by graduates of the school of Stalinism, weakens the anti-imperialist front-as the events in Vietnam have demonstrated – a leadership in the position most exposed to American imperialism could not help but deplore this conflict.

500

maitan

The desire of the Cubans to avoid becoming deeply engaged in the dispute is understandable and they have not hidden their negative reaction to the pressures to which they have been subjected. The Cubans are compelled to bear in mind that in the economic and military field, the ussr is objectively in a much better position to aid them than China. In addition, as against the Chinese arguments about the role of imperialism and the opportunism of the Communist parties, the Cubans have had to weigh their attitude towards de-stalinisation and their sectarianism with regard to Cuban appeals for a united front against imperialism. In any case, the essential fact remains that the choice of sides in the SinoSoviet conflict remains secondary for the Cubans. They constitute an autonomous and fundamentally revolutionary current of the Communist movement owing ideological allegiance to neither Peking nor Moscow. They have proved this in all the fields that are decisive in characterising a revolutionary tendencyin their struggle against bureaucratic deformations and their equalitarian spirit in building socialism, in showing the Latin-American peoples the road to consistent revolutionary struggle without compromising with the so-called national bourgeoisie, in explaining that only the constant creation of revolutionary centres in all corners of the globe can block imperialism and only an energetic reply can compel them to retreat, and finally in projecting original organisational forms, aiming at preventing the revolutionary party from becoming an instrument of bureaucrats and careerists of all stripes and losing vital contact with the masses of workers and peasants. The imperialists have not remained neutral in the Sine-Soviet conflict. The extension of the conflict from an inter-party to an intergovernmental level greatly weakened the cohesiveness of the front of the workers states and the imperialists have sought to take full advantage of this in various areas (putting Tshombe in power in the Congo, escalating the war in Vietnam, invading the Dominican Republic). At the same time, the imperialist powers and their agents, such as the Social Democratic leaders in Europe, have clearly shown their preference for Moscow as against Peking. This attitude is not due to the Chinese position on nuclear war. The American imperialists in fact pay little attention to Peking’s theories discounting the importance of nuclear arms, whereas they study with the utmost attention the growth of Moscow’s stockpile both quantitatively and qualitatively. The American imperialists favour Moscow in the Sine-Soviet conflict because they understand very well that the Soviet bureaucracy seeks a deal with imperialism to maintain the status quo. While Moscow seeks to put a brake on revolutionary struggles, a conservative attitude that meets with approval in the imperialist camp, some of the theses advocated by Peking tend to stimulate revolutionary

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

501

struggles, particularly in the colonial world. A victory of the Chinese position in a Communist party signifies a much more hostile attitude towards imperialism and its “national” allies (e.g., India), while a victory for Moscow’s theses fosters an ultra-opportunist policy, if not the liquidation pure and simple of the Communist movement. The imperialists are aware at the same time that one of the results of the conflict is a “revolutionary rivalry” in certain countries which can even go so far as to impel the Kremlin to tolerate parties under its control moving towards the left, particularly with regard to the colonial revolution, in order to avoid a complete loss of influence. This has occurred in certain countries in Latin America where the effects of the Sino-Soviet conflict have combined with Castroism. Washington is more and more brazenly intervening on a world scale in the affairs of other countries in its efforts to beat back every new revolutionary advance. One of the cornerstones of this policy is continuation of the understanding with the Soviet bureaucracy to maintain the status quo (the imperialist version of the theory of “peaceful coexistence”). Thus, Washington hailed the Moscow treaty to partially halt nuclear tests as a big strategic success. It has every reason to continue this policy and to seek to counter any tendency in Moscow to concede to the pressure from Peking for a firmer anti-imperialist attitude. On the other hand, Washington continues to single out Peking as the main enemy in the anti-capitalist camp. From the beginning it sought to isolate the Chinese revolution and to weaken it through an economic and diplomatic blockade which included barring its entry to the United Nations. This policy has now reached the point of direct counterrevolutionary intervention. The Pentagon is openly debating whether or not to launch a nuclear war on China, hitting first of all at the centres where China has succeeded in establishing the beginnings of a nuclear industry. It is beyond question that world imperialism considers China to be the principal source of danger to its system today – the principal source stimulating revolutions in other countries in the colonial world, and a potential force that in a few decades can utterly and irretrievably destroy Wall Street’s dream of dominating the globe. This hardened opinion cannot be explained by the hypothesis that the imperialists as a whole are mistaken about their own class interests. In the final analysis even de Gaulle recognises Peking not in order to strengthen the Chinese revolution but in order to put France in a better bargaining position with the Kremlin in the common game of blocking the advance of the revolutionary process on a world scale.

502

maitan

The Ultimate Gainer The Fourth International has stressed many times that fundamentally the SinoSoviet conflict involves two bureaucracies. But revolutionary Marxists never limit themselves to bare characterisations like this which cannot solve the problem of what specific attitude to take in each concrete case. They have never identified the workers states or the Communist parties with the bureaucracies heading them; nor have they viewed the bureaucracy as nothing but a single reactionary mass without internal distinctions. On the contrary, they have tried in each concrete case to determine wherein the bureaucrats are only defending their own reactionary caste interests and wherein they are compelled by their own social position to defend at the same time – in their own way – the acquisitions of a revolution. Similarly they have explained the stratification of the bureaucracy and how conflicts can arise between different layers under the pressure of conflicting objective factors and clashing social forces.

Transitional Programme For instance, the Transitional Programme, written by Trotsky in 1938, pointed out the various currents in the bureaucracy and indicated that the Fourth International would not remain neutral or indifferent to the outcome of a struggle between a Butenko and Reiss faction. In 1948, while not forgetting the real nature of the Yugoslav leadership, the Fourth International advocated defending the Yugoslav cp and the Yugoslav revolution against the attacks and campaign of slander mounted by Stalin and the parties of the Cominform and their blockade of Yugoslavia and threats of military intervention. In 1953 in East Berlin and in 1956 in Hungary and Poland, the world Trotskyist movement noted again that in face of an open and dramatic break between the masses and a bureaucratised party, the layers of bureaucrats closest to the workers lined up on the side of the masses. The attitude of the world Trotskyist movement in relation to the Sine-Soviet conflict flows from the same logic. It supports the Chinese Communists in their defence of the Chinese revolution and the People’s Republic of China against the economic blockade mounted by the Kremlin and against the military aid granted by the Kremlin to the Indian bourgeoisie. It supports the Chinese Communists in their struggle against the Khrushchevist concept of conjuring away the danger of imperialist war through “peaceful coexistence”, and their attitude towards the colonial revolution, and their criticism of the neo-reformist orientations of most of the Communist parties.

the sino-soviet conflict and the crisis

503

This does not imply that the Fourth International soft-peddles or remains silent about the other positions held by the Chinese Communists in their international polemic. Nor does it imply in any way giving automatic support to any pro-Peking party or group, whose policies in a given situation can prove to be harmful despite formal adherence to the criticisms of Khrushchevism made by the Chinese leaders. The attitude of the world Trotskyist movement in the Sino-Soviet conflict involves something more than supporting the valid criticisms of the Chinese Communists and standing on their side in defending the Chinese revolution. In reality the Sine-Soviet conflict represents but one of the aspects of the breakup of Stalinist monolithism, the revival of the world revolutionary Marxist movement on a mass scale, and the construction of a new revolutionary leadership. The Fourth International has intervened in the Sine-Soviet conflict from the beginning under its own banner, with its own independent line on all the major questions, with its own program to offer Communist militants seeking the road to a socialist victory in their own country and on an international scale. Both the Kremlin and the Peking bureaucracies recognise in their own way that their dispute raises the spectre of Trotskyism in the workers states, not to mention the Communist parties in the capitalist countries. That is why each of the bureaucracies accuses the other of playing into the hands of Trotskyism, of even adopting objectively “Trotskyist” positions. As proof they have gone so far as to cite Trotskyist documents, particularly those adopted at the Reunification Congress of the Fourth International in 1963.

“Trotskyist Danger” Moscow accuses Peking of advancing the Trotskyist theory of the permanent revolution and the Trotskyist criticism of the bureaucratic degeneration of the ussr, citing in support of this quotations from the Trotskyist documents giving critical support to the Chinese positions on these points. In the same way, Peking accuses Moscow of rehabilitating Trotsky through its denunciation of Stalin’s crimes and its campaign for de-stalinisation, citing in support of this extracts from Trotskyist documents giving critical support to the accomplishments of the Twentieth and Twenty-second congresses of the cpsu with regard to de-stalinisation. Both bureaucracies, in fact, accuse the other of “playing into the hands” of Trotskyism – which, as they well know stands against any kind of bureaucratic rule. Both bureaucracies have an infallible instinct when it comes to smelling out the “Trotskyist danger”. Although the rift in Soviet-Chinese relations has had

504

maitan

injurious effects upon the solidarity of the workers states against imperialism, the world working class stands to gain from clarification of the issues in dispute. The movement for the Fourth International gains from the radicalisation of the revolutionary struggle in the semi-colonial countries and the strengthened tendency against “socialism in one country” stimulated by Peking. It gains from the tendency towards de-stalinisation stimulated by Khrushchev and his heirs. Both currents, in the final analysis, only express the fundamental change in objective conditions which gave rise to the Stalinist bureaucracy and its triumph in the ussr and the world Communist movement – the defeats suffered by the world revolution that ended in the isolation of the first workers state in an economically and culturally backward country. Objective conditions today are moving in the opposite direction – in favour of the rebirth of a world-wide revolutionary movement independent from any ruling bureaucracy, a movement that will tie in with the struggle for proletarian democracy in the workers states.

Conclusion Consequently the Fourth International entertains no illusions about the possibility of any bureaucratic leadership whatever being able to carry out the fundamental historic tasks of constructing a genuine socialist democracy in the workers states, of crossing over from colonial revolutions into socialist revolutions, of overthrowing capitalism in the industrially advanced capitalist countries, the only road offering humanity escape from a nuclear holocaust. These tasks can be carried out only by revolutionary leaderships able to lead mass movements and to translate the revolutionary program of Marxism into reality. The participation of the Fourth International in the Sino-Soviet conflict aims at helping to solve this key problem of our times.

Report on the “Cultural Revolution” in China (1969) Livio Maitan

This is an fi report on estimating the situation of the ongoing Chinese Cultural Revolution presented by Maitan to the 9th fi World Congress convened in Italy in 1969. Source: Intercontinental Press, Vol. 7, No. 26, July 1969, pp. 706–714.

i

[The following is an extensive summary of the report approved by the congress in conjunction with the resolution adopted on this subject.]

…

In order to understand the “cultural revolution”, we have to go back and spend some time on the principal contradictions and tensions which lie at the root of the events of the last three and a half years. First of all, as regards economic development, it must not be forgotten that China started off from an extremely backward economic base, far inferior to the one from which the Soviet Union started. The first five-year plan (1953–57) unquestionably scored spectacular successes in various fields. But in spite of an extraordinary effort and substantial aid from the Soviet Union, the results were still quite modest in absolute figures.1 Moreover, in 1957 the growth rate declined with respect to 1956.2 The line of the Great Leap Forward and the People’s Communes was designed to meet the following necessities: (a) The necessity of not only maintaining but accelerating the tempo of industrial production. This had to be done without limiting the flow of capital into the modern sector while at the same time developing the secondary and traditional industries. 1 See in this regard Xue 1960, p. 241. According to Joint Economic Committee 1957, p. ix, the per capita consumption at the end of 1957 had not yet exceeded the 1933 level. 2 The gross value of industrial and agricultural production is supposed to have increased by 7.8 % in 1956. In regard to industry more particularly the growth is supposed to have declined from 31 % in 1956 to 10.9 % in 1957. (See the article published in the Chinese magazine Agricultural Machinery Technique translated in Selections from China Mainland Magazines (scmm), 4 November 1968, No. 633, p. 5).

© Livio Maitan, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_050

506

maitan

(b) The necessity of achieving a sharper increase in agricultural production in order both to satisfy greater domestic needs and to increase exports and, hence, foreign currency reserves. (c) The necessity of dealing with the problem of rural, underemployment and exploiting fully the advantages of the new productive relations. In the countryside, the Maoist leadership wanted also to counteract rightist tendencies which in the years 1956–57 showed up in an attempt to liquidate a certain number of cooperatives. As is well known, the Great Leap Forward was marked in its initial stage by spectacular growth, but it ended in a failure which created a grave situation, especially in the years 1961 and 1962. It was after this that the Chinese leadership proceeded to carry out a profound re-adjustment of its economic orientation, giving priority to the development of agriculture. Thus in 1963–65an unquestionable revival took shape. Nonetheless, the rate of growth remained limited and clearly insufficient in relation to the country’s needs. It is difficult to give concrete data on this subject because the Chinese authorities have not furnished overall statistics for almost ten years (this silence, however, is very eloquent). According to the estimates of bourgeois economists, it seems, though, that in 1965 China had again come up to its 1958 level (that is the 1958 per capita level) and that only towards 1970 would the country regain its 1960 level of production.3 In agriculture where the difficulties were indicated, among other things, by the large imports of foodstuffs, the 200 million tons of cereals obtained in 1958 has not yet been equaled. I am not overlooking the fact that important successes were scored in certain branches of industry nor am I minimising the influence of unfavourable noneconomic factors such as bad weather conditions and natural calamitiesand above all the abrupt suspension of Soviet collaboration. In any case, the impetus of growth remained absolutely insufficient, and that was all the more grave because the world economy was characterised in this period by substantial new advances in the realm of technology and industrial production. The limited industrial growth rate had the consequence of accentuating the conflict between the tendency towards urbanisation on the one hand and the contraction of the urban economy’s capacity of absorption on the other. The urban population had increased as a result of migration to the cities stimulated by a search for jobs, higher salaries, and generally more comfortable living conditions. At the beginning of the sixties it had reached 130,000,000, while the economic policy makers considered that at the time it should not have

3 See Joint Economic Committee 1957, pp. xi, 53, and 73.

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

507

exceeded 110,000,000.4 If it is considered that the Chinese population increases by about 14,000,000 to 16,000,000 persons a year and that each year the youth reaching working age number 10,000,000, the extent of the problem will be comprehended. In certain periods, the return to the villages took on considerable proportions, and it is significant that, even today, official propaganda, by means of a directive from Mao, is stressing the necessity for the young people to go into the villages.5 In any case, serious bottlenecks had developed on the eve of the “cultural revolution”. The draft resolution stresses another contradiction, the one “between the rapid expansion of literacy and the increase in general level of education of the Chinese youth on the one hand, and the still relatively low number of skilled jobs available in China”. A single statistic is sufficient to show this. In the ten years before 1960, the number of secondary school and university level diplomas rose to 3,300,000; in the subsequent six years it rose to about 23,000,000. It must be added that according to official sources it was impossible to provide education for all those who wanted it.6 In the case of the higher level technical specialties, the opposite phenomenon occurred. The supply did not match the demand.7 Coming to the problems of the countryside, let us keep in mind first of all that the weight of the rural population and the agricultural economy remained heavily predominant and that backward conditions subsisted in all fields. Subsistence agriculture accounted for 80 per cent of the total. Mechanisation touched only limited sectors and electrification was only in its beginnings.8 The launching of the People’s Communes, which aimed at assuring both a very marked increase in production and the overcoming of the social conflicts which the spread of cooperatives throughout the countryside had failed to eliminate, ended essentially in failure on both scores, which was implicitly acknowledged by a readjustment both in general economic policy and in the structures of the Communes themselves. Thus the oscillation between collectivist thrusts on the one hand and tendencies towards private accumulation, the use of private plots, and utilisation of the “free” market, on the other, reoc4 See an interview with Po I-po by Anna Louise Strong in January 1964. 5 Certain sources have spoken of a displacement of tens of millions of people. (See Joint Economic Committee 1957, p. 422.) For Mao’s directive, see, for example, Peking Review, No. 1, 1969, p. 14. 6 See Joint Economic Committee 1957, p. 682; and People’s Daily, 31 March 1966 (quoted also in Joint Economic Committee 1957, p. 516). On this question, see also Snow 1966, p. 212. 7 See Joint Economic Committee 1957, p. 529. 8 See Bettelheim 1968, p. 87. According to Snow (op. cit., p. 198), 94% of the territory of China is being cultivated without the aid of mechanical implements.

508

maitan

curred even after the Communes, especially in 1961 and 1962. To return to the draft resolution, there existed “the contradiction between the objective necessity to socialise the surplus product of agriculture, for purposes of accelerated economic and industrial development, and the political need to achieve this socialisation with the approval of the majority of the peasantry” and “the contradiction between the objective necessity to interest materially the bulk of the poor and middle peasantry in increasing agricultural production, and the inevitable tendency to increased inequality and private accumulation which results from these ‘material incentives’.” The period 1949–65 was not characterised in China by a social stratification as pronounced as the one that occurred in the ussr in the thirties, which was reflected in certain aspects of the official ideology. However, as our movement has not failed to note on several occasions in the past, differentiations and tensions nonetheless developed. First of all, there were inequalities between the living conditions in the cities and the countryside. It is significant in this regard that taking precedence among the demands of the peasants who mobilised at the beginning of 1967 was the demand for a reduction of their relative disadvantage. In the second place, I have already alluded to the inequalities persisting or widening in the villages due to different opportunities for accumulation and remuneration. At the extremes of a wide gamut were found on the one hand peasants living exclusively from the income of their labour and on the other middle or “rich” peasants who were able to accumulate important savings.9 Among the workers, tensions were provoked by the stagnation of wages at a very modest level that lasted quite a long time (for all practical purposes, it seems that no more general increases were given after 1959; the increases in 1963 probably represented the promotion of workers towards better-paid categories).10 Conflicts were provoked also by the existence of quite important inequalities (the differentiation into different categories was accentuated by the employment of piecework, the introduction of bonuses, the granting of consumption and vacation privileges, etc.).11 We must not forget either the malaise caused by job insecurity and by delays in the payment of wages.12 9 10 11 12

In the book cited (p. 403), Snow speaks of peasants with bank accounts living in “privileged” conditions with respect to the masses. See Joint Economic Committee 1957, p. 494. The differential in workers’ wages, in general, was on the order of one to three. See Joint Economic Committee 1957, passim; and Snow 1966, pp. 190–91, and elsewhere. See Joint Economic Committee 1957, p. 682. The problem of delayed wage payments is mentioned in the Urgent Notice published during the January movements. (See Hsinhua News Agency, Hong Kong, 12 January 1967, p. 21).

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

509

In opposition to the workers and the overwhelming majority of the peasants, unquestionably privileged strata existed. The vestiges of the old ruling classes themselves were considerable and, despite the expropriations, the former capitalists enjoyed exceptional living conditions.13 Differentiations had, however, taken form within the post-revolutionary society. Within the economic apparatus, technicians and managers enjoyed salaries about double those of the best-paid workers. In the state apparatus and in administration in general, a wage differential of one to twenty-six introduced marked inequalities. But most of all at the highest levels in the party and the state, privileges were extended and consolidated beyond the formal incomes. While this was already clear to us before, after 1966 it was confirmed by the denunciations made by the Mao tendency and the Red Guards. They raised the question of privileged living conditions, luxurious habits, and manipulation and misuse of public funds for private aims, etc.14 In the case of the army, the remunerations of the generals were among the highest paid by the state.15 Let me repeat: the social differentiation in China in 1965 was not as pronounced as it was in the ussr in the thirties. But in order to comprehend the trend, relative terms are as important as absolute ones. What is more, the fundamental question arises of who made the big economic and political decisions? The extent of actual centralisation in 1965 was more limited than generally thought and remains so today. Central economic planning operated in a very relative way and a quite large margin was left to decentralised decisions (in certain cases with real possibilities for influence to be exercised from below). It is enough, moreover, to recall that the agricultural economy, which remained heavily predominant, was essentially outside the plan. Nonetheless, the essential decisions, both political and economic, were the prerogative of the state and party, and more particularly of their highest spheres. Once again, by their denunciations in 1966–67, Maoist sources confirm that this apparatus was very hardened, that it played a conservative braking role, and that it was detached from the broad masses of the people. This

13

14

15

American sources estimated in 1966 that the indemnities paid to the former capitalists” – 5 per annum on the value of the confiscated property – were quite substantial and that 90,000 families benefited from them. (See the New York Herald Tribune, 16 September 1968). See on this subject the sources cited by E. Germain in Quatrième Internationale, July 1967, p. 35. See also, for example, scmm, No. 633, pp. 17–18. See also Snow 1966, pp. 32, 190, etc. Snow himself notes that the salaries of 95 % of the party officials were markedly higher than the wages of workers. See Snow 1966, p. 263.

510

maitan

was all the more true because the party, which was the real backbone, by no means functioned in a democratic manner and because certain commitments to increase internal democracy that were made at the 1956 party congress remained a dead letter.16 The party’s relations with the intellectuals, finally, provoked especially important conflicts. On the one hand, the intellectuals were a part of the privileged strata, but on the other hand they were the only ones who in the given conditions were able to express the malaises and criticisms that existed and even initiate a public polemic. To the extent that the intellectuals kept to their own milieu and raised primarily their own demands, the regime took a benevolently paternalistic attitude. But when their criticism became more political and they tried to step forward as the spokesmen of broader collective needs, they were pilloried and became the target of virulent attacks reminiscent of Zhdanov’s methods and arguments.17 This then was the background against which the 1965–66 events were to explode. To the tensions I have summarized must be added other factors of a major portent. The now complete break with the Soviets and the evolution of the ussr under the Khrushchev and Brezhnev regimes led the Chinese leadership to ponder the fundamental problems of the transitional stage between capitalism and socialism. The conclusion of the Maoist tendency was that the post-Stalinists had worked for a restoration of capitalism and that the adoption of similar methods would involve a danger of capitalist restoration in China also. Thus, in their view, it was essential to wage an all-out struggle. The circumstances assumed a more dramatic cast, moreover, as a result of a world situation distinguished at once by American imperialism’s attack on Vietnam – which clearly represented a very great danger for China also – and by the defeat suffered in Indonesia by the strongest Communist party that had aligned itself with the Chinese positions.

16

17

As regards the completely subordinate role of the workers even inside the plants, see, for example, Hsinhua News Agency, 6 April 1967, p. 14. The 1956 congress had set a maximum term of five years for the calling of a new congress and decided that plenary meetings of the Central Committee would be held every year. None of these specifications were met. Very significant in this regard is the polemic against the “miscellaneous scholars” undertaken by Teng To, which was spoken of frequently in the official publications, especially in June 1966.

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

511

ii I will not go back over the precise origins of the Mao-Lin Piao offensive here nor the question of how clearly Mao and his followers saw from the start the scope and difficulty of the battle they were unleashing. What is certain is that profound differences in a whole series of areas had existed for years, especially since the time of the Great Leap Forward and the Communes. Mao’s resignation from his post as president of the republic, among other things, had a much greater significance than was supposed at the time. As regards the positions of the various tendencies and personalities prior to November 1965 and during the “cultural revolution”, an evaluation remains extremely difficult. In accordance with an old bureaucratic custom, only the victors have the right to speak and the positions of the others are known only through truncated or arbitrary quotations or by views attributed to them on noone-knows-what foundation. The monstrous accusations directed against Liu Shao-chi and other former leaders can only be taken seriously by those who have a stake in propagating them or by incurable innocents. The fact is eloquent, moreover, that not a few of the criticisms raised against these officials during the “cultural revolution” were raised in the past, sometimes in exactly the same terms, against other oppositionists by Liu Shao-chi [Liu Shaoqi], Peng Chen [Peng Zhen], Lo Jui-ch’ing [Luo Ruiqing], Chou Yang [Zhou Yang], etc. This said, the Maoist polemics and accusations hold a certain interest because they reflect the orientations and conceptions that the Chinese leaders wanted to prevail. In this sense, these arguments represent essential source material.18 In its initial phase, Mao’s battle developed along the following lines: (a) Attacking those intellectuals most dangerous both because of the implications of their polemics and because of their position in the party and administrative apparatus (the offensive of November 1965); (b) winning the leading group in the army by eliminating the doubtful Lo Jui-ch’ing and by assuring strict control by Lin Piao (the military conference of January 1966); (c) dismantling the fortress around Peng Chen in Peking (the offensive of spring 1966). As the conflict developed, Mao saw the breadth and the strength of the opposing front. He realised quite quickly that he could not win a majority, at least a stable majority, in the decisive party bodies and that even the campaigns he was launching could be deflected by other forces (see, for example, 18

As regards the orientation of the main leaders attacked by Mao and certain episodes in the struggle, see the report given to International Executive Committee of the Fourth International in March 1967. (World Outlook, 25 August, and 8 September 1967.) (See also “Stormy Internal Conflicts in China”, World Outlook, 7, 14 October 1966).

512

maitan

the vicissitudes of the first wave of the “cultural revolution” in the universities). The August 1966 Central Committee plenum, which ended with a certain compromise, confirmed the resistance of essential sectors of the apparatus. This is why, precisely at this time, he decided to renew the struggle by appealing to sectors of the masses. This decision could not fail to be heavy with consequences. Why did Mao choose to appeal first to the students? The reasons for this are manifold and can be summed up as follows: (a) This was a sector of the population particularly sensitive to certain kinds of appeals against the vestiges of conservative structures and conceptions. And this was true, above all, inasmuch as it suffered from some of the most acute tensions, which I have just mentioned.19 (b) The problem of the new generations and their relationship to the leadership of the party and the state was particularly felt and this concern had a basis in objective reality. In fact, for the older generations who had known the barbarous exploitation under the former regime, the gains of the revolution were not put in question by the difficulties and contradictions of the new government. For the youth, however, who had been born or who had grown up after the revolution, the revolutionary gains represented a starting point taken for granted and they were inevitably drawn to examine the failings and inequalities of the new society, whose possibilities they wanted to exploit fully, with a more critical eye. It was not without a profound significance that Mao strove to make the youth go through experiences substituting for those undergone by the anti-Japanese war and civil-war generations and to have them learn the horrors and the sufferings of Kuomintang China from the mouths of the old people.20 (c) Mobilisation of the student masses involved much more limited consequences for the life of the country, especially in the functioning of the economy. Moreover, the leading group may have thought that the youth could be more easily controlled. Thus the Red Guards were mobilised by means of revolutionary democratic and equalitarian slogans, and they mounted an assault on a very large section of the apparatus, and, more generally, against the various symbols of privilege. Although the initiative unquestionably came from above, and was tied to the specific interests of the Mao-Lin Piao tendency, the organisation was not rigid in form or strictly controlled. From the beginning, a very pronounced fragmentation occurred, giving rise to some times very numerous groups competing 19 20

Let us remember that, among other things, professors’ salaries were among the highest. Examples of youth listening to the stories of the old about their past recur quite frequently in Chinese publications.

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

513

among themselves in the name of the same Maoist orthodoxy (the official documents are quite explicit in this regard). In a series of schools and universities, including the University of Peking, these divisions and these internecine struggles stretched out over two years, lasting until the intervention of groups of workers at the end of July 1968. In the initial phase, the attacks of Mao’s partisans were directed against “work groups” allegedly led by oppositionists. These groups were attacked especially for their “excesses” and their “violence”. From the spring of 1967 on, the criticisms were directed primarily against ultraleftist, anarchist, etc., groups which were often accused of pushing too far in purging the old cadres. In general, from the beginning, a very clear tendency took form to outdistance the Maoist tops who had unleashed the mobilisation, to break out of the limits that they wanted to impose, to work despite the subjective will of Mao and Lin Piao – for clearly antibureaucratic and revolutionary goals. Those who fail to understand the objective dynamic of mass mobilisations and do not go beyond the intra-bureaucratic crises at the top cannot comprehend the full portent of the Chinese crisis of the last three years. Facing the persisting resistance and difficulties, towards the end of 1966 Mao decided to appeal to the workers, calling on them also to mobilize directly and build revolutionary committees in the plants. The consequences of this appeal were not long in coming, and they far exceeded what Mao would have wanted. The beginning of 1967 was marked by a powerful wave of workers struggles (with strikes, demonstrations, building occupations, etc.), which, while it reached its height in Shanghai, spread throughout a number of the country’s provinces and big cities. To quote the document with which we opened the discussion after the 1967 iec plenum: “The immediate cause of the events of January 1967 lay in the rupture in the leadership of the Chinese cp and in the growing disintegration of the party and state apparatus at all levels. A vacuum, a relative absence of power, was thus created. In these conditions, in which the appeals to the masses helped, the various social forces were set in motion, each impelled by its own needs and objectives”. The question as to how much the Mao group’s appeals influenced the demonstrations of January–February 1967 and how much it was the oppositionists who inspired or made use of these demonstrations is, after all, a secondary one.21 The essential thing is that the workers judged the time had come to express their demands and to throw themselves into direct actions to win these 21

In the case of Shanghai, it must be taken into account that the local leadership at the beginning of the “cultural revolution” had been considered a stronghold of the Maoist tendency and the accusations that the opposition fomented the strike by means of this leadership seem to have scant foundation.

514

maitan

demands. And at the same time they sought to develop new organisations.22 The tendency for the mobilisations to get out of hand, which had distinguished the mobilisation of the student masses, reoccurred in a still more explosive form among the workers. The response of Mao and Lin Piao was again symptomatic. Their essential aim was to halt the strike movement, to canalise the mobilisation of the workers, including by resorting to threats and repression. But at the same time, not wanting to cut themselves off from the masses, they continued to appeal to the population by launching the slogan of taking power, that is, a profound reorganisation of the country’s entire apparatus of leadership. It is precisely this attitude which explains why these outbreaks recurred periodically, why multifarious organisations mushroomed, and why the political crisis shook the country for a quite long period. As regards the countryside, I must rectify the opinion expressed at the iec plenum in March 1967 that the movement was limited primarily to the areas close to the big cities like Shanghai and Peking. On the basis of many items provided since then by the official sources, I must conclude, rather, that the upset was quite widespread. In addition to the demands that I have already underlined – such as the demand for eliminating the relative disadvantage of the countryside – substantial peasant sectors raised demands similar to those that took shape after the halting of the movement of the People’s Communes, especially in 1961–62 – that is, a relative freedom for private accumulation, an expansion of the private plots, the chance to use the “free” market, a decrease in deliveries to the state, etc. It is significant that in certain cases it was the Maoists who sought to counter-act excessive state intervention, which was attributed to Liu Shao-chi and his supporters. In other words, the “classical” conflicts of the transitional period were recurring once again in the Chinese countryside.

iii As I have said, faced with the movements which were sweeping the country, Mao intervened to halt them and canalise them, threatening to go as far as repressive measures and appealing primarily to the army, which in the decayed state of all the apparatuses, remained the only effective instrument.23 He drew 22 23

The official documents mentioned organisations of a trade-union type which arose at the time. Differences existed, however, even in the army, certain sections of which were opposed to intervening directly in the vicissitudes of the political struggle.

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

515

up a plan for politically reorganising the country which could make use of the forces newly emerging from the great turmoil. In the initial phase, emphasis was put on revolutionary-democratic themes, appealing to the tradition and concepts of the Paris Commune. But all this was toned down quite rapidly24 and new political and organisational forms appeared. Thus the formula of the “great alliance” was constantly repeated, whose aim was to unify all the various groups that had emerged. Also repeated over and over again was the formula of the “triple alliance”, which as we know, was supposed to group the representatives of the masses, of the army, and of the cadres. It was on this basis that the “revolutionary committees” progressively formed, which were presented as the essential elements in the organisation of the state and administration in general. This reorganisation was achieved, however, with very great difficulties. Manifold difficulties arose anew among the various tendencies and groups, all of which claimed to be Maoist. It was only on the eve of the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic in 1968 that the reorganisation was completed in all the Chinese provinces. Despite at times stubborn resistance, the old cadres will be very largely “rehabilitated” (according to the current watchword, 95 per cent should be considered healthy). But the army will unquestionably play the most important role in the entire operation, while representatives of the masses will probably get a higher percentage of seats in the committees.25 It must not be forgotten, in any case, that these committees were not elected but were the product of agreements at the top. As for the students, I have already mentioned the leaders’ moves to put an end to the conflicts in the universities. Let me add that the role reserved for the Red Guard has been more and more limited to the point that for several months after the fall of 1968, official propaganda almost stopped talking about it.26 The reorganisation of the party, which is being completed by the congress in progress as this report is being given, is the culmination of the reconstruction that has followed the storm of the “cultural revolution”. In Mao’s concept, contrary to what some Maoists tinted with spontaneism think, the party retains its primary role. And it is significant that Liu has been insistently accused over

24 25

26

The use of the term “Commune” to describe the new structures in a few big cities had only an ephemeral duration. According to Chinese sources, the members of the provincial revolutionary committees will number about 4,000 of which 2,000 are supposed to come from “the revolutionary masses.” This holds at least for the big national press, whose main articles are circulated widely abroad.

516

maitan

the last months of spontaneist tendencies. Moreover, even in the periods in which the party structures were most profoundly shaken, the most important decisions were made and published in the name of the leading party bodies.27

iv According to the propagandists of the “cultural revolution”, the concepts formulated by Mao constitute an original contribution, a major development of Marxism-Leninism. In practice, the appeals to Marx and Lenin are being more and more overshadowed by excessive commendation of Chairman Mao’s thought. It could not be said that the Maoism of the “cultural revolution” involved any fundamentally new elements with respect to the Maoism of the past. And in this sense, the effort made by official propaganda to establish a line of strict continuity is not unfounded. Of course, the conceptions and orientations of the Chinese cp have undergone not a few swings and rectifications. That is why the present leaders are breaking sharply from everything considered “unMaoist” in the history of the party, and to this end they have resorted to arbitrary reconstructions and outright falsifications, attributing the most embarrassing decisions to various scapegoats, especially Chen Tu-hsiu [Chen Duxiu] and Liu Shao-chi. Thus in the last analysis, the Maoist conceptions are a melange. They are made-up reassertions of very general Marxist and Leninist propositions and of the experience of the Stalinist ussr, put in a positive light (including the collectivisation of the early thirties); and – however strange it may see – of certain Khrushchevist ideas; as well as specifically Maoist ideas which flow often from the specific features of the revolutionary history and present reality of China. In general, certain of the orientations proposed seem justified and may even have a concrete validity in a well-defined context. But their error lies in trying to make a virtue of necessity and to erect purely empirical conclusions into theory. This, moreover, harks back to a tradition of the Chinese cp (we need only recall here the fanciful theories of the initial phase of the People’s Communes). The Maoist theories are understandable, however, if you take into account not only the present stage in the development of Chinese society but also an international context involving at once the constant threat of an imperialist aggression, relative economic encirclement of China, and the process of further degeneration in the ussr and in the European people’s democracies. The

27

See on this subject the report to the March 1967 iec plenum already cited.

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

517

crisis of the bureaucratised transitional society which emerged in the fifties has presented the bureaucracy itself with the hopeless problem of finding new or relatively new solutions with respect to the Stalinism of the thirties and forties. Over and above multiple variants, a solution was outlined in the Khrushchev-Libermann line,28 that is a right-wing technocratic bureaucratic solution whose results can already be judged on the basis of about fifteen years experience. In Mao’s eyes, these results are fundamentally the following: (a) a deep-going social differentiation with the crystallisation of privileged layers; (b) political administration completely divorced from the masses and exercised, in the last analysis, for the benefit of neobourgeois strata; (c) a development of powerful centrifugal forces both in the industrial and agricultural sectors (with the logic of profit-seeking prevailing in the former and tendencies to private accumulation predominating in the latter); (d) an ideological demobilisation with a mushrooming of all kinds of revisionist theories which serve as a vehicle for an outright bourgeois ideology; (e) and last but not least, a line of compromise with imperialism to the detriment of revolutionary struggles. There is no need for me to recall the unquestionable historical fact that the degeneration of the ussr began well before 1953. What interests us here is that, basing themselves on the negative results in the ussr in the years 1959–69, the Maoists are trying to outline an alternative solution to the crisis of bureaucratised transitional society and to present the “cultural revolution” as a struggle to achieve such a solution. Let us see then, briefly, what the Maoist solutions are in the main areas and to what extent they can be regarded as valid. In the area of agriculture, Mao clarified or reasserted the following ideas during the “cultural revolution”: (a) Collectivisation is a prerequisite for mechanisation because otherwise industrialisation in the countryside could not develop without introducing new productive relations and this would take place under conditions permitting a continual regeneration of capitalism.29 (b) Collectivisation does not necessarily entail centralisation and nationalisation; to the contrary, it can facilitate the utilisation of local resources and cut down state intervention.

28

29

Editors’ note: Khrushchev-Libermann line, especially the Libermann line, refers to the 1965 Soviet economic reform, which introduced profitability and sales as the two key indicators of state enterprise success. A very important Chinese document on this question, “History of Struggle Between Two Lines”, has been reprinted in No. 633 of scmm.

518

maitan

(c) Mechanisation must be based on giving priority to the development of a small and medium agricultural implements industry. As regards use of tractors, the solution of state tractor stations was rejected in favour of the Khrushchev-type solution of turning over the tractors to the communes. (d) Non-mechanised methods of cultivation must be widely utilised and preference must be given to natural fertilisers. (e) Production must not be spurred by adopting individual stimuli which smack of a capitalist logic. This implies a criticism of concepts relying on private plots, tendencies to individual accumulation, setting production quotas on a family rather than a group basis, and methods of remuneration which were in force before the “cultural revolution” (repeated criticism of “work-points in command”). The summit of all these conceptions is represented by the idea of the primacy of politics and Mao’s thought, which leads to the primacy of political cadres, essentially, the party cadres, for whom political loyalty and class origin count for more than technical skills. Let us remember, first of all, that similar ideas were behind the campaign for the Communes and even, to a lesser extent, for the development of cooperatives. However, the Communes failed to assure a stable, high rate of productive growth. They did not make it possible either to avoid economic and social differentiation among the peasants in the long run. These tendencies cannot, then, be eliminated now. And this is all the more true because the basic structure of the Communes remains much less collectivist than is generally thought and, despite everything, does not involve any qualitative differences from the kholkhozes.30 The decision to turn over the tractors to the Communes and the appeal to self-help in contrast to broader state intervention – no matter what reasons inspired them – are, moreover, likely to provoke further differentiations. As for individual or “private” stimuli, while they in fact involve a danger of inequality and can block the expansion of collectivist relations, they cannot be replaced in the long run by propaganda, by a simple appeal to subjective consciousness. They can only disappear really and completely when new objective conditions void them of their content. The verdict of experience, including in China, is absolutely clear in this matter. Finally, the polemic against the methods of remuneration in force has not been accompanied thus far by any really innovating proposal. (The method adopted by the celebrated Tachai brigade, which is presented as a model,

30

Let me note once again that in the Communes, ownership by the production team, and to lesser extent the brigade, predominates over collective property in the strict sense.

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

519

changes nothing fundamental. It involves primarily the peasants themselves estimating the remuneration to which they are entitled. In was already in practice before November 1965.) In the state industrial sector, the real leadership in the past belonged to the party committee, which was considered to represent more the party at the plant level than the workers of the plant in which it was active. Participation from below was quite limited.31 According to Chinese sources, the criterion of unified leadership exercised by the plant manager was later introduced, at least in some sectors. At the same time, the stress is supposed to have been put on the necessity of adopting profit as the basic index and the administrative apparatus is supposed to have considerably increased. In fact, economic arguments developed in China on several occasions that were similar to those which took place in the Soviet Union. The economist Sun Yefang, whose adversaries accused him of wanting to “put money and profit in command” is supposed to have come to the fore as an extreme Libermannist.32 In this sphere also, polemics seemed to predominate over concrete proposals and to the extent that solutions were outlined, they were more political measures designed to avoid or block certain degenerative processes than they were real innovations. Two important conferences had stressed already in April 1966 the demand for tripartite collaboration among the leadership, the technicians, and the masses, denounced the danger of technocratic backsliding, and reaffirmed the primacy of the party leadership and Mao’s thought. During the wave of 1967 and the period of reorganisation, the constantly recurring themes were the criticism of material incentives and opposition to the utilisation of profit and profitability as primary criteria, stress on the right of leadership belonging to the working class, the affirmation of the duty of cadres not to separate themselves from production and to reject all privileges, as well as the need for substantial reductions in the administrative apparatus. This opposition to the technocratic bureaucratic solutions advocated in the Soviet Union and in the majority of the European people’s democracies obviously cannot in itself be criticised. But we must not forget the following facts either: (a) Planning and economic development cannot exclude certain economic indexes, of which profitability is one, without a very high cost in waste and irrationality which must be paid for in the final analysis by the masses.

31 32

On this subject, see Bettelheim 1968. A notable article on the theory of value and profit in a transitional society was published in August 1966. (Hsinhua News Agency, 13 August).

520

maitan

(b) Rejection of material incentives as the supreme criterion is justified but it would be absolutely wrong to reject not only all kinds of material incentives but also all wage and income increases for the masses.33 Sacrifices can be asked and even imposed during exceptional periods and with precise aims (for example, the Cubans’ campaign for 10,000,000 tons of sugar), but such practices cannot be prolonged indefinitely without causing physical and psychological exhaustion, which, in the last analysis, has a negative effect on the productivity of labour – to say nothing of the possible political and social consequences. (c) The tendency of the apparatus to become detached from the masses cannot be eliminated by voluntary and partial measures. It can only be counteracted if real workers management is achieved and genuinely democratic structures exist at all levels which deprive the apparatuses of all opportunity to determine the fundamental choices. It is symptomatic, moreover, that campaigns were conducted in the past also for direct participation of specialists and managers in production without preventing the crystallisation of privileged apparatuses. Also, degenerative tendencies took form quite rapidly in the newly constituted “revolutionary committees”. This must not, however, lead us to overlook the fact that mighty energies from below were mobilised and that broad strata of workers acquired a clearer consciousness of their rights and aspirations – which will not fail to have its consequences in the future. I have already stressed the Chinese leaders’ characteristic tendency to often make a virtue of necessity and to convert into a general rule a procedure that is valid only in a narrow sense or in a very specific context. This is the case, for example, of their self-reliance concept, which, moreover, is related to the concept of “socialism in one country”. No one could honestly criticize China, which is still the target of severe economic sanctions by imperialism and hard hit by Moscow’s criminal reprisals, for appealing to its people to use all their ingenuity. But we have to take a different view when the Maoist leaders advance the idea of self-reliance as a fundamental principle of building socialism. In the last analysis, exactly the contrary is true. China will only be able to overcome all its difficulties and contradictions – which have profound roots – when it can integrate itself in a truly international system of workers states endowed with a great economic potential.

33

A whole campaign has been developed in China to show that workers have no interest in material advantages.

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

521

Similarly, as I already said at the 1967 plenum, we cannot take for good coin the theory that the division of labour is being overcome in an original way in China. The system that requires the Chinese to devote themselves at the same time to industrial, agricultural, and cultural activities, as well as military training, may correspond to the needs of a period when a war against imperialism remains possible while the economic level of the country is still modest. However, such a system has nothing in common with the conditions that will be achieved in the stage of communism. The explanations given for sending or returning large contingents of youth to the countryside are of more or less the same sort. These campaigns are explained by the conflicts and bottlenecks I described in the first part of my report. Regarding the political reorganisation, the renewal achieved at the end of the great crisis is much more limited than the official propaganda would have us think. It is true that all the structures have been thoroughly shaken up and that a change occurred on a considerable scale. (I will return to the question of the objective consequences of three years of the “cultural revolution”). But, it must be repeated, the “revolutionary committees” which emerged as the essential instruments of renewal are not a real democratic emanation from the masses but the result of deals at the top, with the old cadres regaining the basic functions in the majority of cases. Furthermore, despite the reconstruction of the party, the army has not ceased playing a leading role. Military men often hold the key posts in the committees. I am not forgetting that because of its class nature, its traditions, and its structure, the Chinese army cannot be compared with the traditional armies. But the question is whether the structure of any army – even the most democratic – can be considered a model of proletarian democracy for the society as a whole. I definitely do not think so. But we can see the feature that most reveals the very undemocratic and unproletarian character of the structures of the Chinese workers state, even after the “cultural revolution”, if we consider that according to the official conception, the crown of the whole edifice resides in Mao’s thought. Mao’s thought is considered the supreme, absolutely unquestionable, value. In other words, the summit of the whole structure is a small, highly centralised leadership, the quintessence and symbol of which is Mao, who is the object of an unbridled cult that is in fact most often absolutely grotesque.34 A political structure which projects such an ideology is, in the last analysis, profoundly authorit34

The primary role of the masses proclaimed by the Chinese documents is rigorously subordinated to the acceptance and understanding of Mao’s thought as the supreme value which must be “inculcated” into the population. Many quite explicit quotations could be given on this subject.

522

maitan

arian, just as is any conception which calls for mobilising the masses by slogans which are not designed to develop their consciousness or expand their critical spirit. Moreover, such an ideology is a very unreliable kind of social cement. And this, in the long or short run, means that the outlook is for new instabilities and new ruptures.35

v I do not have the time here to deal extensively with the international role of Maoism. I will note only two quotations. “Within the framework of the world Communist movement, the Fourth International reaffirms its critical support to the Chinese Communists in their struggle against the neoreformism of the Khrushchevist leadership and of a big part of the other Communist leaderships, because it holds that the Chinese line on the fundamental problems of the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles (methods of struggle against the war, conception of the colonial revolution, ‘uninterrupted’ revolution, the road to socialism in the advanced capitalist countries) is on the whole more progressive than that of the Khrushchevists and is more capable of polarising the currents of the left in the Communist movement” (Fourth International, October November, 1963, p. 63). The resolution of the 1965 World Congress stated among other things: “The Fourth International has stressed many times that fundamentally the Sino-Soviet conflict involves two bureaucracies. But revolutionary Marxists never limit themselves to bare characterisations like this which cannot solve the problem of what specific attitude to take in each concrete case. They have never identified the workers states or the Communist parties with the bureaucracies leading them; nor have they viewed the bureaucracy as nothing but a single reactionary mass without internal distinctions. On the contrary, they have tried in each concrete case to determine wherein the bureaucrats are only defending their own reactionary class interests and wherein they are compelled by their own social position to defend at the same time – in their own way – the acquisitions of revolution. Similarly they have explained the stratification of the bureaucracy and how conflicts can arise between different layers under the pressure of conflicting objective factors and clashing social forces …

35

With regard to certain idealist features in the Maoist conceptions and ideology, see the chapter “The Ideology of the Mao Tendency” in the plenum report which has been previously cited. See also the article by E. Germain in Quatrième Internationale, July 1967.

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

523

“The attitude of the world Trotskyist movement flows from the same logic. It supports the Chinese Communists in their defence of the Chinese revolution and the People’s Republic of China against the economic blockade mounted by the Kremlin and against the military aid granted by the Kremlin to the Indian bourgeoisie. It supports the Chinese Communists in their struggle against the Khrushchevist concept of conjuring away the danger of imperialist war through ‘peaceful coexistence’, and their attitude towards the colonial revolution and their criticism of the neoreformist orientations of most of the Communist parties” (International Socialist Review, Spring 1966, p. 85). As the draft resolution shows, I consider that these evaluations remain fundamentally correct. For that reason I would be opposed to any change in orientation in this area. It goes without saying that we are not changing any of the criticisms that we advanced in the two documents quoted. On the basis of the experiences of the last years, we give special stress to our criticism of the Maoist conception of the international Communist movement. This conception seeks to impose an absolute monolithism around “Mao’s thought” and, in practice, around every position taken by the Chinese leading group. It is characterised by an extreme sectarianism with respect to any current, including any revolutionary current, which does not fit into the schemas of Maoist orthodoxy.36 This conception and these attitudes are, moreover, at the root of the failures and fragmentation of the official Maoist groups in the majority of countries.37

vi The “cultural revolution”, which was unleashed as a result of conflicts among different tendencies at the summit of the Chinese Communist party, attained the scope of a profound social and political shakeup in its culminating phase. Whatever its conclusion, it has shaken the country from top to bottom, putting the apparatuses, the structures, and the relationships of forces again in ques-

36

37

The most extraordinary example of this is the attitude the Chinese leaders have taken towards the Cuban revolution and the Castroist movement, which has gone to the point of maintaining a conspiracy of silence against the epic and the death of Che Guevara. Similarly, the Chinese in general avoid mentioning the organisations and leaders of the AfroAmerican revolutionary movement, thus encouraging the sectarian blindness of their American supporters in the Progressive Labor Party. In a series of countries, Maoist influence is expressed mostly in “unorthodox” pro-Chinese movements and organisations, often strongly coloured by spontaneism.

524

maitan

tion. The struggles of the masses for their demands will develop in the next stages in much more favourable objective and subjective conditions than in the past. The draft resolution states unequivocally that the strategy of revolutionary Marxists in China is centred on the perspective of an antibureaucratic revolution which will be the task of the new vanguard of revolutionists presently in formation to achieve. Let me add that this vanguard has greatly progressed and matured in the course of the events of the last three years. The lack of real information makes it impossible to say exactly in what groups and in what sectors this vanguard appears. The charges of Trotskyism which have been levelled in certain documents have at least a symptomatic value. And there is no doubt that conceptions have developed among the Red Guards and the Revolutionary Rebels that are in reality closer to revolutionary Marxism than Maoism. In any event, it is among the most principled contingents of the youth who took part in the movements of August–September 1966 and the workers who unleashed the strikes of January–February 1967 that the cadres will emerge for an antibureaucratic revolution, for a real socialist democratic reorganisation of the Chinese workers state. The transitional demands which revolutionary Marxists propose to stimulate the mass antibureaucratic struggles in China were already formulated in the document which opened our discussion in 1967. They can be summed up as follows: Struggle for broader democracy for the masses and against bureaucratic advantages and privileges. Democratic election of committees by the masses, organisation of the state on the basis of such bodies. Freedom of organisation and speech for all working-class political currents, trade union independence from the state, the right to strike, the right of assembly, freedom of the press, the right to demonstrate and to participate in elections, permanent supervision by the masses of elected representatives and the right to recall them, in accordance with the lessons of the Paris Commune. Democratic planning by bodies democratically elected by the masses from the bottom to the top of the system. It is through such a system and not by decision of the bureaucratic tops that the fundamental economic choices must be determined – especially the relative share of investment and consumption, that is, in the last analysis, the wage level and the living conditions of the workers. In the countryside, complete democratisation of the life of the Communes in order to counteract possible conservative tendencies. Real participation by the peasants in formulating general economic policy and the determination of the necessary priorities at every given stage.

report on the “cultural revolution” in china (1969)

525

Rejection of all Zhdanovist-style conceptions and practices in the cultural field. Freedom of expression and criticism, rejection of the leader cult, and a free confrontation of ideas and tendencies. Struggle against the vestiges of the ideologies of the past must not be conducted by means of administrative measures and demagogic slogans but the development of the potentialities of the new society.

The Social Nature of China (1976) Livio Maitan

In this article, Maitan analyses Chinese society from a Marxist perspective. The text provides a Trotskyist understanding of the Cultural Revolution and the nature of the ccp’s regime. Maitan describes the Cultural Revolution as “essentially reformist”. His view was quite different from that of Peng Shuzhi, who favoured critical support for the anti-Mao faction within the ccp.1 Source: Chapter 16 of Livio Maitan, Party, Army, and Masses in China: A Marxist Interpretation of the Cultural Revolution and Its Aftermath, London: New Left Books, 1976, translated by Gregor Benton and Marie Collitti, pp. 348–357.

Before we embark on any critical analysis of the many contradictions that characterise Chinese society, our point of departure for any overall assessment must be that the revolution which culminated in the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime was a decisive event in the history of this century, not only for China and Asia but for the whole world. Whatever has happened since, the fact remains that the revolution, by destroying the old ruling classes and relations of production and introducing collectivist relations, succeeded in unifying an immense country in which all sorts of centrifugal forces were at work, put it on the road to industrialisation and enabled it, in an historically short period of time, to eliminate age-old scourges, to set up social relations which despite bureaucratic distortions represent an immeasurable advance, and to transform what was formerly the object of inter-imperialist rivalries into a protagonist of world politics. In order that no one should be tempted to misinterpret the analyses set forth in this book, we would simply mention the parallel between the fate of China and that of India. Twenty-five years’ experience has left no room for ambiguity. Whereas China has emancipated herself completely from imperialist control, India is more than ever subject to imperialist penetration. Whereas China has overthrown age-old class barriers, India is still characterised by polarisations bordering on the grotesque and by the survival of a barbarous caste spirit.

1 See also Yang Yang, “Chinese Trotskyists in Exile, Contacts with the Fourth International, and Efforts to Achieve Organisational Unification, 1949–1978”, in this volume [Part 1, Section A].

© Livio Maitan, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_051

the social nature of china (1976)

527

Whereas China has more or less succeeded in unifying the country, India is in the grip of violent centrifugal forces. Whereas China has set out on a qualitatively new path of economic development, India has witnessed the failure even of her economic plans and is unable to protect her people from the recurrent tragedy of famine. Whereas China has no foreign debts, India has indebted herself to a colossal extent. At the root of this evolution lies the qualitative difference in the mode of production and the social regime. However, if we wish to understand the real meaning of events in China we cannot ignore the contradictions that exist within contemporary Chinese society. Foremost among these contradictions, which are proper to a society in transition from capitalism to socialism, is the one between the collective nature of the mode of production and the norms of distribution which, to quote the definition of Marx and Lenin, remain bourgeois. These contradictions, as happened in the ussr, are all the more acute because China before the revolution was an enormously backward country and was not able to insert itself into a supranational socialist economic system. Finally, they express themselves in a specific way, that is they are aggravated and magnified by the growth of a bureaucratic layer and by bureaucratic management. The situation which we outlined in the first part of this volume and which, if our analysis is correct, remains substantially the same today, was the result of negative or contradictory aspects of the course of the revolution, both before and after the seizure of power. One first contradiction was the fact that the Party at the head of the revolutionary struggle, though non-peasant in origin, ideology and international connections, was for many years separated from its proletarian matrix, led a movement almost exclusively composed of peasants and performed the functions of a government in backward areas of the countryside. The second contradiction was that although Mao and the leading group around him on various occasions adopted positions which differed from and even conflicted with those of Stalin and the Kuomintang, attempting to exploit, under cover of formal compliance, all the margins of autonomy permitted by a special situation, they nevertheless underwent the same process of Stalinisation that affected all the Communist Parties (the picture of Mao as completely immune from Stalinism is even more wrong than that of Mao as Stalin’s faithful disciple). This had serious implications for the Party’s political strategy, and above all it decisively influenced the methods of leadership and organisation of the Party, which always remained firmly in control of the movement as a whole, and its methods of administration and government in the liberated areas. There has been much talk about the egalitarian and democratic imprint which the experience of the liberated areas and the Yan’an period was said to have left on the Party and its leadership. It is not our intention to throw doubt

528

maitan

on facts brought to light by disinterested observers, or to ignore or underestimate their importance. In exceptional and highly transitory periods such as those passed through by a society building itself up during the course of a war, bureaucratic and authoritarian methods of leadership do not necessarily imply the short-term creation of conditions of privilege or social stratification: and a leadership conducting a struggle without quarter in a situation of extreme difficulty must constantly be on its guard lest its relations with the masses deteriorate. But that does not mean to say that a training such as the communist parties of the thirties received and the Stalinist methods in force even in the Chinese Party did not have serious and lasting consequences. There is, moreover, another aspect of the problem that deserves a fuller analysis, but which we can only briefly touch on here. The Mao Tse-tung [Mao Zedong] group, during the years of the anti-Japanese war and the civil war, was not only at the head of a Party that controlled a mainly peasant army, but also acted as the government of a portion of Chinese society which began to grow considerably (in 1934, according to Snow,2 Mao put the population controlled by the Soviet government of that period at roughly 9 million; later, after the long march at the time of the Sian[Xi’an] incident, the population of the liberated areas was some two million, but gradually began to grow again until it reached several tens of millions in 1943 and more than 95 million in 1945). The character and the orientations of the leadership were necessarily conditioned by this factor, by the actual – and not the theoretical – part that it played in a society in the process of being transformed but in which few collectivist structures had been introduced, a society dominated by a small and middle peasant economy and in which the political apparatus of the Party and the state was forced to use Bonapartist techniques in order to maintain the equilibrium.3 The failure to smash the old state machine and replace it with entirely new bodies had a particularly adverse effect on developments after the seizure of power. Instead, there developed a hybrid form, which meant that the old structure, methods and personnel continued to exercise an important influ2 Edgar Snow (1905–1972) was an American journalist, the author of Red Star Over China, known for his books on the Chinese Communist Revolution. 3 Author’s note: Very interesting information on the pre-1949 period can be found in Snow 1968, and in Belden 1970. For the positions of Mao and the Chinese Communists we should also mention Deutscher 1964, vol. 1, pp. 11–37. Selden 1971, documents the base areas in the anti-Japanese war. Brandt, Schwartz and Fairbank (eds) 1967, presents a broad survey of documents from 1921 to 1950. Milovan Djilas and Vladimir Dedijer describe the differences between Mao and Stalin in 1945–46 in Djilas 1962 and Dedijer 1953. Isaacs 1961, is an important source for the events and polemics of 1925–27. For Trotsky’s position, see Trotsky 1969a, 1969b, 1929, 1957.

the social nature of china (1976)

529

ence (this was frequently admitted in the polemics that took place during the cultural revolution). All this resulted from bureaucratic ideas in general and more particularly from the Maoist view current at that time of the nature and tempo of the revolutionary process (the aim was not the overthrow of capitalism but a so-called ‘new democratic’ regime of indefinite duration). In practice certain formulas broke down, but not before a number of compromises had been made: and the consequences of these compromises were not automatically eliminated. Real organs of workers’ and peasants’ democracy were not set up and the dominant apparatus drew away from the masses. This resulted in the formation of privileged strata, the slowing down of the rate of economic growth, the appearance of distortions and imbalances in the development of the economy and a failure to make full use of all the potential inherent in the new mode of production. In the final analysis, the cultural revolution was determined by the developments that had gradually been taking place in Chinese society and which we briefly analysed in the first part of this volume. The leadership itself was forced to seek a way out, all the more so because of the international crisis of the bureaucratic system and its own rejection of the alternative solutions adopted in the ussr after Stalin’s death and the Twentieth Congress. The various social forces in the country rushed to the apertures created by the conflicts at the top and the decision of the Maoist group to mobilise first the students and then the workers and peasants, and seized the opportunity to express their aspirations and impose solutions in keeping with their interests. If the analysis we have made is a correct one, the cultural revolution did not involve a qualitative leap over the previous phase. Not only the basic relations of production but also the forms of organisation and management of the productive apparatus in both agriculture and industry, together with social and political relations, have remained qualitatively the same, in spite of some quantitative changes that were often more talked about than put into practice. On the level of ideology, the revival of concepts formulated in other periods, in particular 1958–60, got the better of new ideas and emphases. If there was any new element, it lay not so much in the instigation of a mass campaign – there were precedents for this too in the history of the Party and the People’s Republic – as in the fact that the mobilisation was conceived outside the normal channels and the normal machinery: and this aspect of the movement came more and more to the fore as it deepened and spread. But not even this factor, however important and capable of future developments it may have been, is in itself determining: the crucial question is how far it influenced the basic structures and political relations. We have already seen how the movement concluded with a partial and superficial reconstruction of the

530

maitan

apparatus. For this reason, the cultural revolution was essentially a reformist movement in the framework of the society that had emerged from the victorious revolution and the subsequent process of bureaucratic involution. This was confirmed by the fact that the ‘seizures of power’ were expressly limited to the lower levels and not extended to the decisive centres of power. (In a speech in which, he passed on Mao’s instructions, the Shanghai leader Zhang Chunqiao, while criticising extremist standpoints, had said quite clearly that ‘the proletarian dictatorship can be improved only partially’.4) To characterise the cultural revolution and its aftermath in this way does not mean that we ignore its complexity. On the contrary, an understanding of the dual nature of the movement – conflicts within the bureaucracy and a mobilisation of the broadest layers of society in a campaign that tended to escape control and direction from above – is indispensable for an understanding of the crisis of 1966–69. It should be clear from this study that such an interpretation is not deduced from preconceived principles or schemes, but is founded on a mass of analytical data that can be checked, directly or indirectly, in the official sources themselves. Nor does our characterisation imply that we are unaware of the shifts that took place in the relations between the different classes and social groups. After all, such shifts are typical of any real reformist movement. The privileged stratum left over from the past, the so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’, saw its influence diminish, especially in economic management and administration at those levels where seizures of power took place. No decision was taken to abolish interest payments on investments taken over by the state, even though there was talk of ending the system within the near future. (Note that huge fortunes can still be inherited without death duties in China.5) In the countryside the top strata in the communes did not lose their position in the structure, but emerged weakened on the ideological and political plane, given the renewed emphasis on mobilising the lower strata. The working class, which is still very differentiated from the point of view of wages and general conditions, increased its influence, though in a distorted and indirect way, at the base of the pyramid, at the level of the production unit and, to a far lesser degree, at intermediate levels. Inside the ruling stratum it was the military bureaucracy that gained ground, especially during the decisive moments of the crisis. The purge of September 1971 removed a large part of the top pla [People’s Liberation Army] leadership, but, as we have already pointed out, at provincial and

4 scmp (South China Morning Post), no. 4147, p. 2. 5 See Wheelwright and McFarlane, op. cit., p. 138.

the social nature of china (1976)

531

regional levels the army appears to have retained a strong position. More generally speaking, the cultural revolution relaunched and imposed – for how long it remains to be seen – concepts and solutions more in keeping with the inclinations and aspirations – and the interests – of the political bureaucracy and can be expected to encourage their hegemony even more. But how did relations evolve between the masses and the bureaucracy as a whole? Whatever the more distant prospects may be, in the course of the Cultural Revolution and as a result of the movement the balance of forces tipped towards the masses. Future confrontations will therefore take place under objective conditions (given that the wear and tear suffered by the apparatus was not fully repaired during the period of reorganisation) and subjective conditions (given the growth to maturity of new layers of critical young people, workers and students) more favourable to the masses than before. As a rule, the question of the social nature of a country is not posed academically or analysed with scientific detachment; instead it is inspired by the political situation, by the forces in motion and the aspirations that animate them. Nowadays, as a result of opposing pressure from certain quarters, the tendency exists, in studying the contradictory aspects proper to a society of transition, to single out, in the case of the ussr, those elements that back up a negative characterisation (i.e., as a state in which capitalism has been restored) and, in the case of China, those diametrically opposed aspects that justify holding it aloft as a model transitional society breaking with capitalism. Both these approaches are radically wrong, precisely because they assess intrinsically contradictory phenomena by abstracting one of the terms of the contradiction. Nowadays, however, an analysis of Chinese society gives us a better understanding of the typical nature and tendencies of a society in transition. In China there are fewer of those secondary phenomena of a capitalist economy which, while not implying qualitative change, complicate the analysis and encourage mistaken or biased interpretations (for example, profit has not been introduced as a regulator, the market has more limited functions, there is less stress on material incentives and there are no relations with other collectivist countries such as those that exist between the ussr and the other Comecon countries6). This is why it is easier to accept the definition of China as a transitional and not a capitalist society. It is hard to deny that, after the expropriation of the old ruling classes, non-capitalist, collectivist relations of production were introduced into the industrial economy, which constitutes the most dynamic sector and is 6 Editors’ note: Comecon, i.e., the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, was an economic organisation from 1949 to 1991 under the Soviet Union’s leadership that comprised the Stalinist states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world.

532

maitan

acquiring an increasingly decisive specific weight,7 and that a typically transitory structure, with collective forms of organisation of labour and restraint on the tendencies towards a reproduction of capitalism, exists in the countryside. More generally, the exchange economy has started to wither away, since the chief means of production no longer constitute exchange values and the law of value is contained and regulated by the Plan. Thus Kung Wen-sheng8 wrote in an attack on Sun Yeh-fang [Sun Yefang],9 former Director of the Institute of Economy at the Academy of Sciences: ‘In socialist society there is still commodity production and exchange and the law of value still plays a role. But socialist commodity production differs fundamentally from capitalist commodity production. In socialist society, the law of value does not play its role spontaneously as in capitalist society. It is applied consciously by the Party and the state to serve the socialist revolution and socialist construction.’10 (In the same article he says that profit is only one of the indices of the Plan, thereby admitting that the term profit does not automatically mean profit as it operates under capitalism.) Finally, the monopoly of foreign trade is a solid barrier to protect China from imperialist exploitation and the free play of the world market. (Some groups, including former Maoists such as Progressive Labor in the United States, maintain that China, like Cuba and North Vietnam, is a capitalist country. If these ideas were correct, capitalism, far from being in crisis, would have given proof of exceptional historical vitality, having managed to ensure the industrialisation of the ussr and the incipient industrialisation of China, exploit gigantic revolutionary waves for its own ends and exercise an unopposed and unceasing hegemony, either through traditional means or through the leading parties of state capitalist countries or countries in which capitalism has somehow or another been restored. If this were true, we would certainly be forced to re-examine the whole of the Marxist analysis of capitalism and of the revolutionary role of the proletariat.) 7

8 9 10

Chou En-lai told Edgar Snow that agricultural output in 1970 was about 25% of total combined output of industry, transportation and agriculture. According to the (reconstructed) official data, agriculture accounted for 46.1 % of the net product in 1952 and 38.6% in 1957. (Ta-chung Liu, ‘Economic Development of the Chinese Mainland, 1949–1965’, in Ho and Tsou (eds.) 1968, p. 627). It is not clear who Kung was. Sun Yeh-fang (Sun Yefang, 1908–1983) was a Chinese economist. As Sun advocated the market-oriented reform, he was condemned by the Maoists. hna (Hsinghua News Agency), 13 August 1966, p. 33. See hna, 14 November 1966, scmp, no. 3844, and scmm, no. 539, for other attacks on Sun.

the social nature of china (1976)

533

On the basis of the substructures mentioned above, a political apparatus, superimposed on the masses and represented in its most concentrated form in the central leadership, wields decisive powers, taking basic policy decisions and above all deciding on what to do with the surplus product. This stratum derives its power and privileges not from direct or indirect ownership of the means of production but from the functions it performs and in exchange for which, by virtue of its political dominance, it secures a privileged share in the distribution of income. Precisely because its position, historically speaking, is very precarious and because it is aware that real democratisation would mean an end to its powers and to its position as a ruling stratum, it rejects – in theory as in practice – the Leninist concept of the withering away of the state and advances instead the idea that the repressive apparatus must be strengthened. These essential characteristics of Chinese society determine, in the final analysis, the attitude of its leading groups. But for a closer understanding we should also take into account China’s more specific features deriving from her special position, special traditions and experiences, etc., which enable us to develop an adequate interpretation of episodes on the scale of the Sino-Soviet split and the cultural revolution. In this sense, we can recall her experiences in the war against Japan, the Yan’an period and more particularly her special position in the international context.11 Mao Tse-tung’s personality has synthesised and expressed the contradictions that have marked the course of the revolution, both before and after the seizure of power. After 1927 Mao criticised the policies of the Stalinist Comintern and outlined positions that pointed in a different direction to the opportunist compromise accepted at that time by the Party leadership. But for years he failed to challenge the orthodoxy of the Communist Parties and acted more or less along Stalinist lines in so far as the Party leadership and organisation were concerned; he defended Stalin as a great Marxist-Leninist and continued to accept his interpretation of the events of the twenties and thirties. On occasion he expressed some of the most right-wing views in the entire world communist movement: for example, he not only supported in general the idea of collaborating with the so-called national bourgeoisie, but even put that policy into practice with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, which after the revolution of 1925–27 had revealed its true nature for all to see. But when confronted with the need for a decisive choice during the revolutionary upsurge of 1946–47, he put himself at the head of a peasant insurrection,

11

But see Benton 1975.

534

maitan

ignoring Stalin’s ‘suggestions’ and wishes and leading the Red Army to conquer the country: and ten years later he once more took up the cudgels as the chief spokesman of the left wing of the Communist movement. He was at the head of the Party which played a leading role in the overthrow of capitalism, but after victory he presided over a process of bureaucratisation; and then, at a certain point, he himself took alarm at the consequences of that process. He proclaimed and had it proclaimed that the masses decide everything and that it is necessary to learn from them, whereas in reality he built up a system that was extremely centralised politically and monolithic in tendency, based on an authoritarian paternalism of which the boundless cult of his person was the symbol. He maintained the need for a struggle to the death with imperialism and criticised Soviet policy in the ex-colonial countries, while at the same time inspiring a policy of collaboration and compromise with the bourgeoisie resulting in the massacre of the Indonesian Communists and the paralysis of his followers in Pakistan and East Bengal. He has posed as the standard-bearer in a battle against bureaucracy but has continued to quote Stalin, who more than any other individual symbolises the rule and ideological hegemony of the bureaucracy. He has written poetry in the most traditional manner, and pronounced speeches of undeniable literary value, but has promoted campaigns inspired by the most brutal forms of Zhdanovism in which artistic expression is demeaned to the level of a mere instrument of propaganda. Our assessment of a personality so thoroughly shot through with contradictions – like the society, the political group and the social stratum of which he is an expression – can only be dialectical and dependent on the role that he has objectively fulfilled, is fulfilling or will fulfil in any given situation. Otherwise we shall either fail to understand his role or fall into the opposite trap of uncritical adulation. But beyond Mao and Maoism, the basic problem is the fate of the revolution in China. Chinese society will only be in a position to break out of the circle of contradictions that encloses it if two basic conditions are met: firstly, the building of socialism in China must be organically linked to the building of socialism on a supranational scale, thereby smashing the barriers between nation states inherited from the old society; and secondly, it is necessary to introduce real democracy and give the workers and peasants a chance to carry out their leading role, so that they are in a position to deal with the basic issues from the angle of their own interests and aspirations, of the needs of socialist construction, freed from the distorting interference of the interests and aims of the new privileged strata. To the extent that China follows this path, she will overcome the conditions of backwardness that are at the root of, and in their turn perpetuated by, the bureaucratic involution.

the social nature of china (1976)

535

The real struggle against the bureaucracy is not over, or nearly over – rather, it has not yet begun. It will have to take the form of a struggle from below for a break, for a qualitative leap, in a word, for a revolution, qualitatively different from all movements of reform or self-reform, however profound and however iconoclastic they might appear.

section c Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan

∵

Introduction to Part 2, Section C Peng Shuzhi (P’eng Shu-chih, also written P’eng Shu-tse) (1895–1983) studied in Moscow in the early 1920s and returned to China to join the Central Committee of the ccp in 1925. He was expelled together with Chen Duxiu in November 1929 for supporting Trotskyism. Chen Bilan (Ch’en Pi-lan) (1902–1987), Peng’s wife, joined the League of Socialist Youth in 1922 and the Communist Party in 1923 and went to Moscow to study in 1924, and returned one year later to China, where she too became a Trotskyist in 1929. Peng and Chen left China for Hong Kong in 1948, and later lived in France and the USA. Peng and Chen led the wing of Chinese Trotskyism known as the rcp, also called the majority faction, although it later lost its majority status to the iwp wing of the movement under Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin. For a sympathetic description of Peng and Chen’s role in the Chinese Trotskyist movement, see the article in this volume by Leslie Evans. For an unsympathetic description, see Gregor Benton, “Two Purged Leaders”, also in this volume. A memoir of Peng’s early years was published in French in 1983.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_052

An Interview with Chen Bilan on the Cultural Revolution (1967) In this interview Chen Bilan, the wife of Peng Shuzhi, whose outlook she shared, talks about the ccp’s cultural purges and criticises Mao Zedong’s cultural policies. Chen argues, like Peng, that the Cultural Revolution initiated by Mao was simply a purge of his opponents within the party. This interview, originally published in World Outlook on 14 July 1967, was transcribed by Andrew Pollack for the Marxist Internet Archive. World Outlook was a Trotskyist magazine published starting in 1963 under the auspices of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. In 1968, it was renamed Intercontinental Press.

question: In my interviews with Peng Shuzhi, who analysed the situation in China in some detail, I have got a fairly clear idea of the origins and subsequent evolution of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, the different and contrasting positions of the Maoists and anti-Maoists, and the possible future perspectives of the struggle.1 In the first stage of the Cultural Revolution, the people who were attacked were artists, writers, scholars, and educators. Therefore, I would like to ask you some questions about the differences of opinion on questions of literature, art, education, etc. First of all, may I ask you to describe and analyse the differences between the two factions on these questions, as it seems these differences can be most important and give us a much clearer and better understanding of the general lines and positions of the two contending factions. answer: Yes; this is true. If one understands the differences on these questions, one can get a very good idea as to what the general struggle between the two factions is about. In reality, when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, he began by attacking Wu Han’s drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, Tian Han’s drama Xie Yaohuan, and Deng Tuo’s writings Evening Talks at Yanshan and Notes from Three-Family Village.2 In other words, Mao began by attacking the leading cadres in the cultural fields, which, of course, gave rise to the name Cul1 See Two Interviews with Peng Shuzhi on the Cultural Revolution in World Outlook, August 12, 1966, and February 10, 1967. 2 Wu Han (1909–1969), Tian Han (1898–1968), Deng Tuo (1911–1966) were all prominent Chinese intellectuals and cadres of the Chinese Communist Party. At the beginning of the Cultural

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_053

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

541

tural Revolution. We all know that under Stalinist dictatorial regimes, there is no political freedom, and, under these conditions, there is much dissatisfaction among the people. Dissatisfaction of this kind is usually reflected in literature and art since most artists and writers are very sensitive to the world around them. They observe the daily life of the people and see their plight as well as their hopes and aspirations. Through the means of literature and art, then, they mirror what they have observed – the bad as well as the good. It is for just this reason that Stalinist policies have always severely restricted the cultural fields, in order to keep the bad side from being exposed, including the bureaucratic regime. Literature and art were no longer allowed to reflect the actual reality but became mere propaganda to praise the policies of the bureaucrats as well as them as individuals. It is very clear that such a situation existed under Stalin’s regime; and the policies elaborated by Zhdanov on literature and art are typical examples. The policies elaborated by Mao in this respect have been in no way different, except perhaps they have been more restrictive and harsher. The result in China has been an almost constant resistance in the field of literature and art to Mao’s policies. The present purge of people in this field is by no means the first, although it is the largest and most serious. question: Could you briefly tell us when Mao began to purge these people in the cultural fields and why? answer: Mao’s policy of restricting literature and art began in May 1942 during the Yan’an period. It was during this time that Mao gave his well-known “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” given in preparation for the purge of a well-known writer. In these long discourses, except for a few quotations from Lenin, whom he cited as his authority, Mao demanded that literature and art serve only the workers, peasants, and soldiers in line with the political policies of the party; and he was against any exposures or satires of his Yan’an regime. The writers were only supposed to praise the Communist New Democracy, revolutionary heroes, etc.; and he pointed out that there were many defects in the field of literature and art and that it was necessary to launch a movement in order to purge them. During this time, there were several writers who had written some articles exposing the real life in Yan’an, such as the famous woman writer Ding Ling, who wrote an article titled “Impressions of the March Eighth Celebration”; the famous poet Ai Qing, who wrote an article titled “One Should Understand and Respect the Writers”; and Wang Shiwei, who wrote a series of articles [one of which was] titled “Wild Lilies”. These last were the Revolution, they came under attack for their writings. All three were persecuted and died during the Cultural Revolution.

542

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

sharpest exposure of certain aspects of Yan’an. He criticised the lack of democracy and contrasted the privileged life of the bureaucracy to that of the rank and file. These articles attracted much attention among the people and especially among the young Communists. Mao could not tolerate such criticism and for this reason called a meeting to discuss the questions of literature and art where he gave his talks. These meetings and talks not only prepared for the purge which followed; they also laid the foundations for the basic line of Communist Party policy in questions concerning literature and art. Not long after these discussions and meetings, a special meeting was called to purge Wang Shiwei. Many of the party’s officials, such as the heads of the Central Propaganda Department and the Organisation Department and the president of the Central Research Institute, as well as cadres working in the field of literature and art, and other writers, took part in this meeting. One might wonder why it was such a serious matter. The reason is simple. Wang joined the party in 1926. This made him an old party member and one of the most important members of the Central Research Institute. Wang had translated into Chinese more than two million words of the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. He was, as well, a very capable writer and was respected by almost everyone, especially the youth. Thus the purge of Wang Shiwei was a most important event in the Yan’an period. The meeting lasted sixteen days, during which Wang expressed and defended his opinions in the face of vigorous attacks by the leading cadres and officials of the party. There were a number of cultural workers who agreed with Wang’s opinions and sympathised with him. Yet, due to his being condemned as anti-party, anti-Marxist, and a Trotskyist by some of the party leaders, and especially by Chen Boda – who is now the leader of the present Cultural Revolution Group but who at that time was Mao’s private secretary – who criticised Wang most maliciously, they became fearful and retreated. Nevertheless, Wang, from beginning to end, remained strong in defending his ideas as correct. The meeting finally ended by condemning him as being anti-party, anti-Marxist, and a Trotskyist. He was expelled-from the party, thrown into prison, and tortured. Finally, he acknowledged that he was a Trotskyist; and hence he was killed. We should take special note of the fact that Wang Shiwei’s “Wild Lilies” has exercised great attraction and has interested many youths, including members and sympathisers of the ccp as well as its youth organisation. The book has circulated throughout China by means of handwritten copies passed on and on, time after time. The original copy that I read was borrowed from a sympathiser of the ccp and was of this type. Because of the bravery and boldness of Wang’s resistance against the vicious attacks and his insistence on the correctness of his own position, he became very famous. His name is to be found in most histories of this period.

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

543

question: Were there any other purges after Wang? answer: After the ccp took power in 1949, Mao’s cultural policies were put into effect for the nation as a whole. The first to resist and criticise them was Hu Feng, who was a very famous left theoretician on literature and art. He considered Mao’s “Talks at Yan’an” to be mechanistic and therefore he said that “mechanism has controlled literature and art circles for the last ten years … this ideology of literature and art has been sterilised … when one speaks they must employ Mao’s thought which causes people more than enough trouble”. He held that truth is the highest principle of art. He was against what he regarded as the oversimplified policy of having literature and art serve only political ends and was against the limitation of themes as proposed by Mao. Thus he insisted that all writers should have the right to choose their own subjects. The ideas and opinions of Hu Feng, as I have indicated, are, of course, based on principles which everyone should be able to accept. However, from Mao’s point of view, such ideas were out of bounds and in 1955 he began a campaign against Hu Feng and his followers. This campaign lasted several months and was carried out on a national scale. Not only were Hu Feng’s followers attacked and criticised, but many people in the universities, middle schools, and cultural organisations who only sympathised with him were also attacked and purged. According to reports published at the time, more than 130 Hu Fengites were imprisoned or put in labour camps.3 Since that time there has been no news of him or his followers. Almost immediately after the Hu Feng purge came the “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” movement, April to June 1957. It was during this period that a number of Left writers criticised Mao’s policies on literature and art, such as Ding Ling, Ai Qing and Feng Xuefeng, the most famous contemporary theoretician of literature and art. These three were all leaders of the party in the cultural fields, especially Ding Ling and Feng Xuefeng, who were respectively chairwoman and vice-chairman of the National Association of Literature and Art Workers. In June, when Mao began to suppress the “Hundred Flowers” movement, they came under attack. For example, in September a special meeting was held in Beijing to purge Ding Ling. There were around one hundred participants in this meeting, including many high officials of the party in the cultural fields, such as the minister and vice-minister of culture, Shen Yanbing (Mao Dun) and Zhou Yang. This meeting, like the one held in Yan’an to purge Wang Shiwei, lasted sixteen days and was very exhausting for Ding Ling as she was subjected to one attack after another, accusing her of being a rightist and a reactionary. Attacks

3 For more on the purge of “Hu Feng Clique”, see Mei 2013.

544

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

against her which appeared in People’s Daily made a connection between her and Wang Shiwei and accused her of being like him. Shortly after the meeting, Ding Ling, Feng Xuefeng, Ai Qing, and many others were imprisoned or sent to “re-education camps”. As with Hu Feng and his followers, nothing further has been heard about their fate. Concerning Ding Ling, I should say a few more words. In 1923–24, she was a classmate of mine in Shanghai University where we lived in the same home. We became very close friends, so I knew her very well. She had a very strong character and was very democratic minded. Also during the “Hundred Flowers” movement, we should take notice of the position taken by Shen Yanbing. In a meeting called by the Central United Front Department on May 16, 1957, Shen Yanbing expressed his own views on literature and art. He said, “In regard to literature and art, it must be considered a special field. By only depending on some of the party’s basic texts and without any special knowledge in this field, it is impossible to resolve concrete problems concerning literature and art ... What then should be done? There is the short road which is dogmatism and commandism”. It is very clear that Shen was criticising the whole apparatus of the cultural department. Shen considered that in literature and art, there existed a “general phenomenon” of “monotony” and “repetitiousness”. He explained that the “sickness” of repetition was due to reducing everything to formulas and to the lack of variety in themes. In short, these sicknesses were due to not carrying out the policy of the “Hundred Flowers” movement. All the criticisms of Shen Yanbing no doubt implied that Mao’s policies on literature and art restricted the creative initiative and freedom of the writers; hence the monotonous and repetitious works which were devoid of any liveliness or creativity. question: Since Shen Yanbing was Minister of Culture, that is, the highest leader in the cultural field, why is it that he spoke out against Mao’s policies and why was he not purged with the others? answer: In order to answer this question, it is necessary to give a short resume of Shen’s personal history. He joined the ccp in 1921 and at that time he was already the author of several articles and the editor of the large magazine, Novel. After the defeat of the revolution of 1927, he left the ccp. However, he continued to write and published several books under the pen name of Mao Dun, some of which became very celebrated and he himself became very well known. It was for this reason that he became minister of culture after the ccp took power in 1949. He held this post until January 1965 when he requested that he be allowed to retire. As to the reasons why he criticised Mao’s policies and why he was not purged, we must note that first of all, his speech was made during the peak of the “Hun-

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

545

dred Flowers” movement; second, Shen was not a member of the party; and, third, the Ministry of Culture was really controlled by Zhou Yang. According to some recent reports, however, Shen has been arrested in the current purge. It is most probable that he was arrested because of the position he expressed in his speech of 1957.4 During the 1925–27 revolution, I had quite a bit of personal contact with Shen, and so I also knew him very well. He was an extremely cautious man and most likely, in my opinion, he has probably not made any criticism of Mao’s policies since 1957. question: Since you said that it was really Zhou Yang who controlled the Ministry of Culture and since Zhou Yang himself has recently been attacked, what were his ideas and did they conform with those of Shen Yanbing? answer: Zhou Yang’s opinions on literature and art are not only similar to those of Shen Yanbing, they are much more profound. If we turn only to the article by Yao Wenyuan,5 recently published in the Red Flag, no. 1, 1967, “On the Counterrevolutionary Double-dealer Zhou Yang”, attacking Zhou Yang, we can see what his position is. For example, Yao Wenyuan very clearly states: “Zhou Yang, like Hu Feng, repeatedly advocated the propaganda that ‘the highest principle of art is truth’, and he was against the ‘oversimplification and vulgarisation’, the conditions placed on writers, and the role of literature as propaganda. Zhou Yang considered that ‘dogmatism’ and ‘sectarianism’ and the harsh attitude towards artists and writers has seriously restricted their freedom ... As to the ‘question of making literature and art serve politics’, there was narrow, one-sided, and incorrect understanding. [Consequently, Zhou advocated that] there should be no limits on subjects and that we should help people see the diversity of the world, the laws of history, and the complex nature of life. Regardless of the subject, it can reflect the spirit of the present period”. In another article, Zhou Yang is quoted as saying: “It is better to describe the intellectuals, technicians, and others from the point of view of the proletariat. However, the working class should not be sectarian; that is, it should not only write about the workers and peasants. The idea that proletarian literature is only about workers and peasants is not correct”. Zhou Yang was especially against literature and art serving only politics. He also said, “The writers should not only write about current affairs and should not follow the policy put forward today and, then follow a different policy that

4 Shen was not arrested in the Cultural Revolution period. 5 Yao Wenyuan (1931–2005) was a Chinese communist politician and a member of the “Gang of Four” during the Cultural Revolution.

546

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

might be put forward tomorrow”. Commenting on this article in Wen Wei Po, the Hong Kong liberal Ming Pao Monthly concluded: In a word, Zhou Yang considered that writers should write what they themselves see and according to what they themselves feel, even if what they see and feel does not correspond to the ideas and policies of the party. The writer must be loyal to the facts, to the truth, and to the objective conditions, and write freely what he believes. Therefore, Zhou Yang advocated assuring freedom in the sphere of writing. question: If Zhou Yang, disagreed with Mao’s policies, why was he allowed to remain as Vice-Minister of Culture, in fact the real head of the ministry, to carry out Mao’s policies? answer: This is an important question and it is very necessary that it be answered. Under the personal dictatorship of Mao, many leaders and cadres of the party disagreed with his policies, but nevertheless they were forced to carry out Mao’s decisions. Zhou Yang was only one of many such cadres and leaders. He often found himself in a contradictory situation, that is, not believing in Mao’s policies and even speaking and writing about his differences, but nevertheless forced to carry out Mao’s line in practice. For example, before the purge of Hu Feng in 1955, during a discussion meeting on Hu Feng’s case, Zhou Yang said, “Hu Feng’s general political position is in agreement with the party”. In other words, Zhou Yang did not want the case of Hu Feng to become too serious.6 When Mao ordered Hu Feng to be purged as a reactionary, Zhou was obliged to carry out his orders. In 1957, when Ding Ling, Feng Xuefeng, Ai Qing, and the others were attacked, Zhou Yang was forced into the same contradictory position as in the case of Hu Feng. It was for this reason that Yao Wenyuan accused him of being a “double-dealer” or “two-faced counterrevolutionary”. In reality, then, under the pressure of Mao, many cadres were obliged to carry out policies with which they did not agree. This reflects the contradiction between Mao and the cadres of the party of which the present crisis is only a culmination, reaching the point of explosion. question: Can Zhou Yang’s opinions be considered as exemplary for most of the cadres in the cultural fields?

6 Chen’s assumptions about Zhou Yang are unreliable. Zhou has been widely regarded as a key literary critic and enemy of Hu Feng. Zhou was a key member of the special task group investigating the so-called “Hu Feng Counterrevolutionary Clique”. According to Qian Liqun, Wang Zhaoqian and some other Chinese intellectuals, Zhou led the attack on Hu Feng. See Qian 2013, No. 2, pp. 5–17; Wang 2016, pp. 183–198.

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

547

answer: Yes, it seems as though Zhou Yang’s opinions reflect most of those of the rank and file.7 For example, the two other vice-ministers of culture, Xia Yan and Lin Mohan, as well as the secretary of the party group heading, the AllChina Federation of Literature and Art Circles, Yang Hansheng, all shared the same opinions as Zhou Yang. Yang Hansheng’s opinions were even more radical than Zhou’s, however, and it was for this reason that he has been subjected to harsher criticism than many of the others.8 question: Could you give us some idea of Yang Hansheng’s opinions? answer: Yes, I can, but first I should give you a few details about his personal history. Yang Hansheng was also a classmate of mine at Shanghai University in 1923–24. He was at that time a member of the party and was a very active participant in the revolutionary movement. After the defeat of the revolution in 1927, he remained in Shanghai and was active in the underground, and it was during this time that I had much contact with him and his wife. Beginning in 1928, he wrote several novels and afterwards became a very important party cadre in the cultural work of the party. Because he remained loyal to certain traditions of the party during the second Chinese revolution, he disagreed with the many restrictions which Mao placed upon writers and artists and criticised them very harshly. For example, in 1962, at a meeting of playwrights and actors in Guangzhou, he said: “The party’s policy on literature-and art [that is, Mao’s policy] is equal to ten ropes binding the hands and feet of writers. These ten ropes prove to be five obligations: (1) one must write about important subjects; (2) one must write about heroes and outstanding figures; (3) one must participate in collective writing; (4) one must finish his work in a certain amount of time; (5) one must always have the ok from the party leadership. From these five obligations arise five prohibitions: (1) to write about the contradictions among the people, especially between the masses and the leaders; (2) to write any satirical dramas; (3) to write any tragedies; (4) to write about the defects and failures of a hero; (5) to write about the weaknesses of any of the party’s leaders. All of this leaves a writer in despair and makes it difficult for him to write, and even when he does write, his work is only repetitious”. In conclusion, he advocated that “it is necessary to do away with all restrictions and to break out of all limitations. We must respect the rule of creativity, that is, freedom for the writers”. Yang 7 Zhou had actually been a Mao loyalist regarding literature and art ever since the Yan’an period. 8 Yang Hansheng (1902–1993) was a Chinese writer known under the pseudonym Huahan, who joined the ccp in 1925. During the Cultural Revolution, he was arrested and jailed for several years.

548

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

Hansheng was severely attacked by the Maoists for the above opinions as well as for many other things. In 1957, Yang and Tian Han went to the ussr for the anniversary of the October Revolution. While they were there, they saw many plays, such as The Infinite Perspective and The Bluebird. These two dramas were exposures of the personal cult of Stalin and the purges of his opponents. They portrayed Stalin’s rule to be “like that under the tsars”, and pointed out that “the ussr no longer needs the period of terror”. When Yang Hansheng and Tian Han returned to China, Yang said that the actors of the ussr were very “bold”; “we are very timid. We should make the utmost effort to reform, to be bold and creative”. For these things, the Maoists accused Yang of being a “counterrevolutionary revisionist”; yet, in reality, he was only expressing agreement with the de-Stalinisation taking place in the Soviet theatre. It was this which Mao could not tolerate. question: Wu Han, Deng Tuo, and Tian Han are some of China’s most famous writers who not only have been among the first to be attacked but also among those who have been the most severely attacked by the Maoists. Have they ever expressed their opinions on literature and art? answer: Wu Han, Deng Tuo, and Tian Han have, of course, differences with Mao’s policies, but these have never been expressed openly as far as I know. They have, however, written plays and articles in which they have indirectly criticised Mao’s policies and his personal cult and dictatorship. The two plays, Hai Rui Dismissed by Wu Han and Xie Yaohuan by Tian Han, which use historical plots in order to criticise Mao and his policies, are good examples. Deng Tuo also wrote many articles in which he indirectly attacked the policy of the People’s Communes as well as Mao’s infallibility. But this was explained in your interview with Peng Shuzhi, and so it is not necessary for me to repeat it. Here, I would only like to point out that even those who attacked Mao indirectly could not be tolerated by Mao. question: Were any of the leaders in the cultural fields, such as Zhou Yang, against any of Mao’s other policies? answer: Almost all of those who disagreed on questions of literature and art were also in disagreement with Mao’s overall policy. Since the leaders and cadres working in the cultural fields have frequent contact with writers and artists working directly with the masses, they learn from them the feelings and aspirations of the masses. For example, in a meeting held in Dalian, August 1962, of writers from all over the country, the overwhelming majority of them expressed their dissatisfaction with and criticised the “Great Leap Forward” policy and especially the People’s Communes, as well as Mao’s policies on lit-

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

549

erature and art. They felt that “the life of the peasants is getting worse and worse”, and “the general line is the psychology of an upstart”. Similarly, “the Great Leap Forward is like a stimulant”, and “the People’s Communes are adventurism”. Zhou Yang himself said, “The Great Leap Forward represents subjective idealism”. Again, “the People’s Communes have been established too early”. He even said, “It is good to let the peasants have their own plots”, and he advocated “opening the free market” in the countryside. The criticisms of the “Great Leap Forward” and the People’s Communes by Zhou Yang and the other writers are echoes of the criticism advanced by Marshal Peng Dehuai in 1959. Therefore, in a meeting of the All-China Federation of Literature and Art Circles in June 1964, Mao made an address in which he said that in the past fifteen years, these associations and most of their publications [a few were said to be good] had for the most part failed … to carry out the policies of the party … and failed to reflect the socialist revolution and construction. In recent years, they had even verged on revisionism. If they did not take serious steps to remould themselves, sooner or later, they were bound to become organisations of the Hungarian Petofi Club type. From what Mao said, it is clear that he feared the intellectuals in the cultural fields and it is easy to understand why he began the Cultural Revolution and a purge of all those who opposed him. Mao feared an actual development such as the Hungarian revolution of 1956 in China itself, started by similar groups as the Petofi Club and it is for this reason that he began his purge by singling out these cadres in the fields of literature and art. question: Why is it that many of the famous educators such as Lu Ping, president of Peking University, Li Da, president of Wuhan University, Kuang Yaming, president of Nanjing University, etc., have been purged? Did they have differences, and possibly refused to carry out Mao’s policies in education? answer: These educators were against Mao’s policies on education. But this is a complicated and difficult question. It would make it much clearer if I would first outline Mao’s attitude towards education. Since the ccp took power in 1949, Mao has based his educational policies on the principle that “education must serve politics”. Mao often stressed the idea that “students and professors should remould their thought”. Mao compelled the students to attend political lectures and to participate in political discussions and physical work. In other words, his policy was to make Communists out of all the students and to get them to accept and support the party’s policies. The learning of other subjects, Mao does not regard as being important; or, at best, it is only a secondary consideration. Because of such policies, the standards of education have greatly diminished.

550

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

In the “Great Leap Forward” programme of 1958, Mao put forward the idea of an “educational revolution”. He stressed the idea that “education must be accompanied by productive work”. Under this slogan, the professors as well as the students were sent to the countryside to participate in the work of the People’s Communes, while others were sent to work in the factories, still carrying on their political studies and activities. These conditions led to almost a standstill in the students’ regular studies. This was the situation in 1958– 59. Mao’s policies and their results aroused much dissatisfaction among the professors, teachers, and students. For example, Li Da said: “The Educational Revolution has destroyed the educational process. The fundamental courses have been torn asunder. The quality of education has been lowered, the methods of teaching and studying have been disorganised. All the schools controlled by the party have become anarchic. The relations between teachers and students, between the young and old, and between the masses and the party have worsened to the greatest degree”. He also said, “The Educational Revolution in 1958 caused a very bad situation. It destroyed the activities of the intellectuals and hampered their self-respect”. The crisis described by Li Da represents the common opinion of the overwhelming majority of educators, professors, teachers, and students. Li Da was one of the founding members of the ccp and was one of the twelve who attended the founding congress in 1921. He was elected to the Central Committee of the party and became the head of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department. Sometime afterward, he left the party because he disagreed with the decision that the members of the ccp should join the Kuomintang, although he remained a Marxist. He translated many Marxist books and propagandised the ideas of Marxism in many of his own articles. It is evident that he helped the Marxist movement when he was outside the party. Since he was a professor and had studied education from a Marxist point of view, including the educational system in the ussr, he became very well known as a Marxist educator. This was why the ccp, after taking power, appointed him as president of Wuhan University. It was because of his profound knowledge as an educator that he realised the dangers of Mao’s educational policies and criticised them very severely. Mao’s policy of “educational revolution” met with bankruptcy following the failure of the “Great Leap Forward”. At the beginning of 1960, Mao was no longer able to maintain his policies and so he temporarily sat back while Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping took on the responsibility of dealing with the situation. Educational policies, then, were somewhat changed and corrected. First of all, the Central Educational Department published the “Sixty Points of Higher Educational Reforms”. The chief reforms were aimed at encouraging the students to study in their special fields and to make sure that they had the necessary time to do so. The students were

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

551

supposed to participate in physical work and political activities; however, these things were not supposed to interfere with or be done during the time set aside for study and class. A regular system of teaching and studying was to be re-established as well as a disciplined relationship between the students and professors. In order to raise the quality of education, examinations were also to be reinstated. Many of the students were to be encouraged to take up studies in the scientific fields as well as foreign languages. The schools were no longer supposed to interfere in the love life of the students, nor were they supposed to apply any other inappropriate pressures. Attention was also to be brought to the health of the students and to their welfare in general. The Beijing municipal government, headed by Peng Zhen, carried out these new reforms very enthusiastically and-elaborated a series of concrete measures to implement them. For example, it was stated that students and teachers should not be demanded to learn politics too quickly, nor should any time be taken away from their regular studies for political activities. The teachers must know and teach their subjects as well as possible and the students must learn their lessons as well as they can. The use of abstract political ideas and terms, empty preaching, and long political reports must be avoided. The president of Peking University, Lu Ping, from 1961 completely abandoned the “educational revolution” policy and turned the university into an experiment for the new education reforms. He lowered the amount of time required for physical labour and political activity and made sure the students had adequate time to study their particular subjects. Hence the students of Peking University were much better off after 1961–62. Lu Ping also advanced the slogan, “Learn from the ussr”, that is, China should also try to copy some of the educational policies in some of the Western countries; and he advocated inviting the old professors who had been expelled in the past years to return to their teaching posts. Li Da, Kuang Yaming and many of the other educators carried out similar reforms. Thus the universities and colleges succeeded in returning to normal and constructive educational practices. This educational reform, in the eyes of Mao Zedong, was an absolute negation of his own policies of “education serving politics” and “education combined with productive labour”, and he considered it to be a “revisionist educational line” or the “restoration of bourgeois educational policies”. With this he deliberately prepared to purge those who were responsible for these reforms. On June 13, 1966, Mao published a notice in the name of the Central Committee of the ccp and the State Council. This document is a concrete manifestation of the purge in the educational field and contains two major points: 1. All universities and middle schools were ordered closed for six months in order to “carry out thoroughly the Cultural Revolution”. In reality, this

552

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

meant to “carry out thoroughly” a purge in all the universities and middle schools. Following publication of the notice, there was a furious struggle and all Mao’s opponents in the universities and middle schools came under attack and were purged. 2. Almost all opponents were attacked by the students as they carried out Mao’s orders, resulting in the purge of such people as Lu Ping; Li Da; Kuang Yaming; Peng Kang, president of Xi’an Jiaotong University; He Lüting, president of Shanghai Conservatory of Music; and Jiang Nanxiang, president of Tsinghua University in Beijing. As for the professors, the purge is difficult to estimate; however, from all reports, it seems as though the number would run into many thousands. People’s Daily held that the most important question was to see “whether we shall pass on Mao Zedong’s thought from generation to generation”. This is comparable to the religious attitude towards the Bible, and Mao’s “cultural revolutionary educational” reforms come close to paralleling the educational methods of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. question: What, in your opinion, will be the outcome of the Cultural Revolution? That is, what do you think will be the overall influence and effect of Mao’s Cultural Revolution on Chinese culture? answer: Mao’s purge has included almost all those cadres working in the Central Propaganda Department, the Central Cultural Ministry, the All-China Federation of Literature and Art Circles, the All-China Union of Stage Artists, National Federation of Film Workers, and the National Federation of News Workers, as well as writers, musicians, painters, educators, professors, etc., who are the embodiment of China’s culture. To purge them means to destroy China’s culture. I will only point out here two indisputable examples of what Mao’s Cultural Revolution means concretely to Chinese culture. (1) Since Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, most writers have not dared to write anything. The publication of most cultural magazines has stopped, film-making has almost come to a standstill; the publication and republication of many books of foreign origin and even many by Chinese authors has been terminated; many cinemas and theatres have ceased to operate. In other words, almost all cultural activities no longer exist. (2) Since all the middle schools and universities were closed in June 1966, not one university has reopened and it was only last March that a part of the middle schools began to reopen in such places as Beijing and Tianjin. Even before the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s purge, there was a great lack of teachers and professors; now, of course, there are even fewer. The worst part is that from the elementary schools to the universities there is a chronic shortage of textbooks, since almost the whole printing

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

553

establishment has been given over to printing the works of Mao Zedong. For example, in the last half year, fifteen million Selected Works of Mao Zedong have been produced, each containing four large volumes, as well as eighty million Quotations from Mao Zedong. In addition to this, another eighty million copies of the Selected Works have been scheduled for publication this year. Nearly all other books, therefore, such as textbooks, literature, and even the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin have ceased to be printed. Generally, then, I can say that not only have cultural activities stagnated since Mao launched his Cultural Revolution, but China’s culture is being destroyed to the point of disaster. Finally, I would like to say that the “Proletarian Cultural Revolution” is theoretically absurd. When the proletariat takes power in a country, its greatest task is to overthrow the remaining capitalists in the world and complete the socialist revolution. Before the world capitalist class has been destroyed, it is impossible to construct a real proletarian culture. However, after the world socialist revolution has been completed, the proletariat itself will begin to disappear; that is, classes and, of course, class antagonisms will begin to disappear. It is at this point, then, that socialist culture will begin naturally to establish itself. Therefore, it is in no way necessary to establish a proletarian culture. Mao’s launching of the Cultural Revolution is not only theoretically absurd, it is also foolish from a practical point of view. The socioeconomic base in China is so backward that there are many areas which remain in a state of primitive production. As for culture, the majority of the peasantry remain illiterate along with almost half the working class. If under these conditions, to launch a “proletarian cultural revolution” in order to establish “Four New Things” – new culture, new ideas, new habits, and new customs – does not display ignorance, then it reveals illusions and foolish idealism. If Mao really intended to raise the cultural level of the workers and peasants, he should have started by eliminating the illiteracy of the masses. In order to achieve this, it would, first of all, be necessary to increase the standard of living of the masses, that is, increase their pay and decrease their hours of work. It would be necessary to let them have time and energy to study and to participate in cultural activities. Mao’s policy is, however, just the contrary, demanding that the workers and peasants work longer hours with no improvement in their living standards. Mao’s recent campaign against “economism” and his refusal to grant any concessions to the working class show his attitude quite clearly; that is, the working class should serve only as instruments of production in the interests of the bureaucracy. In reality it can be said that Mao utilised the label of “proletarian” only in order to rationalise his attack and to purge his opposition under the accusation of “taking the capitalist road”. However, we can see that Mao has not attacked

554

an interview with chen bilan on the cultural revolution

the real capitalist and bourgeois elements still existing in China. This in itself is enough to prove that Mao’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” is nothing more than a purge that he is carrying out in order to maintain his own bureaucratic rule and personal cult.

Return To the Road of Trotskyism (1969) Peng Shuzhi 5 March 1969

Peng wrote this article for the fi’s International Information Bulletin, an internal publication put out by the US Socialist Workers Party. In it, he criticises some of the United Secretariat’s key policies and positions in the 1960s, including its guerrilla war strategy and its support for Castro’s Cuban regime and the Algerian Revolution. Source: International Information Bulletin, March 1969, pp. 18–23.

i

Guerrilla Warfare and the Transitional Programme – Castroism or Trotskyism

In February 1968, at a meeting of the International Executive Committee [iec, the leadership body of United Secretariat of the Fourth International], the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare in Latin America were formally proposed for discussion in preparation for a World Congress resolution. At this meeting I made a sharp criticism of guerrilla warfare as a revolutionary strategy for the backward countries and pointed out that such a strategy was in direct contradiction to the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International. Nevertheless, I was in a minority of one at this meeting. Since the above mentioned iec meeting, the pro-guerrilla war tendency has become even stronger and more resolute. Guerrilla warfare is no longer confined just to Latin America, but is now projected for many countries of Asia, the Middle East and Africa as is evident from the draft resolution, “The New Rise of the World Revolution”.1 The section of this resolution entitled “Problems of the Resurgent Colonial Revolution” outlines the general perspective of guerrilla warfare for such countries as Laos, Thailand, Burma, and Indonesia in Southeast Asia, as well as numerous countries in both the Middle East and Africa. Nor are Greece and Spain, two European countries, excluded from this same perspective. In other words, this resolution clearly projects guerrilla warfare as the revolutionary strategy for almost all the backward – and even some

1 See swp 1968b, pp. 1–45.

© Peng Shuzhi, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_054

556

peng

semibackward – countries, hence, the Transitional Programme for these backward countries has either been discarded or completely forgotten. Neither in the many articles appearing in our international press advocating and supporting guerrilla warfare (by comrades Maitan, Moscoso etc.)2 nor in the draft resolution mentioned above has the Transitional Programme been openly and frankly declared to be no longer of any use. At the same time, however, one cannot find any mention of the Transitional Programme for the backward countries. That is to say, the comrades have consciously or unconsciously discarded the Transitional Programme and have replaced it with the strategy of guerrilla warfare. Even the resolution, “The New Rise of the World Revolution”, never calls attention to the decisive significance of the Transitional Programme for the backward countries. The Transitional Programme is only referred to once. In relation to certain shortcomings of the Cuban line, the resolution says that “still lacking is a revolutionary Marxist appreciation of the need for a transitional programme for the city masses …”. (p. 29) That the author limited the transitional programme to “the city masses” proves that he either does not understand the decisive significance of the Transitional Programme for the backward countries or has forgotten it. The Transitional Programme is not limited to just the city masses. “The central task of the colonial and semicolonial countries is the agrarian revolution, i.e., liquidation of feudal heritages, and national independence, i.e., the overthrow of the imperialist yoke” (The Transitional Programme). The above poses a very fundamental question for the comrades of the Fourth International: Should we continue to carry out the traditional and fundamental programmatic line of the International – the Transitional Programme – or should we adapt the new strategy of guerrilla warfare? To answer the above question we should first define the nature of guerrilla warfare. As is evident, the present “theory” of guerrilla warfare is taken from the Cuban experience. Comrade Moscoso, the leader of the Bolivian section, wrote, “In the prevailing conditions in Latin America, the results achieved by the guerrillas in Cuba can be realised in any country. Therefore, I say that guerrilla warfare is incontrovertibly the road which revolutionaries must take to liberate their peoples from capitalist and imperialist exploitation”. (“Lessons of the Cuban Revolution” by Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso, International Socialist Review, March–April 1968, p. 11.) The ideas of Comrade Moscoso are a direct reflection of the ideas contained in the olas3 General Declaration. (See International Socialist Review, November–December 1967.) 2 Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso (1922–2010) was a Bolivian Trotskyist leader. 3 The General Declaration of the Organisation of Latin-American Solidarity (olas) was issued

return to the road of trotskyism (1969)

557

What then is the Cuban experience? As everybody knows, Castro and several others, after having trained as guerrillas in Mexico, stole surreptitiously to Cuba and launched a guerrilla struggle in the countryside. After many months of struggle, the guerrilla movement increased its power throughout the country, finally driving out Batista and taking over the government. The agrarian revolution, national independence, and the nationalisation of the property of both foreign and native capitalists were then eventually and empirically achieved. This seemingly simple and “short-cut” road to revolution has attracted many people to the idea of duplicating the Cuban experience in their own country. Castro himself advocates the Cuban experience as the model to be followed. “We are absolutely convinced that, in the long run, there is only one solution, as expressed in the Resolution: guerrilla warfare in Latin America”. (Fidel Castro, “Speech to olas Conference”, Nov.–Dec. 1967, p. 28.) Despite Castro’s and others’ absolute conviction in guerrilla warfare, one must, nevertheless, pose the following question: Can the experience of the Cuban revolution be repeated throughout Latin America, or, as Comrade Moscoso maintained, can “the results achieved by the guerrillas in Cuba … be realised in any country”? In my opinion, one must answer this question in the negative. First one must understand that the victory of the Cuban guerrilla struggle is mainly due to the failure of American imperialism to intervene. Since the victory of the Cuban revolution, however, and especially since Cuba has become a workers’ state, American imperialism has fundamentally changed its policy. It has not only helped all the reactionary governments in Latin America against the people, but has also directly intervened in the affairs of these governments and has even sent troops to suppress revolutionary movements, as in the Dominican Republic. In those countries where guerrilla warfare broke out, American imperialism was responsible for arming and training special forces to deal with these movements, and the tragic defeat of Guevara is only proof of this change in policy by American imperialism and its effectiveness. The decline and defeats of other guerrilla movements as in Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, etc. are also the result of American imperialism’s direct intervention. These facts should be taken into serious consideration by all those who advocate and support the strategy of guerrilla warfare, and from them clear and unavoidable lessons should be learned.

by the First Conference of the Latin American Organisation of Solidarity, met in Havana from 31 July to 10 August 1967. The main aim of the Conference was to increase solidarity among anti-imperialist forces in Latin America and develop the continental revolution.

558

peng

If one evaluates the strategy of guerrilla warfare from the fundamental and historical principles of Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism, this “new” strategy is even more thoroughly exposed. According to Lenin a revolution must base itself upon the worker and peasant masses, and the first task is the building of a revolutionary party which prepares the masses for the revolution. In the event of a revolutionary situation the party then takes as its fundamental task the preparing of the masses for the armed seizure of power. If on the other hand a revolutionary situation does not exist, any organisation for immediate armed struggle can only lead to a disastrous defeat. This was, in fact, the strategy and result of Stalin’s adventuristic policies which he imposed upon the Chinese cp after the defeat of the second Chinese revolution. As is well known, Trotsky very seriously attacked Stalin for his adventurous policies at the time as can be seen in many articles, especially in “The Chinese Question after the Sixth Congress” (Problems of the Chinese Revolution, Trotsky). At present in Latin America, on the whole, there not only does not exist any revolutionary situation, but many countries have suffered serious setbacks in the development of the revolutionary process – Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, etc. To propose the strategy of guerrilla warfare under these conditions is to propose an adventurous policy similar to Stalin’s after the second Chinese revolution, and such a strategy can only lead to similar disastrous results. To avoid the disastrous results of the guerrilla warfare strategy and to prepare the victory of the revolution in Latin America, it is necessary to project a transitional programme which should contain, among others, demands for: agrarian reform; national independence; freedom of press, speech, assembly, strike, etc.; and a “Constituent Assembly with full powers, elected by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage”. (Problems of the Chinese Revolution, p. 189) It is only through such a transitional programme that we can reorganise and mobilise the masses against the military and oligarchic dictatorships and American imperialism. Only through such an organisation of the masses can we approach the necessary armed struggle for power. Perhaps some comrades will object to the above strategy by saying, as they have already said, that “there is no possibility of a reformist period of legal struggles … Therefore the perspective opened for the Bolivian people is one of direct struggle … This struggle can only be undertaken by armed means – by guerrilla warfare in the countryside, the mines, and the cities … All others [perspectives] are utopian and can only lead to the defeat of the masses …” (“New Revolutionary Ferment in Bolivia”, Intercontinental Press, Vol. 6, No. 22, p. 546.) Such a position is, however, only a repetition of the position taken by the Chinese cp under Stalin’s leadership in the 30’s. Trotsky characterised the ccp’s policies at that time as being adventurous and without perspective, and

return to the road of trotskyism (1969)

559

history has more than proved Trotsky’s criticism correct. “Following the inevitable collapse of the Guangzhou uprising,4 the Comintern took the road of guerrilla warfare and peasant soviets with complete passivity on the part of the industrial proletariat. Landing thus in a blind alley, the Comintern took advantage of the Sino-Japanese War to liquidate ‘Soviet China’ with a stroke of the pen, subordinating not only the peasant ‘Red Army’ but also the so-called ‘Communist’ Party to the identical Kuomintang, i.e., the bourgeoisie”. (The Transitional Programme) The world revolution has paid a most heavy price for the experience of Stalin’s adventurism. We must understand this experience and its lessons not only for Bolivia, but also for Latin America and the world as a whole. Some of the comrades might ask, “But didn’t the Chinese cp conquer power later on in 1949 with the strategy of guerrilla warfare?” The taking of power in 1949 by the ccp, however, was in no way a result of the guerrilla war strategy itself, but rather, a result of the exceptional historical circumstances created as a result of the Japanese invasion of China and World War ii. First of all, the Soviet Union’s occupation of Manchuria, the most industrialised part of China, dealt a heavy blow to the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, and the modern weapons which the Red Army obtained from disarming the Japanese were used to arm the Fourth Army of the ccp commanded by Lin Piao. Most important also was the inability of U.S. imperialism to intervene. U.S. imperialism even cut off aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s regime many months before its defeat. (This is, in fact, one of the major reasons for the defeat.) (On how the ccp was able to take power, I have explained in detail in my “Report on the Chinese Situation”, published in Feb. 1952, by the swp in the International Information Bulletin.)5 Neither can Vietnam be used to justify the strategy of guerrilla warfare. In fact, what is involved in the Vietnamese struggle is not a guerrilla war, but in reality, a limited war between American imperialism and the workers’ states. In spite of the insufficient amount of aid given to the Vietnamese by the workers’ states, especially by the Soviet Union and China, it has only been this aid which has permitted the Vietnamese to continue their struggle. Neither is Vietnam’s geographical position a negligible factor, in that it allows the Vietnamese to receive directly from the workers’ states the all-important aid. The geographical position, however, of such countries as Indonesia, Malaysia, Bolivia, etc., poses insurmountable obstacles in this regard. To call for the creation of “two, 4 The Guangzhou Uprising was a failed Chinese communist uprising in the city of Guangzhou that took place and was quickly crushed in December 1927. 5 See his report in Benton 2015, pp. 949–66.

560

peng

three, or many Vietnams” is utopian. Such a slogan cannot only not be realised in reality, but it completely obscures the origins and nature of the present conflict in Vietnam. To avoid any possible confusion between our criticism of guerrilla warfare and that of the Stalinists in Latin America, we should briefly point out that we do not reject guerrilla warfare as do the Stalinists in order to justify a peaceful road to socialism or to justify a bloc with the liberal national bourgeoisie, but rather, we reject guerrilla warfare as an adventuristic strategy which is opposed to our traditional programme. We do not reject guerrilla warfare as a tactic, but rather as a strategy. Definitely, when the situation in any country matures to the point that we must immediately prepare the masses for armed insurrection to seize power, guerrilla warfare by the peasants might be a most useful tactic. Nobody can reject revising the Transitional Programme in principle. As Marxists we do not regard our programme as a dogma. If there is a new reality which can be proven both theoretically and factually by the comrades, then without question, we must make all the necessary changes in the Transitional Programme to adapt it to the new reality. But we are and must be against any unprincipled revision of – and especially any underhanded attempt to revise – our traditionally accepted programme. If the comrades think that part (or even all) of the Transitional Programme is no longer valid or should be replaced by something else, then they should openly and frankly present their ideas to the International to be discussed and then accepted or rejected by the International. Since the victory of the Cuban revolution, Castroism has had an influence upon certain radical elements, not only in Latin America, but also elsewhere throughout the world. The influence of Castroism has even made its way into the Fourth International. The adoption of the strategy of guerrilla warfare by sections in Latin America and even by the International leadership is a direct reflection of the Castroist influence upon the International. This situation raises the logical question of the relationship and differences between Castroism and Trotskyism. While our movement has given much praise to the Cuban leadership, it has never made any serious criticism of this leadership. Castro, on the other hand, has maliciously attacked and slandered Trotskyism (at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference). Trotskyism is not only the direct continuation of Marxism, but also the inheritor of the traditions of Bolshevism. In addition, Trotskyism represents the development of the theory of the permanent revolution, as well as a Marxist analysis of the phenomenon of a degenerated workers’ state. Comrade Trotsky was also the first to concretely analyse the phenomenon of fascism and to

return to the road of trotskyism (1969)

561

draw the necessary conclusions from the serious defeats suffered by the world working-class movement in the 1920s and ’30s. All of this is concretised and summarised in the basic programmatic document of our movement – Transitional Programme. Castroism, on the other hand, has made no theoretical contribution to Marxism. Castro’s programme is merely one of action based upon his own experiences in the Cuban revolution, i.e., guerrilla warfare. It is clear that Castro does not understand some of the basic tenets of Marxism or some of the most important lessons and experiences of the world working class movement, such as the Bolshevik revolution, the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin, etc. This lack of understanding is expressed practically in Castro’s politics by the lack of any democratic-centralist party in Cuba itself, by the lack of any democratic government in Cuba based upon workers’ and peasants’ soviets, by the support of a guerrilla war strategy in Latin America, etc. We, of course, support the Cuban workers’ state against imperialism like other workers’ states, and we can on certain specific issues even give critical support to the Cuban leadership against this or that tendency, such as giving critical support to their attack on Moscow’s line of peaceful coexistence and the peaceful road to socialism. On the other hand, we must thoroughly criticise all the Cuban leadership’s weaknesses. We must criticise such things as their support of the guerrilla war strategy, pointing out that this is not an alternative strategy to the peacefulroad-to-socialism strategy advocated by the Stalinists, but that objectively in the long run, the strategy of guerrilla warfare will only help the opportunism of the Stalinists as well as American imperialism.

ii

Towards the Working Class

In the past period the International, on the whole, has found itself working in and recruiting from primarily petty-bourgeois strata, especially the student movement. To a great degree, of course, this area of work was determined by the objective conditions; nevertheless, our past work in and orientation to the working class had not been what it should have been. Therefore, the reorientation towards and integration into the working class is the most urgent task facing our movement today. Perhaps some of the comrades would object to the call for such a reorientation of our movement, by saying that our orientation towards the working class has always been understood if not explicitly stated. But the concrete reality of our movement will not support such an objection. We have only to look at the sections in the most industrialised countries of the world, as in Western

562

peng

Europe, to discover that in none of these sections do we have any real basis in the working class. The comrades in these sections come mainly from outside the working class and still remain outside the working class. If such a situation is permitted to continue for any length of time, these sections cannot but degenerate. Of course, our past work in such areas as the student movement has brought us many valuable cadres as well as allowed us to expand our influence by participating in and leading important struggles. But we must realise, that a movement such as the student movement is not and cannot be a constant or stable phenomenon, and that this movement does not constitute (and cannot even be considered as) a basis for building a revolutionary (mass) party. The only basis on which we can consider building a revolutionary (mass) party is the working class. The student movement must be considered secondary and subordinate to this orientation. Our orientation towards the working class must, above all, be concretely based on our work in the trade unions. The trade unions not only represent tens of millions of organised workers, but also one of the fundamental elements of the actual class struggle. The most unfortunate reality is, however, that in the past period the trade unions have not only been dominated by but completely controlled by the different reformist and even pro-imperialist leaderships. One cannot propose any real perspective of building a mass revolutionary party which can take the road to power, without first having struggled against and to a “certain” degree discredited the present leaderships in the trade unions. “It is impossible to capture political power (and the attempt to capture it should not be made) until this struggle [against the opportunist leaderships of the trade unions has reached a certain stage” (“Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder, Lenin, Chapter vi). The central and most important part of the struggle against the present reformist leaderships can only be carried out by consistent work in the trade unions themselves. Of course, this work is very difficult and will pose for our movement its most difficult (as well as most important) tactical problems and considerations. But regardless of how difficult this work may be made for us by the bourgeoisie and the bureaucratic trade union leaderships, “we must be able to withstand all this, to agree to any sacrifice, and even – if need be – to resort to all sorts of stratagems, artifices, illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges, only so as to get into the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on Communist work within them at all costs”. (Ibid.) Therefore, it is mandatory that the coming World Congress take this question into serious consideration and propose a concrete orientation to and plan

return to the road of trotskyism (1969)

563

for work in the trade unions and the working class as a whole. Only with such a concrete plan of orientation towards the working class can we envisage the construction of a mass revolutionary party capable of taking power. There is no other road.

iii

What We Should Learn from the Algerian Events

Boumedienne’s coup d’etat in June 1965 not only marked the turning point in the revolutionary movement in Algeria, but also marked a setback for the revolutionary movement throughout the Middle East and Africa as a whole.6 This coup also represented a heavy blow for the Fourth International and its political position, not only because of the direct involvement and participation in the Algerian events on the part of several sections – France, Algeria, etc. – but also because one of the International’s leaders, Michel Pablo, participated in Ben Bella’s government.7 As a result, we must accept as much of the responsibility as anybody for the serious setback. For this reason, it is mandatory that we examine this setback and our own responsibility for it, in order to draw certain conclusions and lessons from the Algerian events. It was for the above reason that I asked the Second Congress after reunification (Dec. 1965) to discuss formally the Algerian events. But no formal discussion took place. Again, at a meeting of the iec in February 1968, I proposed the Algerian events be officially placed on the agenda of the coming World Congress and a formal position taken. At this meeting both comrades Livio Maitan and Sirio Di Giuliomaria8 objected to the proposal, although the majority at the meeting accepted it. Nevertheless, the objection by comrades Livio and Sirio to such an important discussion represents a most serious weakness of not wanting to discuss the mistakes committed by the International leadership. We must remind the comrades that the attitude towards our own mistakes (especially those on the magnitude of the Algerian events) is one of the fundamental tests of a revolutionary party. As Lenin pointed out, even “a little mistake can always be turned into a monstrous one if it is persisted in, if profound reasons are given for it, and if it is driven to its ‘logical conclusion.’” (Ibid., Chapter v.)

6 Boumedienne, i.e., Houari Boumedienne (1932–1978), was an Algerian politician and the second president of Algeria (1965–78). He plotted a successful coup in June 1965 to overthrow the legalised Algerian government led by Ben Bella. 7 Ben Bella (1916–2012) was an Algerian revolutionary and politician, the first president of Algeria after its independence (1963–65). 8 Sirio Di Giuliomaria was a leader of Italian section of the usfi.

564

peng

The most important lessons should be drawn from the International’s mistakes in relation to the Algerian events. One of the most important mistakes was the failure of the International to seriously criticise Ben Bella’s government as well as the failure to propose any revolutionary programme for the Algerian masses in order to advance their struggle. On the contrary, the International and the International leadership in their many articles, gave much praise to the fln leadership,9 especially to Ben Bella and even Boumedienne. In the pre-reunification discussion in the International Committee, I made a criticism of the sectarian position held by the sll leadership on the Evian agreement, in which I outlined a basic programme for all revolutionaries concerned with Algeria.10 “To resolve this contradiction, [between continued French economic and military interests and Algerian independence] all revolutionaries in Algeria should unite behind the hard-won political independence as the starting point for a Marxist programme to mobilise all the working masses and poor peasants for further struggle. The programme should include, in my opinion, the withdrawal of all French military forces, the cancellation of all French economic concessions in Algeria, a thorough agrarian reform, the nationalisation of all the basic means of production, democratic rights for workers and peasants and the establishment of workers’, farmers’, and soldiers’ councils and a workers’ and farmers’ government. All revolutionaries in Algeria should engage in the struggle to realise this programme so as to bring Algeria into the path of socialism. This should be the line we ought to take in Algeria. This should also be the norm for criticising all measures taken by the Ben Bella government and also the platform on which to rally all revolutionaries in Algeria to form a Marxist party to carry on the struggle”. (“Where is Healy Taking the Socialist Labour League? – A Dangerous Sectarian Tendency”, swp International Information Bulletin, May 1965 – I, p. 18.) The mistakes committed by the International, as mentioned above, represent an adaptation to a petty-bourgeois leadership. Such an adaptation is not accidental or without precedent. The International, in the past, has displayed

9

10

fln, i.e., the National Liberation Front, was an Algerian nationalist political party established in 1954, which principally led the Algerian War of Independence against France, 1954–62. sll, i.e., the Socialist Labour League, was a British Trotskyist group founded in 1959, a key section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The sll was led by Gerry Healy and later changed its name to Workers’ Revolutionary Party in 1973. The Evian agreement was a set of peace treaties signed between French and Algerian sides in March 1962. It ended the Algerian War, 1954–62 and formalised the status of Algeria as an independent nation.

return to the road of trotskyism (1969)

565

a tendency to adapt to reformist bureaucrats and the radical petty bourgeoisie. The International’s past position on the so-called self-reform of the bureaucratic leaderships in the workers’ states and of certain Communist parties, the International’s opportunist attitude towards Tito in the late 40’s and early 50’s, as well as towards Mao’s regime – which continues even today – the International’s tail-ending Bevan11 in England in the 50’s, and its past and present uncritical position towards Castro and the Cuban regime, is only a part of the historical precedent for the International’s opportunist adaptation to the Ben Bella government. Such adaptationism has nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism. The historical record of Marx’s, Engels’, Lenin’s, and Trotsky’s militant struggles against all petty-bourgeois leaderships in the working-class movement is clear enough. One only needs to point to Marx’s serious criticisms of such people as Blanqui and Lassalle. If, however, these militants were active today, it is hard to believe that the International would take a similar critical stance. Or one can point to Trotsky’s scathing criticism of the centrist poum for a more recent example.12 One cannot doubt the general revolutionary character of people like Blanqui or leaders of the poum like Nin, but this did not change their objective political role or keep Marxists from seriously criticising their political position. On the contrary, such people were all the more criticised in order to try to win them or their followers to a revolutionary Marxist position. Recognising our mistakes on the Algerian events, openly admitting them, and correcting them, is even more important in light of the International’s record of many similar mistakes in the past. We must draw important lessons from the Algerian experience and apply these lessons to our present attitude towards the nlf13 in Vietnam, Castro, Mao, etc. In this way the lessons of the Algerian experience can (and must) play a most important role in the building of a revolutionary International.

11 12

13

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960), was a Welsh Labour Party politician and a key founder of Britain’s National Health Service. poum, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, was a Spanish left-communist political party active during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). In 1935, poum was formed as a left-wing opposition to Stalinism. The prominent British writer George Orwell once served with the poum’s militia and witnessed the Stalinist repression of the poum movement. National Liberation Front, i.e., South Vietnam’s section of Viet Cong, was an armed communist organisation which fought against South Vietnamese and US governments during the Vietnam War under North Vietnam’s direction.

566 iv

peng

Conclusion

Replacing the Transitional Programme with the strategy of guerrilla warfare, neglecting the most serious work in the working class and its traditional class struggle organisations, i.e., the trade unions, and continuing to adapt ourselves to different petty-bourgeois currents and leaderships, cannot only not build an International, but will lead our movement into a blind alley. The above represents a deviation from Trotskyism, and it is the most urgent task and duty of the coming World Congress to consider seriously these questions by taking a formal stand on them in order to return to the road of Trotskyism.

Two Purged Leaders of Early Chinese Communism (1985) Gregor Benton

This is a review of a memoir of Peng Shuzhi, leader of one of the two Chinese Trotskyist parties, together with a briefer review of a biography of Chen Duxiu. It appeared in The China Quarterly, 1985, no. 102, pp. 317–328. The Peng memoir was in fact written by his daughter Cheng Yingxiang and her husband Claude Cadart, a French Sinologist, on the basis of notes by Peng and conversations with him. The review led to an angry spat in The China Quarterly between its author, Gregor Benton, and Cheng Yingxiang, which is also included here. Mémoirs de Peng Shuzhi. L’Envoi du communisme en Chine. By Claude Cadart and Cheng Yingxiang. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Chen Duxiu. Founder of the Chinese Communist Party. By Lee Feigon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

In December 1952 Trotskyism in China was wiped out for a generation when two to three hundred of its adherents were seized in a nationwide police raid. Earlier, a handful of its leaders had slipped abroad, hoping to co-ordinate work in China from safe places beyond the Party’s reach. For years they had no news of their jailed comrades; then, in June 1979, 12 survivors stepped unexpectedly into freedom. Trotskyism in China was never the heresy that it became in Stalin’s Russia, and anti-Trotskyism in its most virulent form was a foreign transplant that did not take in the Chinese Communist Party (ccp). This, Wang Fanxi explains, was mainly because the real threat to the Party’s China-based leaders came not from the “Trotsky-Chen faction”, but from Moscow’s well-connected Wang Ming clique.1 On rare occasions the ccp leaders even warmed a little to the Trotskyists, though mostly they treated them as enemies. Since Deng Xiaoping’s return to power, Party historians have begun to reassess Trotskyism, and have partly rehabilitated some of its supporters. In Mao’s

1 Wang 1980a, pp. 111–12.

© Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_055

568

benton

days Trotskyism was classified as “counterrevolutionary”; now it is simply “wrong”. This new tolerance even survived a brief attack during 1983’s “spiritual pollution” campaign. On 8 November 1983 Beijing Radio, reporting on a Nanning conference, listed Trotskyism among the pollutions to be cleaned away, but this reference was omitted from a repeat broadcast the next day. The most visible result of this reassessment has been the rehabilitation of Chen Duxiu, who founded both the official Party and (in 1931) its Trotskyist offshoot. The restoration of Chen to his proper place in Party history is of course part of a wider trend to recognise the strengths as well as the weaknesses of leaders who ended their careers in political disgrace, but it could hardly have happened but for the softer line on Trotskyism. Chen’s rehabilitation has been the work mainly of younger historians, particularly at Anhui University and Shanghai Normal University, though these have enjoyed the support of some Party veterans like Xiao Ke (who said in 1981 that “unless we conscientiously research Chen Duxiu, the future Party history that we write will be one-sided”).2 Starting in 1979, a fresh version of Chen’s political biography was released episode by episode to the Chinese public. First, his role in the May Fourth Movement and in founding the ccp was officially acknowledged. Then Xiang Qing and others wrote that Chen’s “right opportunism” was mainly the result of Comintern meddling,3 and some historians even defended his controversial stand on the Chinese Eastern Railway incident of 1929, when he disputed the Central Committee’s slogan of “armed defence of the Soviet Union”.4 Finally, a study showed up Wang Ming and Kang Sheng’s charge that in 1938 Chen Duxiu took money from the Japanese as a groundless slander.5 One reason for this new view of Trotskyism is that Deng’s government has loosened intellectual controls more generally in China and encouraged scholars to “seek truth from the facts”, including the truth about Party history. But there is also a special reason why Deng and other “returnees” in the leadership are now prepared to be fair to Chen Duxiu. In 1938 Kang Sheng, just back from Moscow where he was trained by Wang Ming and the nkvd, wrote alleging that Chen was in the pay of Japan, and so started the main anti-Trotskyist campaign in China. Kang later switched his allegiance to Mao and was the Maoists’ chief inquisitor during the Cultural Revolution. When Kang died in Decem-

2 Quoted in Jin 1983, pp. 34–35. 3 Xiang 1980, pp. 75–79. This Xiang Qing is a mainland scholar, not the Trotskyist of the same name. 4 Wang 1980a, p. 122; and Jin 1983. 5 Kang 1938; and Sun 1980.

two purged leaders of early chinese communism (1985)

569

ber 1975, he was among those most hated by Deng’s group, which expelled him posthumously from the Party. When the time came to expose Kang’s frameups, consistency required that his first great frame-up (that of 1938) also be exposed. In the new, more liberal climate even Chen’s Trotskyism is no longer entirely taboo, and some scholars can now consider it objectively.6 Many books and articles on Chen have been published in China in recent years, and memoirs by Chinese Trotskyists have appeared in the Chinese press, including a neibu edition of the memoirs of Wang Fanxi,7 which is greatly admired in some Chinese academic circles.8 Many foreign writings sympathetic to Trotskyism have recently appeared in Chinese translation.9 Still, Chen’s rehabilitation is unlikely ever to extend to his Trotskyist period; for that the resistance of senior officials is too great. This explains the cancelling of the planned conference on Chen Duxiu at Anqing in 1980–81 and the non-appearance of the promised Chen Duxiu yanjiu.10 Trotskyism remains a suspect ideology in China, and was handled gingerly even by dissidents like Wang Xizhe, Chen Fu and Shi Huasheng who were attracted by its theses on socialist democracy.11 In the west too literature by or about Chinese Trotskyists is now growing. Two recent additions to it are the memoirs of Peng Shuzhi (P’eng Shu-tse) and Lee Feigon’s book on Chen Duxiu.12 Peng and Chen were closely linked in both the Party and the opposition, and shared a jail in the 1930s. But in jail they quarrelled,13 and they differed greatly in politics and even more so in character. Peng Shuzhi was born into a small landlord family in 1895 and died in American exile in 1983, shortly after his book came out. Publicly his death was ignored in China, though Cankao xiaoxi printed an afp despatch on it. L’Envoi du communisme en Chine, published in co-operation with France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, is the first of three volumes of mem-

6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13

Shiyue pinglun (October Review), Nos. 8/9, 1983, pp. 57–59 and 63–65. Wang 1980b. Outside China, Wang’s memoirs have also appeared in Japanese, German, and French. Feigon 1983a, pp. 259–65. Among them: Ernest Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism; Pierre Frank, History of the Fourth International; Isaac Deutscher, Stalin; and Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism. Jin 1983. See Shiyue pinglun, Nos. 8/9, 1983, pp. 54–56. Cadart and Cheng 1983; and Feigon 1983b. See also “Le Trotskysme et la Chine des années trente”, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, No. 15, September 1983. In 1982 and 1983 Vols. 3 and 1 of Peng Shuzhi, Xuanji (Selected Works), were published in Hong Kong by Shiyue chubanshe. Wang 1980a, p. 208.

570

benton

oirs spoken by Peng to his daughter Cheng Yingxiang and her husband Claude Cadart, checked by them against written records, and put into polished French. It describes his childhood, his adolescence, his stay in Russia, and events in Party history up to 1925. The later volumes will cover the years 1925 to 1927, and the story of the Chinese Left Opposition. Peng grew up in an isolated valley in one of the poorer parts of Hunan’s Wuling Mountains, made famous by the writer Shen Congwen. Through lineage ties he received a higher schooling in Changsha, and at the age of 25 he went to Moscow, sponsored by the friend of a friend. This man, an influential Hunan radical, was (so we are told) bowled over by the “astonishing” young Peng. (Modesty is not among Peng’s qualities. “My memoirs”, he says, “represent a contribution of exceptional interest …, a unique contribution of its sort to the history of present-day China”.) En route to Moscow in early 1921 Peng spent several weeks among Chinese Red Beards newly recruited to the Soviet Red Army, and tried to teach them some Marxism. In Moscow began a life of study and intense political engagement. In November 1923 Chiang Kai-shek, then in the Soviet capital, threw a party for Peng and six other Chinese. Peng writes that the Communist Shen Xuanlu danced portentously over crossed swords and Chiang shouted “Long live the world revolution, long live the Comintern”. Seven years later, all but Peng of Chiang’s seven guests were dead, shot on Chinese streets or in Chiang’s prisons.14 Peng’s role in the early communist movement was not unimportant. After his return from Moscow in 1924 he became one of its main leaders for a while, editing Xiangdao and Xin qingnian. Then, in 1927, he and Chen Duxiu were made Stalin’s scapegoats for the defeat of the revolution and, after they went over to Trotsky in 1929, were vilified as traitors. In time Peng’s name was dropped entirely from Party histories, though Chen’s was kept on as a handy bugbear. There are various minor errors in Peng’s book – Thalheimer is confused with Thälmann, Anti-Dühring is attributed to Marx, Yang Hansheng is mistaken for Yang Xianzhen – that are apparently mere slips of memory and can be disregarded. More serious are the several issues on which Peng’s testimony clashes head-on with that of other veterans. Though Peng’s publisher advertises him as a batisseur (founder) of the ccp,15 it was only in Moscow that he joined the Party, some time after its First Con14 15

Cadart and Cheng 1983, pp. 338–39. Peng’s wife Chen Bilan even wrote that Peng joined the ccp in the autumn of 1920 (before it was founded). See her introduction to Peng 1980b, p. 16.

two purged leaders of early chinese communism (1985)

571

gress in China. Peng dismisses this Congress in which he took no part as of small event, claiming that the main work had been done earlier by the socialist and communist groups with which he himself was linked. But his role even in these groups was minimal. He did not join the Socialist League set up by He Minfan in his native Hunan but proceeded straight to Shanghai, Moscowbound. In Shanghai, like others in the Russian-language class, he joined the Socialist League in mid-1920, but was only a nominal member: he spoke no Shanghainese and in any case would soon be off abroad. In Russia he was among the first few let into the ccp’s new Moscow branch, control of which became a prize and the object of scheming by some Chinese students. He claims that during his stay in Moscow he was secretary of the ccp group there, but this claim is questionable. One source suggests that not Peng but Luo Yinong held this important post.16 Peng depicts himself then as a wise keeper of the Party gate, and says that among those he sponsored for membership were Liu Shaoqi and Ye Ting, two of the Party’s later heroes. But Peng’s fellow student Xiao Jingguang recalls that Liu joined the Party in the winter of 1921, at the same time as Peng, and not (as Peng claims) with Ren Bishi, who joined in 1922. Moreover, we know from another source that Luo Yinong was among those who officiated over Liu Shaoqi’s zhuandang, or transfer into Party membership. Zhuandang required two sponsors whose recommendation was then put before a branch plenum.17 Probably several people entered the Party at more or less the same time, sponsoring one another in order to meet formal Party requirements, and Peng’s claim to glory here is dubious. As for Ye Ting, mainland sources record that he only went to Russia in the autumn of 1924 (by when Peng was back in China – he left in July 1924) and did not join the Party until 1925.18 But according to an independent source,19 Ye was already in Russia in the summer of 1924. Still, its author doubts Peng’s claim to have recruited Ye into the Party, since recruitment of Kuomintang members usually took some months.

16

17 18

19

Zheng 1984b, Part 1, pp. 47–48. A mainland source says that Liu Shaoqi was the first Moscow ganshizhang or “executive chief” – a term that it equates with “secretary” – and that after Liu returned to China in 1922, “responsibility for the Moscow branch was temporarily taken over for a short period by Peng Shuzhi and Luo Yinong” (Hu (ed.) 1982, Vol. 4, p. 263). Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshangyi quanguo weiyuanhui, wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui (eds.) 1981, p. 14. Zhongguo geming bowuguan (eds) 1980, p. 1; Hunan renmin chubanshe (eds) 1980, pp. 77– 88; Gao and Fan 1983, p. 7; Liu and Liu 1983. p. 80; Renmin chubanshe (eds) 1981, p. 34 and p. 140; and Zhongshan daxue “Ye Ting” bianxie zu (eds) 1979, pp. 14–15. Quoted by Wang Fanxi in a letter to me.

572

benton

Peng enjoyed his years in Moscow and stayed on longer than most Chinese, who quickly rejoined the fight at home. The longer he stayed, the more connections he acquired. Peng calls these “thin cow years” that required a special sacrifice, but his sacrifice cannot compare with that of Communists like Liu Shaoqi who went back to risk their skins and share the workers’ hard life. Peng had various privileges in Moscow; some he renounced, others (including his salary) he kept. He says that the ccp’s right turn in 1923 outraged him, but going back to correct it interested him less at first than travelling in Germany and France, which he was about to do when the Party called him home in 1924. He also claims that he and others in Moscow were so shocked by the Party’s new line of “organic collaboration” with the Kuomintang that they pledged unanimously not to follow it, but this is unlikely. True, sectarianism flourished in the hothouse world of Moscow student politics, and many an apprentice Party boss must have balked at the thought of yielding even a little power to outsiders. But working with or joining bourgeois parties was by then such a routine Comintern tactic that the proposal can hardly have been the surprise that Peng now says it was. Besides, there is no evidence that any decision to abandon “entry” was taken at the 1925 Fourth Congress, though Peng calls this Congress a victory for what he claims was his campaign to “redefine the [Party’s] strategy on bases completely independent of those of the Kuomintang”. In fact the record suggests that Peng’s position after the Congress was not as he now claims. Far from opposing the policy of entry, he argued in February 1925 that it was the duty of workers to join the Kuomintang, for how else could they “truly lead the national revolutionary movement?”20 After his arrival in Shanghai in mid-1924 began the period Peng calls “straightening out the Party”. It was doubtless this chapter that led Peng’s French publisher to bill him as “the theoretician-strategist of the Second Chinese Revolution”. At heart Peng’s view of Party affairs in those years is quite simple. He holds that because of the Stalin triumvirate’s meddling, the “correct” line of the Second Congress was overthrown and an opposite, wrong line was forced on the Party at its Hangzhou Plenum and its Third Congress of 1923 – thanks to which it became mired in “Menshevism”.21 Thus the scene is set for the “Bolshevik” Peng to save the Party from its “Menshevik” floundering. The truth is more mundane. None of the Chinese Communists of the time knew much Marxism, and most faithfully observed the directives of the Comintern, to which they sincerely looked for guidance. In 1923 the Comintern issued 20 21

Peng Shuzhi, letter of 2 February 1925, in Zhongyang dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui, Zhongyang dangshi yanjiuhui (eds.) 1982, Vol. 3; quoted in Zheng 1984b, Part 1, p. 49. Trotsky 1976, pp. 39–40.

two purged leaders of early chinese communism (1985)

573

two directives on ccp-Kuomintang relations. The first, dated 12 January 1923, stressed the weakness of the workers’ movement and thus the need for cooperation between the two parties (though it warned against “liquidating” the Party’s political and organisational independence). The second, dated May 1923, said for the first time that “hegemony” in the national revolution belongs properly to the workers’ party.22 Chen Duxiu wrote some articles in the spirit of the first directive; Peng, in Moscow, got the corrected line sooner and subsequently conveyed it to the Party. The January directive calling for co-operation with the Kuomintang did not come out of the blue: the Dutch Communist Henk Sneevliet (Maring) had recommended a similar policy to the Chinese Communists in 1922. Negotiations with Sun Yat-sen on the issue were carried out by the Soviet diplomat Adolph Joffe. Neither Sneevliet nor Joffe were Stalinists: on the contrary, Joffe became a leading Trotskyist and Sneevliet an oppositionist and at one point an ally of Trotsky (though the two engaged in long polemics and finally broke). Sneevliet was no creature of the Comintern but a strong-willed, independentminded revolutionary and an early leader of the left wing of the Indische Sociaal-Democratische Vereeniging in the Netherlands Indies. In 1916 Sneevliet and his comrade Adolph Baars had turned their attention to the nationalist Sarekat Islam and influenced many of its younger leaders, and in July 1920 Sneevliet had won the approval of the Second Congress of the Comintern for his policy of co-operation with Sarekat Islam. His views on what tactic to pursue in China can best be seen as a projection of his experience with Sarekat Islam; it is far too simple to attribute the line of collaboration with the Kuomintang to Stalin’s “Menshevism”.23 In any case, the Manifesto of the Third Congress does not entirely bear out Peng’s contention that the ccp had become “Menshevik” because of the new turn. True, it allowed that the Kuomintang “should be the central force of the national revolution and should assume its leadership”, but its main point is to criticize the Kuomintang, and it describes the ccp’s central task as “to lead the workers and peasants into joining the national revolution”.24 By the time Peng published his memoirs, he was one of perhaps only three survivors of the 1925 Fourth Congress, the others being Li Weihan and Zheng Chaolin. Zheng was not only also a Trotskyist (though within Trotskyism he

22

23 24

Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo fanyishi (eds.) 1981, pp. 76–77 and 78– 79. Liu and Qian 1981, make a similar connection between changes in Comintern and ccp policy in the years 1924–25. See Poeze and Malaka 1976, pp. 114–117, for details of Sneevliet’s activities in Sarekat Islam. Brandt, Schwartz and Fairbank (eds.) 1967, pp. 71–72.

574

benton

and Peng were often at odds) but had been Peng’s fellow student for a while in Moscow. In 1952 Zheng disappeared for 27 years into a communist jail (having already spent seven years in a Kuomintang one), but since his release in 1979 Chinese historians have occasionally consulted him about the Party’s early years. In 1983 Zheng published a note25 that puts Peng’s role at the Fourth Congress in a different light and throws doubt on Peng’s contention that he put the Party back onto the “Bolshevik” road in 1925 and thus preserved it for a while from Russian meddling. Zheng’s note suggests that the new line on “proletarian hegemony”, far from being Peng’s personal achievement, was a Comintern instruction known to all Chinese students in Moscow. The Comintern, shy about publicly manipulating its Chinese section, got the ccp’s Moscow branch to sponsor the new line, which Peng was chosen to represent in China. Even so, at the Fourth Congress it was not Peng but Voitinski who drafted the key resolution on it.26 Zheng’s theory is supported by a recent study which shows that the ccp, “with Voitinski’s help”, took the first step towards “raising its own banner” as early as May 1924 – while Peng was still in Russia.27 In June 1981 Zheng Chaolin discussed this and other points in a private letter to a friend that came into Peng’s hands. Peng replied at length to Zheng’s criticisms, and on 8 February 1982 Zheng answered, whereupon the exchange ended. In early 1984 Peng’s rebuttal, and part of Zheng’s counter-rebuttal, were published in Hong Kong.28 Peng’s contribution dwells at length on Zheng’s charge that Voitinski was the true source of the new “proletarian” line, for if Zheng was right on this point, much of Peng’s claim to glory would evaporate. To support his case, Peng flatly denies that Voitinski even attended the Fourth Congress, let alone wrote the political resolution for it. But other sources, including Li Weihan, independently confirm Zheng’s recollection.29 Frequently in his book Peng attacks the personal integrity of his political opponents, and he aims a special poison at the ccp martyr Qu Qiubai, who ousted him from the Party’s standing committee in 1927. Peng calls Qu a rightist, while claiming that he himself stood for true Marxism in the Party. But this is not how Communists saw things at the time. “In the Central Commit25 26

27 28 29

Zheng 1983. See also Zheng 1984b, Part 1, p. 50. Li Weihan interviewed in Beijing ribao (Beijing Daily), 14 July 1980; according to Fu 1983, Peng “participated in drafting the Congress resolution” (quoted in Zhen Yan, “Dui ruogan zhengyixing lishi wentide tantao” (“On some historical controversies”), unpublished manuscript). Liu and Qian 1981. Peng 1984, and Zheng 1984a, pp. 62–71. Li Weihan, interview. See also “Weijingsiji fu Shanghai mishi” (“Voitinsky’s secret trip to Shanghai”) in Jia Bicai 1981.

two purged leaders of early chinese communism (1985)

575

tee … Petrov [Peng] represents the right, Qu Qiubai the left, and the Old Man [Chen Duxiu] the centre”, wrote three dissenting Russian Comintern officials (then working in Shanghai) in 1927.30 Since Peng’s argument is that the Party “rearmed” at the Fourth Congress against the likes of Qu Qiubai, it is inconvenient for him to admit that Qu was actually among those who approved the new line, so he writes him out of the Congress entirely, claiming that he was away in Guangzhou at the time. Yet Qu not only attended the Congress but played a central role in it: he chaired the group responsible for its political resolution, translated Voitinski’s draft of that resolution, and answered delegates’ questions on the resolution.31 Peng’s self-image is that of innovator, but his memoirs suggest that on the contrary he was something of a dogmatist. His favourite Marxist books included Bukharin’s Historical Materialism, Deborin’s Dialectics of Natural Science,32 and Engels’ Anti-Dühring: works widely criticised as mechanical or schematic reductions of the Marxist idea. After Peng’s conversion to Trotskyism in 1929, he saw all leaders of the official Party as Stalinists, but this did not stop him liking some more than others. Some of the distinctions he draws are telling. Mao (who had a strictly utilitarian approach to dogmas) he loathed, but even when old he kept some respect and affection for the more orthodox and cautious Liu Shaoqi.33 The contrast between Peng and Mao is delightfully brought out by a story Peng tells about Mao going naked but for a napkin about his haunches while teaching at a Party “university” one hot day in 1921, and cocking a snook at his outraged boss. Peng’s aim is to show Mao in a bad light; readers will judge for themselves whether he achieves it. The Trotskyist Zheng Chaolin has called Peng a “Wang Ming before Wang Ming”,34 and the analogy is apt, though it should not be stretched too far. Like Wang, Peng started his communist career not in China but in Moscow, where

30

31

32

33 34

“La lettre du Shanghai, par trois membres de la mission de 1’i.c. en Chine”, in Broue (ed.) 1965, p. 79. This letter, which circulated widely among Soviet oppositionists, blamed what it saw as the ccp’s wrong tactical line equally on the Party’s “right-wing” leaders and the Comintern representatives Borodin and Voitinski. Li Weihan, interview. See also Li Weihan, “Huainian Qiubai” (“In memory of Qiubai”) in “Yi Qiubai” bianji xiaozu (eds.), 1981, p. 241; Zheng and Zhou 1983, pp. 42–52; Zhou Yongxiang (ed.) 1983, pp. 42–43; Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao dangshi jiaoyanshi ziliaozu (eds.), 1982, Vol. 1, pp. 41–47; and Zheng 1984b. The text has Dialectics of Nature, but this is by Engels. Strangely, neither Engels (1925) nor Deborin (1929) was published until after Peng left Russia, though he says he used this title in preparing his lectures. Peng 1980b, pp. 306–325. Zheng 1984b, Part 1, p. 49 and Wang 1977, p. 266.

576

benton

apparently he and Luo Yinong were the only Chinese members of the Russian Party; when he returned to China in 1924 he drew great strength from this Russian link, just as Wang Ming did in the 1930s. Of the students who went back around the same time as Peng, many stepped into leading posts in the Party’s national and provincial bodies, just like Wang Ming’s “Returned Students” (the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks”) in 1930. “The Comintern”, said Zheng Chaolin, “[…] appointed Peng Shuzhi our leader, and gave us a theory and a line to take back”.35 Just as Wang was co-opted straight onto the Politburo in 1930 without ever having faced election, so Peng shot straight into the leadership in 1924. If Wang was the protege of Mif, Peng too had his patron in the person of Grigori Voitinski, who “planted” him in Shanghai to push through the Comintern’s directive. Given Wang Ming’s Moscow training, his specialities naturally included antiTrotskyism, though back in China this issue had little resonance or relevance. Even here the likeness holds, if only just: though Peng in time became a Trotskyist, Zheng Chaolin recalls that when at the Fourth Congress Voitinski proposed a denunciation of the Russian Left Opposition, in a quiet hall, it was Peng who rose to second it.36 Peng denies this story and even denies that any such resolution was put to the Congress. But the text of a Fourth Congress resolution denouncing Trotskyism was published in a recent Party series,37 and another series carries the text of a letter dated 2 February 1925 to the ccp’s Moscow branch listing among Congress items “A Report on the International Communist Movement by the Representative of the ecci” and a “Report on Leninism and Trotskyism”. The author of this letter was […] Peng Shuzhi.38 Wang Ming’s best-known speciality was “Bolshevisation”: the imposition on the Party of “iron discipline”, extreme centralism, and unconditional obedience of the sort that Wang drank in at the Comintern. Peng too was this kind of “Bolsheviser”. Indeed, “Bolshevisation” reached China in not one wave but two: in 1925 with Peng, and again in 1930 with Wang. According to Cai Hesen, it was Peng who brought the regime of “bureaucratic centralism” to the Party; according to Zhang Guotao, Wang Ming simply carried on where Peng left off.39 35 36 37 38 39

Zheng 1984b, Part 1, p. 50. Zheng 1984a, p. 70. See also Zheng 1984b, Part 2. The resolution on Trotskyism is also noted in Zhongguo geming bowuguan dangshi chenlie yanjiubu (eds) 1982, p. 62. Zhongguo jiefangjun zhengzhi xueyuan dangshi jiaoyanshi (eds.) 1979, Vol. 3, p. 180. Zhongyang dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui, Zhongyang dangshi yanjiuhui (eds.) 1982, Vol. 3. Cai Hesen, “Jihuizhuyi shi” (“A history of opportunism”), reprinted in Zhonghua minguo kaiguo wushinian wenxian bianzuan weiyuanhui (eds) 1961, Vol. 1, pp. 604–605; and Zhang 1973, Vol. 2, pp. 408–410.

two purged leaders of early chinese communism (1985)

577

Still, as a revolutionary Peng was braver, more independent and more principled than Wang. As Moscow’s man, his rise in China stopped short of general secretary, unlike Wang, who was the Party’s highest-flying “helicopter” ever. And as a Party chief, Peng’s backer Voitinski was less arbitrary, inflexible and autocratic than Mif. Moreover, though in 1924 the Comintern was already in the habit of infiltrating its supporters into the leadership of national parties, its tactic was to supplement and not yet to supplant national leaders, and it was not yet wholly converted into a machine for forcing Moscow’s views on the world communist movement. It is no surprise that Peng, often the victim of gross slanders, put so much vituperative energy into writing himself back into the history from which he was wrongfully struck out. He was well placed to enrich our understanding of the Party’s early years. But his obsession with magnifying his own role and belittling that of others stands between him and the truth often enough to make his record of these events worthless in parts and everywhere dubious. It is necessary to say this because memoirs by veterans of Peng’s generation are exceedingly rare, and Peng’s will be widely read and quoted. Already scholars writing in French publications of various political persuasions have praised Peng’s book as a valuable resource, apparently without noting its flaws.40 Lee Feigon’s book, the first full study of Chen Duxiu, is one of the few works to analyse his Trotskyist writings, and a sturdy though by no means uncritical defence of him. Feigon’s great merit is to methodically strip away the layers of right and left-wing political prejudice that have gathered around Chen. The man thus bared is of quite another cut than Peng: bolder, less rigid, more open-minded, and more given to self-criticism and self-doubt. Feigon’s book is primarily intellectual history but displays a keen sociological sense of how material and ideal interests combine to set the course of politics, and usefully scotches some well-worn myths about Chen: that he once visited France; that he “ignored the peasantry”; that he became a Trotskyist only as a desperate reaction to his expulsion from the Party; and that he was merely a westernised intellectual. Feigon subjects to telling criticism the thesis that Chen was an unthinking believer in western solutions to China’s problems. That a person of Chen’s towering presence, immense breadth and indelible influence lacked roots in China’s culture is indeed implausible, and Feigon shows that Chen was first and foremost a Chinese patriot for whom democracy was a way of restoring life and strength to the Chinese people. Torn between tradition and the wish for radical change, Chen was a complex character whose private and public selves

40

See Shiyue pinglun, No. 1, 1984, pp. 44–45.

578

benton

were often at odds. This fiery revolutionary was a scholar of Buddhism, Sanskrit and the etymology of Chinese characters. This scourge of the Chinese family wrote beautiful calligraphy for his ancestral temple. This feminist had sex with several hundred prostitutes and lived openly with his sister-in-law while getting his wife pregnant. Of the many epithets Chen attracted, the one he liked best was “an oppositionist for life to any established authority”.41 Another view is that he was communism’s first great dissident, and in this there is much truth. For Chen as for today’s generation of April Fifth, “pure” democracy was an indispensable part of the socialist society, and at the end of his life it was to this his intellectual “first love” that he returned.42 It is easy to see why interest in Chen soared among scholars emboldened by the post-Mao talk of the need for democracy in China. Democracy ran a poor course in the Chinese revolution, and even antiStalinists like Peng Shuzhi were not free from “Bolshevik” contempt for it. But Chen Duxiu, having found traditional strategies for social change wanting, fixed once for all on socialism with democracy as the appropriate remedy for China’s ills. Feigon shows that though Chen got his inspiration for the Party from the Bolsheviks, his idea of it was quite different from theirs. He believed (like Lunacharski) that revolution is the work of saints, and opposed creating a strong Party chief. He even let non-Marxists and anarchists join the Party. Different points of view vied rather freely under his leadership, and though the outcome of this contest was settled largely in Moscow, it was some time before the ccp was transformed wholly along Russian lines.43 Though Peng and others brought authoritarian habits into the Party, it was not until 1927, when Chen was sacked as Party leader, that these habits became general. Feigon’s book is painstakingly researched, though a few small errors have crept into it. Yi Ding is the pen-name not of Wang Fanxi but of Lou Guohua; the photograph of Chen Duxiu “in traditional garb” was taken not at Beijing University in the late 1910s but in the spring of 1937; and the author occasionally misspells Chinese words. Feigon’s main fault is that he sometimes pushes a good idea too far. Though it may be true that Chen Duxiu was rooted in a tradition of elite dissent, Feigon’s claim that the Trotskyists stayed in the cities after 1927 because they were unequipped by “outlook or breeding” to organise the peasants is doubtful. If

41 42 43

Wang Fanxi, “Chen Duxiu, Father of Chinese Communism” in Benton (ed.), 1982, p. 167. Ibid. pp. 157–67. On this point, see also Mao 1969, p. 160.

two purged leaders of early chinese communism (1985)

579

outlook and breeding decided strategy, few Communists of any stripe would have gone into the villages, and few Trotskyists would have gone into factories or city slums. Also unconvincing are the theses that the aggression of Mao’s Cultural Revolution was in part inspired by Chen’s cultural iconoclasm, and that. the ccp’s “obscurantist political vocabulary” may be rooted in Chen’s use of a “special language […] to communicate political and social concerns among […] the elite”. May Fourth can be more plausibly linked to the post-Mao cultural reconstruction; and the obvious source of the ccp’s ruinous jargon is Soviet Marxism. Now that the black-out on Chinese Trotskyism has been partly lifted, we see a complex, original political movement in some ways scarcely less diverse than the Party from which it sprang. Until recently it was only outside China that studies on Chinese Trotskyism could be published; now Chinese scholars too are making their contribution to our knowledge of it. Apart from the intrinsic interest of this movement as a failed experiment in urban revolution in the land of peasant revolution, its importance for scholars is that it shared both personnel and concerns with the official Party. The biographical history of Chinese Communism cannot stop short of its Trotskyist offshoot, as Chinese historians are now starting to see. Moreover, the study of Chinese Trotskyism will throw light from many interesting new angles on familiar questions of the Chinese revolution.

Remarks on a Review of Peng Shuzhi’s Memoirs Cheng Yingxiang and Claude Cadart Source: The China Quarterly, September 1986, no. 107, pp. 530–536 L’Envol du communisme en Chine, the first volume of Peng Shuzhi’s memoirs, was published by Gallimard (Paris) in the spring 1983. Peng Shuzhi died on the 28 November 1983. The China Quarterly published in issue No. 102 (June 1985) a book review by Gregor Benton on two books, but which dealt mainly with L’Envol du communisme en Chine: a totally hostile and negative appraisal, focused on the person of Peng Shuzhi who is no longer in a position to reply to such an attack. In the early spring of 1984, shortly after Peng Shuzhi’s death, a Hong Kong magazine began publishing a series of articles written by Zheng Chaolin (an ex-Trotskyist freed from jail after Mao’s death and living in China), which was “prefaced” by a fragment of Peng Shuzhi’s private correspondence dated Octo-

580

benton

ber 1981, not destined for publication.44 These articles contained a number of vicious attacks on Peng Shuzhi’s moral and intellectual integrity and on his memoirs, of which not a single copy in Chinese was available. They seemed to us too obscene and degrading to deserve any reaction or comment. It therefore came as a surprise to us to discover that the serious academic journal, The China Quarterly, had published a “book review” which includes accusations against Peng Shuzhi that are expressed in almost the same terms. As writers of Peng Shuzhi’s memoirs, we feel morally obliged to make a few comments in the limited space granted to us. When we accepted the very heavy and painstaking task of writing Peng Shuzhi’s memoirs, based on his notes, interviews and our own research using original documents, our intention was to save from oblivion a first-hand historical record of a witness and participant in some of the principal events which to a certain extent shaped China’s destiny. We have no links with any faction or group of the Trotskyist movement, either in China or elsewhere. We are not in the least interested, in carrying out this work, in demonstrating any thesis or defending any political views expressed by Peng Shuzhi later in his life, but in presenting a written version as faithfully close as possible to Peng Shuzhi’s oral accounts and answers concerning those particular historical events, expressed during numerous and intermittent interviews carried out over an extended period (1965–83). This first volume of Peng Shuzhi’s memoirs represents an effort to supply some of the missing links in a chain of events which have been disfigured or obscured for decades by the official historiography of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp); even a few Chinese historians have begun to question and revise the record. As a contribution, it is unique precisely because it is unofficial history written by a survivor of the first generation of Chinese Communist leaders, who had survived many years of purges, persecution, imprisonment and exile to help elucidate those deliberately obscured, distorted or forgotten facts: a contribution which only a direct participant, lucid and honest, has the right to make. The book, of 480 pages in length, is packed with original and meticulous descriptions of the following: Chinese society in transition from Manchu domination to the Republican era as lived through by Peng Shuzhi in his native country; cultural and political ferment after the 1911 Revolution and around the May Fourth Movement of 1919 in Hunan; the birth of the communist movement in Changsha; the shaping of the first communist nucleus in Shanghai around its central figure Chen Duxiu; the training school of young Chinese Communists in 44

Zheng 1984a, 1984b.

two purged leaders of early chinese communism (1985)

581

the same city before embarking on a long period of study in the newly founded University of Toilers of the East in Moscow (1920); how these young Chinese Communists lived and worked in Moscow through the years 1921–24; Chiang Kai-shek’s mission in Moscow (1923); the impact of Stalin-Trotsky clashes and of the Fifth Congress of Comintern on Peng Shuzhi and his Chinese comrades in Soviet Russia (1923–24); the inextricable relations between the ccp and the Kuomintang; political and organisational reorientation of the ccp during the months prior to its Fourth Congress; actual circumstances of the meeting of the Congress; vivid portraits of the real founders of the ccp, Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu, Li Hanjun, Li Da, Chen Wangdao, Cai Heshen, Li Qihan and tens of other leading cadres of the young party. Diverting attention from the crucial events related in Peng Shuzhi’s memoirs, Dr Benton takes out of context some episodes which can only be understood and appreciated within the mainstream of Peng Shuzhi’s narrative. For instance, in dealing with the story of He Minfan, the founder of the first communist group in Changsha, whose name is completely erased from the official record of ccp history, simply because he offended the untouchable Mao, Benton reduces it to a trivial anecdote and directs instead a poisonous sting at Peng, the narrator who committed the sacrilege of “belittling” the Great Man. With this state of mind, ignoring all major subjects evoked in the book, Benton rushes to a final and “irrevocable” judgement on Peng Shuzhi: “… his obsession with magnifying his own role and belittling that of others stands between him and the truth often enough to make his record of these events worthless in parts and everywhere dubious”. After an eulogistic presentation of Wang Fanxi’s memoirs, translated into English by Benton himself, which bears no relation whatsoever with the content and the period dealt with in Peng’s memoirs, he proceeds to level a series of accusations against Peng Shuzhi, borrowing the vocabulary and ideas directly from writings of Wang Fanxi and his comrade-in-arms, Zheng Chaolin (constant detractors of Peng Shuzhi ever since the early 1940s, well known in some Chinese circles): Peng Shuzhi laid undue claim to glory, magnifying his own role in the ccp; he told lies about what happened during the Fourth Congress of the ccp (January 1925), omitting Qu Qiubai and Voitinsky’s presence and the eminent role played by Qu Qiubai in particular; he was dispatched from Moscow as an agent, a “Wang Ming before Wang Ming” to take control of the ccp leadership; he was already a Stalinist, siding with Stalin against Trotsky at the Fourth Congress of the ccp; he was partisan for his comrades to enter the Kuomintang, contrary to what he pretended, etc ...45 45

Ibid.; Wang 1977, pp. 266–67.

582

benton

Apart from presenting the detailed account in Peng’s memoirs noting a documented refutation by a scholar of ccp history of Chaolin’s assertions on the role of Qu Qiubai and Voitinsky Fourth Congress of the ccp (published in the same Hong Kong magazine),46 we would like to make a few further observations how the methods used by Dr Benton reveals his putative “seriousness” in dealing with history. “Peng Shuzhi, the First Anti-Trotskyist in China” Dr Benton refers to one of Zheng Chaolin’s assertions that “resolution” was adopted at the Fourth Congress of the ccp, on Shuzhi’s insistence, to side with Stalin and to condemn Trotsky. only “witness” to this curious incident was Zheng Chaolin, who neither delegate nor observer at this congress. But Qu Qiubai, as early as the spring of 1927, when he launched his factional fight against Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi with the intention of making scapegoats for the failure of the Revolution and taking their wrote that Peng Shuzhi’s thought as revealed in his writings (especially the thesis he developed in “Who are the leaders of the Chinese national revolution?”) was a Chinese version of Trotskyism,47 a “crime” fatal at that time, when Stalin started his merciless purges of Trotskyists in Russia and abroad. Qu’s assertion is in direct contradiction with his present jealous defenders. In the same special issue of Xin Qingnian (New Youth) (December 1924) on “National revolution in China”, in which Peng’s incriminated article was published, an issue edited under Peng’s responsibility, one can read the translation of a Trotsky’s conference in Moscow juxtaposed by other pieces written by Lenin and Stalin. Peng Shuzhi and most of other Chinese Communists at that time were not in a position to choose their “camp” between Stalin and Trotsky, because they were quite ignorant about the controversy, in the absence of information and documents. Benton and Zheng’s assertion can only be ill-intentioned just as the one made by Qu Qiubai 58 years ago. There is methodological constancy in certain schools of falsification. “Peng Shuzhi’s Self-Glorification” Far from being a Wang Fanxi, an undistinguished figure in the revolutionary upheavals of contemporary China, who hurried to write and publish his mem-

46 47

Chen 1984. Qu Qiubai: Zhongguo geming zhi zhenglun wenti (“Questions in controversy of the Chinese Revolution”), distributed as a pamphlet in Wuhan in April 1927 and reprinted by the ccp in June 1928, pp. 86–87.

two purged leaders of early chinese communism (1985)

583

oirs,48 Peng Shuzhi had for years been extremely reluctant to write his own memoirs, because he was too absorbed in and impassioned by the events happening in China and the world during his years of exile abroad, and he tried to intervene or to participate in action and in thought in the political life of his own times through interviews, articles and correspondence with comrades and friends.49 As regarding events and persons involved, the guiding principle adopted throughout the book was to give strictly factual accounts supplemented by descriptions of Peng’s reactions contemporary to the events related. All the personages were introduced in order of appearance, in the process of narration, perceived as he knew them in determined time and space. In other words, their portraits are limited to specific periods and his judgements also correspond to those he made then, not projections of what would turn out to be the case years later, when quite a number of them had become his political opponents. The portrait of Chen Duxiu, for instance, and his prominent role in the constitution of the first communist nucleus in Shanghai and his contributions in the building of the ccp in 1924 are fully related in this volume of his memoirs, despite the bitter estrangement and disputes he had with Chen later in Nanking prison and afterwards.50 Peng’s appreciation of Qu Qiubai is no exception to this rule, based on facts and his behaviour in this period.51 “Wang Ming Before Wang Ming” To put this infamous label on the head of an early revolutionary figure of Chinese Communism, whose name has remained taboo for decades in the official historiography of the ccp, who spent all his life fighting against the Stalinist lines, who had been a victim of purges and slanders, falls right in the tradition of Stalinist conspiracies, which fit too well to the taste of some nostalgic beneficiaries of the “Dark Ages” of Stalinist or Maoist monolithic rule. Zheng Chaolin invented this slander, which was picked up by Wang Fanxi and then by Dr Benton, in the same manner as Qu Qiubai labelled Peng Shuzhi a Trotskyist in 1927 and his political thought a Chinese version of Trotsky’s “Permanent Revolution”, whereas Peng ignored even the existence of such a theory! It is a shame for an old-timer of Trotskyism like Zheng Chaolin to be seduced by such

48 49

50 51

Wang Fanxi’s memoirs Shuangshan huiyi lu had been written by 1957 and first published in 1977 by Chow’s Co., Hong Kong. Apart from his voluminous and unpublished correspondence, Peng Shuzhi’s published works available in English are: Introduction to Trotsky 1976, Peng 1980b; in Chinese: Peng 1983, Vol. 1, and Peng 1982, Vol. 3; in Japanese: Peng 1980a. See in particular Cadart and Cheng 1983, pp. 171–78, 307. See ibid., pp. 286–91, 379–86, 396–97.

584

benton

hideous practices. It is least as irresponsible of Benton to pick it up and take it for granted. Maybe Zheng Chaolin is forgetting his old principles and is now happy to render dubious services to some of those die-hard Stalinists who will never forget and forgive Peng Shuzhi for being one of the most notable antiStalinists. The Case of Qu Qiubai There is a lot of “sound and fury” in Benton and Zheng’s attacks on Peng Shuzhi around the figure of Qu Qiubai. They accuse Peng of having “belittled” this “great revolutionary leader”. Actually, Qu Qiubai has been a controversial character in Chinese Communist history, among top leaders of the Party. During the Cultural Revolution he was publicly denounced (posthumously) as a traitor by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. His widow Yang Zhihua suffered unjust persecutions. Now his posthumous rehabilitation has gone much further than he merits, because nobody who knows a little about the history of the ccp can ignore his role as an agent of Comintern and an executor of Stalin’s policies during the late 1920s, the radical turn from collaboration with the Kuomintang to the left-adventurist policy of 1927–29. Peng Shuzhi’s memoirs only contribute to some extent to reveal, as much as he had direct knowledge and relations with Qu Qiubai, his personality and role in this earlier period of the ccp. But, evidently, Zheng Chaolin and Benton have chosen to become fervent advocates in favour of an idealised image of Qu Qiubai. There is a vogue among Chinese intellectuals today, especially those who were heavily persecuted during the 1950s, or during the Cultural Revolution, to identify themselves with Qu Qiubai as a persecuted intellectual and true martyr of the Revolution. This reaction is quite comprehensible. But between a necessary rehabilitation of Qu Qiubai as one of the early leaders of the ccp and an idealised or mythical hero, there is a considerable margin to be respected in accordance with historical realities. Gregor Benton Replies Cadart and Cheng refute not one of my specific findings: that Peng was probably not Party secretary in Moscow; that he probably did not recruit Liu Shaoqi and Ye Ting;52 that he did not oppose joining the Kuomintang; that the “bloc within” was not forced on the ccp by the Stalin triumvirate; that Peng did not think up the “proletarian hegemony” thesis; that Voitinsky and Qu Qiubai did attend the Fourth Congress (Peng’s supporter Chen Zhenyan, cited by Cadart 52

According to Nie Rongzhen, who did not arrive in Moscow until late 1924, after Peng had returned to China, “Comrade Ye Ting was introduced into the Party by Wang Ruofei and me” [Nie 1983, Vol. 1, pp. 37–40].

two purged leaders of early chinese communism (1985)

585

and Cheng as a “scholar of the ccp history”, does not show otherwise); and that Trotskyism was discussed at that Congress (see Peng’s letter, 2 February 1925 – mendacem memorem esse oportet). None of these points is trivial; each bears centrally on Peng’s claim to glory. What Cadart and Cheng do challenge is my evaluation of Peng, as a precursor of Wang Ming. They are entitled to their opinion. But they should note that this idea originated with Cai Hesen in 1927, not with Zheng Chaolin, and that Zhang Guotao repeated it. True, Cadart and Cheng are not of Peng’s party. But they are his daughter and his son-in-law, and their arguments are the same as his. Curiously, they call themselves “writers” of l’Envol, so they are responsible for its errors. Historians of Communism should have known that Engels, not Marx, wrote Anti-Dühring; that Engels, not Deborin, wrote Dialectics of Nature; that neither Engels’ nor Deborin’s book on dialectics was published until after Peng had left Russia; and that the oppositionist Thalheimer (who wrote his thesis on Micronesian pronouns) is a different person from the Stalinist docker Thälmann. No doubt embarrassment at my pointing out these and other mistakes partly explains the violence of Cadart and Cheng’s response to my review, which by comparison is a model of restraint. It is not surprising that our friends write off as “undistinguished” Peng’s critic Wang Fanxi. What is surprising is their surmise that Zheng Chaolin is giving “dubious service to … die-hard Stalinists”. Peng fled China in 1949. Zheng stayed to hold the Trotskyist flag, and was jailed for 27 years (having already spent seven years in prison under Chiang Kai-shek). In 1967 Red Guards crippled Zheng’s blind wife Wu Jingru. Zheng was freed in 1979, aged 79, his convictions intact; the insinuation that he traded them for his freedom is deplorable. Of course Cadart and Cheng wish that Zheng Chaolin would shut up. Zheng is a rare surviving witness of Peng’s early career in Moscow and China. No scrupulous historian can ignore his writings. Zheng’s recollections differ from Peng’s, and are borne out by my lengthy review of sources. Cadart and Cheng try to discredit Zheng’s account of the Fourth Congress by pointing out (rightly) that he was “neither delegate nor observer” at it; what they omit to tell us is that he was recorder of its proceedings. Autobiographers who make wrong claims must expect correction. Peng’s death exempts neither him nor his “writers” from criticism (any more than Qu Qiubai’s martyrdom exempted him from attacks by Peng). Zheng’s article about Peng was written nearly two years before Peng’s death and was promptly forwarded to him. He could have replied; he chose not to. The idea that Wang Fanxi unduly advertised himself by writing a brief memoir is curious: Peng’s first volume (of three) is nearly twice as long as Wang’s entire book. Odd too is the charge that Wang rushed into print (he waited 20 years, until 1977, before publishing). In the west, Peng’s writings have been widely publicised; Wang’s are little known, Zheng’s are unknown.

586

benton

There is a saying that lies have no feet; they cannot stand alone and need new lies to prop them up. Peng begins by claiming that he invented the “hegemony” thesis … and ends by spiriting three inconvenient attenders from the Congress that adopted it. Cadart and Cheng surround Peng with yet more fabrications: that I call Qu Qiubai a “great revolutionary leader”, that I worship Mao, that Zheng Chaolin published Peng’s private letter (actually a long article) and so on. But still their supports collapse. Postscript The ccp editors of Zheng Chaolin’s memoirs, published in Beijing in January 1986 in a neibu edition by Xiandai Shiliao Biankanshe (Zheng Chaolin huiyilu), do not share Cadart and Cheng’s view that Zheng is no longer a Trotskyist. According to the editors’ preface to Zheng’s book, the author still completely supports the Trotskyist standpoint.

Remembering Peng Shuzhi (2022) Leslie Evans

Leslie Evans (born 1942) was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (US) from July 1962 to August 1983. He served on the party’s literary staff in New York for various of the party’s publications, from January 1967 to September 1979, specialising in coverage of China. In later years he was a Senior Editor for several of ucla’s Asian research centres, overseen by the university’s International Institute. He spent two years, mid-1995 to mid-1996, on loan from ucla to the World Health Organisation as production editor for a study on the failure to invest in research on the diseases of poor countries. In this article commemorating Peng Shuzhi and his wife Chen Bilan, written specially for this volume, he describes his tie to Peng through the swp, Peng and Chen’s views on Mao’s China, and some differences between Peng and the swp leadership.

I First Hear of Peng Shuzhi I encountered Peng Shuzhi, who we in the Trotskyist movement knew as Peng Shu-tse, first in print, in 1967. In later years I met him and his wife, Chen Bilan, a few times when they visited New York from Paris. After they moved to my home town, Los Angeles, in 1973, I saw them in their home a few times when I visited my mother. Finally, after I moved back to Los Angeles from Minnesota in July, 1982, I saw them often over the next year and a few months, until Peng’s death, on 28 November 1983, at the age of eighty-eight. We became friends, as much as is likely for two people with a difference of forty-seven years in their age. I joined the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth movement of the Socialist Workers Party, followers of Leon Trotsky, at nineteen in 1961. I joined the party the next year. In January 1967, when I was then living in San Francisco, the party asked me and my first wife, Kipp Dawson, to move to New York. There, I was assigned to the party’s weekly newspaper, The Militant. But I was more interested in World Outlook, the unofficial weekly news service of the Fourth International, edited by Joseph Hansen. I was allowed to work for Joe on Saturdays, but soon was transferred to World Outlook full time (renamed Intercontinental Press in May 1968). The first I heard of Peng Shuzhi was an interview with him in Paris by Antonio Farien, pen name of David Fender, published in the 10 February 1967, issue of World Outlook. Mao had launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

© Leslie Evans, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_056

588

evans

in May of the previous year. This precipitated a split in the Chinese Communist Party. Mao, backed by the army, led by Lin Biao, and shock troops supplied by the student Red Guards, freed for action by Mao’s closing the universities and middle schools, launched a mass purge against most of the party leadership and the intellectuals. I was struck by the density of Peng Shuzhi’s text, its level of detail for an exile. Here is an example: On 15 September [1966], at the third large meeting of the Red Guards in Beijing to be reviewed by Mao, Lin Biao1 made a speech in place of Mao. What he told the Red Guards, in effect, was that they must attack all those officials who are resisting Mao’s thought, and that they must have no fear since the army was supporting them. It was after this speech that the Red Guards began to be much bolder and even unrestrained. In the wall posters in Beijing leading party members were named and accused of taking the capitalist road. The first secretaries of the Southwest, Northwest, and North bureaus – Li Jingquan, Liu Lantao, Li Xuefeng (who had also become first secretary of the Beijing party in place of Peng Zhen) are only three examples. Simultaneously, officials of the state began to come under attack. Chen Yi, foreign minister, Li Xiannian, minister of finance, and especially Bo Yibo, minister of industry and communications, are only a few examples. Finally, Liu Shaoqi, president of China, and Deng Xiaoping, secretary of the party, also came under attack. In the latter part of October, a special, very important meeting was held. This meeting lasted for seventeen days. It was during this meeting that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were forced to make their selfcriticism after being severely attacked by many of the participants. It was just after this meeting that Peng Zhen and Lu Dingyi, head of the Central Propaganda Department, were arrested. It seemed that Mao thought he had beaten the opposition. On 26 December a large victory celebration of the Red Guards was held in Beijing, and publications such as Red Flag proclaimed the victory of the ‘Cultural Revolution.’ At this celebration, the self-criticism of Liu and Deng were revealed for the first time. Nevertheless, we can see by the events from the first two weeks in January that the opposition was far from being broken.

1 Various transliteration systems were used in quoted material, mostly Wade-Giles. I have tried to convert personal and place names to standard pinyin.

remembering peng shuzhi (2022)

589

Peng in this piece placed the origins of the conflict in the failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). This clearly indicates that he viewed the struggle as based on major policy issues, not merely over factional power. Rereading this interview more than fifty years later, however, there is a jarring note, where Peng writes that the dispute “began at the time of the failure of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ program, when many intellectuals, and even a few top party leaders, openly expressed discontent and were critical of many domestic and foreign policies arbitrarily instituted by Mao”. This seems shockingly understated. Current estimates are that Mao and his supporters, in setting impossibly high obligatory quotas for grain collection, led to death by starvation of between 15 and 55 million people, the greatest famine in human history. Some millions of this number were shot by the army to prevent them leaving the worst hit areas and telling the world what had happened. Peng’s seeming extraordinary minimisation of this event, comparable in its extent to the Holocaust, at least in numerical deaths if not in percentages of the affected population, is accounted for because the ccp was amazingly successful in hiding the scale of the disaster until after the death of Mao in September 1976. Even then, the full extent of the human cataclysm took decades to establish, some of the first reputable estimates in journal literature dating from 1984. Until the end of the century these estimates commonly capped at 30 million. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, however, the estimates have grown into the 40s to the mid-50s of millions. The next I saw of Peng’s writings was a lengthy article that appeared in the 4 March 1967, World Outlook: “Open Letter to the Members of the Chinese Communist Party”. I was new to New York and to the party’s views on Maoist China, but this article struck me even then as far more nuanced than the blanket condemnation of the Stalinist regimes I had heard from party members, as monolithic, with differences limited to purges by rival power seekers in both the Soviet Union and China. Liu Shaoqi, China’s president, who opposed the Cultural Revolution, in the fall of 1966 was denounced as a “capitalist roader” and traitor. He was badly beaten by his own staff in the Central Committee offices in the party’s high command at Zhongnanhai on 3 January 1967. Peng’s article was dated the following month, 15 February 1967. Of Liu he wrote: I am personally acquainted with Liu Shaoqi. I know him very well since I was a co-worker with him in the party from 1920 to 1927. Since he joined the Communist movement in the autumn of 1920, he has actively and wholeheartedly participated in revolutionary activities. After the defeat of the second Chinese Revolution, our ways parted politically (Liu sup-

590

evans

ported the position of Stalin, while I turned in the direction of Trotsky). However, at that time I still considered him to be a revolutionary. Peng called on the ccp members to oppose the Mao cult, to reform and democratise the party. I had understood the swp’s view to be that the ruling Stalinist parties were not reformable. In Peng’s estimate, the Mao faction controlled only five provinces plus Beijing, while the Liu-Deng opposition or neutralists controlled the other twenty-six provinces. He believed there were also numerous socialist currents outside the party altogether. He did not propose critical support to Liu and Deng, but it was implied. I saw the importance of this interview in face of the growing infatuation with Maoism of the student left, in both the United States and Europe. Its simplistic slogans, the Little Red Book of Mao quotations, its “Better red than expert” know nothing ideology, violence against party leaders and intellectuals, and ignorant authoritarianism I found repellant.

Chen Bilan’s Biographical Essay The next I heard of Peng was the publication of his wife, Chen Bilan’s, lengthy biographical piece, “Looking Back Over My Years with Peng Shuzhi”, in World Outlook in four parts in November 1970. He was born in 1895 in Hunan province. (Many years later some details were filled in: He was born on 26 November 1895, in the small rural village of Tonglucun in Longhui county, southwest Hunan province.) From Bilan’s article I learned that Peng joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1920. The next year he attended the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. There, he was elected secretary of the Moscow branch of the ccp, returning to China in Shanghai in 1924. In January 1925 at the Fourth ccp Congress, Peng was elected to the Central Committee and the fivemember Central Standing Committee (the Political Bureau). Of the five, Chen Duxiu was the party’s General Secretary. Peng was made chief editor of the party’s two main publications, Xiangdao (Guide Weekly) and its monthly literary magazine, Xin Qingnian (New Youth). Comintern policy insisted on ccp entry into Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). This hamstrung independent Communist actions. Peng succeeded in convincing the party organisation in Shanghai that the ccp should cancel the arrangement where the party members were inside the kmt, and hence partially under Chiang Kai-shek’s discipline. He urged the ccp to recast the alliance, making the ccp fully independent. In Moscow, Trotsky

remembering peng shuzhi (2022)

591

advocated the same policy. Peng went to Canton (later Guangzhou) and unsuccessfully argued his case to Comintern representative Mikhail Borodin, who claimed Stalin’s authority to insist on the deep entry policy. As Chiang’s Northern Expedition approached Shanghai, the ccp led an insurrection on 21 March 1927, taking control of all of the city except the foreign concessions. In Los Angeles in 1982, Peng told me that the Shanghai uprising was planned in his and Chen Bilan’s apartment. The planners included Zhou Enlai, who took part in directing the armed worker’s units in the streets. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, supposed to be allies of the Communists, arrived on April 12, massacring the workers’ militias and putting an end to the revolution of 1925–27. Peng in the aftermath of the defeat, convinced party head Chen Duxiu of his views. They were both expelled as Trotskyists in 1929. Their new Trotskyist organisation continued its activity, but in October 1932, Chen Duxiu, Peng, and eight other leading Trotskyists were arrested by Chiang Kai-shek’s police. There followed a sensational two-year trial in Nanking. Chen and Peng were sentenced to eight years and the others five. In the event, they were freed after five years when the Sino-Japanese war began and their prison was bombed. With the victory of the Maoist forces in 1948, the majority of the Chinese Trotskyists remained in China, Bilan writes, many moving to provinces where they were less well known. Most were eventually arrested and disappeared into ccp prisons. The central leadership, including Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan, went into exile in Hong Kong in late 1948. In Hong Kong, then still a British colony, the British police repeatedly arrested and generally deported known Trotskyists. When successive police searches for Peng Shuzhi came too close to succeeding, the couple moved in January 1950 to Saigon, Vietnam. There, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh, which had a small Vietnamese Trotskyist component, invited several of the Chinese Trotskyist exiles to attend a conference. Peng did not attend, but the several who did were all arrested and one of them, whose name, Liu Jialiang, I only learned later, soon died in a Vietminh prison. This led the beleaguered pair to move once more, this time to Paris, in June 1951, where they were living as I read Bilan’s account.

The Split and Reunification of the Fourth International Now I knew a good deal more about the author of the 1967 letter to the members of the Chinese Communist Party. I also now understood why Peng, Bilan, and the Trotskyist group in Hong Kong sided with the American Socialist Work-

592

evans

ers Party in the split in the Fourth International in 1953. While I was still living in Los Angeles, in 1963, at the age of twenty-one, the party organiser, Oscar Coover, asked me to accompany him to the home of James P. Cannon, the elderly founder of the swp. I was then the head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance and a party member, which I suppose explains the honour. There, Cannon handed me a document to read, but not take away. It was the proposed basis for the 1963 reunification of the fi. The split had taken place primarily over the tactic of deep entryism by the small Trotskyist parties into the mass socialist, communist, and nationalist parties of Europe and the colonial world. This was being successfully promoted by then-head of the Trotskyist Fourth International, Michel Raptis, pen name Pablo. James P. Cannon in his November 1953 Open Letter announcing the split of the swp and its cothinkers from the International, Cannon described the European Secretariat’s policy as “Stalinist conciliationism”. Small wonder that Peng, who attributed the defeat of the Chinese revolution of 1925–27 to precisely this tactic in relation to the Kuomintang, would recoil from its revival by the world Trotskyist movement. Though I have no direct knowledge of Peng and Bilan’s relations with the Trotskyists they met in Paris, my sense is that it was never close. They had hardly arrived when the International split. The American swp pulled together a small, mostly sectarian, group of Trotskyist parties into the newly created International Committee of the Fourth International (icfi). The European components were mainly, in France, the Internationalist Communist Party led by Pierre Lambert, and in England, the Socialist Labour League led by Gerry Healy. Neither of these parties joined the 1963 reunification. Peng and Bilan did, along with the Trotskyist group in Hong Kong, of which they were the leaders.

Peng’s View of Mao and Liu Shaoqi I would note one more piece by Peng in this period. This is another interview by Antonio Farien (David Fender): “The Relationship and Differences Between Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-ch’i”. The interview was obtained on 6 July 1967. It was not published in the Intercontinental Press, but in International Information Bulletin, no. 2, January 1969 (wrongly dated 1968). These were internal, not for public distribution, documents the swp published in English for the Fourth International. That it appeared only a year and a half after it was written and in a format for which the swp took no political responsibility, suggests that the swp, or some figures in its leadership, did not agree with the contents. I will quote the last three paragraphs:

remembering peng shuzhi (2022)

593

“… Mao represents a more hardened and extreme form of Stalinism. Regardless of the circumstances or the will of the masses he has carried out his adventuristic and sectarian domestic policies. On the other hand, Liu represents a much more moderate and reformist tendency in the party. He attempted to a certain degree to correct Mao’s extremist policies, in order to avoid the catastrophic consequences. “In my opinion this same analysis is valid in the present struggle between the two men. If Mao should win, it would be at the expense of all the Left and revolutionary elements, and he will commit China to a most reckless and cataclysmic course, in which the Chinese revolution would be placed in grave danger. If Liu should win, China’s domestic course will most likely be similar to that carried out when the party was under Liu’s leadership, with China’s foreign policy becoming less sectarian and possibly resulting in a united front with other socialist countries, including the ussr, to aid the Vietnamese and their struggle. “In a China under Liu’s leadership there would definitely be more freedom in the party and society, although the overall question of the Stalinist bureaucracy would not be solved. Nevertheless, Liu’s victory could be a first phase in the development of a real revolutionary struggle for socialist democracy”. I will come back to differences of opinion in the swp leadership on China and the Cultural Revolution later.

My Connections to Peng through the Socialist Workers Party’s Publications By 1969 I was becoming concerned about the growing sympathy for Maoism in the American and international student left. At its 18–22 June 1969, conference in Chicago, the Students for a Democratic Society (sds), the largest left-wing student organisation in the United States, split into three warring factions. The two larger of them, the Progressive Labor Party and Revolutionary Youth Movement ii, were hard Maoist groups. A certain level of sympathy for Mao and Maoism had begun to influence the European Trotskyists as well, which was of concern to Peng. I was also looking for a specialty to cover. No one in the American party wrote on China regularly. I had taken courses in Chinese history at ucla and two years of Mandarin Chinese. So, I settled on writing about China. Inevitably this threw me together with Peng Shuzhi.

594

evans

In June 1971 I was made editor of the party’s monthly magazine, the International Socialist Review, but continued to contribute to the Intercontinental Press on China issues until I left New York for Minnesota in September 1979. I did solicit one article for the isr from Peng: “The Theory of Permanent Revolution and the Underdeveloped Countries”, which appeared in the May 1972 issue. Early in 1974, while I was still at the International Socialist Review, I and Russell Block were assigned to create a definitive collection of Trotsky’s writings on China. At that time the only existing collection, Problems of the Chinese Revolution, from 1932, contained thirteen documents written between May 1927 and August 1930. Our new collection, Leon Trotsky on China, with new material from the Trotsky archives at Harvard, contained sixty-three documents and ran from 1925 to 1940. I wrote to Peng in Los Angeles and asked him to write an introduction. His introduction ran to 66 book pages, focused on the 1925–27 revolution.

In Paris and Los Angeles During Shuzhi and Bilan’s long exile in Paris he wrote numerous lengthy documents on the Maoist victory in China and its early years in power. Just one month after they arrived in France, Peng delivered a report titled “The Causes of the Victory of the Chinese Communist Party over Chiang Kai-shek, and the ccp’s Perspectives” to the Third World Congress of the Fourth International, held in Switzerland in August–September 1951. He was generally critical of the pre-split International’s view of China, which tended to equate the ccp victory with the early days of the Russian Revolution. Peng viewed the ccp regime as a bureaucratic dictatorship that, in the early fifties, still retained much private land ownership and some capitalist enterprises, and lacked any form of democratic input on government policy or selection of its leaders by the masses. The pace of his output speeded up with the 1958 Great Leap Forward, the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s death on 9 September 1976. Of particular interest is an interview he gave to Rose Connolly on 14 March 1977, “An Appraisal of the Political Life of Mao Zedong”, published in four parts in the October 1977 issues of Intercontinental Press. I cited above his general opinion of Mao and will not elaborate on it here. I do want to look at Peng’s assessment, in part 2 of the series, the 17 October 1977 issue, of the positions of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in their conflict with Mao, and the response of the Chinese masses and intellectuals to their reforms. Peng is writing about the period of the end of the Great Leap Forward. When the disaster of the failed communes

remembering peng shuzhi (2022)

595

reached its peak, Mao resigned as head of state in December 1958, appointing Liu Shaoqi to the position in April 1959. Peng writes about Liu’s administration at that time Liu, along with Deng Xiaoping, general secretary of the party, and Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing, initiated a rectification campaign, including the ending of backyard steelmaking, restoration of private plots of land and personal ownership of livestock, restoration of the free market in the countryside, and abolition of most communal kitchens and nurseries. The great majority of the people, especially the peasants, greeted these reforms with enthusiasm. Production was increased and the extreme shortages of vegetables and meats lessened. From 1960 to 1961 an actual famine existed, attributable to the People’s Communes, but by the beginning of 1963, agricultural production was restored almost to the level before the launching of the communes. For those working in education and culture, Liu permitted a certain freedom of expression and independence in their work. This immediately brought forth many newspaper and magazine articles and some new plays. Wu Han, vice-mayor of Beijing, wrote a play called Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, in obvious reference to the recent purge of [Marshal] Peng Dehuai. The play was published in the Peking Daily in January 1961 and performed on the Beijing stage. It met with an exceptionally positive response from the public and critics alike, both for its artistic and political content. Deng Tuo, secretary of the Beijing Municipal Committee, Wu Han, Liao Mosha, head of the United Front work in Beijing, wrote a great many articles published in Beijing’s newspapers and magazines. They published two pamphlets, Notes from Three-Family Village and Evening Talks at Yenshan, using old fables, parables, historical analogies, and satires to criticise Mao. As for Mao, Peng in this essay traces his career at length from his first entry into the Chinese Communist Party in 1920. His final pithy conclusion: Mao strove to be the greatest Stalinist in the world. He became a true Stalin in China, his character and methods almost identical to those of his Soviet hero.

Differences on China in the swp Leadership Here I want to say a few words about differences in evaluating events in China among the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, which sometimes concerned

596

evans

Peng Shuzhi. Joseph Hansen was the foreign affairs specialist in the leadership. I think he always held Peng in high esteem, and was knowledgeable enough about these kind of regimes in general and the Chinese case in particular to understand that there were often substantial issues in dispute and commonly the more moderate or somewhat democratic faction would be more popular. In 1972 Tom Kerry asked to see me, and told me he didn’t like a class I had given on China at that year’s party educational conference in September at Oberlin College in Ohio. I had said there were sharp political difference between the Mao group and the party leaders around Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi. Tom insisted that Stalinism is of a piece, there was no such thing as genuine political differences in a Stalinist regime, only nonpolitical bureaucratic struggles for position. That to claim to distinguish political difference between Stalinist factions implied giving critical support to one against the other and would lead to supporting Stalinists. With these views it seemed clear that Tom disapproved of Peng’s writings. Tom Kerry (1911 to 1983) was not someone you wanted to tangle with. When I joined the party in 1962 the party heads in New York were always referred to as the Dobbs-Kerry leadership (Dobbs being Farrell Dobbs). That team had been succeeded in 1972 when Jack Barnes became National Secretary. But even then, as Barnes once told me, Tom had been the single greatest influence on him in his early years in the movement. When giving talks on China outside of New York, here and there some party member would tell me they heard I had disagreements with the party on China. And a few National Committee members in New York told me disapprovingly that Peng was calling for critical support to Liu Shaoqi. In May 1974 I had another interview with Tom Kerry. He objected now to an article I had written, both because it described definite political differences between Liu and Mao, and because it discussed the reports in the Chinese press that eight million students and Red Guard members had been exiled to the countryside. Tom refused to believe that, no matter what both the Chinese and Western press said. He lodged a formal complaint with Jack Barnes, and I was banned from writing anything on China from May of 1974 to the death of Zhou Enlai in January 1976. These, of course, were issues where my writings were in full agreement with Peng’s. In late 1975 Peng in Los Angeles wrote to me several times saying there was a growing democracy movement outside of the Communist Party in China and its appeals and documents were being regularly published in Chinese language magazines in Hong Kong, readily available in New York’s Chinatown. I even received a letter with the same information from the Chinese Trotskyist group in Hong Kong.

remembering peng shuzhi (2022)

597

Zhou Enlai died on 8 January 1976. Large numbers of mourners began to turn out in Beijing’s Tian’anmen Square, with a massive turnout on 4 April, the traditional day of mourning, the Qingming Festival. The crowd placed wreaths in the square, many bearing inscriptions condemning the Gang of Four, the Maoist clique currently controlling the government. Police removed the wreaths that night. A huge, furious, crowd filled the square the next day, estimated by the Washington Post at 250,000. It had to be covered in the swp press and I was still under ban, though I have been allowed to write an article on Zhou’s history. ip [Intercontinental Press] staff member Michael Baumann asked my opinion, which I gave him. His article appeared in the 19 April 1977, Intercontinental Press. Mainly factual, it contained two assertions that proved to be unacceptable to Jack Barnes, the swp’s National Secretary. Baumann asserted that “there is a grouping in opposition to Mao. Its degree of organisation or size cannot be determined, because of the censorship”. He added that the size of the protest “can be explained only on the basis of the existence of issues widely felt by the masses” and that “the masses may be readier than expected to step in at an opportune moment to impose their solution to the acute problems faced at this stage by the Chinese revolution”. Jack Barnes hastily called Baumann and me into his office. He was quite angry. Barnes insisted that there was nothing but nonpolitical power rivalries going on. He denied that it was possible for a significant democracy movement to exist in a totalitarian state. “Exiles always invent these things. It’s all wishful thinking”. He made it clear that the exiles he was thinking of were Peng Shuzhi and the Hong Kong Trotskyist group. My ban was renewed, and not lifted until the death of Mao that September. It seemed plain to me that Barnes did not take Peng’s writings seriously. There was, in fact, a large China democracy movement essentially outside of, but sympathetic to, the Liu-Deng faction. It lasted twenty-two more years and was crushed in the Tian’anmen massacre of June 1989, also called the ’89 Democracy Movement. As for the large organised opposition to the Maoists eventually led by Deng Xiaoping, there can be no real doubt that Peng Shuzhi advocated critical support. He documented often in his writings, as we have quoted earlier here, this group’s much less repressive approach to political rule, its orientation towards serious development of industry, agriculture, and higher education. And he saw this faction as having strong links with nonparty currents in the Chinese masses with basic desires for higher living standards, and more freedom. Nevertheless, he still considered the Deng tendency to be a somewhat liberal Stalinist current that would not willingly institute genuine democratic rule. So, he continued to advocate a political revolution to achieve that goal.

598

evans

In this contribution he thought to defend himself from the criticism by Tom Kerry and Jack Barnes, without mentioning them by name, by citing an article by the party’s philosopher, George Novack, and Joseph Hansen, who were closer to his assessments. Novack and Hansen wrote: “Schools were shut down and millions of youth turned loose ... The policy was to line up these youth on the side of one of the contending factions … and inveigle them into adopting its factional platform without being informed of what was intended, without giving the opposition currents an opportunity to present their views in a fair debate, and, in fact, with the opposition smeared and branded from the beginning without a hearing as disloyal and even counterrevolutionary … The real ‘crime’ of the accused leaders is not that they have been plotting to bring back capitalism but that they have serious differences with the Mao-Lin faction”. (“The Upheaval in China – An Analysis of the Contending Forces”, in the then just-issued Pathfinder Press pamphlet, Behind China’s ‘Great Cultural Revolution.”) I left New York in September 1979 to join the party’s turn to industry, in my case, in the iron mines of the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota. My last literary task, somewhat surprisingly, was to edit a collection of Peng’s writings. Titled The Chinese Communist Party in Power, it ran to 508 pages. Peng selected the contents. I worked closely with him and Bilan by paper mail and by telephone. The book opened with Chen Bilan’s “Looking Back Over My Years with Peng Shuzhi”, and closed with a July 1967 piece by her, “An Interview with Chen Bilan on the Cultural Revolution”. In between there were fifteen of Peng’s articles, dating from 1951 to 1977. Peng turned 82 in November 1977. He did not write about the dramatic changes in China after Hua Guofeng was replaced by Deng Xiaoping and China advanced to the second largest economy on the planet and the world’s major manufacturing center, though the full development and import of Deng’s reforms occurred after Peng’s death. I think he would have had mixed feelings, as he wrote often in support of Liu and Deng’s relaxation of literary controls and serious approach to the economy and science-based higher education. But his writings generally opposed post-revolutionary China continuing to allow capitalist-owned enterprises to continue to exist. And under Deng a new class of Chinese business millionaires arose.

The Socialist Workers Party’s Turn to Castroism In 1981, the Socialist Workers Party began its turn away from Trotskyism. Jack Barnes and his loyal followers imagined a more fruitful political future as the

remembering peng shuzhi (2022)

599

American exponents of the views of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist Party. There would be no place for Peng Shuzhi in that political world. The November 1981 International Socialist Review, now reduced to a monthly supplement in the weekly Militant, contained a long public article by Doug Jenness under the title “How Lenin Saw the Russian Revolution”. It never mentioned Trotsky, but for those who understood the issues, repudiated Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, and by implication, his claim to be a Leninist. Jenness portrayed Lenin as a consistent advocate of an initial workers and farmers stage of a socialist revolution. I wrote a lengthy response, but the party refused to publish it. But for Peng and Bilan, this had been the argument the Comintern made for the deep alliance with the Kuomintang. Peng responded with a lengthy article – fourteen letter sized pages – in the April 1982 International Information Bulletin, published by the swp as a courtesy to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. Titled, “Criticism on the U.S. swp’s Opinion on Cuba”, it traced the history of the Cuban revolution from 1959. He called for support to Cuba, but pointed to its limitations: “[T]he aid given by the Soviet Union, which was under bureaucratic dictatorship, to other countries was to be exchanged for a price. Thus, the Soviet Union’s support of Cuba at least would bring the Soviet Union’s Stalinist ideology to Cuba”. He wrote that “Castro is not as arbitrary as Stalin or brutal as Mao Zedong. He has some intelligence and knows that Cuba is only a small country in extreme isolation and the mases must not be too oppressed or else Cuba will find it difficult to survive. And so, I do not agree to the opinion that it now requires a political revolution to overthrow the Cuban regime. But I also do not agree with people who think that there does not exist a bureaucratic system in Cuba … For all the time, there is only Castro who gives speeches; he is like a little emperor in Cuba, and his words are royal decrees. This situation is obviously the manifestation of a bureaucratic system. The swp over-adorns Cuba and so overlooks its fact of bureaucratism”. And further: “It can still be forgiven if Castro covers up for the Soviet bureaucracy in order to obtain the Soviet Union’s material aid. But for the world revolution, the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic dictatorship must absolutely not be covered up ... If we, in order to concede to Castro, abstain from mentioning the political revolution in the Soviet Union, it will be fundamentally betraying Trotskyism and the Fourth International, and surrendering to Stalinism and becoming captives of Stalinism”.

600

evans

Their Last Years With the iron mines on layoff, I returned to Los Angeles in July 1982. I would visit Shuzhi and Bilan from time to time. In the summer of 1983, the party began to hold show trials in the branches of people it believed would not accept the Cuban turn. I was expelled in August. There would be a blanket expulsion in early 1984 of all known or suspected supporters of the Fourth International. That fall I spent a lot of time with Shuzhi and Bilan. He was a few months short of turning eighty-eight and in poor health. They were still being supported by the swp, and had a party member assigned to take care of them, which made my visits a little tense. They both strongly – and courageously, considering their financial dependence on the swp – protested the expulsions. Peng wrote an appeal to the United Secretariat in Paris. He was having heart trouble and was in and out of the hospital. Their daughter, Cheng Yingxiang, known as Lilly to non-Chinese speakers, had come with her husband, Claude Cadart, from Paris to help. Lily and Claude were working on the first volume of a projected three volume biography of Peng in French, which was published by Gallimard in 1984: L’Envol du communisme en Chine: Mémoires du Peng Shuzhi. This is still in print. One night, Shuzhi and I sat up very late talking about the devolution of the swp and the dictatorial regimes that ruled the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. As we were about to part, he said, “The masters of Marxism told us to make revolutions, but every revolution we made became bureaucratised. This is the single most important question that must be studied”. Lily was angry with me for tiring her father out. I didn’t visit Peng again for more than a month. I saw him one more time. He had just been in the hospital again for his heart. He sat quietly and said little. He died on 28 November 1983, two days after his eighty-eighth birthday. The Biographical Dictionary of Republican China devotes four pages to his entry. He was always able to surprise me with the extent to which his knowledge came from experience and not from books, though he was widely read. I once asked his opinion on whether the Vietnamese cp was a Stalinist party. He replied: “When I worked with Ho Chi Minh in Canton in 1925, he was a hard Stalinist”. After Peng’s death, the swp national office sent Mary-Alice Waters, second in command to Jack Barnes, to Los Angeles to represent the party. A bitter argument took place between Waters and Lily. I was at the apartment the following day to visit Bilan, and had a long talk with Lily. She told me that Mary-Alice had demanded that Peng’s papers be sent to New York to be placed in the Socialist Workers Party library in their building, then on West Street in Manhattan. Lily

remembering peng shuzhi (2022)

601

refused. Most of the papers were in Chinese, which no one in the swp national office could read. The documents were needed by Lily and Claude for the next two volumes of their biography. Mary-Alice, Lily told me, threatened to stop Chen Bilan’s subsidy, her only income, if the archive wasn’t turned over. Lily said she and Claude told MaryAlice to keep her money. They were taking Bilan to Hong Kong to live with a son. They did. She died there, on 6 September 1987, at the age of eighty-five.

Cheng Yingxiang and Claude Cadart’s Biography of Peng In August 2011 Peng and Bilan’s daughter, Cheng Yingxiang (“Lily”) phoned me from Paris. She and Claude were near completion of their extensive second volume of their three-volume biography of Peng. It would be published in Chinese. The manuscript was entirely handwritten. They asked me to hire a Chinese typist in the Los Angeles area who could create a computer-readable copy. This became a three-year project. My Chinese contacts at ucla found a capable Chinese typist. Lily would call me early in the morning from Paris to say she was mailing the next chapter, or a set of corrections or revisions, for the typist. When received her packet I would scan it, email it to the typist, get back from her a digital file by email. As Lily was not computer literate, I would airmail a paper printout of each chapter to her along with a digital copy on cd for her publisher. The manuscript was complete in digital form in August 2014, and proved to include both volumes two and three. The two books were published in a handsome paper edition in Hong Kong in 2016 by Cosmos Books Ltd. They remained in print on Cosmos Books’ website in December 2022. The Socialist Workers Party has let Peng’s The Chinese Communist Party in Power go out of print. Pathfinder Press, the party’s publisher, uses digital printon-demand, which, like Amazon’s self-publishing system, can produce a single copy without need to invest in stock – if the text in question has been scanned and digitised. Dropping this text from their list seems to be because it would not be well received by the Cubans. Used copies are offered for sale by a few private sellers on Amazon as a rare book, usually for $ 100. On 10 June 1990, the American Socialist Workers Party and its affiliated groups, mainly in Australia, Britain, and Canada, formally terminated their relations with the Fourth International. Inasmuch as the Cubans had a dependent relationship with the Soviet Union, and today are supporters of the Chinese government, there is no longer any basis for the swp, now enrolled in that school of politics, to have a use for the writings of Peng Shuzhi.

602

evans

Claude Cadart and Cheng Yingxiang’s Essay on the Lives of Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan On 22April 1988, Cheng Yingxiang and Claude Cadart, in the presence of forty guests, held a ceremony dedicating a tomb for Cheng’s parents, Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan, in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. Two urns containing their ashes were placed inside. Claude and Yingxiang wrote a memorial article for the occasion. I retrieved a copy in English from the website of the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, Hong Kong. It is titled “Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan: The Lives and Times of a Revolutionary Couple. Two leading figures of the Chinese Trotskyist movement”. As none of their three volumes of biography of the revolutionary couple are in English, I would like to close by drawing on some comments from this source.

Their Subjects’ Origins “They both came from the very heart of China, from the two Hu, the provinces of Hubei and Hunan. Peng was born in Hunan in 1895 into a family of relatively well off and relatively well-educated peasants who lived in Tonglucun, a very small village in the Shaoyang region (then Baoqing). Chen was born in 1902 in Huangpi (near Hankou) in Hubei province, into a family of mandarins and local scholars. Both were Han Chinese; politically, they were of the same generation despite the difference in their ages”. Both Peng and Chen were inspired by the May 4th Movement, begun by student demonstrations in Beijing in Tian’anmen Square on 4 May 1919, opposing territorial concessions to Japan in the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War i. “In Peng Shuzhi’s case, the watershed year was 1920: in April, in Wuhan, (where five and a half years later he was to meet Chen Bilan), he became a Marxist and communist, shocked into commitment by the appalling conditions of modern industry and the living conditions of the workers; in September, in Changsha, he was among the first to join the Hunan communist group … and in October, in Shanghai, he entered the Central Group of the Chinese Communists’ School of Foreign Languages for a three-month stint studying Russian before leaving for the Soviet Union”. From the fall of 1921 to the summer of 1923, Chen Bilan, who turned twenty in 1922, attended a school in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province. One of her teachers was a member of the Hunan communist group. There, Bilan “became the leader of a cultural, feminist and anti-‘feudal’ movement which scandal-

remembering peng shuzhi (2022)

603

ised Wuhan and led the school authorities to expel her”. In the fall of 1923, she joined the Communist Party and made trips to Beijing and Shanghai, planning to go to the Soviet Union. Peng arrived in Moscow in September 1921. He spent almost three years there, “first as a student (1921–23), then as a teacher (1923–24) in the Chinese section of the University of the Toilers of the East”. Chen Bilan left China for Moscow in the fall of 1924, just after Peng had returned to China, so they had yet to meet. She stayed one year, called back to China when the anti-foreign May 30 Movement broke out in 1925 in response to Shanghai police shooting into a student protest. On her arrival, Chen was appointed to the Party executive committee for the three provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui. “It was in this setting the Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan came to know each other. Chen was not only an active and enthusiastic revolutionary, she was also very attractive and a sensitive, clever woman of remarkable vivacity (a quality that stayed with her till the end of her days). Peng was also good-looking, a young man in his thirties who exuded intelligence and drive, and whose prestige within the Party had soared since the beginning of 1922. From then on, they remained inseparable except when circumstances kept them apart”. They had three children. The eldest, her daughter Cheng Yingxiang, born in 1928, followed by two boys.

The Revolution of 1925–1927 Regarding the whole of the years 1921–29, Claude Cadart and Cheng Yingxiang write that “Throughout this period Peng remained steadfastly against the Chinese communists’ line of organic collaboration with the Kuomintang … Peng was outraged when the Comintern imposed this line on the Chinese Communist Party in the summer of 1922”. While in Shanghai from August 1924 to January 1925, Peng persuaded the two main party leaders there, Chen Duxiu and Cai Hesen, of his view. It was approved by the 4th Party Congress held in Shanghai in January 1925. But he failed to convince Borodin, the Comintern representative, during a trip to Canton in May 1926. Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi were scapegoated for the defeat of the revolution after Chiang Kai-shek’s April 1927 coup in Shanghai. The Soviet-led Comintern “lost no time in getting their Chinese communist faithful to sacrifice Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi at the 5th Party Congress in Wuhan, held at the end of April 1927, and subsequently at the famous ‘extraordinary’ meeting held in Jiujiang in Jiangxi province, on 7 August 1927, and the 6th Party Congress held in Moscow in June 1928”.

604

evans

In the summer of 1929 Chen Duxiu and Peng acquired some of Trotsky’s texts, where he had raised the same objections they had to the deep entry into the Kuomintang. They declared for Trotsky and were expelled in November 1929.

Peng and Chen Bilan’s Trotskyist Period in China “From the end of 1929 to autumn 1932, Peng, constantly aided by Chen Bilan, and in collaboration with Chen Duxiu and militants from other Trotskyist groups, managed to win over a huge number of communist cells from Stalinist control and ensure support for the Left Opposition in Shanghai’s working-class districts. This rebirth of social and political resistance was a clandestine operation carried out under the nose of the Kuomintang dictatorship”. On 15 October 1932, Peng was arrested by the Kuomintang. “Chen Duxiu and ten or so other comrades were also taken”. Peng and Chen Duxiu were jailed in Nanking. “In prison they quarrelled – Peng remaining a convinced Trotskyist, Chen Duxiu turning his back on all forms of communism without exception”. Chen Bilan found a job “in the publications section of the Young Men’s Christian Association – which was controlled by the Shanghai branch of the party. Almost every month she wrote articles for the major Shanghainese periodicals, especially Dongfang zazhi (The Oriental Magazine), on a wide range of social issues”. She signed herself Chen Biyun. Peng Shuzhi and Chen Duxiu had been sentenced to eight years, but were released after five as the Japanese invaded China’s eastern provinces and were bombing the Nanking area. He returned to Shanghai where “No sooner he located Chen Bilan again then he tried to start up a Trotskyist workers’ movement from the ‘haven’ of the International Concession which the Japanese had yet to occupy”. This effort ended when in 1942 the Japanese invaded the International Concession. Peng, under an assumed name, “found a teaching post in a private university”. He won over a number of his students and “between 1937 and 1945 he had quietly built up a dense network of adult sympathisers who now helped fund the publication of two Trotskyist magazines, both quite successful. One was Youth and Women, edited by Chen Bilan, and the other was Seeking the Truth edited by Peng himself. They began publishing in early 1946 and folded at the end of 1948”. Claude Cadart and Cheng Yingxiang say that “the Trotskyist organisation they had set up had hundreds of members. It, of course, did not survive the arrival of the Maoists”. Peng and Chen in the fall of 1948 left Shanghai and

remembering peng shuzhi (2022)

605

went to Canton. In 1949 they had to move again, this time to Hong Kong, and then on to Saigon. After the murder of the domestic Vietnamese and refugee Chinese Trotskyists by the Vietminh, the hunted couple moved on to Europe. “They arrived in Marseilles in June 1951, where they stayed a short while before leaving for Paris, the headquarters of the 4th International”.

With the 4th International in Paris “While Peng and Chen were now more or less part and parcel of the leadership of the 4th International, their foreign comrades, for whom Mao’s victory was still a cause for celebration, were loath to listen to their attempts to remove the scales from their eyes by exposing the true nature of this victory which, for them, was nothing more than an ‘oriental’ national revolution led by the urban petit bourgeoisie with the support of the peasantry, and not an authentically socialist, non-Stalinist revolution of a completely new type”. Peng and Chen also strongly disagreed with Pablo’s deep entry tactic, which I discussed earlier in this article.

The Seventies in Los Angeles Peng and Chen followed events in China from their distant refuge in the United States. There had been many negative developments in the fifties and sixties. “But from 1976 there was more cause for hope. There were the events of 5 April 1976 and then, in 1978–79, the Democracy Wall. It was at that time that Peng Shuzhi told us he was now sure that he had plenty of successors in China. May he be right”.

Some Final Words In the close of their lengthy article, Claude Cadart and Cheng Yingxiang offer their assessment of the character of their subjects and close relatives. They were “true Chinese patriots who never lost sight of the need to situate the defence of their country, enslaved by the imperialist powers, in the context of the interests of humanity in general”. And on violence in revolutions: “They both realised that recourse to violence was often the only way to bring about the future. But they did not like it. They distrusted revolutions which

606

evans

owed their success to bayonets and then killed off their generals; they distrusted power which depended on the barrel of a gun. They detested militarism. “For them a revolution was to be a mass movement, led by the workers and beginning in the cities. They were communists, but as communists, they sought to be democrats”. Today even the second generation is gone. Claude died on 4 May 2019, at the age of 91. Yingxiang on 8 April 2020, of Covid, at the age of 92.

section d Wang Fanxi on Bureaucratic Collectivism and Max Shachtman’s Commentary and Response, 1950–1953

∵

Introduction to Part 2, Section D Max Shachtman (1904–1972) was an American Marxist theorist and at one time an associate of Leon Trotsky. He was a major figure in the American Trotskyist movement beginning in the 1930s and leader of the minority section of the Socialist Workers Party that split with Trotsky over Trotsky’s analysis of Russia. In 1940, he established the Workers Party (later the Independent Socialist League)., which in the late 1950s merged with the Socialist Party. He worked as editor of or contributor to The Young Worker (1923), Labor Defender (1925), The Militant (1929–34), Socialist Appeal (1937–40), The New International (1934–58), and Labor Action (1940–58). He corresponded with Wang Fanxi in the 1940s and the early 1950s and saw Wang for a while as his co-thinker. He later became a social democrat and worked with senior assistants of the afl–cio President George Meany. By that time, he was viewed by his former comrades as a Cold Warrior and an apologist for Meany.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_057

Introduction Walter Daum

The article in this section by Wang Fanxi examines the class character of the revolutionary Chinese state established under Mao Zedong. It was written in February 1950, shortly after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army; it was published in English under the title “The Stalinist State in China – The Social Meaning of Mao Zedong’s Victory” in the U.S. journal The New International in early 1951, with its author identified as M.Y. Wang and with a brief introduction by Max Shachtman. It had originally been issued in Chinese as an appendix to a longer work on the class nature of the Soviet Union, “The Soviet Union and Socialism”.1 This section also includes three letters between Wang and Shachtman relating to the article.2 Wang’s essay was part of a debate among the Chinese Trotskyists over the class nature of Mao’s China. It is a remarkable example of a dedicated Marxist grappling in real time with the theoretical challenges of world-shaking events. Its guiding theme is that such upheavals are best understood from the perspective of the exploited working class and its struggle for self-emancipation. It reflects decades of practical work and theoretical exploration by the Chinese Trotskyists, whose dedication to socialist revolution and Marxism was matched by their courage in facing severe repression both before and after the 1949 revolution. The Chinese debate was informed by the ongoing debate in the international Trotskyist milieu over the class character of the Soviet Union under Stalin. This debate had broadened to encompass the expansion of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. It centred around three broad positions on the class nature of the Stalinist-run states: (1) “Degenerated or deformed workers’ states”. This category takes a bit of explanation. Marx had explained that after a victorious socialist revolution by the working class, a classless society – socialism or communism – could not be created immediately. An intermediate period was neces-

1 See the original Chinese in https://www.marxists.org/chinese/wangfanxi/marxist.org‑chines e‑wong‑195007.htm. 2 The Wang-Shachtman correspondence is in the Tamiment Library at New York University: http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_103/dscaspace_ref24.html. Shachtman had a strong interest in Chinese events, having written the introduction to a 1931 collection of Trotsky’s writings: Problems of the Chinese Revolution.

© Walter Daum, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_058

introduction

611

sary in which a transitional workers’ state (or “dictatorship of the proletariat”) would reduce and ultimately eliminate capitalist exploitation and inequality. Accordingly, after the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, the Bolshevik leaders explained that the state they controlled was socialist only in anticipation; it was rather a workers’ state dedicated to the above goals. But in the mid-1930’s, Leon Trotsky warned that since the Stalinist bureaucracy was deepening economic inequality and denying workers’ democratic rights, it was paving the way for a backslide to capitalism. He re-labelled the ussr as a “degenerated workers’ state”: still between capitalism and socialism but no longer advancing towards a classless society. After the war, when additional states were brought into the ussr’s orbit, the Trotskyist Fourth International (fi) regarded them as still capitalist. Later in the 1940’s, when these states had adopted the Stalinist system based on nationalised means of production, the fi designated them as “deformed workers’ states” – not “degenerated”, since they never had been genuine workers’ states to degenerate from. Like the ussr, these states were regarded as situated between capitalism and socialism. The theory’s leading proponents included Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. (2) “State capitalist”. The full statification of the major means of production was seen as the ultimate extension of capitalism’s tendency towards centralisation, Marx’s term for the absorption of many capitals by few. Some theorists saw state capitalism as a worldwide phenomenon resulting from this tendency; others saw it as unique, having resulted from the overthrow of a workers’ state rather than a natural outgrowth of capitalism. Expositors of such theories included Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James in the U.S., Tony Cliff in Britain and Cornelius Castoriadis in France. (3) “Bureaucratic collectivist”, a label for a new non-capitalist but also nonproletarian system. Its proponents agreed with state capitalism theorists that working-class state power in the ussr had been ended (and had never existed in the other Stalinist-ruled states); and with the workers’ state theorists that the capitalist class had been driven from power. Max Shachtman was the theory’s most prominent spokesperson.3 3 A major problem the “third camp” position faced was to characterise the producing class. If the economy was not capitalist then the workers could not be true proletarian wage-earners. Thus, Shachtman wrote that when the working class fails in its revolutionary task, “Stalinism destroys it by transforming it into a class of modern state-slaves.” (“Rival of Capitalism, Oppressor of Labor, Enemy of Peace”, Labor Action, Vol. 15, No. 19, 7 May 1951). (This goes beyond exposing that there were actual slave labourers in Stalin’s gulag of prison camps, as The New International did.) In contrast, Wang, Trotsky and others used the term “slave” only metaphorically, to vividly denounce Stalinist methods of forcible control over the workers.

612

daum

Theories of the Chinese Trotskyists The Chinese Trotskyists used the same three labels but not always with the same content. Peng Shuzhi, the leader of the majority faction, initially held that the ccp’s victory amounted to a shift in power between two factions of the bourgeoisie, since the ruling party was accommodating sectors of the capitalist class. In 1952, however, he changed his position and held that China was developing into a deformed workers’ state.4 The other two theories came from the Trotskyist minority. A version of state capitalism was put forward by Zheng Chaolin as early as 1950. Later he called the Stalinist system “cadreism” after the party officials who ruled over it. This position and several later pieces by Zheng on the subject have been translated and published in a recent compilation of his writings.5 Wang Fanxi’s article presents a theory he called bureaucratic collectivism. Even though he soon abandoned this position and adopted the deformed workers’ state theory, this document remains of theoretical and historical interest.6 Wang starts by addressing the contradictory nature of the Maoist victory. He acknowledges that the ccp overthrew the Nationalist government, “which represented foreign imperialism and the native bourgeoisie and landlord class”. Hence the Party and its state “are wiping out the anachronistic agrarian relationships in China’s farming villages” and “they have dealt a mighty blow to the foreign imperialist powers led by the United States. All of these actions, from the point of view of Chinese nationalism and democracy, have an undeniably progressive character”. (Point 4.) Nevertheless, Wang insists that the state set up by the ccp is “fundamentally and completely reactionary”. This is because in the first year of Party rule over major cities, “the political and economic position of the workers has not only failed to improve, but in certain respects has even deteriorated”. (Point 3.) Wang spells this out: “In the early period of the ‘liberation’, because of the long-standing prestige of the Communist Party and because of the revolutionary illusions entertained towards it by the workers, the working class got out of hand in some of the big cities and went so far as to demand an improvement in living conditions,

4 Peng’s actual wording was that China was “moving in the direction of” a deformed workers’ state. (Benton 2015, pp. 961–966.) Peng’s formula was equivalent to that adopted by the Fourth International at about the same time, “workers’ and peasants’ government”, which fudged the question of the class nature of the state that the Maoist government ruled over. (Peng 1952). 5 Benton and Sexton (eds) 2022. On state capitalism, see chapters 5, 8, 10, 11 and 12. 6 The reasoning behind Wang’s shift is summarised in his “Thinking in Solitude” (1957) in Benton 2015, pp. 967–984.

introduction

613

even confiscation of factories …, the liquidation of certain capitalists, and so forth. But this period came to an end very quickly. … [T]he working class was robbed completely of its right to fight and of its fundamental right to strike”. In that light he challenges the name of the People’s Liberation Army by citing the fundamental Marxist principle: “The liberation of the working class is the function of the working class itself”. Wang adds: “Consequently, ‘liberators’ drawn from another class cannot confer genuine liberation upon it”.

Wang’s and Shachtman’s Theories Compared Where does Wang’s article stand with respect to the international debate? Shachtman claims in his introduction that Wang’s theory is “substantially identical” with his own. Likewise, he wrote to Wang in February 1953, “I am glad to say that, in our own way, we had arrived at exactly the same analysis and conclusion”. Wang had written similarly in his letter to Shachtman of December 1951. This claim, given the identical terminology, appears on the surface to be valid. But the question is more complicated. In his introduction, Shachtman comments that Wang’s “inclination to place the bureaucratic collectivist state within the category, as it were, of state capitalism, we regard as a scientific imprecision and therefore erroneous”. Indeed, whereas Shachtman held that bureaucratic collectivism was a new form of class rule completely distinct from capitalism, Wang argues that it was a variant of capitalism. He writes: On the face of it, bureaucratic collectivism, that is, Stalinism, would appear to be a completely new thing. It is neither socialism nor capitalism. But upon closer examination it is not difficult to perceive that it belongs under a subheading of capitalism. One difference between it and traditional capitalism is collective ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. The ownership of the means of production has not been socialised, but it has been collectivised (in the hands of the ruling class). And as for the relationship of owners to producers, exploitation continues to exist …. (Point 14) That is, Wang uses “bureaucratic collectivism” to describe a system that others called state capitalism. He regards it as a form of capitalism because the ccp at the start continued the capitalistic exploitation of the working class through “a program of state capitalist reform rather than socialist revolution.” (Point

614

daum

12.) Moreover, he sees Mao’s China following the path of Stalin’s Soviet Union, where the ruling Party had “degenerated into a bureaucratic clique exploiting the proletariat.” (Point 13.) He could thereby conclude that, even if the new state took over private capital as it subsequently did, capitalist exploitation would still be maintained. But even though it was a form of capitalism, Wang reserves the term “state capitalism” for a society where the state directs an economy of privately owned capitals. He notes that the tendency towards this degree of state control had been taking place in many countries, including Hitler’s Germany and Roosevelt’s New Deal in the U.S., and that it accelerated during World War ii (Point 6), and that this worldwide tendency helps to explain the events in China. (Point 9.) Curiously, in his letter to Wang of January 1952, Shachtman excoriates the idea held by “many of your comrades” that Russia is a form of capitalism as “theoretically preposterous and politically futile (if not fatal)” and “not Marxism but theology”. In his enthusiasm for Wang’s nominal agreement, he seems to have forgotten that when he published Wang’s article he had criticised Wang himself for putting bureaucratic collectivism into the state capitalism category. Judging from his writings overall, Shachtman rejected state capitalism because he saw it as a contradiction in terms: capitalism requires private, not state, ownership of the means of production. With Wang it is less clear. When he told Shachtman of the closeness of their positions he might have meant simply that they agreed on rejecting the workers’ state theories of the Fourth International and the Chinese Trotskyist majority. But there is evidence that it was more than that. In the Chinese original of the document Shachtman published (the appendix to “The Soviet Union and Socialism” which he subtitles “Discussion Outline”), Wang prefaces the appendix with a note that reaffirms his bureaucratic collectivism wording but ends with this remark: “There is one argument, however, on the question of the relationship between bureaucratic collectivism and capitalism which, having considered it at length, I have come to see differently, at least from a formal point of view. I now think that what is said in Soviet Studies [Wang’s full document] is more factual than what is stated in the outline [the appendix on China]”. So what is he referring to in the full document? Perhaps this: Rather than seeing the present Soviet system as the highest stage of the old exploitative society, it should be seen as the first form of a new exploitative system. Instead of thinking of the Stalinist bureaucrats as a new bourgeoisie, it is better to think of them as another new exploiting class.

introduction

615

For there is a fundamental difference between an exploiting class that stands on collective ownership and the exploiting class which has always stood on private ownership. This says that bureaucratic collectivism was indeed something new, as Shachtman had it, not just the extreme extension of state capitalism, as state capitalist theorists said and as Wang put it in his own appendix on China. But then was it capitalist or not? On the one hand, Wang refers to the ruling bureaucrats as the class that extracts surplus value; that is, they exploit wage labour capitalistically. So that points to the system being capitalist in essence. On the other hand, the system intervenes to limit the operation of the law of value and suppress the periodic crises that plague capitalism. That points away from capitalism. Wang was struggling to come to grips with the complicated reality of a new phenomenon, and he weighed the balance between the two factors differently at different times. He ultimately rejected both choices by opting for the workers’ state theory. Nevertheless, in my view his wrestling with the dilemma illuminated the contradictory nature of the Stalinist economy more sharply than other analyses made in the post-war decade.

The Test of History Wang continues in the passage cited above from Point 14 of his appendix on China: “Bureaucratic collectivism has two great advantages over private capitalism and even over state capitalism … (a) it is possible to regulate capital in a more systematic fashion; (b) it is possible to exploit workers more efficiently. These two advantages are precisely what is needed to overcome the present crisis of capitalism”. Indeed, despite their differences all the Trotskyist theorists in the decade after World War ii saw the Stalinist system as more dynamic than capitalism, capable of more rapidly developing the productive forces. The enormous growth of the Soviet economy in the 1930’s seemed to have proved that state domination enabled not just mass mobilisation of labour but also economic planning, which could eliminate the unpredictability of capitalist competition and prevent periodic crises and other evils of ordinary capitalism. Could the Stalinist system, as Wang says, really regulate capital better and exploit workers more? The latter for a time, undoubtedly, under slave-like conditions where labourers would be whipped into working harder – as when Stalinism in the 1930’s used the massive forced-labour projects of the Gulag to build up Soviet industry and infrastructure at a great cost in lives. But super-

616

daum

exploitation that does not allow for the reproduction of the working class cannot be sustained for long. After Stalin’s death, the Soviet rulers adopted a less repressive labour system that provided socialistic concessions like full employment, health care, education and housing for workers. Maoism adopted and adapted such a scheme for workers in state-owned industry, the “iron rice bowl”. Thus the Stalinist mode of exploitation lacked traditional capitalism’s economic weapons like unemployment to discipline the working class. Hence its rate of exploitation would have been lower, not higher. Likewise, without a capitalist market operating to regulate capital (and without workers’ democratic input), planning was often incoherent and regulation of capital was less than systematic. For example, the system lacked the threat of bankruptcy to eliminate unproductive capitals. Without such constraints firms were not compelled to maximise their rate of profit but only its mass, at whatever the cost in inputs. The Stalinist economic system, dynamic though it had looked in the 1930’s and 1940’s, proved when it stabilised to be less productive than its traditional capitalist rival. Soviet economic strategists tried in vain for decades to reform their system to make it more efficient. In the end the law of value that the system had tried to banish returned to assert itself, with a vengeance. Stalin’s and Mao’s successors finally abolished the socialistic concessions and opened up their economies to private capital – while profiting hugely from the transformation themselves. Wang Fanxi’s insight, however temporary, that Maoism and Stalinism rested on the exploitation of labour in fundamentally capitalistic ways proved to be on the right track. Wang lived to see the transformation of China into billionaireled capitalism and maintained his revolutionary optimism and opposition to capitalism in all its forms. As for Shachtman, a year before he published Wang’s article, he recalled that Marxists believed that capitalism was doomed and that “the alternatives facing mankind are not so much capitalism or socialism as they are: socialism or barbarism”. He concluded: “Stalinism is that new barbarism”.7 If Stalinism was really the modern-day representative of barbarism, the decline of civilisation, it should follow that Marxists would defend capitalism against Stalinism, whatever theoretical category it is placed in. Of course, traditional capitalism was also guilty of brutal barbarism: the atomic annihilation of Japanese cities and the Nazi holocaust, on top of centuries of colonial and imperial depredations of the peoples of the Global South. In the article cited, Shachtman ignored this history (even though in his February 1953 letter to Wang he insisted that

7 Shachtman 1950.

introduction

617

“our position remains firmly internationalist and in no degree represents any conciliation towards capitalism or capitalist imperialism”). He thereby foreshadowed his later sharp rightward turn, ending up a staunch defender of U.S. imperialism’s assaults on Cuba and Vietnam. That turn was not inherent in “third-camp” theory; many adherents fought against it. But an analysis that saw Stalinism as both uniquely barbaric and also more dynamic than capitalism certainly helped pave the road to the right.

The Stalinist State in China: The Social Meaning of Mao Zedong’s Victory (1950) Wang Fanxi, with an introduction by Max Shachtman

In this article, written just four months after Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, Wang reflects on the regime founded by the ccp in 1949. He expounds a theory, similar to Max Shachtman’s at the time, that New China was a bureaucratic-collectivist entity, i.e., not a workers’ state in the Trotskyist sense, and that the same was true of the Soviet Union. However, Wang soon abandoned this position and returned to the traditional Trotskyist view of Russia as a degenerated workers’ state, and went on to define China under Mao as a deformed workers’ state.1 Source: The New International, vol. 17, no. 2, March–April 1951, pp. 100–110.

Editor’s note [Max Shachtman]: We are especially pleased at the opportunity to publish this study by M.Y. Wang of the situation in China today. It appeared only a few months ago, in the original Chinese, in a brochure published illegally in Hong Kong. The brochure is devoted primarily to a Marxian analysis of the evolution of modern Russia and the social significance of the Stalinist state. The author, who is one of the ablest Marxists in China today, draws conclusions as to the nature of Stalinism and its state which are substantially identical with those that have been developed and defended in The New International for years, and his agreement with us in the theory of “bureaucratic collectivism” is gratifying. The final chapter of the brochure, which we are publishing here, is devoted to the highly important and by no means simple problem of the social significance of the Stalinist victory and the Stalinist state in China. It will impress the readers, as it did the editors, with its penetration which discloses the motor forces of Stalinism in China, and thereby substantiates and enriches the theory of Stalinism which we have ourselves sought to unfold. The author’s inclination to place the bureaucratic collectivist state within the category, as it were, of state capitalism, we regard as a scientific imprecision and therefore erroneous. Within the context of the analysis he makes, however, the proportions and significance of the error

1 The author’s name in the original publication was given as M.Y. Wang.

© Wang Fanxi, introduction by M. Shachtman, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_059

the stalinist state in china

619

seem to us trivial. The study is recommended to the attention of the reader with our warmest support, which is prompted in no small measure by our satisfaction in knowing that Marxian thought is far from extinguished in a country where the Marxists have endured such cruel difficulties and persecutions. We wish also to thank Comrade Leon del Monte for undertaking and executing so well the difficult fob of translation. 1. Now that the ccp’s military forces have conquered the entire mainland, the People’s Republic in official existence for five months, and the New Democracy in effect in some of China’s principal cities for approximately one year, we possess sufficient material and facts to judge the nature of the ccp and its state machine and to test the accuracy of our past views concerning them. 2. In judging and estimating the nature of a movement, a political party, or a state, for the proletarian revolutionist there is one unchanging standard: What is its relation to the working class, that is, to the only revolutionary class in the modern world? For us there can be no more decisive standard than that, nor can there be any other point of departure. 3. What is the relation of the ccp, the Liberation Army led by it, and the People’s Republic which it has established, to the Chinese working class? What attitude does it take towards that working class? Notwithstanding the fact that the ccp calls itself a working-class party, notwithstanding the fact that the ccp proclaims this new state to be a “people’s” state led by the workers, nevertheless a variety of facts demonstrates that the political and economic position of the workers has not only failed to improve, but in certain respects has even deteriorated. The working class is the victim of this “War of Liberation”. “The liberation of the working class is the function of the working class itself”. Consequently, “liberators” drawn from another class cannot confer genuine liberation upon it. And this has in fact been the case. Politically speaking, the position of the working class has not changed at all. The military governments established by the conquerors are composed entirely of a new nobility, and have no connection with the working class. Not only could workers’ soviets not be formed in practice, they were not permitted to exist even as a concept. All that the workers got from their “liberators” was the designation – on paper – of “leaders” of the new society. A new government which proclaims that the working class occupies a position of leadership within it has not given the working class an ounce of such latitude as would enable it to advance to political power. In the early period of the “liberation”, because of the long-standing prestige of the Communist Party and because of the revolutionary illusions entertained towards it by the workers, the working class got out of hand in some of the big cities and went so far as to demand an improvement in living conditions, even

620

wang and shachtman

confiscation of factories (as, for example, the Lianchang iron works in Tianjin), the liquidation of certain capitalists, and so forth. But this period came to an end very quickly. In Tianjin from February to April and in Shanghai during June and July there was extensive activity on the part of the workers, but after the suppression in April of the Tianjin movement by Liu Shaoqi and the promulgation in Shanghai on August 19 of Military Government regulations for the adjustment of labour-management disputes, the working class was robbed completely of its right to fight and of its fundamental right to strike. In other words, it was made the victim of exploitation at the hands of private entrepreneurs. This new slave status of the working class was finally fixed in September by governmental fiat, and the workers have been unable to win an improvement in living conditions by striking. In order to disguise this act of barbarism, the new rulers have given the working class the right of “factory control”. But this right, as a glance at the Regulations for the Conduct of Factory Committees will indicate, is a patently worthless piece of trickery. For example: Article 7. The Factory Committee shall be presided over by the Head of the Factory (or the Manager) … Article 8. If a decision passed by a majority of the Factory Committee shall be judged by the Head of the Factory (or the Manager) to be in conflict with the said Factory’s best interests, or when the said decision shall be in conflict with the instructions of higher authority, the Manager or Head of the Factory is empowered to prohibit its implementation. In other words, everything depends on the decision of the factory head or the manager, who is not elected by the workers but is appointed by the “people’s” government, which has no connection with the working class. Basically, what is the significance of this sort of “workers’ control”? Let us have our answer straight from the mouth of one of the “national capitalists”, Sung Fei-ch’ing [Song Feiqing]:2 In my opinion, it is not such a bad idea to let the workers participate in factory management. While on the face of it the workers would appear to be detracting somewhat from the rights of the factory head, in reality the purpose of the participation of workers’ representatives in the administration of personnel, materiel, profits, finances, etc., is merely to 2 Sung Fei-Ch’ing (Song Feiqing, 1898–1956) was a Chinese industrialist. See Sung’s biographies and personal material in Hoover Institution, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c80z73 wq/dsc/.

the stalinist state in china

621

assure the implementation of all decisions passed by the Factory Committee. Since the workers participate in the formation of these decisions, they cannot later oppose them. Thus much friction is eliminated, and in any case the final right of decision remains in the hands of the manager. These few words constitute a frank and honest description of the real nature of this “workers’ control of production”. It merely exalts the workers “on the face of it”, while retaining control of the factory “in reality!” This is the Chinese Communist regime’s general attitude towards the working class, one of paying it lip-service in theory while oppressing it in practice. And besides this, the ccp has yet another poisonous weapon to use against the working class, the system of “heroes of labour”, which divides the workers on the one hand while oppressing them more cruelly on the other. Therefore we may affirm that politically the Chinese Communist regime has not improved the position of the working class, while economically it has lowered its standard of living. The Chinese Communist regime, while characterising itself the “representative of the working class” and making use of the words “people” and “nation”, has in reality, like the Kuomintang, in effect enslaved the Chinese working class. This view must constitute the point of departure for our interpretation of the nature of the ccp and its government. 4. Any political party or state apparatus which enslaves the working class is, in this day and age, from a proletarian, socialist, revolutionary point of view, fundamentally and completely reactionary. Therefore the ccp and the state apparatus which it has set up are also reactionary. Yet at the same time we must recognise the following facts: They have overthrown the Kuomintang government, which represented foreign imperialism and the native bourgeoisie and landlord class; they are wiping out the anachronistic agrarian relationships in China’s farming villages; they have dealt a mighty blow to the foreign imperialist powers led by the United States. All of these actions, from the point of view of Chinese nationalism and democracy, have an undeniably progressive character. 5. The difficulty is this: How and why can a fundamentally reactionary political party and government perform objectively progressive acts? At bottom, what class does such a political party represent? To answer these questions we must first make a brief study of the development of world capitalism over the last twenty-odd years, of the processes of political and economic change within China itself, and of the history of the first proletarian state in the history of mankind. Within this space, naturally, we can point out only with the utmost simplicity and brevity the principal peculiarities in the history of these

622

wang and shachtman

developments, since our immediate purpose is merely to shed light on the international background and historical origins of the ccp’s victory and the emergence of this new state, and thence to draw a conclusion as to its fundamental nature. 6. Since the international economic crisis of 1929–33, and particularly since the end of the Second World War, world capitalism, in its imperialist stage, in order, on the one hand, to deal with the proletarian revolution within each country (a task in which it has succeeded) and, on the other, because of ever more intense international competition, has acquired certain new characteristics in its internal structure, characteristics which Lenin could not adequately foresee at the time of his analysis of imperialism. The most important among them is the process by which monopoly capitalism becomes more closely bound up with the state, some enterprises are taken over by the state, and capitalism becomes statified. Hitler’s Nazism and Roosevelt’s New Deal, carried out at approximately the same time in Germany and the United States, represented fundamentally the same tendency towards statification on the part of capitalism. This movement for a time resolved the internal crisis of capitalism, but intensified the international crisis and culminated in the Second World War. As soon as the war broke out, this tendency was greatly accelerated, because the production of the implements of war reached an unprecedented height. It exceeded the manufacture of the machinery of production and of consumers’ goods and wrought a change in the most important sectors of the national productive plant. This one sector is of exceptionally large proportions and of an exceptionally exacting nature and makes it difficult for other capital enterprises to function with complete freedom; hence, the control of it must be directly in the hands of the State, which causes an unprecedented growth in the statification of enterprise. Since the war, this process, far from being retarded, has been intensified in scope. Beginning with the war itself – except for the Soviet Union, which has a planned economy, and the United States, which gained economically from the war – all of the capitalist empires, victors as well as vanquished, have found themselves in a position from which they cannot extricate themselves. The economy has completely collapsed, the petty bourgeoisie and the workers are exceptionally dissatisfied, the revolutionary crisis is very tense, and at the same time, on the international scene, the world powers, America and Russia, are moving closer and closer to a clash – all of which forces these capitalist countries, for the sake of their continued existence, to concentrate the economic machinery in the hands of the State, to plan for internal stabilisation, and, to whatever degree possible, to ward off external attacks. As a result, such countries with traditionally “free” economies as England and

the stalinist state in china

623

France have both carried out “nationalisations” on a very large scale. The United States would seem to be the exception to the rule whereby, since the end of the war, the system of state interference in the individual economy has become more or less solidified. The principal reason, naturally, is that the power of American private monopoly capital is very great, and at the same time the United States is experiencing a period of abnormal prosperity on the back of a bankrupt world, whence these “free entrepreneurs” have a high power of resistance to the incursions of state capitalism. But if we examine more closely, we see that the production of the implements of war, with the atom bomb heading the list, is being more and more concentrated in the hands of the state, while at the same time Truman’s so-called “Fair Deal”, under the impetus of a future economic panic, could most assuredly take long strides in the direction of state capitalism. (If at such a time a socialist revolution should take place and be successful, then of course the whole picture changes.) 7. A phenomenon accompanying the statification of capitalism and pointed out by Lenin in his study of imperialism, namely, the parasitism and corruption of the bourgeoisie, is also further intensified yet another degree. Broadly speaking, the entire bourgeoisie becomes separated from the means of production and becomes a class of “profit-consumers”. The State becomes the agent that reaps the profits for the owners, and the capitalists simply turn into a decayed leisure class. 8. The decay and stagnation of capitalism causes a further change in the polarisation of classes within capitalist society. On the one hand, capital concentration and the capitalist class shrink in quantity and size; on the other, the ranks of the proletariat cannot continue to expand, but in some countries the ratio of this class to the total population decreases. The bankrupt, impotent petty bourgeoisie becomes ever larger. At the same time, the so-called “new middle class” formed under conditions of state capitalism, that is, specialists, technicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals of every type and description – these and other elements of the impoverished petty bourgeoisie at certain times form the base for the Fascist movement, and at others the cadres of Stalinism. 9. These three phenomena, viz., (a) the tendency of world capitalism towards statification, (b) the thoroughgoing corruption and decay of the individual capitalist, and (c) the numerical increase of the petty bourgeoisie and its rise in importance as a social and political force, may serve to explain the principal events that have taken place throughout the world during the last twenty years, particularly since the end of the war, and can explain very adequately the events that have transpired in China.

624

wang and shachtman

10. The semi-colonial, backward Chinese bourgeoisie, under the pressure of the enmity of the workers and peasants from within and the direct blows of Japanese imperialism from without, fell in wholeheartedly with the world current of the nationalisation of capital. But precisely because the weak base of Chinese industrial capitalism and China’s political and social backwardness caused her “nationalised” capitalism to assume a particularly decadent aspect and the capitalists who controlled these “nationalised” enterprises to exhibit a particularly shameless rapacity, the result has been in the last six or seven years a so-called bureaucratic capitalism and unprecedentedly graft-ridden political setup, the stench of which rises to the heavens. This sort of rule not only enraged the Chinese workers and peasants, but also angered broad layers of the urban petty bourgeoisie and even the medium bourgeoisie, the so-called national capitalists. 11. The Chinese Stalinists, taking advantage of this state of affairs, basing themselves on the overwhelming numerical strength of the impoverished and embittered peasantry, and proposing a program of reformed state capitalism (that is, the New Democracy), rallied the urban petty bourgeoisie and medium bourgeoisie, and gathered to their banner even a part of the working class. Through military might they easily transformed the rotten rule of the Chinesestyle “national capitalists” and took over (but by no means abolished) the state machinery and the entire economy under its control. 12. The above constitutes our explanation, on the basis of the development of world capitalism and its peculiarities, of the reasons for the collapse of Kuomintang rule and the rise of Chinese Stalinist rule. Of course, this explanation can account for only one half of the story. It still leaves unanswered questions such as the following: Why did the ccp rely on the peasants rather than the workers? Why did the “communists” at the head of China’s impoverished peasantry put forth a program of reformed state capitalism rather than socialist revolution? Why are they carrying out a reform from the top down rather than a revolution from the bottom up? Why did they merely “take over” undisturbed the bureaucratic state apparatus rather than abolish it? Why, although they have transformed the rule of the landlords and the bureaucratic capitalists, have they adopted a friendly attitude towards the bourgeoisie in general while carrying out repressive measures against the proletariat? Why do they proclaim themselves to be a working-class party and China to be a “people’s republic led by the working class” while giving the workers not the least opportunity to participate in the government or even to organise soviets? To answer these questions, we can point out the following facts about the internal situation in the country:

the stalinist state in china

625

The Chinese proletariat since 1927, when it suffered a staggering defeat thanks to its adherence to Stalinist policies, has not ascended the political stage. Although a year or two before the struggle with Japan and within the first year after Japan’s surrender the labour movement revived for a time, nevertheless, thanks to the weakness of the proletarian parties, the Kuomintang’s oppression and deceit, and the degeneration of Chinese industry in the war, and under the influence of the decay and stagnation of world capitalism, the ranks of the working class were scattered and weakened, and these movements could never acquire sufficient political and revolutionary character. The fact that the Chinese proletariat for over twenty years was unable to interfere in China’s political processes to a significant extent determined the peasant aspect, the capitalist nature, and the bureaucratic-collectivist direction of Chinese Stalinism. Of course – and this is far more important – we must seek the answer to this question in the nature of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party and the influence they exerted on the ccp. 13. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, since the late Twenties, after the elimination of the entire Old Bolshevik leadership, quickly degenerated into a bureaucratic clique exploiting the proletariat. Of course, as far as membership, organisation, and ideology were concerned, it ceased to be the vanguard of the proletariat or even a part of the proletariat. As for membership, except for a handful of Stakhanovites, workers simply could not join the party; as for organisation democratic centralism gave way to bureaucratic absolutism, and lower-ranking party members (to say nothing of non-party workers) had absolutely no right to criticize, charge, or recall the leaders or their policies; as for ideology, internationalism gave way to narrow Great-Russian nationalism, world revolution gave way to national construction based on the Soviet Union, the class struggle was transformed into “national cooperation” (or a bureaucratic operation), equalitarianism was transformed into the most naked system of privilege and discrimination, collective leadership was transformed into the most arbitrary personal dictatorship. Along with the complete degeneration of the Bolshevik party, and inextricably bound up with it, was the complete change in the character of the Soviet state. This change expressed itself primarily in the following ways: a. The soviets on which the working class had relied to control the state remained in name but disappeared in fact, and the workers were not only unable any longer to “recall at will those of their own elected representatives who did not suit them”, but even to elect their own representatives. b. The officials of the state apparatus, the officers of the regular army, the responsible persons and specialists, formed a relatively stable ruling class, became estranged from the working class, then oppressed the working class cruelly.

626 c.

wang and shachtman

The working masses in general were cheated not only of their right to participate in government but also of any right to fight for the improvement of their own living conditions. d. Therefore the Soviet Union now stands in the following class relationship politically and economically: On the one hand the bureaucracy collectively holds all political and economic power in the state, and on the other the toiling masses are absolutely without rights. This sort of state is naturally not a workers’ state, nor even a degenerate workers’ state, because the working class is politically ruled over and economically exploited; and yet it is not a capitalist state, since there is no capitalist class in it which privately owns the means of production. In that state all the means and materials of production are concentrated in the hands of a bureaucracy comprising the party, the governmental machinery, and the army, which collectively owns all the wealth. Therefore we may say that the Soviet Union of today is a country in which the bureaucracy collectively owns the means of production. The reason this sort of state was able to come into being is that, in the first place, the world socialist revolution was late in arriving and its energies dissipated, thus forcing a backward and isolated workers’ state to degenerate completely; in the second place, that the decay of world capitalism itself and the process which is pushing it at top speed in the direction of state capitalism made it impossible for the degenerated workers’ state to revert to orthodox capitalism. 14. On the face of it, bureaucratic collectivism, that is, Stalinism, would appear to be a completely new thing. It is neither socialism nor capitalism. But upon closer examination it is not difficult to perceive that it belongs under a subheading of capitalism. One difference between it and traditional capitalism is collective ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. The ownership of the means of production has not been socialised, but it has been collectivised (in the hands of the ruling class). And as for the relationship of owners to producers, exploitation continues to exist, and is in fact intensified. Bureaucratic collectivism has two great advantages over private capitalism and even over state capitalism (under the latter also there is large-scale private ownership): (a) it is possible to regulate capital in a more systematic fashion; (b) it is possible to exploit workers more efficiently. These two advantages are precisely what is needed to overcome the present crisis of capitalism. Seen from this point of view, Stalinism is a special kind of reformism, it is the reformism of the age in which capitalism has developed into imperialism. On the one hand it prevents the emergence and success of a genuine socialist revolution, and on the other, by means of collective exploitation, it continues the rule of capital over labour. Bureaucratic collectivism or Stalinism is essen-

the stalinist state in china

627

tially the transitional form which obtains during the delayed and difficult birth of socialism from the womb of capitalism. It cannot create a new historical era, but it can maintain itself for a time, and in several countries at once. In southeast Europe several such states have already been created, while the New China is being recast in the same mold. 15. To create a bureaucratic-collectivist state, one must first have a bureaucratic-collectivist party to carry out the action. The Chinese Communist Party has been that ever since Communism degenerated into bureaucratic collectivism. Because of a common international situation and long-standing historical ties, also because the class relationships within China after the defeat of the Great Revolution (the destruction of the proletariat, the long peasant wars, the utter corruption of the bourgeoisie, the anger and dissatisfaction of the petty bourgeoisie) were favourable to reformism and unfavourable to the growth of revolutionary socialism, the Chinese Communist Party took over entirely the bureaucratic collectivism perfected by Stalin within the Soviet Union. This ideological change was complete by the early Thirties. Now the ccp, embracing this ideology, has come to power and is organising the state around it. Hence it is quite natural that it can only carry out a reform from top down, put forth a state-capitalist program, simply and easily take over the Kuomintang’s bureaucratic state apparatus, destroy only part of the bourgeoisie, put a strict check on the genuinely revolutionary proletariat, and regard with hostility every mass action from the bottom up. Since the creature spawned by the ccp is a bureaucratic-collectivist state and must continue to enslave the workers, it is reactionary; but since such a state must reform capitalism, change property forms, and increase productive power, it cannot help adopting certain progressive measures. Herein we have found our answer to the question posed in 4: How and why can a reactionary regime carry out certain progressive measures? The contradiction between progress and reaction which characterises the Chinese Communist Party’s regime expresses itself particularly in its relation to the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the proletariat and poor peasantry on the other. To stabilise the rule of the bureaucracy it is necessary to conciliate the former and oppose the latter, while to reform capitalism it is necessary to conciliate the latter and oppose the former. 16. This internal contradiction has caused Chinese Communist rule for the present to assume Bonapartist features. It attempts to play the part of a supraclass mediator and proclaims “labour-capital unity for the benefit of all society”, while in reality manipulating and smoothing over class contradictions for the ultimate advantage of the bureaucratic caste. All varieties of Bonapartism rest primarily on the mass base of the petty bourgeoisie, the present ccp included. All forms of Bonapartism are fundamentally anti-working class, and the ccp

628

wang and shachtman

at present is no exception. Of course, Stalinist Bonapartism attacks private property, while orthodox Bonapartist dictatorship does not, and therein lies the great difference between them. It is absolutely necessary for us to understand this point. Therefore we cannot say that the Bonapartism of the ccp will perform a capitalist function in the sense in which we could say it of traditional Bonapartism, of Bonapartism in the literal meaning of the word. It will perform the functions of capitalism in a peculiar way, that is, by substituting the collective ownership of the bureaucracy for the private ownership of the individual capitalist. The capitalism represented by the Stalinists is no longer capitalism in the original sense of the word, but bureaucratic collectivism; the class they represent is not a capitalist class in the original sense, but a bureaucratic class which collectively owns the means of production. This distinction is of exceptional importance. If one points to the Bonapartism of the ccp without understanding this difference, then one will be unable to understand the events taking place before one’s very eyes or to predict future developments, because, while others may expect the attitude of the ccp to become daily more conciliatory towards the bourgeoisie, what we shall in fact see is a greater solidification of collectivism and a strengthening of state capital. Of course, we are under no obligation to make airily optimistic promises about what the ccp will achieve from these sad beginnings. In semicolonial, backward China, which has suffered the ravages of civil and foreign wars for over ten years, if only because of the power of resistance of the internal “automatic economy” (not to mention the increasingly acute contradictions on the international scene), the construction by the ccp of a bureaucratic-collectivist system will probably be extremely difficult. Thanks to two wars within the last ten years, the decisively significant sectors of the Chinese economy are nationalised. This gives the ccp’s future activities a great boost, but they have yet to absorb all private capital, abolish the backward relationships in the farming villages, and collectivise the small farming units which have gone bankrupt in their technical backwardness – all of them uncommonly difficult tasks. To do this the first and most important step is for the Stalinist party to initiate a broad mass struggle, to absorb countless worker and peasant elements and organise them for action, but this is a step that the Stalinist party is wary of taking. To guarantee that the new China shall remain under bureaucratic rule and not turn into a genuine workers’ and peasants’ state, they must limit this movement to certain well-defined bounds, beyond which it must not be permitted to stray so much as a single step. In its present position of extreme caution, events have naturally made it impossible for the ccp’s collectivisation to go very deep; however, the general tendency is in the direction just described, and its principal features have been pointed out above.

the stalinist state in china

629

17. When the Stalinist party, in order to advance the cause of bureaucratic collectivism, very cautiously initiates its mass movement, can the workers and poor peasants, taking advantage of this opportunity, push the struggle further, work free of the limitations imposed upon them by the Stalinist party, and cause a bureaucratically dominated movement to turn into the Chinese socialist revolution – or can they not? In theory, we can never exclude this possibility, and we – the Chinese Proletarian Revolutionary Party – must turn all our subjective efforts in that direction. But, in fact, if we dispassionately analyse China’s present class relationships, we cannot deny that this possibility is extremely slight. The prestige of the Stalinist party among the general masses is still very great, the illusion that bureaucratic collectivism equals socialism is widespread; the Chinese proletariat and its real vanguard have yet to educate themselves and unite through the bitter experience of Stalinist rule, for only then can they initiate a mighty anti-Stalinist revolution. Our chief task at present is patiently to interpret and reinterpret the fundamental nature of Stalinist bureaucratic collectivism. Naturally, “patient interpretation” by no means signifies passive observation. We must participate actively in these events. We must, while pointing out the internally contradictory character of the Stalinist party’s present struggle, on the one hand advance and broaden in scope the fight against the landlords and rich peasants and advocate and participate in all anti-capitalist struggles; and, on the other hand, oppose simultaneously the fight of the bureaucracy, oppose the enslavement of the workers under whatever guise, oppose the oppression of the poor peasantry, and, above all, consistently advocate the convocation of a Congress of workers, peasants, and soldiers, to exchange the Stalinist military agencies and the so-called “People’s Government” for a genuine workers’ and peasants’ state. We must direct every struggle towards the formation of soviets. Our principal slogan must be for a Congress of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants. 18. In view of the political and economic evidence, the China of Mao Zedong, unless a new world war or an internal revolution stops the course of its development, can “peacefully” turn into another Stalinist Russia (that is, it need not necessarily first go through a proletarian revolution and then degenerate in order to reach the same end result); or, if the China of Mao Zedong is to become a workers’ state, then nothing short of a proletarian revolution can alter the present rule. Therefore, not only can we state positively that China is not a workers’ state, but we can also prove by the same token that the Soviet Union is no longer any sort of workers’ state. The difference between the new China and the Soviet Union at present is one of degree, not of kind. Both are equally bureaucratic-collectivist states, except for a huge difference in degree of thor-

630

wang and shachtman

oughness. Therefore the Fourth International’s traditional attitude towards the Soviet Union must be altered. It must reject the view that it is any sort of workers’ state. Similarly it must reject the view that the Stalinist parties are parties of Menshevik opportunism, because, although the Stalinist parties are at present indeed fundamentally reformist, their principal crime is not their collaboration with the bourgeoisie but their bureaucratic enslavement of the proletariat. Needless to say, it is only by viewing the Soviet Union and the Stalinist parties from the point of view of bureaucratic collectivism that one can understand their nature and their actions. The same is true of the Chinese Stalinist party and its newly established state. Hong Kong, February 1950

Correspondence between Wang Fanxi and Max Shachtman, 1951–1953 (a)

Letter from Wang Fanxi [M.Y. Wang] to Max Shachtman, 1 December 19511

To: Max Shachtman 1 December 1951 Somewhere near Kwangtung [Guangdong] Dear Friend, On 15 May of this year I sent a letter from Macao to cde. Brad. No reply has ever been received. It might be lost en route. You must have learned something about our party, the Internationalist Workers Party of China (former Minority Group of the Chinese section of F.I.). On many questions, for example, on the attitude towards China’s Anti-Japanese War after it had been interlinked with the Japanese-American War, we took a position quite analogous with that of your party. After the victory of Chinese Communists in 1949, an extensive and deeplygoing discussion was carried out in our party about the nature of Stalinism and that of the u.s.s.r. As a result of that discussion, we parted with the traditional position on these two questions. We no longer consider the stalinism as an opportunist trend in workers movement and u.s.s.r. as a workers state. Majority of our members accepted the position of state capitalism, while a minority, including myself, takes a position quite close to that of yours, i.e., a viewpoint of bureaucratic collectivism. I wrote a pamphlet last year devoted to that question, and as I remember one copy has been sent to you. I wish that you could someday find a comrade who reads Chinese to translate it, at least its main idea. Our party still remains and continues its activity illegally under the Stalinist regime, despite of heavy blows suffered during the past two years. Until now, about a score of trotskyists were arrested and two of them executed.

1 The original Wang-Shachtman correspondence is housed in the Tamiment Library at New York University.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_060

632

correspondence between wang fanxi and max shachtman

There are a lot of things worth to tell you, but I can’t do it in this letter. For the present, I will confine my letter to an urgent purpose, to re-establish contacts with you. We have been living in absolute isolation since Communists swept over all China, and especially since I was deported from Hongkong in the end of 1949. You can well imagine how anxious are we to get publications again from our brother organisations. Will you please send me letters and printing materials to the following address? Here they are: 1. 2.

(For letters only). Mr. Chen Hao Tung, South China Iron Works, Tsun Wan, Hong Kong. (For letters and L.A. and N.I., but never for mimeographed pamphlets), Mr. Cen Tsu The, p.o. Box 689, Ancon Post Office, Canal Zone, Panama. Warmest Greetings, M.Y. Wang

p.s. This letter is not to be published.

(b)

Letter from Shachtman to Wang, 17 January 1952

114 West 14th Street, New York 11, New York 17 January 1952 M.Y. Wang Dear Friend, I am greatly pleased to hear from you and have already sent my thanks to our friend Chen Tsu The for his kindness in forwarding your letter to me. It is with the greatest regret that I tell you that your original letter to friend Brad was long mislaid and in any case not answered. But I very much hope that with this letter it will be possible for us to start a continuing and fruitful correspondence. The pamphlet to which you refer was received by us some time ago. Fortunately, we have a comrade who us exceptionally talented in the Chinese language, and at my request he translated the section dealing with the nature of the Stalinist movement and the Stalinist state in China. I immediately arranged for its publication in our New International which was printed a few months

correspondence between wang fanxi and max shachtman

633

ago, with a short preface by myself. The article made a deep impression upon all our comrades. We all considered it the first worthwhile theoretical analysis of the development in China that has yet appeared anywhere and we were – and remain – enormously anxious to continue receiving material for our press from you and your friends. We would like very much to receive from you both articles (for publication in our press) and reports (for our private information) about the latest developments in China and their significance, about the situation of the working class and of the peasantry, about the relations between the Chinese and the Russian Stalinists, about the position and activities of the official section of the “Fourth International” and of your own organisation, their respective attitudes towards the Chinese Stalinists and, in turn, the attitude of the Chinese Stalinists towards them. I need hardly tell you that not only the American Stalinists, but the so-called American “Trotskyists” are conducting a tremendous propaganda campaign of revolting idealisation of Stalinism in China. The “Trotskyists” not only support the Mao regime but support it without the slightest trace of criticism. The ideas of internationalism – and the interests of truth – would be greatly helped if you could manage to provide us with authentic information about what is going on in China. It is highly gratifying to learn that your comrades took a position similar to ours with regard to the war in China after it became part of the general imperialist war. It is even more gratifying to learn that the Chinese comrades have broken with the now utterly monstrous theory that the Stalinist slave regime is a kind of “Workers’ State” and that it is the duty of revolutionaries to defend it. Your solidarity with us, fundamentally, on the Chinese question today is likewise encouraging to us. I must add that it is somewhat disappointing – but quite understandable – that many of your comrades have adopted the theory that Stalinism represents a form of capitalism (“state capitalism”). If it had been possible – in these past years – to maintain a free relationship between ourselves, which would have permitted a thorough interchange of ideas and discussion between us, I am sure that the number of comrades holding this theory would be greatly reduced. We ourselves of course regard this theory as theoretically preposterous and politically futile (if not fatal), We will never win the workers away from Stalinism by telling them that it represents capitalism. Any thinking worker will see for himself that the Stalinists are destroying the basis of capitalist society – i.e., capitalist private property – and wiping out the capitalist class itself in the most ruthless way. As for the capitalist class itself, the theory that Stalinism is a form of capitalism can only make the bourgeoisie laugh itself to death. We think that comrades holding to this theory are caught in

634

correspondence between wang fanxi and max shachtman

the same fundamental trap that held Trotsky in its grip: Both of them have the utterly dogmatic, un-Marxist and therefore unscientific notion that modern society is capable of producing either a capitalist state or a workers’ state (socialism), and nothing else. That is why, when Trotsky was able to prove (and he did prove it, in my opinion) that Russia was not a capitalist state, he simply concluded from this that it must be some kind of workers’ state. In the same manner, those comrades who are able to prove (and such proof is not at all difficult) that Russia is not a workers’ state, thereupon conclude that it must be some kind of capitalist state. This is not Marxism but theology. In any case, I hope we shall be able to send you, as soon as possible, the extensive materials on this and other theoretical and political questions that we have published in the course of the last decade or so. At present, it seems impossible to send them. Our friend Chou Tsu The wrote me that his Canal Zone address is only temporary and that as soon as he moves to Europe or some other residence he will let me know. When I hear from him or from you on how to mail the materials, I will see to it that you get them as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, however, I am very eager to hear from you, and in the greatest detail. We want to hear your views, and we want from you also the maximum amount of information about the new Stalinist mystification – this time in China. If it is at all possible – and your letter seems to indicate that it is not too difficult – it would be better if you could write me in English. Knowledge of Chinese is extremely rare among us civilised barbarians. But if, for any reason, you find it necessary to write in Chinese, we will, I think, manage to find a reliable translator. I await word from you impatiently. The very warmest greetings to you and all your comrades from all of us here. Max Shachtman p.s. Are the Chinese comrades in need of material aid of any kind? If so, what, how, in what form, when, where? We are not too rich, but we would be proud to be able to help our comrades in any way possible.

correspondence between wang fanxi and max shachtman

(c)

635

Letter from Shachtman to Wang, 11 February 1953

Y. Barsh 32–30 86th Street Jackson Heights, New York 11 February 1953 My very dear friend: In clearing up some papers before leaving on a trip to visit Natalia Tro., I came across a note and an envelope from you and recalled with the deepest dismay that I had not replied to your letter. I had for some time been confined to bed with a heart ailment, which was followed to moving to the above address, and it seems that in the confusion your letter was neglected. I most sincerely beg your forgiveness and hope we shall henceforth be able to maintain a regular correspondence. As I wrote to you in the first letter, which was evidently lost, we were highly pleased to hear from you. You may know that your article on China was reproduced in full, in a good translation, in our monthly review and it caused a good deal of excitement and interest in our ranks. I am glad to say that, in our own way, we had arrived at exactly the same analysis and conclusion. We regard Stalinism as an international social phenomenon, not progressive, but retrogressive and reactionary – regardless of the country in which it arises or advances. It is not, of course, an ordinary reactionary movement, but one which has a plebeian base, which is anti-capitalist, without a doubt, but which is even more decidedly anti-proletarian and anti-peasant inasmuch as it social objective is the establishment of the class rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. I cannot hope in these few lines indicate the whole of our position not only on Stalinism, but on American imperialism, the war in Korea or the coming imperialist third world war. I can only say, in a word, that our position remains firmly internationalist and in no degree represents any conciliation towards capitalism or capitalist imperialism. Only this: we refuse to fall into the trap of “defence of the Soviet Union” – i.e., of the Stalinist despotism – because of our intransigent opposition to Stalinism. All of us are burning with the keenest interest in the latest developments in Asia, most especially in China. Reliable information is exceedingly difficult to find in the United States. Would it be possible for you to write us, in the very greatest detail, about the position of the movement we are interested in, what has happened to it, what is its attitude towards the Mao regime, etc., etc.? We would also be highly pleased to receive from you an article, or a series of art-

636

correspondence between wang fanxi and max shachtman

icles on the economic and political situation of the mall regime, of its social prospects and its significance, and any and all aspects of the Stalinist movement in China. I am using the envelope you sent me, and pray that it reaches you and find you in the best of health. When writing me, simply address the envelope as indicated at the top of this letter. If possible, let me know where we can send you copies of our newspaper and our review, and indicate if your present address is still worthwhile. Meantime, all of us send you our warmest fraternal greetings. Devotedly yours, Max Shachtman

section e Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin’s Selected Writings on Marxism and Trotskyism

∵

Introduction to Part 2, Section E Wang Fanxi (Wang Fan-hsi) (1907–2002) joined the ccp in 1925 while a student at Beijing University and became a Trotskyist in Moscow in 1928. Returned to China in 1929 and worked for a while as an aide to Zhou Enlai. He worked as a Trotskyist with Zhou Enlai in 1930–1931, before his expulsion from the ccp. Zheng Chaolin (1901–1998), a writer and translator, joined the ccp in Paris in 1922 and returned to China in 1924 to edit the Party organ Xiangdao (“Guide Weekly”). He became a Trotskyist in 1929, and served seven years in prison under Chiang Kai-shek. Arrested by the Maoist secret police in 1952, he was kept in prison without trial until 1979. Wang and Zheng led the wing of Chinese Trotskyism known as the iwp. Their memoirs have been published both in Chinese and in English translation.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_061

On the Twentieth Anniversary of the Transitional Programme (1957) S.Y. Wang [Wang Fanxi]

In 1957, twenty years after Trotsky’s Transitional Programme was first adopted by the Fourth International as its guiding framework, Wang wrote this critical reflection on it, as a contribution to the debate in the international Trotskyist movement. In it, Wang suggests that it needed in some respects to be revised, though in accord with the basic spirit of the original programme, applying the same methods but responding to the new times. The English version of this article can be found among the James P. Cannon Papers, 1919–1975, Wisconsin Historical Society, USA. We got hold of it thanks to Joseph Miller. Gregor Benton edited it for style and clarity.

(Note: This article was written three years ago, in 1957. Not until last summer was I able to translate it into English. Hard living and poor health prevented me from doing so earlier. I send it to you [the swp of the US], as well as to comrades in other countries, on the grounds that the said article, constituting some personal remarks on our Transitional Programme, has even now not lost its timeliness. 30 December 1961.) The Transitional Programme was officially adopted in September 1937, at the Founding Congress of the Fourth International. Twenty years have passed since the adoption of that document. The last two decades have not been a period of peaceful development in the world, but, on the contrary, one of unprecedented and tumultuous changes, of wars and revolutions. During that epoch, the following great events of historical importance can be listed: a war on a world scale, the collapse of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the inauguration of a series of “People’s Democracies” in Central and Eastern Europe; the downfall of Kuomintang rule in China and the extension of the power of the Chinese communists over the whole country; the independence achieved by the former British and French colonies; finally the division of the world into two camps: one headed by the USA, the other led by the Soviet Union – both actively preparing for war, with hideous weapons which could not have been imagined twenty years ago, so that a new war now threatens the total destruction of the human race. © S.Y. Wang [Wang Fanxi], 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_062

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

641

Do these two decades of such tremendous and radical changes make necessary the re-examination of our programme? In other words, does the document setting out our basic positions, which was fully correct in relation to the world situation of 20 years ago, retain its validity today? The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. Twenty-five years later, in 1872, Marx and Engels wrote a preface for the new edition, pointing out among other things that certain secondary passages of the Manifesto were obsolete. Sixty-five years later, in 1939, when the Manifesto celebrated its ninetieth anniversary, Leon Trotsky wrote the following lines: Thus, we see that the joint and rather brief production of two young authors continues to give irreplaceable directives upon the most important and burning questions of the struggle for emancipation. What other book could even distantly be compared with the Communist Manifesto? But this does not imply that after ninety years of unprecedented development of productive forces and vast social struggles, the Manifesto needs neither corrections nor additions. Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with idol-worship. Programmes and prognoses are tested and corrected in the light of experience, which is the supreme criterion of human reason. The Manifesto, too, requires corrections and additions. However, as is evidenced by the historical experience itself, these corrections and additions can be successfully made only by proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the foundation of the Manifesto itself. We shall try to indicate this in several most important instances. Having thus made clear his attitude towards the most authoritative document of Communism, Trotsky indicated eight points of correction and addition. We agree in full with Trotsky’s new contributions to the Manifesto and at the same time appreciate highly his attitude of reverence without idol worship in making these contributions. Towards the Transitional Programme, mainly written by Trotsky, we should, in my opinion, take the same attitude. Having cut off all relations with our brother sections and lived in absolute isolation since 1949, we [in China] scarcely know what has been going on in the International, we do not know whether such a task has been undertaken by our comrades in other countries. It is to be hoped, however, that they have done so, or at least, that the job is being seriously undertaken by them, so that at the forthcoming congress of the Fourth International, a new programme or more precisely a transitional programme with necessary corrections and additions

642

wang

might be adopted. Just to reaffirm our programme and declare that nothing in it has been rendered obsolete is, in my opinion, not enough, and therefore incorrect. I would like to submit the following comments on the Transitional Programme to those comrades who may be responsible for or entrusted with the task of reviewing it. The starting point from which the whole Transitional Programme proceeds is the following assertion: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”. This assertion, in our opinion, retains its full validity and timeliness. Neither the seizure of power by Communists in many countries nor the collapse of Fascist regimes in Germany and Italy has made it obsolete. It was correct twenty years ago, and it is more so today. On the one hand, the imperialist bourgeoisie, with the help of their “socialist” lackeys, is “now immeasurably less capable of averting war than on the eve of the Second World War”. It has been driven by its own desperation. On the other hand, the Stalinist bureaucracies of various countries are doing their utmost to discredit the socialist cause in the eyes of the world proletariat. They build “socialism in their respective motherlands” by barbarous and criminal methods, so as to make the working class of the world lose confidence in socialism, to weaken their determination to fight for it, and thus to get rid of the only means whereby a new world war which threatens the total destruction of civilisation can be effectively prevented. Therefore, as it was twenty years ago, so it is today, “the historical crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership”. Now let us look at the second section of the Transitional Programme, “The proletariat and its leadership”, where among other things, we see the following two important ideas: The chief obstacle in the path of transforming the prerevolutionary situation into a revolutionary one is the opportunist character of proletarian leadership. […] The definitive crossing over of the Comintern to the side of the bourgeois order, its cynically counterrevolutionary role throughout the world, particularly in Spain, France, the United States, and other “democratic” countries, created exceptional new difficulties for the world proletariat. Most of this is undeniably true. But unlike the Second International, the Comintern’s counterrevolutionary role is not primarily “opportunist in nature”, it

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

643

has not “definitively” crossed over to the side of the bourgeois order. Its sin against the working class and socialism lies, on the contrary, in its bureaucratic nature. The Transitional Programme equated the reformist parties with the Stalinist Party, considering both to be opportunist in nature and equally guilty of serving the bourgeoisie. Today we must admit that this was an error of judgment. Because of it we have made many predictions about the degeneration of the Stalinist Party into a party of the capitalist order; because of it we came to believe that the Soviet Union, in the absence of a revolutionary rehabilitation, would emerge from the war for the most part as a conventional bourgeois state; because of it we have been unable to understand the nature of the “people’s democracies” of Central and Eastern Europe; because of it we have been unable to foresee in advance and in the event the victory of the Communist Party and its post-victories. The Stalinist Party was undoubtedly guilty of opportunism. But opportunism was not its sole feature, nor even its main one. In retrospect, we can say that only in the days before the “Third Period” (which began in the autumn and winter of 1929), with the “bloc of four classes” in the Chinese Revolution, the “Anglo-Russian Committee” during the British General Strike, and the concessions to rich peasants and the new bourgeoisie in the building of the Soviet Union, was that Stalinism was characterised by opportunism as more or less the same sort as that of the Second International. Since the 1930s, Stalinism has lurched from left to right under the weight of events at home and abroad, but however shameless, its opportunist aspect has ceased to be strategic and principled and has become mainly tactical and instrumental. The Stalinist Party did not definitively join the bourgeois order but rather opposed the bourgeoisie (and at the same time various anti-capitalist parties – especially the Fourth International) in its characteristically cynical, insidious, and venomous way, using bureaucratic tactics to take control of the mass revolutionary movement. The reformism of the Stalinist party was more a drug in the hands of a liar than a wolf in a sheepskin: it was less about helping the bourgeoisie to anaesthetise the masses and more about persuading the bourgeoisie to relax its vigilance. Needless to say, whenever it encounters sections of the revolutionary masses not susceptible to its control, it chooses to sabotage the revolution by falling on its knees before the bourgeoisie; but even then, it does not go over once and for all to the side of capitalism, for once the situation changes, it will again turn against the bourgeoisie. Classical reformism paralyses the revolution and undermines it in order to protect the capitalist system. There is no question but that it is on the side of the bourgeois order. Stalinism, on the other hand, in order to fight for and secure

644

wang

its bureaucratic control over the revolutionary masses and to ensure that the revolution against capitalism is forever under its bureaucratic control, veers between two extremes: sometimes it goes out of its way to join forces with the bourgeoisie in order to sabotage the revolution, at other times it drives the revolution towards victory in order to overthrow the capitalist system. It has not gone over definitively to the side of the bourgeois order. Reformism differs from Stalinism in this sense. The two traditions differ because of their different origins, backgrounds, and class bases. The roots of reformism were in the capitalist system, whereas the roots of Stalinism were mainly in the new system created in the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, in the existing social systems (capitalist and pre-capitalist) of relevant countries. The origins and nature of the reformist parties is a relatively simple matter: they are a labour aristocracy created out of the bourgeoisie’s super-profits in the imperialist era, rooted also in a large section of the middle and lower petty bourgeoisie and a good number of workers lacking in class-consciousness. They are the bourgeoisie’s loyal opposition, but in no way the mortal enemies of capitalist private property. They call themselves socialists, but the socialism they want can exist only within capitalism. Their basic interests coincide with those of the bourgeoisie and they are therefore definitively on the side of the bourgeois order. Stalinism is primarily an ideology that developed in the wake of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state. It was principally a generalisation of the new reality that gradually crystallised in the Soviet Union before and after the 1930s. In a word, that new reality in the Soviet Union, call it what you will, was not capitalist but had as its roots in a collective system of property ownership. The bearers and practitioners of this “ism” were also a kind of aristocracy, even an aristocracy that emerged from among the workers, but they differed in fundamental respects from the “aristocracy” of reformism, for they controlled a system of collective property and the surplus value, while the latter championed capitalist property and enjoyed a share of its profits. Because of this difference, Stalinism fundamentally opposed the capitalist system, whereas the reformists fundamentally favoured it. The Stalinist movement outside the Soviet Union also fully reflects this difference. In the highly developed capitalist countries, the Stalinists represent the more or less resolutely anti-capitalist proletariat rather than its aristocracy. In backward countries, as a result of the weakness of capitalism, there is little or no material basis for reformism. No reformist party with mass following could ever come into existence in such countries. So all the revolutionary masses have gathered around or leaned towards Stalinism, even though the Stalinist parties, whether in highly developed or under-developed capitalist countries,

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

645

have never been consistent in their opposition to the capitalist system. They shift from all-out leftism to extreme rightism, even more shamelessly than the reformists. These abrupt turns and zigzags, as we all know, have been made in accordance with the changing diplomatic needs of the Kremlin bureaucracy. We have been in the habit of emphasising only one side of the Stalinism, its servile submission to the Kremlin, while seriously underrating its other side, as representative of the more anti-capitalist masses in various countries. True, unlike right-wing social-democrats and many ex-Trotskyists we have never looked upon the Stalinist parties outside the Soviet Union as a mere Soviet Fifth Column. Nevertheless, we have always underscored their dependence on the Kremlin and overlooked their roots in national soils. Consequently, we called them diplomatic tools of Moscow, used to wring concessions from their “own” imperialism when they took a leftist line, and out-and-out reformists when they turned to the right. The history of the past two decades teaches us that Stalinism has not and will not become a one hundred per cent reformist party. Why so? Because, first of all, as Trotsky pointed out in his unfinished book on Stalin, bourgeois rule has been proved obsolete throughout the world. For this reason, capitalism has not been restored in the Soviet Union, even though it is degenerated deeply into a bureaucratic state. Yet it has strengthened and consolidated the new form of property, collective ownership. Stalinist parties outside the ussr, partly representing the interest of Soviet bureaucracy, have likewise not degenerated into capitalist parties. At the same time, the interests of the toiling masses of their own countries, which Stalinist parties represent in the sense outlined above, have also prevented them from degenerating into mere reformism. At the same time there is less and less possibility in any capitalist country of carrying out social reforms because there are ever fewer super-profit to share with the working class. The more obsolete and rotten world capitalism becomes, the less the possibility of the Soviet Union degenerating into a capitalist state, and the less the possibility of the emergence of a reformist Stalinism. If we could not come to this conclusion twenty years ago, then we can and must do so today, when the capitalist world has travelled so much further on the road to its death agony, while the so-called Socialist world has, on the contrary, grown in geographic scope and strength. Today, if we continue to hold to the old position of our Programme on that question, declaring the “opportunistic character” of proletarian leadership (including Stalinist parties) as the “chief obstacle in the path of revolution”, and asserting the definite transition of Stalinist parties into the bourgeois order, we will find ourselves at odds with reality.

646

wang

The characterisation of Stalinism in the “Transitional Programme” should be corrected now. Once the correction has been made, our attitude towards the Stalinist slogan of “Workers and Peasants Government” should also change. Section 13 of the Programme reads as follows: The chief accusation which the Fourth International advances against the traditional organisations of the proletariat is that they do not wish to tear themselves away from the political semi-corpse of the bourgeoisie. Under these conditions the demand, systematically addressed to the old leadership, of “‘Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power!’” is an extremely important weapon for exposing the treacherous character of the parties and organisations of the Second, Third and Amsterdam Internationals. Such a position, so far as Stalinism is concerned, has, we must admit, been proved outdated. The Third International, understood here as the Stalinist parties in the different countries, did their utmost to seize power but only in so far as conditions permitted. Although they danced and would dance with political corpses of bourgeoisie, their goal was quite different from that of the Second International. This we can see very clearly from the “coalition government” formed by the Chinese Stalinists with the “Democratic Groups”. In creating such a “coalition”, the Chinese Communists did not inject “an entirely different and purely ‘democratic’, i.e., bourgeois, content into the formula of ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ wherewith to oppose the proletarian dictatorship” (as we accused) them of doing, but instead made use of the formula as a “democratic tactic”. So if we recognise the bureaucratic dictatorship of Stalinists as proletarian in a certain sense, then we should admit that the slogan “Workers and Peasant Government” or “Coalition Government” raised today by the Stalinists not only differs in character from the Menshevik policy in 1917 but even from their own “people’s front” tactic adopted around 1936. As a result of the rapid decay of capitalism and of the increased self-confidence of the Stalinist bureaucracy, that traditionally opportunistic slogan has become more and more a cover and subterfuge for “proletarian dictatorship”. Precisely because of the above-mentioned position taken in our programme, we Trotskyists of China, as well as the whole world, made a wrong judgment and prognosis about the victory of the Chinese Stalinists and its consequences. We used to affirm before 1949 that the Chinese Communists could not and would not overthrow the Kuomintang and seize power. After their victory at the national level, we declared that they would never be able to break with the political semi-corpses of the bourgeoisie, so we prophesised that they would have to compromise with and make concessions to the bourgeoisie in political

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

647

and economic matters. All these judgments and prognoses have been proved wrong by events. So better late than never, we must admit our mistake in hindsight and correct it. Another important passage in the same section (no. 13) of our Programme runs as follows: However, one cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.), the pettybourgeois parties including the Stalinists may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie. In any case one thing is not to be doubted: even if this highly improbable variant should in some place and at some time become a reality and the “Workers and Farmers’ Government” in the above-mentioned sense is established in fact, it would represent merely a short episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat. The victory of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) in fact turned out to be precisely that realisation of the theoretical possibility that has not been “categorically denied in advance” in our programme. It was true that the Chinese Stalinists’ break with the bourgeoisie took place “under the pressure of completely exceptional circumstance” (war, defeat – which in China’s case should read “victory” – financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.). And it was also true that their victory was beyond the expectation of Mao Zedong and his followers. Here the great perspicacity of the chief author of our programme, Trotsky, who was at once bold, comprehensive and prudent in making theoretical forecasts of the way in which events might develop, is fully revealed. (By the way, it may be proper to point out here that had we understood and paid better attention to this passage of the programme earlier, we would not have been puzzled and surprised in the face of the victory of the ccp.) However, no matter how perspicacious this forecast may have been it still needs some corrections and supplements in the light of new experiences, as this forecast was still based on the identification in kind of the Second and Third Internationals. The experience of China’s “People’s Government” has proved that once such a government was established, although it did not immediately transform itself into a genuine proletarian dictatorship, nonetheless it did not turn into a bourgeois dictatorship, it did not concede power to the bourgeoisie as the old opportunists would have done in such circumstances. What the Chinese Stalinists have done and are doing with their so-called “People’s Government” was and is to make this government a government of the “pro-

648

wang

letariat” (in the sense understood by them) but under greedy, unscrupulous and absolutely bureaucratic control. Moreover, the said government has done several things that could truly have been done only by a proletarian government. We may and should disagree with the ccp in many respects, but it would be groundless to accuse them of being unwilling to break with the bourgeoisie. Yet this charge remains in our programme, as one of the chief crimes of the Stalinist parties. We must change this line. If we wish to have a firm position from which to oppose and accuse the Stalinists, we must first of all declare that from now on (more exactly, since the late thirties) Stalinism’s main crime has been not reformism but bureaucratism. It has not been the Stalinists’ unwillingness to break with the bourgeoisie, but their readiness to break with and oppose the working class. Let us now look at the section of our Programme devoted to the Soviet Union. Concerning the character of the Soviet Union, the Programme gives a social diagnosis and offers a political prognosis. Social diagnosis: “It still remains a degenerated workers state”. Political prognosis: It has two possibilities: “Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism”. I myself once doubted the correctness of this social diagnosis. In 1950, in a pamphlet titled “A Study of the Soviet Union”, I advanced the opinion that the Soviet Union could no longer be considered a workers’ state, and that it should instead be seen as a state of the bureaucratic type, based on collective property. I gave up this view, however, after further consideration and thinking. I have returned to the original position stated in our programme. I find it impossible either in theory or in fact to refute Trotsky’s argument that only a proletarian revolution or at least a revolution – though under a leadership not of genuine proletarian origin – corresponding in some way to the historical interests of the proletariat can completely abolish the private ownership of property in the Soviet Union. History until today has not provided a simple example to the contrary. So a state in which private ownership of property has been abolished, with an economy moving firmly along the road to collective ownership of property, should be considered a workers’ state, or (if controlled by a totalitarian bureaucracy) a degenerated, sick, or deformed workers’ state. I therefore think the social diagnosis of the Soviet Union in our programme remains correct. But the same can no longer be said of its political prognosis. History in the course of the past twenty years has shown that the Stalinist parties did not pass

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

649

into the bourgeois camp. Needless to say, this cannot be ascribed to the “loyalty” of Stalinism to the proletarian cause and socialism. Stalinism has never exhibited this quality. It is the blind alley in which world capitalism finds itself that has caused the Soviet rulers to stick to the road of “socialism”. There was no room left for any other alternative. The Soviet Union has been forced to go on along the socialist road, although it has not succeeded in ridding itself of the corrupt, abusive bureaucracy standing at its head. Twenty years ago, it was rather difficult to guess how strong would be the political, economic, and ideological pressure of moribund world capitalism, how far it would affect the development of the Soviet Union. It was therefore understandable that our programme should forecast alternatives for the political development of the Soviet Union. However, things have become quite different. The capitalist world, headed by US imperialism, is so obviously weakened that we can now affirm that the world bourgeoisie will find it very difficult to turn the Stalinist party into an instrument for the transformation of the Soviet Union into a capitalist state by means of exerting pressure, even military pressure. The political prognosis made in the Transitional Programme therefore needs correcting. We should declare that from now on the group of deformed workers’ states headed by the Soviet Union are unlikely to submit to capitalist pressure and give up their new form of property ownership. The contrary is more likely. In order to strengthen their own privileged position, in the interests of the sort of “socialism” they stand for, and in order to counteract capitalist aggression, the Soviet bureaucrats will continue, probably with increasing effort but by bureaucratic means, to consolidate and develop the system of collective property, while at the same time expanding their system to new areas. This does not in any sense mean that henceforth the only role for the Stalinist bureaucracy will be the promotion and expansion of socialism. The building of “socialism” by the bureaucracy is confined to single countries rather than taking the whole world into its scope; it is envisaged merely in the interests of the privileged bureaucrats rather than of the toilers, so the results of their “socialist construction” will only be to sharpen antagonisms between various countries (even between “socialist” countries themselves) and to render the struggles between the ruling bureaucracy and the toiling masses even more irreconcilable. A system with such intrinsic antagonisms is, of course, not one of genuine socialism, and can never be. But that should not stop us admitting that all those countries ruled by Communist parties today are proceeding along precisely such a path of “socialism”, although this path was not chosen consciously by bureaucrats, nor was its adoption a matter of satisfying their own conscious will. It is above all the result

650

wang

of the circumstances in which a number of sketchily conceived workers’ states were born of similarly half-baked proletarian revolutions. Two wholly antagonistic concepts, national “socialism” and the bureaucratic workers’ state, will therefore probably become realities for a short period of time in the near future in human history. We must underline this reality when we set out to make new social and political diagnoses of the Soviet Union and the “People’s Democracies”. The political task of Fourth Internationalists in these countries should be formulated primarily according to this reality. That is to say, they should concentrate all their strength on the fight against bureaucratism rather than Stalinist opportunism. It is the bureaucratic blunders and crimes that they have committed in building socialism that we should first of all oppose, not the opportunistic capitulation to the bourgeoisie in which they have occasionally engaged, in the form of diplomatic bargains with capitalist powers. A further passage in our programme dealing with the groups within the Soviet bureaucracy says: The revolutionary elements within the bureaucracy, only a small minority, reflect, passively it is true, the socialist interests of the proletariat. The fascist, counterrevolutionary elements, growing uninterruptedly, express with even greater consistency the interests of world imperialism. These candidates for the role of compradors consider, not without reason, that the new ruling layer can insure their positions of privilege only through rejection of nationalisation, collectivisation, and a monopoly of foreign trade in the name of the assimilation of “Western civilisation”, i.e., capitalism. Between these two poles, there are intermediate, diffused Menshevik-sr-liberal tendencies that gravitate in the direction of bourgeois democracy. The description is obviously based in the belief that Stalinism will definitely pass over into the bourgeois order. Consequently, this description, like the belief from which it sprang, has also been shown to be wrong. It is true that revolutionary elements within the bureaucracy have formed only a small minority. But it is not true that fascist, counterrevolutionary elements have grown “uninterruptedly”; they have not proved to be the majority in the bureaucratic structure. There were undoubtedly plenty of bureaucrats keen to assimilate “western civilisation” to their own system, but they too did not prevail in the case of the Soviet ruling caste. As for “centrists” situated between the two poles, and represented by Stalin himself, they were neither diffused nor did they gravitate towards bourgeois democracy. As the decisive group within the bureau-

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

651

cracy, they have worked wholeheartedly to strengthen their rule on the basis of nationalised property. In a sense, one could call them “bureaucratic collectivists”. If the prognosis of the development of the Soviet Union and the “People’s Democracies” can no longer be regarded as one of two alternatives, how should it be defined? Can we say that there is only one future left for these countries, i.e., that after the period of accumulation of collective wealth under the bureaucratic dictatorship, when the working class has grown quantitatively and qualitatively so as to become “master of the country”, a political revolution (with more or less violence) of workers could break out to overthrow the bureaucracy and move forward in the direction of genuine socialism? My answer to this question is “yes and no”. Yes, because among the conceivable perspectives open to these countries, such a perspective is indeed the most probable one. If socialism is the only way out for humankind, those countries that have taken one or two steps along that path would be much more open to that “historical inevitability”. They cannot free themselves from the influence of that “inevitability”, in spite of the fact that they have suffered and are suffering setbacks, betrayals, hardships, and degenerations in proceeding along their present path. If the capitalist economy as a whole can neither return to its “healthy” state of earlier days nor remain forever in its present state of death agony, it will be quite impossible for those countries where capitalism has been overthrown to return to such a condition. In this broad and “abstract” sense (though one with a firm objective basis), we should say that there is only one future left for the Soviet Union and the “People’s Democracies”: to advance towards socialism, albeit through all manner of trials and at great cost. This, of course, does not imply that they will make direct progress towards such a goal. There will be a transitional period, longer or shorter, in the case of each separate country. During that period, different countries will adopt different political as well as economic forms. Each country will experience bureaucracy in politics and inequality in the economy. The nature of the bureaucracy and the degree of social inequality in each country will, as in the past, be decided by the international situation, the degree of economic development, the proportion of the working class in relation to the entire population, the workers’ experience of political struggle, the general cultural level of the country, its democratic tradition, the character of the ruling party, and other factors. The more unbridled the bureaucracy and the wider the gap between social castes, the greater the cost (which otherwise would not be incurred or would be much less) for the building of socialism. We must therefore continue to argue that the success of the construction of socialism in all these workers’ states will depend on the success of a new democratic revolution of the working class. From a

652

wang

long-range historical perspective, however, the anti-bureaucratic revolution of working masses will quite probably break out in time to rescue the socialist achievements from the dangers that beset them as a result of the misrule of the bureaucracy. So there is only one future left for the Soviet Union and other bureaucratised workers’ states – to move forward, by one means or another to socialism. And in what sense can we answer our question with a no? In his article “Again and Once More Again on the Nature of the ussr”, Trotsky wrote: “The Marxist comprehension of historical necessity has nothing in common with fatalism. Socialism is not realisable ‘by itself’, but as a result of the struggle of living forces, classes and their parties ... Precisely in this lies the source of our conviction in victory. But we have full right to ask ourselves: What character will society take if the forces of reaction conquer?” What Trotsky said about the perspective of society in general is entirely applicable to the “workers’ states” in particular. Even if we believe firmly that the anti-bureaucratic revolutions will break out in time and will win in the Soviet Union and other “People’s Democracies”, that the socialist future of these countries will be guaranteed, we still have the right to ask: if the results of the struggle of living forces, classes, and their parties repeatedly show that those states will not be able to “open the way to socialism” through a new proletarian political revolution, could they remain “degenerated workers’ states” forever? Of course not. In such a case, we would have to conclude that both “socialist” and capitalist countries would collapse into an “era of barbarism”. In that sense, the prognosis for the Soviet Union and the other countries is still: socialism or barbarism. “An alternative of this kind” as Trotsky pointed out, “has not only theoretical interest but also enormous importance in agitation, because in its light the necessity for socialist revolution (in capitalist states) and political revolution in ‘workers’ states’ appears most graphically”. The alternative “socialism or barbarism” is not, to my understanding, the same as that of “socialism or capitalism”. At the end of the section in the Transitional Programme devoted to the Soviet Union, a series of revolutionary demands are raised. All these demands remain valid. None has been proved mistaken or outdated. As time passes and more and more countries have come to be ruled by Stalinist parties, these demands have proved ever more timely and correct. They will not only be taken up in the Soviet Union as the programme of the new political revolution but also in China and other “People’s Democracies” as the banner of antibureaucratic revolution. But how is it that a prognosis regarded as wrong and outdated can lead to a timely and correct prescription? The reason lies, I think, in the difference

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

653

between “prognosis” and “prescription”. All these demands and slogans in the Transitional Programme are directed against “social inequalities” and “political oppression”. They fight against the Stalinist regime’s bureaucratism rather than its opportunism. The fact that these anti-bureaucratic slogans retain their full prescriptive strength and validity in its turn confirms the incorrectness of the prognosis. The present world situation differs from that of twenty years ago. Instead of one Soviet Union, there are now several “deformed workers’ states”. Questions that once concerned only one sixth of the world now concern nearly one half of it. In all these newly established “socialist” countries, the revolutionary demands listed in our programme can and should be applied, for they are committing fundamentally the same crimes and errors as the Kremlin. Nevertheless, the antagonisms that disfigure these countries are not, at least in form, all the same. The different social and historical conditions of each country mean that the antagonisms created by Communist regimes in particular countries inevitably assume a national character. We know from recent incidents in Yugoslavia, Poland, and Hungary that the exploitation and oppression of one nation by another still happens even in “socialist” countries. Our new programme should present a new analysis and exposition of these antagonisms and formulate new revolutionary demands. Our new programme should not be merely a new edition of the Transitional Programme with some revisions and additions. It should be re-drafted in the same spirit and with the same method that Trotsky applied when drafting the programme twenty years ago. The whole structure of our new programme should change in accordance with changes in the world situation. In the Transitional Programme, only one section of twenty-one is devoted to the question of the Soviet Union. In our new programme, the problems of “socialist” countries should be treated in greater detail. They should occupy a place at least equal to if not greater than that devoted to the problems of the capitalist world. From now on it is quite obvious that the problems of “constructing the new” (i.e., getting rid of the Stalinist bureaucracy and advancing along a genuine socialist road) should have the same weight as that of “overthrowing the old” (i.e., putting an end to capitalism and its crimes). These two sets of problems are closely linked: they influence each other in a relationship of cause and effect. We must bear in mind that the support or toleration shown by workers and petty bourgeois in the capitalist countries of their own bourgeoisies is to be explained less by a residual “love” of capitalism than by a fear of socialism, which has been ugly in practice and terribly discredited by Stalinist parties in various countries. If the so-called “People’s Democracies” or “socialist” coun-

654

wang

tries were healthy workers’ states along the lines of the Soviet Union in Lenin’s day, their moral power alone would be enough to demolish the very foundations of the dying capitalist world. So the task of overthrowing the Stalinist bureaucracy is in essence the same as that of overthrowing capitalism. The section on the “Struggles Against War and Imperialism” remains fundamentally correct, though some secondary issues need reformulating in order to keep up with the changing world situation. Since a new future world war will break out mainly between the imperialist states and the states ruled by Communist parties, the fight against war and imperialism will involve different tasks and forms of action on the part of revolutionaries. They will differ from those adopted during the past two world wars, which were waged essentially between two imperialist camps. The struggles against chauvinism, in so far as the parties of the Second International and the masses under their influence are concerned, is still an important task in our programme of combating war. But in respect to the Stalinist parties in the capitalist countries it is no longer as important as in the past. Or more correctly, it is posed in a different way. Communist parties in the capitalist countries, during the coming world war, will certainly be mercilessly suppressed by their own bourgeois governments. And they will certainly go underground in order to carry out sabotage and espionage and even to engage in armed uprisings. […] The Communist parties will more probably take a defeatist position and adopt ultra-left and adventurist policies. Our programme has rightly pointed out that “a correct policy is composed of two elements: an uncompromising attitude to imperialism and its wars and the ability to base one’s programme on the experience of the masses themselves”. In the wars to come the blunders and crimes that Stalinist parties may or rather will commit will relate to the first rather than the second issue. In the coming war, both under the Kremlin’s orders and because of their own conviction, Stalinists in capitalist countries will probably support the Soviet Union and other countries ruled by Communist parties. (Such a position would fundamentally be the same as ours.) But in carrying out such a task, they will certainly differ from us in ways and means. They will never “base their programme on the masses”. In other words, they will adopt an adventurist policy regardless of the mood and experience of the masses. Out of time-honoured habit in thought and practice, they will undoubtedly display their bureaucratism to the utmost, and will even ruin the anti-war revolutionary movements by engaging in terroristic acts. In such circumstances, the Stalinists would subordinate the interests of world revolution to the military defence of the Soviet Union. We, on the other hand, would insist that the task of defending the Soviet Union should be sub-

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

655

ordinated to that of world revolution. In our new programme, this difference of strategy for the world revolution must be formulated emphatically and concretely. A new world war, even if fought along class-struggle lines, cannot replace world revolution. Capitalist rule in the various countries can only be overthrown by socialist revolution undertaken by the working class. The military victory of a foreign country (a workers’ state) over a capitalist one, even one that ends in the downfall of the bourgeois government of that country, will not necessarily lead to the victory of socialist revolution. The contrary would usually be the case. Military conquests have always been more likely to cultivate bourgeois nationalism among the masses of the defeated nations and to create new difficulties in the way of proletarian socialist revolution. At a time when Stalinists all over the world (including a great number of sincere communists) are ever more intoxicated with the armed strength of the Soviet Union, we must point out the relation between war and revolution and the difference between them. We must also strongly oppose the Kremlin’s attempts to impose reactionary bureaucratic regimes on the working masses of other countries by means of war. Our programme declares: “In supporting the colonial country or the Soviet Union in a war, the proletariat does not in the slightest degree solidarise either with the bourgeois government of the colonial country or with the Thermidorian bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, it maintains full political independence from the one as from the other. Giving aid in a just and progressive war the revolutionary proletariat wins the sympathy of the workers in the colonies and in the Soviet Union, strengthens there the authority and influence of the Fourth International, and increases its ability to help overthrow the bourgeois government in the colonial country, and the revolutionary bureaucracy in the Soviet Union”. This position retains its full validity. But because the Soviet Union today is no longer isolated and stands at the head of a whole “camp” of countries, because there are more toiling masses now than ever before living under bureaucratic regimes, complicated relations have arisen among various countries within that camp and many new “internal contradictions” beset their relations; so the question of how Fourth Internationalists in a future major war can on the one hand realise the task of defending these countries and on the other call for a new revolution should be dealt with more concretely and in greater detail in our new programme. Slogans and demands in this section should be divided into two categories: those that can be universally applied; and those applicable to a particular country only (such as Yugoslavia, China, Poland, etc.).

656

wang

At the second congress of the Fourth International we raised the slogan “Neither Washington nor the Kremlin but world proletarian revolution!” This slogan, representing our basic position towards both camps, should be included in our programme. It should, needless to say, be accompanied by a clear explanation that we would adopt a “defeatist” policy only in those countries headed by US imperialism and not in the camp led by the Soviet Union, where our position should properly be called “victoryism” – to win victory, we must seek the downfall of those bureaucratic regimes represented by the Kremlin. The section on the arming of the proletariat remains entirely correct. As time goes on, it has been more and more clearly shown to be of utmost importance. As a result of the militarisation of the bourgeois state, nearly every class struggle “irresistibly tends to transform itself into civil war”. So Trotsky taught us that in every strike we must endeavour to organise strike pickets (which are the basic nuclei of the proletarian army). We must propagate the need to create workers’ self-defence groups unified according to neighbourhood, city, and district, and to organise workers’ militias. Our programme points out that “the arming of the proletariat is an imperative concomitant element to its struggle for liberation”. In the concluding passage of this section, the programme demands that all sections of the Fourth International lead the search for new ways and means of arming the proletariat. All this must be retained in the new programme, with even greater emphasis than in the past. However, given the very rich experience gained during and after the Second World War in many important areas of the world, some supplementary comments are required. Our Programme holds fast to the traditional ideas held in this respect not only by Trotsky but by all revolutionary Marxists. It argues that the arming of the proletariat must proceed along the path of strike pickets – workers’ militia – Red Army. This path repeats the birth history of the first proletarian revolutions and their development into civil wars. Though they ended up defeated, they were to a certain extent proletarian armies. Trotsky gave a definition of the Red Army in one of his letters to his Chinese co-thinkers: “Workers’ armed forces can be organised only through the class struggle of the working class. Where there is no proletarian dictatorship, there is no proletarian army. This has been and is our basic idea and of course it is correct. However, we now know that this armed road is not the only one. In undemocratic or backward countries, under war conditions, especially under military occupation by enemy nations, the road to arming the proletariat described above has proved difficult to realise. In such circumstances, the actual logic of the class struggle has forced revolutionaries to take a non-traditional road to armed struggle. We have seen the resistance movements in European countries occupied by the Nazis. We also have seen guerrilla warfare in Asia, espe-

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

657

cially the guerrilla war waged against the Japanese in China. It was not the working class but the peasants and urban petty bourgeois that formed the main body of these armed struggles. These people were under the leadership of bourgeois politicians or Communists. Guerrillas led by bourgeois politicians of course had no revolutionary significance. They participated in the Second World War only as ancillaries to the allied imperialist camp and became counterrevolutionary through and through when the war turned out favourable for the allies. With the armed forces led by Communists, however, things were quite different. Such forces adopted policies more or less in the character of class struggles. They did their utmost to build their armed forces. As a result, Communists in Yugoslavia, China, Indochina, and elsewhere have conquered power and carried out an anti-capitalist revolution spearheaded by these armed forces. Now, if we recognise Yugoslavia, China, and North Vietnam as workers’ states of a kind and thus admit that the revolutions that took place under such leaderships are anti-capitalist in character, then we must also admit that the way in which they armed themselves and promoted revolution is permissible and correct. We should, moreover, do the same wherever possible. Our new programme must affirm this non-traditional road to arming the proletariat, while at the same time affirming the traditional one. In so doing, we must draw lessons from the fact that this same road to armed struggle is inevitably accompanied by ugly and unbridled bureaucratism, and keep our eyes open to the concomitant dangers. […] A number of our forecasts did not come true. They include: One thing can be stated with conviction even at this point: once it breaks through, the revolutionary wave in fascist countries will immediately be a grandiose sweep and under no circumstance will stop short at the experiment of resuscitating the Weimar corpse. Factory committees, it may be supposed, will appear before the old routinists rush from their chancelleries to organise trade unions; Soviets will cover Germany before a new Constituent Assembly will gather in Weimar. The same applies to Italy and the rest of the totalitarian and semi-totalitarian countries. […] But this bears witness less to any “mistake” in Trotsky’s theoretical forecast than to one of the major crimes of Stalinism. The failure of socialist revolution

658

wang

to break out and achieve success in Germany and Italy following the collapse of fascism should be first and foremost explained by the Allies’ insistence on unconditional surrender. This policy bled the defeated nations to last drop of blood, brought the revolutionary classes of these countries into a state of complete disintegration and impotence, and made any kind of revolution impossible; while on the other hand it put the fate of the vanquished entirely under the military control of the victors, so that any kind of revolutionary turmoil was mercilessly suppressed. This policy, although not invented by Stalin alone, was nevertheless strongly supported and implemented by him. The bitter fact that fascism was not buried by socialist revolution at the end of the war allowed its resurgence, which has been greatly accelerated and assisted by the bureaucratic rule of the “People’s Democratic” countries during the past ten years and more especially the Hungarian revolution in 1956. As a consequence of the terrible repression, sections of the discontented middle and lower classes in the capitalist countries have turned away from socialism and back towards fascism. One of the most important and direct causes of the rise of the De Gaulle movement in France today was the tragedy that the Stalinists staged in Hungary, without which the French middle and lower classes might not have moved in such large numbers to the right. Because of this, our new programme should emphatically call for a genuine democratisation and de-bureaucratisation of the Communist parties and the annihilation of Stalinism in thought as well as in action, as pre-requisites to winning the toiling masses of the world back towards socialism and communism. They are also prerequisites for these parties and countries to qualify for the fight against fascism and fascist regimes. If they continue to maintain totalitarian and terrorist regimes within their own countries, they will be in no position to campaign against a fascist or bonapartist regime like the De Gaullist government, far less so to carry out a revolution. Our new programme must point out that the anti-bureaucratic revolution in “socialist” countries is closely interlocked with the anti-fascist revolution in capitalist countries. Both revolutions are inter-dependent and mutually conditioning. I have only dealt with seven sections (2, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, and 18) of the Programme, occupying exactly one third of the total (7 out of 21). I would leave the other 14 sections untouched, because they require no major changes. Most of them can be incorporated into the new Programme more or less as they stand. I conclude with the hope that my modest proposals for revising the Transitional Programme may receive some attention among members of our international movement. I sincerely hope that the points made may prove helpful in the difficult task of preparing our new fundamental document.

on the twentieth anniversary of the transitional programme

659

Appendix In its early stages, Stalinism was, of course, opportunistic in character. It came into being as a faction in the Russian Bolshevist party during the early twenties as a result of the successive defeats suffered by the working class in various countries, the re-establishment of world capitalism, and the emergence of capitalist elements in the Soviet economy. The ideology and tactics of the Stalin-Bukharin faction during the period 1925–1928 could be without exception ascribed to and explained by the concession made because of the pressure exerted by world capitalism. Starting in 1929, however, and after the start of the “third period” launched by the Kremlin bureaucracy, the basic content of Stalinism was no longer opportunism, at least not in the traditional sense of the opportunism of the Second International. Needless to say, the ultra-left Stalinism of the “Third Period”, looked at from the point of view of the interests of the world revolution, was just as harmful as the opportunism. It committed even graver crimes (especially in Germany). But we should recognise in retrospect that since the early 1930s, owing first to the ever greater rottenness and precariousness of the capitalist system and second to the strengthening and consolidation of the collective basis of the Soviet economy, the Soviet bureaucratic caste, which entrenched itself upon that basis, became more confident and therefore bolder in resisting the pressures exerted on it by the capitalist world. In other words, Stalinism, since that period, has been less willing to pass “definitively” over to the side of bourgeois order and more likely to break with the bourgeoisie. It was true that in the face of the terrible threat posed by Hitler, Stalinism turned to the right, moving from the third period to the “People’s Front”. By throwing itself into the embrace of the “democratic” bourgeoisie of the world, Stalinism once again demonstrated its opportunism. Stalinism in the late thirties seemed to be merely a second (and worse) edition of the doctrine of the late 1920s. In reality, however, we can see in retrospect that there was a difference between these two faces of Stalinism. Both were shameless, cynical, and harmful to the proletarian revolution. But they took different attitudes towards the power of the bourgeoisie. In the first edition, opportunism was a strategy while in the second it was practised as a manoeuvre or tactic. In the former case, the proletariat and its party could not, on principle, take power alone; in the latter, they could do so but only when conditions permit. (Whether they are actually able to take power when conditions permit is another question.) […] But how is it that Trotsky, who wrote the Transitional Programme in 1937, did not notice the difference between Stalinism’s two opportunisms? This is not a question that can be answered in a simple way. Stalinism has never been

660

wang

a strictly rounded theoretical system. It always adapts blindly to changing realities, in a process of empirical groping. There is absolutely no guarantee in Stalinism itself that opportunism will not recur. Whether it degenerates ever more deeply into opportunism of the sort espoused by the Second international will depend first of all upon the fate of world capitalism and its weight in relation to the new economic system of the Soviet Union. On this point, in the late thirties, even Trotsky could not be quite sure. So one can appreciate why Trotsky took a more prudent and “conservative” position on this question when he drafted our Programme. Now, however, twenty years down the line, it has become evident that even in war conditions and by resorting to war, the residual pressure of dying capitalism is too weak to force the Soviet Union to become a capitalist country and to force Stalinism to set out definitively on the reformist road.

The Crisis of Marxism (1985) Zheng Chaolin, translated by Huang Ting and Larry Yao

This is Chapter 5 of Zheng Chaolin’s Huilongwu daifanglu (started in early 1981 and finished on 4 December 1985), pp. 160–191. The Huilongwu is one of Zheng’s unpublished works. The manuscript is held in the Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709, 51, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. The term daifanglu (‘Record of awaiting a visit’) comes from The Book of Waiting for a Visit in the Mingyi by Huang Zongxi, a thinker in the late Ming and early Qing, which refers to a memorandum prepared for future visitors. Mingyi is a hexagram meaning light or brightness at a time when the sun is sinking into the earth, a period of political darkness or of light wounded or obscured. Zheng explained the title as follows: “Huilongwu is about five miles northeast of Zhangping County [in Fujian], and has been the ‘ancestral hill [tomb]’ of our Zheng family since the dynastic period. After land reform, our family possessions were expropriated, but our ancestors continued to be buried in Huilongwu, and dead Zheng family members were still taken there for burial. This was the case when I started out on this book (in early 1981). However, in that year we were informed that the railway bureau was going to expropriate the ‘mountain’ (which was near Zhangping County station) and we were ordered to remove the graves. Everyone from my grandfather to my son who was buried on this hill had to be moved to another place. From then on, Huilongwu had nothing to do with the Zheng family or with me, in name or in fact. But I have adopted the name Huilongwu for the title of the book, in a symbolic sense: my home was not on the mountain, and no one would go there to seek out my writings after my death. So the title has a double symbolic meaning”.1 In this chapter, Zheng suggests that Marxists and socialist revolutionaries in the past underestimated capitalism’s staying power. He argues that capitalism has not yet fulfilled its historic tasks and that the trend to socialist revolution remains at a low ebb. Socialists should both “know their time” and prepare for the future socialist movement.

Alongside the stagnation in revolutionary activity, both nationally and internationally, the Marxist theory of revolution is itself in crisis.

1 Huilongwu daifanglu, p. 2.

© Zheng Chaolin et al., 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_063

662

zheng, trans. huang and yao

What Can Be Done about This Crisis in Revolutionary Theory? This idea of a “crisis” is not mere speculation, although some deny that Marxism is today in crisis at all. The “crisis” is not merely a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of Marxist theory by non-specialists. There is indeed a crisis of Marxism. The crisis of Marxism is manifested in the emergence of “Marxism” in several different forms. We have “Western Marxism”, “Eastern European Marxism”, “Marxism” in the pulpits of the universities of the capitalist countries, “Marxism” as self-proclaimed “orthodoxy”, and so on. Marxism in general is no longer “in demand”. It is seen as “outdated” and is no longer thought of as the theoretical basis for future revolutions. We should not deny that there is a pervading crisis of Marxism. However, we must explain how the current crisis has come to be in the hope that we may correct the general distorted perception of it, and thus lay the theoretical foundations for the future world revolution. Marxism, which has developed over several generations, has evolved into a complete system which, through a process of simplification and dogmatisation by ideologues, is today held up as “sacred gospel”, the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels that is universally applicable. This is nothing new. Several totalising theoretical systems have emerged throughout human history to guide human behaviour, and some have survived to this day. Examples can be found in the cultural hegemony of various forms of animistic and monotheistic thinking, which include the Ten Commandments of Moses in Judaism, the Four Gospels in Christianity, the Koran, and the Confucian classics. All these ideological systems originated in the drive to explain the natural laws of existence, rules that a member of a given society is expected to follow, rules that guide human behaviour and provide a measure of socio-political stability and uniformity. They arose organically in human society, at given stages of its development, and were articulated by “prophets”. Espoused by an individual or a collective of ideologues, they take their form from their pedagogical relationship to the masses – hence the great number of saints, prophets, and zealots that litter human history. To ensure that they were universally observed, the “seers” and their successors imbued them with an element of mystery that only they could know. Truth-bearers translated the word of God into flesh and divinised mortals by imposing on them the good word, demanding its strict observance. Confucianism is special among these systems of thought, for it lacks the ontological veil of mystery found in religions and spiritual systems. Chinese Confucianism does not pretend to the authority of God but clearly indicates that it was created

the crisis of marxism (1985)

663

by a human, Confucius. This was the result of specific historical developments. True, there was a time when the Confucian school of thought was said to have been bestowed by Heaven. Confucius was honoured as the “King without a coronation”, ordained by the Son of Heaven (the King of Eastern Zhou). Later generations abandoned the doctrines and contents of the New Text (a branch of Confucianism born in the West Han Dynasty), but Confucius continued to be regarded as a “sage”, enlightened, different from ordinary human beings, and his teachings were seen as universally true, though not in the same way as religious dogmas. So with this history in mind, it is not surprising that many people regard Marxism as a universally applicable theoretical system and believe that it is infallible. Ordinary people see Marxism as the Ten Commandments, the Four Gospels, the Koran and, the Confucian classics, and treat it as a form of religion. When reality does not conform to Marxist predictions, they try to make up for its shortcomings by misinterpreting history, whereby to uphold its prestige. When remedies are no longer possible, Marxism is said to be in crisis and is abandoned. To take such a superstitious view of Marxism without attempting any real analysis is itself a violation of Marxism. Marx himself warned early on against adopting a superstitious position on his theories. Leaving aside his famous statement “I am not a Marxist”, allow me to remind readers of his views on his own theoretical system. In the postscript to the reprint of Das Kapital, volume one, he explains how his method of economic criticism came about: Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.2 Here, Marx clearly states that his theory (his system of economic criticism) was not a priori, let alone divinely inspired. Rather, he fully exhausts the available empirical data regarding the development of capitalism in Europe, specifically during the industrial revolution, while analysing the various routes of capitalist development and exploring the dialectical relationship between them, and only then does he go on to describe the actual movement of capitalism.

2 Marx and Engels 2010e, p. 19.

664

zheng, trans. huang and yao

What might seem to be an a priori structure is, in fact, the product of the painstaking acquisition and analysis of research material, on the basis of which Marx then presents his conclusions. The success of the project depends on the quality of the available materials and the accuracy of the analysis. If new materials and new methods of analysis emerge, the outcome will be different. Although Marx, in the passage cited, was referring to the method followed in his magnum opus, Das Kapital, the same procedure applies to Marxism as a whole. Marx’s economic criticism, his juridical analysis of class and party struggles, his materialist philosophy aimed at changing the world, were not a priori structures. They resulted from an analysis of existing information. The better the quality of the materials, the better the analysis, and as a result the conclusions change. Is it really surprising that as history progresses, conclusions must be revised? Is that a crisis? Yes, it is. But for that reason to discard the whole of Marxism is to throw the baby out with the bath water. A theoretical system that, as Marx noted, is not an a priori structure and cannot be regarded in the same way as the stone tablets of Mount Sinai is, by definition, not immune to crisis. But a theoretical system such as Marxism contains, within itself, the elements needed to overcome such crises. Historical materialism has not yet entered into crisis. The economy remains the basis for explaining the development of politics, law, etc. The resulting explanations may be wrong in details, but not in essence. So far, there are no examples of fundamental error. This means that historical materialism is not yet in crisis, and that the solution to the crisis of Marxism is today still dependent on historical materialism, i.e., on Marxism itself. That is to say, the present crisis is superficial and circumstantial.

There Is a Hierarchy of Theoretical Systems This is not to say that historical materialism is an absolute and eternal truth. Historical materialism itself informs us that there is no such truth. However, regarding the period of history in which we find ourselves (the transition from a primitive classless society to a class society and then to a future classless communist society), historical materialism is a representation of the truth. Its fundamental laws can be elaborated and made more precise in the course of subsequent historical developments without changing or significantly amending them. As for the application of historical materialism to studying the problems of any given society, the laws it deduces and the decisions made are often wrong. The principle and its application are two separate things and can be

the crisis of marxism (1985)

665

considered separately. It is often the case that when people talk about a theoretical system, they confuse principles and the specific application of those principles, without distinguishing between them, so that when they find errors of application, they reject the principles on which they are based; or, conversely, when they find errors of principle, they reject out of hand the possibly correct conclusions drawn from them. This is because they don’t understand that theoretical systems comprise many different levels. This is so not only of the historical sciences but of theoretical systems in the natural sciences. In the case of meteorology, for example, the changes in climate from season to season, the rise and fall of temperature, the nature of the ecological equilibrium, and so on have been set out in summary form and developed into a theoretical system that has been verified and corrected in its application, and constantly subjected to improvement and innovation. The basic law of this discipline is that climate is determined by the position of the Earth in its orbit around the sun. For example, knowing that the Earth is now in Taurus, we will be experiencing a late autumn climate in Shanghai and will soon be entering into winter.3 If all I needed to know is that Shanghai changes from spring to summer to autumn to winter, this law would be sufficient. But if I need to know “today’s weather”, I will have to combine it with other patterns, including wind direction, cloud cover, sea currents, etc. These things become intertwined and often difficult to predict. Sometimes it snows in summer and is hot in winter. We observe here at least two levels: the pattern of changes in the Earth’s position in its orbit around the sun, and the pattern of changes in winds, clouds, currents, and so on. We cannot deny “today’s weather” on the grounds that it does not correspond to the pattern of the Earth’s position in its orbit around the sun. In fact, changes in local winds, cloud cover, currents, etc. are ultimately determined by the position of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun, but this second level is very complex, and moreover very important, even more important than the first, at least for predicting “today’s weather”. However, to predict the general trend of weather changes, it is sufficient to know the first level of the general pattern. For example, if we know that the Earth is now in Taurus, we will know that in the course of the next few months it will be snowy and icy, not hot and rainy.

3 In late November the sun will be in Scorpius. The part of the zodiac that’s pretty much directly opposite is Taurus, so from the point of view of the sun the Earth is in Taurus (comment by Brian Collier).

666

zheng, trans. huang and yao

Subjective and Objective, Individual and Social In terms of historical development, what we are trying to predict is not today’s weather but what season we are in or should be in. Once this has been decided, we can go on to predict today’s weather and thus determine today’s task. Unfortunately, the prerequisites for solving today’s task do not currently exist, or rather they are still subject to disagreements, even regarding the general question of what stage of human history we are in. This is not to say that the current tasks of struggle are not important; such tasks arise in revolutionary situations, and also in non-revolutionary situations. But the current tasks of struggle are of a tactical nature, whereas what is required is the setting of a strategic direction. Strategy governs tactics, but I cannot raise the question of tactics here because things are in constant flux and it is useless to discuss such issues without a strategic direction. Here I also need to raise a matter of principle, namely the role of subjectivity in the development of history. Yes, history is made by people. The subjective role of humans, the political line of political parties, the personalities of party leaders, can influence historical facts, that is an undeniable fact. This is one of the teachings of historical materialism. However, there is another teaching of historical materialism that emphasises that historical processes are also part of natural processes. No matter how much the subjective role of humans, the political line of parties, or the personality of leaders affects the course of history, it does not change the nature of the historical process as a natural process. This question has been much debated in the past, and Marx and Engels have frequently been quoted, but few have quoted Marx as follows: My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them (Preface to the first edition of Das Kapital).4 These are the words of Marx in his maturity. It is here that historical materialism is materialist. The human being is the product of relations, and the development of social and economic forms is a natural historical process. The struggle of the workers to force the capitalist government to give way, to enact

4 Marx and Engels 2010e, p. 10.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

667

labour legislation, to reduce working hours, all this was also described by Marx in Das Kapital as a natural historical process. The development of social and economic forms is not subject to the will of humans. Humans and their will are the product of this natural process. It is not humans that create social relations, but social relations that create humans. Although Marx is speaking here about capital, he is in no way referring to humans (individuals) merely in terms of their economic relations but is referring to human activity in general. It is only in this sense that we can go on to talk about the role of the individual in history. Engels put it well when he said: That Napoleon, this particular Corsican, was the military dictator rendered necessary by a French Republic bled white by her own wars, was fortuitous; but that, in the absence of a Napoleon, someone else would have taken his place is proved by the fact that the man has always been found as soon as he became necessary – Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc. (letter to Borgius).5 By “individual”, Engels meant not only the leader of a big movement but the movement itself. But in history, individuals are not without agency. The history of France in the nineteenth century would have to be written differently if it had not been Napoleon the Corsican who emerged as military dictator of the French Republic. But France would still have been cleared of feudal barriers and would still have been able to develop capitalism, capture colonies, and compete with Britain and Germany on sea and land. If we are talking about a particular historical event, a particular political struggle, Marx, while stressing the “natural historical process”, did not forget the role of the individual, most notably in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, which described the political struggle between several different parties and the political activities of several individuals and the role of their personalities and experiences in it. On closer analysis, however, he described the French Revolution from 1848 to 1852 as a “natural historical process”.6 The activities of the several parties were still dictated by the class positions they represented and the individuals were driven by the interests of their respective parties, while the final victory of Louis Bonaparte, the protagonist of the coup, was not due not to his personal prowess but to the fact that the class struggle at the time created a particular political situation in which several parties were at 5 Marx and Engels 2010 f., p. 266. 6 See Marx and Engels 2010b, pp. 99–197.

668

zheng, trans. huang and yao

loggerheads and had to allow such a mediocre man to pick up the pieces. This illustration of the role of the individual in history is still in line with Marx’s emphasis on “natural historical processes”.

“History Is Cunning” Lenin set out this truth as follows: History as a whole, and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more multiform, more lively and ingenious than is imagined by even the best parties, the most class-conscious vanguards of the most advanced classes. This can readily be understood, because even the finest of vanguards express the class-consciousness, will, passion and imagination of tens of thousands.7 History is “more ingenious” than people, “more ingenious” than the most classconscious worker and the leaders of the vanguard, that is to say: the “natural historical process” is “more ingenious” than the people who inhabit it. History is the work of human beings, and the activity of millions of people is the “natural historical process”. The best and most conscious members of the vanguard and their leaders are often able to perceive the basic laws of historical development but not to grasp in its entirety the complexity of the realisation of these laws. As a result, history often develops beyond the expectations of the best leaders. This is not unexpected from the point of view of the historical materialist. Ever since the emergence of historical materialism, revolutionary teachers have analysed the current situation, made estimates, devised countermeasures, prepared and led revolutions, and succeeded in doing so, but they have also made wrong estimates that have led to failure. It is one thing to recognise the laws of history, another to grasp the various specific historical situations in order to realise their potential. It is not surprising if this leads to failure as a result of miscalculation, for the specific circumstances are exceedingly varied and hard to master. Here I do not intend to analyse historical events that led to the victory of the revolution when the revolutionary instructors were correct in their estimates, because this is what people usually talk about; I intend to analyse their errors.

7 Lenin 1974d, p. 95.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

669

The Mistakes of Marx and Engels In his later years, Engels admitted that he and Marx had been wrong in their evaluation of the 1848 Revolution. In 1895, Engels republished four articles by Marx originally published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in a single volume, under the title The Class Struggle in France, 1848–1850, with an introduction in which he said that when the February Revolution of 1848 broke out in France, his conception of its nature and course was still “strongly coloured by memories of the prototypes of 1789 and 1830”.8 He added that he had not slightest doubt that the great showdown had begun. In 1895, recalling these events, he said: “But history has shown us too to have been wrong, has revealed our point of view at that time as an illusion. It has done even more; it has not merely dispelled the erroneous notions we then held; it has also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. […] It has made clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent, and has caused big industry to take real root in France, Austria, Hungary. Poland, and, recently, in Russia, while it has made Germany positively an industrial country of the first rank – all on a capitalist basis, which in the year 1848, therefore, still had a great capacity for expansion”. He concluded that the outcome proved “how impossible it was in 1848 to win social transformation merely by a surprise attack”.9 This introduction by Engels was controversial at the time and has rarely been quoted since. It can be found in the Chinese translation of Marx’s Complete Works (volume 22), but the Selected Works omit it.10 However, it is essential reading. Lenin and Trotsky were trying to bring about a “social transformation merely by a surprise attack”, thinking that by taking power in Russia they would be able to trigger a chain reaction across the countries of Western Europe. They attributed the failure of the revolutions in Western Europe to subjective causes, not to the objective fact that capitalism still had the “capacity for expansion”. Lenin also spoke in his “Preface to the Russian Translation of the Letters of Sorge” about Marx and Engels’ mistakes. He said:

8 9 10

Marx and Engels 2010d, p. 509. Ibid., pp. 510 and 512. See the Chinese version in Marx and Engels 1974, pp. 591–612.

670

zheng, trans. huang and yao

Yes, Marx and Engels made many and frequent mistakes in determining the proximity of revolution, in their hopes in the victory of revolution (e.g., in 1848 in Germany), in their faith in the imminence of a German “republic”, … They were mistaken in 1871 when they were engaged in “raising revolt in Southern France”, … But such errors – the errors of the giants of revolutionary thought, who sought to raise, and did raise, the proletariat of the whole world above the level of petty, commonplace and trivial tasks – are a thousand times more noble and magnificent and historically more valuable and true than the trite wisdom of official liberalism, which lauds, shouts, appeals and holds forth about the vanity of revolutionary vanities, the futility of the revolutionary struggle and the charms of counterrevolutionary “constitutional” fantasies.11 What Lenin meant in this passage was that the mistake made by Marx and Engels in estimating the revolutionary situation at the time was a mistake committed by revolutionaries, by people eager to fight and over-optimistic, quite different from the mistakes committed by those who opposed the revolution and fetishised constitutionalism.

Lenin’s Mistakes Lenin foresaw the potential for revolution in the First World War, and he estimated that the revolution in Russia in February 1917 would develop into a proletarian socialist revolution and be victorious. Lenin did not adhere to the readymade conclusions of Marx and Engels’ analysis of capitalism. A new stage of capitalism had developed, unlike the capitalism of Marx and Engels’ time, and therefore many of the conclusions that they had reached during their lifetime were no longer applicable. Lenin wrote his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and, based on his new conclusions, developed a revolutionary strategy and set of tactics that finally led to the overthrow of the landowners and bourgeoisie in Russia and the establishment of the first dictatorship of the proletariat in history (not counting the Paris Commune). In this respect, Lenin was correct in his assessment of the world situation at the time. On the other hand, however, Lenin was also wrong. He thought that the world was ripe for proletarian socialist revolution, that the Russian Revolution was merely the first flashpoint of world revolution, and that a successful Rus-

11

Lenin 1977b, pp. 377–78.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

671

sian Revolution would be followed by the seizure of power by the working class in all countries, or at least in the more advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe. In The State and Revolution, he wrote that “this [Russian] revolution as a whole can only be understood as a link in a chain of socialist proletarian revolutions being caused by the imperialist war”.12 But this did not come about. After the Russian proletariat had seized power, only in Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria did the proletariat actually respond. However, it soon failed; in other countries, the proletariat was in a state of fermentation but did not develop to the point of fighting for power. At the time, revolutionary propaganda blamed the betrayal on the Social Democrats and other parts of the workers’ movement, but today, more than half a century later, we should acknowledge that Lenin was wrong in his belief that the October Revolution was the signal for the start of world revolution, both before and after the October Revolution. In reality, the world was not yet ripe for global proletarian socialist revolution. Lenin still expected an isolated dictatorship of the proletariat to spark a second wave of world revolution and lift it out of its isolation. He never accepted that socialism could be achieved in a single country. As early as 1918, he said: “Our difficulty is that everything has to be done by the efforts of the proletariat of Russia alone, and that we have to maintain our position until our ally, the international proletariat of all countries, grows strong enough. Every day impresses on us that there is no other way out” (Speech at the Second AllRussia Congress of Commissars for Labour).13 As late as 1923, in the last article published in his lifetime, he added: “Thus, at the present time we are confronted with the question – shall we be able to hold on with our small and very small peasant production, and in our present state of ruin, until the West-European capitalist countries consummate their development towards socialism?” (“Better Fewer, But Better”).14 He himself replied: “the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured”.15 So it is clear that Lenin did not think in terms of building socialism in Russia and then waiting 12 13 14 15

Lenin 1974b, p. 388. Lenin 1974c, pp. 400–01. Lenin 1973, p. 499. Ibid., p. 500.

672

zheng, trans. huang and yao

for the world revolution. He thought instead in terms of holding out for reinforcements, i.e., keeping the revolution alive until the rest of the world rises up.

Trotsky’s Mistakes Trotsky, like Lenin, also regarded the Russian Revolution of 1917 as a flashpoint in world revolution. In fact, all the revolutionary leaders of the time viewed the world-historic events in the same way. Trotsky did not say that Russia would be able to hold out until the second wave of world revolution came to its aid, but given that no second world revolution had yet come, the state born of the October Revolution would have to try to hold out. Stalin, in opposition to Trotsky, argued that, in Trotsky’s view, “since there is still no victory [of the revolution] in the West, the only ‘choice’ that remains for the revolution in Russia is: either to rot away or to degenerate into a bourgeois state” (The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists).16 I don’t know whether Trotsky agreed with the conclusion Stalin drew for him, but more than half a century of history has proved that the Russian Revolution has both rotted at the root and degenerated into a bourgeois (cadre) state. Trotsky refused to acknowledge this historical fact to his dying day, and continued to see the Soviet Union as a “workers’ state” with a bureaucratic tumour. All that was needed was to cut out the tumour and the body would recover. Trotsky clearly disagreed with the conclusion drawn for him by Stalin, who argued that until the 1930s the Russian Revolution had neither rotted aways nor degenerated into a bourgeois state. To his dying day, Trotsky argued that a bureaucracy, a stratum of the proletariat, ruled the Soviet Union. It was certainly degenerate, but it was not a new ruling class. Trotsky’s insistence that the bureaucracy was a stratum rather than a class was connected to his wrong assessment of the world situation at the time. He was also a person inclined towards optimism. He favoured active engagement in the revolutionary struggle, hoping for recovery from a highly dangerous situation. This mistake was the same as that of Marx and Engels, to which Lenin had drawn attention. The bureaucratic class was certainly decadent, but it was not a new ruling class. History has contradicted Trotsky’s judgement. History

16

Stalin 1976, p. 136.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

673

has shown that the so-called “bureaucratic class” was in fact a new exploiting class that collectively appropriated the means of production and collectively exploited and dominated the workers and peasants, i.e., all producers. This new class is somewhat different from the bourgeoisie in the traditional sense, but it is nevertheless a bourgeoisie, though one with distinctive characteristics. Trotsky’s rejection of the idea that the bureaucracy was a class was also linked to the Second World War, which had already broken out. The Soviet Union had not yet joined the war, but sooner or later it would have to. Trotsky was a strong advocate of defending the Soviet Union. He advocated the overthrow by revolutionary force of the “bureaucrats” who ruled the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union itself had to be defended, because in his view it continued to preserve the legacy of the October Revolution (the abolition of private property and the establishment of a workers’ state); and because it was important to have the remnants of the world’s first revolution to fall back on. In September 1939, Trotsky published “The Soviet Union at War” in a Mexican Trotskyist publication; it was republished in The New International in November. He made the following observation: “It would […] be a piece of monstrous nonsense to split with comrades who on the question of the sociological nature of the ussr have an opinion different from ours, insofar as they solidarise with us in regard to the political tasks. It would be very foolish to break with comrades who disagree with us on the question of the nature of Soviet society, if they are in agreement with us on the question of the political tasks”.17 By “political tasks” he meant the overthrow of the bureaucratic regime through a workers’ uprising. In the same article Trotsky admitted a series of failures on the part of the proletariat: failing to prevent Mussolini, Hitler, Franco from taking power; falling for the Popular Front; letting the Second World War break out, etc. Why these failures? Was it the inability of the proletariat itself, or of its leaders? If of the leaders, then they would have to be replaced and a new party organised. If of the proletariat itself, then even Marxism is thrown in doubt, for Marxism says that socialism can only be built by the proletariat. Socialism would have become a utopia, and utopias are bound to fail. Stalin’s victory was the triumph of reality over utopia, the progress of history. Trotsky then projected the future outcome of the Second World War as the decisive test: if the Second World War did not result in proletarian revolution in the West, then not socialism but a new system of bureaucratic and totalitarian exploitation would rise up to replace the decadent epoch of capitalism,

17

The New International, vol. 5, no. 11, November 1939, p. 325.

674

zheng, trans. huang and yao

and if the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries managed to conquer power but then proved incapable of holding it and instead surrendered it, as in the Soviet Union, to a privileged bureaucracy, one would have to admit that the hopes of Marxism, which rested on the proletariat, were dashed. This would put the rise of Stalinism in Russia in a new light. These are the main points of Trotsky’s detailed discussion. Here is Trotsky’s own description of the “new perspective”: Then we would be compelled to acknowledge that the reason for the bureaucratic relapse is rooted not in the backwardness of the country and not in the imperialist environment but in the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to become a ruling class. Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish that in its fundamental traits the present ussr was the precursor of a new exploiting régime on an international scale. […] If the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except openly to recognise that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society ended as a Utopia.18 These are among the last words left to us by this classic Marxist. How to treat these last words? We can imagine that they are an expression of Trotsky’s firm belief that, as a result of the Second World War, there would have to be proletarian revolutions in the West, and that the Western proletariat, having seized power, given the precedent of the Soviet Union, would not leave its exercise to the bureaucrats. But all these conclusions are an unsustainable hypothesis. However, we can also imagine that Trotsky had already seen the possibility that the Second World War would not lead to a proletarian revolution in the West, or that the revolution would be successful and the Western proletariat would seize power but would be unable to keep it and the resulting regime would even so end up degenerating into a bureaucracy. Such a turn could not be blamed on economic backwardness and imperialist encirclement. Instead, the answer would have to be found in the proletariat itself. These are the only two assumptions. Both illustrate Trotsky’s mistaken analysis of the world situation at the time. The Second World War was bound to cause a proletarian revolution – not only Trotsky thought so, so did most revolutionaries. But we can also ima-

18

Ibid., p. 327.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

675

gine that Trotsky had already realised that the Second World War would not necessarily lead to a proletarian revolution in the West, or that the Western proletariat would seize power but would not be able to retain it, and the resulting regime would still degenerate into a bureaucracy. This would not be due to economic backwardness and imperialist encirclement but to failures within the proletariat itself. Such is the case, and we cannot but acknowledge it. However, we need not conclude from it that Marxism itself has failed. History is “more cunning” than Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky. The wisest minds, using the most correct revolutionary theories to analyse the world situation and the future, sometimes make mistakes, but such mistakes should not necessarily be attributed to the revolutionary itself. It is still true, even now, that we have no more correct theory than historical materialism.

Communism Is Bound to Replace Capitalism Marx applied historical materialism to the study of the laws of capitalist development, the results of which in turn enriched and refined historical materialism; capitalism develops and is still developing today. That the economic base determines the superstructure is an unchanging law of historical materialism. During the period of free competitive capitalism, Marx and Engels developed a successful analysis of politics, culture, ideology, etc. In the early twentieth century, however, these solutions no longer fully applied, since laissez-faire capitalism had developed into a new stage of monopoly capitalism. Lenin, confronting various issues concerning the superstructure, came up with a study of the economic foundations of the time, in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Regarding problems of war, revolution, nationality, democracy, and ideology, he drew conclusions that were not exactly in line with those of Marx and Engels but nevertheless helped him lead the Russian Revolution to victory. However, he was still wrong in his assessment of the objective circumstances of the time, for he considered imperialism to be the “final stage” of capitalism, whereas history has shown that capitalism was still developing and has already gone beyond the stage of imperialism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only half a century after the publication of Das Kapital, capitalism had already assumed a new look; at the end of the twentieth century, more than half a century after Imperialism was written, the changes that had taken place in the economic base and superstructure of capitalism were deeper than those that had marked the passage from Das Kapital to Imperialism, although as yet we lack an authoritative work that summarises these

676

zheng, trans. huang and yao

changes. The various theoretical systems that have emerged from the crisis of Marxism – so-called Western Marxism, Eastern European Marxism, and Stalinism in power, in all its variants – offer a range of views on the superstructure but little (although not nothing) on the economic base. Stalinism and its variants generally hold that we are still in the period of “imperialism” as analysed by Lenin, but that a “socialist state” has emerged to compete with the monopolycapitalist states. They divide so-called “political economy” into a “capitalist” sector and a “socialist” sector. Economics is the science that looks into laws of capitalist development. Thus by definition, there can be no socialist “economics”. No wonder the so-called “political economy of socialism”, which has existed for decades, has been rewritten again and again, and has even been declared obsolete and written off entirely! As for so-called “Western Marxism”, according to one commentator, it does not study the economic foundation at all but is concerned instead only with the very pinnacle of the superstructure, i.e., philosophy and literature. Only the orthodox Marxist trend, which developed “offstage” and in secret, set about studying changes in the economic base as a way of explaining the problems of the superstructure. The results of this research are naturally open to debate, but the emphasis on studying the economic base as a step towards solving political, economic, cultural, and other problems is entirely correct and in line with historical materialism. This is all I need to say. As for the study of the economic foundations of present-day capitalism, that is not up to me to undertake. What I would like to do is simply to highlight a particular law in the Marxist critique of economics, namely, that as a result of the competition that takes place within laissez-faire capitalism, some capitalists win out, some go bankrupt, production concentrates and unites on an ever larger scale, and laissezfaire capitalism therefore develops into monopoly capitalism, and that this trend does not come to an end with monopoly capitalism, but rather continues. Capitalist enterprises, which continue to decrease in number and increase in size, finally usher in the transition from monopoly capitalism to “state monopoly capitalism”, i.e., the fusion of a small number of giant monopolies with the state, leading to the operation and management of state production in the name of the state. Lenin had already seen and analysed this trend during his lifetime, but it did not develop as quickly as he envisaged and is still developing today, often in the form of two steps forward and one step back. History is always “more ingenious”. This trend towards the concentration and integration of capital brought about a change in the function of the bourgeoisie: a division between ownercapitalists and manager-capitalists. Under laissez-faire capitalism, capitalists

the crisis of marxism (1985)

677

managed their own businesses. Most enterprises were small and management was simple. In larger enterprises under more complex management, the capitalists employed officials and accountants to assist in various respects, but the major decisions were still made by the capitalists themselves, in whose hands control resided. However, in the era of monopoly capitalism organisations like joint-stock companies, syndicates, trusts, and combines developed, and in the context of mass production management became more complex and turned into a science or you might even say an art. The capitalists could no longer cope with it themselves, even with the help of officers and accountants. The need arose for specialised managers who not only carried out specific tasks but also had the power of decision making, who were both authorised and competent. These management experts were initially capitalists and shareholders themselves, people who exercised administrative authority on behalf of other shareholders and received salaries on top of the dividends received by all shareholders, some of whom merely received dividends. Gradually, however, these managers were no longer necessarily shareholders, and the non-shareholders among the managers turned out to be more intelligent and better at their jobs; they had the authority to make decisions, received high salaries, and lived the life of a capitalist, but they still remained responsible to the company. State capitalism of this sort is not so far removed from my concept of “cadreism”.19 One difference remains: state capitalism is the result of the natural development of capitalism, which has not yet led to the abolition of private production and the eventual introduction of a planned economy, while cadreism has passed through a socialist revolution, a period of transition, and signals a regression back to private production and the restoration of a market economy. This difference is subtle, formal, or nominal. In this analysis, historical development is seen as a “natural historical process”20 and does not take into account the contradictions in development, i.e., the class struggle. I am assuming that the proletariat, as the antithesis of the bourgeoisie, is inactive in this development. But the proletariat will never do nothing. In Das Kapital, Marx described the development of capitalism as “a process of natural history”,21 but he also wrote about “compulsory limitation by law”, legal limits on the length of the working day, factory hygiene, and other matters, all of which were the outcome of proletarian resistance, including strikes. The class struggle – the proletariat’s struggle for better living and 19 20 21

For more on this, see Benton and Sexton (eds) 2022. Marx and Engels 2010e, p. 10. Ibid.

678

zheng, trans. huang and yao

working conditions, including by means of strikes, riots and revolutions – are also “a process of natural history” rather than an outcome of some “subjective agency”.22 So the replacement of capitalist society by communist society is inevitable, i.e., guaranteed; even if the proletariat does nothing, the natural development of capitalism will lead to communism. In any case, the proletariat will not sit idly back in the course of capitalist development and leave it to evolve in the direction of its logical end.

Capitalism Has Not yet Accomplished Its Historical Mission In his Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, Marx famously wrote that “[n]o social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed”.23 Today, capitalism is not dead. After the “surprise attack” carried out on it by the October Revolution, many thought that it had been fatally wounded and would never recover, but it did recover and is more alive today than before it was wounded. Many thought that it had recovered as a result of a subjective error on the part of the revolutionaries or of some “betrayal”, but half a century later, it is thriving and no new wave of world revolution has come about. The recovery of capitalism cannot therefore be attributed to subjective error or “betrayal”. So what is the reason for the protracted ebb in world revolution over the past half a century or more? We should look at this question from an objective point of view, from the angle of its essence. Let us re-read the introduction written by Engels in his later years to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France. In it, he reviews the mistakes he and Marx and others had made in the 1848 Revolution. It was seen as a “great battle for power”,24 in which the proletariat could overthrow capitalism and establish socialism in the course of one single revolution. Exploring in later years the reasons for its failure, Engels ascribed it primarily to capitalism’s “great capacity for expansion”.25 He cited as proof the fact that capitalism had flourished across Europe after the failed revolution. This assertion by Engels is in line with Marx’s famous preface, quoted above. 22 23 24 25

See ibid., pp. 239–307. Marx 1977b, p. 426. Marx and Engels 2010d, p. 509. Ibid., p. 512.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

679

Can we employ this assertion by Engels to investigate the failure that took place after the October Revolution? We have seen that capitalism recovered from the trauma of the October Revolution soon after it happened. Productivity developed, while inherent cyclical crises continued. The major crisis of 1929–1932 led to the Second World War. However, after the Second World War, capitalism not only recovered from its wounds but surged forward even more rapidly than before. Regardless of successive regional wars, the productive forces developed on a scale unparalleled in history. Science and technology developed at a particularly unprecedented rate. It is said that there were more scientific and technological inventions in the two decades of the 1950s and the 1960s than in the preceding 2,000 years. Those inventions were applied to production within a very short space of time, contributing to the unprecedented development of productive forces. Capitalism has managed not only to develop its inherent productive forces but to permit the unprecedented development of science and technology, thus creating new productive forces.26 Lenin, in his Imperialism, emphasised the decadence of capitalism in its “final stage”.27 He argued that monopoly inevitably leads to stagnation and decay. Science, the motive force behind technological and all other progress, “disappears to a considerable extent” as a result of the rise of monopolies.28 Lenin cited the example of a capitalist who bought a patent but “pigeonholed it, refrained from utilising it”, as an example of how the imperialist era was not conducive to scientific or technological invention.29 Yet for half a century, science and technology not only did not stagnate but advanced at an unprecedented rate. In short, after the October Revolution capitalism throughout the world developed at least as much as after the 1848 Revolution in Europe. So despite all its paradoxes, with constant regional wars, irregular crises, waste, and other setbacks, capitalism has continued to develop throughout

26

27 28 29

Note by Zheng Chaolin: At the end of 1981, People’s Daily quoted the following passage from the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun: “In the long history of humankind, 90 per cent of all scientific and technological inventions of historical significance have occurred in the last 50 years, and 90 per cent of the inventors of these technologies are still alive. These two figures show that science and technology are developing exceptionally rapidly in the late twentieth century, so that in today’s society they are renewed with each passing day”. Lenin 1974a, p. 280. Ibid., p. 276. Ibid.

680

zheng, trans. huang and yao

the world. We have not yet seen any limit to that development, least of all a downward slide. Moreover, world revolution, i.e., proletarian socialist revolution, is international in scope. Although it will not break out at the same time in all countries, it will do so at least within a relatively short time. However, the world today is not confined to Europe. Capitalism in America, Australia, Asia, and North Africa must also develop to a degree sufficient to mature the productive forces of socialist revolution. We cannot yet say that “all the productive forces” that capitalism can accommodate have fully “developed”.30 That means that we cannot hope to overthrow capitalism as a social force by a handful of “surprise attacks”. Capitalism will need to complete its historical mission, and will in the end exhaust its full productive capacity. This is inevitable. “All that exists deserves to perish”.31

The Evolution of the Gravediggers In his Introduction, Engels noted that it was only after the failed Revolution of 1848 that the industrial revolution “created a genuine bourgeoisie and a genuine large-scale industrial proletariat”32 in Europe. So what kind of “proletariat” was it that participated in the 1848 Revolution? In On the History of the Communist League, Engels wrote that at the end of 1847, when the Second Congress of the Communist League commissioned and published The Communist Manifesto with its new battle cry “Working People of All Countries, Unite!”, “the members, in so far as they were workers at all, were almost exclusively artisans. Even in the big metropolises, the man who exploited them was usually only a small master”.33 At the time, with the exception of Britain, only Paris and some other major cities had a handful of modern factories, alongside workshops and artisan production. This shows that Marx’s ideas of communist revolution could not have taken root in the 1848 Revolution. With the development of capitalism, the “genuine industrial proletariat”34 emerged and grew. This proletariat took power for a time in 1871 and demonstrated its strength. The proletariat did not perish with the Paris Commune,

30 31 32 33 34

Marx 1977b, p. 426. Marx and Engels 2010c, p. 359. Marx and Engels 2010d, p. 512. Marx and Engels 1976, p. 177. Marx and Engels 2010d, p. 512.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

681

“but, completely to the contrary, dates its most powerful resurgence from the Commune and the Franco-Prussian War”.35 The European workers’ movement moved its centre from France to Germany, where a powerful Social Democratic Party was formed, threatening the rule of the German bourgeoisie. This centre then moved from Germany to Russia, where the “genuine industrial proletariat” of Russia’s major cities finally launched the first world revolution and established a state based on a dictatorship of the proletariat. But did this proletariat not fail to prevent Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco from gaining power? Was it not taken in by the Popular Front? Did it not let the Second World War break out and, in the end, fail to defend the fruits of the October Revolution? The answer to these questions is yes. It is now clear that capitalism had not yet completed its historical mission, that it could continue to advance, and that the bourgeoisie itself had changed and grown stronger. With capitalism, the proletariat also changed. In fact, it had already changed. Today, at least in the developed capitalist countries, the proletariat is no longer what it was in the years between the October Revolution and the Second World War. With the substantial development of capitalism as a productive force, today’s workers are better off, better educated, and more varied in composition, with non-manual work playing a greater role. The executioner still stands outside the door of the banquet hall waiting for the feast to finish, his sword sharpened and improved from time to time, as the feast drags on. Once the feast is over and the dead are buried, the revolutionary masses will not return to their original places. Instead, as Lenin said in The State and Revolution, they will practise and enjoy genuine democracy. They will oust the capitalists and bureaucrats who at present control production and distribution, “in the work of keeping account of labour and products”.36 “Accounting and control – that is mainly what is needed for the ‘smooth working’, for the proper functioning, of the first phase of communist society”.37 According to Lenin, this kind of accounting and control was something that “any literate person can perform”, “extraordinarily simple operations” requiring mere “knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts”.38 Lenin was speaking to the Russian workers of his time, many of whom were illiterate. Now, not only Western workers but Russian workers too have become more educated and know more than “the four rules of arithmetic and issuing 35 36 37 38

Ibid., p. 514. Lenin 1974b, p. 478. Ibid. Ibid.

682

zheng, trans. huang and yao

appropriate receipts”. They can also perform higher tasks, manage production, and appoint and supervise management specialists to carry out higher and more complex levels of management. In short, the riper the fruit, the less effort it takes to pick. But that’s something for later, when the revolution takes off again.

A Revolutionary’s Job in a Period of Revolutionary Ebb What to do until that time? Let’s see how the classic Marxist writers approached this question. The party led by Marx and Engels took part in the German Revolution of 1848; after its defeat, the two fled abroad, together with comrades, and ended up in London. Then a fight broke out within the party. After failed revolutions, revolutionary parties always quarrel. This is practically a law. The first argument was over how to estimate the situation: had the revolution failed completely, or was it simply a setback? In London, Marx and Engels soberly assessed the situation, especially in economic terms, and assumed that the revolution had failed and would not resume any time soon. Writing in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in May 1850, they said: With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production, come in collision with each other.39 The opposing faction believed that the revolutionary situation was on the rise. They cited as evidence the fact that the various factions in the party of Order on the European continent were fighting each other, to which Marx and Engels replied: The various quarrels in which the representatives of the individual factions of the Continental party of Order now indulge and mutually compromise themselves, far from providing the occasion for new revolutions are, on the contrary, possible only because the basis of the relationships

39

Marx and Engles 2010a, p. 135.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

683

is momentarily so secure and, what the reaction does not know, so bourgeois. All reactionary attempts to hold up bourgeois development will rebound off it just as certainly as all moral indignation and all enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats.40 This estimate was regarded as heresy by many in the party (and beyond) at the time. Some even went so far as to call Marx and Engels “traitors”; as did comrades in the party, people like Willich and Schapper. Willich even challenged Marx to a duel. To quote these people: “If there is no revolutionary situation, we create one”.41 The fight was so fierce that Marx and Engels had to declare the dissolution of their own party, the Communist League. The opposing faction, Schapper and Willich, did not acknowledge this dissolution and continued for a time to operate under the old name, but in the end it finally ceased activity. Nineteen years later, as the workers’ movement developed in various countries, Marx and Engels helped launch the International Workingmen’s Association, an internationally unified organisation of the working class. In 1871, the Association took part in the workers’ uprising in Paris. After the defeat of the Commune, the Association was also beset by internal quarrels. The quarrels reached the point of irreconcilability when Marx and Engels declared Bakunin and his followers expelled at the Hague Congress and moved the headquarters of the International to America, where it was soon dissolved. If it is a law that disputes break out within revolutionary parties after failed revolutions, it is not a law that disputes necessarily lead to the dissolution of the party itself. After the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, quarrels broke out within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and it split into factions. However, it did not declare itself dissolved. Different factions continued to hold party meetings in the country until after the February Revolution of 1917. Naturally, it could be argued that the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was in fact dissolved: the factions had their own organisations, publications, leadership, and agendas, and the party survived in name only. The wave of world revolution set off by the October Revolution failed in the 1920s and the dictatorship of the proletariat established in Russia also survived in name only, so quarrels and splits broke out within the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International. Formally speaking, no dissolution was declared, but the Bolshevik Party had changed its nature and the Communist International had long since ceased to exist in actual fact.

40 41

Ibid. This is perhaps a paraphrase – the original source is unclear.

684

zheng, trans. huang and yao

After the defeat of a revolution, those engaged in it, regardless of whether they dissolve the revolutionary party or retain its form, cannot give up their revolutionary task. However, the nature of the task keeps changing. It is one thing in a revolutionary situation and becomes another in a non-revolutionary situation. In the former case, it initiates and leads revolutions; in the latter, it prepares for future revolutions, including by summarising the lessons of failure and updating revolutionary theory. Marx and Engels, at a time when the productive forces had not yet developed to the point of entering into conflict with the capitalist mode of production, saw their task as studying and clarifying this capitalist mode of production in order to guide the proletariat of the world in overthrowing and replacing it with a communist mode of production. But at the same time, they did not give up the opportunity to organise the main body of the revolution, the workers of all countries, in order to make them aware of their mission and capable of realising international solidarity. Lenin, in addition to trying to preserve a measure of unity in the factional struggle after the defeat of the revolution, devoted his main effort to drawing lessons and developing theories. Trotsky declared the Third International dead. On the one hand, he united the world revolutionary forces with the Fourth International, while on the other hand he developed revolutionary theories to guide future revolutionary activities. Lenin and Trotsky maintained their revolutionary organisations while intervening in actual politics and developing revolutionary theories, so their theories cannot be said to have been divorced from practice. Does that mean that the activities of Marx and Engels after the dissolution of the Communist League and before the founding of the International can be described as divorced from practice? If so, one would have to conclude that in the absence of a revolutionary situation, theory will necessarily be divorced from practice for a period of time, in order to fulfil one’s revolutionary task.

“There Can Be No Revolutionary Movement without a Revolutionary Theory”42 In his essay “On the History of the Communist League” written in 1885, Engels speaks of the changes in the revolutionary situation in Germany in the thirty

42

Lenin said that “there can be no strong socialist party without a revolutionary theory”, whereas Zheng said “there can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory”. Lenin 1977a, p. 211.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

685

years after he and Marx disbanded the Communist League in the early 1850s. He wrote: At the time (of the dissolution of the League) the few persons whose minds had penetrated to the realisation of the historical role of the proletariat had to forgather in secret, to assemble clandestinely in small communities of 3 to 20 persons. Today (at the time of writing) the German proletariat no longer needs any official organisation, either public or secret. The simple self-evident interconnection of like-minded class comrades suffices, without any rules, boards, resolutions or other tangible forms, to shake the whole German Empire to its foundations.43 This passage should not be taken to mean that Engels was opposed to the proletariat having organisations such as political parties or trade unions and believed that “self-evident interconnection” was enough. At the time of his writing, after the abolition of the “exceptional laws”44 (anti-socialist laws), there was already a strong Social Democratic organisation in Germany. The passage merely argues that even without a formal organisation, the proletariat, aware of its historical mission, was sufficient to shake the German Empire. In short, in quoting Engels, I do not mean to suggest that the proletariat should not be formally organised. Engels, again in his Introduction, written in 1895, to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, contrasts the class consciousness of the proletariat at the time of the defeat of the revolution in 1848 and at the time of his writing. He wrote: We had then the many vague sectarian evangels with their panaceas; we have today the one universally accepted, transparently clear theory of Marx, sharply formulating the final purposes of the struggle.45 It could be inferred from this that the “like-mindedness” of the proletariat was a product on the one hand of the class consciousness of the proletariat itself and on the other of an inspiration born of Marx’s theory, propagated by social democratic parties across the world. These two passages from Engels’ writings, while not denying the importance for the proletariat of formal organisation, emphasise the crucial role played in the revolutionary movement by the class consciousness of the proletarian masses and of revolutionary theory. This is what Lenin meant when he said that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”. 43 44 45

Marx and Engels 1976, p. 189. Ibid. Marx and Engels 2010d, p. 512.

686

zheng, trans. huang and yao

The emancipation of the proletariat is, after all, a matter for the proletariat itself. The proletariat differs from one stage of capitalism to another, as does its class consciousness. The so-called crisis of Marxism refers, ultimately, to the inapplicability to the new stage of capitalism today of specific conclusions of Marxism appropriate to liberal and monopoly capitalism. After the defeat of the 1848 Revolution, all sorts of revolutionary theories arose, in baffling profusion; only later did Marxism come to lead the workers’ movement and the Russian Revolution. Now we have several “Marxisms”, each with its own “panacea”. But none of them can explain the current revolutionary problems, none is capable of leading the second wave of world revolution that is in the offing. We have Stalinism, the Soviet theoretical model, which has already gone bankrupt. We have “Eastern European Marxism”, of which there are various schools, but they by and large avoid the problems of class struggle and world revolution and talk not about economics or politics but about deep philosophical questions. There are many other strands of “Marxism”, which are in themselves a very symptom of the fact that Marxism is in crisis. Capitalism has reached a new stage; so has class struggle, so has the proletariat itself, and so should Marxism. But the fundamental doctrine of Marxism, historical materialism, remains unchanged. The forces of production still dominate the relations of production, and the capitalist mode of production still has to be replaced by the communist mode of production. A new Marxism needs to be created and developed to overcome the present crisis, to reject the various forms of so-called “Marxism” and to analyse in clear terms the main characteristics of the new phase of capitalism and to indicate the path to be followed by the proletariat. In short, the world needs a genuine “theory of revolution” to guide the revolutionary movement that is bound to emerge.

“Know Thy Time!” In ancient Greece there was a temple inscribed with the injunction “Know thyself!” I would like to amend it slightly, for the attention of today’s revolutionaries: “Know thy time!” It is essential to know oneself, or to possess “the wisdom of self-knowledge”, as the old saying goes, but to know oneself, one must first know one’s time. Social relations evolve, and the living relations of your time are closer to you as an individual than those of the past. You are more a product of your time. If you do not know your time, you will not know yourself. If you know your time, you will know not only yourself but the future of the world and of humanity.

the crisis of marxism (1985)

687

What era are we in? Broadly speaking, we are in an era when the capitalist mode of production is moving in the direction of the communist mode of production. Why should the capitalist mode of production yield to the communist mode of production? Marx has already explained why; Lenin fleshed out Marx’s explanation. But it is not enough simply to know the nature of the epoch. We must delve further and explore what new stage capitalism has reached, one that Marx and Lenin did not see. We must elucidate the characteristics of this new stage that Marx and Lenin did not explain, and what new means of struggle and what new methods to adopt under the new unforeseen circumstances, and so on. The new phase I am referring to covers both capitalism and cadreism. History has yet to decide whether cadreism transcends capitalism or is part of it. Our age awaits its Marx and its Lenin. I am a veteran of repeated defeats, but lucky enough to have survived the battlefield. The ancients said, “A defeated general cannot speak of courage”. Yet a defeated soldier can learn useful lessons to pass on to future warriors. This little book is but my humble opinion.

A Selection from Wang Fanxi’s Diary, 1989–1993 Translated by Xue Feng

In his diary, Wang reflected on Chinese and world affairs in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, including the Tian’anmen student protests of 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the First Gulf War, while also illustrating his concerns regarding developments in the Fourth International and other controversies within Trotskyist circles. Source: Wang Fanxi xuanji (The Selected Works of Wang Fanxi), vol. 3, Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2018.

1989 19 May The student movement in Beijing, spurred on by mourning Hu Yaobang’s death, has been going on since April 15. The movement seems to have reached a high pitch of revolution, as it grows in scale and people start getting up ever more petitions. I am very excited to see these great developments, but I am too old and sick to write even a small article! The more I want to write, the more I am unable to do so. What a terrible shame! I would have never dared to imagine that the ten-year reform carried out by the Deng clique would end up in such an outpouring of deep public anger! Watching tv last night, I noticed the workers in Beijing holding high the portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai while marching through the streets. This gives grounds for thought. The main demands of the students turn out to be: 1) democracy and 2) anti-corruption. Many people thought that the students were merely following the path of American-style democracy. But the movement over the past few days appears to have demonstrated that quite a few in the general public, especially members of the working class, are still missing Mao and Zhou’s corruption-free era when the communist rulers were willing to share the burden of pain and suffering with the common people. This phenomenon may seem difficult to understand, but in fact it is not. No matter how crazy Mao Zedong appeared to be back then, he insisted on two principles: to please the labourers, and to prevent corruption from running rampant in the system. In the face of the current situation of money worship

© Translated by Xue Feng, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_064

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

689

and corruption at both the top and the bottom of society, it is natural that most workers should have begun to miss Mao and Zhou. It does therefore not surprise me that nowadays some people, in thinking back on the Mao era, retrospectively adjudge Mao’s opposition to the capitalist roaders to have been necessary and correct. 20 May Students and workers in Beijing and a dozen other major cities are continuing their struggle. The bureaucrats of the Deng clique have finally declared martial law and are about to use the army to repress the students. China is in the throes of another revolution. The “political revolution” that we have always hoped for has arrived earlier, bigger, and better than we ever expected. 10 November Two pieces of news came yesterday: the fall of the Berlin wall and the resignation of Deng Xiaoping as Chairman of the Military Commission. The former was unexpected, the latter not. The “Soviet Empire” is a product of Stalinism, created and maintained mainly by force and intrigue. It’s not the same as the “British Empire”. Although the latter was also a result of force and intrigue, it represented a nation and a class with overwhelming economic and cultural advantages over the far more backward countries and nationalities it ruled. Objectively speaking, for some time at least, it could be regarded as a “historical step forward”. However, Russia, the main body of the “Soviet Empire”, is in many ways a backward country, especially in regard to the countries of Eastern and Central Europe. Moreover, the socialist system, by rights supposedly progressive, had long been debased and betrayed by Stalinism. Its control of some of the Central and Eastern European countries rests completely upon military force and other supplementary means such as the secret services. It hardly needs to be pointed out that the “Empire” thus created has fragile foundations and a reactionary orientation. It is only natural that such “Empire” could never at any point gain the wholehearted support of the people of those countries. This “Empire” has lasted for more than 40 years [starting in 1945, with the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe]. This can in no way be seen as a brief interlude. As a way out of the political impasse constantly faced by the Soviet Union itself due to Stalinism, Gorbachev had no other choice than to initiate reform. Consequently, the collapse of the so-called “new Stalinist system” that had been set up forcibly in these vassal states becomes inevitable. The issue is merely how soon this would happen. The sudden changes that have taken place in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany in the course of the past few months are in themselves surprising, but the speed of change (especially East Germany) is beyond my imagining.

690

trans. xue

The break-up of the “Soviet Empire”, or more accurately the “Stalinist Empire”, is already a fact of life. The main question for the future is: will a healthy and democratic socialist system emerge from these changes, or will [these countries] be completely assimilated into capitalism? This can be determined mainly by the future class struggle in each country. I don’t believe that Stalinism, or even a slightly modified Stalinist bureaucracy, is likely to survive for long. Mandel seems to believe in such a possibility, but I disagree. The Tian’anmen massacre indicates a reversal of this [international] trend, but it’s simply a temporary reversal. China will not escape the general trend, even though China’s Stalinist-Maoist system is built on a more solid foundation than the system in Central and Eastern Europe, and even though China is no longer part of the “Soviet Empire”. No matter how hard Deng Xiaoping and his ilk struggle to maintain China under their bureaucratic rule, either in its original form or in a whitewashed version of it, their resistance will eventually prove futile. The break-up of the “Soviet Empire” and the universal crisis in the “socialist camp” have proved, from the point of view of theory, that the bureaucrats are in no way a new class. Instead, they are a parasitic elite that has come about in certain countries following the degeneration of the revolutionary regime [in the Soviet Union] and they will never be in a position to open up a new stage in history. Their position is precarious, and their role transitional. Either they move forward (under pressure and attack from the revolutionary working class) and give way to genuine socialism, or they will regress to authentic capitalism. There is no third way. On this fundamental issue Trotsky was right. However, the term “degenerated workers’ state” is unsatisfactory. In my view, it would be more realistic to refer to it as a transitional state. 31 December I have been drowsy and exhausted these last few days. Despite the many thoughts whirring round my mind, I have been unable to write even a single word. 1989 had indeed been a remarkable year. Some Western political commentators have called it an annus mirabilis, a year of miracles. Undoubtedly, the year 1989 will continue to stand out in the long history of humankind, like 1789, 1917, etc. The “miracles” began in May in China and then spread to Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, ending in Romania. This marks the culmination of decades of conflicts and crises caused by the Stalinist system. As a result, we have seen the downfall of these seemingly powerful regimes, like a house of cards. (The Chinese dictatorship has not yet fallen; but it is in for a tough time.)

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

691

Of all the world’s theorists, politicians, and social scientists, we alone were not only able to foresee this change but regard it as anything but a “miracle”. We have long known that socialism can never be built on the basis of the vile Stalinist system. Given our attachment to the theory of permanent revolution and the spirit of internationalism and our insistence that there can be no socialism without democracy, we know that if these systems are not reformed by a new political revolution, they will revert to capitalism, or even to barbarism. We are at a critical moment. What frustrates me the most in this situation is that the Fourth International, which has been preparing for this change for half a century, appears to have been unable to play any significant role in this great historic moment. We should have played a big role, and we must even play a leading role! I hope that, starting in 1990, the Fourth International will be in a position to achieve a much deeper impact. We can see further and earlier than others. However, even though situations develop in line with our predictions, we always find ourselves sidelined by the flow of events. Why is this so? The Transitional Programme, painstakingly drafted by Old Trotsky, was designed to solve this problem. Unfortunately, we, his “unworthy disciples”, have failed to use it to achieve change. There is no shame in being a “failed prophet”, but if it keeps on happening, we will be open to ridicule and contempt. It is never our job to boast (as Peng Shuzhi did) of being consistently and forever correct. Instead, it is how to win victory from a correct standpoint. As for war, “there is no substitute for victory”. The same goes for revolution.1

1990 4 June Today is the first anniversary of the Tian’anmen Square incident. There have been mass demonstrations in Hong Kong and new protests at Peking University. Contrary to what many expected, the dramatic collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was not repeated in China. This is certainly not because Chinese Communist Party (ccp) rule is better or stronger than other forms of Stalinist rule. It is mainly because of one important difference

1 According to Clausewitz, apostle of the relentless will, “there is no substitute for victory” (editor’s note).

692

trans. xue

between China and the East European countries – in China, there is nothing that might serve as a nucleus for opposition forces. In Eastern Europe, that nucleus is the church. This is especially the case in a Catholic country like Poland, where churches, religious organisations, and the clergy have played a tremendous role in the struggle of the people against the oppressive communist bureaucracy. Religious groups in China are not poised to perform the same function. Although the Kuomintang is supposedly the most powerful of the opposition parties [in greater China], it is so notoriously bad that people cannot readily forget its failures. It is therefore difficult for such a party to claim to be the vanguard of the democratic struggle, despite its efforts to take advantage of the changing situation in mainland China. Could other democratic parties, such as the China Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang and the China Democratic League, play such a role? I think it is very unlikely. There is no single anti-communist political force in a position to unite all the other anticommunist forces; in my view, this is the main reason that Washington tries to curry favour with Beijing. The absence of a force capable of replacing the ccp does not entirely rule out the possibility that some force, backed up internationally, might overthrow the ccp or break it up. In other words, were it the case that no political force was able to take over from the ccp in its entirety, the ccp, although currently unified, would probably, in the throes of a deepening domestic crisis, divide into several separate regimes, constantly fighting one another. Such a situation, at least from the perspective of the major capitalist groups in the United States and even in Japan, who are interested in investing in China, would do more harm than good. It is easy in this light to understand why the US expresses sympathy for the democracy movements on the one hand but is desperate to maintain normal relations with Beijing and to grant it most-favoured-nation status on the other. If only a political force with a socialist vision, grouping together a wide range of members of the working class, could serve as a nucleus for the struggle against the reactionary political system of the ccp, by influencing and uniting the not inconsiderable number of anti-Stalinist revolutionaries within the party – this should be the sole objective of all the people sincerely fighting for the future of China. 19 June Professor Vyacheslav Ivanov, a People’s Deputy in the ussr, Chair of World Culture at Moscow University, Director of the All-Union Library of Foreign Literature, and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, wrote to The Guardian today calling on the British people to do everything possible to help the Soviet

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

693

Union relieve the famine that the Soviets are currently suffering. The crisis in the Soviet Union has finally come to light! How can we explain that seventy years after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union has been plunged deep into such a serious economic and food crisis? The obvious answer is that it is due to the Stalinist system. But such an explanation is too vague and general. In my view, a major and immediate reason for the dire straits in which the Soviet Union and China find themselves is that they have used up more resources than available in their arms race with the US. They have become “superpowers” in military terms, but their people are unable to afford food for their tables. As Chen Yi once said, China should develop a nuclear arsenal “even if we have to pawn our pants”. Now it’s time for retribution. The arms race has had many consequences. Despite being the biggest economy, the US has ended up becoming the world’s largest debtor nation. The Soviet Union is way less wealthy than the US, and has had to face starvation due to the problem of getting loans from lenders. However, West Germany and Japan would never have dared to imagine that not being allowed to rearm after World War Two was actually a “blessing in disguise” – they have become major economic powers, one in the West and the other in the East. A huge joke played by history.2 2 Author’s notes: Reviewing this diary entry two years later, I feel that I have pointed out only half of the problem. To be more specific, I have only touched on the disastrous effects of the arms race for the economy of the countries involved, especially the US and the Soviet Union, but I have not considered the impact of the arms race induced by the Cold War on world capitalism, in the sense that it has advanced science and technology and driven up general productivity. Modern technologies that change with each passing day and brought extraordinary prosperity to capitalism after World War Two were definitely not due to the expansion of the consumer market or an unprecedented increase in the purchasing power of the general public; rather, its main and direct cause was that both sides of the Cold War, but especially the US side, had to constantly create ever newer weapons to use for killing people and to outperform the other side in the Cold War. So once the Cold War ended and the insane arms race lost its raison d’être, a capitalist crisis was bound to break out. Over the past two years, every capitalist country has experienced an economic recession, to ever more serious effect. This makes sense only in the perspective set out above. To cope with and overcome this crisis, the US, having won its Pyrrhic victory in the Cold War, has had to shift the focus of its economy from the arms industry to civilian industry. At the same time, it has to find ways to put to use the homicidal weapons that have been put into cold storage. This has resulted in a series of internal and external policies adopted by the Bush government. Internally, the working class has been exploited more viciously; externally, it has taken advantage of the United Nations to keep provoking small-scale wars in the name of creating a “new world order”. Will the US be able to weather and overcome this crisis? That’s a long story that I won’t get into for the present. I would simply point out one more thing: given that the Soviet Union is far weaker economically, it has come out worst in the arms race, i.e., it “has nukes but no pants”. It owns 45,000 nuclear warheads, space stations, and nuclear submarines but lacks the most basic civilian necessities, including milk and even bread. As for how to apply state-of-the-art

694

trans. xue

28 September Yesterday I received the calligraphy that Lou Shiyi wrote for the title page for Old Chao’s [Zheng Chaolin’s] memoirs. I posted it off to Rudolf today.3 It’s good calligraphy! Today, Sinclair’s friends are holding a memorial service at the Adam Smith Library at Glasgow University, to which I was invited in advance.4 Glasgow is far away, and I am too tired to make it. My eulogy will be read by Charlie Van Gelderen at the meeting.5 Last Sunday, Ah Kow6 and Ah-T came to see me. During the talk we touched on the topic of how to deal with disagreements among friends. This conversation seems to be worth mentioning. Ah Kow was surprised to find a book of Old Peng’s [Peng Shuzhi] selected works on my bookshelf. He asked me why I kept a copy of a book by my “enemy”. I was even more surprised than he was. I asked him why I could not read or even have on my bookshelf the works of people with whom I disagreed. It is a major feature of Stalinism, and indeed of all authoritarian schools and systems, to describe those with whom one disagrees as “enemies”. There were many disagreements between Peng and me, but we could not and did not become “enemies”. Peng might have regarded me as an enemy, but I never saw him as one. I did not do so during his life, and I will not do so after his death either. In my obituary of him, I continued to recognise him as a revolutionary. The idea that those who disagree with my views and actions are my enemies and must be ruthlessly attacked and even destroyed is an ailment and the greatest sin of Stalinism. A true revolutionary, a true Marxist-Leninist and a true Trotskyist, must be forearmed against such a view, must resolutely oppose it, and must reject this style once and for all. It is true that in a debate, especially on some important issues of theory and practice, if there are different views, both sides must clearly state them and fight for their own views without retreating. In a heated debate, it is undeniable that the relationship and feelings among the disputants will be affected. But people who disagree ideologically must adopt the attitude of “I disagree with

3 4 5 6

technology to civilian industry and drive up productivity, the stupid control and “planning” of the Stalinist bureaucracy over industrial operations has played no positive role at all. (Added August 20, 1992). A German translation of Gregor Benton’s English translation of Zheng Chaolin’s memoirs was published, by Rudolf Segall, before the English translation. Louis Sinclair (1909–1990), the creator of a monumental bibliography of Leon Trotsky’s writings, became friends with Wang Fanxi after Wang’s arrival in England. Charlie van Gelderen (1913–2001) was a South African Trotskyist active in the British labour movement starting in the 1930s. I.e., Bobby Chan, a Chinatown activist in London.

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

695

you, but I fully accept that you have the hold to your view”. Lenin was ideologically and politically entirely rigorous, and he would not allow extraneous factors to influence his views and his insistence on issues. However, he never treated those with whom he disagreed as enemies. There are so many examples that I will cite only his relationship with Trotsky and Bukharin. He argued with Trotsky for more than ten years, but that did not prevent him from cooperating closely with him when the revolution came. As for Bukharin, he did not discriminate against him because Bukharin had at one point tried to have him arrested. He always regarded Bukharin as one of the “Party’s dearest comrades”. After talking about Peng Shuzhi, we started to talk about Chen Duxiu and Old Chao, and their relationship with me. I said that Chen was one of my most respected and admired teachers; Old Chao is one of my closest comrades and friends; but that does not mean that we never disagreed. On the contrary, we had many different opinions over time. We have argued not verbally but in writing over these differences of opinion. But these arguments have in no way diminished my respect for them, and I know that they have never treated me as an “enemy”. Needless to say, apart from sharing the same basic views on the revolution, we also share the same general attitude of “being human”. All in all, I tell Ah Kow, in regard to both socialist revolution and the democratic struggle, it is the greatest crime to regard dissidents as enemies and not to be satisfied until they have been killed. I do not agree with Jesus’s idea that we should “love our enemies”; however, I fully support Confucius’s idea of “maintaining harmony while allowing for difference”. 18 November I had a guest and was unable to write my diary for many days. The 7th of this month was the 75th anniversary of the October Revolution, and events in Moscow caused me to feel many different emotions. I had much to say, but my life was disrupted. I felt dizzy and was unable to perform. I have compared Gorbachev to Alexander ii of Russia and his reforms to the emancipation of the serfs by the Tsar. In view of the recent situation in the Soviet Union, this analogy seems to fit. If the bullet fired in Red Square that day had hit Gorbachev, the historical analogy would have been even closer.7

7 On 7 November 1990, at a military parade in Moscow, Alexander Shmonov shot at Gorbachev but missed.

696

trans. xue

Gorbachev’s reforms led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, to the rise of narrow nationalism in Russia and the smaller peoples, and even to the revival of the “devils and spirits” of the Russian Empire, which was unexpected by Gorbachev and also by any opponents of Stalinism. These days, I have been reading Fang Lizhi’s book.8 I have many responses, but unfortunately I lack the strength to write them down. My overall impression is that he is sincere, unlike many other politicians of the democratic type. He is known as China’s Sakharov,9 and for good reason. Like Sakharov, he jumped from “communism” to Anglo-American bourgeois democratism. Like all those who went through the same thought process, his main fault was to equate Stalinism with Maoism and socialism with communism. In his view and that of others, there could be no alternative to “actually existing socialism” (i.e., Stalinism, Maoism, and the associated political systems). However, Fang Lizhi seems to be better than Sakharov and especially Solzhenitsyn,10 who valued the socialist elements in the Swedish, Italian, and British capitalist systems. What Fang Lizhi does not understand is that this version of capitalism, which is more socialist than “socialism”, was not designed by some brilliant intellectual, let alone the result of capitalism’s self-growth, but was a result of internal class struggles in those countries after the Second World War. Such outcomes are now under attack by the capitalist class as the economies and politics of such countries evolve, especially in the light of the crisis that the world capitalist system has experienced over recent years. The outcomes are not only in danger of being cut back but of being abolished altogether. The clearest example is Britain: the main reason for the emergence and tenacity of Thatcherism was the British bourgeoisie’s intolerance of socialist elements in the capitalist system. They want to restore the “pure” capitalism of absolute freedom (absolute freedom for the asset owner to rob and absolute freedom for the labourer to freeze) as articulated and celebrated by Adam Smith. Fang Lizhi says that Marxism is outdated. But the socialism of Sweden, Italy, and Britain, which he so joyfully praised, can only be understood in terms of its

8

9 10

Fang Lizhi (1936–2012), a Chinese astrophysicist, former vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, and a political dissident who was among those held responsible for the Tian’anmen Square incident. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, Nobel laureate, and activist for disarmament, peace, and human rights. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), a Soviet novelist, dissident, and Nobel laureate, famous for his novels about repression in the Soviet Union.

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

697

emergence, its present state, and its possible future through the Marxist doctrine of class struggle. Needless to say, many of the views and arguments contained in Marxism are outdated. Those who fail to acknowledge this are not Marxists. However, Marxism (and indeed even some earlier doctrines) is not obsolete, for the history of humankind is primarily a history of class struggle. Class reconciliation is actually simply one form of class struggle. Like all the leaders of the democratic movement, Fang Lizhi emphasises the importance of intellectuals, and focuses especially on the discrimination, contempt, and abuse that intellectuals have suffered under the Maoist system. He is right in many things. Where he goes wrong is in assuming that intellectuals are an independent force, outside of class society, beyond class, and that they do not represent the interests of any class. In fact, it is an undeniable truth that intellectuals [are not in themselves a class but] can only serve a given class. In the past, Stalin and the Maoists glorified and deified the proletariat. Of course, this was wrong. Marx and Lenin highlighted the role of the proletariat, its historical status, and the leading role it could play, or even must play, in the socialist revolution, but they never glorified the working class, nor did they glorify or mystify individual workers, as if they were different from others once they became workers. It is as if the working class is not made up of ordinary workers but of specially selected people apart from and different from the masses. Marx and Lenin did not, and would not, describe the intellectual backwardness of the working class because of its exploited and oppressed status as a virtue, or describe the backward behaviour of some workers as advance. The advanced role and revolutionary function of the working class in modern society does not arise from their present status quo but from the need to negate it (the need to break free from their chains). So when the revolutionary struggle of the workers – led by the political parties they support – is won, one of the most important tasks for the workers was to educate themselves, to speed up their knowledge and to raise themselves to the level of intellectuals. We must raise workers to the level of knowledge. It is definitely not to lower the intellectuals to the level of the workers in general. The obscurantist policies adopted by Stalin and Mao in this respect were like those of reactionary tyrants in past times. They had nothing in common with the doctrine of leadership by the workers advanced by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and others. 23 November The newspapers are full of comments about Mrs Thatcher, who has just resigned. It’s truly a “feast for the eyes”. But what I think is the most striking

698

trans. xue

feature of Mrs T, one that is never mentioned, is that although she is of an enemy of Marxism in some respects, in other respects she is the most loyal Marxist: like Marx, she is conscious of the fact that our society is made up of different classes with conflicting interests, and that politics is primarily a manifestation of class struggle. In this sense, she is several steps ahead of other politicians of all shapes and sizes. It is only Marxism that hits the nail on the head of Thatcherism. It hardly needs pointing out that both Stalinism and Maoism, which caricature and distort the Marxist doctrine of class, can only promote Thatcherism. The best evidence of this is the “reforms” in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China.

1991 13 February Some time ago I found an old letter written by Chen Duxiu (in Nanjing prison at the time) to the International Secretariat of the Left Opposition, dated 15 May 1934. The letter was full of enthusiasm, revolutionary optimism, and the spirit of internationalism. I immediately translated it into Chinese and sent it to Brother Chun,11 who made several copies for circulation among good friends. I believe this letter will be of great help to present-day researchers of Chen Duxiu. When Chen Duxiu wrote this letter, Liu Renjing was busy hoodwinking two foreign friends (Frank Glass and Harold Isaacs) to join him in a clique in Shanghai to oppose “Chen Duxiu-ism”. The letter was originally intended12 to serve as a negative example; that’s why it was translated into English and sent to the International. I am not quite sure what Liu Renjing meant by Chen Duxiu-ism. To judge by a report Liu wrote at the time (on the situation in China), the reference might have been to “Chen fomenting sectarian strife” in the Chinese Communist Party (ccp), as Liu apparently had illusions in the ccp’s Red Army. (If I was up to it, I would also like to have translated Liu’s report.) In the circumstances, I can’t help but think of Du Fu’s famous lines: “The names of mediocre writers will be forgotten, but those of the great masters will be remembered throughout the ages”. 11 12

Lou Guohua, also known as Lou Zichun. The Chinese original of this letter is not available. Its English translation can be found in the Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection in the Hoover Institution Archives. The context suggests that Liu Renjing might have translated the letter into English.

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

699

The Fourth International has been holding its Thirteenth Congress. I have been asked, “How many times have you attended the Congress? Why aren’t you attending this time?” My answer: I have never attended it. Why? Because in the past, before 1949, we Chinese Trotskyists were in no position, in any sense, to send people to Europe to attend international congresses. After 1949, the Chinese Trotskyists were organisationally wiped out and the few Trotskyists in exile overseas could, so I thought, represent only themselves; they no longer had an entity to stand for. They could only contact foreign Trotskyists (be it from the International Secretariat or from sections in the various countries) in an individual capacity, and not as representatives of the Chinese section. The main purpose of Peng Shuzhi coming to Europe was to join the international leadership as a representative of the Chinese section of the Fourth International. This action was, so I thought, too presumptuous, mainly because the so-called Chinese Revolutionary Communist Party, which he claimed to represent, no longer existed as such. When I came to Europe in 1975, I therefore immediately identified myself to the Secretariat as an individual Chinese Trotskyist. The role I hoped to play was in re-establishing the relationship between international Trotskyists and the Trotskyist remnants in China on a better footing. I have never asked to be a representative of anything. Representing a defunct organisation is, of course, a travesty; as for the handful of Trotskyists who get together in Hong Kong and Macao, it is too early for them to represent us. I would rather support the Fourth International as an individual than participate in it as a representative, the main reason being that one must “call things by their true names”. This, I believe, is a minimum requirement for being a revolutionary Marxist. It is a great pity that, alongside Peng Shuzhi, there seem to be a large number of our younger people who do not place a higher value on this minimum requirement. The main reason why Isaac Deutscher broke with Trotsky and the Trotskyists was his disapproval of Trotsky’s initiation of the founding of the Fourth International. His objection was not that such a body should not be set up but that it was impossible, on the basis of what Trotsky was advocating and doing at the time. The history of the Fourth International in the course of more than half a century of its existence might be taken to have vindicated Deutscher, for no matter how hard we try, the fact is that the Fourth International has never grown into a force capable of influencing the international workers’ movement, of truly intervening in international politics. I have never read any articles by Deutscher opposing Trotsky’s initiation of the Fourth International or any by Trotsky opposing Deutscher’s view. The only text I recall that is at all germane to the issue is the final passage of Trotsky’s postscript to an abridged version of his autobiography:

700

trans. xue

This is the historical significance of the preparatory work of the Fourth International; just leave the sceptics to their cynicism! History is not made of scepticism. This book was not written for sceptics. By “sceptics”, he meant people like Deutscher and those who share his views. I have known Tamara Deutscher, Isaac’s wife, for more than ten years, but for some reason I have never spoken with her about this controversy. Thinking back on it, that’s a pity. But in any case, unlike some sceptics and pessimists, I have always thought that half a century is too short a time to prove that Trotsky’s efforts to initiate and establish the Fourth International were futile and an illusion. On the contrary, they have shown that the efforts by Trotsky and his comrades were necessary. As far as individuals are concerned, we shouldn’t judge people to be heroes or not simply according to their success or failure; as far as ideology is concerned, momentary success or failure is even less a criterion for judging what is right and what is wrong. Today, with the complete collapse of Stalinism, if the ideological system represented by the Fourth International did not exist, i.e., if we were bereft of the thinking and practice of the theory of permanent revolution, a combination of true internationalism and complete mass democracy, we would witness the total triumph of capitalism, not just de facto but also ideologically. One can say that it is only thanks to the ideology represented by the Fourth International that humankind will be able to maintain faith in socialism and communism and finally see their realisation in coming years! That is not to say, of course, that the Fourth International as it exists, organisationally divided and ideologically stagnant, can play such a role. But as long as the general direction is not lost, i.e., as long as the two main principles of revolutionary internationalism and workers’ democracy are kept alive, I am convinced that, under the impetus of events, a strong Fourth International, capable of assuming its historical responsibilities, will be established. In short, a thoroughly revolutionary international organisation can only be established during a high tide of the international revolution. Until then, it can only be seen as a period of preparation. 28 February I’ve had guests for days and I am extremely tired as a result. The last guest left this afternoon and I had such a headache that I couldn’t even read the newspaper. In the evening I listened to the radio and learned that the Gulf War was over. The Iraqi army has been defeated, and the “UN” forces have “liberated” Kuwait and occupied southern Iraq. Iraq has accepted all the “UN” resolutions and President Bush has declared a ceasefire.

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

701

The Gulf War lasted for forty-two days. I felt much emotion. The first thing that came to mind was: To call Iraq “fourth in the world”13 was a deliberate exaggeration, intended [by the US] as an excuse to use force. For the same reason, they called the petty tyrant Hussein “a modern-day Hitler”. By deliberately dressing up a wolf as a lion, the United States brought together thirty countries, hundreds of thousands of troops, and an unprecedentedly large air, land, and sea force. Equipped with state-of-theart technology, they bombed Iraq (a small “third world” country), especially its two largest cities, Baghdad and Basra, into the stone age. Finally, Hussein’s main force, the Republican Guard, was literally burned to cinders and smashed to pieces. During the entire war, the “UN forces” suffered only one hundred or so casualties, while the number of dead Iraqi soldiers must have numbered at least one hundred thousand. This was not war but hunting at its most brutal, a rare one-sided massacre, but carried out under the banner of the “United Nations” and the slogan of “democracy, freedom, and justice”! The contrast between good and evil is so blatant that the hypocrisy of the victors will soon become apparent to the temporarily deluded public. The second thing that this massacre reminded me of is that bourgeois nationalism in the Arab countries, with the Koran as its guiding ideology, has no real future. It imposes brutal repression on the toiling masses of its own countries and its resistance to imperialism is negligible. The national and democratic tasks in these countries can only start to be solved through socialist revolutions under the leadership of the working class of each country. Another thought is that in future, if the most advanced technology is used in warfare, there can only be one of two outcomes: if the two sides are unequally equipped, war will result in the extermination of the weak by the strong; if both sides are equally equipped, both sides will lose. In the worst case, the entire human race will be destroyed. I am therefore more and more convinced of the truth that “if socialism is not implemented, barbarism will emerge”. 3 March Looking over my diary entry of three days ago, I feel that one point must be added to what I said about the outcome of future wars. By those two possible endings, I assume primarily that the two warring parties belong to, or largely 13

According to a Centre for Army Lessons Learned (US) report, published in 1990, between 1980 and the summer of 1990 Saddam boosted the number of his troops from 180,000 to 900,000, thus creating the fourth-largest army in the world.

702

trans. xue

belong to, nations or groups of the same sort, and that war is, for neither side, revolutionary in nature, or even minimally progressive. If one side in a war is revolutionary and the other counterrevolutionary, then whether the war is between two (or more) classes within a nation or between two different countries, the weaker will not necessarily be defeated or destroyed. For it is, after all, people who wield weapons, and such people will be affected by revolution. It is true that as weapons change, so does the class composition of those who wield them: scientists, engineers, and technicians in general will, to a large extent, replace the working masses of the past. But the war machine can never be run by a small “elite”. The “nuts and bolts” are the ordinary working people, who will still make up the largest number. They will be influenced by the revolution; what’s more, even scientists and technicians who handle weapons can be diverted into serving the revolution when they come up against a truly revolutionary situation. Some people think that the unprecedented innovations that are happening in the field of technology are eliminating the presence of the working class. For the same reason, they will argue that future wars are unlikely to lead to revolution. I am sure that history will prove these prophets wrong. 31 March I read with great difficulty the Draft Resolution on the International Situation presented by the Joint Secretariat of the Fourth International to its Thirteenth Congress. I was quite disappointed. It provides no clear and firm answers to the main issues in the current world situation. It merely presents a fragmentary and superficial explanation of certain phenomena and ways of coping with them. Section iv of Part I of the draft reads as follows: Stalinism has not been a simple detour from a pre-established historical path, or a simple parenthesis that will be closed. Its monstrosities hang like a millstone and its ghosts haunt the present. The project of socialist liberation carries these burdens – for the overwhelming majority of workers the very words no longer have the same meaning or promise as they did at the beginning of the century. Those peoples massively rejecting Stalinism are not only mobilising against totalitarian dictatorship and for democratic freedoms. They also express the awareness of economic and social failure, seeing capitalism solely through the prism of its performance in the main imperialist centres. We have not finished paying the price for Stalinism. Memory and hope must be rebuilt.

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

703

This paragraph sums up the tone of the resolution, and represents the view of the authors of the draft on the present situation as a whole, i.e., on the world situation as it is emerging from the total collapse of Stalinism. It undoubtedly captures the essential character of the present situation; it emphasises the seriousness of the collapse of Stalinism, and it is right to avoid chiming with the current assessment of the “excellent situation of the democratic revolution”. But at the same time it says nothing to indicate that the situation is exactly as we have been warning and predicting for decades. It does not stress that it is the result of “socialism in one country”, which we have always opposed. It does not point out that for more than half a century we have fought against this mistaken notion and advanced our own different ideas for the construction of a socialist path based on the notion of non-totalitarianism, popular democracy and socialism guided by internationalism. It fails to point out that the collapse of Stalinism justifies our programme of permanent revolution and internationalism. Instead, the authors of the draft simply say that we must pay for the faults and sins of Stalinism and make a fresh start, in order to build “memory and hope”. This is too negative. There is no reason to take such a negative attitude! Our first task at present is to help the masses of workers to understand that Stalinism is not the socialism we want, to explain to the masses that Stalinism is not a historical necessity, that is to say, if a different policy had been adopted, if the ideas put forward by the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union starting in the early 1920s had been pursued, then even if an ideal socialist society had not been achieved, as envisaged after the October Revolution, humanity today would not be in such a gloomy state: a state marked by a total triumph of capitalist imperialism and a general disillusionment of all oppressed and exploited peoples with the ideals of socialism and communism. In order to restore confidence in socialism and communism, above all among the working peoples of the world, the most important and arguably the only path, in terms of our subjective efforts, is to make known to the world the fundamental opposition between Stalinism and Trotskyism in the course of the last seventy years, to clarify the theory and practice of the two positions: “socialism in one country” versus its inadmissibility. Only by relying on this actual theory and on political struggle, only by making the contents of this great struggle and its relevance to the fate of humanity universally known, only by showing how and why the Soviet Union and other “socialist” systems ended up in this way, only by convincing people that things would have been very different if Trotsky’s rather than Stalin’s ideas had been implemented – in short, only by re-establishing such a “memory” can the “hope” for socialism and communism be restored.

704

trans. xue

So we are not obliged to “pay for” the collapse of Stalinism. On the contrary, we should take advantage of the complete bankruptcy of Stalinism to do our utmost to introduce a genuine, democratic, internationalist socialist programme to the world, thus recovering the price we have paid in the form of our past vilification and persecution by the Stalinists. Needless to say, our future task is not merely to recite Trotsky’s words over and over again and to quote the programmes and documents of the Fourth International. The new situation calls for a new response. The sad experience of more than half a century of Stalinism must also be seriously analysed. The entire history of Stalinism (and also of Maoism) is of great value as a negative example in the construction of socialism, for the future destiny of humanity and especially for the theory and practice of socialism and communism. On the basis of internationalism and mass democracy, guided by our strategy of permanent revolution, we must reconsider many of the problems that in the past were not seen as problems, by referring back to the “socialist” experiment conducted by Stalinists. Is state property unconditionally conducive to socialism? Is a planned economy absolutely incompatible with a market economy? Is the coexistence of public and private ownership (to some extent) beneficial or harmful to the construction of socialism? How should the dictatorship of the proletariat be made compatible with the democracy of the working masses and with human and civil rights in general? Should there be a strict time limit on the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., should it be diminished once the revolutionary regime has been stabilised and consolidated, and when the civil war arising from revolution in any given country has subsided? And so on and so forth. Needless to say, most of these questions would have to be set out in a new programme. However, given that a new programme has not yet been drafted, they should have been mentioned in the political resolution. 25 December Gorbachev has finally officially announced his resignation. He has resigned from the presidency of the no-longer-existing Soviet Union. It was somewhat emotional to see on television the Red Flag that once represented the workers’ and peasants’ revolution lowered from the Kremlin flagpole for the last time. Naturally, over the years this flag has long since ceased to symbolise and represent the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, Bolshevism, and hope for the future of humanity. On the contrary, it has long been used to cover up the crimes of the traitors of the October Revolution, and has long been spoiled and debauched by all the so-called “communists” from Stalin downwards. But just as a faithful and beautiful woman who has been violated by a mob cannot be held responsible for the rape, so the true programme and ideals of the Red Flag

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

705

and Communism, raped by the Stalinists for decades, can in no way be held responsible for any of the evils of Stalinism. Now, conscious or unconscious Stalinists around the world, at a time when Stalinist systems are collapsing one after the other, have about-turned and appointed themselves as democrats, while hauling down the Red Flag, erasing the word communism, and even doing their best to attack and vilify the flag and doctrine. This is not only shameless (on the part of active Stalinists left over from the past) but ignorant and unwitting (on the part of the masses deceived by Stalinism). The tradition of workers’ and peasants’ revolution is bound to survive and to rise again. Moreover, I firmly believe they will rise and prosper under the Red Flag and the true programme of Communism.

1992 29 August I finally sent a copy of my notes on the nature of the old Soviet state, the unprecedented development of capitalism in the post-war period, etc. to Brother Chun and asked him to forward it to Old Chao. There are two other comments in Old Chao’s “outline” [received several days ago]: our attitude towards ethnic and religious issues, which I would also like to discuss with him at some future date. I think we are right to oppose reactionary nationalism; but that does not mean that we should ignore the complexity of ethnic issues. Attaching importance to ethnic issues and being in favour of nationalism are two entirely different things. It would be wrong to see them as one and the same, or simply to deny the existence of ethnic issues. Such an attitude would not only fail to resolve the objectively existing ethnic disputes but, worse still, would objectively help the most reactionary and more powerful peoples to oppress weaker ones. On this issue, Lenin’s position was indeed far superior to Rosa Luxemburg’s. Past history bears out this conclusion, and the sad situation currently unfolding in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia will prove it in both positive and negative ways. The same is true of our attitude towards religion. It would be naive to oppose all religious disputes simply by raising the slogan “Religion is the opium of the people” and to act as if overthrowing religion in toto would solve all the political and social conflicts that arise from religious differences. The anti-religious struggle of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution was highly counterproductive, at least in the sense that one cannot oppose religion simply by mouthing slogans against it; doing so merely had the opposite effect – it greatly strengthened all reactionary and ignorant religious forces.

706

trans. xue

The fight against religion is long-lasting. Religion can never be opposed by political or military means. It must gradually shed its influence in the course of a general cultural and economic improvement, to the point where it will finally disappear automatically. In this very long historical process, any progressive party or regime must strictly guarantee freedom of worship. Otherwise, it will only serve to prolong the survival of religion, or at least help it play a more reactionary role.

1993 20 January The inauguration of Clinton as the 42nd president of the United States happened today. Over the past two weeks, President Bush, before his stepping down, launched a series of bombing raids on Iraq. The reason is that Iraq has not complied with the resolutions of the United Nations. Critics have speculated on Bush’s motives. Some attribute the actions to Bush’s artifice and shrewdness, others explain them as the result of Saddam Hussein taking advantage of the opportunity to make trouble. I feel the most important and painful truth that this incident proclaims to the world is that, for the long haul or the short, the US imperialists, armed to the teeth with the latest technology, will play the role of international police while flaunting the banner of freedom, democracy, humanity, and the market economy and using the name of the United Nations to suppress all movements of resistance to the so-called “New World Order” around the world – whether the movement be revolutionary, reformist, or even “reactionary”. Clinton is bound to continue this line. 14 March The crisis in Russia broke out again in the struggle between the president and the State Duma. After the collapse of Stalinist rule, the country’s political and economic crisis has expanded and deepened, and there is no sign of any turning point. In contrast, under the rule of the ccp, after the Tian’anmen Square massacre, China has remained politically stable and its economy has grown tremendously for more than three years now. Comparing the recent situation in China and Russia, what lessons can we draw? Most of the old Stalinists will tell us that if we want to rule countries like Russia and China, which are generally considered to lack a democratic tradition and whose economic foundations are relatively weak, there is no other way to stabilise the political situation and develop the economy than by exercising totalitarian and arbitrary rule.

a selection from wang fanxi’s diary, 1989–1993

707

Gorbachev might have regretted not complying with the machinations of the military and political leaders of the August coup, and going on to “re-bottle” by means of a Soviet-style Tian’anmen Incident, bloody or not, the “democratic” spirits he had previously released. In fact, Yeltsin and the leaders of Congress were already preparing to establish their own dictatorship, in order to implement their own “democratic reforms”. In the past, individual dictatorship has been used to build “socialism”; now, it is used to build capitalism. This is a mockery of history and the seemingly inevitable fate of humankind at the present moment – especially of people in backward countries. 7 September E.P. Thompson has died. The response in the press was far less than to the death of a tv star. Britain is a country of much talent; but upper society here values talent to more or less the same extent as in China. This is especially true of leftwing talent. It is a pity that I never finished reading Thompson’s masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class, although I have repeatedly dipped into it over the years. This is my worst failing: not being able to read books I love from start to finish. Thompson’s death has reminded me of the book, and I want to read it again, more conscientiously this time. But my energy is constantly ebbing, so this wish is probably just one of countless that I will never be able to carry out. Thompson was an original historian and a revolutionary with a poetic temperament. In addition to his magnificent account of the growth of the British workers from a class “in itself” to a class “for itself”, he wrote biographies of two of Britain’s revolutionary poets: William Morris and William Blake. Thompson charted the lives of these two poets and studied their thinking. His main purpose was to confirm his idea that the class consciousness of the British working class, especially the part that tended towards socialism, emanated from two traditions: one economic and political, the other literary and religious. Thompson sided with the working class, supported socialism and communism, and opposed nuclear weapons, primarily as a result of the latter tradition. Many Marxists think that since Marx wrote Capital and established scientific socialism, idealistic forms of socialism and sentimental opposition to capitalism and other oppressive systems do not help to raise the consciousness of the working class and serve only to anaesthetise exploitation and oppression. But this argument is twisted and even harmful if taken to extremes.

708

trans. xue

Various forms of socialism emerged before full-blown Marxism. Even after Marxism had come into existence and played a decisive role in the workers’ movement, non-scientific socialist thinking continued to play a part. Most of those won by such thinking initially accepted socialism for reasons of sentiment, and only later came to understand socialism intellectually and to embrace scientific Marxism. Despite the fact that Marxism had vanquished sentimental socialism ideologically, organised the working class at the practical level, won over the working masses, and – in some countries, starting with Russia – carried out socialist revolutions and attempted to build a socialist society, there were still many who were driven to embrace socialism on the basis of sentiment. Many of these emotional socialists became full-fledged Marxists through practical struggle and continuing theoretical reflection, but a significant number remained at the emotional stage. These emotional socialists, as history shows, have played and will continue to play an important part in socialist revolution.

Statement on the Tian’anmen Massacre of June 1989 Wang Fanxi

I am very sorry that I am sick and cannot attend today’s meeting. But I cannot remain silent when the Chinese Communist Party has committed such a horrible crime in Tian’anmen Square leading to widespread protests. I was an early member of the Chinese Communist Party. I joined in 1925 and was expelled in 1929. I was expelled because I disagreed with the policies issued by Stalin from Moscow and carried out by his Chinese followers. I opposed those policies. Among those expelled was Chen Duxiu – a main founder of the Chinese Communist Party and the man who proposed the slogan “Science and Democracy” in 1919. After being expelled from the Party, I continued my activities as a socialist until today – although I am too old to do much active work now. Looking back, I am reluctant to say that the Chinese Communist Party, under the leadership of Mao Zedong and his faction, has never done a single good thing for China. That would be untrue. What I want to say is that the Party has done a lot of good things and a lot more bad things in the last 50 years or so. And the recent massacre in Beijing is one of the greatest crimes they have ever committed. We must oppose this government, protest against it, struggle against it, and call on everyone to rise up and replace it. Such a barbaric rule must be defeated and replaced. The question is: how to overthrow it and what kind of political system to replace it? Some people accuse the students of trying to restore capitalism to China. I don’t believe that. I think what they want is a socialism with democracy. That’s what I’m fighting for. If capitalism is restored in China, the people of China, especially the working people, will be in a worse position than they are today, and China will most likely be turned into a new colony. Wang Fanxi Leeds, England, 9 June 1989

© Wang Fanxi, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_065

710

wang

Note by Wang Fanxi The Tian’anmen Square massacre has aroused condemnations and protests all over the world, and Britain is no exception. In particular, the academic community, both Chinese and foreign, held street demonstrations and mass meetings. On June 9, five days after the tragedy, Chinese and foreign students and other people from all walks of life in Leeds held a protest meeting at the university, which was filmed and recorded by Britain’s Radio 4 and broadcast to the whole of Britain two days later. I was unable to attend the conference due to illness, so I prepared this short speech on the spot and asked a student from Hong Kong to read it out on my behalf at the conference. Two pictures of me were added to the broadcast. Of course, it was impossible for me to give a full and precise explanation of the Chinese Communist Party, the Tian’anmen tragedy, and the future of China in such a speech. A friend told me afterwards that I had failed to point out when and what the ccp had done good things and when and what it had done bad things. He thought I should also have pointed out that the ccp could never do anything good in the future, and that it must be replaced. These suggestions are certainly justified; but he forgot that a short speech at a mass meeting must not be all things to all people. On February 18, 1992, I translated the speech from English into Chinese at the request of Brother Zichun (Lou Guohua).

part 3 Memoirs and Recollections

∵

Introduction to Part 3 Part 3 contains translations of memoirs by or about a dozen key figures in the Chinese Trotskyist movement. (The memoirs of Peng Shuzhi, Wang Fanxi, and Zheng Chaolin have been published separately.)

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_066

section a Jiang Junyang

∵

An Intransigent Man: In Memory of My Old Comrade Jiang Junyang (1921–2006) and Our Thirty Years in Prison (2006) Li Yongjue, translated by Yang Yang 28 November 2006

This memoir commemorates Li’s comrade Jiang Junyang, a Trotskyist from Guangxi. It describes a small group of Chinese Trotskyists’ life in prison and labour camps after the 1952 round-up. Source: Li Yongjue (a veteran Trotskyist from Guangdong), Kanke: Li Yongjue huiyilu (Ordeal: The Memoirs of Li Yongjue), published in Xiandai gemingshi wenxian congkan (Modern Revolutionary History Series), Hong Kong, 2007, no. 1, appendix. The Chinese text was transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive.

In 1953, under the direction of the ccp, a group of Trotskyists arrested in central and southern regions of China were assembled in Hanyang, Wuhan, for “reform through labour”. Among them was Jiang Junyang. In 1949, the year of Liberation, he had graduated from the history department of Zhongshan University in Guangzhou. As a historian, he knew a lot about Stalin’s brutal persecution of the Trotskyists. After graduating, he therefore immediately went into hiding in Zhanjiang and got a job as a waiter in a hotel. He thought that this would save him from persecution, but he was recognised by one of his university classmates, who had become a government official. As a result, he was arrested in March 1951. Two years later, he was among those transferred to a re-education camp in Hanyang [a part of Wuhan]. There were more than twenty male Trotskyist prisoners and four females among those brought together for re-education. The men were taken to the Hanyang brickworks, while the women were allocated to the Wuhan Prison Garment Factory. Most of these Trotskyist prisoners were university graduates. For example, Xie Shan from Guangzhou, an accountant, was director of accounting at Guangdong provincial sugar company [at the time of his arrest]; Chen Jingguang was an accountant for an airline company; He Ruoping was a graduate of Jiaotong University; Lin Songqi was a teaching assistant at Zhongshan University; Xu Taixing from Guangxi was a teaching assistant at Guangxi

© Li Yongjue, translated by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_067

718

li, trans. yang

University; Xiao Jingfang, Luo Chunbai, and Lei Runqing were graduates of Guangxi University; He Chunhua was the headmaster of a secondary school; and Huang Dekai was editor-in-chief of Guangxi Daily. [After the roundup] all of us were kept in prison for more than a year and suffered from malnutrition, so that we were barely able to walk. Nevertheless, we were sent to the brickworks to carry mud. We dug the mud from the nearby hills day after day and put it at the side of a railway track, whence it was carted off to make bricks. Each of us had a quota. We had to carry the mud back and forth around one hundred times a day. Everyone was exhausted, and during breaks we collapsed on the ground. But Jiang Junyang seemed to remain in good physical condition and tried to devote his energy to the construction of a new society. After a hard day’s work, we had to participate in a study group for about two hours during the evenings, to “criticise the Trotskyite-bandits and reform our thinking”. [During the study sessions] Party cadres lectured us on how reactionary the Trotskyists were. It was difficult to have to listen to this. We had risked our lives and devoted ourselves fully to the revolution, but now we were criminals according to the ccp. Hence the saying, “winners take all, losers are always in the wrong”. Now the Party was king, whereas the Trotskyists were bandits. By that time, we had no way of fighting back and had to accept whatever fate they imposed on us. Lin Songqi, for one, was determined not to admit that the Trotskyists were bandits, but he was publicly humiliated and tortured and ended up in solitary confinement. We heard little more about him, and there was a rumour that he died shortly afterwards. We were not afraid of death, but we tried to adopt a politically passive attitude by blindly following what the Party cadres said and studying, in an admittedly perfunctory manner. Jiang Junyang even pretended to be an idiot. On one occasion, he said he hoped that Marx would visit China sometime, to imply that he was unaware that Marx was dead. The presiding cadre called him a fool, which made everyone laugh. After that, Jiang got the nickname “Jiang the Fool”, and even some cadres called him it. Jiang liked to pretend that he was a fool by talking nonsense during study sessions, but in fact he was very clever. Even under such hostile circumstances, he still found time to study Marx and Lenin. During the Wuhan floods in 1954, our workshop was submerged, so our reeducation team moved into the hills, where we were put to work strengthening the dam. After the floods had receded, we returned to the workshop, to do building work. When the factory resumed production, the cadres [in charge of our re-education] said that we were all hard-working. Because we were educated, we were re-allocated to the maintenance workshop based in the former ironworks. Some of us learned to be machinists and others fitters, but Jiang got the hardest job, as a caster. We had no protective gear, so whenever the furnace

an intransigent man: in memory of my old comrade

719

opened, our hands and feet were liable to be burned. Then the brickworks were transformed into a plastics factory. Xu Taixing, who had taught chemistry at Guangxi University, set up a laboratory in the factory, which purchased a large amount of waste plastic and produced sandals that were sold all over China. Jiang and I received the longest sentences, of 15 years, while most of the rest got between five and ten years. By 1956, the cadres had stopped calling us “Trotskyite bandits”. They kept telling us that our cases “will be dealt with this winter or next spring”. The government announced that all those who had been sentenced to five years would be released early, while female prisoners who had received sentences of more than five years would be paroled. Both Jiang and I had our sentences reduced, his by three years and mine by five. Later, however, the ccp became more radical and our cases could no longer be “resolved”. We had completed our sentences by late 1962 and early 1963, but we were not released and not allowed to return to [our homes in] Nanning and Shanghai. Instead we had to stay on in this re-education factory as “employed workers”, still subject to “reform through labour”. However, we were no longer prisoners, so we were able to move out of the prison and into workers’ dormitories. As employed workers, we received monthly salaries and ate in the workers’ canteen. We were also permitted to visit the city [Wuhan] on Sundays, while those whose families did not live locally [in Wuhan] received fifteen days leave a year. […] Throughout the long years of control and surveillance, we suffered grievously but persevered in our Marxist beliefs. Whenever he could, Jiang studied Marx and Lenin and worked on improving his English. However, even after his transition to the status of employed worker, he never wrote a single wall-poster. When we had dinner together in Xu Taixing’s home on Sundays, he rarely discussed theoretical questions with us. Although we lived in such poor conditions for so many years, we still managed to muddle through. Jiang had a great sense of humour and was a good cook. When the weather got colder, we sometimes went to the outskirts on Sundays to get dog meat. Then Jiang would cook it using various ingredients and come up with a big pot of delicious food for us, which we ate with relish. We did not leave Wuhan until after the start of reform and opening up [in the late 1970s]. In 1983, Jiang and I were finally allowed to go home, he to Nanning and I to Shanghai, to live with our families. By that time, we had been working in the re-education factory for some twenty years. We were already in our sixties. We had no pension or social insurance, and we received no more than 45 yuan a month to cover our living expenses. If we saw a doctor, we had to pay. The tiny amount of money we received was too little to meet our costs, so we called it “boiling water money” as a joke. Throughout those years, Jiang relied on the

720

li, trans. yang

financial support of friends and family to see him through his difficulties. His younger sister-in-law later introduced him to a widow who was a nurse, and they married and took care of each other in old age. He had one condition: his wife was not allowed to disturb him while he was reading or writing. During our time in the re-education camp, Jiang pretended to be a fool and never wrote a single article for thirty years. When he got back home and started to enjoy personal freedom, that all changed. He was determined to be a conscientious reader and writer. He once told me, in a letter dated April 3, 2003, that “people have entirely abandoned even a basic knowledge of Marxism. The most important thing today is to restore Marx’s socialist theory”. [To this end] he later published a number of articles and translations in Trends in Chen Duxiu Studies,1 October Review, and other outlets. In 2004, his collected writings, My Studies and Reflections on the Basic Tenets of Marxism, was published by the Hong Kong Association for the Advancement of Marxist Studies. This intransigent man summed up his life in the following four precepts: Adhere to principles and reject conservatism; follow the truth and refrain from sectarianism; open your eyes to the world and seize the present; unite and fight, to seize the future. [I wrote this account of Jiang Junyang during a period of illness.]

1 Trends in Chen Duxiu Studies [Chen Duxiu yanjiu dongtai] was published by the Chinese Association of Chen Duxiu Studies. The editor-in-chief was Tang Baolin, a retired history professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Its first issue came out in October 1993, but it was closed down in 2004.

section b Liu Pingmei

∵

The Chinese Trotskyists at Risk, 1946–1952: The Communist Army Defeats the Kuomintang, the Trotskyist Centre Misjudges the Situation (2005) Liu Pingmei, translated by Xue Feng

Liu Pingmei, a veteran Trotskyist from Guangdong, published a history of Chinese Trotskyism, Zhongguo Tuopai dangshi (History of the Chinese Trotskyist party, Hong Kong: Xinmiao Press), in 2005, in which he describes the emergence and collapse of the Chinese Trotskyist movement from the mid-1920s to the late 1980s, using internal Trotskyist documents. This is Chapter 11 of Liu’s book. It presents the Trotskyist attitude towards the civil war between the ccp and the kmt (1946–49) and its predictions for the aftermath of the war. It looks briefly at the increasingly worsening situation between 1949 and 1952 of the Trotskyists who stayed behind in China.

Between 10 January and 31 January 1946, the Political Consultative Conference (pcc) met ten times consecutively in Chongqing, and passed the following resolutions and agreements: (i) Agreement on Military Issues, (ii) Resolution on Charter Issues, (iii) Programme for the Peaceful Establishment of the Nation, (iv) Agreement on the Political Organisational Issues, and (v) Agreement on the National Assembly Issues. The pcc called for the immediate cessation of the civil war, the establishment of a coalition government, the introduction of a constitution, the convening of a National Assembly and the conversion of the Communist army into [part of] the Nationalist army. Instead of a ceasefire, the Kuomintang troops continued to launch massive attacks on the Communist-occupied areas, tearing up both the armistice agreement signed in January and the pcc resolution. In July, a full-scale civil war was launched, attacking the Eastern China Liberation Zone, the Central Plains Liberation Zone, the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu Liberation Zone, the Northeastern Liberation Zone, the Jin-Sui Liberation Zone, and the Shaan-Gan-Ning Liberation Zone. After the capture of Zhangjiakou, a military town and the capital of the JinCha-Ji Liberated Area, on 11 October 1946, the Kuomintang celebrated its victory and Chiang Kai-shek immediately announced that the National Assembly would convene on 15 November 1946. The Trotskyists issued a statement opposing this National Assembly, which was obviously manipulated by the Kuomintang. They resolved to boycott

© Liu Pingmei, translated by Xue Feng, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_068

724

liu, trans. xue

the Assembly and called for a National Assembly with universal suffrage and full powers. On 10 August 1946, the US Ambassador John Leighton Stuart and General George C. Marshall announced in their Joint Declaration that “negotiations had reached a deadlock and mediation had been difficult”. So the military mediation ended in failure. On 29 January 1947, the US withdrew from the threemember military group that was implementing the armistice agreement and withdrew the US side of the military mediation. On 30 January 1947, the Kuomintang Government announced the dissolution of the military group and the military mediation department in Beiping [i.e., present-day Beijing]. The Kuomintang was winning military victories and the military situation was favourable to it, so military mediation was no longer necessary to disguise the Kuomintang offensive and to prevent the further development of the Communist forces. The US’s withdrawal from military mediation therefore represented an abandonment of all pretence of wanting peace. The Communist representatives were forced to withdraw from Beiping and, on 21 February, to retreat to Yan’an [the Communists’ capital at the time]. On 19 March 1947, the Kuomintang army captured Yan’an, where the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was based, and Chiang Kai-shek said he would defeat the Communist army within five months and completely destroy the “Communists” within a year. When the Kuomintang army captured Yan’an, Peng Shuzhi of the Trotskyist Central Committee misjudged the strength of the Communist army, believing that it was incapable of capturing cities or of holding them if it did manage to capture them, and that the peasant army (the Communist army) could not win without a rising on the part of the proletariat and proletarian leadership of the peasant army. Peng Shuzhi only saw that the Kuomintang army had captured some liberated areas and occupied dozens of cities, but not that the Communist army would be able to destroy the Kuomintang’s military forces in a defensive war. From July 1946 to June 1947, the Communist army annihilated a total of 1.12 million Kuomintang soldiers, reducing their strength from 4.3 million to 3.7 million and reducing the regular army from 2 million to 1.5 million. The Communists used a large number of captives to replenish their own army and a large number of peasants joined the Communist army, increasing its strength from 1.2 million to nearly 2 million, while increasing the strength of their regular army from 500,000 to 1 million.1

1 Liao Gailong 1952, pp. 53, 59.

the chinese trotskyists at risk, 1946–1952

725

In July 1947, the Communist army shifted from defence (the “internal mode” [as Mao Zedong called it]) to offence (the “external mode”). The Communist army went onto the offensive on both the northern and southern fronts, while the Kuomintang army was forced to shift from offence to defence. The Communist army under Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping crossed the Yellow River and annihilated nine and a half brigades of the Kuomintang army, numbering more than 56,000 men, in southwestern Shandong. On 27 August, they entered the Dabie Mountains and opened up the Dabie Mountains Liberated Area. Chen Geng and Xie Fuzhi’s corps crossed the Yellow River on their southward migration from Shanxi to western Henan in order to attack the Kuomintang. Chen Yi and Su Yu’s Field Army, in Central Shandong, entered southwestern Shandong in August, in order to attack the Kuomintang army. After the Communist army had gone over from “internal” to “external” mode in July 1947, when they crossed the Yellow River and entered North China, where they won one victory after another, the Central Standing Committee of the Trotskyists held two meetings (on 8 December 1947 and 29 February 1948) to discuss the international and domestic situation. Xizhao, Yaoru, and Biyun2 unanimously agreed that the Chinese Communist Party would not dare seize power, that the Kuomintang would not be able to destroy it, and that there would be an interlude of two or three years. During these two or three years, we should step up our efforts to build a new party. The decisive factor was whether the new party would have the power to influence and lead the coming wave and embark on a revolutionary path. It was impossible for the ccp to turn China into a new-democratic nation like in Eastern Europe. The ccp did not have a socialist political programme, so it had no future. The Kuomintang had the backing of the US dollar and it would never be possible for the ccp to overthrow the Kuomintang completely using military means. The analysis of the situation and the various estimates of the Central Standing Committee proved to be wrong. Initially, it was true that the Communists did not intend to use military force to seize power but instead wanted to realise the Communist Party’s new democracy by peaceful means. Later, as the peace negotiations turned out to be fruitless and the Kuomintang army kept attacking the Communist army, they were forced to resist. When the Communist army gradually increased its military strength in the course of defensive operations and achieved one victory after another in counter-attacks, the ccp resolved to defeat the Kuomintang and seize power. On 10 October 1947, the “People’s Liberation Army Manifesto” was issued: Down with Chiang Kai-shek, liberate the whole of China, organise

2 Xizhao was one of Peng Shuzhi’s aliases. Yaoru was Liu Jialiang, Biyun was Chen Bilan.

726

liu, trans. xue

a coalition government, and punish the war criminals led by Chiang Kai-shek. In December 1947, while discussing the then situation, the Standing Committee made a sharp turn in military terms, resolving to defeat the Kuomintang militarily. Between July 1947 and June 1948, the Communist forces annihilated more than 1.52 million Kuomintang troops and captured 164 important cities and towns with a population of 37 million. The number of Kuomintang troops was reduced to 3.65 million and the Communist army increased to 2.8 million.3 In the second half of 1948, the Communist army launched the four major battles of Jinan, Liaoshen, Huaihai, and Pingjin, decisive encounters in the war between the Communists and the Kuomintang. The result was a victory for the Communists. More than 1.6 million Kuomintang troops were destroyed.4 Kuomintang defenders revolted in various parts of the country. For example, 20,000 men from Wu Huawen’s section of the Shandong garrison revolted, Zeng Zesheng of the Changchun garrison revolted, Zheng Dongguo defected, He Jili and Zhang Guangxia of the Xuzhou garrison revolted, Fu Zuoyi of the Beiping garrison defected, and Beiping was peacefully liberated. While the Communist forces were winning their victories, the Trotskyist Central Political Committee adopted a resolution on 11 November 1948 titled “Recent New Developments in the International and Domestic Situation and the Direction of Our Work”. The resolution declared that the Communist forces’ recent unprecedented victory and the crushing defeat suffered by the Kuomintang should lead to a re-evaluation of the two sides involved in the civil war. Our past analysis of the qualities and class base of the ccp and its armed forces remained entirely valid, but some of our past views needed amending. The Communist victory, apart from exposing the depth of the decay of the Kuomintang’s political system, showed that: (i) the large number of Japanese weapons handed over by the Soviet Union and the new and heavy weapons given by the Soviet Union had enabled the Communist Party to capture cities; (ii) and that the Communist Party was preserving as far as possible all the institutions and ruling strata of the old Kuomintang political system, which became a refuge for the old Kuomintang warlords and bureaucratic politicians and for the landed gentry. This approach reduced the ccp’s military victory to purely military and political opportunism, devoid of even a whiff of reformism. This opportunism had the following implications for the future development of the ccp. First, its

3 Liao Gailong 1952, p. 66. 4 Ibid., p. 93.

the chinese trotskyists at risk, 1946–1952

727

social base was extended to the cities, and encompassed all the contradictions between the countryside and the cities. Second, the ccp’s accommodation to the urban bourgeoisie would lead to its gradual abandonment of its peasant base and its submission to the nationalism of the bourgeoisie, thus becoming a second Kuomintang, while its armed forces would become instruments for the protection of bourgeois private property. Third, the ccp and its military apparatus would simply and gradually take on all the social contradictions of the Kuomintang without introducing any decisive changes. Such a development would guarantee that in the near future the ccp would rapidly reproduce the Kuomintang’s corruption, reactionary nature, and tendency to disintegrate. Fourth, the more the ccp became caught up in the various contradictions of the Chinese nation, the harder it would be for it to dance to the capricious tune of the Kremlin, and it would be forced onto the Yugoslavian path [of independence]. Fifth, any major historical event in future that brought about new tensions in the class contradictions of Chinese society would inevitably lead to a disintegration of the ccp. Under revolutionary conditions the workers and peasants would be bound to split from the upper bourgeoisie and the upper leadership of the petty bourgeoisie. Under conditions of war, all the ccp’s bourgeois warlord politicians would inevitably become a fifth column of the US imperialists, in their attack on the Soviet Union, thus causing the ccp to collapse or surrender entirely on the battlefield. The Chinese civil war would become part of a third world war if there were no timely intervention in the form of world revolution or a third Chinese revolution. World revolution had not yet exhausted its potential, and it was all the more important for us [Trotskyists] to intensify our revolutionary preparations. Possible factors that might favour continued Trotskyist activity in ccp-ruled areas include: (i) the ccp’s inability to resolve the contradictions will cause enduring discontent and division; and (ii) the ccp’s Marxist signboard, which would provide a natural shield for Trotskyist activity. As industry moves south, and thus the centre of political and economic gravity, it is clear that [our] Party’s base in southern China will increase in importance and that the comrades in the South China organisation should intensify their work to consolidate and expand the Party. At [our] above-mentioned Central Committee meeting, Yin Kuan criticised Peng Shuzhi for his wrong estimation that the Communist Party would be in a position to defeat the Kuomintang. We should support the Communist army in its efforts to defeat the Kuomintang army and welcome the People’s Liberation Army [pla] into the cities. Yin Kuan was criticised by all those at the meeting for surrendering to the Communists.

728

liu, trans. xue

The above resolution showed that the Trotskyist Central Committee failed to make a correct analysis and estimation at the moment that the Communist army won a decisive victory, and instead believed that [China] would be divided [at the Yangtze] and the South would remain at peace. Even more seriously wrong was the assertion that the Trotskyists could be able to carry out Trotskyist activities under Chinese Communist rule. The Communist forces had reached the northern bank of the Yangtze River and were threatening Nanjing, where the Kuomintang government was based. The Communist forces were already at an absolute advantage over the Nationalists. In such unfavourable circumstances, Chiang Kai-shek, in an attempt to de-escalate the crisis, in 1949 issued a New Year’s Message to the Communists seeking peace. In response to the Kuomintang’s offer of peace talks, Mao Zedong issued a statement on 14 January setting out eight conditions. At the top of the list was “punishment of war criminals”. As early as 23 December 1948, the [ccp’s] Xinhua News Agency had published a list of 43 war criminals headed by Chiang Kai-shek. This alone was clearly unacceptable to the Kuomintang. In such a situation, where the Communist army was already in a position to defeat the Kuomintang, the Communists had no need for peace talks. They therefore proposed terms that the Kuomintang would be unable to accept. When peace failed, Chiang Kai-shek was forced to announce his “retirement” [from office] on 21 January, with Li Zongren as China’s new acting president. On 20 March 1949, the Central Political Committee of the [Trotskyists’] Revolutionary Communist Party adopted a resolution titled “Our Attitude and Proposals on the Preparations of the Communist Party and Kuomintang for Renewed Peace Talks”. It concluded that the civil war was “beginning to turn openly in the direction of peace talks”. However, the basic contradictions between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang remained, and “a rupture and resumption of [the civil] war remained inevitable further down the road. In the end, China would be forced to drag itself into the cataclysm of a third world war, between the US and the Soviet Union”. The Trotskyist Central Committee still failed to see that the Chinese Communist Party was about to achieve total victory and that the civil war would not be dragged into a third world war between the US and the Soviet Union; and that the Chinese Communist Party had accepted the Kuomintang’s offer of “peace talks” because it needed to rest its troops and arrange for them to cross the river south, for it was not yet ready to launch an offensive. The Trotskyist Central Committee continued to propose “the overthrow of the Kuomintang” in areas under Kuomintang rule and “systematic Trotskyist propaganda and agitation” in areas under Chinese Communist rule. The Trotskyists had still

the chinese trotskyists at risk, 1946–1952

729

not learned from the ccp’s past anti-Trotskyist purges and believed that the Trotskyists could carry out their activities under ccp rule. Two months later – in June 1949 – the Trotskyist Central Committee corrected this decision and instructed Trotskyist organisations in mainland China to cease propaganda and agitation. It was widely rumoured that the Communist army would find it difficult to cross the Yangtze and that China would be divided by the river with the Communists to its north and the Kuomintang to its south. This was to underestimate the Communists’ determination to achieve total victory and of their army’s ability to fight. On 5 February, the Executive Office of the Kuomintang Government moved to Guangzhou [in preparation for the exodus to Taiwan].

i

How the Trotskyists Responded to the Communists’ Move South

The Communist forces were about to occupy Shanghai when the Trotskyists’ Central Office moved to Guangzhou, in January 1949. A Provisional Committee for the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions [along the Yangtze] was set up in Shanghai to manage Trotskyist organisations in Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. It consisted of Qian Chuan (secretary), Liu Yi, Ding Yi, Yang Bo, Ji Yunlong (who did not attend the meetings), and Xiong Andong of the Jiangsu and Zhejiang Area Provisional Committee. Later, Wang Guolong was added.5 The Trotskyists’ party and youth league merged. An internal publication continued, titled Under the Banner of Marxism. On 21 April 1949, Mao Zedong and Zhu De, commander-in-chief of the Communist army, issued an order for a major advance, and the Communist army crossed the river in three directions from east of Jiujiang to Jiangyin, moving south with great momentum. The Communists liberated Nanjing on 23 April and Shanghai on 27 May. The tri-city of Wuhan was liberated on 16 and 17 May, while Taiyuan was captured on 24 April and Datong, Xinxiang, and Anyang in early May, liberating the entire north of China. The Kuomintang garrison at Qingdao in Shandong abandoned the city and fled south, and the whole of Shandong was liberated. The Kuomintang army everywhere was on the point of being routed. The Kuomintang generals revolted and many defected to the Communist army.

5 Wang Guolong (1914–2010) was a prominent Wenzhou Trotskyist organiser, a member of Peng’s rcp. He was arrested during the 1952 roundup and not released until 1979.

730

liu, trans. xue

From July 1948 to June 1949, the Communist forces annihilated a total of 3.4 million Kuomintang troops and captured a total of 482 cities, including provincial capitals and county capitals. The Communist army had achieved a decisive victory. On 25 September 1949, the commander of the Kuomintang troops stationed in Xinjiang [in the far West], Tao Zhiyue, gave up the city by telegram and Xinjiang was peacefully liberated. More than 80,000 Kuomintang troops under Dong Qiwu in western Suiyuan declared an uprising on 19 September. In late September, the Communist army entered Guangdong in the south and the Kuomintang army fled to Guangxi and the government to Taiwan. On 14 October, Guangzhou was liberated. The Trotskyist Central Committee in Guangzhou had moved to Hong Kong in March 1949. It laid down contingency measures in June 1949. It proposed supporting the Communist forces in their pursuit of the Kuomintang forces, and supporting all progressive measures by the Communist Party after liberation while criticising wrong measures. It instructed people from the provincial committee and above to go to Hong Kong, including anyone openly active. It ordered a halt to public activities by the Trotskyists, the recruitment of new members, the adoption of a “single line” of contact between members of the organisation and an end to “horizontal” relations, and a merger of the Trotskyist party and league. The Government of the People’s Republic of China, led by the Communist Party, was founded in Beijing on 1 October 1949. The Trotskyist groups that remained in mainland China were now under Communist rule.

ii

The Trotskyists under Communist Rule

In September 1949, the Kuomintang government organs and the Kuomintang troops that had gone south to Guangzhou were hastily transferred to Taiwan, while some that failed to reach Taiwan retreated to Guangxi and others ran off to Hainan Island. The Guangzhou branch of the Trotskyists, including its provincial officials and above, were evacuated to Hong Kong. Some from Guangxi withdrew to Guangxi, and those who remained in Guangzhou merged into a party-league structure. The Guangzhou branch, acting according to instructions from the Trotskyist Central Committee, backed the [ccp’s] Three Supports Campaign (support the front line, the pursuit of the fleeing Kuomintang army, and the fight

the chinese trotskyists at risk, 1946–1952

731

against bandits and the [general] handing over of weapons). With the front line already having reached Guangxi, the Guangzhou Branch wrote to Jiang Junyang in Guangxi and Liao Zhenru in Wuzhou with instructions on what to do. On 30 June 1950, the Central People’s Government announced its Land Reform Law and the land reform movement got underway in Guangdong. The Guangzhou Branch supported the Communist Party’s land reform and argued that “the land should be state-owned”. Four members of the Trotskyists’ student group participated in land reform. On 25 June 1950, the Korean War broke out, and on 30 June the Trotskyist Central Committee in Hong Kong passed a resolution supporting the North Korean resistance to the South Korean and US forces. The Guangzhou Branch, following on from the resolution, also supported the campaign against the US. The Trotskyists were not able to join the Chinese volunteers in Korea, but those in Guangzhou took part in the propaganda campaign against the US. On 18 March 1950, the ccp’s Central Committee issued a Directive regarding the Severe Suppression of Counterrevolutionary Elements and launched a nationwide Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. In some places, “Reactionary Parties and Leagues” were ordered to register. In Guangxi, the Trotskyists were included on the list of parties to be registered, but not in Guangzhou. The Guangzhou Branch supported the suppression of counterrevolutionaries but expressed its opposition to the suppression of the Trotskyists. The Trotskyists denounced various “backbone elements” of the Kuomintang and its youth wing. In mid-October 1949, the Trotskyists’ Jiangsu-Zhejiang Provisional Committee in Shanghai had been smashed by the Communists and Qian Chuan, its secretary, and Liu Yi, Ding Yi and Wang Guolong were arrested, alongside Shen Yunfang, Hu Zhendong, Zhao Yangxing, and Zhou Lüqiang. They were given a talking-to, and then ordered to refrain from any future Trotskyist activities. Most were released the following day, while Qian Chuan and Zhao Yangxing were detained for around 10 days. After that, the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Provisional Committee ceased activity. Pan Hannian6 of the Shanghai Communist Party sent someone to tell Zheng Chaolin to cease activity, after which the Internationalist Workers Party [the Trotskyist faction that Zheng and Wang Fanxi led] complied with the order. In Guangxi, after the liberation of Nanning and Guilin, the Trotskyists were arrested and imprisoned.

6 Pan Hannian (1906–1977) was a key figure in the ccp’s intelligence service. He was appointed Deputy Mayor of Shanghai in 1949.

732

liu, trans. xue

On 28 January 1952, the ccp’s Central Committee launched its Three Antis and Five Antis campaigns in the cities. The Trotskyists in Guangzhou supported this campaign, and a member of the [Trotskyists’] Guangzhou Youth League went up onto the stage [at a mass rally] to denounce his father for having engaged in what he called the “five poisons”.7 In the autumn of 1951, Liu Chao, a member of the Guangzhou branch, noticed that he was being followed and the organisation decided that he should immediately go back to the town of Xijiao in Zhongshan to lie low. Soon after his return, he was arrested. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, where he later died. The Trotskyists’ Zhongshan branch was destroyed by the ccp in the summer of 1950. Zheng Tieleng, Zhang Zhuowen, Wu Lengfeng, and Zheng Minxing were all arrested, and Zheng Tieleng later died in a labour camp. Gao Hui, who taught at Zhongshan Memorial High School, was not arrested. Fang Liwei joined the army after the liberation of Zhongshan but was arrested in December 1952, while still in the army. In the autumn of 1950, Liao Zhenru, Zeng XX, and XXX, members of the Trotskyist group in Wuzhou, were arrested and imprisoned. Jiang Junyang was arrested in Zhanjiang in early 1951. Starting on 22 December 1952 and continuing through until 8 January of the following year, a nationwide raid was carried out to arrest all Trotskyists, including some who had left the Trotskyist movement in earlier years, sympathisers of the Trotskyists, youth league members, and others who had returned to China in 1950.8 More than 500 people were arrested across the country. Some Youth League members and sympathisers were subjected to “education” and subsequently released, while others were sent to jail on sentences ranging from three years to life. A small number were never [formally] sentenced, but were nevertheless imprisoned alongside those given life sentences. Some were released in 1956, after the commuting of their sentences. In October 1950, Yin Kuan was arrested at his home in Tongcheng, Anhui province, and in the spring of 1964 he was transferred to a prison in Shanghai, but without a verdict. In Shanghai, he was in a group with Zheng Chaolin and

7 The Three-Antis and Five-Antis campaigns were political movements in the early 1950s that consolidated the Party’s power by targeting its political opponents as well as individual capitalists. The Three-Antis opposed corruption, waste, and bureaucracy; the Five-Antis opposed bribery, theft of state property, tax evasion, cheating on government contracts, and stealing state economic intelligence (editors’ notes). 8 After 1949, many leftists and patriots returned to China to take part in reconstruction and help “build socialism”.

the chinese trotskyists at risk, 1946–1952

733

a handful of other Trotskyists who were also unconvicted. Yin Kuan had heart disease and was transferred to Prison No. 8 (the sick wing). The doctors estimated that he would not live for more than two years and the government was reluctant to see him to die in prison, so he was released and allowed to go home. On 18 August 1965, Yin Kuan’s daughters Yin Guixiu and Yin Longzhu went to the prison to fetch him. He died of a stroke on 11 July 1967. In the spring of 1964, those who had been sentenced to life imprisonment and those who had not been formally sentenced were concentrated in Shanghai prisons. In October and November 1972, they were released from prison and placed under strict control in labour camps. On 5 June 1979, the Shanghai People’s Supreme Court ruled that those who had not been sentenced should “have their civil rights restored” while those who had been sentenced should be “granted their civil rights”. They were released from strict control and returned to their homes. Since the nationwide round-up of the Trotskyists in December 1952, there has been no Trotskyist organisation in mainland China.

Forever Persevering: A Tribute to Liu Pingmei (2008) Duan Yue, translated by Gregor Benton 1 February 2008, Beijing

This obituary of Liu Pingmei was written by Duan Yue, an independent Beijing scholar and journalist. It harks back to Duan’s week-long interview with Liu in 2006, in which Liu talked about his life as a Trotskyist and his efforts to research Chinese Trotskyist history. The original Chinese text was transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive.

On the evening of 9 November 2007, I received a long-distance call from Mr Huang in Hong Kong. He told me that Liu Pingmei had passed away. Mr Huang is Liu Pingmei’s son-in-law. I had already learned a year or so before that Liu Pingmei was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, had lost his memory, and was unable to take care of himself. I was therefore prepared for his death. However, on that day, the news still took me by surprise and left me speechless. The first time I heard the name Liu Pingmei was when I interviewed Xiong Andong, an elderly Trotskyist from Shanghai, in 2000. I learned three things about Liu Pingmei from Xiong’s account. First, he was one of the Chinese who believed in Trotskyism and who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1952. Second, he was one of the few who persisted in his denial of guilt. Third, after his release he withdrew from the bank the savings he had accumulated during his seven years on a labour farm near Shanghai but refused to take the interest, on the grounds that it represented exploitation. This information was enough to make me curious about the old man, and I managed to interview him. Mr Xiong said that he had not spoken to Liu Pingmei for many years and recommended that I go and see Zhou Lüqiang, another old man from Shanghai, also a Trotskyist. Zhou wrote back saying that Liu Pingmei had agreed to be interviewed, and sent me a note with a map drawn by Liu Pingmei himself. Liu Pingmei marked his home address and the route of the car, drawn very carefully, in clear handwriting. Although I had not met him yet, I could already feel his kindness and delicacy. In April 2006, I finally arrived in Guangzhou and, following the map, found Liu Pingmei’s residence in an old street. When he opened the door, I could see

© Duan Yue, translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_069

forever persevering: a tribute to liu pingmei (2008)

735

that his movements were a little slow: a head of white hair, a strong face, a calm demeanour, and calm movements, wearing light-coloured clothes, neat and simple. My first impression was that he was a man of great distinction and elegance. I spoke with him for about four hours each day for the next seven days. He dominated the conversation, while I just listened, occasionally asking questions or confirming the names of people and places he mentioned. He spoke in Mandarin, slowly and with an occasional Cantonese accent. Like the other Trotskyists I interviewed, he was articulate and clear in his thinking. I could see that he must have been very gifted in his prime. Liu Pingmei’s ancestral home is in Zhongshan, Guangdong, where his father was a bankrupt landowner. His father went to Shanghai to do business at an early age, so the son was born in Shanghai. He returned to Guangdong a year after his birth. He attended primary school in Shanghai for one year during his school years and, thereafter, spent almost his whole life as a Trotskyist in Guangdong. He was training to be a senior middle-school teacher when he joined the Trotskyists. He had already read many books in middle school, first anarchist literature and then the writings of Marx and Trotsky. In recalling his joining the Trotskyists, he said: “One day my teacher Gao Qingyu said to me, ‘I have joined the [Trotskyist] Communist League to fight for the realisation of communism in China.’ He asked me if I would like to join. I replied, ‘Let me think about such a big event and reply in three days.’ Three days later, after I had said yes, Gao took me to see Huang Jingbo. Huang Jingbo told me about the Communist League, its organisational system, and the discipline that party members were expected to observe. I expressed my willingness to join the organisation and obey its discipline. At the time, I did not know that the League was Trotskyist or that there was any difference between the Trotskyists and the Communists. Later, I gradually learned about the revolutionary line, policies, strategies, and tactics of the Trotskyists. Since then, I have faithfully followed the revolutionary line of the Trotskyists”. The year was 1938 and Liu Pingmei was 18 years old. He never abandoned his Trotskyist beliefs from then until the moment of his death. After joining the Trotskyists, Liu Pingmei became enthusiastic about the work of Guangdong’s Zhongshan Youth Wartime Service Corps, which he set up with his teachers and classmates in 1937. Its main work was to propagate anti-Japanese propaganda among the people, boycott Japanese goods, help soldiers at the front line write letters home, and organise battlefield rescue activities. After a year or so, the youth service group was forcibly disbanded by the local government and Liu and his comrades distributed a “Letter

736

duan, trans. benton

to the People of Zhongshan”, stating that “the people have the freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to resist the Japanese and oppose the suppression [by the Kuomintang] of anti-Japanese mass organisations”. Wanted by the government because of this, he went into hiding and started travelling between Guangdong, Macao, and Hong Kong. At the beginning of 1941, he was able to secure work in a money-printing factory in Hong Kong. On 8 December 1941, the Japanese army captured Kowloon, and on the 18th the Japanese landed on Hong Kong Island in four separate locations. The huts where Liu Pingmei’s family and his fellow workers had taken refuge were searched by the Japanese. The old and sick were released, while the young and strong males were kept behind. Some were tied up and beheaded. Liu was almost beheaded too. He told me: “A Japanese raised his sword and walked towards me, I blocked it with my left hand. The sword cut me, and I fell to the ground. The Japanese thrust his sword into my neck. Blood gushed everywhere. I fainted before I could feel the pain”. When he awoke, the Japanese had gone away, leaving him for dead. After various other life-threatening adventures, he finally recovered. He said that his head had almost been cut off and that the deepest point of the wound was a finger’s breadth away from the carotid artery. If the Japanese had used just a little more force, his head would have fallen off. I photographed his wounds, one on his arm and two on his neck. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, Liu Pingmei dragged his wounded and ailing body around Guangdong and Guangxi working and teaching, while at the same time promoting Trotskyist ideas. During those years, he was often wanted and hunted down by the Kuomintang government, and he lived in poverty. On the eve of the establishment of the new Communist regime in 1949, at a time when the Trotskyist organisation in Guangzhou was practically paralysed, Liu stepped in to preside over the work of the Trotskyists in the city. He managed to keep the organisation going despite the pressures of his own difficult life and the tense political environment. Activities at the time consisted of little more than reviving reading groups among students and young workers to discuss politics and read the writings of Lenin and Trotsky. Liu Pingmei’s idea was that “someone should step up and take responsibility, now that the organisation was at a low ebb”. He knew that “sooner or later I would be arrested”. On 22 December 1952, he went home to celebrate the winter solstice. The same night, he was arrested in the school dormitory. His ex-wife, also a Trotskyist, recounted what happened at home that night when I interviewed her. She was in bed with her child, less than three months old. There was a knock

forever persevering: a tribute to liu pingmei (2008)

737

on the door, and several public security officers barged in. They pointed guns at her and said, “You are under arrest”. “What about the baby?” “Take it with you”. Liu Pingmei recalled, “A few days later, from my cell, I heard a baby crying, and I knew it was my daughter. That’s when I realised that my wife and daughter were there too”. On the third day of his interrogation, Liu Pingmei received a copy of the verdict. It was two pages long, on flimsy paper with a red vertical grid. The words were handwritten in blue ink, many of them blurred. It was headed “Judgement of the People’s Court of Guangzhou, no. 476”. The judgement listed Liu Pingmei’s three crimes. At the end of the verdict, it said that he “should be severely punished for not showing remorse after his arrest. In accordance with the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on the Punishment of Counterrevolutionaries, Liu Pingmei is hereby sentenced to life imprisonment”. The signature was stamped with the large red seal of the Guangzhou People’s Court. The date was 1954. According to Liu Pingmei’s recollection, it was 1956 when he received this verdict. The old man explained to me the inaccuracies contained in each of the three counts. He recalled that there was no opportunity to make depositions, submit appeals, or mount any form of defence during the trial. After delivering the verdict, the public security officers told him: If you do not accept this verdict, you can appeal. But Liu Pingmei did not do so. He told me, “I already knew in my heart that the charge was not against me alone but against the entire Trotskyist movement”. From the day of his arrest, whether at his trial or during subsequent interrogations, Liu Pingmei never once admitted his guilt, and instead repeated over and over again, “I am not a counterrevolutionary, and the Trotskyists are not counterrevolutionaries”. In the 27 years from 1952 to 1979, he suffered torture and years of imprisonment because of his refusal to confess and his stubborn thinking. His wife, who had been sentenced to ten years in jail, told me, “After I was released from prison I saw that life was too difficult for my children, so I filed for divorce”. Liu Pingmei said: I was prepared for the divorce, just as I had been prepared for my arrest. During the Cultural Revolution, Liu was again criticised for refusing to repent. According to Xiong Andong and Wang Guolong, three Trotskyists were dragged out of prison during the Cultural Revolution to be criticised – Zheng Chaolin, Jiang Zhendong, and Liu Pingmei. Jiang Zhendong was forced to kneel on the ground, as was Liu Pingmei. In 1972, the Trotskyists in prison were sent to the Qingpu Labour Reform Farm. It is said that Mao Zedong had given instructions to show the group leni-

738

duan, trans. benton

ency, amid the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and the ubiquitous social disorder. On that occasion, everyone left, leaving Liu Pingmei alone in prison. He was sent to the Labour Farm more than twenty days later than the other Trotskyists. The reason for this was his denial of guilt and his obstinacy. In 1979, the Trotskyists at the labour farm were officially released and each received a copy of the ruling. Liu Pingmei’s ruling was as follows: Liu Pingmei, male, aged fifty-nine, from Zhongshan County, Guangdong Province. Sentenced to life imprisonment by the Guangzhou People’s Court in 1954 for counterrevolutionary crimes. Having shown remorse during his sentence, he was released on 30 November 1972, on grounds of clemency, and it is hereby decided to grant him civil rights. 5 June 1979, Shanghai High People’s Court. Liu Pingmei recalls that he approached the authorities immediately after receiving the ruling and said, “You are making a mistake. I am not a counterrevolutionary, and the Trotskyists are not counter-revolutionaries. I have not confessed my guilt, I have not repented. You must think carefully. If I am required to confess my guilt before I am released, I would rather go back to prison”. Presumably, higher authorities learned of this. The next day, he was told by his supervisors that he was being released regardless of his attitude. Liu Pingmei’s daughter recalls, “In 1979, some people from the Public Security Bureau came to tell me to get ready to bring my father back, and I thought, if the government is giving him a way out, how can I not give him a way out?” From the time she was three months old until the age of twelve, Liu’s daughter had seen him on only two occasions, when she visited him in prison with her grandmother, and they had not seen each other since. Her only memory of her father, apart from the social discrimination she had suffered as a member of a counterrevolutionary family and the extraordinary hardships of her life, is of hearing her grandmother say: “Your father is a good man”. In 1979, when she was 28 years old, she was not sure she would be able to recognise him. When she went to Shanghai to pick him up, she carried a photograph provided by the Public Security Bureau. On his return to Guangzhou, Liu Pingmei began work on his history of Chinese Trotskyism, in a room lined with books. He said that in those years he spent everything on books, except for what he needed to buy food. I browsed through his books, of which there were around one thousand. They were divided into

forever persevering: a tribute to liu pingmei (2008)

739

three categories: the works of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; the history of the ccp, the Russian Communist Party, and the Communist International; and theoretical and historical works on the Trotskyists, including the grey books1 published by the Communist regime in the 1960s for internal Party reading and directed criticism. I asked him how he got those grey books, which were very valuable. He said that he had picked them up here and there in old bookstores. In his later years, his most important work was his 2005 History of Chinese Trotskyism, published in Hong Kong. He said, “We were not satisfied with Mr Tang Baolin’s History of Chinese Trotskyism.2 I thought that it would be better to write one myself and address the facts as we know them”. A few months after I had finished the interview, he sent me the book. Objectively speaking, it has many flaws and its academic value is open to question, but not as the work of a lay scholar. It presents new historical materials that will help in the study of the history of the ccp and of the Trotskyists. Summing up his life experience, Liu said, “I have no regrets whatsoever, and my mind has always been made up on the issue of my beliefs”. I asked him, “It is said that after the victory of the ccp, the Chinese Trotskyists were in intellectual chaos. What were your thoughts at the time?” He said, “This was something that was mainly relevant only in Hong Kong, not on the Mainland. The biggest problem for the Trotskyists on the Mainland was survival, how to secure a foothold under the new regime; the Trotskyists in Hong Kong were able to think in a more concentrated way about the Trotskyists themselves”. Personally, “I will not change my beliefs simply because of the victory of the ccp”. I asked again, “Were you afraid when you were sentenced to life imprisonment?” “No”, he said, “I was not afraid. I had been preparing for it for a long time, and when I joined the Trotskyists I was ready to die for the revolution”. I asked, “The goal of the revolution at that time was to overthrow the Kuomintang regime. It had now been overthrown, and those who arrested you were not the Kuomintang but the Communists”. He smiled and said, “Yes, I didn’t expect that, in the end, I would end up in a Communist prison, I didn’t expect it to be the Communists”. I asked him: “Did the collapse of the Soviet Union mean the destruction of the socialist ideal? Did your faith not waver as a result?” He said, “No, it was 1 Books published for distribution among high-ranking officials but not allowed to circulate publicly. 2 Tang Baolin 1994, a book that generally follows the official current ccp line on Chinese Trotskyism.

740

duan, trans. benton

something Trotsky had anticipated. The main problem in the Soviet Union was the dictatorship of the party, the party itself had deteriorated. Socialism and even communism cannot be achieved by just one or two revolutions, there have to be many struggles, there has to be permanent revolution”. When I asked him about his views on the dictatorship of the proletariat, he said that “the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat is right, but the dictatorship of the proletariat as practised in China is wrong. It is because the dictatorship of the proletariat in China is all about fighting among ourselves, the masses against the masses, everything is pointed in the wrong direction. The dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to be dictatorship over the enemy. But in China it has become an intra-party factional struggle, it became an armed struggle during the Cultural Revolution”. The day I finished my interview, I bought a big bunch of flowers and gave them to him. When he saw them, his face broke into a childlike smile. That smile was so touching that I couldn’t help but think back on his explanation of his name: “I changed my name to Liu Pingmei [peaceful plum-blossom] after joining the Trotskyists. At first I wanted to call myself Tiemei [iron plumblossom], but I thought that Tie sounded too harsh, so I changed it to Pingmei. Pingmei means ‘peace’ and ‘calm’”. Although I spent only seven days with Liu Pingmei, I benefited from travelling with him through the 85 years of his past life. I had the privilege of meeting a strange and legendary old man, of recording the trajectory of his life, of being moved by him and developing a deep respect for him. I am sure that he did not pass away without regrets. In China, the rule of law is not yet strong enough to safeguard freedom of thinking and belief, especially in the case of dissidents; our political culture is still stuck in the authoritarian stage of history and is slow to move forward. I am also sure that when the old man left us, he did so with a sense of calm and magnanimity. As far as his personal conscience was concerned, he would not have left with the same shame as the poet Wu Meicun,3 a scholar of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. In the 55 years since 1952, no matter whatever pressures were brought to bear on him, he never once stopped insisting: “I am not a counterrevolutionary, the Trotskyists are not counterrevolutionaries!” I conclude my tribute by quoting two couplets from the later years of the Trotskyist leader Chen Duxiu:

3 Wu Meicun (1609–1672) fled to Changzhou to escape the conquering Qing Dynasty, but later served it.

forever persevering: a tribute to liu pingmei (2008)

741

The heart is always open when walking without shame and subterfuge, breath is like a rainbow in hard times. One day the seabed will dry up, dust dancing in the air. She regards her distant husband turned on the mountain top to stone, will there ever be a time when he returns?

section c Sun Liangsi

∵

Memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986) Sun Liangsi, translated by Gregor Benton

Sun Liangsi (1912–1987) joined the Chinese Trotskyists in Shandong, his native province, in 1932. He participated in underground Trotskyist activities in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing in the 1930s and the 1940s. Before and after the Japanese War (1937–1945), he worked successively as a teacher, soldier, and electrician in a Chongqing arsenal (whence he was forced to flee after his arrest). Starting in 1948, he became a seafarer and eventually retired in Hong Kong. He was a member of the Internationalist Workers Party (iwp) formed by the minority faction led by Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi in 1949. In exile in Hong Kong, he ran a business, published Trotskyist literature, and wrote this account of his life as a Trotskyist. The manuscript of this autobiography is kept at Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 16, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

“Tending cattle until late at night, when will the dawn arrive?” When I was thirteen or fourteen, herding cattle, I picked a withered leaf and put it in my mouth and chewed it. At twenty, I fell in love with George Bernard Shaw’s sardonic remark: “If you’re not a Bolshevik at twenty, you should be shot at forty”.1 Not until I was forty, having in the meantime been to England, did I realise that their Bolsheviks didn’t have to go to prison: they could simply change their profession, boss people around, and pour themselves a glass of wine. Look at our Bolsheviks. I’ll give an account of my thirty years of life, from aged seven to thirty-seven.

First Memories When I was seven, Mother died. A month before she died, Third Brother died in the flu epidemic. Mother was distressed at his death, and joined him in it. 1 What Shaw actually said was: “If you don’t become a red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you will become a hopeless fossil when you’re fifty. If you try to become a red revolutionary when you’re twenty, then you may have the chance of not falling behind the times when you get to forty” (quoted in Gray 1985, vol. 5, pp. 211–238). Thanks to Daniel Gaido for the source.

© Sun Liangsi, translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_070

746

sun, trans. benton

That was in early December 1918 (late September, according to the old calendar). Mother was younger than Father. She was a “replacement bride” (Father’s original wife had died after giving birth to Elder Brother). Father was thirtyseven. My memories only stretch back to the years after my Mother’s death. I was so confused and ignorant that I only had a vague picture of Mother in my mind, a picture of her in a reverie. A month after Mother’s death, Father married Stepmother and from then on we were called “motherless children”. With Third Brother gone, I had no one left to play with. Second Brother, who was five years older than me, went off to study with Elder Brother and ignored me at home. I only had Younger Sister to play with. She was two years younger than me, and because she was a girl, she was not allowed to go to school, so I taught her what I had learned at school and she learned it. I started going to school in the first lunar month of that year. We ate and slept with maternal Grandmother, who was like an old broody hen, determined to protect us. We felt threatened by Stepmother, but at first nothing happened. Grandmother was in her sixties and Grandad had died before the birth of Second Brother. One day, in front of Grandmother, Stepmother scolded me: “You thieving rascal!” Grandmother rose angrily to her feet and pointed at her: “What did he steal? If he’s a thief, what does that make you? I won’t allow those dirty words in this house!” Grandmother never used foul language or bad words. We got used to that from a young age. When I turned twelve, in June, Grandmother died. Sister and I fell into Stepmother’s clutches. Second Brother was seventeen and left home to learn business. Zhuozi cried every day. Stepmother bound Zhuozi’s feet and she was unable to bear the pain or to sleep through the night. She became more and more distressed. She was stricken with dysentery in the autumn and died in the spring of the following year. Stepmother couldn’t care less about her illness and she was skin and bones at her death. I grieved her death, but I thought that it was better for her to die than to see her suffer. I’d heard people speak too often of “the poor motherless child”! What had become of us? Which of our neighbours would support us? If our own mother had seen the fate of the girl she left behind, would she not have been heartbroken? When Sister died, I took over her duties, and Stepmother treated me like her maid. I climbed the mountains to herd cattle, looked after the children in the house, and listened to her cursing my dead mother.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

747

I lived a life of poison. I had to suffer the hardships of the world after I had lost Mother, my Elder Brother, and my Younger Sister. I was hurled into the hell of Stepmother. I had no choice other than to break free.

Joining the Army On the third day of the first month of the year in which I became sixteen, Sun Jirui and I ran away. We ran off to Sun Chuanfang’s recruiting office2 in Zichuan in Zibo City, filled in a form, and told the officer: “We don’t want our families to come looking for us, can we be sent away immediately?” The officer said we’d arrived a bit late, they’d just sent away a group, they couldn’t just send the two of us. You needed at least a dozen. We were terrified to hear this, and told the officer that we couldn’t afford to be seen during the day, and that we would have to hide away in case people came looking for us. The officer smiled and told us to do as we pleased, so we went out into the countryside and basked in the sun in the wheat fields away from the wind, and did not return for supper until after sunset. We saw that there were two new recruits, coal miners from a nearby pit. We were still a long way from a dozen. The next day after breakfast, we left again and came back after dark. There were two more recruits, one of them an oldtimer with a beard. It had been more than a year since Jirui and I had discussed joining the army. Whenever we got together, all we talked about was becoming a soldier, and how after a few years, and winning a few battles, we would become officers. We were privates, and it was not easy for us to get promoted to corporal. Best forget it for a few years. I remember my second lieutenant was promoted effortlessly to officer rank. He wore a holster and had a bodyguard and a horse, it was so impressive. The villagers would see us differently, they would see us as a success. Leaving Zibo, that was the day we were looking forward to. By the third night, there were seven new recruits, making nine of us in all. At this point, the officer said that we would be sent away the next day. He introduced us to a squad leader who had just returned from delivering the previous batch of recruits. We liked what we heard. Things were beginning to look up. That night, we registered our names, our place of origin, and our age. I was the only one who had been to school and the only one who wore a long cotton robe. I also had a pocket watch bearing the image of Sun Yat-sen. I was asked to write something, and when the officer saw that I wrote badly, he said that

2 Sun Chuanfang (1885–1935) was a Chinese warlord.

748

sun, trans. benton

I could continue to practise after becoming a soldier, and that if I improved, I could become a clerk. I was ashamed to hear him say that. Early in the morning on the fourth day, Jirui and I were feeling tense, right up until the last moment. As long as no one saw us on the way to the railway station at ten o’clock, we could climb aboard the train and become soldiers. At eight o’clock, my stomach suddenly began to churn. I told myself, it doesn’t matter, just eat a little and you’ll be fine. I had starved before and I was familiar with this feeling of sickness. So I went to the bakery on the street to buy a couple of hot biscuits, and as I was eating them on the way back, I saw Second Elder Cousin close behind me. I was so shocked that I ran back to the recruitment centre and slammed the door on him, ignoring his shouts. “We’re in trouble!” I told Jirui, in a big panic. “They’re on our heels”. Jirui told me angrily that I should not have left the centre in the first place. I said that my stomach pain had come on at exactly the wrong time, now it had disappeared completely. Our only hope was to get away quickly and shake them off. At half past nine, as we were lining up to leave, there was a knocking on the door and a loud shout. “The President of the Chamber of Commerce is here to pay a visit!” When I heard this, Jirui and I froze, unable to move. The door opened. The President was ushered into the courtyard. We both hid behind other people, hoping the earth would swallow us. In less than two minutes, we were called in. Sure enough, Second Elder Cousin came in behind the President and identified us. “They’re the two”, he said. “They’re both due to get married this year. That’s an important event here. You can’t change the date. After they get married, they can go to work”. The officer agreed, and told us to go back with Second Elder Cousin. “There’ll be plenty more chances to become a soldier”, he said. So we followed the President back to the Chamber of Commerce. Once we arrived, we became prisoners and were guarded by the police. By mid-day, Second Elder Cousin had become red-faced and drunk. He and Elder Brother led us out of the Chamber of Commerce. When we were asked what we wanted to eat, we just shook our heads. They took us to a restaurant, set out some food and alcohol, and told us to sit down, but we left our chopsticks on the table, unable to eat. Second Elder Cousin said to Jirui, “It’s obvious to everyone that Fourth Brother has a stepmother and is going to be a soldier, but why you? Why do you want to be a soldier? You have a good family, your parents spoil you, why do you want to be a soldier?”

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

749

With tears in his eyes, he said: “If I’m going to stay at home, Mother will have to send her away. Otherwise, I’ll run away again!” “You mean your child bride?”3 Second Elder Cousin laughed. “That’s easy, I’ll take care of it, if you don’t want her, we’ll find another one, I’ll tell Stepmother”. Jirui’s family owned a small grocery store across the street from us, and the house was in pawn. They had two brothers and a family of five. They had no land, but they could not rely on the shop alone, so they shared the farming of a strip of land with Second Elder Cousin’s family (half of the yield from which they handed over to the landlord). They could barely get by. One year, during a natural disaster, refugees turned up in the village offering their children for sale, and Jirui’s mother bought three little girls, as future daughters-in-law – to increase family labour power for the present and to save the cost of a bride price when the time came. The three girls were all about ten years younger than their brothers. Jirui’s was only seven years old at the time. I was amazed to hear that he had wanted to join the army to get away from his child bride. He had never said anything about it, it was new to me to. Elder Brother waved his new gun at me and said he would shoot me if I didn’t go back with him. He had not been ordered to fetch me home. Second Elder Brother had dragged him along in order to find Jirui for his mother. He had gone to drum up Second Elder Cousin, and by sheer bad luck had caught me and ended up dragging me home. “Hey, has the boss come back?” “Where did boss come back from?” “You’ve only been away for a few days, and you’re already a company commander?” That was not the sort of banter that I wanted to hear.

Learning about Business In 1928, on 13 August, I was ordered to get married. My wife-to-be, surnamed Li, was four years older than me. Her grandparents were our neighbours. They knew that my family had a stepmother, so why did they feed their daughter to the wolves? She was deaf, having fallen ill at an early age, and could not hear unless you shouted, so she was hard to marry off. I was so young and impetuous that I thought I was being insulted, that I had been landed with someone no

3 A daughter-in-law raised in her future husband’s family as a child.

750

sun, trans. benton

one else wanted. And I lacked the imagination to realise that she too was a bitter and wretched person, for although she had no stepmother, her own mother had died long ago. When she came to our house, my parents treated her badly and so did I. She was not considered to be a good daughter-in-law, quite apart from her deafness. On acquiring a bride, I also acquired in laws, and my brother-in-law Li Hongqi, who at the time was deputy manager of his small Taiji company, asked me to join him and learn how to do business. Although I was already seventeen years old, I had no proper job and no prospect other than entering trade. I had never done any work in the fields, such as ploughing, hoeing, or raking. I had looked after four children for Stepmother in the previous five years (she gave birth to eight children, all of whom died), and while doing so I sometimes used to listen to Second Grandfather tell ghost stories from the classical Liaozhai collection. (He was Grandfather’s younger brother and had no children; Eldest Brother acted as his grandson, and had a better house and fields than us.) Brother-in-law was worried that I lacked the skills to make a living, so he taught me fortune-telling and divining, which entailed much memorising and recitation. However, he decided that I slurred and stuttered too much to get my rice by following the silver-tongue trade. I knew too few characters, and I needed a better hand if I was to convince the gullible. From then on, he dropped the idea. At the age of seventeen, I was married and without a trade, so I had no choice but to give it a try when he offered me the chance to learn how to do business. Taiji was located on a street in Boshan full of small businesses, including money shops (traditional banks) and eating houses. It was next to the station, where coal was shipped in from the mountains and sold wholesale. Only the manager called me “Mr Liang”, using the official style, whereas the others called me by my first name and Li Hongqi by my lineage number. I did the menial work. I swept the floor, cleaned the tables, and kept the fire going. The cheap coal from Boshan was so smoky that it hurt my skin, and the backs of my hands were covered in blood throughout the winter. I was supposed to prepare both meals, but since I had never learned to cook, Elder Brother took charge and I was his skivvy. He had joined the firm two months earlier than me, so with me as his junior assistant, he was spared the hard labour and got to stand at the counter. The manager ate in another restaurant and was so addicted to opium that he rarely showed his face. He spent all day drinking tea and visiting people, and never returned until after midnight. Li Hongqi displayed his skills and passed his secrets on to me, but unfortunately I paid them little heed. At the end of the evening, I tidied up the kitchen before spreading my bedding on the counter and climbing up onto it. I felt as if the night passed

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

751

in a flash before I was yet again up on my feet. At six o’clock, I got up, swept the pavement and the counter, and started work again. I was so sleepy during the day that I sometimes fell asleep while standing at the counter holding my feather duster. In those days, the money shops issued their own banknotes, in various denominations. There was a shortage of copper dollars on the market, so notes were used instead. None of the money shops had substantial reserves, and some had none. The Japanese were buying up copper dollars. By the time I entered the trade, there were few copper coins in circulation. Customers became angry and aggressive. This kind of drama was played out in every money shop. I was not employed at the counter at the time. My job was in the courtyard to the rear. One afternoon, there was a hubbub at the counter. I ran in and saw that one of the customers had got behind the counter. He was lunging at the table and grabbing the bookkeeper. Without thinking, I seized the fellow’s feet from behind and pulled him to the floor. The bookkeeper had already grabbed the poker from the fire to defend himself, and smashed the customer with it. The customer lay there on the ground without getting up, and shouted: “Taiji is beating me to death!” More and more people gathered to watch, and there was blood everywhere. The fellow’s head was broken. They took him to hospital and later paid him compensation. The bookkeeper blamed me. He said that I alone had caused the trouble and that the man’s head had hit the stove. I had always respected the bookkeeper. He was young and shrewd, and good at arithmetic, and he had urged me to learn to use the abacus and to practice it at night. I did not defend myself and let it be, for I had already decided that I did not want to learn business. After Lunar New Year, on the evening of the fifth day of the first lunar month, the manager was in the upstairs room at the back of the building “talking official business”. All the senior partners were sat there in a row. The manager began by talking about the lack of business over the previous year and the outlook for the New Year. He then criticised the staff one by one. I was eavesdropping from outside the door. Li Hongqi was warned about his gambling habits. The manager continued: “Mr Liang (me) is a clumsy man who caused trouble at the counter. You must find someone else”. When I heard this, I was ecstatic. Early the next morning, I ran back to Zhaozhuang. My three months in the city had been like three months in jail. I looked up at the sky and felt that it had suddenly widened. How on earth did Second Brother manage to study business, it was so boring.

752

sun, trans. benton

Off to School The business to which Second Brother was apprenticed, Tong Tai, was 300 years old. In the kitchen was a master chef, but apprentices were not allowed to enter. A handyman did all the hard work. Second Brother deployed his talents at the counter. His learning was highly valued, as was his clarity and discernment. He was in charge of all correspondence and dealings at the counter. In the late spring, Second Brother returned home from Beiping4 on leave. It was 1929, the year after the Ji’nan incident of 3 May 1928, when a dispute between Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army and Japanese soldiers and civilians in Ji’nan, the capital of Shandong, escalated into an armed conflict. As part of the “settlement” of the dispute, the provincial government retreated from Tai’an to Ji’nan. The main gate of the Glass Company in Liuxing (built by the Germans and abandoned during the European War) had a signboard announcing the Kuomintang’s Boshan People’s Training Course. People were already training in Zhaozhuang, and the rumour was that they would get jobs once they finished their training. During the training period, men and women studied together in the same class and were fed, housed, and clothed. Someone told me that if Sixth Master gave me an introduction, I could get a place on the course. I summoned up the courage to go and ask. He rarely returned to the village, but luckily there he was in his garden. Naturally he didn’t recognise me, and anyway he told me that the training course was full and there were no jobs available after graduation. I was not qualified for the course. However, Yanshan Middle School was enrolling students. He told me to go to the Glass Company and see for myself what was available. Now that the Kuomintang’s revolution had won out, the world had changed, you could go anywhere you liked. He had previously been a member of the Provincial Council, now he had all the trappings of a veteran member of the Kuomintang. In fact, Second Brother knew a lot about that sort of thing, though he wouldn’t talk much about it. I pestered him to come with me to the Glass Company and barged through the doors of Yanshan Secondary School, which was being refurbished. The headmaster and staff were all new, left-over veterans of the revolution. The building was sound and awash with funds, so they planned to add a senior middle school. When I read the advertisement, which said that there was no age limit for new students and you didn’t need a diploma or an English-language qualification – the only thing you needed

4 At various times and under the Republic after 1928 and until 1949, Beijing was called Beiping.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

753

was three subjects, [Kuomintang] Party Principles, Mathematics, and Chinese Language – I could not resist giving it a try. After returning home from Taiji, I had dreamed constantly of entering a foreign-style school, and now that I was qualified, I decided to give it a go. Second Brother handled everything. He found out that the application fee was one yuan and the two photos needed for registration cost only a few cents, so I reckoned that the two yuan would be enough. He gave me the money. After enrolling, I borrowed a book from one of the students on the civilian training class in the village, which consisted of a few questions and answers about party doctrine. I learned it off by heart, from start to finish. I didn’t bother to revise maths or Chinese. I had learned percentages and scales in the Liang family village school, and I had not forgotten them over the years. There was nothing I could do about my writing, so I just let it go. The schoolboy student in me really wasn’t afraid of the exam. The day of the exam, I rushed from home to school. The plank bridge I usually used had been washed away at night by a flood, so I had to take a detour by way of the stone bridge; when I arrived, the candidates were already in the examination room. The headmaster Chang Zizhong stood at the door. As soon as he saw me hurrying in, he asked me my name, gave me the questions, and sent me in. I took out my ink brush and wrote down the answers I had memorised, word for word, and handed them in. The second exam was in mathematics. I did all the calculations on a piece of paper. The headmaster told me to put my name on the paper and took it away. I was a bit frustrated. I hadn’t known that the exam was only for one hour, and I had dawdled a bit. The party doctrine test was longer, it took two hours. In the afternoon, I took the Chinese-language exam and wrote an essay. Again it lasted two hours, so I took it easy. It was a fortnight before the results were released, in mid July. I asked Second Brother to come with me to get the result, and he agreed with a smile. He didn’t believe I would get in, nor did he give me what might turn out to be false hopes. When we arrived at the entrance to the school, the list was already posted on the wall. Second Brother’s eyes were fixed on the bottom of the list, mine on the top. I’d come second! He was astonished, but he was no less happy than I. When we got home, Second Grandfather and the others found it strange that I had beaten those who had officially graduated from primary school – me, a cowherd, who had been tending cattle for the previous five years. But then came the question: how would we pay the school fees? At the time, Second Brother was working in a company that fed him but paid only 50 yuan for the whole year, without any bonuses. So as not to disappoint me, he left me forty yuan and went back to Beiping.

754

sun, trans. benton

Forty yuan was the minimum cost for a term’s tuition, but the second term cost only thirty-seven yuan, and my child wife saved us ten yuan by handsewing a school uniform for me. When school started, there were forty-four of us in the seventh grade. In each classroom, two people shared a desk. My fellow student Han Qixiang was only thirteen years old, a real senior primary school graduate. Those of my age or older who had never been to primary school made up more than half the class. After the victory of the Northern Expedition, the Kuomintang had launched a campaign in the countryside to mobilise the sons and daughters of the wealthy landowners in the mountain villages to come to the city to be educated. There were also sons and daughters of workers from the stations along the Jiaoji railway line. Half of my classmates, like me, had never studied English before and had to learn the alphabet, using a model text book. Many of the primary-school graduates knew this book already, and they became my teachers. I devoted all my time and effort to learning English. Arithmetic was nothing new to me, or to worry about. My Chinese-language teacher was an old bagong, a top scholar under the Qing, who taught me the classical literary language and always put me top in the fortnightly essays, with good marks and comments. This impressed Elder Brother, but it drew criticism and attacks from the new youth imbued with modern thinking: he doesn’t know times have changed, he’s still writing ancient texts! In fact, when I was eleven or twelve, Second Grandfather had forced me to read Confucius’ Analects every night, and I knew the Four Books (Confucian classics) by heart. One day, when the bagong was temporarily absent, while we were there shouting at each other in the classroom, the headmaster suddenly entered the room. He announced that he was going to be in charge of the senior middle school’s Chinese-language teaching. He also said that he was going to publish a novel, which put us in great awe of him. He asked us what new books we had read, and no one answered. He wrote Nahan (“Battle Cry”) and Lu Xun on the blackboard, but no one had heard of them either. He told us that Lu Xun was a great Chinese writer and Nahan was his book, which we had in our library. He also told us where the library was. Lu Xun, Nahan, and the library – that was the first I’d heard of such things. As soon as the headmaster left, I went to the library and borrowed Nahan, after which I often borrowed books. I also became friends with the librarian, Little Dong. In the early spring of 1930, our Mandarin teacher was replaced by Mr Wang Tiefu, who read us some vernacular verse and taught us to recite Tang poems. I was full of admiration. I no longer wrote in classical Chinese. I was soon able to

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

755

write in the vernacular, though less effectively than the others. I enjoyed reading Lu Xun and felt that, even in the vernacular, he turned ink into gold. I read greedily for the whole of the school year, it was the happiest days of my life. At the end of June, just before the examinations, the rumour suddenly spread that Yanshan Middle School would no longer issue diplomas in the future. Students asked the school for a certificate of completion and went to Ji’nan to transfer to another school. Although the headmaster insisted that this was not the case and the middle school had already been established and a senior middle school would follow, none of it actually happened. The problem was that the group of teachers had been recruited due to their connections to the Director of Education, so the local community had no confidence in them and wanted to get rid of them and bring in their own people. That’s how the rumour started. The school tried to stop us by force, forbidding us to leave or to apply to other schools, and threatening otherwise to expel us and refuse us a leaving certificate. Before we parted ways, my classmate Li Bensi said he would help me transfer to the First Normal School, where I would not have to pay tuition fees and would even get five yuan a month to spend on food. If I got in, I would save money. When he and the others went to Ji’nan to take the entrance examination, thereby sacrificing a whole year’s enrolment at Yanshan, they asked me to do the same. I said no. If the First Division started recruiting new students, I wanted to try my luck. However, I couldn’t let the Yanshan people find out, for if I failed, and Yanshan expelled me, I would not be able to study at all. Li Bensi wrote back to tell me that I would fit well into the first two classes of the First Division, and that he had asked the headmistress of the girls’ high school to guarantee that I would be allowed to sit the exam. “My God, the exams are tomorrow. The letter has arrived so late! How can I go?” I had never been away from my native-place before, and I was really scared of Ji’nan. “It doesn’t matter, you’ll make it. Come with me, the train is at 5.30 pm. We’ll meet you at the station”. The student who said this was Zhai Baonai. He was the same age as me, and had already been to Guandong (northeast China) to serve as a soldier. I was relieved to have him with me. I immediately went to see the director of training and education. I asked for sick leave, went home, got some travel expenses, and went to Ji’nan with Zhai Baonai. The train arrived in the middle of the night and it was already 1 or 2 o’clock before we arrived at his dormitory, and I was too excited to sleep. As soon as it got light, I walked round Daming Lake. I was staying at Quehua Bridge, not far from the First Division

756

sun, trans. benton

headquarters. Li Bensi gave me my examination papers and sent me straight to the place where the examination was to be held. That day, we were examined in Mandarin, English, and arithmetic. The next day, when I went to take the test, I saw a notice posted outside: “General knowledge, history, and geography are exempted for transfer students”. It turned out that the examination was already over. I wanted to go home immediately, but Li Bensi took me sightseeing, since if I failed the exam, who knows when I would ever get another chance to see Ji’nan? Back at school, I reported to the director of training and education that I had returned from the leave. When he saw the state of me, he thought I was seriously ill and needed to recover. Ten days or so later, he summoned me to his “office” and asked me if my illness had been feigned. I didn’t know what to say. At that point he smiled and handed me a letter-card from the First Division in Ji’nan saying that I had come top in the entrance examination (all correspondence was checked by his department). He told me that I would not be expelled and that he had told the headmaster that I was an honour to the school and that I would be given a transfer certificate and a report card. He said I could go home and report the good news. The news delighted Second Grandfather, for the school run by the First Division was at the former site of the building where the imperial examinations [under the Qing Dynasty] had used to be held – he had failed them three times. Forty-nine others had tried to get their hands on the five yuan a month for steamed buns, but the prize had fallen to me. Elder Brother agreed that it was a good idea to train as a teacher, and he proposed to Father and Stepmother that they make available a little of our ancestral property to Second Brother and me, so that we could live independently. He was now village head and no one dared go against him. When Father learned of his proposal, he arranged for Elder Brother to give us two small plots of land, totalling seven mu, and Elder Brother himself gave me a plot of land with which to pay off my debts and pay the school fees. But one year in the First Division was not as pleasant as I had imagined, and hardly as much fun as Yanshan. At first, the five of us transferees were like drops of oil on water: we were unable to mix with the old students or to make friends with them. Three of us were sponsored by the county school board. They said they had been suspended from school before the “revolution” and had already been in business for several years, and that they were familiar with officialdom and up to date with their schoolwork. One was a pockmarked boy with a deep sense of inferiority, who was unable to keep up with his studies. I don’t know how he managed to get in. The members of the group were among the oldest in the school. One,

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

757

Liu, was already in his forties and had many children. The class was not at all lively, and seemed old-fashioned. Later, after my arrival in the city, I became dejected and depressed. I already knew about the Communist Party and the Red Army, and it was highly fashionable to be red. So I pretended that I too was red. I adopted some names that had the word red in them, but I still could not figure out where the leaders of the Reds were. I was a bit like Lu Xun’s Ah Q, who wanted a revolution. So during the summer holidays, I hastily studied geometry and trigonometry, borrowed an old Yanshan Middle School diploma, and applied for the new teacher training course at Qufu Normal [teacher-training] School. I arrived in Qufu in the autumn.

Qufu Normal School Qufu Normal, originally the Second Normal School of Shandong Province, was renamed after the Northern Expedition. The Second Normal School in Baoding in Hebei Province was similarly renamed, because it too had been a “communist nest”. Qufu Normal was once famous throughout the country for its performance of “The Master Went to See Nanzi”.5 When I joined the school, the headmaster, Zhang Yuguang, was up to his ears in construction work. The self-study rooms and the dormitories were newly built and very comfortable. The auditorium was the newest building, and there was still an unfinished section intended for classrooms. The old library and bathhouse had been renovated. At the time, Qufu did not yet have electric light, so the school had its own generator. The students’ union ran a communal kitchen which provided food both nutritious and tasty, and there was money to share out at the end of each month. The students were all very friendly and supportive of one another, unlike in the First Division. The school was close to the Confucius Temple, and every day we went for a walk there to listen to students arguing about dialectics 5 The “May Fourth” Movement raised the slogan “Down with Confucius”, and students at Qufu Normal School (then called “Shandong Second Division”) responded with an anti-Confucian campaign. In 1928, a member of the left wing of the Kuomintang, Song Xianwu, became headmaster and supported the students’ activities. The student union decided put on a play, “The Master Went to See Nanzi”, to relaunch the May Fourth campaign known as “Down with the Confucian Family Shop”. The play was a spirited satire on the “Sage” and the associated rituals. It drew strong reactions from local Confucian leaders, who accused it of “insulting the ancestors.” These leaders received support Kong Xiangxi and Chiang Kai-shek. Headmaster Song Xianwu was dismissed and the student leaders were expelled. Lu Xun was so concerned that he published a collection of eleven essays on the case.

758

sun, trans. benton

and materialism. On our days off, we visited the outskirts, where the autumn sun was shining and students were laughing and joking everywhere. Shortly after the start of the school year, on 18 September 1931, at seven o’clock in the afternoon, all the students gathered in the auditorium for an emergency address by a guest who had just fled south from the northeast, where the Japanese had launched an attack. At the time, there were no newspapers in Qufu. As soon as we heard the shocking news, we started making banners and forming into teams. We arrived at Yanzhou Station early on the morning of the 19th, and draped passing trains with red and green banners to let North and South know that Qufu Normal was already fighting the Japanese. The student union grew into a mass anti-Japanese union, teaching staff included. Nightly meetings were held to discuss what anti-Japanese slogans to raise. Teachers gave long speeches in favour of this or that slogan. The difference between the Communist Party’s cadre faction and the [Trotskyist] Opposition was evident, as were the various positions put forward by the staff. The Director of Education and the teachers he had brought with him were “old [pro-ccp] cadres”. They were opposed by the Director of Training, and the two factions fought over the slogan of a National Assembly.6 This slogan was proposed by the Director of Training and opposed by the Director of Education, and the teachers and the general masses took sides. However, the debate was invariably won by the Director of Training, and the Director of Education was left in ignominy. Lacking clear and convincing arguments, he resorted to misinterpretation and misrepresentation to smear his opponent. The Director of Training had no problem in worsting his rival. Tall and thin and suffering from a serious lung disease, he was concise, persuasive, and provocative, but he was also fair and frank, and naturally gained much support and respect from the crowd. His name was Zhang Yitang, a native of Hubei. Many of the students had a political background. The Kuomintang Reorganisation Faction,7 the Third Party8 and the Communist Party were all represented, and everyone knew who belonged to what. The cadre faction was unscrupulous. It used strong language and laid slanderous charges. It exaggerated the progress of the Chinese Red Army and threatened the masses. One day, when a group of students were gathered together holding a discussion, a student surnamed Ma said: “The Red Army has almost reached Bengbu, and 6 The Trotskyists campaigned for a National Assembly. 7 The Reorganisation Faction was led by Wang Jingwei, originally a Kuomintang leftist and later a Japanese puppet. 8 Its original members were left-wing Nationalists in the 1930s.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

759

we haven’t joined the Communist Party yet!” He looked round anxiously. We laughed at him for being an opportunist, like the cadres. We preferred not to devote ourselves to supporting the Communists, even if the Chinese Red Army had been about to march in through Qufu’s southern gate. After 18 September, there were strikes and daily anti-Japanese propaganda exercises, although classes eventually resumed. However, on 18 January, we returned to Yanzhou Station to show our solidarity with the students returning north. We blocked the train and instructed the driver to wait for three days before continuing his journey south. Instead, we went to the site of the provincial government in Ji’nan to hear Han Fuju9 speak. We were then sent back to school. Before 18 January, the headmaster and the staff he had hired went south to support the resistance and did not return, so a new headmaster and new staff arrived in the middle of the winter holidays. The student council knew full well that this headmaster was coming to sort out the students, but there was little preparation or foresight. For example, a sign had been attached to each student’s bed with his or her name on it. It was obvious what was intended, but no one protested and only a few students removed their sign. On 20 May, at around three o’clock at night, when people were sound asleep, a battalion of Han Fuju’s regiment surrounded the school and started up the generators. The lights came on and agents stood at the door of each dormitory, arresting people on the basis of their names. They woke everyone, pointed guns at their chests, released those not on their list of names, and marched the rest off to an adjoining room. At dawn, the army withdrew, taking with them nineteen students and six instructors, a total of twenty-five people. The students were in a panic, as if a fire had broken out. The headmaster and staff failed to show up.

Zhang Yanshu Let’s start with the May Incident. After 28 January and the winter holidays, school restarted. The teaching building was completed and classes moved into it. Some of the classrooms were big, and simultaneously accommodated two or three classes, while the smaller

9 Han Fuju (1890–1938) was a Kuomintang general and military governor of Shandong from 1930 to 1938.

760

sun, trans. benton

ones accommodated only one class at a time. As a result, our Logics and Social Studies classes were combined into two classes of the same grade. There were no lectures and no assignments, and the teachers were not required to take a register, so students attended as often or as little as they wished. I was very impressed with Mr Liu Longchao’s logic class. He behaved like a famous actor. He made his entry, pointed out the topic, and then went methodically to work, intoning at a variety of speeds, from slow to fast. His manner and gestures were quite the thing. As soon as he stopped, the bell rang, with complete logicality and not a moment wasted. He was a native of Sichuan, an anarchist in his early forties, with a long beard from which he derived his nickname. On 20 May, after he had been arrested, he was incredibly brave and resolute. He was held in Ji’nan prison until the eve of the loss of the city. However, he refused to sign a form indicating his surrender and repentance, so he was carted off to Nanjing before finally being released. Social studies were taught by Ms Zheng Yongtao, who had returned to China after studying in Moscow. She wore sunglasses, lipstick, high heels, and a bourgeois outfit. At the time, Hitler was about to come to power in Germany. Stalin responded to Trotsky’s warning by accusing him of viewing the German workers through tinted glasses, and of being blind to their political consciousness. As soon as Hitler came to power (said Stalin), he would collapse. “If he doesn’t die before he come to power, he will die after coming to power”, according to the “instruction” recited by Ms Zheng. At this point, Zhang Yanshu, a fellow student of the sixth grade, stood up to debate with her. Instead of responding positively, she accused him of speaking on behalf of Trotsky and going down an evil path, and launched into a tirade against Trotsky and a glorification of Stalin. This did not sit well with the audience. Although no one rose to protest, many were unhappy with her response. Zhang Yanshu found support. He didn’t need to defeat Zheng Yongtao – it was enough to expose her rudeness and arrogance and the misguided policies of the Third International that she spouted. Soon afterwards, my classmate Old Wen went for a stroll with me and asked me what I thought of my classmates and whether I had joined any party. As soon as he realised that I despised the cadre faction and sympathised with the Trotskyists, he told me that he himself was a Trotskyist and asked me to join. I immediately said yes. The next day, he introduced me to Zhang Yanshu and we attended a branch meeting together. He asked me if I had any good contacts to bring into the organisation. I suggested Zang Shuhe, who was a grade above me, a very versatile and talented young man nicknamed the Sage. Zhang Yanshu thought it would be a good idea to recruit him, but he was afraid that Zang was too undisciplined and would not want to live life as part of an organisation. I had a good relationship with Zang, so I told him I had joined the Trotskyists

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

761

and asked him if he was interested. He didn’t believe me at first, but when I told him the details, he hugged me rapturously. He said he had long wanted to join the Trotskyists, but didn’t know where to find them. He knew more than I did about the Stalin-Trotsky dispute and he was completely on Trotsky’s side. He hated the old cadre faction and its style. The cadre faction’s secretary and organiser in the school were in his class at the time and he loathed them as a pair of bureaucrats. Zang Shuhe was so popular and influential that we soon had three cells and more than a dozen members. Zang was serious and enthusiastic about his work and modest towards his comrades. He showed Zhang Yanshu respect. His behaviour was a complete departure from that of the cadre faction. His father was an old-style official. He had “finely chiselled features clear eyebrows and was extremely handsome”, with whiskers spread on his upper and lower lips and cheeks, like a potted plant, the fruit of several lifetimes of art. However, his line was destined to become extinct. Abstinent since childhood from material and physical desires, he had grown up to become sexually impotent. His wife was unable to produce children. Even so, girls flashed their eyes at him. Zhang Yanshu was tall and broad-shouldered, with a flat nose, low cheekbones, and a jutting forehead that made his face appear sunken. He was persuasive, energetic, and able to breeze through dangerous situations with aplomb. He liked to say, “Things are not so bad!” He always had a winning smile. Zhang was a native of Sishui County. He had gone to school in Qufu after being ostracised for belonging to the reform faction in the county headquarters of the Kuomintang. His family was very poor but optimistic. As soon as Zhang Yitang revealed his Trotskyist colours, Zhang Yanshu had contacted him and set about organising a Trotskyist group. He chose Little Cui to go to Shanghai with Zhang Yitang to participate in the 28 January Movement.10 Little Cui did not return until more than a month after the start of the school year. According to him, Zhang Te in Shanghai was even better than Zhang Yitang. The workers called him Little Zhuge.11 He was a real workers’ leader. The workers loved to listen to his speeches and would always defend him. Little Cui admired him more than anyone. After Little Cui’s return, Zhang Yanshu left for Shanghai. He stayed there for two weeks, and returned just before the spring break to prepare for the provincial conference. Zang and I were elected as delegates and went with Zhang Yanshu to Ji’nan, where we rented accommodation in the 10 11

The 28 January 1932 incident or Shanghai incident was a military conflict between the China and Japan that lasted for several months. Zhuge Liang (181–234ad) was a Chinese statesman, recognised as the most accomplished strategist of his time.

762

sun, trans. benton

Quehua Bridge area. The venue was a classroom in Ji’nan Normal School (the First Division) which had been borrowed for the purpose by Zhang Mengjiu, a representative of the Ji’nan Division, on the pretext of hosting a meeting of his hometown association. The meeting was attended by fewer than a dozen people. Wang Xuting represented the Jinpu Railway. He was small in size, very quiet, and nearly forty years old. The one who surprised us most was the representative from Beiping, Liu Jialiang.12 He looked so young and handsome that we all saw him as our younger brother. All I remember is that the meeting agreed that Shandong belonged to North China, that we could no longer have direct contact with the Party Centre, and that in future we would be under the control of Beiping. That was Zhang Yanshu’s first meeting with Liu Jialiang. The meeting lasted only half a day and then it was over. Zhang Yanshu, Wang Xuting, and Zhang Mengjiu were elected to the provincial committee. Conditions were so difficult and the situation was so tense that the provincial committee had to find another place to meet. After the arrest of Chen Duxiu, Zheng Mengjiu quit theTrotskyist movement and said that the revolution was over. Zhang Yanshu delivered a report based on notes he had brought back from Shanghai (in two densely filled volumes), covering all the subjects in which he had received training in Shanghai: economics, politics, the Third International, and issues such as the slogans of the National Assembly. He said that the question of the uprising was scheduled to be given by Chen Duxiu, but unfortunately it had to be cancelled due to Chen’s illness, so he had not actually got to meet our leader. We also had lots of printed materials from Shanghai to discuss, but the landlord of the premises didn’t like the look of us and wanted us to move. He said that the secret police were after us. “Cunning rogues from Licheng” could use all kinds of tricks. We’d paid a month’s rent, but were only able to stay for seven days. Zhang Yanshu stayed behind to continue the provincial committee meeting, and Old Zang and I, together with his shadow, Gai Ziyu (who imitated Old Zang in every way), ended up in my house, to finish discussing the documents, because Ji’nan was closest to Boshan. As we were walking towards my home from the railways station, we bumped into Bai Er. As soon as he saw me, he said, “You’ve come because of the telegram? Your Second Grandfather has passed away!”

12

Liu Jialiang, who died in a Vietnamese prison in 1950, was a leader of the second generation of Chinese Trotskyists.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

763

A bolt from the blue! We had never dreamed that such a thing might happen at the time. Bai Er worked in the Liang family primary school, so I asked him to take my comrades to the school for a while and told him that I would come back for them after I had done my wailing over the body. By that time, Elder Brother’s family had set up a mourning station and a mat awning. I was supposed to accompany the mourners, but I had to look after my two friends. Old Zang told me to buy some white cloth so that he could write a funeral couplet. I sent it to the person in charge, who was astonished when he unfolded it, given that he was completely illiterate. He asked me to read it out aloud. He had been unable to find anyone to write the elegy. Old Zang’s couplet was seen as a blessing on behalf of Second Grandfather. The fame of Zang the Sage has passed on to this day in the village. We dealt with mundane matters during the day, and at night we read the mimeographed Trotskyist pamphlets: Huohua (Spark), Xiaonei shenghuo (School life), and one inscribed on the cover with the words “This is the great scripture of the world”, the size of the palm of your hand, on the land question. The mimeographs were all very delicately constructed. We took turns at reading them aloud and discussing and summarising them. However, gradually drowsiness set in and we could read no further for the time being. We finally finished reading them and had gathered some idea of their contents. But the ideas failed to grow on us, to take root. The two of us had one thing in common: we could “appreciate” the writings of Marx and Lenin, but we could not delve deeper into them, let alone apply them. We had joined the revolution out of passion and a sense of righteousness, to devote ourselves to revolution on behalf of the poor, and we had joined the Trotskyists because the Trotskyists’ style was different from that of the ccp cadres. I read all Trotsky’s articles on the Chinese Revolution, as well as his predictions in relation to the German question at the time. My personal goal was to penetrate the ranks of the workers, to befriend them, to make propaganda for the revolution among them, and to promote world revolution, and thus to trigger the start of human happiness. When I returned to school from Zhaozhuang, I ran for the post of officer of the student union co-operative, on the instructions of our group. Zhang Yanshu and the comrades from Baoding Normal distributed some pamphlets they had mimeographed: Lenin’s State and Revolution, Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disease, From February to October, and so on, all of which were aimed at the cadre faction, to help us with our propaganda. These books were very much in demand among the cadres and easy to sell. The old cadres tried to stop us but they had no arguments. All they could say was that they were too expensive and that we were making money that went to our organisation.

764

sun, trans. benton

At around this time, I started vomiting blood. My face was yellow and thin, and I was suspected of having contracted tb. The organisation therefore suggested that I should stop working and take time off to recuperate. We all expected that a reactionary attack would come at any moment, so we exposed our new group as little as possible to the public, simply reading and discussing without revealing our actual identity, to avoid attracting the attention of the political police. Neither Old Zang nor I had been blacklisted during the May Incident. Old Wen was the first to surrender after his arrest. He had been well known as an economist. Little Cui was arrested and tied up, but he claimed that he was not the same person as the name above the bed. He made a big fuss and his classmates supported his story, so the agents let him go, such was his boldness and gift of the gab. Zhang Yanshu also escaped the net, having stayed elsewhere on that particular night. For a long time he had been renting a small room in which to store documents, books, and mimeographs. On that occasion, he had worked late into the night and therefore managed to avoid getting caught. When I returned home after the May Incident, a lung specialist from the West Lake Hospital, a friend of Elder Brother, turned up in Boshan on holiday and told me to lie still, get some sunshine, and eat more eggs. I did as I was told. In two months, I recovered my strength and good health. I returned to school, did the exam, and took a break from studying, by becoming a teacher in the primary school in Lu Village. The little town was surrounded by mountains and beautiful scenery, and I spent the winter holidays there. Then I got the news that Zhang Yanshu had been arrested. On the first day of the lunar year, Zhang Yanshu was arrested in his home. His old Kuomintang comrade, now a member of the county committee, took credit for his arrest, put him in shackles, and escorted him to Ji’nan the same day. However, the provincial chief was on New Year’s holiday and there was no one was there to take Zhang in, so he was put up in a small hotel in the port. There were three people in the room. Two took turns to look around Ji’nan, while the other stayed in the room and slept in the dark. Zhang Yanshu used a poker to pry off one of his leg irons. When he saw a motor car driving by, he called it over, jumped on board, and asked the driver to take him all the way to Qihe. In a primary school in a town in Qihe County, the local village gentry had invited the local headmaster for a New Year drink. When they saw Zhang arrive, they invited him to join them. Eventually, late at night, the headmaster managed to helped him remove the shackles from his legs, which were badly swollen. He rested for three days and then left for Beiping. During the summer holidays, Second Brother agreed to let me go to Beiping, and Zhang Yanshu arranged for me to stay at the Shandong Hotel. He asked me

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

765

to give a report on political work in the province of Shandong. Goodness, how on earth could I manage such a task? Although I had gone here and there on behalf of the organisation in the course of the previous six months, I’d never done anything along those lines! The only thing was for him to ask me questions and I would do my best to answer them. The rural teachers’ training centre in Ji’nan was our biggest achievement, we had already established an organisation there, and now the rural teachers in Yanzhou and Qingzhou had also become organised. Being a village teacher was a dead-end job, and graduates of the village teachers’ school could only teach village children. Their future was grim, so they looked increasingly towards revolution as the way forward. Middle-school education was slow to develop. Most middle-school graduates aspired to join the Central Military Academy, the Provincial Police Academy, or the Aviation Military Academy. I had a classmate nicknamed Jiang Gan whose family were coal miners in the Hongshan pit. His father was a Green Gang leader and he himself was a slippery type. We knew each other too well – otherwise he would have recruited me to work down the mine. Zhang Yanshu was so excited about this proletarian connection that he decided to go to Hongshan and asked me to contact Jiang Gan for him. Zhang Yanshu revealed very little to me about the organisation in Beiping, and I was not in a position to ask too many questions, given the general reign of white terror. The second time we met, he put me in a group together with himself and Hu Huanzi, the party secretary. The two of them delivered long speeches analysing the situation in China and abroad. I was a bit out of place and said nothing. As for party work, none of us had much to say. After a few meetings of this kind, the group went cold, so much so that it no longer met. Before leaving, Zhang took me to a dormitory to meet Si Chaosheng.13 We didn’t talk, but this meeting laid the groundwork for the collaboration between Si and me in Wuhan in 1938. In the summer of 1934, Zhang Yanshu returned to Beiping. He had been working as a coal miner in Hongshan for eight months, but he had not made a single friend. His relationship with Jiang Gan had not been good and his health had suffered, so that he had to wear woollen trousers even at the height of summer. Once he arrived in Beiping, he plunged into activity and had little to say about the organisation, except to tell me that for the time being he would not be able to participate.

13

An associate of Liu Renjing, a founding member of the ccp, who joined the Left Opposition in Moscow.

766

sun, trans. benton

Two months later, he seemed to have settled down and took me to his home in Xisi Pailou, just before the Mid-Autumn Festival. The two of us oil-printed a pamphlet less than ten pages long titled “Pioneers”. He said that the organisation had cleared out the traitors and that he had met two on the street but they had not shadowed him. Even so, he had decided to move to Dongcheng. Ever since meeting Zhang Yanshu, there was nothing we would not talk about. His knowledge and experience were far superior to mine, and he took care of me in every way. On one occasion, I wrote a one-act play for him to read, but he said it was not dramatic enough, it was just slogans, it didn’t work as drama. Zhang Ziping’s14 stuff was boring but at least it was artistic. I knew what to do after he said that. I had forgotten who art should serve. When the Mid-Autumn Festival arrived, I bought some cooked lamb and live crabs and went to spend the holiday with Zhang Yanshu. His life had never been hard. He paid no attention to holidays. He refused to eat the crab I had cooked, saying that it was undercooked and that he would get sick if he ate it. The next day I had diarrhoea, which continued for several days, and when I recovered, I thought something must have happened to Zhang Yanshu. He had told me during the holidays that he was moving to a house in Chaoyangmen Lane in the east. The house had a rear exit onto a back alley, so it was easy to make a quick getaway. He had asked me to go there to help him with his work. Now a week had passed and I hadn’t heard from him. It didn’t feel right. I went to see Little Cui, who had arrived in Beiping a month earlier. Zhang Yanshu had talked with him in some detail about the Beiping organisation. On his arriving back in Beiping from Hongshan, the Central Committee in Shanghai had ordered him to overhaul the organisation in Beiping, a big task. At the time, the [Trotskyist] Central Committee was made up of the “Four Great Warrior Attendants” who had gone south from Beiping – Si Chaosheng, Hu Huanzhi, Wang Shuben, and Liu Renjing. They had expelled Chen Duxiu and all those who refused to follow their orders.15 Zhang Yanshu was extremely stubborn and went so far as to insist on the implementation of the Central Committee’s resolution at the meeting. Unwilling to give face to the petty bourgeoisie, several members of the “local committee”, in a fit of rage, betrayed the organisation to the Third Regiment. These traitors were the heads of the organisation in Beiping. They sold out what was left of it. Zhang was not arrested immediately and was allowed to move Dongcheng, probably in an attempt to dig some of his secrets.

14 15

Zhang Ziping (1893–1959) was a popular writer in China in the 1930s. See Wang Fanxi’s memoirs for this incident.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

767

Three months later, I received a letter from him saying that his case had been finalised and that he was going to be transferred to Nanjing. His future address would be Zhang Ziqin, Shuiximen Army Prison. I continued to correspond with him on behalf of the Shandong organisation. I sent him books and clothes, and I visited him twice in the army prison.

Zhang Bingyu In the spring of 1935, I no longer had any friends and there was no longer any organisation. Little Cui was about to leave Beiping. At his home, I met a young man called Zhang, who was four or five years younger than I. He loved literature and art and saw me as his fellow student. He encouraged me to go with him to his home in the northeast, where I could study foreign languages for two years. I was tired of Beiping, so we set off on a meandering journey. We arrived in Qingdao on 13 May and took the boat to Dalian. I was already feeling bad about the situation in the Yuelai Hostel before departure, and when I went to the Dadong Company to buy the ferry tickets and had my photo taken for the id, I was like a thief caught in the act. Only we two were dressed in casual white jackets, while everyone else was barechested and wearing labourers’ pants. As soon as the ship left the dock, we were questioned by the Japanese secret service, who assumed that we were agents sent by Chiang Kai-shek. The next morning, when we docked at Dalian, we and our luggage were dragged off in a horse-drawn cart to the Japanese government office. A group of “Yangzhou” girls [i.e., prostitutes] and pimps were also pulled in. They were dealt with on the ground floor, while we were taken up to the first floor. Our papers were again searched, and among the English books was a volume titled Problems of the Chinese Revolution, written by Trotsky, which Zhang Yanshu had borrowed for me from the Trotskyist organisation and which I had been unable to part with. Fortunately, the censor threw it to one side as soon as he saw it, frowning and admitting that he could not read English. He claimed to be a student at Northeastern University and was not too keen to be doing this sort of work. The same few questions were repeated over and over again: “Where are you from?” “Where are you going?” “Are students from Beiping fighting against the Japanese?” “Did Chiang Kai-shek send you?” The man’s eyes darted constantly in the direction of his Japanese superior, but the Japanese was too busy to pay attention to him, so the Chinese investigator kept quiet. By the time the search was over, the government office had emptied. The hostel staff arrived to pick us up, and the “Yangzhou” boss was wandering around downstairs, asking if we had seen

768

sun, trans. benton

his girls. He seemed to have lost them. When we arrived at the hostel, the hostel master said, “You must leave quickly. You can’t stay in Dalian, we’ll be in trouble if we run into the inspectors again”. We asked what time the bus left. We then took the six o’clock bus north, leaving the gates of Dalian behind us. We passed through Yanji in Jilin and reached Tumen. We then crossed the river to Sinso in Korea and took a bus from there back to Huichun in Jilin. The direct bus from Yanji to Huichun was only available on the return journey. Huichun was no longer as Little Zhang had described it; its days of affluence and quiet were over. The Japanese had designated Huichun as an opiumgrowing area. Young people frequented the opium stalls. Young local people spoke Japanese, wore Japanese clothes, and bowed deeply when meeting each other. But most of them still hated the Japanese. They said it was impossible to live “beyond the pass”, in Japanese-occupied territory, and we should not come back. Little Zhang’s family consisted of a widowed mother and two sisters. The mother was still young. She had been deceived by someone selling fake gold and lost a lot of money. There was a big kang (oven, also for sleeping on) in the house. After eating, it became too hot to sit on. The two of us wandered the streets every day. A little fat man who had opened a photo studio took a photo of me in an opium field. We watched the “receiving of the imperial decree” from the imperial envoy sent by [the puppet] Emperor Kangde [Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing] from Shengjing [Shenyang], it was quite a drama. We had been living in Huichun for a couple of months when we received a visit from the Manchurian secret service. Our friends told us to leave quickly, so we fled the town. Little Zhang decided to go to Harbin and I went back to Shandong. I made it all the way to Changchun and then headed for Shenyang. It was a lonely journey. I couldn’t risk going back through Dalian, so I bought a train ticket and left through the Shanhai Pass at the eastern end of the Great Wall, which I passed through without any inspection. After staying in Beiping for a few days, I travelled on to Ji’nan, where the organisation was developing. The Rural Teachers’ Training Centre was in contact with teachers from the middle schools in the countryside. The leaders of the movement were Cui Binzhi and Chang Shukang from Ji’nan Rural Teachers’ College. Everyone wanted to link up with the Shanghai organisation. By this time, Binzhi was already known to the secret services, so to avoid the heat he took a year off and went with me to teach at Beiluo Primary School in Taierzhuang. On the staff was Comrade Sun from Yixian County. The school director and he were members of the same clan (lineage).

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

769

Cui Binzhi was also from Sishui. His family was extremely poor and could not afford to pay for his tuition, but he was a very handsome young man, and the headmaster of the local primary school promised his niece to him, after which he was able to finish primary school and go on to train as a teacher. He was very active in the organisation and developed connections in all the secondary schools in Ji’nan. Yan Zigui, a teacher in the First Middle School, had Trotskyist tendencies and was trying to get in touch (after we left, Chang Shukang and Zigui managed to contact each other.) The following year, in the spring of 1936, we received a letter from Zhang Bingyu, saying that he had become a teacher at the primary school attached to the Greater China Rubber Shoe Factory in Xujiahui in Shanghai, but that he was unable to track down the organisation and wanted me to go and help him do so, given that I knew more about the organisation than others did. Zhang Yanshu had said that there was a man called Shao Lu in Shanghai who was also from Sishui (Shandong) and had taken him horse-racing, during which time he had met some fellow villagers from Sishui who worked as stable boys. I told Zhang Bingyu about this in a letter, but he ignored me and simply drew me a sketch map of the way to his school, from Shanghai North Railway Station along Henan Road to Zhuanji Bridge, the site of his school. He promised to introduce me to people when I arrived. He was in a lonely mood and needed a friend to keep him company. Such was his nature. While passing through Nanjing, I took the opportunity to go to Nanjing Prison at Shuiximen, where I met Zhang Ziqin for the first time and delivered some things to him. When I told him that I had come to Shanghai to look for Shao Lu, he frowned and indicated that there were ears on the wall (eavesdroppers) and I should say no more. I asked something else to divert attention from our earlier conversation. I realised there might be a problem with Shao Lu. While I was waiting to be received in the prison, I heard a thick-set prisoner dressed in blue clothes saying to his mother, “There are many people here who are suffering, I’m not the only one who needs to eat, everyone does, next time cook a bit more!” I almost shouted, “This must be Gorky’s ‘Mother.’ ”16 As a first-time visitor to region south of the Yangtze, I was delighted by the green hills, the clothes that local men and women wore, and the softness of their voices. However, the nearer I got to the dangerous city of Shanghai, the more I was on edge. I got off the train at North Station but decided not to take the tram. I walked for an hour, following the sketch map, and eventually arrived at the school.

16

A reference to Gorki’s novel Mother.

770

sun, trans. benton

It was 2.30 in the morning. After sunrise, Zhang Bingyu took me for breakfast to a bakery owned by a Baoding man, and I rented an attic room. I think it was Sunday, so he had no teaching. After settling in, we went to the racetrack and found Liu Yuanjun, head of the grooms, a big man with a loud voice and an openmind. When he heard that I was also from Sishui and that I was looking for Shao Lu, he seemed to hesitate. He told me that Shao Lu was no longer in Shanghai. He asked me where I was going, and told me to ask “Old Tang”, perhaps he would know. But he would not be off work until six o’clock that evening. Old Tang was a pipe-maker who lived in the grooms’ dormitory because he was from the same village in Sishui as them. He told us that Shao Lu had been in trouble with the law and had ended up in court, but he would try to track down Shao Lu’s friends. I was told to go back a couple of days later. When I returned, I met Zhao Zhicheng, a telephone worker, who took down my address. Then Brother Chen (Chen Qichang) visited me in my attic – we had found the organisation! This was the third day after May Day, in 1936. On May 1, Zhang Bingyu and I had gone to Nanjing Road to join the Communist Party’s demonstration, and at twelve o’clock, just as people started shouting slogans, we were arrested. The man who had taken us there, Zou Mianhong, rushed away through the alleys and took a shortcut back to his room. He was a painter, a former teacher at the Zouping Rural Institute, and probably a Communist. He had told us in advance that this would happen. In Communist Party terms, we were his “masses”. Zhang Bingyu was from the countryside in Sishui. His family was better off than Zhang Yanshu’s. He and Xinru had attended the same primary school, and were in their third year at Qufu Teachers’ Training College. He was a grade below us. He was a bit shorter than Xinru but better looking, especially his eyes. He spent a lot of time playing tennis and basketball. He had a good friend called Zhu Dengxiang who was a bit effeminate and loved tennis. One day, when they were returning to the dormitory after playing tennis, they saw that the school doctor was examining a student who had vomited blood. The doctor noticed Zhu Dengxiang’s complexion. He whispered to Zhang Bingyu that Zhu Dengxiang’s lungs were in the same state as the student who had vomited blood, and referred him to Qilu Hospital for a closer examination. Zhang Bingyu accompanied him there and Zhu Dengxiang did not return. He died at home six months later. The school doctor seemed a fool, but actually he was competent and willing to take responsibility. When I started spitting blood, having shared a room with two consumptives who later died, he was not in the least nervous.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

771

At the time, I had no dealings with Zhang Bingyu, because Zhu Dengxiang was my classmate from Yanshan. He was the son of a landlord and was jealous that I did better than him in the exams, so he tried to look down on me. I had nothing to do with Zhang Bingyu, and it seemed to me that he only liked handsome people. After the May Incident, he had studied at the Institute of Rural Construction in Zouping, and after about a year, Liang Shuming17 asked his eldest disciple Zhang Zonglin to run an experimental rural teacher training centre. The disciple then asked him for an assistant who “could jump if needed”. Liang gave him Zhang Bingyu. Zhang Bingyu became a director of the teacher training centre. He changed his name to Zhang Limin, which he used from then on, so I’ll use that name too. Zhang Zonglin and Liang Shuming had different ideas about rural reconstruction, so Zheng Zonglin left Zouping to go south, and Limin followed him. The teaching post in the Greater China Rubber Shoe Factory was Zhang Zonglin’s strength. A rough and ready man from the north teaching in Mandarin in Shanghai! Zhang Zonglin was unable to stand on his own two feet, so he turned to Tao Xingzhi for help,18 and Limin followed Tao and Tao’s disciples. We went to Tao’s lectures on Latinisation, and enjoyed the entertainment and the cheap food. We envied the Fujianese, who were sated after just two bowls of gruel. Limin always added five (or preferably ten) steamed rolls. Tao often lamented that we ate too much. Brother Chen (Qichang) came to our attic regularly, bringing books and copies of Struggle and School Life. In our opinion, Struggle was the best revolutionary publication available, there was nothing to match it. You could say that at the time we were making revolution for the sake of Struggle. It made us proud to be under the Trotskyist banner. We dispatched Struggle across the whole of the country, and those who received it enjoyed it and became more confident in the organisation. The fact that we could read Chen Duxiu’s articles in School Life convinced us that the organisation was invincible. However, Chen avoided talking about the realities of organising in Shanghai – under the white terror, the less we knew the better. He wanted us to arm our brains. “When the big moment comes, there’ll be no time for reading, and you’ll feel that you haven’t read enough”. That’s what he always used to say. 17 18

Liang Shuming (1893–1988) was a philosopher and politician active in the Rural Reconstruction Movement in the late Qing and early Republic. Tao Xingzhi (1891–1946) was a well-known educator and reformer who championed progressive education.

772

sun, trans. benton

We were under the illusion that the Fourth International had thriving sections in other countries – an easy illusion for internationalists to harbour. It was very unwise of Brother Chen Qichang (Zhongshan) to suddenly develop illusions in Lu Xun and to send him publications and a letter, which led Lu Xun to denounce the Trotskyists.19 As soon as Lu Xun’s response was published, Qichang rushed over and, after explaining what had happened, took out his second letter, in reply to Lu Xun, and showed it to us. He asked us to print it out as a mimeograph on his behalf and help him distribute it. We asked him why he wasn’t planning to print it properly. He said that, on the one hand, it would interfere with the work of our typesetter and delay the publication of Struggle, while on the other hand it would appear that Chen Zhongshan was representing the organisation. Publishing it as a mimeograph would indicate that it was a personal response. Limin was a good mimeographer, but he had scant experience. He engraved the wax plates, which looked even neater than the lead type. The ink was well prepared, so the printing was clear and attractive. But we doubted that it would have much effect. How could it match up to Lu Xun’s authority? After the summer holidays, Limin was in a difficult position. Zhang Zonglin was going to the northwest. Limin refused to follow him, having regained confidence in the Trotskyists over the previous six months. But how to earn a livelihood? Suddenly, good news came from Wujiang. A young gentryman surnamed Zhou had gone to Zouping to stay in the rural institute to have his arthritis treated. He met Limin, and proposed him as a substitute teacher during his own convalescence. In a letter, he asked Limin to go to Wujiang to run a private primary school, and remitted the travel expenses for him to set out immediately. I went to Zhucheng with Zhang for about a month. However, he was ashamed that he had only got into a teacher training college in Beiping and would have to stay at home and become a primary school principal. From Zhucheng, I went to Qihe, Ji’nan, Changqing, Zhuangping, and other places, and then to Wujiang. When Limin took over the primary school, he invited Little Cui and Miss Han from Zouping, plus me, four professional teachers, together with the young men of the locally based Chen and Fan families, to do the teaching. Little Cui had already left the organisation and his father-in-law had “unblocked” his status in the county Kuomintang branch, after which he returned home to get married. The Shandong teachers won the praise of the town’s

19

i.e., Chen Zhongshan.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

773

gentry for their work. Limin’s innovative teaching and his encouragement of extra-curricular activities was especially popular with the students. But when it came to inculcating ideas, Limin was too impulsive and failed to get a grip. He spoke out of turn, and people began to whisper that he was a Red. I had to try to calm him down. The school board was aware of this. I often warned him about following his impulses before meetings at which he was due to speak, in order to forestall trouble afterwards, especially after the Double Twelfth incident in Xi’an in 1936, when Zhang Xueliang briefly arrested Chiang Kai-shek and the young comrades in Wujiang became intoxicated. As a result, our situation was even more difficult. “Who is hindering our progress?”20 Limin cut out this line from the song and posted it in the Year 6 classroom, to the consternation of the local fascists. Nie Er’s song rang out across the school, alarming the rightist gentlemen no end. The members of the school board who supported us were also attacked. We let them announce that we would step down at the end of the school year in order to placate the rightists, who wanted to get rid of us immediately. We had won a few sympathisers among the governors, who became readers of Struggle and handled letters and publications for us, to avoid the censors. As for the students, they were still young. They didn’t join the organisation, but their general thinking was to the left. When Nanjing fell to the Japanese, most of them fled to northern Anhui, where they became effective cadres of the ccp. As soon as summer vacation began, Limin and I went to Shanghai. Soon afterwards, Binzhi and Lou Xuan came down from Shandong and the four of us lived together and attended Tao Xingzhi’s summer course together. By that time, the Yadong Book Company had published some pamphlets on the Moscow trials, Son, Friend, and Soldier, I Stake My Life, and Before the New World War, which we all read and sent to Shandong. After the Lugou Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937, which marked the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Limin got depressed. He always had to work and was unable to wait patiently for work to begin. The propaganda about prioritising the resistance to Japan extinguished his class consciousness. If the ccp had not hated the Trotskyists so much, Limin would have made an excellent cadre for them. At this time, however, the ccp excluded all those who were suspected of being Trotskyists, so it was not leftists but right-leaning “patriots” who came calling on Limin.

20

A line from a song composed in 1935 by Nie Er, best known for his “March of the Volunteers”, the national anthem of the prc.

774

sun, trans. benton

The Wujiang lineage in Nanjing wanted to set up a private middle school and asked Limin to teach there. The rest of us were not qualified to teach middle school, so we had to let him go off by himself. I didn’t realise that that would be the last I saw of him.

The Enlarged Conference After the Battle of Shanghai, which started on 13 August 1937, my living expenses were met by the organisation. But the subsidy did not extend to my accommodation, so I had to seek out Liu Yuanjun at the race course and live together with the stable boys. Liu Yuanjun introduced me to a policeman, who he said was Shao Lu’s father. Liu Yuanjun despised him and said that Shao Lu was quite a different character from his father. When I had turned up the previous year, this old man was in Sishui, having just married a young wife. Liu Yuanjun denounced him for this, saying that he was 50 years old and even so married an 18-year-old girl, and that it would have been more suitable if he’d given her to his son, she should have been his daughter-in-law, not his wife. At the time, Liu was working for a foreign company, on the night shift. He and the policeman nodded when they met. The policeman hated us from the bottom of his heart. His son was in trouble with the law because of us, and was unable to give his father money. Only one of my room-mates, Liu Yuanjun’s nephew, was a stable-boy. Old Tang had been living there for ages, whereas Liu Jiquan and I were new arrivals. Not long afterwards, another man arrived, a native of western Shandong, who worked for the Germans as a master chef.21 Old Tang regarded himself as a person of high status, a real member of the working class. He liked to engage in anti-Japanese rhetoric. The chef used to come home late, after ten o’clock. He would ask me to write up his accounts, in English, with a list of all the beef, vegetables, and fruit he had bought that day. At first I found it difficult. I had to use the dictionary a lot and had a lot of trouble getting it right. The chef drove Old Tang away with his snoring – he was a short, fat man who started snoring as soon as he dozed off, thus preventing others from sleeping. Liu Jiquan was from Sishui. He used to sell plasters. He had previously worked in a mine in southern Anhui. He had come to see his relatives and planned to go back to Shandong afterwards. The mine workers had given him a

21

Parts of Shandong (the Kiautschou [Jiaozhou] Bay) were leased to the Germans from 1898 to 1914.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

775

“wanmin umbrella”, meaning a certificate of honour.22 He earned good money and had a good name. In those days, the foreign concessions were full of refugees, who were setting up stalls everywhere. Naturally, he was keen to make a few bucks for travel. I used to help him out by drumming up customers. I thought I could learn some of his tricks. He thought I wanted to learn his trade, and he gave me lots of advice. I was in the same branch as Han Jun and Hua Zhenbin. Sometimes Jiang Zhendong came to join us. Han Jun was very energetic. He was absolutely committed to his work and very capable, and he liked discussing technical details. I found out about the anti-Japanese groups that I joined from newspaper advertisements and Tao’s circuit of contacts. The groups were all led by the ccp. At first, they got me join propaganda groups and hand out leaflets or give speeches in the streets. As soon as we began to talk more deeply, they noticed that our positions were different. There was a refugee shelter where a member of the Tao group introduced me as an activist, and I used to have meals there. On one occasion, I saw an advertisement in the newspaper and went to sign up as a member of the National Salvation Association. The registration office was in front of a shop on the Rue du Consulat in the French Concession. There was no National Salvation literature on display and only one person in charge of registration. The registration form had a box for volunteers, and I was instructed to fill one in. Once others arrived, I was to follow behind the person in front and neither get too close nor lag behind. We were to enter the School for the Deaf in Shanghai’s Chinese sector. There was no one living there at the time because of the Japanese bombing. There were three or four hundred people gathered in the playground awaiting speeches. At midday, some armed Nationalist soldiers suddenly appeared and stood on a platform to announce that they were the Loyal Salvation Army and that since we had “volunteered”, we should wait to be organised and trained. Our future task was to blow up the enemy’s railways, bridges, docks, and warehouses. People were flabbergasted when they heard this. There was a moment’s silence for a while, followed by a sudden buzz of conversation. Finally, someone spoke up: “When we came to this meeting, our families didn’t know that we would be staying to work. They are waiting for us to go home to eat. We must first go home and make arrangements, and then we can come back to work. Is that ok?” This demand, supported by the crowd, forced the soldiers to change tack. They told us to form into three groups. The first group would be those who did not intend to return home and could be reorganised. A dozen or so youngsters started bouncing up and down and shouting

22

Indicating that the recipient was distinguished.

776

sun, trans. benton

that they would not go home. The soldiers waited for a while, but when no one else joined the group, they ordered that it be fed first. Then they announced that those who intended to go home and then come back again should join the second group, and almost everyone did. The remaining handful, those who did not intend to return, joined the third group. They were invalids and disabled people, and they had turned up because they thought they would get a hand-out. The soldiers instructed us to keep what we had heard a secret, for the sake of the nation. And not to talk about what happened if we failed to return. But we shouted out that of course we would return. We were then told we were free to go. We left in single file, and entered the International Settlement. Once inside, everyone started cursing and swearing, glad to have escaped the trap. Shao Lu was released from Suzhou and returned. He caught up on old times with Little Zhao, but paid no attention to his father. Before 18 January, he had worked for a telephone company together with Little Zhao. He was a very competent organiser. The organisation arranged for him to work as a driver for Li Furen (Frank Glass, an American comrade who worked for us in Shanghai). In the first month of the previous year, he had gone to Little Zhao’s house for dinner and been caught by the secret police and sent to the reform institute. Now he had no intention of resuming his place in the organisation. The Nanjing government had set up an air defence survey team and recruited mechanics, electricians, and drivers in Shanghai. He passed the driver’s test and left soon afterwards. Shao Lu, who I had eagerly awaited for such a long time, vanished in a flash. After Shao Lu’s departure, Liu Jialiang returned to Shanghai and lived in a communal kitchen on Rongshi Road. I went to see him. He was writing a report for the Fourth International. He said that now he was the only one who could write letters in French, a language he had learned in prison. He also told me about his “heroic struggles” in prison, claiming that he had trained in martial arts as a child. I didn’t like what I heard. Even if some it were true, there was no need for self-promotion. A few days later, Wang Shuben23 moved in with Liu Jialiang, Wang Shuben was no stranger to me, although it was the first time we had met. I had heard a lot about him from Lou Xuan. He had been a student at Peking University and

23

Wang Shuben is an alias of Wang Zhenhua. On 13 August 1983, Beijing’s Guangming Daily and on 16 August 1983, Shanghai’s Wen Wei Po both wrote about the brutal murder of Mr and Mrs Wang Zhenhua and their son, Xiaohua Youhua, by the Kuomintang at the ChinaUS Special Technology Cooperation Institute’s White House in 1949, and referred to them as “Trotskyist martyrs”.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

777

a revolutionary since 18 September. He had once sold peanuts in Tianqiao and been arrested by detectives. He didn’t brag about his life in prison, but he told me that once he wanted to eat roast chicken so badly that he had written a letter to someone to have it sent into the prison. However, when he received it, he no longer wanted to eat it. He went to Old Fan’s house every day, and when he came back he would tell us about Fan’s illness. Soon afterwards, Old Fan died of typhoid fever. There were so many refugees in the International Settlement that rents shot up, so Han Jun moved to the communal kitchen. The beggars at the race course chased away all the boarding house guests, and I also moved to the communal kitchen. We were unhappy with Chen Duxiu’s departure to Wuhan,24 and we thought he’d sunk even lower when we heard about the comments he published.25 When Peng Shuzhi26 arrived in Shanghai, he organised an enlarged conference. The conference was divided into two groups that met on the same day in different places. Our group met at the home of Old Zeng, a Fujianese middle school teacher who lived in a rather spacious apartment. His wife was not a comrade. During the conference, she moved to a neighbour’s house. After the meeting, she handed me a small parcel of clothes and asked me to take it back to Shandong and send it on from there. Her ex-husband was from Jiaodong and had died. The couple later left China and broke away from the organisation. Our group consisted of the four from the communal kitchen plus Old Peng and Old Zeng, six of us in all. The conference went well. Not a single person spoke up for Chen Duxiu. After listening to Peng Shuzhi’s report, I thought to myself that Chen was finished and that I would have to go with Peng in future. Back in the communal kitchen, Han Jun said, “I can’t believe that we and Old Peng are on the same side”, he’d been ready to open fire on Old Peng! The other group was Chen’s bosom comrade Jiang Zhendong and others, they opposed taking the stick to Chen Duxiu and killing him off. Old Trotsky had already supported Chen Duxiu several times in disputes, and Old Peng’s views could not be trusted, Old Peng was getting ready to take over as chief. A fortnight after the enlarged conference, the resolution on the resistance war was printed. On 9 November, I took the resolution back to Qingdao.

24 25 26

After his release by the Kuomintang from prison in Nanjing, just before the start of the war, Chen went first to Wuhan and then to Sichuan, where he died in 1942. A reference to differences between Chen and his comrades regarding the war. Peng led what was to become one of the two factions in Chinese Trotskyism. He fell out with Chen Duxiu while the two were briefly together in a Kuomintang prison in the 1930s.

778

sun, trans. benton

I had not seen Elder Brother Chen (Qichang) for a long time, and I never saw him ever again.

The Fires of War I found Tao Shaowu, our “cunning rogue from Licheng”,27 whose organisational roots I have forgotten, in the Jiaoji Railway Station in Qingdao. His career could be described as an iron rice bowl, it was truly remarkable. I left him a copy of the resolution and made an appointment for him to attend the provincial conference. He put me on the train and took care of the conductor, so that I didn’t have to buy a ticket. I first went back to Zhaozhuang to see my father and my brothers, who were anxious about the arrival of the Japanese. Early the next morning, I shaved my head, put on a crop-worker’s half jacket, and rode Elder Brother’s bicycle to Tai’an. At first I stuffed the resolution into my socks, but when I got nearer to Tai’an, I suddenly thought that was not a good idea. I was carrying a small tool bag on the handle-bar, containing pliers and spanners. I decided that was safer, so I put the resolution in it. When I reached the northern gate of Tai’an City, I was subjected to a severe interrogation. I made up a story about my brother. I said he had originally studied in Ji’nan but now he had moved here with the school, and the school might be about to move elsewhere, so my old father was worried and had asked me to come and pick him up. The sentry made no further comment. He simply gestured that I should remove my hat and my shoes and socks. He could see nothing on the bike except for the bag, which he pinched with his fingers and felt the pliers inside. He didn’t require me to open the bag. He simply waved me through into the city. It was already dark, so I first looked for a hotel. As soon as I was in my room, I tucked the resolution under the bed. Immediately afterwards, someone again came to interrogate me, and repeated the same procedure. This time he opened the tool bag, but found only the spanners and pliers. Having passed these two tests, I first ate and then went to bed. The next morning I went to see Yan Zigui at the Third Middle School, where I handed him the resolution and set a date for a meeting in Tai’an in seven days’ time. He informed the Zhucheng and Qingzhou branches. I then cycled to Yanzhou, where I met with a crowd of young comrades who were very enthusiastic and had chosen delegates to attend the forthcoming meeting. I stayed overnight

27

The author is probably teasing.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

779

with them. They said that my clothes were not right and that I was bound to be interrogated. They therefore found me some more appropriate clothing – a cotton gown, a felt hat, a scarf, and a pair of Western-style trousers, and dressed me up like a middle-school teacher. I passed through Qufu, but I didn’t go into the city. We no longer had any organisation there, things had changed greatly, to my great regret. The wind was against me and the road uphill, so I had to push the bike. When I arrived in Sishui, it was already dark. This time, the sentry didn’t question me. I knocked at the door. A student, Wang, opened it, and was so shocked to see me that his face changed colour. He told me to get out, to leave his house. I asked him where Zhang Xinru’s house was. He said Xinru was not at home, and that if I asked someone else, I would be arrested. He closed the door on me, without a thought for how I, a stranger, was to spend the night. How could I go back? I was too tired to go by bike. I suddenly remembered that a man called Zhou from Sishui had visited Limin in Wujiang, and we had looked after him for quite a few days. He was from a merchant family. I found his shop house and told his family about my friendship with Zhou, and that I was passing through Yanzhou and had hoped to visit him. It turned out that Zhou was seriously ill and in a critical condition. However, since I had come, they could only welcome me on his behalf. They arranged dinner and lodgings, so I was able to rescue the situation. I went back to Zhaozhuang from Sishui, rested for three days, and then went to see my Yanshan classmate Qiao Tongen, nicknamed Pockmarked Second Brother. He was already in his second year at the Normal University. I’d met him the previous winter. He told me that the situation was critical and that he would join the Trotskyists in the future, so I left him a copy of the resolution. I took the train south to Tai’an. There were very few people on the streets in Ji’nan. When I met Zigui in Tai’an, he was very impressed with the text of the resolution, especially when I told him that it was written by Liu Jialiang. He said that the people he had been working with had progressed so quickly that he could afford to go full-time. I stayed the night. At dusk, the news of the retreat from Ji’nan suddenly came through. The school set off immediately on foot, with Zigui escorting the students. He was unable to make any arrangements for me. At that point, Ma Hua, a delegate from Qingzhou, arrived. He had a young comrade called Wang in tow. The three of us boarded the train. The train only made two stops and then came to a complete halt. Military trains were blocking the track. In daylight, the train was likely to be bombed from the air. We got off and set out on foot, joining on the way with some primary school teachers. Together, we set off into our aimless exile.

780

sun, trans. benton

Some of the wounded soldiers returning from the front asked us about the war. They were from northern Shandong. They couldn’t say where they had been wounded. They were strapping young fellows, new recruits, and now they were looking forward to going back to their hometowns. When people in the countryside saw folk fleeing in droves, they too began to panic and wondered whether they ought to join us. Fried peanuts were by now only a copper dollar a catty – peanuts would not keep for long, and the peasants had no choice but to sell them cheaply. Ma Hua was a student of Yidu Normal School, a Muslim, dressed in a green uniform and holding a horse stick in his hand. Little Wang had been a soldier for many years and had been promoted to a secret agent. However, he sympathised with the Communists and let them go after catching them, so that they could flee back to their hometowns. When he told Ma Hua about his experiences, Ma Hua turned him into a Trotskyist and he became Ma Hua’s shadow – there were other such “comrades” among the Trotskyists, not just this pair. When we arrived at Qingguji in Cao County, we rested for a day. Just as we were about to enter into Henan to the west, Ma Hua suddenly decided to go back to Qingzhou to fight as a guerrilla. Who could object? So off he went, with Little Wang, on their long journey. His spirit was beyond compare. For a few days before they left, we discussed the political resolution and the slogans and tasks in the resistance, as well as Little Wang’s activities in the secret service, which he described in great detail. His knowledge of the revolution and his understanding of Trotskyism were already quite deep. I went to Lanfeng, a small station on the Longhai Railway line, and climbed aboard a train heading west. Zigui and I arrived in Zhengzhou in a compartment full of transport supervisors. Zhengzhou was bustling and once again peaceful. Zigui invited me to dinner and a bath at the Huayangchun Hotel and then pointed out that I could go west to Xi’an and look up Li Ziyi at the Central News Agency – he would be sure to find me a job if I mentioned Zigui’s name, there was no need for a letter of introduction. However, I went south to Wuhan instead, to join Liang Xisan, from Zhaozhuang, who had been an accountant in a Nanjing warehouse for many years. Zigui opened his wallet and took out six silver dollars, which he said he had been saving in case there was a devaluation of the currency. Now he was giving me half of them to pay for my travel and in the hope of a future meeting. I parted company with the economist and took the train south to Wuhan.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

781

In Wuchang,28 I first went to the military administration. I was told to go to the former Nanjing warehouse, now renamed the Fourth Grain Service Warehouse, just outside the Japanese Concession in Hankou. I found the warehouse, but the head had gone to Changsha. However, the deputy head, who was also from Boshan, treated me like a young nephew once he heard that I was from Zhaozhuang and that my name was Liang. After a brief discussion about my travels, I hastened to make clear that the relationship between me and the director was simply that we bore the same family name and came from the same village. The deputy director then said, “Since you are here, we should first find you work. We need people in the Twenty-Second Warehouse. The director is also from Boshan, I worked there originally”. When the boss returned, they arranged for me to work here. The Twenty-Second Warehouse was a three-storey building in the commercial area along the river in Hankou. Upstairs was an office and the director’s residence. Downstairs were dormitories for the depot staff and the troops. Soon after I arrived, I met my old school friend Zhai Binnai, who was working there. After taking me to meet the boss, he treated me to a drink and a meal. Two days later, I was given a job in the warehouse as second in command. According to Zhai Binnai, that was quite an honour. He was a graduate of the Ji’nan Police Academy and had been a police officer in Dongping County. He and the boss were from the same village. Zhai Binnai arranged for me to get a yellow uniform. A merchant from Zhoucun who had arrived on the same day as me was already wearing a new uniform and looked good in it. However, I made my excuses. I put on a long gown, wear a special badge, go down to the river to supervise the transport of wheat flour from the warehouse to the train, pay the merchants, collect the money – all very simple. But I felt the wheat sacks and they were as hard as lumps of stone. So I asked the fellow, is this wheat destined for the front, is it for our brothers under arms to eat? Was he embezzling the good wheat? He told me that he himself didn’t have the guts to steal army food and that the boss and the warehouse administrator were responsible for the theft. This was a deal that the two of them had struck. This sort of grain could only be sold to the army. There was, however, good wheat flour in the warehouse. I told him to load up the good wheat instead, which he did. Later, he pressed me to accept five yuan and invited me to take a bath, but I refused. Even before it was time to change shifts, my superior, who was a lieutenant officer in the warehouse, came over and told me to go back and take a rest. From then on, they never again assigned me work. 28

Wuchang and Hankou are parts of the tri-city of Wuhan.

782

sun, trans. benton

Then I saw a small advertisement in the newspaper: Wang Jizi and Shi Yimin had arrived in Wuhan. The liaison point was the children’s bookshop. As a result of this advertisement, I met up with Yimin, who had been my chemistry teacher at the First Normal School. No one had realised that he was political. Although he was a veteran from Beiping, a contemporary of Li Ziyi and Yan Zigui, he was not a good propagandist. However, he had a deep affection for his classmates. Little Hu, Liu Renjing, Si Chaosheng, and Tao Shaowu were all able to get together thanks to this advertisement.

The Apprentice After Manager Liang returned, I went to see him, on the third day of the lunar year. I had no idea that he would treat me with such good grace. I might have basked in the reflected glory of Mr Zang, “the Sage”. He administered Second Grandfather’s funeral. After asking me about the situation in Zhaozhuang, he said that I had no future in the warehouse and should find a better way to make a living. He was on good terms with Kang Ze, so how about sending me to Kang Ze for training? When I heard that I might be trained as a special agent for the government, I was shocked. I told him that I vomited blood every spring and would not be able to stand that kind of training. In that case, I could go to school and study abroad after graduating and he would pay for everything, I wouldn’t need to worry. Five or ten years earlier, I would have jumped at such an offer. But now that the country is in turmoil and war was raging, where was the university? How could I simply continue my studies? ok, let’s be practical, then, and learn something that would allow me to make a living. He said that the Japanese had a yarn factory in Qiaokou which had now been taken over by the Ministry of Military Affairs, and the factory manager, Zhao, and the section chief, Wei, were both our people. That was “just what I wanted”, I jumped up and down with joy. I had dreamed of becoming a worker ever since joining the Trotskyists, and now that dream was about to come true! I urged him to write me a letter of introduction. He told me that life as an apprentice was arduous, and I should go to him for a monthly supplement of ten dollars for my apprenticeship. I took the letter of introduction and said goodbye to my old friend Zhai Binnai, who was unable to understand my joy. He thought that there was no way that anyone with a job in the warehouse would become an apprentice. To celebrate my apprenticeship, Yimin invited me for a special treat at the Dasan Restaurant. He had been trying to become an industrial worker ever since graduating from university, always unsuccessfully, although he’d been to

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

783

the lawless parts of Tianjin and liked to joke about it. Clearly Trotskyists traditionally tried to become workers. In those days, it was almost impossible for intellectuals to enter the factories – much more so than to enter a university! The Taian Yarn Factory in Qiaokou was located near the Han River. The cotton was transported down the river to the factory and the yarn came out the other end and continued on downstream. The raw material was pumped from the barges into the factory boiler and the drying pool. There was a generator that supplied the factory’s electricity. In the factory, Section Chief Wei said I could do my apprenticeship in either machinery or electricity. I chose electricity. He then asked the head of the works department to send someone to take me to the electricity section and put me up in the staff quarters. The electricity section was the smallest department in the factory. It had one boss, eight masters (four on duty in the workshop), one handyman, and me, an apprentice, eleven people in all. The factory was now under the control of the Ministry of Military Affairs. The engineering section chief and his subordinates were all from the northeast. The general affairs director was a Shandong man. As a result, Liu, formerly a technician in the operations department, was immediately hostile to me.29 He handed me over to the boss, Wu Chuqing. By that time, in the spring of 1938, I was 27 years old, one year older than my master, Xiong Kuichou. Being of such an age and still an apprentice, I was the butt of their jokes, but I was easy-going and soon became one of them. It was the job of the electricity section to replace burnt out motors in the workshop, by removing the coils and fitting new ones, sometimes all of them, sometimes just a couple. I worked as a handyman under Kuichou and learned the trade from him. I became interested in electricity and searched all the Wuhan bookshops for books on engine manufacture and repair, but I only found three or four, none of which touched on practicalities or addressed the sort of questions I needed answering. In terms of craftsmanship, I found it hard to keep up with Kuichou, who came from a technical background, and I was anyway a slow learner. There were no Sundays off in the yarn factory, but on the first day of the month, there was a twelve-hour break to allow the day and night shifts to switch over. The electricity section had to work extra hours during the break to remove dust from the engines. As for the usual twelve-hour shifts, I tried to talk about it during working hours or breaks, but it was difficult to inculcate the masters with any political consciousness. The same was even more true, needless to say, of the leader, who was the highest paid and politically the least aware. He

29

Sun was a Shandongese.

784

sun, trans. benton

should have had a better-organised mind. Instead, he allowed himself to be crushed from the top, and showed not the slightest hint of resistance. Kuichou earned two yuan less than him, while the other two members of the workshop received 24 yuan. These wages were higher than the average mechanic’s, so they tended to gamble and throw their weight around. Old Zhang, a handyman, was paid only seventeen yuan a month and had to support a wife and four children. He was so down-beaten that he used to collect scraps of firewood and yarn to take home with him. I, on the other hand, as an apprentice earning 12 yuan a month, was able to eat together with the masters, which cost 7 yuan a month. That amazed the others. In the evenings, I first ate in the workshop and then went for a walk along the riverbank. Among the newly-built mat huts were some book and newspaper stalls promoting anti-Japanese propaganda. Workers were welcome to leaf through them, listen to the lectures, and ask questions. Some of the ideas expressed were so obscure that few people bothered to respond. The Third Party, the statist faction, and the ccp all had stalls. The ccp stall had the most appeal and the biggest audience. The workshop was also full of workers talking about the war. The Trotskyists who went to Wuhan did not set up an actual branch. Yimin and Liu Renjing visited Chen Duxiu, and Liu Renjing proposed the slogan “defend Wuhan”. Chen Duxiu’s response: “Defend your big belly!” (implying that Liu Renjing was spouting nonsense). I was indignant at Chen Duxiu and therefore missed the opportunity to see this great revolutionary teacher. At first I was closest to Little Hu, who introduced me to Liu Renjing. Liu was looking for people to join him, and did his best to reel me in. Si Chaosheng, who had set up his own newspaper, The Road to Victory, pointed out to me that Liu Renjing had been in the Kuomintang’s reformatory and I should beware of him. So I often used to meet up with Old Si. He was beaten up by some Communists (old classmates from Yanjing University) while selling The Road to Victory on the anniversary of 7 July, and his brave fighting spirit was evident. Shortly afterwards, while he was talking with Little Hu, the two of them got into an argument and Little Hu mentioned that the Shanghai organisation had expelled him. Si Chaosheng was furious. I tried to persuade him to drop everything and go to Shanghai to sort out the problem. So The Road to Victory was interrupted, and he ended up leaving the movement. Wang Shuben came to Wuhan from Shanghai and became my mentor. Suddenly, Ma Hua arrived in Hankou, with Little Wang. The three of us, Wang Shuben, Yimin, and I, decided to keep Little Wang in Hankou to work with me in the factory and to send Ma Hua back to fight as a guerrilla. We all liked Little Wang, but we hated Ma Hua. However, there was no way of splitting them.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

785

Almost immediately, they left together for Qingzhou, “as master and servant”. They had only turned up to see what was going on in the rear (behind Chinese lines). They didn’t report on their guerrilla activities either. When I first arrived at the factory, I got to and came back from work in the dark, but now the days were longer and I could see the sun. I lived in the staff dormitory, a Japanese tatami room, which was better than the accommodation provided for ordinary workers, but I often used to get into trouble for turning up late to work. I was supposed to arrive in the section at 6.30 am, whereas the staff clocked on at 9 am, so there was no one to wake me up. I meant to buy an alarm clock but failed to find one. Alarm clocks seemed to have disappeared from the market and even from the second-hand stores. I thought of moving to the factory where there was a wake-up call, but it was filthy and overcrowded, worse than a dog’s kennel, and anyway short of bunks.

Joining the Army The call to defend Wuhan grew ever shriller, and the situation in Wuhan became more and more urgent. First the defence, then the retreat, then the fall. News came that the factory was about to move further inland to Sichuan, far behind the front. The workers were wondering what to do. Those with families and children were the most anxious. In the evenings, more and more people assembled in Little Lu’s house. Suddenly, the workers in the security section were ordered to demolish the machinery. The workers were on edge: where would they get severance pay if the machinery was smashed? At midday, someone in the dining hall called out: “Each section will elect a representative to attend a meeting”. Two thousand women working on the day and night shifts in the various sections, ranging from washing to weaving, sent ten delegates. There were fewer than four hundred male workers in the security, repair, and electricity sections. The repair section sent Little Gong and the electricity section asked me to attend, so we two apprentices represented two sections. The security section was represented by a female employee, Huang Yun, who became the general representative and went on to represent the twelve of us delegates in negotiations with the new factory manager (a northeasterner). We only had one meeting at Little Liu’s house, where the female delegates talked like machine guns, dadada, about the war and made no mention of what terms the factory might offer. Huang Yun said that she had met the factory director, who promised to give an answer as soon as possible. It seemed that the factory manager was her relative. None of the workers’ demands were particularly extravagant, given the

786

sun, trans. benton

war. All we wanted was two months’ severance pay. Whether we would decide to accompany the factory in the general wartime evacuation of industry and educational institutes to Sichuan was another matter. First, redundancy, and then we could talk about evacuation. Those who went with the factory would be registered separately. I met regularly with Wang Shuben after I became a delegate and he gave me valuable advice. We talked about Huang Yun, who was already more than forty years old. She had bound feet and seemed a bit fragile. She talked in an intellectual tone, and was obviously a Communist cadre. They were already in the habit of teaching workers to do no more than listen to their leaders, who did everything on their behalf. But the workers could not trust them and wanted to fight for their own interests by exercising their own independent power. The workers understood that “unity is strength”. The women workers took it upon themselves to prevent the men from dismantling the machines, and all the men stopped work. The women continued to work as usual. At noon on the third day, Huang Yun came to the canteen and announced that the factory manager had promised to pay two months’ severance pay and the matter was settled. The male security workers could dismantle the machines and we could expect severance pay. The workers were doubtful and remained quiet, unsure of what to do. At that moment, I jumped up onto a table and said to Huang Yun, “How do you know that the factory manager will give us severance pay?” Huang Yun said, “I can guarantee it!” I said, “Who are you to vouch for that? You are just a worker! If the factory cheats us and doesn’t pay us, then will you feed us? Who knows where you’ll be!” The workers rushed to agree with me. Huang Yun said angrily: “If you don’t believe me, I don’t care!” She then stormed out of the canteen. But none of the other workers left. Instead, they waited for me to speak. I said, “We have to receive severance pay before we can let the factory dismantle the machines. Huang Yun shouldn’t represent us. We should have a new election. The last election was unfair and was not proportionate to numbers”. A little while later, the factory posted a notice: “The whole factory is closed, the shift workers will leave the factory”. We were in the middle of a general meeting and declared that we would not leave the factory without severance pay. The day and night shifts went on as usual. A new election was held. A delegate was elected for each group of ten women, to maintain order in the group, with one higher delegate representing ten lower delegates. All the sections followed this procedure, so that we ended up with more than twenty delegates in all. They asked me to be the general representative. I explained that such a name was not ideal. Yes, I could negotiate with the factory authorities on behalf of the delegates, but there had to be at least four or five other delegates present,

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

787

or things might go wrong. In reality, I became the leader and Little Gong my loyal companion. He stayed by my side as we patrolled the factory throughout the night, warning the other delegates about using candles and the threat from bad guys. Two veteran workers who had participated in the 1925–1927 strikes came to tell us about the tactics that hooligans would possibly use to break the strike. They were apprehensive and less solid than the young people. The number of female delegates increased, while there were only three male delegates. In addition to Little Gong and me, the security section chose an old man to represent Huang Yun. Little Gong was like a child. He wore black overalls and his face was splashed with black and grey. He never teased the women workers. I also never approached the female workers and never said anything untoward. However, without my knowledge, a female delegate expressed amorous feelings in my regard and I was reprimanded by the others. Everybody knows that it is important to be cautious, to guard against rumours, and not to allow people to undermine us in this way. The workers were politically conscious and had ample experience of traditional forms of struggle. They knew the direction that the struggle should take, without any need for propaganda or explanations. Although it was a small-scale event, lasting just a couple of days and nights, the workers received a great deal of education from it. Section Chief Wei sent someone to ask me to answer a phone call from Chief Liang. I replied that I would answer once the meeting was over but in the meantime I was unavailable – so my relationship with the director was over. Two days later, in the morning, the factory posted a notice declaring two months’ severance pay. We had evidently won. The workers received their money and left the factory. Gong and I struck up a friendship and talked about the differences between Huang Yun and me and who the Trotskyists were. Unfortunately, we were unable to stay in touch, and after the fall of Wuhan I lost touch with Little Gong. The factory posted another notice concerning the evacuation of the factory. All the foremen were to go, together with the masters they recommended. As for the ordinary workers, there were many restrictions and wages were not raised, so the workers were reluctant to leave their hometowns. The head of the electricity section invited Han Fu to go with him, but Kuichou refused and decided instead to go with Little Shan to the Xi’an Dahua Yarn Factory to look for Big Shan, originally a master in an electrical workshop in Hankou. Although Big Shan had always been the boss, he defended his craftsmen and did not follow the factory’s orders to the letter. Having been an apprentice for nine months, I wanted to continue my apprenticeship, so I decided to follow my master. By this time, Wuhan’s Trotskyists had fallen into disarray. Yimin and

788

sun, trans. benton

Little Hu were long since gone. Wang Shuben was about to return to Shanghai and was very much in favour of my going to Xi’an, thinking that Li Ziyi would greet me there. We arrived in Xi’an, where Kuichou was living in the workers’ dormitory at the Dahua factory. It turned out that Li Ziyi had arranged for me to work and live in a primary school in the northwest corner of the city as a teacher. The headmaster, Li Hengfu, was an old Trotskyist from Beiping. There were quite a few old Trotskyists around Li Ziyi, more than a dozen. They assisted the famous Li Ziyi devotedly. Li Ziyi, now renamed Li Shenshi, which was indicative of his direction (shenshi means “cautious time”), was then head of the Xi’an branch of the Kuomintang Central News Agency, Hu Zongnan’s domain. Also living in this primary school was an exile, You Dashao, the young master of the Shandong Provincial Bank, who announced to me, on behalf of Li Shenshi, the precepts I was to observe. I asked Li Shenshi whether he had any other work to do. He said that he could introduce me at any time to the 35th Army, where Fu Zuoyi carried out his training courses, and that he could send me to Suiyuan by way of their office in Xi’an. Fu Zuoyi also greatly appreciated him. It seemed to me that the path he was offering me was narrower than Manager Liang’s, and that I would do better find my own way out. The Dahua yarn factory was outside the west gate. When I had a moment, I would go to see Kuichou and Big Shan, in the hope that they might be able to get me into the factory. It was not at all easy to do so. They had only managed to get Little Shan in, Kuichou was unemployed. Actually, too many people were trying to get into the factory. One day I went to Kuichou’s house. He had just come from the city and said, in an excited rush, that he had found me a job, so I should go and do it and await my chance. The bathhouse in Huaqing Springs in the city had asked him to find them an electrician to manage more than 60 lamps and a water pump, for 20 yuan a month, plus free bathing and laundry. The pay was low but the work was easy, so I was happy. He said, “I only know engines, I’ve never touched a lamp, I don’t know about wiring and I’ve never even changed a fuse, how dare I take on such a job?” In a flash, two months passed by. I was suddenly informed by the headmaster that I had to move. He claimed that I had not kept to my contract: I had overstepped the mark in my conversations with the students and I kept going to the workers’ quarter outside the west gate. The headmaster, Li Hengfu, took Li Shenshi to court. Elder Son You was the contract enforcer. I moved to Big Shan’s room in the workers’ building. His sister-in-law was very kind to me and looked after me. “Don’t worry, you have food to eat, what

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

789

do you have to fear?” I helped her with the children for a few days, and she liked me even more. The only thing was that the accommodation was cramped. Little Shan and his wife slept in the newly built attic. Kuichou and I slept on the floor, on a mattress. There was no room to stretch our legs, so I decided to leave. I saw an advertisement in the newspaper for a military nurse, and I took it. After shaving my head and changing into a new cotton uniform, I came to say goodbye to Kuichou and Big Shan. Big Shan’s wife was in tears as she watched me board the train and head off east, to what she imagined to be certain trouble. Now that I was about to become a soldier again, my mood was quite different from the first time. I didn’t want to be promoted, I didn’t want to get rich, I just wanted to make friends with young people who were ambitious and out to make a revolution.

Desertion When I joined the army, I became a military nurse in the medical service of the 47th Division of the Ninth Army. The divisional commander was Qiu Changhui and the army commander was Wei Lihuang. I had to listen to them dozens of times, day after day, so I still remember them. But I have only a vague memory of the head of the military medical service and the section chief. The Ninth Army headquarters was located in Luoyang, whither my train was headed. Soon after the train left, I met two good brothers. We were sitting together on a bench, shaven-headed with not a single hair left on our heads. One of my bench-companions was a seventeen-year-old boy from Hangzhou called Huang Zhengcheng. The other was Li Xingkui from Shenyang. Huang Zhengcheng looked like a young monk. According to him, he had been sent to a monastery as a child and had learnt some sutras from his grandmother. I had looked through a copy of the Heart Sutra left behind by the Japanese in the staff quarters of the Taian Yarn Factory. I recited it with him, and he was delighted. I called him by his nickname Ah Nan and he called me by my new soldier’s name, Liang Shan. Li Xingkui was twenty-one, with a wide forehead and big eyes. He had still been a primary school student at the start of the war, on September 18, 1937, but he soon became a soldier and now called himself an “old soldier”. He had no family. He was present at the siege of Taierzhuang, from which he escaped – he spent several days and nights walking in the rain and said that he was so exhausted that he had fallen asleep while standing. He was admired by those who heard him speak. He said it was boring to be a nurse, and that sooner or later he would have to “flick his feet” and take off. The three of us were about the same height. Ah Nan had a bit of a hunchback.

790

sun, trans. benton

We were escorted by the army medical officer, who was accompanied by two head nurses and two veteran nurses. There were thirty of us in all. We had all been tested. All of us were primary-school graduates. The escorting officer used civilised means rather than weapons to scare us. He told us what our future might be after training, and we listened and journeyed on happily. At noon, the train arrived at Mianchi, in Henan, where we got off. There was an order from the division that we new recruits were to leave for the Yellow River. We would arrive the same night and cross the river in the morning. We would start training in the Zhongtiao Mountains. I had the most luggage of the three. Apart from a quilt and a jumper, I also had two books on electrical engineering, an English-Chinese dictionary, and an English copy of Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles. Everyone showed an interest. I had wanted to discard the books, but Nan and Li Xingkui wouldn’t let me. They themselves had little luggage and could carry them for me, saying, “You can throw them away when you can no longer carry them”. When we arrived at the Yellow River, we washed ourselves in it. This section of the river was quite narrow. The mountains on the opposite bank were high and craggy and the water was calm. Our “twilight stay by the Yellow River” had a sense of poetry rather than of war. We were billeted in the homes of the common people. The cook cooked cabbage and boiled pork, and each of us had a large bowl of large white steamed buns to eat. Ah Nan tucked into it, while Li Xingkui and I were full of joy. The three of us ignored the rumours that were going round, according to which we had been cheated, we were not nurses but stretcher bearers, and that once we crossed the river and came under fire we ourselves would end up on a stretcher. The three of us ignored this talk. We thought we could fight the Japanese devils by whatever means, including as stretcher bearers. The next morning, new orders arrived: we were not to cross the river, and would drive back to Mianchi instead. The entire 47th Division was to spend three months in the rear for training, while the 56th Division would leave for the front. As we headed back, everyone was in a happy mood. The worries of yesterday had blown away. When we reached Mianchi, we drove into a dilapidated temple. We stood there in line, and were divided into squads and assigned to our beds. In the afternoon, in the classroom, Section Chief Ma summoned all the trainees and spoke to us for the first time. He spoke methodically, so that what he said was easy to understand and embrace. He introduced the topics that the training course would follow. He spoke about the “structure of the human body”, while other officers spoke about medicine and surgery.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

791

We recruits were divided into three teams of ten men each. I and my new companions were under squad leader Zhang Lixun, a staff sergeant, and deputy squad leader Lao Li, a corporal, both more than forty years old. The squad leaders of the second and third squads were effete urban types, students of Medical Officer Song, who had just been promoted to corporal. Our squad commander was not yet 30. He gave us two drills in the morning and two in the evening, as well as a lecture in the evening. We were all satisfied with this. He often sang to us, and struck everyone as a new-style officer. He sang the Ninth Army’s anthem, The March of the Volunteers, and The Great Sword will Cut Off the Heads of the Foreign Devils, which everyone liked. We were told to dig up a corpse as a “specimen”. The squad leaders chose the wrong grave. When they opened the coffin, the body had not yet fully decayed and the stench was overwhelming. He taught us some Latin spelling, which was of course the basis for the names of various medicines, but he kept mispronouncing them and we lost interest. Dr Song had been promoted from nurse to officer. He looked weak and self-conscious, and when talking he often lapsed into incoherence. He had a soft spot for his pretty underlings, and kept blushing. Dr Han was more coarse, and already a major. He spoke honestly, which I liked to hear. He said: “What kind of doctor do you need in the army? There are only two kinds of medicine: quinine and aspirin. Quinine is when you’re cold or feverish, aspirin is for coughs, colds, and asthma. “Real doctors don’t join the army. The director of a rear hospital, a major general, such a powerful man – surely he must be an important doctor? No, he’s a head nurse at the Qilu Hospital who went to Nanjing for a short period of training. The instructors, young as they were, had all come back from studying overseas and kept writing on the board in foreign languages as they spoke! All they said was, tell the patients to drink more water! Let’s give this instructor a nickname: – Dr ‘Drink more water.’” At a certain point, our small group of three grew to five. Ma Guoli and Hu Mian joined us. Hu Mian was from south of the Yangtze and had worked as a veterinary nurse. Ma was from Hebei, a fitter on the Changxindian section of the Pinghan Railway. The five of us ate and drank together. Pay for a private was 10 yuan and 80 cents, less 6 yuan for food and 20 cents for straw sandals, so the actual amount received was 4 yuan and 60 cents. It was enough to eat in the small restaurant. Vegetable dishes cost only five cents a bowl, shredded meat 10 cents, and other meat less than 20 cents. Old Ma’s older sister was still in the war zone training to be a teacher, so he had to send her his wages. One day, when Old Ma was not present, Li Xingkui suddenly said, “Old Ma must be a Muslim. Look at the slanted eyes and the whites of them, they’re

792

sun, trans. benton

so big they form a big triangle. I’ve never seen him eat pork. Whenever we eat pork, he goes off to buy tofu soup. Whenever he eats in a restaurant, he only eats vegetarian food!” As a result, everyone was convinced that he was a Muslim. The next time we met, Li Xingkui laughed and asked Old Ma if he was a Muslim. To our surprise, Old Ma was furious and scolded Li Xingkui. We did our best to calm him down. We said that we meant no harm and that there was no need to get angry. He then explained that Muslims could not be soldiers, if people knew he was a Muslim, he would have to leave. He was stuck in Xi’an and had no choice but to join the army, and he would leave as soon as he had the chance. Later I learned that he was a left-winger. Although he no longer believed in Islam, he was unwilling to turn his back on Muslim customs, so he ate vegetarian food but refused to eat pork. The divisional hospital was located in three caves on the edge of a cliff. The seriously wounded were transferred to Luoyang, while the lightly wounded were treated on the spot. We trained and nursed at the same time. I was assigned to collect the military blankets of the sick and wounded soldiers, together with my deputy squad leader, Old Li. Sick and wounded soldiers arriving from the other side of the river were each given a blanket, which was collected when they returned to their units or were transferred to a hospital. We all wore cotton-padded uniforms, but the newly arrived sick and wounded were still in unlined clothes, so one blanket was not enough to keep them warm and they came to us at night begging for an extra blanket. Old Li drove them away. The next morning, he and the squad leader went to check numbers. The straw mats had been burned to provide heat and all that was left was ash. The two of them beat the patients with sticks. The sick and wounded were treated no better than ants, here at the front line of the rear. However, the glorious soldiers in the rear, decorated with medals and honours for their exploits and now flaming with rage, settled accounts with the director and the nurses to make them behave more appropriately. In the blink of an eye, three months had passed. Our studies were over and we moved to Xiaoyi with the army medical service. It was like a holiday. After breakfast, once we had finished our routine work, we set out in twos and threes to visit the streets and alleys and all the places of interest, before returning to class just before dinner. This was the hometown of the great poet Du Fu, a flat piece of land interrupted by “small bridges, flowing water, and people’s dwellings”. You couldn’t usually see the houses, which were built below the ground by digging out a courtyard in the form of a quadrangle, as deep as a three-storey building, with doors and windows cut into the four walls to form dwellings. The cowsheds and donkey troughs were located under the eaves. Elm trees graced the

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

793

courtyards, and their tips peeped out above the ground, but no smoke was visible. This is what Laozi [Lao Tzu] meant when he said “We cut out doors and windows to make a house, but their usefulness is always in their empty space”. Wu Peifu30 built his arsenal here, leaving a legacy of factories above ground and a deep and extensive network of transport links underground. There were unemployed workers from the arsenal and their families. One morning, there was an emergency roll-call. We stood together in formation, ready to listen to a speech. Section Chief Ma accompanied the Director. The Chief of Service muttered under his breath, “Got the telegram, she died the day before yesterday!” He knelt down and kowtowed. We were at a loss for words, and the Section Chief pulled him to his feet. After we had dispersed, we learned that the Director’s mother had died in her hometown in Hebei, and the Director wanted to open a period of mourning in Xiaoyi. The old factory, the office building, and the auditorium were all still in use. Immediately they started making preparations for the ceremony. The soldiers were expected to donate two dollars each. I was outraged to hear this. Given our rations, 20 cents was no small amount, let alone two yuan. So many soldiers had died in the resistance – who offered condolences on their behalf? The only one who came out in my support was Li Xingkui, none of the rest had the guts. We each contributed 20 cents and boycotted the funeral feast. No one criticised us, but no one dared to speak to us during the mourning period. Shortly after the mourning period was over, Squad Leader Zhang Lixun said to me, “Liang Shan, it’s time for you to go!” At the time, there were the two of us in the room. Our beds were next to each other, and sometimes I used to pester him to tell me stories about his life. He was from Henan, a big man who was good to his brothers and never lost his temper. He had a hoarse voice, which he claimed was due to syphilis. I didn’t reply. I couldn’t tell whether he was being kind or unkind. In fact, Old Ma and I had been discussing deserting for quite a while. He had received information that Xi’an was recruiting workers to go to Sichuan. I also got a letter from Yimin in Leshan, telling me to go to Sichuan and return to factory work. Coincidentally, we met one of Old Ma’s friends in Xiaoyi who was prepared to help us desert. We took our civilian clothes to his house, together with various other things we wanted to keep, one batch at a time. The three of us went to check out the route and work out when to desert. I dared not inform Ah Nan and Xingkui. They would forgive me.

30

Wu Peifu (1874–1939) was a warlord between 1916 and 1927.

794

sun, trans. benton

The day before we were due to leave, a deserter was dragged before the class. This man was an opium addict and not well liked. He had been captured in the station waiting room, still in his uniform, by the squad leader and an old military nurse. The section commander gathered all the nurses together and, after a lecture, beat the deserter with a pole. They beat the hell out of him, but no one protested. In the morning, Old Ma asked me if I was still up for it. I said, “We’ve set the date, we can’t change it now, I’m ready for them to break my legs if they want”. At ten o’clock, we arrived at a ruined brick kiln on the outskirts and our friend brought our things. We took off our uniforms at the kiln and changed into civilian clothes. We were shivering in the cold. A coal train left the station and Old Ma stuck his hand out and climbed aboard. I was not as agile as him. I calculated that the coal train had not yet got up to speed, and would take time to do so as it left the station. However, it was a downhill track and the carriage was travelling so fast that when I reached out, I was almost sucked under its wheels, so I let go. Old Ma was stood in the carriage entrance with his arm ready for me to grasp it, so I made up my mind clamber up. As soon as the guard van arrived, I grabbed the handrail with both hands and jumped onto the step. Old Ma rushed through into the guard van and the two of us celebrated our success. He had a go at my poor climbing skills, but I pointed out that it was my first time, so how could I compare with him, an old railroad man? While we were still arguing, the train suddenly slowed down, to walking pace, and we noticed that there was a big uphill climb ahead of us. If only I’d known, I would have walked a bit further before jumping! That was 29 March 1939.

5 May Old Ma was familiar with railway regulations, so he decided the journey. Once the coal train arrived in Luoyang, we slipped off to buy a ticket for the Blue Steel express. You needed a ticket for this train, otherwise you could be shot. I didn’t have enough money for a ticket all the way to Xi’an, so I bought one only as far as Xin’an. However, the ticket was collected before Xin’an, so we went to Mianchi for nothing. Old Ma got off and bought tickets to Guanyintang. After Mianchi, I relaxed a bit. We stopped there for a long time, and we were afraid of bumping into someone who might know us. It was nearly dusk, and we guessed that by now the word was getting about that we were already on our little trip. Old Ma said, “Liang Shan is so bold that he’s not even afraid of a beating!” But it’s true that my beating would definitely have been a lot worse than his.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

795

There were two sections ahead, Mindi and Tongguan, for which we were supposed to buy tickets. I said, “If we carry on like this, we won’t reach Xi’an and we’ll run out of money”. Old Ma was penniless and we’d agreed that I would pay for the journey. After Guanyintang, it became very dark and suddenly the lights went out all over the train. The blinds were pulled down and no smoking or talking was allowed. The Japanese devils on the other side of the river had been shelling the trains all night and trains were therefore no longer stopping – this was convenient for us, we were so happy that we could no longer sleep. It was not until we reached Huayin that the lights came back. We dismounted from the express train and climbed aboard a salt train, without buying a ticket – and without further worry. We arrived in Xi’an at noon. I still had a bit of money left, and the two of us went to the Huaqing Springs and took a bath, had a meal in one of Xi’an’s halal restaurants, and then split up to visit friends. By the time we met up again in the afternoon, Old Ma had applied to join the Twenty-First Arsenal and was about to take the factory train to Sichuan. I wanted to be a craftsman, not an apprentice, so I had no choice but to trek off to Sichuan. After taking leave of Old Ma, I went to Dahua to spend the night with Big Shan and his wife and Kuichou. They were happy to see me return safely, and they were even happier when I told them that I was going to join a factory in Sichuan and would no longer be a soldier. On the third day, I took Yimin’s letter and went to the airport to find Little Xu, who was working as an interpreter, and borrowed five yuan from him for my onward journey. He was very happy to see me return unscathed and to help me with five yuan, especially when he heard me say I was prepared to walk to Sichuan if necessary. So I packed my luggage, put my electrical engineering books, dictionary, torch, long cotton gown, and unlined jacket into a bamboo basket and hoisted the basket onto my back. I said goodbye to Kuichou and Big Shan and his wife, climbed aboard the night train on the western section of the Longhai Railway, and reached Baoji at dawn. From there I set foot in the Qinling Mountains. The majestic peaks, the delightful birdsong, and the joys of youth filled my heart, and before I knew it I was walking through the town of Yimen. I stopped at a table in a small roadside restaurant to note down what I had seen. I bought a pair of straw sandals to try on. While soldiering for six months, I had been saving for straw sandals month by month, and today was the first time I got to try some on. Straw sandals like in The Water Margin! The first day I didn’t dare do much walking and stayed instead in the restaurant. After three months of training

796

sun, trans. benton

to be a nurse, I was perfectly aware of how best to protect your feet. Hot water and regular washing was essential. As soon as it was light, I continued on my way, staying in monasteries and pavilions. As I wandered on, I took the old roads, such as Miaotaizi, Liuba, Baocheng, Da’an, and the Sichuan-Shaanxi Highway, which I had longed for ever since reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms31 as a child, but which were by then already being used by motor cars. The most memorable part of the journey was when a woman came to repair the road, trouserless and covering her lower body with a stone, sitting at the roadside shattering rocks for the paving. At dusk, I came across a camel caravan resting by the roadside, bringing Russian petrol through Xinjiang to Sichuan. Two large barrels were strapped to each animal. It took eight days to reach Da’an. My feet were tired, so I rested there for two days. When I got back on the road, my feet no longer hurt and instead felt even stronger than before. On arriving in Guangyuan and crossing into Sichuan, I felt that the Sichuan region was richer and that food and accommodation were cheap. I was limited to 50 cents a day, which was no problem in Sichuan. Their teahouses had hostels at the back, and for 10 cents you could get a place in a room, together with a mosquito net (a communal mattress was even cheaper) and a large wooden basin to wash your feet. For 10 cents, you got a big bowl of white rice topped with vegetables and meat. You could drink as much rice water as you liked, for free. Tea, was only a copper. A couple of days later, I saw a sign on the road indicating how far it was to the top of the pass. Written on the stone in chalk were the words: “Come on, xxx”. “We’re almost there – go for it!”, “Fight on!” “xx spring, waiting for you up ahead!”32 And there was I walking the same route! At the overnight stop, someone asked me why it had taken me two months to reach that point. It turned out that migrating high schools evacuated from Shandong had passed through here on their way to Mianyang from Hubei, and this person thought I was a straggler. The Jianmen Pass, the Jiange Road – it was all amazing, and I whooped as I strode along the way. The cypress trees planted at the Zhang Fei Temple33 made me think of Zhang Fei on the opera stage, with each tree a mighty

31 32 33

The Water Margin and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms are two early novels written in vernacular Chinese during the early Ming Dynasty. At the start of the Sino-Japanese War, individual refugees and whole schools and factories moved inland to Sichuan, as part of a massive evacuation. The Zhang Fei Temple is historic site on the south bank of Yangtze River, with stunning scenery. The temple is the subject of many legends.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

797

Zhang Fei. The seven-bend mountains and the nine-bend creek, topped by the Emperor Wenchang, circled by rivers running off in the direction of the Jinchan basin. I was still 30 li from Luojiang. It was dark and I needed a hotel, but I was out of money. I picked a clean inn, washed my feet, ate, took out my torch, and went to the innkeeper’s room, where I told him I was short of money and asked him to take the torch in lieu of payment. He said that I could have the meal for free, it was common for people to leave without paying. I said, “After tonight, I’ll have to pay for the meal on the road tomorrow morning”. He immediately gave me 20 cents and I thanked him. I was really ashamed but immensely grateful to my Sichuan brothers for their righteousness, there are none more righteous than the men of Shandong and Hebei. When I arrived at Luojiang at noon, I met Zigui and told him what had happened the previous night. Zigui immediately told a student to cycle across and return the money. I was so relieved. After a day of lingering in Zigui’s company, I went off by myself again. Although we had little time together, I was able to tell him a lot about my experiences during the period of my separation from the organisation. At the same time, he told me about the hardships he had suffered and his journey to Sichuan. He had faith in his students and had carefully built up the organisation among them. We both shared the same view: students must go into factories, they could not become reliable unless they were first tempered. As soon as I got into a factory, he would introduce students to it. I stayed overnight in Chengdu and I can’t remember what I did there. What I do remember is the night-time street food market, which was cheap and appetising. I didn’t know then that Chengdu’s cuisine was famous all round the world. I boarded a junk and sailed from Chengdu up the Min River, passing through Meishan and Qingshen and on to Leshan. Yimin had gone to Sichuan from Wuhan, whence to Leshan as an accountant. As soon as I arrived, he put aside his work and accompanied me day after day, eating, drinking, and relaxing together. We both have similar personalities. We are both quite emotional. We have the same weaknesses, we both speak indistinctly. The soil and water of eastern Shandong is not comparable to that of Zigui’s northern Shandong. Zigui is known for his oratory, while Yimin and I have difficulty in expressing our opinions. Yimin’s family was rich and he was always allowed to spend what he needed, and he was famous for his generosity. At the end of a five-day stay, he put me on a wooden junk, gave me some additional clothing, and pressed money on me. He also told me to tell him if I ran short – he could send me more any time I needed. He arranged a place for

798

sun, trans. benton

me to stay in Chongqing and someone to find me a job and guarantor. When I think of it, he was truly a good brother in the Song Gongming style.34 It was a seven-day voyage from Leshan to Chongqing on a junk, a mediumsized vessel carrying six or seven guests, plying up and down the river, not in all cases the entire way to Chongqing. The first time I sailed along this river, I was fascinated by the boatmen’s horns, mesmerising and ecstatic, which at critical moments achieved a rhythm faster than would ever have seemed possible. Their steady call resonated along the river bank, so that all who heard it were propelled to action. I revelled every day in the wordless poetry spoken by these river workers. One day at noon, the boat suddenly span round twice. I found it fascinating to observe, and went round to the back of the junk to see what tricks the skipper was up to. I immediately realised that we had crossed a dangerous shoal, that we were lucky to be alive, and that the skipper had deliberately let go of the tiller. Thanks to him, we managed to get back on course. If we’d spun round a couple more times, the junk would have been smashed to pieces. This was the famous Green Dragon Shoal. That evening, the junk docked at a pier and we went to a hostel. We strolled around the streets, ate in a restaurant, drank tea in a teahouse, and listened to the chatter of the tea lovers. I didn’t understand much Sichuanese. Two days before we were due to arrive in Chongqing, we heard a rumble downstream. People thought it was an enemy plane dropping bombs, and no one knew where the bombs might have fallen. When the ship arrived in Chongqing on 5 May, the part of the city where we stepped ashore was a bomb site. Nine out of ten of the old buildings in that part of Chongqing had collapsed. The bombings of 3 May and 4 May have gone down in history. The lessons of those two days led to the opening of air raid shelters all over Sichuan.

The Electrical Training Class I found the address to which I had been directed. It was not far from Chaotian Gate, on a street full of rubble. The building where the owner lived had not collapsed, but a thick layer of dust covered the entire area. The owner was one of Yimin’s fellow villagers, a single man. He was trying to kill a chicken in 34

Song Jiang (Song Gongming) was a historical figure who led an armed rebellion against the Song Dynasty in the early twelfth century. He was turned into a fictional character, renowned for his chivalry, in the classical Chinese novel The Water Margin.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

799

his kitchen but he couldn’t manage it, so I took over. If I was to be a worker, I would have to be able to turn my hand to anything. So I boldly got to work. I had been killing chickens all my life and done it many times, it wasn’t a big deal. The restaurant had run out of food, so the two of us had the chicken for supper. The next day, a letter of introduction from the owner in my pocket, I headed straight for Ciqikou and found my way to the cloth factory run by the Ministry of Military Affairs, where I met with Mr Wang, an official. After reading the letter, he asked me where my luggage was. “I didn’t bring it”. “Get your luggage and start work tomorrow”. I returned to the rubble heap and stayed overnight again. I couldn’t help thinking of Qin Ming in The Water Margin, who walked at night through the rubble. I’d done the same thing twice. After Mr Wang had guided me to the dormitory and I had put my luggage down, he took me to the electrical room to see the foreman. The foreman was in his fifties. He had a monk’s shaven head, gourd-shaped. His left eye turned upwards and the right-hand corner of his mouth drooped. He was wearing oldstyle cloth pants. He brimmed with resentment, nodding and smiling in front of Mr Wang but cursing him as soon as he had left. He had a Tianjin accent (everyone who speaks Tianjin dialect despises Shandong people). Since Mr Wang was his superior, he could only curse him behind his back and never to his face, so he took out his anger on me, an electrician who had got his job by pulling strings. He said all sorts of nasty things to me. After just three days, I was ready to leave, and I would have done so but for the arrival of Liu Zhenji on the morning of the fourth day. In the electrical room, under the despotic rule Old Tianjin, was Old Su, a native of Hunan, who could write and do arithmetic. Old Tianjin could do neither, so he used Old Su as his secretary. When he had to submit reports or lists of the materials he needed, or to write letters to his family, Old Su did so on his behalf; Old Su also had to listen to Old Tianjin scolding people behind their backs and undermining them to their faces. Another man, Old Dong, from Hubei, with thin yellow skin, had a small family. He always arrived late at work, rushed through what he had to do, and finished early, so he could go home. I thought that was all, but there was a fourth person who turned up on the fourth day, Old Liu, who had come back from leave. He was around 25 years old, above average build, broad shoulders, big hands, a big face, big eyes, and a straight chest, and he spoke most emphatically. He sat in the only chair in front of a small business desk, with the foreman and Old Su standing on either side of him wearing smiles. Old Liu knew I was a fresh face and invited me to sit down for a chat. The others went off to work, and the more we talked, the better we got on. Old

800

sun, trans. benton

Tianjin came in a couple of times, and Old Liu gave him a blank stare on each occasion. When Old Tianjin left, Old Liu said, “Ignore him, the more you fear him, the worse he gets”. After that, Zhenji and I made friends. He guided me through my work, and the foreman no longer dared try to harm me. We talked about electricity, current affairs, and revolution. I had pamphlets with me, such as Before the New World War and Son, Friend, and Soldier. He read them and became a Trotskyist. He was a native of Huangpi and had been apprenticed since childhood. Perhaps he had attended primary school, I can’t remember. After a month or so, Zhenji joined the Chongqing Electricity Company, where he was treated well, the work was light, and he had a trainee and an apprentice, so he didn’t really have to get his hands dirty. The company was located in Zengjiayan in Chongqing, as was the dormitory. As soon as Zhenji left, Old Tianjin was as if a thorn had been removed from his side. There was no one left to contradict him. He could be as stubborn as he liked. But Old Su and Old Dong and I had already grown close, so Old Tianjin didn’t dare tread too heavily on my toes. However, I was far from happy with the factory. It employed only two hundred workers. So far, not all the machinery had been evacuated from the east, so it was often impossible to start work on new projects. The workers who had migrated west along with the factory were mostly manager types and were paid to do nothing. In such an environment, little could be achieved. In July and August, the Electrical Department of Jinling University started an electrical training course and advertised for students. I applied as soon as I saw the advertisement, and was accepted. Jinling University used Zengjiayan for the teaching, and across the street was the electrical power company, so Zhenji and I met up again. There was a Professor Yan and a lecturer under the head of the Electrical Department at the university, a man called Yang. They had gained experience in their work during the First World War and had laid early plans to make money from the war. The electrical training course, which took on junior middleschool graduates and their equivalent, offered free board and tuition – no fees, no accommodation costs, meals subsidised by the school, and an extra set of work clothes. The class was taught in the classroom up to mid-day, while the second half of the day was spent on practical work in the workshop. It took one year to graduate. For a student like me, it felt right. I learned mechanical drawing, wiring installation, and general electromechanical knowledge. After one year, I would really be an electrician, ready to take on any job, for example at the Huaqing Springs. There were three groups in the factory: the radio and dry cell groups, with only three students, under Lecturer Ji; and the transformer group, with more

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

801

than 30 students, under Professor Yan. After the May bombings, the central government had been dispersed to Qingmuguan in the Gele Mountains, 40 to 50 li from Chongqing, where electricity was in short supply and the lights were often dim. Professor Yan designed a small variable voltage device, by means of which just a few kilowatts of power could fire up a dozen lights. We the workers cut the silicon iron, wound the coils, assembled them, and soldered the heads. It was not perfect, but it was safe and durable. With demand outstripping supply, the price rose and we even received a little pocket money. There were many Sichuanese among the students, all from prosperous families. They had refused to study and could not go on to higher education, but now they feared being press-ganged into the war and had therefore taken refuge in this kind of school, where the teaching was easy to follow, the work was fun, and the classroom was full of joyful sounds. Jinling University had its own air-raid shelters down by the Jialing River. The entrance was around ten feet up the cliff. It had a domed interior fitted with rows of wooden benches and battery-powered electric lights, which were looked after by the students of the electrical training class. Each person was responsible for bringing some portable instruments into the shelter. Whenever the weather was clear, there was bound to be an air-raid warning. In such cases, we spent less time in the classroom and more in the shelter. Twice, a twothousand-pound bomb landed near the cave in the river, and the river was suddenly full of dead fish. Chiang Kai-shek’s own air-raid shelter was next to the gate to Jinling University, so even he got the benefit of a few heavy bombs. Suddenly word got out that there were red cloths and reflectors in the dormitories of the electrical training classes, to guide enemy planes towards their targets. Our dormitory was on the top (fifth) floor and had a movable skylight onto the roof. The Sichuanese students suspected that a student from Hubei was responsible for the mirrors. This student was a good singer and painter. He was always cheerful and good-humoured, but he lacked friends among his classmates. One day a pretty girl at the school gate asked me to find this man for her; he was not at school and later he said the girl was his sister. I suspected that he was lying, and became wary of him. Two months after the start of the school year, two of Zigui’s students arrived, and I asked Ma Guoli to introduce them to the Twenty-First Arsenal as apprentices. One was called Meng Xianwu, the other was the leader of the students, the best-read and most articulate. He worked as an apprentice for three days and then decided to transfer back to the school. From then on, he stopped talking about revolution. Later, Zigui used him as an example to strengthen the will of the others. A third visitor was Yang Shouyuan, a small man little bigger than a child, how could he be a senior-middle school student? Yimin came to

802

sun, trans. benton

Chongqing, where he had a job as an accountant with a magazine. He introduced me to the director of the company and I asked him to take on Yang Shouyuan to learn typography. I thought if he managed to learn the craft, he could be of use to us. He persevered. Meng Xianwu was a good apprentice and his master praised him. He learned to beat iron, but when he was stoking up the fire, he was unable to tell the colours apart and a doctor diagnosed him as colour blind, so he had to change jobs. The two of them and I formed a cell that met every fortnight to exchange ideas and discuss work, the general situation, and reading. Although Shouyuan looked like a child, he was well educated in theoretical matters. I knew from casual conversation that both of them admired Zigui, who had been a great influence on the students at the school. His talks and speeches were always stirring, and his analysis of current affairs was almost prophetic. Special agents staged disturbances at the meetings but were subdued by the masses, who protected him. He was careful not to let the agents get hold of him. The organisation was established by the students themselves, while he remained their mentor. Shao Lu and I got in touch when he was hastily admitted to the Air Defence School byway of Shanghai. He set off for Hengyang, where he was trained and sent to work as a driver in the photo survey team. He found a girl from the north at the Hengyang railway station, only sixteen years old, and married her. Soon afterwards, Shao Lu’s wife wrote to say that Shao Lu had been detained by the team, suspected of stealing and selling equipment. His wife was distraught and begged me to help. I was about to write back when a policeman in uniform arrived and said that he and Shao Lu were close relatives and that Shao Lu’s mother-in-law was his own sister-in-law, and that their family ran a bathhouse in Nanjing. I told him not to worry and that we would take care of them. He thought I was very loyal and that I must be very resourceful, so he regained his peace of mind. His name was Wang Jintang. He was a tall, good-looking fellow, a military policeman for most of his life, and had only just become a security squad leader in a government office. I had never had a friend in his line of work, so I wanted to get to know him. Soon afterwards, Shao Lu was released. Wang Jintang came to thank me, but I couldn’t find the time to return his visit. Spring came and 1940 had begun. I became more active. One evening, I went to see Ma Guoli at the arsenal. He said I had come at exactly the right time. At the beginning of the following month, he was going to work in a commercial factory at Hualongqiao, where there were dormitories and good wages. He gave me his new address. It was nearly ten o’clock when I got back to the river and there were two boats awaiting passengers. The boatman didn’t say a word

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

803

and started to move off into the river. I sensed tension, and asked what had happened. A passenger said that he had arrived a little early and wanted to pay for an extra ticket to cross immediately, but the boatman had refused unless he bought three extra tickets, so the boat left only after my arrival. We exchanged names and talked about our jobs. The man was Zheng Bing, a native of Baoding, who worked as a waterway engineer at the Fiftieth Arsenal. He said that their director, Zhang Junzhao, was a graduate of Jinling University, that he would introduce me to him, and that I could decide myself whether to make use of the connection. I thanked him and said I would visit him after graduating. Yimin left the reactionary newspaper for which he had been working to become head accountant at the Dachuan Needle Factory and asked me to go to the factory for a day out. Tao Shaowu also came to see him on the same day, and asked me to visit him in his school, Central University at Shapingba in Chongqing, a cultural district that I had visited only once. A letter arrived from Shanghai asking me to visit Zhang Weiliang at the newly opened Southern Bookstore in Jiaoyangkou. He had just arrived in Chongqing and brought with him new books and pamphlets and new Trotskyist publications such as Poxiao and Xiliu. He also brought with him a touch of Shanghai organisational ability. He worked for Shi Fuliang35 and headed the Southern Bookstore. The Southern Bookshop was attached to the Southern Printing House, which recruited apprentices, for whom a night school had been arranged. The Communist Shi Fuliang lectured on general economics at this night school, analysing in simple terms how the apprentices were ‘“exploited”. Zigui’s student Liu Chao got into this apprenticeship class. He was a bright boy and entered a good trade. Weiliang, a small, near-sighted man, was pretty as a powdered jade. He was around twenty-four, and had brought his wife and children with him. He had a calm, steady manner. When we met, I felt at peace and free from any worries. Listening to his whispered words, I was able to forget my own situation. Such is one’s gain, it will never die. On the afternoon of the day of Trotsky’s murder, Zhenji came to the university workshop to tell me the news. I was working at a vice with a file in my hand, and I froze. I looked at him for a moment. His big eyes seemed about

35

Shi Fuliang, i.e., Shi Cuntong (1899–1970), was a founding members of the ccp but left it in 1927. He was also a scholar and translator. In 1945, he became vice-president of the China National Democratic Construction and joined the ccp-led Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in 1949. Zheng Chaolin tells his story in “Love and Politics”, Benton and Sexton (eds) 2022.

804

sun, trans. benton

to pop out. I let go of the file and the two of us walked down to the riverfront with our arms hooked into one another. We took a long walk on the ropeway and talked endlessly. I told him about Zhang Mengjiu from Ji’nan Normal in Shandong, one of our leaders, who had decided after Chen Duxiu’s arrest that the Trotskyists were finished and given up on the revolution; he had erected a tablet [to Chen] and made his revolution by it, unlike us. We felt that the road Trotsky pointed out was the only road, and that if we were masons paving that road, we would do better to be stones on the road rather than stumbling blocks. Fame and fortune were alien to us. We were simply doing our bit for the future of humanity, in Trotsky’s spirit. Students from Sichuan were going home in dribs and drabs, and some new students were moving into the dormitories. At the end of August, I left Jinda to go to the Fiftieth Arsenal. I enrolled on Jinling University’s electrical training course under the name Liang Yi, but I don’t remember the reason for that name. In the class, the teachers and classmates knew me by it. My colleagues in the arsenal also shouted it out. My stay there lasted only two years.

The Fiftieth Arsenal The Fiftieth Arsenal was in Guojiatuo, a little over an hour’s boat ride downriver from Chaotianmen, just beyond the Tongluo Gorge. The Tongluo Gorge, with its two facing mountains, created a fast and narrow flow and a lively stream on leaving the gorge. The junks plying the river used Guojiatuo as a stopping place, and junks from Daxingchang in the opposite direction also came and went. It was a crossroads. On entering the arsenal, to the left is the guest house and the prototype section, both of which are within the gorge. To the right is the guard house, the factory gate, and – beyond the gate – the main avenue. Scattered across this area were more than a dozen workshops, canteens, and workers’ dormitories, circling back towards the quay. On the quay, newly built bamboo huts, including a restaurant, a teahouse, and a general store, flourished. The electrical section was tucked away in a small col at the head of the gorge. You had to walk more than one hundred yards to reach the arsenal gates. Zheng Bing and Zhang Junzhao were sat behind a desk. Director Zhang, adopting the tone of Number One Alumnus, told me that he controlled everything from power generation to external engineering and automatic telephone exchanges, and that I should visit the various departments to complete my studies. He shouted, “Li, the superintendent”, and a pockmarked man emerged from an

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

805

inner room. Zhang handed me over to Li. Li took me into the room, which turned out to be spacious. Inside were eight or nine electricians waiting to be assigned work, as well as equipment and tools. Pockmarked Li was the brains. He handed me a set of tools and a toolbox. I was starting a new life in a new setting. Was I at least a craftsman? The most important thing was to get acquainted with my colleagues. The dormitories were large, with high, wide windows. Under each window was a small desk and two beds, one to the left, the other to the right. Each bed was surrounded by four pillars surmounted by wooden planks, for hanging up mosquito nets and storing clothes boxes. There was an open space for shoes and socks under the beds. Each room housed between 30 and 40 people. The baths and toilets were neat and tidy. Although the roof was thatched, the design was modern and fresh air and hygiene were a feature. Every Sunday I went to Chongqing to meet with Zhenji and his people. In the spring of 1941, Xu Wensheng arrived. Xu was an old rural teacher from Qingzhou, and he knew Binzhi and Zigui. The letter he wrote to me carried the address of a temple in Baishiyi, which I found strange. It turned out that he was a platoon leader, stationed there. He had long since graduated from military school. We spent half a day together in the mountains. When he found out what was going on in Chongqing, he had resolved to desert. His company commander had been at the same school as him, so deserting for him was no more than a matter of taking leave from his classmate and staying on in Chongqing, without qualms or apprehension. Two weeks later, he was already a clerk in the sales department of the Chongqing Electricity Company, with his office and dormitory at the entrance to the school. With Wensheng and Zhenji, we were now three, and had grown commensurately in strength. It occurred to us that getting out a publication should be our priority. Zhenji rented a stone house by the river at the entrance to the school and bought a mimeograph and paper. Wensheng had a nice hand. Thus Workers’ Voice was born. None of us had ever written an article before, so we had our work cut out. However, we could all tell whether something was good or bad, and we refused to publish anything that was not up to scratch. My first article, “Why Don’t Arsenals Produce Guns?” was signed Liang Shan and appeared in the first issue. It described the inefficiency of the Fiftieth Arsenal and the indifference of the factory management to workers’ food. I remember that when I first joined the factory, the food had been so good that I was amazed. A table of eight was served with four plates of salted eggs, fried eggs, peanut rice, and squash in the morning, and as much congee and steamed buns as you could stomach. Midday and evening meals were even bet-

806

sun, trans. benton

ter, cooked by Sichuan chefs. It felt like eating in a restaurant every day of the year. Two months later, however, the food suddenly turned bad, so bad that the only thing left in the morning congee was the squash, and there were no steamed buns at all. At midday and in the evening, the food was cabbage and stinky tofu, which was hard to swallow and left you unsated. At that moment, the guest house was inaugurated. Jiang Piao, the factory director, summoned the staff to listen to his speech, in which he boasted about the beauty of the guest house, which was located at the mouth of the exit from Tongluo Gorge. It faced the river on one side and the factory gate on the other. It dominated the entire expanse. But he failed to say when an arsenal full of German equipment, set up with the goal of making cannons, would start providing actual cannons. The publication was irregular. I can’t remember how many issues came out. Weiliang contributed money but not effort, and Zigui did a lot of shouting but without much putting of pen to paper. Shouyuan and Little Liu wrote now and then. Zhenji’s short articles were a real leap forward by him. He had been educated by Struggle and the pamphlets we had put out. He was also able to pull in articles by others, and his trainee Liu Youshou had long since joined the group and helped develop it. The national currency was in a state, the national economy was heading for collapse, army rice was mixed with gravel, the students never got enough to eat, there was no meat and no oil to cook it with. More and more students came to us from Chongqing. They didn’t consult with Zigui, they simply ran off to the south by themselves. Not long afterwards, a top-notch student, Old Fan, came to Luojiang. Old Fan was from Changqing. He had a big face and big eyes. He was a good student, a good speaker, and a fighter. We put him in charge of liaising with the students sent down by Zigui. He didn’t enter the factory for the time being. Little Yang, who knew how to type, was transferred to the Twenty-first Arsenal together with Old Meng, and some students were allotted to them. The Third Arsenal in Dadukou (steel making) also recruited apprentices, and about ten students were admitted. Cao Qinghua took a test to become a bus conductor. Zhao Shengwen came to work in a minor post at the Fiftieth Arsenal. As soon as they got their jobs, they took one or two people with them to sit around doing nothing. At this point, I proposed that we suspend the distribution of our printed material. The students were new to the factory and not used to the life of a worker. They found it hard to cope with the factory environment. If they spoke out of turn, they could deny it, but if it was in black on white and fell into the hands of the political police, they would definitely be in trouble. My proposal was opposed by most people, who accused me of being a liquidationist. While we were arguing, Wang Shuben arrived in Chongqing.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

807

Wang Shuben was a professional revolutionary, and soon after Si, Hu, Wang, and Liu had expelled Chen Duxiu, they too were sent off to the army prison. Before the fall of Nanjing, they were released and returned to Shanghai. Wang Shuben was eking out a bare living from the tiny allowance provided for him by the organisation. He was a promiscuous man who liked flirting with women, but to do that he needed more money, which he sought to borrow from others. Little Wang fell in love with almost every woman he met. However, it was hard for him to make conquests simply by retelling his stories about being a “revolutionary hero”. So he went to Wuhan to see an old friend and swell his allowance somewhat. After he returned to Shanghai, the allowance stopped. However, unlike the revolutionaries in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangdong, there was always somewhere to which he could turn. During his three years in Shanghai, he lived a life of unbearable hardship. The organisation, funded by donations, was in the hands of Peng [Shuzhi] and Liu [Jialiang]. Little Wang came up with a solution: He said secret agents were after him, he was unable to shake them off, and the organisation should raise the money for him or buy him a boat ticket to Hong Kong. Peng and Liu were alarmed, so the organisation bought him the ticket and from Hong Kong he went on to Guangxi and from there to Chongqing. Before he arrived at our stone house, I had received a letter from Shanghai saying that Little Wang was already a traitor and that we should cut relations with him. Han Jun also wrote from Hong Kong about the ugly performance that Wang had staged in Shanghai. Before I could discuss the matter with Zhenji and Wensheng, he had already got our address from Weiliang and was looking for me. He was wearing a yellow military uniform and lying on his bed in a depressed state, unwilling to talk. He only said that he had come to Chongqing to seek out first Ziyi and then Weiliang. He didn’t say a word about Shanghai. Weiliang was so wrapped up in his business affairs that he had forgotten about the organisation. He had received the information earlier and in more detail than I (he had easy access to the post), but he didn’t let me know and instead pushed Little Wang in my direction. I showed the letters from Shanghai and Han Jun to Zhenji, Wensheng, and Old Fan. The letters were highly cryptic. They used only pronouns, so I couldn’t make out what error he had made or who had done what. Moreover, at that moment we were getting Workers’ Voice ready for publication, so as long as he spoke the language of revolution, people would be loath to believe that he was a traitor. After lunch, Wang’s spirits lifted and he was determined to lead the organisation in Chongqing, leave Ziyou behind, and get on with the revolution. Then Wang’s articles kept arriving. As Wensheng commented, “Little Wang could cre-

808

sun, trans. benton

ate an article every time he goes for a shit”. The number of our publications grew. In defiance of the organisation’s need for security, Wang [said that he] was prepared to go to prison. He had his toothbrush, his tooth-cup and his hand towel ready, and showed them to Wensheng. He was acting out the tragedy of the Chinese professional revolutionary. My job in the arsenal was far from ideal. After working for two months in the generator section, I asked for a transfer. The foreman was from Tianjin and was afraid that I would squeeze him out, so I left early to reassure him. I went to the newly opened air-raid shelter at Tongluo Gorge to install the lines. It was a hard life, climbing up onto a high shelf day in and day out and staring at the ceiling, my neck and back a mass of aches and pains. When I finished there, I went to work in the prototype section. I then took a break for a couple of months, with nothing to do. So I asked to be transferred back to work with Pockmarked Li on engine repair, and I learned much from him. My colleagues were politically backward. They thought that electricians should be seen as “worker-aristocrats”, with higher wages and easier work, so they imagined themselves superior and were unable to sympathise with ordinary people. I myself therefore moved closer to the ordinary workers. Around July and August, I made friends with two of them and tried to establish a relationship, with the intention of diluting my colleagues’ perception of me – they were always joking that I was a mere propagandist. I was unable to focus comrades’ attention on our organisational crisis. Li Shen (Zhao Shengwen) and I had the most chances to talk, yet it was hard to convince him. Was all the work that I, Zigui, and Zhenji had done on the verge of collapse? I had to get out, but where to? I wrote a letter to Wujiang to inquire about Limin. Limin wrote back saying I should leave, so I told him I was preparing to go. I dropped the letter into the post box at the factory. Three days later, I was arrested. The letter had been intercepted and was being held in the inspector’s office.

Escape I was arrested on 8 October, the 18th day of the 8th month on the old calendar, just three days after the Mid-Autumn Festival. Early in the morning, at around nine o’clock, a guard came holding a slip of paper and said to section leader Zhang: someone is looking for Liang Yi. Zhang called me over. I read the three characters Yang Shouyuan on the slip of paper. My heart sank. Couldn’t he have come to find me? He had never been before. If they weren’t allowing people to pay visits during working hours, could he not have asked the guard to pass the

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

809

message on? Before I could say anything, Zhang said, “Go with him!” I followed the guard outside. He was a Cantonese, no bigger than me, but stronger. He walked alongside me, in case I had any intention of escaping. I realised that I was about to lose my freedom on that clear autumn morning. When was I ever going to see the light of day again? I looked greedily at the sky and the clouds, the river, and the mountains. The orange-trees on the hills were bursting with fruit and still green. The walk to the guardhouse was soon over. Inside, the head guard, accompanied by two guests in Western suits, told me to follow them as soon as he saw me. They led me to the guest house and we sat down in the vestibule. The younger one, a section officer, and the older one (in his forties), who called himself Section Chief Xiao, announced: “Yang Shouyuan has confessed about you, and you are under arrest”. I was then asked about my introduction to the Fiftieth Arsenal and my connections. Even if they didn’t believe me, I was sure that Zhang Junzhao would exonerate Zheng Bing. When questioned further, I refused to answer. There was tea, cigarettes, and snacks. Xiao gobbled the snacks down while asking me with a smug look on his face whether the words “Yang Shouyuan” looked like Yang’s own handwriting. He had deliberately imitated Little Yang’s handwriting to trick me. It was clear that I would not be able to escape their net, so I followed them. I left the guest house and went back to the dormitory for a search. Before I left, Xiao warned me: “Be open, so that everyone can see what’s going on, then we won’t need to apply torture”. He didn’t want to alarm the workers in the factory or scare away my accomplices. So the three of us took a shortcut back to the dormitory as if out for a stroll. They confiscated a letter in my suitcase from the electricity company, signed by Wensheng. This was bad news. This could mean that Wensheng was in for it. I was furious with myself! I put my newly made Zhongshan suit and a thick jumper that Second Brother had given me as a parting gift into a bag, along with my toothbrush and towel. I glanced behind me in the direction of Li Shen’s dormitory and people seemed to be coming and going. No one had burst into my dormitory while we were present, so perhaps the caretaker had sealed the front and back doors. It was nearly noon and the boat was due to sail at twelve o’clock. The two agents accompanied me aboard as if I were a friend and bought a ticket on my behalf. We didn’t arrive at Chaotianmen until 3 pm. In the meantime, I remembered that the previous night, colleagues had mentioned that the inspector-general had come to inspect the factory wearing his official uniform. I hadn’t paid any attention to this gossip at the time, not realising that the head of the secret service had himself turned up to fish for such a tiny fish as me. After arriving at Chaotianmen, we went up to the pier and walked along Shaanxi Street, and then turned left into an alley. On both sides were tall build-

810

sun, trans. benton

ings, with the dark alleyway in between as if leading straight into the bowels of hell. After about one hundred steps, we entered a gate on the right. Again on the right was a lift to the upper floor. In front of us were three small rooms and a sign announcing the adjutant’s room and, on the left, the communications room. There was a narrow patio surrounded by high walls. A uniformed soldier with a rifle stood guard at the door. The two agents went upstairs. A young armed officer came out of the adjutant’s room to receive the “job”, me. The squad leader came across to search me, but when he saw my hands in the air and my calm demeanour, he merely went through the motions and didn’t really frisk me. He ignored the two coins concealed in my trouser pocket. Deputy Lin had just finished writing down my name and factory when someone on the floor above called down for the prisoner to be brought in. I ended up sitting in front of a young unit chief. He looked at the dossier, which was marked “Yang Afang” instead of “Liang Yi”. He called me Yang Afang, but I didn’t answer. Yang Afang was the name I used in my correspondence with Shanghai. I immediately realised that they must have checked all my correspondence at the arsenal. The officer had just finished writing down my age and place of birth, simply as a matter of routine, when someone came down from the third floor to say that the Director wanted to examine me personally. So I went up to the third floor and sat down facing him. On his desk were copies of Workers’ Voice and various leaflets. There were also transcribed copies of letters from Shanghai and Hong Kong. He didn’t ask much. He mainly wanted to see if Yang Afang was the “old man” he thought he might be, so he was disappointed. He pointed to my article “Why Don’t Arsenals Produce Guns?” and said: “You write this, didn’t you”. I didn’t answer. He looked at my signature and wondered if I really was an electrician and not a Communist student returned from Russia. He said, “What’s the point of doing this? Go back downstairs and think about it!” I went back down, and Lin instructed the head of the communications team to take me to the communications room. The squad leader fixed me up with a bed and an army blanket and put my bag on the bed. Not until that moment did I think back to the section chief’s appearance: tall, but without the mighty stature of a soldier; wide-mouthed, like someone born to eat human flesh and drink blood. By six o’clock, the people upstairs had gone, and so had Deputy Lin. A student came out of his room and popped his head round the door of the communication room to greet me. He then sat down at a small table by the door to the deputy’s room. “I suppose you’re Old Liang? My name is Zhang Hongren, you haven’t met me”. He told me that things had gone badly at the Twenty-first Arsenal, Yang Shouyuan had organised a play for a propaganda troupe, special agents had infiltrated it and arrested Yang, and he had given up a lot of names, all of whom had been caught. Some had repented and signed confessions to

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

811

that effect. They had been sent to reformatories. This man Zhang hadn’t repented, so he was waiting to be reassessed. “Where is Meng Xianwu?” I asked. “They didn’t catch him, maybe he escaped”. Hongren was a good-looking young man with thick eyebrows and a square mouth. People liked him. I have never forgotten his face. He said that he spent the nights in the adjutant’s room. I encouraged him not to repent, and pointed out that this was a good place from which to escape. We talked until Deputy Lin returned, whereupon he went back to his room. I then returned to the communications room and got chatting with the squad leader, who invited me to join him for dinner. He was from Henan, a veteran soldier. He told me that the inspector’s office was responsible for problems in the arsenal. He said, “Yours will be an easy case to deal with. You’ll be back in a month or so. There was a man in the Twentieth Arsenal who stayed here for three weeks, that was the longest ever. Nowadays we get one case a week”. I flicked through the letters on the desk and realised that we were at No. 72 Lantern Lane on Shaanxi Street. The director’s official title was chief inspector Zhang Shi,36 or Mr Zhang Xingshen. Judging by his big mouth, he must have been from Zhejiang. Deputy Lin, who had long hair, loved to dress up, and had a pale complexion, was Zhang Shi’s brother-in-law. His movements were casual, quite unlike those of a military man. I had just finished reading Ba Jin’s translation of Kropotkin’s autobiography.37 The bit in which he escapes from the prison in St Petersburg was so stirring that I began to fantasise about doing the same. It had been raining all night, a torrential downpour that went on until after breakfast. Suddenly a group of students arrived, a dozen of them, dripping wet from head to toe, one with wounds on his feet, unable to stand, with two men propping him up. I knew only one of them, Cao Qinghua. Pretending not to recognise him, I asked, “Where are you from? What are you doing here?” Cao Qinghua played dumb: “We are from the Third Arsenal in Dadukou. I don’t know why I’m here, do you?” The lad was grinning all over his face, truly a smart young person. They wrung out their clothes and went upstairs, where Hongren greeted them at the door to the adjutant’s room. Shortly afterwards, they came back down. Cao Qinghua continued to insist that he didn’t know

36

37

Zhang Shi studied in the Soviet Union, where he joined first the Communist Party and then, as one its founders, the Chinese Trotskyist Opposition. However, immediately after being criticised, he betrayed his comrades and joined the Kuomintang as an agent of its Military Intelligence. Ba Jin (1904–2005) was a Chinese writer, anarchist, and Esperantist.

812

sun, trans. benton

what was going on. After a while, Hongren was again summoned upstairs and stayed there for a long time. Wearing a dejected look, he told me that he was being sent downstairs. I had to reassure him: “You people are a straightforward case, just go down, my case is quite different from yours”. So goodbye forever to my lovely friend. After he left, I was taken back upstairs. The same interrogator, the same dossier, and the same refusal on my part to answer any questions. He called me “stubborn”. He went through all my materials on the table and showed me a small diary that I had previously mislaid, which I had kept since entering Sichuan from Xi’an. There was also a drawing and instructions for a transformer that I had designed, which Li Zhuozhi had insisted I make for him. This guy slept right behind me, our beds touched each other. He was a workman in the gunnery yard, lowly in status, but he spent hours preening himself, and always stank of eau de toilette. He was from Hubei and had initially asked for a small transformer and then made sure I wrote the instructions for him, which I did, not thinking for one moment that he might be a secret agent. I still didn’t change my attitude, and they started calling me rude and overbearing. I had been thinking about things for several days at that point, and I suspected by then that there were no spies among the electricians except for my immediate neighbour in the dormitory, Li Zhuozhi. The dormitory superintendent, who was a high-up in the secret service, had arranged for Li Zhuozhi to sleep behind me. But they had failed to ferret out my relationship with Li Shen. The head of communications told me that no torture would be applied at present, only evidence would be collected, and when everything was in order, we prisoners would be transferred to the Military Justice Office on the south bank of the river. Every day at five o’clock in the afternoon, a “real” plainclothes detective came in and stood there without a word, all in black – black hat, black trousers, black jacket, and black raincoat. Sometimes he was summoned upstairs, but most of the time business was handed down to him. I observed him closely. I’d never seen him before, and it was unlikely that he had a political function. The worker from the Twentieth Arsenal mentioned to me by the communications boss came by and introduced himself: a native of Lixing who had moved there with the factory and was slightly pockmarked. He was embarrassed by his role. He said, “I can’t help it, I have to do what they tell me to. I have to come back to the factory once a week”. He always remained upstairs for an hour or so. He was probably a Communist and seemed to think that I was too, otherwise he wouldn’t have spoken to me like that.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

813

I was treated very well by the head of communications. I ate the same food as him and at the same table – much better food than in the factory. However, one day at noon, Zhang Shi came upstairs and saw us eating together. He shouted, “How can you eat at the same table as a prisoner! Lin Qin!” Lin Qin ran out of the room. Zhang shouted, “If a prisoner eats at the same table as an officer, the officer will be held responsible if anything goes wrong!” After saying this, he turned round and went upstairs. Lin Qin then came back to take care of communications. By this time, I had already taken a bowl of rice and was sitting on my bed. Lin Qin was a clean and tidy person and didn’t like dirty workers getting near him. Lin Qin was a platoon leader. Under him was a squad leader with a big gun who stood guard at the door. I don’t how many soldiers there were downstairs, in the reformatory class. The communications section was under the control of a squad leader and his deputy, a man from Nanjing, who I got to know well. I knew a few words of Nanjing dialect, having lived in Wujiang for a year. He was a good cook. I was always eager to help out in the kitchen, where I picked up some of his skills. After ten days or so, the squad leader told me he was leaving, the office was too poor, there was no money in it. That evening, we drank a few glasses of alcohol together, and at five o’clock in the morning he grabbed his luggage and was off. At noon, his deputy reported for duty. Since he was now alone, he was extremely busy – so busy that I sometimes collected the incoming mail for him. The foggy season was already underway in Chongqing. On some nights, it was so foggy that I began to think of trying to escape. I had a Fiftieth Arsenal badge hidden in my pocket. I could use the pin on it to short-circuit the fuse and escape in the dark. But it was risky. I had no contacts on the outside, so I could easily be caught. I used to sleep during the day. After supper, I would wash my clothes and chat with the soldiers on guard duty. One soldier was keen to go with me and become an apprentice, but he lacked the guts to release me. Late at night, I could go out of the door and look down the alley into the street. The alley was closed in behind high walls and was very narrow. It stretched for quite a long way, and it would not be easy to escape along it. The deputy squad leader told me that my case was almost done, few people stayed so long, I’d already been there for more than three weeks. He was also leaving. I wore my Zhongshan suit every night at the time, with my woollen jumper inside, and paced back and forth in the building, working out how to get away, which direction to take, what to do once I was outside. Sometimes I convinced myself that if I failed to escape from such a place, I should be ashamed of myself.

814

sun, trans. benton

One morning, the deputy squad leader vanished, without so much as a goodbye. By then, there were too few soldiers left to stand guard. Deputy Lin and the squad leader were nervous. I was left alone in the communications room. I fell asleep, I don’t know for how long. Suddenly I woke up to the sound of snoring. I popped my head round the doorway. The squad leader had fallen asleep holding his gun while standing guard. Seizing the opportunity, I slipped past him and out through the main door, and walked off briskly in the direction of the entrance to the alley. The street was empty of people. I turned left and hurried down Shaanxi Street. By now, I was in a panic. Two blocks down, a pair of hands reached out and grabbed me. “What are you up to?” I was so sort of breath that at first I was unable to get a word out. Finally, I blurted, “I’m a deserter”. “Which section?” “Military Engineering”. The man that had caught me was a policeman, wearing a green uniform. He whispered, “Follow me”. I followed him step by step. “Got any money?” “Not much”. “Show me”. He took ten dollars and left me one – I could hardly argue. He squeezed my shoulder, “What’s in there?” He knew it was a jumper, he could feel it. “Take it off and give it to me”. “I’ll be cold if I give it to you”. “ok, let’s swap”. We exchanged clothes. He took my good jumper from Beijing, and I took his old sanitary garments from the Shanghai Sanyou Industrial Company. He said, “Walk slowly. There are still three or four hours before they open up. You can’t cross the river now”. I followed his advice, and walked slowly and calmly. When I reached the junction, a traffic policeman was directing traffic in the centre of the road, and I feared he might question me. A rickshaw pulled up alongside me in the dark. I climbed aboard, whispering, “Take me to Hualong Bridge”. When I reached the outskirts and saw the moon, I realised that it was the 15th day of the lunar month and that I had been detained at No. 72 Lantern Lane for four whole weeks. I got off the rickshaw near Hualong Bridge. I walked round the deserted streets, alongside a rubbish tip. If someone passed by, I hunkered down. I waited until dawn, until people started moving around, and went to Ma Guoli’s place of work to seek him out. He had just got up and was not yet fully dressed and he was surprised that I had come so early. I sat at the foot of his bed

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

815

and quietly told him how I had been arrested and how I had escaped. I asked for a shirt and a bamboo hat, which he gave me, together with a few yuan. I left through the entrance and climbed the mountain road to Baishiyi. It was raining lightly, so I wore my hat and overalls and walked slowly along the stone path beside the mountain road, where I encountered very few people. At some points, I walked along the river embankment. This was in accordance with the escape plan I had hatched. I had mulled it over a thousand times in my head. I couldn’t go to Weiliang or Zhenji, or anyone else connected to the organisation, I could only go to non-political friends. Old Ma couldn’t do much, if I asked him to “rescue” me, he would be scared to death. I was sure that Wang Jintang, the ex-policeman, would give me shelter. However, I didn’t know the set-up in his office, and I decided it would be better to wait until nightfall. I spent the day in the hills above Baishiyi and ate at a roadside stall, where Wensheng and I had previously gone strolling. I knew the area well. Looking down towards the river, I could see Mount Gele on my right. There were more buildings on the hill than there had been the year before. As darkness fell, I began to climb the mountain. It was the first time I had come to this dispersal site. The streetlights and the lights in the nearby were blacked out. I managed to read the signpost on the building by the light of the moon. I enquired at a small gate. I found someone who knew Wang Jintang, and this person gave me precise directions. It was already midnight. The guard was a young man from Henan. He took me with him and we woke Wang Jintang. He was very surprised, but when he realised it was me, he was delighted. He offered me cigarettes and tea. I told him what had happened. He said I was safe where I now was. When he heard that the policeman had forced me to give up my jumper, he was furious, and seemed determined to get it back. I told him that I didn’t want to make a “Second Journey to the Palace”, i.e., to end up arrested a second time.38 The next step was how to get out of Chongqing. Wang didn’t have any money, so we had to wait for Shao Lu, who wrote to say that he was going to drive a vehicle through Chongqing to Kunming and he could give me a lift out of the city. I had no other choice. Wang gave me a place to sleep. Dawn was about to break. There were two policemen on guard day and night, but Wang told me not to worry about them. However, I couldn’t just hang around, I had to find

38

“The Second Journey to the Palace” is the name of a Peking Opera, also known in Sichuanese and other forms.

816

sun, trans. benton

something to do. He said it was easy to get work. After finishing his business in the morning, he took me to work in the afternoon. The barber arrived at his place later and shaved Wang Jintang’s face. I asked him to shave my head, like a monk. In the afternoon, Wang Jintang took me to Longdongwan, where there was a children’s nursery. He knew the person in charge, also a Mr Wang, and handed me over to him. Mr Wang was very grateful, since there was a shortage of people everywhere. I changed my name to Sun Jilong, and from then on my surname was Sun, not Liang. Longdongwan is a scenic spot surrounded by hills and streams, and at the foot of the hills is the town of Ciqikou. The hills are steep and difficult to walk up and down. The nursery was one of Song Meiling’s charity projects.39 It was accommodated in two large buildings on a small hill, around which the director’s and doctor’s offices and residences were built. Further down the hill were the nurses’ and nannies’ rooms, the nappy washing and drying room, and (further still) the dairy pens, the male workers’ quarters, and the dining room, which took up a good part of the hill. Mr Wang showed me how to fetch water from the stream and pour it into the sink for the women to wash the children’s nappies. I had to carry a hundred and fifty pounds of water each trip and my shoulders began to swell, but still I couldn’t keep up with the washerwomen. Mr Wang noticed, and said, “You’re not very strong, are you? How about you become our messenger, the previous one has just quit?” When I heard this, I thought, “This is not a good idea. If I run into the guys from No. 72, I’m a goner!” So I said immediately, “But I can’t read, how can I be a messenger?” A man in an old uniform next to me said, “Mr Wang, I’ll be the messenger, let him sound the night watches”. Mr Wang didn’t like this guy, but he asked me, “How about it, do you want to sound the watches?” I said, “Let’s give it a try. If you sound the watches, do you still have to work during the day?” “It’s a night job, you sleep during the day”. So I agreed to do it and inherited the watchman’s clapper and torch. Mr Wang told me to deliver the milk at eight o’clock and to start my shift at nine o’clock. At eight o’clock, I took the fresh milk up to the nursery on the top of the hill and gave it to the caretaker, and then I started my shift. It took twenty minutes

39

Song Meiling (1898–2003) was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

817

to do one round. I also helped the caretaker. Wielding the clappers, I kept thinking of the sound of the clappers back home, during the winter months, which was so clear and beautiful. The thought brought tears to my eyes, like those of a man away from home missing his wife. It was quite unlike the clattering that you hear in the south (in Wujiang). I had to bang once on the first watch, twice on the second, once on the third and then twice, and so on on the fourth and fifth watches, the last two in the row. There were different shifts. The first was at nine, the second at ten and eleven, the third at twelve and one, and so on. After a week of beating the clappers, the director and the doctor praised my efforts, and the old mothers and the neighbours stopped going by the bell and went by the sound of my watch instead. Mr Wang saw me in a different light. He let me sleep during the day. I didn’t go to the kitchen for my breakfast until supper time, and I had my supper at breakfast time. Then I intoned, “The sun is out, the sun is not ours, we are going to sleep”,40 and returned to my little room. On Sundays at midday, Wang Jintang would come to see me, while visiting a place not far from where I was now living. He lent me some copies of the classical text Fengzhou zhanjian (“Fengzhou Outline and Mirror”), which I read over and over again. Unfortunately it was incoherent, but I was unable to find any other reading material. One day, Wang Jintang arrived in a panic. Shao Lu had written to Liang Yi (i. e., me). Deputy Lin had intercepted the letter. Pretending to be Liang Yi, he had sought Wang Jintang out. Wang Jintang read the letter that Deputy Lin showed him. In it, Shao Lu had said that he would be driving through Chongqing to Kunming. “You have to go quickly”, Wang Jintang told me, “this man Lin is looking for you”. When young, Wang Jintang had served as a soldier in Fujian and spoke Fujianese, so he questioned Lin for a while in Fujianese and then told him that he did not know Wang Jintang and that Lin would have to find him for himself. I realised that Lin Qin would not have the patience to wait for Wang Jintang to return. He was a young fellow and lacked the patience to do anything. I told Wang Jintang to go back later and everything would be fine. On Sunday, he came to my place to say hello. The next day he came to tell me that Lin had not managed to find his place and told me to relax. Within two weeks, Wang Jintang was under my window, shouting, 40

“The sun was about to rise and the darkness was about to pass, but even after the light appeared, the future did not belong to a social butterfly like Chen Bailu, so she could not see her own future, she thought that the light did not belong to her and that she must kill herself” (Cao Yu, Sunrise).

818

sun, trans. benton

“Look who’s here!” “Ah, Shao Lu!” Shao Lu stood in front of me, grinning all over his face. He asked me when I would be ready to leave. He said he wasn’t driving this time, that he was going in someone else’s car to Kunming and couldn’t take me with him. I was frustrated, and said, “I’ve been here for days, I can’t not leave”. I asked him to leave me some old clothes (I couldn’t go wearing the same clothes I had escaped in) and I would go to Kunming to find him. Lunar New Year was about to happen, and it had snowed a couple of times. I decided to leave at the end of the first month, by which time my hair had grown back. (I shouldn’t have shaved my head in the first place, if the army had seen me, they would have dragged me off as an unwilling recruit, since I looked like a coolie.) If there is something to say, it takes time. If there is nothing to say, it takes no time at all. In the twinkling of an eye, it was 29 March 1942. I decided to leave Longdongwan the same day. I crossed the river from Tongjiangyi and set off for Tongzi. The tung trees along the road were already in blossom, and it was only a few days before the Qingming Festival. It is difficult to measure the kindness of Wang Jintang, but I hope that he will live long.

Release Walking along the Sichuan-Guizhou highway, my mood was quite different from that of three years earlier, when I strode into the Dasan Pass, full of pride and youthful joy. The first night, I stayed in a small town and was checked twice by the military police. I was able to avoid trouble by showing my nursery pass. It seemed that I would not be able to travel on foot. After calculating the money I had accumulated over the previous five months, I decided to get a ride as an overquota passenger (a “yellow fish”) on a lorry. The next day, when a lorry drove past the check-point and stopped to wait for yellow fish, we got aboard and paid our fare. When it reached the next check-point, the driver shooed us off, drove on for a few hundred yards, and then waited for us yellow fish to catch him up again. The yellow fish jostled their way through the barrier, chasing the lorry. I found it easier, since I had next to no luggage. I spent the night in Zunyi and found a lorry from the Resource Committee at the hotel that was going all the way to Qujing in Yunnan. The driver was very civilised and drove sensibly, and I was the only passenger. I was therefore exempted

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

819

from jumping off and on again at each barrier, and I was treated as a mate. From Qujing, I took a train to Kunming. Within a few days of finding Shao Lu, I got a job on a commercial vehicle as an assistant and we drove further into Yunnan, towards Wanchai. However, when we arrived in Baoshan, we learned that Wanding had fallen to the Japanese, so we turned back to Kunming. After experiencing Yunnan’s high mountain roads, we travelled round the Cangshan Mountains and skirted the Erhai Lake. Every kilometre of the way, at least one lorry had tumbled off the road. The Kuomintang’s military supplies were scattered everywhere. Shao Lu asked me to stay with his survey team at Tanhua Temple in the eastern suburbs of Kunming. The mechanics were overhauling the vehicles and I helped out. Two months later, when the overhaul was finished, Shao Lu had to drive back to Lanzhou, so I left the survey team and went to Kunming West Station. Old Tang (a pipe-maker from the horse-racing group) had opened a “Shandong bakery”, where I worked for him for a while as a waiter. We sold braised beef, scallion cakes, rice gruel, and peanuts. Students from the United University and soldiers from the north stopped by, in addition to passing customers. Business boomed. However, the work was too much for Old Tang alone, so he limited himself to one big pot of beef and one of rice. The number of oil cakes depended on his mood. Sometimes he made two large pancakes to exhibit at the door – “signature dishes”. Diners criticised him: the fare was not a patch on that in Shandong. He was an amateur, not a professional. The small shops in the area were all mat huts, with reed mats for walls and no brickwork. Old Tang’s shop was unable to withstand severe rain and storms, and sometimes it had to be shut down. On a good day, when the market was open from dawn to dark, Old Tang went home to sleep, while I slept in the shop with another worker from Henan. This man was old and toothless, having come out of the army. There were many advertisements for recruitment examinations. The veterinary school in Xichang was recruiting new students with senior middle school qualification, and promised graduation at the end of a two-year course. All expenses were paid by the school, and the registration and examination were conducted by the Sino-French University (sfu, founded in 1920). I went to apply, but I had no papers, and I was told that I needed an affidavit from a qualified person to prove that my papers were indeed lost. I suggested leaving it until after I had passed the entrance exam, and I was accepted on that basis. There were actually only five people on the list, the reason being that applicants had to walk to Xichang. I went to the sfu and met an old professor. I told him that I lived in a bakery and I couldn’t find anyone of standing to prove that I had studied in senior middle school – could I be accommodated? He said, “We’re acting

820

sun, trans. benton

on the behalf of others, we can’t make decisions. I’ll let you go to Xichang, but if they don’t let you in, you’ll have trouble coming back”. So I didn’t become a vet. I had thought it would be easier treating animals than people, and it would have been wonderful to have studied for two years in a scenic region. I could only choose to take an examination for a course that required no documents. The Yunnan Telecommunication Administration was recruiting telephone operators, and I applied. I was accepted, but I needed a guarantor. Using the stamp of the “Shandong bakery”, I enrolled on the telephone training course, with food and accommodation as well as two military uniforms. The director asked me to see him. He wanted me to read aloud to him from an English-language textbook. He was excited to hear me read, since the new students were poor at English and anyway few in number. He chose me for the course, and wanted me to join the telegraph class. But I refused. I would graduate in three months if I joined the telephone class and get the chance to go to other counties, but the telegraph class lasted six months and involved a period of practical training. Kunming is a big city, so for safety reasons it was better that I leave early. I therefore didn’t receive special training from the director, much to the puzzlement of my Yunnan classmates. Classes were held at the Golden Horse Temple. The refectory and the dormitory were located at a nearby dam not far from the temple. The course work was easy, but the military training was tough. The main gate to the barracks faced south. There was a big exercise ground at the entrance, offices to the north, staff quarters, and a building in which the telephone and telegraph classes happened. The director of military training was the leader of the Yunnan warlord Long Yun’s Meihua Regiment.41 During the first three weeks of school, there were no holidays and no days off. There was jogging every morning and evening, two meals of rice mixed with sand and grain, and no oil used in preparing the dishes. Once in the dining hall, you had to wait for a whistle to sound before starting to eat, and when it sounded for a second time, you had to put your chopsticks down. After the evening run, we had to listen to long, boring lectures, with lots of yelling. On the fourth Sunday, after a housekeeping inspection, we enjoyed a break. We left the premises at twelve and returned at seven. I went to Old Tang’s for a meal of beef, which he put in a tin for me. Everyone brought back their own food. At seven o’clock, the military training director gathered us together and sent us off on our run, for an hour. Some students were full of alcohol and started vomiting.

41

Long Yun (1884–1962) was a Yunnan warlord. He later joined the ccp’s government but was labelled a “rightist” in 1957.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

821

In the blink of an eye, two months had passed – two months of arduous training. The military training director suddenly put on a smiling face and started acting in a more kindly, encouraging way: Yunnan people love and cherish Yunnan. He kept going on about the virtues of Yunnan’s Chairman Long Yun. The Yunnan students were all given individual talks. Most of the students were young men from rich families who had come for training to avoid having to enlist, just like in Chongqing. The director of military training picked out some of the more disruptive students and absorbed them into his Meihua Regiment. After the graduation exams, in the spring of 1943, we were distributed across the various counties’ telecommunications offices. I got sent to Dayao in western Yunnan. My classmates told me, “If you want a prostitute, go to Dayao”. I didn’t think much of the place (but I didn’t know at the time that it was at the foot of Jifu Mountain, a well-known scenic spot). There was a student named Guo who was sent to Fohai because of his bad grades. He wept non-stop. Fohai was notorious for its miasma, and had a very high death rate. He was afraid that if he didn’t go, he would be forced to enlist; and if he did, he would die of the plague. When I saw the state of him, I proposed that we change places, so the two of us went to the director to ask for his permission. Guo bought me a meal of cold sliced beef at Da Ximen. It cost two dollars. I travelled with two students from Yuanjiang and Mojiang. They had been assigned to their hometown, and were naturally happy. Never having been on a train before, they chose a circuitous route so as to be able to visit more places, which was what I wanted too. We travelled along the Yunnan-Vietnam line and got off at Bisezhai, where we changed to Mengzi and then to Shiping. Looked at from afar, Mengzi had big sandy beaches and reed fields at the foot of the eastern mountains. It was the homeland of migrating geese, and one of the lakes in Shiping was famous for its bowfin fish. The two students were like juren42 returning to their hometowns. Along the way, they dispatched porters to carry their luggage and buy meat dishes for them, and the local bailiff always obeyed their orders. The town of Yuanjiang is on the bank of the river. It is a hot and sweaty place, with flies everywhere and an abundance of tropical plants such as bananas and sugar cane. Mojiang is not on the river and can only be reached by climbing high into the mountains. Here, people have to light fires morning and night, and they carry around hand ovens. My classmates treated me to a three-day break, after which I hitched a ride with a caravan of horses and headed off to Mohei. There was also a telecom-

42

Successful candidates in the imperial examination in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

822

sun, trans. benton

munications office and a classmate in Mohei, so I stayed a day there before rejoining the horse caravan. The hills nearby were bare of trees, with no firewood to cook the salt, so we had to make sure that anyone who came to buy salt from us had to bring firewood in exchange. Two stops further on, we reached Pu’er, a political and commercial centre and a distribution hub for goods from north and south. Two days later, we entered Xishuangbanna and saw the Dai people and their houses for the first time. The men’s clothes are more or less the same as those of the Chinese, but the women’s blouses are narrow with long sleeves. They wear bucket skirts woven in horizontal stripes of red and green, with white towels or fancy silk scarves wrapped around their heads. Their houses are arranged in such a way that the people live upstairs and the livestock downstairs. The houses are detached from one another, like pieces on a chessboard. The Dai people took over from our porters, but in twice their numbers, for they were unwilling to carry heavy weights. Three days later, we reached the Lancang River. The river is wide and fast-flowing. The people cross in boats, while horses swim across in their wake. Coming ashore, we were in Jianghong (Cheli), the capital of Xishuangbanna, the site of its royal palace. It was very hot, like on the Yuanjiang River, completely tropical, with a wide, neat street called Jinghong in Dai, translated as Tianwang Street in Chinese. After a two-day rest, I left my colleagues behind and continued on my journey. I spent the first night sleeping in the open in Akatian, before arriving at Fohai the next day, just in time for the Qingming Festival. Fohai, now known as Menghai, was one of Xishuangbanna’s Mueang.43 It was renamed Fohai County during the “bureaucratisation of native officers”.44 The county government was controlled by merchants in the old days. There were several large tea estates nearby, equipped with single-storey buildings for storing goods. These were closed down during the war and stocked with unsold Pu-er tea. The police station was located on one of these estates. The telecommunication office was at the back of the police station, a small detached building, which was also the property of the tea estate. The main door faced west, with three storefronts, a central meeting place, and the communications station. A telephone exchange had been installed in the north room. The south room was equipped with a wireless telegraph transceiver. Upstairs were three more rooms: the director lived in the north room and I in the south. There was 43 44

Mueang (also spelt Muang, Mong, or Meng) were early semi-independent city-states in mainland Southeast Asia, including southern Yunnan. The bureaucratisation of native officers (gaitu guiliu) was a policy in the Ming and Qing dynasties designed to strip native officers of political power.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

823

a clear stream in front of door and a garden outside the back door – a peaceful environment. There were no immediate neighbours, and about three hundred paces further south was the Maengsa Temple. To the north was an open space in front of the main street, where two old Hui men sold beef and noodles. The main street stretched southwards. There were shops and homes to the west of the street and a square to the east, where people of various ethnicities sold vegetables, fruit, nuts, berries, and the like every morning. The Aka, Laohoujia, and Dai people all frequented the street. The local government office was deep in the bamboo forest to the northeast, in a building enclosed by a white wall. For the first ten days after my arrival, the director was busy paying his respects, while I was busy doing all sorts of other things. On the way to the town, I had passed through a Dai village called Mangyanghan, with a few dozen families, and a small village called Manlan across the river. The two villages were near a huge embankment full of deserted paddy fields. The Buddhist masters and monks of the Mangyanghan Monastery were busy making gaosheng for the New Year. The young people from the settlement came to help. The Dai New Year, also called the water festival, takes place ten days after the Qingming Festival. A high bamboo platform was erected in the field and the gaosheng were lined along the top of it, the Big Buddha, the Second Buddha, the Tusi Laoba, the Third Buddha, the Great Monk, and so on, passing down from biggest to smallest. A gaosheng is a bamboo tube cut into sections and stuffed with gunpowder pounded solid. A number of tubes are bundled together, around a length of bamboo that stretches out in the form of a tail (or tadpole). A gunpowder fuse is added and the fuse ignites the gunpowder in the tube, which begins to rise. If the weight of the head and tail is right, the contraption rises sails into the air and shoots out in all directions. If the head is heavy and the tail light, it will only rise slightly and then fall back down to earth or not leave the stand at all. In the case of big gaosheng, the lift is so powerful that the sound and vibration is like that of a locomotive. It is said that the inventor of the rocket was inspired by the gaosheng. After the water festival, the bureau installed a switchboard and started selling telephones. This was the terminal, connected through to Kunming in the north. Sometimes it was even possible to get through to Cheli, to the delight of the horse caravans. The line broke down from time to time, and often the linemen could not be bothered to fix it. So although the telephone lines were set up, they frequently failed to work. The wireless telegraph didn’t work either, and the telegrams had to be delivered by post instead.

824

sun, trans. benton

After the opening of the telecommunications office, the rainy season began and the director hurried back to his hometown. He was afraid that the miasma would get him. With him gone, there was only me and a messenger left in the office. I didn’t believe in the miasma, so every day at dawn I went to the Liuhuan springs in Mangyanghan (about six or seven li away), took a bath, and went to the monastery to learn spelling from the monks. I then returned for breakfast with the girls going to the market. It would rain for two to three days on end, but the paddy fields flourished, up until the October harvest, when the rainy season stopped and the sun returned. In the dry season, when there is nothing to do in the fields, the villagers join together to go hunting in the mountains or to go fishing in the river. In the evenings, the young girls of the village burn firewood in small groups at the crossroads and spin cotton thread around the fire. The boys, draped in blankets, lean against the girls’ backs and talk of love. When the girls stop spinning, late at night, the boys wrap their blankets around the girls and whisper with them. The Dai people “value women over men” and the women think that to have girls is an ineffable blessing. They take young men into their homes to marry their daughters. First they plant and cut the paddy for the women’s families and only then for the men’s. There was no place to chat in the evenings, so I used to visit the local police chief. As I lay there on his opium couch, he would offer me a pipe. When I pushed it away, he said, “Hey, that’s not on. If you come to Yunnan and don’t take a few puffs, what will you say when you get back to your Shandong?” So I had no choice but to partake. On the second and third nights, the same thing happened. On the fourth night, when I said, “That’s the third time, if you want me to come back and talk with you more often, I’ll have to say no. If not, I will have to say goodbye”. He laughed: “It’s a common problem with opium smokers: they are very generous to those who are not addicted, but stingy to those who are. If you don’t want to join the club, I won’t force you. You should come and talk with me more often, we’re friends”. From then on, although I didn’t always go there, I went when I was bored, to hear about the history of Yunnan. He had served as an official in several counties in southern Yunnan and was very knowledgeable. He smoked constantly, and did not put any great value on “black rice” (opium), just as the son of a rich family knows nothing of the hardships of finding enough rice to eat. He needed to consume about two taels of crude opium a day. Giving me an example, he said that even if he got addicted, he could still smoke opium “for free” by using one hundred silver dollars as capital. He

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

825

explained further: if he was in danger of running out of opium, he could buy 100 taels of crude opium from peasants for one hundred silver dollars, which was a lower price than if he had bought freshly harvested opium at five silver dollars per tael. One hundred taels of crude opium was enough for a novice smoker to smoke in one year. He could also collect thirty taels of opium ash in that same period. The ash could be sold to the horse gang for one hundred silver dollars. That meant he would get his capital back. Moreover, he could avoid the miasma, and save on medical bills. It sounded like I was again being asked to join the club. I was smoking cigarettes at the time and had given up on several occasions, so how dare I touch opium? You could also say that smoking cigarettes was teaching me to avoid opium, so at least the cigarettes were of some benefit. The local garrison was the 93rd Division of Chiang Kai-shek’s Central Army, which had its headquarters deep among the bamboos on the southern outskirts of Fohai, with barracks built of bamboo and stretching down towards the Daluo River. But this division had for a long time been short of three regiments, and after three years of replenishing to the tune of nine regiments, it was still less than two regiments in real terms. There were definitely enough officers – what was missing was soldiers. I met a Sichuan recruit who told me, “We had one regiment of soldiers from Sichuan, but on the way here people either died or deserted, and by the time we reached Kunming all that remained was one battalion. The commander’s goods came south, but people died. No one carried the stuff, it was simply sold, anything to make money. When we arrived in Fohai, there were only a dozen of us left, and now I’m the sole survivor”. The middle ranking people in the division, who often come to the telecommunications office to chat, included the army doctor, the accountant, and the radio operator. Wang Sile, the medical officer, was from Henan, and I became friends with him. His medical supplies were stored near the Manxing Mountains and I often went to his place for dinner and a chat. His soldiers had planted a vegetable garden, complete with various kinds of fruit and vegetables. The first rainy season passed without me getting sick, and I stayed so healthy that I made nonsense of all those theories about having to smoke opium to avoid the miasma. The second rainy season passed safely, but I was no longer as happy as I had been when I first arrived, since everything was no longer new. One afternoon, when I was chatting with Wang Sile in the vegetable garden attached to the medicine store, suddenly branches rattled on the hill behind me and two leopards came bouncing across the footpath and sped off into the fields. They then span round and ran back up the mountain. It was the small sunny month, the

826

sun, trans. benton

tenth lunar month, and the male and female chased after one another, like a young nun and monk running together down the hill.45 That night, the tiger came down into the town and bit the county government’s horse. One tiger even leapt into the local constable’s house, in broad daylight, and stole a chicken. The constable thought enough was enough, and got his gun ready. The tiger came in the afternoon. It jumped on the constable. His brotherin-law, in his eagerness to save him, fired a shot. The tiger fled and the bullet pierced the constable’s head. I have never heard of a tiger eating a man. One afternoon, I went to the medical depot and on the way there I saw a tiger’s tail slinking through the fields. I walked on without stopping, and saw a large black tiger hanging around under the holly tree at the edge of the field. I told Wang Sile, who took out his gun and went looking for it, shouting, “Where’s the tiger? Where’s the tiger?” When he saw the tiger, he was clever enough to fire a shot into the air instead of at the tiger. Like a sudden gust of wind, the tiger scurried up the mountain, leaving behind a trail of branches and a cloud of leaves. At the end of 1944 I finally became ill. It was like the flu, but instead of an alternation of cold, fever, and sweating, it was cold, fever, and no sweating, and particularly heavy at night. This was the first stage of blackwater fever, followed by red urine and black stool. Shortly before this, the postmaster (from Sichuan) had died of it. I had taken a box of Adiponectin pills with me from Kunming, and now I could use them. I went to the pharmacy and asked Mr Wang to give me an injection, which he was always happy to do, to improve his technique. He injected me into a vein in my left arm. As soon as the needle was withdrawn, I fainted. I came to a little later, screaming that I was thirsty. The kettle had run out of water and the orderly rushed off to boil some. I kept drinking, and boiled water kept on arriving, from afternoon through to midnight, when I eventually pulled through. I got out of bed and went to the vegetable patch to take a pee. Standing there, the urine rushed out like a waterfall for a full quarter of an hour. I was so relieved to be alive. The intramuscular injection, which Mr Wang had mistakenly given as an intravenous injection, had almost killed me. It left him in a state of shock. I would like to take the opportunity to thank my friend for this one injection, which cured me permanently of my “night wobbles”. After that, I never again suffered cold or fever in Fohai.

45

An allusion to a Kunqu Opera, Niehai ji, which Sun probably knew in its Peking Opera form.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

827

In Xishuangbanna, the land is flat and people grow glutinous rice (similar to Shanghai’s sticky rice) in paddy fields. Their kings have now been renamed as village heads. The Aka people, on the other hand, grow dry rice high up in the hills. Their villages are built above the clouds, where the air is dry and there are no flies. The valleys near Pingba are inhabited by the Laohoujia (Luohei), the dry Dai, and Han Chinese. Most of the headmen are Han Chinese. They used to be called “Kings of the Mountain”, but now they are called baojia46 chiefs. They lend money at usurious rates to the opium smokers. They grow opium and sell groceries. They exploit all the minority-ethnic groups. I once visited a hilltop king in the rainy season when the clouds were thick and the rain kept on sweeping in and out. His standard of living was like that of a rich peasant elsewhere in China. He lacked a decent house and garden. However, his stack of silver dollars, opium, and guns were enough to make a “king” of him. He offered me hospitality, and when he learned where I came from, he invited me to live in his house as a teacher and teach his children. He offered me three times the wage of a telecommunications officer. But how could I live with such a bloodsucker? Not unless I turned into an opium addict first. On 15 August, Japan surrendered. After a period of revelry, the authorities began cracking down. The old director was sacked and the new one was stranded in Kunming. Telecommunications were interrupted. The 93rd Division was stationed in Luang Prabang in Laos, where it had taken over from the Japanese. The postal clerk and I discussed me making a trip to Luang Prabang. He had been in charge since the death of his boss, and had obtained a pass from the military. I took a line worker, Old Liao, with me and we set off together. It was mid-October and the rainy season was over, so it a good time to make the trip. When we reached Mengxing, we met Shi, the director of the military station. He shouted, “The time to get rich has passed, no need to work too hard!” I was unmoved by his words and continued in the direction of the army. I had never been abroad before and was determined to see what it was like. After Mengxing, we entered Laos, in a canoe sent over by the army. When we put our luggage onto the canoe early the next the morning, the boatman indicated with his hand that it was overloaded. However, the man from the army (a Sichuanese) said, “Don’t listen to that old man, the boat is not too heavy! In Sichuan, as long as you pay for it, you can take as much luggage as you like. This is an

46

The baojia was a system of control and communal self-defence created during the Song Dynasty and revived in the Republican era (1912–1949).

828

sun, trans. benton

official boat, so of course they say it’s too heavy. But ignore him, just get aboard and tell him to move”. The canoe was dug out of a large log, with one rower in front, two behind, one for the rudder and one for the paddle, and two military postmen and two telecom employees, seven of us in all. There were fifteen such boats in our convoy. Along the valley through which the river flowed, hills and mountains faced each other across the water and the trees provided welcome shade. Birds chirped and sang, the sun shone, and it was a joy to the soul. Sichuanese are very good at talking, and the postal clerk spoke a lot about regulations on the river. We were getting more and more excited as we listened to its roar, which was getting ever louder. The water widened, and the canoe in front of us marked time. Only when all fifteen canoes were assembled did one of them take the lead, with the rest following behind. The boat flew like an arrow. Whenever we passed through shallows, the man in the bow stretched out his hands to open a way for us, while those behind pushed left and right to keep the boat on course. In no time, the boat was back in clear water. When we looked around, we saw high cliffs, rocks, and waves making a tremendous din. As the water slowed, the boat captain and his men sat back for a smoke. “I was terrified when the bottom of the boat scraped against the rocks”, said the Sichuanese. “In Sichuan, if that had happened, the boat would have fallen apart!” Half an hour later, we reached another sand strip and flew over it like an arrow. By twelve o’clock, we had passed six or seven such beaches. As soon as we saw the boat captains strap their little bundles round their waist, we knew that danger lay ahead. If they ignored their packs, there was nothing to worry about. At one rapid, the boat swooped down into the water from a great height. As it lifted its bow, a huge cliff loomed up along the river bank, and the boatman tacked sharply to the right at ninety degrees, so that we flew, again like an arrow, across several waves. It was drizzling slightly. Another rapid lay ahead. Our canoe was fourth from the rear. At the end of the rapid, a big boulder stood in our way. A man with a hawser gave a big push but the momentum was too great and he toppled into the water. The man behind him took over, and the two pushed the canoe past the boulder. The vessel filled with water and ran aground. The three canoes behind us collided with our stern and also filled with water. All the canoes were brought ashore, to rescue them. While this was happening, we had to stay put for a while. This was a good place to stop. The canoe skippers shepherded us ashore while pushing the boats to safety. The Chinese soldiers opened their luggage in the courtyards of local houses to

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

829

dry them in the sun. They were full of bundles of banknotes. The Laotians were amazed at how much money the Chinese had with them. Early the next morning, the boatmen decided to transfer my mate, Old Liao, to another canoe, which had fewer passengers and was therefore lighter. The brother from Sichuan seemed to have stopped talking. Along the way, he recited numerous Guanyin mantras and prayers to the Maitreya. He said: “I have never seen such dangerous rapids in Sichuan”. Six days later, we arrived safely at the confluence of the Mekong and the Datta. After leaving the canoe, I wondered how the boatmen would manage to get back to where they came from. How many days would it take? I wanted to thank them, but I didn’t have the language. The passengers and luggage of fifteen canoes on the Datta can fit aboard one big bamboo raft on the Mekong. The river is no longer narrow and rapid and there is not the same constant sound of rushing water. However, the flow is punctuated by massive eddies. The rafters have to steer hard to avoid being swept into the whirlpools, from which a canoe or wooden boat would be unable to escape. The rafts are made of large bamboo poles tied into bundles and joined together in a square, covered with bamboo mats and a sitting area protected by vertical posts and cross-beams where dozens of people can sit or lie. Each of the four corners is protected by a large hawser. To avoid the whirlpools, the rafters sometimes have to row sideways. After two days, small steamers appeared on the river. On the other side of the river, in Thailand, were houses and woodlands. After five days, we reached Luang Prabang, an ancient capital of Laos. All the public buildings bore the national emblem, a three-headed elephant, a sort of tripod, with three elephant trunks arranged like the three legs of an incense burner. The French-style houses, surrounded by parasol trees, have the air of French imperialism. There was also a Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which had welcomed the arrival of the 93rd Division. The first thing the officers did on arrival was to change their gold for French francs, so that the constant demand broke the market for gold. The overseas Chinese (diasporans) suffered big losses before they realised that French currency had long been in decline. The local inhabitants and the monasteries are similar to those in Xishuangbanna, as are the language and customs. As for marriage in Xishuangbanna, as long as both parties are in accord, the man can simply buy a chicken and a bottle of wine and invite his friends and relatives to eat and drink at the woman’s house before entering the bridal chamber. Divorce is a bit more costly. The husband gives four silver yuan to the laoba (the baojia head), the laoba recites a “break-up spell” in the presence of the man and woman,

830

sun, trans. benton

and the man then does a “double swing” and leaves the family. Members of the horse gangs in Xishuangbanna get married in this way and set up home, with little cost but much fun. After the French occupied Laos, they passed a law ordering the man to pay two silver dollars for a marriage and ten for a divorce. This was highly convenient for foreign bigwigs and foreign soldiers. In these two Buddhist places, there are no prostitutes. Divorced women are considered a “disgrace”. Once the “disgrace” becomes common knowledge, young men drool over such women and they are even more popular than younger women. While on my travels, I have seen children with curly hair or dark skin, descendants of Frenchmen or African soldiers in French employ. The strange thing is that all the women over forty have cropped hair, stuff their ears with thick rolls of cloth, and chew betel nut, so that their lips are stained red. The capital is smaller than one of our county towns, so it took just a couple of days to wander round. All the officers I knew did the same. I asked about the return journey. Apparently there were no boats available, so I had to take the mountain road. The leader of the division’s communications team, a Sichuanese, introduced me to his relative Zhang Gezi, who had a packhorse and was bound in the same direction. So I bought two stallions, reddish with black manes, one with just a couple of teeth, the other with a full mouth. I didn’t take them to ride on, just to carry luggage and food; I was content at the thought of being able to walk unencumbered and empty-handed. On the seventh day, I said goodbye to my various acquaintances in Luang Prabang and embarked on my journey. Zhang Gezi was in his forties, originally a hustler who had settled down in Mengxing. He was a thin man with a smoking habit and a sturdy walker. Zhang led the way. On the first and second days, others stayed with us along the route. By the third day, there was no one except us. We chose a lush green meadow near a mountain stream and set up to sleep in the open. We unloaded the horses, put down the saddle blankets, let the horses graze, and took our Burmese knives and went off to cut bamboo and gather firewood. We then built a fire and arranged it in such a way that the flames leapt high into the air, to scare away wild animals. We washed rice in water from the stream and stuffed it inside fresh bamboo segments, together with banana leaves, and placed it by the fire to cook. After that, we spread out banana leaves on the ground next to the fire and slept comfortably. When the bamboo rice was cooked, it smelt fresh and fragrant, and the beef and green peppers were most appetising. It was dark and the horses were grazing around the fire, afraid to stray too far into the dark. In one day, we managed just 30 kilometres, up and down winding mountain roads, with not a soul in

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

831

sight. The bamboo forest was thick with bananas. We climbed up the mountain into a pine forest. The journey was pleasant, and that night I slept soundly on my pillow. I woke in the middle of the night and added more bamboo to the fire and thus kept the horses and us safe. At dawn, the little birds were chirping to wake up their companions. At our next stop we came across a family that camped alongside us and gave us food and shelter. But that only happened at every other stop – otherwise, we had to bivouac in the open. On the road to Mengxing, Zhang Gezi took a wrong turning and we were diverted onto a long mountain path, overgrown with reeds and rushes, with a small path running through it on which we and the horses were invisible. There were tigers and leopards in the vicinity, but not under the trees, since they cherish their furs and don’t like birds shitting on it. We were all scared, horses and people, under the bright high moon. Suddenly, I saw four or five buffaloes in front of us, to my great delight. “It’s all right now”, I said. “Let’s follow them, there must be someone home”. Old Zhang laughed. “If you follow the buffaloes”, he said, “you’ll never find anyone. Their owners let them wander freely until they need them for ploughing. Then they fetch them home. Otherwise, they eat and sleep on the bare mountains”. Sure enough, by walking in the opposite direction to the buffaloes we soon found a family, a prosperous hilltop family, with an adobe wall and a thatched roof, more or less like an equivalent Han family. There was a horse pen, into which our horses were led. The door and roof were of thick wood. The cattle and dogs were kept inside. The owner said that from time to time tigers and leopards came scratching and growling at the door of the pen. After dinner, we took a walk outside the big gate. On the bare ground, five buffaloes lay in a circle with their heads facing outwards, with three calves enclosed within. Zhang Gezi said, “Buffaloes aren’t afraid of tigers and leopards, they’re equally matched. Look! They lie in a circular formation with five heads facing outwards. They work together to protect their children, so that the tigers and leopards will never dare to attack them”. On the twelfth day, we arrived at Mengxing and stayed overnight at Zhang’s house. The next day, we took leave of one another, and my trip to Laos was over.

832

sun, trans. benton

Reunion It was November 1945 by the time I returned to Fohai. Soon afterwards, a new director turned up with an order to transfer me back to the Kunming office. I sold my horses, packed my luggage, and went north with the horse caravan. We made twenty stops before reaching Yuxi, where I had a chance encounter with Director Xia Ban (who had been transferred there). He kept me there for three days and we dined lavishly on roast duck, even better than Peking roast duck, I still remember it to this day, and we got drunk. After reporting to the Kunming office, I was assigned to work at the shop in the city. My dormitory was in the Golden Horse Temple. I thought carefully about what to do. Should I try to “reunite” with my old friends? Should I leave behind the joys of Yunnan, where “every season is like spring”? One day, as I was walking past the gatehouse of the building, I heard someone behind me say, “I know you, you’re Liang …”. I looked round and it was Brother Ah Nan (Huang Zhengcheng). He had been walking past me when he suddenly realised who I was. By that time, I was wearing a smart hat and sunglasses, but still my good friend recognised me. We went into a hostel and had a drink and chat. After my arrest, he had come to visit me at the Fiftieth Arsenal and had been detained and questioned, but he explained our relationship to them and was released. It seems I was still in Longdongwan at the time. Nan seemed taller now. He was wearing a nice army uniform. He drank, talked about women, and seemed to have lost his childlike innocence. We arranged to meet again the next day, but he failed to arrive. As I waited, I sighed, in the knowledge that I would never see my friend again. Such is fate! I decided to go back east as soon as possible, in order to meet up with my other old friends. A couple of days later, I received a letter from Chen Erxian in Wujiang, welcoming me to join him, so I immediately went through the formalities of leaving the company and received my relocation fee and a permit to return home. I booked a bus to Changsha, travelling as a “yellow fish”. There were only three of us on board: me, a prostitute going to Wuchang to ply her trade, and a young nurse bound for Changsha to get married. It was midwinter and the grass was dying south of the Yangtze, but the green bamboo was still pleasing to the eye. It was a long time since I had been in the North, and impressions lingered in my mind. After arriving in Changsha, I took a train to Wuhan and then a river ferry downstream to Nanjing and then a smaller ferry to Wujiang. In Wujiang, I met my good friends Chen and Fan, and we talked about my eight years of separation. The town head, Jiang Shaozhi, who had been one of

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

833

my favourite pupils back in the day, arranged accommodation for me in an official dormitory, where I waited for news from Shanghai. Chen Erxian advised me to try the Trotskyist editorial board of Seeking the Truth and Youth and Women, which I did.47 Shanghai responded by sending me the address of Brother Su in Lai’anli near the North Railway Station. I met with Zigui’s students Su Xuechang, Old Fan, Old Du, Xiong Andong, Yang Shouyuan, Cao Yulin, and Liu Yi at Su’s place. The only ones I had already met, in Chongqing, were Old Fan and Yang Shouyuan. These new acquaintances were lovely people. Zhang Hongren had gone to the northeast. Meng Xianwu and Zhao Shengwen had not been heard from. After taking flight, they were unable or unwilling to get back into touch with their old classmates. Eighty per cent of the Chongqing organisation had been destroyed, and Wang Shuben and Old Kui (a student of Zigui) were still locked up in Chongqing prison. Those in the Lantern Lane Reformatory were released one by one after six months. They were now studying at university and belonged to Old Peng’s organisation. Zhenji, Weiliang, and Liu Chao had not been implicated and were still lurking around in the background. Zhenji’s organisation had even grown. Liu Chao and Weiliang had a business relationship rather than an organisational tie to the Trotskyists. Zhenji had become a full-fledged publishing figure at the Southern Printing Company. Wen Sheng was still working for the power company. His career remained the same, and he had broken off contact with Zhenji. The letter from him that the spies found in my box had done for him. The spies had been able to trace the handwriting to the author of various articles for Workers’ Voice. Wen Sheng had a wife and son, so he couldn’t go to jail. He managed to make an official surrender with the help of Wang Pingyi, who saved Wen’s career and prevented him from being implicated with Zhenji’s group. He and Wang Pingyi had been classmates in primary school and he had visited Wang when he first arrived in Chongqing. Zigui taught at one of Hu Zongnan’s schools in Xi’an48 and worked with Liu Renjing. Liu Renjing had been sent to the reformatory at a very early stage, whereas Zigui had been spared this humiliation, thanks to Li Ziyi. Li Ziyi gained the trust of Hu Zongnan, and was therefore able to facilitate some Trotskyist surrenders. 47 48

Published by the group around Peng Shuzhi, leader of one of the two factions of postwar Chinese Trotskyism. Hu Zongnan was one of Chiang Kai-shek’s most trusted generals.

834

sun, trans. benton

For four years, Zigui had taught at Lianzhong. He should have known his own “revolutionary future”: prison and exile were not an option, the only path was that of Li Ziyi. But when he stood up there on the podium face to face with his hesitant young students, he could not resist criticising the Communists’ criminal collaboration with the Kuomintang, whose military defeat he predicted. He continued to show young people the way forward to revolution, inspiring and educating the next generation. He said that he was now a grandfather holding his bowl of congee and gazing down at his grandchildren. It was already the end of the lunar year, so I rushed to buy a ferry ticket to Qingdao, where I disembarked on the third day of the first month. My fingers were frozen and I could barely lift my luggage. But there was good news: the Jiaoji Road was open to traffic! I had heard in Shanghai that I could only go as far as Weixian, but now it turned out that I could go all the way through to Zhangdian, where I could transfer onto a train to Boshan. I got off at Zhangdian and checked into a hostel. The train wasn’t due until the next morning. But I suddenly froze. The guest in front of me in the hostel register was Sun Liangchen! I had known this name ever since starting to study trade all those years ago, and now I would have to enter my new name “Sun Liang X” alongside his! In those days, you could not travel without a document, and I was using my severance certificate from the Yunnan Telecommunications Bureau, which bore that name. What a coincidence! The Zhangdian-Boshan branch line was carrying provisions for Li Xianzhou’s attack on Laiwu in Shandong. Second Brother and Sister-in-Law were living in that city. They had three children, and he was working as an accountant for the local authority. His life was very difficult. I went to see Father in Zhaozhuang and spent half a day with him. Along a road under three feet of snow, I visited the grave of my late wife, who had died in the month following the Mukden Incident on 18 September 1931, and had been buried on my behalf by Second Brother. I remembered her with remorse. After Han Fuju withdrew from Ji’nan at the end of 1937, guerrillas had sprung up under the Kuomintang special services and under the Communists. Qiao Tongen had long prepared for this, by organising an anti-Japanese resistance. Legend has it that he had three Mauser pistols. While two women students who were having promiscuous relationships, he started shooting as soon as things went wrong – these may have been scurrilous rumours put about after Pockmarked Second Brother Ma’s column was wiped out. It is said that after his arrest, according to a ccp publication, he was taken to Tai’an, where he was

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

835

executed for demanding to speak at a struggle meeting in defence of the Trotskyists’ anti-Japanese campaign. Zang Shuhe is remembered by the people of Zhaozhuang as a saint. He is said to have been buried alive after his guerrilla group was wiped out. What actually happened is unclear. The only thing we know for certain is that people were wiped out. I went back to Shanghai by way of Qingdao and met up again with Yimin again in a small house on Boshan Road. He was working as a bank manager, but still unmarried. He bought my boat ticket for me and I stayed with him for three days. He asked me to bring a gift and letter to his lover in Shanghai. I could not know that this would be my last reunion with him, and I later lost track of him. When I returned to Shanghai, Li Xianzhou was captured in Laiwu and the town of Zibo was liberated for the second time. I stayed in Little Zhao’s house, and contacted Binzhi and Lou Xuan. I met up with them a few times and got some information about the deaths of Zhang Yanshu and Zhang Bingyu. The first thing I learned on the eve of August 1349 was that Zhang Yanshu had written a letter of surrender. He should have been sent to a reformatory, but he insisted instead on going to the army prison. Lou Xuan, a member of the Beiping Organisation, who left Beiping very late, said: “Traitors within the police force from the National University took revenge on Zhang in Shandong. They tortured him, not in order to force him to confess his relationship (for he had already betrayed the organisation) but to make sure that he surrendered”. After 13 August, he was released from the army prison and he returned to his hometown, Sishui. He knew the Trotskyist “party regulations” and did not report to the Trotskyist organisation but instead engaged in a “united front” with the Trotskyists. He organised guerrilla groups and he had a rifle that he carried with him wherever he went. He went to Zhucheng to see Old Zang, and on his way back he passed through a marketplace. Because he was carrying a gun, he was arrested and questioned by the local armed forces. Eventually they shot him. Realising that the game was up, he had written a valedictory letter to his wife, telling her to get married and not to be a widow. Zhang Yanshu was older than me. He was about thirty-three when he died. Names he often used included Xinru, Ziqin, and Ziqin (written with a different character). The Beiping organisation called him Shandong Zhang. 49

The Battle of Shanghai lasted from 13 August 1937, to 26 November 1937, when it ended in victory for Japan.

836

sun, trans. benton

Before the Japanese occupied Nanjing, Limin and his men mounted guerrilla attacks on the Beijing-Shanghai railway line. They fought brilliantly. Wujiang was their main base. No one ever told me where they got their funding, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask. When Wang Jingwei went to Nanjing to set up his puppet government, the collaborationist Zhou Fohai heard of Zhang Limin’s great reputation. He had him arrested and demanded that he surrender, but Limin refused. Zhou Fohai changed tactics, and allocated Zhang a small house, with two plainclothes assistants to live with him and money to spend as he pleased. He had lots of Western suits and went to dance halls, bars, and brothels, but always in the company of the two plainclothesmen. Later, he made friends with an American doctor at the Gulou Hospital as the result of a medical appointment, and asked the American to receive a letter on his behalf, after he had contacted Wujiang. He asked the Wujiang people to send a junk to ambush the town of Banqiao and to meet up with him. During this time, the two plainclothesmen had relaxed their surveillance, in the belief that Zhou Fohai thought so highly of Limin that Limin would soon be one of Zhou’s favourites. They began to treat him with respect and even awe, to flatter him, and to try to become his friends. Every day between noon and one o’clock, they went off together for their midday meal. Limin used this hour of freedom to make preparations for his escape, by buying the necessary equipment. One day, at twelve o’clock, just after the two guards had left, he changed his clothes, jumped into a hired delivery van, and sped off towards the city gate, where he showed the Japanese soldiers some delivery documents. When the Japanese saw that his consignment was SinoJapanese friendship books, they waved him through, towards Banqiao. He then told the driver to dump the books and gave him a note for the Japanese in case they stopped him. He boarded a junk on the Wu River and sailed off upstream, towards the west. At that point, a reward was offered for Zhang Limin’s arrest at the gates of Nanjing. An enlarged photograph of him hung for quite some time in public places. While on the run, he married a Hangzhou woman. Binzhi and Lou Xuan were his right-hand men, and his Sishui classmates from Qufu Normal came to join him. To resist Japan and for self-preservation, he became the magistrate of Jinshan County, under a volunteer unit of the Loyal Salvation Army.50 By that time, he and his comrades were desperate to track down the Trotskyists, to find an organisation capable of mapping out a future path and strategy.

50

A lightly equipped volunteer force loosely associated with the Kuomintang.

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

837

They visited the foreign concessions in Shanghai and elsewhere, but they could find no trace of the Trotskyists. At that point, they thought of me. If I was part of their team, they would be bound to find the organisation. However poor the organisation was, however much it needed money, at least they could have donated something. It was then that I sent a letter to Wujiang from Chongqing, which landed in their hands. They were so happy that they wrote back immediately, but I was unable to reply – it was the early autumn of 1941, and I had been arrested immediately after writing the initial letter. After the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941 and the launching of a large-scale pacification campaign by the Japanese and the puppets, the situation became so dangerous that they retreated to Hangzhou Bay,51 and got a junk ready for Limin and his wife and family to make a getaway. However, immediately they boarded the junk, the New Fourth Army52 emerged from the cabin and, without any explanation, cut them down with swords. Binzhi’s wife and son were not yet aboard, so they escaped the slaughter. Binzhi and Lou Xuan took command of the [Trotskyist] resistance to the Japanese pacification drive. Lou Xuan succeeded Limin as leader. After the pacification drive was over, he caught the New Fourth Army soldiers that had attacked Limin and demanded to know why they had killed their brothers in the resistance to Japan. And the children – did they also have to be cut down? The captives had no answer. Lou Xuan machine-gunned them to death – he himself told me the story. When Binzhi saw my face as I listened to Lou Xuan, he explained: This is what guerrillas do, I don’t get it either. I really didn’t understand. At the time of the 7 July 1937 Incident, when Japan launched its full-scale invasion, Limin, Lou Xuan, Binzhi, and I lived and studied together on the first floor of a house on Masnan Road in Shanghai. Lou Xuan often used to weep in my presence, emotionally as fragile as a girl, but the war had changed him into someone who killed people and drank their blood. He gave me a modern-style suit as a gesture of friendship. He had had no choice other than to leave the revolution, and when he saw that I had become a worker and still stood in its ranks, he betrayed his deep feelings of shame. He said with a sigh, “From today on we are forever parted”. Limin was only 33 years old when he died. He and his wife had a son who was raised by his grandmother’s family in Hangzhou. Binzhi’s wife was also 51 52

An inlet of the East China Sea, bordered by Zhejiang and Shanghai. The Chinese Communists’ second army (after the northerly Eighth Route) in the SinoJapanese War, based in central and southern China.

838

sun, trans. benton

from Hangzhou. Binzhi didn’t marry the schoolmaster’s niece, although they had got engaged as a result of an arrangement by the schoolmaster Once the war began, the Chinese Communist Party refused to allow the Trotskyists the slightest chance of growing or even surviving. The elimination of the Trotskyists came even before resistance to the Japanese and the Kuomintang. Zhenji ran away to Shanghai. Zigui went to the United States and also went to Shanghai. They had their reunion and their catch-up. Weiliang arrived by plane from Chongqing, on a business trip for the publishing company. I met him for an afternoon and he returned to Chongqing the next day. He had aged rapidly. In just four years, his teeth had started falling out. His boss had worked him almost to death. Shao Lu flew in from Lanzhou with Tao Shaowu, and they went to Siping Street in search of antiques to sell. Shao Lu told me that no one had heard from Wang Jintang for a long time and that it was impossible to find out why. However, his attitude and tone of voice made me think that something bad must have happened, so I asked no further questions. They were close to one another, and unless he had passed away, there was no way they could have broken off relations. There’s little time left, we must prepare for the afterlife now. Shao Lu met Little Hu in Siping Street and said he was wearing a military uniform, carrying a pistol, and working as a secret agent, and that he had a wife who was ugly and bad-tempered. It turned out that Hu Huanzhi had returned to the northeast from Wuhan to live the life of a young gentleman (his father was the Minister of Finance in Japanese-occupied Manchuria), but it would have been hard to predict what happened to him. He had been arrested in Beiping and tortured with pepper water. The Trotskyists’ “Four Great Warrior Attendants”, Si, Hu, Wang, and Liu, had transferred to the South, but they had all been arrested in Shanghai. Hu was amongst the four, arrested and gaoled in the Shanghai Army Prison. He acted resolutely and remained unbowed. Zhang Shi, the inspector-general of the Military Manpower Administration, was promoted to the post of Shanghai police chief. I spoke to Zheng Lao (Zheng Chaolin) about him. That was the first I knew that he had been a Trotskyist and betrayed the organisation. “Was it him that released you?” Zheng Lao joked. I still can’t forget his face, so I’ll use that to close this chapter about reunions.

The End of the Line It was not until January 1948 that Little Zhao found me a job as an electrician in the shipyard of the Asia Industrial Company. The man who introduced

memoirs, 1918–1948 (1986)

839

me was the company’s accountant. To give Zhao face, he raised my salary to the same level as my foreman. The factory was in Yangshupu (Shanghai). During my first three months there, I suffered much ridicule and contempt. The senior workers thought that I was a “fox masquerading as a tiger [having relied on Little Zhao to get the job]”, who knew how to get paid but not how to do the work. But within three months, my reputation had soared: “Old Shandong” (me) was a top-class electrician. Engineers came to ask me to be their assistant. By early September, the chief engineer wanted me to go with him to Subic Bay, a US military base in the Philippines. There was endless work available, and a month off every six months. The monthly pay was increased to $40 in custom-gold vouchers. I was paid a month’s wages in advance. When I gave it to Su’s wife, she said it was enough for eight quintals of rice – it would take Su six months to earn that much. The Guanjin coupons were Wang Yunwu’s “masterpiece”,53 issued on 18 September of that year. I left Shanghai on the same day on a company barge. I have been in exile ever since. Completed on 30 November 1982 Edited on 10 April 1986

Epilogue In 197X, I returned home to Shandong [from Hong Kong] for the first time since Liberation. I received a warm welcome from my family. I stayed seven days. The evening before my departure, the United Front Bureau sent someone to visit me with an apology. He said that the head of the bureau had been away on business, and would like to invite me to visit him. I went, and he threw me a banquet. Among those attending was the head of the local Public Security Bureau (the police), Section Chief X. In 198X, I paid a second visit to my place of birth. Section Chief X drove over in a jeep to invite me to a restaurant at the Zhangdian Railway Station. First a sightseeing tour, then the banquet. After the banquet was over, there were speeches. The name of an old man I met daily was mentioned, and I was asked if I knew him. After I had admitted that he was a friend, I was asked what he did. I said I don’t need to answer your questions. You invited me for a tour and a

53

Wang Yunwu was Chiang Kai-shek’s finance minister in 1948.

840

sun, trans. benton

banquet. Today I am your guest. No more questions, please. I want to go home and rest. My young daughter was kicking up a fuss and shouting “I want my Daddy”. She was also at the banquet. I tried to get her away, she was aware that something was up. She started quarrelling with her guide in the local park. Section Chief X sent his jeep to take us home. The next morning, we left for Beijing, where we stayed for ten days. On the way home to Hong Kong, I began asking myself what had happened. Why, on my first visit, had they waited until shortly before my departure to “united front” me? There were four departmental heads – had they all been away on business? Were they unsure of what to do – whether to seize me as a criminal or to fete me as a villager returned from abroad? So they’d waited until the end before declaring themselves. This second time, despite the false alarm at Zhangdian, nothing had happened in Beijing or along the way. Clearly people are right to say go back to your country but not to your village, for it’s in the big cities that policies are put into effect. I began to think: what if Section Chief X had arrested me this second time and locked me up in prison? What would I have to do? The first thing I would have to do would be to write an “autobiography”,54 from 8 years old to 38, or even 68, for use by the authorities at any time. So I have written this memoir, to cover the years 1918 to 1948. After I’d finished writing it, I duplicated five copies of the draft and sent four copies to friends and one to my nephew. My nephew got a message from the Qingdao customs saying it was counterrevolutionary and had been confiscated. Ah well, if necessary a request can be submitted to Qingdao to see that copy, or we can send another one from Hong Kong. Last year, I went to England to see my old friend [Wang Fanxi]. He suggested that my memoir was missing a chapter. Which chapter? A chapter on my four years in Yunnan. Why hadn’t I included them? I told him it was because I thought my life after my desertion was not worth mentioning, so I’d left it out. However, I complied with my old friend’s suggestion and added a chapter of travel notes. 15 April 1986

54

A common requirement in such cases, amounting in some respects to a sort of confession.

A Comment on a Book by Bo Chen [Sun Liangsi] (2011) Xu Dingming, translated by Gregor Benton

In July 2011, the literatus Xu Dingming1 published this comment on the memoir by the veteran Trotskyist seafarer Bo Chen, a pen-name of Sun Liangsi. Xu Dingming, Cong shu ying kan Xianggang wenxue (Viewing Hong Kong Literature from Books and Films), Hong Kong: Chuwen chuban she, 2019, p. 504.

The ancients believed that there were gods and kings for everything in heaven and on earth, which is why they worshipped mountains, trees, and rocks. Some who loved the sea or made their living on the sea submitted to the sea and called themselves Bo Chen [the water tribe, following Zhuangzi]. The first time I encountered Bo Chen on the Hong Kong literary scene was in 1957, when he participated in a competition organised by The New Wave of Literature and Art and won third place with his short story ‘The Wind.’ It was about the lives of sailors at sea, their gambling, quarrels, and bloody fights, and their struggle against the elements. Every detail was rendered so delicately and realistically that it could never have been written by anyone who had not worked aboard a big ship. I had read nothing else by Bo Chen until I bought this book, Cui Zhen [published by Chow Kee in Hong Kong in 1971]. From the preface and the postscript, I learned that Bo Chen came from a poor peasant family in Shandong. He had attended primary school for just a few years, worked as a labourer, served in the army, and finally made seafaring his lifelong career, travelling to the Gulf of Mexico, Australia, Singapore, and round the world. Bo Chen wrote this 300,000word book in the course of voyages between 1951 to 1961. It is nearly 400 pages long, a miscellany of fiction, sketches, vernacular stories, historical tales, comic operas, and one-act plays. Experience told me that anyone who publishes such a miscellany is bound to be a one-book author. However, Cui Zhen is a dish full of colour and fragrance.

1 Xu Dingming (1947–), a Hong Kong educator, ran a bookshop for 20 years and has written many books of poetry and prose.

© Xu Dingming, translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_071

Remembering Uncle Tai Leung [Da Liang, Leon, Sun Liangsi] (2022) Tang Yuen Ching

This short memoir drafted by Tang, a member of the League of Social Democrats and wife of Lau Shan-ching, commemorates Sun Liangsi, a Trotskyist seafarer whose memoir also features in this volume.

I met Mr Sun Liangsi (Uncle Tai Leung) in 1978 at a meeting of the Chinatown magazine Fuxing [“Re-awakening”, set up by young Trotskyists influenced by Wang Fanxi] in London in 1978. Uncle Tai Leung had come from Hong Kong to visit his comrade Mr Wang Fanxi (Uncle Gen) in Leeds and was planning a trip to France. Uncle Gen urged me to return from London to Hong Kong, for Hong Kong was close to the mainland and a place where one could quickly receive accurate information [about Chinese affairs]. It was better than buying a cow in England across a distant mountain. Uncle Tai Leung wrote down his Hong Kong telephone number and told me to call him. After returning to Hong Kong in April 1979, I went for tea with Uncle Tai Leung in the Lotus Restaurant in Central. Uncle Tai Leung had also invited Uncle Lau [Lou Guohua] and Mrs Lau [Lou’s wife], who told me that Uncle Tai Leung was very frugal but generous to his friends. In 1979, the Hong Kong mass transit system was under construction, and properties were being requisitioned in Tsuen Wan, where Uncle Tai Leung had a premise. I remember he received compensation of hk$ 750,000. Uncle Daliang asked me: What can you do with hk$750,000? I said, frankly, “You are already 70. You should put it in the bank and live off the interest”. He laughed and scolded me: “Rubbish, you’ll be eaten up by inflation”. I thought to myself, I didn’t come back to Hong Kong to make money but to import the experience of the British workers’ movement, so that workers can live with dignity, not live as slaves simply out to make money. Uncle Tai Leung had been a seafarer in his younger years. He told me about a shipboard experience that I will never forget. Once, when his ship arrived in Japan, all the crew went ashore after anchoring, to have fun. They swarmed into a bar. While everyone was happily drinking, a tsunami happened and everyone fled into the open in case there was an earthquake. Aftershocks

© Tang Yuen Ching, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_072

remembering uncle tai leung [da liang, leon, sun liangsi]

843

shook down the roof tiles. When the tsunami stopped, the Japanese all rushed back to the bar to settle their bills. Uncle Tai Leung was gobsmacked. The Japanese are so self-disciplined! Truly, we Chinese should recognise our limitations! Uncle Tai Leung was a romantic. When I paid him my New Year’s visit, he was planting napa cabbage, which we all ate at family dinner during the Spring Festival. He used to plant them in a traditional way. When they sprouted, they looked like a tiny forest. Compared to the neighouring tall and mighty daffodils, they looked exquisite and exceedingly pretty. Uncle Tai Leung was a talented writer. He had published a book of romantic fiction titled Cui Zhen, which unfortunately did not sell well. Copies were lying around in piles all over his house. Every time I went, I would take a dozen or so with me, to Uncle’s great amusement. I told him that giving them away would make him better known. The truth is, we used the covers to disguise banned books [to take across the border into China]. What looked on the surface like a romantic novel was in fact Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed or Wang Fanxi’s Mao Zedong Thought. Ap Chai,1 a young Trotskyist, had escaped from prison in Shanghai and fled to Hong Kong. He had tuberculosis, which was as difficult to treat in those days as cancer is today. Ap Chai received financial support from Uncle Tai Leung and Uncle Lau [Lou Guohua]. Mrs Lau gave him eggs to nourish him back to good health. Ap Chai first ran a knitwear factory and later switched to property development, in which he became very prosperous. That’s why Uncle Tai Leung wanted me to work in real estate in 1979, after he and Ap Chai had become good friends. Uncle Tai Leung was killed in a car accident. Sun Yi, Uncle Tai Leung’s daughter, said he was so frugal that he would no longer want her to go to school in England. She presumed that her father wouldn’t want an expensive funeral either. She would therefore simply send him to the crematorium without any ceremony. Ap Chai opposed this. He made a phone call to book a funeral hall for his old friend’s last journey. Because of the endless arguments, and the suddenness of Uncle Tai Leung’s death, Ap Chai, as the eldest, overruled Sun Yi and took care

1 Also known as Little Zhou, Ap Chai was a member of the Trotskyist Youth League in Wenzhou. Arrested together with many other members in October 1950, a year and a half after the “Liberation” of Wenzhou. He escaped in January 1951 with the help of Little Wang, a Wenzhou Public Security official who had been influenced by Trotskyism. Both fled southwards and finally settled in Hong Kong. Ap Chai later withdrew from politics and became a successful entrepreneur.

844

tang

of everything. Sun Yi didn’t buy a niche to place her father’s ashes in. Instead, she put the ashes at her home which was located at the Islands District. Mrs Lau was distraught and in tears at the funeral, hovering between life and death. I had to support and comfort her. I had not been prepared for Uncle Tai Leung’s death. It was so sudden and overwhelming.

section d Wang Fanxi

∵

Remembering Wang Fanxi (2007, 2009) Wang Yanqi, translated by Xue Feng

These two short memoirs written by Wang Fanxi’s daughter Wang Yanqi [and provided and translated by Xue Feng] commemorate Yanqi’s parents, Wang Fanxi and Ma Yusheng. Wang Fanxi never saw his wife or daughter again after leaving Shanghai in 1949. Yanqi’s son, Xue Feng, called Fengfeng here, was of course Fanxi’s grandson.

Remembering My Father Wang Fanxi In January 2000, at the start of the new century, in a letter to me, Father mentioned for the first time what he wanted to happen after his death. He said, “I wish to be cremated after death and my ashes to be brought back [to China] by a friend of mine. You can arrange for me to be buried with Grandmother at some future date”. He was referring to my son Fengfeng’s grandmother, i.e., to my Mother Ma Yusheng. Mother was saddened by the letter. She said to Fengfeng, “If you want to study abroad, you should go to Leeds, England, instead of America, so that you can keep your grandpa company for a few years”. At the time, Fengfeng had passed the toefl exam and was preparing to apply for a master’s course at Columbia University in the United States. Actually, Father was not in favour of Chinese studying overseas. He wrote to me as follows: “Most foreign universities have become places for ‘trading’ in students. You shouldn’t be superstitious about it. There has been an increasing trend for people to emigrate to foreign countries in China. However, it’s not wise to blindly follow the crowd”. However, Mother, who had always been obedient, was this time most determined. She wrote to Father saying, “We’re all going to die at some point. But it’s unacceptable for there to be no relative at the bedside accompanying us in the final days of our lives. If Fengfeng can study in Leeds, he will be able to stay by your side for quite a while; and maybe in the future he can fulfil our wishes on behalf of the family”. Things went smoothly, as if with Heaven’s help – soon after Fengfeng left for Leeds, Father wrote in a letter: “I’m happy to feel the joy of family life”. On 30 December 2002, Fengfeng said farewell to his grandfather when he reached the final destination in his 95-year journey; and on 16 January 2003, at Father’s funeral in Leeds, Fengfeng, as a representative of our family, gave a eulogy in English. Although we had been plagued by family separation for more than half a

© Wang Yanqi, translated by Xue Feng, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_073

848

wang, trans. xue

century, which was of course a tragedy, I must say that the fact that it ended well was still of some consolation to us. On the third day of the second lunar month in 2007, which was both Wenchang Pusa’s1 birthday and Father’s 100th birthday, I fulfilled his last wish by having his and my Mother’s ashes buried in the same grave. The grave was small and barely adorned. I believe neither of them ever bothered about luxury. Father treated money like dirt when he was alive, leaving behind a tangible legacy of just £1,900. His archive, containing all his manuscripts, letters, and many other historical documents, has been well preserved in forty-nine filing boxes in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. These intangible legacies that Father left to the world are certainly far more valuable than the tangible ones. On their small headstone I had a four-line poem inscribed: They waited for each other for fifty-six years. Now they’re reunited in the blue sky. Although life is ephemeral, there are no regrets and grievances. My Mother passed away on 25 December 2005, at the age of 95, coincidentally enjoying the same span of life as Father. Kind people live longer. We should rejoice in their longevity rather than grieve at their passing. Mother was an ordinary woman who invariably treated others without resentment, shame, or subterfuge. She married Father in 1936. They lived together for thirteen years, and then apart for fifty-six years. During the first thirty years after Father’s departure, we had little news of him, and at times we didn’t even know whether he was alive or dead. Mother was optimistic. She told me, “Your Father used to be called ‘Stone Pagoda.’2 He was vomiting blood on his release from prison in 1934; but he survived. He is bound to be alive”. In the course of the next twenty years, Mother lived each day in expectation, and in peace. She looked forward to receiving letters from England at a frequency of around one every two months, with the occasional photograph. In her final years Mother was bed-ridden, and her quality of life deteriorated. After the age of 85, she became progressively less mobile. Usually she sat quietly in her armchair, doing some sewing or thumbing through my Father’s letters and photographs.

1 Wenchang is the Taoist god of literature and culture. Pusa is the Chinese equivalent of Bodhisattva. Chinese folk beliefs do not generally differentiate between Buddhism and Taoism. 2 In Haining, “Stone Pagoda” was used to describe a person with a strong physique.

remembering wang fanxi (2007, 2009)

849

After Father had turned 90, he grew increasingly nostalgic and homesick. He began to worry that Mother would go before him. Music kept playing in his head, including his primary school anthem and Soviet music from the 1920s [when Wang spent three years in Moscow]. He never asked us to visit him, but suddenly two letters arrived in quick succession asking me to travel to Leeds to visit him for two months. By that time, Mother had become so weak that I couldn’t leave her alone even for one single day. My mother-inlaw was also virtually bed-ridden, and had to be looked after by my husband. I was already in my late fifties, torn between Mother, for whom I was the sole carer, and my job, with which I made a living. It’s reasonable to suppose that even if I had succeeded in getting a visa, I would have had to face the fact twice that I might never see my beloved Mother after leaving for Leeds or my beloved Father after returning to Shanghai. I was afraid not of loneliness but of tearful partings. It was hard to say hello, and equally hard to say goodbye.3 Luckily, Mother insisted that Fengfeng study at the University of Leeds instead of at a school in the United States, which somewhat made up for our regrets. One cloudy and windy day more than half a century ago, Mother said to me, “Father is going to a far-off place. Let’s see him off”. I was five years old at the time. Mother took me by the hand to Sassoon House, the North Block of Peace Hotel on Shanghai’s Bund, where there was a travel agency. Father was to collect a ticket to Hong Kong from here. On entering the lobby, I climbed onto a big sofa by the window, craning my neck to get a better view of the ships on the Huangpu River, and then pestered Mother to take me to Huangpu Park, which was in the neighbourhood. Having watched Father fading into darkness at the far end of the dreary lobby, Mother took me to the park. I was terribly excited, but when I turned round to look, I saw that Mother’s face was covered in tears. As a five-year-old, I was already able to remember things; but I could not understand why people cried when families were breaking up, or understand that that was the last time she would be in the company of her loved one. As time went by, that day became even more deeply etched onto my mind. Whenever I pass the North Block of Peace Hotel, I can always see in my mind’s eye Father’s back fading into the distance. He is now dead and will not return, but his spirit transcends dimensions of time and space and will be always there with us. Under particular historical circumstances, he chose a path that went beyond the ordinary and dedicated his life to pursuing his

3 A line from a Tang poem by Li Shangyin, a prominent Chinese poet of the late Tang dynasty.

850

wang, trans. xue

aims with integrity and perseverance. If you can’t live a life without regrets, then you can at least live it without shame. May the souls of my parents rest in peace in Heaven. Wang Yanqi, Wang Fanxi’s daughter March 2007

Fenggang “Fenggang” is among the nearly twenty pen names adopted by my Father Wang Fanxi for his writings. Although he didn’t use it often, I believe it’s a name that he treasured deep in his heart. “Fenggang” is the name of my older sister, Wang Fenggang, who died when she was just one year old. My parents married in 1936, and Fenggang was born in March 1937. One month after her birth, Father was arrested in the Shanghai French Concession. It was the third time in his life that he had been to prison. At first he was taken into custody in Longhua Prison,4 and he was later transferred to a prison in Nanjing. The prison, located somewhere around Yanziji, was destroyed in an air raid on Nanjing conducted by the Japanese. All the prisoners escaped, and even the jailers ran away. Father had only two dollars in his pocket, given to him by Wang Shunlin, the jailer. However, he still managed to travel to Wuhan and then on to Hong Kong, before returning to Shanghai in February 1938. Hardly had he got back than he began to worry, for his wife and daughter were nowhere to be found. Fortunately, he discovered their whereabouts by searching through the correspondence from a post office near our home. It turned out that Mother had fled Shanghai with my sister to seek safety in Xiaoshan, Zhejiang. My maternal grandfather had already passed away during the war, and his large courtyard house [located in Maqiao, Mother’s hometown in Haining] had been set on fire by Japanese aerial bombing. The family of three was finally reunited in Shanghai. Coincidentally, that day was Fenggang’s first birthday. To celebrate it, Father took his family to a restaurant, situated on what is today Yan’an Road, for a birthday dinner; and afterwards they went to a nearby photo studio to have a first-birthday picture taken of Fenggang. The little girl in the photo is sweetly smiling. As the saying goes, happiness breeds sorrow. The next day Fenggang contracted measles, known in Chinese as chushazi, or 4 In Shanghai during the Republican era. In 1927–1937, many Chinese Communists were held in this prison. In February 1931, five members of the League of Left-Wing Writers were executed there.

remembering wang fanxi (2007, 2009)

851

exanthematic reactions. Her condition was severe, and no treatment availed. She died a few days later. Mother told me that when Fenggang’s thin-walled casket was brought to our door, Father hugged her body and could not stop weeping. According to Mother, she had never seen Father shed so many tears. Father was imprisoned four times in his life. The second time was in the summer of 1931, when he was held in Suzhou Prison. There he met Lou Zichun [Lou Guohua], who became his lifelong friend. The harsh conditions and inhumane treatment in prison damaged his health [he had lung and stomach problems]. Mother said that it was scary to see him vomit blood in such quantities that she had to use a basin to capture it. At the end of 1934, Lou Zichun and Father were released from prison one after the other, only to learn that their wives had left them and remarried. After his release, Father tried to return to his “home” in Shanghai, but was turned away, because he was “lice-infested”. He had no other choice, despite his poor health, but to travel back to his hometown [Xiashi, in Haining], which he had left fourteen years before. He rented a small room on the West Hill, where he could enjoy fresh air. One day, to his surprise, at the Yayan Teahouse he came across a good friend, a primary school classmate, who had actually become my uncle-in-law, the husband of my mother’s second older sister. My second aunt’s hometown was Maqiao, to the south of Xiashi, set in idyllic surroundings. My uncle-in-law took Father to Maqiao, where he got to know my mother, Ma Yusheng. For some time Father made regular visits to Grandfather’s courtyard house. As soon as he arrived, my two uncles [my mother’s two younger brothers] immediately set off to collect river snails from the river beside their home. At lunchtime, Father’s three favourite dishes were set out on the table: stir-fried river snails with ginger and spring onion, steamed “stinky tofu”, and stewed pork with preserved vegetables. The country trails and mulberry fields healed his lungs and soothed his heart. In 1936 my parents got married in Shanghai and gave birth to my Fenggang in March 1937. Father became emotional about the past after reaching the age of 90. The melody of his primary school anthem and old songs from the Soviet Union in the 1920s occupied his mind. One of his favourite songs in his youth was: Wide is my Motherland, with many forests, fields and rivers. I know of no other country where a person can breathe in such freedom. In his letters [from England] he would often tell us stories about our relatives, including some about my second aunt and Fenggang. One day in 1999, I received a letter from him, asking for a picture of Fenggang. At the time, Mother had begun to lose her mind. She told me that after Fenggang’s death, her first-birthday photo had been enlarged and placed in a wardrobe. I rummaged

852

wang, trans. xue

around and finally found the photo. I immediately went to the Wang Kai Photo Studio to have several copies made, and posted them off. To my delight, despite frequent moves and many “home raids” [in 1952, at the time of the round-up of Chinese Trotskyists, during the Cultural Revolution, and at other times], the photo had remained tucked away in a hidden compartment in the wardrobe. Father replied very quickly this time. He said, “I burst into tears as soon as I saw Fenggang’s photo”. I didn’t show this letter to Mother. Hopefully her soul in Heaven will forgive me. Father was subjected to inhumane torture in prison under the Kuomintang. He was hit by the interrogator with a wooden stick on the back of his head and on his body, until the stick broke and flew out of the interrogator’s hand. Father was covered in wounds and bruises, hovering between life and death. But though he was always willing to shed his blood, he never shed tears in prison. He cried only on account of his tiny daughter: he was a man of great tenacity but his heart was soft. Like us, he was an ordinary person undergoing pain, distress, and hardship. However, he was also an extraordinary person, for he chose an unusual path in life, the one of which he dreamt and for which he fought. Life is intractable, as if controlled by an invisible force. But there is still something immovable at the bottom of the heart of some people, in defence of which they are prepared to put everything aside, to persevere until the end without ever turning back. I believe Father to be such a person. Perhaps Fenggang, the phoenix on the hill,5 does not belong to the mortal realm. Wang Yanqi, Wang Fanxi and Ma Yusheng’s daughter March 2009

5 The meaning of her name in Chinese.

Remembering Wang Fanxi (2022) Lau Shan-ching [Liu Shanqing]

Lau Shan-ching (1951–) is a Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and former member of the Revolutionary Marxist League. Under the influence of the global youth radicalisation, the 1970s gave rise to a series of mass movements in Hong Kong, concerned with anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, the national identity issue, and defending the Diaoyu Islands. The traditionally pro-ccp trade unions were drifting away from the workers’ struggle, and political organisations initiated by young Trotskyists sprang up in Hong Kong, centred on organisations such as the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml) and the magazine October Review. Lau participated in those social movements during his student years. After graduating from the University of Hong Kong, he joined the rml. He became a standing committee member and was in charge of China affairs. He was arrested for supporting the democracy movement in mainland China and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment (1982–1991) for engaging in “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement”. He has since been persecuted and intimidated by the National Security Office for his persistence in commemorating the 4 June Incident. This article recalls the visit Lau paid to Wang in 1992 in Leeds, after Lau’s release from prison in China.

I only met Genshu once. He was, of course, a big name, having served as Zhou Enlai’s secretary for a short time [after returning from Moscow]. Tang Yuen Ching1 was fond of telling stories about him. You could say that he had the grace of a diplomat, standing at the door to greet his young comrades, chattering wittily and elegantly. I arranged a speaking tour after my release from prison, and I had a tight schedule. The friends who received me wanted to arrange some entertainment and sightseeing to console me for my ten years’ absence from society, but I did my best to resist, because I wanted to see some people and to have a good rest. I didn’t have many days in England, and I spent one of them visiting Genshu. There was a group of Chinese Trotskyist friends in England, and they were all very respectful of Genshu. When I visited him, he was in his twilight years, and

1 Tang is Lau’s wife.

© Lau Shan-ching [Liu Shanqing], 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_074

854

lau

his energy was not as great as in the past. This bestowed on him a solemn and less playful demeanour appearance. He lived alone in Leeds, and it took us several hours to drive north from London. We had to come and go on the same day, so we didn’t have much time to meet him. What’s more, he had some age-related ailments, so he was nervous about meeting guests. Because of that, we reckoned on disturbing him for no more than around an hour. A comrade nicknamed “Bus Driver”2 had a car, and he was a good friend of Genshu’s. He was responsible for driving us to Leeds and then back to London. The three of us left early, I seem to remember Ng Lui Nam3 also accompanied us. “Bus Driver” talked along the way about Genshu’s recent situation. He was a very kind-hearted person, and had offered to put up a female neighbour, a foreigner, who had been driven out by her boyfriend on a cold winter’s day, her luggage left strewn around her on the ground. But having arrived in his flat, she refused to leave. Finally, he had to ask “Bus Driver” to get her to leave. “Bus driver” also had things to say about Long Hair.4 When Long Hair travelled to England, Genshu put him up for a while. Long Hair was a pub-goer, and Genshu had to stay up late into the night waiting for him to come home. Long Hair had a key to the door, but Genshu insisted on staying up, just as he insisted on greeting visitors at the door. Finally, I met Genshu. He seemed to have a strong physique. He had a square face and must have been handsome when young. Although he was suffering from chronic diseases and had had a difficult life, he exuded a sense of peace. As Hardy said in The Return of the Native: “As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities”. It was impossible for anyone who visited him not to be touched by his experiences and his integrity. Both Genshu and I cherished this meeting, although we were aware that we could not talk about everything and that it might be the only time we would meet. Lui Nam was an anarchist. When he started filming our meeting, Genshu told him to stop. I understood: he was a giant of our history, worried about the 2 Jabez Lam, a Chinese community leader in London. Jabez is pronounced more or less like the word “bus driver” in Cantonese. 3 Wu Lünan, a social activist in the UK, was born and bred in Hong Kong, and moved to the UK in the 1980s. He co-founded Chinese for Labour in 1999, and organises a 4 June vigil every year in London. 4 i.e., Leung Kwok Hung (Liang Guoxiong), a social activist in Hong Kong, who was at one time a member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council. A Trotskyist in his youth, he was a member of the Revolutionary Marxist League.

remembering wang fanxi (2022)

855

possibility that recording the meeting might have unpredictable consequences. While I talked with Genshu, “Bus driver” and Lui Nam sat there without interrupting. Genshu was concerned about Ng Chung Yin’s behaviour.5 When I got up to say goodbye, he appeared reluctant, as if he wanted me to stay overnight. I was also saddened, but my schedule was too tight. Genshu finally told me that he was worried that I would become a pawn of Western politicians. After I had returned to London, I wrote to tell him that I understood what he meant and would bear his words in mind. A long time later, I read the notes he wrote in his final years. It turned out that he was rather unhappy with the meeting, and his comments about me suggested a certain lukewarmness. He thought I was not a political person, and in that respect he was right. Our political ability is minimal compared to his generation. He still thought I would be used by the West as a pawn against China, but I proved him wrong. Nevertheless, he mentioned in his notes my follow-up letter after our meeting, which might have been a surprise to him, since he had met with occasional unintended discourtesy on the part of those who came to express their admiration for him. In his notes, he also mentioned Long Hair, who he said was good at learning but had adopted some bad Western habits and lacked the good Chinese tradition. In his eyes, Au Loong-yu was more impressive. This made me understand that he was still concerned about developing the Trotskyists and that he valued the Marxist-Leninist training of the young people, while my own theoretical development was indeed too poor. 19 January 2022

5 Ng Chung Yin (Wu Zhongxian, 1946–1994), a Hong Kong Trotskyist activist. He founded the Revolutionary Marxist League, a Trotskyist party, in 1974. He went to China in 1981 to try to get in touch with Chinese political activists. After spending 17 days in Beijing, he was arrested on his way to Nanjing. He was said to have surrendered to the Chinese authority, although he insisted that this was a “fake” defection. He was expelled from the Trotskyist party due to the incident, which ended his political career.

Remembering Mr Wang Fanxi, “Uncle Gen” (2022) Tang Yuen Ching

This short memoir by Tang Yuen Ching, at one time a social activist and Trotskyist in Hong Kong and the wife of Lau Shan-ching, the imprisoned pro-democracy activist, recalls Tang’s visits to Wang in the UK. Tang wrote it especially for this volume.

I met Mr Wang Fanxi in 1978 when he accompanied an old comrade on a trip from London to France, two old men in the company of us two youngsters. The first time we met, Uncle Gen easily dealt with my doubts by citing Trotsky’s theories. Back then, the debate was about whether the road China had taken [after the Cultural Revolution] was socialist or capitalist. It was just after the ten years of catastrophe during the Cultural Revolution. Rebuilding from the ruins would inevitably bring business opportunities or opportunities in life, it depended on your point of view and perspective! Uncle Gen persuaded me to return to Hong Kong. Why? 1. Business opportunities were limitless. 2. Information obtained at first-hand was always more reliable than information that was the result of deep reflection. 3. Hong Kong was the closest place to the Mainland, so it would be wrong to miss the opportunity. 4. Talents and opportunities should not to be wasted. Uncle Gen was already seventy, but he still cherished his native country. He hoped that the next generation would return to China and do the work that he had intended to do. As well us, Uncle Gen persuaded other young people to return to Hong Kong. Before leaving, we went up to Leeds to visit the old man – who by that time really was an old man. He had Parkinson’s, and his hands shook. Although [after 1979] he lived alone, he still had many people to look after him. In the end, however, he had always had to rely on his will and resources. There was no tofu in Leeds in those days. Before going up to Leeds, I went to Chinatown to buy some tofu and some Shanghainese food to take with me. Uncle Gen happily greeted me at the door. His diplomatic style was unforgettable. As he stood there at the door, full of dignity, I thought at most that he would politely accept my bag. What I didn’t expect was the diplomatic bear hug he gave me.

© Tang Yuen Ching, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_075

remembering mr wang fanxi, “uncle gen” (2022)

857

When he learned that I had brought tofu with me, he said with a flash of humour, “I am so happy to have eaten Tang Yuen Ching’s tofu!”1 We laughed together. Happiness is something that can only be felt but not expressed. After returning to Hong Kong, I visited him for the third time in January or February 1989, during the Chinese New Year holiday. Somewhat upset at the away of a comrade in Hong Kong, I had planned to emigrate to the UK. Uncle Gen said frankly: “A real socialist system will not be seen in my lifetime or yours, not even in the next four to five generations. But that doesn’t mean that we should give up on it. In the past, women had to remain widows when their husbands died. They suffered discrimination if they remarried, and they were drowned in the pig-dip cage if they had children before marriage. It took an age of struggle to overthrow feudal rites. The struggle for freedom and equality did not happen overnight; it needed education, enlightenment, integration, and the convergence of civilisations before the process was completed. South Africa’s policy of apartheid was only overthrown after a long period of struggle and reform. It is easy to give up, and it is difficult to choose good and persevere. This is even more true of culture, which flows in an endless stream and has a long history”. Uncle Gen was already so old! Young Chinese students in those days, especially those independently funded and studying abroad, were not ashamed to ask questions and were clearly seeking a way out. They said that Beijing was already on the brink of a volcano. In the universities, students had stopped throwing away their empty bottles and were storing them up for when the time came to throw them at Xiaoping.2 They were deeply dissatisfied with Deng Xiaoping’s policies, and with a whole host of problems including profiteering, bribery, corruption, and incompetence, which were leading China to the point of collapse. I was terrified to hear all this [from Uncle Gen], and I could see and feel the urgency of the situation! After hurrying back to Hong Kong, I encountered a signature campaign calling for the release of [the jailed dissident] Wei Jingsheng.3 We felt that Wei was simply one of many political prisoners! We therefore issued a call for the release of all political prisoners.

1 To eat a woman’s tofu meant to flirt with her. 2 Xiaoping means little bottle. Smashing little bottles was, at the time, a way of showing contempt for Deng Xiaoping. 3 Wei Jingsheng (1950–) is a Chinese political dissident who wrote a well-known wallposter “The Fifth Modernisation” on the Democracy Wall in Beijing in 1978. Wei was later arrested and jailed for a total of 18 years (1979–1993, 1994–1997). He was deported to the USA in 1997.

858

tang

After Hu Yaobang died in Beijing in April 1989 and the start of the 4 June democracy movement, events confirmed the truth of what Mr Wang Fanxi had said, that it is easy to give up but hard to opt for the good, especially given the long drag of culture. 2 February 2022

section e Xiong Andong

∵

Memoirs (2006) Xiong Andong, translated by Gregor Benton

This autobiography of Xiong Andong, a veteran Trotskyist from Shandong, describes his childhood, his conversion to Trotskyism (while a student at the Sichuan National Sixth Middle School), his participation in Trotskyist underground activities in Chongqing and Shanghai, and his 27 years in prison and on a labour farm under the ccp. The original Chinese text was transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive.

Leaving Home as a Young Boy – My Childhood I am originally from Maojiakou in Huimin County in Shandong Province, a natural village of some thirty families, close to the bank of the Yellow River. Born in 1922, I spent my childhood there until the age of twelve. I have never forgotten sailing on the river’s muddy waters. When I was twelve, Great Grandmother passed away and Father, after coming home for the funeral from Ji’nan, decided to take me with him to Ji’nan to study, while leaving Younger Brother, who was three years younger than me, behind with Mother. When I left home, Mother stood silently at the front door, and when I looked back, she was still watching. She was thirty-five years old at the time. I could not know that I would not see her again for the next forty years, by which time she was already seventy-five years old and I was in my fifties. After Father took me away, he never returned. My parents married in the old-fashioned way, through matchmakers. Father was the same age as the twentieth century when, as a young man, he was shaken to the core by the new thinking of the May Fourth Movement. After graduating from university, he suggested dissolving his marriage with Mother – I was eight years old at the time. Both generations of my elderly grandparents opposed his suggestion, as an unkind and unjust repudiation of a wife who had already given birth to two sons. They were unwilling to tell the relatives and lose face. We Chinese are a face-loving people. To this day, face underpins people’s social values. With old and new ideas at loggerheads, Father unilaterally announced in a newspaper advertisement that he had divorced Mother and started a separate family in Ji’nan. In those days, men were free to do as they pleased, while women were in bondage and had to suffer extreme misfortune. Women who were divorced hanged themselves, jumped down wells, and killed themselves

© Xiong Andong, translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_076

862

xiong, trans. benton

with scissors. Mother, who was protected by my grandparents, was not thrown out of the house, but she lost all sense of happiness and joy and was eventually buried with barely a word spoken. Father lived in a rented house in Ji’nan, a five-room dwelling with a large courtyard and three acacia trees taller than the roof. To the south was a similar dwelling, rented by another family, and to the west were two small houses shared by the servants of the two families. To the east was a stone wall and behind it a vegetable patch. The family was small: Father, Mother (I called my birth mother niang, my stepmother ma), Grandmother and me, and a maid, Mother Zhang. Father used to teach at the Ji’nan Teacher Training College, where he stood in as headmaster. The year I arrived in Ji’nan, he was transferred to the Pingyuan Teacher Training College, 180 li [90km]1 from Ji’nan, on the Jinpu Railway line. After graduating from Ji’nan Women’s Normal, Stepmother also went to Pingyuan to teach. Grandma and I stayed in Ji’nan. Grandma treated me badly. In front of Father, she lavished affection on me, but behind Father’s back she treated me coldly. My naive mind, suffering hurt for the first time, began to understand the meaning of human feeling. The maid, Mother Zhang, was a big, honest country woman. Her husband was in the army and she had no news of him. She had no children, so it had been hard for her to live in the countryside, and she was happy to make the move to Ji’nan, where she treated me with kindness. Father sent me to Ji’nan Number 2 Experimental Primary School, where most of the teachers were students from my father’s teaching days at Ji’nan Normal. The head teacher, Zhang Zijian, was arrested during the 1925–1927 revolution and my father had to bail him out. I studied for three years at a private village school in the countryside. I read The Three Character Classic, The Hundred Surnames, Zhu Zi’s Motto on Family Governance, a copy of the Analects of Confucius, and half of Mencius. Mr Zhang gave me an oral and written test and, fearing that I would not be able to keep up with the class in arithmetic, put me the third grade. I attended primary school for another four years and was the oldest in my class. The school had a large playground, a basketball court, a volleyball court, a tennis court, a sandpit for high and long jumping, and a field for shot put and discus. Everything was available. I had never seen anything like it in the countryside and found everything so new that I was scared when I took my first pe lesson. Some of my classmates saw that I was a village boy and bullied me for

1 Li is known as the Chinese mile, a traditional Chinese unit of distance. 1 li is usually equivalent to 500 m or 0.5 km. [newly added reference].

memoirs (2006)

863

not knowing how to do sport. They deliberately bounced the ball in front of me and taunted me with it. The teacher who taught physical education, Mr Zhuang, was also a student of my father’s. He smiled at me and patiently taught me the ropes. The school library had a large collection of books, with several shelves full of the Commercial Press’s Universal Library.2 I had heard the story of The Water Margin in the countryside, and I borrowed it from the library to take home and read (in a shortened version put together for young people). It was the first full-length novel I had ever read. My Chinese teacher introduced me to Zhang Tianyi’s Big Lin and Little Lin and Bing Xin’s To Young Readers, and a classmate who sat at the same desk as me introduced me to The Struggling Child’s Efforts, a novel translated from the Italian. The Water Margin was just a story, but with The Struggling Child I entered the role and felt the joys and sorrows of the world.3 The first class on Mondays was always the same: the whole school gathered together in the auditorium and was led by the headmaster in reciting President’s [Sun Yat-sen’s] Will, singing the national anthem, saluting the President’s statue, and other ceremonies. The talk was always about two issues: the invasion of Jehol and Chahar by the Japanese army and the Japanese ronins’ misdeeds along the Pingjin Railway; the other issue was the Central Army’s fight against the Communists in Jiangxi. We were told that the Communists were killing and burning people and that they held all the wives in common. That was the first time I first heard the name of the Communist Party and of Zhu Mao.4 3 May was the day of national shame. In 1928, the Japanese army sent troops to Ji’nan to stop the advance of the Northern Expeditionary Army up to the Pingjin Railway line. They killed more than 5,000 people, including students, and Cai Gongshi, the Chinese emissary who protested to the Japanese, was brutally killed by cutting out his tongue. Every year on 3 May, Mr Zhang gave a speech, during which he was often stifled by emotion and unable to continue. Patriotism and the wish for revenge prompted a group of us to smash up a shop near the school entrance that sold Japanese goods. Our action was praised by the onlookers and the teachers did not stop us. It was the first time I had ever participated in such an action.

2 The Universal Library (Wanyou wenku) was a collection of books published by the Commercial Press starting in 1929, with a total of 1,710 titles and 4,000 volumes. 3 The Water Margin is an early novel written in the early Ming Dynasty about a group of 108 outlaws who rebel against the Song government. 4 Zhu De and Mao Zedong, founders of the Chinese Red Army.

864

xiong, trans. benton

In the two years between 1935 and 1936, the Japanese army continued its invasion of northern China, attacking cities and military targets. The battles of Bailingmiao and Xifengkou took place either side of the Great Wall; the Japanese ronins created an autonomous government in Jidong run by traitors, which further roused the anger of the Chinese people. The anti-Japanese salvation movement went from strength to strength. We primary school students were also involved in the anti-Japanese movement, and our teachers led us out onto the streets, shouting slogans, waving banners, distributing leaflets, and collecting donations for the anti-Japanese army in Suiyuan. At the time of the Xi’an Incident in December 1936,5 I was in the sixth grade and could already read newspapers – Father had a subscription to Ta Kung Pao. There were all sorts of legends about the Xi’an Incident, and from the discussions of the adults and teachers, I knew that the civil war had stopped and the Communists were now cooperating with the Kuomintang against Japan. Every summer and winter, Father and Mother returned to Ji’nan for a holiday. Father’s colleagues and friends used to bring their wives to our house for visits. Song Zhanzhai and Gao Chuanzhu, who were from the same village and middle school, were very close to my father – they were like brothers-in-arms. Song Zhanzai taught at Pingyuan Teacher Training College and was director of the primary school, and his wife had been a very good classmate of Mother’s while at the Women’s Training College. Gao Chuanzhu was an official in the central government in Nanjing. Whenever he was on official business in Ji’nan, he would always come to my house to play Go with my father and have dinner before leaving. In the countryside, I had never before met an official, and I always thought that officials would look like the caricature officials on the village opera stage, but he did not look at all like that. He was so calm and approachable that I called him Uncle Gao. I met him when I was in Chongtou during the war and in Nanjing during the civil war. When I was arrested as a Trotskyist in 1952, I had a lot of trouble during my interrogation clarifying my relationship with him. Wang Xintang’s wife was also a classmate of Mother’s at the Women’s Teacher Training College, and their house was close to mine, so they often visited. Wang Xintang liked to talk about current affairs and he told my father about the Xi’an Incident, which had barely reached the newspapers at the time. When war broke out, he remained in Ji’nan, where he was murdered by the enemy and the puppets after refusing to take up a post under them.

5 During this incident, military leaders of the Kuomintang detained Chiang Kai-shek in order to force him to change his accommodationist policy regarding Japan and the ccp.

memoirs (2006)

865

The two teachers who made the deepest impression on me were Li Qinghua and Ma Xiaopeng, both of whom taught at the Pingyuan Teacher Training College, Li Qinghua teaching art and Ma Xiaopeng teaching history. Li Qinghua was young, not yet married, and liked to joke. Mother once said she would introduce him to a girlfriend from Ji’nan Women’s Normal. He visited my house, and often asked me to climb Qianfo Mountain or go to Daming Lake with him. He carried a painting kit in his backpack and painted landscapes and sketched people in his vivid way, rendering the clouds and lake in just a few strokes. I bought twelve colour brushes and a drawing book, and when I was 5 or 6, I learned to draw from my art teacher. Although I did not continue drawing later, I was always interested in art. I had a soft spot for Mr Ma Xiaopeng because he refused to take a new wife. From the time I was eight, when I learned that Mother had been abandoned by Father, I often saw her at home in tears. Influenced by my grandparents’ traditional thinking, I had an aversion to Father marrying again. After arriving in Ji’nan at the age of twelve, my stepmother was kind to me and tutored me in arithmetic, but I never felt a close mother-son bond. I also found it difficult to get close to the new-fashioned wives of my father’s friends. When Mr Ma Xiaopeng brought his wife from the countryside to visit me, I felt differently. When I saw Mrs Ma, I thought of my mother, and felt close to both Mr Ma and his wife. Mr Ma once gave me a set of children’s books published by Kaiming Bookstore, as well as Bing Xin’s To Young Readers, Ye Shaojun [Shengtao]’s The Scarecrow, Zhang Tianyi’s Big Lin and Little Lin, and many biographies of world scientists, published in children’s editions by the Commercial Press.6 When Father led the students and teachers of his school in Shandong into exile after the outbreak of the 7 July Incident, I learned that two teachers, Li Qinghua and Ma Xiaopeng, who had joined the Communist Party during the revolutionary events of the 1920s, had stayed behind rather than go into exile. They led some of their students in guerrilla attacks in enemy-occupied areas. During my exile starting in 1938, I became interested in the Communist Party’s role in the war and I developed good feelings towards it because of what Li Qinghua and Ma Xiaopeng, and my primary school teacher Zhang Zijian, had done. When I visited Father in Xuzhou after my civil rights were restored in 1980,7 he told me that during the war, Li Qinghua, alias Li Juruo, had died fighting the 6 They were all well-known writers of the Republican era. 7 Xiong Andong was released from prison by the Communists in 1972 but remained in detention.

866

xiong, trans. benton

enemy in Jiaodong. Ma Xiaopeng also died a tragic death. He was killed in 1939 during the Huxi Incident in western Shandong, when he was in charge of propaganda in the ccp Committee in Huxi District, and he was accused of being a Trotskyist. Later, I learned that after the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, all those persecuted during the Huxi Incident had been rehabilitated.8

Resisting Japan and Moving to Sichuan In the summer of 1937, I entered the first year of Ji’nan Number 1 Junior Middle School (hereafter Jizhong). It had been two months since the Lugouqiao Incident that marked the start of the full-scale Japanese invasion, and no one believed that a war would happen – the Nationalist government in Nanjing was used to compromising with Japan. In October, after the Japanese had captured the Pingjin Railway, they invaded southwards along the Jinpu Railway and approached Ji’nan, so Sun Dongsheng, the headmaster of Jizhong, decided to move the school to Tai’an and temporarily borrowed the Tai’an Middle School premises for classes. On 24 December, the eve of the Japanese invasion of Ji’nan, Japanese planes bombed Tai’an for a whole day. A few of us didn’t have time to flee the city, so we cowered beneath the city walls, listening to the sound of planes overhead and the ear-splitting hiss of bombs hitting the ground, followed by a ground-shaking explosion and the sound of houses collapsing. As one group of planes departed, another flew in to replace it, taking turns to bomb the city. We returned to school, having been baptised in the horrors of war, and our teachers and classmates were both scared and awakened by the bombing. That night, Sun Dongsheng decided to lead the whole school of more than 200 students and teachers away from Tai’an, each carrying their own luggage. We arrived in Xuchang, Henan Province, in January 1938, by way of western Shandong and eastern Henan. We stayed in Xuchang and insisted on continuing our classes. Sun Dongsheng’s advice to “travel ten thousand li and read ten thousand books” encouraged us. His optimism and belief in freedom and democracy helped us grow up in the big school of society during the war years. During the Spring Festival in Xuchang, on New Year’s Eve, the sound of firecrackers rang out in thousands of homes, and we had our first taste of

8 The Communists later admitted that many anti-Japanese fighters were killed indiscriminately.

memoirs (2006)

867

the bitterness at being away from our native place. Some students lay on their beds with quilts over their heads and cried. Kui Kuan, Hou Bingchen, and I ran into the courtyard and sang: “My home is on the Songhua River in the northeast”, a resistance song. When we got to “Oh parents, when will we …,”. we all choked back tears and could sing no further, with the firecrackers still exploding in the distance. In early March, we packed our rucksacks and marched off for a week to the town of Liqi (now Sheqi County) in Nanyang. On the fourth day of the march, we crossed the border between Ye County and Fangcheng, the poorest area in Henan at the time, rumoured to be rampant with bandits, but who turned out to be peasants with no land to till. The slogans posted along the way read: “It is better to be a soldier than a bandit”, “A bandit is not the son of a good man”, etc. In those days, when people were in despair and soldiers and bandits were often indistinguishable, “It is better to be a soldier than a bandit” became a propaganda slogan. Sheqi had used to be a big town of national renown with a prosperous commerce and developed handicrafts. There were dozens of streets and alleys, and handicraft workshops of all kinds, each in its own street. But what we saw was a depressed and decaying town, the result of imperialist pressure since the end of the Qing Dynasty and the depredations of the warlord era in the early days of the Republic of China. More than 2,000 students and teachers from middle schools and teacher training colleges from all over Shandong arrived in the town and decided to form the “Shandong United Middle School” under the leadership of the Shandong Provincial Education Department. In reality, however, the components of the union remained in a state of fragmentation. More than 200 students lived in the temple hall next to the Shan-Shaan Association Hall, sleeping on the floor at night and rolling up their bedding during the day to listen to the teachers in separate classes, studying while at the same time carrying out anti-Japanese propaganda activities. At the start of the wartime united front between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, the public was in a mood to resist the enemy. The Battle of Taierzhuang led to a great victory over the Japanese, and the people were encouraged by news of it. Chen Daqing, the divisional commander, and university students who had joined the army staged a parade. As I watched the procession, I envied the students and looked forward to further victories. In mid-May, when Xuzhou was lost and Zhengzhou was in extreme danger, we packed our rucksacks once again and said goodbye to the old town of Qiuqi, moving further and further away from home towards the northwestern corner of Hubei Province, in the direction of Yunyang.

868

xiong, trans. benton

The day after leaving Sheqi, we passed through Nanyang on the way to Zhenping, Neixiang, and Zhechuan, where there was little banditry or drugaddiction, and into the Wudang Mountains. After ten days on foot, we arrived at the end of May in Yunyang, on the bank of the Han River. More than 2,000 students and teachers congregated in the town, which then came under the Ministry of Education. Yunyang is a mountain town dominated by the Ma Wang Temple, which became our school site. A number of simple classrooms and dormitories for teachers and students were built, with bamboo pillars and beams, thatched roofs, bamboo fences, and adobe walls. It rained heavily in Yunyang, so we slept under a length of tung-oil cloth, in beds that were often soaking wet. Life was hard, with dysentery and malaria, and more than one hundred students fell ill. The latrines stank to high heaven, and there was shit everywhere, even in the courtyard. The provincial Shandong United Middle School was, as I said, far from united, and each component worked on its own. Powerful figures in Shandong’s educational circles fought over its leadership and corruption was rampant. Teachers’ salaries and students’ living expenses were embezzled by officials, creating a big mess and much chaos. In this school of more than 2,000 students, the 200-odd teachers and students of Jizhong formed an active, progressive-minded collective, and pasted colourful wall posters all over the campus. Under the leadership of Qu Yaxian, a music teacher, a drama group formed, and staged plays after school in the streets. In August 1938, Sun Zhennan, the younger brother of Sun Dongsheng, the former headmaster of Jizhong, came to Yunyang from Yan’an9 to recruit talent. A dozen people, including the mathematics teacher Mi Renfu and Sun Guanwen, the son of the headmaster, and the Jizhong student Yu Xinmin, went back with Sun Chennan to Yan’an. This event was semi-public at the time and had a great impact on us students. Our main concern as students was the war, but the school authorities were too busy competing for power and profit to care about such matters, and their main concern was to take advantage of the chaos to make money. The military training instructor was unable to inspire us. In his civics class, Mr Yan Zigui10 attracted an overflow audience whenever he spoke on current affairs. He criticised the tendency to blind optimism and blind pessimism and the idea that 9 10

I.e., the ccp’s capital during the Sino-Japanese war. Yan Zigui had Trotskyist tendencies. See Sun Liangsi’s memoir [Part 3, Section C], and below.

memoirs (2006)

869

“weapons-only will decide”. He pointed out that the conditions for victory in a long war were: vigorous mobilisation of the masses, universal mobilisation, an improvement in soldiers’ living conditions, a reduction in working hours, an eight-hour working day, land to the tiller, and the immediate convening of a national assembly with universal suffrage to lead the war. These principles helped us to see things more clearly and to strengthen our conviction in the fight for victory. In October 1938, when Wuhan fell, the situation became tense and we were all on tenterhooks. The Ministry of Education ordered our relocation to Sichuan. The situation in the school became even more chaotic and the authorities were in a state of anarchy. To stop us getting caught up in the conflict, Sun Dongsheng led more than 200 students and teachers from the former Jizhong School away from Yunyang on December 1, 1938, accompanied by large numbers of students from other schools who envied our democratic procedures. The Han River runs westwards from Yunyang to Ankang in Shaanxi Province, through the serried peaks of the Tailing and Daba Mountains, where the population is sparse. Two years earlier, in 1936, the Red Front Army, led by [the maverick Communist] Zhang Guotao, had stayed in this area for more than a year, and traces of its occupation could still be seen in remote temples in the mountains. On one large stone Zhang’s forces had carved the words “there’ll be salt to eat if we reach Sichuan”. The children of the mountain villagers mistook us for the Red Army and scrambled around shouting, “The Soviets have come to sing to us”, – evidently the Red Front Army had been on good terms with the people in this area, contrary to Kuomintang propaganda, which claimed that the Communists merely killed people and lit fires. The mountain people in this area were generally poor, and adults and children stood shivering in the cold with few clothes on. From Ankang to Hanzhong, in the basin of southern Shaanxi, the roads are flat with many paths crisscrossing one another, numerous wheat and vegetable fields, bamboo fences, simple dwellings, a constant clucking of hens and barking of dogs, billowing smoke, and herd boys riding home in an atmosphere of peace. I acquired scabies in Ankang, in accordance with the popular saying, “Even the gods cannot escape scabies in southern Shaanxi”. Many of my classmates were also infected, and the itching was so unbearable that we had to sit around a wood fire and keep rubbing sulphur powder on our bodies. While staying at one point in Chenggu, I visited a bookstore near the National Northwestern University and bought three books: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The Foundations of Communism, and Basic Questions of Social Science. Foundations of Communism included the text of The Communist Manifesto and Friedrich Engels’ The Principles of Communism (in 25 Questions and

870

xiong, trans. benton

Answers). At the time, I bought them not out of conviction but out of curiosity, to know what Communism was about. When in primary school, I had listened to the headmaster talk every Monday about the Kuomintang’s Three People’s Principles (nationalism, people’s rights, and people’s livelihood). I also knew that Sun Yat-sen advocated the reform of capitalism, land to the tiller, and a world for the common good and a universal commonwealth. Though I bought the three books out of curiosity, two years later I was a believer in socialism as expounded by Marx and Engels. After Hanzhong, we travelled south into Sichuan, sometimes along the freshly gravelled Sichuan-Shaanxi highway and sometimes along ancient paths by way of a shortcut. In Ningqiang, during the Spring Festival in 1939, I saw a platoon of soldiers with guns, led by a company commander, escorting dozens of press-ganged conscripts to the divisional control area, as if escorting prisoners. I recall a scene in Yunyang when I was washing clothes with some schoolmates by the side of the Bangchui River, northwest of the city, and saw a group of soldiers execute two conscripts who had tried to escape, with the entire group forced to watch. Between January and early February 1939, more than 350 students and teachers led by Sun Dongsheng arrived in the Mianyang area of Sichuan. This was followed by the arrival of more than 2,000 other students and teachers and the establishment of the “National Sixth Middle School”, directly under the Kuomintang’s Ministry of Education. Its headquarters were located in Mianyang (in the senior middle school building), with other schools in other places. The fourth branch was mainly composed of students and teachers from the old Jizhong, and Sun Dongsheng remained its headmaster. The school had travelled 5,000 li [2,500km] on foot for more than a year through the five provinces of Shandong, Henan, Hubei, Shaanxi, and Sichuan to reach the unoccupied rear [“free China”]. In early 1942, the Ministry of Education ordered the abolition of the fourth branch because it was considered to have “turned red”.

The Fourth Branch of the Sichuan National Sixth Middle School Luojiang is a beautiful, quiet town on the banks of the Rijiang River in Sichuan. We used the Wen Temple, the Shan-Shaan Association Hall, the Chenghuang Temple, and the Sansheng Temple for our school buildings and student dormitories, while teachers rented accommodation in private homes. Between March 1939, when classes began, and February 1942, when it was abolished by the Ministry of Education on the pretext of its “rebellion”, the

memoirs (2006)

871

branch existed for three whole years. In 1939 and 1940, I completed my second and third years at the college. I left Luojiang in early 1941 after graduating from junior middle school. Here are some of the teachers who had a big influence on us. Sun Dongsheng A graduate of Peking University, he became headmaster of Ji’nan Number 1 Junior Middle School in Shandong Province. After the 7 July Incident in 1937, he left his wife and children behind and led more than 200 students and teachers on a 5,000-li trek that reached Luojiang in Sichuan in early 1939. He inspired us to persevere in our studies by saying, “Walk ten thousand li and read ten thousand books”. He inspired us to strive for excellence by reciting the poetry of Lu You.11 “Knowledge is light, ignorance is darkness”, he said. He sprinkled the democratic and liberal spirit of the May Fourth era into our hearts and minds. He opposed the dull teaching methods of the cramming style. Instead, he advocated free study, free research, and free reading. He taught us self-government and practised democracy in everything. Under his advocacy, our class became a garden of self-government, democracy, and freedom. In September 1939, he was transferred to the Kuomintang’s Central Training Corps accused of “conniving with left-wing teachers and students” and was heavily censured. After protesting to the Ministry of Education, he returned safely to the school on 1 December. He recounted the hardships he had endured in Chongqing with tears in his eyes. The whole school held a welcoming assembly, attended by pomp and circumstance. In April 1940, the Ministry of Education of the Nationalist Government again withdrew him from his post as headmaster and instead appointed him as an inspector of secondary education, in an attempt to divorce him from the teachers and students of the Fourth Branch. He disdained this assignment and in early 1941 went to teach at Sichuan University in Chengdu. He loved to recite lines by the patriotic poet Lu You, and his life was one of which it can be said: “I have no intention of striving for the spring, but I am jealous of its fragrances, and the new fragrance is no less winning than the old”. His adherence to the spirit of the May Fourth Movement was resolute but thankless, first under the political system of the Kuomintang and then under that of the Communist Party.

11

Lu You (1125–1209) was a historian and poet of the Southern Song Dynasty.

872

xiong, trans. benton

Li Guangtian In 1928, while studying at Ji’nan Normal School, Li was arrested by the secret service of the warlord Zhang Zongchang and made to do hard labour for more than a month before the forces of the National Revolutionary Northern Expedition arrived in Ji’nan and released him. In 1929, he joined the Department of Foreign Languages at Peking University, where he befriended Bian Zhilin and He Qifang, both of whom became his literary friends. In 1935, he graduated from university and went to Ji’nan First Middle School to teach Chinese literature. In 1937, when the war against Japan broke out, Ji’nan Number 1 Middle School was evacuated. Li travelled to Sichuan with his students and other teachers from Jizhong Middle School and continued teaching in Luojiang. He also introduced the well-known writer Chen Xianghe and the Sichuan poet Fang Jing to the Fourth Branch to teach Chinese-language classes, so that a junior secondary school with nearly 300 students had three famous and progressive-minded literary figures teaching Chinese. Due to financial constraints, it was not possible to print the textbooks Li had recommended, so he read them aloud instead, while we listened attentively. He also read aloud, in full, Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q, Diary of a Madman, and Xianglin’s Wife, guiding us into an understanding of the spirit of Lu Xun and teaching us to go into the darkness, like Lu Xun, to uncover more darkness and fight the darkness. Or go towards the light, learn the ways of battle, prepare for a greater struggle against the darkness. Li explained the works of Gorky and introduced us to his Mother, My Childhood, On Earth, My University, etc. He also read aloud in class Qu Qiubai’s translation of The Petrels, ending his recitation with a passionate call to “Let the storm rage!” He pointed out that petrels, ducks, gulls, and penguins were figurative representations of people from different social classes in the midst of a social revolutionary storm. Li introduced us to the works of writers from the Old Russian period, and spent more than three weeks in class reading aloud from Lu Xun’s translations of Gogol’s Dead Souls and Taras Bulba. During those months, I also read Turgenev’s Rudin, Father and Son, Virgin Soil, On the Eve, and The Threshold, as well as Tolstoy’s Resurrection and other works and writings by Soviet authors, so that we could understand the October Revolution and its noble spirit. I was in my rebellious years at the time, and what I read resonated in my psyche. Li also introduced us to famous literary figures from France and England in the nineteenth century, in the belief that reading novels by famous writers allows one to gain an indirect understanding of social life and to broaden one’s horizons. He said that Balzac’s novels painted a picture of social life during the phase of the primitive accumulation of capital, just as Marx dissected capital-

memoirs (2006)

873

ist society with the scalpel of reason. I was reading The Communist Manifesto at the time, so I read Balzac’s novels with great interest. Li also read aloud from Chinese literary journals and edited the school literary journal Forge, ten issues of which appeared between June 1939 and July 1940, when it was forced by the Kuomintang authorities to cease publication. He edited Marching in the Sands, a collection of thirty works by seventeen students, totalling over 100,000 words, a factual account of what they had seen and heard on the 5,000-li journey from Shandong to Sichuan. With the sensitivity and sense of justice that characterises adolescents, they unrelentingly exposed and denounced the ugliness and corruption of society. As a result, he was unable to find a publisher brave enough to publish the collection. At the beginning of 1941, the Nationalist-Communist alliance was on the point of collapse, Li Guangtian was forced to leave the Fourth Branch, and went to teach first at the Southwest United University and later in Kunming. At the end of the war, he was demobilised together with the university and went to teach first at Nankai University in Tianjin and then at Tsinghua University in Beiping. He joined the ccp in 1948. After the founding of New China, he became head of the Chinese Department at Tsinghua University and was then transferred to the post of Dean of Yunnan University in Kunming, in 1952. In 1956, he was elected as an alternate delegate to the Eighth National Congress of the ccp. During the Cultural Revolution, he was persecuted, and he died in November 1968. He was rehabilitated in 1978. In the 1980s and 1990s, various books by him were published. Fang Jing I had already seen Fang Jing’s poems in the newspapers and knew of his fame as a Sichuan poet. At the invitation of Li Guangtian, he worked at the Fourth Branch for ten months between 5 August 1939, and 20 June 1940. As soon as he arrived, he wrote a poem in tribute to us and as a greeting. Mr Fang looked younger than Mr Li, like a college student just out of school. He loved to say: “I am not here to teach you, I am here to learn from you”. He read all the wall posters we had plastered all over our provisional campus and attended our various gatherings – symposia, poetry readings, etc. At the end of 1939, I heard that Liu Shoushou and Zhang Jiqian were Communists; I did not know, nor would I have imagined, that Mr Fang Jing was the one who had introduced them to the Party. Nearly half a century later, however, in a book published by the Sichuan University Press, Fang Jing explained that “when I arrived at the Luojiang Fourth Branch, the Party organisation said to me: ‘With the war on, it is necessary to do youth work and united-front work,

874

xiong, trans. benton

and we have to build the Party, develop a few members and sow the seeds. Although Luojiang is a small place, it is on a major transport route. Students in exile have much progressive power, and the headmaster is a democrat. It is important that you go there and work for a year.’ So I worked in Luojiang for a year according to this instruction”. In Luojiang, Mr Fang Jing completed his task of building the Party in five months, absorbing three students into the Party and forming a Party group. They were: Liu Shoushou, who was in the same grade as me, Zhang Jiqian, who was one year below me, and Shi Renhou, who was two terms below me. In the same book, Liu Shoushou said: “At the end of August 1939, the ccp’s Chengdu Committee sent Comrade Fang Jing to the Fourth Branch. He was familiar with Mr Li Guangtian. He talked to us three times, and on the final occasion he disclosed his identity and asked us if we wanted to join the Communist Party. I said: ‘We have been looking for the Party for a long time’, and all three of us wrote an application, which was approved. In November, we were led by Fang Jing to take the oath”. At the beginning of 1941, after the South Anhui Incident,12 the White Terror escalated and the political situation became more and more tense. There were rumours of arrests in the school, and three Communist students left. Liu Shoushou went to the north and Zhang Jiqian returned to his home in Shandong, which was occupied by the Japanese, who later killed him. After 1949, Fang Jing remained director of the Southwest Normal College. Chen Xianghe Chen Xianghe was invited and introduced by Mr Li Guangtian to teach Chinese language to a third-year class in April 1939. Mr Li told us that from 1929 to 1932, Chen Xianghe had run the Sinking Bell Society in Beiping, which Lu Xun described as “the most resilient and honest literary group in China, and the one that has struggled the longest”. Before arriving at the Fourth Branch, Mr Chen had taught Chinese-language classes in various secondary schools in Chengdu. According to Chen, there were more than seventy middle schools in Chengdu, and almost all of them, both middle schools and junior middle schools, used classical-Chinese textbooks for their Chinese-language classes and were not allowed to teach the vernacular. At a time of national survival, young people were being forced to read texts from ancient times, thus imprisoning their minds in the past.

12

A military clash between the Communists and the Kuomintang that in practice marked the end of the anti-Japanese united front.

memoirs (2006)

875

At the Fourth Branch, Mr Chen was pleased to see students freely organising various societies and producing wall posters, and to see their Salvation Singing Team and Anti-Enemy Drama Troupe go out into the streets or villages. He assisted Li Guangtian in editing the thirty contributions to Marching in the Sands and wrote the Preface, which read: “In their exile, they saw along the way into exile the bankrupt and desolate countryside, the masses calloused by endless toil and days on end without a meal, with every corner of China infested by soldiers and bandits, opium, epidemics, corrupt officials, landed gentry, and exorbitant taxes, which had made the country destitute. All this had opened their eyes wide”. Faced with this group of young people growing up amid the fires of resistance, Mr Chen asks himself in the preface, “What will become of them?” He replies: “From the facts, I guess it must be hard for them to ever close their eyes again in future”. At the start of 1941, after the Southern Anhui Incident, the Kuomintang launched a second anti-communist upsurge and its youth movement took control of the school, in March. Mr Chen was dismissed from the school in which he had worked for two whole years. After 1949, Mr Chen specialised in the study of China’s classical literature. During the Cultural Revolution, he was persecuted and died. Half a century after opening his eyes to the democratic trend of the May Fourth period, Mr Chen was doomed by the onslaught of the anti-May Fourth spirit and the vicious wave of idol worship. In 1978, he was rehabilitated. Yan Zigui Yan Zigui joined the [Trotskyist] Chinese Communist League13 when he was a university student in Beiping. In 1936, he returned to Ji’nan to teach in a private middle school. In the autumn of 1937, he started teaching at Ji’nan First Middle School. “After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, he went into exile in Sichuan with Ji’nan Number 1 Middle School. On the way, he explained to the students the nature of the war against Japan and the changes in the situation, pointed out that the theory of a quick victory was blind optimism and the theory of certain defeat was blind pessimism, criticised the theory of ‘weapons only’, and propagated Chen Duxiu’s ten proposals on the war”.14

13 14

It set up in January 1935 in Shanghai. Chen Duxiu said: “In this war of resistance against Japanese imperialism, which is also a revolutionary war, in order to rouse the masses of the country to support this war and to mobilise the financial and human resources of the country for a final victory, there must be a clear programme of resistance, a concrete statement of whose interests the people of

876

xiong, trans. benton

From March 1939 to October 1940, he worked as a civics teacher for the Fourth Branch of the Sixth Middle School. He refused to use the civics textbooks published by the Zhengzhong Bookstore and instead took Kung Pao, Xinhua Daily News, and Central Daily News with him to class and used a piece of chalk to explain the international and domestic situation. He pointed out that China’s War of Resistance against Japanese aggression was a war of national liberation for national independence, that China’s resistance was just and Japan’s aggression was reactionary. The Second World War, which started in September 1939, was the same in nature as the First World War. It too was an unjust war between the imperialist powers for control of the world. Yan lectured openly in the classroom on “Wage Labour and Capital”, revealing the secret of capital accumulation and the capitalists’ profit – surplus value. the country are fighting for, while abstract generalities about the interests of the nation may not necessarily be able to mobilise the people of the country, especially the more backward ones. The following ten points are indispensable in the war of resistance. (1) The ultimate aim of the war against Japan is to overthrow the obstacles imposed by the imperialists on the development of Chinese national industry. (2) All parties in opposition and the people in general should have political freedom, freedom of assembly and association, freedom of speech and publication. Slaves who are not free have little incentive to fight for the interests of the nation. (3) To unite with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union and the rest of the world (including those of Japan) in the struggle against Japanese imperialism. (4) Confiscate the property of the Japanese imperialists in China and confiscate the property of traitors and corrupt officials to pay for the relief of wounded soldiers and refugees. (5) Force the rich to subscribe to public bonds for national salvation, impose progressive taxes on property, and increase taxes on business income due to the war, and do not impose war costs on the workers, poor peasants, and small businesspeople and employees. (6) Relieve the people’s suffering, for example, by reducing the working day, solving the problem of poor peasants’ land needs, limiting high rents and profits, abolishing the system of harsh taxes and the baojia system, and stopping forcible enlistment, so as to increase the enthusiasm and strength of the people to resist. (7) Restore the trade unions, student unions, businessmen’s associations, and farmers’ associations elected by the masses in all sectors. (8) Reorganise the national army and put it directly under the central government, strengthen political education in the army, improve the treatment of soldiers, and implement close cooperation between the army and the people in the areas where it is stationed. (9) Arm the people, especially the workers and peasants, in order to purge the traitors and consolidate the rear. Organise and train special armies of unemployed workers at the front to strengthen the war effort. (10) Quickly convene a National [Constituent] Assembly to concentrate the national resistance forces and keep watch on the overall situation”.

memoirs (2006)

877

He lectured on “Dialectical Materialism and the Materialist View of History”, explaining that both nature and human society are constantly evolving and new societies will replace old ones. During the two years from Yunyang in Hubei to Luojiang in Sichuan, some fifty students were directly or indirectly influenced by Mr Yan’s ideas, and they set up the “Truth Reading Club”, to study Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. In Luojiang, on Sundays, they went into the mountains or to the rocks on the bank of the Rijiang River to listen to Yan Zigui’s lectures on Trotsky’s “Permanent Revolution” and “The Question of the Chinese Revolution”, etc. They accepted Trotsky’s view that the Chinese bourgeoisie, represented by the Kuomintang, could not accomplish the tasks of anti-imperialist national liberation and antifeudal democratic revolution. Only the Chinese proletariat leading the peasantry to seize power and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat could fulfil the tasks of national liberation and democratic revolution, while the dictatorship of the proletariat inevitably infringed on bourgeois ownership and raised the call for socialist revolution, and that there was a continuous link in the revolutionary development (or continuity) between the national, democratic, and socialist revolutions in colonial and semi-colonial and all economically backward developing countries. Yan Zigui encouraged members of the study group to go to the factories, to engage in the workers’ movement, and to seek and practise the path of Chinese Revolution. With the help of Yan Zigui and Liang Yi (both of whom had been members of the Chinese Communist League before the War of Resistance), in October 1939, more than a dozen students, including Meng Xianzhang, Yang Shouyuan, Cao Qinghua, and Sun Hongzhi, who were members of the “Truth Reading Club”, left Luojiang for Chongqing. Only Sun Hongzhi returned to study at the school. In the summer of 1940, members of the Kuomintang youth organisation at the Mianyang headquarters of the Sixth National Middle School persecuted progressive teachers and students (known at the time as “left-leaning elements”, those suspected of being dissidents), The student member Fu Guoliang was arrested, and a second group of “Truth Reading Club” members, Fan Wenhua and Su Xuechang, was also arrested. The second group of “Truth Reading Society” members, Fan Wenhua, Su Xuechang, Kang Zhiquan, Liu Zhichao, Chen Rulin, and Ren Yuxi, left Mianyang (in the case of middle-school students) and Luojiang (in the case of junior middle-school students) for Chongqing, most of them to take up jobs as factory workers. Yan Zigui also left Luojiang for Chongqing at the start of the autumn school year in 1940. In early 1941, when relations between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang became openly hostile, students were strictly forbidden to read extra-

878

xiong, trans. benton

curricular books and progressive newspapers, and teachers and students with progressive ideas were monitored and persecuted. In October 1941 and February 1942, the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation was attacked by the Kuomintang secret service on two occasions, and Yang Shouyuan, Cao Qinghua, Zhang Hongren, Ren Yuxi, Du Wenlin, and Zhao Fengtian were arrested. Yan Zigui and his wife Du Rui fled Chongqing to Xi’an, and Yan was recommended by a university classmate called Bai to join the Wangqu branch school of the Central Military Academy as an economics instructor. In 1947, Yan Zigui got a scholarship to study in the United States. No one knows what happened to him subsequently. Qu Yaxian Qu Yaxian was a music teacher. Before the War of Resistance, when Jizhong was still in Ji’nan, the school flew both a national flag and a purple school flag. The school song was written by Mr Li Guangtian and composed by Mr Qu Yaxian. I don’t know why purple was chosen as the school colour. The song we loved best at the time was the “March of the Volunteers” (now China’s national anthem) After the Chinese New Year in 1938, when Jizhong went into exile for four months in Nanyang, Mr Qu organised the “Jizhong Anti-Enemy Salvation Work Group”, which comprised a choir and a drama troupe, and went round the streets making propaganda and rousing the people to fight the Japanese and save the country. Several students from the senior class joined the army and went to the Central Military Academy in Wuhan. After the Chinese defeats at Xuzhou and Zhengzhou, students from Shandong who had been exiled to various parts of Henan moved to Yunyang in Hubei and set up the National Hubei Middle School. Mr Qu reorganised the “Jizhong Anti-Enemy Salvation Work Group” into a theatre company and started rehearsals for some resistance plays, which enlivened the atmosphere in the mountain city. During our six months in Yunyang, Mr Qu taught us lots of new songs, my favourite being “We are in the Taihang Mountains”, plus two Russian songs, “The Workers’ Song” and “The Volga Boatman’s Song”. It was wonderful to see the people rise up against the war. What I saw in the Kuomintang rear was baojia heads dragging out recruits who had escaped, and were then captured and shot. My mathematics teacher Mi Renfu and Sun Guanwen, the son of the headmaster of Jizhong, and his classmates Liu Guihua, Liu Zhenwin, Yu Xinmin, and many others went to [Communist-controlled] Yan’an. I met Yu Xinmin, who was a year ahead of me. In the 1980s, I saw him mentioned in a Party history book as secretary of a Party committee. Around 1938, shortly after the start of the Nationalist-Communist collaboration, society

memoirs (2006)

879

and politics were still lively and there was a largely liberal atmosphere. It was not until 1939 that anti-communism became rife again. Among us students, some who believed in Marx and Trotsky went into the factories and engaged with the workers’ movement, using the Workers’ Song to inspire the young workers. After the loss of Wuhan, our school was relocated to the Mianyang area of Sichuan by order of the Ministry of Education. Mr Qu Yaxian led his 24-strong singing troupe on a three-day tour through every town on the way to Sichuan from southern Shaanxi to perform in support of the resistance. At a hospital for wounded soldiers, he also performed for the medical staff. In February 1939, the troupe arrived in Luojiang, where the Fourth Branch, mainly composed of students and teachers from Jizhong, was located. In early 1939, Mr Qu gathered together some male and female students who liked to sing and staged a resistance concert.

My Middle School Days In the first half of 1938, more than 200 students and teachers from Ji’nan evacuated to Liqi in Nanyang, Henan Province, to join together with students and teachers from middle schools from all over Shandong. In the second half of 1938, the Shandong United Middle School moved to Yunyang in Hubei and became the National Hubei Middle School. I was in the first year of junior middle school. Our food was managed by a food committee, with one member elected by each class. One day, I happened to walk past the dining room and saw some members eating our food. I went back to my class and angrily denounced our food committee representative, Fu Naizhao, and told him he deserved a beating. Later, some young men came up to my dormitory. They shoved and punched me. I was quickly pulled away by Cheng Demao, Li Yunsheng, and Zhang Xijin, my room-mates. This was the first time I had been humiliated in such a way. I was so angry that I never spoke to Fu Naizhao again. From that time on, I became particularly close to Cheng Demao, Li Yunsheng, and a few others. In 1939, our school was a free and democratic place, with students forming associations, organising reading groups, and holding seminars of all kinds. Wall newspapers were plastered all over the wall of the Shanxi Hall. I can still remember the titles: “The People”, “Commando”, “White Fire”, “New Land”, “Battle Flag”, “Torch”, “Trumpet”, “October”, “Storm”, and so on. There were meetings of all kinds, including political, but mostly literary – essays, poems, car-

880

xiong, trans. benton

toons, etc. Teacher Fang Jing said: “Your wall posters all have one common feature: they grasp reality, recognise the truth, and want our pens to match the swords and spears with which we fight for national liberation, expressing feelings and thoughts that echo the times”. We agreed to gather the books and magazines each of us possessed and to store them in a bamboo box, for anyone to dip into. The books were mostly literary, but they included social science books such as Ai Siqi’s Philosophy of the Masses, Zhang Zhongshi’s Basic Problems of Social Science, He Ganzhi’s Problems of the Nature of Chinese Society, and Leontief’s Outline of Political Economy. Literary magazines were purchased from time to time. Material life was exceedingly hard. The dormitory, housed in temples, was damp and musty. Students slept on planks with only one quilt, half of which was pressed underneath them while the other half was wrapped around their bodies. In the essay class, Mr Li Guangtian set us as a topic “We grew up in hunger”. But we had a rich and varied spiritual life, reading books, designing posters, writing articles, holding reading seminars, singing, and going round the streets and villages to promote anti-Japanese activities. Mr Li was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and died as a result. Before the summer holidays in 1939, the Ministry of Education sent an inspector to the school to “rectify ideas”. I heard Mr Li Guangtian say in class, “He pretended to be a cat and turned out to be a dog”. After the summer holidays, another supervisor accused Mr Li Guangtian of teaching the works of Gorky and Lu Xun instead of following the teaching materials prescribed by the Ministry of Education. In the view of corrupt and incompetent officials at all levels, out to preserve their own vested interests, liberal democracy was tantamount to “leftism” and “redistribution”, which frightened them to death. The Trotskyist students in the Chinese Communist League were influenced by the thinking of Yan Zigui. In the classroom, they listened to the same social science theories as their classmates, but outside the classroom, unlike the rest of us, they received ideological guidance from Mr Yan. They set up the “Truth Reading Club” as a front organisation, with around fifty members. By the end of 1939, a Communist Party group had emerged among the students of the Fourth Branch. I was unaware at the time that it was the work of Mr Fang Jing. I only knew that three Communist students, Liu Shoushou, who was in the same grade as me, and Zhang Jiqian and Shi Renhou, who were a year below me, were very active in it, and set up front organisations. Others influenced by their Communist classmates set up an October Club and published the wall newspaper October.

memoirs (2006)

881

Influenced by the activities of my fellow Trotskyists and Communists, I read several Marxist-Leninist books, including The Communist Manifesto and State and Revolution. Before reading them, I had thought that Marxism-Leninism must be difficult to understand, but I soon realised that this was not the case. I came to understand that the capitalist system alienated human beings to the level of beasts in order to generate profits for capital. In those days, it was easy to see that war could only be eradicated through socialist revolution. In a socialist society, there would be no more exploitation, no more oppression, everyone would be free and equal, and everyone would be able to develop themselves to the full. I believed in the Communist doctrines of Marx and Lenin. At the beginning of 1940, Liu Shoushou, the Communist, often used to come to my dormitory to talk with us. He knew that some of us were progressive and inclined towards the Communist Party. On one occasion, he gave us a A Concise Course on the Soviet Communist Party (Bolshevik) and said, “This book is very important, read it to know what Leninism is. You don’t need to read the writings of Marx and Lenin to know they are correct, didn’t they all come true in the Soviet Union? The Trotskyists read Marx and Lenin, but what the hell do they know! They are anti-Marxist-Leninist, anti-Soviet, and anti-Communist, they just want to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union”. We read it, together with a pamphlet titled Trotskyite Bandits, written by Kang Sheng. I did not believe that Mr Yan and his fellow Trotskyists were bandits, and I did not understand why the Communists described Chen Duxiu as a traitor. I was curious to know what the Trotskyists were all about. Before the summer vacation in 1940, I found Trotsky’s My Life in the local library and borrowed it. When my room-mates found out, they scolded me: “How can you read such a book? Don’t read it!” I replied, “How do you know it’s wrong if you don’t read it?” Du Wenlin, who was in a different class from me, knew that I was reading Trotsky’s My Life because I wanted to understand Trotsky, not because I was anti-Marxist-Leninist, and he took the initiative to introduce me to Trotsky’s other works. In the first half of 1939, he started to put up a wall poster, not in the school but on the street, to inform the public about the anti-Japanese struggle. He was so diligent and conscientious that he produced one issue a week over a long period of time. During the two months or so before and after the summer vacation of 1940, I read a number of Trotsky’s books, as well as articles that Du Wenlin had copied into an exercise book. After reading them, I saw that Trotsky believed that Stalin had departed from the tradition of the Russian Revolution, corrupted Lenin’s Soviet democracy, betrayed the internationalist mission of the Third International, and rendered it null and void. I learned that Trotsky opposed the

882

xiong, trans. benton

Stalinist system of privileges and defended the idea of a socialist world revolution as defined by Marx and Lenin. Stalin, on the other hand, undermined the credibility of socialism and risked the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. I also read the Frenchman André Gide’s Return from the Soviet Union and its sequel. Gide sympathised with the oppressed and the poor. He hated capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism and initially revered the Soviet Union. In 1936, he was invited to Gorky’s funeral, but the Soviet reality he saw with his own eyes was completely different from that propagated by pro-Soviet reporters. On his return, he wrote a factual account of what he had seen and heard in the Soviet Union, to the dismay of the Communists, who had hoped to use Gide’s celebrity to make capital. Gide told his readers in no uncertain terms that Stalin’s Soviet Union did not match Lenin’s idea of socialism and that he had seen the privileges of the old world restored in the guise of socialism. As a result, Gide was the object of vicious slanders by pro-Soviet elements. Through my reading, I came to believe in Trotsky. After the summer of 1940, I broke with Li Yunsheng, Cheng Demao, and Xin Fajun, who believed that Stalin was a true Marxist and the Soviet Union had achieved socialism. Progressive-minded students at the time had their eyes opened during those difficult war years and came to link their quest for personal survival to the fate of the nation. The repeated military defeats of the Kuomintang, the climate of political darkness, corruption, collusion between government and business, inflation. and the soaring price of rice had a direct impact on our lives. We were precocious and dissatisfied with reality. Some of us went to Yan’an, some returned to our hometowns in enemy-occupied Shandong to fight a guerrilla war, and some went to Chongqing to become factory workers and seek a new path for the Chinese Revolution. In the winter of 1939, more than a dozen students, including Meng Xianzhang, Yang Shouyuan, Cao Qinghua, and Sun Hongzhi of the Trotskyist Truth Reading Group, left school behind and headed for Chongqing, though not yet a Trotskyist, I learned afterwards that they had gone to work in factories. Only Sun Hongzhi returned to school, unable to bear the hardship. In the summer of 1940, members of the Kuomintang’s Youth League set fire to the school’s headquarters and framed and persecuted progressive teachers and students. At that point, a second group of Trotskyists left school for Chongqing. They included Fan Wenhua, Su Xuechang, Kang Zhiquan, Liu Zhichao, Chen Rulin, and Ren Yuxi. At the time, I was reading Trotsky’s books and knew a little about the activities of the Trotskyists. Their decision to abandon school and go into society had a big influence on my thinking.

memoirs (2006)

883

In January 1941, the Kuomintang launched its third anti-Communist crackdown and there were rumours of arrests in Luojiang. Three Communist classmates, Liu Shoushou, Zhang Jiqian, and Shi Renhou, fled the school, but Liu Huasheng, who was influenced by them, was arrested. Fifteen other progressive students were forced to leave the Fourth Branch. In March, the Ministry of Education sent a young female music teacher to lead its Youth League. She taught love songs and folk songs rather than war songs, In May 1941, the Kuomintang in Luojiang sent military police to surround the school and arrested more than 20 progressive students, who were held for more than four months without evidence. In October 1941 and February 1942, Kuomintang spies attacked the Sichuan Regional Committee of the Trotskyist Chinese Communist League in Chongqing and arrested two of its main leaders, Liang Yi and Wang Zhenhua, as well as a dozen students, including Yang Shouyuan, Cao Qinghua, Zhang Hongren, Du Wenlin, Ren Yuxi, and Zhao Fengtian, all members of the Truth Reading Group. From 1941 to 1943, I studied at the Zitong school. After graduating, I left Mianyang for Chongqing, in early 1944. The Zitong school was tightly controlled by the Kuomintang and its youth organisation. The Director, Song Dongfu, was a bully who strictly forbade students to read progressive books and publications or to form societies and student self-government associations. He made unannounced visits to students who were considered to have “thought problems”, and used Kuomintang students as stalkers. Whenever he lectured, the students were required to stand to attention whenever the name Chiang Kai-shek was mentioned. His lectures were a monkey-taming act. Students were given warnings or left the school to avoid arrest. Ten students, including Li Yuting, Kui Kuan, Wang Xuecheng, Shan Songzen, Wang Xiangchen, Zhang Hongren, Du Wenlin, and Jiang Fuxue of the Trotskyists’ Truth Reading Group, were forced to leave the school. Most went to Chongqing to become workers. Some remained but ostensibly stopped interacting with one another. We hid our Trotskyist literature under the hospital beds in the isolation unit, where Wang Yuanxun was convalescing, or in a mountain temple, buried in the cracks between the bricks of an ancient tomb, or in a hole in the wall of the Nanshan Pagoda. In early 1942, the Ministry of Education set up a teacher training college in Mianyang to train teachers for the northern part of Sichuan. When we heard the news, we felt like released prisoners, and without waiting for the official announcement, we packed our bags and headed straight for Mianyang on foot, one hundred and ten li away. Headmaster Cai stood at the entrance to the school and watched us leave without a trace of emotion, smiling bitterly. As I walked past him, I bowed, not knowing what to say.

884

xiong, trans. benton

The new school in Mianyang used the premises of an abandoned knitting factory, mostly brick-and-tile bungalows. Beyond the campus walls was farmland. In the early spring, the school seemed set in a sea of golden rape. The Sichuan-Shaanxi highway, built just before the outbreak of the war, was one of the two international routes that linked the north-western highway to Xinjiang. The other international route was the Yunnan-Myanmar Highway, which was completed and opened to traffic in 1939. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet Union was unable to provide assistance to China and the United States brought in military supplies for the Kuomintang government by way of the Yunnan-Myanmar Highway. After the destruction of the Trotskyist organisation in Chongqing in October 1941 and February 1942, we lost contact with Chongqing for a while. In 1942 and 1943, the Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War reached a turning point with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Thus the Chinese people’s war against Japan and for national independence merged into the imperialist war between the US and Britain and Japan for control of Asia and the Pacific. In Europe, France surrendered and the British army withdrew from the continent. In early 1942, Chongqing’s Ta Kung Pao published an article by Chen Duxiu titled “An Outline of the Post-War World”, which was immediately attacked by the Chinese Communist Xinhua Daily and even by the neutral Ta Kung Pao. In May, Chen Duxiu died, after a long illness. The disbanding of the Third International set off an anti-Communist clamour in Chongqing’s Nationalist press: “Disband the Communist Party, abolish the [Communist-run] border areas”, and so on. We did not know at the time that the Shanghai Trotskyists were divided over the nature of the Sino-Japanese war and the nature of the Soviet Union. We continued to see the war against Japan as progressive, in line with Lenin’s view on nationalities and colonies, and we agreed with Trotsky’s view that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state. Lenin’s books were available in the major cities such as Chongqing, Guilin, and Chengdu, but Trotsky’s were nowhere to be found, and the few we had on hand were worn out from multiple reading and poor storage, so Cao Yulin decided to copy them by hand. It was impossible to do the copying in the schoolroom, for fear of attracting Kuomintang attention. Every Sunday, Cao and I did our copying in a farm building, while keeping an eye out. We copied over many Sundays. When we first started, the owner’s wife was feeding a flock of fluffy chicks that ran around my feet. By the time Cao Yulin had finished copying the books – The Present and Future of the Soviet Union and The Theory of Permanent Revolution – the chicks were fully fledged and running loose in the bamboo grove behind the house.

memoirs (2006)

885

In the summer of 1943, we received the good news that some of the Trotskyist students arrested in 1941 had been released and sent off to study at designated schools. Zhang Hongren went to Santai, Yang Shouyuan to Langzhong, Zhang Shengshi to Jiangjin, and Du Wenlin to Shapingba. At the same time, those students who had not been arrested in 1941 reestablished a Trotskyist organisation in Chongqing. After graduating from senior middle school at the end of 1943, Cao Yulin, Diao Changyao, Wang Chunlü, and I decided to go to Chongqing, while Jiang Guilin, Yang Chengzhi, Wang Yuanxun, and Liu Xigu went to Chengdu.

A Brief History of the Trotskyist Organisation in Chongqing “After the outbreak of the war of resistance, Yan Zigui attracted a large group of exiled Shandong students towards the Trotskyist organisation. The Trotskyist organisation in Sichuan also developed considerably and resumed publication of its newspaper, Dianguang” (Tang Baolin, A History of Chinese Trotskyism, p. 214). In his memoir, Liang Yi [Sun Liangsi] recounted that in April 1939 he walked from Xi’an to Sichuan along the Sichuan-Shaanxi highway and went to Luojiang and “met Yan Zigui” (at the time, Yan Zigui was an instructor at the Fourth Branch of the National Sixth Middle School), and that Zigui had already reestablished the [Trotskyist] organisation and was sending Trotskyists into the factories. During the war, that a Trotskyist organisation arose in Sichuan was due above all to Liang Yi and Yan Zigui. Yan Zigui influenced the recruitment of more than fifty students into the Trotskyist organisation in the Fourth Branch, while Liang Yi first went to Chongqing to work in a factory into which he introduced the Trotskyist students, in concert with Yan Zigui.15 Between October and December 1939, the first group of Trotskyist students, Meng Xianzhang, Yang Shouyuan, Cao Qinghua, Sun Hongzhi, Yin Chunde, Zhang Shengshi, and Yang Chengzhang, arrived in Chongqing, where most of them became factory workers. Yang Shouyuan learned typography at the Yishi newspaper and then entered the technical school attached to the Twenty-first Arsenal; Meng Xianzhang joined the arsenal as an apprentice and Sun Hongzhi as a forge worker, but Sun returned to school because he could not adapt to the life of a factory worker.

15

See Liang Yi [Sun Liangsi]’s story in Part 3, Section C.

886

xiong, trans. benton

In the summer of 1940, a second group of recruits arrived in Chongqing. They were Liu Zhichao, Su Xuechang, Fan Wenhua, Ren Yuxi, Kang Zhiquan, Liu Guang’en, Zhao Shengwen, Cao Qinghua, Liu Hengxin, Guo Huanxian, Chen Rulin, Mou Jiayi, more than a dozen of them. Liu Zhichao became a typesetter at the Southern Printing Factory; Su Xuechang a weaver in the South Bank Weaving Factory; Liu Hengxin a cloth worker for the Ministry of Military Affairs; Liu Guang’en a cloth worker for the Ministry of Military Affairs; Kang Zhiquan a bus driver; Cao Qinghua a bus conductor; Zhao Shengwen a handyman at the Guojiatuo Fiftieth Arsenal; and Ren Yuxi an alcohol brewer. In the summer of 1941, the third group arrived in Chongqing. They were Shan Cai, Shan Songzen, Wang Xiangchen, Zhang Hongren, Du Wenlin, Kui Kuan, Zhao Fengtian, Wang Xuecheng, Li Guangzhi, Jiang Fuxue, and Li Yuting, again more than a dozen. Shan Cai worked at the Jiangbei Iron Works; Shan Songzen was a forge worker at the Jiangbei Iron Works; Wang Xiangchen was a draftsman in the Twenty-first Arsenal, as was Zhang Hongren; and Du Wenlin was an apprentice at the Southern Printing Factory; while three members, Wang Xuecheng, Li Guangzhi, and Jiang Fuxue, died of cholera after not finding work in time and living on the streets or spending the night on an abandoned boat on the bank of the Jialing River. A large number of Trotskyist students became factory workers, and Liang Yi worked hard to establish a core leadership group. Before the outbreak of the Pacific War, Shanghai and Chongqing were connected by air and post, and Liang Yi was introduced to Zhang Weiliang in Chongqing by the Shanghai Trotskyist organisation. Zhang Weiliang worked as a staff member in the Southern Bookstore owned by Shi Fuliang and helped Shi Fuliang to manage it. Thanks to Zhang Weiliang’s connections, Liu Zhichao and Du Wenlin joined the Southern Printing House. At the end of 1940, after Liang Yi contacted Zhao Fangju, a platoon leader in the army, Zhao Fangju left the army and joined the Chongqing Electric Power Company as a clerk. Zhao Fangju, a native of Qingzhou in Shandong, joined the Trotskyists in the 1930s, while attending a teacher training school in Shandong. He belonged to the same generation of Trotskyists as Liang Yi. In September 1940, Liang Yi left the Jinling University’s electrical training course to work in the electricity section of the Fiftieth Arsenal. This arsenal was located in Guojiatuo on the Yangtze River. It was an hour’s journey by ferry from Chaotianmen dock. Every Sunday, Liang Yi went to Chongqing to meet with Liu Zhenji, Zhang Weiliang, and the student Fan Wenhua. Fan Wenhua was one of the first students to be influenced by Yan Zigui, and in the first half of 1939 he and his classmate Meng Xianzhang started up the Truth Reading Group. He was elected President of the first Student Self-

memoirs (2006)

887

Government Association, but his temper got the better of him and he quarrelled with the Director of General Affairs and was expelled (later, the expulsion was reduced to a demerit). He left school and went to Chongqing in the summer of 1940. Liang Yi described him in his memoir. Fan Wenhua was highly capable and the most trusted and respected of the fifty or so members of the Truth group, as well as being the best read (he had purchased nine out of the twelve volumes of Lenin’s writings in Chinese). When he arrived in Chongqing, he became Liang Yi’s deputy and ran the organisation’s liaison work full-time. He was also one of the leaders of the Chongqing Trotskyist group in its later years, where he went under the pseudonym Ai Fu. He was the only one of the Chongqing Trotskyists who was a full-time organiser, dependent on his classmates in jobs for his living expenses. In early 1941, Wang Zhenhua arrived in Chongqing. Wang Zhenhua was also known as Wang Shuben, a name he is said to have adopted in deference to Schopenhauer (Shubenhua in Chinese). A native of Harbin in the northeast, he arrived in Beiping after the 18 September Incident and, while studying at university, joined the Left Opposition of the ccp under Chen Duxiu. In June 1934, the Trotskyist students Wang Shuben, Liu Jialiang, and Si Chaosheng and Hu Wenhuan arrived in Shanghai from Beiping and seized power in the Shanghai Trotskyists’ Provisional Committee and set up a Central Committee. In January 1935, they changed the name from Left Opposition of the Chinese Communist Party founded under Chen Duxiu to the Chinese Communist League, which meant that the Trotskyists were no longer claiming to be a faction of the ccp but saw themselves as a new communist party. In March 1935, they were arrested by the Kuomintang and sent to Nanjing Military Prison. Their name, Chinese Communist League, remained in use. After the 7 July Incident in 1937, they were released at the same time as the other political prisoners and Wang Shuben returned to Shanghai and later went to Hong Kong. In the course of a dispute, the editorial board of Struggle expelled him on the grounds that he had committed an organisational error (more on his expulsion in the next section). After his expulsion, he returned to Hong Kong. Unable to remain there, he went to Guangxi to live with his female partner, Li Jieshuang, who had been influenced by his work in Hong Kong and joined the Trotskyists. At the beginning of 1941, he arrived in Chongqing from Guangxi and was introduced by a university classmate to a job as a proofreader on the night-shift at the Yishi newspaper. At the same time, he was introduced to Liang Yi, whom he had known since their days together in Beiping. Liang Yi knew that he was a good theoretician and could write well, so he put him in charge of the organ, Workers’ Voice, and gave him responsibility for directing Party work in the Twenty-first Arsenal, where more than a dozen Trotskyist students were working, and which

888

xiong, trans. benton

was a focus of Trotskyist activity in Chongqing. Having been expelled by the Trotskyist Central Committee in Shanghai, he was unexpectedly drawn back into the Trotskyist organisation in Chongqing, the capital of the anti-Japanese war, and was given direct supervision over a group of enthusiastic but politically inexperienced Trotskyist students and made editor-in-chief of Workers’ Voice. By Lunar New Year in 1941, the “old men” of the Chinese Communist League assembled by Liang Yi in Chongqing included Liang Yi, Zhang Weiliang, Wang Zhenhua, Zhao Fangju, Yan Zigui, and others. All the above people had jobs, so they were only able to meet on Sundays. The first half of 1941 was the most active period of the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation in its early days. Using the publication Workers’ Voice, Trotskyist students scattered across a dozen or so factories could spread Trotskyist ideas. As rice prices soared, workers in the factories often went on strike to demand wage increases and rice subsidies, and Wang Zhenhua issued leaflets articulating the workers’ demands, based on information received from the factories. For example, Liu Yi, a worker at the Jiangbei Iron Works, was very active in a workers’ strike and told the Trotskyist students in his factory that he could not express his ideas in words, so Wang Zhenhua put them together in propaganda texts and wrote leaflets for distribution. After the end of the war, Liu Yi went to Shanghai to attend Peng Shuzhi’s Party building conference. Liu Zhenji at the Electricity Company influenced Li Changkun and Liu Youshou to become Trotskyists; Meng Xianzhang at the Twenty-first Arsenal influenced Bai Yuxi, a mechanic, to become a Trotskyist. Liu Guang’en, a Trotskyist student at a textile factory with only 200 workers, led the factory’s workers in a victorious strike for higher wages and rice subsidies, and the workers celebrated by giving him red silk and red flowers. Meng Xianzhang, who worked at the Twenty-first Arsenal, recalled in a letter to Li Yuting written on 5 and 29 April 1994, that Wang Zhenhua regularly visited the Twenty-first Arsenal to give us talks on revolutionary theory and help us set up our work. […] Most of the talks were given on the bank of the Jialing River opposite the Linjiang Gate, talking while walking. Once, when it was dark, Wang Zhenhua stayed overnight in the house I rented on Chenjiakan Street, and checked to see whether there was room in my place for the printing press. When Wang Zhenhua first arrived in Chongqing and met up with Liang Yi, Liang Yi did not yet know that Wang had been expelled by the Trotskyist Central Committee in Shanghai. It was only around May that Liang Yi and

memoirs (2006)

889

Zhang Weiliang were informed by the Shanghai Trotskyist Central Committee and the Hong Kong Trotskyist organisation of the Central Committee’s decision, although the details of the expulsion were not made clear. They had already drawn Wang Zhenhua into the organisation and he was editing the newspaper. They needed someone of Wang Zhenhua’s theoretical level and ability to write articles. They were clearly in a dilemma. As editor of Workers’ Voice, Wang Zhenhua continued to propagate Chen Duxiu’s ten proposals for the anti-Japanese and stepped up his criticism of the Nationalist government in Chongqing. The Trotskyist students in the factories, newly fledged and enthusiastic, had little political experience and did not know how to protect themselves. Liang Yi, an experienced underground worker, already sensed a crisis. He proposed to the students that they “suspend the distribution of our (propaganda) materials”, adding: “If you say something imprudent, you can deny it, but if it falls into the hands of agents in black on white, you will be in for it!” This group of young men who had entered the factory as workers for the sake of their beliefs and in pursuit of truth were like newborn calves in the presence of tigers: they ignored Liang Yi’s advice and accused him of “liquidationism”. I remember that from about the end of June onwards, only Liang Yi, Zhang Weiliang, and Liu Zhenji held meetings, but without allowing Wang Zhenhua and me to attend. […] I remember that the fourth issue of Workers’ Voice came out in early or mid-June, and that Wang Zhenhua’s article was withheld from publication by Liang Yi and Liu Zhenji. […] I spoke to Wang Zhenhua about this, but he was reluctant to talk more about it, as if he had something to hide. […] Wang Zhenhua didn’t talk much about this, but one could still sense that there was a certain amount of disagreement between them. […] […] Starting in early or mid-June 1941, Wang Zhenhua was removed as chief writer and editor-in-chief of Workers’ Voice, and I was also relieved of the task of mimeographing and distributing it. From then on, Wang Zhenhua and I were excluded from the organisation and became “supernumeraries” (Zhao Fangju, Sunset Recollections, pp. 61, 68– 69, 75, and 114). So in May 1941, after Liang Yi and Zhang Weiliang were informed that the Shanghai Trotskyist Central Committee had expelled Wang Zhenhua, Liang Yi began to move against him. Wang Zhenhua could see that Liang Yi believed the Trotskyist Central Committee and would not listen to any of his arguments. According to Zhao Fangju, “He did not want to talk about it, it was as if he had something to hide”.

890

xiong, trans. benton

Liang Yi also understood that Wang Zhenhua’s theoretical level was high, he was very experienced, and he had superior organisational skills. Moreover, he had gained the trust of many Trotskyist students, who were well read in Marxist-Leninist theory and capable of thinking independently rather than blindly believing in any one individual. “I have to leave here, where to go?” Liang Yi asked himself. This was in keeping with his character, temperament, and style. Such thoughts arose whenever Liang Yi encountered difficulties; on many occasions, having been active in one place for a while, he was unable to stay any longer, so he would move his nest elsewhere. He immediately wrote to Zhang Limin at a private middle school in Wujiang, Jiangsu. They were old friends from Shandong. After receiving Zhang Limin’s reply, Liang Yi decided to leave Chongqing for Wujiang. On 8 October 1941, the eighteenth day of the eighth lunar month, Chiang’s agents, one step ahead of Liang Yi, arrested him at the Fiftieth Arsenal. At the same time as arresting Liang Yi, Chiang’s agents conducted a major raid on the Trotskyist students scattered across the various factories. More than a dozen were seized, including Yang Shouyuan, Zhang Hongren, Ren Yuxi, Du Wenlin, and Cao Qinghua. Most of these Trotskyist students were sent to the Ba County Daxing Factory Concentration Camp – a wartime youth training facility. Some cadres of the New Fourth Army below regimental level captured during the South Anhui Incident in January 1941 were also sent there. Liang Yi was imprisoned for a month in the inspector’s office of the Chongqing Military Administration but escaped to Yunnan. As for Fan Wenhua, Su Xuechang, Wang Xiangchen, and Liu Yi, they fled to Zunyi in Guizhou, while Li Yuting, Guo Huanshen, and Liu Hengxin fled to Chengdu. Shen Zhengkong, an old engineer from the Twentieth-first Arsenal, was a university graduate and a mechanical expert. He sympathised with the workers and hated the arbitrary behaviour of the agents in the factory. In a letter to Li Yuting in 1994, Meng Xianzhang recalled that he was not in the factory that day and had therefore escaped arrest. He was sent to a textile factory on the south bank of the Yangtze River the following day, and sheltered there for a few days before going on to work in a factory run by Wuhan University school in Leshan. In February 1942, Chiang’s agents carried out a second crackdown on the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation, arresting Wang Zhenhua, another of its key leaders. He had left the Yishi newspaper after the first raid in October 1941 and gone to teach at the Huayan Higher Agricultural School. His female friend Li Jieshuang, who was at the National Women’s Normal School in Baisha Town, Jiangjin, was arrested at the same time. During the same period, Liu Zhenji and Wang Kunrong, workers at the Electric Power Company, and Zhao Fengtian (Zhao Jinsheng), an odd-job worker at

memoirs (2006)

891

the Nanchuan Aircraft Repair Factory, were arrested in possession of two copies of Lenin’s Selected Works, which had attracted the attention of special agents stationed in the factory. After the raids in 1941 and 1942, Liang Yi, Wang Zhenhua, and Liu Zhenji, three of the five core members of the early Trotskyist organisation in Chongqing, were arrested. Zhang Weiliang went into hiding and Fan Wenhua, who had been running the organisation for Liang Yi, also had to flee to Guizhou. Zhao Fangju was the only one of the core leadership team who seemed to have remained unaffected and was still working for the power company. I never met Zhao Fangju while I was in Chongqing, not having arrived there until 1944. After the two raids, Zhang Weiliang was the only “old man” left in the leadership of the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation, which was reconstituted in 1943 – the rest were students. Fan Wenhua and Kui Kuan both contacted Zhao Fangju to ask him to continue in the leadership, but he refused. It was only in the 1980s that I began to correspond with him, after the organisational department of the ccp in Sichuan published the sad story of the deaths of four members of Wang Zhenhua’s family, killed by Chiang’s agents and posthumously recognised as revolutionary martyrs. In the early 1990s, Zhao came across Liang Yi’s memoirs, in which Liang Yi had written: “Wen Sheng (Zhao Fangju) was allowed to surrender by Wang Pingyi, in order to save his career”. On 4 December 1993, Zhao Fangju sent me a long letter analysing and refuting Liang Yi’s claims. I gave a copy to Zheng Chaolin and asked him how he would respond. Zheng said that since Liang Yi had already died, it was impossible for him to correct the facts himself, and that Zhao Fangju could write a simple explanation. After I wrote back, Zhao Fangju never complied with Zheng’s request. It was only when I received a copy of his memoirs, published in Hong Kong in May 2005, that I realised that it was not until the first half of 1941 that Zhao Fangju had become involved in the activities of the Chongqing Trotskyists. He wrote that in June 1941 he had been “pushed out of the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation”. Three months before the big raid by Chiang’s agents in October 1941, he left the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation. Of the three main leaders of Workers’ Voice, Liang Yi and Wang Zhenhua were arrested separately, but Zhao Fangju stopped being active and was not arrested. In October 2004, when Cao Yulin was writing his memoir of the war years, we had not yet seen Zhao’s reminiscences and did not yet know about all the complexities of the events described in them. In June 1943, Fan Wenhua, Su Xuechang, Liu Yi, Wang Xiangchen, and his new wife Yang Dayuan, who had fled to Guizhou for refuge, returned to Chongqing and found Shan Songzen, Kui Kuan, Liu Zhichao, Kang Zhiquan, Yin Chunde, and Liu Zhenji, who had been released after six months. They also

892

xiong, trans. benton

contacted the Trotskyists’ “old man” Zhang Weiliang and the sympathiser Shi Yimin. Fan Wenhua and Kui Kuan went to contact Zhao Fangju to get him involved, but he said no. The revived Chongqing Trotskyist organisation in 1943 first tried to contact those who had been separated from the organisation and arrested and then produced an internal mimeograph publication, Electric Light, for which Fan Wenhua took responsibility. After 1943, several other people became active in Chengdu: Yang Chengzhi, who had been admitted to Sichuan University; Wang Yuanxun, who was recovering from a lung disease in a church-run hospital; Li Yuting, Guo Huanshen, and Liu Hengxin, who had fled to Chengdu from Chongqing in October 1941 to escape Chiang’s agents; and Zhao Fengtian, who had also gone to Chengdu after his release in 1943. Several of them put up wall posters and distributed leaflets at Sichuan University. After the Spring Festival in 1944, when Cao Yulin, Wang Chunlü, Diao Changyao, and I arrived in Chongqing, the local committee of the [Trotskyist] Chinese Communist League in Sichuan had been restored to its original size. Its main members were Fan Wenhua, Kui Kuan, Su Xuechang, Liu Yi, Liu Zhenji, and Liu Zhichao. The “old man”, Zhang Weiliang, did not appear to do any specific work, but Liu Zhichao liaised with him. In 1954, the verdict of the Communist Party court was that Zhang Weiliang was “the leader and behind-the-scenes commander of the highest organisation of the Trotskyist bandits in Sichuan”, and so on. When I was in Chongqing, I did not know the exact division of labour among them, and it was not appropriate for me to ask questions. When Kui Kuan arrived in Chongqing in the autumn of 1941, he found Zhang Ningyu, an art teacher from his primary school in Ji’nan. She could draw and play the sheng, flute, and huqin, and she worked in a touring propaganda team as part of the War Service Corps. Through her introduction, Kui Kuan went to work behind the counter at the Sino-French Pharmacy. Before he could make formal contact with the organisation, it was raided. He thus escaped the big October crackdown. After the restoration of the organisation in 1943, he left the Sino-French Pharmacy and went to work as a miller in the rice mill attached to a textile factory run by the Ministry of Military Affairs, which milled rice for the workers of the factory and flour for the textile industry. The other person in charge, Fan Wenhua, specialised in organisational liaison. He lived on Fuxing Street, a slum area built along the hillside. Many of the dwellings were constructed of bamboo. I visited the house in which Fan Wenhua lived. Not far from it was a large open cesspit. After Zeng Yulin, Diao Changyao, Wang Chunlü, and others had arrived in Chongqing, Cao Yulin stayed with Fan Wenhua to help him produce Electric

memoirs (2006)

893

Light. Diao Changyao had been introduced by someone from his hometown or village to work as a clerk at the China Bookstore, and Wang Chunlü was employed by the Post and Telecommunications Bureau at Nan’an Post Office. I was introduced by a close friend of my father to a job managing the recreation room at the Workers’ Welfare Society belonging to the Ministry of Social Affairs. This welfare society had been commissioned by US trade unions to show support for China’s war against Japan and to help the Kuomintang government improve social welfare. The recreation room had a subscription to two copies of each of the city’s newspapers, including [the Communist Party’s] Xinhua Daily, and served as a reading room for people from the neighbourhood. In the summer of 1944, Cao Yulin was admitted to Zhejiang University, but due to the need for organisational work in Chongqing, he took a year off and stayed in Chongqing to help Fan Wenhua write and print Electric Light and leaflets. On one occasion, I accompanied Cao Yulin to Shapingba to distribute leaflets and stick up posters. Shapingba is some twenty li from the city, and housed the Central University, Chongqing University, the Central Middle School, and the Central Drama College, as well as several middle schools. Fan was so clever – instead of brushing the paste on the wall and sticking the poster to it, he first put the poster flat on my back, applied the paste to it by hand, and told me to put my back against the wall, so that when no one was watching, we could make a quick getaway, leaving the poster stuck to the wall. When we went into the post room at Central University, he was also very good at slipping leaflets and newspapers into the students’ letterboxes. After Chinese New Year in February 1945 came the Hu Shihe Incident in Chongqing. The sworn brother of Chongqing Police Chief Tang Yi, Tian Kai (Tian Tuxing), was a military secret agent. They were accused of stealing electricity for a restaurant run by a group of them. Electricians turned up to cut off the power supply, but the restaurant blocked them. In the chaos, Tian Kai shot and killed Hu Shihe. The electric company and its three power plants had more than one thousand employees, and hundreds of workers went, tools in hand, to smash up the restaurant. The police chief Tang Yi shielded Tian Kai, accusing the workers of being troublemakers and ordering the police to arrest them. [The Trotskyist] Liu Zhenji and the staff of the power company placed Hu Shihe’s body in the main hall of the restaurant. For three days, from 19 February (the seventh day of the first lunar month) to 22 February (the tenth day of the first lunar month), the walls of the restaurant were covered with elegies sent by citizens and factories. The entire staff of Xinhua Daily sent an elegiac couplet: “When will freedom and light come?” During the war of resistance, government and business colluded with each other and made a fortune, causing the price of rice to soar and making the lives of the people unbearable.

894

xiong, trans. benton

The mayor, He Yaozu, was a relatively flexible and sober-minded person who had often been in contact with Communists and democrats due to his work. The Chongqing municipal government also submitted an elegy. Liu Zhenji and the staff of the power company, with the support of the public, moved Hu Shihe’s body from the restaurant to the Chang’an Temple, where mourning continued for three days and tens of thousands of people went to pay their respects. At the time of the Hu Shihe Incident, I was studying for my university entrance exams in Baisha, Jiangjin. For ten days, starting 19 February, the Chongqing press, including Xinhua Daily, reported again and again on the progress of events concerning the death of Hu Shihe. When I returned to Chongqing in the summer, I realised that the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation had been actively involved in the matter, and that Fan Wenhua and Cao Yulin had played an important role in contacting Liu Zhenji and printing leaflets written by Kui Kuan, to transform the struggle against electricity theft into a struggle against the system of secret agents. Liu Zhenji was a key member of the Trotskyist organisation in Chongqing and was always at the centre of the struggle. Forced by events, Chiang Kai-shek had no choice other than to execute Tian Kai, and there was nothing that the agents could do. Four years later, on 27 November, 1949, on the eve of the conquest of Chongqing by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, in the concentration camp run by the Sino-American Cooperation Institute at Ciqikou, the agent Yang Jinxing (nicknamed Ape) shot and killed four members of the Trotskyist Wang Zhenhua’s family, including two children aged two and less than one year old. Thus Yang Jinxing avenged the death of his sworn brother. (He was arrested in 1955 and executed in 1958) Restored in 1943, the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation adjusted its work. As well as continuing its activities among the urban industrial workers, it took steps to expand its influence in other sectors of society, including higher education. Yang Chengzhi, Liu Hengxin, Zhang Shengshi, Xiong Andong, Yin Chunde, Mou Jiayi, Zhang Hongren, Yang Shouyuan, and Wang Xiangchen worked in a total of nine of the evacuated universities, and when the universities moved back to Nanjing, Shanghai, Beiping, Hangzhou, Shenyang, and Qingdao in 1946, after the start of the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists, they took part in the student movement, campaigning against the civil war and for democracy. After August 1945, when Japan surrendered and the war ended, battle began between the two Chinese parties. I joined the democratic movement against autocracy and dictatorship (described in another chapter). In Shanghai, I met with Fan Wenhua, Kui Kuan, and Su Xuechang, from whom I learned that

memoirs (2006)

895

Zhang Weiliang had contacted the Shanghai Trotskyist Central Committee and that the Trotskyists had split into two factions. Su had first received a personal letter from the minority leader Yiyin (Zheng Chaolin) asking whether the Chongqing organisation was for the minority or the majority, and another from the majority Uncle Ou (Peng Shuzhi) asking the same question. Kui Kuan wrote back: the Sichuan organisation was not divided into factions and wished to know the reason for the two factions, which was not clear from their publications, New Flag and Youth and Women (later renamed New Voice). At the time, a group of Trotskyist students in Sichuan were looking to the Trotskyist veterans in Shanghai for leadership. In May 1946, the Central University suspended classes in preparation for the move to Nanjing in June. Before leaving Chongqing, I went to visit Kui Kuan. Su Xuechang, Fan Wenhua, and Liu Yi had already left for Shanghai. Su Xuechang had a brother twenty years older than he, a worker in the Shanghai Post Office. Su Xuechang had been raised by this brother and made sure to visit him. Fan Wenhua was trying to find out for himself why the Shanghai Trotskyist Central Committee had split. Liu Yi wanted to go back home to Xuzhou for a visit, and left together with Fan Wenhua. All three of them were key members of our Sichuan committee. Kui Kuan didn’t want all three of them to leave together and told Fan Wenhua: When you go to Shanghai, you will be acting in a personal capacity, not in the name of the Sichuan organisation. When the three of them arrived in Shanghai, Su Xuechang and Liu Yi were “fought for” by the majority and Fan Wenhua by the minority. People are easily dominated by sectarian ideas. The majority said the majority was best and the minority said the opposite. Kui Kuan in Chongqing still could not understand the reasons for the split. He asked me to write to him from Nanjing to clarify the matter. Li Ji, who worked with Kui Kuan in the rice mill on the south bank, accepted Trotskyist ideas and went to work as a mechanic in a factory in Hualongqiao, where he influenced and won over a mechanic called Liu and another called Tian. A woman called Gao, a factory worker from Sichuan, had been a pupil in a middle school in Chengdu. In her third year, she and some classmates organised a reading club, read progressive literature and art books, and were considered “new school” by their fellow-students. When the headmaster asked them to disband the reading club and stop reading progressive literature, she asked him why and was soon in hot water. She was ordered to withdraw from school. When she was still a child, her parents had arranged a marriage for her with the son of a grain merchant. After middle school, she often argued with her parents about the marriage contract. Her father threatened to stop her studying, so she decided to leave home. She had read Gorky’s novels and

896

xiong, trans. benton

wanted to go out into society, like Gorky. She wrote to Xinhua Daily telling them of her plight and explaining that she wanted to study under the Communists in Yan’an. She received no reply from Xinhua Daily, which was dealing at the time with an anti-communist clamour after the announcement of the dissolution of the Third International. With the financial support of a few close classmates, she went to Chongqing and enrolled as a worker in the Yufeng Yarn Factory. At the factory, she came across some leaflets supporting workers’ demands for wage increases and calling on them to organise. She saw that the leaflets had been distributed by the Chinese Communist League. She thought, wrongly, that she had found the Communist Party. She asked Kui Kuan why the Communist Party was struggling for the complete realisation of the Three People’s Principles. Kui Kuan replied that such a question could not be answered in a few words, and that you needed to know the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism and the history of the Chinese Revolution to understand the issue. She expressed her willingness to read up on these subjects. Kui Kuan introduced her to The Communist Manifesto and State and Revolution. Kui Kuan’s other contacts included members of Zhu Xuefan’s Labour Association, mostly young intellectual workers whose political ideas were inclined towards the Communist Party. Zhu Xuefan was a well-known social activist who opposed the one-party dictatorship of the Kuomintang. In July 1946, after being sent back to Nanjing with my school, I arrived in Shanghai and stayed at the home of Su Xuezhi, the elder brother of Su Xuechang. Brother Su was a kind and generous elderly postal worker, basically illiterate, who had spent his life picking up and dropping off mail at railway stations. Our Trotskyist students who had returned from Sichuan used his home as a liaison station. As a result, the Communists said he was being used by the Trotskyists and he was never promoted, but he didn’t care. When I visited him in the early 1980s, twenty-seven years after my imprisonment by the Communists, he said, “Trotskyism, I don’t understand the first thing about it”. Su Xuechang and Liu Yi joined Peng Shuzhi’s majority and Fan Wenhua joined Zheng Chaolin’s minority, and the three of them used to argue at Brother Su’s house. I asked them to bring me the documents from 1941 when the split started. I spent a whole week in Brother Su’s attic reading Life in School. Although I had not met any of the veteran Trotskyists in Shanghai – Peng Shuzhi, Zheng Chaolin, and Wang Fanxi – I knew their writings and translations and had been enlightened by their ideas. I regarded them with respect and admiration. In Life in School, they debated two issues: the nature of the Sino-Japanese War and the principles of organisation. The question of the

memoirs (2006)

897

nature of the Sino-Japanese War was actually a discussion of the nature of the Chinese Revolution. After reading School Life, I was confused. It seemed to me that the two sides in the debate were fighting a war of abstract concepts, mixed with personal attacks. As a junior figure in the movement, it was hard for me to understand. I couldn’t imagine that exactly forty years later, in the early 1980s, they would still be arguing and fighting. After the summer of 1947, Fan Wenhua went back to Shandong. He sold the cotton his wife and son had gathered from the cotton fields and returned to Nanjing, whence he took the riverboat to Sichuan, to canvas on behalf of the minority. When I arrived in Shanghai in early 1948, Liu Yi told me that Kui Kuan had already indicated that he would join the majority. When Peng Shuzhi held a party meeting, Liu Yi attended on behalf of Kui Kuan and Peng Shuzhi intended to transfer Kui Kuan to work in Shanghai. After the meeting, my relationship with Kui Kuan was severed and he was contacted by Liu Yi on behalf of the Central Committee. Liu Yi left for Hong Kong in 1950, after which he remained in contact with Kui Kuan until December 1952 [when the Trotskyists in China were rounded up and sent to prison]. According to a letter Liu Zhichao sent to Li Yuting in 1994, the Trotskyist organisations and the underground ccp were working together against the [Kuomintang] enemy. But according to a publication concerning “the counterrevolutionary prisoner Zhang Weiliang”, published in 1954, the opposite was true: When [Sichuan] was about to be liberated, he and Kui Kuan and others actively planned to pretend to be activists, win over the masses, deceive the workers, and organise them under the pretext of protecting the factories, while secretly carrying out counterrevolutionary activities. […] The “Socialist Youth League” was organised. How did the “conspiracy” plan come about? On 6 December 1949, the Sichuan newspaper Xinshu carried a short biography of Zhao Jinsheng, who had been killed by Chiang’s party. It was written by Kui Kuan, described as a journalist. It included the following passage: He had organised the Workers’ Society and edited The Labourer. In order to unite the working class, at the end of 1948, he organised the Chongqing Workers’ Federation and founded the Workers’ Federation Newspaper, while launching a campaign to explain how workers could “deal with con-

898

xiong, trans. benton

tingencies” and “protect factories and machines”. Unfortunately, however, he was arrested for the second time in June. Kui Kuan, in his capacity as a journalist, could only write about the “contingency plans” of the Trotskyist organisations as if they were the personal ideas and actions of an individual. On 27 November 1949, on the eve of the People’s Liberation Army’s conquest of Chongqing, Chiang’s agents massacred more than 300 Chinese Communists and other revolutionaries at the foot of Mount Gele. The massacre of four members of the family of the Trotskyist leader Wang Zhenhua, his wife and two infant children, was among the worst atrocities ever committed by Chiang’s agents against political prisoners. Also killed were Wang Kunrong, a Trotskyist worker, and Zhao Jinsheng, a Trotskyist student. Su Xuechang left Chongqing for Shanghai in 1946 and joined Peng Shuzhi’s majority faction. After Peng Shuzhi had founded his [new] Party in 1948, Su changed his name to Su Tao and was sent to Taiwan to develop the Trotskyist organisation there. Fan Wenhua left Chongqing for Shanghai in 1946 and joined Zheng Chaolin’s minority faction. He then returned to Sichuan and went north again. He was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment and sent to a labour camp in a mine west of Xichang, where he died. Forty years later, his son went to the site to seek out his remains, but although his name was mentioned in the archives, his bones were nowhere to be found. Kui Kuan was classed as a “leading member of the Sichuan Trotskyist bandits”. Liu Zhichao and Kang Zhiquan, who were arrested at the same time as Kui Kuan, recalled that Kui Kuan taught revolutionary songs to other inmates in the detention centre, thus indicating that Kui Kuan’s mood and his attitude to life in prison were upbeat. He was sent to work on a reform-through-labour farm. In the 1990s, his nephew wrote to me from Ji’nan to say that before 1962, his family had known that he was being held in Chongqing and had sent clothes to him, but that after 1962, there was no longer any word of him. I would like to say a few more words about Zhao Fangju. The Chongqing Trotskyist organisation existed for thirteen years, from the end of 1939 to the end of 1952. Zhao Fangju worked in the core group of the organisation for six months in the first half of 1941 and was responsible for printing Workers’ Voice. In October 1941, before the first crackdown by Chiang’s agents, he quit. Under Chiang, he escaped arrest, but not under the Chinese Communists. Unfortunately, he had a history of quitting and was only held for a short while. A Trotskyist who was not a Trotskyist, a rightist who was not a rightist, he floundered for more than twenty years in the relentless waves of history. In his later years, he wrote

memoirs (2006)

899

an account of his life as a Trotskyist, under the title Sunset Reminiscences. There was much about him of Lu Xun’s Ah Q, and something of the two clowns in the local Shao opera that Lu Xun wrote about.16 I would also want to write about what happened to Yan Zigui and Liang Yi, as a conclusion to my account of the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation. Yan Zigui was the teacher and sponsor of more than thirty Trotskyist students who went to Chongqing to work in factories. In October 1941, after the destruction of the Trotskyist organisation by Chiang’s agents, Yan left Chongqing to teach at the Xi’an Military Academy. His students were very upset by his choice. In 1947, he enrolled in a publicly funded study programme in the United States to study economics, and nothing more is known about his fate. In the early 1980s, I heard from Liang Yi that Yan Zigui went to live in Taiwan in his later years, under the surveillance of the authorities. As for Liang Yi, the organiser who sent Trotskyist students into the factories to become workers, he was arrested by Chiang’s agents in October 1941. After escaping, he fled to Xishuangbanna in Yunnan, on the border with Laos, where he stayed until the end of the war. Back in Shanghai, he joined the minority under Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi, and described himself as one of its “paving stones”.17 He died in a car accident in Hong Kong in the late 1980s.

Wang Zhenhua and Li Jieshuang Wang Zhenhua, also known as Wang Shuben, was a native of Harbin in northeast China. He went south after the 18 September Incident and studied economics at Peking University. After Chen Duxiu’s arrest in October 1932, the Left Opposition of the ccp fell into a state of fragmentation and was disrupted three times after forming three provisional committees in succession. In June 1934, four Trotskyist students from Beiping arrived in Shanghai: Si Chaosheng, Liu Jialiang, Wang Shuben, and Hu Wenzhang, who pushed out the “old men” Chen Qichang and Yin Kuan and formed the Central Committee of the Left Opposition. On 25 January 1935, this Left Opposition was renamed the Chinese Communist League, signifying that it was no longer a faction within the ccp but a new communist party. In March, Si, Liu, Wang, and Hu were arrested and sent to Nanjing Central Military Prison, Liu for seven 16

17

Lu Xun’s Ah Q is the epitome of someone who won’t face up to reality and convinces himself that he is successful in his endeavours and superior to others. “Clown faces” are used to represent gangsters, rascals, and villains. The story is told in this volume, in Sun Liangsi’s memoir [Part 3, Section C].

900

xiong, trans. benton

years and the others for three to five years. On 29 August 1937, at the time of the Japanese invasion, they were released at the same time as other political prisoners. Hu Wenzhang went to the Northeast, Si Chaosheng went to Wuhan, and Liu Jialiang and Wang Zhenhua returned to Shanghai. Wang Zhenhua then went to Hong Kong, where he engaged in Trotskyist organising. In 1940, the Trotskyists in Shanghai and Hong Kong fell out over organisational principles, and Wang Zhenhua returned to Shanghai to argue with the editorial board of Struggle (which was acting in place of the Central Committee), i.e., Peng Shuzhi, Chen Qichang [Chen Zhongshan], Wang Wenyuan [Wang Fanxi], Liu Jialiang, Lou Guohua, and Zheng Chaolin. However, for a while the dispute remained inconclusive. For a long time, Wang Zhenhua’s livelihood could not be resolved, for the members of the editorial board were all living off the sale of manuscripts (writings and translations). Wang Zhenhua asked the organisation to buy him a ferry ticket back to Hong Kong, but he received no response. As a result, he told Jiang Zhendong that the secret agents were after him and that he could not get rid of them. The editorial board took fright and asked Jiang Zhendong to buy him a ticket and send him away. The members of the editorial board were furious and thought that Wang Zhenhua had seriously violated organisational discipline, so they decided to expel him. In the 1980s, when Zheng Chaolin told me this story, he said that the decision to expel him had been a bit harsh. He also told me that Wang Zhenhua’s views on the war against Japan were inclined towards Chen Duxiu’s views, and that no one on the editorial board of Struggle agreed with Chen Duxiu in that respect. Wang Zhenhua was unable to return to Hong Kong, so he went to Guangxi and stayed temporarily with his lover Li Jieshuang. At the beginning of 1941, he arrived in Chongqing, the Kuomintang’s wartime capital, and was introduced by a university friend to a job as a proofreader for the newspaper Yishi, thus solving his livelihood problems. At the same time, he met up with Liang Yi, who was already active in Chongqing as a Trotskyist organiser. Liang Yi was worried about the lack of anyone with theoretical and writing skills of the sort needed for the planned publication, Workers’ Voice, and Wang Zhenhua was just the person he needed. He immediately put Wang Zhenhua in charge of Workers’ Voice, and at the same time handed over to him the dozen or so students who had become workers at the Twenty-first Arsenal. After Wang Zhenhua took over the editorship of Workers’ Voice, in addition to propagating Chen Duxiu’s ten proposals for the resistance, he stepped up his criticism of Chiang’s government, especially its passivity towards Japan and its arbitrary exploitation of workers on the pretext of carrying out the war, so that it was impossible for workers to maintain even a minimum standard of living.

memoirs (2006)

901

Wang Zhenhua diligently traipsed round the factories to contact the Trotskyist students working in them. Meng Xianzhang, who worked at the Twenty-first Arsenal, recalled in a letter written in April 1994: “Wang Zhenhua came to the Twenty-first Arsenal regularly to explain revolutionary theories to me and to set out my work”. The first half of 1941 was the most active period of the early Trotskyist organisation in Chongqing. From the winter of 1939 through to the summer of 1941, students of a Trotskyist persuasion from the Sixth National Middle School went to Chongqing in three batches of about thirty people in all, to work as factory workers. All of them were young men and women who had gone into society for the sake of their beliefs and the truth. They were enthusiastic but seriously inexperienced. When Wang Zhenhua was expelled from the Shanghai Trotskyist Central Committee and came to the [Kuomintang] rear in Chongqing, his spirits lifted. When he first arrived in Chongqing in early 1941, Liang Yi had dragged him into his organisation without knowing that Wang had been expelled by the Shanghai Trotskyist Central Committee, and he omitted to tell Liang Yi the details of his expulsion. In May, Liang Yi was informed by the Shanghai and Hong Kong comrades that he should comply with the Trotskyist Central Committee, but he was unable to dispense with Wang Zhenhua at once. At the same time, he lost confidence in the group of young students, as his memoir shows. He felt that the organisation was in crisis and made preparations to leave Chongqing. On 8 October 1941, the 18th day of the eighth lunar month, Chiang’s agents conducted their first major raid on the Trotskyist organisation in Chongqing, with the arrest of Liang Yi at the Fiftieth Arsenal and of more than ten Trotskyist students at the Twenty-first Arsenal and in other factories. In April 1994, I learned from a letter from Meng Xianzhang that he himself had not been in the factory on that particular day so he was not arrested. Two days later, Wang Zhenhua went to Meng’s place of residence to inform him that he would be taken to a different factory on the south bank of the Yangtze River and that he should stay there for a while. After the raid, Wang Zhenhua left the Yishi newspaper and moved to Huayan Senior Agricultural School to teach. In February 1942, Chiang’s agents carried out a second raid on the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation and Wang Zhenhua was arrested at the school, while his partner Li Jieshuang was arrested at the National Women’s Normal School in Baisha Town, Jiangjin. During the same period, Liu Zhenji and Wang Kunrong of the Electric Power Company and Zhao Fengtian (Zhao Jinsheng) of the Nanchuan Aircraft Repair Factory were arrested. In 1943, Wang Zhenhua and Li Jieshuang were taken from Chongqing to the concentration camp at the Sino-American Cooperation Institute in Xifeng,

902

xiong, trans. benton

Guizhou, where they were imprisoned. At the time, the leftwing Kuomintang generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng and Ye Ting, the captured commander of the [Communist] New Fourth Army, were being held in the Xifeng concentration camp. After the end of the war, the Xifeng camp was wound up and Wang Zhenhua was taken back to Chongqing and held in the Bai Gongguan prison attached to the Sino-American Co-operation Institute in Ciqikou, where he married Li Jieshuang. In 1947, Li gave birth to a son named Wang Xiaohua. In early 1949, she gave birth to a second son, Wang Youhua. On 27 November 1949, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army was about to capture the mountain city of Chongqing, and Chiang’s agents carried out a bloody massacre in the Ciqikou concentration camp. All four members of Wang Zhenhua’s family were murdered. Among those killed were Wang Kunrong and Zhao Jinsheng. At the end of the month, after the liberation of Chongqing, the story of the tragic death of the four members of the Trotskyist Wang Zhenhua’s family was spread around the mountain city by surviving refugees. Kui Kuan, the leader of the Chongqing Trotskyist organisation, along with Liu Zhichao and Li Ji, went to Ciqikou to retrieve the remains of Wang Zhenhua and the others, and Kui Kuan wrote a short biography of the four martyrs, Wang Zhenhua, Li Jieshuang, Wang Kunrong, and Zhao Jinsheng, which was published in Xinshu newspaper on 6 December 1949. At the end of 1949, the Chongqing regional government cited the murder of Wang Zhenhua, Li Jieshuang, and their two young children as a typical example of cruelty of Chiang’s party. In early 1950, Kui Kuan and Li Ji made a special trip to South Hot Springs to visit Luo Guangbin, who was convalescing there and had been imprisoned at the same time as Wang Zhenhua in Bai Gongguan prison. Luo Guangbin spoke at length about Wang Zhenhua’s time in prison and praised him for his staunchness. In Hongyan (“Red Crag”),18 there is a description of a “Ms Jiang” picking the “flowers in prison”. This suggests that when Luo Guangbin was creating the revolutionary characters for his novel, he had not forgotten Wang Zhenhua and Li Jieshuang, although anti-Trotskyist prejudice prevented him from saying who the parents of the “flowers in prison” really were. The names of Wang Zhenhua, Li Jieshang, and their family were not included in the general list of martyrs of the massacre, because Wang and Li were Trotskyists.

18

Red Crag is a novel published in 1961 based partly on its authors’ Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan experience as former inmates of the Kuomintang prison in Sichuan.

memoirs (2006)

903

The anti-Trotskyist theme was not a domestic product of the Chinese Revolution but a Soviet import from the Stalinist era, which influenced our political life for half a century. Because Wang Zhenhua and Li Jieshuang were Trotskyists, their heroic and tragic deeds at the time of their sacrifice were buried in the dust of anti-Trotskyist history for more than thirty years. It was not until the early 1980s that the Sichuan Provincial Committee, in line with a decision by the Organisation Department of the Central Committee of the ccp “to clarify the issue of the more than one hundred victims and their children, a major event in modern history”, reviewed the cases of more than 90 political prisoners who had not up to that point been recognised as martyrs. In August 1983, four Chinese newspapers reported on the case of Wang Zhenhua and Li Jieshuang: Guangming Daily on the 13th, Wenhui bao on the 16th, Sichuan Daily on the 28th, and Chongqing Daily on the 31st. Here is an extract from the article “The Trotskyist Parents of the ‘Flowers of Prison’” in Shanghai’s Wenhui bao, 16 August 1983. [Li Jieshuang’s] fellow inmate [the Communist] Comrade Ren x x recalled that “Li Jieshuang pounded rice soup when she had no milk, and served the tortured and sick inmates in the prison with the little that she had. She and her husband also made the paste used to mend worn-out books when they were in charge of the library before Comrade Che Yuexian’s death. The inmates of the concentration camp went on a two-day hunger strike in protest against the public shooting of comrades at Daping on 28 October; having been on hunger strike for two days, the couple were unable to get the stove going, and their babies were crying out from hunger”. The Kuomintang agents were very clear about Wang Zhenhua. They had asked him to cooperate against the Communists, but Wang firmly refused. Comrade Han Zidong recalled that Wang Zhenhua expressed admiration and sympathy for the loyalty displayed by our [Communist] comrades. Comrade Mao x x, a refugee alongside Wang Zhenhua, recalled that when Wang Zhenhua learned that the People’s Republic of China had been established on October 1 and that the March of the Volunteers had been made the national anthem, he had run to the window and quietly told Luo Guangbin and Chen Ran and the others the happy news. From the recollections of the victims and the confessions of the executioner Yang Jinxing (nicknamed Ape), we know that at the start of the

904

xiong, trans. benton

massacre on 11 and 27 November 1949, after the victims on the upper floors of the prison had been slaughtered, the first people to be escorted out from downstairs were Wang Zhenhua, Li Jieshuang, and their two infant children, father and mother both handcuffed, each holding a child. Wang Zhenhua was very weak, but he held his chest up as much as possible and walked forward with Xiaohua in his arms, not a trace of fear on his face. Li Jieshuang, who was extremely weak, struggled to hold her “prison flower”, Youhua, who was less than a year old, and followed behind her husband. As they passed by the cells, friends clearly saw that Li Jieshuang had not a single tear on her face. Her demeanour was extraordinarily severe, like a marble statue. Step by step, the couple advanced, reluctantly bidding farewell with their eyes from their fellow sufferers huddled together behind the barred windows. Xiaohua, two years old, cried out in fear at the sight of the fierce executioner, calling out in a shrill voice: I’m scared, Mum, I’m scared. Li Jieshuang turned to the executioner Yang Jinxing and said: Shoot me a few extra times, but let the children go. Yang Jinxing stared at her with his bloodshot eyes and yelled: Shoot them all, children and parents together, don’t allow the grass to grow. Wang Zhenhua then shouted across to Li Jieshuang: Together, together, why talk with this bunch of dogs? The guns fired. The entire family of four collapsed together in a pool of blood. In 1984, in The Party Has Not Forgotten Them – The Martyrs of Red Rock, prepared by the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the ccp, is an article titled “A Couple Who Would Rather Die than Submit – Wang Zhenhua and Li Jieshuang”. Here is a summary: After the 18 September Incident, Wang Zhenhua, a young man, saw his hometown occupied by the enemy and had to go into exile in another part of China. He had no home to return to, and his hatred for the Japanese imperialists was so great that his chest burned with anger. In 1934, when Wang Zhenhua was studying in the Economics Department of Peking University, he took an active part in the anti-Japanese propaganda activities of students exiled from the [Japanese-occupied] northeast. At that time, there were Trotskyist students in the Peking University Student Union who shouted anti-Japanese slogans, carried revolutionary banners, and pretended to be very radical. As Wang Zhenhua was young and naive and radical in his thinking, he did not know the true nature of the Trotskyists and was introduced to them and went astray.

memoirs (2006)

905

Under the reactionary rule of Chiang Kai-shek, he was expelled from Peking University as a radical. He had in the meantime moved to Shanghai, where he continued to propagate anti-Japanese salvation and oppose the Kuomintang’s sell-out and surrender. He therefore offended the reactionaries and was arrested by the Kuomintang government and imprisoned for more than two years. [He went to Shanghai and took an active part in the Trotskyist organisation, unified by Chen Duxiu into the Chinese Communist League, a new communist party, and was arrested by the Kuomintang government in March 1935. After the 7 July Incident, the beacon of anti-Japanese resistance burned across the motherland. It was only after the formation of the anti-Japanese national united front that he was released and able to engage in organising the Trotskyists in Shanghai. As he openly put forward the idea of defeating Japanese imperialism, a political departure from the Trotskyist counterrevolutionary programme of undermining the resistance, he fell out with the Trotskyist Central Committee and was ordered to leave Shanghai and go to Hong Kong. [This is an inaccurate and sectarian account.] Soon afterwards, he went to Wuzhou in Guangxi, together with Li Jieshuang, and stayed there for a while. He then went to Chongqing by himself, to participate in and lead the work of the Sichuan Regional Committee, a Trotskyist organisation in Chongqing. He was responsible for editing the mimeographed publication Workers’ Voice. Although he had not yet completely broken away from Trotskyist thinking, he focused on propagating anti-Japanese salvation, firmly advocating the defeat of Japanese imperialism, opposing the compromise and surrender of the Kuomintang, and exposing its corruption and incompetence. His writings were fluent and inspiring, and popular with some of the young workers and students of the time. The Trotskyist Central Committee in Shanghai hated Wang Zhenhua to the core and immediately dismissed him from the Trotskyist local committee in Chongqing. [Xiong’s note: The last two sentences are anti-Trotskyist lies.] The main spirit of his articles shows that he had basically broken away from the Trotskyists. Workers’ Voice, a newspaper he ran, was openly distributed in some schools and factories to encourage workers to go on strike, thus arousing the hatred of the Kuomintang reactionaries. In February 1942, Wang Zhenhua was again arrested and imprisoned. After a harsh interrogation, he was sent to the Sino-American Cooperation Institute’s Bai Gongguan Prison. Li Jieshuang, formerly known as Li Qiqing, was originally from Cangwu, Guangxi. Her father, Li Qingyu, was a merchant in Wuzhou at the end of

906

xiong, trans. benton

the Qing Dynasty and ran a prosperous family business. Ms Li was born in Wuzhou in May 1920. Her father died early and her mother, Huang Yanwen, brought up her and her siblings. As a teenager, Li Qiqing sympathised with the tragic plight of working women under feudal oppression and treated her maidservants not only as equals but with respect. In 1932, she was promoted from primary school in Wuzhou to middle school. She was a quiet and dignified girl who studied diligently and was very good at languages and well liked by her teachers. She was deeply dissatisfied with the darkness of the old society and gradually developed the idea of resisting the Japanese and saving the country and fighting for women’s liberation and self-reliance. She went to Nanning in the spring of 1936 for training, and in the summer she joined the first student army in Guangxi. In the student army, she tirelessly read progressive publications, especially Soviet literature, to broaden her horizons. She later went to Guangxi University, where she was influenced by her progressive classmates and joined a reading club. After the outbreak of war, she joined the anti-Japanese salvation movement. Although only 17, she was talented. She could sing and dance well, and liked to act in plays. After the fall of Guangzhou, she went to Hong Kong to work on a newspaper. During her stay in Hong Kong, she became acquainted with Wang Zhenhua. [In Hong Kong, she worked in a factory as a Trotskyist.] She later returned home to Wuzhou in Guangxi with Wang Zhenhua. Soon afterwards, Wang Zhenhua went to Chongqing. Immediately after Wang Zhenhua was arrested by Kuomintang agents, they searched his room and found letters written to him by Li Jieshuang, so the reactionaries arrested her too. She claimed that she was married to Wang Zhenhua, so the two were escorted to the Xifeng concentration camp in Guizhou for a long period of imprisonment. The enemy understood that Wang Zhenhua and Li Jieshuang had a high level of education and tried in vain to soften them up and get them to cooperate. However, Wang Zhenhua sternly refused. The enemy used all kinds of threats and inducements to make Wang Zhenhua and Li Jieshuang succumb, but all in vain. They therefore resorted to mental torture. Although imprisoned in the same jail, for a long time they were not allowed to see each other, in a vain attempt to break their will. [The article continues along similar lines to the previous one.]

memoirs (2006)

907

My Participation in Trotskyist Activities in Shanghai In July 1948, Ji Yunlong came from Shanghai to Nanjing to see me and brought me the draft programme for the establishment of the Party and The Road from Capitalism to Communism, i.e., Trotsky’s “Transitional Programme”. A few days after Ji’s departure, Lin Songqi arrived at the Central University and told me that Uncle Ou (Peng Shuzhi) had arrived in Nanjing. I then went with Lin Songqi to where Uncle Ou was staying, and Lin Songqi said goodbye and went back to Shanghai. Uncle Ou told me that he had first gone to Guangzhou and then to Wuhan and now to Nanjing. He was staying with a friend with whom he had a close personal relationship, also surnamed Peng, who was then working as a commissioner in the Ministry of National Defence. I was told to be careful not to speak with the wrong people. Uncle Ou asked me to accompany him to Central University and Jinling University. After leaving Central University, I walked with him past Huqiao Prison. He said, “We’re going to start again”. I understood him to mean that it was time to build the Party again. Walking to the entrance of Jinling University, he said, “The buildings here are still the same”. During the Northern Expedition, he was the director of the political department of the xth Army, and after the Northern Expeditionary Army had captured Nanjing, he had given a speech in the auditorium of Jinling University to a packed audience. Speaking of the past, he was highly excited and endlessly emotional. I accompanied him into the empty auditorium and sat for a while. After smoking his pipe and staying silent for a long time, he told me that he was going to hold a Party congress at the end of August or the beginning of September, and that I must come to Shanghai in late August. The following day, I arranged a meeting with Jin Wanlin and Du Yifei, students from Central University, and Yang Tongchun and Xiong Renwang, students from Jinling University. They accompanied Uncle Ou to Xuanwu Lake and the Zijin Mountains and spent the day walking and talking. When he returned, Uncle Ou told me that he had a good impression of the men, all of whom were able to express their opinions clearly. I told him that Du’s ideas leaned towards the minority faction, and he asked, “Does the minority have people coming?” I told him truthfully, “This is an open door”. That was indeed the case, and shortly before Uncle Ou arrived, at about the same time as Ji Yunlong turned up in Nanjing, Li Pei of the minority had come to see me in Nanjing and brought me two copies of the newly published Chinese translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. In the spring of 1948, Fan Wenhua (a classmate), who had joined the minority, stayed with me for a while while passing through Nanjing.

908

xiong, trans. benton

When I mentioned the “open door” and saw that Uncle Ou stayed silent, I told him that of the seven or eight people who had travelled from Sichuan to Shanghai, some were in the majority and some in the minority but we were still a group, no one was trying to recruit anyone, and we respected each other’s views. On the third day, I arranged for Zhao Shen (an employee of the library of the Ministry of National Defence) and Li Xiumei (an employee of the Logistics Department, a worker influenced by Fan Wenhua in Sichuan) to meet with Uncle Ou, and I accompanied them both to talk with him for a while. Then I took him to Jiangning Normal to visit Fan Yueqiu. Fan Yueqiu was directly influenced by Ou’s ideas at the time. She influenced two female students and one male student at Jiangning Normal. They set up a reading club. A young Cantonese couple (sympathisers), who had arrived in Nanjing from Wuhan, accompanied Uncle Ou back to Shanghai that evening, or else I would have arranged a meeting for him with Cao Xianzhi and Cao Huibai, as well as with Hu Zhendong and Qiu Jilong from the Jianguo Law and Business School On the night of 19 August 1948, the Nationalist government arrested Yang Tongchun, Cao Xianzhi, and Cao Huibai from Central University. As for Du Yifei, who lived downstairs, he managed to escape through the back window with the help of classmates when the agents pounded on his door. From then on, he lost contact with me. The day after the Nanjing arrests, I arrived in Shanghai. Liu Naiguang arranged for me to live on the third floor of a small department store on North Zhejiang Road, where Qian Chuan and Li Lihua lived. Every morning, Liu Naiguang came to take me to the meeting place. The meeting was first held for the first three days in the Dagong Primary School on Haining Road, but it quickly adjourned when Zheng Keng (Pu Ke), who was in charge of security, noticed that something was going on. The next two days the meeting was held upstairs at the Taifeng Tobacco Shop in Baxianqiao. The shop owner, Yan Yanbin, was an old friend and sympathiser of Uncle Ou’s, so after the meeting, he hosted two sumptuous banquets upstairs to celebrate and also as a cover. Attending the conference were Peng Shuzhi, Chen Bilan, Liu Jialiang, Yin Kuan, Yu Shouyi, Ji Yunlong, Liu Naiguang, Zheng Keng, Wang Guolong, Yang Bo, Liu Yi, Jiang Junyang, Lu Ji, Ding Yi, Qian Chuan, Zhou Rensheng, Zhang Tao, Xiong Andong, Chen Xiaoxia, and others. During the discussion of Peng Shuzhi’s political report, there were heated debates on how to understand the interrelationship between the democratic revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the socialist revolution. Peng Shuzhi argued in his political report that the Chinese proletariat led the peas-

memoirs (2006)

909

ants to power in a democratic revolution to achieve national independence and land reform, that this power was the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that in order to retain power, the proletariat could not stop the socialist revolution without violating the system of bourgeois ownership. Lu Ji and Jiang Junyang disagreed with this formulation. They thought that the dictatorship of the proletariat was the socialist revolution and that the proletariat came to power by carrying out a socialist revolution. Peng Shuzhi, Liu Jialiang, and Yu Shouyi all thought that Lu Ji was echoing the view of the Zheng Chaolin minority; Lu Ji thought that Peng Shuzhi’s view was a theory of revolutionary stages and not of permanent revolution, and so on. With my limited theoretical skills, I was not interested in these abstract arguments and kept quiet. Afterwards, Liu Yi told me that Uncle Ou was dissatisfied with my silence, probably because my talk about an “open door” had led to misunderstandings, but actually I thought that the ideas set out in Peng Shuzhi’s report were closer to Trotsky’s theory of continuous revolution. The meeting adopted the political report, the Party programme, and the Party constitution. The Chinese Communist League changed its name to Chinese Revolutionary Communist Party. Elected to the Central Committee were Peng Shuzhi, Liu Jialiang, Chen Bilan, Zhen Yu,19 Yin Kuan, Yu Shouyi, and Dai Yan. The alternate members were Liu Yi, Zheng Keng, and Liu Naiguang (secretary).20 The standing members were Peng Shuzhi (secretary), Liu Jialiang (organisation), and Yin Kuan (propaganda). At the time, I was full of joy and hoped that China now had a Party fighting for socialism; whether it could become a true proletarian Party had yet to be tested. More than half a century has passed and I know not how many Yellow Rivers have flowed into the East China Sea, yet old man history has marked the Chinese Trotskyists’ examination script with a zero. At the end of 1948, to avoid sabotage or decapitation by either the ccp or the Kuomintang, the newly established Central Committee moved to Hong Kong and decided to set up a Jiangsu-Zhejiang Party Committee in Shanghai to lead the organisation in Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu. The Committee consisted of Qian Chuan, Ding Yi, and Liu Yi, with Wang Guolong, Yang Bo, and Xiong Andong later coopted. Our organ was Under the Banner of Marxism, edited and printed by Zhou Lüqiang.

19 20

i.e., Jiao Lifu. i.e., Zhang Kai, a supporter of Peng Shuzhi.

910

xiong, trans. benton

I came to Shanghai from Nanjing after the Chinese New Year in 1949 and was assigned to work with three branches: the French Tramway Company branch, the branch at the Xinkangli Ironworks; and another workers’ branch on Panyu Road; and also with Ye Yadian of Jiaotong University and Han Fengying, a woman worker at a yarn factory. From January to the beginning of May, the life of the Provisional Committee and the branches went on normally. Shanghai was liberated between May 25 and 27. After that, the Provisional Committee stopped meeting for more than two months because its six members had to adapt to the postLiberation social environment, and there was a big change in the composition of the branches associated with it. More importantly, the military victory of the ccp had shaken some of the Chinese Trotskyists’s theoretical positions. They had always believed that the ccp was a petty-bourgeois peasant party and that therefore it would not be able to lead the Chinese Revolution to victory, also because it was constrained by Stalin’s foreign policy. But the reality was that the ccp, holding high the banner of Marxism-Leninism, had declared land reform in 1947, setting off a peasant war in which the poor and the peasants had occupied the land, overthrown the Three Great Mountains (imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism), and won the third revolution, an unprecedented event in Chinese history. How to understand the inevitability of the ccp’s victory and the historical inevitability of the Kuomintang’s defeat and how to answer the questions raised in the branches regarding the ccp’s victory was at the top of the Provisional Committee’s agenda. Two of the three members of the workers’ branch I had contacted were missing; only one person remained in the tramway branch, and the other two contacts had gone back to their hometowns in northern Jiangsu to participate in land reform and share out the land; one person from the Xinkangli branch had run away and was said to have joined the army. In September, the Provisional Committee met to report on the situation in the branches, and major changes ensued. Another meeting was held in October and it was decided to regroup membership of the branches and resume publication of Under the Banner of Marxism. The meeting lasted one day and then adjourned. That same day, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau arrested Qian Chuan, Ding Yi, Liu Yi, and Wang Guolong; others too were arrested, including Zhou Lüjang, Zhao Yangshi, and Shen Yunfang. After a week, they were released, but they were warned to cease all organisational activity or suffer the consequences. Liu Yi found me after his release and told me this. From then on, the organisation of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which had only been in existence for a year, was paralysed. Many individuals,

memoirs (2006)

911

mostly in their workplaces, joined the various democratic reform movements led by the ccp, thus doing their bit to transform the old society and build a new one.

Changning Middle School I reported to the private Fenghua Middle School in August 1949, the first new academic year after the liberation of Shanghai. The school had been converted after the Communist victory from a property with a garden previously owned by the nephew of Chiang Kai-shek’s former wife. It was located at the Huayang Road exit of Changning Road. A man from the army ran the school. He pretended to be a cultured man and spent his time on the Shanghai Bund. He couldn’t run a school by himself, so he invited a wellknown scholar from Tiantai County, Mr Wu, to run it for him. Mr Wu was so determined to make a success of the school that he hired renowned teachers and genuine university graduates to do the teaching, leaving general affairs and finances in other hands. An underground Communist, Lan Wenrui, a graduate of Fudan University, was introduced to Mr Wu to teach biology at the school. Before Liberation, he had been head of the Teachers’ Federation in the western district of Shanghai, and I met him at a federation meeting. The man who had previously taught art had also been a Communist, and was said to have been arrested and killed. After the liberation of Shanghai, Mr Wu did what was necessary for the time, and Lan Wenrui presided over the school administration. Mr Wu had a good reputation. Lan Wenrui’s brothers and sisters and his brother-in-law were all members of the Party. His father, Lan Gongwu, was an old revolutionary who was an administrator of the then Council of State. With Liberation, cadres and former underground members of the Party in the city were all conscious of having become masters of their own house and their hearts were pounding, busy all day long transforming the old society and easing it out of backwardness, poverty, and ignorance in the direction of a new society of freedom, equality, and light. I saw Lan Wenrui going to meetings in the district every day, in the morning, the afternoon, and sometimes the evening, as if there was so much work to do that he couldn’t stop. It was because he was so busy that he persuaded Zhang Hong to let me go. He told me that he had formed a good impression of me in the Teachers’ Federation, and when he found out that I had earlier sided with Zhang Hong in an incident at another school, he was even more convinced that I could help. I

912

xiong, trans. benton

should add that at the time he did not know that I was a Trotskyist, only that I was a university student with progressive ideas. He assigned me to teach geography for the whole school, from first to third year, as well as to direct the students’ extra-curricular activities. Having studied history at university and knowledgeable about both geography and geology, I was confident that I could teach the subject while at the same time learning it. A new international bookshop had opened on Yuyuan Road near the university, where I was able to buy charts published in the Soviet Union for geography teaching (all in Chinese). I made good use of them in my teaching. The bookstore also had a large collection of Soviet socialist propaganda posters, which I hung on the walls around the campus and on the wall of the library. The teachers and students mistook me for a member of the ccp. Lan Wenrui’s membership was not made public until 1951, when the school was transformed into a municipal school and the establishment of a Party group was announced. The forty or so students who had transferred together with me from my previous school had already assumed that I was a member of the ccp. I was a Communist who was not a member of the Party. Society had only just been liberated, and rumours abounded. People’s hearts were in turmoil. Ideas about respecting and fearing the United States coexisted with others that advocated suspecting or opposing the Soviet Union. Among the students, those who believed in and supported the Communist Party were closest to my and Lan’s hearts, while other students were close to Mr Zhou, who taught Chinese literature. The students were naturally ready to reveal their thoughts and feelings, while the teachers were more complex and, as adults, had a wealth of social experience and were used to disguising their true selves. Lan Wenrui once told me that Mr Zhou, Mr Qiu, and others had behaved in a reactionary way before Liberation. The trade unions in a wool mill and a cotton mill near the school wanted to set up evening literacy classes and asked the school to help. Old Lan and I decided to organise some of the progressive-minded boys and girls to join in. Every evening, Old Lan and I accompanied the students to the factories, where they were warmly welcomed by workers older than they, and where they gained in confidence and commitment. In 1950, a campaign was launched to get young students to join the army, and students enthusiastically signed up. I was head of the junior class, so none was old enough. I therefore helped the head teacher of the senior class rally support for the campaign. There were many problems. Some parents were not prepared to respect their children’s wishes. After talking with one such parent for a whole afternoon, I began to understand his feelings. He was not hostile

memoirs (2006)

913

to the Communist Party but he clung to the traditional idea that there was no future in being a soldier, that good people do not become soldiers. Between 1950 and 1951, the social and political situation in the country changed rapidly, and so did people’s thoughts and feelings. The father who had previously opposed his son’s enlistment now changed his mind. A trade union was set up in the school and the staff became part of the working class. Yang Nianzu was elected head of the trade union branch at the school. This teacher suffered during the Cultural Revolution, when he was branded a counterrevolutionary for speaking ill of [Mao’s wife] Jiang Qing and sentenced to ten years in prison. Shortly after the union was formed, a branch of the ccp emerged at the school, with three members: Lan Wenrui, senior student Zhou Jiuhong, and the student Li Rufeng. I had known for a long time that these two students were members of the Party and I often saw the three of them holding group meetings in Lan’s living room. Some teachers and students were surprised to see that I was not a member. “Teacher, you’re not a Communist?” The students kept asking me. I often used Soviet propaganda posters to tell the students that socialism was a free and democratic society without exploitation or wealth, to inspire them. One day, I happened to see a Communist I knew from the Central University, Zhao Hongcai, in Old Lan’s office, engaged in a long conversation. I suspect that Zhao Hongcai had come to investigate my Trotskyism. I don’t think Old Lan had known that I was a Trotskyist until that point, but I noticed that his attitude towards me did not change. I introduced Yang Renhua, a music graduate from Central University, to him and Zhao Zongzhi, Yang Bo’s wife, to teach history, both of whom he accepted, showing that he still trusted me. Yang Renhua was just a classmate, I can’t remember how I met her, except that she was the daughter of the first wife of the Sichuan warlord Yang Sen. Zhao Zongzhi was a member of the Trotskyist faction influenced by Yang Bo at Shandong University, a fact I kept from Old Lan. Zhao Zongzhi was among the Trotskyists arrested during the national crackdown on 22 December 1952, but she was released after undergoing training. When I visited Old Lan at Changning Middle School in 1980, he told me that after her release, Zhao Zongzhi had approached him and asked to return to teach at the school, but he did not take her on because the school was not short of staff and because of policy restrictions. After Liberation, I did not carry out Trotskyist activities among the students, because I thought it was simply impossible. Before Liberation, the target of influence had been progressive people dissatisfied with the corrupt Kuomintang regime and suspicious of the Communist Party’s line, but who nev-

914

xiong, trans. benton

ertheless were seeking revolution. After Liberation, the revolution led by the Communist Party was still moving forward and the awakened workers and students were willing to follow the Communist Party to transform the old society and build a new one. There were those who were skeptical or opposed to the policies of the Communist Party, and I encountered many such among the students, most of them influenced by their families or by reactionary ideas left over from the old society. The Trotskyists were not, despite what Stalin said, mortal enemies who opposed the Communist Party for the sake of it. They were pursuing the path of scientific socialism. When I saw that the Communist Party was tilting away from so-called New Democracy towards socialism, I preferred to speak openly about socialism and Marxism rather than try to develop a Trotskyist organisation among the students. I had my prejudices, for example, I hung up Lenin’s picture in the library but not Stalin’s, but the students would hardly have noticed, and even Old Lan did not object. In fact, he often told the students about Lenin and did an excellent imitation of him, but I never heard him tell stories about Stalin, probably because he had no stories to tell. In those days, there were many books about Lenin in bookshops but very few about Stalin. During the purge of Trotskyists in December 1952, not a single student was implicated as a result of me. Unfortunately, in 1957, several students who had been close to me and had listened to my ideas were branded as rightists, but I only found out about this during the Cultural Revolution, from activists who came to the prison to arraign me. Apart from trying to prove that they were not Trotskyists and did not have Trotskyist ideas, I was saddened by the fact that they had been declared rightists because of me. Now I think about it, I was not to blame, for it was the policy of the Communist Party that was at fault. In the summer of 1952, Shanghai held an ideological reform campaign for middle-school teachers. The whole city was declared a brigade, which was divided into teams. Old Lan was team commander. He knew that I was a Trotskyist and I asked him how I should fill in the box on the form headed “political profile”. He told me not to fill it in and that the issue would be “dealt with separately”. He put a dozen female teachers from another middle school into a study group with me, headed by the headmaster of that school, a man named Li, a member of the ccp, whom I had met before Liberation in the Teachers’ Federation. After listening to a report, the group leader summarised its spirit. We talked for two days, and set about distinguishing what was wrong thinking and what was reactionary thinking. A popular saying at the time was that historical innocence is not the same as historical clarity. This meant that only if a historical problem is identified and the organisation reaches a conclusion can historical clarity be achieved.

memoirs (2006)

915

Ideological reform required everyone to recount their own history clearly, to distinguish between wrong bourgeois ideas (bourgeois ideas were not classified as reactionary until after the anti-rightist campaign in 1957) and imperialist reactionary ideas, and, on the basis of heightened ideological awareness, to recount their own history clearly, regardless of any anti-communist historical problems, even historical problems involving bloodshed, as long as they are clearly explained in the context of the ideological reform campaign. In the reform movement, problems would be treated as ideological issues and people would not necessarily be held politically responsible as long as they gave a clear account of themselves. I took a pack of Daqianmen cigarettes from my bag while examining my mistakes and said: “When I go out, I take Daqianmen cigarettes with me and offer them to my friends, but at home, when I am alone, I smoke a more expensive brand. That kind of thinking and behaviour is selfish and self-serving, hypocritical, and bourgeois”. Several of the female teachers laughed – not necessarily at me, but at the fact that I spoke out so openly about my snobbishness and pettiness. One tried to help me to quit smoking altogether. The women were kind-hearted and simple-minded, and were unable to comment on my ideological self-examination. The women teachers were kindhearted and innocent, and unable to make any comments about my ideological examination. The group leader made a few points, which I could see were in line with Old Lan’s thinking. At the end of the ideological reform, we had to fill in the forms. Under political affiliation, the group leader put down membership of the ccp, one female teacher put down the Democratic League, and the other female teachers and I put down “the masses”. If I had been put in a group with teachers from my own school and had said “the masses”, I guess some of them would have taken the opportunity to give me their opinions and voice their discontent with Old Lan. Old Lan had joined the school before liberation and had at one point lived a loose and even romantic life. Before the Party organisation in the school went public in 1951, some teachers and a few students continued to call him “curry” behind his back, a Shanghai term whose meaning I do not understand but which was spoken contemptuously and dismissively. During the first two years after Liberation, he was busy with work outside the school and I was busy with schoolwork on his behalf. Many teachers praised me for my decent style, but such remarks were meant to reflect badly on Old Lan. I knew that some teachers were dissatisfied with Old Lan, and it is difficult to say whether the dissatisfaction was for personal or political reasons. By putting me in a different group, it was clear that I was being let off the hook, pending “separate treatment”. As to what such treatment might entail,

916

xiong, trans. benton

it seems to me that Old Lan could not have known before 22 December 1952, when the net finally fell. After the end of ideological reform, the class of which I was teacher rose to become the senior class, in the autumn of 1952, and I remained with it. I wanted to stay with this class until it graduated. Old Lan fully supported my ideas and approach. After the Thought Reform Movement, it seemed to me that thinking had been effectively reformed. Relationships between people changed, people spoke cautiously to each other, people moved to make comments were less vocal, and some people became respectful and polite towards Old Lan. I remember that during the anti-rightist movement in 1957, by which time I was in prison, I read in the newspapers that the actor and film director Shi Hui had been branded a rightist and one of the reactionary statements attributed to him was said to have been made during the ideological reform of 1952, when he said that it had transformed people into “everlasting smiles”. In October 1949, when the Shanghai Trotskyist majority’s Provisional Committee was busted, its main leaders, Qian Chuan, Ding Yi, and Liu Yi, fled to Hong Kong and the Shanghai organisation ceased to exist. From 1950 to 1952, I kept in touch with Yang Bo and his wife Zhao Zongzhi and with Cao Huibai, Si Peiyao, Ye Yatian, and Ye Chunhua. After Cao Huibai returned from Hong Kong, I managed to get her a job teaching language classes at the Fenghua Middle School for a few months in the first half of 1950. Lan Wenrui did not yet know that I was a Trotskyist, and Cao Huibai argued with him about the people’s democratic dictatorship and the dictatorship of the proletariat; afterwards, Lan Wenrui told me that “Miss Cao’s thinking is not simple”. I told Cao Huibai not to argue with Old Lan on such issues in future. After the school became the municipal Changning Middle School, I introduced Zhao Zongzhi to teach history, which she did for more than a year, until 22 December. In 1950, when Ye Yadian was studying at the Jiaotong University, she had sometimes visited me at Fenghua Middle School and invited me to her home, where I was entertained by her mother and elder sister. After graduating in 1951, she was assigned to the Nanjing Radio Factory. When I returned to Nanjing to visit my parents during the vacation, I received her in my home and introduced her to Jin Wanlin and Cao Xianzhi. Si Peiyao kept in touch with me for a longer time, from late 1950 to 1952. She came to the school often, sometimes once a week, and my students were on familiar terms with her. The female students even asked me if she was my girlfriend, and I replied to them, citing a Yuan poem: A person is locked inside my heart, I have lost the key, the door cannot be opened, the person inside cannot get out, people outside cannot get in, “You guess, is she my

memoirs (2006)

917

girlfriend?” A few of the students who liked to read literary novels, and who were intelligent and sensitive, had detected my spiritual sadness. Si Peiyao knew that many students were close to me, and at one point she suddenly asked, “Why don’t you develop them [into Trotskyists]?” I asked her jokingly, “How do you know I haven’t?” “How many have you developed?” I said again, with a straight face, “Don’t ask such a question!” I didn’t expect that she would take the joke seriously. For this reason, I suffered for two days during the initial trial after my arrest, something I had never expected. Ye Chunhua was a native of Wenzhou. Before liberation, a group of Wenzhou middle school students who believed in Trotskyism came to Shanghai and became a target of competition between the majority and minority factions of Trotskyists in Shanghai. Qian Chuan and Wang Guolong, both from Wenzhou, were part of the majority’s Provisional Committee and went to work on this question. Qian Chuan introduced Ye Chunhua to me, and I sent him to Nanjing to find a temporary job as a copyist in the teaching office of Jinling University. Nanjing was liberated in April 1949 and I don’t know when he returned to Shanghai from Nanjing. When I saw him again in Shanghai in late 1949 or early 1950, I realised that he had joined Zheng Chaolin’s minority. Through him, I met Zheng Chaolin twice, in Zhongshan Park. We wanted to find a quiet place to sit and talk, and he led us to a secluded pavilion. A pair of young lovers sat there and I was a bit reluctant to disturb them, but they got up and left as soon as we entered. Zheng Chaolin showed me an essay he had just written on state capitalism. It was not very long and was a theoretical discussion of the nature of world capitalism in the wake of the Second World War. The Labour government in Britain and the Social Democratic government in France were nationalising vigorously to escape a postwar crisis, and Zheng Chaolin compared the nationalisations in Britain and France to that in the Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy, arguing that the managerial class that had emerged in the capitalist countries and the Stalinist bureaucratic caste that ruled the Soviet Union were both state capitalist. He argued that the Soviet Union was no longer a “degenerated workers’ state”, as Trotsky had believed, but had restored capitalism in the form of state capitalism. (In his later years, he developed the concept of “Staliniststyle capitalism – a special kind of state”.) Having read his thesis, I simply took it for what it was. I remained committed to Trotsky’s view of the Soviet Union as a “degenerated workers’ state” of a transitional nature, for I had not yet seen the emergence of private ownership of the means of production

918

xiong, trans. benton

in the ussr. But my theoretical understanding was limited and I was not in a position to debate with him. After the liberation of Shanghai, I met with Zheng Chaolin only twice. In 1964, the government organised the Trotskyist prisoners to study the antirevisionist Nine Commentaries.21 I was not in the same group as Zheng Chaolin, who wrote a 80,000- to 90,000-word treatise on “cadreism” (state capitalism as he understood it) and submitted it in the form of a report on the Nine Commentaries. The government cadres said that what he had written was poisonous and did not allow it to be disseminated. Yu Shouyi, who was in the same group as Zheng, told me that Zheng said that the core of Stalinism was cadreism, that cadres decided everything, that cadres were not elected but appointed from the top down to state organs, and that they were not servants of the people but masters of society, while the means of production were not collectively owned and so on. In 1950, Li Ji and Liu Renjing each put out a statement of repentance in the newspaper, and Ye Chunhua came to see me with that day’s issue of People’s Daily. I was not surprised at Li Ji’s statement. Before liberation, Peng Shuzhi ran the magazine Seeking the Truth and asked Li Ji to write an article for it. Li Ji wrote an article titled “Elder Brother, it’s not ok”, in which he expressed the view that one (the Trotskyists) should know when not to do something. I was also not surprised by Liu Renjing’s declaration. His arrest by the Kuomintang in 1935 and his immediate surrender at the time showed that he lacked backbone and had abandoned his socialist position and was working for the Kuomintang. After the Communist victory, it was only logical that he should want to return to the ranks and make a living again. At the time, I thought he was lying and distorting events. At the time, watching him vilify himself in this way, I assumed he was not saying what he really thought. Fifteen years later, during the Cultural Revolution, it was my turn to lie in exchange for peace, by putting various labels on myself. Thinking back, Liu Renjing might have done the right thing. The truth turned upside down, that was a perfect example of social existence determining consciousness In the first half of 1952, Ye Chunhua sent me several issues of his group’s mimeograph publication New Directions, which mainly consisted of articles criticising the ccp for protecting capitalism and implementing policies such as equating capitalists and workers, in line with Zheng Chaolin’s ideas about state

21

In 1964, the Central Committee of the ccp issued Nine Commentaries on the differences between China and the Soviet Union as they had developed since 1956. From then on, the dispute between China and the Soviet Union escalated even further.

memoirs (2006)

919

capitalism. I remember one article titled “I can’t find a chapter on legal profits in Das Kapital”, whose contents I have forgotten despite its arresting title. At the time, there was indeed a trend of thinking that amounted to spontaneous opposition to capitalism and the bourgeoisie. In my school were two teachers, Mr Zhou and Mr Qiu, who – according to what I had heard – had been very reactionary before Liberation, though when I arrived at the school I never heard them say a word against the Communist Party. Mr Zhou said, regarding the policy of protecting the legal income of capitalists and equating capitalists and workers [after 1949]: “What sort of Communism is that?” I couldn’t understand his standpoint. As for Mr Qiu, he made an even more interesting remark: “The New Democratic policy is one of raising pigs, fattening the capitalists up for fifteen years and then slaughtering them”. After reading New Directions, I had no opportunity to tell Ye Chunhua what I thought of it, for I was arrested along with scores of other Trotskyists on 22 December 1952.

My Arrest On 22 December 1952, I returned to the staff room after dinner to play a few games of ball with Yang Nianzu. Lan Wenrui called Yang Nianzu over for a game of chess and I returned to my writing desk to read the weekly reports submitted by my students. I had been their class teacher in their first year, and continued to be so in their third year of middle school. I had made it a rule that each have his or her own exercise book and write a weekly journal every Sunday, to be handed in to me on Monday. They could write about life, studies, or family and school matters, any problems among their classmates or any opinions they had of the teachers who taught them, including me. I also made it clear that the purpose of asking them to write a weekly journal was to help me do my job as a class teacher. They liked the idea and were happy to do it. Their diaries got better. Some raised problems of the mind, and I wrote down my responses to them. The weekly diary became my tool for communicating with the students, and the relationship between teacher and student became ever closer. The headmaster, Lan Wenrui, appreciated my approach. He too was seeking new ways of educating people. He agreed to my plan to take my class through the whole school, right up to the end of their senior year. I wanted to go through this process two or three times with different cohorts of children, to familiarise myself with the developmental process of children at this stage in their lives. I wanted to pursue a lifelong career in education.

920

xiong, trans. benton

I sat there marking my students’ diaries, “It’s Mr Xiong, isn’t it?” I noticed two people standing next to me. I looked up and saw unfamiliar faces; one big and fat, older than me, and the other thin and young. “Yes, what is it?” “Can I come into your room for a moment, please?” (My quarters were next door to the staff room.) They followed me into a small room (where I slept) and closed the door. “You’re under arrest”. The fat man took out his arrest warrant and waved it in front of me. I was not surprised, nor was I alarmed. In 1949, the ccp led the Chinese Revolution to victory and Stalin’s reputation in the international communist movement soared. More than a decade earlier, Stalin had set up his Moscow trials – of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and so on. I knew about them even before I became a Trotskyist. The trials aroused my curiosity about Trotsky. I read Trotsky’s books and started to believe in his theories. After the Second World War, Trotskyists were repressed throughout Eastern Europe. As a member of the Chinese Communist League, I could not admit that Marxist-Leninist socialist beliefs [i.e., including Trotskyism] were counterrevolutionary under the Chinese Communist regime. My arrest was inevitable. The fat man stayed inside my room to search it, and the young man took me outside and told me not to say anything. Lan Wenrui was standing at my writing desk, and I could see that he had already known what was about to happen. I handed him some keys and gave a knife and some nail-cutters to Deng Zijue, who was standing beside him. I followed the young man silently out of the staff room. It was after eight o’clock and the campus was quiet and empty. As we left the school gate, the janitor, Old Wang, who was lying on his bed, asked, “Going to see a film?” As I walked out of the school gate, I saw a small car parked across the road in front of a cigarette and paper shop. I had seen it there when school ended in the afternoon. I had gone across to buy cigarettes and the woman in charge had complained that the car was blocking the front of her shop. I didn’t realise that it was waiting for me. The young man took out his handcuffs and handcuffed me. “This is official business”, he said. “I did you a favour by not handcuffing you earlier, to save you face”. The car drove to Shanghai No. 1 Detention Centre, where there was a long line of cars in the courtyard. I realised a lot of people were being arrested. The car edged slowly forward, to the second metal door, where I was uncuffed and told to get out. I stood for a moment under the spotlight, after which they sent

memoirs (2006)

921

me up to the third floor, to a room at the west end, with a small square hole in the door and a white-sign that read “No. 18”. From then on, for the next two years, “No. 18” was my name and number. The cell door clanged shut behind me. The world was left outside the door and I lost my freedom. The sound of a whistle woke me up. It was already dawn. The walls inside looked as if they had been recently painted, they were snow white. The room was about fifteen square metres, with two glass windows on the west wall. The sills were higher than my head, so I could only look upwards at the blue sky and the white clouds. The wounds born of three years of anguish, bitterness, and psychological trauma because of frustrated love were hard to heal. Time had not changed my heart, although I had expended my entire energy on school work and students in an attempt to dilute the mental pain. The iron gates were locked. Love and hate were fused into a smouldering past, endlessly long.

Trial and Sentence On the second or third day after my arrest, the Internationale suddenly rang out everywhere, followed by reprimands, the opening and shutting of doors, the shouts of people being dragged away, and then silence. A modern version of Don Quixote, in which the windmill is the devil and the man on horseback, armed with a spear, fights it to the death. I mourned and sighed. One night after New Year’s Day in 1953, I was woken up, taken downstairs, and put in a pre-trial room. The atmosphere was tense, with armed pla soldiers standing outside the room. I passed between them. Three men sat behind the interrogation table, the older one in the middle, who looked to be in his forties, a recorder with a pen to his right, a chubby young man to his left, and a man in public security uniform standing beside the table. After the older man in the middle had asked my name and place of origin, the standing officer said, “He is the official in charge, I am from the Public Security Bureau”. He stammered a little as he continued: “It is our policy to be lenient when you confess and strict when you resist. You must confess your crimes honestly and seek leniency”. Then he added, “You know what the Soviet gpu is like”. The official sitting in the middle, went on to say something about not fighting wars for which one is

922

xiong, trans. benton

unprepared, I should have no illusions, they knew everything about me. They didn’t want my data, they wanted my attitude. The young man on his left and the public security officer then repeated something similar. The public security officer also said: “We will not stop until we have won”. The man in the middle said: “I will now ask you two questions to see if you are honest”. One question was how many students I had “developed” [won over to Trotskyism] in the school. In his words, “corrupted”. The other question was about my relationship with senior Kuomintang officials in Nanjing, with special emphasis on “how I had colluded”. I was confused by these questions, since neither related to any actual fact. “Don’t be nervous, haven’t you read any philosophy books? Objective existence cannot be denied. Don’t think that you have prestige among the students. We will educate them, they will understand and speak up”. I gave my explanation: when the Public Security Bureau broke up the Provisional Committee in 1949, we were told to stop organising. I complied, and I did not “develop” any students. The students in the school who wanted to follow the socialist path through the Communist Party thought I was a Communist teacher and approached me as such. I encouraged them to join the Communist Youth League (at that time it was called the New Democratic Youth League). Public Security Officer: “Don’t argue. I’ll show you the facts! That will be to your disadvantage”. Chubby young man: “Don’t be afraid. It will be to your advantage to tell the truth about your ‘collusion’ with senior Kuomintang officials, and you can take credit for your honesty. We want to prove through you the ‘collusion’ between the ‘Trotskyites’ and the Kuomintang, so that our children and grandchildren will no longer be deceived and poisoned by them, and so on”. Public security officer: “We are training you to be an example!” I was immediately scared, was this going to be a re-run of the Moscow trials? Their attitude was amiable and confident. I was told at the end to think it over, not to worry about it, etc. When I returned to my cell, the duty officer blew his morning whistle. After breakfast, I was taken down again for interrogation. There were only two people behind the interrogation table, the recorder and a young man with a thin face who looked tense. He glared at me for a long time before saying, “Have you thought about the questions we want you to consider?” I hesitated, not knowing how to answer him. He had a violent temper. Throughout the morning, he reprimanded and scolded me, slapped the table, and did just about everything except hit me.

memoirs (2006)

923

As his anger mounted, the recorder beat the wooden chair with an iron bar to intimidate me. The interrogator kept saying, “Speak up!” The interrogation went on like this until the afternoon, when he suddenly shouted out my name: “I’ll give you one last chance to go back and think it over, and if you are still like this, I’ll lock you up for five years and then try again”. When I heard the last sentence, it was like a message: it wouldn’t end up like the Moscow trials. Otherwise, why would I have to spend five years in prison? When the whistle was blown that night, I was taken down once again. I decided to tell the truth without further delay, to avoid being locked up for five years. Behind the table sat the three men from the preliminary hearing: the recorder, the official, and the fat young man. The public security officer was not there. The fat man spoke first: “Let me show you three documents”. The recorder pushed forward the materials. The first was headed “I confess”, with space below for a signature. The second was longer than the first, and was headed “I denounce”. The third was a sheet of paper with my name on it, and a few simple words, “We were wrong, we should confess our problems, and we will remain friends afterwards”. The handwriting, which I recognised, was genuine and not an imitation. The official: “We have shown you the materials, to save you. Those older than you, those younger than you, those of your generation, have all come to understand. You are the only one who remains stubborn”. I said, “The two questions you want me to answer have no basis in truth. I think your question is based on material provided by Si Peiyao. She asked me casually, I answered her jokingly, but she didn’t realise it was a joke”. As I spoke, the senior official suddenly stood up and walked away after writing something down. Fat young man: “Objective existence cannot be denied, the phenomenon reflects the essence. Tell us about your relationship with high officials of the Kuomintang”. I noticed that he did not use the word “collusion”. I said, “He [the official] didn’t go to Taiwan [with Chiang Kai-shek at the end of the civil war], he’s still in Nanjing. When I went back to Nanjing for Chinese New Year last year, I even visited him. My relationship with him is a long story, why not let me write about it?” “ok, that’s fine, write about it, in detail”. Soon after I had returned to my cell, the recorder brought me a pad of paper and a pen. Here is a summary of the story of my “collusion”.

924

xiong, trans. benton

Gao Chuanzhu, known as Jingzhai, was one of the first officials of the Kuomintang to be sent to study at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. He returned to China during the Northern Expedition to do political work for Chiang Kai-shek’s First Army, and later remained an official in Nanjing. During the Anti-Japanese War, he was secretary of the Special Party Department of the Central Military Commission of the Kuomintang in Chongqing. After the war, he became a member of the Shandong Provincial Government and Director of Education in Ji’nan, under the chairmanship of Wang Yaowu. My father and he were schoolmates and longtime friends. I knew him when I was a child and called him “Uncle Gao”. When I arrived in Chongqing in 1944, I went to visit him and was very close to him during the war. After I was demobilised back to Nanjing in 1946, I often went to his home in Nanjing to help his wife with household chores such as buying rice and coal briquettes. On one occasion, he returned to Nanjing from Ji’nan and said he wanted to meet some Shandong students from the Central University, to see if any of them wanted to work with him in Ji’nan. He was intent on inviting guests to dinner at his home and asked me to help entertain them. Among the students he invited, three were leaders of the Kuomintang youth movement, with whom I had been in remote contention in the school movement for many years but whom I had never met. They were a bit flattered by the invitation, not to mention that I too would be at Gao’s house. I took advantage of the opportunity to play the young host, offering cigarettes and tea. I avoided joining in their conversation with Gao, and I was at another table with Mrs Gao and her children during the meal. After the meal, I offered cigarettes and tea and they left, and I went with Gao and his wife to see them out. After that, the three leaders of the Kuomintang youth movement nodded whenever they met me. The servility of a society of ranks. In 1951, during a crackdown, I heard that one of the three had been arrested in Nanjing. When I was asked to give an account of my “collusion”, I thought of the act I had staged at the Gao family home as fashionable young gentleman, so I was sufficiently emboldened to spend the morning and afternoon in a standoff with the irascible young interrogator. After a dozen reports had been written and handed in, for a long time there were no further arraignments. It was only after Stalin’s sudden death, on 5 March 1953, that the interrogations started up again. It was the irascible young man who undertook them. He made no further mention of my alleged “developing” of students or of “collusion”.

memoirs (2006)

925

At every arraignment, the young interrogator glared at me. He often cited “materials” that falsely accused the Trotskyists. On one occasion, he stopped and asked the recorder to show me a book written by Kang Sheng denouncing the “Trotskyist bandits”, and later brought Lu Xun’s “Letter to a Trotskyite” to show me. At one arraignment he said angrily, “The Trotskyite bandits in Wenzhou have set fire to a whole street!” The young interrogator followed Stalin’s 1937 conclusion that the Trotskyists were “a gang without principles and without ideas, of wreckers and diversionists, intelligence service agents, spies, murderers, a gang of sworn enemies of the working class in the pay of the intelligence services of foreign states”. He saw me as the backbone of this “odious” group. The other official also interrogated me, but in a small room with two sofas, one large and one small, with a long table between them. I was on the small sofa and on the big one, together with the fat young man. In a different tone from that used in the formal arraignment, he asked me some questions. Talking about my activities at the Central University in Nanjing, he suddenly interjected, “If Cao Huibai hadn’t been influenced by you, she would have been such a good cadre for us!” I said, “Yes. Several of the people influenced by me turned out to have been leaning towards the Communist Party”. The fat man said, “Cao Huibai lived very modestly, didn’t she?” I said, “She probably only had one comb to comb her hair with”. When they asked me how I saw myself, I said, “I too have moved from leaning towards the Communists to being a Trotskyist. I am subjectively revolutionary”. The other official said, somewhat menacingly, “I understand what you are saying, but in the future our young people are unlikely to understand you, or to forgive you”. History has proved Stalin wrong. Wrong too was the ccp’s verdict on the Chinese Trotskyists, which has now been rewritten as follows: “The equation of the Trotskyists with national traitors was a product of the mistaken conclusion commonplace at the time in publications of the Communist International that the Chinese Trotskyists had links to Japanese imperialist intelligence organisations”. When the Communist International existed, the Chinese Communist Party was a branch of the Communist International, and it was a matter of organisational principle that the lower levels echo the higher ones. At the end of 1953, I was shown the record of my interrogation and signed it. My interrogation was over. I was confined to my cell for the whole of 1954, with no books or newspapers to read, my mind empty, my life wasting away day by day, month by month,

926

xiong, trans. benton

except for eating, drinking, and sleeping, my days silent, my cell like a coffin, my spirit on the verge of collapse. The window sill was higher than my head, and when I looked up and out through the glass, all I could see were white clouds and all I could hear was the faint noise of the city in the distance. I often think about the class of students that I had taught, from their first year to their last. I knew their personalities, temperaments, and family situations, and they listened as I taught them to believe in socialism and support the Communist Party. In 1951, during the crackdown on counterrevolutionaries, I took them to a meeting of 10,000 people to suppress counterrevolutionaries. In 1952, I took them to the Meilin factory to attend a meeting to expose and criticise the capitalists. When I was arrested, it grieves me to imagine what the students must have thought and how they viewed me. In the summer of 1954, a woman opened the door to my cell and beckoned me to follow her to a pre-trial room, where she told me to sit down. She said, “We locked you up for six months so you could reflect on your crimes. What are your thoughts now?” I had no answer. I sat there speechless, my eyes down. I knew she was looking straight at me, and there was a long pause. She then said, “Go back, go back and think about it”. Her tone was gentle as she sent me back to my cell. The cell door had a square opening with a small flap, and every day the officer on duty opened it to look inside. The following morning, the flap opened and the woman’s face appeared. A newspaper flopped through the hole, the July 1 issue of Liberation Daily. A day later, that for July 2 followed: From then on, I had a newspaper to read each day. The newspaper was vigorously promoting the Party’s general line, but I found it hard to focus on that issue. What I thought about most was my own fate and how it would be handled. On October 1, National Day, the mid-day meal was over and the newspaper had not yet been delivered. I was wondering why when the door opened and I was taken to the pre-trial room, where a cadre wearing glasses sat behind the desk and told me to sit down. “After reading the newspaper for three months, what do you think about your crime? What are your thoughts now?” I didn’t know how to answer. Again, I sat there speechless. Again after a long pause, he said, “Go back! Think it over again!” His tone was heavy with reprimand. The next day no newspaper arrived, and none thereafter. On New Year’s Day, 1955, I was transferred to a large room where several prisoners were already sitting. The administrator and the cadre with glasses from National Day assigned me a seat, closed the door, and left. The man sitting next

memoirs (2006)

927

to me told me that the one with glasses was in charge of training at the detention centre. This man kept on at me. He told me that he was an old policeman, a retained officer, a public security officer, that he had contributed a lot during the suppression movement [waged against counterrevolutionaries], that hard work was the only way forward, and so on. Even before he had finished, a small window on the door of the room opened and the officer’s face appeared. He called me over and asked, “What’s he talking about?” I told him the truth, and the hole snapped shut again. I felt humiliated, as an intellectual who had once been a middle school teacher. The old policeman sitting next to me liked to chatter. According to him, prisoners in solitary confinement were still seen as important cases, whereas to be transferred to a bigger room with other people meant the case was about to be concluded and sentence passed. Within a few days, one man was transferred out. He was said to be a senior employee of an airline in the Kuomintang years, and to have a stubborn attitude. He claimed to have been doing his duty for the Party and the country. According to the old policeman, “I think he’s for the chop”. Later, another young man was transferred out, a factory worker who had been a gang leader and completely void of political sense. He always used to say: “Whatever the party, we workers just live by our muscles”. The old policeman said, “Fighting was a crime even in the old society. Even then people had to be arrested. At best, this person will be sent for reform through labour”. One day the old policeman was transferred out. With a smile on his face, he picked up his towel and chopsticks and left. One day, I was told to get my things and follow the official to the ground floor, to a pre-trial room. The big boss was standing behind the table: “The sentence is now pronounced”. Judgement of the Military Law Division of the Shanghai Military Control Commission of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Shanghai Military Law Judgement (55) City No. 03034. The defendant Xiong Andong, also known as Xiong Yongji, Chen Guorui, and Lu Yuan, male, thirty-one years old, native of Huimin County, Shandong Province. The defendant, after joining the Trotskyite “Chinese Communist League” in Sichuan in 1941, was active in spreading Trotskyite falsehoods among students. In 1946, he headed the Trotskyite “branch” in Nanjing, and was active in various universities. In 1948, he attended the founding meeting of the Chinese Revolutionary Communist Party. In March 1949,

928

xiong, trans. benton

he infiltrated into Shanghai and became a member of the Provisional Committee of the party in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. After the liberation of the city, in October 1949, the “Provisional Committee” of the party in Jiangsu and Zhejiang was destroyed, but the criminal refused to surrender. In May 1950, he gathered together the surviving bandits and set up a “central group”, which maintained contact with the bandits’ central committee and collected military and political intelligence. He is hereby sentenced to life imprisonment and loss of political rights for life, in accordance with Paragraph 4 of the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on the Punishment of Counterrevolutionaries. xxx January 1955 The phrases “gathering military and political intelligence in China” and “attempting to subvert our people’s democratic regime” were unfounded “presumptions”. I was outraged by the completely false accusations. When sentenced to life imprisonment, the first thing I thought of was that I would never see my birth mother again, which was worse than a death sentence. I was only thirty, so for me a life sentence was crueller than for a sixty or seventy-year-old. A death sentence would have been better. I am now eighty-four years old, lucky to have survived this long. History has shown that I am not guilty and that the Trotskyists were not guilty. I hope that the people of my country will not see this sad and ugly drama played out again. In October 1966, when Zheng Chaolin was being criticised, the government arranged for our Trotskyist group to share a room with Zheng Chaolin. Probably in order to work on Zheng Chaolin’s mind, the group leader said to Zheng, “I feel that the government is saving you by criticising you”. To illustrate his point, he recounted a past incident. In 1954, a female cadre had approached him and asked him about his crime, and he had given a statement in reply. The female cadre said, “It is good to have such understanding and to reflect deeply”. From then on, every day he received a newspaper. Later, another cadre approached him and asked him about his thinking, in response to which he praised the Party’s general line. The cadre told him something along the following lines: Our policy towards you is to destroy the organisation, save the individual, and reform your minds; no matter how big or small the crime, you must first confess it in order to seek rehabilitation; confessing your crime is not the same as not being punished or sentenced; the sentence is not a death sentence; the key to the prison door is in your own hands; you must fight for it, etc. The team leader added that when he heard that he had been sentenced to life imprisonment, he was at peace, for he deserved it. In the light of what the government cadres

memoirs (2006)

929

had told him before the sentence was handed down, a life sentence was indeterminate and he should do his best, etc. I don’t know whether Zheng Chaolin listened or not, or how he felt. However, a year earlier, in 1965, Zheng Chaolin had written in a poem: Do you not see some old acquaintances of mine bending their heads low and saying yes when so required, but all to no avail? Like me, they have spent these thirteen years in jail, hungrily looking upwards at the swan that wings its way across the sky – where is the leniency? The study group leader and Zheng Chaolin were both kept in prison for twentyseven years.

Off to Prison to Serve My Sentence Immediately after the verdict, I was sent to Tilanqiao Prison in Shanghai to serve my sentence. Tilanqiao Prison was built by the British colonialists during the Concession period. There were eight rectangular five-storey blocks for male prisoners, one for female prisoners, two housing a labour reform factory and one each for the hospital and catering. I was sent to Prison No. 1, which was for felons, mostly lifers, but also for those awaiting execution. There were more than 60 cells on each floor, one and a half metres wide and two metres long, with three people to a cell. The two men I shared a cell with when I first entered the prison were Yang Guangwen, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment and had served as a civilian officer in [the Kuomintang warlord] Yan Xishan’s army. The other, Wang Guoquan, had been sentenced to 15 years and had been chairman of a yellow trade union22 in a large factory in Shanghai. Before Liberation, when democrats held a meeting at the Nanjing Road Workers’ Building, the reactionaries had mobilised their [yellow] union chiefs in the factories to pretend to be ordinary workers and break up the meeting, using violence. After Liberation, all the union leaders who remained in

22

A company or government-friendly union.

930

xiong, trans. benton

Shanghai had been arrested, and anyone who could not prove that they were not present on the day of the violence was executed. Wang Guoquan, a member of a football team, had happened to be at a match in Wuxi that day and he had newspaper reports to prove it, so he was spared. He was an athlete type, simpleminded and upright. Knowing that I was a prison novice, he looked after me. Shortly after I was admitted, the prison held a meeting at which one could “admit one’s guilt and submit oneself to the law”. The atmosphere was electric, as the sentences of some prisoners were commuted and others increased. Two death sentences were pronounced on the spot, and the unfortunates were immediately dragged off. The prison director made a long speech in which he repeatedly talking about confessing, reforming, and starting a new life. After the meeting, I was appointed leader of a study group. Five cells formed one group, with 14 or 15 people. I asked Yang Guangwen and Wang Guoquan what it was like to be a study group leader. They told me that the prisoners in this group were historical23 counterrevolutionaries and criminal murderers and arsonists. None of them was highly educated, and the previous study group leader had also shared a cell with Yang and Wang. Yang told me: “This is a good opportunity for you, to report your thoughts more often to your supervisor, both your own thoughts and those of others”, etc. The word education took on a new meaning for me, different from the meaning it had had at school. Wang Guoquan told me: “You are an intellectual and an educated person. As group leader, you must first memorise the contents of the educational classes and convey them to the group. You have to record the speeches each of us makes, organise them, and give them to the supervisor”. The leader of the neighbouring group, Kong, was a northeasterner with a Shandong accent. When he realised that I was a fellow-countryman [from Shandong], he approached me and said: “It’s not easy to get assigned as a group leader as soon as you arrive. This gives you the chance to redeem yourself, you must report frequently, report diligently, and give your heart to the government”. From then on, I noticed that whenever he had the opportunity, he went to his supervisor to report, and he often spoke with his supervisor at great length. He also typed up written reports. He told me that this was the best way to show loyalty to the government and thereby obtain a cut in sentence and leniency. His constant concern was to obtain a remission of sentence and leniency. I was young and had a good memory, so I didn’t take notes but was even so able to convey the contents of the meeting. The prisoners watched me intently

23

i.e., their crimes had been committed before 1949.

memoirs (2006)

931

and listened in silence, so that for a moment I forgot that I was a prisoner and felt like I was back in the classroom. The next morning, all the prisoners raised their hands to speak, and I took notes carefully. After a round of presentations, I put my notes together and handed them in. Back in the cell, I asked Wang Guoquan, “How will the study go tomorrow morning?” “You just have to explain the contents of the lesson again”. I repeated the contents of the lesson and another round of speeches followed. I took careful notes and handed them in again. But I found that each person’s speech was almost identical, but for a few changed words, with the first round. Each came out with the same clichés about confessing their sins and obeying the law, becoming a new person, and so on. They all played the usual trick of “abstract confession but concrete denial”. For example, a prisoner who had been sentenced to life for killing his wife with a pair of scissors admitted that killing his wife was the worst possible crime, but at the same time said that he would not have killed her if she had not grappled with him for the scissors, since they were very much in love. As for Yang Guangwen, he said that he would not only confess, serve his time, and repent his crimes, but that he would continue to confess his crimes. He too was confessing his crimes in the abstract but denying them in the concrete. He said he had served as a reactionary officer under the Kuomintang reactionaries, and that when his troops were defeated, they had sacked a small nearby town and raped people. He said that although he himself had not done anything wrong, he could not help but be held responsible for the actions of his soldiers, and his life sentence was lenient. My job as group leader turned out to be a trap. I was put through the “confession” machine for processing. In front of these counterrevolutionary criminals, I could hardly say that I was innocent, that I had been convicted for believing in socialism and disagreeing with the Communist Party, that I had been warned when entering the prison not to talk about the Trotskyists to other inmates, and that in my statement I had said that I was guilty of being “antiSoviet, anti-Communist, and anti-people” and of fantasising about the US and the Soviet Union fighting a World War, etc. (these were the words put into my by the young interrogator after my initial arrest). I also said that I wanted to deepen my understanding of the spirit of reform, deepen my confession of guilt and compliance with the law, radically change my outlook on life and the world, completely reform myself, and so on. But such reform simply produces someone who can consciously tell lies. This phenomenon is a product of ignorance and arrogance, big words, empty words, falsehoods, an age in which everyone is trapped into deceiving others and themselves.

932

xiong, trans. benton

My First Taste of Labour For a whole year, including the second half of 1955 and the first half of 1956, I was put in a group in the yarn-shaking workshop and the warping mill. I wrote to tell my father about my sentence. Soon afterwards, he sent me a parcel containing two pairs of cloth shoes with tyre soles, plus some daily necessities. These cloth shoes were just what I needed. It was very hard work, but intellectuals working hard for the first time simply gritted their teeth and got on with it. It was nothing compared to my life sentence, which entailed intense psychological pain. After shaking yarn for more than three months, I was transferred to the warping mill by Brigade Leader Jiang. The warp yarn was used to weave towels and quilts. The warp machine was driven by a motor, and was technically demanding. You had to keep a constant eye on the yarn to stop it breaking. I learned the technique from a warp master who had been a technical worker in a knitting factory, purged for “historical” problems. He had only been sentenced to twelve years. Because of his skills, he was kept in prison rather than being sent to a camp, so that he could lead the rest of us. He was a quiet and responsible worker. Our warp machine was old and did not rotate evenly, which affected the quality of the towels and quilts. This man suggested using newspaper to roll in with the yarn in order to make it more evenly distributed, and the officials adopted his proposal. The newspapers used were old ones from the prison office building, between a couple of months and a couple of years old. It was by then more than three years since my arrest, and I had had no access to newspapers and was unaware of world events. Although the newspapers were discontinuous, we were able to learn something about changes in the national and international situation over the previous three years. The following three issues caught my attention. (a) After land reform, the peasants’ enthusiasm and motivation increased, and for a while agriculture developed rapidly throughout the country. However, the owners of small plots of land were powerless against natural disasters. Moreover, land and labour were once again beginning to be sold. Plans therefore arose for mutual-aid groups and producers’ co-operatives. The newspapers said that co-operatives of a semi-socialist nature were on the rise. (b) Between 1953 and the end of 1955, the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts, and capitalist industry and commerce was achieved. On New Year’s Day 1956, when Chairman Mao received democratic figures from all walks of life in Beijing, Peng Zhen, the Mayor of Beijing, declared: “We have entered socialism”.

memoirs (2006)

933

I’d never imagined that the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts, and capitalist industry and commerce could be completed ahead of schedule and the country could move onto the road to socialism. Even though I was a Trotskyist prisoner, I was happy to see the propaganda in the newspapers, and I shouted “Yes!” This reflected the thinking of young Trotskyists at the time. They mistook Mao’s socialism for Marx and Engels’ scientific socialism. (c) In February 1956, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reversed the view on Stalin. In an old newspaper, I read Mikoyan’s speech exposing and criticising some of Stalin’s sins and errors, and I was surprised that people like Khrushchev and Mikoyan, who were already top leaders of the Party and state when Stalin was alive and had revered him as a great leader and revolutionary teacher, were now denouncing his crimes. The old newspapers were stacked up in random fashion, but I still looked through as many as I could to find out more about the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, though I never did find Khrushchev’s “secret report”. One day after breakfast, before work started, Xia Jianxun and I were caught peeking at one of the newspapers. Brigade Leader Jiang called us over and told us to get our things (towels, etc.) and go back to Prison No. 1. Was it for peeking at the newspaper? I was very apprehensive. When I got back to Prison No. 1, to my relief I learned that it was for a study session.

The 1956 Visit Prisoners from the various reform units were all gathered together on the fifth floor of No. 5 Prison, about forty of us. Some I knew, but most I did not know. There were no other prisoners on the floor, and we lived in small cells in pairs, under the care of two full-time supervisors named Xu and Lu, whose management style was more relaxed than in other parts of the prison system. On 29 June 1956, the prison governor announced to us that the government had organised a visit to Shanghai. He said: “The purpose of the visit is for you to go outside and see the level of construction of industry, agriculture, culture, education, and health, and to show you that we Communists are engaged in socialism”. Another official said, “We don’t want to beat you to death with sticks, we want to reform your minds”. He told us to pay attention during the visit, to listen properly, to take notes, and to make a careful study after returning from the visit. This was indeed unexpected, but hearing the speech, I was flooded with an emotion that I found hard to conceal. Was a life sentence any different from beating someone to death with a stick?

934

xiong, trans. benton

Forty of us were divided into three groups for five days. We all made statements thanking the Party and government for giving us the opportunity to make this visit and to learn from it. For a whole week, we visited one unit each day in the morning and one in the afternoon; motor factories, shipyards, heavy industry, textile and dyeing factories, paper mills, and pharmaceutical factories, as well as an agricultural cooperative, a university, a workers’ new village, and the No. 1 Department Stores on Nanjing Road. The tour really opened our eyes and minds. The production lines in the big factories were spectacular, and we got a clear idea of the whole production process. It was exciting to watch the assembled machine tools and lathes fall off the production line. I thought to myself, in the hands of capitalists, these factories would simply increase their private profits, but when the same factory is nationalised, that is no longer the case. No wonder the prison governor said that he wanted to show us socialism and to reform our thinking. What I could not have imagined at the time was that ten years later, under the same signboard of more socialism, the Cultural Revolution would lead to the same prison governor being overthrown by “revolutionary rebels” in the prison. During the tour, I noticed that the workers in the factory worked hard and in earnest. The person in charge of each unit gave us a report, mostly about how production had been on the verge of bankruptcy under the squeeze of the imperialist and bureaucratic economy before Liberation and about the remarkable achievements that had been made under the leadership of the Communist Party since Liberation. After listening to the report, we were allowed to ask questions. For example, during the visit to Caoyang New Village (the first workers’ new village in Shanghai), someone asked: “Is it true that only model workers can live in the workers’ new village? Can ordinary workers live there?” The reporter said that the proportion of model workers was greater. During the visit to the textile and dyeing factory, someone else asked, “Is the proportion of workers divorced from production [e.g., cadres and office workers] not too large?” The reply: “Office staff and managers are not completely divorced from production”. In short, those of us who did not believe that Stalin’s Soviet Union was socialist still had doubts about the Chinese Communist Party’s lopsided approach to socialism, following the Soviet model. At the agricultural cooperative, I was convinced that working in an organisation was better than working alone. However, I also had doubts: without tractors, without electricity, and with production relying on human and animal power, by how much could productivity be increased? Can we build socialism in such a way?

memoirs (2006)

935

After the visit, I wrote a summary of my thoughts and handed it in. Those who had been sentenced to just six or seven years’ imprisonment went back to their farms and labour camps, where they were to remain as workers even after completing their sentences. More than 20 people who had been sentenced to more than 12 years remained in the city prison, still concentrated on one floor. Such people did not participate in labour and spent their time reading the newspaper or splitting into groups for study, and studying individually. The prison appointed only two full-time cadres to look after us, and in addition to People’s Daily, Liberation Daily, and Wenhui bao, we received two monthly magazines, People’s Literature and People’s Pictorial, to add to our reading. Supervisor Xu told me that his family lived near Fuzhou Road and if we wanted to buy books, he could do that for us; he probably came from a student background and had a certain level of culture and education. Our management was relatively lax. Apart from reading the newspaper and studying for half a day, we spent the rest of the time reading on our own account. I taught myself Russian, with the help of Cao, and my father sent me some Russian reading books and the Russian-Chinese Little Dictionary, with which I read Our Great Motherland in Russian and Malinkov’s Political Report to the Nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On 1 October 1956, we were taken to People’s Square to watch the National Day parade, from the third-floor balcony of a hotel next to the square. The square was already crowded with people waving flags. After passing the podium, the parade came in our direction. Compared with the three National Day parades between 1950 and 1952, the present one was more spectacular. Four years earlier, I had been part of the parade and the organiser of a unit, but now I was an “enemy” of the people sent to watch the celebrations in order to “be educated” and to “change my views”. In a daze, at the head of the contingent of students from the College of Chemical Engineering, I saw Yu Yimin’s sister holding the college banner. I didn’t know her well, but I had met her at a friend’s house in the first half of 1952, and I knew from a friend that, as a school student, she had been influenced by the Trotskyist minority and that she had influenced my friend’s sister, her classmate. I was happy to see her walking in the procession and to know that she had been spared my fate, along – so I presumed – with my friend’s sister. Little Yu was also sitting on the balcony watching the parade, and confirmed that it was indeed his sister. After the Chemical Engineering College contingent came a group of white clad nurses from the city’s hospitals, a solemn and moving procession, followed by a phalanx of one thousand red scarves, children marching vigorously in quick, short steps, their childish voices shouting “Long live the Communist Party of China!” Flowers of the motherland. The command car sped up and called out

936

xiong, trans. benton

over the tannoy, “Slow down at the front, the children can’t keep up”. After the children came the writers’ and artists’ motorcade, inching along in the children’s wake. Forgetting for a moment that we were prisoners in their eyes, we celebrated and rejoiced together with the people.

Studying The Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat The visit in 1956 convinced me that the ccp’s approach to the Trotskyist issue was not exactly the same as the Soviet approach and had Chinese characteristics. The Soviet Stalinists set out to exterminate the Trotskyists. The ccp let us go out into society and “educated” us in order to change our minds and stop us, by “factual reasoning”, from doubting or opposing the Communist Party. Two of my colleagues, a few years younger than I, once said, “If I had known that the Communist Party was practising socialism, I wouldn’t have become a Trotskyist”. There was a feeling of remorse in these words that was impossible to conceal. In February 1956, the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party sharply criticised the Stalin cult, and in April the ccp published a pamphlet titled On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. We Trotskyists were scattered across various labour camps and had not officially seen the newspapers, the documents of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, or the above-mentioned article published by the ccp. It was not until June that a copy of the article was given to us to read and study. In October 1956, in the wake of the Poznan and Hungarian events in Eastern Europe, the ccp published another long pamphlet titled Once Again on the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Studying these two documents, it struck me that the ccp was defending Stalin, as a great Marxist-Leninist. It praised Stalin’s creative application and development of Marxism-Leninism, defence of the legacy of Leninism, opposition to the enemies of Leninism (the Trotskyists and Zinovievists), and so on. Trotsky, on the other hand, had argued that Stalin had corrupted the traditions of the October Revolution and Lenin’s soviet system, by implementing a series of wrong lines and policies on many international and domestic issues. Stalin represented the interests of the privileged bureaucratic layer. He had replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat with the gpu and imposed a personal dictatorship. The Moscow Trials were concocted to kill off an entire generation of Bolsheviks loyal to Lenin.

memoirs (2006)

937

I have never read Khrushchev’s “secret report” (even to this day), but I can guess the gist of it from newspaper articles quoting from it. Khrushchev and Mikoyan, the Soviet leaders at the time, who had praised Stalin as their “real father” and “new parent” when he was alive, opposed and denied Stalin just three years after his death, showing that Trotsky had been right to expose and criticise Stalin from the mid to late 1920s through to the 1930s. In response to Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s dark side, Once Again on the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat did not oppose Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders head-on but instead opposed statements by Tito and other leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party, expressing shock and indignation at their attack on Stalin. For Tito and the others did not limit themselves to criticising the dark side of Stalin but analysed Stalinism as a political system, arguing that Stalin’s party was the embodiment of bureaucratic dictatorship. I studied the two documents, but I could hardly vent my true thoughts on the Stalinist issue. Instead, I had to follow the tone of the documents, mouthing platitudes and falsehoods, without daring to tell a single word of the truth. Shen Wenling and Lin Hua,24 who had both been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, were sent back to their places of work after the 1956 visit. Both were eligible for early release. However, once they heard about the Twentieth Congress, they told their fellow inmates “it’s because of Stalin that we spent five years in prison”. Other inmates denounced them and reported them to the police, who added ten years to their sentences for “slandering the great revolutionary teacher and for insubordination”.

The 1957 Anti-Rightist Struggle as Seen from Prison In the first half of 1957, the twenty or so Trotskyists in the city prison were still concentrated on one floor, each held in a cell with two other people, spending their long years in prison reading newspapers and studying on their own account, seemingly without a plan. I shared a cell with Chen Mang, from Wenzhou, and I continued to study Russian and memorise Russian words, while Chen Mang recited ancient poems in a rhythmic voice, something that he was very good at. Chen Mang had been sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. He was a kind, quiet, old-style intellectual. His lover was a Shandong woman. They had not yet married. I’d known this woman for a long time, and I knew

24

Lin Hua, i.e., Lin Huanhua, the first Guangxi native to become Trotskyist.

938

xiong, trans. benton

her family. I knew she had a lover, but I hadn’t known that it was Chen Mang. In 1964, Chen Mang had gone to Qinghai as part of a labour brigade, and had died there of illness. In the early 1980s, after I had been released and returned to Shanghai, I learned from the friend of an old worker that this woman from Shandong had been waiting for Chen Mang, unaware that he was dead. She had no “historical” problems and had not been affected by any of the political movements. She was a primary school teacher, and remained single for the rest of her life. In the spring of 1957, the newspapers started talking about the Hundred Flowers and the Hundred Schools of Thought and the issue of intellectuals and the rectification of the Communist Party. The newspapers reported that Mao Zedong had invited the democratic parties to help in rectification, and that Zhou Enlai had gone to Hangzhou to call for contention and debate, saying: “I have come to tear down the wall”, i.e., the wall that separated the Communist Party from the people, because of subjectivism, sectarianism, and bureaucracy. On May Day, when the rectification campaign began, the newspapers mobilised people from outside the Party to help the Communist Party rectify the situation. Articles critical of the Communist Party appeared in the newspapers and in the Party press, something that had never happened in the first three years after Liberation. During an ideological reform campaign in 1952, intellectuals had gone around feeling that they were about to be punished. They learned to say only good things about the Communist Party and never bad things, whence the term “Goethe-ites” – ostensibly aficionados of the German writer Goethe, but actually Chinese who sycophantically “sang the praises” (gede) of whoever was in power. The opposite became true in 1957. In May 1957, the newspapers were full of articles criticising and attacking the Communist Party, and these articles became more and more frequent and ever louder. A group of non-Party intellectuals and others who had been prominent before Liberation, most of whom had studied in Britain and the United States and were admirers of Western liberal democracy, had opposed Chiang Kai-shek’s autocratic dictatorship and, after the end of the war against Japan and the dashing of their hopes for democracy and freedom under the Kuomintang, fled to Hong Kong. When the Communists won the civil war, many such people responded to the Communist Party’s call for a new, free, democratic, and independent China and went over to its side. In 1955, New Democracy was transformed along socialist lines, and in 1956 China ostensibly entered the era of socialism. In a socialist country under the dictatorship of the proletariat led by the Communists, the hopes of such people for Western-style democracy and freedom were again dashed, and Chu

memoirs (2006)

939

Anping’s25 article “The Party dominated the world” was an unpleasant truth that hit the nail of the Stalinist model on the head in China. In June 1957, the tide changed dramatically. Those people who had made noises during the May rectification campaign were denounced as rightists. We in prison could not take part in this dramatic movement, while some Trotskyists who had earlier been granted clemency were doomed by this development and classed, together with the rightists, as counterrevolutionaries. During the struggle against the rightists, a new term appeared in the press: contradictions among the people. This meant that in a socialist society there were two different types of contradictions, contradictions among the people and contradictions between the enemy and the people – this was one of Mao’s contributions to the development of Marxism. Mao’s socialist society was a society with classes, class contradictions, and class struggle. The concept of socialist society as expounded by Marx and Lenin was one in which classes would have died out and there would be no class contradictions or class struggles.

A Study Tour in 1957 The government suddenly announced that it was organising another study tour for us. The visit began on 17 August and ended in mid-October. Its objectives were to show that the ccp was serving the people; that it was socialist; and that the Soviet Union was an aid to proletarian internationalism. These aims were clearly directed at those of us who were identified as anti-Soviet, anticommunist, and anti-people. The Trotskyists who attended the tour were He Zichen, Zeng Meng, He Zizheng, Xie Gongmo, Li Pei, Ji Yunlong, Wang Guolong, Zhou Rensheng, Jiang Zhendong, Ye Chunhua, Huang Jiantong, Yu Shouyi, Li Yongjue, Lu Jie, Jiang Junyang, Yang Bo, Lin Hua, Shen Wenling, Yu Yimin, Zheng Liang, Du Fei Zhi, Xiong Andong, and more than twenty others. The tour covered seven regions, including Shanghai, Beijing, Shenyang, Fushun, Benxi, Anshan, and Wuhan, where it visited sites of heavy and light industry, agriculture, water conservancy, transport, and science and education. The programme in Shanghai was similar to that in 1956, except that the agricultural co-operatives had been merged into higher-level cooperatives.

25

Chu Anping (1909–1966) was a liberal scholar and journalist who edited the China Democratic League newspaper Guangming Daily in the prc era.

940

xiong, trans. benton

In Beijing, the main attractions were the Guanting Reservoir, the Zhanggezhuang Cooperative, the Nanjiao State Farm, Tian’anmen Square, the Great Hall of the People, the Monument to the Heroes of the People, and the Temple of Heaven. In the Northeast, we visited coal mines, iron-ore mines, iron and steel mills, heavy machinery plants, an advanced cooperative, and a nursing home. The industrial and mining enterprises in the Northeast were huge. They included Shenyang Heavy Machinery Factory and the Anshan Steel Company’s rolling mill and steel pipe factory. The leaders of each unit described how their factories had been expanded or rebuilt with the assistance of Soviet proletarian internationalism and restored to production after the severe damage inflicted on them at the time of the Japanese surrender. None of the leaders of these units said anything about the Soviet Union dismantling and confiscating the machinery after the Japanese surrender. It was not easy for us to ask about this, since it might have been anti-Soviet propaganda put about by the Kuomintang. In Wuhan we mainly visited the Yangtze Bridge, the Wuhan Iron and Steel works, a meat processing plant, the Central China Institute of Technology, the Zhongnan Institute of Nationalities, and the Wuhan Medical College. Wherever we went on this tour, unit leaders made special mention of the anti-rightist movement. During our stay in Beijing, the leader of the tour, Section Chief Cao, asked us what we wanted, and He Zichen said he wanted an audience with comrades from the Central Government. Cao looked at He Zichen but did not reply. He Zichen was a former member of the Communist Party, having participated in its Fifth and Sixth Congresses in the late 1920s, and had worked with Mao Zedong in Hunan during the Revolution of 1925– 1927. But “the winner is king, the loser is bandit” – He Zichen forgot that he was a prisoner, and was still dreaming of the past! After the visit, Section Chief Cao, in his speech, replied to the request made by He Zichen: “Are you still asking for an audience with the head of the Central Committee? I think we would do better to continue to work and reform”.

Continuing to Work and Reform After returning to Shanghai Prison from Wuhan, I was put back in the warping mill. One day, one of the officers who had accompanied us on our visit came to the workshop to talk to me. He asked about my health and my work and said there would be another tour the following year.

memoirs (2006)

941

In early 1958, Mr Yang came to the workshop to talk to me again and told me that the tour had been cancelled and that I should work hard to be rehabilitated. The inmates were given a course of education on the theme of “building socialism more quickly”. Shortly after Section Officer Yang had spoken to me, I was transferred to the towel-weaving workshop. The machine used to weave the towels was decades old. Although several times larger and more complicated than the looms used by peasant families in the countryside, it operated in the same way. As a child, I had messed around with looms and was no stranger to them. The technical instructor explained the operating procedures to me and told me to watch how it was done while helping out with other jobs in the workshop. A week later, when one of the inmates fell ill, the instructor asked me to try it out. This instructor had formerly worked in a private towel factory, and had now been transferred to the newly established labour-reform workshop. One of the prisoners had also worked in the same factory, and for some reason had been sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. The two of them had been friends, and it was clear that the instructor still had a measure of affection for the skilled prisoner. I worked full-time, with three meals eaten in the workshop and two hours of study a day after ten hours’ work. The study was limited to reading newspapers and listening to the radio. In 1958, I knew that the Great Leap Forward was underway and that the aim was to catch up with the United States and overtake Britain in iron and steel production. The newspapers reported that the ears of wheat in the fields were so tightly packed that an egg would not roll off them. No one dared say that they did not believe this, for even Mao Zedong said that there was too much grain to eat. I could only believe these reports were true, given the theory that “if the people are bold, the earth is productive” and the instruction “Don’t be afraid of not being able to do it, just be afraid of not being able to think of doing it”. During my visit in 1956, we had visited a primary agricultural cooperative formed by merging several mutual-aid groups. In 1957, we had visited an advanced agricultural cooperative formed by merging several primary cooperatives. I believed in agricultural collectivisation and I believed that the ccp was guiding the peasants along the path to socialism. In 1958, people’s communes were formed by merging high-level agricultural co-operatives. The press proclaimed the transition to communism. In the 1930s, Stalin had vigorously promoted the collectivisation of agriculture and the establishment of collective farms, which Trotsky criticised as “crazy” and a “dangerous adventure”.

942

xiong, trans. benton

Were the people’s communes also a “dangerous adventure”? I knew nothing about the Russian countryside, but I had grown up in a village and I knew a lot about the Chinese countryside and peasants. After Liberation, the peasants were given land and worked it with great enthusiasm. But they were powerless against natural disasters, so at the time I believed the propaganda in favour of collectives. In early 1959, I was transferred to the knitting workshop, where I worked for six months knitting gloves and for a further year and eight months knitting socks. Ten hours a day, I poured all my energy into my work and forgot my worries. There was only one supervisor in the workshop and one technician. The technician had originally been a security worker in the factory, and Supervisor Zhu had been a soldier. One day after lunch, the technician came up to me and asked me to go to the office, where Supervisor Zhu smiled and asked, “Where did you go yesterday after lunch?” “I went to the rubber room [padded cell]”. “What for?” “To see what it’s like in there”. I thought something must be wrong, that someone had informed on me. I immediately admitted my mistake. Supervisor Zhu, still smiling, said, “There’s nothing wrong with that, we can always find out by asking”. The technician said, “Off you go, then”. As I returned to my machine, the technician blew the whistle to start work. There were two rubber rooms on the same floor as the workshop, for prisoners who banged their heads against the wall trying to kill themselves. Each room was about ten square metres in size, with one wooden door and no windows. The interior walls, the floor, and the back of the wooden door were covered with a very thick layer of rubber. The doors were usually locked, but on that day, the door to one room was left ajar, so I went in to have a closer look. I banged the wall and jumped up and down on the floor, and it really was elastic. I thought it must have been Kong who reported me. When prisoners report people, cadres are sure to listen. This phenomenon is a product of a system that uses sentence reduction as a means of political blackmail, a system that exploits the fragile psychology of prisoners in their desperation, so that they go to great lengths to make reports, like granny praying to the gods. In prison, I came across more than one Kong, people who do everything possible to obtain leniency and a reduced sentence. Some developed the habit of reporting monthly, weekly, and even daily. I’m sure it wasn’t the labour team leader who informed on me. His machine was next to mine. He was a diligent and solid worker, who due to some histor-

memoirs (2006)

943

ical problem had been sentenced to twelve years. He was not well educated, so every week, when writing his group report, he got me to help. He had opinions about Kong, who regularly delivered inferior products, but he never voiced them. During the ten-minute break after lunch, he often went to help people with their work, but I never saw him help Kong. When we Trotskyist prisoners gathered together for study, there was no restriction on our access to newspapers, but in the labour teams, access to newspapers was controlled. Only some were available for reading. The head of our study group was an honest man. When he was reading the newspaper, I sat next to him and sometimes had a peek, but I could only catch the headlines – my eyesight was too poor to read the smaller print.

Returning to Prison No. 1 with Oedema In July 1959, I was transferred from the glove workshop to the sock weaving workshop until early 1961, when I was transferred out of the labour team due to oedema. The sock workshop and the glove workshop were in the same building but on different floors. The sock workshop had 50 to 60 machines, which were semielectric and less labour intensive than towel- or glove-making. Sock weaving happened in two shifts, a day shift and a night shift, with shift changes at six in the morning and six in the evening and a free daytime shift once a fortnight. During the so-called three years of natural disasters,26 the daily ration for prisoners was six taels of rice, two meals of thin rice and one of dry rice, with no oil in the dishes and no meat dishes for months on end. On National Day, there were some small fish and shrimps, which the prison cadres were said to have gone out to catch in the rivers and streams around the city. Prisoners working in the workshops were given a daily steamed bun, made from plant stems. In the second half of 1960, some prisoners were transferred out of the workshops because of swollen feet. However, they were reluctant to go, because they would get less to eat if they were returned to the prison. At the end of 1960, my

26

The years 1959–1961 were marked by widespread famine. The ccp blamed the 3 years of recorded history’s worst famine from 1959–1961, where some 30 million starved to death, on natural disasters, even though the causes are now well-established – disastrous failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward causing massive dislocation & neglect of agriculture, accentuated by false reporting, corruption and mismanagement.

944

xiong, trans. benton

feet too were a little swollen, but the swelling went down so I kept it to myself. At the beginning of 1961, however, the swelling became so bad that my calves also swelled up, so I was returned to Prison No. 1. All the prisoners suffering from oedema were put on the same floor, two to a cell, and were allowed to lie down and rest during the day. My cellmate, Ji Su, was more than ten years older than I. He had been purged in 1955 and sentenced to fifteen years as a traitor. During the Revolution of 1925– 1927, while still in his teens, he had joined the Party and worked as a transport worker. After the failure of the Revolution, he was arrested by the Kuomintang. He “repented” and was released. During the War against Japan, he worked as a district head in a county in the remote mountains of Shaanxi. After the war, he returned to Shanghai and opened a shop on North Sichuan Road. After the liberation of Shanghai, he was assigned to the Municipal Public Security Bureau and provided a lot of valuable materials. In 1955, he was purged. He claimed that he had done nothing to either harm or help the revolution; he had not informed on anyone after his arrest by the Kuomintang; and he had repented. He told me, “If I had not repented, my head would have been chopped off long ago”. He knew a little about the purge of the Trotskyists in 1952 and a little about the Communist leaders who had later become Trotskyists – Chen Duxiu, Peng Shuzhi, Zheng Chaolin, and others. I was in the same cell as Ji Su for more than three months, until May Day 1961, when he was transferred to a prison for sick prisoners. I was admitted to the prison hospital for treatment. I was treated like an ordinary patient. I lay in bed all day, receiving injections and medication. I was given meat at mid-day and in the evening and a glass of soy milk after breakfast. In a little over two months, the swelling in my feet and legs had gone down and all but disappeared. By that time, I weighed just forty-five kilos, compared to the seventy-three kilos I had weighed before my arrest. After the oedema subsided, I was transferred to another prison for three weeks, where I met Ji Su again. His oedema was better but had not completely gone. His wife came to see him every month, and brought with her the prescribed ten eggs and a jar of tinned meat, all bought at a high price. He told me that he had seen several patients with oedema die, and that he had watched his cellmate from Shanxi pass away. I asked him if his name was Yang. He said, “Yes, an old army officer called Yang Guangwen, how did you know him?” “I shared a cell with him when I first entered prison. He kept on asking to be rehabilitated”. Ji Su laughed bitterly “He was that sick and still used to write his little reports”. Before National Day in 1961, I was transferred back to Prison No. 1.

memoirs (2006)

945

Starting in 1962, those in Prison No. 1 sentenced to life imprisonment were not allowed to leave prison to join labour workshops and were only allowed to participate in labour projects within the prison. These included gluing matchboxes, gluing paper bags for medicine, and gluing paper bags for use in shops. In 1965, a translation team was set up to give some of the intellectual prisoners who could read foreign languages a chance to use their skills.

Studying the Nine Commentaries in 1964 From 1962 onwards, there was a lot of propaganda in the newspapers about selfreliance. I was surprised. How could a socialist country emphasise proletarian internationalist aid and then suddenly become self-reliant? I remember that Liu Shaoqi visited North Korea and made a long speech about self-reliance. In 1957, in order to educate us Trotskyist prisoners about proletarian internationalism, we were taken to the northeast and to Wuhan. In the northeast, we visited many industrial and mining enterprises said to have been expanded or rebuilt with the assistance of the Soviet Union, just like the Yangtze Bridge in Wuhan. In the 1950s, Voloshilov’s visit to our country set off a wave of internationalist rhetoric. In 1963, however, the ideological differences between the Soviet and Chinese parties came out into the open. Khrushchev withdrew his experts and tore up the contracts. Behind the ideological dispute lay a clash of material interests. It was during this period that the Nine Commentaries were published. We Trotskyist prisoners were again assembled and divided into two groups to study them. Liu Pingmei (from Guangzhou), Zhou Rensheng (from Zhejiang), Yu Shouyi (from Wuhan), and Lin Hua (from Guangxi) were also transferred to Shanghai to take part in the study. Of the Trotskyist prisoners assembled, four (Zheng Chaolin, Yin Kuan, Yu Shouyi, and Huang Jiantong) had not yet been convicted; eight (Jiang Zhendong, Ji Yunlong, Wang Guolong, Liu Pingmei, Li Pei, Ye Chunhua, Zhou Rensheng, and Xiong Andong) had been given life; three (Shen Wenling, Lin Hua, and Zheng Liang) had been given 15 years; and four (Chen Mang, Xia Jianxun, Shen Yunfang, and Xie Gongmo) had been given 12 years. These fifteen people formed a single study group. From 16 to 20 May 1964, we visited the Shanghai area, mainly factories affected by Khrushchev’s breaking of contracts and withdrawal of experts. After the tour, our study of the Nine Commentaries began. The Nine Commentaries were a comprehensive critique of the revisionist argument that imperialist wars could be avoided, that socialism could coexist peacefully with capitalism, and that socialism could be achieved without viol-

946

xiong, trans. benton

ent revolution. They also denounced Khrushchev for turning his back on Stalin and for turning socialism in the Soviet Union into not just capitalism but social imperialism. The publication of the commentaries was a major event in Chinese political life and, for us Trotskyist prisoners, a major shock. Parts of the commentaries were familiar to us. Trotsky had criticised Stalin for revising the concept of socialism as expounded by Marx and Lenin, and had argued that the Soviet Union under Stalin was not socialist but a society of a transitional nature that had the potential either to advance towards socialism or to revert to capitalism, and that the prolongation of the rule of a privileged bureaucracy could only lead to a restoration of capitalism. During his lifetime, Trotsky continued to insist that the Soviet Union was a “degenerated workers’ state”, mainly on the grounds of the nationalisation of the means of production and the socialisation of the productive forces. The commentaries said that Stalin was a great Marxist-Leninist, that Stalin’s Soviet Union had been a socialist society, and that it was Khrushchev who had changed the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had sullied the face of the great MarxistLeninist Stalin. The commentaries were actually criticising Khrushchev’s secret report on Stalin. They blamed Khrushchev for the sort of chauvinism that Stalin had practised under the cover of proletarian internationalism. Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin and the commentaries’ criticism of Khrushchev were two different things and could not be treated as one. Naturally, we sought to avoid having a “pro-revisionist” hat slapped on our heads, but it happened nevertheless. Group members were scared that even the slightest disagreement with the commentaries might cause the authorities to suspect us. We would simultaneously label ourselves as disloyal and bad elements who “endorse Khrushchev and cling to revisionism”. No matter what comments we received from the study group, we had to make sure that we severely criticised the bad elements that we ourselves represented. This is what is known as “combining reality and thought”. Such an “endorsement of Khrushchev and immersion in revisionism” would mean that we firmly advocated Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin and blindly believed in a return to the road of Leninism led by Khrushchev.27 The commentaries also revealed that the Trotskyist Fourth 27

In the Sino-Soviet polemics of the 1960s, both sides denounced each other for adopting “Trotskyite positions” or standing with the “Trotskyites.” However, the Fourth International had said that it would give critical support to de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union, while at the same time critically supporting China by condemning Khrushchev’s policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist bloc in the context of the Cold War. See “The Repercussions of the 22nd Congress of the cpsu – Resolution Adopted by the International Secretariat”, Fourth International, No. 14, 1961, from which the ccp side was quoting.

memoirs (2006)

947

International had written to Khrushchev after the Twentieth Congress asking him to rehabilitate Trotsky. In October 1964, the successful test of our first atomic bomb coincided with Khrushchev’s ousting from power in the Soviet Union. However, the ccp had not changed its view of the nature of the Soviet state, nor did relations between the two parties and the two countries improve. Among the Trotskyist prisoners in Shanghai, Zheng Chaolin responded to the commentaries with an essay of around 90,000 Chinese characters and submitted it to the government. Its title was “On Cadreism”. The government cadres later declared that Zheng Chaolin’s essay was toxic and warned him not to spread it among the group. In October 1966, when fighting before rival groups in the Cultural Revolution was going on all over China, Zheng Chaolin was still being criticised. Cao Huibai in Chongqing, after studying the commentaries, wrote a report on his thoughts to the Party organisation. As a result, he was forced to wear a hat.28 His wife was made to divorce him and the result of an earlier appeal was overturned. During the Cultural Revolution, things got much worse, and he was severely beaten and died. After studying the commentaries, the four Trotskyists who had been sentenced to twelve years in prison (Chen Mang, Xia Jianxun, Shen Yunfang, and Xie Gongmo) were transferred to the Shanghai Labour Reform Farm in Qinghai Province or (in the case of Xie Gongmo) allowed to go home under supervision. The three serving fifteen-year sentences and the eight serving life sentences, as well as the four unsentenced Trotskyists, continued to be divided into two groups in Prison No. 1, studying in the morning and returning to work in the afternoon. In the second half of 1964, a new supervisor called Wang turned up. His style and manner were simple. Other supervisors always had a proper writing desk with a glass top and various office tools, but this Wang brought in an old student desk from somewhere and put it in the corner, from where he worked. He brought two thermos flasks with him, so he didn’t need to get a prisoner to fetch water for him. When I was studying in the morning, he would walk over to have a look, and the same in the afternoon, when I was working. One afternoon, when he saw that I had finished distributing tasks, he said, laughing: “For the uneducated, drawing lots is understandable; but you are all intellectuals, and you still resort to such methods!” As socialists believing in materialism, we were naturally embarrassed by his comment. Our group leader

28

To signal his political disgrace.

948

xiong, trans. benton

immediately made a self-criticism to Wang, and admitted that he “should have stopped doing so a long time ago!” But he put the onus on me, so all I could do bow my head in silence. From then on, I no longer devoted so much time to this task. After collecting the cotton waste, I divided it up at random, for everyone to take one batch. I took the last batch. A few days later, Wang came over and stood in front of Zheng Chaolin. He then turned to the rest of us and said: “In my view, you should select a few pieces of good silk for him to unravel, look at his hands”. Indeed, I’d long noticed that Zheng Chaolin struggled to unravel the silk, and he was always far slower than the rest of us. I would not have come up with this solution by myself, for fear of being seen to sympathise with an opponent of reform. At the end of 1964, under Wang’s leadership, a translation group was set up in the prison, bringing together prisoners to translate science and technology books. The group comprised Zheng Chaolin, Yu Shouyi, Zhou Renshang, and Wang Guolong. On New Year’s Day 1965, each prisoner received a set of Mao Zedong’s Selected Works (vols. 1 to 4), which had just been published. I had read volumes 1 and 2 in 1952. I now read the fourth volume, which contained policies, guidelines, and commentaries on the four years from the end of the War against Japan to victory in the War of Liberation, to try to understand the reasons for the ccp’s victory in the civil war. In October 1947, the ccp had promulgate the Outline of the Land Law and carried out land reform in the liberated areas of northeast and northern China, realising what Sun Yat-sen had proposed and the Kuomintang had been unable to do. Young peasants joined the Communist-led army in great numbers, leading to a dramatic peasant war, quite different from peasant wars in the past. This peasant war happened under the guidance of the ccp, which represented the peasants’ interests. The eight million Kuomintang troops, the vast majority of whom were drawn from the countryside, were caught up in the tide of agrarian revolution, which disintegrated their army and led to its inevitable defeat.

Seven Years at Qingdong Farm Prison No. 1 is where lifers are held. I was held there for twenty years. The world outside the prison has four seasons and the alternation of day and night. Inside the prison, life is the same day in, day out, with no changes. Every morning the sound of a whistle, three people locked in a small cell, everything organised like an army. The supervisors on each floor open the cell doors almost simultaneously. The sound of iron doors, iron locks, and brass keys

memoirs (2006)

949

clanging against each other whistles through the prison like a storm. When I first arrived, it made my head swell and I had a taste of iron in my mouth. As the days passed, I became accustomed to hearing it, and the sound of metal became a symphony of life. When the door to the cell opens, the toilet-bucket is carried out and taken downstairs, where the sound of slopping out rises from the cesspool, with the stench sometimes carried up on the draft. The inmates then take the buckets back inside the iron door, which is slammed shut with another clang. The three men sit quietly, waiting for the orderlies to bring water with which to wash their faces, each holding a large enamel cup. There is another deafening symphony of clanging doors, locks, and keys. The inmates exit from their cells and study in groups. The mood is lifted by the sound of food boxes being loaded up in the distant dining room. The supervisor: “Back to your rooms!” There follows yet another clanging of doors while we sit waiting for our food. After the meal, we start to transform the knitted trimmings into yarn. After another clanging upstairs and downstairs, we sit still, unwinding the yarn while awaiting our turn to go downstairs in batches to the courtyard between the two buildings to take the air for half an hour. When we return, the door clangs shut and we continue our work, waiting for the evening meal. After a roll-call, the key is inserted into the lock and turned twice. This is the end of the day. We wait for the whistle to go to bed. Tomorrow, the same will happen. Day after day, year after year. On the morning of 28 September 1972, after breakfast, it was time to open the doors of the cells and release the prisoners for study, but the whole prison remained silent. The floor supervisor opened the door to our cell and then went back to his office, without opening the rest. This unusual event caught our attention. Zheng Chaolin, Yu Shouyi, and Huang Jiantong, the three unsentenced Trotskyists, were told to get their belongings and go downstairs. The three of them had been imprisoned for twenty years and no verdict had yet been announced. Soon afterwards, Wang Guolong, Ye Chunhua, and Zhou Rensheng were told to get their belongings and go downstairs. They had all been sentenced to life and had served twenty years. It was as if something had changed. I was caught up in my thoughts. I don’t know how long it took, but at a certain point I was told to get my things and go downstairs. I walked into an office. Zheng Chaolin, Yu Shouyi, Huang Jiantong, Wang Guolong, Ye Chunhua, Zhou Rensheng, Jiang Zhendong, and several others stood there in silence.

950

xiong, trans. benton

Someone from the Public Security Bureau then came to announce our release. We were given release certificates and had to put our palm-prints on them. However, the release certificates were immediately removed. A cadre with an unfamiliar face waved me over as I walked into the office and said to me, “Your rehabilitation is not going very well, you’ll have to reform your mind in future”. This cadre was Yu Hongfei, who took over our affairs from then until his retirement in the 1990s. We were told that we were about to go to the labour reform factory (the Zhoupu Glass Factory in Nanhui County) and the labour reform farm (Qingdong Farm in Qingpu County) to continue our reform through labour.

The Farm In the afternoon, we left Shanghai’s Tilanqiao Prison in two vehicles, accompanied by a large number of cadres. Some of us went to Qingpu, some to Nanhui. After the cars had sped through the prison gates, the gates closed again behind us. Twenty years of our youth were left inside them. In 1958 and 1968, I used a small piece of iron to scratch our lives onto two pieces of glassware; on a small cup, I ground out the word “smile”, together with my number, 760; on a teacup, I ground out a bridge and the flowing water beneath it, together with a petunia flower and the words: “Standing by a river, Confucius said, time goes on and on just like the flowing water in the river, never ceasing”. Each expressed my mood and state of mind in those two eras. After driving through the hustle and bustle of the city, the car raced along a road prepared for war (so wide that the trees on either side of the road had been cut down to make a runway for the landing and taking off of warplanes). Along the edge, peasants threshed and dried their crops. The fields were verdant under a blue sky. It was wonderful to breathe in the fresh air and revisit nature. In the distance, the clucking and barking of chickens and dogs rang out from the farmhouses, triggering endless nostalgia and taking us back to our childhood and its joys. The car stopped in front of Qingdong Farm. A row of small dwellings faced south between the farm headquarters and the cadres’ family quarters. To the west of it along a dirt road was the cadre dormitory; to the north, a rice field; to the east, the farm headquarters; to the south, a peach grove bordered by a navigable river with a stone bridge across which small tractors passed. South of the bridge was a natural village, Tianshengzhuang.

memoirs (2006)

951

The row of dwellings, facing north and south, consisted of twelve rooms. Each room had one window facing north and a door and window facing south. The gateway to the row of dwellings opened onto the second dwelling. The dwelling to the east was for the cadres, and the ten rooms to the west had numbers painted on the doors. No. 1 was our study room, nos. 2–7 were for the six of us, and I lived in no. 3. No. 8 housed our work tools and miscellaneous items. Nos. 9 and 10 were the storage rooms of the twelfth team, where bricks of coal were stacked. There was a large courtyard, some thirty metres from east to west and ten from north to south. In the yard was a palm tree, an apple tree, and a sycamore tree. After we had moved in, we planted ten grape vines and built a large trellis. Each dwelling had a double bed, a desk, and a stool, all freshly made and painted. The cadres told us that we would each live on sixty yuan a month, with publicly funded medical care, and that we could bring our families to live with us or visit us. The farm sent Cadre Pan to be in charge of us. He was a soldier who had changed jobs due to disability, of peasant origin, not very well educated, but very policy-conscious. From his conversation, we knew that our resettlement was in accordance with central decisions. He said that the roof of a row of houses was not at standard height, so the farm used dozens of jacks to raise the roof by a foot. Our monthly living expenses of 60 yuan were higher than the monthly wages of ordinary cadres on the farm (who received on average 45 yuan) and higher still than the monthly wages of employees who had completed their sentences and remained on the farm (15 yuan). Our status was that of members of the category of the three hat-wearers. We were housed separately and forbidden to associate with personnel. In Pan’s opinion, the government had decided to keep us on as pensioners, to the very end. Judging from the political situation in the country at the time and the various measures taken to rehouse us, Pan was probably not wrong. On the evening of the day on which we arrived at the farm, I closed the door to my room, left the light on, and sat in silence at my desk for a long time. I turned the light off again and paced back and forth in the room, thinking about everything. The previous night, I had been lying on a plank bed in a small cell in prison, waiting for the symphony of doors, locks, and keys the following morning. Now, with my own hands, I gently closed and opened the door of my house, walked out into the courtyard, looked up at the twinkling stars, and smiled at the world, as if in a dream. After we had settled down, a doctor from the farm hospital gave us a full health check and treated those of us who needed it. In the second half of 1972, I underwent surgery for haemorrhoids and then spent several months having all my teeth removed and a denture fitted.

952

xiong, trans. benton

The government transferred Ye Chunhua’s wife, Cao Jiacong, from Baimaoling Farm in Anhui to Qingdong Farm. It was a great event for one of the six of us who lived alone to have a family on the farm. The government’s attitude towards those who did not have a family and wanted one was: “neither to support nor to oppose”. Following this line, Zheng Liang actively sought someone with whom to start a family, a major concern for everyone in the courtyard. Zhou Renxin’s wife Zhao Qingyin, accompanied by his mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, came on a visit from Wenzhou, with his young grandson in her arms.29 The reunion of four generations was also an important event in the courtyard. Zhou Rensheng’s mother was a kind-hearted old lady who was very optimistic about people and things. She brought bottles of a special Wenzhou wine with her and gave one to each of us. She cooked eggs for us in the wine. We felt the warmth of the human world. In late 1946, Zhao Qingyin had been in charge of correspondence between Shanghai and Nanjing (where I was at the time). She was referred to as my elder sister in the letters. In the autumn of 1947, I had gone to Shanghai from Nanjing and been introduced to her at Zhou Rensheng’s place. The first time we met, I was impressed by a young girl who looked like a student and liked to laugh. More than twenty years later, she had become a very different person, silent and uncommunicative. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, she was often dragged out by Red Guards for criticism and was so exhausted that she even ignored her own son. When I first met Zhou Rensheng, he was not yet married. Now I was happy to see him and his family reunited, although I could not but bemoan my own fate. Zhou Rensheng lived in no. 4 and I lived in no. 3, next to each other. In my little home, I thought of myself, already past my prime, with no children and no one to depend on. I was enveloped by a feeling of bleakness and despair.

Two Trips to the Countryside to Visit Relatives In August 1973, Pan handed me a letter from Shandong. Our letters used to first go through Cadre Pan and were then distributed to us. “Who else is at home?” Pan asked me after I had read the letter.

29

Zhou Renxin, i.e., Zhou Rensheng, a prominent Wenzhou Trotskyist.

memoirs (2006)

953

“Only my old mother”. “Can’t she come? You should go back and see her”. His words warmed and comforted me, but they also puzzled me. When we were settled on the farm, we were told that our families could come and visit or live with us, but not that we could go home to visit them. Besides, according to Pan, I hadn’t done very well in my rehabilitation. “Do you think it will work?” I asked. “You can always apply”. To my amazement, my request was granted. Old Pan told me to get ready, and Cadre Yu of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau and Section Chief Bei came to the farm and told me what to do on the way there and the way back. They also told me that Cadre Pan would accompany me. The reason was that I had been away from society for a long time, and many changes had taken place – for example, the procedure for buying tickets, getting accommodation, and so on. All that would be handled by Old Pan. But they didn’t need to explain why a counterrevolutionary prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment could not simply run around by himself. The train reached Ji’nan at dawn. When we stepped out of the station, there were banners and slogans on all the walls and bits of torn paper bearing political slogans blowing around in the morning breeze. The two “revolutionary rebel” groups [from the Cultural Revolution years] were still acting out the role of Sun Dasheng, the Monkey King. On the road from the railway station to the coach station, young boys were running around with hand-carts, some empty and heading for the city, others loaded with rubbish, which they were carrying back to the suburbs. They were peasants trying to make a living. Before chemical fertilisers had been invented, peasants in the north used to get up early in the morning and carry their dung baskets around the villages, collecting dog and human dung and using it to fertilise the fields, a method handed down from their ancestors. Officials were busy fighting for power and profit; peasants were busy collecting rubbish and dung in the hope of a good harvest. Such is the history of human civilisation over thousands of years: like nature, it has its own internal laws, changing and developing step by-step. It is 180 li from Ji’nan to my home, and there is a bus stop in the market town where the commune is located, five li from home. Old Pan stayed in the commune’s guest house and I walked the five li. I was afraid. I hadn’t seen Mother for forty years, and I didn’t know how old she would look. She had been thirty-five years old when we parted. She had walked with me to the village, and whenever I looked back, she had still been standing there watching me.

954

xiong, trans. benton

The moment I saw her, I was almost afraid to continue looking. The face I had seen aged thirty-five was not the old, dull face in front of me. I shouted “Mother” and helped her up onto the kang. We stared at each other for ages, unable to speak. I noticed that she was looking at my mouth. I immediately realised that she was wondering about my buck teeth. A smile flashed across her wrinkled face as I removed my denture and showed it to her. “Just like your old grandfather”, she said, “you’ve got false teeth!” It pleased me that she had noticed. There was another silence. Not speaking was a better way than speaking at that moment of expressing the deepest feelings of the heart. “We have to thank Chairman Mao and the Party Central Committee for their great revolutionary humanitarianism”, she said, and I heard her with respect. A man came striding through the door of the house carrying a tobacco pipe in his hand. Third Uncle greeted me and introduced me to Liu Damai, the village head. When I heard the title, I stood up and bowed my head to show respect. Making himself at home, he found a stool to sit on, stuffed some tobacco into his pipe, lit it with a match, took two puffs, and said to Third Uncle: “I came back from the commune, I heard that Andong is back, well, well …”. “How long can you stay?” “I’ve been given a week”. “That’s good. It’s good to come back for a visit. It’s difficult to be both loyal and filial”. What did he mean? Of course it was a matter of filial piety to come back to see my mother, but where did “loyalty” come in? I had to wait for him to take two more puffs before he said, “Do you have everything you need to cook and eat at home? Let me know if you have any problems”. “We have everything we need”, Third Uncle said, answering on my behalf. I said, “The government has subsidised me with food stamps”. After he left, I learned that he had never gone to school as a child and had gained a smattering of education only after becoming a cadre. Early the following morning, labourers from each family went down to the Yellow River to cut grass for fodder along the bank. I decided to take a sickle and join them. Several wheelbarrows were soon full. We then pushed the wheelbarrows back and went to the big fields after breakfast, to harvest the sorghum. I was alone on the bank of the Yellow River for a while. The scene was much the same as it had been 40 years earlier, except that none of the group of people who had come to cut the grass had yet reached the age of 40. They were members of the People’s Commune, working collectively for the production team. The next day was the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, known in the old days as the Ghost Festival, the day you visited the graves of those who had died. Mother was pushed by my cousin on a wheelbarrow for more than ten li

memoirs (2006)

955

to visit Grandmother’s grave, but I did not join her, guessing that this was one of the things that the cadres in the Shanghai Public Security Bureau had warned against. Moreover, Third Uncle did not want me to go either, also because of the political implications (at the time, the campaign to criticise Lin Biao and Confucius was in full swing). Mother very much wanted me to go with her, but I said no, without giving a reason. Mothers throughout the world unconditionally follow their sons’ wishes. Mother was disappointed but did not try to force me. Whenever I think about it now, I am overcome by feelings of pain and grief. Instead I went with my uncle and aunt and the production team to the wetlands by the river to harvest hemp. The production team had a rope-rolling section, which produced ropes of different thicknesses under the technical guidance of Third Uncle, a sideline run by the production team. As I was leaving, Mother took a quilt out of a wooden box and handed it to me. She had spun the yarn and woven the fabric herself. The yarn used to weave the quilt had been dyed in different shades of indigo, and the quilt was woven in a quaint pattern of small squares. The lining was light indigo. She had sewn two quilts, one for me and one for Brother. The quilts had waited in the wooden box for more than thirty years. She had always wanted to hand them over to us in person. She waited and hoped, and now I finally received mine. However, Brother was working for the army in an educational institution in Sichuan. After Mother died, Sister-in-Law took the quilt home with her. The morning I left, Mother, supported by my niece, stood in front of the house to watch me go. We parted without a word. After the previous parting, we had been apart for forty years. This time, it was forever. The second time I returned home was on the morning of 8 January 1976. I received a telegram from Third Uncle: “Mother is critically ill, return at once”. Before bringing the telegram to me, Old Pan had already spoken to the Shanghai cadres on the phone and made a decision. He said, “Get ready, we leave this afternoon”. At midnight, the bus passed Bengbu, and after a sudden burst of mournful music on the radio, the sad news came that Zhou Enlai had died. The whole bus fell silent, apart from sighs. I got off at a market town five miles from home. Old Pan continued his 70-li journey to the terminal in Huimin County, for it was winter and the commune guest house was in poor condition. He informed the commune of his address and told me to call him if anything went wrong. Third Aunt lived in the market town. As soon as she saw me, she burst into tears. “The funeral has already happened. Mother’s grave is on the western slope”.

956

xiong, trans. benton

The slope is just to west of my village. There were some poplar trees and a few grave mounds, including a fresh one, Mother’s, with streamers fluttering in the cold wind. I stood at the grave and wanted to cry but couldn’t. I silently contemplated Mother’s life. In that patriarchal society, Mother’s fate was tragic. She was a sacrifice on the altar of the new ideology of individual liberation and freedom of marriage that emerged during the May Fourth period, when she had been abandoned by her husband. During the years of war and revolution, her two sons had got caught up in the whirlwind of history. Her eldest son, me, had been branded a “counterrevolutionary” and sent to prison, while her second son, a revolutionary soldier, had fought all over China. I wondered to myself how she had managed to withstand the shocks. Now, her hopes, misfortunes, and pains had all been buried with her in the earth, and all was at rest.

Visiting Father in Xuzhou The road back to Shanghai passes through Xuzhou. I got off the bus and went to visit Father at Huaihai University, accompanied by Old Pan, who also wanted to visit some of his old comrades who had moved to Xuzhou. I hadn’t seen Father for twenty-four years. He was the same age as the century. He had been an educator all his life, in Shandong, Sichuan, and Nanjing before Liberation. After Liberation, he had moved from Nanjing to Wuxi, to teach at the Teacher Training College. During the Great Leap Forward in 1958, the college had moved to Xuzhou, where he had taught in the Department of Physical Education and the Department of Biology. Since the start of the Cultural Revolution, I had lost contact with him. He had been subjected to criticism. The Red Guards had sent him to work on a farm, but he had later gone back and was now working as a librarian. I asked him, “How is the educational revolution going?” He thought for a moment and then said, “A few female students come running into the library, sit there on a stool nibbling melon seeds. There’s no dignity left in teaching”. Six years later, in 1982, after I had been released from supervision and regained my civil rights, I went to visit him again. We talked about the days of “sweeping away evil spirits, snakes, and gods”. He said: “Many professors were criticised at the time. They had to wear a sign round their necks with their name written on it”. After the Cultural Revolution, he was sent back to the library, where he worked until his death aged eighty-four. At lunchtime during my visit to Xuzhou, a man came to inform Father that there would be no more meetings for the while, except for the meeting to

memoirs (2006)

957

mourn Premier Zhou. Then he said with a worried look, “One minute they say it’s open, then the next they say it’s not, I don’t know what’s going on!” Then there was silence. The political atmosphere in the country was tense and confusing, with movements criticising Confucius and Mencius, commenting on The Water Margin, etc., and using the past as a metaphor for the present.30 No one dared to say a word about national affairs, except to follow the wishes of the editorials of People’s Daily and Red Flag. I was fully aware that someone in my position should not comment. At dinner, a neighbour burst in. Father introduced me as a fellow villager from Shandong [rather than as his son]. I was chilled and ashamed. I didn’t blame my father in the slightest, but I regretted having visited him unannounced when he was still in the process of “re-education through labour”. He had two sons, one a political commissar in the People’s Liberation Army, a source of honour and comfort, and me, a source of grief and shame. The day before I bought my train ticket back to Shanghai, Old Pan took me to visit the Memorial Hall to commemorate the Battle of Huaihai, in which he had fought. As the enthusiastic attendant explained the story of the battle, she became emotional. Little did she know that one of the only two people in her audience was a “counterrevolutionary” serving a life sentence. In front of her sincerity and kindness, I felt as if I had deceived her and was hopelessly ashamed.

Study In September 1972, the cadres announced that we were to continue to reform our minds through study and labour, with study as the main focus. We were told that we must read Mao’s Selected Works, Lenin’s Selected Works, and Stalin’s writings. Once a month, the six of us were allowed to go shopping in Qingpu, and once a year Old Pan took us shopping in downtown Shanghai. In Qingpu, our first stop was always the Xinhua Bookstore. In Shanghai, we first visited the bookstores on Fuzhou Road. We were free to buy whichever books and newspapers we wanted. Zhou Rensheng had an order for The Complete Works of Lenin. He knew foreign languages. Others had ordered the Complete Works of Marx and

30

Political campaigns launched towards the end of Mao’s life.

958

xiong, trans. benton

Stalin and Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. As for me. I bought several books on agriculture and vegetable growing, to help me adapt to life on the farm. Apart from attending group study and participating in labour, we mostly stayed in our own rooms and did our own things. We seldom visited other people’s rooms, so as not to disturb their self-study. Back in my own room, I often closed the door behind me, sat down at the desk under the south-facing window, made myself a strong cup of tea, took down a book from the bookshelf, and dived into it, in search of knowledge and to enjoy myself and forget the boring pronouncements and verbal battles going on in the study sessions, based not on sincerity but on falsity. Room 1 was our collective study room, with a rectangular table and a few stools. Whenever we studied, we sat around the table with our copies of Red Flag and our notebooks, cigarettes and tea on hand, in a courteous and solemn atmosphere. I wrote down the main ideas in the editorials for future quoting. Zhou Rensheng, the study-group leader, was competent and dedicated. Old Pan, the cadre, sometimes brought a cup of tea to sit for a while to show how much he valued our studies. In fact, he was not in charge and did little supervision. A year after the 13 September Incident,31 the criticism of Lin Biao’s extreme leftist line and anarchist ideology was followed by criticism of his extreme rightist essence, so extreme left became extreme right all of a sudden. In the study group, we argued about whether Confucius represented feudalism or slavery. The argument caught the attention of Old Pan, who came to my house in the evening and said: “What are you arguing about? I can’t make head or tail of it. I heard before that Confucius was feudal society, now it turns out he’s a slave society, what’s going on? If you think your ideas are in line with MarxismLeninism, then stick to them. Otherwise, you must accept their criticism. To insist on being wrong is unacceptable”. I gave in. I admitted that my ideas had not been reformed. However, I insisted that I was opposed to the Central Committee. As a result of the quarrel, the criticisms of the others were included in the half-yearly summary of my ideological reform in 1974 and in the year-end summary. In 1975, the same old arguments had to be repeated. At the time, the only way to show that you were right was to rub others’ faces in it. In a climate of “total dictatorship”, I didn’t even try to defend myself. Instead, I held my tongue. 31

The Lin Biao Incident in 1971, in which Lin died when a plane carrying him and family members crashed in Mongolia, allegedly after attempting to assassinate Mao and defect to the Soviet Union.

memoirs (2006)

959

In January 1976, after going back to Shandong to take care of my mother’s funeral and visiting my father in Xuzhou, I returned to Shanghai on the 19th and read the reports Zhou Enlai’s death. On 4 April, the “Tian’anmen Square counterrevolutionary incident” took place.32 Old Pan immediately told us to study the report in People’s Daily. In my speech at the meeting, I let slip the comment “How come there are so many counterrevolutionaries?” Some took up the remark and I ended up wearing the hat “not believing the report in People’s Daily”. In those days, it was the fashion to grab people by their pigtails and expose and criticise them. When the argument got heated, I was further exposed: “You don’t have Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism or On the Opposition on your bookshelf”. It was true, so I gained another hat, that of “bitter hatred of Stalin”. How dare I hate this revolutionary teacher! When we settled down on the farm, we had been told to include these two books in our programme of selfstudy. But I was too simple-minded, and refused to buy just for the sake of appearances books that I had no intention of reading. I have suffered a lot in this life for being stubborn. I resolved to wear a “disobedience” hat to ward off the “bitter hatred” hat. I said that I was willing to accept any punishment, and that the claim that I harboured a “bitter hatred” of Stalin was a subjective inference by others, which could in no way be substantiated. After the study session, Old Pan summoned me to his room and said: “Comments made by others must be treated correctly. Tomorrow, the farm quartermaster (who looked after the supply of oil, salt, vinegar, sugar, alcohol, cigarettes, soap, and paper) has a vehicle going to Qingpu to buy goods. Go with it, help them load up the supplies, and then go to the bookstore and buy those two books”. The half-yearly summary of my ideological reform in July 1976 added two more items to my account: “not believing that the Tian’anmen Incident was a counterrevolutionary incident” and “not purchasing books by revolutionary teachers, a sign of resistance to reform”. But 1976 was an extraordinary year in which Zhou Enlai died, a giant meteorite fell in Jilin, the Tian’anmen counterrevolutionary incident happened, Deng Xiaoping was overthrown for the second time, Chairman Zhu De died, the Tangshan earthquake killed and injured more than 200,000 people, and – on 9 September – Chairman Mao Zedong died, leading on 6 October to the fall of the “Gang of Four”.

32

This incident actually took place on 5 April 1976.

960

xiong, trans. benton

Given that the deaths of Mao, Zhu, and Zhou coincided with meteorites and earthquakes, People’s Daily noted that a meteorite had also fallen in the third century b.c., when Qin Shi Huang died.33 All the deification had perhaps confused me, for I began to think that there might be some truth in the idea of celestial influence. The confusion and surprise caused by the death of Mao and the crushing of the “Gang of Four” seemed to mitigate the fear and grief caused by the Tangshan earthquake. Old Pan was constantly listening to reports and holding meetings, while the cadres were trying to unify their thinking. Things became more relaxed in the last three months of 1976. My own view was that since Mother’s death, I had nothing more to worry about, and that I would spend the rest of my life on the farm. In December 1976, Old Pan told us to write a year-end summary of our ideological reform. Since we had to write one every six months, I had already prepared a draft of my thoughts, which I added to or subtracted from as needed. It was invariably about deepening or further deepening the exposure and criticism of my Trotskyist crimes, consolidating my confession of guilt and compliance with the law, intensifying the reforming of my mind, and so on. Lots of big words, empty words, lies, incantations, and oaths, a never-ending litany of criticism and self-criticism. Old Pan summoned the six of us to ramble on about our ideological preparations. The Shanghai cadre Yu Hongfei and Section Chief Bei listened to us. Yu Hongfei then spoke. He said there were two requirements: (1) for us to study in future rather than to engage in empty formalism: and (2) to expose our ideas and engage in independent thinking about the “Gang of Four”. As soon as I heard this, I realised that the issues that we had been debating in the group for more than two years had finally been put to rest. No one was interested any longer in criticising or “helping” me. The half-yearly and yearend summaries were blown away. In 1977, our studies became more relaxed, as we read newspapers every morning and carried out manual labour in the afternoon. Old Pan got us a semiconductor radio, so in addition to reading the newspapers, we listened to the radio.

33

Mao liked to compare himself to Qin Shi Huangdi (259–210 bce), the first emperor of unified China.

memoirs (2006)

961

Labour When I first arrived at the farm, I was put in charge of labour matters. The six of us did not belong to a production team. We were housed in a semi-enclosed courtyard. We were not allowed to interact with workers on the farm. As the name implies, a reform-through-labour farm is a place where people are rehabilitated by labour, so how could we not work? We were therefore assigned to do work that could be done in isolation from outsiders. For example, every morning we went to the living quarters of the farm cadres to sweep up leaves and rubbish; every Sunday, we replaced the quilts, sheets, and pillowcases in the farm guest house and washed them; we weeded the farm yard; and on May Day, New Year’s Day, and the Spring Festival, we worked in the farm cadres’ canteen, killing the chickens and ducks, preparing the fish, cleaning the pig intestines, cleaning the vegetables, and so on. The three summer months were the busiest time of the year, both on the farm and in the rural commune. Cadre Pan was a disabled soldier who walked on a crutch, but he nevertheless led us to work in the fields every summer. The harvesting of the winter wheat and the planting of the rice seedlings were labour-intensive, so we were not asked to do them. Instead, we were told to raise a bed of rice seedlings for planting in the fields. We were also made to pick up the ears of wheat left on the ground by the harvesters. These two tasks were not particularly onerous, but after ten days or so, we were still exhausted. To the north of our row of houses was a low-lying wetland, overgrown with weeds and infested with flies and mosquitoes. In the winter of 1972, we dug a drainage ditch to clear it. We grew our own food, and in that sense our living was idyllic. When group study was over, I often went down to the vegetable garden to weed, catch insects, tidy up the plants and seedlings, or watch the butterflies and the bees, to repair my mood.

Interlude In 1978, all rightists were rehabilitated. Several rightists who were under supervision were allowed to leave the farm. When we heard the news, no one talked about it, to avoid giving the impression that we were no longer open to correction. Even so, Zhou Rensheng and I occasionally opened up our hearts to one another – it’s not good to keep things entirely under wraps. I remember one day he said to me, “I don’t think I’m a Trotskyist anymore”. Without thinking,

962

xiong, trans. benton

I shot back: “If you’re not a Trotskyist anymore, why are you still locked up in this place?” We smiled at each other, and this smile was obviously a unspoken reflection of our feelings about the rehabilitated rightists, although we didn’t mention them explicitly. I remember that conversation between the two of us because within a few days, a worker who had completed his sentence and stayed on at the farm came to see me and Zhou Rensheng. He measured the doors and windows of our rooms, asking us if there was anything we needed doing. He told us that the farm had been instructed from on high to build new, better rooms for the six of us. The preparations had already begun and the houses were to be built of brick with not less than 20 cubic metres per person. There would be a common kitchen and stove, a common toilet and bathroom, and a large room for activities. The site where the new houses were to be built was more than one li away from where we lived at the time. To the north and west of the plot, across a large fishpond, was the army farm; to the south, a dirt road for vehicles and tractors; to the south of the dirt road was the labour farm; to the east, a tree nursery. A few years earlier, on one occasion when Pan had taken me to the army farm to get chrysanthemum seedlings, I had walked through this very plot. The soil from the fishpond had been piled up on it, so it was a little higher than the surrounding farmland and level with the dirt road to the south. Around the pond, willow and elm trees had grown to quite a large size. When I heard that new houses would be built for us on this plot of land, I was happy. Away from the farm headquarters and the cadres’ quarters, life would be less distracting and quieter. The next day I went to take a closer look, and envisaged planting vegetables and fruit trees in the open space around the houses, close to the pond for easy access to water and a cool rest under the shade of the trees along the bank. I accompanied Huang Jiantong, Zhou Rensheng, Ye Chunhua, and others to the site on several occasions. The builders had already started accumulating piles of bricks and tiles. I was so excited that I could not wait to see the building start. Old Pan never told us about the rebuilding, so we couldn’t ask. After all, we didn’t have the right to ask. However, Old Pan knew that we knew. At the end of 1978, work on the new buildings stopped. I went to the site and saw a few “little reformers” (youngsters sentenced to four or five years) taking away the bricks and tiles by the truckload, under the supervision of a worker who had finished his sentence and chosen to remain. Little did I know that a few months later, our civil rights would be restored and we would be allowed to leave the farm. Those who had homes went home,

memoirs (2006)

963

Wang Guolong and Zhou Rensheng to Wenzhou, Liu Pingmei to Guangzhou, and Lin Hua to Guangxi. The few of us without homes were allocated housing in Shanghai.

Restoration of Civil Rights On 5 June 1979, Zheng Chaolin, Wang Guolong, Jiang Zhendong, Yu Shouyi, Lin Hua, and Li Pei at the Zhoupu Factory and six others at the Qingdong Farm – Zhou Rensheng, Liu Pingmei, Zheng Liang, Huang Jantong, Ye Chunhua, and Xiong Andong, a total of twelve Trotskyist criminals in all – gathered together in the auditorium of the Qingdong Farm to attend a ceremony jointly organised by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau and the Shanghai High People’s Court to restore their civil rights. One by one, they received the ruling from the Supreme People’s Court. Here is the ruling that I received: Xiong Andong, male, aged fifty-eight, from Huimin County, Shandong Province, was sentenced to life imprisonment and deprived of his political rights for life by the Military Law Division of the Shanghai Military Commission of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in 1955 for counterrevolutionary crimes. Having shown remorse during his sentence, he was shown clemency on 28 September 1972. It has been decided to grant him civil rights. Shanghai High People’s Court 5 June 1979 I was arrested on 22 December 1952. In May 1955, I was sentenced to life imprisonment in accordance with paragraph 4 of the Regulations on the Punishment of Counterrevolutionaries. After 20 years in prison, on 28 September 1972, I was released on the grounds that I had “shown repentance during my sentence” and was sent to a farm for seven years, under strict control. On 5 June 1979, a “decision was made to grant [me] citizenship” and I was released from the 27 years of detention and control that had elapsed since my arrest on 22 December 1952, and returned to society as a homeless and unemployed citizen. I was released because I had “shown remorse”, but I was not rehabilitated. How could the Trotskyists not be guilty? The counterrevolutionary characterisation of the Trotskyists was based on Note 30 on page 162 of the first edition

964

xiong, trans. benton

of Mao Zedong’s Selected Works, published in 1952. For more than half a century, books and dictionaries had copied the entries on Trotsky and the Trotskyists in Note 30. In the note, Stalin is quoted: The Trotskyists are “a gang of unprincipled and thoughtless assassins, saboteurs, detective spies, murderous bandits, a gang of deadly enemies of the working class operating in the employ of foreign spy agencies”. In those days, in the Soviet Union and China, the term “supreme directive” had not yet been invented, but Stalin’s speeches were even more authoritative than a supreme directive. In Note 30, the Chinese Trotskyists were characterised as instruments of imperialism and the Kuomintang. The Chinese Trotskyists were convicted precisely on the basis of Note 30. Ideological reform during the twenty-seven years of our detention meant accepting Note 30 and admitting that we were counterrevolutionaries. If we could admit to being Trotskyists, write frequent reports on our thoughts, and denounce the Trotskyist crimes, we would be reformed. In 1988, the Supreme Court of the ussr vindicated the victims of the Moscow trials between 1936 and 1938, proving that the charges against Trotsky and the Trotskyists were unfounded – falsehoods created to please Stalin. In 1991, to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the ccp, a second edition of Mao’s Selected Works was published, with a new Note 33 on page 168 of volume 1 to replace the old Note 30. The Dictionary and Thesaurus published in the 1990s were also amended. In the new Note 33, Stalin’s comment on Trotskyism was withdrawn without any explanation. The characterisation of the Chinese Trotskyists was also withdrawn, but in that case the reasons were explained: “Likening the Trotskyists to traitors was due to the fact that at the time of the Communist International the Chinese Trotskyists were falsely accused of being in the pay of Japanese imperialist spies”. Grieving my lost youth, I sadly smile. Written in December 2006 in Shiquan New Village, aged 85.

Tributes to Trotskyist Comrades (2007, 2014) Xiong Andong, translated by Gregor Benton

These two obituaries by Xiong, a life-long Trotskyist from Shandong, pay tributes to his comrades Liu Pingmei, a veteran Trotskyist from Guangdong, and Chen Daotong, the son of Chen Qichang.1 Source: Appendix of Xiong Andong huiyilu (The Memoirs of Xiong Andong).2 The original Chinese text was transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive.

Remembering Liu Pingmei In prison, Liu Pingmei was apparently the only one of my fellow prisoners who never confessed to the crime of counter-revolution. For this reason, he was often criticised [by guards and compliant fellow prisoners] and told to bow his head and confess his guilt. Yet he stayed silent. His critics bore him no personal ill-will: criticising whose who would not admit their guilt was an exercise in self-preservation. On 28 August 1972, twenty years after being sentenced, we Trotskyists were told to fetch our belongings – we were about to leave prison. Liu Pingmei was the only one not so notified. He stayed in his cell, watching us leave one by one, unclear (like us) about our destination. We learned that we had been granted clemency – not full release, but transfer to a labour farm, under supervision. After we had been on the farm for more than twenty days, a car drove up with Liu Pingmei in it. I guessed that after being kept alone for so long, he had succumbed to mental pressure. I could not have been more wrong. The day after Liu Pingmei arrived at the farm, cadres started turning up, from the Public Security Bureau and the prison, one in military uniform. A correctional cadre from the farm accompanied them to the room where Liu Pingmei was staying. The cadres told me to boil water for tea and to tell everyone else to go back to their rooms and not to move around. 1 Chen Qichang (1901–1943), a Trotskyist leader active in wartime Shanghai, was executed by the Japanese in 1943. 2 See Part 3, Section E.

© Xiong Andong, translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_077

966

xiong, trans. benton

The kitchen was opposite Liu Pingmei’s room. The door to his room was closed and I could not hear what was said. The door opened and the cadres were about to walk out. One shouted, “How can we explain his attitude to the authorities?” I heard these words so clearly that they are engraved on my mind to this day. So Liu Pingmei’s attitude had not changed! He was still “stubborn” – so stubborn that the cadres found him impossible to deal with. After twenty years in detention and forced rehabilitation, Liu Pingmei had not been “reformed” to the extent that he was prepared to lie or put on an act. Having been released from prison after more than 20 days in solitary confinement, he was still “stubborn”, still making it hard for the authorities to apply the policy of “releasing him with leniency after his repenting of his crime”. Hence the question, “How can we explain this to the authorities?” As I carried boiling water to the cadre’s office to make tea, the cadre who was wondering how to explain Liu to the authorities said, “Tell me, what happened to Liu Pingmei?” His question took me back to a scene in the prison office some twenty days earlier. A cadre had called me over: “Your rehabilitation is not going well, you need to continue to reform your mind”. Now I was being asked about Liu Pingmei – to test my attitude? I replied, “Liu Pingmei has an odd temperament, I don’t know him well”. I made the tea, filled the thermos, and left. Two cadres walked past my window to Liu Pingmei’s room, and in a short while turned back to the office. They came and went in a hurry. I don’t know what they said to Liu Pingmei. Afterwards, I heard their car start up. The disciplinary cadres also made a round of the yard before leaving. Silence returned. I sat in my room for a long time, agitated. On 5 June 1979, seven years after our transfer to the farm, Liu Pingmei, like the others, received a copy of the ruling of the Supreme People’s Court. It said: “During his sentence, he has shown remorse. He is released with leniency and has been granted civil rights”. Truly a case of making him who starts the trouble end it, how elegantly the pen is wielded! Thus the curtain fell on a farce to celebrate the birthday of a foreign master, leaving it to future generations to sort out right from wrong.3 While on the farm, each of us received sixty yuan a month to live on, a lot more than we needed. In response to a government call, we put the extra money in the bank to support national construction and yield interest, to benefit both the public and us. When we left the farm in June 1979, we withdrew the principal of the deposit and the accumulated interest. But Liu Pingmei said the interest was exploitative. He wanted none of it and took only the principal.

3 Rumour had it that the Chinese Trotskyists had been arrested as a birthday gift to Stalin.

tributes to trotskyist comrades (2007, 2014)

967

When Liu Pingmei went to Wenzhou in his later years to attend a seminar on the thoughts of Chen Duxiu, in May 2001, he came to Shanghai for two days. I took him for a walk in a nearby park, and he told me about being “struggled against” in prison. In the park, bird cages hung from the trees. Thrushes sung in them. Liu Pingmei said, “Seeing that takes me back”. Time has passed, things have changed, but the scar on my heart is hard to remove. Six years ago, we met and parted, but it became an eternal goodbye. Written on the winter solstice, 2007

A Tribute to Chen Daotong In early 1980, I first met Chen Daotong at the home of Zheng Chaolin. Zheng introduced him to me as the son of Chen Qichang, and I stood in awe of him. Daotong told me that after his arrest in Beijing at the end of 1952, he had met one of my middle-school classmates, Zhang Hongren (Gong Yi), who was a brother to me when we worked and studied together. Zhang Hongren often talked about me, so Daotong said, “I have known your name for a long time”. This brought me nearer to him. I felt as if I was reuniting with an old friend. Daotong and Hongren shared a similar political destiny, having both been Trotskyists. At the end of the War against Japan, Hongren studied at university in Shenyang and Daotong in Beiping. In 1947–1948, they joined the victorious Communist-led peasant war and were assigned to work units, undergoing rigorous political study and ideological reform. The political belief at the time was that historical innocence4 was not the same as historical clarity.5 They did not play the role of Lu Xun’s “two clowns”, i.e., they did not pledge their loyalty as educated clowns to the political power, as part of a double-dealing act. They both thought that their joining the Trotskyists, although not in line with the new democracy advocated by the ccp at the time, had ultimately been aimed at achieving socialism and communism, so they made no secret of it when expressing their desire to follow the Communist Party. Little did they know that it would lead to their imprisonment under the people’s democratic dictatorship at the end of 1952. Neither of them would ever forget that when they were declared to be counterrevolutionaries, their colleagues turned pale and watched angrily, hostility written on their faces, as the arrests happened. “At the

4 Having no political taints in one’s personal history. 5 Having explained clearly to the Party organisation everything that one has done in the past.

968

xiong, trans. benton

side of the sinking boat, thousands of sails pass by, and ten thousand trees rise in front of a sick tree”. Daotong and Hongren shared a common sentiment, and the two formed a friendship behind bars that lasted them for the rest of their lives. They were given a lighter sentence (four years) because they had, of their own accord, given a full account of their family history and personal experiences from childhood to adulthood. In 1956, they were released from prison, in their early thirties, and were sent to a new workplace in Beijing. After getting to know Daotong, I often ran into him at Zheng Chaolin’s home. After visiting Zheng, he would sometimes stop by at my house. His family lived on Xikang Road, close to where I lived. I realised that Daotong was a straightforward and cheerful person, independent-minded and highly driven. He had joined the Trotskyist organisation in 1946, having been drawn in by his father’s social and political connections. In early 1948, he announced his withdrawal from it. Chen Daotong’s leg was injured and he had difficulty walking, but previously he had used to go to bookshops, where he would also buy several books on my behalf or tell me what to buy. When the area on Xikang Road where he had lived since his father’s day was demolished, he and his family moved to a new village near Qibao, built by his work unit, and he was allocated a more spacious house. It took more than an hour to reach. His father, the Trotskyist Chen Qichang, had died a hero’s death at the hands of Japanese gendarmes, leaving a deep scar on his soul, about which he wrote many poems in later years. The last time I visited him was at the end of 2012. His wife Ye was a warmhearted woman who was not only very hospitable but made sure to accompany me on the bus on the return journey, for I had to change twice before taking another bus back home. I did not visit them in 2013, when I was hospitalised several times. In early 2014, I heard that Chen Daotong had advanced lung cancer. I was anxious to visit him, but was unable to do so until May, and he died on 4 May. His children, following his will, only informed his friends and relatives later. I feel a deep sense of sadness and grief. Another honest and sincere friend has been lost. May 2014

section f Yin Kuan

∵

Remembering Yin Kuan (1983) Zheng Chaolin, translated by Gregor Benton Completed 24 May 1983

These excerpts from Zheng Chaolin’s memoir of Yin Kuan, who helped lead the famous three armed workers’ uprisings in Shanghai starting in 1926 and later became a Trotskyist, show among other things how the Trotskyists preserved their rich cultural and intellectual life even in Mao’s prisons. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709, 15, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

It was not until 1947, two years after the Japanese surrender, that we suddenly received a letter from Tongcheng in Anhui Province.1 It turned out that the year after the surrender, Peng Shuzhi had raised a sum of money to set up an open magazine that he called Seeking Truth, and had recruited several celebrities to write articles under their real names, even Li Ji.2 However, Peng Shuzhi published his own articles under an alias. When Peng published an article on Laozi3 in the first or second issue, Li Ji wrote an article criticising Peng in the next issue. Peng then came up with a counter-criticism, and the two sides argued the toss. I found it boring to argue about Laozi in that situation, but Yin Kuan saw the magazine Seeking Truth in Tongcheng and realised that it had to do with us [Trotskyists], so he wrote a letter to Li Ji c/o the magazine and asked him to pass it on to us. Yin Kuan gave us his address and advised us not to debate with Li Ji, to avoid hurting our friends’ feelings. He dismissed Peng Shuzhi’s boring article as Trotskyist boilerplate. We wrote to him immediately. Jiang Zhendong and I scraped together ten yuan and sent it to him. From then on, we were in touch. We always thought that Yin Kuan must be at home waiting for the rice to fall into his pot.4 Later we found out that he was not as poor as we had been

1 Yin Kuan was born in Tongcheng. During the Sino-Japanese War, he returned there. 2 Li Ji (1892–1967) was a Chinese Marxist scholar and translator, a former ccp member (1921– 1929), and an ex-Trotskyist (1929–1930). In late 1950, along with Liu Renjing, he made a statement in People’s Daily confessing his “guilt” as a Trotskyist. He translated a wide range of Marx and Engels and other Marxist works into Chinese. 3 Laozi (6th Century–4th Century bc) was the founder of philosophical Taoism. 4 Implying that Zheng thought Yin Kuan must have been very poor.

© Zheng Chaolin, translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_07

972

zheng, trans. benton

in Shanghai. He was headmaster of the Tongcheng Teachers’ Training College and a member of the Tongcheng County consultative council. I wrote to him sarcastically about his being a Kuomintang official. In his position, I could have been a headmaster, but never a councillor. He knew I had a temper and didn’t argue with me. Soon afterwards, he came to Shanghai and stayed at the Zhonglu Primary School, where Jiang Zhendong was headmaster, and met with all our old friends. It was only then that he realised that our organisation had already split and that neither Jiang Zhendong nor I was in contact with Peng Shuzhi. We apprised him of the theoretical and political aspects of the split, as well as its effect on personal relations. Jiang Zhendong told Yin Kuan what he had personally heard Peng Shuzhi say, at a meeting. I don’t know how the conversation came round to Yin Kuan, but Peng Shuzhi solemnly declared that he was not willing to work with Yin Kuan in any way in the future. I have already explained that Chen Duxiu had also declared that he would never work with Yin Kuan again. Peng Shuzhi’s statement was no different. I myself have always had good feelings for Yin Kuan, but there were times when I fell out with him. When Yin Kuan came to Shanghai, he met with Peng Shuzhi and heard from him about the split. But I have no memory of it. I remembered later that he wanted to hear both sides’ explanations, but he did not express a clear attitude, or rather, he said something ambiguous that made it sound as if he was on our side. Yin Kuan then went back to Tongcheng. Soon afterwards, there was a student rebellion at the teacher training school of which he was headmaster, and the students kicked him out. He sent me a mimeographed leaflet distributed by the students, without any accompanying explanation. The leaflet was very long and cursed “Yin Kuan, the Trotskyist bandit”. I don’t know whether they were whipped up against Yin Kuan by the Kuomintang or the Communists. When he came back to Shanghai in the summer of 1948, he still didn’t want to talk about it. One day in the summer of 1948, totally out of the blue, Yin Kuan came to Shanghai, and once again stayed in the Zhonglu Primary School. He didn’t say why he had come, and we didn’t connect his visit with the so-called “Party Building Conference” organised by Peng Shuzhi’s faction. We had known about their preparations and they had sent us a draft of the main documents of the congress. At the time, I was in hospital with typhoid fever. Wang Fanxi wrote an article criticising the so-called “Party Programme” drafted by Peng Shuzhi. I forget whether I was already out of hospital when Yin Kuan arrived (this can be checked). We never suspected that Yin Kuan would go to a congress of Peng

remembering yin kuan (1983)

973

Shuzhi’s party. In the course of the next few days, he left the school early in the morning and did not return to bed until the evening. Finally, he asked Wang Fanxi, Jiang Zhendong, Lou Zichun [Lou Guohua], and He Zishen to meet him at my home. By then, I had been discharged from hospital and was recuperating. He told us that he had been at the congress of Peng Shuzhi’s faction over the previous few days; he gave a detailed account of the congress and how he had been elected to the Central Committee, put in charge of propaganda, and made part of a “Standing Committee” alongside Peng Shuzhi, Liu Jialiang, and Chen Bilan. He said that Peng Shuzhi, Liu Jialiang, and others wanted all the delegates to oppose us [i.e., Zheng et al.], but they were unable to achieve their goal and there were still people among the delegates who were in favour of us; and that he, Yin Kuan, had also said that the criticism of Peng Shuzhi’s draft platform written by Wang Fanxi was justified and could not be ignored, etc. After hearing Yin Kuan’s revelation, I felt sick to the stomach, though I don’t know how the others felt. […] Afterwards, Yin Kuan moved out of Zhonglu Primary School and went to live in a house arranged for him by Peng Shuzhi. Peng also got him a job teaching in a secondary school in Shanghai. Despite this, he often came to my home and talked with us in detail about Peng Shuzhi’s side of the story. […] I no longer had anything to say to him. Shortly after the World Congress5 of the Fourth International, a declaration was sent to us and I translated it, despite the fact that I had not yet recovered from my illness. But I did not let Yin Kuan know that I was translating it. They had also received the declaration, but since it was in French, they gave it to their “Head of Propaganda”, Yin Kuan, to translate. Yin Kuan told me about it. I said, “ok, go and translate it so I can read it later”. I had soon finished my translation and mimeographed it. Only then did Yin Kuan stop translating, and the bit he had worked so hard on ended up in the waste-bin. Soon, however, Yin Kuan clashed with Peng Shuzhi, Liu Jialiang, and the others. How could Yin Kuan and Peng Shuzhi work together, either in terms of theory, politics, or even personal relations? Yin Kuan was too slapdash in such matters. But I was not surprised to see them fall out so quickly. We also ignored Yin Kuan and he had to go back to Tongcheng. At the end of 1948, when the leadership of Peng Shuzhi’s party decided to move to Hong Kong, Liu Jialiang wrote to Tongcheng asking Yin Kuan to go to Hong Kong with him, but Yin Kuan ignored him. After the incident, it occurred to me that Yin Kuan was the sort of person who thought himself very clever and authoritative, but in fact he was

5 The Second World Congress of the Fourth International in Paris in 1948.

974

zheng, trans. benton

very stupid. This is what many people call his “cynicism”! There’s no point in getting angry about it. After the Liberation of Shanghai in 1949, in the late summer and early autumn, Yin Kuan shipped a batch of agricultural products from his hometown to Wuhu and Nanjing to sell, and used the proceedings to come to Shanghai to see us. As usual, he stayed in the school, and we did our best to make him feel welcome. He wanted to stay in Shanghai, but not in the school, and asked if he could live in Wang Fanxi’s home [in Shanghai]. By this time, Wang Fanxi had already left for Hong Kong. What could we do about it? I didn’t do him the favour he was seeking, so he went back home to Tongcheng. From then on, he cut off contact with us. He no longer wrote to us, and we did not write to him either. In 1950, if not later, He Zishen heard from somewhere that there was an old man in Tongcheng who was openly criticising the policies of the Communist Party to the masses and the Communist Party could do nothing about him. He Zishen said: “Could it be Yin Kuan?” I didn’t know. I still don’t know whether there was such an old man and whether it was Yin Kuan. In the same year, or later, a letter arrived from Yin Kuan’s daughter. She said that her father had gone to Shanghai but was destitute and wanted us to take care of him. We inferred from the letter that Yin Kuan had been arrested but had been released and sent to Shanghai. Actually, he was still being held in Hefei. Recently, I heard a rumour about how Yin Kuan was arrested. Apparently, at some point in 1950, when Mao Zedong had gone to Anqing on a visit, the secretary of the local Party committee had told him about an old man in Tongcheng County who claimed to be an old friend of Zhou Enlai’s and was saying a lot of strange things and the local Party didn’t know what to do with him. Luo Ruiqing, the Minister of Public Security at the time, was there and asked what the man’s name was. The secretary said, “His name is Yin Kuan”. Luo Ruiqing said, “We are looking for him”. That’s how Yin Kuan got arrested. It seems that the story that He Zishen heard was well founded. However, when Yin Kuan met me later in prison, he also talked about his arrest, but not in such terms. Maybe he didn’t know that this had happened. But it is true that Yin Kuan liked to tell people that he was an old friend of Zhou Enlai’s. After a group of us went to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1923, the Communist Youth Party6 in West-

6 The Chinese Communist Youth Party was a student organisation founded in Paris in 1922 by Zhou Enlai, Zheng Chaolin, Yin Kuan, and other Chinese studying in Western Europe. At its Third Congress in 1923, members decided to become the European branch of the ccp’s youth wing, the Chinese Socialist Youth League, renamed the Chinese Communist Youth League in 1925. It ceased to exist around 1926, when many members left Europe.

remembering yin kuan (1983)

975

ern Europe was led by Zhou Enlai and Yin Kuan. But why raise this connection now that the Communist Party was in power? In the second half of the 1950s, when I was being held in the Shanghai Second Detention Centre, I left my cell one day to get a haircut. The barber asked me quietly, out of earshot of the guards, “Are you an old friend of Premier Zhou?” I realised that the barber had mistaken me for Yin Kuan, and that Yin had been arrested in his hometown of Tongcheng and brought to Hefei, where he been detained for ages before being transferred to Shanghai. He was first held in the detention centre run by the Ministry of Public Security in East China, whence he was later transferred to Shanghai No. 1 Detention Centre. He suffered greatly in Hefei. He was handcuffed with his hands behind his back for a long period, and had to be fed and have his backside wiped by other people. On the morning of 29 June 1956, I was in Shanghai No. 1 Detention Centre, where I had been for three and a half years, alone in a room. The guards came and told me to “pack my things”. The guards opened the door, helped me get my things, and walked me down from the third floor. When I got to the first floor, I suddenly saw Yin Kuan, walking ahead of me, with his things being carried by another guard. We looked at each other, not daring to say hello. It was the first person I had seen in three and a half years. When we got downstairs, we spoke. At first, the guard who was escorting us intervened to hush us, but then he let us carry on. We had no idea where we were going, but we didn’t think that we were going to be shot. The jeep drove through the gates of Tilanqiao Prison, and after a long wait in the reception room, we were sent to Prison Number One [within the complex]. Yin Kuan told me that this prison was full of felons. He had also been held there for a while. We were taken to the third floor and initially occupied separate cells for around three hours, and then I was put in a cell together with him. We talked until late at night, until prisoners on the floor above told us to shut up. The next morning we were separated again and never had another opportunity to share a cell. That morning, we saw dozens of others arrested on the same charge [of Trotskyism] who had been transferred in from other sections, to be dealt with. Among them was Jiang Zhendong, and also He Zishen. The doors of our cells were left open, so we could step outside to see these new arrivals. Puzzled, I asked Yin Kuan: “What are we doing here?” Yin Kuan said, “To study!” Then I realised that Yin Kuan had more experience than I did. It turned out that the State Council had given orders to the authorities to organise study visits for the Trotskyist prisoners. We were divided into several groups, each of a dozen or so people. After a few days of discussions, on 5 July we went out to visit factories, shops, advanced-level [agricultural] co-operatives, [workers’] cultural palaces, exhibitions, stadiums, and so on. We were underway for about a week. After that, we met to study. Finally, we were required to

976

zheng, trans. benton

write a summary, an activity that continued until 12 August. Those of us who had not yet been sentenced were sent back to the detention centre – not the First Detention Centre but the Second. In September of the same year, we went to Tilanqiao Prison for another study session, this time concerning the documents of the [ccp’s] Eighth National Congress, and at the same time went to People’s Square [in Shanghai] to watch the National Day rally and parade. During the period of intensive study, the doors of the prison cells were usually left open during the day and we could walk out into the corridor. So even though I was not in the same cell as Yin Kuan, we still had the opportunity to talk and exchange a few sentences. Even when the cell door was closed, we could stand behind it and talk loudly. Yin Kuan and I were not assigned to the same group, but I knew the general drift of what Yin Kuan said from other people in his group. When he was first arrested, Yin Kuan had probably resisted, and he therefore suffered in Hefei; after he was transferred to Shanghai, he softened up and did things like confess his guilt, so the controls on him were relaxed a bit, i.e., he was not necessarily left alone, and even shared a cell with other prisoners. I, on the other hand, was always left in solitary confinement, except during intensive study, and it was not until after the Cultural Revolution, when I was “struggled against”, that I was able to share a cell with other prisoners. Even after his confession, Yin Kuan was still not trusted. It was easy to see that his confession was fake. I stayed in the same cell as him that night and talked with him into the early hours, and on several occasions afterwards. I was satisfied that, whatever my old friend might say on the surface, his fundamental thinking, his Trotskyism, remained unchanged. We still had a common language. For example, when we talked about the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and about Khrushchev’s secret report,7 I said: “One day in the future, Stalin’s glass coffin will have to be removed from Lenin’s grave”. Yin Kuan said, “I don’t want them to remove it, I want someone else to remove it”. This indicated that he was even more opposed to Stalin and the Stalinists than I was, including those Stalinists who were opposed to Stalin. Another example (from 1957) was when we talked about the anti-rightist movement8 being waged at that time. He said, “The so-called ‘rightists’ are in fact the ones who support

7 The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (cpsu) was held in February 1956. At it, Khrushchev made his famous “secret report” revealing the dark side of the Soviet Union under Stalin and condemning Stalin’s personality cult. 8 The anti-rightist movement was a political campaign launched by Mao Zedong. It lasted almost two years, from 1957 to 1959. It aimed to purge dissidents from the ccp and resulted in the persecution of at least half a million people.

remembering yin kuan (1983)

977

the Communist Party, those who oppose the Communist Party would only say complimentary things in today’s circumstances, not critical things”. All this was well put, and enough to demonstrate that no matter how guilty Yin Kuan said he was on the surface, he never considered himself guilty on the inside. In his group study, according to what people in the same group told me, Yin Kuan adopted the attitude of acknowledging his guilt but saying little or nothing about it and lots about others’ guilt. For example, he angrily “denounced” Peng Shuzhi and his organisation as Kuomintang agents. He cited evidence that [Peng’s] “party-building meeting” was very generously funded and that it was followed by a banquet. Where did this money come from? Wasn’t it from the Kuomintang secret services? He also mentioned some members of the group who he said that were secret agents. He thought that by saying so, he could satisfy the demands of the Communist Party and show that he, Yin Kuan, was not himself a secret agent. His “denunciation” was measured. He never said that Wang Fanxi, Zheng Chaolin, Jiang Zhendong, and other members of the socalled [anti-Peng] “minority” were agents. Unlike others, he never said that all Trotskyists were agents. But such statements by Yin Kuan were nevertheless harmful. Once I knew about it, I advised him not to attack Peng Shuzhi at such meetings. But he repeated the same accusations about Peng Shuzhi in front of me. I said, “This may all be true, but we should settle accounts with Peng Shuzhi at some future date, not inside a Communist Party prison”. He also went on about the money used to stage Peng’s party conference. I said, “I know where the money came from, but I’m not going to tell you just now, I’m simply telling you that it was innocent and had nothing to do with Kuomintang agents”. It turned out that Yin Kuan really did not know the source of the money for Peng Shuzhi’s conference; he simply imagined that no one would ever give so much money to the Chinese Trotskyists for a conference, so his only conclusion was that the secret services must have funded it. To make up for the fact that the old comrades were not following him in large numbers or not at all,9 Peng went to great lengths to bring Yin Kuan out from the Chinese interior to shore up appearances [at the founding conference of his party in 1948]. Yin Kuan was elected onto the Central Committee and put in charge of propaganda. He was given a house to live in and a job at a secondary school. However, he had refused to tell Yin Kuan where the funds came from.

9 Implying that most veterans went with the group under Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi in the late 1940s.

978

zheng, trans. benton

In late April 1957, Yin Kuan and I were transferred from the Second Detention Centre to Tilanqiao Prison, where we stayed overnight, to visit the May Day Parade but not to study. On 17 August 1957, we went to Tilanqiao again, this time to prepare for a visit outside Shanghai. We stayed there for just three days before returning to the Second Detention Centre, for plans changed at short notice and the two of us were not required on the visit. But the rest went, first to places around Shanghai, then to Beijing and the Northeast, and then to Wuhan and back to Shanghai. They also had to study and write summaries. When I found out about this later, I was happy not to have gone, but Yin Kuan protested, asking why he was not allowed to join in the visit. During the Great Leap Forward and the ensuing “Three Years of Natural Disasters”,10 we were all locked up in the Second Detention Centre. Yin Kuan was sick and had to go to the prison hospital to recuperate. I was not ill or was not aware of being ill, but in April/May 1961 I was also sent to the city prison hospital for a medical check-up and returned there for a dozen days or so. This time Yin Kuan was there too. I saw him in the exercise yard and we exchanged a few words. We hadn’t seen each other in five years. The first thing he said was, “You’ve turned into a little old man!” Yin Kuan returned to the Second Detention Centre before me. I left the Second Detention Centre on 20 October 1962, and then I was officially transferred to Shanghai Prison. I don’t know when Yin Kuan was transferred. He was in Prison Number 8, I was in Number 5, and most of our fellow prisoners were in Number 1. The government was afraid that the two of us old men might die. We were given “nutritious meals”, three times a week, with some sliced or shredded meat, later increased to once a day. Although I was not a patient, I was also given “nutritious food”. We two old men were looked after but segregated. I continued in solitary confinement and did not attend the other prisoners’ classes. On 16 May 1964, the government took a new measure concerning the Trotskyist prisoners: they were all gathered on the third floor of Prison Number 1 to study the so-called “anti-revisionist documents”11 that were being published one after another at the time.

10 11

The “Three Years of Natural Disasters” referred to the famine of 1959–1962, when tens of millions of Chinese starved to death. In the early 1960s, the “comradeship” between China and the Soviet Union fell apart and China under Mao denounced the cpsu as a hegemon power and a purveyor of “Soviet revisionism.” The “anti-revisionist documents” were an edited collection of anti-Soviet propaganda.

remembering yin kuan (1983)

979

My clothes were taken to the third floor by other prisoners while I hung around downstairs. I was escorted to the director’s office. The head of the unit, Section Chief Li, and a female secretary were already sitting there. Soon afterwards, Yin Kuan came in, followed by two more prisoners. None of us had yet been sentenced.12 Section Chief Li gave a lecture, mainly on living and study arrangements. He said: “The four of you will be organised into a group and live on the eastern part of the third floor, one to a cell, and one of you (not Yin Kuan and, of course, not me) will be appointed as the group convener; the four of you will take turns at keeping records; the government will organise a visit [for you], and when you come back from the visit you will have to study and write a summary; there will be other study sessions later”. He pointed to a short man sitting next to him and told us, “If you have any requests about your living arrangements, you can ask our comrade Lu”. After Section Chief Li’s lecture, we went up to our cells on the eastern wing of the third floor. Two [Trotskyists] were already settled there, but Yin Kuan and I were newcomers. Our rooms were connected, so we could talk with each other while standing at the cell door. By now, our clothes had been placed in our cells. The head of the prisoner work-team reported to Supervisor Lu that there were a lot of bedbugs in Yin Kuan’s clothes and that they had caught some of them but not yet finished doing so; there were also bedbugs in my clothes, but fewer. Supervisor Lu took this very seriously, as Prison Number 1 had won the Red Flag for Hygiene, displayed high on the wall of the director’s office. Pretty soon, the bedbugs had been vanquished. Our four cells were at the front, near the balcony of Supervisor Lu. The prisoners in our case, both convicted and unconvicted, were all in charge of the Public Security Bureau, which also dealt with questions concerning living conditions. One of the guards had told one of the prisoners: “We can’t deal with your affairs here, we have to report them to the Public Security Bureau”. This meant that the Trotskyist prisoners had a special status in Tilanqiao prison: we could stay together with others imprisoned on the same charge, unlike other prisoners, who were separated; and we went out on frequent visits, whereas other prisoners rarely or never did. At the time, there were relatively few prisoners in Tilanqiao 1. There were two or three empty cells on the third floor, and others behind our four cells. The convicted Trotskyists were kept in a few cells in the western part of the same building. There were up to twenty of them, three to a cell. Supervisor Lu strictly prevented our two groups from

12

Zheng Chaolin, Yin Kuan, Huang Jiantong, and Yu Shuoyi were the four Trotskyist veterans who had been never sentenced by the ccp but were nevertheless held in prison.

980

zheng, trans. benton

mixing. When we went down to the yard for out daily exercise, the west-wing inmates were always at the front of the line and the east-wing inmates at the rear. When we went on visits, we mixed with each other and could talk, but we were under the surveillance of the staff, so we could say little more than hello and blabla. I personally never said a word, and even if I and the others had wanted to talk to people from the western end, they didn’t dare talk to me.13 I went away for about a week; I can’t remember what I did. I had no interest in visiting. Once, after visiting a factory, I sat down at a long table and listened to the factory manager’s report on the history and current situation of the factory. At the end, he asked for questions, but I never once asked one. What interested me was not so much the plant, the machinery, and the product but how much say the workers had in the management and planning of production and what was the ratio of surplus value to variable capital. These kinds of question were not allowed. Before the visit, our group met to “study”. First there was a rambling conversation. I suggested that I could not be the note-taker. Yin Kuan asked, “What did you say?” It turned out that during the lecture by Section Chief Li in the supervisor’s office downstairs, Li had said that the four of us should take turns at taking notes. Yin Kuan had not heard him say this, and now he rushed to say that he couldn’t take notes either. He said that he couldn’t even write out his own opinion, let alone that of others. Afterwards, whenever the group leader reported to Supervisor Lu, he exempted us two old men from the task. Yin Kuan asked to be provided with the classical works of Marx and Lenin, saying that he wanted to be able to “quote from the scriptures” when speaking at the study sessions. The group leader said that he had some classical works of Marx and Lenin in his possession and could lend them to us. Apart from the study sessions, Yin Kuan and I stood at the locked cell door and shouted across to one another, but naturally it was less fun than when we had been sharing the same cell. Yin Kuan said that he had written some poems in the traditional style while in prison, and I told him that I had too. So we each copied a few ci and exchanged them. I told him in all honesty, “Your poetry demonstrates unevenness of tone, and the rhyme scheme and the tonal structure are quite shaky, they don’t work at all”. He retorted: “Why go on about rhyme schemes and the tonal structure? Why can’t they rhyme according to modern-day pronunciation?” I knew it would be futile arguing with him. On the other hand, he praised the lyrics of one of my own ci, Jiangdu Spring. He

13

Zheng was a particularly stubborn prisoner.

remembering yin kuan (1983)

981

said it was like something done by Li Houzhu.14 Here are some lines from it: “I am haggard, with white temples and a thinning waist. Fortunately, I have not yet lost my mind. I still know the difference between right and wrong”. He suggested just one change – replacing “fortunately” with the words “I hate the fact that”. The last two lines were: “This ci is dedicated to the autumn grave. Who will shed the tears?” He asked me what I meant by “autumn grave”, so I told him. On the whole, he appreciated the content of my ci, but I liked it even more when people paid attention to the metre and the rhyme scheme. Later, we went on a tour [organised for the Trotskyists by the prison]. Before we had finished our visit, however, he suddenly called out one day through the wall of his cell: “Chaolin, I’m dying!” “Nonsense”, I said. He said, “I’m in a panic”. The team leader told the guards on the third floor to get the doctor prisoner, Zhang Fuqing (previously the chief surgeon at Guangci Hospital), who took Yin Kuan to the prison hospital for treatment. I saw Zhang Fuqing take him there. Soon afterwards, another prisoner came to collect his clothes and took them away. A few days later, the hospital sent someone to disinfect his cell. I thought, Yin Kuan is dead! There was no Yin Kuan on the later stages of the visit, no Yin Kuan at the study session following the visit, and no Yin Kuan at the later sessions organised to study the ccp’s anti-revisionist documents. What a shame! I knew that Yin Kuan had been prepared to speak out on many things during those study sessions. He must have had a lot to say after so many years of contemplation. I myself decided to seize the opportunity to express ideas I had developed over the years. I would have liked Yin Kuan to hear what I had to say and me to hear what Yin Kuan had to say, but unfortunately neither was possible. I took an active part in studying the anti-revisionist documents, starting with the [ccp’s] General Line on World Revolution and concluding with the Ten Commentaries, which were published only in the course of our studies. After the studies were completed, summaries were written. For my part, I wrote a summary in the form of a pamphlet of 85,000 words, titled A Treatise on Cadreism [Zheng’s word for state capitalism]. I decided that Yin Kuan must be dead. The prison administration was so strict that there was no way of knowing whether a hospitalised prisoner was dead or alive. I wrote a poem titled “In Memory of Yin Kuan”. This, together with some 400 other poems I had written in prison, was confiscated during the Cultural Revolution.15 After I was released from prison, I was able to recall 14 15

The poet Li Yu (937–978), the last emperor of the Southern Tang and a renowned poet and writer of ci. Verso published many in Benton and Feng (eds) 2019.

982

zheng, trans. benton

only about one tenth of them. Unfortunately, I have been unable to recall the words of this particular poem, written to the tune of “A Tribute to the Emperor’s Grace”. Why did I use that tune? Because it was the one used by [the Song Dynasty calligrapher and poet] Xin Qiji [1140–1207] in his lament for his friend Zhu Xi [1130–1200, the master of neo-Confucianism]. Zhu Xi died during the “proscription on false learning”, so Xin Qiji had to resort to obscure formulations in his eulogy. But it turned out, to my astonishment, that Yin Kuan was not actually dead when I wrote my poem mourning him. It was just a rumour! One day in October 1965, a year and four months after I had written my eulogy, the chief of the prison administration, Section Chief Li, suddenly turned up at the prison and summoned all the [Trotskyist] prisoners to the entrance to Prison Number 1, to announce to us that the government had decided to release Yin Kuan and that he would be handed over to his daughter the following day. Yin Kuan was still alive! Soon a prisoner pushed in a wheelchair on which sat Yin Kuan. Everyone went over to shake his hand. Section Chief Li asked Yin Kuan to speak. He had obviously been briefed on what to say, and spoke coherently. The gist of what he said was that we had been wrong. He advised us to rehabilitate ourselves and said that the government would release us if we did, wasn’t he a ready-made example? and so on. After he had spoken, Section Chief Li told the prisoner to push Yin Kuan back to the hospital. Section Chief Li then asked each of us to talk about our feelings. It was clear what he meant, but who dared say what was really on his mind? It was best to go along with what the government wanted. I was deliberately the last to speak. Before I spoke, Ji Yunlong, who thought himself the cleverest of the accused and was closest to the government, started by asking Section Chief Li whether Yin Kuan had been released or was on medical parole. I laughed inwardly. I thought to myself, “Why would you, a clever man, ask such a stupid question?” In return, Section Chief Li asked him, “What do you think?” Ji Yunlong then made a statement framed according to what the government required. Finally, it was my turn. I said, “A few years ago I told the person sent to deal with our arraignment that [the female Trotskyist] Zhang Fen had lost her mind and Yin Kuan was sick, he would die if he stayed locked up, both of them have children and warm homes, they should be allowed to go home. Then they can be cured. Zhang Fen’s sentence has long since expired, and I don’t know how she is now. But now you have released Yin Kuan and allowed him to go home, which is exactly what I have always wanted, though the request I made a few years ago is not necessarily the cause of what has happened today”.16 16

Zheng is trying to avoid appearing presumptuous.

remembering yin kuan (1983)

983

Section Chief Li held his temper, but said coldly, “Humph! Your request from a few years ago!” “Humph! You wanted Yin Kuan to be allowed to go home!” […] At the time, I was not yet part of the study group, so I was not criticised for what I said. Later, during the struggle against me in the Cultural Revolution, my remarks on that day were also not cited as evidence of a crime. Section Chief Li told us that Yin Kuan’s daughter had come to “receive” him. He said that when they told her that the government was about to release Yin Kuan and was going to let her take him home, she had become anxious and said that she had not brought enough money for the journey. He had then told her, “Don’t worry, we’ll send someone with you to help you take him back”. I concluded that Yin Kuan would either die back home or on the way home. We had no way of discovering whether Yin Kuan was dead or alive, so whenever an official came to ask me about Yin Kuan’s whereabouts, I always said, “Yin Kuan is dead, he died in 1965”. But this time it turned out that I was wrong again. Yin Kuan returned home, changed his lifestyle, and slowly recovered. He was able to take his grandson for walks outside his house and lived for two more years before his death in 1967, a period of “unprecedented success” [during the Cultural Revolution]. But he wasn’t “struggled against” [by Mao’s Red Guards], it was too late for that. It was not until 1982 that I made contact with Yin Kuan’s family. One other fact I learned from Yin Kuan’s daughter was that Section Chief Li had asked her, “Will your father have any problems when he returns home?” She replied, “Our family can afford to support him”. Section Chief Li said, “That’s good”. [Yin Kuan’s daughter] Yin Longzhu was a loyal and honest person. She was worried about not having enough money to take her father home, but she didn’t want to depend on the government to support him. Yin Kuan too was worried about his own life after his release from prison. He asked Section Chief Li, “What will I do when I go home?” Section Chief Li said, “I have already spoken to your daughter”. When Yin Kuan arrived home, he realised that the government had left his affairs entirely in the hands of his children. During those “unprecedented” years, although he was never beaten, his living conditions worsened daily, and he ended up wishing he was back in prison, though there was nothing he could do about it. It was beyond my imagining. In 1967 he died of malnutrition and hunger, rather than of old age and illness. Thus died a revolutionary. He was one of the top leaders of the three armed workers’ uprisings in Shanghai [in 1926–1927], he led and developed Communist Party work and the mass movement in Shandong province, he presided over Communist Party work in Anhui province after the defeat of the revolution, he wrote many propaganda and educational articles, and finally he led a sec-

984

zheng, trans. benton

tion of the Communist Party out of Stalinism and onto a Trotskyist path after the defeat of the revolution [in 1927], and remained a Trotskyist to the last. Whatever his shortcomings and mistakes, and however much he was forced to compromise in his later years, Yin Kuan is still a revolutionary who deserves to be remembered for his role in the Chinese Revolution.

section g Zheng Chaolin

∵

Remembering Zheng Lao [Zheng Chaolin] (2007) Li Yongjue, translated by Xue Feng

This memoir of Zheng Chaolin in his later years in Shanghai is from Chapter 15, At Zheng Lao’s1 Side, of Li Yongjue’s memoir Kanke (The Ordeal), published in Xiandai gemingshi wenxian congkan (Modern Revolutionary History Series), Hong Kong, 2007. The Chinese text was transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive. Li Yongjue was a veteran Trotskyist from Guangdong, born into an overseas Chinese family. He regularly met with Zheng Chaolin after 1983 and became one of his key assistants.

i At the beginning of the period of reform and opening up, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I heard the news on the radio of Liu Shaoqi’s rehabilitation.2 It mentioned the testimony of Zheng Chaolin, who came up with evidence to show that Liu was not a “traitor”, a “national traitor”, or a “scab” who had betrayed the working class. Above Zheng Chaolin’s name was a title – “Member of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (cppcc)”3 – which came as a surprise to me. I was still “employed” in the labour reform factory at the time, so I immediately wrote to the cppcc to ask if Zheng had been rehabilitated. Zheng wrote back to tell me that the 1952 classification of the Trotskyists as counterrevolutionaries had not yet been reversed. In 1983, after my return to Shanghai, I often visited Zheng Lao. This centenarian4 had been in prison for 35 years (8 years under the Kuomintang and 27 under the Communists5). He had been tortured to the point of being half-blind, 1 Zheng Lao (old Zheng), with lao as suffix, is an honorific used for venerated old people. 2 Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969) was a Chinese communist revolutionary, politician. He was the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China (prc), the de jure head of state, from 1959 to 1968. During the Cultural Revolution, as China’s foremost “capitalist-roader”, he was purged. He died in 1969. In 1980, he was posthumously rehabilitated by Deng Xiaopeng’s new government. 3 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (cppcc) is a political advisory body in the prc and a central component of the ccp’s United Front system. 4 In fact, Zheng, born in 1901, never reached one hundred. 5 According to Wang Fanxi, Zheng had been imprisoned under the Kuomintang for 7 years, thus 34 years in prison in all.

© Li Yongjue, translated by Xue Feng, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_079

988

li, trans. xue

half-deaf, half-lame, and unable to straighten his back – he was disabled, and his lower back was bent double, at 90 degrees. But the old man had a strong will, and was determined to persevere in his beliefs throughout his life and to insist on vindicating the Trotskyists. In his final years, he overcame all kinds of difficulties to keep on writing in order to restore the truth of what had happened, against all odds. His struggle continued as long as he lived. His perseverance was a source of great inspiration. Li Pei6 had his civil rights restored together with Zheng Lao. He had the utmost respect for him. He lived near Zheng Lao and liked to help him by reading out articles and letters and transcribing manuscripts for him, after knocking off work; on holidays, he went to bookstores to search out information and buy new books; he bought food and other daily essentials for the old man, bathed him, brushed his back, and put him in a wheelchair so he could go down to street or the park, as well as doing other things. He was praised as Zheng Lao’s “personal secretary”. Li Pei transcribed all of Zheng Lao’s writings for more than ten years after Zheng Lao’s release from prison. He worked wholeheartedly and enthusiastically for the old man, often until midnight, as if he were continuing the revolution. This spirit of selfless dedication in the course of more than ten years, completely voluntary and without any compensation, was an enormous boon. Unfortunately, Li Pei passed away in 1993. When the sad news came, the old man was grief-stricken. He said, “Now that Li Pei has died, I too am finished”. He thought that he would be unable to read, write, walk, or link up with society without Li Pei, and his life would be meaningless. Of course, after Li Pei’s death, others worked for the old man. In the last few years of his life, Zhou Lüqiang7 and I took turns to take over Li Pei’s work, seek out relevant information, read articles, sort out manuscripts, do shopping, and so on. Lao Zhou did an even better job and was even more attentive. The old man was happy, and they would buy some dishes and have a drink together.

6 Li Pei (?–1993) was a Guangxi Trotskyist. He was also arrested during the 1952 round-up. After being released, he became one of the personal secretaries and close friends to Zheng Chaolin in Shanghai during his later years. 7 Zhou Lüqiang (1927–) is a Wenzhou Trotskyist. After Li Pei died in 1993, he replaced him as a key personal secretary to Zheng during his later years.

remembering zheng lao [zheng chaolin] (2007)

989

ii When his citizenship was restored, Zheng Lao and his beloved wife Liu Jingzhen8 were allocated a two-room flat. A couple of months after Zheng Lao’s release, Liu sadly died. His grandniece, Xiaofang, from Fujian, came to take care of him. In order for her to get a Shanghai hukou (residence permit), Zheng Lao wrote to [Zhou Enlai’s widow] Deng Yingchao to ask her to intervene. In the flat, Zheng Lao occupied one room and Xiaofang the other. Zheng Lao’s room was less than 14 square metres in extent. He had four bookcases full of books. There were even books on the top, piled up almost to the ceiling. His personal correspondence and other materials were packed in several cardboard boxes under the bed. This was Zheng Lao’s bedroom, study room, writing room, meeting room, dining room, and sitting room. It was so tiny that you couldn’t even walk round it. The old man had bad cataracts and his eyesight was almost zero, so he had to read in the sunlight with his eyes close to the pages and using a powerful magnifying glass to see even faintly. At first, I read the articles that he wanted to hear, and I also recorded them so that he could listen later. But it didn’t really work, for he was deaf and could not hear clearly. I therefore had to make enlarged copies of things he was keen to read, bit by bit, using his magnifying glass. Zheng Lao received many letters every day, mostly from old comrades such as Wang Fanxi (in England) and Lou Zichun (in Hong Kong). He also received many letters from experts and scholars, some of them famous, asking questions about the early history of the ccp, to which the old man always replied conscientiously. Wang Fanxi’s hand always shook while writing, and he called the characters he wrote “tadpole script”, while Zheng called them “oracle bone script”. Zheng Lao’s joints were stiff, including his hands. His eyes were practically blind and the words he wrote were crooked arranged across the page, sometimes overlapping one another when he lost his place. Sometimes the ink ran out unbeknown to him, leaving several lines blank, so the articles and letters he wrote were jokingly called “heavenly letters”, which few could decipher. Some of his letters were returned by the recipients, who said that they were unintelligible, whereupon they were-transcribed and sent out a second time. Old Zhou9 could read and understand Zheng Lao’s “heavenly letters” better than me, for he had been a teacher for many years, so he dealt with most of the writings. As for the articles for which I took responsibility, I would first take 8 Liu Jingzhen (1902–1979) was a Chinese communist and Trotskyist revolutionary, Zheng Chaolin’s wife. 9 “Old Zhou” refers to Zhou Lüqiang.

990

li, trans. xue

them home and read them carefully, underlining words and sentences I didn’t understand in red and then asking for clarification. After the first transcription, I had to read them back to the old man, and after he had checked and corrected them, I made the final transcription. I recall in one article titled “My Time as a Worker-Student in France” there was a paragraph about “a child from Sichuan” about working with [the then teenage Sichuanese] Deng Xiaoping, in which various words overlapped each other, so I had to clarify them before making my transcription.10 In the end, the old man had to proofread it a second time, so that not even a single punctuation mark was missing. Such was the old man’s rigorous and serious approach to writing, from which we all learned.

iii Zheng Lao’s life was hard, and it was a real miracle that he managed to live to nearly one hundred! A journalist asked him what he did to stay healthy. His answer was surprising – it turned out that he did not believe in any of the traditional methods. First, he had been in prison for decades, so he never had the opportunity to eat heathy supplements; second, he was disabled, so he was unable to do any exercises, such as tai chi or qigong. He just sat there all day long, concentrating on thinking, reading, and writing. This is perhaps the secret of his longevity. Every morning on waking, he would eat two slices of bread, put on a suit and tie, and cover his big, shiny head with a Parisian-style beret.11 He liked to drink coffee, boiling up the coffee beans and then sitting down to enjoy it, to mark the start of his day’s work: writing articles, replying to letters, receiving visitors. The midday meal was prepared by Xiao Fang. The old man would then microwave it, and use boiling water to make some soup. Although Zheng Lao had spent a total of 35 years in prison and had become physically disabled as a result of torture, he was anything but a cold and heartless person. Instead, he was a warm and welcoming old man. When friends came to visit, they were always warmly received. Zheng Lao was very happy when Xiuyun and A-Zhao visited him, and was especially friendly and courteous to A-Zhao because A-Zhao had shared a cell with Liu Jingzhen and taken care of her. Liang Ting, who was also in the same cell, blamed Liu for not confessing [to the Communist interrogators] and criticised her. Zheng Lao had a clear idea of whom to love and whom to hate. He received A-Zhao warmly, but

10 11

See Zheng 2004, vol. 2, pp. 395–96. According to Benton’s recollections, Wang Fanxi once sent him the beret from Leeds.

remembering zheng lao [zheng chaolin] (2007)

991

refused to meet Liang Ting. When the old man met A-Zhao, he was able to tell her clearly where he had met her and Liu Yi more than fifty years before. It was a deep and admirable friendship!12

iv In 1989, Mao Mao, Deng Xiaoping’s daughter, made a special trip to Shanghai to visit Zheng Lao, who had worked with Deng in France, while researching her book My Father Deng Xiaoping. Zheng was four years older than Deng, so he was Deng’s senior in France. The two men had also lived and worked together in the Soviet Union [after transferring to Moscow from Paris], so they knew each other well. Mao Mao mentioned Zheng Chaolin many times in her book, so that after its publication of he became “famous” and there was an influx of visitors from home and abroad. Important magazines like Shanghai tan and Yanhuang chunqiu carried articles about Zheng Lao. After Deng’s death in 1997, the tv documentary “Deng Xiaoping”, watched by households across the whole country, featured Zheng Lao at three points: as a “former Chinese student in France”; as a “former member of the Central Committee of the ccp”; and as a “former member of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the cppcc”. In the twinkling of an eye, Zheng Lao became a prominent representative of democracy. From the ccp’s point of view, the intention was to make the propaganda point that a Trotskyist leader had become a member of the cppcc and was still was still openly active. As more and more reporters and scholars turned up seeking interviews, and more television stations sent film crews, it was obvious that Zheng’s room was too small and inappropriate for someone in his position. It became embarrassing, and often Zheng’s desk had to be moved to his grandniece’s room for filming. Later, even the cppcc took the point, and stepped in to apply for a larger flat for Zheng. I heard that after negotiations, the then Shanghai Party Secretary personally approved the application. In 1998, Zheng moved from Shiquan Road to a three-room flat on the tenth floor of a high-rise building on Chifeng Road. It was difficult for such an old man to adapt to such a change in

12

Xiu Yun, A-Zhao, Liang Ting and Liu Yi were all Trotskyists or their sympathisers. Xiu Yun was Zou Xiuyun, ex-wife of Ding Yi, a Trotskyist teacher and guerrilla fighter. After Ding died in Hong Kong, she fell in love with Li Yongjue. Liu Yi was a Shandong Trotskyist worker and the husband of A-Zhao. In 1949, along with other Trotskyists, Liu fled to Hong Kong and later died there. A-Zhao’s real name was Tang Yonglan (1924–2003), a Guangdong Trotskyist.

992

li, trans. xue

his environment. The new flat was further away, so the number of Zheng Lao’s visitors decreased. At the time, he was working on an important “final essay”, to summarise the historical experience and lessons of the Marxist movement in the twentieth century. He did so under the exceptionally difficult circumstances of old age and a lack of information. Due to his strong will, at the age of 98, the old man finished this essay of nearly 80,000 words, titled Marxism in the Twentieth Century, which was included in Volume iii of History and Recollections: Selected Essays of Zheng Chaolin in His Later Years (published by Hong Kong Cosmos Books Ltd. [Tiandi tushu] in 1998). The Communist Party’s policy towards the Trotskyists remained unchanged, and those arrested in 1952 have not been rehabilitated. Zheng Lao often told people, “Our goal now is to fight for complete rehabilitation. We must not wait passively. We actively fight for it at every opportunity”. This is exactly what he did. For his last ten years and more, he campaigned for the rehabilitation of the Trotskyists. He wrote frequently to the Central Committee of the ccp to argue that the 1952 denunciation of the Trotskyists as counterrevolutionaries was false, in the same way as the Moscow trials of the 1930s. Although many years passed by, his complaints sank into the sea, and there was never any news. He did not share the negative attitude of some people, and pointed out that even the Pope in Rome had rehabilitated Galileo, 360 years after Galileo insisted that the earth went round the sun rather than vice versa.13 He objected even more strongly to those who believed that rehabilitation would not happen even after 10,000 years. Before he died, he asked the Shanghai cppcc to forward a letter to the 15th Party Congress, in which he asked for the last time for the Trotskyists’ rehabilitation. In “Celebrating One Hundred’s Years of Life”, the old man said: “Even though I am half blind and half deaf, I will continue fighting for justice and rehabilitation until the vilification ends, even up to my hundredth birthday and beyond, for as long as I remain alive”.

13

“In 1633, the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church forced Galileo Galilei, one of the founders of modern science, to recant his theory that the Earth moves around the Sun. Under threat of torture, Galileo recanted. But as he left the courtroom, he is said to have muttered, ‘all the same, it moves’. 359 years later, the Church finally agreed. At a ceremony in Rome, before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul ii officially declared that Galileo was right” (New Scientist, 7 November 1992).

An Account of Some Events Surrounding Zheng Chaolin’s Death and Funeral Zheng Hiu-fong, translated by Gregor Benton

This article was published recently by Zheng Chaolin’s grand-niece Zheng Hiufong, who cared for him between his release from prison in 1979 and his death in 1998. The magazine that published Ms Zheng’s article, Shiji (“Century”), is a bimonthly published by the Central Research Institute of Literature and History and the Shanghai Municipal Research Institute of Literature and History. The predecessor of Century was Shanghai Literature and History .

After the Spring Festival of 1998, Grandpa’s health was obviously weakening. Knowing that his time was up, he kept saying that his life was coming to an end, that the life given to him by his parents was running out, that this melon was ripe, and that if it wasn’t picked, it was about to fall. At the time of Grandpa’s 98th birthday in April 1998, we celebrated several birthdays for him separately. At that time, he was working intensively on the task at hand, revising and correcting his long essay “Marxism in the 20th Century”, which he had begun to write in the second half of 1997. He himself described it as his “final essay”, which he would never again have the energy to return to; and at the same time, he was cooperating with Mr Fan Yu, and with Fan Yu’s help, he was able to complete the publication. With the help of Mr Luo Fu, Hong Kong Tiandi Book Co. officially published “Historical Events and Memories: Selected Writings of Zheng Chaulin in his Late Years”, and we needed to supplement and provide the materials used by Mr Fan. In the spring of 1998, we were in a race against time.

Making Arrangements and Writing One’s Own Obituary After Grandpa regained his citizenship in June 1979, he was assigned to the Committee of Literature and Historical Materials of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (cppcc) with a salary of 120 yuan per month. The 5th afternoon of each month was my regular day to go to the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference to collect his salary. On the 5th afternoon of

© Zheng Hiu-fong, translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_0

994

zheng, trans. benton

June or July 1998, I went to the cppcc to pick up the salary as usual. In the lift, I met a comrade from the Personnel Department who was in regular contact with us, and he asked me about Grandfather’s health and whether there was anything he needed help with. When I went home and I relayed the message to Grandpa, he said, “Please ask them to come to our home”. Two or three days later, this comrade and a deputy secretary-general of the cppcc turned up. During the interview that day, Grandpa said three things. First he thanked them. He said, “From 1979 until now, you have taken care of me, and my body is almost used up; now I have to say goodbye to you”. Second, Grandpa took out a copy of the letter he had written to the 15th Congress of the ccp Central Committee, which requested that “the case against the Trotskyists of 22 December 1952 be declared wrong and [the Trotskyists be] vindicated”. Grandpa said, “I can no longer wait for an answer, so please forward this copy of the letter for me”. Third, Grandpa said, “When I die, don’t hold a memorial service; keep things simple”. One evening in June, grandfather suddenly said that he felt he had to talk to me one last time before he died, and I hurriedly recorded what he had to say. He even wrote his own obituary, as if in my name, as below:

Obituary Mr Zheng Chaolin, a member of the Fifth and Sixth Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference of Shanghai (1979–1988), sadly passed away on 10 October 1998, after failing to recover from his illness. He was born on 15 April 1901 and was 98 years old. His will is simple and there will be no memorial service. A farewell ceremony will be held on 10 October 1998 at the funeral parlour on Xibaoxing Road. Here is my obituary for friends and relatives! (Signed) His granddaughter Zheng Xiaofang [Hiu-fong] 10 October 1998

an account of some events surrounding zheng chaolin’s death

995

Grandpa Dies On 1 August 1998, Grandfather passed away in Shanghai’s Renji Hospital at 4:29 am. The hospital was closed on the weekend of 1 and 2 August, and I went to the hospital early on Monday morning, 3 August, to check on Grandfather after I had applied for a death certificate. The doorkeeper asked me if I knew which compartment, and I said yes. I pulled out the big drawer where Grandfather’s body was stored and spoke to him, I hadn’t seen him for two days. Then I went to the police station to apply for the cancellation of his household registration, then to the Longhua Funeral Parlour to apply for the staging of a farewell ceremony, and finally to a cloth shop to buy a big red silk cloth to cover him during the farewell ceremony. I went home and told my parents I had seen Grandpa, and my 6-year-old daughter cried out: “Mum saw Grandpa, but I didn’t see him!” On the afternoon of the 3rd, a hearse from the funeral parlour came to pick up Grandfather from Renji Hospital, and Wu Mengming, nephew of Chen Duxiu [founder of the ccp in 1921 and later leader of the Chinese Trotskyists], and I escorted him to Longhua Funeral Parlour. The farewell ceremony was scheduled to be held in the lobby of the Longhua Funeral Hall. Grandpa was the last to die of the delegates at the [ccp’s famous] August 7 Conference [of 1927], and the time for the farewell was especially scheduled for the morning of 7 August. We informed all our friends and relatives about the time. At about 6 o’clock on the afternoon of the 3rd, we suddenly received a call from the cppcc asking my father and me to go to the cppcc immediately but for the other relatives not to go, as there were important matters to discuss. We immediately took a taxi to the cppcc, and saw several copies of the obituary already printed for the farewell ceremony on 7 August. There were still four or five comrades in the office of the Personnel Department on duty, and one of them, a male comrade in his forties whom we had not seen before, was mainly the one who spoke to us. He said that the leaders had to travel on 7 August, so the farewell could be rescheduled for 5 August. I was surprised to hear that it would be the day after tomorrow. People coming from elsewhere were scheduled to arrive in Shanghai on the 6th, and it was too late for us to make a lot of preparations. I gave various reasons for not changing the time, but in the event there was no room for discussion. In particular, Uncle Liu Guisheng at Tsinghua University has not yet decided on a specific time to come to Shanghai because his students had to graduate. At the end of the discussion, I said that if Uncle Liu Guisheng could come to Shanghai before the 5th, I would agree to bring forward the farewell ceremony. So the staff took me higher into the building to make a long-distance phone call to Beijing. After I had explained the matter to

996

zheng, trans. benton

uncle, he said that he could come to Shanghai on the 5th. In this way, we went back to the office of the Personnel Department and set the time for the farewell on the morning of 5 August. On the morning of the 4th, a female director of the Personnel Office of the cppcc accompanied me to Longhua Funeral Parlour to change the time of the farewell. Our only “choice” was to hold the ceremony at 11 am. The female director asked me: “What will be written on the funeral couplets at the farewell ceremony? Please show it to us”. I said I was still considering it. She said, “Funeral parlours sell [ready-made couplets] too”. I said, “You can’t simply buy one in this case, just leave the couplet paper empty”. She said, “That wouldn’t look good empty”. I said, “That’s okay”. So at Grandfather’s farewell service, the couplets on the left and right sides of the hall were left empty. When I came back from the funeral parlour, I called people one by one to notify them that the time for the farewell had been changed. On the 4th, the family was busy was busy preparing for the farewell ceremony the next day, writing couplets [of their own], ordering wreaths, making phone calls, arranging for friends and relatives coming from elsewhere to stay in a hotel, and arranging meals for everyone in a nearby restaurant. On the evening of the 4th, the cppcc called me again, asking me to send all the condolence messages, elegiac couplets and eulogies that had been received at home to the cppcc early on the morning of the 5th, so that the cppcc could arrange them “in a uniform manner”. The next morning, I sent them all to the cppcc as requested. At 10 o’clock on the morning of the 5th, we arrived at the lobby of Longhua Funeral Parlour, where people from the cppcc had already arrived. In the family lounge, a deputy secretary-general told me that they had read the condolence messages, elegiac couplets and eulogies, etc., and found most of them fine, while some were not quite appropriate. After consideration, they did not bring them all. I immediately said, “Then they must all be returned to me”. He said, “Definitely all of it back to you”. Afterwards, a friend who was an editor at a magazine told me that he had brought a notebook to copy the memorial texts, but it turned out there was nothing to copy. Mr Zhou Yongxiang, the author of “Qu Qiubai’s Chronicle” at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, hung a couplet he had written earlier on the basket of flowers he had sent: “Bright and upright, highly respected, and renowned for his revolutionary achievements. Right and wrong, history has ruled that although he died, his name will live on in the ages”. After the farewell party, we moved Grandpa to the back of the hall. By this time the glass cover had

an account of some events surrounding zheng chaolin’s death

997

been removed, and I was standing close to Grandfather again. I cried and said to him, “You have to give me your dreams in future”. After the farewell ceremony, Uncle Liu Guisheng and I got into a hearse to escort my grandfather to the Minhang Crematorium. The officials asked us, “Do you want to see the furnace?” I answered yes. We were also asked if we wanted to see the release of the body. I answered yes. We were asked if we wanted to pick up the ashes ourselves. I answered yes. After completing the formalities for each item, Uncle and I stood in front of the furnace and watched as Grandfather was pushed into the door of the furnace. The fire burned up the red silk cloth, and the door of the furnace closed with a clang. That scene still floats clearly before my eyes. The next day, I went to the cppcc and retrieved all the condolence messages, couplets, and eulogies. Two Shanghai tv stations, as well as Jiefang Daily and Wen Wei Po, reported the news of death.

Returning to the Starting Point As requested by Grandfather, he did not wear new clothes during the farewell, but instead wore his usual best clothes; he was not invited to eat tofu rice; and his ashes were placed in a wine jar from which he had drunk. After the ceremony, I called Mr Wang Yuanhua to tell him how uncomfortable it had been to organise the farewell ceremony for Grandfather. Mr Wang comforted me on the other end of the phone. Grandpa’s ashes were stored in Longhua Funeral Parlour for nearly a year, and I went to see him on the first day of every month. In July 1999, according to Grandpa’s wish, we sent him back to his hometown in Fujian Province without any great to-do, and from then on Grandpa and his grandparents, parents, wife and children were together forever. Grandpa left his hometown in Fujian for France in 1919, and returned home in 1999, the first time in 80 years that this traveller had returned to the starting point of his life. Written on 15 April 2023, Grandfather’s 123rd birthday

part 4 Correspondence and Interviews

∵

section a Correspondence between Veteran Chinese Trotskyists, Comrades, and Friends

∵

Correspondence between Eiichi Yamanishi and Wang Fanxi, 1960–1967 In these letters between Wang and Yamanishi (1899–1984), a prominent Japanese Trotskyist leader and translator, Wang asks Yamanishi and the Japanese Trotskyists to help promote a campaign of international solidarity with the Chinese Trotskyist comrades in Mao’s prison. Yamanishi suggests that Wang resettle in Japan with the assistance of Japanese Trotskyists. However, Yamanishi’s effort led nowhere. Wang emigrated to the UK in 1975. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 11, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

(a)

From Yamanishi to Wang, 30 November 1960, Tokyo

Dear Comrade Wong [Wang], Thank you very much for your letters. As you advised us in your letter, our organisation of about 200 members united on 27 October with another faction of about 30. This group belonged to the Pabloite faction in Japan and made up the big majority in the faction. The Pabloite faction is now left with about 10 members of its own, there is other group about 30 or 40, which broke away from xxx summer last year.1 They have a Schachtmanite tendency with pedantic scholasticism, with little practical activity. But we are trying to win them back.2 The recent unification has proved quite encouraging for our members. It is a very good experience for them all. But all these Trotskyists of Japan, as well as the anti-Stalinist radical students of Zengakuren, have an ultra-left sectarian tendency.3 Almost all of them

1 The Pabloite faction was led by Michel Pablo (1911–1996), a leader of the Fourth International (1948–1960). He proposed that Trotskyists in the West should enter social-democratic and Stalinist parties. Pablo’s strategy led to a split in the Fourth International in 1953. 2 Max Shachtman (1904–1972) was a one-time Trotskyist leader in the US. He abandoned Trotsky’s theory of “deformed/degenerated workers’ states” and came to regard the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union as a new ruling class based on “bureaucratic collectivism”. His “bureaucraticcollectivist” theory attracted Wang Fanxi for a while in the early 1950s. 3 Zengakuren, i.e., the All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations, a key component of the anti-capitalist student protests in Japan in the 1960s.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_081

1004

correspondence between eiichi yamanishi and wang fanxi

practically boycotted the recent general election; some openly insisting the boycott. Even our organisation did not participate in the campaign. Utterly childish. I have been explaining to them the necessity to study the struggles by Lenin and Trotsky for winning the Social-Democratic workers, their speeches and documents at the earlier congresses of ci [Communist International] or at the plenums of ecci [The Executive Committee of the Communist International], T’s4 articles on the Chinese question, L’s5 Infantile Disease, and so on. Such ultra-left mood is quite natural for young men. It is quite understandable. But unless they overcome completely this infantile tendency, our movement can never grow into a real workers’ movement. They must learn to trust the mass workers who are quite accustomed to work organisationally, with their huge, national organisations. The general election was a very good chance for them to go into the mass workers, to penetrate deep into them, but thy lost the best chance. But I am quite sure, with patient explanation, they will learn quickly. The result of the election showed that mass workers quite correctly oriented towards the left. cp [Communist Party] got 3 instead of one in the last diet. The Democratic Socialists lost severely. sp [Socialist Party] rose from about 120 to more than 140. Within sp, members from trade unions and other left wingers increased. Since there was such a strong current, if, beginning with our comrades, all the factions of Zengakuren, together with Socialist Youth League of sp and Democratic Youth League of cp (these last two are each quite critical of their elder parties, just like Zengakuren) – if these youth organisations all formed a united front or some kind agreement to throw their whole weight and strength into the election campaign and energetically collaborated with the workers, then the mood of the campaign might have been very different, making the slogans of the candidates into their real commitments. Our organisation should have made a proposal of united front to all youth organisations including that of cp. Now, we are seriously discussing the entering tactics into sp or syl. I think in a near future, we can realise this tactic nationally. We can publish our papers in these organisations, and almost openly propagate our policy and T’s ideas. T’s ideas is [are] now rapidly becoming a feverish current. His works are going to be published in a series by a publisher. We are feeling, sensing the rapid approach of a big landslide in the intellectual life of Japan towards T’s ideas, that means, we must grow, steadily and quickly.

4 I.e., Trotsky. 5 I.e., Lenin.

correspondence between eiichi yamanishi and wang fanxi

1005

You perhaps know the movement of the Korean students. They are now demanding the unification of both Koreas on the basis not of Stalinists nor of South Korean leaders, but of the policy of the students themselves. The South Korean leaders are being compelled to take up their demands, or at least to make such gestures. The movement of students and young people are growing everywhere in the world each making a direct and immediate repercussion on each other. This means that a real International must be established without losing any more time. We are determined to cooperate very closely with sll [Socialist Labour League, UK], swp [Socialist Workers Party, US] and our comrades of Canada, etc. But we also think it is necessary to participate in the coming congress of is [International Secretariat], to present the position of the ic [International Committee]. As you know, the T Central and South America are in a turmoil, especially the Central America. The T’s parties in those countries must be active. We may be able to find comrades who are willing to collaborate with us ic members to regenerate the fi. We are firmly convinced that China and Japan must be united each other on the lt [Leon Trotsky]’s ideas, first of all economically. China’s plans and Japanese industries, these must be closely linked together. Many guests of intellectuals and unionists go to China only to pay homage to the leaders, but shutting their eyes to the misery of the masses there. The long article of Comrade Peng [Shuzhi] on the People’s Communes is excellent. We also published some excellent articles by your comrades on the real situation of your country. We wish to get such news very much. I regularly hand our papers to our mutual friends for you. The central organ is the World Revolution which is printed, the Labourer and others are mimeographed. I thank you very much for T’s book on the Chinese questions. It is very valuable. I am now re-publishing my translation of the book from American edition. I am very glad to be able to supplement it with priceless articles from your book. Thank you very much. I wrote this letter in a hurry to be in time for our friend’s departure. I hope to write you again soon. And I shall be very happy to hear from you soon, in English as much as possible. Yours fraternally, Eiichi Yamanishi

1006 (b)

correspondence between eiichi yamanishi and wang fanxi

From Wang to Yamanishi, 15 January 1961, Hong Kong

To Y.N. Dear Friend: Your letter dated 30 Nov[ember] 1960, has reached me. Thank you very much for the trouble you have taken in writing me such a long and interesting letter. We are so glad to learn that our Japanese comrades have achieved a preliminary unification. Under the present situation of Japan, we are firmly convinced that your organisation, how insignificant is now might be, will presently develop by leaps and bounds. The boycott policy towards the recent Japanese election adopted by your comrades, of course, was wrong. They perhaps, I guess, took the present Japanese situation as “direct-revolutionary” as they might have thus reasoned, if it were not, President Eisenhower’s state visit to Japan would not have been successfully prevented. Such an orientation, is undoubtedly incorrect, even if according to my superficial observation from afar. You and your comrades, however, will certainly succeed to persuade and educate these young comrades through their own mistakes. You are quite right in pointing out that China and Japan must be united. This unification, I think, first of all, must be realised in the close cooperation between Japanese and Chinese revolutionary vanguards. Until now we have known each other very little. There were no relations between T movements of the two principal nations in the Far East. At the time when the Chinese section was more or less a mass organisation, T ideas in Japan, it seemed, only won a handful of intellectuals; while you begin to have some influence among the masses, and even upon the real politics, we Chinese brothers, were dispersed and suppressed by the Mao regime. It’s a pity that the T movement in the Far East has thus far so “unevenly” developed. We will do our best to make it even. Your perhaps have been informed, that the Communist League of China (the name of Chinese T[rotskyists] in 1934–1949) was splitted [split] on the eve of the Pacific War into two groups: majority and minority. The main issue on which the League split concerned the nature of China’s anti-Japanese war once it interlocked with the imperialist war between USA and Japan. Cde P [Peng Shuzhi] was the Majority leader while I was one of the leading members of the minority. In 1945, when the war was over, the issue which had caused the split lost its practical importance. Our two groups should have re-united in order to make use of the developing post-war situation. It was a misfortune, in retro-

correspondence between eiichi yamanishi and wang fanxi

1007

spect, that we – both groups, had not shown enough readiness to achieve that purpose. Consequently, in spite of the fact that we did play during the post-war period not a small role among the working people and students (especially in Shanghai) and had considerably enlarged our influence all over the country, yet we were still lag far behind the progress of revolutionary tide. Our tiny forces (majority and minority) had not grown up rapidly enough to be willing to master the situation. Communist armed forces occupied Shanghai in May 1949. Our group took a decision on a conference that the main forces should remain there in order to carry on underground work. (While the group led by Cde P[eng Shuzhi] took a different decision of evacuation to Hong Kong.) Since then our activities continued under the Communist rule until 21 Dec[ember] 1952. In a single night (21–22 Dec), the secret agents of the cpc made a nation-wide raid on our organisation and arrested nearly nin(e)ty-nine per cent of Chinese T. The total number of arrested was about seventy, among which more than four-fifth belonged to the minority. They were thrown into prisons, and then sent to labour camps in Shanghai and Wuhan. Most of them were secretly tried and had been nominally sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5 to 12 years. In fact, however, only a very few comrades had been actually released after having served their terms. Those leading members of our organisation such as Cdes Chen Chao-lin [Zheng Chaolin], Ho chi-sen [He Zishen], Ying Quuan [Yin Kuan] and others, have never been sentenced, but just kept in prison to be extorted from them a recantation. However, Mao and Chou are so far disappointed in converting their old “friends”.6 and I am convinced they will never be satisfied in that respect. Now there are only a few Ts in hk, and they are not organised in the strict sense of the word at that. This is the result, on the one hand, of the suppressive measures of the Hong Kong government (since 1949, it has had thrice deported our comrades), and on the other hand, of the hardship of living and the disorientation and disillusion of some weak-willed members. Nevertheless, pamphlets were kept publishing incessantly, although at long intervals, during the past years. I firmly believe that the fate of Chinese T as well as that of the socialist construction in China, to a great extent, are depending upon the development and success of Japanese socialist revolution under the leadership of your organisation.

6 Zheng, He, and Yin were all veteran Communists who had worked in early period with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, etc. and later became Trotskyists.

1008

correspondence between eiichi yamanishi and wang fanxi

Now allow me to speak a few words about myself. I studied during the past eleven year the whys and hows of the victory of cpc and the failure of Chinese Ts. I wrote my views and lessons down in a personal memoir(s) and pamphlets. Since last summer, I have been working on a book criticising “Mao Tze-tung thought”.7 All of these books are in Chinese and have not been translated into English. In the nearest future, however, it is hoped that at least some shorter articles will be rendered into foreign language and there-by to exchange opinions with overseas comrades, especially with you. You have been probably told by our mutual friend that I was deported from Hongkong in the winter of 1949. As a result, I lived and am living in a condition of Isolation. It has been impossible for me to keep a regular correspondence with foreign friends. I read only a very little literature from abroad during the past decade. Consequently, I am quite ignorant of the discussions and regroupments happened within the fi. For example, I didn’t clearly know what were and are the differences between Pabloites and Cannonites.8 Only recently I got some old literatures about that question. I’ll study them carefully and take my own position. There are still a lot of things I wish to speak with you; but the letter is too long already. Let it be concluded for the time being. On receipt of this letter, you need not reply, – your time is too precious, I know; but do let me know whether my letter reach[es] you or not through our friend L [Lou Guohua]. Next time I will supply you some articles about the situation of China. I am, Fraternally yours, [Wang Fanxi] ps. In this connection, by the way, I wish to call your attention to the efforts which we had made since then with the aim to lighten their hardship. We have sent several appeals to our foreign comrades and sympathisers for moral and material help. But so far as I know, none of our brother sections has ever done something in this respect. As I don’t believe that our comrades of the world would think the persecution of Chinese Trotskyists by Mao’s regime is

7 See Wang 2020. 8 James P. Cannon (1890–1974) was an American Trotskyist leader and a founder of the Socialist Workers Party in the USA. In 1952, the swp led by Cannon split from the Fourth International, and along with Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League (UK) and Pierre Lambert’s Internationalist Communist Party (pci in France), the swp helped organise a new Trotskyist body, the International Committee, in 1953.

correspondence between eiichi yamanishi and wang fanxi

1009

not worth protesting, so I do believe that the inactivity hither-to shown by our foreign comrades is only due to the lack of good contacts between them and us. Will you please take the initiative of organising an international campaign for helping those Ts in Mao’s prison? I’ll give you a full list of those imprisoned in the next letter.

(c)

From Wang to Yamanishi, 14 August 1966, Macao

Dear Comrade Yama-nishi, Through our mutual friend I am sending you and other friends some material regarding Chinese T’s arrested by the Mao regime and are still being kept in prison. The list of names, which was compiled by me with the assistance of a few friends, were sent in last May to our friends in the States and France with a proposal to launch an international commission to render some help to them. So far we have got response from America that they are willing to do something for it and perhaps they will take the initiative to organise such a commission in collaboration with our friends in other countries. They are trying, I am told, to seek some names of prominent personalities, including Bertrand Russell, for the proposed commission.9 It would never be able, however, to bring forth some positive result, we are sure, if among those personalities there was no any Japanese. As we know well, the voice from Japanese leftists means much more now to Peking leaders than that [those] from the European and American progressives. For that reason, we do hope that you and other Comrades will cooperate with our friends of other countries in launching the international commission and endeavour to get some Japanese notables on to it. In making the proposal, we only want to call your attention to one point that for obvious reasons none of the prominent whom we are going to seek for should be anti-Communist or “anti-Chinese”. Since I am living in a place very peculiar in the sense that it is nominally out of but actually within the power of the cpc [Chinese Communist Party], I would like to call your attention to one point that do not mention my name either as one of the initiators or as any other capacity. Fraternal greetings, V.S. Wang 9 Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a world-famous mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual.

1010 (d)

correspondence between eiichi yamanishi and wang fanxi

From Yamanishi to Wang, 28 January 1967, Tokyo

Dear friend, I must first apologise myself to you for not writing such a long time. I have been in constant touch with our mutual friend and trusted he is in contact with you. First let me emphasise that if you come, we will do our best to support you. Our friend is quite confident of your living. And I also think you can teach Chinese to young men here and in that way, you will also be able to earn a part of your living. So do not worry about your living here. But try to get here as quickly as possible, before it is too late. Unfortunately, I am too well known to be a T and cannot act openly for you. But let us know if you can get permission from your side. That will be better if you can. If not, please tell us what to do. I read your long letter with real interest. I also read article by xx. These reports help us very much for understanding the most important events in China. But we need much more up to date information about the so rapidly developing situation. Our mutual friend is a great help, but his Japanese is not sufficient to convey the news from your side clearly to us. If you come here, you will be a great help. Just now the world is in great need of correct and quick information of the Chinese developments from your side. If we can get them in prompt and clear from them, we can send them to US, then to the whole world. At present, the Fourth [International] is developing a campaign for Hugo Blanco.10 That is quite right. But we must also do the same for the Chinese Cs [Comrades] who are being victims of both Mao and Liu [Shaoqi] factions in China. We must raise the question in close connection with the demand to defend the Chinese political Revolution against both cliques in China, against Kremlin oligarchy who is frantically trying to utilise the present crises to their interest and most of all against foreign imperialisms. I am now going to see your friend, and allow me to send you this brief letter written in such a hurry. Let me repeat again that you should try to leave there and come here before it is too late. And let us know further about it. Do not worry about your living here. We will do our best to support you. Besides you will be able to get work here. Sincerely yours, E.Y.

10

Hugo Blanco (1934–), a Peruvian Trotskyist leader.

Two Letters to the Leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, Asking for the Rehabilitation of the Trotskyists (1980, 1982) Zheng Chaolin

These letters by Zheng formally demand the rehabilitation of the Chinese Trotskyists shortly after his release from prison. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 17, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

Preface: Wang Fanxi’s Letter to the Bureau of the usfi 15 June 1983 Dear Comrades, I am sending you through Cde. P.F. [i.e., Pierre Frank] a translation of two letters written by Comrade Zheng Chaolin of China addressed to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the Central Commission for Inspecting Discipline of the ccp respectively since his release from prison in June 1979. For obvious reasons, the letters cannot be published at present either publicly or internally. I translated and send them to you only for your information – to let you know how our comrades in China, who had terribly suffered yet have been all along loyal to the cause of the world socialist revolution, are doing and thinking in the present situation. Also, I send them to you to be added to the archives of the Fourth International as two valuable documents of Chinese Trotskyists. Cde. Zheng Chaolin (1901–) joined the communist movement in France in 1922; participated [in] the Chinese revolution of 1925–27 first as an editor of the Party weekly “The Guide” and then as a member of the Hubei Provincial Committee of the ccp. After the defeat of the revolution, he accepted the position of the Russian Left Opposition and became of a founder of the Trotskyist movement in China. A member of the cc [Central Committee] of the Chinese Trotskyist organisation since 1931 (first “The Left Opposition of the Chinese Communist Party (Bolshevik-Leninists)”, then “The Communist

© Zheng Chaolin, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_082

1012

zheng

League of China”). After 1941, when the Communist League of China split into Internationalist Workers Party [founded 1949] and Revolutionary Communist Party [founded in 1948], Zheng was elected the Secretary of the former organisation. Zheng was arrested by the Kuomintang in 1931, got a 15-year sentence, which he actually served 7 years, as he, together with all other political prisoners, was freed from prison at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war. When the ccp came to power in 1949, Zheng decided to remain in China and continued to lead the activities of the iwp till December 1952 when all Trotskyists (including Zheng) throughout the country were arrested by the ccp police. Under arrest and interrogation, Zheng never showed any wavering in defending the cause of the Fourth International. As a punishment on his recalcitrance, they imprisoned him for 27 years and only released him in June 1979 following a change of the political situation in China. Still under some sort of surveillance, Zheng has been given a job in a so-called “Literature and History Commission” in Shanghai and ordered to contribute to the writing of the history of the early days of the ccp. Cde Zheng has written a lot on the Party history, but none of them allowed to be published. They incurred the displeasure of the high-ups of the party, as most of them are correcting the mistakes or exposing the falsifications made by the official historians and at the same time defending the Chinese Trotskyists – Chen Duxiu in particular, against the absurd charges and slanders which the ccp, in parroting the cp of the Soviet Union, had ever brought up against them. Nevertheless, Zheng’s efforts have proved not entirely fruitless. Over the past three or four years, research into Chen Duxiu’s life and activities, into the Chinese Trotskyist movement and the relations between the Comintern and the ccp has become, so to speak, rather fashionable among the young Chinese historians. A number of good articles have so far appeared in some official magazines. In them, one can clearly see a serious attempt to restore the history of the ccp and the Chinese revolution to truth. This of course is mainly due to the limited liberalisation trend emerged in the post-Maoist era, which enabled people to dare the risk of questioning the official falsifications and lies. To a certain extent, however, I should say, this sort of truth-seeking in the field of the Party history has been boosted by Cde Zheng’s participation. Many young historians of various universities and some academic institutions have come to visit him, demand interview, correspond with him and read his articles, which are unpublished, yet put into circulation among the experts. Owing to his advanced age and poor health, and also due to the still ubiquitous control of the ccp, it is quite natural that Zheng could not do any-

two letters to the leadership of the chinese communist party

1013

thing trying to reconstruct the Chinese Trotskyist organisation. Nevertheless, he has all along cared very much conditions of those old comrades who survived together with him the ccp oppression. One of the aims of his letters to the Leadership of the ccp was to protest against the discrimination inflicted on the released Chinese Trotskyists. According to recent information, our comrades in certain places (Wenzhou) have received better treatment. It might be a result of Zheng’s protest. Anyway, Cde Zheng has been giving, by his own example and activity, moral support and encouragement to all other comrades: fortifying the old surviving ones and through them probably recruiting new and young ones to our cause. With Greetings, W.F.H [Wang Fanxi]

Two Letters to the Leadership of the Chinese Communist Party Zheng Chaolin First Letter (1980) To the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, 24 October 1980 I am writing to you to make the following demands: 1) Rehabilitate the Chinese Trotskyist organisation as a whole and myself as a member of it. All members of the Trotskyist organisation of China have now been nominally granted citizenship; but the organisation a whole is still regarded as “counterrevolutionary”, and all its members as “counterrevolutionaries” who had been released only on leniency or because of their “recantation”. To treat us like that is in flagrant contravention of the spirit of democracy and legality which is now supposed to be in promoting. The case of Chinese Trotskyists is a case of typical injustice. It must be reversed and put to right. On what charges were the Chinese Trotskyists prosecuted 27 years ago? First, on that they affiliated to the Fourth International – the world organisation of Trotskyism, which like its founder Leon Trotsky, was “counterrevolutionary”. Secondly, that the Chinese Trotskyists opposed the ccp and continued to do so after the liberation. Thirdly, that the Chinese Trotskyists had “spied” for the Japanese imperialist and received an amount of money in return for their service. At the same time that the Chinese

1014

2)

zheng

Trotskyists had also worked for the Kuomintang secret service. Indicted and imprisoned on these charges, the Chinese Trotskyists had never been given a public hearing, nor a chance to defend themselves. Now, under new circumstances, with the promotion of democracy and legality, and for the first time in 30 years since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China we are having a criminal law, the above-listed charges should be reviewed so as to see whether they were true and could be substantiated by evidence. As a matter of fact, all these charges, ranging from the assassination of Kirov1 and serving the Nazis, of which Trotsky and his followers had been accused to the collaboration with the Japanese imperialism and working for kmt secret police, of which we Chinese Trotskyists had been accused, were completely groundless. History has already passed its judgement and proved the innocence of Trotskyists of the world. End immediately the discrimination against all Chinese Trotskyists. While citizenship is now nominally restored to all Chinese Trotskyists and some of them are even actually allowed to exercise their rights without discrimination, it is not the case with most of them. The majority of released Trotskyists are still subject to discrimination, especially in employment. According to the policy proclaimed by the government, intellectuals with special training (who had been sent either to the countryside or to prison under the “Gang of Four”2) should be now allowed to return to their old jobs, but the Trotskyists falling within that category cannot benefit from it. For example, the Trotskyist-teachers can only be employed either as substitutes or on temporary basis. In certain provinces, local authorities usually oblige the Trotskyists to write at short intervals reports about the “current conditions of their thinking”, despite the fact that they have been restored their citizenship. Worse still, they are sometimes even ordered to report in person to the police. These are really violations of democracy and legality. And such practices should be stopped immediately. Here I would mention another fact, though it happened in the past, that a number of imprisoned Trotskyists got extra prison terms under false

1 Sergei Kirov (1886–1934) was a Bolshevik and Soviet politician. He was assassinated in late 1934 and his assassination has been widely regarded as the origin of the Great Purge of Bolsheviks launched by Stalin. 2 The “Gang of Four” was a group of four radical Maoist leading figures within the ccp leadership during the Cultural Revolution period, including Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen.

two letters to the leadership of the chinese communist party

3)

1015

charges when they had already served their time. To those victims, particular rehabilitation and compensation should be made. I confine myself in this letter to give you a sketchy picture of how the Chinese Trotskyists suffered and are still suffering. If necessary, I will give you concrete instances. Return to me all the manuscripts and books seized by the secret police when I was arrested. When I was arrested in 1952, several books in manuscripts, either written or translated by me, (amounting to one million words) were seized. I demand the return of all these manuscripts, which consist of 3 treatises on political theory, material for the history of the ccp, three novels translated from German, Italian, and Russian respectively, a study on phonetics and over four hundred poems written by me. All these, apart from those seized from my home and those handed by myself to the prosecutors, were confiscated by the prison authorities during the “Cultural Revolution” in 1968. So far I have been given back a part of these books and periodicals seized from my home, but most of them are still being held in the secret police.

Second Letter (1982) To the Central Commission for Inspecting Discipline of the Communist Party of China, 26 October 1982 In my personal name, I appeal to you with the following demand: to make a new inquiry into the case of the Trotskyist organisation of China in order to see whether it was a counterrevolutionary organisation or not, and whether the members of it, who were arrested in December 1952 and then convicted, were counterrevolutionaries. All those Chinese Trotskyists, including myself, arrested by the government after the Liberation, have now been released and restored citizenship. Being so treated, however, we were told that it was not because we were not guilty, but because we had shown recantation during imprisonment and therefore released on leniency. Thus our case is still classified as a case of counterrevolution and our members still regarded as counterrevolutionaries. This, I must say, does not coincide with facts. In fact, the charges against the Chinese Trotskyists were wrong, the whole thing was a wrong case and it must be rehabilitated and put to right. I made such a demand in a letter (24 October 1980) addressed to the Secretariat of the cc of the ccp. To my great disappointment, the letter has not got any response during the past two years.

1016

zheng

Now, on the occasion of a new leadership elected at the 12th National Congress of the ccp, I would like to make the demand again and this time addressed to you. Reasons for my making this demand are as follows: In the indictment against all of us no answer was given to the question: Why was the Chinese Trotskyist organisation counterrevolutionary and why were its members counterrevolutionaries? In it the counterrevolutionary nature of a Trotskyist organisation was taken for granted, and therefore whoever belonging to it was naturally a counterrevolutionary – the membership alone was sufficient to indict one to be guilty and sentenced. But we have the right to know on what grounds the Chinese Trotskyist organisation was declared counterrevolutionary. No single word was said in the indictments. Only from the mouths of the interrogators, judges, prison warders and from some government officers who had something to do with us, did we hear some reasons which supposed to be able to substantiate the accusation. Roughly the reasons are as follows: 1) The Chinese Trotskyists organisation was an organisation of “national traitors”. Evidence: Chen Duxiu, representing Chinese Trotskyists, once made an agreement with the Special Service Department of the Japanese Army in China, according to which Chen received a monthly allowance of three hundred Chinese dollars, with which he financed the Chinese Trotskyists to carry on national traitors’ activities. We, Chinese Trotskyists, had denounced this charge since the very beginning when it was published in the ccp newspapers in 1938 as absolute absurdity. Yet exactly this absurd charge constituted one of the main reasons which indicted us as counterrevolutionaries. What about this accusation today? There are a great number of historians of your own party who have written articles appeared either in public magazines or in internal publications to prove with a great amount of evidence that the allegation that Chen Duxiu receiving a monthly allowance from the Japanese Special Service Department was completely groundless and that it was a pure invention made by Kang Sheng and Wang Ming Co., a “political calumny” designed to smear Chen Duxiu and Chinese Trotskyists. I don’t have to enclose those articles in this letter, as I believe you have already collected them. The only point to which I would like to call your attention is: since these articles appeared over the past two years, I have not yet seen anybody wrote anything tying to defend the old accusation against Chen Duxiu and Chinese Trotskyists, i.e., trying to uphold the old slander that they were paid agents of Japanese imperialist. Thus, the first and most serious charge by which we had been indicted as

two letters to the leadership of the chinese communist party

2)

1017

counterrevolutionaries has completely fallen away, and it was achieved not by us Trotskyists, but by the contemporary historians, who made independent investigation into these “evidence” and published their conclusions in government-run newspapers and magazines. Trotsky himself and the Fourth International were the “running dogs of fascists” and “agents of Nazi Germany”. Evidence: the criminal facts exposed at the court and confessed by the co-defendants of Leon Trotsky during the successive Moscow trials staged in the late 1930s. These “facts”, extremely fantastic and absolutely absurd, were repudiated right away at that time by Trotsky and the Trotskyists throughout the world (including us, the Chinese Trotskyists). Moreover, they were thoroughly investigated by some impartial inquiry commissions, one of them was headed by the world-famous philosopher John Dewey, and were declared by them totally unfounded. So it was well-established that the Moscow trials were sheer judicial frame-ups perpetrated by Stalin. When we were arrested and persecuted as counterrevolutionaries, however, exactly these preposterous “facts” constituted one of the main rationales of the decision in our case. We were denied any chance of defence in this respect. What about these “facts” today? At present, just as in the 1930s, Trotskyists of the world still categorically repudiate these “evidence of crime”. But it no longer necessarily takes us to do it. Today, at lease to my knowledge, the public opinion of the world nearly unanimously recognise that the Moscow trials were frame-ups, and there is scarcely any body in the world who would believe in the truth of the “exposures” made at the Moscow trials. Over the past few years, several scores of books dealing with the political struggles in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist ear have been translated and published in our country. All of them, without exception, take a same view of the Moscow trials and conclude that they were frameups. Since all these books were published by the government publication institutions, most of them for internal circulation only, and some of them are on sale publicly, I don’t have to name these books or to take quotations from them. Nevertheless, I would like to quote some passages from one book, which in my opinion, is a work of authority and enables us to solve the questions whether L. Trotsky was “a Nazi agent”. It was “the Euro-Communism and the State” written by Santiago Carrillo, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain. A whole section in the 5th chapter of the book was devoted to the “Trotsky affair”, in which Carrillo said, in the thirties, during the Spanish civil war the cp of Spain believed “the myth that Trotsky collaborated with the Nazis and he was

1018

3)

zheng

protected by the American imperialism”; at that time, to decide whose position was right: Stalin’s or Trotsky’s, amounted to a question of “creed” and “we chose to believe the leader of the ussr”. Now, “history and the 20th Congress of the cp of the Soviet Union have confirmed a number of Stalin’s outrages which had once been exposed by Trotsky”. We “should not deny the right of rehabilitation to those individuals or groups who had been wrongly accused of ‘fascist agents’ – better late than never”. Having thus exonerated Trotsky and Trotskyists and stood for the rehabilitation of them, however, Carrillo did not forget to make clear that he was still opposed to Trotskyism, for example, he said, “the position Trotsky adopted on the Spanish revolution of 1936–39 was completely wrong”. (All the above-quoted were from pp. 105 and 106, “The Euro-Communism and the State”, 2nd edition, published by [Chinese] Commercial Press January 1982.) (Translator’s note: All quotations were re-translated from the Chinese.) Carrillo was absolutely right when he distinguished one question from another; whether Trotsky was a “fascist agent” from whether Trotsky’s position was correct. While opposed to Trotsky’s position on certain questions, he admitted that Trotsky was not a “fascist agent” and that the Spanish Communist Party was wrong when it followed Stalin in accusing Trotsky as such in the 1930s. In the present letter, I would not discuss the question of Trotsky’s ideas, but limit my argument to his integrity as a revolutionary. As a matter of fact, Carrillo simply said what the world public opinion had already said. But, due to his special capacity, his words acquired the most authoritative character. Thus, in my opinion, to quote Carrillo alone is quite enough to disprove the accusation that Trotsky and the Fourth International were “fascist agents”. Then, how can the 2nd charge whereby we, Chinese Trotskyists, were indicted as counterrevolutionaries hold out? It completely lost its ground, because it has been refuted – not by us, but by the world public opinion in general and by the General Secretary of the cp of Spain in particular. Chinese Trotskyists have always been opposed to the ccp. Evidence: too many to be produced. True, we did oppose the ccp. The problem is what kind of the opposition we opposed and are still opposing some theories held and some policies adopted by the ccp. So the difference between us and the ccp is the difference between political opinions, and such a difference can never be taken as a crime of counter-revolution. Anyway, there is no single article in the first criminal code, “The Criminal Code of the

two letters to the leadership of the chinese communist party

1019

People’s Republic of China”, proclaimed in 1979 and put into force since the new year day of 1980, stipulating that any opposition theoretically to the ccp is liable to prosecution. Thus, the third reason by which we had been charged as counterrevolutionaries when we were under arrest cannot stand either. Is there any longer any reason then to accuse us of being counterrevolutionaries? For delaying out exoneration? To rehabilitate the wrong cases is not only the demand made by those people who had been wronged, but made also by the people of the whole country. It is a disgrace to the country if there are wrong cases undone, which indicates that this country does not honour democracy and legality. So, not only in the interest of me and my co-defendants, but also in the interest of the People’s Republic of China and its ruling party – the ccp, i.e., in order to create a better image in the eyes of the people of the world, I request you to consider my demand. Finally, I would like to draw your attention to the following fact: most of my comrades, either freed after serving their sentences or released through “leniency”, are being discriminated in employment. The overwhelming majority of them are not allowed to be employed in the stateowned enterprises. They can try to find job in the collectively owned factories only. If they are lucky enough to get any work there, only on temporary basis. These who used to teach in schools are now, in case being luckily taken back, only as substitutes. Those intellectuals who have been sent down to the countryside to do manual labour since the end of the sixties are not allowed to be back to the cities, worse still, some of them are still being kept in the “reform-through-labour” farms. Not a few of my old friends well over the retirement age are not to be entitled get any old age pension. All these unjust treatments and discriminations I just mentioned, I hope, should be done aways with through your interference as soon as possible. It should be done immediately, before you might take any decision on my demand for the rehabilitation of all Chinese Trotskyists and their organisation. Greetings, Zheng Chaolin

Correspondence between Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin concerning Zheng’s Huilongwu Daifanglu (1986) Translated by Yang Yang

This exchange discusses whether global capitalism is in its “death agony” or had still not exhausted its historical potential. Wang argues that Trotsky’s theory of “deformed/degenerated workers’ states” upheld by the fi remains credible, but Zheng disagrees. He believes that the Stalinist bureaucracy has turned into a new ruling “cadre class”, as he argues in his Huilongwu Daifanglu.1 Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 32, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

(a)

Letter to Zheng Chaolin Wang Fanxi

Brother Chaolin, I have finally finished reading your Daifanglu (the collection of your essays). I have been sick recently, so it took me twenty days. Many personal thoughts occurred to me while reading it, but I wrote little down. So I shall have only a brief discussion with you regarding the content. My physical strength does not allow me to write at any length, I’ll simply touch on a few fundamental problems in the form of some brief points, which I ask you to take into account and reconsider. I hope this is not the final version of your Daifanglu. You can still make several changes before you publish it or preserve in some other form. First, let’s discuss some epistemological questions of our time. Following Lenin, Trotsky called our present age the era of “the death agony of capitalism”. At the very beginning of his Transitional Programme, he says that “[T]he

1 Huilongwu daifanglu (started in early 1981, finished on 4 December 1985) is an unpublished work in which Zheng explains his views on capitalism and Stalinism. The manuscript is held in the Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709, 51, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. One chapter has been translated into English in this volume – Chapter 5: The Crisis of Marxism (Part 2, Section E), another in Benton and Sexton (eds) 2022.

© Translated by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_083

correspondence between wang fanxi and zheng chaolin

1021

economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism”. He goes on to point out that “All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet ‘ripened’ for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind”.2 This Transitional Programme, adopted in 1938, seems not to have dated in any sense but is on the contrary more accurate to day than ever. The issue and the choice – “socialism or barbarism” – that mankind now faces is ever more urgent at a time when new technologies have brought into existence sorts of inventions, nuclear weapons in particular. It is wrong to argue on the basis of the current massive technological revolution that the historical mission of capitalism has not yet been completed. On the contrary, the new technologies that are emerging one after the other are in no way an indication of the vitality of capitalism – rather, they are a demonstration of its “death throes”. How do new technologies come about? Simply speaking, they are products of the Second World War and will lead to humanity’s next catastrophe. In his Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory (1967), Ernest Mandel points out that “an almost uninterrupted transformation of the techniques of production […] is virtually a by-product of the permanent arms race, of the cold war in which we have been involved since the end of the Second World War. In fact, if you carefully examine the origin of 99 per cent of the technological changes applied to production, you will see that they are military”.3 It is a sure fact that without a socialist revolution that overthrows the capitalist system this ever-changing technological revolution will push humanity to the brink of extinction, culturally and even physically. The new technologies are increasingly incompatible with capitalism. This is also evident from the impact of their application to civilian production. Here are a few examples from the UK in recent times. Recently, a newspaper group led by The Times installed its latest printing machines in great secrecy in a premises surrounded by barbed wire. The group secretly recruited four to five hundred workers to learn new printing techniques. As soon as these new workers had learned how to operate the machines,

2 Trotsky 1946, pp. 5–6. 3 Mandel 2002, p. 46.

1022

trans. yang

the management began to negotiate with six thousand existing staff, raising a series of terms unacceptable to them. The workers therefore rejected the management offer and went on strike. As a result, all six thousand were laid off. These laid-off workers continued to organise protests. To counteract them, the Tory government dispatched armed police, who suppressed the strikers while guarding the strike-breakers. It is indeed a “great leap forward” when four to five hundred workers can perform the same work as six thousand. Naturally, given that the new technology is in the hands of individual capitalists, such a “great leap forward” merely adds to the bosses’ profits. Meanwhile, as a result of this technological advance, the six thousand who previously earned £ 200 or £ 300 a week become unemployed and have to claim redundancy pay, which amounts to approximately £30 a week. Another example is the miners’ strike. When the Second World War ended, there were over one million British miners working in the pits. However, due to the development of new sources of energy – the application of nuclear power to production and the introduction of new mining techniques – many pits had been shut down and the number of miners was sharply reduced. By 1984, there were only about 200,000 miners working in the industry. Nevertheless, the Tory government continued to shut down more and more “unprofitable” mines and made another third of the mining workforce redundant. In response to the massive redundancies, in March 1984 a miners’ strike was launched, which lasted nearly a year. The miners’ morale was high. Some of the scenes reminded me of revolutions in the past. However, the government mobilised the entire repressive apparatus and the tuc (Trade Union Congress) and Labour Party leaders neither fulfil their “sweet-talking” promises nor stood shoulder to shoulder with the miners, so the strike ended in failure. In the course of the last year or so, plenty more pits have closed and the number of miners has been shrunk by another 70,000. Unlike textile workers back in the days of the Industrial Revolution, today’s British miners do not reject new technologies. On the contrary, they are happy to accept them and to learn new skills. All they ask for is a share in the benefits brought about by the fruits of technologies, as well as shorter working hours, no layoffs, and the same or more pay for doing less work. But such benefits can only be achieved under a genuine socialist regime. Under a capitalist system, the application of new technologies simply means more profits for the bosses. Working people are eventually thrown onto the garbage heap. More and more British workers have learned lessons from the present struggle. They realise that without a socialist revolution, the new technological revolution can only plunge the majority of working people into misery and poverty.

correspondence between wang fanxi and zheng chaolin

1023

Now new technologies are pushing all human-beings at an accelerating pace towards collective suicide, and this is already known on the streets. Unfortunately, the existing workers’ parties are mired in opportunism. While promoting the illusion of capitalist reformism, they deliberately work on behalf of the capitalist system in order to prevent the working masses from heading in the direction of socialism. Hence, the main message of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme – that “The historical crisis of humankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership” – has become much truer at the current stage. We should therefore never think of dismantling our revolutionary organisations. The world situation at present is very different from that after the dissolution of the First International in 1874. I remember that one of the main reasons for the disbanding of the First International was the obstructions caused by the Bakunin clique. To keep things moving, the best solution was to disband the International. Has global capitalism exhausted its historical potential? I think that this question is intertwined with Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. In his time, many Russian Marxists opposed his Permanent Revolution by quoting a famous passage from Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) – “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed”.4 On the basis of Marx’s assertion, the Mensheviks argued that capitalism in Russia was still in the course of development and had a long way to go. They therefore failed to envisage the construction of a proletarian dictatorship, let alone of a socialist future for Russia. In response to the Mensheviks, Trotsky pointed out that Marx’s assertion “takes its departure […] not from the country taken separately but from the sequence of universal social structures”. He added that “the structure of industry, and also the character of the class struggle in Russia were determined to a decisive degree by international conditions. Capitalism had reached a point on the world arena where it ceased to justify its costs of production – understanding these not in the commercial but the sociological sense. Tariffs, militarism, crises, wars, diplomatic conferences and other scourges, swallow up and squander so much creative energy that in spite of all achievements in technique there remains no room for the further growth of prosperity and culture”.5 Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution is mainly based on his study of the dynamics of the bourgeois revolution in Russia. It not only admits the

4 Marx 1977a, “Preface”. 5 Trotsky 2008, p. 890.

1024

trans. yang

backwardness of Russia’s capitalist development but even uses Russia’s backwardness as the basis for its argument. The theory also presupposes that global capitalism has exhausted its historical potential. Otherwise, the theory of Permanent Revolution would indeed, as its opponents claim, be a fantasy without any objective roots. If today we propose that capitalism has not yet completed its historical mission, in retrospect we would need to admit that the guiding principle of Permanent Revolution on which we insisted in the course of the Chinese Revolution, which demanded constant advance in the direction of socialist revolution, was an unrealistic fantasy and an illusion with no future. As far as I know, the most sophisticated study of late capitalism is Mandel’s. I can ask a French friend to buy a copy of Mandel’s Late Capitalism and mail it to you if you read French more readily [than English]. Before you finalise Daifanglu, I think you should re-read the Transitional Programme. This document is the equivalent for our time of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. Nearly half a century has passed since it was drafted. Until today, our comrades remain fundamentally faithful to the principles of the Transitional Programme. On the twentieth anniversary of its publication, I wrote an article pointing out that some parts of it were out-of-date and needed correcting.6 You should begin your critical reflections with the Transitional Programme as your starting point, and revert back to it. We cannot deny that this document represents the genuine tradition of revolutionary MarxismLeninism and its theoretical application to the new era. We should hold firm to it as the basis of our work in order to apply Marxism and develop it theoretically. I hope this letter reaches you. Best regards, Your younger brother, Fanxi 6 April 1986 ps: I re-read my letter again this morning before posting it. I think there are a few more points that I should take this opportunity to discuss with you. (1) The main battlefield of the world socialist revolution indeed lies in the most developed imperialist countries. Only a victory of the revolution on this battlefield can have a decisive impact on the spread of world socialist revolution. Nevertheless, we should concentrate on the dynamics of revolutions not

6 Wang 1958b. See its English version in Part 2 Section E.

correspondence between wang fanxi and zheng chaolin

1025

only in the developed world but also at their incidence in the rest of the world. Lenin’s idea of “advanced East, backward West” remains correct today. The idea that the struggles in the “Third World”, i.e., for democracy and national independence, should be regarded as an embodiment of the strategy of “encircling the cities from the countryside” on a global scale is, of course, ridiculous. But it is absolutely right to see those struggles as “part of the world revolution”, for they can, to some extent, exert a radical influence on the rest of the world and spark flames of revolutions there. In the past, we evaluated the Chinese Revolution in a positive way. We should take the exactly same position towards the ongoing revolutions in Asia, Africa, and Central America today. We should embrace those revolutions, participate in them, and even lead them if possible. We certainly should not take a passive attitude towards them. (2) Naturally, such revolutions are often led by cadres who have no proletarian roots, who are in most cases petty-bourgeois revolutionary intellectuals. Military officers and “rebel Catholic priests” also figure among these revolutionary cadres, while only a few in the revolutionary leadership are rooted among the workers and peasants. The course and direction of such revolutions is quite different from the traditional approach to socialist revolution. Most of them often start with armed struggles. At the very beginning, the revolutionary forces gain strength in the villages. They then gradually move on in the direction of civil war, in which the corrupt and reactionary rulers propped up by the imperialist powers are defeated and replaced by new revolutionary regimes. Such regimes, as in the case of Cuba and Nicaragua, first destroy the backward forces in the countryside. Second, given the logic of the struggle and the internal and external situations, the new regime is forced to nationalise big industries, the banks, and other institutions (this process has been already completed in Cuba, but only partly so in Nicaragua). In the meantime, the revolutionaries who come to power eventually embrace and accept Marxism-Leninism as a result of their own independent experience in struggle and their reflection on it. Their political organisations have been transformed into Communist parties with clear political programmes. In this way, these countries are not all that different in nature, economically, politically, and ideologically, from the “socialist” states. How should we assess the class nature of the new regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua? This issue has been the focus of a major debate within the Fourth International for many years. Briefly speaking, there are three opposing views: (a) Those regimes are a particular form of military dictatorship and essentially capitalist, fundamentally distinct from Soviet workers’ state (this is the

1026

trans. yang

view of the Healyites in Britain). (b) Other comrades think that Cuba has established a solidly proletarian dictatorship, which unlike other workers’ states is not only a workers’ state but is neither degenerated nor deformed. From their perspective, Cuba is a flag-bearer of the ongoing world socialist revolution. Our Trotskyist comrades should therefore united with it and abandon sectarian positions in order to push forward the progress of the world revolution (this is the view of the swp [US] and their allies in Australia). These people are quite pessimistic about the prospects for socialist revolution in the imperialist countries and thus pin all their hopes on the Third World. (c) The rest of our comrades, who comprise the majority of the Fourth International, recognise that Cuba is a workers’ state that has already established a proletarian dictatorship (as has the Nicaraguan workers’ and peasants’ government). These comrades also consider that the Cuban Revolution is relatively internationalist in spirit. Thus we should vigorously support the regime in Cuba and defend it. However, its cannot be seen as a proletarian dictatorship on the same lines as that established by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. Castro’s party and the Cuban regime are heavily influenced by Stalinist ideology. Although politically more open than other “socialist” states, it is not in essence distinct from them. We should therefore continue to take an independent and critical position towards it (and even more so towards Nicaragua). At the same time, these comrades emphasise in particular that the hope for world revolution in our time cannot be pinned on the so-called “Third World” alone. Alongside revolutions in the Third World, political revolutions in the “degenerated workers’ states” as well as socialist revolutions in the imperialist countries are all essential and cannot be underestimated. Of the two sorts of revolution, proletarian revolution in the developed countries will eventually determine the fate of humanity as a whole. I agree with the third view. Nevertheless, I do understand to some extent why the second view is gaining ground. Within the “old guard”, which includes Peng Shuzhi, many in name of “criticism” talk the talk but do nothing, while merely waiting for a utopia to drop from the sky. So it is no wonder that the younger generation, in their eagerness to achieve something, are seeking an alternative to which to attach themselves. (3) Is the Soviet bureaucracy a social class or a social caste? This is a question that I think should be left to the next generation to answer. Only when history provides more information can we give a definitive answer. At present, I think the most important thing is to establish criteria by which to evaluate the historical effect of such a group – be it class or caste – in order to determine the position we should adopt towards it. This is absolutely essential from the perspective of revolutionary practice.

correspondence between wang fanxi and zheng chaolin

1027

Traditionally, we took the nationalisation of the means of production as our criterion for deciding whether a regime is a workers’ state (whether degenerated or not) and whether a regime represents, in some sense (at least objectively), the historical interests of the proletariat. I believe that this criterion is still relevant. This criterion permits us, on the one hand, to determine our attitude towards those countries that have already undergone revolutions: if a new regime has nationalised the major means of production in a country, its status aka “workers’ states” is, therefore, justified, and we can adopt political positions derived from our definition of workers’ states. On the other hand, whether regimes that previously nationalised the means of production but have undergone political, social, cultural, and even economic degradation can still be qualified as “workers’ states” depends primarily on the extent to which they have retreated from nationalisation or even reversed it. It is on the basis of this criterion that our political positions towards such regimes can be determined. This is not directly relevant to whether or not the ruling groups in such countries are new classes or new castes. So when Max Shachtman and others raised questions concerning the issue of “workers’ states”, Trotsky explained that there was no need for differences of opinion on the question of how to characterise such states to be reconciled, and that Trotskyist organisation should not split simply because of differences of opinion. The most important principle for Trotskyists would be a unity on the basis of unified political positions. However, once James Burnham and others asserted that the “managerial class” [i.e., the Soviet bureaucracy] should be seen as a new class, and that it was more reactionary than the old bourgeoisie, they concluded politically that we should endorse the latter and overthrow the former. Such a view is quite different from our own and should not be tolerated by our organisation. We must “draw a clear line”. For obvious reasons, [the author of] Daifanglu is not in a position to conduct a concrete discussion of our political position on the “new class”. Nonetheless, when it comes to the destiny of such regimes, I recall your words – that it might be easier to transform in the direction of genuine socialism than a capitalist system. This view is actually very close to our traditional one, or at least half of it is. When I say “half”, I mean that according to our traditional view, if such regimes do not undergo a revolutionary transition to socialism, they will, in the end, revert to capitalism. I think that the third view is more rounded than the one you advance in your Daifanglu, and that it will correspond more with the future historical developments.

1028

trans. yang

(4). The three principles7 that Marx took as lessons of the Paris Commune concerning the new form of workers’ state are naturally crucial. Any healthy workers’ state must conform to those three prerequisites. Nevertheless, more than one hundred years of revolutionary history tell us that those three principles probably only apply immediately after the establishment of the worker’s state, after which they gradually weaken under the pressure of class struggle until they die away altogether when the workers’ state faces its demise. The degree of weakening corresponds more or less to the degree of degeneration of the workers’ state. Should we deny countries the status of workers’ states, in any sense of the term, to the extent that those three principles (to which we should, at the very least, add the principles internationalism and democratic rights) are constrained, weakened, or cancelled? This is one of the biggest questions constantly debated among international socialists. Our traditional position was that as long as state ownership of the means of production has not been fundamentally abolished, such countries should continue to be characterised as workers’ states, regardless of the degree of degeneration of its rulers. This view is, needless to say, far from perfect, and smacks a little of the “[blind] loyalty of fools”, but I have reflected on it again and again and approached the issue theoretically and especially from a practical point of view. Indeed, this traditional view is not always perfect, and even with some “blind loyalty” to old Trotskyism. However, I must confess that our old position is more tenable and more accurate than any other new position, especially when approaching the issue from a theoretical and especially from a practical point of view. (5) I disagree with Chen Duxiu’s final views,8 as do you. However, it cannot be denied that he grasped the main point of the discussion. Can genuine socialism be achieved only by means of democracy (chiefly through a parliamentary system), or by the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the core issue in the debate. Many believe that the means determine the end. They are convinced that victory achieved by insurrection and the subsequent establishment of a 7 The first principle is to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under it, the standing army is replaced by the “armed people”; while the proletarian dictatorship is subject to “a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time”. The second principle is that it elects its officials by “universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class”. The third is that “from the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage”. Marx 2009, p. 37. 8 Chen Duxiu wrote Wode genben yijian (My basic views) in late 1940. For an English translation, see Chen 1998, pp. 70–74.

correspondence between wang fanxi and zheng chaolin

1029

dictatorship can never lead to socialism, and can only give a rise to totalitarian bureaucratic rule. From their point of view, Stalinism is a direct descendant of Bolshevism, any talk of degeneration or betrayal is irrelevant. On this fundamental issue, both you and I support Lenin’s and Trotsky’s view. Nevertheless, having witnessed the evil face of these omnipotent and totalitarian regimes over the past fifty years, and having re-read what Lenin and Trotsky said on this matter, I think that we have a duty to offer some “revisions” of their views. Some twenty years ago, I wrote a long article titled “On Chen Duxiu’s final views”,9 in which I suggested a few clarifications regarding Lenin and Trotsky’s views in this regard. You should do more of this in your Daifanglu. Your younger brother, Fanxi 16 April 1986

(b)

Letter to Wang Fanxi Zheng Chaolin

Elder Brother Fanxi: I have read your 14-page letter. I doubt that my reply will be as long. After my release from prison, I was keen to put together a systematic compilation of the views I had formed during the debates with others in the prisoners’ study group [between 1952 and 1979], as well as the conclusions I have drawn from my own independent research and thinking, in order to bequeath them to posterity. In calling them my “final views”, I do not mean to imply that I would never change them. All I mean to say is the obvious point that if I die after completing their commitment to writing, I will no longer be in a position to make posthumous changes. What is happening today is unexpected. Since compiling my thoughts, I have not shown them to anyone in China. However, I have posted letters abroad to a few intimate friends, for them to comment. Nevertheless, I have no intention of starting up a debate, and I certainly have no intention of completely overhauling my systematic views. It is good that you first raise the question of whether or not capitalism as a system has exhausted its historical impact. Although I do not mention this

9 Wang 1958a.

1030

trans. yang

problem until the last chapter,10 on the crisis of Marxism, my whole elaboration is based on it. It is precisely because capitalism has not exhausted its historical role that a new system must be formed – one that will transform private ownership of the means of production into collective ownership, but which will continue to produce in accordance with the law of value in a capitalist form. This is in accordance with the “principle of combined development”. But this collective property is owned not by the proletariat but by a new class (the managerial bourgeoisie or “cadre class”). Our old criteria must be changed. For example, you say that the nationalisation of the main means of production justifies calling a country a “workers’ state”. But to call a country a “workers’ state” on the basis of nationalisation, without asking who owns the collective property, would be a big mistake in the case (for example) of today’s Poland. In this Polish “workers’ state” even the trade union Solidarnosc, which minimally represents the interests of workers, has no access to this “collective property”, let alone unions and political parties that might truly represent the workers’ interests. The great advances in science and technology and their application to production are the best proof that capitalism has not yet exhausted its potential. “Science and technology have developed more in the last twenty years than in the previous two thousand”.11 This statement, even if exaggerated, nevertheless reflects an outstanding achievement. Lenin, in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, cited as a characteristic that epitomises the decay of monopoly capitalism the fact that scientific and technological development has come to a standstill, and that even if some invention were to come along, the monopoly capitalists would purchase the patent to it and lock it up in a safe to ensure that it was not applied to production. Today, however, not only are major inventions taking place in science and technology but nearly all of them can be applied to production. It is true that most of these new inventions are to meet war needs and are eventually used in warfare, but so were many inventions in the past. For example, initially merchant ships and warships were one and the same thing. Although they later diverged, the merchant marine was still influenced by and modelled on the warship. Engels also traced the wage system back to the pay system used in the past by the cavalry. When the time comes for the passage from handicraft workshops to machine industries, the application of scientific and technological inventions to 10 11

“Makesizhuyi de weiji” (The Crisis of Marxism) is translated in this volume [Part 2, Section E]. A popular saying in China in the 1980s and 1990s.

correspondence between wang fanxi and zheng chaolin

1031

production results in unemployment among workers. Now, the same is happening but on an even larger scale, with 400 to 500 people replacing 6,000. It would be better to implement socialism, so that those 6,000 can share the fruits of invention. However, the inventions themselves prove that capitalism has not exhausted its historical role, and the fact that capitalism has not exhausted its historical role means that it is able to manage those 6,000 unemployed, in more or less the same way as mechanised industry is able to deal with the craft workers left behind after the bankrupting of the workshops. However, it does so not by putting them to work but by preserving them as an industrial reserve army, in accordance with the laws of capitalist development. The basic idea of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme is that the conditions for world socialist revolution have sufficiently ripened but the revolutionary leadership is in crisis. The same is still true half a century on. There have been instances in history when the objective conditions were ripe but the subjective leadership was wrong and therefore failed. But if the objective conditions really were ripe, such failures could have been corrected soon afterwards. This is what Marx meant by the doctrine of the development of human history as a spontaneous process. But now, half a century after the drafting of the Transitional Programme, there is no visible sign of a world socialist revolution, so this lack cannot be attributed to errors of subjective leadership. Instead, we should carefully re-examine the objective conditions. We should consider the problem from a different angle, by recognising that the leaps forward in science and technology over the past half century show that capitalism has not yet exhausted its historical role. In March, I read an interview in the journal Dushu (Reading) with Fredric Jameson, [a Marxist political theorist] from the US. I guess you probably know about him. He was invited to Peking University as a visiting scholar in the field of literary criticism. I almost stopped reading it at one point, but a reference to Marxism attracted my attention. Then he began talking about Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism [Verso 1999], and quoted passages by Marx from Mandel’s book. The following quotation is from the interview, but the author does not distinguish between what Mandel himself says and what Jameson thinks. The passage goes as follows: The late stage of capitalism is the purest ever form of such a system. It confirms Marx’s assertion in his Capital regarding commoditisation. In some of his writings before Capital, Marx emphasised that a socialist movement will only be possible after the whole world has gone capitalist, i.e., an era has come about in which labour power around the globe has undergone

1032

trans. yang

commodification. […] It is precisely this point that persuades Mandel of the emergence of a third stage of capitalism.12 Did Marx really say that socialist revolution could only succeed once the entire world turned capitalist? I have a copy of Late Capitalism [in Chinese], but the translation is too bad to check. I would therefore like a copy of the original French text so that I can understand exactly what the quoted paragraph means. In my view, the bourgeois revolution is national and can be carried out and accomplished separately, in different countries, while the proletarian revolution is universal and must take the whole world as its stage and is predicated on the maturing of conditions internationally. This does not mean, of course, that socialist revolution can only happen when every corner of the earth has reached the utmost limit of productivity that capitalism can accommodate. However, there will still be room for capitalist development as long as economically backward regions and populations are widespread. This reminds me of Rosa Luxemburg’s elaboration of such an idea in her theory of capital accumulation. From this point of view, the rapid development of capitalism, the socalled “opening up” and “reform” of backward countries, of the so-called “Third World”, is today objectively conducive to the preparation of the future socialist revolution. As for the socialist revolution itself, we should pin our hopes to the developed capitalist countries. We should return to Marx and Engels. In the past, we liked to utter slogans and concepts such as “the limbs die first and the heart dies later” and to talk of “backward Europe and advanced Asia”, “the dawn of revolution comes from the East”, etc. All of those ideas were born of disappointment because of the failures and debacles of the revolution in the developed countries. I have only dealt with one issue in this letter, namely, my understanding of the current era. I have no intention of discussing the other questions you raised in your last letter. Eventually, capitalism will be replaced by socialism. As to when this happens, I myself suspect that the prospect is remote, but I do not rule out the possibility of a revolution soon. Even if objective conditions are not yet fully ripe, revolutions might still break out and might even succeed, just like the embryo of revolution in Russia in October 1917. Here, too, subjective leadership can play a role. Revolutionaries can be forgiven for being optimistic in their estimation of how things will develop. Lenin appraised Marx and Engels, and we should similarly appraise Lenin and Trotsky. I do not think that we were

12

Tang 1986, no. 3, p. 119.

correspondence between wang fanxi and zheng chaolin

1033

wrong to follow Trotsky in insisting that the theory of permanent revolution applies to the Chinese Revolution. We Trotskyists cannot be judged by the success or failure of our endeavours. Our positions are still better than those of others. As for my book, it will be published posthumously, so there’s no point in talking about tactical questions. Your Younger Brother Chao 4 May 1986

Correspondence between Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi on “Late Capitalism” (1992) These two letters briefly discuss Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism. Zheng argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was ultimately caused by the boom in Western capitalism, while Wang regards that boom as unsustainable and believes that it will deepen the capitalist crisis. The original Chinese text was transcribed by volunteers for the Internet Marxist Archive.

(a)

A Letter to Wang Fanxi from Zheng Chaolin, 2 September 1992 Translated by Yang Yang

Brother Fang [Wang Fanxi], I received your letter of August, but not yet your diary. Brother Guo He [Lou Guohua] told me that a few copies of the diary should be made as soon as it arrived in Hong Kong, and he would post them to me. It is wrong to burn your diary before your death. It is a record of one’s thoughts. Let us leave the judgement of right and wrong to future generations. My health is not good. and my so-called privileged dispensation will end soon. Even if I were to die suddenly tomorrow, it would hardly come as a surprise. I have had a heart disease for more than ten years now. The angina started last autumn. Then it happened a couple of times more in the first half of this year. Recently it has been more sporadic. Thanks to various remedies, my life was spared, but the day will come when no remedy will work. I can no longer write lengthy articles. I remain capable of organising long articles in my mind, but my eyes do not allow me to put them down on paper, since I am unable to read the materials by myself. From now on I too can only write a “diary”, i.e., the bare conclusions of my thinking, but not assertions capable of producing theories. Diaries are also a genre, as the French philosopher Pascal showed. My “assertions” will inevitably be at odds with each other. The premise is that of surviving a few more years. In reality, however, I survive from day to day, so that I can write one more diary entry. I have had the privilege of cataract surgery to improve my vision, and my mouth has been fitted with a set of dentures. Nevertheless, I am soon to die, so why would I submit to further pain that might also bother others?

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_084

zheng chaolin and wang fanxi on “late capitalism”

1035

To put it in a nutshell, today’s economy has developed rapidly over the last forty years, by fortyfold. This represents a period of outstanding progress in human history, that much is undeniable. Strangely enough, however, very few people may have offered a reasonable theoretical explanation for this leap in economic development. Bourgeois economists may argue that it is a spontaneous process that requires no explanation. Neither did Ernest Mandel explain it in his Late Capitalism, unless one takes his long-wave theory as the explanation. Nonetheless, this leap in human progress requires elucidation. I have tried to provide one, but it seems to me unsatisfactory (others may also have provided interpretations of which I am unaware). The “Cold War” itself is not a proper explanation, and the Cold War was merely a phenomenon of late capitalism, in which productivity grew inordinately. It is not production but distribution that determines economic development. If more commodities were produced, it would simply create full warehouses. If the warehouses were empty of commodities, production would develop spontaneously. Following this, new scientific techniques would be invented and applied to production, including the techniques invented for the Cold War. However, the Cold War did play a significant role in the downfall of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet bloc and the American bloc were at odds, each wanted to swallow up the other. Hence, both sides had to prepare for war. However, the economic power of the Soviet bloc lagged far behind that of the US side. Thus, the Soviet bloc had to assume great burdens in order not to avoid lagging too far behind the US. As a consequence, the pressures instigated by the US through the Cold War were imposed on the people of the Soviet Union. No one was prepared to risk turning the Cold War into a hot war. In the end, all the burdens and pressures led to the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, and the Soviet Union itself soon perished. Imagine how much labour, material resources, and funds were invested in the manufacture of thousands of atom and hydrogen bombs in the Soviet Union. All of them were created by the blood and sweat of the Soviet toilers. In order to manufacture nuclear bombs, the Soviet people had to lower their standard of living. But those nuclear weapons are now merely a pile of waste. Even before this sudden capitalist economic boom, the burdens on the people of the Soviet Union were much heavier than those borne by the people on the US side. When the boom came, the burdens on the former were increasingly magnified, leading eventually to collapse. The fall of the Soviet Union was a function of the Cold War, but in the final analysis it was caused by the sudden boom of Western capitalism.

1036

zheng chaolin and wang fanxi on “late capitalism”

Now a great crisis is brewing. Masses of floating capital has nowhere to go but China. If things continue in this way, the living standards of the Chinese people will rise significantly in coming years. One US economist has predicted that the time will come when China’s gdp exceeds that of Europe and North America combined. But I think this is an exaggeration. If it were to happen, where could all the commodities be sold? By then the whole world would be in the state of chaos. It would lead to the rise of the second wave of world revolution. Sadly, I will not live to see it. Now I must stop writing. Your younger brother Chao

(b)

A Reply to Zheng Chaolin by Wang Fanxi, 14 October 1992 Translated by Gregor Benton

Elder Brother [Zheng] Chao[lin]. I have not replied earlier to your letter of 2 September because I had forgotten where I put it. I have searched everywhere. Old people are forgetful, and I seem to be even more so. Yesterday, this letter finally emerged by itself, from a pile of books. Reading it over, I felt I had a lot to say to you. A few days ago, I came across your recent work, “The 70th Anniversary of Guide Weekly”,1 which is very well done. It doesn’t look as if it was written by a 92-year-old man. Pascal’s2 Pensées is one of my bedside books, but it did not inspire me to write my journal. I had no more strength to write. However, the thoughts in my head refused to lie down, the urge to write was like the urge to use the toilet in an emergency. This is why I intend to burn my journal before I die. In Late Capitalism, Mandel changes Marx’s scheme of reproduction in a way that I think is wholly appropriate. He says: Marx’s scheme of reproduction [which operates with] two sectors – Department i: means of production; Department ii: consumer goods – into a scheme with three sectors, adding to these two Departments a third

1 Zheng Chaolin was editor of the ccp’s Guide Weekly [Xiangdao zhoukan] in the 1920s. 2 i.e., Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher.

zheng chaolin and wang fanxi on “late capitalism”

1037

Department producing means of destruction. We are justified in making this distinction because Department iii, unlike Departments I and ii, produces commodities which do not enter into the process of reproduction of the material elements of production (replacing and extending the means of production and labour-power consumed).3 The means of destruction have existed since time immemorial, but they have occupied a large and important place in the national economy only since the First World War, and especially during the Second World War, and were consolidated during the Cold War. They became, at least from the 1940s onwards, a separate “sector” of the economies of the major countries of the world (capitalist and “socialist”). One of the main characteristics of the production and reproduction of this sector is that it is not for the market, not to satisfy the needs of the consumer; but to outwit the de facto or imagined opponent, to destroy the human and material resources of the other side more effectively and on a larger scale. Thus the production and reproduction of the means of destruction is not limited by the consumer market. As Luxemburg predicted after the First World War: “The weapons economy is a surrogate market” (quoted in an article by Mandel, I don’t know what he was referring to in Luxemburg’s writing), it is itself a market. Technological innovation in this sector is therefore completely independent of the consumer market. Whereas in the past capitalists preferred to buy new technical inventions and keep them secret in order to sell their products and to make the most out of the fixed capital already invested, this is no longer the case in a situation in which the production of weapons has become a major and independent category. In order to overcome the enemy, the two opposing sides (initially Germany vs the United States and Britain, then the Soviet Union vs the United States) applied all the forces at their disposal to the technical adaptation of the means of destruction. The improvements in this area, not to mention the 40-fold increase in the course of forty years, could even be said to have advanced 400 or even 4,000 times. The destructive power of a nuclear bomb is more than 40 times greater than that of the largest conventional artillery shell. Rapid technological revolution in the production of means of destruction has, of course, had an impact on the production of means of production and of consumer goods. The uninterrupted technological transformation of production that we have seen since the end of the Second World War is in fact only a by-product of the arms race and the Cold War. Beginning with the release of atomic energy, the use of auto-

3 Mandel 1976, pp. 276–77.

1038

zheng chaolin and wang fanxi on “late capitalism”

mation, computers, miniaturised technology, and lasers happened first in the military sphere and was only then introduced as a “by-product” into the other two major sectors of production. Whereas the market was the original cause of technological innovation, now constant technological innovation has led to a rapid growth in productivity. Increasing production requires an expanding market. What can be done? Apart from the traditional methods of securing new markets, the alternative is to create them artificially by any means possible. Keynesian economics, popular in the post-war period, was, I feel, created for this purpose. I have not studied Keynesian theory. (In fact, I am incapable of doing so. I am not only “scientifically illiterate” but “economically illiterate”.) But from what I can gather, the Keynesian doctrine is mainly “eat first, then owe money” [ yinchimaoliang] and: don’t be afraid of trying to satisfy your vanity even when you cannot really afford to do so. Credit should be used as much as possible to improve the enjoyment of life on the part of the individual, while the state should invest in order to cause the economy to prosper, to solve the unemployment crisis, and to ensure social stability and national prosperity. The false prosperity and booms thus created were, of course, unsustainable. Their failings were fully exposed in the 1970s. Both the government and individuals were in debt, and indebtedness had already marked the advent of the Second World War and the capitalist world crisis. Ideologically, the so-called “monetarist” school emerged to replace Keynesianism, as its scourge: first of all, to deal with astronomical state debt, to reduce inflation, to attack the income of the working class, and to cut the huge welfare spending that had been going on since the 1940s. The so-called “Reagan doctrine” and “Thatcherism” emerged in order to realise these ends. The result is now clear: a deepening of the decline of capitalism in the world. The collapse of the Soviet bloc under the pressure of the Cold War has given a boost to Western capitalism. It seemed as if the crisis in the capitalist countries would not only soon pass but that capitalism would live forever. But this was, as the American economist J.K. Galbraith warned at the time, “to laugh too soon”. Having laughed at the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the crisis in the capitalists’ own house soon reached catastrophic proportions. The burden of destroying the means of production overwhelmed the economies of countries such as the US and Britain. What happens in future is another matter and a long story. What I just said only scratches the surface. (1) Why did postwar capitalism lead to an unprecedented increase in productive capacity? And (2) why did the economies of the Western capitalist countries confront such a serious crisis after their total victory in the Cold War?

zheng chaolin and wang fanxi on “late capitalism”

1039

Mandel is right, of course, to relate these matters to Marx’s theory of cyclical crises and, in particular, to Kondratiev’s so-called long- and short-wave theory,4 but it would be wrong, or at least insufficient, to speak of a long- and short-wave theory without highlighting the special role played by the “means of destruction” sector in the national economy over the last half century – insufficient, that is to say, to answer the questions raised above. There is much more I would like to say to you, but unfortunately I lack the strength to write. This letter, far from being a finished product, was written off and on over the course of three mornings. Looking at the photo of you and Brother Ban [Gregor Benton] makes me “both envious and jealous” – if only I could come and go as he does, and be in the same room as you after half a century of separation, and talk with you! Brother Ban is travelling again, he is probably in Japan at the moment, and will go to China soon. Chun [Zichun, i.e., Lou Guohua] wrote to say that you have recovered from your heart condition. Chun is unhappy with your refusal to stop drinking. But I think differently. Three glasses of rice wine will not affect your heart, and life is a hard business. As Li Bai5 once said, “Fame after death is not as good as three glasses of wine before death”. Li Bai was right, but unfortunately I can’t drink, so I’m missing out on one of life’s great pleasures. Younger Brother Fang [Wang Fanxi]

4 The economic theory of “Kondratiev-waves” was first developed by Nikolai Kondratiev (1892– 1938), a Russian Soviet economist who also proposed nep, the New Economic Policy. 5 Li Bai (701–762) was an ancient Chinese poet, one of the most prominent figures in the flourishing of ancient Chinese poetry in the Tang Dynasty.

Zheng Chaolin’s Letters to Friends, 1989–1998 Translated by Gregor Benton

These letters concern Zheng’s later publication. They include a letter to the Trotskyist Jiang Junyang on Stalinism and another to Fan Yong, a senior Chinese publisher and editor, in which Zheng expresses his gratitude to Fan for having helping him publish his writings in China. The original Chinese text was transcribed by volunteers for the Marxist Internet Archive.

(a)

To Huang Wen1

Comrade Huang Wen. I write to pay my respects and to return the enclosed proofs. Thank you. I would like to add a few lines to these proofs if that is still possible. Another thing is that after writing about the first meeting between Shen Yanbing and Lu Dingyi in my home, the following lines were omitted, namely: Who would have thought that the outgoing Minister of Culture and the incoming Minister of Culture in 1966 would have been guests at my house in those days?2 Without these words, what I said earlier about the meeting between the two would be meaningless. You have kindly given me some copies of your magazine, but the magazine is not available in Shanghai. I would like to buy two additional copies and for you to send them to me, for which I enclose 12 yuan. I have two copies of the first issue of this year and one copy of the second issue of this year. I have received all the issues of your magazine, thank you. Zheng Chaolin 6 April 1991 1 Huang Wen, female, was a senior editor at the People’s Literature Publishing House. 2 “In the first half of 1966, while reading Jiefang Daily in prison, I learned that Shen Yanbing had stepped down as Minister of Culture and that Lu Dingyi had replaced him, and I recalled how, in 1926, the old Minister of Culture and the new Minister of Culture were guests of mine” (Zheng Chaolin, “Reminiscences of Shen Yanbing”, 5 May 1981).

© Translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_085

zheng chaolin’s letters to friends, 1989–1998

(b)

1041

To Mr Qian Bocheng3

Mr Bosheng. Thank you for the two articles you have published. The first article was already very well conceived, but the second was even better. I was so glad to read it, and my friends were even happier than I. In the past, articles have been published in journals about me as a person, but no one has ever dared to link me to the question of our rehabilitation – you are the first to do so. I am an ordinary person, what is there to write about? I have no objection to people writing about me, or even writing about me in excessively glowing terms, if I can only use it to expedite our demand for rehabilitation. We were accused of two things. First, of being “national traitors” (Chen Duxiu was said to have received a monthly subsidy of 300 yuan from Japanese intelligence on behalf of the Trotskyists); second, Trotsky himself was accused of being a spy for the German Nazis (as supposedly evidenced by the three show trials in Moscow). In 1988, the Supreme Court of the ussr declared the three Moscow trials to have been wrongful and rehabilitated [their victims], and in 1991 a new note was added to the new edition of Mao’s Selected Works stating that “likening the Trotskyists to traitors was due to the fact that at the time the Communist International falsely accused the Chinese Trotskyists of being in the pay of Japanese imperialist spy organisations”. So even without our input, others had already shown that neither charge could be proven. Yet to this day, our case is still classified as “counterrevolutionary”! You are the first person who has dared to link me to the rehabilitation of our case. In addition to this, the quotations in your two articles from my humble writings are matters to which others pay little attention, despite their importance. Naturally, there are some factual errors in both articles, but they have no bearing on the conclusions. I will not deal with these factual errors today but will list them later, for you to include in your Complete Works. Again, with thanks and in admiration. Yours sincerely, Zheng Chaolin 11 March 1997 3 Born in 1922, Qian Bocheng worked at the Shanghai Life Bookstore and Shanghai’s Wenhui bao, as well as at several other publishing houses in Shanghai.

1042 (c)

trans. benton

To Brother Qun4

Brother Qun. Yesterday, Ah Li5 came to my home to show me a letter you had written to him, in which you copied out a paragraph in English and asked me how to translate it. I translated it as follows: For his part, they are again a police organisation. In this way, they play the role of both guiding the people along the road to social progress and governing them from a policing point of view. This speech,6 to judge by this passage, can be seen as a glorification of the Stalinist system that ruled the Soviet Union for decades and whose aim was to guide the people along a path of social progress but by exercising police means. In short, this argument is a reflection of the pervasive and poisonous influence of Trotsky’s theory of the “degenerate workers’ state”, i.e., the idea that the Soviet Union under Stalin was still a “workers’ state”, though one degenerated by bureaucratic rule. In fact, this was a false view (but one still worth discussing) from the early years of the Left Opposition. In the middle period, at the start of the Second World War, it could still count as a viable opinion, but now that the Stalinist system has been eliminated, it would be ridiculous to try to hold on to it. Why was it that, when the Soviet Union was destroyed, when the last of the Stalinist institutions was overthrown, not a single “worker” came forward to fire a shot in defence of the “workers’ state”? At the time, Yeltsin’s Russia was hoping that someone would teach it how to restore private property, to abolish the red flag, and to adopt the Tsarist flag as the national flag, to mourn the murder of the last Tsar, and so on. The speech was also aimed at bringing about a revival of the Stalinist system and a reassertion of political control. Trotsky’s initial theory of a “degenerate workers’ state” was understandable, for he could not have imagined that Stalin’s regime would last so long. If in the

4 Qun is the Guangxi Trotskyist Jiang Junyang. 5 Ah Li is the Guangdong Trotskyist Li Yongjue. 6 A speech given by Stephen Bilchak to the National Conference on Socialist Activism and Education in San Francisco in August 1996, titled “Obstacles to the Restoration of Capitalism in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” Bilchak was the leader of the Polish section of the Fourth International.

zheng chaolin’s letters to friends, 1989–1998

1043

years before the Second World War the political situation in the Soviet Union had changed, if Stalin had lost power and others had come to power, if the Left Opposition had been able to operate openly in the Soviet Union, it would have been detrimental to our activities to make the Soviet Union sound too sombre. The Opposition’s mass following often went further than Trotsky, arguing at a very early stage that the counter-revolution had won out in the ussr and a Thermidorian coup had been carried out. Trotsky at first objected to the idea that Thermidor had emerged victorious in the Soviet Union, but later, when more and people made the same point, he was forced to accept it, although he clarified that, in the French Revolution, Thermidor merely signalled the start of the ebb of the revolution and not yet the restoration of the old system. The fruits of the October Revolution were still intact. In fact, Trotsky was wrong. There was a revolutionary period after October that in my opinion lasted for about ten years, from November 7, 1917, to December 1927, during which time Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the same time as the defeat of the Guangzhou rising. Later, counter-revolution won out. Imperialism, the bourgeoisie, intellectuals in general, and the Chinese democrats in particular all agreed that the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated the bankruptcy of socialism and of Marxism, but in fact it only demonstrated the bankruptcy of Stalinism, for no socialist society had ever been achieved anywhere in the world. What is “socialism”? Marx, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, and Lenin, in The State and Revolution, made it clear that in a socialist society, products are not expressed in terms of value, there are neither commodities nor money, and products are distributed according to work done. Where, I ask, has a socialist system ever been achieved? The Soviet Union under Stalin was not a “workers’ state”: it too was a society run in the interests of the exploiting classes. The first wave of world revolution, which began with the October Revolution, failed before our eyes, but a second wave of world revolution will rise again at some future point, just as the bourgeois revolution was completed in several waves [rather than in one]. So the socialist world revolution will not be completed in one wave. The unprecedented prosperity of capitalism today will not last long, and one day a worldwide economic crisis will break out. At that point, a second October Revolution will come about, not in the relatively backward countries but in the developed countries, and once such a revolution has broken out, it will extend to the great majority of the developed countries and a socialist system can be expected to replace the present capitalist system. This is the question that was asked.

1044

trans. benton

Younger Brother [Zheng] Chao[lin] 15 April 1997

(d)

Zheng Chaolin’s Eight Letters to Fan Yong,7 1989–1998

Letter 1 Comrade Fan Yong. I have known for a long time that there was a Fan Yong in China who was a longstanding member of the publishing community. I too was once a publisher, and at one time [in the mid-1920s] I was the Director of the Publications Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, so we are colleagues. A few years ago, I received a letter from Sanlian Bookstore saying that they intended to reprint my translation of The Resurrection of the Gods.8 This book is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Western literature, but unfortunately it was first published during the resistance to Japan and did not sell much. I have not yet received Mr Luo’s9 gift of a subscription to Ming Pao Monthly, but I have already received a copy of his important book, and several friends and I have long wondered who this “Cheng Xueye” really was. From the book, I can see that he knows a lot about me, so I guessed he must be an acquaintance. However, he got some facts wrong in the article, for example by confusing [the Trotskyist] Lou Guohua with [his cousin the Beijing poet and literary figure] Lou Shiyi. Now I know that Cheng Xueye is in fact the pseudonym of a Hong Kong journalist, Mr Luo, please convey my thanks to him. I will personally send him a signed copy of my Surviving Poems by Yu Yin [Zheng Chaolin’s book of prison poems] when it is published. I would of course like to personally sign a copy for you, but I recently received a letter from [the academic critic] Zhu Zheng saying that the book will not be published because the number of copies ordered by Xinhua Bookstore is too small. Zhu is trying to save the project, but I am not convinced that he will succeed.

7 Fan Yong (1923–2010) was a Chinese publisher. After the founding of the prc, he served as deputy chief editor and vice president of the People’s Publishing House and general manager of Sanlian Bookstore. 8 The Resurrection of the Gods is a novel portraying Leonardo da Vinci written by Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), a Russian novelist. 9 Luo Fu (1921–2014), formerly known as Luo Chengxun, was a veteran journalist in Hong Kong, where – as a member of the ccp – he was responsible for united-front work.

zheng chaolin’s letters to friends, 1989–1998

1045

The publication of The Resurrection of the Gods is a fact and cannot be doubted, but I have no news of it, not even a sample copy. I wrote a letter to the Sanlian Bookstore on 17 May, but I have yet to receive an answer. You and Zhu Zheng are rare talents in the Chinese publishing industry, but neither of you is able to develop his strengths at present. I sigh for Chinese culture. Wishing you good health and happiness! Zheng Chaolin 1 June 1989 Letter 2 Comrade Fan Yong. I acknowledge receipt of your letter of four days ago. The day before yesterday, I also received a sample copy from Sanlian Bookstore [i.e., a copy of The Resurrection of the Gods]. The binding is much more beautiful than that of the original edition published during the war, but unfortunately the illustrations have been removed and in that sense it is not as good as the original edition. Today, I received your letter and realised that you had asked Sanlian to send me this copy. Like weather, the publication of books is an unpredictable business. [The Chinese edition of] my Memoirs was delayed for five years and not printed until 1986. If it had been delayed for a further six months, I doubt whether it would ever have been printed! I know that there were friends, both known and unknown, who helped me in the process. I know that you are one of the friends who read the original manuscript and took active steps to get it published. It is ok that some passages have been omitted; they were dispensable. But it is a pity that a whole chapter, on “Love and Politics”, was left out.10 Some readers have asked me for the original chapter, thinking that I have it in my possession. I did not write this chapter out of prurience but to illustrate a particular aspect of the struggle within the Party at the time, not only because of differences in political views but also for private reasons. If I could find the manuscript of this deleted chapter, I would like to retain it. Zhu Zheng11 worked hard to help me publish two books, Surviving Poems by Yu Yin and The History of the French Revolution, both of which were unfortu-

10 11

This chapter was restored in the English translation of Zheng’s memoirs. See Zheng 1997. Zhu Zheng (1931–) is a Chinese prominent editor and publisher.

1046

trans. benton

nately aborted. I could not bear to write to Zhu Zheng again to ask him about this. I am still worried about his personal safety. I am still hoping that one day I will finally be able to sign a copy of my poems and give it to Mr Cheng Xueyao to seek his opinion. Ming Pao Monthly has not yet arrived and has probably been lost in the post. Fortunately, I have a copy of his article. The novel [regarding a Chinese Trotskyist prisoner] in the second issue of Fiction World arrived a while ago. The author is unknown to me. He has found some rare historical materials. There are factual errors in the story, but the intention is good. Have you read the third issue of Wenhui Monthly this year? [The dissident Marxist writer] Wang Ruowang has also painted a very good picture, in the form of a memoir. These two images are a product of the wave of rehabilitations carried out in the Soviet Union in 1988. History has finally restored the truth. I have not read much of China’s “new literature”. The images of us reflected in it are not good. I have read [Mao Dun’s] Midnight [1958], and I am told that Yang Mo’s Song of Youth paints an even worse picture. But the two glorious portraits that have appeared so far this year more than compensate for that. Will others follow? Zheng Chaolin, 24 June 1989 Letter 3 Comrade Fan Yong. I wrote to you on 29 June to say that you had forgotten to send me the Ming Pao Monthly. Mr Lou [Shiyi] sent it to me after reading it. It was only after you mentioned it that I realised that my memoir had been put aside for forty years before it was eventually published. I was surprised to see it published, and it was not my intention to write it in the first place. Towards the end of the war, in 1944, China Bookstore had stopped accepting manuscripts and I had no means of subsistence. A friend was willing to support me for six months, on condition that I write my memoirs within those six months. I didn’t want to write them, but I had to. I decided to use myself as a mirror on the times I had lived through and the people I knew who were active during them, and less about myself. Even today, I have no interest in writing about myself. However, the times are even more complicated than they were in the past, and I know even fewer people who are active. Even if I wanted to write a memoir, I would not be able to do so. Recently, my cataracts have become so severe that I need a magnifying glass to read, and I write as if carving my char-

zheng chaolin’s letters to friends, 1989–1998

1047

acters onto wax paper. After my ninetieth birthday and if my cataracts have by then cleared up, I might be able to consider writing a sequel if I have nothing more important to write. I have not heard from Zhu Zheng for a long time. I wonder how he is? Have you from him? It is a great pity that there is apparently no use for good publishers like you and Zhu Zheng. Zheng Chaolin 7 June 1989 Letter 4 Comrade Fan Yong. I am grateful for your reply, which I received on 17 November. I am writing to you today not about my own book but to recommend a translation. There is a very famous book called The Prophet Trilogy. It has three volumes, each of which is about 300,000 Chinese characters in length. The three volumes are The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. The author, Isaac Deutscher, was a Polish national who fled to Britain and became a British citizen. The original text is in English and was published by Oxford University Press, there have been further translations into German, French, Japanese, and other languages. The book is rich in material and beautifully written. No Chinese translation has so far been published,12 as it is a biography of Trotsky. In the past, no one dared to touch Trotsky, or even to translate materials for the purpose of “negative teaching”. However, since the rehabilitations ordered by the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union in 1988, it is time for China to take a different view of Trotsky. Last year and this year, several books by Trotsky appeared in China, including Literature and Revolution, and they were published for positive [rather than negative] purposes. I have some old friends who started translating this million-character masterpiece a few years ago and they have just finished it and are in the process of checking it. They know that the situation has changed in recent years with the opening up of the country, and that Trotsky’s own work has been published in China, as has Deutscher’s biography of Stalin, which was published a few years ago. They therefore entrusted me with the job of trying to find a publisher for their translation. I thought of you, so I am writing today to ask you to introduce

12

The Prophet Trilogy was published in Chinese in 1999.

1048

trans. benton

this translation to the People’s Publishing House. The translators have given me a copy of the three prefaces, and I hereby forward to you, to give you a taste of the contents of the book. Since the reform and opening up, publishers have brought out a number of works translated from foreign languages, on practical and historical issues. This has helped give domestic readers a small insight into the general state of mind overseas. I think the experts and scholars responsible for the selection of such materials will be familiar with this work by Deutscher. My friends say that if the People’s Publishing House accepts this translation for publication, its experts are welcome to check the translation against the original to suggest improvements. My friends can always send the original English text together with the translation. Today is New Year’s Eve, 1992, and tomorrow will be 1993. I with my old and ailing body wish you a long and healthy life! Zheng Chaolin 31 December 1992 Letter 5 Comrade Fan Yong. I received a letter from you today. Thank you for your interest in the publication of my Memoirs and of The Resurrection of the Gods, which were both published thanks to you. In a market economy, the publishing business is naturally about economic issues, but for the sake of culture and the revolution, there are times when economy can be left out of account. I have also been in charge of publishing in my early life [in the Central Committee of the ccp in the 1920s]. This contradiction is not difficult to resolve. My humble work, Remembering Yin Kuan, was intended to be published as a separate volume, so it was not included in my reminiscences. However, it is similar in nature to the essays in Reminiscences, so it could easily be combined with them. Reminiscences is a collection of essays. The essays are for the publisher to choose from, they need not all be published. I would like to use the title Thinking of the Past to avoid confusion with my Memoirs. There might be another more suitable title. I leave the final decision to the publisher. I naturally hope that the publisher will accept the manuscript. A few days ago, the Changzhou Qu Qubai Memorial Hall published Qu Qubai Studies no. 5, which included a long article of mine, written seven years ago and not published until now. The Memorial Hall only gave me two copies, both of

zheng chaolin’s letters to friends, 1989–1998

1049

which I have given away, so I cannot send you one. I have sent money to the Memorial Hall to buy more copies and will send one to you when I receive it. I am very happy to have this long article published. I hope that all the other essays will also be published in the future. Wishing you a happy New Year! Zheng Chaolin 13 March 1993 Letter 6 Comrade Fan Yong. I sincerely thank you for your interest in me. Without your help, my Reminiscences would never have been published. I hear that the volume has sold well and has been welcomed by readers. I have compiled a collection of fifteen essays over the past two days, and I am sending you a copy of the table of contents. The title of the book is The Painted Tower is Still in Love with the Red Sunset, which is meant to express nostalgia. It is based on two lines from a poem of mine: “Old friends have passed away like flowing water, but the painted tower is still in love with the red sunset”. This line was used as the title for an interview with me that was published in People’s Daily by the man who wrote the tv series about Qu Qubai. Zheng Chaolin 10 July 1996 Letter 7 Comrade Fan Yong. When I think of you, I cannot but be grateful for the kindness you have shown me. Without your help, neither my Memoirs nor my Reminiscences would ever have been published. Soon I will send you the manuscript of a second collection, titled Scales and Claws,13 containing thirty-five essays, slightly more than Reminiscences. It was a letter from you that first prompted me to compile this collection. I would never have thought of submitting it to the Fire Phoenix Library. It was

13

“Claws”, lin, is the second character of Zheng Chaolin’s given name.

1050

trans. benton

only when you wrote to me with this suggestion that I gave the matter serious thought. As a result, however, I decided that my writings did not have the same literary skills as other writings in the series. But then I thought, why not compile a collection for “internal circulation”?14 So I spent a lot of time compiling my collection of scales and claws. It is not that I have no old articles to collect – simply that in the past I did not dare publish them because of my dissident views. However, in recent years the situation has changed, and even my Reminiscences could be published (albeit “internally”). My Memoirs were also published, together with other publications that could not be published in the past but can now appear without any restriction whatsoever. That lifted my spirits, so I sent you my scales and claws for you to show to the publisher. If it is approved for publication, another collection of my old articles could then follow. Apart from my poor literary skills, there is a further reason why my collection could not be submitted, the issue of “political dissidence”. The editors of the People’s Publishing House have the right to decide on this issue, but the editors of the Fire Phoenix Library do not. Zheng Chaolin 6 September 1996 Letter 8 Comrade Fan Yong. I really don’t know how to thank you for wasting your time and energy on my affairs. I have spoken to Little Hu face to face about the big project. He can tell you about it when he returns to the capital. There is only one new thing to talk about in this letter. When a translation of Romain Rolland’s Moscow Diary was published last year (or the year before that), after a fifty-year gap, two translations were published in China. This caused a small ripple in Chinese publishing circles, and some magazines published articles and comments that brought up André Gide’s subsequent trip to the Soviet Union. On his return to France, instead of publishing his diary, Gide wrote a book titled Return from the Soviet Union, which directly attacked the cult of Stalin’s personality and provoked vicious

14

For restricted circulation among Party cadres and officials.

zheng chaolin’s letters to friends, 1989–1998

1051

attacks from pro-Soviet forces all over the world. Today, more than sixty years on, articles are being written in China comparing the two books and protesting at the attacks on Gide all those years ago. People are trying to find Gide’s Return from the Soviet Union for the purposes of comparison. I am told that a publisher has found a translation of the book and has printed it. The Yadong Library version, which I translated, was reprinted several times in the 1930s and served a political purpose. Now friends have persuaded me to republish this translation and have tracked down the original. They have suggested that I use my real name instead of the pseudonym I used at the time, and that I write a translator’s preface. I have accepted all these suggestions. I am now sending you the original Yadong edition, which is more than sixty years old, together with my new preface. Can you find someone to publish this book as soon as possible? There is a Dunhuang Publishing House, do you know anyone there? Mr Mu Hui, editor of the magazine Qiushi [Seeking the truth],15 who photocopied the original book for me, has told me that he suggested that the Dunhuang Publishing House publish it and they said they were willing to do so but feared copyright disputes. If you know someone at the press, please tell them in my name that I translated the book and there will be no copyright dispute. I hope that Dunhuang Publishing House will publish it. Zheng Chaolin 26 March 1998

15

Qiushi is the ccp’s official theoretical journal and the organ of its Central Committee.

Correspondence between Chinese Intellectuals and Wang Fanxi (1990, 2000) Translated by Gregor Benton

These letters between Wang and two eminent Chinese liberal intellectuals (Liu Binyan, a well-known Chinese journalist and political dissident who went into exile in 1988, and Gao Fang, a leading Chinese Marxist theorist and university professor) touch on the history of Chinese Trotskyism, theoretical problems of Marxism, and political suppression under the ccp. Source: Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 46–49, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

(a)

Letters between Liu Binyan1 and Wang

Greetings, Mr Wenyuan!2 Thanks to fate, I was fortunate enough to meet Ms Cheng Ling-fang,3 and then to have the opportunity to communicate with you. I am very grateful for your kind gift of your masterly memoirs, which have filled in some gaps in my knowledge of the history of the Chinese Revolution. The history that you have experienced is very important to me. I was born a generation after you, in 1925. My experience has been quite unlike yours, but our fates are similar: I was also unable to join the Party because

1 Liu Binyan (1925–2005) was a Chinese journalist, writer, and political dissident. Labelled a “rightist”, he was expelled from the ccp in 1957 but rehabilitated in 1966. Nevertheless, he was sent to countryside for labour reform during the Cultural Revolution. In 1979, he was again rehabilitated. At an early stage in the Reform and Opening Up, he wrote exposing cases of social injustice and corruption. In 1987, he was expelled from the party once again. In 1988, he went to the United States to teach and write. Due to his open support of the 1989 student protests in China, he was barred from returning to the country. 2 Wenyuan is one of Wang Fanxi’s pen-names. 3 Cheng Ling-fang was then a MPhil student from Taiwan in the Department of Chinese Studies at Leeds University, and a friend of Wang Fanxi. She is now an Emeritus Professor at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan.

© Translated by Gregor Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_086

correspondence between chinese intellectuals and fanxi

1053

my political views did not coincide with those of Mao Zedong’s group, and I was twice expelled from the Party in the course of thirty years. If you are interested, you can look up my autobiography, which was recently published in Taipei. Ms Cheng will pass it on to you. In my haste to write it, I forgot to include the horrific massacre of revolutionaries in Shandong in 1941– 1942, in the guise of a “purge of Trotskyists” in the ccp. In Harbin in 1941, the Japanese carried out numerous arrests and destroyed the ccp’s underground organisation. Some Party members and young progressive intellectuals then decided to go “within the pass”4 to restore Party connections. In the area of Dezhou in Shandong, they started working for the anti-Japanese base. However, they were soon suspected of being spies or Trotskyists. Two reviews failed to confirm this and they resumed their work. At the time, however, the Japanese were on the attack and the local government was forced to move elsewhere. Thinking that these [former suspects] might be harbouring a grudge, they deliberately exposed them during the transfer and killed some. Two couples have already been identified: the men were shot and the women buried alive. I learned about this in 1984, when I attended a ceremony in Shandong for the reinterment of the couples’ ashes. It is said that the “purges” in Shandong were brutal, and that as many as 500,000 to 600,000 people died.5 You must have heard of the case of the transfer of hundreds of underground Party members and students to the hills outside Xiamen on the eve of the liberation of the city (they were suspected of being Trotskyists). The [written] history of the ccp changes year by year, and is entirely lacking in authenticity. Your autobiography is of great value in that respect. If someone were to write a book about the despicable ways in which the Maoists have dealt with the opposition over the decades, it would have a big impact. For forty years now, the ccp has kept a tight grip on the people’s minds, and the process of their awakening has been slow. Last year’s pro-democracy movement proved once again that the people’s illusions in the ccp leadership have not yet been dispelled. So it is essential to expose the true face of the ccp by all means possible. I wonder if you or your friends have any intention of writing such a book? Of course there are difficulties – it is not easy to acquire information in China. However, things are changing. Last year Dai Qing, a woman writer, published a book called The Death of Wang Shiwei.6 (In the 1940s, I heard rumours that Wang Shiwei was not a Trotskyist.) 4 “Within the pass” refers to geographical regions of China, the boundary marker being the Great Wall. 5 If 500,000 people died, which would seem unlikely, they were of course not actual Trotskyists. 6 Wang Shiwei (1907–1947) was a writer and Trotskyist sympathiser, executed in Yan’an in 1947

1054

trans. benton

In short, this work needs to be done urgently, while the older generation is still alive. [Contact person and address and telephone number omitted]. Please take care of yourself! I wish you good health and a long life! Liu Binyan 8 January 1990

… Mr Binyan, Ms Cheng forwarded your letter to me from Taiwan and I was very happy to read it. There are many things on which I would like your advice, and there are many things I would like to tell you. However, as I am old and ill, it is extremely difficult for me to think and write, so I can only write you a short letter to express my gratitude. My book on Mao Thought was completed 36 years ago. At the time, Mao’s prestige was still very high. His so-called “old-age disorder”7 was not yet too obvious. I was in an out-of-the-way place [Macao], the conditions under which I did my research and writing were very poor, and my views were based on a handful of officially published books and journals. Naturally, the results were far from good; however, I do not think that the basic views I expressed in my book have been refuted by events, and recent changes have confirmed many of my predictions. I would like to know what your impressions are after reading my book. I would be interested in your advice. The Trotskyist question cannot be confined to China. It must be linked to the Stalin-Trotsky controversy in the Soviet Union and the perverse actions of the Soviet leaders. Soviet historians have done much work on this question in recent years, and I hope that Chinese historians will do the same. Ms Dai Qing’s efforts are admirable, and I am sure you yourself will also achieve much more in this area. I am not able to do anything, and I can only count on you and your fellow writers. But if you have any questions, I will do my best to answer them. for refusing to give up his views on literature and politics. He was rehabilitated in 1990. Dai Qing is a well-known Chinese journalist, writer, and political dissident, still living in Beijing. Her father Fu Daqing was a Chinese communist martyr and a friend of Zheng Chaolin. 7 Perhaps a play on Lenin’s view of a certain style of leftism as an “infantile disorder”.

correspondence between chinese intellectuals and fanxi

1055

Many real and many alleged Trotskyists were killed by the Chinese Communists before and during the war, but unfortunately we have not so far been able to give a precise account of the killings. The situation in Shandong mentioned in your letter is very credible. I would be grateful for more details. I pray for your understanding. I wish you well. Wang Fanxi 10 February 1990 p.s. I wrote this letter yesterday but did not send it. I am in better spirits today, so I will add a few more lines. I believe you have studied the life and thought of Chen Duxiu. I am sure you are familiar with it. In recent years, ccp historians seem to be taking a great interest in him. I am in possession of two chronologies of his life [published in China] and I hear that a third is about to appear. A biography of Chen has also recently appeared in Taiwan. Some 17 or 18 years ago, in Hong Kong, a Chinese scholar teaching at an American university published a chronology of Chen Duxiu’s life. With the rise of the “pro-democracy movement” in China and around the world, I believe that this “Chen Duxiu research fever” will continue to grow. Chen Duxiu’s “de (democracy) and sai (science)” became the two main watchwords of China’s new thinking [in 1919] and of the revolutionary movement that followed. In his later years, Chen insisted that “without democracy, there can be no socialism, and no workers’ state”,8 and this formulation will certainly serve as a clear platform for Chinese and foreign “pro-democracy movements” in future years. At present, some pro-democracy activists are demanding only democracy, and some even put democracy and socialism in complete opposition to each other, which I think is wrong. They should learn from Mr Duxiu. I wonder what your view is? I have not yet received your autobiography. I will read it carefully as soon as I receive it. Thank you in advance. I have also asked a friend in Hong Kong to send you some small books, among them the memoirs of Zheng Chaolin.

8 Wang notes that this formulation is not an exact quote but his summary of the thinking of Chen in his letter on this matter.

1056

trans. benton

Please excuse the ragged handwriting, my hands are too weak to write. 11 February 1990

… Mr Fanxi I am delighted to have received your letter of 11 February – it took less than ten days to get here. I regret that I was unable to see you in Leeds last year when I was in the UK for a conference in Edinburgh (had I known you were there, I would have been sure to visit you). But there will surely be another opportunity to visit the UK at some future date. Today, I looked through all the notebooks that my daughter brought with her from China, but unfortunately the one in which I wrote about my trip to Zaozhuang in Shandong in 1984 was not among them, so I can only recount briefly and from memory what happened. A group of Party members and progressive intellectuals (all young people) decided to go south of the pass to find the Party organisation. In 1941, some two dozen young men and women slipped through the Japanese blockade and reached the anti-Japanese base in Shandong. I learned the truth about what happened to two couples [among these people]. They arrived to work in the area now known as Dezhou, where the secretary of the local Party committee at the time was Guan Feng (the Guan of “Wang Guan Qi” group in the Cultural Revolution).9 These young people were suspected by the local cadres because of their unusual attire and behaviour, and because they interspersed their speech with foreign words. The two couples were isolated and interrogated, but nothing was found to be out of place, so they were released and resumed their work (I remember that the women worked for the Women’s Union). At this point, the Japanese attacked the area and the Communists were forced onto the retreat. The retreat took place mainly at night, and often passed through enemy-held territory or close to Japanese watch-towers. This posed a problem: what if the two couples resented the interrogation to which they had been subjected and started shouting or otherwise exposing the fugitives to enemy sentries? There was no other option than to eliminate them. The two men were shot and the two women were bur9 Guan Feng (1919–2005) joined the Central Cultural Revolution Group in the early stage of the Cultural Revolution. “Wang Guan Qi” refers to Guan Feng, Wang Li, and Qi Benyu, three key members of the Group. All three were removed from the Group after the Wuhan Incident of 20 July 1967, which triggered massive violent conflicts.

correspondence between chinese intellectuals and fanxi

1057

ied alive. One couple’s two young children (a boy and a girl) were also thrown into the pit to be buried alive with their mother, but onlookers and grassroots cadres intervened to drag them free. The girl was adopted by a young woman. The boy was later sent to Tianjin and adopted by an intellectual named Wang, a Party sympathiser who for years had been infiltrating intellectuals into the [Communist] base areas (he was the one who sent the Harbin intellectuals to Shandong). When the boy grew up, his adoptive father told him about the death of his parents, and he was determined to find out the truth. During the Cultural Revolution, he campaigned long and hard in many places to find witnesses, and in 1984 he was finally able to secure the approval of the ccp to rehabilitate his parents and have their ashes interred in a ceremony in Zaozhuang (in fact there were no ashes, just two empty boxes). Several relatives from his mother’s side and comrades from his parents’ underground days in Harbin came to Zaozhuang to attend the ceremony. I had attended a reading group on the periphery of the underground run by the Party in 1939, but I was too young (fourteen) to have known his parents. Even so, I was invited. All but one of the two dozen or so people who slipped through into the base that year were killed (the exception was a non-Party activist of my acquaintance, Wang, who had come to Harbin from Hebei and was engaged in progressive political activities – he falsely claimed to have diarrhoea during the march and interrogation, and was able to escape). Even more tragic was the Xiamen underground incident, as you already know: on the eve of Liberation in 1949, the provincial committee of the Fujian underground received a secret report that a large number of Trotskyists had infiltrated the Xiamen underground. But how could they be investigated in enemy-occupied areas? So it was decided on the pretext of “concentration of forces” to transfer hundreds of underground members and university students to the mountains outside Xiamen, where they were executed en masse, just days before the Liberation of Xiamen. (This is mere hearsay and may not be true, but there is more than one source, so it probably is true.) I think in your memoirs you wrote about another big “purge of Trotskyists” in the early 1950s.10 I was working at the China Youth Daily in Beijing when, in March 1951, a young editor sitting opposite me, Ding Fo’en, was suddenly arrested (without the arrest being made public) on the grounds that he had joined a Trotskyist organisation in Anhui. A few years later, he was found not to have been a Trotskyist and was released, but he was unable to get work in Beijing and was sent to Xinjiang, where he continued his career.

10

Probably a reference to the mass arrests of Trotskyists in December 1952.

1058

trans. benton

According to Dai Qing, Wang Shiwei’s wife and son are still alive, and a decision was made in 1987 to rehabilitate Wang. From what I hear, someone is already collecting information about the history of the Chinese Trotskyists, especially the Chinese “purge of the Trotskyists”. I have heard that 500,000 people were killed in the “Trotskyist purges” in Shandong alone, I don’t know if that makes sense. I have read only a few excerpts from [your] Mao Zedong Thought. It is very rare to have had such profound insights more than 40 years ago. I will have to read and study it carefully. I have not yet received the book in Hong Kong, but I would like to express my gratitude to you in advance! I hope you will cherish your health and bestow on the Chinese people as much spiritual wealth as possible! Binyan 26 February 1990

(b)

Letters between Gao Fang11 and Wang

Dear Mr Wang, I have taken the liberty of writing to you out of the blue, please forgive me. I graduated from Fuzhou’s Sino-British Middle School, a well-known church school, in 1946, and then went to Shanghai and managed to get a place at Peking University. Since 1950, I have been teaching the history of the international communist movement at Renmin [People’s] University in Beijing. I was long influenced by Soviet Stalinism and therefore viewed the Trotskyists as heretics, but since the 1980s my views have changed greatly as a result of wider reading. I have bought and read the memoirs of Shuang Shan [Wang Fanxi’s pen-name] and of Zheng Chaolin, which have both come out in China. In the course of the last six months, during a visit to my children and grandchildren in the United States, I borrowed from a friend a copy of [the Trotskyist magazine] Pioneer, published by Xinmiao Press in Hong Kong, and I have been in contact with Mr Lin Zhiliang [Lam Chi Leung].12 I have also bought a number of Trotsky’s books published by Xinmiao, as well as the revised edition of Shuang Shan’s mem-

11 12

Gao Fang (1925–2018), was a well-known Marxist theorist at Renmin University in Beijing. Lin was a Hong Kong Trotskyist, a member of the Pioneer Group.

correspondence between chinese intellectuals and fanxi

1059

oirs, your Mao Zedong Thought and Sino-Soviet Relations, and Lies and Truth.13 I have benefited greatly from reading them. Your review of Tang Baolin’s History of Chinese Trotskyism was particularly useful for clarifying historical facts that have been misrepresented for many years.14 Given my fifty years of experience teaching and researching, in my later years I would like to write an outline of the history of world communism that would rehabilitate the Trotskyists and give a proper account of their position and role in the world communist movement. I hope to receive your guidance and assistance in this regard. I still lack some of your publications, including On the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and your book on Mao Zedong Thought,15 for which I will resume my search, since I doubt whether you have copies to hand. It is still very difficult in China today to completely negate the Cultural Revolution and make an accurate assessment of Mao Zedong Thought. The “leftist” poison has not yet been removed. In this regard, your writings are vitally important. The year before last, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto, I heard that a new edition of it had been published in Britain, with a long preface written by a famous historian. I have not seen this book in any of the bookstores I visited in the United States. If convenient, could you ask someone to buy me a copy and send it directly to my home in Beijing? I will repay the cost. I enclose a name card with my permanent address and telephone number. I will be back in Beijing by the middle of next month. Yours sincerely, A Communist salute! Gao Fang 27 September 2000, in New York State, USA

… 13

14 15

The first two are available in English translation. Lies and Truth is a critical study, published in Hong Kong, of Peng Shuzhi’s exaggerated and often untruthful claims about his own role in the Chinese Revolution. See Benton 2015, 1149–1161. Mao Zedong Thought and Sino-Soviet Relations, mentioned above, consisted of several chapters excerpted from Wang’s wider study Mao Zedong Thought, not included in the English translation of that book.

1060

trans. benton

Mr Gao Fang, I was very excited to receive your letter from the United States six months ago. I wanted to write back immediately, but I was unable to do so because my heart condition had suddenly worsened and for a while I was on the brink of death. Recently, my condition has improved, but I am too old (I am now 94) and all my bodily functions have deteriorated. I have stopped reading and writing. I had a number of questions that I wanted to ask you, but I guess we must leave them to one side. At the start of last month, I asked someone to send you a copy of my memoirs, I hope you receive it soon. Yesterday, however, I re-read your letter and learned that you already have this book. I am going to write to my friends in Hong Kong within the next few days to ask if they can find a copy of Mao Zedong Thought for you. If so, I will have it sent to you. I would very much like to hear your criticisms. In your letter to my friends in Hong Kong, you mentioned the debate I had with Mr Tang Baolin a few years ago about his book History of Chinese Trotskyism, and I am grateful to you for your praise. But the fact that I differ from Mr Tang in certain regards does not detract from my respect for him. His views on the Trotskyists are getting closer to the truth, especially since the release of various secret Soviet documents. For this development, I have asked friends in China to convey my joy and respect to Mr Tang. There is much more I would like to say, but my head is spinning and my hands are shaking, so I must stop. Sincerely Wang Fanxi 7 May 2001

section b Interviews

∵

Introduction to Part 4, Section B These interviews with veteran Trotskyists and ex-Trotskyists mostly regard Trotskyist activities in Hong Kong in the post-war era.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_087

Interview with Hu Luoqing, 3 June 2011 Conducted by Louisa Wei, translated by Yang Yang

This interview was conducted by Louisa Wei (lw), a professor at the City University of Hong Kong, with Hu Luoqing (hl), a veteran female Trotskyist who joined Socialist Youth League in 1949 and was imprisoned in 1952. The interview provides details of Hu’s own suffering in prison and out of prison as well as vivid memories of her second husband, Xie Shan, a Trotskyist poet, and of other prominent Trotskyists, such as Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin.

lw Can you recall the arrest of Xie Shan,1 Wang Fanxi, and others in Hong Kong, i.e., the “mailbox incident”? hl I remember it probably happened in mid-September 1949. Four mailboxes (rented for receiving letters and documents from the Fourth International [fi]) were discovered by the British-Hong Kong secret police (the Special Branch). The same day, before sunrise, four people were taken into custody, including Xie Shan and Yao Quanyuan.2 By that time, Xie Shan had got a job working for the New Asia Bank, while Yao had joined the Jinyuan Bank. One of those renting the mailbox was Li Tengjiao,3 a business person. He was neither a Trotskyist nor a sympathiser. However, his younger brother was a Trotskyist. So through his brother, Yao asked him to help receive official documents of the Fourth International, using his mailbox. That morning the police seized three mailboxes and arrested those involved. Among those arrested were Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua. They were living together with Xie Shan in a dormitory provided by Xie’s bank.4 Under interrogation, Lou Guohua was the first to “confess”. He said: “One of the boxes is mine, but those documents don’t belong to me”. After thinking for 1 The poet Xie Shan was jailed in 1952. He engaged in poetic exchanges with Zheng Chaolin, some of which feature in Benton and Feng (eds) 2019. 2 Yao Quanyuan worked at the Jinyuan Bank. He was not a Trotskyist but a good friend of the Trotskyist Lou Guohua. See Hu 2009, p. 35. 3 Li Tengjiao was a businessman. His younger brother Li Lide was a Trotskyist. After this “mailbox incident”, Li Lide left the Trotskyist group. 4 According to Hu, before his arrest, Wang Fanxi had been living together not with Xie Shan but with Lou Guohua and Yao Quanyuan, in a dormitory provided by Yao’s bank. Se Hu 2009, p. 35.

© Conducted by Louisa Wei, transl. by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_0

interview with hu luoqing, 3 june 2011

lw hl

lw hl

lw hl

1065

a while, Wang Fanxi, who was unemployed at the time, decided to take full responsibility. He told the police that all the documents belonged to him and had nothing to do with anyone else. In the end, the police let Lou go but deported Yao, Xie, and Wang to Macao. Lou was lucky and dodged the bullet. As a matter of fact, Lou was the actual recipient of the fi documents. Yao was a really nice person. He was not in the least resentful. He later recalled as follows: “The Hong Kong government was really ruthless. We were found guilty of a crime just for receiving a few letters from the outside world”. He later returned to the mainland and got a job managing a cinema in Guangzhou. How long were Xie Shan and the others kept in prison? A few months. They were not released until late November. Wang Fanxi had a photo taken of himself on which he wrote the exact date of his deportation to Macao, 21 November, while Xie Shan was deported a day later. Xie only stayed in Macao for a while and then went back to the mainland. So how and when did you find out about Xie Shan? I first met Xie in prison. I didn’t know him before that. However, I had heard about him. When he was detained in Hong Kong, a foreign agent interrogated Wang Fanxi, Lou Guohua, Yao Quanyuan, and Xie Shan. During the interrogation, Xie spoke English to the agent. He said, “You people always talk about democracy. Why are we criminalised simply for receiving letters from abroad?” The foreigner smiled. Without a word, he smashed Xie to the floor, sending his glasses flying. At the time, Xie was not actually a member of the Trotskyist organisation, merely a sympathiser. He’d rented the mailbox to help out a Trotskyist leader. Was that Peng Shuzhi? Yes. Xie showed a lot of interest in Peng’s lectures when he was in Shanghai. Later, when Peng Shuzhi moved briefly to Hong Kong, Peng asked Xie to receive letters on Peng’s behalf. Xie did not have a mailbox at the time, so he rented one for Peng’s correspondence. [Under interrogation], he said the rented mailbox was not for his personal use but for Peng’s. However, he took full responsibility for it. His action touched the hearts of those who got to know of it, including Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua. [This story of his bravery] spread quickly among the Hong Kong Trotskyists, and it later came to our ears in Guangzhou. [That’s how] I go to hear about Xie Shan. Later, we were [arrested and] gathered together in a Guangzhou prison, after which we were transferred to Wuhan. I was among the first [Trotsky-

1066

wei, trans. yang

ist] prisoners sent to Wuhan. Luo Liping and her husband [Li Yongjue]5 were in the second group. [In Wuhan], Luo and I were locked up in the same cell. When I met her, she began talking about the other [Trotskyist prisoners]. For example, she told me Xie Shan’s Hong Kong story, much of which I had heard about before. Luo had lived in Hong Kong for a while and was acquainted with Xie Shan. In 1956, the [ccp] government organised a study tour for us. At the time, the Trotskyist prisoners [in Wuhan] were kept together. There were more than twenty of us, four female prisoners and about twenty men. Once on the tour bus, Luo Liping pointed to a tall, thin man and told me him Xie Shan. I didn’t know him at the time. According to government regulations, the prisoners were not allowed to talk, so we just smiled at each other. In 1957, I was released from prison. The others who had been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment were also released. So I went back to Guangzhou. Then Luo brought Xie Shan, Chen Jingguang,6 and others to visit me. That was the first time I spoke to Xie Shan. I was unable to find a job in Guangzhou, and at the same time I had to attend a study group run by the police station. The cadres from the Police Department came to my home quite often, asking about my current situation and disturbing my life. So I concluded that since I was living in constant fear in Guangzhou, perhaps to the detriment of Xie Shan and others, it would better if I went elsewhere to seek a living. Later, Through Li Suyi’s7 personal connections, I went back to Wuhan and got a job as a garment worker in a clothing co-operative where Li was working. When going to Wuhan, I had left one of my daughters and my mother at home, but I was anxious about them. Xie Shan was extremely considerate. He always visited my family. Luo Liping moved to Shanghai for a job, while her husband Li Yongjue remained in jail, on a 15-year sentence. So Xie frequently visited their two daughters too. Xie felt that it 5 Luo Liping and Li Yongjue, a couple, were both Trotskyists. They were accused of engaging in “counterrevolutionary activities” and sentenced to 5 and 15 years’ imprisonment respectively. Luo was released in early 1957 and died in 1988. Li was not released from labour reform until 1983. In Li’s later years, he became one of Zheng Chaolin’s key assistants in Shanghai. 6 Chen Jingguang was a Trotskyist and poet from Guangdong. As a poet, he wrote under the name Lantian. He had been taught by Peng Shuzhi at university and it was under Peng’s influence that he became a Trotskyist. He was arrested during the 1952 roundup of Trotskyists and sentenced to 5 years in prison. He died in 1985 at the age of 64. 7 According to Hu, Li Suyi was one of her fellow Trotskyist prisoners in Wuhan. Nothing else is known about her.

interview with hu luoqing, 3 june 2011

lw hl

lw hl

1067

was his duty to help his fellow prisoners and their families. He was always polite and kind to everyone. My daughter was implicated as a result of her connection to me, as one of those executed, imprisoned, or put under surveillance. So she suffered discrimination. She was smart and had good grades, but she was not allowed to attend school. Xie Shan came up with the idea that she should attend a private primary school. She enrolled in a private school at around the age of 8 or 9. Then, all the private schools were nationalised, so she ended up studying at a public school. When anything happened at home, Xie helped my daughter get a letter to me. When she fell behind with her studies, Xie acted as her personal tutor, and helped her to make headway. In 1972, when I was in my forties, Xie Shan and I remarried. How did you join the Trotskyist organisation? I was born in a Guangdong village in 1929. My family was quite conservative and practically illiterate. My father had only three years’ schooling. His family was living in poverty, so he started work at the age of 11. My elder brother worked in a Shunde silk factory. He was illiterate. They did not allow me to go to school in Guangzhou. In 1938, the Japanese aggressors occupied Guangzhou and we were forced to return the countryside. I had studied intermittently, in the course of several years. After witnessing the poverty and backwardness in the countryside, I was determined to make my own way. In 1949, I was introduced by a classmate to the Hai League [a progressive student organisation], and I became a member soon thereafter.8 What was it alike? I knew nothing about politics. I was introduced by a classmate to this Hai League. I was told that there was a reading club where League member could discuss social problems and women’s problems. At one point there was a discussion on the dual oppression suffered by Chinese women at the hands of society and the family. I joined in enthusiastically. At the time, the Kuomintang was extremely corrupt, while the people were suffering from the devaluation of the currency and general inflation. So I was not at all sympathetic towards the Kuomintang. But where was China going? [In the Hai League,] I realised that only socialism could save China. So I later became a member of the [Trotskyist] Socialist Youth League. I didn’t know at the time – I only found out about it later. I joined the Social-

8 The Hai (Sea) League was founded by Jiang Junyang, a Trotskyist from Guangxi, at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University.

1068

lw hl lw hl lw hl lw hl lw hl

lw hl

wei, trans. yang

ist Youth League in 1949. Because of my involvement, I was arrested on 22 December 1952. The Socialist Youth League was a Trotskyist group and Hai League was one of its front organisations. Did you know that it was a Trotskyist group when you joined? No. I just thought that China should follow a socialist path. That was the reason I joined the Socialist Youth League. It was spontaneous. Were all the members of the Hai League arrested? Or people from the Socialist Youth League? Not all of them. But many were caught for participating in Trotskyist activities. A few Trotskyist sympathisers were also caught. Did all this happen in Guangzhou in 1952? Yes, in Guangzhou. How many people were arrested? Just over 200 people disappeared into prison around the country, not many in Guangzhou.9 Two is quite a lot. Some people who had left the organisation earlier were also arrested, but some had not been in touch with the Trotskyists for decades. So this roundup did not only aim at the Trotskyists who were still politically active [but also at their potential sympathisers]. The roundup of the Trotskyists was deliberately planned. Our cases had been under investigation for a year. Who was responsible for the roundup? The Public Security Bureau? Yes, the Public Security Bureau. The roundup was a direct instruction from the central government, not local authorities. The roundup was a unified action organised from above. It was over within just one day – 22 December 1952, the winter solstice. Later, under the direct leadership of a task force assigned by the central government, arrangements were made for our prisoners to receive visits and undergo study. All our “confessions” were taken away [and sent to the central archives]. Whether we should be released or further detained was decided by the central government. Local authorities had no say in it. If we Trotskyists wanted to make a complaint or suggest something, our message would be directly delivered to the central government, not to local authorities. Everything [concerning the Trotskyist prisoners] was under direct control from above.

9 However, according to Zheng Chaolin, up to 1,000 Trotskyists and their sympathisers were arrested during the 22 December roundup. See Benton 1996, p. 39.

interview with hu luoqing, 3 june 2011

1069

lw When were you convicted? hl On 25 March 1954, after being held for more than a year in the Guangzhou detention centre. I was sentenced by a Military Tribunal, organised by the Guangzhou Military Commission, to ten years’ in prison. On 27 March, I was taken from Guangzhou by train, but I was not told where I was going. After a journey of more than thirty hours, the train finally arrived in Wuhan in Hubei Province. At first, we Trotskyist prisoners were assembled in Hubei. Then four female prisoners were allocated to a garment factory, while the [male-prisoners] were sent to a brick-and-tile factory, except for one who was sent to a printshop. We were all subjected to “re-education by labour”. In the garment factory, our female prisoners made pla military uniforms for soldiers, and sometimes we made clothing for cadres. lw What were the charges? hl Counter-revolution, as a Trotskyist. I didn’t exactly gather the specific charges against me, but what I heard that I was accused of being “an active participant in the Trotskyite-bandit organisation”. There was nothing about my “involvement in ‘stealing state economic intelligence’” or “collusion with imperialism”. The judges simply said that the Trotskyists were a bunch of counterrevolutionaries. They emphasised that if you were not among the “revolutionary masses”, you were by definition a “counterrevolutionary”. lw So you were in your early twenties when you were gaoled. How long were you in prison? hl More than four years. I was released in March 1957. In 1957, a small group [of Trotskyists] was released, but no one else was freed. There was a young man called Xiao.10 He was initially sentenced to seven years while in his twenties, and then spent the next thirty years in gaol and was eventually freed in 1983. In 1957, the four female prisoners, Luo Liping (sentenced to five years), Li Suyi (twelve years), me (ten years), and another (eight years) were all released at about the same time. Only one of the male Trotskyists received an early release. The rest merely got their sentences reduced, at best.11 lw How was your family situation after your release. What about your exhusband?

10 11

Xiao was probably Xiao Jingfang. Before the roundup, he was a university student. The released male prisoner was perhaps Xie Shan, sentenced to five years and released in Wuhan in March 1957.

1070

wei, trans. yang

hl He was teaching in a secondary school. He had been my leader in the Trotskyist youth league. In 1952, he was arrested at the school and later sentenced to life imprisonment. I haven’t seen him since. lw So you have never seen him at all? Do you know if he is still alive? hl I do know something about him, because I remained in touch with his mother. On one occasion, we were allowed to visit him in prison. His mother and his little sister were present, and so was I. He and I divorced in 1958, but his mother didn’t know that. So when I was freed I sent his mother some money as we had done before, and I didn’t tell her know about the divorce. During the prison visit, an official was also present. I don’t know if he was the director [of the detention centre], but he probably knew me, since I had been imprisoned there for some time. The official told me not to see each other again now that we were divorced. Then he took my ex-husband’s mother and sister inside for a visit, but not me. So I never saw him ever again. lw How did you make a living after your release in 1957? hl I was ill when my release was announced. I was so sick that I couldn’t walk unaided. So I stayed in prison for a while and then returned to Guangzhou around mid-April 1957. However, the Guangzhou government did not assign me a job and it was difficult for me to get one on my own. Since my family circumstances were poor, I had to get a job. So I went to the police station and ask for a job allocation, but they said that the authorities had told them not to assign me a job for the time being, which meant that I shouldn’t count on it. Unable to get a job, I was under enormous stress. In the end, I went back to Wuhan and got a job in a clothing cooperative with Li Suyi’s help. lw Can you tell us something about the friendship between Xie Shan and Wang Fanxi after the 1949 mailbox incident? hl After their deportation to Macao, they lived in the same place for a few months. They became close friends and liked to chat about things, past and present. Xie Shan was deeply influenced by Wang. After his release [from prison in China in 1957], under a restrictive order, Xie did not write much to Wang. Later, [after Zheng Chaolin’s release in 1979,] Xie was able to write letters to Zheng Chaolin. Their letters originally arrived within a week, but later they had to be censored and took more than ten more days to arrive. So Xie gave up his weekly correspondence with Zheng and did not even dare to write to Wang [by then in the UK]. The only way he could reach Wang was to pass on a few messages via Zheng. [After Xie Shan’s death,] I began to write to Wang, sinceI had nothing to fear. Not via Zheng but directly, if I had anything to discuss or to ask him about. Back

interview with hu luoqing, 3 june 2011

lw hl

lw hl

12 13 14

1071

then, Zheng’s health was quite poor. His calligraphy looked like a mess of tadpoles, so few people were able to read it. [So] there was no point in me bothering him further. What impressed you most about Wang Fanxi in what you heard from Xie? What impressed me most was his headaches and vertigo. He had had these physical problems for ages. I knew that he had been arrested and imprisoned several times under the Kuomintang, and had suffered serious torture during his imprisonment. So I guessed that his illness was the result of being given electric shocks. He wasn’t even aware of the consequences at the time, because he was young and thought that it didn’t matter. However, as he got older, the symptoms worsened. Zheng Chaolin was unable to extend his fingers as a result of electric shocks, so his fingers were deformed. I suppose Wang’s headaches were also symptoms of electrocution. How did you contact Wang Fanxi? I never met him in person. We just exchanged correspondence. After Xie Shan died, I was depressed, so I wrote a short biography of Xie Shan, about 10,000 words, to kill time. Then I showed it to some friends. I got positive responses. They told me it was very well written and they suggested that I write some more. I took their suggestion and added more than 100,000 words.12 But I knew little [about Xie Shan as a Trotskyist and his Trotskyist friends], so I asked others. Later, I got into touch with Wang Fanxi via Zheng Chaolin. The main reason I needed to reach Wang was because before Xie Shan’s death, a few friends had gone to England to visit Wang. At that time, they had talked about Xie Shan’s classical poems. They all thought that Xie was a good poet and recommended that his poems be published. Wang told this to Zheng. Zheng agreed, and he asked Xie to edit his own poems so that he [Zheng] could recommend them to a publisher. By that time, Zheng had got his own poetry (Yuyin canji) published,13 but he always though Xie’s poems were better and that they deserved to be published. Later, Xie Shan started to edit his own poems himself. As soon as his editing was done, he sent the compilation out. Eventually, his poetry was brought out in Hong Kong with the assistance of Wang Fanxi and his Hong Kong friends.14 Xie Shan was ill when he started his editing, but he said Hu’s biography of Xie Shan was published in Hong Kong in 2009. See Hu 2009. Zheng Chaolin’s Yuyin canji was published in the mainland China in 1989. It has been translated into English by Gregor Benton. See Benton and Feng (eds) 2019. Xie Shan’s poetry was finally brought out in Hong Kong in 1996, under the title Kukou shi-

1072

lw hl lw hl

15 16 17

wei, trans. yang

that he would only see the doctor once the job was done. He was hospitalised the day after he delivered his compilation and he died a couple of days later. By the time the proofs were out, he was gone. So I began to exchange letters with Wang Fanxi, regarding typos and problems in Xie’s poetry, while at the same time asking questions about Xie Shan’s past. Xie admired Wang and regarded him as his mentor and friend. Wang wrote me a long letter recalling Xie Shan’s past. After that, we kept in touch for a very long time. However, Wang always felt exhausted, and the headaches and dizziness troubled him constantly. In meantime, he had to look after his own affairs. He wrote his own letters and posted them, and if he received a letter, he felt compelled to reply. So I felt uneasy about writing to him after I got to know about his personal situation. Since he was his own carer,15 writing to him would simply burden him even more. Did you ever meet Zheng Chaolin in person? Yes, a few times. I was present for his last birthday [in 1998]. He passed away at the end of that year.16 What was your impression of Zheng? He was a superb person. He was brilliant and had an excellent memory. [For example,] regarding the site of the 7 August meeting in 1927,17 in Wuhan he went straight to the place where they had assembled and explained what happened. Wang Fanxi, on the contrary, had a less reliable memory, perhaps because of his headaches and vertigo.

cicao (Poems from a bitter mouth). See Xie 1996. In fact, Dora Benton cared for him in his later years. Actually, Zheng died on 1 August 1998. The 7 August meeting was an emergency meeting of the ccp convened in Wuhan in 1927. At it, a decision was taken to replace Chen Duxiu with Qu Qiubai as the Party’s General Secretary. Zheng Chaolin was present at this meeting, and a unique eye-witness of it.

Interview with John Shum, 8 June 2011 Conducted by Louisa Wei, translated by Yang Yang

John Shum Kin-fun (“Johnny”, born 1952) is a well-known Hong Kong actor and film producer. In the 1970s, along with Ng Chung-yin (Wu Zhongxian) and other young radicals in Hong Kong, he took part in local Trotskyist activities and became a key organiser in the movement. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, he tired of the fights within Trotskyist circles and devoted himself to the film industry. This interview, conducted by Louisa Wei (LW), describes Shum’s ( JS) experience as a Trotskyist.

lw How did you first get in touch with Peng Shuzhi? js I did a lot of research on the Communist movement in China in the years 1924–1927, from the start of the Kuomintang-ccp collaboration to its collapse. In 1972, in Paris, I got an opportunity to visit Peng Shuzhi and his wife Chen Bilan, both of whom were elderly. At the time, we read a lot, but the most important book was Harold Isaacs’s Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution.1 The other things we read said that Trotsky was right and Stalin was wrong. So we were naturally attracted to Trotsky’s position. We also read Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution and his other theoretical writings, but that’s another story. From a research point of view, when I was doing my study on the 1924–1927 Chinese Revolution, I was very lucky to be able to consult Peng about that period of history. I spent many hours in his home discussing the history of the Chinese Revolution in the 1920s. He had been at the centre of the ccp and a member of the Party’s Central Committee, so his knowledge was extensive. Talking with such a senior insider of the revolution, we were mere students, undergoing history lessons. lw So were you and Ng Chung-yin studying in France at the time or were you doing something else there? js It was more likely a “study tour” than actual studying abroad in. We wanted to gain political experience from our foreign comrades. Why France? Because, as you know, the 1968 student movement that happened there was quite romantic, we went there to absorb theories of revolution and to gain the experience of the student movement. 1 See Isaacs, 2010.

© Conducted by Louisa Wei, transl. by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_0

1074

wei, trans. yang

lw Had you and Ng participated in the Hong Kong student movement before going to France. js We participated in the Chinese-language movement around 1970 and 1971, a student movement that aimed to force the Hong Kong Government to recognise Chinese as an official language under the colonial system. Then we devoted ourselves to the Baodiao Movement (i.e., Defend the Diaoyu Islands movement).2 From then on, we began to study widely on various theoretical problems. We jointly published a magazine, 70’s Biweekly. I remember we published a Trotskyist article in the 70’s Biweekly that I discovered years later was written by Wang Fanxi. Apart from Wang, there was another younger Trotskyist who also contributed to our magazine. This “young” Trotskyist, Xiang Qing, was in fact not young at all. He was in his fifties at the time, having joined the Chinese Trotskyists in the 1940s. The Trotskyists approached with their articles. When we read the theoretical articles they had written, we were impressed. It did not occur to us that such articles could have been written by some “old men”. Wang Fanxi was then in his sixties. I discussed with Ng how to respond to these Trotskyist articles. In those days, we were ideologically inclined towards anarchism, but we were critical of capitalism, so we also studied Marxism, anarchism, and the Second International. Those Trotskyist articles were theoretically important. How did we reply? Our theoretical knowledge was too shallow to launch a debate with the Trotskyists. So what to do? Everyone had his or her own political attitude towards the ccp. Our position towards the ccp was “one divides into two”,3 i.e., we all along opposed the Kuomintang’s rightist theories and viewed the Chiang Kai-shek clique as wrong and corrupt. So what about China? Our conclusion was that China was authoritarian. As anarchists, we simply opposed everything. When we made an intensive study of the history of the ccp, ranging from the Three-antis and the Five-antis,4 the Anti-Rightist Movement,5 “Three

2 The Baodiao Movement was a social movement launched by Chinese students in the United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the early 1970s asserting China’s sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands, after the US government had agreed to return the islands to Japan in 1970. 3 “One divides into two” is a Maoist philosophical term linking Marx’s dialectical materialism to threads in ancient Chinese philosophy. 4 The Three-antis (1951) and the Five-antis (1952) were political movements carried out by the ccp aimed at eliminating corruption and “enemies of the state”. 5 The Anti-Rightist Movement (1957–1959) was a political campaign to purge the dissidents within the ccp launched by the party hierarchy. According to Song Yongyi and other scholars, it resulted in the political persecution of up to two million people (Song Yongyi, et. al., 2010).

interview with john shum, 8 june 2011

1075

Red Flags”,6 to the three years of famine (1959–1961) and the Cultural Revolution and looked more deeply at Marxist theory, i.e., the theoretical contributions to socialism and communism made by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong, we soon concluded that the ccp regime was an authoritarian dictatorship. Although it was progressive in some respects, we realised that it lacked the element of socialist democracy. How could that be, given that socialism is a more progressive economic system than capitalism? Was it because of the influence of feudalism or because China had not undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution? In Mao’s socialist theory, there was a stage of New Democracy, but China jumped over it in one bound. Should we agree or disagree with the ccp’s implementation of the “People’s Communes”? That was a big problem for those of us then in our twenties. Marxism was the most insightful among the various ways of thinking available, so it was important to look at the big problems from a Marxist angle. In the meantime, we were also strongly influenced by the New Left, which considered that Marxism lacked a focus on the human factor, on psychological factors. Our thinking was quite chaotic. So among those “hundred flowers”,7 we started our own research. The good thing about living in Hong Kong was that in the 1960s and the 1970s, we had the chance to the entire spectrum of political and ideological tendencies prevalent at the time across the globe. We also held discussions with disillusioned Red Guards who had escaped from the mainland during and after the Cultural Revolution and were aware of what was going on there. We also studied a wide range of documents from the Cultural Revolution, for example, the ccp’s 16 May Circular (1966),8 which was issued as a way of kick-starting the Cultural Revolution, Shengwulian’s Whither China? (1968),9 and so on. Some other important articles sent in for publication in 70’s Biweekly were drafted by the Trotskyists, later revealed to be Wang Fanxi and Xiang Qing. We did not know much

6 The “Three Red Flags” (1960–1964) was a generalised term covering the period of the Great Leap Forward: “the General Line of Socialist Construction”, “the Great Leap Forward”, and “the People’s Communes”. 7 “Hundred flowers” refers to a variety of ideological currents that influenced Shum and his comrades at the time. 8 Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/​ documents/cpc/cc_gpcr.htm. 9 “Whither China?” was first published in English in Hong Kong’s Survey of the China Mainland Press no. 4190, pp. 1–18, published in Hong Kong by the American Consulate General. See also Benton and Hunter (eds) 1995, pp. 124–134.

1076

wei, trans. yang

about Trotskyism until Ng Chung-yin and I visited and consulted Peng Shuzhi in Paris in 1972. From Peng, we learned about the theoretical basis of Trotskyism. From then on, we started to study the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, regarding the Stalin-Trotsky dispute and the one-party dictatorship (should inner-party factions be allowed or not?). Then we turned to problems regarding China, and made an intensive study of the various political campaigns launched by the ccp in the years following the establishment of the prc. These included the CounterCounterrevolutionary Movement that began in 1952, the Three-antis and the Five-antis, and the political persecution of the so-called “Hu Feng Counterrevolutionary Clique” (1955),10 which we found problematic. We also studied Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yenan [Yan’an] Forum on Literature and Art (1942), in which Mao said that the literature and art must serve the revolution.11 Trotsky opposed this view. To discover Trotsky’s views on these matters, we read his Literature and Revolution. This showed Mao’s view on literature to be wrong. In 1972, Ng and I stayed in Paris for nearly eight months. We met almost every week. Sometimes, we went to Peng’s home twice a week, where Peng discussed various important theoretical issues. lw Was Peng a political refugee in France? What was his situation? js Yes, he was a political refugee. His daughter later became a well-known Sinologist in France. We never asked him how he got to France, that was unimportant. Later, when we returned to Hong Kong, Ng and I joined Peng’s Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp). In France, we discovered that some Trotskyist veterans had remained in Hong Kong. We asked Peng if he knew who wrote the Trotskyist articles submitted to 70’s Biweekly. He guessed that it might have been Wang Fanxi. However, Peng and Wang were hostile to one another and had been quarrelling over many issues for decades. We decided to ignore their arguments. After returning to Hong Kong, I paid a special visit to Wang Fanxi in Macao. I can’t remember exactly when he resettled in Macao, it was probably in 1950 [actually it was 1949] after he was arrested by the British police in Hong Kong and deported. In 1973, I met Wang for the first time in Macao. Before my visit, we already knew of each other. The Trotskyists had not recruited any new members for decades until Ng and I joined, as their youngest members. Because of our participation in the Hong Kong student movement, I was 10 11

For further details on the political persecution of Hu Feng and his friends under the Maoist regime, see Mei 2013. See Mao 1965, vol. 3, pp. 69–98.

interview with john shum, 8 june 2011

1077

quite well-known. When I visited Wang, I also met with another veteran Trotskyist, Xiang Qing, who had also been exiled to Macao. Xiang was more than ten years younger than Wang. He had joined the party in the 1940s. We discovered that one of Wang’s pen names was Lian’gen, so we called him Uncle Gen (Genshu). Both Wang and Xiang hoped that we would be able to re-organise Trotskyist activities in Hong Kong. They placed all their hopes on us youngsters. I was a good organiser and I attracted many young people to our side. Around September 1974, I left Hong Kong. I left because I was disgusted with some groups and their members in the Hong Kong Trotskyist movement. Owing to difference of opinions, even their personal friendships collapsed. Within the movement, some could not tolerate dissenting views. My own character is quite moderate, and I was not meant to be a political person. So I left politics and went to England. Because of my departure, Genshu and quite a few others were upset. Then, in 1975, Genshu too came to England, after Gregor Benton, a British scholar teaching in the Chinese Department at the University of Leeds, had sponsored him with the help of contacts among his academic colleagues and British Trotskyists. Gregor helped Genshu get a study in the university library in Leeds, where he settled. In fact, he was an accomplished scholar. He wrote beautiful Chinese and his English was excellent, as was his Russian. He could also read in French and Japanese. He and Zheng Chaolin co-translated Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. Genshu translated directly from the Russian, while Chaolin used both the Russian and German versions. One day I found him reading a Japanese newspaper. I was amazed. “How come you so good at learning foreign languages?”, I asked. He responded, “I am nowhere near good enough. Chaolin can read and speak eight languages”. Among their generation of Chinese scholars were many of great learning. Before leaving the UK in 1978, I visited Genshu frequently, as I did every time I subsequently returned to England. lw So by that time, you introduced Leung Yiu-chung [Liang Yaozhong]12 to Genshu. Did you also have a hand in publishing a magazine called Fuxing (“Re-awakening”) at around that time in the UK? js I got to know dozens of British Chinese youngsters and made friends with them. I founded a study group and organises around twenty of them to take part in its activities. The goal of the study group was not to recruit

12

Leung Yiu-chung (1953–) is a former pan-democracy member of the Legislative Council in Hong Kong (1995–1997, 1998–2020).

1078

wei, trans. yang

them into a Trotskyist organisation but to introduce them different theoretical currents as well as modern Chinese history. My view remained Marxist. So I taught them history from a Leninist-Trotskyist standpoint. But they were so young that they understood nothing. There was no point in lecturing them in any depth. So my main job was to get them to participate in social activities and help bring about social change rather than recruit them for the purposes of revolution. I deliberately avoided organising a Bolshevik group as I had already begun to question Lenin’s idea of a revolutionary vanguard party. As for Ng Chung-yin, he was organising on behalf of the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml) in Hong Kong. He was trying to develop the Trotskyist forces in Hong Kong. In the UK, I published a few Chinese journal, including Huaren gongyou (“Chinese Worker”), which we distributed in the local Chinese community. The idea was to unite all the workers and gradually make them aware of their rights. But I had left the Trotskyist party. My aim was no longer to develop a revolutionary organisation. lw How did you leave the party? Did you have to inform someone that you wanted to leave or did you just leave without telling anyone? js No, I didn’t have to tell anyone. My position in the rml was rather “special”. I was the shilipai, the “man who has real power”. No one in the organisation had anything against me, nor could they, since I was never aggressive and would hurt no one. In any case, in their view, I had become politically inactive. Even so, I still recruited a few Chinese youngsters in the UK and we built a small “Re-awakening” group. When they returned to Hong Kong, some of them joined the rml. lw How many people were in the rml at its peak? js I’m not sure, perhaps a few dozen. I never asked them about the organisation. When I returned to Hong Kong in 1978, Ng again approached me and asked me to attend rml meetings. I asked him in what capacity. He said I didn’t need to join the party role, I could simply be an observer. As I said earlier, I’m a moderate and mild-mannered person. I therefore agreed and attended several rml meetings. I was also invited to attend their standing committee meetings. But I felt it was not right for an observer to make suggestions and table motions. It was ridiculous! It was typical Chinese “particularism”. I often used to laugh at them, saying: “You have organisational principle, so how come I’m sitting at your party meetings?” It was absurd. I had no party role, and I neither helped them nor worked together with them to develop the party organisation. Nevertheless, several key young members of the rml standing committee were indeed influenced by me. Subsequently, I did just one more thing for them. In 1979, when the

interview with john shum, 8 june 2011

lw js lw js

lw js js

lw js

13

14

15 16

1079

Sino-Vietnamese war broke out, they decided to publish a special issue on the war. Ng asked me to edit the special issue, which I did. I’m particularly curious about the activities of the rml in Hong Kong. Was it an open political organisation? Yes, it was. Did it have a party programme? It had everything. The rml was a proper political party that identified with the programme of the Fourth International. Since I left the party, I can’t say whether or not it was officially recognised by the Fourth International as its Chinese section.13 However, at the time, the rcp was the Chinese section of the Fourth International in Hong Kong.14 So you didn’t approve of them splitting into lots of factions? They wasted nearly 90 per cent of their time fighting each other. In 1980 or 1981, I can’t recall the exact date, Ng Chung-yin was arrested in mainland China.15 He then pretended to capitulate to the ccp. After his release and his return from the mainland, he came to see me and told me everything, “I was arrested in China and I capitulated to them. They showed me materials profiling all our Hong Kong comrades, including you. The Chinese officials know everything. I told them that there were things I knew and things that I was unaware of. Anyway, since they knew what I’d been up to, I had no choice but to accept it. They even asked me to help them, and I agreed. Finally they let me go”. After talking to me, Ng continued to attend Trotskyist meetings. Ng’s act had violated the discipline of the Trotskyist organisation. From the point of view of their organisation, he was a traitor, so he was expelled from the Trotskyist organisation. Why was Ng arrested? He went to the mainland to work for the Trotskyists. Perhaps he tried to recruit Wang Xizhe,16 and others on the mainland. I don’t exactly

The rml was officially recognised by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International as one of its Chinese sections after the unification of the rml and the other three small Trotskyist groups (the Internationalist Workers Party, the Unity Faction of the rcp, and the Re-awakening Group) in 1978. The rcp had, since its founding in 1948, been the official section of the Fourth International and was never de-recognised. Starting in 1978, there were therefore two official Chinese sections of the Fourth International in Hong Kong (the other being the rml), until the disbandment of the rml in the early 1990s. Ng was arrested in Tianjin on 28 March 1981. Wang Xizhe (1948–) is a prominent activist of the Chinese democracy movement. He was arrested in 1981 and sentenced in 1982 to fourteen years in prison for organising “counter-

1080

wei, trans. yang

know what sort of work he did, but I’m sure that it was some sort of contact work. lw Was he arrested by the Public Security Bureau or the National Security Bureau? js The National Security Bureau. lw The Trotskyists said Ng was a traitor. So did he confess about other activists or did he say that the Security Bureau people knew everything anyway? js You don’t know Ng Chung-yin, he’s a very smart person. If he wanted to fool you, you would never know. Why? Because although 80 per cent of what he said was true, the most important 20 per cent was false. Genshu thought that from the party’s point of view, if you are arrested, you should not capitulate to your enemies, even if the enemy know everything about you – even them you should not capitulate. But I ask myself, how come we had the right to decide the direction of Ng’s life? If he were in jail, who would take responsibility for feeding his three children? Genshu had his own position. Genshu had been physically and mentally tortured in the Kuomintang’s prisons. Prison life left its mark on him. His hands would tremble when he picked up a pair of chopsticks. So I always respected his opinions. However, I could not pick a side and say who was right and who was wrong. Ng was my old friend and I respected his decision too. Could someone like me survive under the ccp’s system? So I got out of politics.

revolutionary activities”. He co-authored “On Socialist Democracy and the Legal System” during the Cultural Revolution and later wrote “Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution” during the first wave of the Chinese Democracy Movement (1978–1981). These two documents are translated in Benton and Hunter 1995, pp. 134–145 and 157–175.

Interview with Xiang Qing, 17 August 2014, regarding the Hong Kong Trotskyists Conducted and translated by Yang Yang

This interview with Xiang Qing, a veteran Trotskyist leader, describes the Trotskyist movement in Hong Kong and its internal debates in the 1950s and the 1970s.1

yy How did you join the Trotskyists? xq I joined the Trotskyists officially in 1947, after arriving in Hong Kong. In the same year, I had graduated from Guangxi University. I enrolled in the National Southwestern Associated University2 in 1939, but I ran away and only returned in 1946. By that time, the university had been disbanded, and since I was on leave of absence and still had a degree, I was allocated to Tsinghua [University]. However, I transferred instead to Guangxi University. It was around the end of 1946 or the beginning of 1947 that I wrote a letter to the Trotskyist majority,3 which at the time was publishing Youth and Women, later renamed New Voice. I was not sure whether there was an official organisation in Guangxi in 1947, all I knew was that there were still Trotskyists. So they wrote to an assistant professor at Guangxi University and asked him to come to see me. That’s how I became officially connected to the Trotskyists. I knew that the Chinese Trotskyists were always more concentrated in Shanghai and Hong Kong, so I said I would go to Shanghai as soon as I graduated, but the first step was to go to Hong Kong, which was easier to reach. That’s how I got in touch with the Trotskyists. Passing through Guangzhou in mid journey, I met two comrades, who gave me the address of the Hong Kong Trotskyists. The two Guangzhou comrades were Liu Pingmei and Jiang Junyang. 1 Xiang Qing (1922–2022) was a lifelong Chinese Trotskyist leader who witnessed the rise and fall of the Trotskyist movement in mainland China and Hong Kong. 2 National Southwestern Associated University was a university formed and operated by Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Nankai University in Yunnan during China’s Resistance War against Japan (1937–45). 3 In 1942, the Trotskyist Communist League of China split into two factions – the Majority led by Peng Shuzhi and the Minority organised by Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi. The Trotskyist majority here refers to Peng’s faction, later renamed the Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp).

© Conducted and translated by Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_090

1082

yang

I joined the Party no later than the end of September 1947. After arriving in Hong Kong, I spent almost my entire life in the Trotskyist organisation. I lived with some comrades. Seven years later, on 8 December 1954, the Special Branch of the Hong Kong Police arrested me. A strike movement was brewing in Hong Kong at the time, starting with a tram workers’ strike. The Communist-led trade union, Hong Kong and Kowloon Federation of Trade Unions, was making a lot of noise but was slow to take concrete action. In my own estimation, the Hong Kong government were worried, since most of the previous big struggles in Hong Kong had been led by the Chinese Communist Party (ccp). Each time, they would arrest one or two leaders of the struggle and deport them, but this was not very effective, given the existence of various behind-the-scenes organisations. They didn’t want to fight the open leaders, they wanted to arrest the people behind the scenes. As a result, they found me. I had a very special lifestyle. I lived in a wooden shack with very little furniture, with some big bags and lots of books. Soon after reaching Hong Kong, I got married. My wife went to work every day to teach. I had no specific job and spent a lot of time at home. The Special Branch was scouting round for clues and spotted me as a suspicious person. I learned afterwards that they had been following me for quite a time. They ransacked the house and found a lot of documents, from which they soon realised that I was not a communist but a Trotskyist. So I guessed that they were actually trying to catch the ccp leaders but arrested me by accident. However, they were keen to crack down on the Trotskyists as well. They dithered for a couple of months after arresting me on December 8, and finally they deported me to Macao on 19 February 1955. In 1949, Wang Fanxi and part of the majority faction were deported by the British Hong Kong government, mostly to Macao. I lived in Macao for a number of years. It was not until late 1959 that an old comrade introduced me to Wang Fanxi, but after that he and I were in regular contact and very close. By 1968, Hong Kong and Macao were heavily affected by China’s Cultural Revolution. There was a major anti-Portuguese revolt in Macao and major incidents in Hong Kong. As a result of this change in circumstances, both Wang Fanxi and I felt that although Macao was still nominally under Portuguese rule, the ccp was in fact in full control. After the mass movement, the Macao government fully accepted the ccp’s demands. First of all, it expelled all public Kuomintang representatives and cracked down on rightist groups. Flying the Kuomintang flag was banned. So we feared for our safety in Macao. If the ccp wanted us, they could come and arrest us at any time. We needed to get back to Hong

interview with xiang qing, 17 august 2014

1083

Kong, where the British Hong Kong government was less ready to fall in completely with the ccp’s wishes. Wang Fanxi had more social connections. He was using a new name and had been able to visit to Hong Kong, without any problem. After that, I too started going to Hong Kong as a Macao resident. This continued until 1974, when because of new circumstances I decided that it was best not to go to Hong Kong for the time being. I stayed away until 1985, when the Sino-British negotiations were finalised. yy After the ccp’s victory, Peng Shuzhi argued that the Chinese Communists were petty bourgeois and had achieved victory through a peasant army and with Soviet Russian help. In the early 1950s, you wrote your own reflections on the victory of the Communist Party under the pen-name Maki (Maji). You argued that it was the beginning of the third revolution4 in China. What was the reaction to your opinion within the Hong Kong organisation? xq The fact that the Communist Party was able to achieve a complete victory so quickly in 1949 was completely unexpected. This fact was acknowledged within the Chinese Trotskyist movement. But some said that the ccp itself had not estimated in advance that it would be able to seize power so quickly. Such people didn’t think that our failure to reckon on a Communist victory was a particularly significant mistake. I disagreed. I thought that the victory of the ccp was tantamount to a major defeat for us Trotskyists, and in fact marked the beginning of the disintegration of our Trotskyist organisation. I stated my opinion in early 1951. At the time, the actual leaders of our Central Committee – Peng Shuzhi, Chen Bilan, and Liu Jialiang – had already gone overseas. In early 1950 they reached Saigon, where Liu died. Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan then went to France and stayed abroad. Not only were they not present when I put forward my new views but they found it hard to correspond with us. It took at least a year before Peng and Chen in Paris knew about my new views and the fact that they had caused much controversy within the Hong Kong organisation. My initial view was that we had been greatly shaken internally by the victory of the ccp, which was beyond our expectations. What should we do in the new situation? Our political programme needed to change, as did our political demands and slogans. So there was an immediate discussion in

4 The third revolution refers here to a revolution leading to genuine socialism from a Chinese Trotskyist perspective.

1084

yang

Hong Kong. Before Peng Shuzhi left Hong Kong, in January 1950, there had been an enlarged meeting of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp). Two days before they left, a political resolution was passed, drafted by Peng Shuzhi. I attended the enlarged meeting. All the Central Committee members in Hong Kong, plus some local leaders, amounted to around ten people. The meeting lasted only half a day and the resolution was passed quickly and without much discussion. Later on, I came round to thinking that both the resolution and Peng Shuzhi’s estimate of China’s evolution after the Communist victory were completely wrong. In early 1951, however, when I put forward my new opinion, the errors in the resolution were not so obvious. In the immediate aftermath of the ccp’s victory, especially in the newly liberated big cities where the mass movement against the Kuomintang had in the past been vibrant, there was much disillusionment among left-leaning youth and Communist intellectuals. This was because real reform had not yet begun, while the authoritarian and even corrupt nature of the Communist Party, especially in Guangzhou, was blatant. That’s why the Communist Party was called the “Even More Miserable Party”5 by people at the time, meaning that it was worse than what had gone before. But we Trotskyists, at least some of us, believed that although real reforms had not yet begun, the Communist Party would have to implement them sooner or later. Of course there would be no political democracy, but land reform, social improvements, and the whole apparatus of power and the whole structure of society would change radically and drastically. That would by no means amount to a dictatorship of the proletariat, but democratising reforms would definitely ensue. It was even possible that the ccp would abandon its two-stage theory of revolution,6 break with the bourgeoisie, and confiscate its property. But it was also possible that the ccp would become even more corrupt and rightist, as the resolution had intimated. Even so, my main estimate was that a shift to the left in the ccp was the greater possibility. I argued that the beginning of reform in the ccp would be the first stage in the evolution we’d been fighting for in the course of so many years.

5 A play on words, where “even more miserable” sounds a bit like “Communist” in Cantonese. 6 The two-stage theory of revolution, or stagism, later became a Stalinist formula applied to China. It argues that underdeveloped countries have first to pass through a stage of capitalism by way of a bourgeois revolution before moving to the next stage of socialism. This theory was opposed by Trotsky, who developed his own theory of permanent revolution.

interview with xiang qing, 17 august 2014

1085

We were already thinking about how to revise our programme. I was entrusted with the task of writing out views that had already been largely settled. But I felt that we could not just put forward a programme of work but needed to give a clear estimate of the current situation in China. If I were to attempt this myself, it would have to be my personal opinion, forit was not something that had already been discussed. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it was not a simple matter. I knew from the newspapers and the radio that partial reforms were already underway. I therefore wrote a new opinion arguing that our view of the situation had simply been wrong. The reforms being carried out by the ccp were an initial step in the third revolution, the beginning of permanent revolution. And it was very likely that a continuous development from democratic to proletarian revolution would be achieved at the hands of the ccp. So I wrote out my new view of the situation, while leaving out what had already been discussed and decided. The discussion had started right after Peng Shuzhi and the others’ departure. In the summer of 1950, I was commissioned to write a conclusion to the discussion. I thought I would be able to write it up in a few days at most, but the more I thought about it, the harder it became, so I kept putting it off, until the beginning of 1951. It was Chinese New Year. My wife had gone back to Guangzhou, for travel was still easy and controls were loose. I went to the home of Zhen Yu (i.e., Jiao Lifu).7 I often stayed at his house, where most of our meetings happened. Sometimes I stayed overnight. So that’s where I did my writing. It took about three days to finish. I left the document for everyone to read, and they all said that it had revised our view completely. But it wasn’t long before Zhen Yu and others basically came round to my side. When the party was founded in 1948, an official Central Committee had been elected, with seven full members and two alternates. By the end of 1948, the situation had changed and the Trotskyist Central Committee had moved to Hong Kong. Five of the seven members of the Central Committee formed the Political Bureau. They were four members of the older generation (Peng Shuzhi, Chen Bilan, Liu Jialiang, and Yin Kuan) and the Zhen Yu, a Cantonese. Only three members of the Political Committee went south from Shanghai in 1948. They did not include Yin Kuan, who argued very strongly with them before they left. At the time, the ccp’s mil-

7 Jiao Lifu (Ruan Jinzhao, ?–2004) was a Trotskyist organiser and an rcp leader in Hong Kong in the early 1950s. His party name was Zhen Yu.

1086

yang

itary victory was not yet complete, but Yin Kuan already felt that it would soon come about. He argued that we had not understood the situation earlier, and that we should now recognise it for what it was. We had kept on about fighting for a National Assembly,8 but all that was now out of date, and we should clearly support the ccp’s victory over the Kuomintang and even welcome the arrival in the cities of the People’s Liberation Army (pla). The other three adamantly opposed this viewpoint. So Yin Kuan fell out with them. The three who came to Hong Kong said at the extended meeting held before they left Hong Kong that Yin Kuan had abandoned his responsibilities as a member of the Central Committee by not moving to Hong Kong with the rest of leadership, so now they had no choice other than to find a replacement for him, Bu Ke. At the same time, it was decided to abolish the original Political Committee and to establish two permanent organs, the Central Committee and the Political Bureau, consisting of Peng, Liu, and Chen, plus an Organisational Bureau. The latter remained in Hong Kong and consisted of the three Central Committee members who had remained in Hong Kong, Zhen Yu, Dai Yan, and Bu Ke.9 However, the Hong Kong-based Organisational Bureau was not accessible to lower echelons of the Hong Kong organisation, only to bodies outside Hong Kong, which led it directly. The Organisational Bureau’s activities in Hong Kong were performed under the borrowed name of Guangdong Provincial Committee. This provincial committee consisted of Bu Ke, Dai Yan, and myself, appointed by the Enlarged Conference. So there were only four people in these two bodies. Some of the things done in Hong Kong in the name of the Provincial Committee were done by these three members, while others were done by the Organisational Bureau. This made things very complicated. When a new programme of action was discussed, a summary had to be written for the record, and I was entrusted with writing it, but actually it was decided by these four people. After I had written out my views, I showed them to the three people in the Organisational Bureau. They were shocked at first, but they quickly came round to accepting what I had written. However, the Organisational Bureau had no public face in Hong Kong, so this new opinion could not be published in its name. Nor could it be

8 “National Assembly” was a “feasible slogan” put forward by Trotsky himself in 1930 to be applied by the Chinese Trotskyists to mobilising the masses during the low-ebb of the Chinese Revolution. 9 The people named were all key figures in Hong Kong’s Trotskyist organisation in the early 1950s. All three were the members of the rcp’s central committee at the time.

interview with xiang qing, 17 august 2014

1087

published in the name of the Provincial Committee, as was the custom, since it was a discussion of the national situation. We therefore decided to use the name of a non-existent organisation – the Editorial Board of the Central Organ. The newly published opinions basically reflected my ideas, but not on every point. Everyone agreed that further nationalisations were highly likely. But what was the class nature of the ccp regime? It used to be pretty much accepted by the Trotskyists that the ccp had effectively been a peasant party since 1927 when it left the cities to wage a peasant war. Now it could no longer be described as a peasant party. For me, it was a centrist party built on the basis of the peasant class and the working class and representing the common interests of both these classes. Centrist means swinging between revolution and reform. But they disagreed with the name, arguing that the ccp was still a petty-bourgeois party, though it could not be said that its base was mainly peasant. Its mass base was, quantitatively speaking, gradually increasing its worker component. As a result, a discussion document was put forward in the name of the editorial board of the party newspaper. This document was unanimously agreed by the Organisational Bureau, and Peng Shuzhi and the others did not even know about it.10 There were some comrades in Hong Kong newly arrived from Shanghai, cadres who had moved to Hong Kong along with the Central Committee. They firmly opposed this discussion paper, saying that it went completely against the Chinese Trotskyist tradition. They even said that the person who had drafted it might be a spy and that it represented a total surrender to the ccp. They did not say so in their article, but this is what they really thought. After this, the organisation in Hong Kong split into two factions, according to their views on this discussion paper. So, the ideas I came up in early 1951 culminated in a heated debate among the Hong Kong Trotskyists. Some branches supported our new approach, others were controlled by people from Shanghai. This disagreement was also a regional battle within the Hong Kong branch. When Old Peng was on the point of leaving [Hong Kong], he divided the Hong Kong organisation into five districts, each with a district committee. Many of our Trotskyists had already fallen inactive, and the number of branches had shrunk. The main branches were in Shau Kei Wan and Tsuen Wan. District 1 was Shau Kei Wan; District 5 was Tsuen Wan. In

10

This document is also collected in this volume. See “The Third Chinese Revolution and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist Party” [in Part 1, Section B].

1088

yang

District 1, I was secretary of the district committee, while a group from Shanghai dominated District 5. The local cadres from District 1 supported me, while the cadres in District 5 from Shanghai sought to refute my views. They opposed my opinion from the very start: “You say that the victory of the ccp is the first stage of the third revolution in China, but the victory of the ccp is simply a victory in a peasant war and does not deserve to be called a revolution, much less the third revolution we have hoped for all these years”. So at the beginning the specific argument was over whether the ccp victory counted as a revolution, and what was a revolution. This argument went on for many months. Almost all the branches in the Shau Kei Wan area were on my side, while Tsuen Wan supported the position of the Shanghai veterans. The Hong Kong Local Committee, the leading body in Hong Kong at the time, proposed that the two sides should interact, with representatives of each attending the branch discussions of the opposing faction. In Shau Kei Wan, we did so immediately. Our opponents were allowed to go to any branch on our side to participate in the discussion. After the discussion, if they wanted to talk further with any particular individual, so be it. They mainly sent Qian Chuan as their representative.11 Our side sent Zhen Yu and me. However, they invariably refused to let us attend their branch meetings. They said that I might be a spy and that I was now thoroughly opposed to Marxism and Trotskyism. They didn’t even want to read what we wrote. Old Peng was not present at such meetings. Later on, when he resumed correspondence with us, he did not say directly which faction was right and which was wrong. He only said afterwards that neither faction knew much about the issue and neither knew that at the end of 1949 the International Executive Committee [of the Fourth International] had adopted a resolution on the victory of the ccp. The document had made it clear that the Fourth International considered the victory of the ccp to be a new revolution. When this document was translated into Chinese, several of their veterans were still in Hong Kong. Everyone had read it. But the actual document did not say explicitly that this third revolution in China had already succeeded. There was no such statement; it simply said that the victory of the ccp represented a fundamental transformation following the defeat of the 1927 revolution. It was the beginning of a move in the direction of a third revolution.

11

Qian Chuan was a veteran Trotskyist originally from Wenzhou.

interview with xiang qing, 17 august 2014

1089

Old Peng felt that the International had already documented this clearly, and his fellow old-timers shared this view. However, they were about to leave Hong Kong, and they failed to make their position clear to the young Trotskyists in the colony. So later on, there were unnecessary arguments within the organisation. Peng was simply thrashing around and hitting out indiscriminately at both sides, without coming to a specific judgment, in order to demonstrate his own forever correctness. He insisted that he had always been right and that the Hong Kong organisation was so naive that it did not even know how to read the document in question. The document regarding the resolution of the rcp’s Enlarged Conference drafted by Old Peng after the victory of the ccp clearly stated that the ccp had become a second Kuomintang and that the problem of China would not be solved until the Third World War. Because of these issues, the First and Fifth Districts remained very much at loggerheads. Several leaders, including Zhen Yu and Bu Ke, were so elevated that they were actually the Organisational Bureau, though ostensibly they were considered to be the Provincial Committee. However, the comrades in the two districts had little respect for them. Later, after my arrest and deportation to Macao, all the remaining branches and district committees in Shau Kei Wan came under the influence of Li See.12 After I left for Macao, Li See and many others from other district committees and branches in Shau Kei Wan crossed the water to see me. They all asked the same question: “Why were you arrested, could it be that [the Fifth District] informed on you?” I said no. “Although they were against me, they were not so much as to do such a thing”, I added. “Anyway, the British were arresting me as a Chinese Communist”. More importantly, the comrades in the First District felt that the Shanghai faction was out to expand its power base in Shau Kei Wan and wanted to take control of the Shau Kei Wan District Committee. The few remaining comrades on their district committee said, “If they really do that, we will split with them”. They came to see me and asked if that would be the right thing to do. I said, “Absolutely not, splitting now can only have a negative outcome”. That was the situation at the time. I was firmly against splitting the organisation. But after that, organisational activities came more or less to an end. By 1956, when the Polish and Hungarian incidents13 took place, we briefly resumed activity 12 13

Li See (1922–2006) was a Guangxi Trotskyist, a leading figure in the rcp. Li See was his party name. His real name was Liang Shijie. Uprisings against the Stalinist-puppet states and their Soviet-imposed policies in Hungary and Poland in 1956.

1090

yang

and wrote some articles, but after that the organisation basically ground to a halt. I was good friends with Zhen Yu, and we had been comrades before we became friends. After I left for Macao, he too soon fell inactive, and then he became a factory owner and asked me to help out in his factory, as a worker. By the 1960s, the organisation was not even minimally active. It was not until the 1970s that some young people came back from overseas to join the Trotskyists. This led to a revival of the rcp. yy Could you say more about the resurgence of the Trotskyists in Hong Kong in the 1970s? xq After the rise of this group of young people, which was centred on the anarchist-leaning 70s Biweekly group, some split off and became Trotskyists. These young people had returned from overseas in April 1973 and later set up the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml), a Trotskyist youth group, which won a number of adherents in Hong Kong. The first was Ng Chung-yin (Wu Zhongxian), who had been close to the Fourth International majority group while abroad and who, I believe, had been charged by it with returning to Hong Kong and developing the Fourth International. So he soon broke away from the rcp on a pretext and started leading the rml. Less than a year after his return, Shum Kin-fun also fell out with the leaders of the rcp, but he did not break away from the party and joined the rml only in a personal capacity. Shortly afterwards, they organised a “Four-Anti Movement”14 in Hong Kong, which caused quite a stir. However, the authorities cracked down on them. They forced Sham Kinfun into a highly precarious situation. After his release from prison, he was unable to find a job, apparently because of pressure from the government. He had some relatives in the police force, and was later told that as long as he was out to cause trouble, he would remain jobless. So he was forced to leave Hong Kong. After the “Four Antis”, he went overseas. Later, he gathered together a few people in Britain and started up the Fuxing (Re-awakening) group. He also joined the Hong Kong Trotskyists’ “Great Unity” group. “Great Unity” was an organisation centred on the rml. At the time, all the Trotskyists were united in one organisation, except for a very small number of the rcp’s most stubborn supporters. The newcomers to the Trotskyist movement starting in the 1970s had initially joined overseas and then returned to Hong Kong. On their return, most visited Macao to see 14

The “Four-Antis Movement” was a campaign against employment, price increases, poverty, and “suppression”, mainly organised by a small group of young Hong Kong Trotskyists in September 1974.

interview with xiang qing, 17 august 2014

1091

Wang Fanxi and me, especially a few who belonged to the rcp, including Ng Chung-yin, Shum Kin-fun, and Lee Wai-ming (Li Huai-ming). But Ng Chung-yin soon abandoned the rcp. Before Shum Kin-fun returned from overseas, Peng Shuzhi told him: “When you go back to Hong Kong, not only should you report to the Hong Kong Trotskyist organisation; you should also visit Xiang Qing in Macao”. So he came to see me within a few days of his return to Hong Kong. Wang Fanxi was still in Macao [before leaving for Leeds], and when all these young people came, they always met with me and Wang Fanxi. Mostly they came to my house, because it was bigger and therefore more convenient. Shum and I were the closest, both to each other and in our views. Soon afterwards, Shum fell out with Zhang Kai, the leader of the rcp. All the young “rebel” members of the rcp were close to me. In the end, when they decided to declare “great unity”, they first came to talk it over with me. In the 1970s, the young Trotskyists and the older generation of the rcp differed markedly: the young people believed that they should conduct open activities in Hong Kong, but the rcp insisted on the principle of secrecy, and still operates in secret even today. But they were known to everyone, so there was actually no secret whatsoever. When people visited them, they were always extremely wary and did not want to talk or meet with anyone. After unification, the Fourth International sensed a new atmosphere in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, this youth-centred “unity” was too shallow and soon split. There were two organisations within the united rml: one was the rml itself, at the party level, and the other was the Young Socialist Group, represented by Au Loong-yu. The split started with the relationship between the party and the group. Most of the Young Socialists were students, but their ideological levels varied greatly. Au and his youth group were more focused on theory, so they organised study sessions with students who were starting to get into politics. But the rml was less focused on theory. Their student background was even more evident, but they refused to focus on book learning and felt that this was a bad intellectual habit. Things came to a head when Au Loong-yu and his group approached some secondary school students who were about to graduate and organised study classes with them. They discussed youth issues, including social questions, how to study, love relationships, etc. They hadn’t yet directly discussed politics. However, some comrades directly attacked them. At a meeting to review the work of the rml, they were publicly accused of being a “small group” [i.e., a clique or faction]. As a result, things escalated.

1092

yang

Au and his group refused to back down and Au came to tell me what had happened. It seemed to me a very serious matter, and I feared a split. It was already obvious that attacking Au in this way was intentional. Moreover, when the meeting was about to be adjourned, it was officially announced that this was a matter for discussion inside the party and should not be disclosed more widely. This was bureaucracy of the worst kind. However, as soon as the meeting finished, Au told a female member of the Young Socialists. I suggested to Au that he acknowledge his “mistake”. In theory, the commitment to secrecy was wrong. In terms of discipline, the rml should not have made such a decision. However, now that it had been made, it should be observed. I told Au he should stay and argue with them, internally. But the “mistake” was in fact justifiable, for the original decision was itself unreasonable. As a result, the group split into two factions and the “rebel” elements were expelled. Some would say that this was sectarianism. In a Marxist revolutionary group, in strictly organisational terms, a “faction” is entirely legitimate, as a union of the politically like-minded. People who have different opinions within the party and who unite and speak and act as a group are a faction. The difference between a faction and a party is that a faction cannot go against the party’s officially adopted political and organisational decisions, and cannot come into conflict with it in terms of its actions. Within the party, however, members of a faction can raise objections, and they can do so collectively. Everyone has this right and each faction has the right to ask the organisation to communicate its views to other parts of the party. There should be complete freedom of expression and of the dissemination of opinions internally. yy Some people say that the Trotskyists are a party grouped around a journal, what do you think of this? xq Many people feel that this is a characteristic of Trotskyism, or even its greatest weakness, that the Trotskyists do nothing but churn out publications, all they do is talk. But this is not the case. Ever since the days of Marx and Engels, Marxists’ main tangible work has been to write and publish articles and views. This has always been a central part of their work. Of course there is much commentary in our publications. However, we should not only be commenting – we should also be pointing out what to do, and make our own specific demands and appeals. Often, however, due to objective conditions, we have little power on our own account, and even when we do turn out our publications, we have few outlets. Even when they are well received, we will not necessarily be in a position to print as many as we need. The ruling class and other

interview with xiang qing, 17 august 2014

1093

groups whose views differ from ours oppress and exclude us – principally, of course, the Stalinists and various forces close to them in different countries. On the one hand there was this external pressure. On the other hand, we have never really had a party of any size anywhere in the world. We once had a big party in Sri Lanka, but most members eventually abandoned Trotskyist positions. Orthodox Trotskyism has never grown into a large party. So all that Trotskyists can do is publish a journal. That is not to say that this is the extent of our ambition – it is simply all that we can do at the moment. If we can maintain a publication, a long and uninterrupted publication, rich in content, that’s great, but in fact Trotskyists have rarely been able to do that in any country. We have never been able to do so in Hong Kong. I think it is important to accept our tradition of publishing. At the same time, we acknowledge that even when our publication is at its best, its impact will be tiny. It’s not that we don’t have the right approach, it’s that we lack a conducive environment. It’s great to be able to publish regularly and to have something to say. In fact, however, we have never been able to do so to much effect, and instead of making progress in this area, we are now regressing and becoming even weaker. However, this is not the fault of our [political] approach. I personally feel that keeping October Review15 going ever since 1974 has been no easy matter. In the beginning, John Shum was the main force behind October Review, but he soon became inactive. The rcp then inherited the publication. They couldn’t publish it on schedule, but at least they managed to keep it going. In terms of content, however, it has always been the same old thing, never saying much new about Chinese issues. The old ways haven’t changed. So much is still unrealistic. For example, before the issue of Hong Kong’s return to China was raised, the journal often scolded the ccp for the incompleteness of its revolution, the fact that China, now that the ccp has been in power for so many years, still did not dare to take back Hong Kong and Macao, and the fact that since the 1960s and 1970s, the ccp and the colonial government of Hong Kong were increasingly compromising and co-operating with one another. When negotiations began, the journal focused on criticising the ccp, saying that it had been dragging its feet for too long, that in the past it had not even negotiated and now it was negotiating too slowly, it should have taken back Hong Kong and Macao much

15

October Review has served as the rcp’s organ ever since 1974.

1094

yang

earlier than it did, etc. However, they were unable to offer any specific advice on how to take back the territory. They did not consider the issue of how useful Hong Kong would be to China if the ccp simply took back the territory regardless of everything. As for the hearts and minds of Hong Kong people, would they embrace Hong Kong’s return to China? yy You and Wang Fanxi met in Macao in 1959. What was your relationship? xq Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua were Trotskyist veterans. We had a very close relationship. Because we were both in Macao, we grew very close to one another. As for Lou Guohua, he was in Hong Kong, so our contact with him was a bit less frequent. But after I got to know Wang Fanxi, nearly every time Lou Guohua came to visit him, he also met with me. I never discussed political issues with Wang Fanxi in a serious way.16 However, we chatted about politics all the time. Mostly we talked about the current situation, or criticised the ccp’s policies and practices. Mostly we agreed. There were no particular disparities or big differences of opinion, although it was clear from the articles written by each of us that there were some differences. We were just good friends. There were even some occasions on which it was obvious that I was criticising views that Wang Fanxi had put into writing. To give just one example: in 1974 the World Congress of the Fourth International was attended by its first ever representative from Hong Kong. The rcp had long been the official Chinese section of the Fourth International and was entitled to send a delegate. But this was the first time since the founding of the Chinese section (including the Hong Kong organisation) that it had sent a delegate to a meeting of the Fourth International. Previously, Peng Shuzhi had been in France and was unable to return to Hong Kong or the Chinese Mainland. When the International met, Peng naturally acted as a representative of the Chinese section, as leader of the rcp. However, he could not count as a delegate from China or Hong Kong. In 1974, the rcp sent an official delegate, Li See, to the Congress, but he knew no English, so John Shum also attended, as his interpreter. Beforehand, the rcp made various preparations. Wang Fanxi, Lou Guohua, and I knew about this. Wang Fanxi therefore wrote a brief statement of his views on the Third Revolution in China and the ccp’s rise to power, as well as a review of what the Chinese

16

Political issues here may be a reference to the internal politics of Chinese Trotskyists and the controversy regarding the 1942 organisational split, Xiang was affiliated to Peng’s rcp while Wang was a leader of the Minority.

interview with xiang qing, 17 august 2014

1095

Trotskyists themselves were up to at the time. Wang gave these materials to Li See. In them, he said that when the ccp was seizing power after 1927, we Chinese Trotskyists had failed to work in the countryside, and that we should have participated in the armed struggle in the countryside. Instead, we had insisted on staying in the big cities, alongside the workers. But given the reactionary circumstances, we were unable to do anything in the cities, and the number of workers we managed to win over was exceedingly small. It was impossible to talk politics with the workers, and even if you did, they wouldn’t accept you; or those who did agree with you turned out to be secret agents. So by insisting on being among the workers in the big cities, we were actually unable to achieve anything. Wang’s argument was that if we had been like the ccp and, rather than insisting on staying in the cities, had gone instead into the countryside, we might have developed more successfully, and it might have turned out easier to develop our forces in the smaller cities. Such was his opinion. He showed me what he had written. Lou Guohua also read it, and agreed with it. But I wrote a dissenting opinion. My comments were not formally directed against Wang. I was simply responding as a Chinese Trotskyist who was also reflecting on the causes of the victory of the ccp and reviewing which of the Trotskyists’ past practices had been right and which wrong. I argued that our failure to develop forces had been mainly determined by objective circumstances. But although we had failed to develop, we were not completely without achievements, and our people had never given up. We opposed what the ccp had done, for it had a strong mass base and the support of the Soviet Union and the Third International. Had its leaders been prepared to stay in the cities, they could have avoided staging risky urban uprisings and retreating of their own accord to the countryside and establishing Soviets in the most backward villages during a period of revolutionary ebb. It was ok to retreat to the countryside to carry out an agrarian revolution. But the ccp called its rural regime a Soviet republic at a time when it lacked an adequate base of urban support. As a result, the cities were voluntarily abandoned. Had that not happened, had the ccp not adopted the slogan of “overthrow the Kuomintang” for the time being but retained it as a long-term next step; had it instead made defensive demands and called for and partial reforms, it could have campaigned for a National [Constituent] Assembly of the sort that Trotsky was recommending. But instead the ccp, despite its relative strength, refused to countenance such a line and descended into adventurism. This line led inevitably to failure, and ten years later, in

1096

yang

1937, it was abandoned. But at what cost? If the leaders of the ccp had accepted Trotsky’s advice and insisted on a defensive, partial struggle in the cities, they could have successfully held out. Our failures were due to objective difficulties; theirs, to subjective errors. Wang Fanxi’s opinion lacked realism. He was arguing that if we had known earlier, we could have done the same thing, but if so, what would have been the point in being a Trotskyist? There would have been no difference between us and the ccp. He also said that while it was not easy to go down to the countryside, it was less difficult to enter the small towns. However, that was even more unrealistic. It’s easier in the countryside because the villages are remote and the bourgeoisie and the Kuomintang are less powerful. In the small towns, on the other hand, everyone knows what you’re up – how many people have been sacrificed as a result? So I simply made the point that the victory of the ccp did not mean that we should have abandoned the cities. What I wrote was entirely directed at Wang, but not explicitly so. Moreover, my statement was not openly published. I merely intended to let the Fourth International know that those Chinese Trotskyists who remained active were thinking about these issues, but from different angles and standpoints. Wang showed me what he had written, and I showed him what I had written. When he read it, he smiled and said gently, “Goodness, these views are directed not at Old Peng but at me”.17 I simply smiled and held my tongue. I think I can say that that was the only time we had a serious political contretemps.

17

Wang knew that Xiang had been a consistent critic of Peng ever since the rcp’s retreat to Hong Kong. However, it should have come as no surprise to Wang that Xiang opposed his views, for Xiang remained a member of the rcp. Wang could probably see no point at the time in pursuing arguments with Xiang.

Interview with Long Hair, 27 October 2015 Conducted by Yang Yang, translated by Gregor Benton Location: Hong Kong Legislative Council Members’ Offices

Long Hair (1956–) was a key member of the rml in the 1980s and is now a prominent leader of the League of Social Democrats, a left-wing and pan-democracy political party established in Hong Kong in 2006. His real name is Leung Kwokhung (Liang Guoxiong). He organised the April Fifth Group in 1988 and was twice elected to the Hong Kong Legislative Council (2004–2010, 2010–2017). He is currently in prison in Hong Kong, a prisoner of conscience. In this interview, Long Hair (LH) recalls the rise and fall of the Trotskyist group in Hong Kong, between 1975 and 1989, and his personal involvement.

yy

How did you come into contact with the Trotskyists, how did you join the Trotskyist organisation, and what kind of work did you do? lh I came into contact with the Trotskyists through a friend who introduced me to them through various study and reading classes, and I began interacting with the young Trotskyists. In the course of our exchanges and discussions, I gained a more comprehensive understanding of some of the theories, ideas, and history of the Trotskyists. In 1975 or 1976, I joined the Young Socialist Group [i.e., the ysg, which later unified with the rml in 1978]. At that time, the division of labour in the organisation was somewhat unclear and we did not have many members. Everyone had to do what they could, such as write articles, hold meetings, and go out onto the streets to campaign. This was good training for us. yy How many people were in Hong Kong’s Trotskyist organisation at that time? lh One hundred at the most. yy After you joined the Trotskyists, were there any attacks on your activities by the Maoists or any major crackdowns by Hong Kong’s colonial government? lh The “Gang of Four”1 had already fallen. This had a big impact on the ccp in Hong Kong. The “Gang of Four”, who were supposed to be Mao’s

1 The “Gang of Four” was a group of four radical Maoist leadersin the ccp leadership during

© Conducted by Yang Yang, translated by G. Benton, 2025 | doi:10.1163/978900470994

1098

yang, trans. benton

designated successors, were arrested and called “counterrevolutionary”. Originally, the leftists in Hong Kong were still criticising the Trotskyists in 1975–1976, and after the fall of the Gang of Four, they lost their ability to do so, for because they no longer had a base [in Chinese politics]. For a long time, they were unable to figure out what was revolutionary and what was counterrevolutionary. They didn’t even know whether they themselves were revolutionary or not. Since Deng Xiaoping’s comeback, the ccp had no longer been using the same language as in the past [during the Cultural Revolution] to explain the legitimacy of the regime. The Hong Kong government’s repression of us was limited, because not many people were involved in social and political movements in Hong Kong at the time. But I’m sure that they maintained surveillance over us and had infiltrated us. yy So let’s talk about your arrest by the Hong Kong Government in 1979. lh The genesis of that event can be traced back to 5 April 1979. On that day, the Revolutionary Marxist League (rml) organised a demonstration in Victoria Park to commemorate the third anniversary of the April Fifth Movement2 in Beijing, demanding from the ccp the release of political prisoners and democracy. We applied to the police for permission to demonstrate, which was granted. We marched to the Xinhua News Agency3 [Hong Kong branch] and protested, chanting slogans and sing outside the entrance. The police came over and said we were not allowed to stage a demonstration outside the Xinhua News Agency. They didn’t arrest us, they simply warned us. Because of the weather at the time – it was raining – not too many people attended the demonstration, so we

the Cultural Revolution. It included Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. 2 The April Fifth Movement was a spontaneous mass protest during the Cultural Revolution which took place in Beijing’s Tian’anmen Square on 5 April 1976. The initial aim of the protest was to commemorate Premier Zhou Enlai’s death on 8 January at the Chinese traditional Tomb-Sweeping Day. During the 5 April rally, people began to criticise the “Gang of Four” and the ccp. The protest was immediately suppressed and denounced as a “counterrevolutionary incident.” It was “rehabilitated” by the Party in 1978. 3 The Hong Kong Branch of the Xinhua News Agency was established in 1947 on behalf of the ccp. It was de facto an unofficial representative body of the People’s Republic of China in colonial Hong Kong. It took charge of informal contacts with the British government and the prc’s united front and covert activities in Hong Kong. It ceased to exist in 2000, when it divided into two local prc departments: the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the Xinhua News Agency Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Branch.

interview with long hair, 27 october 2015

1099

decided to hold another rally on 22 April. When we turned up with our application for a licence, they said no. We later complained at a press conference that the Hong Kong government was refusing to allow a demonstration because of pressure from the Chinese Communist government. We then announced that we would not comply with the Public Order Ordinance, a colonial ordinance of the British Hong Kong government according to which you had to apply to the police in advance if you wanted to hold a demonstration. So on 22 April, we were arrested just as we were gathering for the demonstration. In June of the same year, four of the seven arrested were sent to prison. yy At the gathering you shouted that “the British Hong Kong crackdown on the rml is a crackdown on social movements”. lh Here’s the background. After 1976, because of the fall of the “Gang of Four”, the ccp in Hong Kong was in an ideological crisis. Within the Hong Kong student movement, the more left-leaning members did not know how to act as Marxists; and the spontaneous mass movement frequently encountered a particular problem in the course of fighting for their demands, a problem that we too had encountered, i.e., that the colonial Public Order Ordinance, which governed public demonstrations and marches, affected almost everything you tried to do. Even handing out leaflets had to be registered with a department called the Home Affairs Department. Without its permission, you weren’t allowed to distribute them. In 1977–1978, there were some spontaneous and sporadic mass movements in which people who had been involved in political and social movements in the past participated. This could be said to represent a new beginning for social movements in Hong Kong in the period after the fall of the “Gang of Four”, but the British Hong Kong Government suppressed them. Even before our arrest [in 1979], other movements were suppressed by the colonial authorities. These included the Golden Jubilee Secondary School incident in 1978. Some pupils and teachers started raising questions about the management of the school, and the Education Department felt that they actual aim was to organise a student movement. In the process of struggling for the abolition the Golden Jubilee Secondary School, a mass movement of a sort was created, and it had a profound impact. It lasted until July [1978]. As a result, the Hong Kong government had to give in, and the school was divided into two parts [the Ng Yuk Secondary School and the St Teresa Secondary School]. Because of the social tensions, a spontaneous mass movement arose. The Hong Kong Government was the target of a major onslaught.

1100

yang, trans. benton

Then, in 1979, there was a protest by Yau Ma Tei boat people.4 The boat people went on a march, but before they reached their destination, the police arrested more than 100 people [76 according to news reports] on the bus [heading in the direction of the Governor’s residence], which led to another social mobilisation in support of those arrested. So a spontaneous mass movement had been created within the social movement in the years following the downfall of the “Gang of Four”. [Although] the Maoists among the political activists had largely ceased their activities, under social pressures of that sort, there was inevitably some resistance from the grassroots. In 1978, the then Governor of Hong Kong visited mainland China5 and asked what would happen to Hong Kong after 1997. The top brass was anxious to reassure investors. It seems to me that the suppression of social movements in Hong Kong at the time was actually related to this. By reassuring investors, the ccp was equally reassuring the Hong Kong Government. So the colonial government suppressed political forces that were unfavourable to the ruling class, especially us Trotskyists, for we were not only against the Hong Kong government but we were also against the ccp. So the crackdown was a small favour to the ccp. yy What about the internal situation of the rml, e.g., its main principles, the launch of its publication, and the subsequent split? lh The Trotskyists were a Marxist-Leninist organisation, so they practised democratic centralism. [I think] democratic centralism actually differs in nature from place to place and culture to culture. To put it simply, democratic centralism means in my opinion that party members have the maximum democratic rights to discuss issues and to elect people. Later on, I was basically responsible for the rml’s publication, Combat Bulletin. Each issue comprised around 1,000 copies, of which 300–400 were sold. The Daily Combat Bulletin was a leaflet distributed daily in a fixed number of places in workers’ districts. In 1978, some of the young people in the rcp unified These people formed a minority faction in the rcp. In September 1978, they left the rcp and

4 The Protest of Yau Ma Tei Boat People occurred on 7 January 1979. Under an official requirement to improve the housing conditions of boat people living in the Yau Ma Tei area, a group of boat people demanding that the colonial authorities meet their resettlement needs organised a march to the Hong Kong Governor’s residence on Hong Kong Island. However, they had not applied for a license for their demonstration, and were stopped on that pretext by the police. Of their number, 76 were arrested. 5 In fact, Governor MacLehose went to China in March 1979.

interview with long hair, 27 october 2015

1101

fused with the rml, leaving the rcp badly depleted. But the unification was rushed and there were differences of opinion in internal debates regarding views and tactics in the mass movement. There were also two factions within the Fourth International (fi) at the time – a minority led from North America [i.e., the Leninist-Trotskyist minority faction] and, in Europe, a majority tendency [i.e., the International Majority Tendency]. We spent a lot of time discussing the divisions in the fi, which was of course not to the advantage of those of us on the left. Certainly traditional Stalinism was hit hard by events of the time. After the Vietnam-Cambodia and China-Vietnam conflicts and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the whole of the left suffered greatly. In that climate, there were always differences within the organisation regarding the international situation and work in Hong Kong and on the Mainland. It was in such an atmosphere that we split [in December 1980]. Our minority faction left to form a Xinmiao group [now known as the Pioneer group]. Subjectively speaking, however, the young people in our organisation were relatively immature. We often talked about the experience of the Bolsheviks, but the oldest among us was about 40 and the youngest were in their 20s, so we didn’t have much to say about party building, we were merely plants in a warm house. But there was no disagreement among us about the nature of the ccp regime, because at that time the economic reform had not yet begun in China, so traditional Trotskyists still saw it as a deformed workers’ state. There were no disagreements about the workers’ state theory and state capitalism – such discussions did not come until after [the events in Tian’anmen Square in May–June] 1989. We spent a lot of energy translating the documents of both international factions – we wasted too much time on it. After the split, there were probably still a few dozen people in the rml, but some were no longer active. yy Could you tell us more about what the rml did to show solidarity with the labour and the student movements? lh Our strategy was simple: to be the vanguard of the masses. We barged into the mass movement to fight to become its vanguard, like the European Trotskyists. We were not only out there doing propaganda work, we were also involved in social movements, especially in radicalising young people, influencing the most capable and progressive elements among them. An approach pursued at the time at the suggestion of the Americans was that the Hong Kong Trotskyists should go as much as possible into the industrial areas to become workers.6 This was a crazy idea on the part of 6 usfi 1980, pp. 43–50.

1102

yang, trans. benton

the Americans. They said that a crisis of capitalism was on its way and they were eager to join the industrial workers in their revolt. Many people who had been teachers became factory workers. So regarding this, we had strong disagreements in our group. The fi’s policy of a “turn to industry” later became a main cause for our split [in 1980] [with some supporting and others opposing it]. yy Were there any examples of the Trotskyists successfully joining and organising social movements? lh No, there was too much suppression. The ccp spread the idea in the mass movement that the Trotskyists were troublemakers There were those who said we were ultra-left, others said we joined mass movements with ulterior motives. So mass movements were generally unwilling to accept Trotskyist participation. As soon as you raise the Trotskyist banner, they didn’t want to get involved. It was not easy for us to get involved. For example, in the Boat People’s protest (mentioned above), we went every day to support them and they were unable to exclude us. Later, after the ccp suppressed the Beijing Spring [in 1978–1979], people’s attitudes towards us changed a lot. Of course, the suppression of the democracy movement was in 1981. During the crackdown on the democracy movement on the Mainland in the two years between 1979 (when we launched a demonstration in Victoria Park to commemorate the third anniversary of the April Fifth Movement of 1976) and 1981, many intellectuals, students, and leftists from Hong Kong went to the Mainland to exchange views with pro-democracy activists there. Through these exchanges, we learned that the ccp had put us on the blacklist of pro-democracy activists. These developments weakened the taboo against the Trotskyists. Finally, in the wake of the Democracy Movement of 1989, centred on Tian’anmen Square, the taboo disappeared. Unfortunately, however, the Trotskyists no longer had a properly functioning organisation. yy So in what ways were the rml and the pro-democracy activists linked? What impact did the rml have on the pro-democracy movement? lh This mainly happened through Lau Shan-ching (Liu Shanqing). He was absorbed into the student movement (he joined the rml) and was a key figure in it. There were others too, including Ng Chung-yin (Wu Zhongxian). They ended up being arrested. Their arrest was a fatal blow to the Hong Kong Trotskyists. After all, although the Trotskyist movement in Hong Kong faced certain risks, compared to the movement on the Mainland, the political risk we faced was minimal compared to theirs. In fact, we discovered that there was no longer any leeway in which to work, as a result of the arrest of Ng and Lau, the ccp’s infiltration of the Trotskyist

interview with long hair, 27 october 2015

1103

organisations in Hong Kong, which seems to have been almost complete. So basically [our] work in China stopped. Some people walked away from the movement. Several of the leaders of the rml left Hong Kong. Hence, due to our lack of person-power, I had to pour my entire energy into the rml. I became a full-time activist. As for our influence on the Chinese Democracy Movement [in the early 1980s], we had some political impact and opened the eyes of some of them. yy In the 1980s, apart from supporting the pro-democracy movement on the Mainland, what other activities did the rml engage in? lh It was all grassroots work. After the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, our whole conversation revolved around the transition on the basis of this document, how to hold the ccp to its promises [of autonomy for the Hong Kong people], such was the case in 1987–1989. The rml collapsed completely during the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing. We set up a social movement, the April Fifth Action Group [to commemorate the April Fifth Movement of 1976 in Beijing], and we put all our energy into it. You could say that we disbanded our small vanguard [the rml] in terms of revolutionary activities but sought to turn our new group into another form of vanguard, in order to lead a new wave of local social and political movements [starting in the late 1980s]. There was no movement involving the rml for a very long time because of the disparity in class forces and the low level of mass awareness, for rml could not gain mass support on the basis of its past activities and had suffered an organisational split. It therefore became passive in the 1980s. If there is a movement but you don’t engage in it, you are doomed – this is the lesson of Russia in 1905. In 1990 or 1991, I proposed the dissolution of the rml. What was the point of calling ourselves a revolutionary vanguard party if we were incapable of carrying out the job of a revolutionary vanguard party? We wrote to the fi and relinquished our status as a section, since we were no longer qualified as such. We focused our whole activity on the issue of our April Fifth Action Group. Everyone from the original rml took part. At the same time, each of us had a job, I was working the night shift as a bus driver, we no longer had the time or energy to be Trotskyists. Let me give you an example. In May 1989, I was one of the leaders of the April Fifth Action Group and, at the same time, of the rml, and both organisations had to put out leaflets, but that proved beyond us. So the rml died a natural death in the end. yy You have lived through the storm for so many years and seen the rise and fall of the rml. What is the significance of the Trotskyists?

1104

yang, trans. benton

lh If you are a leftist, the things that were going on in Mainland China were a big problem, and quite contrary to what Marx said. You have to find another way from. Some people have abandoned Marxism, some haven’t. The Trotskyists are just one group among the latter. The Chinese Trotskyists are unique: they sprang from the blood of the Revolution of 1925–1927. I have had a lot to do with the old Trotskyists. We received letters from Uncle Gen [Wang Fanxi] and we also had dealings with Lou Zichun [Lou Guohua]. Many of us could not understand Lou, since he spoke (Mandarin with a heavy Ningbo accent), but I could understand him. Wang and Lou were a big influence on me spiritually and morally. I have a lot of respect for them and for their personality and spirit. They are people who have given their lives to our beliefs, and to Marxism. Whether I disagree with them or not, their contribution and charisma cannot be denied. As for the Hong Kong Trotskyists, we have not done very much, except for playing our part in the social movement. We may have failed in advocating Trotskyist ideas, but on the whole, we still managed to put forward a lateral point of view in the social movement and to challenge the ruling class. Unfortunately, we were not able to defend our point of view in the era in which Marxism encountered a great challenge [in the 1970s and the 1980s]. We are insignificant compared to those Trotskyists and other Marxists who in their time gave their lives in the course of defending their beliefs.

part 5 Epilogue: Revolutionary Socialist Writings in China and the Diaspora in the 2020s

∵

Introduction Au Loong-yu

The Chinese Trotskyist movement is now nearly one hundred years old. Although it disappeared in Mainland China after the ccp arrested all of its members in 1952, it survived in Hong Kong for another seventy years. The rise of a new generation of social activists in the early 1970s enabled the latter to recruit new blood to their ageing membership. This coincided with the beginning of the economic take-off of “free-market” Hong Kong. Due to the economic setting, combined with the colonial government’s political repression and socialism’s loss of credibility, the Hong Kong Trotskyists never had a chance to develop into an influential movement, despite being active in the social movement. They were already lucky enough to be able to conduct political activity openly. Hong Kong played a role like that of Shanghai in its days as an “international concession” – on top of being a practical colony of the foreign powers, it also provided a small space for opponents of the Kuomintang regime. However, after the 2019 Hong Kong revolt, Beijing abruptly ended the city’s autonomous status. The time when Hong Kong was the last place in China to house all kinds of political dissent is now gone. The political survival of the handful of leftists there now hangs in the balance. Hong Kong’s tragedy coincides with China’s “lockdown” during the three Covid years. However, Beijing’s “lockdown” has been quite different from that in other parts of the world. People were literally “locked up” in their homes, buildings, and neighbourhoods to comply with the authorities’ “zero covid” strategy, without regard for whether the neighborhoods concerned had enough supplies or for whether their illnesses were properly treated. On top of this, the regime imposed forced Covid-testing and forced quarantine in places that were not safe from infection. The great early twentieth-century Chinese writer Lu Xun once called China an “iron house” under reactionary rule, where those inside might soon suffocate. Today, China is a 2.0 version of the same “iron house”. On 8 August 2022, the ccp announced that its Twentieth Congress would be held on 16 October. Many people were deeply disappointed by the news – they had not wanted Xi Jinping to get a third term. Then a sudden incident – a single spark to start a prairie fire – threw the party’s plans into disarray. On 13 October a man called Peng Zaizhou hung banners from the Sitong Bridge in Beijing demanding the end of zero Covid, freedom, and, last but not least, the removal of Xi Jinping, who was preparing the party’s Twentieth Congress at the time. No one would have believed that his lone act could have any consequence other

© Au Loong-yu, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_092

1108

au

than his arrest. What we did not know at the time of his arrest was that five weeks later, the anger of workers at Zhengzhou Foxconn (the largest supplier of the Apple’s iPhone) was also set to explode. Zhengzhou was having a Covid outbreak and new restrictions were being imposed. These were further tightened after two weeks to the point that workers, most of them migrants, were forced to clash with the security guards in order to be able to flee the plant and go back to their hometowns or villages. This was followed by fighting with the police. Similar open resistance to the “lockdown” broke out in many cities but was not reported in the official media. A fire in Ürümchi on 24 November, which killed 10 people because of the “lock-up”, further escalated the protests, which spread to more than 20 cities and more than 200 universities. The protests, sometimes violent, forced the local authorities to retreat. On 7 December the National Health Commission announced “ten measures” to ease the restrictions, and soon the lockdown was lifted. The resistance, known as the “A4 movement” (because many protesters simply held up a blank piece of paper, an act copied from the Russian protesters who wanted to expose of police repression) was the first time since the crackdown on China’s 1989 democratic movement that massive protests had forced the party state to retreat. The party state had spent decades depoliticising the public by instilling fear about anything related to politics, especially protests. It wanted to turn people into “economic animals” who have no rights, except to work hard and make money. Yet in just two weeks the ccp’s “lock-up” politicised the public to the extent that thousands protested for “freedom”. The whole saga and the people’s victory has helped to discredit Xi Jinping and his gangs and strengthen the position of those officials who disagreed with him. Above all, however, it strengthened the confidence of the people – as citizens, not slaves. On top of this, the “A4 movement” awakened a new generation. The protests subsided when the authorities seemed to back down, Chinese students and citizens are beginning to ask embarrassing questions about politics. Not just the Foxconn workers but students were to the fore in two week-long protests. Chinese students in New York and London staged protests in solidarity with Peng Zaizhou on the 29 October, before the national wave of protests began in China. After the Ürümchi fire they held protests at 328 universities all over the world, even after the domestic protests had subsided. On 10 December, they protested against Foxconn’s biggest client Apple in New York, Seattle, London, and Sydney. The freer environment at most universities outside China enabled politicised students to continue political discussions without fear of arrest. The “A4 movement” is the first light at the end of a long tunnel, for it awakened the generation born at the turn of the century. Perhaps a new page in Chinese history has been turned. Small numbers of Chinese and

introduction

1109

ethnic-Chinese Trotskyists have been working with other leftists in China or the diaspora from the very start. The five articles included in this chapter reflect the ongoing discussion and the work that is being done. They all stress the importance of workers’ struggles in this broad resistance. Soon after Peng’s one-person protest, Au Loong-Yu commented in his Oneman show disrupted by a nobody that Xi’s victory symbolises the fact that ccp is now entirely in the hands of a reactionary clique – the “second red generation”, offspring of party veterans – and its cronies. It is no accident that the congress passed a resolution on the party constitution that called on the party to “pass-down its red genes”. This represents a further consolidation of the trend for “red generations” to become a hereditary aristocracy, in need of an emperor without a crown. Yet this victory of the party’s pre-modern political culture, embodied in Xi, is the “best recipe for making big mistakes”. Regarding the pandemic, the national lockdown was “meant to buy time for the invention and mass production of an effective vaccine, and to earn the trust of the public” – two endeavours in which Xi failed miserably. Managing a modern society without causing unnecessary pain and imposing sacrifices is much more difficult to achieve than the party’s strategy of simply imposing controls, but this is something of which Xi has shown himself to be wholly ignorant. He and his “second red generation” continue to see themselves as omniscient and infallible. Precisely because of this, China is now entering a very dangerous period. Ruo Yan’s Courage at Sitong Bridge fully acknowledges the limitations of Peng Zaizhou’s liberal programme. However, Ruo Yan stresses that Peng’s key demands “are a crucial step that must be amplified by the Left in the short term: to oppose Xi’s attempt to rule beyond term limits through the mobilisation of a popular mass movement. Only mass mobilisation of civil society can open up the space to build an independent socialist mass opposition, which centers on bridging the minimum demands adequately raised by Peng and the maximum demand of building genuine institutions of socialist democracy against authoritarian capital”. Ruo Yan praises Peng for having recognised that “the struggles of workers during the pandemic and the need for their voices to be heard in pushing for a more democratic system of representation” and socialists could “further build on Peng’s document to directly introduce demands that centre on broadening workers’ independent power, such as calling for the right to form independent unions and other organs of dual power, which presses against the limits of liberal constitutionalism”. Just as Ruo Yan’s article was first published, in late October 2022, the Zhengzhou Foxconn workers had begun fleeing the area, which was plagued with Covid. At the time of his arrest, loose network of Trotskyists worked with other leftists among the Chinese diaspora and local organisations to launch protests

1110

au

online and on the streets against Apple and to express their solidarity with Zhengzhou’s Foxconn workers.1 The Lausan article published in this chapter, based on an earlier statement posted on a Hong Kong leftist website, listed a series of demands that were mainly immediate in character, guided by a popular democratic aspiration. Yet its last demand concerning the right to strike and calling for workers self-organisation was simultaneously a tribute to the role of Foxconn workers in the broader “A4 movement” – their struggle was in many senses the vanguard of the resistance – and recognition of the role of the working class in social transformations. The Statement by Some Revolutionary Communists in China concedes that a lockdown is one way of controlling the pandemic, but it stresses that lockdowns should be conducted in a democratic way, by supporting “the popular campaign for grassroots participation in pandemic control decision-making” and forming “autonomous pandemic control committees to negotiate with local governments”. Not so the regime, which continues its top-down policy and ignores people’s basic human rights. “The health, lives, livelihoods, rights and freedoms of the masses become fodder for the enrichment and self-aggrandisement of the bureaucracy … The people were not only deprived of any decision-making power related to these measures, but even the basic channels of dialogue with the bureaucracy were blocked”. Julian Yin’s article also has an explicitly socialist perspective, but seeks a different audience. It attempts a dialogue with the Western left, by trying to convince it of the need for solidarity with the Chinese people’s struggle. It also calls for attention to the actual situation of the Chinese labour and student diaspora. Socialists in the Chinese diaspora often participate in more informal or nonpublic spaces, including political broad tents and organisations lacking in ideological cohesion and even chat groups. We should support such initiatives and beware of treating them as recruiting grounds or trying to take them over. Much of the Western left, while defending the progressive elements of liberal democracy, aim to go beyond it towards socialism. Yet Julian Yin points out that “the people in China are coalescing around a demand for the restoration of basic democratic rights – which we must amplify”. The ccp has profoundly

1 Change.com: Apple must investigate Zhengzhou’s Foxconn factory. Supported by Students for Hong Kong, Labour Movement Solidarity with Hong Kong (UK), Borderless Movement (Hong Kong), China Labor Watch (US), Sedane Labour Resource Centre/Lembaga Informasi Perburuhan Sedane (Indonesia), Dove and Crane Collective (US), Forum Arbeitswelten (Germany), Lausan Collective, Citizens Daily cn, Befria Hong Kong (Sweden), and Hong Kong Labour Rights Monitor.

introduction

1111

discredited the very word communism in the course of its seventy-year rule, by suppressing all organised opposition and basic political freedoms. Many Chinese today are confused about the distinction between left and right and between the ccp’s version of socialism and the authentic tradition of Marx’s socialism, or incline towards liberalism because of its growing visibility. Liberals too have been unable to organise in China, but they are allowed to exist as individuals. The same is not true for leftists and labour activists. This has grave consequences – there has been no continuity between episodes of the rise and fall of popular democratic or labour movements. Every new generation has to begin again from scratch. This is why so many people are confused about politics in general and about the distinction between left and right, making it hard for them to connect to international politics, except in some cases for a vague feeling of connection to Trump or Putin. Julian Yin also targets Western leftists loath to support Chinese protesters because of Washington’s hostility to Beijing and the notion that “anti-US imperialism overrides everything”. He rightly insists that “the tensions between the US and China are no excuse for socialists in the US to abandon solidarity and engagement with communities resisting authoritarianism”. He further challenges some leftists borrowing the old slogan “the main enemy is at home” to promote the latter’s call for indifference to international solidarity campaigns for Chinese protesters. Actually this old slogan was never intended to mean “don’t bother about other countries, just fight your own US government”. Julian Yin went on to argue that in today’s world the need for international solidarity is even clearer, especially during the Chinese protests, when the triangular collusion between Apple, the Taiwanese company Foxconn, and the Chinese government guaranteed the global production and sale of iPhones, a perfect example of how Western capitalism is supported by the barracks-like factory regime in China. In today’s super-globalised world, the “main enemy” is the least bound by national borders. Non-Chinese socialists cannot fight against Western corporations without promoting solidarity with the Chinese workers. For the first time since the Tian’anmen massacre in 1989, the struggle from below has forced the party to retreat. In some respects, however, the victory was Pyrrhic – the party jumped from extreme lockdown to extreme opening up but with virtually no preparation, triggering millions of Covid cases and a very high death toll. Even so, the tragedy has added to the general discredit of the party, by exposing its impotence and incompetence. Previously the ccp condemned those who promoted the recent “lying flat” (tangping) craze, i.e., opting out of the struggle for career success, consumer fulfilment, and unrelenting competition, a movement of passive resistance to the official “China dream”, which promotes conformity and following the party line. Now critics condemn the

1112

au

party itself being “lying flat” by opening up with minimum prior preparation. The three decades since 1989 in China have witnessed a degree of depoliticisation unprecedented in contemporary China, but the “blank paper movement” has put an end to it. A new page in Chinese history seems to have been turned, this time by the people. We are close to the centenary of the great Second Chinese Revolution 1925– 27, whose defeat gave birth to Chinese Trotskyism. The Trotskyists were, unfortunately, also defeated, but whatever their tactical mistakes, they “upheld the standard of urban revolution and socialist democracy and pointed to a way of releasing Chinese society from the endless chain of repression, risings, and repression. Because of their democratic critique of Chinese society and Stalinist politics, they have become metaphors incarnate for a host of unresolved problem in Chinese politics”.2 Most Chinese nowadays have never heard of Trotskyism. Yet when, in response to the ccp’s three year-long “lock-up”, they finally rose up in struggle for a better society and an end to totalitarian rule, historically they are echoing what the Trotskyists, including Chen Duxiu, Peng Shuzhi, Zheng Chaolin, and Wang Fanxi, fought for.

2 Benton 1996, p. 118.

Courage at Sitong Bridge: The Call for Mass Action in China Ruo Yan First published in Tempest, 24 October 2022

In a rare display of dissent just days before the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp), a man disguised as a construction worker hung banners on 13 October from a busy intersection on the Sitong Bridge in Beijing with provocative political slogans – calling on the masses to strike at work and at school. One read “We want food, not pcr tests. We want freedom, not lockdowns. We want respect, not lies. We want reform, not Cultural Revolution. We want a vote, not a leader. We want to be citizens, not slaves”. The other said, “Strike at school and strike at work”, and attacked the head of state itself: “Oust the dictator, traitor Xi Jinping”. Online users quickly discovered the protester’s identity to be Peng Lifa, a researcher of electrophysics who had posted some of his demands online days prior to his public protest. These demands were excerpted from a larger document that he has allegedly posted on Researchgate under the name Peng Zaizhou (now deleted but archived by online users on a different site), which details an extensive strategy for mobilisation and a more concrete vision for political reform. Peng’s protest came at a critical juncture for the ccp. Xi was eager to consolidate his third term in power at the party’s national congress this year and potentially identify a new cohort of leadership. The congress obliged, helping Xi take his authority to new heights by electing a Politburo Standing Committee composed entirely of his loyalists. China’s pandemic strategy has seen mixed results, as its draconian quarantine measures have triggered discontent while its larger economic policy has deepened the everyday exploitation of workers and the economy has shown signs of slowdown and other weaknesses. Many college graduates are unemployed, as China’s precarious economy has massively ballooned in recent years. Xi and the party elites are all the more keen to preserve political stability despite these social contradictions. Peng’s protest, though small in scale, disrupted the regime’s intention to regulate dissent completely on the eve of the national congress. Within a week of Peng’s brief act of dissent, anonymous Chinese overseas students and other diaspora allies have shown solidarity by creating posters

© Ruo Yan, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_093

1114

ruo

and other graphics to amplify Peng’s demands and plastering them on the walls of more than 250 universities and other public places around the world. People in China are reproducing Peng’s demands against Xi and for mass action by scribbling on public toilets, while strangers Airdrop each other dissident messages on the streets. These are not pre-revolutionary conditions, of course, but this level of reaction is not only rare, but testifies to the fact that Peng’s calls for popular strikes in civil society to mobilise the masses against authoritarian rule have struck an important chord. While Peng’s framework contains important contradictions that we must explore, his key demands are a crucial step that must be amplified by the Left in the short term: to oppose through the mobilisation of a popular mass movement Xi’s attempt to rule beyond the official limits of his term. Only mass mobilisation of civil society can open up the path to building an independent socialist mass opposition, which centres on bridging the minimum demands adequately raised by Peng and the maximum demand of building genuine institutions of socialist democracy against authoritarian capital.

Peng’s Vision and Strategy Peng’s document begins with a clear exposition of his strategy and political vision. He identifies Xi’s dictatorial rule – which he likens to Chinese warlord Yuan Shikai’s usurpation of Kuomintang rule in the early 20th-century – as a key problem. And thus, civil society needs to rise up en masse, from universities to workplaces, to “exert pressure” on the regime to oppose Xi’s rule. A political alternative would be centered on expanding suffrage in order to best safeguard the rights and livelihoods of Chinese people. Peng also emphasises that those in “lower society” must be empowered, providing a lengthy list of those he considers to be the protagonists of this campaign: unemployed people (including young college graduates who cannot find jobs), migrant workers, those who cannot afford medical services, service workers, those who have faced eviction, etc. In addition to classroom and workplace strikes, he advocates a series of tactics that include various nonviolent direct actions, from setting up roadblocks to making public demands throughout the city. He calls on people to spread the demands in social media networks – even government internal communication networks – and to surround the cgtn office and occupy Tian’anmen Square. The framework of struggle is an eclectic mixture of reformist strategies. Peng never calls for the end of ccp rule, but develops structures for reforms that

courage at sitong bridge: the call for mass action in china

1115

would, in his view, democratise it. Some policy proposals are highly specific: He includes a proposal for a “People’s Republic of China National Suffrage Committee” that would ensure democratic participation in elections, roughly modelled on liberal democracies. For Peng, this process would be easily doable with a technical reform. The regime could simply repurpose the extensive network of Covid testing sites as voting stations. The document lists other specific pandemic policies that would grant more flexibility to ordinary people, and even develops a sample spending budget proposal. For the Left, much remains wanting in the programme, but we must be clear that any further demands for the expansion of workers’ power and democracy can only be built on an energised civil society and mass movement – a point that Peng clearly observes and tries to address. Even as Peng still operates within the framework of liberalism, citing the texts of the late right-wing dissident Liu Xiaobo and “colour revolution” and calling for the safeguarding of the market economy, his desire to stimulate mass action opens up new opportunities for struggle. Such a commitment to popular struggle pushes beyond the traditional consensus among Chinese dissidents, which prefers Western establishment intervention to the independent activity of the Chinese masses.

Strengths and Limits of Peng’s Vision As such, we must clearly amplify the strengths and identify the weaknesses in Peng’s text. While the document’s political framework is limited and fragmented – calling for policies that might even be endorsed by liberal reformers loyal to the party – it recognises the struggles of workers during the pandemic and the need for their voices to be heard in pushing for a more democratic system of representation. Directly criticising Xi’s unaccountable leadership even within the degenerated rule of law under the ccp provides an effective rallying point to begin stirring the discontents of the Chinese people into mass action. The demand may seem rather basic, but we must remember how far removed Chinese society has been from experiencing any form of mass organisation on a national scale. Socialist demands are nothing more than a maximisation of the masses’ capacity for collective self-determination to build democratic institutions, so our demands for further revolutionary transformation must emerge from and chime with a broader mass movement resisting the most basic violations of the rule of law. Peng’s vision of democracy leaves the class hierarchy of Chinese society, as structured by the ccp, fundamentally untouched. In other words, it identifies

1116

ruo

the core issues of Chinese society only in part, so it can only offer an ineffectual political solution in the long run. The authoritarian and bureaucratic structure of the ccp is powered by capital accumulation; in other words, the political organisation of society is built upon a strict division of labour and an autocratic surveillance infrastructure designed to reinforce one another. Genuine democratic representation cannot exist within the mold of ccp governance, and electoral reforms without changes to the political power of the ruling class would miss the point: that under the logic of market economics, people cannot be empowered to collectively plan and re-organise society along the principles of freedom and self-determination, and to actually prioritise the needs and well-being of the community over profit. Peng’s technocratic solution to maximising democracy by repurposing the extensive networks of Covid testing reveals two crucial things. He rightly suggests that China’s current level of modernisation and productive capacity already makes a highly developed system of democratic governance possible on a mass scale. On the other hand, what he does not grasp is that genuine democracy cannot emerge as a technical reform in a system built to sideline the needs of the labouring masses for the benefits of the ruling class. Nonetheless, Peng’s proposal that all sectors of civil society must be mobilised to bring about change opens the way for the masses to organise in support of these more radical demands. From that point of view, we must ask further questions. How ought we to create connections between these forces in civil society in order to build a successful movement? Which forces should lead and what kinds of political programme is needed to deepen the movement? What forms of institutions and organisations are necessary to coordinate and ensure space for democratic assembly and debate on larger strategic questions between different sectors of the movement? At the centre of Peng’s strategy is his call for a national strike from the workplace to the classroom. This targeting of the country’s productive capacities reflects the growing awareness of Chinese workers’ power in an economy that is more proletarianised than ever before. Youth unemployment soared to a record 20 per cent of the workforce in July, and the last few years under the pandemic have seen a massive expansion of the precarious economy. Whereas workers and students during the Tian’anmen movement of 1989 created only a tepid and uneasy alliance, Peng readily draws links between the two. “To strike at work and at school” have become two sides of the same strategy. As a key site of social reproduction of labour, the school is integrally linked to the country’s productive capacities, such that student and workers’ strikes should be seen in the same continuum of struggle against the commodity economy. The quick response of Chinese overseas students to echo and

courage at sitong bridge: the call for mass action in china

1117

build on Peng’s demands internationally across cities and university campuses further testifies to the potential of youth and student power to help develop an independent mass opposition with the Chinese working class. But Peng’s version of this strategy is in need of a more rigorous programmatic vision of revolution, in which political power would be seized by workers set to reorganise the way in which China’s production relations are structured. Contrast Peng’s key demands to those of Beijing’s Workers Autonomous Federation (waf) workers in 1989: “The waf’s pamphlets at the time accused the ccp of hijacking the people’s authority to manage their own economic resources, and demanded that the ccp must cede power to the workers to determine the course of the country’s productive industries”.1 In other words, genuine democracy must entail the working class seizing power, beyond calling for technocratic adjustments that leave the core of society’s economic structure untouched. And such a kind of “proletarian dictatorship” does not centre on one-party rule of any kind, but instead – in the words of some Tian’anmen workers themselves in an interview with the Hong Kong Trotskyist publication October Review – “must be based on an adequate democratic structure and legal system”.2 In contrast, Peng’s deference to colour revolution as a strategic framework within which to mobilise the masses reveals the narrowness of China’s political horizon. The Tian’anmen workers never got their chance to concretely realise their vision of political democracy. The ccp has always been keen to prevent the emergence from the masses of any alternative programmes for socialist democracy. Reducing people’s political options to mere variants of a false dichotomy – liberal demands for Western intervention or Western-style bourgeois democracies, or a reformist opposition operating loyally within the party – has worked in the party’s favour. Peng’s manifesto does not provide us with a fully coherent third path, but paves the way for something like it to emerge by emboldening the self-activity of the masses. He hesitates to call for any radical action against the authority of the party itself, while drawing unevenly from Western colour revolution methods and preserving the logic of market accumulation. Peng’s document nonetheless is a first step forward, and now we must build upon it to keep catalysing opportunities for mass action and to practice collective organisation and achieve programmatic clarity. Only then can we cre-

1 Au 2022. 2 “ ‘The Party has betrayed the interests of the workers and the people’: Interview with Beijing waf: Three.” In Lu Ping (ed.) 1990.

1118

ruo

ate new modes of struggle in a society with few opportunities to practice mass mobilisation and organisation on a national scale (beyond spontaneous upsurges).

Building the Movement We Need To effectively build on Peng’s dissent requires developing a cohort of Chinese workers and students as organisers in their community – locally and in the diaspora – to energise mass engagement to collectively propose new programmes for socialist democracy. This core of organisers should not rush into partybuilding or other forms of militant action that would guarantee a prompt government clampdown. Instead, they should cultivate the working class’s political consciousness by bringing together politically advanced members of their community to synthesise the lessons of different local, national, or diaspora struggles. We must not mistake Peng’s protest and the growing discontent of Chinese workers as a sign that the time is already ripe for an immediate revolutionary struggle. The historically unprecedented scale of the ccp’s surveillance state, coupled with the political incoherence of the Chinese working class, suggests the need for transitional programmes and demands. Working-class forces are in a similar situation today as they were at the time of the decimation of the Chinese communists by the Kuomintang in the late 1920s – a terrain of growing social contradictions but hardly conducive to organising. As Leon Trotsky reflected at the time, we must focus on “fighting at present not for power, but to maintain, to consolidate and to develop its contact with the masses for the sake of the struggle for power in the future”.3 Transitional demands encourage Chinese workers and students to sharpen their own political analyses and practise exercising power by raising demands that can connect to broad masses of Chinese society while exposing the Chinese political system’s contradictions. This can include pressing beyond Peng’s demands to articulate the need for fully-elected local and national assemblies for decision-making, democratically representing workers and other dispossessed elements of Chinese society – including the full right to self-determination for Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers, and other ethnic groups. We can further build on Peng’s document to promote a broadening of workers’ independent power, like calling for the right to form independent unions

3 For Trotsky’s “The Chinese Question After the Sixth Congress”, see Trotsky 1962.

courage at sitong bridge: the call for mass action in china

1119

and other organs of dual power and thus to go beyond the limits of liberal constitutionalism of the sort that Peng wants. Peng’s programme for mass action to restore some of basic democratic freedoms can make way for socialists to promote transitional demands that (to quote Ernest Mandel) “allow the masses to learn, through their own experience, the extension of their own freedom comes up against the restrictive institutions of bourgeois democracy”.4 Such a nucleus of socialist organisers would not seek to centralise different sectors of society into one organisation but exist simply to crystallise the political consciousness of the masses “in a process of continuous organisation”.5 Again, we must look to the lessons of the past. Zhang Yueran, critically reflecting on the role of Maoist student organisers in the jasic workers’ struggle in 2018, remarked that rather than focus on consolidating a party vanguard at the moment, Chinese organisers should instead focus on strengthening “the organisational capacity of workers”. Developing rigorous and cohesive political programmes should not be a substitute for helping to expand the “necessary organisational capacity for workers to take massive action as on making sure workers’ struggle unfolds in the correct political direction, under the guidance of revolutionary theory”.6 Revolutionary socialist democracy in China can only be won by adopting such organisational practices from the start. “Seven Theses on Socialism and Democracy”, written in exile in 1957 by Chinese Marxist Wang Fanxi, formulates a vision for revolutionary democracy in China. A genuine “proletarian dictatorship” requires a “system of divided power” that recognises the right for “opposition parties” and other organised forces to exist. Workers’ power would not be centralised in one party, let alone one party-state, and “must under no circumstances replace the political power democratically elected by the toilers as a whole”. This would entail “an end to the present system in the Communist countries, where government is a facade behind which secretaries of the party branches assume command. The ruling party’s strategic policies must first be discussed and approved by an empowered parliament (or soviet) that includes opposition parties and factions, and only then should they be implemented by government”.7 This is no utopian programme for implementation only after the revolution, but a reality that would dialectically emerge from the practice and organisational strength of everyday people’s struggle in response to the forces of 4 5 6 7

Mandel 1977. Mandel 2020. Zhang 2020. Wang 2020.

1120

ruo

authoritarian capital. In other words, we must build a revolutionary nucleus of organisers to push for socialist perspectives in the movement, not in place of but alongside empowering other independent mass organisations in coalition with one another. These would include workers’ organisations, lgbtq+ student groups, feminist collectives, and diaspora groups. In that way, a genuine socialist programme for change would model the very institutions and practices of democracy that we wish to build on the road to revolution. And so, the task today is to promote the mass mobilisation that Peng demands. As Students for Hong Kong urged in their recent statement, we must “create more spaces for independent assembly and discussion … to continue spreading this fire of liberty”. Diaspora activists have a big role to play in this, especially by creating organisations that would be too risky to build in the mainland. We can keep promoting exchange and coalition-building, in the hope of building a base in civil society that might eventually mobilise on an even wider scale than Peng imagines.

One-Man Show Disrupted by a Nobody: On the 20th Congress of the ccp Au Loong-yu First published on Anti-Capitalist Resistance website, 25 October 2022. In the course of just one month, workers, students and residents would rise up in their thousands in more than 20 cities to protest against the inhumane Zero-Covid lockdown policy.

Xi Jinping officially got his third term, which further consolidates his absolute power over the party and the nation. The list of the newly “elected” members of the central committee shows that his supporters dominate the body. Dramatically, halfway through of the last day of the congress Hu Jintao, the former president of the country, was seen unwillingly led away to the exit of the hall, leaving many observers puzzled. The bbc reported that “the two most likely reasons for his departure are that it was either part of China’s power politics on full display, with a leader representing a former time being symbolically removed, or that Hu Jintao has serious health problems …. However, if he was led away at the end because of ill-health, why did this happen so suddenly? Why in front of the cameras? Was it an emergency?” On 24 October, a further news update showed that before Hu Jintao was led away, his files were taken from him by Li Zhanshu, a former member of the Standing Committee of the Polibureau. When Hu tried to take back his files Xi Jinping called someone to his side and spoke with him. Hu was then escorted away.

Reform from above Always a Myth Certain liberal and neo-liberal dissidents, in China or abroad, have spoken of a struggle between a “reformist faction” and a “conservative faction” within the ccp and hoped for change from the former. But their reliance on this or that party leader, e.g., Hu Jintao, has led only to disappointment. After Xi Jinping took power in 2012, some critics continued to seek salvation in premier Li Keqiang, but Li showed no signs of resisting Xi. In August, the Taiwan newspaper United Daily News reported that Xi would get his third term as president of the country and also as chairman of its Military Commission, but at the same time Li would be promoted to the post of party secretary. This report again raised hope, but it too soon led to disappointment. © Au Loong-yu, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_094

1122

au

Since 1989, when Beijing was the scene of turmoil and demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people, there has been no evidence of serious political factions forming within the party leadership. Such factions presuppose a coherent ideology and agreement on basic principles, but cliques have formed not around principles but around individual leaders, so despite some differences in approaches, political factions have so far not emerged. The three most powerful cliques since 1989 have grouped around a succession of top leaders – Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. It seems, however, that have no serious differences and are united on at least one point of principle, that the party must tighten its hold on the nation, even if some contenders might, at one time or another, opt for a slightly more dovish approach than others. Whereas Xi’s two predecessors might, in practice, tolerate individual dissidents (as long as they are not too well known), Xi himself took a more hawkish approach and banned dissent more generally. Despite small differences, all three leaders have agreed on the need to prevent an organised opposition from emerging, actually or potentially. This is the first prerequisite of their Orwellian state.

Xi’s Red Gene and His Blue Blood Cronies Xi’s third term does signify a new development. Congress passed a resolution on the Party Constitution with an amendment specifying that “developing fighting spirit, strengthening fighting ability”, be added to the constitution. The resolution further elaborated: “Adding this point will encourage the whole Party’s historical self-confidence … and help pass down its red genes”. The need to “pass down red genes” has been emphasised times in the past ten years by the party or by Xi himself. Its present reiteration marks a dangerous trend, for Xi has now finally consolidated his third term, signifying that the “second red generation” (descendants of the original elite) now complete power in the party and are building an autocracy around Xi. Xi began his first term under worse conditions than his predecessors. Both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were each appointed by a powerful existing leader, Chen Yun (for Hu) and Deng Xiaoping (for Jiang). That earned both Jiang and ccp-style “legitimacy” – the blessing of Chen and Deng. Xi, in contrast, was selected as Hu’s successor by 400 top party leaders in 2007, by which time both Deng and Chen were long since dead. According to a reporter on the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun (well known for its insider connections in China), Hu had tried to get Li Keqiang chosen as top leader but

one-man show disrupted by a nobody

1123

he was sabotaged by Jiang Zemin, who managed to rally enough votes for Xi instead. Jiang’s success was based on Xi’s special advantage over Li – Xi is a member of the “second red generation”, of red seedlings (genzheng miaohong), while Li is not. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the start of the collapse of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, reactionary leading cadres in the ccp worked hard to pass their power on to their children, on the grounds that only thus would the party be in a position to survive the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Their argument was that “children of revolutionary cadres will never betray their parents”. Their plan worked quite successfully. In 2007 the “second red generation” and their cronies (not necessarily “seedlings”) succeeded in transforming themselves into a “revolutionary aristocracy” and “kingmakers”. In 2018 they succeeded in overthrowing the rule laid down by Deng Xiaoping that the nation’s top leader should not serve for more than two terms. In 2022, as a result of Xi’s dictatorship, the party congress confirmed the ascendancy of his clique throughout the country, at the expense of other cliques. A single moment symbolised this passage: Hu Jintao’s unceremonious ouster from the congress hall. The idea of “gradual reform from within the establishment” is an illusion. Xi will only further deepen and refine the Orwellian state. From his perspective, this is even more necessary now that the economy is in serious trouble. Any democratic transformation would have to come from the toiling classes. But such is the level of state control that it will be very difficult for social protest to rise up and to sustain itself. The severe lockdown under the pandemic, which resulted in widespread violations of basic human rights (like locking people into their homes and compounds) and the fear of repression in general has deepened the mood of depression in Chinese society.

Peng’s One-Man Protest However, the Twentieth Congress will go down in history because of the brave actions of a single person. On the morning of 13 October, Peng Zaizhou, also known as Peng Lifa, staged a one-man protest at the Sitong Bridge in Beijing. He is reportedly a worker in the field of science and technology. Peng hung two banners from the bridge. One carried the words “We want food, not Covid tests. We want freedom, not lockdowns. We want respect, not lies. We want reform, not a Cultural Revolution. We want a vote, not a leader. We want to be citizens, not slaves”, The second banner called, even more radic-

1124

au

ally, for “a boycott of schools, strikes to oust the dictator and traitor Xi Jinping”. Peng proposed a day of action on 16 October. Nothing happened on that day. Instead, he was arrested. As well as hanging up his banners, Peng posted a detailed “action programme” and a call for political action. He recommended a “non-violent and popular colour revolution” – not to topple the ccp regime but to oust Xi Jinping. He called on a reformed government to – introduce party democracy and allow the election of party leaders – implement nationwide universal suffrage – restrict the power of the government – lift the ban on organising political parties – disclose officials’ personal assets and savings – protect the market economy Peng also referred to Liu Xiaobo and his “Charter 2008”, to indicate that he is following in the footsteps of Liu’s liberal programme. However, Liu was never been keen on agitating for strikes and widespread social protests. In general, after the crackdown on the 1989 democratic movement, both the liberal and the “new left”, although bitterly opposed to one another, had at least one thing in common: they both rejected the idea that working people could be the agents of social change. Instead, they saw social protest as dangerous. Reform must come instead only through the party. This led to both sides ending up as mere lobbyists of the ccp. Liu Xiaobo, however, was in some ways different, for he went campaigned publicly for a liberal transformation (but one that prioritised “market reform” over the struggle for democracy). Because of this, he was jailed and later died in prison. Liu never publicly agitated for a national strike to bring down the top party leader – this difference between him and Peng makes Peng quite special. Calling for strikes and publicly attacking the top leader are serious crimes in China. Demanding the disclosure of officials’ personal assets is also a slap in the face for Xi Jinping, who boasted to congress of his “overwhelming victory” in the fight to eradicate corruption. Peng’s demand exposed Xi’s hypocrisy and will have struck many as a better way of ending corruption than executing offenders.

Voices from Below Peng himself was undoubtedly prepared for the worst. However, it is worth noting that once the pictures of his banner appeared in social media (the only available, even if only very briefly), it was echoed by many netizens. The sup-

one-man show disrupted by a nobody

1125

port for Peng quickly spread to Hong Kong and other parts of the world, where college students, especially Chinese and ethnic Chinese, began reposting pictures of his banners. Here are three online postings by people on the Mainland (using their online names) that are worth quoting at length: Qianfenghugang: This valiant effort is excellent, but not many people will response to his call and take to the streets … I am now studying in a college, people around me do nothing but focus on their lessons provided by the communist bandit university, and play online games when they are free. Take the campus lockdown as an example, people are frustrated by the lockdown, but no one came out to protest. Anyone who did, even simply by emailing the president of the university, would be punished. The communist bandits use examinations to control the students. If people break campus rules, campus authorities can punish them …. I’m not interested in the curriculum, and I hate the repressive management. If ever people mobilise against the authorities, I will come out to support them. Piaoliushe: Peng is not the first person …. to demand freedom. Several months ago, the authorities came under attack by internet provocateurs in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Yiwu, and Wuhan. They were all eventually brought under control, but they will not be the last. The economic downturn is speeding up …. Those willing to resist should do so. Those not brave enough to resist can at least tangping [“lie flat”, passively resist the officially promoted lifestyle of working hard to climb the social ladder], refuse to comply, decline to consume or work hard, and refuse to get married and have children, in order to accelerate the collapse of this rotten society. Fameidebaozi: I despair of people like Li Keqiang (former premier) and Wang Yang (former member of the Standing Committee of the Politbureau). We were crazy to hope for anything from anyone in the Communist Party. Anyone wants change must shed blood to achieve it …. My previous idea was stupid, a joke.

1126

au

A Reactionary Clique Promoting “Modernisation” Xi boasts of his success in controlling the pandemic and vows to continue his zero Covid policy. It is true that Covid is under control. The party is good at delivering results if by results you mean imposing control. It has been perfecting its tools of social and political control ever since 1949, and it has now upgraded to a twenty-first century digital version. Yet it also faces a dilemma. Its commitment to industrialisation and modernisation allows it to tighten its grip on the country and enrich itself as a result. But the same process is raising China’s cultural level, empowering people to communicate instantly over great distances, making a greater number of people increasingly aware of the crimes committed by the party. Since the Covid lockdown, even the middle class is beginning to question the party’s legitimacy. Another problem is that the party’s modernisation project is led by a ruling clique strongly imbued with elements of China’s pre-modern political culture – an arrogant leader who requires slavish conformity from those under him This is an obvious recipe for big mistakes. Take the lockdown. Xi’s success in 2021 has long turned sour. Lockdown can only be a first step in dealing with a pandemic. It is at best a way to buy time for the invention and mass production of an effective vaccine, and to earn the trust of the public. In these two endeavours Xi failed miserably. Managing a modern society without unnecessary pain and at the least possible social cost is much more complicated than imposing control, but Xi is good only at the latter. His excesses during lockdown have resulted in a backlash in the form of widespread discontent. No wonder that Peng’s call for “food, not pcr tests” won so many hearts. With more and more countries opening up after vaccinating their populations, China is still [in October 2022] behind closed doors. The domestically produced vaccine does not work well, and people do not trust the party. Even if Beijing chooses to open up in future, such a step might further endanger people’s health. On the other hand, to carry on with zero Covid will deliver further heavy blows to the economy. But Xi and his “second red generation” continue to believe in their own omniscience. Precisely because of this, China is now entering the most dangerous period.

From Ürümchi to Shanghai: Demands from Chinese and Hong Kong Socialists – A Letter on Strategy and Solidarity with Uyghur Struggle Chinese and Hong Kong Socialists Published in Lausan on 28 November 2022

Lausan’s note: This is an expanded version of a letter written by Chinese and Hong Kong socialists on the mainland and overseas on the night of 26 November 2022, when protests first erupted. The abridged Chinese version first appeared in Borderless Movement on 27 November. This version has been revised through the weekend as events developed.

On Thursday, 24 November, 2022, a fire broke out in a residential building in Ürümchi, the capital of China’s “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”.1 The fire killed mostly Uyghur victims and injured many more. These numbers are said to be under-reported, and the tragedy was a result of China’s failed pandemic policy which has severely restricted the movements of everyday citizens and denied their access to basic necessities for prolonged periods of time. While these policies have affected millions of Chinese citizens, Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region have long suffered from

1 The ccp’s tactics of mass detention and surveillance affect many communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (xuar, also known as “Xinjiang”, “Northwest China”, “East Turkestan”, “Uighuria”, “Ghulja”, “Tarbagai”, “Altay”, “Dzungarstan and Altishahr”, and/or “Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin Region”, and which will henceforth be referred to as “Xinjiang”), most visibly Uyghurs but no less significantly other indigenous and minority ethnic groups. A highly contested term, the proper name Xinjiang was first used by the 18th century emperor Qianlong, and conferred on the xuar upon Zuo Zongtang’s reoccupation of the region in the late 19th century. In Mandarin Chinese, it means “new territory”, “new border”, or “new frontier”. As outsiders, we appreciate being in conversation with comrades on how best to advocate for the liberation of those suffering settler colonial repression in the region. Using accurate terminology to the best of our knowledge and recognising how the ccp’s campaign of mass detention and cultural genocide impact numerous communities differently across the xuar region are important elements of this work.

© Chinese and Hong Kong Socialists, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_095

1128

from ürümchi to shanghai

heightened repression, up to and including mass internment and extreme surveillance by the Chinese government. Xinjiang has also seen the most stringent lockdown policies implemented, with many unable to leave their homes for more than a hundred days. In response, Ürümchi residents launched an unprecedented city-wide protest on Saturday 26 November, braving the police to surround government buildings and demand an end to the current lockdown policies. These flawed lockdown policies resulted in the compound gates being bolted shut by authorities, such that residents were unable to escape. Protests of different kinds spread across major cities throughout the night. Some took the form of collective and independent mass action, like the student-led vigil in the Communication University in Nanjing and the public statement written by medical students from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. Citizens of Shanghai took to the streets to escalate their action further, chanting slogans like “Down with the ccp! Down with Xi Jinping!” Regimes across the world have failed their people throughout the covid19 pandemic, and China’s authoritarian brand of capitalism has led to further restriction of the rights of its everyday citizens. Working conditions have become even more precarious. In late October, it was revealed that Foxconn workers in Zhengzhou were trapped in a “closed-loop system” that restricted their movements and access to basic necessities in conditions of forced labour. Many workers tried to flee the factories by scaling fences. Instead of calling for accountability from its private enterprises and revising its lockdown policies in the region, the local government responded by sending its cadres to Foxconn’s production line to ensure profitability. Last week, newly-hired Foxconn workers staged a small revolt protesting their conditions, and the local government sent hundreds of hazmat-suited police to aid Foxconn in repressing the workers. Students and workers across China are taking to the streets to demand accountability for a “Zero Covid” policy that has seen their rights taken away and their safety placed in danger. Once again, the people of Xinjiang have had to bear the brunt of China’s repressive policies in the horrific Ürümchi fire. But now the region with some of the country’s most marginalised has become the spark for what is possibly the largest scale mobilisation in Chinese society in years. More urgently than ever, Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang and in other regions of China must continue to centre the struggle of Uyghurs and oppressed minorities and fight alongside them. We demand accountability for the victims of the Ürümchi fire, and call for radical systemic change:

from ürümchi to shanghai

1129

Demands 1.

Abolish the current lockdowns that forcibly detain people in their homes, denying them of access to basic needs. 2. Abolish forced pcr testing for Covid-19. 3. Allow those who are infected to isolate at home, while those with severe symptoms have the right to treatment in the hospital; cancel forcible transfer and isolation of infected and non-infected individuals in mobile cabin “hospitals”. 4. Provide options for multiple vaccines, allowing individuals the right to choose their own healthcare. 5. Release Sitong Bridge protester Peng Zaizhou and other political prisoners who are being detained from the protests. 6. Call for nation-wide mourning of the deaths of those caused by irresponsible lockdown measures. 7. Ensure the resignation of bureaucrats responsible for pandemic mismanagement. 8. Pandemic control measures must be informed by medical experts and conducted democratically amongst the people. 9. Safeguard the rights of people to the freedom of speech, assembly, organisation, and protest. 10. Support independent workers’ power in and beyond these protests; abolish anti-worker practices like the 996-work schedule and strengthen labour law protections, including protecting workers’ right to strike and self-organisation, so they can participate more extensively in political life.

Strategies 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

If anyone is threatened by the police, others should stand up to support them. We should not stop others from chanting more radical slogans, but try to prioritise positive and concrete demands for systemic change. Changes in the political authorities within the system would not be useful unless we thoroughly democratise the system itself. Avoid the risky tactic of long-term occupation of streets and town squares – adopt “Be Water”-style mobilisation to prevent authorities from too easily clamping down on protesters. Beyond protesting, strengthen mutual aid and self-organisation among communities and workplaces.

1130

from ürümchi to shanghai

People in China today are beginning to mobilise around Sitong Bridge protester Peng Zaizhou’s call for mass action across to demand “democracy, not more forced pcr testing”. We do not know how this movement will develop, but we continue encouraging independent mass organisation by students, workers, and other marginalised groups in the mainland and abroad, including Hongkongers, Taiwanese, Uyghurs and Tibetans to continue building a longterm strategic programme for democratic struggle in China. We stand in solidarity with this developing movement and call on the Chinese government to respect the livelihood and basic civil liberties of its citizens.

Solidarity with the Mass Protests Demanding the Lifting of Lockdown Restrictions and for an Antipandemic Effort That Is Scientific, Democratic and for the People! “Some Revolutionary Communists in China” 30 November 2022

This statement was issued on the Internet at the end of November 2022 by a group of young Trotskyists in mainland China. To evade surveillance and suppression by the Chinese Communist authorities, it was published under the name of “some Chinese revolutionary communists”. This new generation of Trotskyist youth dates back to 2014, when its supporters produced an underground publication called Jinglei (“Thunder”), which focused on commenting on current events in China and translating foreign Trotskyist writings. Its supporters subscribe to the basic positions of the Fourth International but have not joined any organisation (nor is it convenient for them to do so). However, they support eco-socialism and socialist feminism. Due to real political dangers, they had to stop bringing out their publications starting in 2019, but they still maintain basic Trotskyist positions. This statement shows that this group of young people criticise the bureaucratic policy of lockdown, while at the same time refusing to fall into the “anti-communist” positions supported by some Chinese democrats or to endorse the policy of “herd immunity” advocated by the extreme right in the West. Instead, they advocate a policy of epidemic prevention based on science, democracy, and conformity with the interests of the people. This introduction was provided by Lam Chi-leung.

Since mid-November 2022, many mass protests demanding the lifting of lockdown restrictions have taken place in mainland China. On 14 November, tenants in Guangzhou’s Haizhu protested against lockdown measures; on 22– 23 November, Foxconn workers in Zhengzhou protested demanding freedom of movement, subsidies and the implementation of promised reforms; on 24 November, a fire broke out in an apartment building in Ürümchi, but the rescue of fire engines was delayed by fences blocking the road, which eventually led to the death of 10 people and the injury of 9 others. Subsequently, there were protests in Ürümchi, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Lanzhou,

© “Some Revolutionary Communists in China”, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_096

1132

“some revolutionary communists in china”

Tsinghua University, the Communication University of Nanjing, and other universities to mourn the victims of the Ürümchi fire and oppose the lockdown measures, and the protests are still ongoing. Protesters chanted slogans such as “We don’t want lockdowns and we want freedom”, “End the lockdown!” “Freedom of speech!” “Freedom of the press”, “Democracy and the rule of law”, and even physically tore down iron sheeting and fencing in place as part of lockdown measures. Many residents of urban communities mobilised to enter into collective negotiations with neighbourhood committees for the lifting of lockdown restrictions on their communities and neighbourhoods. These protests shattered the inactivity and passivity that had characterised the political and social movements of the past decade, tearing a gaping hole through the impenetrable web of the regime’s surveillance and control. The ramping up of lockdown controls and tightening of pandemic surveillance seem to indicate that the Chinese state is taking the fight against the pandemic seriously, in stark contrast to the regime’s severe suppression of pandemic-related “rumours” at the beginning of the pandemic in January 2020. However, they are two sides of the same coin – that of the regime’s bureaucratic dictatorship. Under a bureaucratic dictatorship, the measure of an official’s competence is the efficiency with which they can suppress dissenting speech. The be-all-endall of the bureaucracy is the maintenance of its own power. The health, lives, livelihoods, rights and freedoms of the masses become fodder for the enrichment and self-aggrandisement of the bureaucracy. The entirety of the pandemic prevention and control measures were carried out from the top down, and the people were not only deprived of any decision-making power related to these measures, but even the basic channels of dialogue with the bureaucracy were blocked. Regardless of any adjustments in policy, the regime has constantly lied and suppressed speech since the beginning of the pandemic. The cogs of the bureaucracy have ground many lives to dust: whistle-blower doctor Li Wenliang died after contracting the disease he had attempted to warn his colleagues about; more than twenty people died in a car accident en route to a quarantine camp in Guizhou; the fire in Ürümchi consumed ten more lives; residents in Sichuan were prevented from escaping their homes during an earthquake. This is not to mention the many people who were prevented from accessing essential medical care due to the lockdowns, with some paying for it with their lives. It is of course not the rich, but the working class and the grassroots, who have borne the brunt of the severe lockdown measures. They include airport janitors, who are especially vulnerable to infection, and the informa-

solidarity with the mass protests

1133

tion revealed by the tracking and tracing of many infected people evinces their harsh working and living conditions, which have been exacerbated by the lockdown. To date, the harsh lockdown measures have exacerbated the hardships brought by the already depressed economy, leading to the massive unemployment of workers, the bankruptcy of small traders, and vast quantities of unharvested agricultural products rotting in the fields. On the other hand, collusion between the bureaucracy and business continues, especially with some connected families monopolising industries such as nucleic acid testing to make a fortune aided and abetted by bureaucratic decree. Although entire swathes of the economy are suffering, the production and profitability of some big enterprises (such as Foxconn) are still protected by bureaucratic power. The fencing-off of entire districts, the stringent implementation of universal nucleic acid testing, and the construction of warehouse-style quarantine camps have all contributed to a serious waste of various resources, and in places have even facilitated the spread of the pandemic. Draconian containment measures shut down many social service agencies, increased the burden of housework on women, and have made many women and children more vulnerable to domestic violence. During the beginning of the pandemic, due to the high rate of severe illness and mortality caused by the new coronavirus and the absence of a vaccine and proven treatment protocols, we believed that it was necessary – the point of being an obligation – for the people to accept certain physical quarantine and lockdown measures to protect the health of workers, farmers, the vulnerable and the grassroots. However, we oppose the strengthening of state or bureaucratic power for this purpose. In many countries, right-wing and far-right governments have promoted “herd immunity” without regard for the health and lives of workers and the underprivileged, resulting in the rapid spread of the pandemic throughout the world. Today, however, the threat posed by the Omicron variant has significantly lessened, yet the government continues to ramp up increasingly draconian pandemic control measures in disregard of basic scientific principles, simply to strengthen and maintain the stranglehold of the bureaucracy over society. Some local governments have relaxed their control measures under the pressure of mass movements (e.g., Ürümchi, Chongqing, etc.), but these results are the result of people’s spontaneous protests, not of government wisdom or benevolence. To better respond to future changes in public health and epidemic prevention policies, we advocate: 1. Democratisation of pandemic control decision-making. We support the popular campaign for grassroots participation in pandemic control de-

1134

2.

3.

4.

“some revolutionary communists in china”

cision-making, as exemplified by residents’ collective negotiations with neighbourhood committees to relax lockdown measures while protecting the infected in Beijing and other places. Community residents, workers, employees, students, and rural farmers can spontaneously form autonomous pandemic control committees to negotiate with local governments, neighbourhood committees, village committees, etc. to decide on current and future epidemic control and prevention initiatives in various living and working places, and to decide on various economic and governance issues related to pandemic control and hygiene. In addition, the government should seek to holistically gauge the people’s opinion on pandemic control policy, based on their own interests, to inform pandemic control policy without completely ignore the people’s will and rights. The release of all those who have been arrested, and the cessation of all censorship and any action to suppress protests. We support the slogan of “We don’t want lockdowns and we want freedom” and demand the implementation of the rights to freedom of speech, procession, and assembly. We demand the disclosure of information on nucleic acid testing, the number of deaths, the number of ventilators, the number of icu beds and the extent to which they are occupied by Covid-infected patients, the number of positive antigen and nucleic acid tests, the age and gender distribution of the sick, the extent of the pandemic’s spread in residential areas, workplaces and schools, the state’s financial expenditure on nucleic acid and vaccines, etc. We demand the severe punishment of the crony capitalists and corrupt bureaucrats who have caused casualties due to their autocratic management of the lockdown. At the same time, we call on the public to protest rationally and not to engage in violent clashes with the police. The abolition of the draconian lockdown and collective quarantine measures, which should be replaced by voluntary home-based quarantine of infected people, with the government bearing the cost of home quarantine. Rent and mortgage payments should be frozen for the locked-down areas, or should be waived for future periods based on the duration of the previous lockdown. Women’s self-help activities against domestic violence should be supported. To reduce the spread of various infectious diseases, more investment should be made in education and public transportation to achieve small class sizes and easy and convenient public transportation. The intensive investment into and development of public healthcare. To cope with the inevitable uptick of Covid infections following the loosening of pandemic control restrictions, the unvaccinated (especially the

solidarity with the mass protests

5.

6.

1135

elderly) should be encouraged to get vaccinated as soon as possible. The extremely wasteful universal nucleic acid testing campaigns should be stopped. The huge amount of money currently spent on nucleic acid testing and lockdown and control measures should not be diverted to other uses, but should be invested entirely in the medical sector and vaccine development and popularisation. Medical investment should be gradually increased according to economic development and people’s needs. The government should have as its goals the strengthening of preventative measures against various infectious diseases, the construction of new and accessible healthcare facilities ranging from small community clinics to large public hospitals, the training of many new medical students and healthcare workers, and the widespread promotion of basic medical and hygiene knowledge throughout society. In order to be able to respond more effectively to public health crises like the Covid-19 pandemic, we need to demand an end to the crony-capitalist commodification and marketisation of healthcare and establish a high-quality, free medical care system for all. Give subsidies to unemployed workers and those who have no income because of the lockdowns and other pandemic control measures. Comprehensively improve the working conditions of workers, including improving sanitary conditions in the workplace, banning overtime work without reducing monthly income, and providing accessible healthcare by establish community clinics in industrial areas. We demand that workers and employees who are put into mandatory quarantine be compensated for their lost wages. Workers should have the right to establish autonomous trade unions and participate in corporate decision-making and oppose the actions of some companies (such as Foxconn in Zhengzhou) that prioritise the continuation of production and the pursuit of profit above workers’ rights, wellbeing or concerns about their health and safety. Finally, workers must be guaranteed their right to sick leave and resignation at will. The indiscriminate hunting and killing of wild animals must be stopped. There is a high probability that Covid-19 is transmitted from wild animals to humans, a consequence of the serious encroachment of capitalism on natural territories. We demand that the protection of wildlife be strengthened, that the encroachment of capitalist and bureaucratic interests on nature reserves cease, and that the current industrial farming methods, which are likely to lead to the spread of mutated and powerful diseases among animals, be ended and replaced by more ecological and environmentally friendly farming.

1136

“some revolutionary communists in china”

We believe that only a socialist democracy emancipated from the bureaucratic class’s monopoly on power and the profit-seeking behaviour of capital can truly give rise to a people’s campaign against the pandemic, a healthcare system that belongs to the people, and a life that belongs to the individual.

Socialists Should Support the Popular Resistance in China Julian Yin 30 November 2022

The current protests in China signal one of the largest mass mobilisations in the country since the Tian’anmen movement of 1989. The immediate trigger was a fire on the night of 24 November that killed at least 10 people, mostly Uyghurs, and injured many others in a residential building in Ürümchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. The tragedy occurred because firefighters could not reach the building in time. This was a consequence of Xinjiang’s lockdown regime, which has trapped many residents in their homes for more than 100 days – one of the most stringent lockdowns in the country. Discontent with China’s lockdown policy has been simmering for a long time. Local actions, many led by workers resisting the uneven and draconian lockdown across different cities, have occurred almost since the beginning of the pandemic. In October, a lone protester appeared at a busy intersection in Beijing with banners, calling for Chinese citizens to engage in mass action – strikes at school and work – to create pressure for an end to forced lockdowns and an expansion of democratic rights. Just days before the current protests, Zhengzhou’s Foxconn workers, many denied access to basic necessities and working in forced labour conditions due to a combination of Foxconn’s labour practices and regional lockdown guidelines, protested against management. The hallmark of dissent in China, however, is that localised efforts are usually not allowed to consolidate into anything like an independent movement, one that could articulate connections between social issues and build organisation across sectors or regions. Until this past weekend, the incident at Ürümchi catalysed citywide protests, autonomously and anonymously coordinated with the help of social media. This triggered a nerve in other Chinese cities, whose residents have long resented the lockdown measures, and in overseas communities, which quickly called for vigils for the victims in Ürümchi. Practically overnight, protests and civil disobedience spread across China. The political content of these protests remained highly inchoate, but one thing is clear: this rare moment represents a shift in the political consciousness of the Chinese people.

© Julian Yin, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_097

1138

yin

People are engaging in independent action nationwide to change the material conditions in one of the two largest capitalist superpowers in the global economy, so socialists must extend their solidarity. Our key task is to amplify and synthesise the best of the demands emerging in China, build overseas solidarity, and echo the protesters’ call for basic democratic rights, while at the same time calling for socialist democracy. This is a critical moment for socialists to help deepen the calls for systemic reform on the ground and to explain the capitalist nature of Chinese authoritarianism.

What’s Happening in These Protests? Due to the absence of independent political organisations, Chinese citizens are accustomed to expressing dissent anonymously through social media channels like Weibo and Telegram. Many local wildcat actions have been organised in this way. The past weekend saw this method of organising spread on an unprecedented scale and tested its limits. Countless new public and anonymous discussion groups formed to coordinate protests and demands. Opposition to the lockdown united the country, but many other aspects of the nascent movement continue to be debated. Anonymous activists on the streets in group chats, in the comment section of livestreams, and in the diaspora are constantly debating strategy and tactics. Should the deaths at Ürümchi be politicised? Should we call simply for reforms to the lockdown regime or demand more radical change to the political system? In Beijing, some protesters are demanding “a democratic, free, and open communist party”, while others in Shanghai are calling for the overthrow of the party-state. Ürümchi protests began with activists surrounding government buildings to demand accountability. By Saturday night, students began organising themselves on campuses. One of the first and largest gatherings was at a university in Nanjing, and medical students in Wuhan released one of the first organised public statements in support of the protests. The key demand for an end to lockdown should not be confused with far-right Covid-denialism in the West. Most protesters are not against pandemic control in itself. The demands target the Chinese government’s particular brand of lockdown. There is no evidence of widespread Covid denialism as a factor in the protests. Most protesters wear masks, and many discussions focus on the need for a more responsible and accountable approach towards pandemic control. Currently, there is no mechanism for democratic input into how such policies should be developed and implemented. In many cases, measures have

socialists should support the popular resistance in china

1139

been implemented to the detriment of citizens’ health. China’s lockdown has been highly uneven and mismanaged, aimed at constraining citizens’ movements without providing access to basic necessities. Great numbers of people, some uninfected, have been forced by the police to congregate in large makeshift hospitals – a move much criticised by medical authorities. As the Ürümchi tragedy shows, local governments implement ill-planned lockdowns while state agencies neglect to provide accurate data on case counts and deaths. Many citizens have been trapped in their homes and must rely on online mutual aid and friendship networks for daily necessities. The recent Foxconn incident shows that the fundamental logic of these lockdowns is not to protect people’s well-being but to strengthen control over the working population, in order to maintain the productive capacity of China’s capitalist industries. Foxconn employs a “closed-loop system”, approved by local government, to trap workers in the factory complex in the name of pandemic control. Workers are forced to work more intensively and for longer hours to satisfy the production quota for Apple’s new iPhones. Many lack adequate housing and even access to three meals a day. Some have had infected personal belongings thrown away when they themselves are put in isolation. When crowds of workers broke out recently from the factory complex and fled on foot, the local government sent party cadres to act as scabs and keep Foxconn’s production line going. When newly hired workers protested, the local government dispatched hundreds of riot police to help Foxconn suppress them. The state response to these struggles foreshadowed today’s nationwide repression. Reports of police attacking and detaining protesters in Shanghai, where demands calling for the overthrow of Xi Jinping and the Chinese government first surfaced, spread quickly. Within minutes, new Telegram group chats started building solidarity campaigns. Some of these groups began discussing political strategy beyond the city. Attempts at censorship and repression continue to spread. Plainclothes state agents have been spotted in the protests. Workers in some state-owned enterprises have reported that management has forbidden them to “like” or reshare news of the protests online. China’s surveillance regime, strengthened by the contact-tracing technologies that have emerged as part of pandemic control, has allowed state authorities to track down protesters. The global reach of online technologies has allowed overseas communities to respond rapidly. Vigils have been organised across the world. People are debating what demands and actions to pursue, and some discussions have erupted into conflict. In Amsterdam, for example, some Chinese protesters

1140

yin

from the majority Han group confronted overseas Uyghurs who were waving the East Turkestan flag and denounced them as separatists. However, other Han Chinese supported the Uyghurs’ presence at the gathering. Such incidents reveal the political diversity of the protests, which became the occasion for ethnic and overseas Chinese in the diaspora to engage in frank debate about political change in China.

What Can Socialists Do? There are no publicly organised independent socialist organisations in China. The state has always infiltrated and repressed underground movements, especially on the left. Local protests, including wildcat strikes, are often tolerated, but rank-and-file organisers and left-wing militants are quietly disappeared and silenced with cold efficiency. In 1952, the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) rounded up the entire Trotskyist movement under bogus charges. Many died in prison. Others remained imprisoned for decades. More recently, Maoist student radicals were heavily suppressed after their solidarity mobilisation with workers at the jasic factory in Shenzhen. Obviously, there are many opportunities for sympathisers outside China to express solidarity, but socialist organisations abroad must think more creatively, and more cautiously, about how to conduct international solidarity actions. Socialists in the Chinese diaspora often participate in informal or non-public spaces, or in so-called broad-tent organisations. Formal exchanges between socialist organisations are important, but authoritarian rule calls for flexibility. Socialists should not be dogmatic about organisational forms but should adapt to conditions in order to sustain the longer-term goal of learning from the people and changing reality. A key location of mass political activity is the numerous group chats promoted by the @Citizensdailycn account on social media such as Telegram. Other progressive overseas Chinese and other diaspora activists interested in China issues organise in relatively new platforms like Not Your Little Pink, Dove and Crane Collective, and Students for Hong Kong. Socialists should support these initiatives, but without using them as a base on which to recruit members for their organisations or trying to take them over (though we should also build our own independent organisations). We must learn from these activists’ experiences and defend their autonomy. At the same time, we should try to synthesise the best of their demands into a socialist platform capable of connecting these autonomous communities with our socialist organisations.

socialists should support the popular resistance in china

1141

Today, people in China are coalescing around a demand for the restoration of basic democratic rights. We must do our best to amplify their efforts. But in doing so, socialists can emphasise that the ccp’s one-party dictatorship is necessarily tied to China’s capitalist system. A thorough restoration of freedom of expression, self-determination, and independent organisation in China would mean replacing existing state institutions with socialist democracy. Socialist democracy defends a multi-party system that includes and builds on democratic rights already won under bourgeois systems, but only manifests fully after a revolutionary overhaul of such regimes. We must go beyond them by doing away with bureaucrats and capitalists’ hold over the means of production. The ultimate goal is to vest political power in the working class in the form of a democratically planned economy. Promoting socialist democracy means bridging the platforms of local and overseas movements as they currently exist on the one hand and promoting our own vision on the other: strengthening demands for independent workers’ power and defending the right to self-determination of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other ethnic groups, including Hongkongers, who demand it. Such demands cannot be realised within the limits of bourgeois democracy. Socialists’ real task is to organise among the broader population in such a way that the diverse parts of today’s incipient movement can embrace these ideas in their own way. The tensions between the US and China are no excuse for socialists in the US to abandon solidarity and engagement with communities resisting authoritarianism. The slogan “the main enemy is at home” breaks down, as Vincent Wong explains, when one realises that migrant populations are part of the social movement in the imperialist countries. Wong writes: Migrant communities do not have the privilege of thinking only about what happens in one place and centring their local enemies in every situation. Members of those communities have family, friends, loved ones, colleagues, and comrades back in their countries of origin who are often in struggle against authoritarianism, capitalist exploitation, military aggression, and ultranationalist forces there.1 For people unable to express dissent in their own countries, for example China, political movement spaces in other imperialist countries can be an alternative site for raising demands as an independent opposition and building mass organisations. 1 Vincent Wong, Midnight Sun, 13 April 2022.

1142

yin

How can socialist organisations show solidarity in line with these perspectives? Here are a few ideas: – Follow journalists and social media commentators in touch with the movement on the ground. These include @whyyoutouzhele and @renminwansui5 on Twitter, @citizensdailydn and @northern_square on Instagram, and overseas organisations like Not Your Little Pink, Dove and Crane Collective, Uyghur Collective, and Students for Hong Kong. – Support the struggles of Uyghurs and non-Han ethnic groups in Xinjiang, who have faced severe oppression from the Chinese state. A good example is dsa [Democratic Socialists of America] Muslim’s co-sponsored campaign in 2021, the “30 Day Pledge to #BoycottGenocide”, which targeted companies complicit in using Uyghur forced labour. – Produce educational materials that amplify demands by protesters closest to our own politics, especially socialist or left-wing groups. – Expose reactionary disinformation, especially from propaganda outlets of the Chinese state that try to target the Western left by misrepresenting the demands of the Chinese protesters. Dongsheng News, for instance, is trying to deny the connection between lockdown on the one hand and the Foxconn deaths and mass discontent on the other. Its goal seems to be to absolve the Chinese government of responsibility. – Support campaigns against labour abuses in China that complement the current protests, especially those that directly link US corporations to labour abuse. Such campaigns can provide the opportunity for agitation by socialists in the US. The campaign against Foxconn, which directly addresses the alliance between Apple and Chinese state capitalism, is a good example. Help connect US-based and international trade unions and other labour organisations connect with relevant organisations in the Chinese diaspora. – Cultivate formal relations with Uyghur, Chinese, Hongkonger, and other diaspora organisations on the frontline, not necessarily by embracing all their demands but by discussing with them ways to advance a socialist critique of Chinese authoritarian capitalism, while at the same time organising support for their events and vigils. – Help circulate reports of missing and detained protesters, and campaign for the rights of Chinese refugees as part of the broader migrant justice movement in the US. International solidarity is a cornerstone of the socialist movement, and those in the Global North have a unique responsibility. The left does not hold state power and its efforts may be limited, but to give up trying would be to abandon the field to the “anti-China” hawks in the US establishment and give free rein to their efforts to co-opt protest movements in China. The US right has long found

socialists should support the popular resistance in china

1143

allies within anti-ccp diaspora organisations. Socialists must work to sever such links. It is essential to campaign against the “new cold war” – but we still need to build practical solutions to organise people against Chinese authoritarian capitalism without amplifying US militarism. Supporting the movement for democracy in China requires having a clear understanding of the nature of authoritarian capitalism there. We might be on the brink of a turning point for the international socialist movement. Popular resistance to capitalism and authoritarianism is growing in China, one of the most strategically important countries in the world. Our solidarity and support belong with that progressive and popular movement.

appendix 1

Bibliographies Chinese Research on Trotskyism in China since the 1980s Yang Yang and Gregor Benton A ghost of Trotskyism continues to haunt China. The releases of the veteran Trotskyists in the late 1970s and the more liberal climate in the 1980s, when Chinese intellectuals were able to enjoy limited freedom of speech, created space within which to discuss various historical problems relating to the Chinese Trotskyist movement before 1952. Since the early 1980s, Chinese writers, mainstream historians, and other scholars have begun to take an interest in Trotskyism, particularly after the rediscovery of Chen Duxiu. By the early 1990s, research on Chen Duxiu and (to a lesser degree) Chinese Trotskyism had become a growth industry in Chinese universities. Eighteen books on Chen and chronologies of Chen’s life were published in China between 1987 and 1994. In 1993, 35 research journal articles on Chen appeared. In 2002 alone, 90 Chinese articles were published regarding Chen.1 In 1989, a group of Chinese scholars founded the Society for Chen Duxiu Studies. This society was declared independent and entirely financed by members’ contributions. In October 1993, it decided to publish a research bulletin (2 to 3 issues a year), called Chen Duxiu yanjiu dongtai (Trends in Chen Duxiu Studies), under the editorship of Tang Baolin, a mainstream party historiographer, who has played a key role in the study of Chinese Trotskyism in China. From its very first issue, Chen’s relationship to Trotskyism occupied a foremost place in the discussion, in which many surviving veteran Trotskyists, including Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin, joined. The discussion surrounding whether Chen’s embracing of Trotskyism was a false step in his political career was intense. Dongtai became a quarterly research journal in 1999 and a bi-monthly in 2003. In June 2001, it changed the name to Jianbao (The Bulletin of Chen Duxiu Studies). It ceased publishing with issue no. 39 in February 2004, reportedly after receiving warnings from the Party. The boom in Chen Duxiu studies in China encouraged more scholars to look into the history of Chinese Trotskyism. According to Sun Huixiu, a young Chinese historian now teaching at Beijing Normal University, nine research art-

1 Xie 1994, p. 2.

© Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004709942_098

1146

appendix 1

icles on Chinese Trotskyism appeared in Chinese academic journals between 1980 and 1989, four of them concerning the relationship between Chen Duxiu and the Chinese Trotskyists. Four of the nine were by Tang Baolin.2 However, all those articles either pursued the ccp’s orthodox narrative, with the Party as the unique revolutionary centre, or did not go beyond the winner-loser dichotomy. In 1994, using largely primary source materials, Tang Baolin published a 400page monograph on the historical evolution of Chinese Trotskyism, Zhongguo Tuopai shi (A History of Chinese Trotskyism). It was published in Taiwan. Tang’s contribution to the history of Chinese Trotskyism led to a more open discussion on this subject in China. Tang’s book was extremely controversial in some quarters. Veteran Trotskyists and a group of serious China historians saw the monograph as an attempt to hold up the ccp’s victory to praise by denigrating the Trotskyists as political losers and an “anti-revolutionary group”. Some reviewers criticised his use of uncorroborated material, including interrogations of imprisoned Trotskyists, as questionable and unethical. Tang was ostensibly hoping to dispel Stalinist and Maoist prejudices towards Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists, and can even be said to have achieved that aim in some limited respects, particularly in regard to the rehabilitation of Chen Duxiu. Unfortunately, however, his book displays the same flaws and shortcomings as his earlier writings and same prejudices in relation to Chinese Trotskyists other than Chen Duxiu. It peddles the same mixture of misunderstandings, crude misrepresentations, and mindless copying of familiar Stalinist and Maoist smears, alongside a substantial but erratic complement of truthful investigation and fair reporting that lends spurious credence to the residual lies. It is beset by mutually contradictory assertions and resorts habitually to a double standard, one – harsh and cynical – for the Trotskyists, who can do little right, and another – fawning and indulgent – for the ccp, which can do nothing wrong. So Tang’s book was intensely criticised by a number of veteran Chinese Trotskyists, including Wang Fanxi.3 To challenge Tang’s winner-loser dichotomy and to rehabilitate the Trotskyists as revolutionaries, Liu Pingmei, a veteran Trotskyist from Guangdong, wrote his own similarly titled Zhongguo Tuopai dangshi (History of Chinese Trotskyism) from a Trotskyist perspective. It was published by Xinmiao Press, Hong Kong, in 2005.4

2 Sun 2017, p. 7. 3 See Benton 2015, pp. 1149–61. 4 Chapter 11 of Liu’s book has been translated and collected in this volume [Part 3, Section B].

bibliographies

1147

In 2011, Tang Baolin’s Chen Duxiu quan zhuan (A Full Biography of Chen Duxiu) was published by Hong Kong Chinese University Press and subsequently reprinted by China’s Social Sciences Academic Press (in 2013). It is similarly flawed. Nevertheless, in an interview, Tang admits that his assessment of Chinese Trotskyism was in some regards unfair.5 In an unpublished personal note, he has re-categorised the Chinese Trotskyists as “unswerving Marxists”.6 In the present century, Chen Duxiu studies and research on Chinese Trotskyism by party historians is epitomised by Zhu Yan’s Wannian Chen Duxiu, 1927–42 (Chen Duxiu in His Later Years, 1927–42) (Beijing: Renmin Press, 2006, reprinted by Qingdao Press in 2020 under the title Da geming hou de Chen Duxiu [Chen Duxiu after the 1925–27 Revolution]) and “Guanyu Zhongguo Tuopai de jige wenti” (Several Questions about Chinese Trotskyism, published in Jiangsu daxue xuebao, shekeban [Journal of Jiangsu University, Social Sciences Edition], No. 11, 2012). But neither volume goes beyond the limitations that characterised the discussions in the 1980s and 1990s. Even so, a few Chinese historians and research students have published work on the history of Chinese Trotskyism and its key figures that treats the subject more seriously and fairly. In 2010, Wang Xinsheng, a party historian, published an article titled “Gongchan guoji yu Zhongguo kangzhan shiqi de fan Tuoluociji pai yundong” (The Comintern and the Anti-Trotskyist Campaign during China’s Resistance War against Japan) in a top party history journal, Zhonggong dangshi yanjiu (ccp History Studies), where he argued that the anti-Trotskyist campaign was staged by the ccp in line with directives given by Stalin and the Comintern during the show trials of the late 1930s. The anti-Trotskyist line was ruthlessly implemented by the hardliners Wang Ming and Kang Sheng. Because of Stalin’s interference, individual Trotskyists were not allowed to join the ccpled Anti-Japan united front. A handful of younger Chinese historians have begun to look into the early formation and political activities of the Chinese Trotskyists in the Soviet Union, using Russian primary sources. In 2004 and 2021 two articles appeared – Zhang Zeyu’s Zhongguo liu Su xueyuan Tuoluociji fanduipai shimo (A Brief History of the Chinese Trotskyist Students in the Soviet Union) and Sun Huixiu’s “Mosike de Zhongguo liuxuesheng Tuopai yanjiu, 1926–30” (Research on the Chinese Trotskyist Students in Moscow, 1926–30). The former presented a brief history of the rise and fall of the first generation of Chinese Trotskyists while studying in the Soviet Union, the latter focused on their organisation and activities in

5 Interview with Tang Baolin, 14 March 2014, by Yang Yang. 6 Tang no date.

1148

appendix 1

Moscow. The two articles were partly based on the authors’ PhD dissertations. Chapter 9 of Zhang’s Liuxue yu geming: 20 shiji 20 niandai liuxue Sulian rechao yanjiu [Studying Abroad and Revolution: The Upsurge of Chinese Students in the Soviet Union in the 1920s], a thesis submitted to Nankai University in 2004, was published by Renmin University Press in 2009; Chapter 1 of Sun’s Jindai Zhongguo Tuopai lishi zaiyanjiu [A Further Research on Trotskyism in Modern China], submitted to Renmin University in 2017. Sun’s thesis explores Trotskyist activities in Moscow, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong up to 1952. It represents the best of academic research on Trotskyism in China before 1952. A comprehensive monograph based on this thesis appeared in 2023 at Zhonghua Book Company (Hong Kong).7 Two other ma theses sympathetic to Trotskyism are Wang Yuncui’s Zhuiqiu yu quzhe: Lun Zheng Chaolin qianbansheng zhengzhi sixiang shanbian (The Pursuit and Zigzag: The Evolution of Political Thought in Zheng Chaolin’s Early Life), submitted to Fujian Normal University in 2004, and Xu Wuzhi’s Yanmo de gemingzhe: Wenzhou Tuopai de xingqu yu fumie, 1933–1952 (The Rise and Fall of Wenzhou Trotskyists, 1933–52). The former called Zheng Chaolin a “resolute” revolutionary and a Trotskyist leader, the latter not only asserted the Trotskyists’ role as revolutionaries but traced Trotskyist activities in Wenzhou in the early 1950s, using local archives.8 In December 2021, to commemorate the 120th anniversary of Zheng Chaolin’s birth, in collaboration with the Shanghai Municipal Society for ccp History Studies, Zheng’s great niece Zheng Xiaofang published a volume of Zheng Chaolin’s early writings (1922–29) and another of his collected essays and memoirs of him by others (this was only circulated “internally”, i.e., within the Party and its ambit.). Most of the essays focus on Zheng’s early activities in the ccp and neglect his career as a leading Trotskyist revolutionary. This shows the official view of the Chinese Trotskyists has changed little in recent times. In the course of the last 15 years, a few Chinese journalists and independent scholars have turned their attention to Chinese Trotskyism, in some cases using interviews and oral history. In 2008, Wu Jimin, a veteran Shanghai senior journalist, published a documentary history of the Chinese Trotskyists in Singapore, Lianyu: Zhongguo Tuopai de kunan yu fendou (Purgatory: The Chinese Trotskyists’ Ordeal and Struggle), in which he briefly notes the early development of the Trotskyist movement in China and depicts 9 different leading Trotskyist figures by largely using massive oral interview records previously collected from 7 See Sun 2023. 8 Xu’s last chapter of his thesis and some of the internal documents from Wenzhou are collected in this volume [Part 1, Section E].

bibliographies

1149

the Trotskyist survivors.9 Two other independent researchers, Duan Yue and Wang Yongsheng, have also recorded personal histories of individual Trotskyists, particularly in the Wenzhou area. In 2010 and 2012, Duan completed her interviews with the Trotskyists Wang Guolong and Xiong Andong (both so far unpublished). In 2016, Wang Yongsheng’s Mitu de gaoyang: Zhongguo Tuopai chenfulu (The Lost Lamb: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Trotskyists) was published in Taiwan, depicting a dozen of the Wenzhou Trotskyists’ ordeals and struggles. All three authors show deep sympathy for the Chinese Trotskyist movement. Wang Ruowang, a renowned dissident writer , wrote a short but very sympathetic piece of rapportage, Yige “Tuopai fenzi” de gushi (The Story of a Trotskyist) in 1989.10 Based on Shuang Shan huiyilu, the memoirs of Wang Fanxi, it portrays a semi-fictionalised Trotskyist, Qiao Keren, and describes his life in prison. Wang Ruowang reflects some of the repression applied to the Trotskyists during the Mao era. In 1990, Zhou Meisen, a Chinese novelist, completed his novelette Zhong’e (Heavy Yoke), also a fictionalised Trotskyist, based on Zheng Chaolin. In the literary fields, several younger scholars have begun to pay serious attention to Trotsky’s literary theory and the intellectual connection between him and Lu Xun. For example, Yang Zi, a young literary critic and academic from the Chongqing Normal University, has written a number of studies. In 2019, she brought out a monograph, Tongluren zhishang: Lu Xun houqi sixiang, wenxue, yu Tuoluociji yanjiu (Beyond Fellow-Travelling: A Study on Lu Xun’s Thought in His Later Years, on Literature, and on Trotsky), Shanghai, Shanghai Joint Publishing. In Taiwan in 1976, Zheng Xuejia, an eminent historian and writer, explored the origins of the anti-Trotskyist campaign launched by the ccp in the late 1930s, and published his study Suowei “Tuofei Hanjian” shijian (The So-called “Trotskyite-Bandits and National Traitors” Incident). Zheng argued that the Trotskyists’ exposure of the ccp’s dark side, including its hostility to democracy, would have dented the ccp’s mass support if they became known. The ccp therefore denounced the Trotskyists as “bandits” and “national traitors” to drive a wedge between them and critical sections of the patriotic, left-leaning public during the Sino-Japanese War. More recently, some Taiwanese gradu-

9 10

This book was translated by Gregor Benton and incorporated into Benton 2015, pp. 41–156. Wang Ruowang (1918–2001) was a Chinese dissident writer. He was a member of the ccp from 1937 to 1957, when he was expelled as being accused of a “Rightist”. He rejoined the Party in 1979 but was again expelled for promoting “bourgeois liberalisation” in 1987. He ended up going into exile and died in New York.

1150

appendix 1

ate students have begun studying the history of Trotskyism in modern China. Cheng Kun-Teng’s ma dissertation, Huangmo de geming zhilu: Zhongguo Tuopai de buduan geminglun yu geming jueze, 1925–1952 (A Desolate Path Taken by the Chinese Trotskyists: Their Interpretations and Practices of the Permanent Revolution, 1925–1952), submitted to National Taiwan University in 2008, re-examines Trotskyism as a special strand of political thought in Chinese intellectual history. In 2021, Lau Pik-ka, herself from Hong Kong, submitted an ma thesis on Hong Kong’s left-wing political activities in the 1970s, Chongji “Xianggang qishi niandai” Shenhua: huohong niandai shehui yundong de sixiang, qinggan yu zuzhi (Bursting the Myth of the “Hong Kong 1970s Fiery Era”: Thoughts, Affects, and Organisations of the Fiery Seventies Social Movement) to Taiwan’s National Central University. It investigates the ideological conversion of a small group of Hong Kong anarchist youths from the 70’s Biweekly collective to Trotskyism and the polemic between the Trotskyists and the Maoists in 1974. Several writings by Chinese Trotskyists have been published in mainland China and Hong Kong. Abridged editions of Zheng Chaolin huiyilu (The Memoirs of Zheng Chaolin) were published in 1982 and 1986. On the day Zheng died in 1998, a collection of Zheng Chaolin’s later writings, Shishi yu huiyi: Zheng Chaolin wannian wenxuan (History and Recollections: Zheng Chaolin’s Collected Writings in His Later Years) was published by Cosmos Books in Hong Kong, with the help of Fan Yong and Luo Fu, two well-known publishers. Fan Yong and Zhu Zheng, another prominent scholar, had earlier published Zheng Chaolin’s prison poems under the title Yuyin canji, later translated into English by Gregor Benton and published by Verso. In the early 1990s, Zheng Chaolin organised a group of veteran Trotskyists, including Zhou Rensheng and Wang Guolong, to translate Issac Deutscher’s Trotsky Trilogy, published by Central Compilation and Translation Press in 1998. In 2004, an abridged version of Zheng’s collected writings, edited by Fan Yong (abridged without Fan’s consent) was published under the name Zheng Chaolin huiyilu by Dongfang Press (i.e., Renmin Press). In the same year, Wang Fanxi’s memoir, Shuangshan huiyilu, was also published by Dongfang Press. In Hong Kong, Cosmos Books published three other memoirs by Chinese Trotskyists, Hu Luoqing’s Shiren Xie Shan he tade Tuopai pengyoumen (The Poet Xie Shan and His Trotskyist Friends, 2009), Chen Bilan’s Zaoqi Zhonggong yu Tuopai: wode geming shengya huiyi (The Early ccp and Chinese Trotskyists: My Memoirs as a Revolutionary, 2010), and Peng Shuzhi’s Peng Shuzhi huiyilu (The Memoirs of Peng Shuzhi, 2 vols, 2016), and a volume of Chen Duxiu’s later writings in his later years (2012). October Bookshop, a Hong Kong Trotskyist press, published four volumes of Peng Shuzhi’s collected works, while in 2018

bibliographies

1151

Hong Kong City University Press brought out a 3-volume of Wang Fanxi’s collected writings edited by Zhu Zheng. In 2019, City University Press also published Louisa Wei Shiyu’s Wang Fanxi: Tashan zhishi yu liufang zhilü (Wang Fanxi in Exile) Three archives housing Chinese Trotskyist materials will be central to any future efforts to write a fuller history of the movement. In 1992, Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan’s personal papers were acquired by the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University. In 2002, after the death of Wang Fanxi in Leeds, all his available manuscripts in Chinese were bequeathed, together with many of Zheng Chaolin’s papers in Wang’s possession, to the Special Collections in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, set up earlier by Wang with the help of Gregor Benton. In 2021, materials relating to the Hong Kong and Chinese Trotskyist movement was donated by Au Loong-yu to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where it is curated by Eef Vermeij and his colleagues. Bibliography (by Year) 1. Journal Articles on Chinese Trotskyism (1) Wang Yilin, ‘Chen Duxiu yu Tuopai’ (Chen Duxiu and the Chinese Trotskyists), Anhui daxue xuebao (Journal of Anhui University), 1980(02), 32–37. (2) Tang Baolin, ‘Zhongguo Tuopai zuzhi de lishi yange’ (The Historical Evolution of the Chinese Trotskyist Groups), Dangshi ziliao (Party History Materials), 1981 (01). (3) Tang Baolin, ‘Shilun Chen Duxiu yu Tuopai de guanxi’ (On the Relationship between Chen Duxiu and Chinese Trotskyists), Lishi yanjiu (Historical Studies), 1981 (06), 126–52. (4) Sha Jiansun, ‘Tuoluosiji fanduipai zai Zhongguo chansheng jiqi pohuai’ (The Birth and Collapse of the Trotskyist Opposition in China), Dangshi yanjiu (Party History Studies), 1982(02). (5) Zhang Jun and Tang Baolin, ‘Chen Duxiu zhuanxiang Tuopai he beikaichu chudang wenti pouxi’ (An Analysis of Chen Duxiu’s Ideological Shift to Trotskyism and His Expulsion from the ccp), Jindaishi yanjiu (Modern Chinese History Studies), 1983(02), 135–53. (6) Wang Xueqin, ‘Chen Duxiu yu Tuoluociji zhuyi’ (Chen Duxiu and Trotskyism), Fudan xuebao, shehuikexue ban (Journal of Fudan University, Social Sciences Edition), 1985 (06). (7) Liu Peihan, ‘Zhongguo de Tuoluociji zhuyi yundong’ (The Trotskyist Movement in China), Liaoning shifan daxue xuebao (Journal of Liaoning Normal University), 1986(02), 64–70.

1152

appendix 1

(8) Sun Maosheng, ‘Zhongguo Tuoluocijipai de xingshuai’ (The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Trotskyists), Kexue Shehuizhuyi yanjiu (Studies of Scientific Socialism), 1988(01). (9) Peng Xiuzhen, ‘Qianxi Chen Duxiu zhuanxiang Tuopai de yuanyin’ (An Analysis of Chen Duxiu’s Conversion to Trotskyism), Xiangtan daxue xuebao, shehuikexue ban (Journal of Xiangtan University, Social Sciences Edition), 1988 (04), 1–4. (10) Tang Baolin, ‘Jianlun Zhongguo Tuopai’ (A Brief Survey of Chinese Trotskyism), Zhonggong dangshi yanjiu (ccp History Studies), 1989(01), 17–25. (11) Tang Baolin, ‘Chen Duxiu yu Tuoluociji’ (Chen Duxiu and Trotsky), Anhui jiaoyu xueyuan xuebao, zhexueshehuikexueban (Journal of Anhui College of Education, Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 1993 (02), 38–41. (12) Chen Xinjian, ‘Guangxi Tuopai chutan’ (An Investigation into the Guangxi Trotskyists), Xueshu luntan (Academic Forum), 1995 (04), 93–98. (13) Tang Baolin, ‘Chen Duxiu wannian yu Tuopai de lunzhan’ (The Polemic between Trotskyists and Chen Duxiu in His Later Years), Dang’an yu shixue (Archives and History), 1996 (02), 40–44. (14) Hu Ming, ‘Chen Duxiu Tuopai wenti shimo’ (The Whole Story of Chen Duxiu as a Trotskyist), Shaanxi shifan daxue xuebao, zhexue shehuikexueban (Journal of Shaanxi Normal University, Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 2004 (03), 106–15. (15) Zhang Zeyu, ‘Zhongguo liusu xueyuan Tuoluociji fanduipai shimo’ (A Brief History of the Chinese Trotskyist Students in the Soviet Union), Lishi jiaoxue (Historical Teaching), 2004 (12), 19–24. (16) Wang Xinsheng, ‘Gongchanguoji yu Zhongguo kangzhan shiqi de fanTuoluocijipai yundong’ (The Comintern and the Anti-Trotskyist Campaign during China’s Resistance war against Japan), Zhonggong dangshi yanjiu (ccp History Studies), 2010 (11), 56–67. (17) Li Huifen, ‘Shilun Liu Renjing chengwei Tuopai de zhuyao yuanyin’ (Why Liu Renjing Became a Trotskyist), Shanghai gemingshi ziliao yu yanjiu (Material and Studies regarding Shanghai’s Revolutionary History), 2012 (00), 297–305. (18) Zhu Yan, ‘Guanyu Zhongguo Tuopai de jige wenti’ (Several Questions about Chinese Trotskyism), Jiangsu daxue xuebao, shekeban (Journal of Jiangsu University, Social Sciences Edition), 2012 (04), 1–7. (19) Yang Qiang, ‘“Shibai zhuyi” shifou chengli: shishu yize Zhongguo Tuopai yanjiu shiliao de zhenglun’ (Is ‘Defeatism’ Sound: A Polemic Caused by a Controversial Document regarding the Study of Chinese Trotskyism), Jiaozuo shifan gaodeng zhuanke xuexiao xuebao (Journal of Jiaozuo Normal College), 2014(02), 38–40, 79.

bibliographies

1153

(20) Sun Huixiu, ‘Mosike de Zhongguo liuxuesheng Tuopai yanjiu, 1926–30’ (Research on the Chinese Trotskyist Students in Moscow, 1926–30), Suqu yanjiu (Soviet Area Studies), 2021 (04), 61–79. 2. Books, Theses, Unpublished Notes on Chinese Trotskyism (1) Zheng Xuejia, Suowei ‘Tuofei Hanjian’ shijian (The So-called “TrotskyiteBandits and National Traitors” Incident), Taipei: Guoji gongdang wenti yanjiushe (Research Society for International Communism), 1976. (2) Tang Baolin, Zhongguo Tuopai shi (A History of Chinese Trotskyism), Taipei: Dongda tushu, 1994. (3) Wang Yuncui, Zhuiqiu yu quzhe: lun Zheng Chaolin qianbansheng zhengzhi sixiang shanbian (The Evolution of Zheng Chaolin’s Early Political Thought), ma dissertation, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, 2004 (unpublished). (4) Liu Pingmei, Zhongguo Tuopai dangshi (The History of Chinese Trotskyism), Hong Kong: Xinmiao Press, 2005. (5) Zhu Yan, Wannian Chen Duxiu, 1927–42 (Chen Duxiu in His Later Years, 1927–42), Beijing: Renmin Press, 2006, reprinted by Qingdao Press in 2020 as Dageming hou de Chen Duxiu (Chen Duxiu after the 1925–27 Revolution). (6) Yi Shensi, Geming niandai de sanchong bianzou: Tuoluociji, Chen Duxiu, fanduipai, 1923–29 (Three Variants of Revolution: Trotsky, Chen Duxiu, and the Oppositionists, 1923–29), ma dissertation, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, 2008. (7) Cheng Kun-Teng, Huangmo de geming zhilu: Zhongguo Tuopai de buduan geminglun yu geming jueze, 1925–2952 (The Lonely Path Taken by the Chinese Trotskyists: Their Interpretations and Practice of Permanent Revolution, 1925–1952), ma dissertation, National Taiwan University, Taipei, 2008. (8) Wu Jimin, Lianyu: Zhongguo Tuopai de kunan yu fendou (Purgatory: The Chinese Trotskyists’ Ordeal and Struggle), Singapore: Bafang wenhua chuangzuoshi, 2008 (translated in Benton 2015). (9) Zhang Zeyu, Liuxue yu geming: 20 shiji 20 niandai liuxue Sulian rechao yanjiu (Studying Abroad and Revolution: The Upsurge of Chinese Students in the Soviet Union in the 1920s), Beijing: Renmin Press, 2009. (10) Duan Yue, Wang Guolong koushu shengmingshi (Oral Narratives of Wang Guolong, A Life), 2010 (unpublished). (11) Tang Baolin, Chen Duxiu quan zhuan (A Full Biography of Chen Duxiu), Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese University Press, 2011, reprinted by China’s Social Sciences Academic Press in 2013.

1154

appendix 1

(12) Duan Yue, Caifang shouji: Xiong Andong (Interview Notes on Xiong Andong’s Life), 2012 (unpublished). (13) Xu Wuzhi, Yanmo de gemingzhe: Wenzhou Tuopai de xingqu yu fumie, 1933–1952 (The Rise and Fall of Wenzhou Trotskyists, 1933–52), ma dissertation submitted to East China Normal University, Shanghai, 2014 (unpublished). (14) Wang Yongsheng, Mitu de gaoyang: Zhongguo Tuopai chenfulu (The Lost Lamb: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Trotskyists), Taipei: Liehairen, 2016. (15) Sun Huixiu, Jindai Zhongguo Tuopai lishi zaiyanjiu (A Further Research on Trotskyism in Modern China), PhD thesis submitted to Renmin University of China, Beijing, 2017 (unpublished). And Sun’s monograph is now brought out by Zhonghua Book Company (Hong Kong) in 2023: Tuopai yu Jindai Zhongguo, yixiang zhengzhi wenhuashi de kaocha (The Trotskyist Faction and Modern China), Hong Kong: Kaimin shudian. (16) Louisa Wei Shiyu, Wang Fanxi: tashan zhishi yu liufang zhilü (Wang Fanxi in Exile), Hong Kong: Hong Kong City University Press, 2019. (17) Lau Pik-ka, Chongji ‘Xianggang qishi niandai’ Shenhua: huohong niandai shehui yundong de sixiang, qinggan yu zuzhi (Bursting the Myth of the ‘Hong Kong 1970s Fiery Era’: Thoughts, Affects, and Organisations of the Fiery Seventies Social Movement), ma dissertation, National Central University, Taipei, 2021. (18) Tang Baolin, Dui Zhongguo Tuopai wenti de yidian xinsikao (New Thoughts on the Problem of the Chinese Trotskyists), no date. 3. Chinese Trotskyists’ Collected Writings and Memoirs (1) Peng Shuzhi, Peng Shuzhi xuanji (Peng Shuzhi’s Collected Works), vol. 3, Hong Kong: October Bookshop, 1982. (2) Zheng Chaolin, Zheng Chaolin huiyilu (The Memoirs of Zheng Chaolin), Beijing: Xiandai shiliao biankanshe, 1982, reprinted in 1986 (circulated internally only). (3) Peng Shuzhi, Peng Shuzhi xuanji (Peng Shuzhi’s Collected Works), vol. 1, Hong Kong: October Bookshop, 1983. (4) Peng Shuzhi, Peng Shuzhi xuanji (Peng Shuzhi’s Collected Works), vol. 2, Hong Kong: October Bookshop, 1984. (5) Zheng Chaolin, Yuyin canji (Poems written by Zheng Chaolin), Changsha: Hunan Renmin Press, 1989. (6) Zheng Chaolin, Huaijiu ji (Recollections), Beijing: Dongfang Press, 1995. (7) Zheng Chaolin, Shishi yu huiyi: Zheng Chaolin wannian wenxuan (History and Recollections: Zheng Chaolin’s Collected Writings in His Later Years), Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1998.

bibliographies

1155

(8) Zheng Chaolin, Zheng Chaolin huiyilu (The Memoirs of Zheng Chaolin and Zheng’s Collected Writings in His Later Years), edited by Fan Yong, Beijing: Dongfang Press, 2004. (9) Wang Fanxi, Shuangshan huiyilu (The Memoirs of Wang Fanxi), Beijing: Dongfang Press, 2004. (10) Hu Luoqing, Shiren Xie Shan he tade Tuopai pengyoumen (The Poet Xie Shan and His Trotskyist Friends), Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 2009. (11) Chen Bilan, Zaoqi Zhonggong yu Tuopai: Wode geming shengya huiyi (The Early ccp and Chinese Trotskyists: My Memoirs as a Revolutionary), Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 2010. (12) Peng Shuzhi, Peng Shuzhi xuanji (Peng Shuzhi’s Collected Works), vol. 4, Hong Kong: October Bookshop, 2010. (13) Chen Duxiu, Chen Duxiu wannian zhuzuoxuan (Chen Duxiu’s Collected Writings in His Later Years), edited by Lin Zhiliang, Wu Mengming, and Zhou Luqiang, Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 2012. (14) Peng Shuzhi, Peng Shuzhi huiyilu (The Memoirs of Peng Shuzhi), 2 vols, Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 2016. (15) Wang Fanxi, Wang Fanxi xuanji (Wang Fanxi’s Selected Writings), 3 vols, edited by Zhu Zheng, Hong Kong: Hong Kong City University Press, 2018. 4. Novels on Chinese Trotskyists (1) Wang Ruowang, ‘Yige “Tuopai fenzi” de gushi’ (The Story of a Trotskyist), Shanghai: Wenhui Monthly, 1989 (03). (2) Zhou Meisen, Zhong’e (Heavy Yoke), Guangzhou: Huacheng Press, 1990, reprinted several times by different publishers, most recently in 2023. 5. Articles, Theses, and Monographs on Lu Xun, Trotsky, and Chinese Trotskyists (1) Liu Qingfu, ‘Lu Xun yu Tuoluociji de wenxue sixiang’ (The Literary Thinking of Lu Xun and Trotsky), Beijing shifan daxue xuebao (Journal of Beijing Normal University), 1986 (03), 31–37. (2) Tang Tianran, ‘Dui Sidalin qingchu yiji de quyi peihe: Wang Ming xiang Disanguoji chengbao Lu Xun “Da Tuoluocijipai de xin”’ (Flattering Stalin: The Submission of Lu Xun’s ‘Letter to Chinese Trotskyists’ to the Comintern by Wang Ming), Lu Xun yanjiu dongtai (Trends in Lu Xun Studies), 1989 (08), 75–6, 34. (3) Yao Xipei, ‘Lu Xun cangshu Zhong de Tuoluociji zhuzuo jiqi yingxiang’ (Trotsky’s Writings in Lu Xun’s Collection and Their Impact on Lu Xun), Shanghai Lu Xun yanjiu (Shanghai Lu Xun Studies), 1991 (02), 195– 206.

1156

appendix 1

(4) Zhang Zhixin, ‘Yongbao liangji: Lu Xun yu Tuoluocji, “Lapu” wenyi sixiang’ (Embracing Two Extremes: Lu Xun’s Connections with Trotsky and ‘raap’ [Russian Association of Proletarian Writers] Literary Theory), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu Xun Research Monthly), 1994 (07), 4–9. (5) Wang Shihua, ‘Shilun Lu Xun Tuoluociji guan de zhuanbian: Lu Xun yu Qu Qiubai’ (On the Transformation of Lu Xun’s Views on Trotsky: Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu Xun Research Monthly), 1996 (03), 24–31. (6) Liao Siping, ‘Tuoluociji yu Lu Xun’ (Trotsky and Lu Xun), Xiangtan daxue shehuikexue xuebao (Journal of Xiangtan University, Social Sciences Edition), 2001 (03), 88–91. (7) Nagahori Yuzo, ‘Lu Xun de Chen Duxiu guan yu Chen Duxiu de Lu Xun guan’ (Lu Xun’s Views on Chen Duxiu and Chen Duxiu’s Views on Lu Xun), Nei Menggu shifan daxue xuebao, zhexue shehuikexue ban (Journal of Inner Mongolia Normal University, Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 2002 (04), 47–53. (8) Nagahori Yuzo, ‘Lu Xun “gemingren” de tichu: Lu Xun jieshou Tuoluociji wenyi lilun zhiyi’ (Lu Xun’s Idea of ‘Revolutionary People’: Evidence of Lu Xun’s Acceptance of Trotsky’s Literary Theory), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu Xun Research Monthly), 2002 (10), 24–34. (9) Fang Weibao, ‘Tuoluociji yu Zhongguo xiandai zuoyi wenyi’ (Trotsky and Left-wing Literature and Art in Modern China), Anhui shifan daxue xuebao, renwen shehuikexue ban (Journal of Anhui Normal University, Humanities and Social Sciences Edition), 2005 (05), 551–555. (10) Liu Xiaojing, Lu Xun yu ‘Tuopai’ guanxi yanjiu (A Study of the Connections between Lu Xun and the Chinese Trotskyists), ma dissertation, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, 2008. (11) Nagahori Yuzo, ‘Lu Xun geming wenxuelun zhong de Tuoluociji wenyi lilun’ (A Reflection on Trotsky’s Views on Literature and Art in Lu Xun’s Revolutionary Literary Theory), Xiandai Zhongwen xuekan (Journal of Modern Chinese Literature), 2011 (03), 82–91. (12) Zhang Guanghai, ‘Lu Xun jieji wenxue lunshu de zhuanbian yu Tuoluociji’ (The Evolution of Lu Xun’s Proletarian Literature and Trotsky), Xiandai Zhongwen xuekan (Journal of Modern Chinese Literature), 2011 (03), 97– 101, 118. (13) Song Huanying, ‘Lu Xun yu Tuopai: huwei “yizhang” de gemo’ (Lu Xun and the Chinese Trotskyists: A Mutual Misunderstanding), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu Xun Research Monthly), 2014 (08), 12–18. (14) Nagahori Yūzō, Lu Xun yu Tuoluociji: ‘Wenxue yu Geming’ zai Zhongguo (Lu Xun and Trotsky: Literature and Revolution in China), Taipei: Renjian Press, 2015.

bibliographies

1157

(15) Peng Guanlong, ‘Tuoluociji wenlun dui Lu Xun wenxue sixiang de yingxiang’ (The Impact of Trotsky’s Literary Theory on Lu Xun’s Literature), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu Xun Research Monthly), 2015 (05), 69–76. (16) Yang Zi, ‘Houqi Lu Xun sixiang xinyang jiangou zhong de Tuoluociji yingxiang’ (Trotsky’s Influence on Lu Xun’s Ideological Framework in His Later Years), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu Xun Research Monthly), 2015 (07), 52– 65. (17) Yang Zi, ‘Tuoluociji “Taichu weishi” yu Lu Xun de wenyi piping guan’ (Trotsky’s ‘Taichu weishi’ [“In the beginning was the event”, Trotsky’s play on “In the beginning was the word”] and Lu Xun’s Views on Literary Criticism), Nanhua daxue xuebao, shehuikexue ban (Journal of Nanhua University, Social Sciences Edition), 2016 (03), 82–90. (18) Yang Zi, ‘Tuoluociji yujing xia Lu Xun “Geming wenxue” guan de xinchuanshi’ (New Interpretations of Lu Xun’s “Revolutionary Literature” in the Context of Trotsky’s Literary Theory), Wenyi zhengming (Literary Contention), 2016 (04), 176–184. (19) Yang Zi, ‘Lun Changkuiyouzao jinzuo “Lu Xun yu Tuoluociji: Wenxue yu Geming zai Zhongguo”’ (A Review of Nagahori Yūzō’s Lu Xun and Trotsky), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu Xun Research Monthly), 2016 (07), 45– 55. (20) Zhu Zheng, ‘Guanyu shuming Lu Xun de “Da Tuoluosijipai de xin”’ (On ‘A Letter to Chinese Trotskyists’ in the Name of Lu Xun), Xiandai Zhongwen xuekan (Journal of Modern Chinese Literature), 2017 (04), 41–48. (21) Peng Guanlong, Tuoluociji yu Zhongguo xiandai geming wenxue sichao (Trotsky and Currents of Modern Revolutionary Literature in China), Taipei: Huamulan wenhua, 2017. (22) Bai Haijun, ‘Lu Xun yu “Wenxue yu Geming” guanxi de yifen xincailiao yinfa de sikao’ (A Reflection Triggered by a Newly Found Document on the Impact of [Trotsky’s] Literature and Revolution on Lu Xun), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu Xun Research Monthly), 2018 (12), 36–45, 52. (23) Yang Zi, Tongluren zhishang: Lu Xun houqi sixiang, wenxue, yu Tuoluociji yanjiu (Above the Fellow-Travellers: A Study on Lu Xun’s Thought in His Later Years, on Literature, and on Trotsky), Shanghai: Shanghai Joint Publishing, 2019. (24) Dong Tengyu, ‘Ping Yang Zi “Tongluren zhishang” ’ (A Review of Yang Zi’s Beyond Fellow-Travellers), Quyu wenhua yu wenxue yanjiu jikan (Studies of Regional Culture and Literature), 2021 (02), 320–325. (25) Qiu Huanxing, ‘“Tongluren Lu Xun” yu “yi Tuoluociji wei fangfa” ’ (Lu Xun as a Fellow-Traveller and Trotsky as a Research Method), Xiandai Zhongwen xuekan (Journal of Modern Chinese Literature), 2021 (04), 17–23.

1158

appendix 1

(26) Zhong Cheng, ‘Zailun Lu Xun dui Tuoluociji sixiang de jieshou jiqi zhuanbian’ (Re-examining Lu Xun’s acceptance of Trotsky’s Literary Theory and His Conversion), Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan (Modern Chinese Literature Studies), 2021 (10), 126–143. 6. Key Chinese Trotskyists’ Columns at the Marxist Internet Archive (1) Chen Bilan: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/chenbilan/index.htm. (2) Chen Qichang: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/chenqichang/index.ht m. (3) Jiang Junyang: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/jiangjunyang/index.ht m. (4) Liu Pingmei: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/liupingmei/index.htm. (5) Lou Guohua: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/louguohua/index.htm. (6) Peng Shuzhi: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/pengshuzhi/index.htm. (7) Wang Fanxi: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/wangfanxi/index.htm. (8) Xie Shan: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/xieshan/index.htm. (9) Xiong Andong: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/xiongandong/index.ht m. (10) Zheng Chaolin: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/zhengchaolin/index.h tm. (11) Zhou Rensheng: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/zhourensheng/index​ .htm. 7. Chinese Trotskyist Archives (in Chinese) (1) Hong Kong and Chinese Trotskyism Collection, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands: https://search.iisg.amsterdam/​ Record/COLL00650. (2) Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan’s Papers, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University, USA: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/130 30/kt638nc0kw/entire_text/. (3) Wang Fanxi Archive, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, UK: https://​ explore.library.leeds.ac.uk/special‑collections‑explore/8644/wang_fanxi _archive.

English Language Sources on Chinese Trotskyism since 1969 Sean James Alexander, Robert J. 1991, ‘Trotskyism in China’, in International Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 201–23.

bibliographies

1159

Barrett, Thomas (ed.) 1996, China, Marxism, and Democracy, Selections from October Review, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Benton, Gregor 1985, ‘Two Purged Leaders of Early Chinese Communism’, The China Quarterly 102: 317–28. Benton, Gregor 1992, Chinese Trotskyism and Democracy, Leeds East Asia Papers, 1–26, University of Leeds, Department of East Asian Studies. Benton, Gregor 1994, ‘Lu Xun, Leon Trotsky, and the Chinese Trotskyists’, East Asian History 7, 7: 93–104. Benton, Gregor 1996, China’s Urban Revolutionaries: Explorations in the History of Chinese Trotskyism, 1921–1952, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Benton, Gregor (ed.) 1997, An Oppositionist for Life: Memoirs of the Chinese Revolutionary Zheng Chaolin, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Gregor Benton, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Benton, Gregor (ed.) 1998, Chen Duxiu’s Last Articles and Letters, 1937–1942, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Gregor Benton, Chinese worlds, Richmond: Curzon. Benton, Gregor (ed.) 2015, Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo, Leiden: Brill. Benton, Gregor, Cheng Yingxiang, and Claude Cadart 1986, ‘Remarks on a Review of Peng Shuzhi’s Memoirs’, The China Quarterly 107: 530–36. Benton, Gregor and Feng Chongyi (eds.) 2019, Poets of the Chinese Revolution: Chen Duxiu, Zheng Chaolin, Chen Yi, Mao Zedong, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Gregor Benton and Feng Chongyi, London: Verso. Benton, Gregor and John Sexton (eds.) 2022, Zheng Chaolin, Selected Writings, 1942– 1998, with an introduction by Gregor Benton, Boston: Brill. Broué, Pierre 1990, ‘Chen Duxiu and the Fourth International, 1937–1942’, Revolutionary History 2, 4: 16–21. Chattopadhyay, Kunal 2004, ‘Trotskyism in China: The Formative Years’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 65: 971–83. Cheng Yingxiang and Claude Cadart 1998, ‘Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan: The Lives and Times of a Revolutionary Couple’, China Perspectives 17: 30–35. Collin, Paul 1990, ‘The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution: An Essay on the Different Editions of that Work’, Revolutionary History 2, 4: 2–4. Durand, Damien 1990, ‘The Birth of the Chinese Left Opposition’, Revolutionary History 2, 4: 7–15. Feigon, Lee 1983, Chen Duxiu, Founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hirson, Baruch 2003, Frank Glass: The Restless Revolutionary, London: Porcupine Press. Kuhfus, Peter 1985, ‘Chen Duxiu and Leon Trotsky: New Light on Their Relationship’, The China Quarterly 102: 253–76.

1160

appendix 1

Kagan, Richard 1969, ‘The Chinese Trotskyist Movement and Ch’en Tu-hsiu: Culture, Revolution, and Polity’, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Kagan, Richard 1977, ‘Trotskyism in Shanghai, 1929–1932: The Politics of Iconoclasm’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 1&2: 87–108. Li Fu-jen (Glass, Frank) and Peng Shu-tse (Peng Shuzhi) 1974, Revolutionaries in Mao’s Prisons: The Case of the Chinese Trotskyists, New York: Pathfinder Press. Miller, Joseph 1979, ‘The Politics of Chinese Trotskyism: The Role of a Permanent Opposition in Communism’, PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Miller, Joseph 1982, ‘Trotskyism in China: Its Origins and Contemporary Programme’. Working paper for the 4th National Conference, Asian Studies Association of Australia. Miller, Joseph 2001, ‘Peng Shuzhi and the Chinese Revolution: Notes Towards a Political Biography’, Historical Materialism 8, 1: 265–96. Miller, Joseph 2016, ‘From Unity to Division: Chinese Trotskyism and World War ii’, Marxist Studies 13, 4: 181–216. Pantsov, Alexander V. and Daria A. Spichak 2008, ‘New Light from the Russian Archives: Chinese Stalinists and Trotskyists at the International Lenin School in Moscow, 1926–1938’, Twentieth-Century China 33, 2: 29–50. Pantsov, Alexander 1994, ‘From Students to Dissidents: The Chinese Trotskyists in Soviet Russia (Part i)’, Issues and Studies 30, 3: 97. Pantsov, Alexander 1994, ‘From Students to Dissidents: The Chinese Trotskyists in Soviet Russia (Part ii)’, Issues and Studies 30, 4: 56. Pantsov, Alexander 1994, ‘From Students to Dissidents: The Chinese Trotskyists in Soviet Russia (Part iii)’, Issues and Studies 30, 5: 77. Pantsov, Alexander 2000, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927, Richmond: Curzon Press. Pantsov, Alexander 2002, “Stalin and the Chinese Communist Dissidents,” in Morris Slavin and Louis Patsouras, eds., Reflections at the End of a Century (Youngstown: Youngstown State University Press), 28–40. Pantsov, Alexander (ed.) 2020, Karl Radek on China: Documents from the Former Secret Soviet Archives, Leiden: Brill. Pantsov, Alexander and Gregor Benton 1993, ‘Did Trotsky Oppose Entering the Guomindang “From the First”?’, Twentieth-century China 19, 2: 52–66. Peng Shuzhi 1980, The Chinese Communist Party in Power, New York: Pathfinder Press. Spartacist 1997, ‘Permanent Revolution vs. the “Anti-Imperialist United Front”: The Origins of Chinese Trotskyism’, Spartacist 53: 21–35. Wang Fan-hsi 1991 [1980], Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary, second revised and expanded edition, translated by Gregor Benton, New York: Columbia University Press.

bibliographies

1161

Wang Fan-hsi 1993, Isaac Deutscher, Chen Duxiu and the Chinese Trotskyists: A Comment on Deutscher’s The Prophet Outcast, translated by Gregor Benton, Leeds East Asia Papers 23, University of Leeds, Department of East Asian Studies. Wang Fan-hsi 2020 [1964], Mao Zedong Thought, translated by Gregor Benton, Leiden: Brill. Wang Yilin 1984, ‘Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyites: Post-Mao Reevaluations of the Early ccp Leadership’, Chinese Law and Government 17, 1–2: 68–80. Williams, Harry 1998, ‘Trotskyism in China: Struggling towards the road of light’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 30, 4: 63–69. Yang Qiang 2015, ‘Review of an Argument on a Historical Article of Chinese Trotskyite’, Canadian Social Science 11, 8: 121–24. Yang Yang 2018, ‘Radicalism at the Margin: The New Emergence of the Chinese Trotskyist Movement in Hong Kong, 1969–1981’, PhD thesis, University of Essex.

Articles and Books relevant to Chinese Trotskyism and Translations into Japanese of Writings by Chinese Trotskyists published since 1980 Nagahori Yūzō Aotani Masaaki 1982, “Torotukisuto” Rojin to Torotukī, Chin Dokushū (The “Trotskyist” Lu Xun and Trotsky, Chen Duxiu), Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (Monthly journal of Chinese affairs) no. 408, 34–35, 42, Tokyo: Institute of Chinese affairs. Benton, Gregor 1996, Ō Bonsei eno intabyū: Tō Hōrin cho “Chūgoku Torosukisuto shi” wo megutte (An interview with Wang Fanxi: On History of Chinese Trotskyism by Tang Baolin), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 19, 132–156, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Benton, Gregor 2003, Tuitō Ō Bonsei (1907–2002) (Wang Fanxi (1907–2002): An obituary), translated by Yukawa Nobuo, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 40, 205–210, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Chin Dōdō 2002, Chin Kishō no shi (The death of Chen Qichang) translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (Monthly journal of Chinese affairs) no. 650, 29–41, Tokyo: Institute of Chinese affairs. Chin Dōdō 2016, Ka Shiyu bannen hutatu no koto (The meaning of He Zhiyu’s two significant actions in his later years) translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Hiyoshi kiyō Chūgoku kenkyū (The Hiyoshi review of Chinese studies) no. 9, 121–169. Chin Dokushū (Chen Duxiu) 2016–2017, Chin Dokushū bunshū (Selected works of Chen Duxiu) 3 volumes, translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Ogawa Toshiyasu, Onodera Shirō, Takemoto Norihito, Ishikawa Yoshihiro, Miyoshi Nobukiyo, and Eda Kenji, Tokyo: Heibonsha.

1162

appendix 1

Chin Kyōrin (Chen Jinglin) 2002, Chin Dokushū no Soren kan (Chen Duxiu’s vision of the ussr), translated by Yoshino Bukio, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 39, 159–181, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Chin Gyokuki (Chen Yuqi) 2002, Chin Dokushū no bannen no minshushugi shisō (Chen Duxiu’s final democratic views), translated by Yoshino Bukio, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 39, 133–158, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Chō Hōkyo (Zhao Fangju) 2017, Kōnichi sen no zensen nite (We were on the front line of the anti-Japanese war), translated by Hayano Hajime, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 70, 130–144, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Chō Kyokō (Zhang Juhao) 1982, Tōseki hakudatsu go no Chin Dokushū o dō miru ka (How to evaluate Chen Duxiu after his expulsion from the party), translated by Kokayu Shōji, Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (Monthly journal of Chinese affairs) no. 408, 43–53, Tokyo: Institute of Chinese affairs. Eda Kenji 2002, Chin Dokushū kenkyū no chihei (A perspective on studies on Chen Duxiu), Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 39, 200–222, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Eda Kenji 2007, Chin Dokushū no “Saigo no kennkai” o megutte: Aru Chūgoku chisikijin no “minshushugi” “shakaishugi” sosite torotukizumu shisō ni tsuite (On Chen Duxiu’s “last views”: A Chinese Intellectual’s thoughts on “democracy”, “socialism” and Trotskyism), Shakai sisutemu kenkyū (Social Systems) no. 10, 1–10, edited by the editorial board of Social Systems, Kyoto: Kyoto University. Eda Kenji, Nakamura Katsumi and Morita Seiya 2018, Sekaishi kara mita Roshia kakumei: sekai o yurugashita hyaku nen kan (The Russian revolution in world history: One hundred years that shook the world), Tokyo: Tsuge shobō shinsha. Fukumoto Katsukiyo 1994, Chūgoku kyōsantō gaiden (ccp’s supplementary stories), Tokyo: Aki shobō. Hō Jutsushi (Peng Shuzhi) 1980, Ushinawareta Chūgoku kakumei (The Chinese revolution lost), translated by Nakajima Mineo, Tokyo: Shinhyōron. Ka Shokuhō (Jia Zhifang) 1999, Wasure u bekarazaru senpai: Tei Chōrin sensei (An unforgettable oldman: Mr Zheng Chaolin), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 28, 162–196, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Kikuchi Kazutaka 1996, Chūgoku Torotukī ha no seisei, dōtai oyobi sono shuchō: 1927 nen kara 34 nen o chūshin ni (The origin and development of Trotskyism in China), The Shirin (The journal of history) vol. 79 no. 2, 258–290, Kyoto: Kyoto University. Kiyama Hideo 1999, Kanshi no kuni no kanshi, rengoku hen 5: Rō Torotukisuto no goku chūgin (Chinese poetry in the land of Chinese poetry, book of purgatory 5: Poems composed by an old Trotskyist in prison), Bungaku (Literature) vol. 10 no. 1, 164–171, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Koyama Saburō 1993, Gendai Chūgoku no seiji to bungaku: Hihan to shukusei no bungakushi (Politics and literature in contemporary China: Literary history of criticism and purges), Tokyo: Tōhō shoten.

bibliographies

1163

Kyō Sei (Xiang Qing) 2017, Ō Bonsei shōden (A biographical sketch of Wang Fanxi), translated by Hayano Hajime, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 70, 178–182, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Morita Kyō 1982, Chūgoku Kyōsantō shi no ikutsu ka no danmen ni tsuite (On some cross-sections of the history of the Chinese Communist Party), Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (Monthly journal of Chinese affairs) no. 408, 20–33, Tokyo: Institute of Chinese affairs. Nagahori Yūzō 1998, Tei Chōrin: Chūgoku Torotukisuto no Hutsu So ryūgaku, gokutyū taiken to gaikokugo (Zheng Chaolin: A Chinese Trotskyist’s experiences while studying in France, the Soviet Union, and in prison and his learning of foreign languages), Sinica monthly Oct. 1998, 104–109, Tokyo: Taishūkan shoten. Nagahori Yūzō 1998, Hantai ha o tsuranuita Tei Chōrin (Zheng Chaolin, who remained a staunch oppositionist), Tokyo Shimbun evening edition, 17 October 1998. Nagahori Yūzō 1999, Shōgai ni wataru sayoku hanntai ha Tei Chōrin o okuru (In memory of the lifelong left-wing oppositionist Zheng Chaolin), Chūgoku 21 (China 21) no. 5, 235–241, Aichi: Aichi daigaku gendai Chūgoku gakkai (Society of contemporary Chinese studies of Aichi university). Nagahori Yūzō 2002, Intabyū: Chūgoku Torotukisuto no meiun (An interview with two Chinese Trotskyists), Chūgoku 21 (China 21) no. 14, 171–188, Aichi: Aichi daigaku gendai Chūgoku gakkai (Society of contemporary Chinese studies of Aichi university). Nagahori Yūzō 2003, Ō Bonsei san o shinobu (In memory of Wang Fanxi), Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 40, 216–221, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Nagahori Yūzō 2011, Rojin to Torotukī: Chūgoku ni okeru “Bungaku to kakumei” (Lu Xun and Trotsky: “Literature and Revolution” in China”, Tokyo: Heibonsha. Nagahori Yūzō 2015, Chin Dokushū (Chen Duxiu), Tokyo Yamakawa shu pansha. Nagahori Yūzō 2018, Chin Dokushū no Chūkyō hukutō kyōryoku mondai to “Torotukī ha ni kotaeru tegami” (On the problem of Chen Duxiu’s restoration to ccp and of his cooperation with ccp in relation to “A reply letter to the Trotskyist”), Hiyoshi kiyō Chūgoku kenkyū (The Hiyoshi review of Chinese studies) No. 11, 1– 13. Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 1979, Chūgoku Torotukisuto kaisō roku (Memoirs of a Chinese Trotskyist), translated by Yabuki Susumu, Tokyo: Tsuge shobō. Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 1995, Shohyō: Chūgoku Torotukisuto shi (Book review: History of Chinese Trotskyists by Tang Baolin), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 17, 138–146, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 1996, Rō Kokka tsuitō (In memory of Lou Guohua), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 18, 171–175: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 1997, “Chūgoku Torotukisuto shi” no chosha ni kotaeru (Answer-

1164

appendix 1

ing to the author of “History of Chinese Trotskyists”), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 23, 157–173, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 1998, Dōshi Tei Chōrin no shi o itamu (In memory of comrade Zheng Chaolin), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Kakehashi weekly (bulletin of jrcl) Sep. 28th, 1998. Tokyo: jrcl. Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 2002, Eigo ban “Chin Dokushū saigo no ronbun to tegami” he no jobun (Preface to English version of “Chen Duxiu’s last articles and letters”), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 39, 182–185, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 2002, Chin Dokushū, Chūgoku kyōsanshugi no sōshisha (Chen Duxiu, Founder of the Chinese communism), translated by Sasaki Chikara, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 39, 186–199, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 2006, Kohū icho dokugo kan (My impressions of Hu Feng’s posthumous works), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Hiyoshi kiyō gengo bunka komyunikēshon (The Hiyoshi review: language, culture and communication) no. 37, 1–23, Yokohama: Keio gijuku daigaku (Keio university). Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 2007, Sō Unpin to Kyo Shikō o omou (To the memory of my old friends Song Yunbin and Xu Zhixing) translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Hiyoshi kiyō gengo bunka komyunikēshon (The Hiyoshi review: language, culture and communication) no. 39, 182–210, Yokohama: Keio gijuku daigaku (Keio university). Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 2008, “Rojin no tegami” kara Chin Kishō sono hito o kataru (In memory of my old comrade Chen Qichang), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Hiyoshi kiyō Chūgoku kenkyū (The Hiyoshi review of Chinese studies) no. 1, 105–142. Yokohama: Keio gijukudaigaku (Keio university). Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 2010, Ō Jitumi to “Ō Jitumi mondai” o kataru (Talking about Wang Shiwei and the case of Wang Shiwei), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Hiyoshi kiyō Chūgoku kenkyū (The Hiyoshi review of Chinese studies) no. 3, 65–109, Yokohama: Keio gijuku daigaku (Keio university). Ō Bonsei (Wang Fanxi) 2022, Mō Takutō shisō ronkō (Mao Zedong’s thought), translated by Teramoto Tutomu, Inagaki Yutaka and Nagahori Yūzō, Tuge shobo shinsha. Ō Irin (Wang Yilin) 1982, Chin Dokushū to Chūgoku Torotukisuto no kankei ni tsuite (The relationship between Chen Duxiu and Chinese Trotskyists), translated by Aotani Masaaki, Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (Monthly journal of Chinese affairs) no. 408, 36–42, Tokyo: Institute of Chinese affairs. Ri Ei (Li Shu) 1982, Dai kakumei shippai go no Chin Dokushū (Chen Duxiu after the defeat of the Great Revolution), translated by Tanaka Tetuya, Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (Monthly journal of Chinese affairs) no. 408, 54–64, Tokyo: Institute of Chinese affairs. Ryūshū (Liu Xiu) 2003, Chin Dokushū wa Torotukī ha, dai 4 intānashonaru o ridatsu shitanoka (Did Chen Duxiu withdraw from Chinese Trotskyists’ organisation and

bibliographies

1165

from fi?), translated by Yoshino Bukio, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 41, 181– 192, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Saito Tetsurō 1998, Chūgoku kakumei to chishikijin (The Chinese revolution and Chinese intellectuals) Tokyo: Kenbun shuppan. Sasaki Chikara 2002, Chūgoku Torotukizumu undō to Chin Dokushū (Chinese Trotskyists movement and Chen Duxiu), Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 39, 3–13, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Sasaki Chikara 2002, Hukken suru Chin Dokushū no kōki shisō (The reevalation of Chen Duxiu’s late ideas), Shisō (Ideas) no. 939, 98–115. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Sasaki Chikara 2003, Chūgoku Torotukisuto no sai chōrō Ō Bonsei sensei o tuitō suru (In memory of the oldest Chinese Trotskyist Mr. Wang Fanxi), Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 40, 211–215, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Sekine Ken 2003, Ō Bonsei no sōgi oyobi ni san no oboegaki (Funeral ceremony for Wang Fanxi) Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 40, 222–230, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Shi Gen (Shi Yuan) 1982, Chin Dokushū to Torotukī ni taisuru shin hyōka (New assessment of Chen Duxiu and Trotsky), translated by Chūgoku kenkyūjo henshū bu (the editorial board of Institute of Chinese affairs), Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (Monthly journal of Chinese affairs) no. 408, 25–27, Tokyo: Institute of Chinese affairs. Sōzan (Ō Bonsei), Ittei (Rō Kokka) (Wang Fanxi, Lou Guohua) 2016, Chūgoku Torotukī ha no haiboku kara kyōkun o kumitoru beki da: dai 10 kai sekai taikai ni teishutu suru tōron taikō (Lessons should be drawn from the defeat of the Chinese Trotskyists: Outline submitted to the 10th World Congress of Fourth International), translated by Hayano Hajime, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 69, 218–230, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tai Sei (Dai Qing) 1990, Mō Takutō to Chūgoku chishikijin: En’an seihū kara han uha tōsō e (Contemporary Chinese intellectuals: Liang Shuming, Wang Shiwei, and Chu Anping), translated by Tabata Sawako, Tokyo: Tōhō shoten. Tei Chōrin (Zheng Chaolin) 1994, Kohū no tyōbun “Rojin sensei” o yonde omou (Some comments on Hu Feng’s long essay “Mr. Lu Xun”), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 17, 156–168. Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tei Chōrin (Zheng Chaolin) 1995, Shohyō: Chūgoku Torotukisuto shi (Book review: History of the Chinese Trotskyists, by Tang Baolin), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 17, 147–162, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tei Chōrin (Zheng Chaolin) 1999, Chūgoku kyōsantō sōshoki Kō Takumin e no tegami (A letter to the genaeral secretary of ccp, Jiang Zemin), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 28, 171–172, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tei Chōrin (Zheng Chaolin) 1999, Chūgoku kyōsantō dai 15 kai taikai he no tegami (A letter to the 15th congress of ccp), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 28, 173–176, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan.

1166

appendix 1

Tei Chōrin (Zheng Chaolin) 1999, 60 nen mae no sekai teki ronsō: Sobieto ryokōki shin jo (The great global debate of 60 years ago: A new preface to Jide’s Return from the ussr), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 28, 165– 170, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tei Chōrin (Zheng Chaolin) 2002, Chin Dokushū dōshi o tuitōsuru (Mourning Chen Duxiu), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 39, 126–132, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tei Chōrin (Zheng Chaolin) 2003, Shoki Chūgoku kyōsantō gunzō: Torotukisuto Tei Chōrin kaioku roku (Memoirs of Zheng Chaolin), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Miyoshi Nobukiyo and Ogata Kō, Tokyo: Heibonsha. Tei Genjitsu (Ding Yanshi) 2008, Gendai Chūgoku ni okeru Chin Dokushū kenkyū to Torotukizumu undō (Studies on Chen Duxiu in China today), Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 53, 121–131, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tei Gyōhō (Zheng Xiaofang) 1999, Tei Chōrin saigo no hibi (Zheng Chaolin’s last days), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 28, 177–181, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tei Gyōhō (Zheng Xiaofang) 1999, Tei Chōrin choyaku mokuroku shokō (Draft of a bibliography of works and translations by Zheng Chaolin), edited and translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 28, 193–196, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tei Rei (Ding Ling) 1982, Tei Rei no jidenteki kaisō (Ding Ling’s autobiographical memoirs), translated by Nakajima Midori, Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha. Tō Hōrin (Tang Baolin) 2003, Ō Bonsei shi o itamu (In memory of Mr. Wang Fanxi), translated by Nagahori Yūzō, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 40, 203–204, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Tō Hōrin (Tang Baolin) 2012, Chūgoku Torotukisuto zenshi (History of Chinese Trotskyism) translated by Suzuki Hiroshi, Tokyo: Ronsō sha. Yakushiji Wataru 2017, Chūgoku Torotukisuto undō to watakushi: Ō Bonsei intabyū (Chinese Trotskyists and I: An interview with Wang Fanxi) translated by Sakai Yoshichi, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 70, 145–177, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Yokokawa Jirō 1982, Chin Dokushū hyōka o megutte: Chūgoku ni okeru kyōsantō shi kenkyū no shin dōkō (On the evaluation of Chen Duxiu: new trends in the study of Communist Party history in China), Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (Monthly journal of Chinese affairs) no. 408, 1–19, Tokyo: Institute of Chinese affairs. Yokoyama Hiroaki 1983, Chin Dokushū (Chen Duxiu), Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha. Yokoyama Hiroaki 2009, Chin Dokushū no jidai: “Kosei no kaihou” o mezasite (The Age of Chen Duxiu: Aiming for “the liberation of individuality”), Tokyo: Keiō gijuku daigaku shuppankai. Yokoyama Hiroaki 2016, Kuiaratamenai hankotsu seishin: Tei Chōrin intabyū (A per-

bibliographies

1167

son of unrepentant rebelliousness: An interview with Zheng Chaolin), edited and translated by Yokoyama Hiroaki, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies) no. 69, 200–217, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan. Yokoyama Hiroaki 2017, Son Bun to Chin Dokushū: Genadai Chūgoku eno hutatu no michi (Sun Wen and Chen Duxiu: Two ways towards modern China), Tokyo: Heibonsha. Yokozawa Yasuo 1995, Ō Jitumi no meiyo kaihuku (Wang Shiwei’s rehabilitation), Kumamoto gakuen daigaku bungaku gengogaku ronshū (Journal of Kumamoto gakuen university: Literature and Linguistics) vol. 2 no. 1. Yoshidome Akihiro 2020, Chin Dokushū to Chūgoku kakumei shi no sai kentō (Reevaluation of Chen Duxiu and the history of Chinese revolution), Tokyo: Shakai hyōronsha.

Special Issues on Chen Duxiu and Chinese Trotskyism in Japanese 1.

2. 3. 4.

A reevalation of Chen Duxiu and new trends in ccp historiography, Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (Monthly journal of Chinese affairs) no. 408, Tokyo: Institute of Chinese affairs. Feb. 1982 Chen Duxiu and the Chinese revolution, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 39, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan, December 2002. The tragedy of the Chinese revolution, part 1, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 69, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan, February 2017. The tragedy of the Chinese revolution, part 2, Torotukī kenkyū (Trotsky studies), no. 70, Tokyo: Trotsky Institute of Japan, July 2018.

Publications in Russian on Chinese Trotskyism Alexander Pantsov Arincheva, Daria A. 2015 Kitaiskiye revoliutsionery v Sovetskoi Rossii (1920–1930-e gody): Fotoal’bom (Chinese Revolutionaries in Soviet Russia [the 1920s–1930s]: Photo Album), Moscow: Ves’ mir. Arincheva, Daria A. 2018, Kitaiskiye revoliutsionery v Sovetskoi Rossii (1920–1930-e gody): Fotoal’bom (‘Chinese Revolutionaries in Soviet Russia [the 1920s–1930s]: Photo Album’), 2nd ed. Moscow: Ves’ mir. Galitsky, V.P. 2002, Tszian Tszingo: tragediia i triumf syna Chan Kaishi (‘Chiang Chingkuo: Tragedy and Triumph of Chiang Kai-shek’s Son’), Moscow: rau-Universitet. Golovachev, V.Ts. 2020, ‘Pantsov Aleksandr Vadimovich (Alexander Vadimovich Pantsov)’, in V.Ts. Golovachev et al. (eds.), Kitaevedenie – Ustnaya istoriya: Sbornik interv’yu s vedushchimi rossiiskimi kitaivedami (Russian Synology – An Oral History: A Collection of Interviews with the Leading Russian Sinologists), vol. 4, Moscow: iv ran Press, 256–298.

1168

appendix 1

Pantsov, Alexander V. 1990 ‘Lev Davidovich Trotsky’ (‘Leon Davidovich Trotsky’), Voprosy istorii (Questions of History), 5: 65–87. Pantsov, Alexander V. 1991a, ‘Novoe o L’ve Trotskom’ (‘New Light on Leon Trotsky’), Svobodnaya mysl (Free Thought), 14: 121–124. Pantsov, Alexander V. 1991b, ‘Demon revolyutsii ili proletaskii reoliutsioner?’ (‘Demon of the Revolution’ or Proletarian Revolutionary?’), Politichekiye issledovaniya (‘Political Research’), 1: 188–194. Pantsov, Alexander V. 1998, ‘Sud’ba kitaiskogo trotskista’ (The Fate of a Chinese Trotskyist), Problemy Dal’nego Vostoka (‘Problems of the Far East’), 3–4. Pantsov, Alexander V. 1999, ‘Bolsheviki i Gomindan d period kitaiskoi revoliutsii 1925– 1927 godov’ (‘The Bolsheviks and the Guomindang During the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27’, in Arlen V. Meliksetov (ed.), Gomindan i Taiwan: Istoriya i sovremennost’ (The Guomindang and Taiwan: History and the Present Day), Moscow: iaas Press), 8–25. Pantsov, Alexander V. 2001, Tainaia istoriia sovietsko-kitaiskikh otmoshenii: Bolsheviki i kitaiskaya revoliutsiya 1919–1927 (The Secret History of Sino-Soviet Relations: The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927), Moscow: Muravei Guide Press. Pantsov, Alexander V. 2004, “Stalin i kitaiskiye kommunisticheskie dissidenty” (‘Stalin and the Chinese Communist Dissidents’), Revoliutsiya in reforms v sovremennom Kitaie: V poiskaoh paradigms razvitiya (‘Revolution and Reforms in Modern China: In Search for a Paradigm of the Development’), Moscow State University Institute of Asian and African Studies press, 2004, 81–99. Pantsov, Alexander V. 2005, ‘Karl Radek – kitaeved’ (‘Karl Radek – A Sinologist’), Vestnik Moskovskaogo Universiteta: Seriya Vostokovedenie (Herald of Moscow State University: Oriental Studies Series), 4: 13–38. Pantsov, Alexander V. 2007, Mao Tsedun (‘Mao Zedong’), Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya. Pantsov, Alexander V. 2009, Rasskazy o Mao Zedone (‘Stories about Mao Zedong’), 2 vols., Rostov-na-Donu/Krasnodar: Phoenix/Neoglory. Pantsov, Alexander V. 2011, ‘Stalin i kitaskii vopros; 1919–1927’ (‘Stalin and the Chinese Question: 1919–1927’), in Istoriya stalinizma: Itogi i problemy izycheniya: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii. Moskva, 5–7 dekabria 2008g. (History of Stalinism: Results and Research Problems: Materials of the International Scholarly Conference: Moscow, December 5–7, 2008), Moscow: rosspen: Fond “Presidentskii tsenr B.N. Yeltsina”, 299–312. Pantsov, Alexander V.2012, Mao Tsedun (‘Mao Zedong’). 2nd, revised ed., Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya. Pantsov, Alexander V.2013, Den Siaopin (‘Deng Xiaoping’), Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya. Pantsov, Alexander V.2019, Chan Kaishi (‘Chiang Kai-shek’), Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya.

bibliographies

1169

Pantsov, Alexander V. 2022, Mao Tsedun: Put’k vlasti (‘Mao Zedong: A Road to Power’), Moscow: Veche. Pantsov, Alexander V. 2022, Mao Tsedun: Velikii kormchii (‘Mao Zedong: The Great Helmsman’), Moscow: Veche. Pantsov, Alexander V. (ed.) 2005, ‘Karl Radek o Kitaye: Dokumenty i materialy’ (‘Karl Radek on China: Documents and Materials’), Moscow: ooo Sovero-print. Pantsov, Alexander and Daria A. Arincheva 2021 Zhizni I sud’by pervykh kitaiskikh kommunistov: Sbornik statei i materialov k 100-letiyu Kompartii Kitaya (‘Lives and Fates of the First Chinese Communists: A Collection of Articles and Materials Dedicated to the 100rd Anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’), Moscow: idv ran Press. Pantsov A. and Pierre Broué, ‘Otkrytoye pis’mo generalu D.A. Volkogonovu (“An Open Letter to General D.A. Volkogonov”, Konflikty i consensus (Conflicts and Consensus), 5: 73–80.)’ Shen Yue [Sheng Yue] 2009, Universitet imeni Sun Yat-sena v Moskve i kitaiskaia revoliutsiia: Vospominaniia (‘Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and the Chinese Revolution: Reminiscences’), trans. L.I. and V.Ts. Golovachev, Moscow: Kraft+. Spichak (Arincheva), Daria A. 2009, Review: “Shen Yue, Universitet imeni Sun Yat-sena v Moskve i kitaiskaia revoliutsiia: Vospominaniia (Sheng Yueh, Sun Yatsen University in Moscow and the Chinese Revolution: Memoirs), trans. from English by L.I. Golovacheva and V.Ts. Golovachev. Moscow, 2009”, Otechestvennye arhivy (Fatherland Archives), 5: 120–123. Spichak (Arincheva), Daria A. 2011, Kitaiskii avangard Kremlia: Revolyutsionery Kitaya v Moskovskikh shkolakh Kominterna (1921–1939) (‘The Kremlin’s Chinese Advance Guard: Revolutionaries of China in Moscow Comintern Schools [1921–1939]’). Moscow: Veche.

Papers of Leon Trotsky on China, Writings of Chinese Trotskyists in English, and English Articles on Chinese Trotskyism collected in the Marxist Internet Archive (mia) Andrew Pollack

Leon Trotsky on China 1927: Class Relations in the Chinese Revolution 1927/1931: Problems of The Chinese Revolution 1928: On the Canton Insurrection Three Letters to Preobrazhensky 1928: The Third International After Lenin 1929: The Sino-Soviet Conflict and The Opposition 1932: Peasant War in China and the Proletariat 1932: A Strategy of Action and Not of Speculation, Letter to Peking Friends

1170

appendix 1

1933: On the War in China 1937: On the Sino-Japanese War 1938: The Chinese Revolution [Introduction to Harold R. Isaacs: The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution]

Papers of Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan in the mia Peng Shuzhi – The Causes of the Victory of the Chinese Communist Party over Chiang Kai-shek, and the ccp’s Perspectives: Report on the Chinese Situation to the Third Congress of the Fourth International, 1951 – The Chinese Experience with Pabloite Revisionism and Bureaucratism, An Open Letter to James P. Cannon, 1953 – Pabloism Reviewed: From Pablo to Cochran, Clarke, and Mestre, 1955 – Therefore They Demand Immediate Reunification, 1955 – A Common Discussion for Reunification with all the Trotskyists Remaining with the is [fi], 1955 – Resolution on The Parity Commission, 1955 – Your Section formally proposed to withdraw from the Parity Commission, letter to Gerry Healy, 1955 – A Criticism of The Various Views Supporting the Chinese Rural People’s Communes, 1960 – On the Nature of The Chinese Communist Party and Its Regime Political Revolution or Democratic Reform, 1960 – Two Interviews on the Cultural Revolution, 1967 – Open Letter to the Members of the Chinese Communist Party, 1967 – The Relationship and Differences Between Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-Ch’i, 1968 – What Our Position Should Be on the Factional Struggle Inside the ccp, 1968 – Letter of Comrade Peng Shu-Chi to the International Executive Committee, 1968 – The Struggle Within the ccp and China’s Situation, 1968 – Return to The Road of Trotskyism, 1969 – Criticisms on the U.S. swp’s Opinion on Cuba, 1982 Chen Bilan – An Interview with Chen Bilan on “Cultural Revolution”, 1967 – The New Developments in the Chinese Situation, 1969 – The Real Lesson of China on Guerrilla Warfare, 1973 A “Register of the Peng Shu-tse [Peng Shuzhi] and Chen Bilan papers”, including materials in both English and Chinese, is housed at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University

bibliographies

1171

On Chinese Trotskyism Alexander, Robert J. 1991, “Trotskyism in China”. Barrett, Thomas and Xiao Dian 1989, “Upheaval in China!” Broué, Pierre 1990, “Chen Duxiu and the Fourth International, 1937–1942”. Collin, Paul 1983, “The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution: An Essay on the Different Editions of that Work”. Durand, Damien 1983, “The Birth of the Chinese Left Opposition”. Glass, Frank 1940, “The Communist League of China”. Peng Shuzhi 1947, “Trotskyism in China”. Spartacist League 1997, “The Origins of Chinese Trotskyism”. Wang Fanxi 1948, “Problems of Chinese Trotskyism”. Zheng Chaolin 1945, “Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists”. Zheng Chaolin 1942, “On the Nature of Revolution”.

appendix 2

Key Organisations Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp) In 1931, the Trotskyists established a unified Trotskyist political party in China – the Left Opposition of the Communist Party, later renamed the Communist League of China (clc). In 1942, the clc split into two small factions, a pro-Peng Shuzhi majority and a minority led by Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi. In 1948, the majority faction (Peng Shuzhi and his supporters) founded a new Trotskyist party – the Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp) – in Shanghai. On the eve of the Communist military victory over the Kuomintang in late 1949, the leadership of the rcp left mainland China for the British colony of Hong Kong, where Trotskyist activities continued and survived. The rest of the rcp remained in China, where they were arrested and imprisoned in December 1952. The rcp’s Hong Kong branch became fragmented and inactive in the mid-1950s. In the 1970s, the rcp began to re-organise. A new central committee was elected at its second congress in 1977, while the Hong Kong branch had been led by a “Provisional National Committee” (pnc) formed in 1954. In 1977, according to party minutes, the rcp had 33 members. It had two affiliated youth organisations, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (rcy) and the Young Socialist Group (ysg) (all rcy members were in the ysg). In September 1978, the ysg and a few old Trotskyists split off from the rcp and joined the unified rml. The rcp still exists in Hong Kong. Its party organ, October Review, continued to be published until March 2021. Internationalist Workers Party (iwp) In 1949, the iwp was founded by the Chinese Communist League’s minority faction in Shanghai, under Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi. After 1949, the iwp remained to a minimal extent active in mainland China. However, its members and supporters were rounded up in late 1952 by the authorities. A few members, such as Wang Fanxi and Lou Guohua, were by that time in exile. The iwp was unable to continue its activities in mainland China or Hong Kong. In 1978, a few surviving iwp individuals joined the unified rml. Another eminent iwp leader, Zheng Chaolin, remained imprisoned in China until 1979. Wang Fanxi took refuge in England in 1975. The 70’s Biweekly In January 1970, while publishing their own political magazine 70’s Biweekly, a small group of young Hong Kong radicals influenced by European New Left thinking created a local New Left-oriented political group, “The 70’s”. In the early 1970s, influenced by anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian ideas, “The 70’s” group launched various political initiatives and staged protests against the British colonial establishment. Starting in 1972, a group of its core activists went

key organisations

1173

abroad to learn more about the New Left movement in Europe. During their stay in Europe, many became Trotskyists. After returning to Hong Kong in 1973, activists such as Wu Zhongxian (Ng Chung-yin) split off from the original “70’s” and formed two new small Trotskyist groups – the Revolutionary Internationalist League (ril) and the International Young Socialist Alliance (iysa). Revolutionary Marxist League (rml) In mid-1974, the ril and a few iysa members fused together in a new Trotskyist youth group called the Socialist League, which later changed its name to the Revolutionary Marxist League. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, this group organised various activities, including the “Four-Antis Movement” (a campaign against employment, price increases, poverty, and “suppression”) and campaigns in solidarity with the Chinese Democracy movement, to express their political position, one of opposition to both British colonialism and the ccp regime. In the Hong Kong media, the group was often called the Combat Bulletin group, given that it published a journal called Combat Bulletin. In September 1978, the rml united with a small number of members of the iwp and the rcp from the first generation of Chinese Trotskyists, and also with two other Chinese Trotskyist youth groups, the Re-awakening (Fuxing) group in Britain and the Young Socialist Group. This new unified group kept the name rml. It had its own youth organisation, the Young Socialist Group (previously called the Progressive Students). In the 1970s, the rml probably had no more than 100 members. In December 1980, it split, and its political activities finally came to an end in the late 1980s. Young Socialist Group (ysg) The ysg was a Trotskyist youth group of around 20 members in Hong Kong in the 1970s. At first, this group was affiliated to the rcp, as its “mass” youth organisation. In September 1978, the ysg split from the rcp and combined with the rml’s youth group, the Progressive Students. After this organisational unification, the ysg became the youth league of the rml. In December 1980, seven ysg members were expelled from the group (and one resigned). Those expelled, together with others, established the Pioneer Group in early 1982, a small organisation active in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s.

Appendix 3: Biographical List The Chinese names in this list of Chinese Trotskyists, international Trotskyists and their supporters and other relevant people are mostly both in Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles transcriptions. Ali, Tariq (Clarissa, Howard, Ghulam, 1943–). A former British-Pakistani Trotskyist. Became a leading member of the International Marxist Group (img), the British section of the usfi, and the Fourth International from 1968 to 1981. A well-known writer in Britain and internationally. Editor of the New Left Review. Au Loong-yu 区 龙 宇 (Ou Longyu) (1956–) A leading figure in the ysg. He first contacted local Trotskyists in 1975 and joined the ysg in 1976. In 1978, along with other ysg activists, he joined the rml. He took part in the debates that attended the ysg-rml dispute in 1980. In late September 1980, he and his close comrade Yu Chunli (alias: Bu Xue) ended their membership of the rml, and he was expelled from the ysg in December. In 1982, he and other expelled ysg Trotskyists established the Pioneer Group. Alias: Yue Zhi, Liu Yu-fan. Barnes, Jack (Hans, Juan, Celso, 1940–) An American Trotskyist, national secretary of the Socialist Workers’ Party since 1972. Benton, Gregor 班国瑞 (1944–) Studied Classical Chinese at Cambridge. In 1964, expelled first from Cambridge, for a year, for campaigning

to free Nelson Mandela; and then from the Communist Party, forever, for supporting Trotsky. Has published a score or so of books (in several languages) on China’s Communist history, military history, dissent, and diaspora. A close friend of Wang Fanxi and appointed by Zheng Chaolin as his literary agent. Cannon, James P. (1890–1974) An American Trotskyist leader and a founder of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the USA. In 1952, the swp led by Cannon split from the Fourth International, and along with Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League (UK) and Pierre Lambert’s Internationalist Communist Party (pci in France), the swp helped organise a new Trotskyist leadership body, the International Committee in 1953. In 1963, the swp withdrew from the International Committee and reunified with the Fourth International (United Secretariat). Cannon played a leading role formally or informally in the swp until his death. Chen Bilan 陈 碧 兰 (Ch’en Pi-lan) (1902–87) Joined the League of Socialist Youth in 1922 and the Communist Party in 1923. Sent to Moscow to study in 1924, and returned to China one year later. Active in the

appendix 3: biographical list women’s movement. Became a Trotskyist together with Chen Duxiu in 1929. Self-exiled at the end of 1948, first to Hong Kong, then to Vietnam, France, and the us, finally, she went to Hong Kong, where she died. The wife of Peng Shuzhi. Alias: Bi Yun. Chen Daotong 陈道同 (1927–2014) Son of Chen Qichang. Joined the Trotskyists in 1946 but withdrew in 1948. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to four years. Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 (Ch’en Tu-hsiu) (1879–1942) Editor of New Youth, leader of the New Culture Movement, founder of the ccp, and its General Secretary until 1927. In 1931, became a Trotskyist and helped found the Chinese Left Opposition, which he then led. In 1932, went to prison on charges of seeking to overthrow the government and replace it with a proletarian dictatorship. Aliases: Shi An, Sa Weng, Xue Yi, Kong Jia, Zhong Fu, San Ai, Zhi Mian. Chen Jingguang 陈景光 (1921–1985) A Trotskyist and poet from Guangdong. Became a Trotskyist under Peng Shuzhi’s influence at university. Arrested during the 1952 round-up and sentenced to 5 years. Alias: Lantian. Chen Qichang 陈其昌 (Ch’en Ch’ich’ang) (1901–43) A Beijing student leader, and a member of the middleranking cadre of the ccp after 1925. Turned to Trotskyism in 1929, and became a leader of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. Arrested and executed by Japanese gendarmerie.

1175 Aliases: Chen Qingchen, Jiang Weiliang, Chen Zhongshan. Chen Zhongxi 陈仲禧 (Ch’en Chunghsi) (1908–43) A Hong Kong worker, who joined the Trotskyists in 1930. As a communist, he led an armed peasant struggle in Zhongshan county, Guangdong, towards the end of 1927. He was organiser of the Hong Kong Trotskyists in the mid-1930s and led an anti-Japanese guerrilla unit in Zhongshan during the War of Resistance. Died in battle around 1943. Evans, Leslie (1942–) An ex-member of the Socialist Workers Party (US) from July 1962 to August 1983. He served on the party’s literary staff in New York for various of the party’s publications, from 1967 to 1979, specialising in coverage of China. In later years he was a Senior Editor for several of ucla’s Asian research centers, overseen by the university’s International Institute. Frank, Pierre (1905–1984) A French Trotskyist leader, served as Trotsky’s secretary in Prinkipo, Turkey. Divisions among the French Trotskyists were overcome during the ww2 and Frank was a central leader of the section from the end of the war until he resigned in 1975 for health reasons. He was also a leading member of the Fourth International from 1948 until 1979. Gao Fang 高放 (1925–2018) A wellknown Marxist theorist at Renmin University in Beijing. Glass, Frank 李 福 仁 (1901–1988) British-born Cecil Frank Glass arrived

1176 in China from South Africa in 1930 and worked in Shanghai as a journalist on various English-language newspapers. A radio commentator in Shanghai; his last job there was as an assistant editor on J.B. Powell’s China Weekly Review. Aliases: Li Furen (Li Fu-jen), Frank Graves, John Liang. Han Jun 寒君 (Han Chun) (?–1945) A leader of the younger generation of Chinese Trotskyists. Active among Hong Kong workers throughout the period of the Japanese occupation of the colony until his death in 1945. Hansen, Joseph (1910–1979) An American Trotskyist. He was sent to be one of Trotsky’s secretariat in Coyoacan, Mexico in 1937 and was there until his assassination. He was a member of the swp leadership from 1940 until 1975. Along with Cannon, he played a major role in the 1963 reunification of the fi. He was also a fraternal member of the leadership of the usfi (1963–1979). Editor of the Trotskyist news service World Outlook/Intercontinental Press. He Shufen 何树芬 Became a Trotskyist in the late 1920s under the influence of Ou Fang. Engaged in Wenzhou Trotskyist activities organised by Zeng Meng in the late 1930s. He Xi 贺希 One of the first generation of Chinese Trotskyists. Attracted students to Trotskyism and Marxism while teaching in Guangxi in the early 1930s. He Zhizheng 何 止 铮 (1903–64) Became a Trotskyist in Moscow in 1930. Arrested in 1932 with Chen

appendix 3: biographical list Duxiu and Zeng Meng in Shanghai and sentenced to 5 years. In 1937, organised a Trotskyist group in Wenzhou with Zeng Meng. Arrested in 1952 but released a year later. Aliases: He Baozhen, He Fang, He Afang, He Afen, He Anxian, He Zhize. He Zishen 何 资 深 (Ho Tzu-shen) (1898–1961) A Beijing student in the early 1920s. Participated in the Northern Expedition. Active in Hunan and succeeded Mao as Secretary of the Hunan Provincial Committee. Became a Trotskyist in 1929, and spent several years in jail under the Guomindang. Arrested by the Maoist secret police in 1952. According to his prison-mate Zheng Chaolin, he had collapsed in both body and spirit before he died of a stroke in prison in 1960. Aliases: Zhang Hongdu, He Zhiyu. Hong Xiurong 洪秀荣 A Wenzhou Trotskyist. With Xia Yanfan 夏延樊 from Wenzhou, and Su Xuechang 苏 学常 (also known as Su Tao) from Shandong, organised a Trotskyist branch in Taiwan in 1947. All arrested in 1948 by the Kuomintang. Hong and Su were sentenced to two and a half years respectively, while Xia was sentenced to 4 years. Hu Feng 胡风 (1906–85) Alias Zhang Guangren 张光人, a disciple of Lu Xun and a well-known independent left-wing leader of the so-called Hu Feng clique. Purged in 1955 by Mao. Hu Qiuyuan 胡秋原 (Hu Ch’iu-yuan) (1910–2004) One of the Chinese students who returned to China

appendix 3: biographical list sometime in the early to mid-1930s, after studying in Japan. The majority of these returned students supported the ccp, but a few (notably Hu and Zheng Xuejia 郑学稼) showed some sympathy for Trotskyism. However, Hu and his friends very quickly became associated with the Guomindang. Hu Shi 胡适 (Hu Shih) (1891–1962) A Chinese philosopher and writer. Advocate of the vernacular literature. Collaborator with Chen Duxiu on New Youth. After May Fourth, Hu split with Chen Duxiu and was strongly criticised by the communists. A supporter of the Kuomintang and pro- American. Huang Jiantong 黄鑑铜 (Huang Chient’ung) (1918–87) A leader of the Guangxi Trotskyists. Released from prison together with Zheng Chaolin in 1979, and died in 1987 in Shanghai. Huang Yushi 黄禹石 A Wenzhou Trotskyist and a local schoolteacher. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to 15 years. Huo Luoqing 胡洛卿 A female Trotskyist from Guangdong. Joined the Trotskyists in 1949. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to 10 years. Released early in 1957. The wife of Xie Shan. Isaacs, Harold Robert 伊罗生 (1910– 86) An American journalist who published China Forum in Shanghai in the early 1930s. Influenced by Frank Glass, he became sympathetic to Trotskyism and in Beijing he wrote The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution with the help of Liu Renjing as

1177 his translator, he discussed the text with Trotsky, who wrote an introduction to it. The first (1938) edition was followed by several reprintings with Trotsky’s introduction deleted. After Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, Isaacs left the Trotskyist movement. Worked for the Columbia Broadcasting Company and Newsweek before entering academic life in 1950, in 1965, became Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aliases: Yi Luosheng, Harold Roberts. Ji Yunlong 藉云龙 A Trotskyist leader of the Shanghai organisation, assistant of Peng Shuzhi. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Died in prison. Aliases: Hua Bei, Xie Shaoweng, Zhu Yunlong. Jiang Junyang 姜君羊 (1922–2006) A leading Guanxi Trotskyist. Joined the Trotskyists in Guangzhou in 1946. Organised the Trotskyist activities in Guilin, Guangxi, in 1949. Arrested in 1951 and sentenced to 15 years. Released in 1982. Aliases: Hui Zhi, Lin Wei, Lin Zi, Qun, Tian Ren, Tian Shu, Tian You, Weiran. Jiang Zhendong 蒋振东 (Chiang Chentung) (1906–82) A textile worker and veteran Communist. One of the leaders of the Shanghai insurrections of 1927. Became a Trotskyist in 1929. Arrested by the Maoist police in 1952 for his dissident activities. Released from prison in 1979. John “Johnny” Shum Kin-fun 岑建勋 (Cen Jianxun) (1952–) An eminent Hong Kong actor and film produ-

1178 cer. In the 1970s, along with Wu Zhongxian and other young radicals from Hong Kong, he actively took part in local Trotskyist activities and became a key organiser in the movement. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, he withdrew from Trotskyist politics and then fully devoted into filming industry. Kui Kuan 隗宽 A Shandong Trotskyist. With Zhang Weiliang 张维良, from Sichuan, and others, organised the Trotskyist underground activities in Chongqing. Both arrested in 1952. Kui was missing after 1962 while Zhang died in a labour-reform mine. Lau Shan-ching 刘山青 (Liu Shanqing) (1951–) One of the former key members of the rml. He was a member of the standing committee of the rml and was in charge of China affairs. In late 1981, He was arrested for supporting the Chinese Democracy Movement when visiting the families of pro-democracy activists in Guangzhou. Sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in 1983. Released in 1991. Leung Kwok-hung 梁国雄 (Liang Guoxiong) (1956–) Known as Long Hair 长毛. Was with the Young Socialist Group when it unified with the youth group of the rml in late 1978, but did not join the rml until 1980. A prominent leader of the League of Social Democrats, a left-wing and pandemocracy political party established in Hong Kong in 2006. Organised the April Fifth Action group for social movement in 1988. Elected as a

appendix 3: biographical list member of Hong Kong Legislative Council (2004–2010, 2010–2017). He is currently in gaol in Hong Kong as a prisoner of conscience. Li Huai-ming 李怀明 (Li Huaiming) Joined the rcp in the early 1970s after returning from Paris. A leader of the rml in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alias: Yip Ning (Ye Ning). Li Ji 李季 (1892–1967) a Chinese Marxist scholar and translator, a former ccp member (1921–1929), and an exTrotskyist (1929–1930). In late 1950, along with Liu Renjing, he made a statement in People’s Daily confessing his “guilt” as a Trotskyist. He translated a wide range of Marx and Engels and other Marxist works into Chinese. Li Pei 李培 (1919–1993) A Guangxi Trotskyist. Joined the minority faction led by Zheng Chaolin. Arrested during the 1952 round-up. Sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, then extended to life imprisonment. Released in 1979. Became one of the key assistants and close friends of Zheng Chaolin in Shanghai in Zheng’s later years. Li Yongjue 李永爵 (1921–2008) A Guangdong Trotskyist. Active in Shanghai Trotskyist underground activities, 1941–1949. Arrested during the 1952 round-up and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. Released in 1983. Became one of Zheng Chaolin’s key assistants in Shanghai. His wife Luo Li Ping 罗丽萍, a female Trotskyist. Sentenced to 5 years, died in 1988. So in Li’s later years, he remarried

appendix 3: biographical list with Zou Xiuyun 邹秀云, a female Trotskyist sympathiser and ex-wife of Ding Yi 丁毅, a Trotskyist teacher and guerrilla, died in Hong Kong. Alias: Li Ping. Lian Zhengxiang [Lian Zhengyan] 连 正详 [连正炎] (1928–51) A young Trotskyist student in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, shot by the communists in 1951. Liang Shijie 梁 时 杰 (1922–2006) Known as Li See 李西. A Guangxi Trotskyist. A leading figure of the rcp in Hong Kong. Lin Huanhua 林焕华 (1915–1983) The first Guangxi native who joined the Trotskyists. A leader of the student Trotskyists in Guangxi province in the early 1930s. In charge of printing for the Trotskyist centre in the mid1930s in Shanghai, a member of the Central Committee of the Internationalist Workers Party and a member of the Executive of the Printworkers’ Trade Union in Guangzhou until his arrest in December 1952. Released in 1979. Aliases: Lin Huayuan, Lin Hua. Lin Songqi 林松祺 (1920–55) A Wenzhou Trotskyist and an editor of Youth and Women (later changed the name to New Voice, an organ of the Revolutionary Communist Party). Engaged in Trotskyist activities with Zhou Rensheng, Zhang Hongye, and Hong Xiurong under the leadership of An Mingbo 安明波, a Trotskyist teacher, at Zhejiang University in 1942. Later became a Trotskyist liaison officer. Arrested in 1952 in Guangzhou and eventually exten-

1179 ded his term of imprisonment from 7 years to 15 years. Died in prison in 1955. Liu Binyan 刘宾雁 (1925–2005) A Chinese journalist, writer, and political dissident. He was labelled a “rightist” and thus expelled from the ccp in 1957, but rehabilitated in 1966. Nevertheless, he was sent to countryside for labour reform during the Cultural Revolution. In 1979, he was rehabilitated again. At the early stage of the Reform and Opening Up, he wrote to expose the problems of social injustice and corruption. In 1987, he was expelled from the party again. In 1988, he came to the United States for teaching and writing. Due to his open support of the 1989 student protests at Tian’anmen, he was barred from returning to China. Liu Gui’an 刘桂安 (1919–2018) Known as Zhang Kai 张开. Secretary of Peng Shuzhi. Joined the Trotskyists at the age of 20. Attended the founding congress of the rcp in 1948 in Shanghai. Since the 1950s, been the secretary of the Provisional National Committee of the rcp until 1978. Editor of October Review. Aliases: Liu Mang, Kang Jun, Liu Naiguang, Wei Kang, Liu Guang, Xiang Sheng, Fang Xing, Ru Ri, Jun Xing, Zhen Yan, Wei Bo, Juan Di. Liu Jialiang 刘家良 (Liu Chia-liang) (?– 1950) Liu Jialiang, Si Chaosheng 斯朝生, and Wang Shuben 王叔本 (1911–1949) were three of the leaders of the second generation of Chinese

1180 Trotskyists. Liu died in a Vietnamese prison in 1950, Si left the movement long before that, and Wang was executed by the Kuomintang in a concentration camp in Chongqing with his wife Li Jieshuang 黎洁霜 and their two sons on the eve of the Kuomintang military debacle in 1949. Aliases: Yao Ru, Liu Haisheng, Liu Shaoyan. Liu Jingzhen 刘静贞 (Liu Ching-chen) (1902–79) Joined the Party and took part in the Revolution of 1925–7. Married Zheng Chaolin and became a Trotskyist together with Chen Duxiu. When Chen was in prison she acted as a link between him and the surviving underground Trotskyist organisation. Arrested by the Communists in 1952, freed five years later, and rejoined her husband Zheng in a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution. Released in June 1979 and died in October of the same year. Alias: Wu Jingru. Liu Pingmei 刘平梅 (1920–2007) A Guangdong Trotskyist teacher. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1979. After his release, he began to study the history of Chinese Trotskyism. Published Zhongguo tuopai dangshi (The History of Chinese Trotskyism). Liu Renjing 刘仁静 (Liu Jen-ching) (1902–87) A founding member of the ccp and General Secretary of the Socialist League of Youth, joined the Left Opposition in Moscow and visited Trotsky in Turkey in 1929. Played a part in organising the Trotskyist

appendix 3: biographical list organisation in China and helped Harold Isaacs write The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. Arrested in 1934, and recanted in prison. After 1949, recanted again, to the Maoists. Died in a car accident in 1987. Aliases: Nelsi, Niel Sih, Liu Jingyuan, Lieershi, Xu Yong. Liu Shaoqi 刘 少 奇 (Liu Shao-ch’i) (1898–1969) A veteran Communist and prominent Chinese labour leader of the ccp from the mid-1940s on. Head of State of the People’s Republic of China after 1959, purged in the Cultural Revolution, but rehabilitated in 1980. Lou Guohua 楼国华 (Lou Kuo-hua) (1906–95) Joined the ccp in 1925. He became a Trotskyist in 1928. During the 1942 Chinese Trotskyist split, he sided with Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin and became a member of the minority faction (later the iwp). He was one of the few survivors of the first generation of Chinese Trotskyists In Hong Kong, he ran some publishing ventures and published a range of Trotskyist literature in Chinese. In the early 1970s, he sought to disseminate Trotskyism among the New Left radicals in Hong Kong. In the mid1970s, he sided with his old comrade Wang Fanxi in calling for an organisational unification of the Chinese Trotskyist groups in Hong Kong. Aliases: Zichun; Yi Ding, Shao Yuan, Ze Cheng. Lu Ji 陆绩 A Trotskyist leader of the Hong Kong organisation in the late 1940s. Arrested by the British-Hong

appendix 3: biographical list Kong authorities in 1949. Returned to mainland China and arrested together with his wife Li Ling 李玲 in 1952. Died in prison. Luo Han 罗汉 (Lo Han) (1898–1941?) Expelled from France in 1921 and joined the ccp in 1922. Active in the Guomindang army until the 20 March Incident (1926). Became a Trotskyist in 1928 in Moscow and a leader of the Chinese Left Opposition. Died in Chongqing in a Japanese air raid. Maitan, Livo (Claudio, 1923–2004) An Italian Trotskyist. An active leader of the Italian section of the fi and a central member of the fi leadership from 1948 until his death. Mandel, Ernest (Ernest Germain, Walter, H. Vallin, 1923–1995) A world-renowned Marxist economist He joined the fi in Belgium in 1940 and was active in the wartime resistance to the Nazis. A central leader of the fi from 1944 until his death. Mao Hongjian 毛鸿鉴 (Mao Hungchien) A leader of the Guangxi Trotskyists in the early 1930s. A member of the Central Committee of the Internationalist Workers Party after 1949. He left mainland China for Hong Kong in 1949, but he voluntarily returned to Guangxi in 1956. During the Cultural Revolution, he was persecuted. Ou Fang 区芳 With Chen Yimou 陈亦 谋, Song Fengchun 宋逢春, and Shi Tang 史唐, one of the main founders of the first Trotskyist group in China. Returned from Moscow in early 1928.

1181 Active among workers in Hong Kong. Arrested in 1930 in Shanghai and imprisoned by the Kuomintang. Ou and Chen died in prison, while Song and Shi left the movement after their release. Peng Shuzhi 彭述之 (P’eng Shu-chih, also written P’eng Shu-tse) (1895– 1983) A former ccp leader and a key figure in the history of Chinese Trotskyism. A returned student from Moscow and a member of the Central Committee of the ccp in 1925–27, and chief editor of the Party organ during the 1925–7 revolution. He was expelled from the ccp together with the party founder Chen Duxiu in 1929, after the two had shifted towards Trotskyism. In 1931, he attended the Trotskyist unification congress in Shanghai. During the Sino-Japanese War, Peng rejected Wang Fanxi, Zheng Chaolin, and others’ views regarding the War of Resistance. In 1942, he organised a majority faction, and in 1948 he and others founded the rcp. Before the ccp seized power at the national level in October 1949, Peng and other rcp leaders decided to move their central committee to Hong Kong. In the early 1950s, Peng and his family fled Hong Kong and eventually turned up in Paris. During his exile in France, Peng became a key figure in the Trotskyist Fourth International (fi). In the 1950s, he played an important role in opposing Michel Pablo’s leadership of the fi. When the fi split in 1952 (into the International

1182 Committee of the Fourth International [icfi] and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International [isfi]), he joined the icfi. However, when a large majority of international Trotskyist groups from the icfi and the isfi re-unified and formed a new Trotskyist international body (the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, usfi or Usec) in 1963, he joined the latter. In later debates in the fi, he sided with the international minority faction. In the 1970s, he also exerted his influence on a group of young Hong Kong leftists, including the 70s Group, some of whom studied for a while in Europe. He continued to be recognised as the key leader of the rcp by surviving members of the rcp in Hong Kong. In 1973, he moved to Los Angeles, where he died in 1983. Aliases: Xi Zhao, Ou Bo (Uncle Ou), Ivan Petrov, Nan Guan, Tao Bo. Qiu Jilong 邱季龙 (1929–?) Became a Trotskyist in Wenzhou under Zhou Rensheng’s influence. Arrested at Peking University in 1952, Released in 1957 but sent for labour reform. Returned to Wenzhou in 1977 and became a university researcher at Wenzhou Education College (later University of Wenzhou) in 1978. Raptis, Michel (Pablo, Speros, 1911– 1996) A Trotskyist with a Greek origin. Participated in the founding congress of the fi in 1938. Principal of the entryist strategy in the early 1950s which led to an organisational split of the fi. Secretary of the fi from 1948

appendix 3: biographical list to 1960. Left the fi shortly after its reunification in 1964. Rejoined briefly in 1993. Rousset, Pierre (Roman, Paul Petitjean, Sterne, 1946–) A veteran French Trotskyist. Leading member in events of 1968 and subsequently. Member of the fi leadership since the 1970s and coordinator of the Trotskyist unification in Hong Kong in the 1970s. Principal founder and co-director of the iire in Amsterdam from 1982 to 1993. Ruan Jinzhao 阮 金 兆 (?–2004) Known as Jiao Lifu 焦励夫 or Zhen Yu 真渔. With Xiang Qing, Dai Yan 戴 颜 and Zheng Zejian (also known as Pu Ke 朴克), leaders of the rcp and Trotskyist organisers in Hong Kong in the early 1950s. Sakai, Yoshichi 酒井与七 (1937–) A leading Japanese Trotskyist. Politically active in the Japanese Trotskyist movement from 1959 to the 1990s. A member of the International Executive Committee of the usfi in the 1970s and the 1980s. A member of the Bureau of the United Secretariat in Paris, 1980–1981. General editor of the Writings of Leon Trotsky in Japanese from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Shachtman, Max (1904–1972) A former Trotskyist leader in the USA, seen as second only to James P. Cannon as a leader of the swp (1938–40). Presided over the founding congress of the fi in 1938. He led a minority faction that split with the swp in 1940. Abandoned Trotsky’s theory of “deformed/degenerated workers’

appendix 3: biographical list states” and regarded that the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union had become a new ruling class in a “bureaucratic collectivist” society in 1941, which attracted Wang Fanxi for a while in the early 1950s. Shao Lu 邵鲁 A Trotskyist worker from Shandong. Arrested in 1935 by the Kuomintang and arrested again by the ccp in 1958 in Xi’an. Released in 1962. Shen Yanbing 沈雁冰 (Shen Yen-ping) (1896–1981) The pen-name of Mao Dun 矛盾. A veteran Communist and a participant in the revolution of 1925–7. A famous writer, second only to Lu Xun. The first Minister of Culture in the post-1949 Communist Government. Sheppard, Barry (Diego, Stateman, 1937–) A former American Trotskyist. Played a major role in the swp including as a fraternal representative on the fi leadership until he was expelled in 1989. Subsequently active on the US left. He paid a visit to Wang Fanxi and other exiled Chinese Trotskyists in Macao in 1969. Sun Liangsi 孙良驷 (1912–87) Joined the Trotskyists in 1932 and organised their branch in Shandong, his native province. Later worked underground with the Trotskyists in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing. Successively a teacher, an electrician apprentice, a soldier (in the war against Japan), an electricity worker (in the Chongqing arsenal, whence he was forced to flee after his arrest by the secret police), and, starting in 1948, a seafarer and

1183 electrician; in exile and retirement in Hong Kong, he became a writer, a businessman, and a publisher of Trotskyist literature. Killed in a road accident. Aliases: Liang Si, Bo Chen. Tang Yonglan 唐 咏 兰 (1924–2003) Also known as A-Zhao 阿招, a female Trotskyist from Guangdong. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to 7 years. The wife of Liu Yi 刘毅, a Shandong Trotskyist worker, who fled to Hong Kong in 1949 and died there. Tu Qingqi 屠庆祺 (1906–1992) Known as Du Weizhi 杜畏之. A Henan Trotskyist, a member of the ccp in its early years. A student at the Sun Yatsen University in Moscow (1925–27) where he became a Left-Opposition sympathiser. Expelled from the ccp because he opposed the “Lisan Line” in 1930. Shortly after the unification of the Chinese Trotskyists in 1931, joined the Trotskyists, but arrested by the Kuomintang agents and withdrew from the Trotskyists in 1932, while as a university professor and translator, translated a vast range of Marxist works. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Transferred to Qincheng Prison in Beijing in 1963 while continuing to translate Marxist works but forcibly used for the ccp propaganda. Released in 1976. Verbizier, Gerard (Vergeat, 1942–2004) A French Trotskyist. Detached to fi centre in Brussels in 1969 he followed activities in Asia and the Middle East. From the late 1970s, dedicated himself to film making.

1184 Wang Changyao 王长耀 (Wang Ch’angyao) A returned student from Moscow who became a Trotskyist in the early 1930s. Active in the Beijing student movement before he returned to his native province of Shandong, to organise an anti-Japanese guerrilla detachment that was destroyed by the ccp. Wang Fanxi 王凡西 (Wang Fan-hsi) (1907–2002) Joined the ccp member in 1925 while studying at Peking University. He became a Trotskyist during his studies in Moscow in 1928. Returned to China in 1929 and worked for a while as an aide to Zhou Enlai. Worked as a Trotskyist with Chen Duxiu in 1930–1, after being expelled from the Party. Was arrested for the first time in 1931 and again in 1937. Spent most of the intervening years in jail. In 1931, he attended the Trotskyist unification congress in Shanghai as a delegate and was elected to its central committee. During the Sino-Japanese War, he sided with Zheng Chaolin and others in the internal disputes on organisational issues, the nature of the resistance war, and general Trotskyist strategy. When the Trotskyist clc spilt into two small groups in 1942, a majority and a minority, Wang became a leader of the minority. In 1949, he and his comrades from the minority faction established the iwp. In the same year, he was sent by his comrades as a reluctant exile to Hong Kong to continue as the Trotskyists’

appendix 3: biographical list liaison officer, but he was almost immediately arrested and deported by the British colonial authorities to Macao. In 1975, he moved to Leeds in England. In the early 1970s, he put much effort into trying to influence a small number of radicals in Hong Kong and in Britain’s Chinatown. During his exile both in Macao and in Leeds, he kept touch with the international Trotskyists as well as with the younger generation of Chinese Trotskyists in Hong Kong. In the debates of the Fourth International in the 1970s, he was sympathetic to the international majority faction. He died in Leeds in 2002, never having returned to China. Aliases: Wang Wenyuan; Lian’gen; Shuang Shan, Vasilii Pavlovich Kletkin, Wang Wenyuan, Wang Mingyuan, Lian Gen, Shuang Shan, San Nan, Feng Gang, Shou Yi, Yi De, San Yuan, Hui Quan, Liu Shuxun. Wang Guolong 王国龙 (Wang Kuolung) (1914–2010) Became a Trotskyist in 1929. A leader of the Wenzhou Trotskyists. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to life. Released in 1979. Waters, Mary-Alice An American Trotskyist. Joined the swp in the 1960s. She subsequently became a central figure in the swp leadership alongside Jack Barnes. Wu Zhongxian 吴仲贤 (Ng Chung-yin) (1946–1994) A social-movement activist; a Trotskyist organiser; and a leader of the rml. In 1969, as a student, he was active in the Chu Hai

appendix 3: biographical list College sit-in. In 1970, together with other young New Left radicals, he founded the 70’s Biweekly group. In the early 1970s, he became a Trotskyist while in Europe. In 1973, he split from the 70’s Biweekly group and organised a Trotskyist youth group, the Revolutionary Internationalist League, which later became the rml. From 1973 to 1981, as a Trotskyist, he organised and participated in various social and political movements. In March 1981, he was arrested by the Chinese political police while visiting pro-democracy dissidents on the mainland. While in custody, he decided to make a “confession” and a “fake capitulation” to the ccp. In April, he was allowed to go back to Hong Kong, and he told the story of his “surrender” to his rml comrades. This announcement triggered an internal discussion among Hong Kong and international Trotskyists regarding “revolutionary loyalty”. Although he resigned from the rml in August 1981, following the usfi’s statement condemning his “surrender”, the rml officially expelled him in November 1981. He died in Hong Kong in 1994. Aliases: Hu Congshan, Mao Lanyou. Xie Shan 谢山 (1922–1996) A Trotskyist poet from Zhejiang. Arrested in Hong Kong and deported along with Wang Fanxi in 1949. Return to Guangdong in 1950. Arrested during the 1952 round-up and sentenced to 5 years. Became a poet friend of Zheng Chaolin in his later years.

1185 Xiang Qing 向青 (1922–2022) Became a Trotskyist in 1947. In the early 1950s, he was a leader of the rcp in Hong Kong. Deported by Hong Kong’s colonial authorities in 1955, after which he settled in Macao. In the early 1970s, together with Wang Fanxi, he joined in discussions with young Hong Kong radicals about the theory and history of Trotskyism. Later, he favoured the unification of the rcp and the rml. In 1978, he left the rcp and joined the unified rml. In the 1980 rml split, he sided with Au Loong-yu and resigned from the rml. In 1982, he became a member of the Pioneer Group. Alias: Maki, Su Da. Xiong Andong 熊安东 (1922–2018) A Shandong Trotskyist. Participated in the Trotskyist underground activities in Chongqing, Nanjing, and Shanghai in the 1940s. Attended the founding congress of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1979. Xu Taixing 徐太兴 (?–1998) A Jiangxi Trotskyist. Joined the Trotskyists at Guangxi University in 1947. Organised a Trotskyist youth branch in Guilin, Guangxi, with Jiang Junyang and others. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to 5 years’ labour reform. Yamanishi, Eiichi 山西英一 (1899–1984) A prominent Japanese Trotskyist leader, a translator and a teacher. He studied abroad in the UK from 1931 to 1935 where he became a Trotskyist through his British Trotskyist contacts. He translated some of Trotsky’s

1186 writings during and after the Second World War Yan Zigui 闫子桂 A Shandong Trotskyist teacher. Joined the Trotskyists in Beiping (now Beijing) in the 1930s. Won many of his students to Trotskyism while teaching in middle schools. Studied abroad in the US from 1947. Ended up living in Taiwan in his later years. Ye Chunhua 叶 春 华 A Wenzhou Trotskyist. Led the minority group Marxist Youth League in Wenzhou during the early 1950s. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1979. Yin Kuan 尹宽 (Yin K’uan) (1897–1967) A veteran Communist who joined the ccp in France, was active in its Shandong Provincial Committee, its Anhui Provincial Committee, and its Jiangsu-Zhejiang Regional Committee in 1925–7, and became a Trotskyist in 1929. Twice arrested by the Guomindang for his revolutionary activities, and arrested by the Maoists in 1952. Yu Shouyi 喻守一 (? –1989) A former leading cadre of the ccp in Hubei. Later became a Trotskyist and a Central Committee member of Peng Shuzhi’s Revolutionary Communist Party. Fled to Hong Kong in 1949 but returned to the mainland in the early 1950s. Arrested during the 1952 round-up but never sentenced. Released in 1979 and later engaged in translating Issacs Deutscher’s Trotsky Trilogy into Chinese. Died in 1989. Alias: Mei Errui.

appendix 3: biographical list Yu Shuoyi 俞 硕 遗 (Yu Shuo-i) A leader of the Shanghai young Trotskyists and a member of the Central Committee of the Internationalist Workers Party who was the first to be arrested after 1949 and died in an asylum where he had been sent after developing schizophrenia. Alias: Yu Shouyi. Zeng Meng 曾猛 (Tseng Meng) (1904– 60) Introduced to the Communist Party by Deng Zhongxia 邓中夏 and Li Qihan 李 启 汉 in Guangzhou. Became a Trotskyist in Moscow. Worked under Zhou Enlai on return to China before his discovery and expulsion. Arrested in 1932 with Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi, but bailed by a Guomindang agent. Returned to Wenzhou, where he worked as a Trotskyist but he later became inactive in the early 1940s. Arrested after 1949 but never sentenced. Died in prison in 1960. Aliases: Xu Huiying, Wang Ziping. Zhang Hongye 章宏业 (1924–2008) A Wenzhou Trotskyist and a member of the rcp. Left the mainland for Hong Kong in 1949 and became an organiser of workers’ movement. Later moved to Canada and died there. Aliases: Zhang Tao, Jiang Tao, Zhang Hua. Zhao Yangxing 赵养性 Became a Trotskyist in Wenzhou in the 1940s. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to 8 years. After his release, sent to Inner Mongolia with Zhou Lüqiang for labour reform. Returned to Wenzhou in the 1980s.

appendix 3: biographical list Zheng Chaolin 郑超麟 (Cheng Ch’aolin) (1901–98) A prolific writer, philosopher, poet, and translator, he joined the ccp as a work-study student in Paris in 1922, whence he went to Moscow for two years, to study Marxist and Communist theory. Returned to China in 1924 as a senior cadre and edited the Party organ Xiangdao (‘Guide Weekly’). A member of the Party’s Hubei Provincial Committee during the Revolution of 1925–7, and a participant in the Emergency Conference of 7 August 1927. Became a Trotskyist in 1929, and a founder and leader of the Chinese Trotskyist organisation. Served seven years in prison under Chiang Kaishek. Arrested by the Maoist secret police in 1952 and was kept in prison without trial until 1979, when he was released into restricted freedom in Shanghai. His memoirs were published in China in 1986. So was a book of his prison poems, widely hailed as a masterpiece of contemporary Chinese verse and subsequently translated into English. His memoirs and a book of his political writings have also appeared in English translation. Aliases: Yvon, Yiyin, Zelian, Marlotov, Lin Chaozhen, Yi Wen, Wang Jian, Shuyan, Lin Yiwen, Jue Min, Yi Yin, Lan Yin, Tang Yushi, Ze Lian. Zheng Guosheng 郑国胜 Known as Little Wang or Wang Guoquan. Originally a public security official under the ccp in Wenzhou. He was among

1187 those in charge of many Trotskyists jailed in Wenzhou in 1950. Among them was Cao Jiaji 曹 家 骥, also known as Ap Chai or Little Zhou, who won Zheng to Trotskyism. Zheng and Cao both fled Wenzhou in late 1950 or early 1951 and eventually settled in Hong Kong. Cao Jiaji later withdrew from politics and became a successful entrepreneur. Zheng became a member of the iwp. According to Au Loong-yu, reporting on a conversation with Xiang Qing, Zheng also tried to save another Trotskyist who was about to be executed, after freeing Cao, but in that case he failed. Zhou Ji’ou 周冀瓯 (1929–2006) A Wenzhou Trotskyist. Left Wenzhou for Taipei in 1949. Translated massive internal documents of the Fourth International. Died in Toronto. Alias: Zhaoli. Zhou Lüqiang 周 履 鏘 (Chou Lüch’iang) (1927–) The youngest of the known Trotskyists, he was born in Wenzhou and joined the movement in 1947. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to seven years, but did not return to Shanghai from Inner Mongolia until 1987. Zhou Rensheng 周仁生 (Chou Jensheng) (1922–2004) Became a Trotskyist in 1940. Active in Wenzhou. Arrested in 1952 and sentenced to life. Together with Wang Guolong, translated Deutscher’s Trotsky Trilogy after their release. Aliases: Zhou Abao, Zhou Renxin.

References Archival Sources G.B. Parliament 1985a, House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Report on The Chinese Community in Britain (January 1985) hc102, hmso London. G.B. Parliament 1985b, The Government Reply to the Second Paper from the Home Affairs Committee (Cmnd 9586), hmso London. Guojia fazhan weiyuanhui dang’an guanliju (National Archives Administration, National Development Council [Taiwan]), Archive no. A504000000F/0039/youbu/24/ 1/016. Hong Kong Public Records Office, hkrs 70-6-390-1; hkrs 890-2-36. Lim, Shu Pao (1938–2008), ref: lma/4504, London Metropolitan Archives Collections Catalogue. Taiwan Supreme Court, Verdict (38)18, 19 December 1949, Transitional Justice Commission of Taiwan: https://twtjcdb.tjc.gov.tw/Search/Detail/21438. Wang Fanxi Archive, ms 1709 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 23, 27, 28, 32, 46–49, 51, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, UK. Wang Fanxi-Shachtman Correspondence in the Tamiment Library at New York University, US: http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_103/dscaspace_ref24​ .html. “Wu Zhongxian zhi youren xinhao” (A Letter from Wu Zhongxian [Ng Chung-yin] to His Comrades), 25 May 1972, The 70’s Biweekly and People’s Theatre: A Private Archive of Mok Chiu-yu Augustine and Friends, Hong Kong Baptist University.

Sources Cited in This Volume Ananta, Aris and Evi Nurvidya Arifin (eds) 2004, International Migration in Southeast Asia, Singapore: iseas Publishing. Au Loong-yu (Lau Yu-fan/Yue Zhi) 1979, Dui zhuanxiang chanye de piping (Critique of the “Turn to Industry”), unpublished manuscript. Au Loong-yu 1997, “Gaobie ‘Chongji wenhua’” (“Goodbye to ‘the Culture of Confrontation’”), Sun Miu 46, November. Au Loong-yu 2012, China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility, London: Merlin Press. Au Loong-yu 2015a, “Chuban yu sixiang tansuo: Shehuizhuyi qingnianshe – Xinmiao/ Xianqu” (Publishing Work and Explorations of Ideologies: The Young Socialist Group and the New Sprouts/Pioneer Group), interviewed by Ip Iam-chong and Lau Lai Leng, Thinking Hong Kong 7, July.

references

1189

Au Loong-yu 2015b, “Guanyu Raymond Lau xiansheng fangwen gao de jidian chengqing” (Responses and Clarifications to Raymond Lau’s Interview), Thinking Hong Kong 7, July. Au Loong-yu 2015c, “Teli duxing de fanduizhe: Au Loong-yu” (The Unique Oppositionist: Au Loong-yu), interviewed by Chung Yiu-wah, The Initium, 14 August. Au Loong-yu 2016, “Sanian qian de nuoruo, sanian hou de kuguo: 1986 fanhe yundong” (Today’s Ordeal Created by the Cowardice in the 1950s: The 1986 Anti-nuclear Movement), Stand News, 9 December. Au Loong-yu 2018, “The Jasic Workers Mobilisation, a High Tide for the Chinese Labour Movement?” International Viewpoint, December. Au Loong-yu 2020, Hong Kong in Revolt: The Protest Movement and the Future of China, London: Pluto Press. Au Loong-yu 2021, “The Annihilation of Hong Kong’s Civil Society: Implications and Weaknesses,” Made in China, no. 3. Au Loong-yu 2022, “Reform or revolution: The Strengths and Setbacks of the 1989 ProDemocracy Movement.” Lausan, 4 June. Au Loong-yu (Yue Zhi) no date, Dui Gemameng changweihui de “dangtuan guanxi de jiben lichang” de piping yijian (The Criticisms of the rml Standing Committee’s “Basic Standpoint on Party-League Relations”). Bao Lian and Zhang Wen no date, Lijie dangde wenji, jiejue dangde weiji (Understanding the Party Crisis, Resolving the Party Crisis). Belden, Jack 1970, China Shakes the World, New York: Monthly Review Press. Benton, Gregor 1975, “The Yenan Literary Opposition”, New Left Review, i/92. Benton, Gregor 1977, “Teng’s Comrade Still Behind Bars,” International Edition of The Guardian, Le Monde, and The Washington Post, 9 November. Benton, Gregor 1982, “Writers and the Party: The Ordeal of Wang Shiwei, Yan’an, 1942”, in Benton, ed. 1982. Benton, Gregor 1983, The Hongkong Crisis, London: Pluto Press. Benton, Gregor 1985, “Two Purged Leaders of Early Chinese Communism”, China Quarterly, 102: 317–28. Benton, Gregor 1996, China’s Urban Revolutionaries: Explorations in the History of Chinese Trotskyism, 1912–1952, New Jersey: Humanities Press. Benton, Gregor 2015, Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo, Leiden: Brill. Benton, Gregor and Alan Hunter (eds.) 1995, Wild Lily, Prairie Fire: China’s Road to Democracy, Yan’an to Tian’anmen, 1942–1989, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Benton, Gregor and Feng Chongyi (eds.) 2019, Poets of the Chinese Revolution, London: Verso. Benton, Gregor and John Sexton (eds.) 2022, Zheng Chaolin Selected Writings, 1942–1998, Leiden: Brill.

1190

references

Benton, Gregor, ed. 1982, Wild Lilies: Poisonous Weeds. Dissident Voices from People’s China, London: Pluto Press. Benton, Gregor, ed. 1998, Chen Duxiu’s Last Articles and Letters, 1937–42, Richmond: Curzon Press. Bettelheim, Charles 1968, La Construction du Socialisme en Chine, Paris: François Maspero. Bianco, Lucien 1985, “Peng Shuzhi,” in Lucien Bianco, Yves Chevrier, et al., eds, Dictionnaire biographique du Mouvement ouvrier international. La Chine, Paris, Les Editions ouvrières, pp. 511–523. Brandt Conrad, B. Schwartz, and J.K. Fairbank (eds.) 1967, A Documentary History of Chinese Communism, New York: Atheneum. Broue, Pierre (ed.) 1965, La question chinoise dans l’Internationale Communiste (1926– 1927), Paris: edi. Broué, Pierre 1985, “Trotsky et les Trotskystes face à la deuxieme guerre mondiale,” Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 23, September, pp. 35–60. Cadart, Claude and Cheng Yingxiang 1983, Mémoires de Peng Shuzhi. L’Envol du communisme en Chine, Paris: Gallimard. Cadart, Claude and Cheng Yingxiang 1998, “Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan: The Lives and Times of a Revolutionary Couple: Two leading figures of the Chinese Trotskyist movement,” China Perspectives, no. 17. Cadart, Claude and Cheng Yingxiang 2016, “Houji” (“Postscript”), in Peng Shuzhi huiyi lu (“Peng Shuzhi’s memoirs”), edited by Claude Cadart and Cheng Yingxiang, Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 2016, vol. 2, pp. 405–447. Carrillo, Santiago 1982, Ouzhou Gongchanzhuyi yu guojia (The Euro-Communism and the State), Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan. Central Committee of the rcp 1978a, Zhongwei zhi ysg zhong gongzuo zhu dangyuan de tongzhi (The Central Committee’s Notification to the Party Members Working in the ysg), 2 February. Central Committee of the rcp 1978b, Guanyu ysg wenti de jueyi (The Resolution on the ysg Problem), 26 February. Central Committee of the rcp 1978c, Dui jiantuan gongzuo, dangtuan guanxi wenti de yijian he taidu (Suggestions and Attitudes regarding the Building of the Youth League and Party-League Relations), a draft proposal submitted to the special congress of the rcp, 17 April. Chan, Anita 1975, Canjia Riben disiguoji zhibu dahui de bugao (Participating in the Congress of the Japanese Section of the fi), unpublished document. Chan Ching-wah 2019, “Mengyan qiangsheng de huixiang: cong ‘Liusi sanshi’ dao ‘Fansongzhong’” (The Echoes of the Gunshot Nightmare: Talking from the 30th Anniversary of the June 4th Incident to the Anti-extradition Bill Movement), Ming Pao Monthly, July.

references

1191

Chan Ying 2000, “‘Wuliang’ jigou fasai lanzha, qianxian yuangong tuanjie zijiu” (Exploitative companies throws tantrum, frontline workers unite to save themselves), Sun Miu, 58, November. Chen Bilan 2010, Zaoqi zhonggong yu tuopai: wode geming shengya huiyi (The Early ccp and Chinese Trotskyists: My Memoirs as A Revolutionary), Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu. Chen Bilan 2015, “The Real Lesson of China on Guerrilla Warfare: Reply to a ‘Letter from a Chinese Trotskyist’ (1971),” in Benton, ed., 2015, pp. 985–1000. Chen Duxiu 1998, Chen Duxiu’s Last Articles and Letters, 1937–42, edited and translated by Gregor Benton, Richmond: Curzon Press. Chen Erjin 1984, China: Crossroads Socialism: An Unofficial Manifesto for Proletarian Democracy, translated by Robin Munro, London: Verso. Chen Site 2015, “Preface,” in Benton, ed., 2015, pp. 43–46. Chen Yun Chung and Pun Ngai 2007, “Neoliberalisation and Privatisation in Hong Kong after the 1997 Financial Crisis,” China Review, vol. 7, no. 2. Chen Zhesan 1969, “The Current Crisis in Rural Taiwan and How to Solve It,” Zhongguo jingji (“China’s economy”), no. 227, August. Chen Zhenyan 1984, “Dui ruogan zhengyixing lishi wenti de tantao” (“Inquiry into some controversial problems of history”), Zhongbao yuekan, Nos. 8 and 9. Cheng Ching-fat 2000, “Only through collective power can they fight for their rights: Interview with the Chairman of the Personal Care Workers and Home Helpers Association Cheng Ching-fat,” interviewed by Lam Chi-leung, Globalisation Monitor vol. 5, May. Cheng Shaoguo 2006, Lin Jinlan shuo (“Lin Jinlan speaks”), Renmin wenyi chuban she. Chien Chiung-jen (Jian Jiongren) 1997, Taiwan gongchan zhuyi yundong shi (A History of the Communist movement in Taiwan), Taipei: Qianwei chuban she (Vanguard books). Chiu, Stephen Wing Kai and Tai Lok Lui (eds.) 2000, The Dynamics of Social Movements in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Chou Yicheng 2007, Disan shehui de xiangxiang: Chaoyue duikang, zouxiang gongtong weilai (The imagination of the Third Society: Beyond confrontation, towards a common future), Taipei: Tianxia wenhua. Cohen, Noam 2007, “Who’s Attacking an Online Marxist Archive? China Is Suspected of Trying to Block Access to Texts,” The New York Times, 5 February. Corner, Trevor and Andrew Johnson (eds.) 1984, Issues in Multicultural and Anti-Racist Education in Scotland: A Report, Glasgow: Scottish Educational Research Association. Dedijer, Vladimir 1953, Tito Speaks, London: Weidenfeild & Nicholson. Deutscher, Isaac 1964, “Maoism – Its Origins, Background, and Outlook”, Socialist Register, vol. 1, March, pp. 11–37.

1192

references

Djilas, Milovan 1962, Conversations with Stalin, London: Rupert Hart-Davis Publishing. Ding Dong 1997, “Cong ‘Fanshiyin/imf’ yundong hua chuanmei de baodao shoufa” (A Critique of Media Reporting on the Anti-World Bank/imf Movement), Sun Miu 46, November. Eng, Robert Y. 2017, “The Intractability of the Sino-Japanese Senkaku/Diaoyu Territorial Dispute: Historical Memory, People’s Diplomacy and Transnational Activism, 1961– 1978.” The Asia-Pacific Journal vol. 15, issue 22, no. 2. England, Joe and John Rear 1981, Industrial Relations and Law in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Executive Committee of the ysg, no date, Dangtuan guanxi jueyi cao’an (Draft Resolution on Party-League Relations). Feigon, Lee 1983a, book review, Theory and Society, No. 2, pp. 259–65. Feigon, Lee 1983b, Chen Duxiu. Founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fields, A. Belden 1988, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States, New York: Autonomedia. Froissart, Chloé 2015, “Han Dongfang (in collaboration with Michaël Sztanke), My struggle for Chinese workers,” China Perspectives, no. 2, pp. 64–65. Fu Shangwen 1983, “Zhonggong ‘Sida’ tichu wuchanjieji lingdaoquan wenti tantao” (“On the raising of the issue of proletarian hegemony at the Fourth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party”), Lishi jiaoxue, No. 12. Gao Jun and Fan Yinzheng 1983, “Ren Bishi,” Chinese Communist Party Biographies, Vol. 8, p. 7. Gao Fang 2003, “Shijie Tuopai zuzhi de youlai yu yanbian”. (“The Origin and Evolution of the World Trotskyist Organisation”), Bainian chao, no. 2. Globalisation Monitor Editors 2000, “Privatisation Exacerbates the Wealth Gap,” Globalisation Monitor 5. Goodman, David and Bryna Goodman (eds.) 2012, 20th Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday and the World, London: Routledge. Gray, Piers 1985, “Hong Kong, Shanghai, The Great Wall: Bernard Shaw in China,” Shaw, vol. 5, 1985, pp. 211–238. He Ren (John Shum) 1978, Wo zai shiping gongzuo de jingyan (My Experiences working for October Review), unpublished document. Hirson, Baruch 2003, Frank Glass, The Restless Revolutionary, London: Porcupine Press. Ho, Fred, ed., 2001, Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian/Pacific America, Oakland, CA: ak Press. Ho Ping-ti and Tsou Tang (eds.) 1968, China in Crisis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hong Jianing 2011, “Yang Weizhong: Zui nancan de gongyun fenzi, jianchi yitiao butaohao de lu” (Yang Weizhong: The union activist who insisted on taking a difficult road), Tianxia zazhi (Commonwealth Magazine), no. 400, April.

references

1193

Hsiao, Frank S. and Lawrence Sullivan 1983, “A Political History of the Taiwanese Communist Party”, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 269–89. Hu Hua (ed.) 1982, Zhonggong dangshi renwu zhuan (Chinese Communist Party Biographies), vol. 4, Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe. Hu Luoqing 2009, Shiren Xie Shan he tade Tuopai pengyoumen (The poet Xie Shan and his Trotskyist friends), Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu. Hunan renmin chubanshe (eds) 1980, Huainian Liu Shaoqi tongzhi (In commemoration of Comrade Liu Shaoqi), Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe. Isaacs, Harold R. 1961, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Isaacs, Harold R. 2010, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Chicago: Haymarket Books. Jia Bicai 1981, Zhongguo geming yu Sulian guwen (The Chinese Revolution and Soviet Advisers), Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Jiang Guansheng 2012, Zhonggong zai Xianggang 1949–2012 (Chinese Communism in Hong Kong, 1949–2012), Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu. Jin Zhao 1983, “Chen Duxiu pingfande qianqianhouhou” (“Before and after the rehabilitation of Chen Duxiu”), Zhongbao yuekan, No. 7. Johns, Sheridan 1976, “The Birth of the Communist Party of South Africa,”International Journal of African Historical Studies, ix, 2. Joint Economic Committee 1957, An Economic Profile of Mainland China, Washington: US Government Printing Office. Jones, H. and A. Findlay 1998, “Regional economic integration and the emergence of the East Asian international migration system,” Geoforum vol. 29, issue 1, pp. 87– 104. Kang Sheng 1938, “Chanchu Rikou zhentan minzu gongdide Tuoluociji feibang” (“Root out the Trotskyists, who are spies for Japan and public enemies of the nation”), Jiefang zhoukan (Liberation Weekly), Nos. 29 and 30 (28 January and 8 February, respectively). Lam, Jermain T.M. 2003, “Enhanced Productivity Programme in Hong Kong: A Critical Appraisal.” Public Performance & Management Review 27, no. 1, pp. 53–70. Lau, Raymond Wing-kam 2015, “Jiefang Makesi zhuyizhe, Siwu xingdong, Jiuyue 29ri Shijian” (Marxists Liberated, the April 5th Action, and the September 29th Incident), Thinking Hong Kong 7, July. Lau San-ching 1992, Wuhui de zhengcheng (The Journey with No Regret), Hong Kong: Ming Pao Publications Ltd. Law Wing Sang 2017, “‘Huohong niandai’ yu Xianggang zuoyi jijin zhuyi sichao” (“Fiery Era” and Hong Kong’s Left-radicalism), Twenty-first Century, vol. 161, pp. 71–83. Lenin, Vladimir 1973, Lenin Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin, Vladimir 1974a, Lenin Collected Works, vol. 22, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

1194

references

Lenin, Vladimir 1974b, Lenin Collected Works, vol. 25, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin, Vladimir 1974c, Lenin Collected Works, vol. 27, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin, Vladimir 1974d, Lenin Collected Works, vol. 31, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin, Vladimir 1977a, Lenin Collected Works, vol. 4, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin, Vladimir 1977b, Lenin Collected Works, vol. 12, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Li Hsiao-feng 1987, Taiwan minzhu yundong sishinian (Forty years of Taiwan’s democratic movement), Taipei: Ziliwanbao she. Li, Promise 2020, “The Radical 70’s Magazine That Shaped the Hong Kong Left.” The Nation, 17 April. Li Yongjue 2007, Kanke: Li Yongjue huiyilu (Ordeal: the memoirs of Li Yongjue), Hong Kong: Xiandai gemingshi wenxian congkan (Modern Revolutionary History Series). Liao Gailong 1952, Zhongguo renmin jiefang zhanzheng jianzhi (A Brief History of the Chinese Liberation War), Zhengzhou: Haiyan Bookshop. Lin Meinuo (ed.) 1990, Fennu de yebaihe: Sanyiliu Zhongzhengtang xuesheng jingzuo jishi (Angry Wild Lily: The student sit-in at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Square on 16 March), Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe (Vanguard books). Liu Pingmei 2005, Zhongguo Tuopai dangshi (A history of the Chinese Trotskyist party), Hong Kong: Xinmiao chubanshe. Liu Qifa and Qian Feng 1981, “Diyici guogong hezuode celüe wenti” (“On the tactics of the first co-operation between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party”), Jiang Han luntan, No. 4. Liu Yiyu and Liu Jingchun 1983, “Luo Yinong,” Chinese Communist Party Biographies, Vol. 8, p. 80. Lu Ping (ed.) 1990, A Moment of Truth: Workers’ Participation in China’s 1989 Democracy Movement and the Emergence of Independent Unions, edited by Lu Ping, Hong Kong Trade Union Education Centre. Lui, Tai-lok, Stephen W.K. Chui, Ray Yep (eds) 2018, Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Hong Kong, London: Routledge. Maitan, Livio 1976, Party, Army, and Masses in China: A Marxist Interpretation of the Cultural Revolution and Its Aftermath, translated by Gregor Benton and Marie Collitti, London: New Left Books. Maitan, Livio 2019, Memoirs of a Critical Communist: Towards a History of the Fourth International, translated by Gregor Benton, London: Merlin Press. Mandel, Ernest 1976, Late Capitalism, London: New Left Books. Mandel, Ernest 1977, “Revolutionary Strategy in Europe: A Political Interview,” New Left Review. Mandel, Ernest 2002, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, Chippendale: Resistance Books. Mandel, Ernest 2020, Introduction to Marxist Theory: Selected Writings, Chippendale: International Institute for Research and Education/Resistance Books.

references

1195

Mao Zedong/Mao Tse-tung 1965, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 3, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Mao Zedong/Mao Tse-tung 1969, Mao Zedong sixiang wansui (Long Live Mao Zedong Thought), Hong Kong: Bowen shuju. Marquis, Christopher, and Kunyuan Qiao 2022, Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Marx, Karl 1977a, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl 1977b, Marx Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl 2009, The Civil War in France, Moscow: Dodo Press. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1974, Makesi-Engesi quanji (The Complete Works of Marx-Engels), vol. 22, Beijing: Renmin chuban she. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1976, Marx and Engels Selected Works, vol. 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 2010a, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 10, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 2010b, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 11, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 2010c, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 26, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 2010d, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 27, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 2010e, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 35, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 2010f., Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 50, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Maxwell, Kenneth 2003, Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues, London: Routledge. Mazzocco, Ilaria, and Scott Kennedy 2022, “Public Opinion in China: A Liberal Silent Majority?” Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 9 February. Mei Zhi 2013, F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years, translated by Gregor Benton, London: Verso. Miller, Joseph 1976, Interview Notes, unpublished. Mo Qi 1982, “A Personal Record of the 1980 Organisational Split”, unpublished document. Mok Chiu Yu, Law Wing Sang, and Au Loong Yu 2021, “50 years after Baodiao: How Hong Kong struggled against all nationalisms,” interviewed by Promise Li, Lausan, 11 November. Ng Chung-yin (Wu Zhongxian) 1997, Dazhi weijing: Ng-Chungyin wenji (Our Work’s Not Finished: Collected Essays of Ng Chung-yin), Hong Kong: Lewen Bookshop.

1196

references

Ng Gong-shao 1997, “Jiu Lau Yu-fan [Au Yoong-lu] Gaobie ‘Chongji wenhua’ yiwen de huiying” (“A Response to Lau Yu-fan’s Goodbye to ‘the Culture of Confrontation’”), Sun Miu 46, November. Ngo Van 1995, Revolutionaries They Could Not Break: The Fight for the Fourth International in Indochina, 1930–1945, London: Index Books. Ngo Van 2010, In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, edited by Ken Knabb and Hélène Fleury, translated by Hélène Fleury, Hilary Horrocks, Ken Knabb, and Naomi Sager, Edinburgh: ak Press. Nie Rongzhen 1983, Nie Rongzhen, Huiyilu (Memoirs of Nie Rongzhen), 2 vols., Beijing: Zhanshi chubanshe. Pan Lu 2022, “New Left without Old Left: The 70’s Biweekly and Youth Activism in 1970s Hong Kong,” Modern China 48.5, pp. 1080–1112. Pantsov, Alexander 2000, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927 Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Parish William L. and Martin King Whyte (eds) 1978, Village and Family in Contemporary China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1950, Dui Zhonggong tongzhi Zhongguo de zhengzhi jueyi (The Political Resolution on China under ccp’s Rule), Marxist Internet Archive. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1952, “The Third Chinese Revolution; A Resolution of the Fourth International,” Fourth International, vol. 13 no. 4, July–August. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1954, “The Chinese Experience with Pabloite Revisionism and Bureaucratism (A Letter to James P. Cannon),” 30 December 1953, swp Discussion Bulletin, A 15. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1967, “Open Letter to the Members of the ccp” World Outlook, 24 March. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1968, “Open Letter to the Members of the ccp,” World Outlook, 24 March 1967, International Information Bulletin, March, no. 1. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1980, Shiwaleta chugoku kakumei (The Lost Chinese Revolution), edited and translated by Mineo Nakajima, Tokyo: Shin Hyorun (New Tribune). Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1982a, “Criticisms on the US swp’s Opinion on Cuba”, International Information Bulletin, April. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1982b, “Mao Zedong yu Liu Shaoqi de guanxi he fenqi” (“The relationship and differences between Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi”), in Peng Shuzhi 1982, vol. 3, p. 284; for an English translation, see Peng Shuzhi, “The Relationship and Differences Between Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-ch’i,” International Information Bulletin, no. 2, 1968. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1982c, Peng Shuzhi xuanji (Selected Writings of Peng Shuzhi), vol. 3, Hong Kong: October Bookshop. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1983, Peng Shuzhi xuanji, vol. 1, Hong Kong: October Bookshop.

references

1197

Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 1984, “Dui Zheng Chaolin xugou gushide jielu” (“Exposing Zheng Chaolin’s fantastic stories”), Zhongbao yuekan, No. 1. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 2010, Peng Shuzhi xuanji, vol. 4, Hong Kong: October Bookshop. Peng Shuzhi/P’eng Shu-tse 2016, Peng Shuzhi huiyilu (Memoirs of Peng Shuzhi), edited by , Cadart, Claude, and Cheng Yingxiang, 2 vols., Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu. Peng Shuzhi (Ou) and Chen Bilan (Yun) 1978, Zhi Zhang Kui tongzhi de xin (A Letter to Comrade Zhang Kui from Ou and Yun), 26 March. P’eng Shu-tse 1980, The Chinese Communist Party in Power, edited by Leslie Evans, New York: Monad Press. Pirani, Simon 1987, Vietnam and Trotskyism, articles reprinted from the Workers Press together with supplementary material. Published by the Communist League [Australia]. Poeze, Harry Albert, and Tan Malaka 1976, Strijder voor Indonesia’s Vrijheid. Levensloop van 1897 tot 1945, The Hague: B.V. de Nederlandsche Boek- en Steen-drukkerij v/h H.L. Smits. Preparatory Committee for a Trotskyist Organisation 1981, Gei Guoji de baogao: Guanyu 1980 nian Gemameng he Sheqingshe limian de fenlie (A Report Submitted to the Fourth International regarding the 1980 Organisational Split between the rml and the ysg). Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin 2010, “Unfinished Proletarianisation: Self, Anger, and Class Action among the Second Generation of Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China,” Modern China, no. 36. Qian Liqun 2013, “Hu Feng, Shu Wu and Zhou Yang-men” (Hu Feng, Shu Wu and ZhouYangites), in Shu Cheng (Book City), No. 2, pp. 5–17. Renmin chubanshe (eds) 1981, Huiyi Ye Ting (In Memory of Ye Ting), Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. rml 1978a, Neibu tongxun (Internal Communication Bulletin), Hong Kong: Revolutionary Marxist League, 9 September. rml 1978b, Neibu ziliao (Internal materials), Hong Kong: Revolutionary Marxist League, 30 October. Rošker, Jana S. 2020, “Modern New Confucianism and the Challenges of Chinese Modernity: Intercultural Dialogues in Chinese Philosophy,” Culture and Dialogue, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 196–219. Rousset, Pierre 1978, Zhi tongyi shujiju Xianggang tuopai yundong tongyi wenti de baogao (To the United Secretariat: A Report on the Fusion of the Hong Kong Trotskyist Movement), translated into Chinese, 10 May. Rousset, Pierre 1986, “La révolution vietnamienne: Rapport d’introduction à un débat dans la Quatrième Internationale,” Europe Solidaire sans Frontières, February. Ruckus, Ralf 2023, The Left in China – A Political Cartography, London: Pluto Press.

1198

references

Sakai, Yoshichi 2015, My Activities in Hong Kong on Behalf of the Fourth International, 19 September, unpublished manuscript. Schwarcz, Vera 1986, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, Berkeley: University of California Press. Selden, Mark 1971, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Shachtman, Max 1950, “Reflections on a Decade Past,” The New International, Vol. 16, No. 3, May–June. Sheppard, Barry 2005, The Party: The Socialist Workers’ Party 1960–1988, A Political Memoir, vol. 2: Interregnum, Decline and Collapse, 1973–1988, London: Resistance Books. Simons, H.J. and R.E. 1969, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950, London: Penguin. Skeldon, Ronald 1998, “Labour Migration to Hong Kong,” asean Economic Bulletin, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 201–18. Society for Democratic Struggle and Sun Miu Group 1989, “Jianjue zhengqu 91nian Lifaju yiyuan quanbu zhijie puxuan” (Resolutely Struggling for Universal Suffrage and Direct Democracy in the 1991 Election of the Legislative Council), Sun Miu 13, November. Society for Democratic Struggle 1990, “Zhongguo minzhu yundong de fangxiang” (The Direction of China’s Democracy Movement), Fendou tongxun (Struggle Bulletin), vol. 1, 4 May. Song Yongyi, et. al. 2010, Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign [cd-rom Database], Hong Kong: Universities Service Centre of China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Snow, Edgar 1966, L’altra riva del fiume, Turin: Einaudi. Snow, Edgar 1968, Red Star Over China, New York: Grove. Stalin, Joseph 1976, Problems of Leninism, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Sun Huixiu 2017, Jindai Zhongguo Tuopai lishi zaiyanjiu (Further Research on Trotskyism in Modern China), PhD thesis, Renmin University of China. Sun Huixiu 2023, Tuopai yu Jindai Zhongguo, yixiang zhengzhi wenhuashi de kaocha (The Trotskyist Faction and Modern China), Hong Kong: Kaimin shudian. Sun Miu Group 1983, “Xianggang ren de chulu: zhengqu minzhu, shouhui zhuquan” (The Outlet of Hong Kongers: Struggling for Democracy and Recovering the Sovereignty), Sun Miu, 20 February. Sun Qiming 1980, “Chen Duxiu shifou Hanjian wentide tantao” (“On whether Chen Duxiu was a traitor”), Anhui daxue xuebao (Anhui University Journal), No. 2. swp 1952a, International Information Bulletin (iib), published by the Socialist Workers’ Party (US), February. swp 1952b, International Information Bulletin (iib), New York: Socialist Workers’ Party (US), March.

references

1199

swp 1954, swp Discussion Bulletin, A15, published by the Socialist Workers’ Party (US), February. swp 1968a, International Information Bulletin (iib), New York: Socialist Workers’ Party (US), January. swp 1968b, International Information Bulletin (iib), New York: Socialist Workers’ Party (US), October. swp 1969a, International Information Bulletin (iib), New York: Socialist Workers’ Party (US), March. swp 1969b, International Information Bulletin (iib), New York: Socialist Workers’ Party (US), July. swp 1974, International Internal Discussion Bulletin (iidb), New York: Socialist Workers’ Party (US), April. Tam Chun-yin 1999, “Yaumatei xiaolun: gei gongying shiye siyinghua yiji erguang” (The Case of the Yaumatei Ferry Company: A Slap on the Face of the Privatisation on Public Services), Globalisation Monitor vol. 1, September. Tang Baolin 1994, Zhongguo Tuopai shi (The History of Chinese Trotskyism), Taipei: Dongda tushu. Tang Baolin no date, Dui Zhongguo Tuopai wenti de yidian xinsikao (New Thoughts on the Problem of the Chinese Trotskyists), unpublished manuscript. Tang Xiaobing 1986, “Houxiandai zhuyi: Shangpinhua and wenhua kuozhang, fang Jiemuxun jiaoshou” (Interview with Prof Jameson on post-modernism: Commoditisation and the expansion of Culture), Dushu, no. 3. Tian, Ian Liujia 2022, “Socialism from the Grassroot: New Directions of Leftist Organising in Post-Socialist China,” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action, no. 22, 30 January. Trần Mỹ Chau and Phan Thị Trọng Tuyến. 2015, Trần Văn Thạch (1905–1945): Cây bút chống bạo quyền áp bức, Victoria, British Columbia. Trotsky, Leon 1929, The Third International after Lenin, New York: Militant. Trotsky, Leon 1946, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Programme, New York: Pioneer Publishers. Trotsky, Leon 1957, The Chinese Revolution: Problems and Perspectives, New York: Pioneer Publishers. Trotsky, Leon 1962, Problems of the Chinese Revolution, Chicago: Paragon Books Gallery. Trotsky, Leon 1969a, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New York: Merit. Trotsky, Leon 1969b, The Problems of the Chinese Revolution, London: New Park Publications. Trotsky, Leon 1976, Leon Trotsky on China, New York: Monad Press. Trotsky, Leon 2008, The History of the Russian Revolution, Haymarket Books: Chicago. Tsow, Ming 1983, “Ethnic Minority Community Languages: A Statement”, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.

1200

references

Unity Faction 1978, Weishenme women yaoyu gemameng tongyi (Why We Want a Unification with the rml), 14 September. Unity Faction no date, Zhengqu liji shixian Zhongguo Tuopai de tongyi (Struggling for an Immediate Unification of the Chinese Trotskyists), a draft proposal submitted to the special congress of the rcp. usfi 1980, 1979 World Congress of the Fourth International: Major Resolutions and Reports, New York: Intercontinental Press. usfi 1984, Intercontinental Press vol. 22, no. 23, December. Wang Fanxi (i.e., Feng Gang) 1946, “Cong He Yin Huaqiao bei tusha shuoqi” (“On the massacre of Overseas Chinese in the Dutch East Indies”), Xin qi, no. 3. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 1958a, Cong Chen Duxiu de “zuihou yijian” shuoqi (On Chen Duxiu’s final views), 1958, Marxist Internet Archive. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 1958b, Guodu gangling ershinian (On the Twentieth Anniversary of the Transitional Programme), Marxist Internet Archive. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 1967, “Lun wuchan jieji wenhua da geming” (“On the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”), in Shuang Shan, Lun wuchan jieji wenhua da geming (“On the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”), Hong Kong: Xinda chuban she, 1974, pp. 1–43 (second pagination), at pp. 4–9. For a rough English translation of this essay, see W.F.H. (Wang Fanxi), “On the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” 1967, in The 70s, eds, The Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution, Hong Kong: The 70s, 1976, pp. 70–106, at pp. 76–80. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi Shuang Shan huiyilu (Shuang Shan’s Memoirs), Hong Kong: Zhouji hang. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 1980a, Chinese Revolutionary, Memoirs, 1919–1949, translated and with an introduction by Gregor Benton by Gregor Benton, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 1980b, Shuang Shan huiyilu, Beijing: Xiandai shiliao biankan she. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 1991, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary, translated and with an introduction by Gregor Benton, New York: Columbia University Press. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 2004a, Shuang Shan huiyi lu, Beijing: Dongfang chuban she. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 2004b, Wang Fanxi wannian zhaji (The Notes of Wang Fanxi in His Later Years), Hong Kong: Sun Miu/Xinmiao Publishing. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 2018, Wang Fanxi xuanji (Wang Fanxi’s Selected Writings), edited by Zhu Zheng, 3 vols., Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press. Wang Fanxi/Wang Fan-hsi 2020, Mao Zedong Thought, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Gregor Benton, Leiden: Brill. Wang, Yuhua 2014, “Empowering the Police: How the Chinese Communist Party Manages Its Coercive Leaders,” The China Quarterly, September; vol. 219, pp. 625–648.

references

1201

Wang Zhaoqian 2016, Wentan yi Jianghu (The Wild Chinese Literary World), Beijing: Xiandai chubanshe. Wasserstrom, Jeffrey, and William Yang 2023, “A Year of Protests, Ceremonies, and Surprises,” in China Story Yearbook: Chains, edited by Linda Jaivin, Esther Sunkyung Klein, and Annie Luman Ren, Canberra: anu Press, pp. 185–199. Wei Tingchao 1997, Taiwan renquan baogaoshu 1949–1996 (Taiwan human rights report, 1949–1996), Taibei: Wenyingtang chuban she. Wickens, P.L. 1978, The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Wong, Brian 2022, “As Hong Kong Marks 25 Years of British Handover, Its ‘Cage Homes’ Remain a Stark Reminder of Its Inequities,” Time, 30 June. Wong Wai-hung 1989, “Shenfang zoushang Deng Xiaoping shi ducai zhilu” (Be Cautious of a Road to Deng Xiaoping-alike Dictatorship), Sun Miu 12. Wu Jimin 2008, Lianyu: Zhongguo Tuopai de kunan yu fendou (‘The Chinese Trotskyists’ ordeal and struggle’), Singapore: Bafang wenhua chuangzuo shi. Xiang Qing (Su Da) [Trotskyist] 1978, Zhiwen zhongweihui (Questioning the Central Committee), 21 March. Xiang Qing (Su Da) no date, Liangzhong luxian de xuanze (The Choice between Two Lines). Xiang Qing and Li Huai-ming (Ye Ning) 1978, Dang he qingniantuan guanxi de yuanze: Gegongdang tebie dahui jueyi dui’an (The Principle of Party-League Relations: A Counter-proposal to the [Draft] Resolution of the rcp’s Special Congress), 15 March. Xiang Qing [historian] 1980, “Guanyu gongchanguoji he Zhongguo wenti” (“On the Comintern and China”), Xinhua yuebao (New China Monthly), No. 4. Xiao Ke 2015, “Preface to the Collected Poems of Chen Duxiu,” in Benton, ed., 2015, 691– 693. Xie Shan 1996, Kukou shicicao (Poems from a bitter mouth), Hong Kong: Xinmiao chubanshe. Xie Wei 1994, “Mantan Chen Duxiu ying kaifang jinqu” (There Should Be a Discussion about Chen Duxiu), Chen Duxiu yanjiu dongtai (Trends in Chen Duxiu Studies), no. 2. Xu Dingming 2019, Cong shu ying kan Xianggang wenxue (Viewing Hong Kong Literature from Books and Films), Hong Kong: Chuwen chuban she. Xue Muqiao 1960, The Socialist Transformation of the National Economy of China, Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Yang Yang 2018, Radicalism at the Margin: The New Emergence of the Chinese Trotskyist Movement in Hong Kong, 1969–1981, PhD thesis, University of Essex. Yang Yang, Pik-ka Lau, Ip Po Yee 2022, “The formation and disintegration of Hong Kong Maoists in the ‘Fiery Era’ (1970–1981),” Twentieth Century Communism, Issue 22, pp. 14–46.

1202

references

Yang, Yuan 2018, “Chinese students clash with guards over Marxist society crackdown,” Financial Times, 28 December. Yang, Yuan 2023, “China shows that suppressing strikes only fuels discontent,”Financial Times, 13 February. “Yi Qiubai” bianji xiaozu (eds.) 1981, Yi Qiubai (Remembering Qiubai), Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Zhang Guotao 1973, Wode huiyi (My Memoirs), 3 vols., Hong Kong: Mingbao yuekan chubanshe. Zhang Jiakang 2004, “Xiangzhi yousu de Hu Shi he Chen Duxiu” (The friendship between Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu), Wenshi jinghua, no. 7. Zhang Yueran 2018, “The Jasic Strike and the Future of the Chinese Labour Movement.” Made in China Journal 3, no. 3: 12–17. Zhang Yueran 2020, “Leninists in a Chinese Factory: Reflections on the Jasic Labour Organising Strategy,” Made in China Journal, May–August. Zhen Yan, Dui ruogan zhengyixing lishi wentide tantao (On some historical controversies), unpublished manuscript. Zheng Chaolin 1983, “Guanyu Muluhuosika (Mlokhoska) dimingde shuoming” (“On the place-name Mlokhoska”), Dangshi yanjiu ziliao (Research Materials on Party History), No. 3. Zheng Chaolin 1984a, “Peng Shuzhi biyan xiashuo” (“Peng Shuzhi talks nonsense with eyes shut”), Zhongbao yuekan, nos. 1 and 2, 1984. Zheng Chaolin 1984b, “Yiben gei ziji tuzhimofende huiyilu” (“A self-whitewashing memoir”), Parts 1 and 2, Zhongbao yuekan, nos. 4 and 5. Zheng Chaolin 1997, An Oppositionist for Life: Memoirs of the Chinese Revolutionary Zheng Chaolin, translated and edited by Gregor Benton, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Zheng Chaolin 1998, Shishi yu huiyi: Zheng Chaolin wannian wenxuan (History and Recollections: Selected Essays of Zheng Chaolin in His Later Years), Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu. Zheng Chaolin 2004, Zheng Chaolin huiyilu (The Memoirs of Zheng Chaolin), 2 vols, Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe. Zheng Chaolin and Zhou Yongxiang 1983, “Wo dui Qu Qiubaide yixie huiyi” (“Some recollections of Qu Qiubai”), Shanghai wenshi ziliao xuanji (Selected Shanghai Historical Documents), No. 42, pp. 42–52. Zhongda xinzuo xueshe 2022, “Jianjie” (Introduction), 3 April, no place. Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao dangshi jiaoyanshi ziliaozu (eds.) 1982, Zhongguo gongchandang lid zhongyao huiyiji (Important Meetings of the Chinese Communist Party), 2 vols., Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe. Zhongguo geming bowuguan (eds) 1980, Liu Shaoqi tongzhi shengping huodong nianbiao, 1898–1969 (A Chronicle of the Activities of Comrade Liu Shaoqi, 1898–1969), Beijing: Zhongguo geming bowuguan.

references

1203

Zhongguo geming bowuguan dangshi chenlie yanjiubu (eds.) 1982, Zhonggong dangshi zhuyao shijianjianjie (Important Events in the History of the Chinese Communist Party), Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe. Zhongguo jiefangjun zhengzhi xueyuan dangshi jiaoyanshi (eds.) 1979, Zhonggong dangshi cankao ziliao (Reference Materials on the History of the Chinese Communist Party), Vol. 3, Beijing: Zhongguo jiefangjun zhengzhi xueyuan dangshi jiaoyanshi. Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshangyi quanguo weiyuanhui, wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui (eds.) 1981, Geming shi ziliao (Materials on the History of the Revolution), no. 3, Beijing: Wenshi ziliao chubanshe. Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo fanyishi (eds.) 1981, Gongchanguoji youguan Zhongguo gemingde wenxian ziliao (Documentary Materials of the Comintern Relating to the Chinese Revolution), Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Zhonghua minguo kaiguo wushinian wenxian bianzuan weiyuanhui (eds) 1961, Gongfei huoguo shiliao huibian (Historical Materials on the Communist Bandits’ Ruining of China), Vol. 1, Taibei: Zhonghua minguo kaiguo wushinian wenxian bianzuan weiyuanhui. Zhongshan daxue “Ye Ting” bianxie zu (eds.) 1979, Ye Ting, Shaoguan: Guangdong renmin chubanshe. Zhongyang dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui, Zhongyang dangshi yanjiuhui (eds.) 1982, Zhonggong dangshi ziliao (Materials on Chinese Communist Party History), Vol. 3, Beijing: Zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe. Zhou Yongxiang (ed.) 1983, Qu Qiubai nianpu (Chronology of the Life of Qu Qiubai), Guangdong renmin chubanshe. Zhu Yunlong 1946, “Yindunixiya de mingyun” (“The fate of Indonesia”), Qiuzhen, 1 May, vol. 1, no. 1.

Interviews – – – – – – – – – –

Interview with Po I-po by Anna Louise Strong, January 1964 Interview with Tang Baolin by Yang Yang, 14 March 2014 Interview with Jabez Lam by Yang Yang, 4 May 2014 Interview with Xiang Qing by Yang Yang, 17 August 2014 Interview with Yoshichi Sakai by Yang Yang, 1 September 2017 Interview with Tariq Ali by Yang Yang, 11 September 2017 Interview with Anita Chan by Promise Li, February 2021 Interview with M by Promise Li, March 2021 Interview with Lam Chi-leung by Promise Li, December 2021 Interview with Tam Leung Ying by Promise Li, February 2022

1204 – – – – – –

references

Interview with Au Loong-yu by Promise Li, June 2022 Interview with Au Loong-yu by Promise Li, July 2022 Interview with J by Promise Li, July 2022 Interview with Lam Chi-leung by Promise Li, July 2022 Interview with Lau San-ching by Promise Li, July 2022 Interview with J by Promise Li, September 2022

Newspapers and Periodicals – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Apple Daily (Hong Kong) Beijing Daily Chen Duxiu yanjiu dongtai (Trends in Chen Duxiu Studies) Dushu (Reading) Far Eastern Economic Review Fendou tongxun (Struggle Bulletin) Fourth International Globalisation Monitor Guangming Daily Hackney Citizen Hackney Gazette Huohua (Sparks) Intercontinental Press International Information Bulletin International Internal Discussion Bulletin International Socialist Review Jiefang zhoukan (Liberation Weekly) Labor Action Los Angeles Times Midnight Sun Ming Pao Monthly Neibu tongxun (Internal Communication Bulletin) Neibu ziliao (Internal materials) New York Herald Tribune New York Times People’s Daily Quatrième Internationale Revolutionary History Selections from China Mainland Magazines Shiyue pinglun (October Review)

references – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

1205

Shu cheng (Book City) Sintao Daily News Socialist Appeal South China Morning Post (scmp) Stand News (Hong Kong) Sun Miu/Xinmiao swp Discussion Bulletin The Economist The Initium The Militant The Nation The New International Tianxia zazhi (Commonwealth Magazine) tvb News Wenshi jinghua (Prime of Literature and History) Wen Wei Po World Outlook Xinhua yuekan (New China Monthly) Zhanxun (Combat Bulletin) Zhongbao yuekan

Online Sources Jabez Lam interview: https://britishchineseheritagecentre.org.uk/en_uk/ph/interview s/bcwh_lamjabez.html Lausan: https://lausancollective.com Made in China Journal: https://madeinchinajournal.com Marxist Internet Archive (mia), Chinese: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/index.ht ml Thinking Hong Kong: https://www.thinkinghk.org/ “Vienna Choir”: https://news.ruc.edu.cn/archives/48691

Index This index, created by Yang Yang and Zhang Shaoming, has omitted a number of names of people (notably Zheng Chaolin, Peng Shuzhi, and Wang Fanxi), places (including Beijing, Nanjing, and Wenzhou), and organisations (Revolutionary Communist Party, Internationalist Workers Party, and Chinese Communist Party) central to and ubiquitous in the text. Some activists who occur just once or twice have also been omitted, to keep the index within a manageable length. However, many of these names have been included in Appendix 3: Biographical List.” “One Country Two Systems” 236 “Third Period” 425, 643, 659 “Third Word War” 334, 457, 464, 635, 727–8, 1089 “Three Red Flags” 222, 1074–5 18 September Incident/Mukden Incident 834, 887, 899, 904 7 July Incident/Lugou Bridge Incident/ Lugouqiao Incident 773, 865–6, 871, 887, 905 70’s Biweekly 99, 139, 168–74, 176, 179, 204, 395, 1074–6 Abern, Martin 427 Ah Q 375, 757, 872, 899 Ai Qing 541, 543–4, 546 Algerian events 563–5 Ali, Tariq 32, 80, 82, 96–7, 393 All-China Federation of Trade Unions (acftu) 48 Amnesty International 34, 86, 323, 395 An Mingbo 293–4, 335 Andrews, W.H. 421–3, 425 Anglo-Russian Committee 643 Anhui 45, 444, 568, 603, 732, 773–4, 874–5, 890, 952, 971, 983, 1057 Anqing 45, 569, 974 Anti-Rightist Movement 916, 940, 976, 1074 April Fifth Action 177, 179, 187–9, 191, 193–5, 199, 1097, 1103 April Fifth Movement/5 April Tian’anmen Square Incident (1976) 257, 578, 1098, 1102–3 Article 23 (Basic Law, Hong Kong) 199, 205 Au Loong-yu 48, 50–1, 53, 90, 107, 109, 144, 172, 181, 378, 390, 408, 855, 1091, 1109 Authoritarian capitalism 1142–3

Ba Jin 21, 43, 811 Bai Subing 295–7, 368 Bakunin, Mikhail 683, 1023 Baodiao (Baowei Diaoyutai) movement 171–3, 192, 201–2, 1074 Barnes, Jack 428, 596–8, 600 Basic Law (Hong Kong) 191–2, 205 Basic Law Drafting Committee 185 Baumann, Michael 597 Beijing Spring 211, 1102 Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation 47 Bella, Ben 563–5 Boat people 1100, 1102 Bolshevism 129–30, 138, 456, 560, 704, 1029 Bonapartism 120–1, 125, 627–8 Borodin, Mikhail 449, 591, 603 Boyle, Edward 96–7, 399 Brecht, Bertolt 170 Bu Ke 1086, 1089 Bukharin, Nikolai 32, 42, 324, 446–7, 575, 659, 695 Bunting, S.P. 421, 425 Bureaucratic collectivism 612–25, 618, 626– 31 Burnham, James 1027 Cadart, Claude 567, 570, 584–6, 600–5 Cadreism 20, 612, 677, 687, 918, 947, 981 Cai Hesen 14, 576, 585, 603 Cannon, James P. 36, 93–94, 592, 640 Cantonese 202, 233, 394, 735, 809, 908, 1085 Cao Huibai 908, 916, 925, 947 Cao Jiacong 329, 952 Cao Jiaji (Ap Chai) 26–7, 300–1, 304, 337, 339, 843 Cao Qinghua 806, 811, 877–8, 882–3, 885–6, 890

index Cao Yulin 297, 316, 329, 833, 884–5, 891– 4 Carrillo, Santiago 1017–8 Castoriadis, Cornelius 611 Castro, Fidel 36, 555, 557, 560–1, 565, 599, 1026 Castroism 36, 492, 499, 501, 555, 560–1, 598 Ceylon /Sri Lanka 61, 154, 325, 1093 Chen Daotong 965, 967–8 Chen Jingguang 717, 1066 Chen Mang 937–8, 945, 947 Chen Qiaonian 23 Chen Qichang 149, 326–7, 431, 451–2, 770, 772, 899–900, 965, 967–8 Chen Rulin 877, 882, 886 Chen Wei 296, 368 Chen Yi 588, 693, 725 Chen Yimou 325–6 Chen Yuqi 297 Chen Zhongxi 75, 327 Cheng Yingxiang 567, 570, 600–5 Chengdu 797, 871, 874, 884–5, 890, 892, 895, 1131 Cheung Man-kwong 184, 209 Chiang Ching-kuo 296, 368 China Deviants 46–7 China Labour Bulletin 47 China Spring 224–5, 404 Chinese Bolshevik Leninists 326, 428–9 Chinese Democracy Movement (cdm) 187, 1103, 245–6, 255–7, 261, 270, 273–4, 276–8, 280, 282, 284, 285, 287 Chinese Information and Advice Centre (ciac) 402–4 Chinese Language Movement 201, 1074 Chinese Left Opposition 6, 10, 23, 85, 156, 427, 570 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (cppcc) 987, 991–7 Chinese Red Army 9–10, 758–9 Chinese Socialist Youth League (Trotskyists) 292 Christian Industrial Committee 228 Chu Hai 168, 170–1 Chuang 49 Cliff, Tony 393, 402, 611 Cold War 381, 1021, 1035, 1037–8, 1943

1207 Combat Bulletin 83, 142, 267, 1100 Comintern/Communist International/Third International 2, 9, 11–2, 15–6, 44, 52–3, 61, 418, 421–2, 425–6, 446–7, 449, 533, 559, 568, 570, 572–7, 581, 584, 590, 591, 599, 603, 642, 646–7, 683–4, 739, 760, 762, 881, 884, 896, 925, 964, 1004, 1012, 1041, 1095 Communist League of China/Chinese Communist League (Trotskyists) 12, 66, 68, 72, 80, 91, 149, 162, 164, 294, 326, 369, 418, 420, 426, 429–31, 437–9, 447, 875, 877, 880, 883, 887–8, 892, 896, 899, 905, 909, 920, 927, 1006, 1012 Communist Manifesto 183, 641, 680, 869, 873, 881, 896, 1024, 1059 Communist Party of Great Britain (cpgb) 393–4, 402 Communist Party of South Africa (cpsa) 420–1 Communist Party of the Soviet Union 16, 44, 149, 324, 480, 625, 933, 935, 976, 1043, 1076 Communist Youth League (to the ccp) 22, 304, 922 Communist Youth League (Wenzhou Trotskyists) 300, 329 Confucianism 15, 21, 444, 448, 662–3, 982 Cuban Revolution 493, 496, 556–7, 560–1, 599, 1026 cwi (Committee for a Workers International) 378–9, 382–4 Dai Qing 1053–4, 1058 Dai Yan 328, 909, 1086 Das Kapital 663–4, 666–7, 675, 677, 919 De Gaulle, Charles 497, 501, 658 Deformed workers’ state(s) 10, 40, 158, 250, 397, 404, 407, 411, 610–2, 618, 648–9, 653, 1101 Degenerated workers’ state(s) 10, 20, 40, 129, 560, 611, 618, 626, 652, 690, 1020, 1026 Democratic centralism 25, 147–50, 152, 154, 160–1, 210, 390, 625, 1100 Democratic Progressive Party (dpp, Taiwan) 366, 372, 376

1208 Deng Tuo 540, 548, 595 Deng Xiaoping 19, 21, 37–8, 45, 50, 53, 56– 7, 174, 229, 323, 347, 402, 550, 567, 588, 594–8, 689–90, 725, 857, 959, 990–1, 1098, 1122–3 Deutscher, Isaac 699, 700, 1047–8 Deutscher, Tamara 700 Dewey, John 23, 447, 1017 Ding Ling 541, 543–4, 546 Ding Yi 328, 335, 729, 731, 908–10, 916 Du Fu 698, 792 Du Wenlin 878, 881, 883, 885–6, 890–98 Dunayevskaya, Raya 611 Dunn, Baroness Lydia 190 Esperanto 21–22 Executive Committee of the Communist International (ecci) 576, 1004 Falklands/Malvinas war 231, 237 Fan Wenhua 877, 882, 886–7, 890–1 Fan Yong 1040, 1044–50 Fang Jing 872–4, 880 Fang Lizhi 696–7 Fang Zezheng 301, 329 Farien, Antonio (David Fender) 587, 592 Feng Xuefeng 543–4, 546 First World War 419, 670, 800, 876, 1037 Five Anti(s) campaigns 337, 341, 344, 732, 1074, 1076 Formosa Incident (Meilidao shijian) 372–3 Foxconn 1108, 1110–1, 1128, 1131, 1133, 1135, 1137, 1139, 1142 Frank, Pierre 33, 80, 100, 1011 Freedom Socialist Party (fsp) 29 Friedman, Milton 231 Frontline Welfare Employees Union (Hong Kong) 197 Fu Loo-bing 173 Fu Zuoyi 726, 788 Fudan University 43, 297–8, 346, 911 Fujian 310, 328, 332, 335, 661, 817, 989, 997, 1057 Fujianese 356–7, 771, 777, 817 Fuxing/Re-awakening Goup 29, 108, 155, 157, 389–91, 398, 401, 842, 1077–8, 1090 Fuzhou 431, 437, 454, 935, 1058

index Gang of Four 42, 154, 370, 597, 959–60, 1014, 1097–1100 Gangren zhigang/“Let Hong Kongers rule Hong Kong” 226 Gao Fang 43, 45, 1052, 1058–60 Genshu/Uncle Gen/Lian’gen (aka Wang Fanxi) 147–51, 153, 159, 167, 370–4, 394– 9, 401, 403–11, 842, 853–7, 1077, 1080, 1104 Gide, André 435, 882, 1050–1 Giuliomaria, Sirio Di 563 Global South 36, 616 Globalisation Monitor 196, 199 Golden Jubilee Secondary School (Hong Kong) 1099 Gorbachev, Mikhail 42, 689, 695–6, 704, 707 gpu 72, 429–30, 432, 436, 921, 936 Great Han chauvinism 360–1, 373, 375 Great Leap Forward 371, 487, 505–6, 511, 548–50, 589, 594, 941, 956, 978 Guan Feng 1056 Guangdong 50, 54, 75, 126, 150, 220, 234, 316, 328, 591, 631, 717, 723, 730–1, 735–6, 738, 807, 965, 987, 1067, 1086 Guangxi University 718–9, 906, 1081 Guangxi 67, 149–50, 326, 328, 429, 717–9, 730–1, 736, 807, 887, 900, 905–6, 945, 963, 1081 Guangzhou/Canton 23, 54, 230, 246, 316– 7, 326–8, 330–1, 334, 433, 446, 454, 467, 471, 547, 559, 575, 591, 600, 603, 605, 717, 729–32, 734, 736–8, 906–7, 945, 963, 1043, 1065–70, 1081, 1084–5, 1131 Guerrillaism 33, 36–7 Guevara, Che 17, 174, 557 Guilin 328, 437, 731, 884 Gulag 615 Gulf War 688, 700–1 Hai League 1067–8 Hakka(s) 356 Han Chung (Han Jun) 75, 251, 775, 777, 807 Han Dongfang 47–48 Han Fuju 759, 834 Hangzhou 262, 297–8, 305, 328, 454, 572, 789, 836–8, 894, 938

index Hansen, Joseph 89, 137–8, 141, 587, 596, 598 He Zhisheng (He Zizheng/He Afang) 295, 939 He Zishen (He Zhiyu) 83, 164, 316, 329, 973– 5, 1007 Healy, Gerry 94, 393, 402, 564, 592 Hebei 757, 791, 793, 797, 1057 Henan 725, 780, 790, 793, 811, 815, 819, 825, 866–7, 870, 878–9 Historical materialism 664, 666, 668, 675– 6, 686 Ho Chi-minh/Ho Chi Minh 35, 591, 600 Ho, Albert 190 Hong Jianing 378–9 Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China (hkaspdmc/The Alliance) 174, 189–91, 209, 212 Hong Kong and Kowloon Federation of Trade Unions (hkftu) 1082 Hong Kong and Kowloon People’s Assembly 203 Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (hkctu) 171, 199 Hong Kong Federation of Civil Service Unions 209 Hong Kong Federation of Students 183, 188, 194, 205 Hong Kong Research Project 230 Hong Xiurong 295–6, 368–9 Hu Feng 344, 543–6, 1076 Hu Luoqing 1064 Hu Shi 15, 449 Hu Yaobang 188, 688, 858 Hu Zhendong 292–3, 335, 731, 908 Hu Zongnan 788, 833 Hua Zhenbin 775 Huang Jiantong 316, 329, 345, 939, 945, 949, 962 Huang Wen 1040 Huang Zheng 26–7, 304, 339 Hubei 602, 758, 796, 799, 801, 812, 867, 870, 877–9, 1011, 1069 Huidian (Meeting Point) 184, 225, 229 Hunan 15, 570–1, 580, 590, 602, 799, 940 Hundred Flowers Movement 543–4, 938 Huxi Incident 866

1209 I Wor Kuen/Yihequan 28 India 325, 449, 467, 481–2, 489–90, 501, 526–7, 671 International Committee of the Fourth International (icfi) 94, 96, 592 International Majority Tendency (imt) 67, 83, 97–101, 103–4, 106, 1101 International Marxist Group (img) 85, 96 International Marxist Tendency (imt) 384– 5 International Young Socialist Alliance (iysa) 140 Internationale 317, 921 Isaacs, Harold 39, 92, 426–7, 432, 698, 1073 Islam, Sarekat 573 James, C.L.R. 611 Jameson, Fredric 1031 Japanese Revolutionary Communist League (jrcl) 96, 100–1 jasic 50–1, 1119, 1140 Jenness, Doug 599 Ji Yunlong 316, 345, 729, 907–8, 939, 945, 982 Jiang Junyang 316, 717–8, 720, 731–2, 908–9, 939, 1040, 1081 Jiang Qing 252, 913 Jiang Zhendong 83, 150, 164, 316, 327, 345, 737, 775, 777, 900, 939, 945, 949, 963, 971–3, 975, 977 Jiangsu 298, 316, 328, 335, 603, 729, 807, 890, 909–10, 928 Jiangxi 19, 134, 603, 863 Jin Shupeng 43 Joffe, Adolph 573 Johannesburg 421, 423, 425–6 Jones, Claudia 402 Jones, David Ivon 421–2 Kadalie, Clements 423 Kang Sheng 568, 881, 925, 1016 Kang Zhiquan 877, 882, 886, 891, 898 Kaohsiung 295, 367–8 Kautsky, Karl 160 Keelung 295, 367 Kerry, Tom 596, 598 Keynesianism 1038 Khrushchev, Nikita 41, 482–3, 487, 494, 504, 510, 518, 933, 937, 945–7, 976

1210 Klennerman, Fanny 424–5 Korean War 331, 343, 353, 466, 474, 496, 731 Kowloon 238, 431, 736 Kropotkin, Peter 811 Kui Kuan 867, 883, 886, 891–2, 894–8, 902 Kunming 437, 815, 817–20, 823, 825–7, 832, 873 Lai Siu-ching 187 Lam Chi-leung 48, 192, 196, 198, 378, 384, 1058, 1131 Lam Man-cheuk 197–9 Lam, Carrie 198 Lambert, Pierre 94, 592 Lan Wenrui 911–3, 916, 919–20 Laozi (Lao Tzu) 21, 793, 971 Lau Chin-shek 171, 228 Lau Shan-ching (Liu Shanqing) 211, 246, 408, 842, 853, 856, 1102 Lau Tse-lim 182 Lau Wing-kam, Raymond 187, 191 Lausan 49, 1110, 1127 Law Wing Sang 180 League of Left-Wing Writers 19 League of Social Democrats (Hong Kong) 175, 200, 842, 1097 Lee See (Li See) 104–5, 261, 269, 277, 1089, 1094–5 Lee, Martin 183, 190–1 Leeds 4, 25, 29, 45, 188, 246, 370, 386, 394– 6, 398–9, 404–6, 408–10, 709–10, 842, 847–9, 853–4, 856, 1056, 1077, 1091 Left Chinese Student Association 46 Legislative Council (Legco) 174–5, 185, 187, 192, 194, 196, 199, 204–5, 1097 Leninist-Trotskyist Faction (ltf) 67, 83, 97, 100, 103, 106, 142 Leung Chung-kwong 139 Leung Yiu-chung (Liang Yaozhong) 174, 192, 1077 Li Bai 1039 Li Da 549–52, 581 Li Dazhao 15, 203, 581 Li Guangtian 872–5, 878, 880 Li Huaiming (Li Huai-ming/Lee Waiming/Yip Ning) 106–7, 179, 203, 262–6, 277, 1091 Li Ji 918, 971

index Li Jieshuang (Li Qiqing) 887, 890, 899–906 Li Pei 316, 329, 345, 907, 939, 945, 963, 988 Li Shizeng 21 Li Suyi 1066, 1069–70 Li Weihan 573, 574 Li Yongjue (Ah Li) 717, 939, 987, 1042, 1066 Li Yuting 883, 886, 888, 890, 892, 897 Li Ziyi (Li Shenshi) 780, 782, 788, 833–4 Lian Zhengxiang (Lian Zhengyan) 27, 300– 1, 303, 305, 338, 340 Liang Shuming 771 Liang Ting 295, 990–1 Ligue Communiste 99 Lin Huanhua (Lin Hua, Lin Huayuan) 83, 164, 316, 329, 937, 939, 945, 963 Lin Piao 511–4, 559 Lin Songqi 292–3, 295, 335, 345, 717–8, 907 Lin Yixin (Chen Daiqing) 296, 368 Ling Songmin (Ling Songren) 295–6, 368– 9 Liu Binyan 43, 45, 1052, 1054 Liu Bocheng 725 Liu Bozhuang 23 Liu Chao 732, 803, 833 Liu Hengxin 886, 890, 892, 894 Liu Jialiang (Liu Shaoyan) 7–8, 25, 148–9, 159, 293, 328, 591, 762, 776, 779, 887, 899–900, 908–9, 973, 1083, 1085 Liu Naiguang (Zhang Kai) 908–9, 1091 Liu Pingmei 27, 345, 367, 369–70, 723, 734– 8, 740, 945, 963, 965–7, 1081 Liu Renjing (Neil Sih) 12, 91, 252, 325, 418, 433, 698, 766, 782, 784, 833, 918 Liu Shaoqi 16–7, 37–8, 56, 98, 363, 511, 550, 571–2, 575, 584, 588–9, 592, 594–6, 620, 945, 987 Liu Yi 328, 335, 729, 731, 833, 888, 890–2, 895–7, 908–10, 916, 991 Liu Zhenji 799, 886, 888–94, 901 Liu Zhichao 877, 882, 886, 891–2, 897–8, 902 Long Hair (Liang Guoxiong/Leung Kwokhung) 89, 174–5, 187, 190, 193, 199, 200, 854–5, 1097 Long March 13, 19, 528 Los Angeles 8, 14, 31, 34–5, 37, 420, 427–8, 587, 591–2, 594, 596, 600–1, 605 Lou Shiyi 41, 694, 1044, 1046 Lou Xuan 773, 777, 835–7

1211

index Lou Zichun/Gu He (aka Lou Guohua) 147, 149, 153, 159, 167, 327, 710, 851, 973, 989, 1039, 1104 Lu Ji 316, 328, 331, 908, 909, 939 Lu Ping 549, 551–2 Lu Xun 17, 41, 202–3, 375, 754–5, 757, 772, 872, 874, 880, 899, 925, 967, 1107 Lu You 871 Luo Fu (Cheng Xueye) 993, 1044 Luo Han 431, 433 Luo Liping 1066, 1069 Luo Ruiqing 511, 974 Luo Yinong 16, 571, 576 Ma Hua 779–80, 784 Ma Yufu 23, 326 Ma Yusheng 847, 851–2 Machiavelli, Niccolò 3, 17 Maitan, Livio 32–3, 36, 38, 89, 93, 100, 479– 80, 505, 526, 556, 563 Manchuria 452–3, 475, 559, 838 Mandel, Ernest (Walter) 32–4, 36, 44, 89, 100, 137–8, 183, 374, 376, 378, 380, 611, 690, 1021, 1024, 1031–2, 1034–7, 1039, 1119 Mao Hongjian 150, 327 Marshall Plan 464 Marshall, George 458, 724 Martial law 190, 365–7, 373–4, 689 Martov, Julius 160 Marxism-Leninism 18, 313, 324, 490, 516, 881, 896, 910, 936, 958, 1024–5 Marxist Internet Archive 147, 292, 352, 378, 384, 418, 540, 717, 734, 861, 965, 987, 1040 Marxist Marching Squad 293–4 Marxist Youth League (Trotskyists) 7, 300– 1, 329–30 Marxist Youth 8, 81 May Fourth 15, 20, 22–3, 43, 55, 202–3, 211, 446, 568, 579–80, 861, 871, 875, 956 Mei Erduan 210 Meng Xianzhang 877, 882, 885–6, 888, 890, 901 Mengzi 821 Menshevism 572–3 Mif, Pavel 16, 576–77 Mikoyan, Anastas 933, 937

Miliband, Ralph 96 Miller, Joseph 109, 137, 640 Ming Pao Monthly 546, 1044, 1046 Minkan 256 Mitterand, Francois 497 Mo Zhaoru/Mok Chiu-yu 168, 395 Moodie, Graeme 97 Moscoso, Hugo Gonzalez 556–7 Nanning 328, 568, 719, 731, 906 National Assembly/constituent assembly 6, 11, 56, 157, 203–5, 210, 213, 227, 237, 364, 558, 723–4, 758, 762, 869, 1086, 1095 Neighbourhood and Workers’ Service Centre (Hong Kong) 174, 192 Neo-liberalisation/neoliberal 175, 193, 195– 6, 378, 1121 New Culture Movement 202 New Democracy 120, 125, 337, 352, 362, 474, 541, 619, 624, 725 New Directions 918–9 New Flag 327, 895 New Fourth Army 837, 890, 902 New Left (Western) 52, 99, 1075 New Left Review 171 New Left Society (Hong Kong) 46, 52 New Social Forum 196 New Voice 297, 895, 1081 Ng Lui Nam 854–5 nkvd 10, 61, 568 Northern Expedition 591, 754, 757, 872, 907, 924 Northern Expeditionary Army 863, 907 Novack, George 598 October Review/Shiyue pinglun 41, 83, 89– 90, 179, 184–86, 203, 207, 210, 407, 720, 853, 1093, 1117 October Revolution 117, 204–5, 324, 438, 445, 548, 611, 671–3, 678–9, 681, 683, 693, 695, 703–4, 872, 936, 1026, 1043 Pablo, Michel 32–3, 36, 94, 563, 592, 605, 611 Pacific War 7, 75, 80, 92, 149, 326, 357, 419, 427, 837, 886, 1006 Pakistan 170, 490, 534 Pan Hannian 731 Paris Commune 515, 524, 670, 680, 1028

1212 Paris 2, 8, 14, 21–3, 31–2, 35, 40, 61, 90, 92, 100, 151, 171, 245, 272, 318, 325, 375, 394– 5, 579, 587, 591–2, 594, 600–2, 605, 639, 680, 683, 991, 1073, 1076, 1083 Patten, Chris 193 Peking University/Beijing University 23, 51, 346, 549, 551, 578, 639, 691, 777, 871–2, 899, 904–5, 1031, 1058 Peng Dehuai 38, 549, 595 Peng Zaizhou/Peng Lifa 1107–9, 1113, 1123, 1129–30 Peng Zhen 511, 551, 588, 595, 932 People’s Communes 222, 505, 507, 514, 516, 548–50, 595, 941–2, 1005, 1075 People’s Democracies 129, 489, 494–5, 516, 519, 640, 643, 650–3 People’s Front 455–6, 646, 659 People’s Liberation Army (pla) 8, 219, 530, 610, 613, 725, 727, 894, 898, 902, 927, 957, 963, 1086 People’s Daily 162, 544, 552, 918, 935, 957, 959–60, 1049 Permanent revolution 2, 6, 10, 55, 58, 70–1, 76, 78, 93, 116, 129, 132, 158, 212–3, 253– 4, 362, 503, 560, 583, 594, 599, 691, 700, 703–4, 740, 877, 884, 909, 1023–4, 1033, 1073, 1085 Pioneer Group/Sun Miu/Xinmiao/Xianqu she 174–5, 177–9, 182–99, 201, 204– 5, 207, 276, 278–80, 378, 723, 1058, 1101 Plekhanov, Georgi 43, 418 Popular Front 430, 496, 673, 681 poum 565 Poznan and Hungarian events 936 Progressive Labor Party 593 Pun Ngai 196 Qian Bocheng 1041 Qian Chuan 292, 328, 335, 729, 731, 908–10, 916–7, 1088 Qian Yongxiang 366, 370, 373–4 Qiu Jilong 292–3, 908 Qiu Yufan 376, 379, 382 Qu Qiubai 19, 574–5, 581–6, 872, 996 Qu Yaxian 868, 878–9 Radek, Karl 42 Red Flag 545, 588, 957–8

index Red Guards 3, 37–8, 82, 84, 509, 512, 524, 585, 588, 705, 952, 956, 983, 1075 Ren Bishi 571 Revolutionary Communist Youth (rcy) 106, 142 Revolutionary defeatism 55, 419 Revolutionary Internationalist League (ril) 101, 139, 179 Revolutionary Marxist League (rml) 88, 101, 108, 147, 173, 179, 204, 218, 245, 260, 391, 853, 1078, 1090, 1098 Rousset, Pierre/Roman 82, 88, 90, 96, 105– 6, 142, 261, 264–5, 267–71, 283 Roy, Manabendra 449 Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club 226 Russell, Bertrand 21, 23, 1009 Russian Revolution (of 1917) 74, 210, 253, 438, 448, 486, 594, 670–1, 672, 675, 686, 881 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 161, 324, 683 Saigon 591, 605, 1083 Second International 642–3, 646, 654, 659– 60, 1074 Second World War 55, 93, 325, 353, 365, 400, 428, 452, 610, 622, 642, 656–7, 673–5, 679, 681, 696, 876, 884, 917, 920, 1021–2, 1037–8, 1042–3 Seeking the Truth 604, 833, 918 Shachtman, Max 39–40, 151, 609–11, 613–6, 618, 631–2, 634–6, 1027 Shandong 54, 75, 149, 295, 368, 454, 470, 725–6, 729, 745, 752, 757, 762, 765, 767– 9, 772–4, 777, 780, 783, 796–7, 799, 804, 819–20, 824, 834–5, 839, 841, 861, 865– 8, 870–1, 873–4, 878–9, 882, 885–6, 890, 897, 924, 927, 930, 937–8, 952, 956–7, 959, 963, 965, 983, 1053, 1055–8 Shao Lu 769–70, 774, 776, 802, 815, 817–9, 838 Shau Kei Wan 1087–9 Shaw, George Bernard 745 Shen Wenling 937, 939, 945 Shen Xuanlu 570 Shen Yanbing (Mao Dun) 543–5, 1040, 1046 Shen Yunfang 296, 335, 368, 731, 910, 945, 947 Sheppard, Barry 82, 96, 102, 142

index Shi Fuliang (Shi Cuntong) 803, 886 Shum, John (Johnny Shum/John Sham/Shum Kin-fun) 81, 100, 102, 108, 171, 174, 389– 90, 394–5, 406, 1073, 1090–1, 1093–4 Si Chaosheng 765–6, 782, 784, 887, 899–900 Si Peiyao 916–7, 923 Sino-British Joint Declaration 184, 239, 1103 Sino-Japanese War/Resistance War against Japan (1937–1945) 5, 86, 115, 117, 131, 418, 444, 559, 591, 773, 884, 896–7, 1012, 1147 Sino-Vietnamese war (China-Vietnam conflicts) 1079, 1101 Sneevliet, Henk (Maring) 573 Socialist democracy 87, 98, 107, 179, 181, 202, 205, 207, 257, 259–60, 265, 504, 569, 593, 1075, 1109, 1112, 1114, 1117–89, 1136, 1138, 1141 Socialist Labour League (UK) 402, 564, 592, 1005 Socialist Workers’ Party (swp, formerly International Socialists, UK) 393, 398 Socialist Workers’ Party (swp, United States) 28–30, 32–7, 39, 89, 94, 96–7, 397, 427– 8, 559, 564, 587, 590, 592–3, 595, 597, 599–601, 640, 1005, 1026 Socialist Youth League (Trotskyists) 292, 294, 299, 328, 336, 897, 1064, 1067–8 Society for Democratic Struggle (Hong Kong) 189, 192 Solidarity Against the World Bank and imf 194 Song Meiling 816 Sorge, Richard 427 South African Labour Party (salp) 422 Sparks Group 318 Special Branch (Hong Kong Police) 1064, 1082 State capitalism 331, 611–5, 618, 623–4, 626, 631, 633, 677, 917–8, 981, 1101, 1142 Struggle (Doh Tseng) 427, 434, 451 Students for a Democratic Society (sds) 593 Su Tao (Su Xuechang) 295–6, 368–9, 833, 877, 882, 886, 890–2, 894–6, 898 Sukarno 491–2 Sun Hongzhi 882, 885, 877 Sun Liangsi (Bo Chen, Liang Yi) 26, 163, 167, 405, 804, 808, 745, 810, 817, 841–2, 877, 883, 885–91, 899–901

1213 Sun Yat-sen 18, 27, 204, 210, 252, 573, 747, 790, 863, 870, 948 Sun Yat-sen University (Moscow) 293, 924 Sunflower Student Movement/Sunflower Movement 367, 372, 381–3 Suzhou (a city in Jiangsu) 329, 776 Swabeck, Arne 428 Szeto Wah 183, 209 Taipei 295–6, 367–9, 374, 1053 Taiping Rebellion 468 Taiwan 26–7, 29–30, 46, 51, 54, 92, 158, 168, 171, 192, 219, 229, 234, 292, 295– 6, 309, 328, 351–64, 365–80, 382–6, 398, 411, 729–30, 898–9, 923, 1054–5, 1121 Tam Leung-ying 196–7 Tang Baolin 43, 739, 885, 1059–60 Tang Yuen Ching 187, 853, 856–7 Tao Xingzhi 771, 773 Thatcherism 696, 698, 1038 The 1848 Revolution 669, 678–80, 686 The 1905 Revolution 683, 1103 Third World 170, 496, 701, 1025–6, 1032 Three People’s Principles 252, 790, 870, 896 Three-Anti(s) Campaign 202, 307, 312, 314, 331, 337, 341, 344–5, 732, 1074, 1076 Tian Han 540, 548 Tian’anmen 47, 174, 177, 186–9, 191–2, 194, 199, 257, 404, 406, 408, 597, 602, 688, 690–1, 706–7, 709–10, 940, 959, 1101–2, 1111, 1114, 1116–7, 1137 Tianjin 255, 454, 469, 552, 620, 783, 799, 808, 873, 1057 Tibetans 1118, 1130, 1141 Tilanqiao Prison 929, 950, 975–6, 978–9 Tito 464, 565, 937 Transitional Programme 502, 555–6, 558–61, 566, 640–3, 646, 649, 652–3, 658, 659, 691, 907, 1020, 1021, 1023–4, 1031 Trotskyist Youth League 300, 336–7, 339 Tsinghua University 552, 873, 995, 1081, 1132 Tsuen Wan 192, 842, 1087–8 Tung Chee-hwa 199

1214 Umbrella movement, revolution (of 2014) 175, 205 Under the Banner of Marxism 729, 909–10 United Secretariat of the Fourth International (usfi/Usec) 61, 66–7, 80, 85, 96– 100, 142, 268–9, 261, 271, 275, 277–80, 282, 408, 480, 540, 555, 599, 1011 Uyghurs 47, 1118, 1127–8, 1130, 1137, 1140–2 Verbizier, Gerard (Verjat/Verjeat) 32, 82, 96, 105 Victoryism 7, 56, 656 Vietnam, Vietnam War 8, 10, 28–9, 33, 88, 92, 151, 222, 325, 393, 481–5, 489, 494, 496, 499–500, 510, 532, 559–60, 565, 591, 617, 657, 821, 1101 Voitinski /Voitinsky, Grigori 16, 574–7, 581– 2, 584 Wan Yuze 376, 379–80 Wang Guolong 292–4, 299, 316, 328, 335, 338, 345, 729, 731, 737, 908–10, 917, 939, 945, 948–9, 963 Wang Kunrong 890, 898, 901–2 Wang Ming (Chen Shaoyu) 14–6, 19, 86, 567–8, 575–6, 581, 583, 585, 1016 Wang Ruowang 43, 45, 1046 Wang Shiwei 55, 541–4, 1053, 1058 Wang Shuben (Wang Zhenhua) 766, 776, 784, 786, 788, 806–7, 833, 883, 887–91, 894, 898–906 Wang Xizhe 569, 1079 Wang Yanqi 17, 847, 850, 852 Wei Jingsheng 259, 857 White Terror 367, 369, 765, 771, 874 Wild Lily Student Movement 374–6 Wong Wai-hung 189, 209 Workers Fight (wf, UK) 393–4, 397 Workers Power (wp, UK) 394, 397 Workers’ Democratic Association (Taiwan) 377–9, 382 Wu Han 540, 548, 595 Wu Jingru 3, 85, 87, 585 Wu Zhongxian (Ng Chung Yin, Ng Chungyin) 81, 88–9, 99, 101–4, 106, 139, 168, 179, 204, 245–6, 261, 272, 276, 282, 284, 394, 407, 855, 1073, 1076, 1078–80, 1090–1, 1102 Wu Zutang 294, 296, 368

index Wuhan (including Hankou/Hanyang/ Wuchang) 23, 54, 317, 328, 433, 436, 450, 549–550, 602–3, 717–9, 729, 765, 777, 780–2, 784–5, 787, 797, 807, 832, 838, 850, 869, 878–9, 890, 900, 907–8, 939– 40, 945, 978, 1007, 1065–66, 1069–70, 1072, 1125, 1128 Xi’an, Xi’an Incident 329, 528, 552, 773, 780, 787–8, 792–5, 864, 885, 899 Xia Tingfan 367–9 Xiamen 335, 1053, 1057 Xiang Qing / (Maki/Maji) 93, 102–3, 105, 107, 114, 140, 181–2, 201, 204, 378, 1074– 5, 1077, 1081, 1083, 1091 Xiang Qing (party historian) 568 Xiangdao (Guide Weekly) 570, 590, 639, 1036 Xiao Ke 42–3, 568 Xie Gongmo 939, 945, 947 Xie Shan 717, 1064–7, 1070–2, 1150 Xin qingnian (New Youth) 15, 444, 570, 582, 590 Xin sichao (New Thought) 202–04 Xinhua News Agency 189, 479, 728, 1098 Xinjiang 47, 730, 796, 884, 1057, 1127–8, 1137 Xiong Andong (Xiong Yongji) 298, 316, 328, 345, 729, 734, 737, 833, 861, 894, 908–9, 927, 939, 945, 963, 965 Yamanishi, Eiichi 95–6, 1003, 1005–6, 1009– 10 Yan Zigui 769, 778, 782, 868, 875, 877–8, 885–6, 888, 899 Yan’an 55, 75, 527, 533, 541–3, 724, 850, 868, 878, 882, 896, 1076 Yang Bo 328, 729, 908–9, 913, 916, 939 Yang Chengzhi 885, 892, 894 Yang Guangwen 929–31, 944 Yang Hansheng 547–8, 570 Yang Jinxing 894, 903–4 Yang Shouyuan 316, 328, 801–2, 808–10, 833, 877–8, 882–3, 885, 890, 894 Yang Wei-chung/Yang Weizhong 192, 375, 377 Yao Wenyuan 545–6 Ye Chunhua 293, 345, 916–9, 939, 945, 949, 952, 962–3 Ye Ting 571, 584, 902

index Yin Chunde 885, 891, 894 Yin Kuan 33, 84, 251, 316, 328, 345, 727, 732– 3, 908–9, 945, 969, 971–84, 1007, 1048, 1085–6 Yoshichi, Sakai 80, 96, 101–9, 137–42, 396, 398 You Xiangming 94, 101, 104–5 Youde, Edward 231 Young Socialist Group (ysg) 90, 106–9, 145–6, 165, 179–83, 203, 208, 276, 278– 80, 390–1, 1091, 1097 Youth and Women 297, 604, 833, 895, 1081 Yu Chun-li 109, 181 Yu Shouyi 316–7, 328, 345, 908–9, 918, 939, 945, 948–9, 963 Yugoslavia 40, 76, 129, 481, 495, 502, 653, 655, 657, 705, 727 Yunnan 437, 818–22, 824, 832, 834, 840, 873, 884, 899, 1081 Zang Shuhe 760–1, 835 Zeng Meng 25, 292, 300, 316, 338, 345, 939 Zengakuren 1003–4 Zhang Bingyu (Zhang Limin) 767, 769–71, 835–6, 890 Zhang Chunqiao 1014, 1098, 530 Zhang Guotao 14, 1202, 576, 585, 869 Zhang Hongren 810, 833, 878, 883, 885–6, 890, 894, 967 Zhang Hongye (Zhang Tao) 292–3, 296, 335, 368 Zhang Jiqian 873–4, 880, 883 Zhang Junzhao 803–4, 809 Zhang Weiliang 803, 886, 888–9, 891–2, 895, 897 Zhang Xueliang 773, 902

1215 Zhang Yanshu 759–62, 764–7, 769 Zhang Yueran 51, 1119 Zhao Fangju 886, 888–9, 891–2, 898 Zhao Fengtian (Zhao Jinsheng) 878, 883, 886, 890, 892, 897–8, 901–2 Zhao Shengwen 806, 808, 833, 886 Zhao Yangxing 293–4, 731 Zhdanov, Andrei 510, 525, 534, 541 Zhejiang University 26, 293, 297–8, 893 Zhejiang 4, 17, 25–6, 54, 75, 297, 308, 316, 328, 332, 335, 341–2, 347, 369, 603, 729, 731, 807, 811, 837, 850, 893, 908–9, 928, 945, 1125 Zhen Yu (Jiao Lifu) 150, 909, 1085–6, 1088– 90 Zheng Guosheng (Wang Guoquan) 26–7, 163, 167, 304, 339–40, 929–31 Zheng Liang 316, 329, 939, 945, 952, 963 Zheng Yongtao 14, 576, 585, 869 Zhengzhou 780, 867, 878, 1108–10, 1128, 1131, 1135, 1137 Zhongshan 328, 431, 433, 732, 735–6, 738 Zhongshan University (Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong) 717 Zhou Enlai 21, 25, 170, 405, 584, 591, 596–7, 639, 688, 853, 938, 955, 959, 974–5, 989 Zhou Lüqiang 345, 731, 734, 909–10, 988 Zhou Rensheng (Zhou Renxin / Zhou Abao) 8, 292–6, 298, 316, 328, 332, 335, 345, 367–69, 908, 939, 945, 949, 952, 957–8, 961–3 Zhou Yang 511, 543, 545–7 Zhu De 729, 959 Zhu Zheng 17, 43, 1044–7 Zinoviev, Grigory 324, 920