(3) THE TRIALS OF CHINESE TROTSKYISM

OUR ACTIVITIES

THE EMERGENCE OF THE ORIGINAL TROTSKYIST ORGANIZATION AND ITS LATER SCHISMS

THE UNIFICATION CONGRESS

(4) TROTSKY'S THEORY OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION

TROTSKY'S ESTIMATE OF CHEN DUXIU

THEORETICAL DISPUTES WITHIN CHINESE TROTSKYISM

(5) CHEN DUXIU AND THE TROTSKYISTS

CHEN DUXIU'S 'MISTAKE'

DOUBLE STANDARDS

"DEFEATISM" AND "NATIONAL BETRAYAL"

THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

"SLAVES OF A FOREIGN MASTER"

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF THE REVOLUTION OF 1925 - 1927 HAD FOLLOWED THE TROTSKYIST LINE?

"MAGNANIMITY" AND "INGRATITUDE"

Appendix (iii)

BIOGRAPHICAL LIST

OUR ACTIVITIES

The first thing we did was to get organized. We set up three branches and worked hard on our new Trotskyist thinking. Yin Kuan drafted a "Propaganda Outline," which was very long and was mimeographed as a fat pamphlet that served as a basis for discussion in the branches and for outside propaganda. Doubtless Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi read it and agreed to its contents before it was printed. I can't remember whether I did too. We also collected together the articles by Trotsky then in circulation and published them in a printed volume titled On the Question of the Chinese Revolution. It consisted of writings by Trotsky himself but included none of the unsigned articles by Trotsky's Soviet followers. It's possible that the Trotskyists who'd returned to China from Moscow asked us for the money to help them publish this book. Wang Pingyi and others read the proofs. I was an experienced proof-reader but they ignored me and gave the job to Wang Pingyi and others, who had no experience whatsoever. So the book was riddled with mistakes, which particularly saddened me. The articles were poorly translated, and some sentences were unreadable. If I'd been proofreader I could at least have rendered the translation a little smoother, even though I had none of the original texts to hand. The book was not announced as "Volume 1." When Liu Renjing brought back the Russian texts of the two long articles to China, Liu and I translated them into Chinese from the originals, so the translation was far superior. We published it as the second volume of On the Question of the Chinese Revolution. When it was decided to go ahead with this second volume, I rather impolitely claimed the proof-reading for myself, so the result was also much better. Apart from that, we published a periodical that was mimeographed and had no name. I can't remember how many issues of it we brought out.

Chen Duxiu financed all these publications, both punted and mimeographed. At some point, the CCP had stopped paying Chen's living expenses, but he managed to raise some money from his social connections, including some to finance our political work. As for the rest of us, we, too, had to fend for ourselves. At first the organization had kept me and Jing; but after we left prison in the spring of 1929, when I started translating for the Propaganda Department, I got paid by the word: if I translated nothing, I got nothing. Every time I delivered a translation to the Propaganda Department I was given something new to do. Later, either because I stopped translating or because they didn't need me any more, this source of livelihood dried up. Fortunately the newly opened Hubin Bookshop, where Ma Renzhi worked as manager and Yang Xianzhen as editor, gave me some translating work to do, so I solved my problem. Ma Renzhi was from the same county as Peng Shuzhi, who told him about Trotskyism and won him over. But Yang was impossible to win. Not long afterwards he went to Northern China, and the Bookshop fell completely into the hands of Ma Renzhi.

Apart from written propaganda, we were also active as an organization, and we won over various Party comrades to our side. Ma Yufu was especially active in work of that sort. He had been the person on the Jiangsu Provincial Committee responsible for labour movement cadres. He knew lots of worker comrades and leaders of branches with a large working-class membership. Though he'd already withdrawn from the Jiangsu Provincial Committee, he still had connections in the Party. He won over a whole branch attached to the newspaper workers' union and another in a silk factory; he also won over a large number of individual workers, including railway workers, tram workers, mill workers, print workers, and building workers; apart from that, he won over several cadres who had been working for long periods in Shanghai. Peng Shuzhi and Wang Zekai won over some members of the Party and the Youth League who had come to Shanghai from other parts of China.

Ma Yufu let Yin Kuan, He Zishen, and Zheng Chaolin deal with these various individuals and branches. I personally was assigned the newspaper branch and two worker cadres. Tu Yangzhi, secretary of the newspaper branch, was full-square with us, and two of his branch cadres also generally supported us. Tu called a plenary branch meeting in the great hall of an old-style house within the area of the Little North Gate. I attended this meeting, and at it I opposed the policies of the Central Committee from the standpoint of the Trotskyist Opposition. Some activists backed me up, but by no means all of the twenty-odd people in attendance did so. To consolidate our influence, Ma Yufu and I decided to take Tu and the two cadres to meet Chen Duxiu. We borrowed the house of Dong Tiejian, a comrade, for the meeting. I also took advantage of my wife Liu Jingzhen's contacts among the Yunnanese in Shanghai to hold discussions with some Yunnanese comrades, including one sent to Shanghai by the Provincial Committee in Yunnan to make contact with the Party centre. I also met regularly with a cadre active among print workers and another active among

According to a recent account, Chen Duxiu was expelled because he wrote three letters to the Central Committee attacking its position on the Chinese Eastern Railway Incident. I've not seen the resolution on Chen's expulsion, so the only thing I have to go on is my own memory. True, the Central Committee of the CCP published a pamphlet with a number of articles denouncing Chen and an appendix containing Chen's three letters on the Chinese Eastern Railway question. True, in 1931, Cai Hesen published an article called "On Chen Duxiu-ism" which said that these letters clearly showed that Chen had gone over to the counterrevolution. But in November 1929, Chen was expelled for "anti-Party activity," not for expressing "wrong opinions" on the Chinese Eastern Railway question.

Those of us who had been expelled denied the validity of the resolutions expelling us. We protested, and continued to view ourselves as members of the CCP. Chen Duxiu published his "Letter to all Party Comrades"; we published "Our Political Views," signed by eighty one people (about a third of them invented). The two documents are still extant, and recently someone quoted from them in a study. I myself haven't seen them in fifty years, so I forget what was in them. Recently I came across Chen Duxiu's letter to the Comintern written in 1930. On 8 February 1930, the Politburo of the CCP told Chen Duxiu that the Comintern had telegraphed requesting him to go to Moscow to discuss the expulsions. On 17 February Chen replied to the Comintern letter.

Our first leadership consisted of Chen Duxiu, Peng Shuzhi, Yin Kuan, Ma Yufu, and Du Peizhi, who was secretary of a branch of the CCP in a silk-factory in Shanghai that Ma Yufu had won over. In those days we copied the Central Committee's practice of promoting workers into leadership positions, so there were workers at every level of our organization. Du Peizhi, who had been elected on the recommendation of Ma Yufu, attended two meetings of the Central Committee, both of them at my place. Later he was arrested and held in Nanjing. Ma Yufu flew into a panic, fearing that Du would reveal where we held our meetings, for after one such gathering Du had joked that he could "easily get rich, all I have to do is tell the detectives of the Guomindang that they can arrest Chen Duxiu at such-and-such a time at such-and-such a place and I'll get a big reward." We were on the point of moving house when Ma rushed in to tell us that Du had been shot in Nanjing. It turned out that he'd been arrested not on political charges but for armed robbery in a city on the Nanjing-Shanghai railway line. He'd been delivered to Nanjing where they'd shot him shortly afterwards. He'd not breathed a word about his political activity: he'd not sold out Chen Duxiu.

Du Peilin, the elder brother of Du Peizhi, remained a member of our organization. I met him on one or two occasions. But just before the First Congress of the united organization in 1931, I heard that he, too, had been taken. Three weeks after the Congress, when the first batch of our Central Committee members were arrested, I bumped into Du Peilin in the detention centre run by the Longhua Garrison Headquarters. He'd changed his name to Wang Qichang. It turned out that he, too, had been arrested in Shanghai for an attempted armed robbery. He introduced to me his accomplice, a man called Zhou, who he said was a Trotskyist sympathizer. He'd been planning to introduce this man to our organization. Du Peilin was politically quite knowledgeable, and a good speaker. Whenever we discussed political questions with Communist Party members in our prison, Du would occasionally interject a few sentences. Later he was sentenced to seven years in gaol. After Wang Fanxi was released from prison, he met Du in Shanghai and had a talk with him in a tea-house. Wang tried to get Du to become politically active again, but he refused. In 1940 when I returned to Shanghai l once saw him walking along the pavement while I riding in a tram.

We Trotskyists under Chen Duxiu were midway converts, the product of propaganda and activity by the onginal Chinese Trotskyist organization, which had grown up in Moscow in 1927. 1 only know about its early period from hearsay, so there's not much that I can say about it. I can just talk generally about it, on the basis of what other people told me.

Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University was founded in the autumn of 1925. Its first principal was Radek, a leader of the Soviet Trotskyist Opposition; there were also a number of Oppositionists on its teaching staff. These people were active among Chinese students and helped them set up a Chinese Trotskyist organization. That was in the heyday of the Chinese Revolution, when the eyes of revolutionaries all over the world were fixed on China and when the Chinese Revolution was one of the three main issues of controversy in the Soviet Party. The Oppositionists had pointed out early on that the China policy of the Comintern, under the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party led by Stalin, was wrong and would lead to the defeat of the Chinese Revolution. But the Stalinists persisted with their mistaken policy. The course of the Chinese Revolution vindicated the Opposition on all counts, which brought more and more members and supporters of the Soviet Party over to its side; among the Chinese students, too, it grew and grew, as did the self-confidence of its members. On 7 November 1927, the Soviet Opposition staged a demonstration against Stalin during the march-past on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. There were demonstrations both in Moscow and in Leningrad, where Trotsky and Zinoviev personally participated. In Moscow some Chinese Trotskyists also took part in the demonstration.

After these demonstrations, Zinoviev and Trotsky were expelled from the Party one after the other. Probably at the same time, the Trotskyists at Sun Yat-sen University came further into the open and were deported back to China, where they organized along Trotskyist lines. Some continued to be active in branches of the CCP. The main Trotskyist activity was in Shanghai and Hongkong. In Hongkong some people were active in the Tai-ku Dockyards, where they succeeded in gathering a group of workers around them. In Shanghai they began bringing out a mimeographed publication called Our Word. (Before 1916, Trotsky had published a Russian-language journal in Paris called Nashiye Slovo [Our Word], which some people translated into China as Womende yaninn [Our Views]. I don't know why the members of the original Trotskyist organization in China insisted on using

the same name as Trotsky.) They translated and mimeographed Oppositionist documents and they also controlled a small bookshop called New Universe. Apart from the comrades who'd come back from Moscow, quite a few comrades were recruited in Hongkong and especially in Shanghai, most of them members of the CCP.

To lump together what I know from different periods, the best-known members of the Our Word group were Ou Fang, Shi Tang, Chen Yimou, Liang Ganqiao, Zhang Te, Lu Yiyuan, Zhang Shi, and Duan Ziliang.

These people still kept up secret links to the Chinese Trotskyists in the Soviet Union, using the New Universe Bookshop as their correspondence address.

After the first batch of Trotskyist students had been deported, the Chinese Trotskyist organization in Moscow continued to exist and indeed to flourish. Apparently at one time nearly half the students there were Trotskyists, including at KUTV and other colleges. There was even a Trotskyist (i.e., Liu Renjing) at the Lenin Institute. They carried out their clandestine work most professionally, and succeeded in maintaining their cover.

In 1929, word went round that a batch of students were to be sent back to China to work for the Party. When the Trotskyists heard this, they met secretly and discussed what their response should be. They decided that the comrades who went back would continue to work for the official Party, and moreover would strive to do so better than anyone else; but that they would do everything they could to avoid being discovered, and await the chance to reform the Party from within.

Quite a few of these people took up important jobs in the Party. Wu Jiyan became Secretary of the Central Committee's Propaganda Department, Wang Fanxi became an aide in the Organization Department, Du Weizhi (i.e., Tu Qingqi) took up some important post in the Central Committee, and Zhao Ji, Liu Yin, and Pu Dezhi also worked for the Party after attending a training school.

But Liu Renjing came out openly as a Trotskyist. He returned to China via Western Europe. He visited the Trotskyist organizations in Germany and France, and in Turkey he stayed in Trotsky's home439 for several days. He discussed the Chinese Revolution with Trotsky, who wrote the "Draft Programme of the Chinese Left Opposition" for Liu to take back to China with him and to present for use as an internal discussion document. Once Liu Renjing had got back to Shanghai, he started looking up old friends, for example Yun Daiying. He told Yun that the Central Committee was bureaucratic, but Yun denied this and demanded proof; he also said that if the Central Committee really was bureaucratic, then he (Yun) would join Liu in opposing it.

Liu Renjing already knew that we Chen Duxiu-ites had gone over to Trotskyism. Through intermediaries he sent a letter to Yin Kuan and me asking us to go and see him in a hostel in the French Concession. He warmly greeted us. In 1926, when he was working in the Central Committee of Communist Youth, I'd been quite close to him, and in the spring and autumn we'd often gone for outings together if the weather was nice. I'd given him a quilt with cotton wadding on the eve of his departure for abroad, and I'd invited him for a meal at the East Asia Restaurant. It was quite natural that we should greet each other with such warmth. I forget what he told us that day. Obviously we talked about how we had become Trotskyists. He also told us about his meeting with Yun Daiying (described above).

I don't know if it was on that day or another day that he arranged to meet Chen Duxiu at my place. At the time I was living on East Youheng Road. I went to his hostel to fetch him, while Chen Duxiu waited for him in my home. I remember that when we had almost reached my house, Liu Renjing nodded to someone coming in the other direction. I asked him who it was. He said it was Li Mogeng.440

When he met with Chen Duxiu there was no longer any need to discuss who was right, Stalin or Trotsky. Liu took out Trotsky's "Draft Programme" and his two long articles, typed in Russian. I've already described how Liu and I arranged between the two of us to translate these documents into Chinese, and how we Chen Duxiu-ites published them as Volume 2 of On the Question of the Chinese Revolution.

Sometime after Liu Renjing's return to China the Trotskyist organization in Moscow was unearthed, a list of names was found, and two hundred-odd people came to grief. According to reports, after Liberation44i two or three of them returned to China from places of exile in Siberia. As for the Trotskyists who had already returned home, if their names were on the list then the Comintern or the Soviet Party informed the Central Committee of the CCP, which expelled the lot of them. It's said that Zhou Enlai told the better-known ones that if they admitted their mistakes and criticized Trotsky, they could stay in. No one took up his offer.

In normal times these people still hidden in the Party had kept up secret ties to the original Trotskyist group. After their expulsion, the handful of people around Wu Jiyan came over to the Chen Duxiu group, but the rest joined the original Trotskyist group. Wu and his people all signed the statement "Our Political Views."

Shortly after the Trotskyists from Moscow expelled while still working in the Party joined the original Trotskyist organization, conflict broke out in its ranks and some people split away from it. This was mainly due to the activity of Liu Renjing.442

Liu Renjing prided himself on being a veteran who had met Trotsky in Turkey and had brought Trotsky's "Draft Programme" back to China. He despised the young leaders of the original Trotskyist organization. They in their turn despised him. So they got into a fight. Liu Renjing then wrote a long article listing some peccadillos committed by these young leaders and incited some members of their organization against them. Most of them had only got back to China in 1929 and had only recently been discovered and expelled. The main one among them was Wang Fanxi, who in those days called himself Wang Wenyuan. They brought out a printed journal called Shiyue (October) and set up a new organization. After that a minority, actually, only four people, copied them and set up yet another organization and yet another journal, called Zhandou. In those days we used to receive through the post copies of Militant, the newspaper of the Trotskyists in the USA. Actually, Zhandou is not the equivalent of this word in Chinese. Zhandou means "combat," whereas the English word "militant" means combatant or (in Party terms) cadre. (I'm too lazy to check whether this definition is actually given in the English dictionary.) Whatever the case, these four people— Zhao Ji, Liu Yin, Wang Pingyi, and Pock-Marked Xu—translated it as Zhandou, regardless of what it meant in English. I never saw any copies of Zhandou, so I don't know whether it was printed or mimeographed. Later some other people joined this small group, but it was not as big as the October group and certainly not as big as the Our Word group.

Though these three groups fought one another, they were unanimous in their attitude toward the Chen Duxiu-ite Trotskyists: they considered us as opportunists who had lost favour with Stalin and now wanted to climb back into prominence using Trotsky's name. All three groups wrote to Trotsky setting out their views on us. After we had formally set up an organization, we, too, sent Trotsky a letter explaining our point of view and enclosing a translation into English of the "Letter to All Party Comrades" put out by Chen Duxiu after his expulsion, together with the statement on "Our Political Views" signed by eighty one people. As far as I remember, we didn't explain to Trotsky what our attitude was toward the original Trotskyist group in China. Not long after Liu Renjing and Wang Fanxi had organized the October group, for some reason or another Liu resigned from it and set up on his own. Later he published a journal called Mingtian (Tomorrow). He was Trotsky's "correspondent" in China, so he often used to write to Trotsky and Trotsky to him. I don't know how he estimated us Chen Duxiu-ites in his correspondence with Trotsky, but I know at least a little about the exchange between the two men. In October 1929, still in the period before our expulsion, our branch secretary Yang Xianjiang ordered me to join a flying demonstration443 in front of the General Post OffIce on North Sichuan Road. After I'd got rid of all my leaflets, I bumped into Liu Renjing, so the two of us pretended to be passers-by and watched what was going on. We saw several demonstrators being arrested, and some dustmen sweeping up our leaflets and stuffing them into rubbish-carts. I and Liu then went our separate ways. Liu wrote to Trotsky describing this demonstration. His aim was to denigrate it, and to show that it was not worth the sacrifice. But Trotsky wrote back disagreeing. He said that demonstrations of this sort served at least one purpose, which was to let people know that the CCP still lived.

Though we Chen Duxiu-ites and Liu Renjing were constantly in touch, we never discussed organizational questions. None of us thought of trying to draw him into our group, nor did he ever ask to join it. Under the circumstances, it is easy to see why. Nevertheless, some people say that after Liu Renjing got back to China he asked to be allowed to join us and to lead our Propaganda Department but that Chen Duxiu said no, whereupon Liu joined the Our Word group and began opposing Chen. That is not in accordance with the facts.

There were four Trotskyist organizations in China. How did they become one?

At first the Our Word group put forward the following condition. The Chen Duxiu-ite opportunists, including Chen himself, would only be allowed to join their original Trotskyist organization singly, after individual vetting. As far as I remember, Chen himself never expressed an opinion on this, but Peng Shuzhi did. In Peng's opinion there was only one conceivable way of achieving unity. These students who had come back to China from Moscow, being young and inexperienced, should join our organization, which was built around a nucleus of old men steeled in the Great Revolution. Yin Kuan, on the other hand, proposed all along that it shouldn't be a question of either us joining their organization or them joining ours, but of a merger of the various groups after a period of joint discussion. Yin Kuan had more contact than the rest of us with members of the other organizations, and at one time shared a house with Zhao Ji and Liu Yin. He knew that neither of the above proposals would work. The various concerned parties reported to Trotsky, who wrote back criticizing the students from Moscow for their attitude toward Chen Duxiu and his supporters. He carefully examined the documents of the Chen Duxiu group and could find nothing wrong with them in principle: the arguments advanced by the returned students were mere nitpicking. Trotsky also said that Chen Duxiu knew what revolution meant, which is not necessarily true of you young people. He proposed that we should first unite and then deal with the outstanding issues, for differences in our theoretical approaches could best be resolved by discussion within the framework of a unified organization.

This letter had a big impact. The Our Word group had no choice but to back down from its original proposal and to recognize that Chen Duxiu was also a Trotskyist, on a par with them. The other two groups were naturally happy to accept Trotsky's proposal. But the Chen Duxiu-ites (actually, Peng Shuzhi and his followers) became arrogant. On the surface they recognized that the four groups were equal, but in reality, they wanted the other three groups to unite around the Proletarian group.

Each organization nominated two delegates to the Negotiating Committee. At first I had nothing to do with this body, so I can't say who represented the other three groups. All I remember is that initially, the Our Word group was represented by Ou Fang (I forget who the second delegate was), and that after Ou's arrest they were represented by Liang Ganqiao and Chen Yimou. The October group was represented by Wang Fanxi and Song Fengchun or Pu Dezhi. The Combat group was probably represented by Zhao Ji and Liu Yin. The Central Committee of the Proletarian group formally nominated Ma YuBu and Wu Jiyan.

The negotiations had been going on for a long time, but they were making no progress. On one occasion Wu Jiyan told me in the course of a private chat that the delegates had obviously studied the mores of bourgeois parliamentarians, arguing first about this, then about that, and making no headway whatsoever on the central issue, which was how to unite. Since I had nothing to do with these negotiations nor did I attend meetings of our Central Committee, I have no idea what the arguments were about. But for Yin Kuan's intervention, the wrangling might have gone on for ever.

At this point, I shall return for a moment to discuss dealings between us Chen Duxiu-ites and Chen Duxiu himself. During the period of the Great Revolution no one ever knew precisely where Chen lived. He always used to come to us, never the other way around. Even Ren Zuomin, who was Party Treasurer and Secretary to the Central Committee, didn't know where Chen lived, with the result that at the end of 1925 or the beginning of 1926, there was a big scare for a while when Chen Duxiu suddenly disappeared. Chen had not been to Ren's place to attend to Party affairs for quite some time, everyone began to panic. For the time being there was nothing for it but to wait and see. We waited and waited, but still Chen did not show up. We began to think that the imperialists or the warlords had secretly kidnapped him or even killed him. Chen Yannian, who happened to be passing through Shanghai, looked up Wang Mengzou, owner of the Oriental Book Company, and pleaded with tears in his eyes for news of his father. The Oriental Book Company people said that they, too, had not seen Chen for ages. Previously Chen had made a habit of going to look up Wang Mengzou at the Book Company's editorial office on Changsha Road, which was where he got most of his news about events in society and politics. The employees there were absolutely reliable, but they, too, had not seen him for what was already a long time. We sent Gao Erbo, a member of Communist Youth, back to Songjiang to make enquiries. Chen Taoyi, the then Governor of Jiangsu Province, was from Songjiang, where his family had been on friendly terms with Gao Erbo's family for several generations. If Chen had indeed been secretly arrested, some information might have leaked out about it. But there was not a whisper to be heard. Instead, Chen Tacyi was roundly denouncing various malpractices of the warlords, especially sex scandals. As far as I remember, Sun Chuanfang was then Commander-in-Chief in Nanjing of the Five Provinces.444 On one occasion, in the course of a chat in the Central Committee's Peasant Department or some other Department, I seem to recall that Zhang Guotao said that the situation was quite hopeless. He began to talk with me about Chen's life, and he ended up by remarking that if Chen, with all his talents, had chosen a government career, he would have gone right to the top, but instead he'd become a revolutionary, and now look where he was. Everyone thought that Chen was already dead. Ren Zuomin put a missing-person notice in Republic Daily, but to no avail. One day, however, Chen Duxiu suddenly turned up at the liaison centre run by Ren Zuomin. Everyone rushed in all directions to spread the news. Chen Yannian had already boarded a ship to leave Shanghai, so we sent someone to fetch him back ashore. What had happened? It turned out that Chen Duxiu had contracted typhoid fever and gone to hospital, where his mysterious lover had looked after him. He hadn't wanted us to know about his lover, who was still a secret. He told us that before going into hospital he'd already informed Ren Zuomin that he'd be absent for quite a while. He'd seen the notice in Republic Daily while he was in hospital, but he'd paid no attention to it, thinking that he would soon recover and be discharged. Everyone was very angry about this, though I don't know if anyone criticized him. After that he apparently allowed Ren Zuomin (but no one else) to visit him at home. I don't know if the same applied to Wang Ruofei after Ren quit his job and a Central Committee Secretariat was set up under Wang. Neither Ren nor Wang ever breathed a word about where Chen lived.

Before the three armed risings of 1927, Chen's home had apparently already broken up. A few days before the risings started, Chen went to stay in the Central Committee's Propaganda Department, where he held meetings and met cadres. He was there on the night of the rising too, receiving reports and issuing directives. I was among the people who transmitted messages for him. It was not until early April, after his joint declaration with Wang Jingwei, that he left the Propaganda Department and went to Wuhan.

In Wuhan he stayed on the second floor of the Central Committee office, with Huang Wenrong as his private secretary. After he had "stopped attending to his duties" he went into hiding together with Huang somewhere in Hankou. After returning to Shanghai, he went to live in a three-storey house on Fusheng Road (to the North of Range Road). He lived on the middle floor, under Peng Lihe and his wife, who acted as his cover. Wang Ruofei had arranged the house for them. Lots of people used to go and see him there. After I'd returned to Shanghai and settled down, I, too, went to see him; after I'd got married I took Jing to meet him. I know for certain that the following people went to visit him: Wang Ruofei, Qu Qiubai, Luo Yinong, Chen Qiaonian, He Zishen, Peng Shuzhi, Wang Zekai, and Luo Qiyuan. Wang Mengzou was also a regular visitor.

In 1928, after the arrest of Luo Yinong, Peng Shuzhi urged Chen to move, but Chen stayed put. In 1929, after I and Jing had been arrested, Peng again urged Chen to move, and eventually he did, to a place still North of Range Road but nearer to North Sichuan Road. Afterwards, Peng explained to me that it wasn't because he didn't trust me, but because he feared that my wife would be unable to stand the test of prison. After my release I refrained from visiting Chen in case someone might be following me.

Actually, all this has nothing to do with my main present theme, but since it occurs to me I might as well say it, for in any case these anecdotes concern the life of Chen Duxiu.

After his relations with the Central Committee of the CCP had been disrupted, Chen Duxiu moved from his house on Range Road into a place in the Tilanqiao area, but without informing the Central Committee of his new address. As far as I know, in this period only Peng Shuzhi knew where he lived.

Probably sometime in the second half of 1930, Chen moved to the upper floor of a terrace house on Dent Road near Seward Road. By that time several people were able to visit him, in particular Peng Shuzhi, Ma Yufu, and Zheng Chaolin. Little Pan44s was already living with him. I think it's here that they got to know each other. One day in 1931 while I was out walking near the Hongkou Market I bumped into him and we walked along together. I asked him how things were. He told me that there was a man living in the small room above his kitchen who had told Little Pan that he was in the Communist Party, so Chen intended to move out. I told him that he should do so without delay, but he said things weren't yet so serious. I said I'd help him move. After a while either he or I found an empty room above a tailor's shop at the end of a lane off Zhoujiazui Road near Alcock Road and rented it. I helped him hire a cart and move. After that, I was the only person who knew where he lived. Little Pan didn't even know my name, and used to call me "Little Fatty." After that I seem to recall that he moved to another room at the top of a house on the same lane.

Yin Kuan never once went to Chen's place. He was only able to meet Chen at Peng Shuzhi's place, with Peng invariably in attendance. Yin never dared say anything to which Peng would object. Peng was like Chen's "manager." On one occasion Yin apparently bumped into Chen on the street and arranged for him to go to Yin's home and meet some people who told him about what was going on in the Negotiating Committee. Chen learned for the first time that Peng Shuzhi and Ma YuEu had been keeping him in the dark. It turned out that on the question of unity Peng and Ma thought as one: that the other three groups should unite around the Proletarian group. Wu Jiyan, Secretary to the Central Committee, went along with them. They had stuck to their opinion, in complete violation of the principle that the four groups should be equal and kept the true facts to themselves whenever the Central Committee of the Proletarian group met.

Chen Duxiu could not agree with this. He clearly felt that we embodied lethargy and lifelessness, and he enjoyed the youthful spirits of the Moscowreturned students. Before this, he had met and talked with a group of these students. I forget whether he reported on this at a meeting of the branch or told me about it in private conversation, but whatever the case he described the emotions he had felt at the time. He said it was like meeting young people at the time of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 or at the time of the founding of the Communist Party. He'd felt that they were full of vigour and vitality, and full of hope. So I don't believe Pu Qingquan when he Says446 that Chen Duxiu denounced these young Trotskyists as "monkey pups still smelling of their mother's milk." Pu doesn't say whether he himself heard Chen say this or someone else told him that Chen said it. Judging by what Chen told me at the time about his feelings, I can hardly believe that he entertained such thoughts and even less that he expressed himself in such hostile terms.

What Yin Kuan said made Chen very angry. At the next meeting of the Central Committee he raised the issue. Peng argued back, and the Central Committee split into two factions. Chen and Yin proposed negotiating on the basis of equality: Peng Shuzhi and Ma YuEu stuck to their original proposal, which boiled down to uniting around the Proletarian group. I don't know what attitude Luo Shifan and Wu Jiyan took. The outcome was victory for Chen and Yin, whereupon Ma YuEu and Wu Jiyan were recalled as delegates to the Negotiating Committee and replaced by Chen and Yin. After that there was an argument—and a fierce one—every time the Central Commlttee met, right up to the time of the Unification Congress. Later Ma YuBu stopped attending meetings of the Central Committee and He Zishen took over from Wu Jiyan as Secretary. He Zishen stood full-square with Chen Duxiu.

After the Proletarian group had changed its representatives, the work of the Negotiating Committee progressed smoothly. It had discussed theoretical questions before too, but in a nitpicking way. Now, everyone put forward their points of view in a calm and measured way, so that it was quite easy to reach common conclusions. There was a serious and businesslike discussion about preparing the Congress. The Negotiating Committee became a Preparatory Committee for the Congress, which drafted a set of resolutions for the Congress and in the process hit some controversies, mainly on the question of proletarian dictatorship and the call for a National Assembly, which two issues were basically resolved by the Negotiating Committee. Either at the same time or later, the question of the number of delegates was raised, together with concrete arrangements for the holding of the Congress. It was decided that the Proletarian group would take charge of arrangements and funding, and that each group would elect its own delegates on the basis of the size of its membership. The Our Word group and the Proletarian group were allowed an equal number of delegates; the October group was allowed a much smaller number; and the Combat group was allowed one delegate.

Ma Yufu withdrew from the Central Committee and became inactive. Peng Shuzhi, on the other hand, held out in opposition to everything that the Negotiating Committee decided, and even called it "a conference of robbers out to divide the spoils." Those who supported Peng didn't dare oppose Chen Duxiu, so they concentrated their fire instead on Yin Kuan. Yin had fewer followers than Peng. So Chen Duxiu and He Zishen decided to drag out Zheng Chaolin.

After becoming a Trotskyist, I observed discipline, obeyed the order to attend the meetings of a Party branch, gave classes to new recruits from the Party, and discussed with various comrades how best to attack the Central Committee of the CCP, but I took no part in the internal activities of our own organization. By trade I was a translator and publisher, so I volunteered to translate things for the organization. But I wrote no articles, engaged in no diplomacy, and fought for no positions. Zhao Ji and Liu Yin, who lived in the same house as Yin Kuan, reproached Yin for sealing them off from people and for not letting them meet other Chen Duxiu-ites. They especially said that they wanted to meet Zheng Chaolin, Cai Zhende, and Ma YuEu. Yin Kuan told me about this on several occasions, but I never went. Someone once told me that one day while a number of comrades were chatting together at Peng Shuzhi's place, Chen Duxiu commented that Zheng Chaolin lacked the "desire to be a leader." Yin Kuan countered that it wasn't the "desire to be a leader" that Zheng lacked, but a sense of duty to the cause. What Yin meant was that the reason he was always running about was not because he wanted to be leader but because of his sense of duty to the revolution. I still don't know to this day whether it's sense of duty that I lack, or "desire to be a leader."

When I was finally "dragged out" to work for the organization, at first I was Secretary of the East Shanghai District Committee, as successor to Liu Bozhuang. Liu Bozhuang was a Peng Shuzhi supporter. There should have been three people on the Committee, but I only remember the railway worker Wang Zhihuai helping me, I forget who the third person was. In those days most of our membership was concentrated in East Shanghai, and most of our branches were the Party's old Chen Duxiu-ite branches. As far as I remember, there was no workers' branch as such, just a certain number of workers we'd come into contact with on an individual basis. The Our Word group also had an East Shanghai District Committee. The Unification Congress had not yet taken place, but the work of the Negotiating Committee was proceeding smoothly and a decision had been taken to merge the district committees of the different groups forthwith. I accepted an invitation to go for talks on cooperation to a primary school run by the Our Word group in East Shanghai. There were three members of the Our Word group present, led by Shi Tang. I'd often heard his name, but this was the first time I'd actually met him. He knew me, however. It turned out that he'd worked as Ni Youtian's apprentice in the Central Committee's printing factory, where I'd often had to go on business. Many people worked there, and though I didn't know them, they knew me. Shi Tang had been sent to Moscow either before or after the defeat to study at Sun Yat-sen University. Within a short while this printing worker had excelled beyond all expectations and become a well-informed and well-read cadre of the revolution. After unification he went to Guangxi to teach in a middle school where he became very popular among the students, many of whom came to Trotskyism through him. But all that happened later.

Shi Tang asked me: "Why did we not hear people talk about you more often?" But what was so strange about that? I had no dealings with the Moscow-returned students, I was not on the Negotiating Committee, I had not uttered an opinion on unification, and though I'd said what I thought on some theoretical questions that were raised in the branch, I'd not talked about them outside the branch. But now that I had become Secretary of the East Shanghai District Committee, and was trying to implement cooperation at branch level, my name was often in people's mouths.

I also ran the election of delegates to the Unification Congress for the East Shanghai District Committee of the Proletarian group, so I was inevitably drawn into the internal struggle. The person in charge of preparing wax stencils and running the mimeograph was Wang Zekai's nephew Wang

Fusheng. At a meeting he opposed my arrangements for the election. His uncle, a Peng Shuzhi supporter, had put him up to this. Wang had come to my place and argued with me about unification, and we'd parted on bad terms. If the negotiations had gone on any longer, Peng's supporters might have switched their sights from Yin Kuan to me.

He Zishen was in charge of Congress arrangements. We rented a newly built two-storey lane-house in an alley to the North of Ward Road on Dalian Bay Road. Wang Zhihuai and his wife and daughter lived downstairs as landlords, and we pretended to rent the upper storey. We made a rule that from 1 May to 3 May, while the Congress was in session, no one save Chen Duxiu should be allowed to leave the building.

The Proletarian group was represented by Chen Duxiu, Zheng Chaolin, Wang Zhihuai, Jiang Zhendong, and Jiang Changshi; later, after a membership count, we were allowed one more delegate, i.e., Peng Shuzhi. The Our Word group was represented by Liang Ganqiao, Chen Yimou, Song Jingxiu, and two workers from Hongkong. The October group was represented by Wang Fanxi, Song Fengchun, Pu Dezhi, and Luo Han. The Combat group had only one delegate, Lai Yantang.

The Congress went on for three days. Apart from the elections at the end, it spent its whole time discussing resolutions, principally political ones, that had been drafted by the Negotiating Committee after a long and intense discussion. But this discussion had been quite different in character from that during the early stages of negotiations, which had been little more than an exercise in mutual fault-finding. This later discussion was premised in a sincere wish for unity. The Negotiating Committee had reached broad unanimity on the questions of proletarian dictatorship and the National Assembly. The same went for other resolutions on the labour movement, the peasant movement, women, youth, and so on, as well as on rules and regulations. The Congress did not only pass resolutions. When the political resolution came up for discussion, Chen Duxiu addressed the Congress about it in the name of the Negotiating Committee; others then got up and spoke or argued, but only about minor details that were easily resolved. The same thing happened when the other resolutions came up. All these resolutions fell into the hands of the Guomindang intelligence service and may be available in the Guomindang archives on Taiwan.

The Congress elected a Central Committee composed of members and alternate members. Everyone's agreed that there were nine members, but most people have forgotten about the two alternate members. Different people remember different names. For example, I remember the full members as being Chen Duxiu, Wang Fanxi, Zheng Chaolin, Chen Yimou, Song Fengchun, Pu Dezhi, Ou Fang, Wang Zhihuai, and a Hongkong worker; and the alternate members as Song Jingxiu and Peng Shuzhi. They didn't include Luo Han.449 So the following controversies arise. Was Luo Han elected to the Central Committee? Was Peng Shuzhi a full member or an alternate member? Was Ou Fang elected? I stick to my opinion that Luo Han was not elected; as for Peng, as far as I remember the two people (Pen" and Liang Ganqiao) who came bottom got an equal number of votes, so there was a run-off that Peng won, as a result of which he was elected. Nine of the eleven successful candidates became full members and two (Song Jingxiu and Peng) became alternate members. Ou Fang was in Caohejing Gaol at the time, still alive. He was elected as a gesture honouring him.

On 4 May, we rested for a day. On 5 May, we held our first Central Committee meeting, at the same place. Chen Duxiu was made General Secretary, Chen Yimou took charge of the Organization Department, Zheng Chaolin became head of the Propaganda Department, Wang Fanxi was appointed editor of the Party organ, and Song Fengchun took over the Secretariat. The same five people constituted the Standing Committee.

An incident took place at this meeting that left a deep impression on those present, and that most survivors of the meeting still remember. I am referring to Peng's letter to Chen Duxiu. Peng, who had not originally been a delegate to the Unification Congress, had written a long letter to

Chen Duxiu denouncing the Congress as a "conference of robbers out to divide the spoils" and making other similar unpleasant allegations. After we'd all gone to start the Congress, he took this letter to the home of He Zishen (who was in charge of the Proletarian group's Secretariat) and asked him to give to Chen Duxiu. Peng didn't know where Chen lived, so he had no choice but to deliver it in this way. I don't know when He Zishen actually handed it over to Chen, but at the first plenary session of the Central Committee held on 5 May Chen produced it and as far as I remember someone read it out aloud. Chen then asked Peng if he still stood by the letter. All eyes turned to Peng, who sat there blushing violently and unable to utter a single word. If it had been Yin Kuan, he'd have bluffed his way out of it with some plausible-sounding argument. I suddenly began to feel sorry for Peng and said "Let's not take this too far." After all, it's no fun to watch someone speechless and squirming with embarrassment. Later Chen Duxiu told He Zishen what had happened, and He Zishen then told me off for being too soft: he said it could lead to bungles. He said that if Peng had won the upper hand, Peng would never have shown mercy. He Zishen was right, of course. I remember this incident clearly, but at the same time I have no clear recollection of Peng attending the Unification Congress, which is why I originally thought that Peng only came to Dalian Bay Road when the plenary session of the Central Committee was held on 5 May.

The plenary session instructed Chen Yimou (head of the Organization Department) to merge the branches of the four organizations as soon as possible and assigned Wu Jiyan, Zhao Ji, and Yan Lingfeng to the Propaganda Department. A decision was taken to call the Party journal Huahao (Spark) and to rush out the first issue. Finally, the Central Committee sent a letter to Comrade Trotsky reporting on the Unification Congress. I remember that Wang Fanxi wrote the letter and the rest of us all signed it. Now that Harvard University has opened Trotsky's letters archive, one day someone will probably unearth it.

I can't remember what happened between 5 May and 21 May. I forget whether I stopped being Secretary of the East Shanghai District Committee, and if so, who replaced me. In those days my main visitors were Wang Zhihuai and Song Jingxiu. Song made a point of talking to me about Ou Fang, who he said should be promoted into the leadership as soon as he was released from prison. One day Wang told me that Ma YuBu wanted to know where Wang lived and where I'd moved to so that he could pay me a visit, and that he'd told him, which I said was all right. I wasn't the slightest bit vigilant at the time. Naturally, I didn't agree with Ma's attitude to unification and I disliked his inactivity, but it never occurred to me that he'd betray us. Peng Shuzhi moved from the house he's been living for quite some time to a place on Route Pere Robert in the French Concession and told lots of people, including Ma YuEu, his new address. Ma Yufu, too, often used to visit him there. I was the only person Peng didn't tell. I didn't tell him when I moved, either.

Sometime between 5 May and 21 May, we held a meeting of the Standing Committee to assess the draft of the first issue of Spark. I remember I had written an article for it on the Spanish Revolution. We decided to hold a rather bigger meeting on the 22nd. On the 21st, I held a meeting at my place about propaganda work. That afternoon Wu Jiyan, Zhao Ji, and Yan Lingfeng were all there. Yan, who was from Fuzhou, wasn't in any group at the time, having declared that he'd only join after they united. He I'd heard about him, but I'd never met him. He told me that before he'd left China for the Soviet Union, he'd heard me give a lecture at Shanghai University. In 1926, the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Regional Committee had frequently assigned me to give lectures at Shanghai University. These lectures weren't part of the formal curriculum, and took place in the evenings. Crowds of people used to attend them, including many who weren't students. I wasn't the only one who used to give them.

After the meeting Zhao left, but Wu and Yan stayed behind for a game of mahjong that our landlord came up to join. I'd been there less than a month, so with that many visitors it was wise to play a game of mahjong to allay any suspicions that my landlord may have entertained. He was called Zheng, like me, and was twenty-odd, from Ningbo. He worked for an insurance company and was a member of the Merchants' Volunteer Corps450 that the police used to call out when necessary to help maintain public order.

Just as the game was underway, Peng Guiqiu came rushing up and asked me if Yu Mutao knew where I lived. I quickly steered him out onto the sun terrace and quietly asked him what had happened. He told me that Yu had turned informer, that that evening at ten o'clock people would be arrested, and that I should flee. I told him that Yu didn't know my address. Peng Guigiu then left, and after we had finished playing mahjong Yan Lingfeng left too, but Wu Jiyan and his wife stayed. I told them what Peng Guiqiu had said. They agreed that since Yu Mutao didn't know my address, we were safe, so they stayed in my place while I went to tell other people what had happened. I first went to Chen Duxiu's place. I was the only one who

knew where he lived. We decided to scrap the meeting planned for tomorrow, and that he wouldn't go to Dalian Bay Road. I then went to Peng Guiqiu's place, where I met Xie Depan. There I learned that Peng Shuzhi had told Xie to bring me the news of the impending raid, but that Xie had sent Peng Guiqiu instead. It turned out that the story about Yu Mutao had been guess-work on the part of Peng Shuzhi. That there would be a raid at ten o'clock that night was a fact, but the rest was inference. Peng Shuzhi knew that the only unreliable person among those who knew his address was Yu Mutao, for Yu had recently asked Cai Yuanpei to write a preface for a book that Yu was about to publish. I now realized that the matter was not as straightforward as I had originally thought. Perhaps the informer did know where I lived. Perhaps he even knew where the meeting was to take place.

I immediately went to see Liu Renjing, who lived close by. His wife, Lu Mengyi's younger sister, was already in bed, but Liu was still up. I told him what had happened, and he promised to get someone to go the following day to the meeting place and warn people. As I was walking home I had second thoughts, and went myself to the house where the meeting was to be held. The people inside were all asleep. They answered my knocking, and I told them what had happened. At the time I still thought that a raid was possible rather than certain, so I didn't insist that they vacate the building there and then. I told them that the meeting would not go through, but I failed to tell Song Fengchun to go that same night and warn Wang Fanxi and the others in West Shanghai. That was because of my general irresolution in the face of important events. I didn't think either to inform He Zishen, for very few people knew him, and all those who did were reliable. Had I done so, he was so vigilant and resolute that he would have proposed fleeing forthwith. When I got home it was already past midnight. Wu Jiyan and his wife were still there, but they, too, drew no new conclusions from the new information I gave them. They then went home. I thought to myself, since I had been emphatically instructed to flee, even though ten o'clock had long since come and gone, it would be best not to leave anything to chance. After a discussion, Jing and I started preparing to pack a few necessities into a small suitcase so that we could spend the night in a hotel. Just as we were packing, there came a knock at the door. It was a team of detectives from the Longhua Garrison Headquarters together with some Chinese and foreign policemen from Tilanqiao Police Station.

I and Jing, together with the maidservant who cooked for us, were taken by van to Tilanqizo Police Station, where we were put behind bars; the van then drove off again, to reappear not long afterwards with He Zishen and his wife. At that point, I realized that the informer was Ma Yubu. He knew where He Zishen lived, he knew where Peng ShuzLi lived, he'd recently found out where I lived from Wang Zhihuai, and he knew where the house was where the Congress had been held. Sure enough, the van soon reappeared with Wang Zhihuai and his wife and daughter, and with Song Fengchun and Jiang Changshi. None of us slept that night. The next morning sometime after nine the van took the whole lot of us to the Magistracy of the Settlement, where we were asked a few questions before being sent back to Tilanqiao. As we walked back in, we saw Chen Yimou, Wang Fanxi, and Pu Dezhi in the lock-up. It turned out that some policemen had stayed behind in the house where the meeting was to have been held, and when these people turned up as planned, they had been seized. Wang Fanxi had gone together with Zhang Te45t (I don't know what the meeting was about). As soon as they entered, Zhang was snapped into handcuffs. Wang rushed out through the back door, and the policemen rushed out after him, so Zhang Te fled through the front door, still handcuffed. He took a rickshaw to Jiangwan, where he removed the handcuffs at a friend's house.

According to He Zishen, that very morning Chen Duxiu had gone to He's house, but at the mouth of the alley he had met the landlord, who informed him that He Zishen and his family had been arrested the previous night. That's more or less what did happen, but I don't know if He Zishen heard it from one of the other prisoners or just guessed it.

At Tilanqiao Police Station we were divided up into men and women. The men's lock-up was a big cell alongside a smaller one. One afternoon a lawyer came, accompanied by another person. A prisoner who some of us recognized as Lou Guohua was called out from the small cell. We understood from his conversation with the lawyer that on the 22nd he'd gone to visit friends on the Dalian Bay Road but unfortunately had knocked on the wrong door and been seized. He managed some firm for Yu Qiaqing; the man accompanying the lawyer was Yu's son. So he'd been locked up in a different place from us and handled differently. I realized that Liu Renjing must have told him to go to the place where he had been arrested and to tell the people there to flee. Later I found out that before doing so he'd shifted all the documents from his house and made preparations for the period after his arrest; only then had he gone to Dalian Bay Road to knock on that fateful door. He'd been a delegate for the Our Word group. His wife, also a comrade, had given birth on May 1, so he hadn't been able to attend the Congress and Song Jingxiu had filled in for him.

A few days later the entire case was sent for judgment to the courts in the International Settlement. Wang Zhihuai and his wife and daughter, my wife Liu Jingzhen, and He Zishen's wife Zhang Yisen were not extradited but kept in a lock-up attached to the courts (it was a month before they were released). Lou Guohua was remanded on bail of $10,000. The rest of us—seven in all, mostly under aliases—were extradited to the Shanghai Garrison Headquarters.

We were all bundled into a van and taken off to the White Cloud Temple at West Gate, where the detectives attached to the Garrison had their office. The boss, a man called Ma from Anhui, interrogated us individually. I told him I was Wang Jian from Ganzhou in Jiangxi.

"If you won't even tell me your right name, how do you expect me to do my job?" he said.

He kept on at me for quite some time and eventually began to threaten me with electric shocks, but still I refused to yield.

"Think of it from my point of view," he continued. "All I want from you is your real name and an admission that you are a member of the Communist Party."

As he said that, he dipped his finger in some tea and traced the name "Zhongfu" on the table in front of him.

"Nor am I asking you about him,"452 he added. "He's an old friend of mine."

After that, I had no choice but to tell him my real name and that I was a member of the Communist Party.

Ma Yufu knew that only through me could Chen Duxiu be found. As soon as I had got through the door of Tilanqiao Police Station the Detective Sergeant there, a man called Wang Bin, had asked me to "help out" by telling him where Chen lived. He asked the foreign police sergeant to use torture on me, but the man refused. The day we were extradited Wang Bin spread his hands and said that after so many days the bird would certainly have flown. Chief Detective Ma of the White Cloud Temple probably also calculated that even if I did tell them, Chen would by then have moved, so he might as well be kind to me.

None of the others save He Zishen had been arrested according to a special list of names, so the question did not arise whether the names they had given were true or false. The police at the White Cloud Temple took mug-shots of them and showed them to Ma YuBu. Naturally, he knew who they were, but the police didn't force him to put names to faces. He got He Zishen's family name wrong, and wrote it with another character that is pronounced similarly but in a different tone; and an official wrote the character zi as a xian, which looks quite similar. So He Zishen spent six years in gaol as He Xianshen. And that was lucky for him, because earlier he'd escaped from court-house custody in Ji'nan, and the Guomindang had put out a warrant for his re-arrest. If they'd found out who he really was, they might have sent him back to Jitnan to be dealt with. Wang Fanxi, Pu Dezhi, and Chen Yimou didn't even say where they lived. They frequently felt the end of Wang Bin's rattan cane, but in the end he gave up on them.

We probably spent a week to ten days in the White Cloud Temple before being handed over to Longhua. Just before that, a detective told Jiang Changshi: "You've got Ma YuEu to thank for this."

A little over a month after we had reached Longhua, Lou Guohua turned up. He'd been bailed out all right, on a surety of $10,000 paid in by his friend. By then he believed that he was in the clear, so he attended court for the hearing, meaning afterwards to retrieve the $10,000 bail. But unluckily for him, in the meantime Wang Bin's people had searched He Zishen's house and unearthed a form that Lou had filled out at the time of the Unification Congress.

During our time at Longhua we were active in various ways, we had our struggles, and a number of interesting things happened, but I don't intend to talk about them here. I'll mention just one thing. A rumour reached us from outside that He Zishen and I were to be shot, but the others would be spared. In late October or early November I was called out for a mug-shot. Prisoners who'd been in Longhua for a long time knew that two or three days after that happened, you were invariably taken out and shot. I myself had seen the same thing happen on several occasions. But what could you do? "An earthen pot will inevitably be broken on the well."453 However, the second day went by without anything happening, and so did the third, and so did a whole week of days. Finally, all seven of us were told to pack our things and attend court, where an official stood on a platform and read out our sentences from a notebook. I got fifteen years, He Zishen got ten Pu Dezhi got two and a half, and the rest got six.454 We were then sent to Caohejing Model Prison.

According to what others have told me, the reason I escaped the firing squad was because Xiong Shihui, Commander of the Shanghai Garrison Headquarters, was replaced by Dai Ji. Dai Ji was a general of the Nineteenth Route Army, which had just arrived to garrison Shanghai and was far more enlightened than the armies of Chiang Kai-shek's military clique.455

I don't intend to say anything about our odyssey through Chiang's prisons: how we went from Caohejing to Hangzhou, from Hangzhou to Suzhou, from Suzhou to Nanjing, and how we spent five years behind bars in Nanjing Gaol.

THINGS I HEARD SAID

While we were at Longhua, news filtered in that four members of the former Our Word group had issued a declaration breaking from Trotskyism and capitulating to the Guomindang. They were Liang Ganqiao, Zhang Shi, Lu Mengyi, and a fourth person whose name I forget. They'd quite simply gone over from revolution to counterrevolution, but they didn't serve up any comrades to the Guomindang as a "gift on the occasion of a first meeting," so in that respect they did not quite sink to the depths of Ma Yufu. (Later, however, Zhang Shi and Lu Mengyi became leading members of Guomindang intelligence, and Liang Ganqiao became a leading anti-Communist under Hu Zongnan.)

It was hardly surprising that these four turned traitor. The Our Word group had originally opposed unifying with the Chen Duxiu-ites, and though Trotsky's letter had forced their hand, a minority of them were still inwardly opposed to it. The people around Ou Fang in the Our Word group were all right, but those around Liang Ganqiao were not. After Ou disappeared into gaol, Liang took over. His ambition was to become leader of the united Trotskyists, so that he could then indulge in his conspiratorial schemes. He planned to have Chen Duxiu elected General Secretary at the Unification Congress and then to send him to Turkey 458 so that he himself could take over, but things didn't turn out as he wished. He came bottom of the poll together with Peng Shuzhi in the election for the Central Committee, and he lost in the run-off. Peng's name stank in the nostrils of most delegates, but Liang's stank worse.

During the Congress, Wang Pingyi, a member of the Combat group, had to return to his home in Shandong after something came up. He returned to Shanghai after the Congress, and the people who were dissatisfied with its outcome disparaged it to him, so he declared that he would lead the opposition to it. I had heard about this even before our arrest. Sometime later Wang Pingyi, too, joined the Guomindang secret police and changed his name to Wang Boping.

After our arrest some people in the Our Word group, including Zhang Te and Shi Tang, left Shanghai for Guangxi. In those days Guangxi was under Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi,4s9 who were busy recruiting talent and going on about autonomy, for they planned to resist Chiang Kai-shek's Nanjing Govemment. Zhang Te was from Guangxi, though the others probably weren't. Zhang Te returned to Guangxi to become an official and participate in the internal struggles of the Guangxi clique; not long afterwards he abandoned Trotskyism. But some people, led by Shi Tang, went to become not officials but middle-school teachers, and they continued to propagate Trotskyist ideas both in the classroom and outside. They influenced no few of their students, who played an important role in a whole series of student movements in Guangxi. But Shi Tang and his fnends never develop a Trotskyist organization in Guangxi; on the contrary, they left the Trotskyist organization. I only mention this in connection with the defection of Liang Ganqiao and the three others.

At Longhua we met up with seven other new Trotskyist prisoners. They were: Yin Kuan, Jiang Zhendong, Liu Yi, Song Jingxiu, and three others; all were held on a different block from us. According to what others have told me, there are two theories about these people. Yin Kuan says that when they realized that they were without a leadership, a number of them met together in a hotel on Fuzhou Road to set up a new one, but unfortunately one of the people at the meeting was a spy who betrayed them. According to Song Jingxiu, however, there was already a new leadership and Yin Kuan's aim at this meeting was to set up a faction. So when Song learned about it he went to the hotel and urged Yin against this course of action, but unfortunately they were all arrested. I don't know who's telling the truth.460 Subsequently Yin Kuan and Song Jingxiu were both sent to prison, but Jiang Zhendong, Liu Yi, and the other three were freed on bail. Later Song died in gaol, but Yin Kuan was bailed out when he fell ill, after which he failed to report back to prison.

I don't know when the leadership under Chen Duxiu was restored. After first we and then Song Jingxiu had been arrested, as far as I remember the only members—one full, the other alternate—left on the Central Committee were Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi. Wang Zhihuai had gone to work as a labourer on the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Railway, Ou Fang had already died (in gaol), the Hongkong worker had gone back to Hongkong after the Congress, and though Pu Dezhi and Song Fengchun were already out of gaol, they were temporanly inactive. I don't know what activities this leadership engaged in. This was the period of the September 18 Incident461 and the Battle of Shanghai,462 so the country was in turmoil and conditions were ripe for revolutionary agitation.

In the late spring or early summer of 1932, Peng Shuzhi, Li Ji, Wu Jiyan, and Du Weizhi gathered briefly in Shanghai's Zhongshan Park for a meeting. After the meeting Peng and Li left by the back gate and Wu and Du by the front. Keeping watch at the front gate was Gu Shunzhang, who recognized Wu (though he didn't know his name) and arrested him and Du. They were handed over to the Nanjing Garrison Headquarters. Du Weizhi, a professor at Anhui University, phoned the principal of the University, Cheng Yansheng, and the Garrison Headquarters decided to send him to Anqing and hand him over to Cheng, whence he escaped back to Shanghai the same night. Wu Jiyan's cover eventually broke and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. A few years later his relatives got him out.

In October 1932, I was in Nanjing's Central Military Prison. The man in charge of the Education Section in this prison was Shen Bingquan, a student of Hangzhou Law College and originally a member of the Communist Party who had been arrested on 12 April 1927, at Hangzhou. Somehow or another he'd ended up working for the Guomindang in this prison. Politics are a complicated business. Most people would call this man a traitor, and so did I at the time, but it's not true. In the Central Military prison he showed special consideration to political prisoners, particularly the better-known ones. When I was first in the South block of the prison, he got the Second Section to transfer me after a few months to the preferential treatment unit, where there were already two other political prisoners, both students of Nanjing's Central University, one a man called Yang Jinhao from Pudong, the other a man from Suzhou called Wang Chubao, the half-brother of Wang Rongbao. After we'd settled in, Shen Bingquan came to see us. He told us that the prison authorities planned to teach illiterate prisoners to read and write, so the three of us had been assigned to prepare a text-book. The other two thanked him and agreed to do so, but I kept quiet. This preferential treatment unit was alongside the prison sports ground, you could see it whenever you were let out for exercise. People used to say that Noulens and his wife463 were at first kept here, though they were later moved to another place. In the summer of 1932, when I was let out for exercise on one occasion, I saw two political prisoners who were living in this preferential treatment unit, both of them members of the CCP who'd studied abroad, one called Chen Jiakang and the other Jiang Zemin.464 We'd already met them at Longhua. They'd mended Wang Zhennan's car for him, so Wang Zhennan (who was Minister of Military Justice at the time) had instructed the prison authorities to send them to the preferential treatment unit. I could tell from the way that other prisoners talked whenever we were let out onto the sports ground that they heartily despised people who lived in the preferential treatment unit. After Chen and Jiang had left, Shen Bingquan managed to get me and the other two prisoners transferred there.

During that period, one day a young political prisoner I knew came to see the doctor in the clinic on the other side of the sports ground. At the time I was taking a walk in front of the entrance to the preferential treatment unit. This young man told me, "Chen Duxiu has been arrested." His words struck me like a thunderbolt. On one occasion at Longhua I'd heard a rifleshot from across the wall and realized that another political prisoner was dead. A few minutes later one of the guards, a man from Jiangxi, had stopped at the gate to our block to tell us that the man who had just died was an old man, a Communist Party leader. That, too, had given me a nasty shock, and it wasn't until later that I learned from another prisoner that the man they'd shot was Xiang Zhongfa. Now, in my preferential treatment unit, I hoped against hope that the rumour was not true. But the same day or the next, Shen Bingquan came to see us. He said with pretended nonchalance that Chen Duxiu was unlikely to die. I said instinctively that if he'd been arrested, I could see no reason why he wouldn't die. Shen Bingquan had thought that his words would startle me, and had never imagined that on the contrary my words would startle him. He asked me how I knew that Chen had been arrested. I can't remember how I answered. He must have thought that we political prisoners were extremely well informed. And so we were.

A few days later I wrote to Shen Bingquan requesting to be transferred back to the South block, and he had no choice but to accede.

While I'm on the subject, there's something else I ought to add about Shen Bingquan. In the summer of 1933, he again came to visit me in the South block. Without beating about the bush, he told me that he was responding to a request by my friend Hua Lin, who came from the same province as Shen, to show me special consideration. He told me that something had come up, and he asked me if I was interested. It turned out that the Military Court intended to appoint some people who knew foreign languages to translate foreign military law into Chinese for use as reference material in drafting a legal code for the Chinese military. The translators would be housed in the North block, and would spend their working day in the instruction rooms and return to their cells in the evening. Since I owed this chance to Hua Lin, I said I'd do it.

Later, my wife Liu Jingzhen came to see me and told me about Chen Duxiu's arrest. She said it was Xie Depan who had informed on him. I asked her whether he'd informed on him before or after his arrest. She said after.

At the time Jing was teaching in Shanghai. Each year during the summer and winter holidays she would visit me in Nanjing's Military Prison. She also visited me once or twice during term-time. Naturally, she also visited Chen Duxiu whenever she was in Nanjing. It wasn't until after my release that she told me that she had been in charge of liaison between Chen and the outside world. She used to smuggle letters and documents of the Shanghai

organization to Chen, and to smuggle out articles and documents by him. Each time she would hide these things in the bottom of a biscuit tin, underneath the biscuits. She didn't necessarily read the documents, nor was she the only person who worked for the organization in this way. Because she did this work, Chen Duxiu directed the organization not to enrol her in any of its branches. I believe that some Shanghai Trotskyist leaders went in person to visit Chen in gaol. The articles contained in the mimeographed publications that we brought out in that period, together with Chen's secret letters, which are still in existence, will probably throw light on the nature of this liaison, and on the extent to which Chen Duxiu had the Shanghai Trotskyist organization under remote control in those days.

After her arrest in 1952, Liu Jingzhen told the Government about her role as link-woman in that period. She was freed in 1957. It's hard to believe that in 1968, while she was under criticism in the Cultural Revolution, she was asked once again to talk about the "biscuit tin" episode, and her tricking of the Guomindang dictatorship was used against her as evidence of "counterrevolutionary criminal activity."

I don't know under what circumstances the Shanghai organization was restored after Chen Duxiu's arrest. According to what I've heard, the main mover was Chen Qichang, later assisted by Yin Kuan after he had got out of gaol; after Yin's second arrest, Wang Fanxi got out of gaol and also helped. It was in this period that the organization was rent by a serious conflict.

The case of Liu Renjing and his supporters was handed over to the Nanjing Garrison Headquarters. Liu Renjing immediately turned traitor, so instead of going to gaol he was sent to the Suzhou Reformatory for a period of self-examination. The others—Si, Liu, Hu, and Wang—were not prepared to capitulate, so they ended up in gaol: Liu Jialiang got seven years, the rest got five. They were handed over to the Central Military Prison

I met Si, Hu, and Wang there, but I never met Liu Jialiang, who was kept in the South block. Somehow they managed to persuade a fellow prisoner who was a member of the CCP to explain about them to me. I didn't know this man, nor he me. He worked in the prison printing factory The prisoners in the West block used to exercise in the area just in front of the printing factory windows. One day, I forget which year, but it was one or two years before the outbreak of the war with Japan, one of the prisoners working in the printing factory called me over to the window while I was out exercising. This man stood by the window and talked with me for a few minutes. He told me that there were four Trotskyists in the prison, that they had put up a good show while being held in the Nanjing Garrison Headquarters, and that they wanted to meet me but were afraid I wouldn't trust them, so they'd asked him to introduce them to me. Later, again while I was out exercising, a man came across and began walking alongside me He told me that his name was Hu Wenwei (alias Hu Wenzhang); on another occasion, Wang Huating (alias Wang Shuben) also came across and started talking with me, and tile same thing happened on several subsequent occasions. Hu and Wang told me about their struggle with Yin Kuan and Chen Qichang and especially about the underground printing apparatus. At the time I thought it was a wrangle over a mimeograph. It never occurred to me that the so-called underground printing apparatus was in fact a "printing factory."467 Wang Huating also told me about their analysis of the various classes in Chinese society. On one occasion when Si Chaosheng met me in the bathhouse he talked with me at great length, not (like Hu and Wang) about the past but about the future. They heard from somewhere that I would soon be released, so Si proposed that I set up a magazine to propagate Trotskyist Ideas. In the course of my talks with these three men I avoided voicing my own opinion. None of them tried to disguise their detestation for Liu Renjing.

Later, after I had got out of gaol, I heard that Liu Renjing had behaved quite shamelessly in the Reformatory, where he had become leader of the "Students' Society" (or whatever the so-called autonomous organization was called that the Guomindang political police set up for prisoners), with He Zizhen as his deputy. The two of them were one hundred per cent behind the Guomindang in its persecution of Communist prisoners. While I was in the Central Military Prison I came across an issue of the magazine put out by the Reformatory, in it an article by Liu Renjing praising Chen Lifu's theory of vitalism. (Another article by Peng Kang46s was about Laozi. The magazine is probably available in some archive.)

Si, Liu, Hu, and Wang were also set free on 29 August 1937. They first stayed in a hotel in Nanjing for a while and only then went back to Shanghai. While they were in the hotel, Si said he didn't want to be a Trotskyist any more, but the rest continued to be active in Shanghai. They kept up their struggle against Chen Duxiu, and even denounced him as a "Fuzhou Road prostitute." Later Hu Wenzhang went to Manchuria to join an anti-Japanese army, and nothing more was heard of him. Liu Jialiang was seized and martyred in Vietnam.469 As for Wang Shuben, at the time of Liberation he died in the headquarters of the Sino-American Joint Mission470 in Chongqing.

The printing press led to quite a storm. Either before or after Liu Renjing's usurpation of the leadership, a comrade working in the printing factory decided that he would expropriate the equipment for his own private ends and open a shop. Frank Glass then disguised himself as a British policeman and went by car, with Shao Lu acting as his chauffeur, to steal it back, with Little Zhao [Zhicheng] from the Telephone Company pretending to be his interpreter.

Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi finally split in Tiger Bridge Prison in Nanjing. Pu Dezhi and Luo Shifan stood by Chen. Outside the prison, Yin Kuan and Chen Qichang also opposed Peng.

Apart from Pu Dezhi and Luo Shifan, four other people were arrested at the same time as Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi. They were: Zeng Meng, He Zizhen, Peng Daozhi, and Song Fengchun. Not long after entering gaol, Zeng was freed through the intercession of former fellow-students of his from Huangpu Military Academy after writing a letter of repentance. The others considered him a traitor. He Zizhen also got out, but via the Reformatory, where he behaved despicably. Peng Daozhi, Peng Shuzhi's younger brother, died in gaol of typhoid fever. Song Fengchun was also freed as a result of a campaign by people outside prison.

On 7 July 1937, the Lugouqiao or Marco Polo Bridge Incident took place,472 marking the start of all-out war between Japan and China. By that time the Guomindang and the Communists had already formed their second united front. The Chinese Red Army had become the Eighth Route Army of the National Revolutionary Armed Forces and had set up an office in Nanjing. The Communists demanded the freeing of political prisoners and so did public opinion, but for a long time before that a number of celebrities—old friends of Chen Duxiu—had been demanding Chen's release.

Before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident but after the establishment of the Eighth Route Army's office in Nanjing, Pan Hannian, a member of the office staff, had visited the Central Military Prison to see his cousin Pan Zinian. He told Pan Zinian that the Guomindang was still not prepared to free all political prisoners, and that it would only consider freeing prisoners if the CCP made a list of those it wanted released. Pan Zinian came back and reported on this exchange; I only heard about it indirectly. After a while Pan Zinian, who was serving life, was freed early. Only then can the question of a "list" have come up, for if all the prisoners had been freed, there'd have been no need for one.

Some people said that the CCP asked the Guomindang to free a list of people including Chen Duxiu. I've never heard such a theory before, and common sense tells me that it's not true. Chen Duxiu was freed as a result of the campaign by those celebrities. It had nothing to do with the CCP. The formal procedure was that Hu Shi and Zhang Boling bailed him out. Some office of the Guomindang proclaimed that it had resolved to free Chen on bail because he "loves his country deeply, and deeply regrets what he has done." (Two days after his release, on 25 August, Chen protested at this statement in a letter to the editor of Shanghai's Shenbao newspaper: "A sincere patriot would not venture to brag about his love of country, and I know of nothing that I should regret"; "I have done no wrong, so regret would have no object.") In short, Chen Duxiu's release was not connected in any way with the CCP.

Then there's the black propaganda of the Guomindang's dirty tricks department. According to one report, Zhou Enlai visited Chen Duxiu in gaol; according to another, Chen Lifu and Tao Xisheng greeted Chen Duxiu as he left the prison, Chen went to stay in the Guomindang Central Committee's guest house, Chen Lifu invited Chen Duxiu to dinner on the evening of his release, and at the banquet Chen Duxiu made a tearful speech of thanks. This is all mischievous fabncation. Zhou Enlai never visited Chen Duxiu in gaol and when Chen walked free it was his student Chen Zhongfan (then Director of Jinling University's Literature Department) who personally fetched him from gaol and put him up in his house in Yinyangying. As for us Trotskyists in the Central Military Prison and Tiger Bridge Prison, our release, too, had nothing whatsoever to do with the CCP. By 13 August, the war had already reached Shanghai, and by 15 August, Nanjing was being bombarded from the air. The Guomindang was preparing to abandon Nanjing, so it put into operation a regulation commonly used in bourgeois countries whereby in times of war the gaols are emptied and the prisoners dispersed. The great majority of the prisoners—political, common, and military—were released. Pu Dezhi, Luo Shifan, and Peng Shuzhi were freed in late August. Luo and Peng immediately went to Shanghai, Pu immediately returned to Anqing. He Zishen, whose original sentence had been shorter than mine, was freed about one week earlier than me and went to Tiger Bridge Prison to visit Chen Duxiu; he also met Pu, Luo, and Peng there. Chen Duxiu arranged for He Zishen and for me and my wife to go to Jixi in Anhui to stay for a while in the house of Wang Mengzou, owner of the Oriental Book Company. Without waiting for me to leave gaol, He Zishen was taken by my wife Liu Jingzhen to the Science Book Company in Wuhu.473 I wasn't released until 29 August, whereupon I immediately went with Jing to Chen Zhongfan's two-storey foreign-style house in Yinyangying. Downstairs was a guest-room and a dining room; upstairs was the main room, where Chen Duxiu and Little Pan were staying. Chen Zhongfan had already sent his dependents back to his native place in Yancheng, and he himself had moved into the upstairs side room. When I and Jing arrived, Chen Duxiu and Little Pan were temporarily away, so we waited for them in the main room. Pan came back first: Chen Duxiu didn't get back until the afternoon. Several groups of guests called in on him, and he received them in the downstairs guestroom. I and Jing went out to buy some bread and cakes for our supper. That night we slept on the floor in Chen Duxiu's room, and early next morning we set out for Wuhu.

When we went up or down the stairs, we often saw Chen Zhongfan come out of his room. Chen Duxiu hadn't introduced us to him by name, he'd simply said that we lived in East Nanjing and had fled here to escape the bombing. Whenever Chen Zhongfan met Chen Duxiu he would stand respectfully by, in the manner of an old-style student in the presence of his teacher. On Chen Duxiu s bedside table I saw a wuyangufeng474 that Chen Zhongfan had newly written for his old teacher. Part of it used the story about the divine dragon, and how you could see its head but not its tail, to praise Chen Duxiu.

In the evening I chatted with Chen Duxiu, who already knew my views475 on the war from He Zishen. Naturally, he disagreed, but that evening he deliberately avoid mentioning them. He merely showed me the theses he had composed in gaol. I studied them carefully, but 1, too, disagreed with him. For the most part I can no longer remember what they said, but one still sticks in my mind. It said that for the time being we should have an "armistice" with the Guomindang. I especially disagreed with that one, and read it but said nothing. He knew why. So we didn't talk any further about our estimate of the war and our attitude toward it. Instead we talked of other things, among them the question of the CCP. By then I opposed the CCP, not just generally but from a whole number of theoretical and practical angles. My opposition had been especially heightened by the recent Moscow trials, for in my opinion the CCP breathed out of the same set of nostrils as Stalin on this question.476 I knew from Chen Duxiu's past attitude and from the tone of voice he adopted that evening that he, too, opposed the CCP. I crystallized my attitude to the CCP in the form of a question. I asked Chen Duxiu: Will the CCP disband wholesale and enter the Guomindang? No, he said, after a moment's thought: if they were to do that, they would no longer be in a position to play out their reactionary role to the end. He put special emphasis on the word "reactionary." It was completely obvious to me from his reply that he was even more opposed to the CCP than I was. So all the talk then by the Guomindang and the Communists about Chen wanting to start working again for the Communist Party was pure fabrication. Today people are still peddling the same rumours. Some people even claim that Chen said to Dong Biwu "Of course I want to start working again for the Communist Party." Others say that in 1938 in Wuhan every time he spoke Chen said that "the Party's line and policy is completely correct" and that "we resolutely support Party policy." But in truth Chen opposed the CCP even more thoroughly than 1, the only difference being that at that time he didn't oppose the proposal for an alliance against Japan between the Party and the Guomindang. He had his own view of this proposal, which by no means boiled down to the view that "the Party's line and policy is completely correct." Chen Duxiu's subsequent speeches and actions right through until his death are all explicable in terms of what he told me that evening about his attitude toward the CCP.

That was the last time that Chen Duxiu and I met and talked.

The next morning I and Jing left Chen Zhongfan's house and went to the Railway Station outside Nanjing's Zhonghua Gate to catch the train to Wuhu. Chen Duxiu escorted us to the door and waved goodbye as we disappeared in rickshaws.

We corresponded with Chen Duxiu a few times after reaching Jixi. Probably some of his replies are still in existence.

After I parted from him I heard only indirectly about his life and thought in Nanjing, Wuhan, Chongqing, and Jiangjin, so I'd best leave to others the job of describing it.

(4) TROTSKY'S THEORY OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION

It's impossible to write a memoir of the Chinese Trotskyist movement or of Chen Duxiu's relationship to that movement without talking about the theoretical debates within Chinese Trotskyism. And in the final analysis it's impossible to talk about those debates without going back to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.

TROTSKY'S ESTIMATE OF CHEN DUXIU

I once heard Liu Renjing say that while he was staying with Trotsky in Turkey the two men talked about Chen Duxiu. Trotsky highly estimated Chen Duxiu's talents as a revolutionary, but he said that Chen was no theoretician. Later, when Liu Renjing turned against Chen, he told people what Trotsky had said. Naturally, he put the emphasis on Chen Duxiu not being a theoretician rather than on him being a revolutionary, thus making Trotsky's comment seem derogatory. But in my opinion it was simply a statement of fact. The crucial question is what Trotsky meant by "theoretician."

By it he meant people like Marx and Engels and like Lenin, or at the very least people who were well versed in the writings of Marx and Engels and of the thinkers whose ideas Marx and Engels borrowed in the course of elaborating their theoretical system. Such people were not only good at theory but were also good at embedding theory in real conditions and using it to explain real conditions, and also at supplementing and even revising it on the basis of practice whenever it broke down. Clearly Chen Duxiu did not meet the requirements for a theoretician" of that sort.

But that doesn't mean that he was in no sense a theoretician. In preparing and enacting the Revolution of 1911, in opposing Duan Qirui and leading the New Culture Movement, in setting up the CCP, and in leading the Revolution of 1925-27, he advanced original theories and wrote theoretical essays. Looking back on his life as a revolutionary, it is evident that during each of its successive periods his acute vision enabled him to grasp the main elements in the objective situation and to propose policies for dealing with it. Before the Revolution of 1911 he realized that "reform and modernisation" were no longer enough and that what was needed was "revolution," so he stopped supporting Kang Youwei and became a "rebel." After the defeat of the Revolution of 1911 and of the Second Revolution,478 he realized that the New Army, the secret societies, and armed activity were no longer the way forward, and that it was necessary to launch a direct onslaught on traditional morality and culture. So he set up a youth journal and attacked the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius that for more than two thousand years had ruled China. Unlike Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who carried out reforms under the cover of the "Late Texts School" or Zhang Binlin, who did the same under the cover of the "Old Texts School,"479 he preferred to assail Confucianism head-on. And he was right. The situation as it then was required precisely such an assault on the "Confucian shop": neither the Confucius of the Late Texts School nor the Confucius of the Old Texts School were capable of mobilizing young people. After the May Fourth Movement, Chen realized that cultural revolution by itself was not enough and that political revolution was called for, so he threw himself into building the Chinese Communist movement and gathered together like-minded people to found the CCP. From then on his views constantly diverged from those of the "China experts" in the Comintern's Far Eastern section. In 1926, after the Zhongshan Gunboat Incident, he immediately proposed that the CCP withdraw from the Guomindang and cooperate with it from the outside, but those same "China experts" disagreed. Constrained by discipline, he was unable to break completely and decisively with his opponents, as he had done with Hu Shi and his ilk in the later phases of the May Fourth Movement on whether or not to "talk politics."450 After the defeat of the so-called "Great Revolution" he clearly saw that the revolution had been defeated and that the blame for the defeat belonged to those self-same "China experts" and ultimately to Stalin, who had usurped power in the Soviet Union. But he was unable to understand precisely why Stalin wanted to deny that the revolution had been defeated and why Stalin imputed to him the Party's past mistakes. He mulled these questions over in his mind for more than a year, but he was still unable to resolve them. It was not until mid-1929, when he read Trotsky's articles, that the scales finally fell from his eyes.

Considering Chen Duxiu's life as a whole, the reason he could grasp the main elements in the situation, make a correct assessment of it, and settled on appropriate policies for dealing with it was because he had a clearer vision than his contemporaries, but it was also because objective conditions had by that time ripened so far that the main elements in the situation were starkly visible. Before then even the clearest vision would not have helped: only a systematic grasp of theory and of Marxism would have illuminated their hidden contours. But Chen Duxiu lacked such knowledge: he frequently understood things correctly and grasped the main elements in the situation, but he was unable to analyse them from the point of view of systematic theory or to discern them in a situation that had not yet ripened.

From the moment when they first embraced Trotskyist ideas, the Trotskyists in China have been divided by numerous theoretical disputes, and perhaps they still are even to this day.481

When we Chen Duxiu supporters first came across Trotsky's articles in May and June 1929, we did not become Trotskyists overnight. Our conversion must be considered as a process. The Chinese Revolution had already been defeated and the fault was Stalin's—we accepted these two points forthwith, for we thought the same. But there were other elements in Trotskyist theory that took longer to accept. One was the thesis that not feudal remnants but capitalist relations were predominant in China, that China had long been capitalistic, that China's backward rural economy was dominated by urban capitalism, and that Chinese society was already bourgeois; so the job of the Chinese Revolution was to expropriate the bourgeoisie, set up a dictatorship of the proletariat, coordinate with the revolution in other countries, and found a socialist society—in short, China's revolution (or rather, China's third revolution) would be proletarian-socialist. Only after a rather long period of reflection and debate did we each in our own time come round to this and other theses of Trotskyism. The speed and depth of conversion differed from person to person. Chen Duxiu held out longest and raised a host of differences in the course of his discussions with us (mainly with Yin Kuan and Peng Shuzhi). The debate was not just verbal but written, in the form of articles. Unfortunately these writings of Chen Duxiu have all been lost. According to what Yin Kuan told me, at the end of each separate discussion the Old Man would stick to his own opinions and oppose ours; but by the next meeting he would already have accepted our position and would raise new issues on the basis of it.

Finally, Chen accepted the thesis that Chinese society was already capitalist, that the cities controlled the villages, and that capitalism benefited from feudal exploitation. He made these views his own: they became a constituent element in his thinking. Using his rich knowledge of Chinese history, he explained the special function of Chinese commercial capital. He even used his philological knowledge of ancient Chinese to show that China had never known a slave society. This reminds me of an incident in late 1929, when Zhou Enlai and Xiang Zhongfa went to visit Chen in his house on Range Road. Just at that moment Peng Shuzhi came in. Chen's two guests got up, shook hands with Peng, and said hello. Peng then joined in the conversation. I don't know what they talked about, nor do I know the purpose of Zhou and Xiang's visit, but I do know either from Peng or Chen that at one point, there was a discussion about whether the towns dominated the villages or vice versa. As soon as Chen raised this question, Xiang replied without thinking that the villages dominated the towns. Zhou Enlai intervened in a conciliatory way to say that things were not quite so simple. Zhou Enlai, who knew more about society than Xiang, realized that Xiang was making a fool of himself. This incident happened just at the time when Chen Duxiu was coming over to Trotskyism. I don't believe that this was an expression of Chen's acceptance of Trotsky's analysis of the nature of Chinese society, for it's a truism that towns dominate villages, you don't need to be a Trotskyist to think that.452 It was simply a temporal coincidence. But right up to his death Chen never completely accepted the Trotskyist thesis on the nature of the Chinese Revolution and of revolutionary state power. He broadly embraced it, but he did so reluctantly, and rather less than whole-heartedly. Even as late as 1939 in his reply to Trotsky's letter he still criticized some Trotskyist comrades for saying that China's third revolution would be socialist from the outset. Actually, the comrades who sustained this thesis had correctly grasped Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, but Chen Duxiu failed to do so, right up to his death. There's a document (Chen's letter of 5 August 1929, to the Central Committee) in which Chen advances the thesis that the present Chinese Revolution is not bourgeois-democratic but what "Lenin in Russia had called a 'democratic revolution of the proletariat and peasantry."' This shows that Chen had already embraced Trotsky's thinking but was still wavering on the question of the nature of the revolution. When on 17 February 1930, Chen replied to the Comintern's telegram inviting him to Moscow, he proposed a "proletarian dictatorship" in opposition to the Central Committee's "democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants." That means that he had already solved the problem of how to define state power and, consequently, the nature of Chinese society. Finally, by 1938, the only problem he had still not solved was whether or not China's third revolution would be socialist from the start.

Yin Kuan and Peng Shuzhi, Chen's interlocutors in those days, also failed ever to understand Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.

Yin Kuan opposed our raising the question of the nature of Chinese society and its revolution in discussions with other comrades in the branch before we were expelled from it. In his view it was enough to discuss issues like whether the revolution was in ebb or in spate, who was to blame for its defeat, and the need under present circumstances to conduct the struggle by peaceful and legal means. He thought that it was scholastic and harmful to discuss the nature of society and of the revolution. Yin Kuan was a good writer, but I forget whether he wrote any articles on systematic theory. His position suggests to me that he did not properly grasp what Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution meant.

I had an argument with Peng Shuzhi at one of our branch meetings at which Chen and Peng were both present. This is what I said. The Chinese Revolution is in essence proletarian-socialist. From a theoretical point of view, the past defeats happened because the Chinese Revolution was viewed as bourgeois. Actually, my remark was a mere commonplace. In June 1922 in Paris I had already held this opinion when I and many other comrades launched the Communist Youth Party. In 1921, the programme adopted by the CCP at its First Congress also embodied this thesis. It said:

Our Party programme is as follows. (1) To overthrow the bourgeoisie with a revolutionary army of the proletariat and to rebuild the state with the toiling classes, until all class distinctions are abolished. (2) To introduce a dictatorship of the proletariat in order to achieve the goal of class struggle—an end to classes. (3) To destroy the system of bourgeois private property and to expropriate machines, land, factories, and the means of production, including semi-finished products. (4) To ally with the Third International.

Here is the passage Stalin quoted in his article "The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists":

Clearly the Russian Revolution of 1917 unfolded precisely in accordance with Trotsky's formula of permanent revolution.