(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.

Here I should add that the differences and disputes that arose between Lenin and Trotsky before the Revolution of 1917 evaporated after it, when the views of the two men tended to converge.

When Trotsky first advanced his theory of permanent revolution in 1905, he argued with Lenin on a whole series of questions. Trotsky thought that in a backward country like Russia the bourgeois-democratic revolution could only be completed if the proletariat controlled the state, but if the proletariat did control the state, then the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia would burst its historically prescribed bounds: proletarian state power would encroach deeply not only on the feudal but also on the bourgeois property system. Lenin, on the other hand, believed that Russia's bourgeois-democratic revolution could not exceed its histoncally prescribed bounds, and proletarian-socialist revolution could only begin after bourgeois-democratic revolution had been completed. These two revolutions could not become intertwined. So Lenin insisted on the slogan of workers and peasants' democratic dictatorship, and opposed the slogan of proletarian dictatorship. Lenin frequently wrote on this question. I shall quote just one or two instances.

In Chapter 10 of Two Tactics he said:

Our slogan—a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry—[recognises] the incontestably bourgeois nature of a revolution incapable of directly overstepping the bounds of a mere democratic revolution.489

In the same chapter he stressed that these two revolutions should not become confused and intertwined:

To confuse the petty bourgeoisie's struggle for a complete democratic revolution with the proletariat's struggle for a socialist revolution threatens the socialist with political bankruptcy. Marx's warning to this effect is quite justified. The reason:

In actual historical circumstances, the elements of the past become interwoven with those of the future; the two paths cross. Wage-labour with its struggle against private property exists under the autocracy as well; it arises even under serfdom. But this does not in the least prevent us from logically and historically distinguishing between the major stages of development. We all contrapose bourgeois revolution and socialist revolution; we all insist on the absolute necessity of strictly distinguishing between them; however, can it be denied that in the course of history individual, particular elements of the two revolutions become interwoven? Has the period of democratic revolutions in Europe not been familiar with a number of socialist movements and attempts to establish socialism? And will not the future socialist revolution in Europe still have to complete a great deal left undone in the field of democratism?490

Here Lenin admitted that the "the elements of the past become interwoven with those of the future," that "their paths cross," but only in order to emphasize that their main and essential components should not be allowed to do so. Lenin stuck to this opinion right through until 1917, on the eve of his return to Russia. On March 20 of that year, i.e., after Russia's February Revolution had already broken out, while preparing to return to Russia Lenin wrote in "Letters from Afar":

With these two allies, the proletariat, utilising the peculiarities of the present transition situation, can and will proceed, first, to the achievement of a democratic republic and complete victory of the peasantry over the landlords, instead of the Guchkov and Milyukov semi-monarchy, and then to socialism, which alone can give the war-weary people peace, bread and freedom.491

Right up to that point, Lenin had insisted that socialist revolution could only start when bourgeois revolution ended. The two revolutions must not be confused. Their main and essential components must not become intertwined. But after his return to Petrograd on 4 April, his views on the nature of the Russian Revolution changed. First, he abandoned the call for a "democratic republic" and started calling for a "commune state," meaning that power must be placed "in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants." Next, he started calling for the "confiscation of all landed estates" and for "the immediate amalgamation of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers' Deputies."492 This means that he wanted simultaneously to carry out bourgeois revolution and socialist revolution, simultaneously to encroach on the feudal and bourgeois property systems. "The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It," which he wrote five months later, put this same position even more clearly: "We are living in the twentieth century, and power over the land without power over the banks is not capable of regenerating, rejuvenating the life of the people."493 Here, the intertwining of the two revolutions is by no means just that of "elements," but concerns components as important and fundamental as the expropriation of the land and of the banks.

Finally, a few months after the October Revolution, Lenin once again wrote (in "New Times and Old Mistakes in an Old Guise"):494

Was the revolution a bourgeois revolution at that time? Of course it was, insofar as our function was to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution, insofar as there was as yet no class struggle among the "peasantry." But, at the same time, we accomplished a great deal over and above the bourgeois revolution for the socialist, proletarian revolution.

The revolution did not just go beyond its limit. Four years after the October Revolution Lenin said: The tasks of Russia's bourgeois revolution can only be resolved by proletarian-socialist revolution, and what's more the former will be resolved as a by-product of the latter. In "Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution" he said: "We solved the problems of the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution in passing, as a 'by-product' of our main and genuinely proletarian-revolutionary, socialist activities."495

Trotsky had only said that at the same time as encroaching on the feudal property system the revolution will encroach on the bourgeois property system. Lenin went one step further. He said that encroaching on the bourgeois property system was the main revolution, and encroaching on the feudal property system was a "by-product" of this main revolution, that it was achieved in passing.

In short, after Lenin's return to Russia in 1917, there were no longer any differences between him and Trotsky on how the Russian Revolution would develop.

After Lenin's death, Joffe (the same Joffe who signed the joint manifesto with Sun Yat-sen),496 a leader of the Trotskyist Opposition, committed suicide in the course of an intense struggle within the Soviet Party. Before doing so he wrote Trotsky a letter in which he recalled a conversation he had once had with Lenin where they had discussed Lenin's pre-1917 dispute on how the Russian Revolution would develop. Lenin had admitted that in the dispute Trotsky had been right and he himself had been wrong.

Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is inseparable from his "law of combined development." Lenin discovered the "law of uneven development" and used it to explain a great many things. Trotsky invented his "law of combined development" on the foundations of Lenin's discovery, and used it to explain even more things. Trotsky's law showed that a large number of so-called "transitional" periods in history are not simply "transitional" but constitute social systems in their own right. Past and future forms of development "combine" their special characteristics and so develop into a system. For example, the system of "autocratism" in modern European history produced by the "combination" of certain special features of capitalism with others of feudalism can endure for a comparatively long time and sustain its own special politics, culture, and thought. "Tsarism," the system that ruled Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was not only "transitional" but formed a rather integrated system in its own right, its special characteristic being that capitalism controlled the state by making use of feudal exploitation and feudal methods of rule. It's precisely because capitalism and feudalism developed in combination that the Russian Revolution could not first topple and expropriate the feudal system of ownership but had simultaneously to topple and expropriate the capitalist system of ownership. Many historical and practical problems are easily solved using Trotsky's law of combined development.

Another important dispute in the Chinese Trotskyist movement concerned the call for a National Assembly.

In "The Chinese Question after the Sixth Congress" Trotsky said that a democratic movement should be carried out in China, around the call for a National Assembly; slogans calling for socialism, proletarian dictatorship, and Soviets should be relegated to general propaganda. This proposal of Trotsky's is inseparable from his appraisal of the Chinese situation at the time. As a realist, he considered that the Chinese Revolution had already been defeated, that the revolution was at a low ebb, and that the tactics adopted by revolutionaries in such circumstances must differ from those used while the revolution is in flood.

In his reply to the Comintern dated 17 February 1930, Chen Duxiu quoted Lenin to the effect that in a period of reaction the revolutionary parties had to complete their education. They were learning how to attack. Now they had to realise that such knowledge must be supplemented with the knowledge of how to retreat in good order.497

It is sheer common sense that in a period of reaction, when the revolution is at a low ebb, revolutionaries should change their tactics. The tactics adopted by the Bolsheviks in the years between the defeat of the Revolution of 1905 and the relaunching of the revolution in 1917 are a case in point. But Trotsky's suggestion that Chinese revolutionaries should call for a National Assembly and employ the tactic of a democratic movement provoked a violent dispute among Chinese Trotskyists. The dispute, at first internal, gradually became public. Deng Yanda, who was just setting up his Third Party at that time, sent a car to fetch Gao Yuhan for talks, after which Gao reported back to Chen Duxiu. I, too, knew about it at the time, and though I've forgotten most of it, one thing sticks in my mind. Deng asked Gao why the Trotskyists called for a National Assembly when they thought that the Chinese Revolution was proletarian-socialist. He didn't understand, just as he didn't understand why the CCP adopted the tactic of Soviets andarmed struggle when according to them the Chinese Revolution was bourgeoisdemocratic. Actually, if Deng was clever enough to pose the question in this way, a moment's reflection should have told him the answer to it.

At their Sixth Congress the Chinese Communists reluctantly admitted that the revolution had been defeated and that it was at a low ebb, but in their heart of hearts they still believed that it was in flood or at the very least soon would be. Various measures that the Party took were premised in this belief. Otherwise how can we explain the so-called "Li Lisan line" of late 1930 or the "third left line" that ruled the CCP for four long years?498 The tactics that the CCP followed in those years were tactics appropriate to a period of revolutionary high tide.

Even some Chinese Trotskyists believed that the revolution was still in flood. They were convinced by Trotsky's ideas on basic issues in the Chinese Revolution, but they did not accept his estimate of the situation in China. Before the unification talks started, I came across a mimeographed copy of Our Word on a bookstall at the intersection of North Sichuan Road and Range Road. Flicking through it, I noticed that the lead article stressed that the revolution was at high tide. Needless to say, people who believed that could hardly accept Trotsky's proposal for a National Assembly, and even if they did, it would be contrary to their convictions. They would attach all sorts of bizarre interpretations to the slogan. As far as I know, this view was not represented in the Proletarian group.

Some other Chinese Trotskyists believed that the next revolutionary high tide was distant and uncertain, that China's bourgeois state would probably enjoy a long period of stability, and that the present system of military dictatorship would gradually give way to parliamentary democracy, which in their view would be long-lasting. Naturally, these people, whose main representative was said to be Liu Renjing, welcomed the call for a National Assembly.

Between these two extremes came a variety of nuances. In short, most people did not grasp the need to distinguish between strategy and tactics, between propaganda and agitation, between the revolution in flood and at ebb. They thought that the call for a National Assembly was incompatible with the socialist character of the Chinese Revolution, and that this slogan and the slogan calling for Soviet state power were mutually exclusive.

A large number of people wrote to Trotsky reporting on this controversy. I still remember one passage in Trotsky's reply where he warned against absolutely counterposing the two slogans. He said that generally speaking in a period of reflux we should use the National Assembly slogan to mobilize the masses and to bring on the high tide. But we can't rule out that with the masses on the rise and a National Assembly elected and leading the revolution, it might be possible in the name of the National Assembly to proclaim China a Soviet Republic!

Even today people still ask why Trotsky proposed calling for a National Assembly, and what role this slogan played in the history of the Chinese Revolution. I have already explained its active meaning; as for the actual role this slogan played in China's recent history, all I can say is that the Chinese Trotskyists, whose job it was to give full scope to the slogan in its positive sense, were in no position to do so, battered as they were from two directions at the same time: by the Guomindang, which was out to destroy their bodies, and by the CCP, which was out to destroy their souls. So the slogan was monopolized by the Guomindang, which employed it in its passive and counterrevolutionary sense.

(5) CHEN DUXIU AND THE TROTSKYISTS

Was or was not Chen Duxiu a Trotskyist?

This is one of the hardest questions currently facing students of contemporary Chinese history and people who wish to study and grasp the present political situation in China. Chen's role in Chinese and world history can never be rubbed out. The old slanders against him cannot be upheld.

Just think of the picture of Chen Duxiu painted by several generations of political commentators! An opportunist who buried the Great Revolution, a renegade, a national traitor, a paid agent of the Guomindang, a counterrevolutionary, and so on. The founder of the CCP, elected its top leader at five successive congresses, was that sort of man? Some people even go so far as to claim that the leader of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 was not Chen Duxiu but someone else.499

Finally, there is the question of the Trotskyists. The Comintern taboo has already been broken; but the taboo on Trotskyism remains, and people carry on repeating—as they have been doing for decades now—that the international Trotskyists and the Chinese Trotskyists are counterrevolutionaries. So how come Chen Duxiu, leader of May Fourth and founder of the CCP, got mixed up with this counterrevolutionary political organization?

Some people say that he was only influenced intellectually by Trotsky and that he didn't join the Trotskyist organization.

Some people say that he joined the Trotskyist organization but broke with it after the Guomindang arrested him.

Some people say that after his release from the Guomindang gaol he declared that he was not a Trotskyist, i.e., that he broke with the Trotskyist organization, and that after that there is no evidence that he had anything more to do with the Trotskyists.

Some people say that when he joined the Trotskyist organization the Trotskyist question was still a contradiction among the people,502 and that by the time the Trotskyists had become a bunch of murderers and foreign spies he had already broken with them.

Some people say that he gave up his Trotskyist ideas a few years before he died.

And so on.

Naturally, there are also people who know full well that the Trotskyists are anything but counterrevolutionary and that Chen Duxiu's conversion to Trotskyism and his membership of the Trotskyist organization were an organic outcome of his entire intellectual development. But they still don't dare say so in public.

In my view, there is no longer any need for me today to defend Chen Duxiu against the charge that he was an "opportunist," that he was to blame for the defeat of the revolution, or that he was a "counterrevolutionary," a "renegade," an "agent," a "running dog of the Guomindang," and a "national traitor." I simply wish to explain the facts and meaning of his relationship to the Trotskyists, and to say that any attempt to research his life and thought that tries to bypass this relationship is as self-deceiving as the stupid thief who in trying to steal a bell plugs his own ears in the hope that no one will hear it ringing.

The membership of the CCP is far in excess of ours, but they're just armed forces with intellectuals but without any working-class base at all. We have fewer than fifty people in Shanghai and Hongkong, plus probably more than one hundred stragglers in other parts of the country.

Needless to say, we do not fool ourselves that we will grow quickly in this war, but if we had pursued more or less right tactics, we would not be in our present feeble state. From the very start our group tended toward ultra-left positions.... A small closed-door ultra-left organisation of this sort obviously stands no chance of winning members; and even if It did, it would be an obstacle to the further development of the Chinese Revolution....

We should beware of perpetuating the illusion that we can only restart our activities after the recovery of territories now occupied by the Japanese. Even today, while Japan continues to occupy parts of our country, we should prepare forthwith to start work afresh, within the narrow space that remains open to us....

If ultra-leftists who stay aloof from the masses and the real struggle . . continue to brag and pretend to be big leaders, to organise leadership bodies that lack all substance, and to found petty kingdoms for themselves behind closed doors and relying on the name of the Fourth International, they will achieve nothing beyond the tarnishing of the Fourth International's prestige in China.

Ask yourself, are those the words of someone who has placed himself outside the Chinese Trotskyist organization?

At the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Chen Duxiu became so angry that he said things in letters to his friends that went beyond the limit of what is permissible, but it would be wrong to take that as proof that he had broken with Trotskyism.

I have in my possession an article he wrote on 13 May 1942, a fortnight or so before his death. The article, called "The Future of Oppressed Peoples," shows that he remained a Trotskyist to his dying day. Here are some excerpts from it.

So in my opinion, in a capitalist-imperialist world, no small or weak people can hope for a future so long as it tries only behind closed doors, relying only on its own small forces, to remove the reality of imperialist aggression. Its only hope lies with oppressed toilers the world over. The national question will automatically be resolved if the oppressed, backward peoples unite, overthrow imperialism everywhere, and replace the old world of international capitalism based on commodity deals with a new world of international socialism based on mutual help and a division of labour.503

This passage shows that right up to his death Chen Duxiu continued to stand on the side of Trotsky's world revolution and rejected Stalin's idea of socialism in one country.

The article also says:

Some people vilify the Soviet Union of the early period, whereas we support it; others flatter the Soviet Union of the later period, whereas we detest it. There's a very big difference between these two periods. In the former period the Soviet Union stood for world revolution; in the latter, for Russian national self-interest. Ever since the Soviet leaders first betrayed their own cause after the setback to the revolution in Western Europe and abandoned the policy of putting world revolution to the fore, replacing it instead with Russian national self-interest, clear-thinking people in all countries have gradually progressed from scepticism to disappointment; and though some still think that the hope for mankind lies with the Soviet Union, in reality they can only view it as one among a number of world powers. People who stubbornly insist on calling it socialist only besmirch the name of socialism.

This passage, too, supports Trotsky and opposes Stalin. The difference is that Trotsky still considered the "Soviet Union of the later period" to be a "degenerated workers' state," whereas Chen Duxiu denounced it point-blank as a one of the "world powers." It's a fact that the "Soviet Union of the later period" had already degenerated into "social-imperialism"; it had started to degenerate from the time of Stalin onwards.

So Chen Duxiu remained a Trotskyist till his dying day, from both an organizational and a theoretical point of view.

Looking back, the main "injustices, frame-ups, and mistakes"504 were the show-trials of the 1930s, which practically wiped out a generation of revolutionaries. Even today the victims of these trials are treated with contempt. First they must be rehabilitated.

Needless to say, I am not speaking from a juridical point of view. Only a Soviet court, under the control of the Communist Party, can judicially rehabilitate these victims—the so-called "Trotskyites," "Zinovievites," and "Bukharinites." I am speaking only from the point of view of historical fact. From the point of view of history, i.e., from the point of view of the overwhelming majority of knowledgeable people in the world, these victims have long since been rehabilitated. Just a short time ago the new Pope John Paul 11 rehabilitated Galileo, but for the past several hundred years there can hardly have been anyone still convinced by the charges against Galileo. Today probably only a handful of people in the world still believe the Moscow verdicts against the "Trotskyites."

A footnote in Mao Zedong's Selected Works quotes Stalin as follows:

In the past, seven or eight years ago, Trotskyism was one of such political

trends in the working class, an anti-Leninist trend, it is true, and there

fore profoundly mistaken, but nevertheless a political trend.... Present

day Trotskyism is not a political trend in the working class, but a gang

without principle and without ideas, of wreckers and diversionists, intel

ligence service agents, spies, murderers, a gang of sworn enemies of the

working class, working in the pay of the intelligence services of foreign

states.500

Stalin said this in 1937, in the period of the Moscow show-trials. But on what grounds did Stalin claim that the Trotskyists were "agents, spies, murderers"? True, Vishkinsky, who was in charge of investigations, came up with all sorts of "criminal evidence," but this "evidence" has already been systematically rebutted by the Dewey Committee. This Committee published two volumes of findings to show that the charges were groundless, and it declared Trotsky innocent. Dewey apart, other evidence has accumulated over the past forty or more years that I would like to mention.

According to Stalin, Trotsky's two biggest crimes were to assassinate Kirov and to spy for the Gestapo in order to help plot Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union.

First the assassination of Kirov. Even at the time Trotsky came up with evidence to show that Stalin himself killed Kirov to frame the then Opposition, but this evidence did not have much impact. More than twenty years later, Stalin's successor Khrushchev, at the Twenty Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, proved that Kirov had indeed been killed by Stalin. Recently twenty letters by Stalin's daughter Svetlana were published in China. In one of them Svetlana denies Khrushchev's allegation and says that Kirov was killed not by Stalin but by Beria. Whatever the case, in today's world, including in the Soviet Union, no one—or at least hardly anyone—any longer believes that Kirov was killed by Zinoviev and Trotsky.

Stalin also killed Tukhashevski, Blucher, and two other Red Army generals on trumped-up charges of having secret dealings with the Nazis and plotting to betray the Soviet Union. But at the Twenty Second Congress Khrushchev declared these allegations, too, to be Stalin's fabrications. Stalin had first forged them and then surreptitiously leaked them to President Benes of Czechoslovakia. Benes, believing them to be true, secretly informed Stalin, who imposed death sentences on the basis of them.

This is just one piece of "evidence" among many. After the Second World War, when the Allies tried the Nazis for war crimes at Nuremberg, some well-known people led by H. G. Wells wrote to the Tribunal asking it to produce from among its vast files evidence of Trotskyist collaboration with the Nazis. It couldn't.

For the time being I'll restrict myself to just these three points. There is a mountain of evidence to show that the charges levelled against the Trotskyists at the Moscow show trials were groundless, and another mountain of evidence produced by the Dewey Committee. Today researchers can investigate whether or not this evidence substantiates Stalin's charges against the Trotskyists.

As for the Trotskyist organization in China, there is ample evidence to clear its name. It has already been shown that Chen Duxiu and Luo Han did not act via Tang Youren as paid agents for Japanese intelligence, but the strange thing is that people still believe that the Chinese Trotskyists did. It has been proved that Chen Duxiu was not a Guomindang agent or a running dog of Chiang Kai-shek, but people still think that the Chinese Trotskyists were. The charges against Chen Duxiu were unable to stand up under scrutiny. But what is the evidence against the organization of the Chinese Trotskyists? Can it stand up under scrutiny?

Appendix (ii)

Interviews with Wang Fanxi

on Tang Baolin's History of

[Editor's Note: One of the only two people still alive in a position to correct and refute, on the basis of personal knowledge and experience, the various mistakes and unfair allegations in Tang's book is Wang Fanxi. The following comments by Wang, divided into nine separate points, are based on interviews with him held on 29 and 31 May 1995. For a more detailed and systematic review (in Chinese) of Tang's book and a correction of further important errors and misrepresentations, see Wang's forthcoming article, which will probably appear in Shiyue pinglun (October Review), published from GPO Box 10144 in Hongkong.

The only other person in a position to respond knowledgeably to all Tang's claims and charges is the Trotskyist Zheng Chaolin. Unfortunately Zheng, born in 1901, can no longer see well enough to subject Tang's book to thorough critical scrutiny, but he was able, with the help of a tape recording, a magnifying glass, and an enlarged photocopy of the text, to read chapters 5 and 6. Through Wang Fanxi, I obtained a copy of the resulting review, which runs to some sixteen pages, transcribed on Zheng's behalf by a copyist.507

In the most recent issue of the Japanese journal Torotsukii kenkyu (Trotsky Studies), Tang Baolin describes himself as Zheng's literary agent and "firm friend."508 One can surmise such "friendship" could hardly have outlived a reading of Tang's book, whose smears and jibes Zheng angrily repudiates in his review.

"This is a bad book," he writes, summarizing the "unanimous" opinion of other veteran Trotskyist survivors in Shanghai. "It is an anti-Trotskyist screed that turns facts upside down and concocts untruths in order to vilify the Trotskyists It should be severely criticized and rebutted." It is, he concludes, "the final repercussion of the anti-Trotskyist movement brought back to China from Moscow by (the arch-Stalinists) Kang Sheng and Wang Ming (in 1937)."

Zheng Chaolin's indignation is most fired by his "friend's" practice of using depositions made during the Cultural Revolution by Mao's Trotskyist prisoners as "evidence." He points out that on the basis of similar "confessions" by some of China's best-known writers gaoled in the 1960s, all sorts of discreditable theories could be mounted and that many of those (like Fu Lei, father of the pianist Fu Ts'ong) who refused to incriminate themselves or others by means of such depositions were driven to commit suicide.

Leon Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution can be understood in two related senses: "vertically," meaning that in economically backward countries, the bourgeoisie is incapable of carrying out bourgeois revolution, so the bourgeois and socialist stages of revolution are telescoped and carried out under the leadership of the proletariat; and "horizontally," meaning that "the completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable.... The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena."

Tang Baolin in his book does not elaborate much on permanent revolution in its vertical aspect, and he completely misunderstands it in its horizontal sense. He confuses permanent revolution with the export of revolution through military intervention, an idea wholly at odds with Trotsky's theory. Trotsky was not in principle opposed to assisting revolutions that might break out in other countries, even by sending troops to help the revolutionaries. But he was prepared to do so only under strict conditions. In a famous article on military doctrine published in 1921, he wrote:

In the gigantic class struggle unfolding today, the role of military intervention from the outside can acquire only a supplementary, contributory, auxiliary significance. Military intervention can hasten the culmination and facilitate the victory. But this cannot occur unless the revolution is mature not only with regard to social relations—and this condition is already fulfilled—but also with regard to political consciousness. Military intervention may be likened to the forceps of an obstetrician, which if applied in time can reduce the birth pangs, but if brought into play prematurely can produce only a miscarriage.509

Tang Baolin gives two alleged examples of permanent revolution in the sense of the export of revolution through military intervention. In 1919, he says, Trotsky personally proposed leading thirty or forty thousand cavalry to India; and in 1923, he wanted to "send the regular Red Army to Germany under his personal command to ignite the fire of proletarian revolution in Europe." Both examples are groundless.

In fact, in early 1919, no real Red Army yet existed in Russia. The old Tsarist army had been dissolved, and the Red Army had to be created on the basis of armed workers and peasants. Trotsky set up the Red Army from scratch, and commanded it in Russia's civil war. Nineteen nineteen was the most dangerous year in that war. How could Trotsky have sent thirty or forty thousand cavalry to India? Furthermore, in 1919 there was no revolution in India to support.

The story about Germany is equally far-fetched. True, there were revolutionary crises in Germany in 1923, and controversies about the German Revolution took place, mainly among Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Trotsky. However, none of these people proposed "sending the Red Army to Germany to ignite the revolution in Europe."

COMMON ACTION AND THE UNITED FRONT

For Stalin and the Stalinists, there was no difference between the "united front" (sometimes called "popular front") and common action. On the relationship between communists and bourgeois, petit bourgeois, and other workingclass parties, the Stalinists knew only two attitudes: join them uncritically and slavishly subordinate yourself to them; or indiscriminately attack, denounce, and persecute them. They never understood the tactic of common action by means of which a revolutionary party could, might, and even had to maintain a certain relationship with petit bourgeois (and in special cases even bourgeois) parties and working-class organizations, in order to achieve some specific progressive purpose, while at the same time preserving its organizational and political independence.

In the early 1930s in Germany, the Stalinists called the German socialdemocrats "social-fascists" and considered them (rather than the rising Nazis) to be the main enemy; they refused to enter into common action with the social-democrats, as Trotsky was then urging them to do. Their refusal greatly helped the triumph of the Hitlerites. After the Nazis came to power, the Stalinists executed a 180 degree turn, in order to fight nazism and fascism.

At this point, they formed the "popular front," which in fact represented a capitulation, both ideologically and organizationally, not only to the reformist parties, which they had only yesterday considered the "main enemy" but also to bourgeois parties.

Trotskyists everywhere, including in China, always opposed the united front in its Stalinist sense, for example between 1924 and 1927 and, again, during the Sino-apanese War of 1937-1945. But they did not oppose common action with petit bourgeois parties and politicians, as long as such action was undertaken for a specific, progressive purpose and for a limited period of time. In the course of such common action, the workers' party had to retain its independence of operation, plan, and idea. (It is true, though, as Chen Duxiu himself pointed out, that Chinese Trotskyists committed some sectarian errors while carrying out this sort of common action.)

Even though Tang Baolin seems to understand the distinction betw.een united front and common action, he still argues that because we Trotskyists opposed the united front, we also opposed common action. However, Trotskyists did join and support the anti-Japanese resistance, though we did so under our own banner and while retaining our own program and the right to criticize other political parties.

On this very point, Trotsky defended Chen Duxiu against Liu Renjing in 1932, when Liu, adopting an ultraleft position, accused Chen of opportunism for favoring common action with the Guomindang's Nineteenth Route Army in the defense of Shanghai against the Japanese.

In a discussion with Harold Isaacs held on 8 August 1935, Trotsky's position, as recorded by Isaacs, was as follows:

On the problem of the united front with the bourgeoisie: Trotsky did not believe Liu Jen-ching's [Liu Renjing's] conclusion that Chten Tuhsiu [Chen Duxiu] has become an opportunist. He thinks that Liu's argument was undialectical and that it tended to throw around ambiguous terminology. For instance, Trotsky thinks there should be a distinction between "united fronts" and "common action."

On 9 August, Isaacs's record continues:

To resume yesterday's discussion, Trotsky read my draft and pointed out a few weaknesses on the first page. He felt that my analysis of the different layers of the bourgeoisie and their subjective and objective viewpoints was insufficient and undialectical. He said that if we used such a pat formula, we would tend to be dogmatic and opportunist. He emphasized:

"Common action, especially a short-term common action, is one thing, but capitulation to the bourgeoisie in the form of a permanent 'united front' such as the French Popular Front is another. They are entirely different. It is good to keep our organization completely independent; but the heart of the matter is how to use this independence. We should continually carry out 'common action' with the students' and peasants' organizations." (Emphasis added.)5',

CHEN DUXIU'S 'MISTAKE'

According to Tang Baolin, Chen Duxiu came to Trotskyism "by mistake." In reality, however, Chen's Trotskyism was the logical culmination of his thinking about democracy, imperialism, and socialism, and grew from his own bitter experience of the defeat, as a result of Stalin's misdirection, of the Revolution of 1925-1927. Tang's theory is a Maoist rehash of the liberal philosopher Hu Shi's argument that Chen Duxiu became a communist by mistake, after leaving Beijing University and the company of his old friends. Chen Duxiu's last four articles, written shortly before he died in 1942, are socialist and internationalist in content; in essence, they are still Trotskyist.s~2 So it is wrong to say that Chen Duxiu went over to Trotskyism by mistake and later reawakened to bourgeois democracy.

DOUBLE STANDARDS

Tang Baolin neither sympathizes with nor approves of the persecution of Stalin's critics and opponents in the Moscow trials. In China, too, the accusation of Trotskyism was, according to Tang, wrongly levelled at a number of innocent people, including Yu XiusongS'3 and Wang Shiwei.st4 However, Tang goes on to give credence to confessions extracted by compulsion and under "scientific interrogation" from young Trotskyists arrested in China in 1952; these confessions were then used to convict the deponents and their comrades of political crimes. (On the basis of analogous confessions obtained in the 1930s by the Soviet GPU, one could, of course, conclude that Zinoviev, Bukharin, and company were Hitler agents—but only at the cost of being thought insane.)

Much of the evidence that Tang selects from these confessions is quite bizarre and concerns various alleged instances (of a sort originally imputed to us by the Moscow-trained Stalinists Wang Ming and Kang Sheng in the 1930s and long since discounted by serious historians even in China) of Trotskyist collusion with Guomindang politicians, police agents, and the Japanese. For example, on the basis of depositions made in 1973 (six years before the Trotskyists' release from gaol, and twenty-one years after their arrest) by the imprisoned Ye Chunhua, the Trotskyist Peng Shuzhi is said to have colluded with the senior Nationalist politician Sun Ke (i.e., Sun Fo), the son of Sun Yat-sen, who was supposedly particularly interested after the war in the fortunes of Peng s journal Qiuzhen (Seek the Truth); Peng is also said to have tried to meet Sun Ke in Guangzhou while leaving China for Hongkong in 1949; Zhang Shu, a Trotskyist renegade who became a senior police officer in Shanghai, is said to have protected us; and it is suggested (with scandalous implications) that I and Zheng Chaolin felt safe under the Japanese in occupied Shanghai at the time of the arrest of the Trotskyist martyr Chen Qichang.515

Regarding the "evidence" provided by Ye Chunhua about Peng Shuzhi's alleged collusion with Sun Ke, Zhang Shu's alleged protection of us, and my and Zheng Chaolin's supposed sense of security under the ]apanese, Ye admitted to Zheng Chaolin after his and Zheng's release from prison in 1979 that he had simply told his inquisitors what they wanted to hear; he had been a mere boy of thirteen in Wenzhou at the time of the events and could not have known what he claimed to know.516

Tang Baolin does not accept Wang Ming's and Kang Sheng's accusation that Chen Duxiu and the Chinese Trotskyists acted as paid agents of Japanese imperialism. However, he does appear to believe that the Chinese Trotskyists (though not Chen Duxiu) objectively, if not subjectively, played into the hands of the Japanese invaders. He accuses the Chinese Trotskyists of adopting a defeatist policy toward the Chinese side in the Sino-Janese War. He also accuses them of adopting a defeatist policy toward the Chinese Communist Party during the civil war between it and the Guomindang.

He labels the Chinese Trotskyists as "ultra-leftist and reactionary." In fact, he fails to understand (or deliberately misunderstands) the Chinese Trotskyist view on the Sino-Janese War; in particular, he misrepresents the meaning of revolutionary defeatism.

The policy of the Chinese Trotskyists on the Sino-Japanese War was based on Trotsky's analysis, which was stated as follows:

In my declaration to the bourgeois press, I said that the duty of all the workers' organizations of China was to participate actively and in thefront lines of the present war against Japan, without abandoning, for a single moment, their own program and independent activity....

Is this policy defeatist or defensist? There is no simple answer to such a question. In marxist politics, and in the vocabulary of marxism, this policy of Trotsky's was completely new. It was not simply a form of traditional defensism, nor was it an example of revolutionary defeatism as formulated by Lenin in the First World War. Aiming to transform the war against the foreign invaders into a revolution to replace the leadership of the resistance war and thereby to assure the victory of the war against the foreign enemy—this policy was much nearer to revolutionary defeatism than to defensism. Yet there is a big difference between Lenin's revolutionary defeatism and Trotsky's position on China's resistance war against Japanese imperialism, for the latter was not indifferent to the fate of the war but regarded the revolution within as a guarantee (though not a prerequisite) of victory in the war without.

So in retrospect, I wrote that the position on the Sino-Janese War taken by Trotsky and followed by us can more properly be called "revolutionary victoryism" than defeatism.

(Here I won't touch on the differences among Chinese Trotskyists on this question.)520

What I have said should, I think, be enough to disprove Tang Baolin's charge that the Chinese Trotskyists objectively served the interests of Japanese imperialism.

Trotsky and the Chinese Trotskyists' policy of victoryism was thought out from the fact that the Sino-Japanese War was part of the aftermath of the defeat of the Revolution of 1925-1927; it was premised in the assumption that the corrupted and compromising Guomindang regime could not really defeat the Japanese and that the surest, safest way of doing so was to

organize the workers and peasants under their own political banner. (After all, that part of the Guomindang led by Wang Jingwei had stopped resisting and become Japanese puppets, while the wing led by Chiang Kai-shek had all along vacillated and sought better conditions under which to surrender.)

Tang Baolin's other charge, that the Chinese Trotskyists adopted a defeatist policy toward the Chinese Communist Party during the civil war of 1945-1949, is wholly without substance.

THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

Tang Baolin fails to grasp why the Chinese Trotskyists called for a National Assembly after 1927. According to him, we Trotskyists from the very beginning suffered under the illusion that the Chinese Communist Party could conquer power by mobilizing the urban workers in a movement for a National Assembly. The truth is, however, that the Trotskyists raised the call for a National Assembly only in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in 1927, at a time when Stalin (contending that the revolution was still in the ascendant) was calling for soviets and armed risings.

According to Tang Baolin, the Chinese Trotskyists' concentration on the urban proletariat and the call for a National Assembly led them to ignore the struggle of the peasants; as a result, their project was doomed. Mao Zedong, in contrast, succeeded because he led the peasants in armed struggle under the banner of the Chinese Soviet. Tang seems not to know that in 1928, Mao complained that because the Chinese Communist Party lacked democratic slogans, he was unable to rouse the peasants. He also forgets that in 1937, at the time of the Second United Front, the party started campaigning for a National Assembly.

"SLAVES OF A FOREIGN MASTER"

Tang Baolin, conveniently forgetting the role played in the fortunes of the official party by "Moscow gold" and foreigners like Sneevliet, Borodin, Voitinski, Roy, Pavel Mif, and Otto Braun, attempts to smear the Chinese Trotskyists as "slaves of a foreign master" on the grounds that, in December 1935, they elected the British-born Frank Glass (alias Li Furen) as secretary-cum-treasurer of their organization. According to Tang Baolin,

A political party that receives foreign subsidies, and furthermore elects a foreigner as its leader, will scarcely find general acceptance and may even be denounced as "national traitors," "capitulationists," "slaves," "tools," and the like. Yet the Trotskyists, who see internationalism as their highest principle and world revolution as their mission, consider such behavior appropriate.

Tang can sustain his thesis that Frank Glass "led" the Chinese Trotskyists only by ignoring and suppressing my comment, recorded in the conference minutes (which Tang was able to consult), that the job given to Frank Glass should be considered "technical," not political. The minutes (in English) are quite explicit on this point:

Chen Chi-chang [Chen Qichang]—During this time it is important that the Secretary[-Treasurer]522 of the Standing Committee should be able to bring about unity between all the members of the committee. Therefore it is better that CFG [Frank Glass] should be the secretary.

Discussion on the character of the secretary—that is whether the secretary is really the political spokesman or whether his tasks are primarily of a technical nature such as writing letters, keeping minutes, etc.

Wang Ming-yuen [Wang Fanxi] says the position of secretary should be regarded as one for performing technical tasks, and not as one which carries with it the deciding of the political line of the party.523

My proposal regarding the position of secretary was approved by all those in attendance at the conference.574

We Chinese Trotskyists viewed the post of secretary in much the same way as had the Bolsheviks under Lenin. For the Bolsheviks, it was a position to which no one attached any great importance; it "could have only a technical character, never political."525 The view of the secretaryship as political was a post-Leninist invention of Stalin (the post's first "political" occupant) and the Stalinists. Far from being the Chinese Trotskyists' political leader, Glass was our technical administrator.576

In effect, Glass's role during his fifteen months as administrator of the Chinese Trotskyist organization was twofold. He was our de facto treasurer, a sensible "technical" appointment, given that he was the main source of our income at the time; and he was our correspondent with, and letter box for, foreign Trotskyists overseas.527 After Glass left Shanghai, for a short time Jack Belden (who was not himself a Trotskyist but a friend of Glass) took over from Glass this role as letter box. (As far as I remember, I received mail on only one occasion through Belden.)

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

According to Tang Baolin, the Chinese Revolution of 1925-1927 would have been defeated under whatever leadership, even if it had followed the advice of Trotsky. The reaction, including the right wing of the Guomindang (says Tang Baolin), was too strong, the Chinese Communist Party was too immature, and the revolution as a whole had not yet ripened. So the disputes between Stalin and Trotsky regarding the Chinese Revolution were a tragi-comedy, or a farce; and the child of those disputes—the Chinese Trotskyist movement—was disfigured and disabled.

Neither I nor Tang Baolin has any way of knowing how the revolution would have ended if its leaders had pursued other policies. However, even if the party had suffered a defeat under Trotsky's political line, the perspective before it after the defeat would have been quite different. Its members are unlikely to have felt disillusioned and deceived, as did many after the events of 1927; and the party might have effected the switch to independence and opposition more quickly, more smoothly, more confidently, and at less cost in human life. (How many excellent revolutionaries died in the period of adventurism!) The reentry into politics of the working class might have been sooner; under new revolutionary democratic slogans, the party might have been able more easily to rebuild its organization in the cities.

In the case of a Japanese invasion, and Chinese involvement in world war, the workers, peasants, and urban toilers might have played a more independent role and brought about the Third Chinese Revolution with less pain and sacrifice.

Most important of all, the new regime that issued from such a revolution would not have been despotic and bureaucratic but would have been genuinely internationalist, more inclined toward the proletariat, less influenced by peasant prejudice, and prepared to tolerate freedom of thought and creative activity of all sorts.

China would have been spared preposterous, whimsical, and highly destructive schemes like the People's Communes and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

On 22 December 1952, all the Trotskyists in China were arrested and put in prison. Tang Baolin says, "The People's Government of China adopted a different policy toward those that it arrested from that followed by the Government of the USSR. It did not physically destroy them, but educated and reformed them, and treated them humanely." He singles out the cases of Yin Kuan and Zheng Chaolin, who were (he says) frequently sent by the prison authorities for health check-ups and given better food—one or two shreds of meat three times a week.

Yet, says Tang, those Trotskyists who fled to Hongkong before and after the Chinese Communist Party took over the whole of the country continue their anticommunist counterrevolutionary activities. As examples of such activities, Tang specifically mentions my memoirs and my study on Mao Zedong thought.525 "These two books," he writes, "summed up Wang's and the Chinese Trotskyists' knowledge about Trotskyism and the Chinese Revolution; they also represent the consummation of the attack on Mao thought and the Chinese Communist Party." Of the revolutionary optimism expressed in my memoirs, Tang writes: "It would seem that history will continue to play jokes on the Chinese Trotskyists until the very end."

It is true that Mao and the Maoists dealt with the Trotskyists in a different way from Stalin and his Chinese disciples Wang Ming and Kang Sheng. But the difference is of degree, not principle. To persecute political OppOsitionists is incompatible with bourgeois democracy, let alone socialist democracy To put political oppositionists in prison for twenty-seven years can never be called "humane," however well they are treated.

I don't know how many Chinese Trotskyists died in gaol, but many did either by execution or owing to the intolerable conditions under which they were forced to live. I do know that my two nephews committed suicide, one in prison, the other immediately after his release, and that the young Trotskyist Lian Zhengyan was shot in Wenzhou.

BIOGRAPHICAL LIST

The Chinese names in this list of Chinese Trotskyists and their supporters and other people mentioned in the text or in Zheng Chaolin's appended essay are given in Hanyu Pinyin transcription; the Wade-Giles transcription is added in brackets where it differs from the Hanyu Pinyin transcription.

An Fu. A leader of the Chinese Trotskyists in Moscow. Arrested in 1930 and executed by the GPU. Alias: Vitin.

Cai Yuanpei (Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei) (1868-1940). A veteran Guomindang leader and important liberal educationalist. Sponsored the New Culture Movement around 1919 in his capacity (between 1916 and 1926) as chancellor of Beijing University. He founded and became president of the Academia Sinica.

Chen Bilan (Ch'en Pi-lan) (1902-87). Joined the League of Socialist Youth in 1922 and the Communist Party in 1923. Sent to Moscow to study in 1924 and returned to China one year later. Active in the women's movement. Became a Trotskyist together with Chen Duxiu in 1929. Self-exiled at the end of 1948, first to Hongkong, then to Vietnam, France, and the United States; finally, she went to Hongkong, where she died. The wife of Peng Shuzhi. Alias: Bi Yun.

Chen Qisonian (Ch'en Ch'iao-nien) (1902-28). Chen Duxiu's second son.

Joined the party in 1922 in France and studied in Moscow. Elected onto the Central Committee in 1927. Arrested and executed by Chiang Kai-shek in the spring of 1928, by which time he had become head of the Organisational Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee.

Chen Qichang (Ch'en Ch'i-ch'ang) (1901-43). A Beijing student leader and a member of the middle-ranking cadre of the CCP after 1925. Turned to Trotskyism in 1929, and became a leader of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. Arrested and executed by Japanese gendarmerie. Aliases: Chen Qingchen Jiang Weiliang; Chen Zhongshan.

Chen Yannian (Ch'en Yen-nien) (1899-1927). The eldest son of Chen Duxiu and a founder of the European Branch of the CCP. Secretary of the Southern China Regional Committee of the party until 1926. Then secretary of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee. Executed by Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai in May 1927.

Chen Yimou (Ch'en I-mou) (1907-31). See under Ou Fang.

Chen Zhongxi (Ch'en Chung-hsi) (1908-43). A Hongkong worker, who joined the Trotskyists in 1930. As a Communist, he led an armed peasant struggle in Zhongshan county, Guangdong, toward the end of 1927. He was organizer of the Hongkong Trotskyists in the mid-1930s and led an anti-Japanese guerrilla unit in Zhongshan during the War of Resistance. Died in battle around 1943.

Deng Yanda (Ten" Yen-ta) (1895-1931). Director of the General Political Department of the Northern Expedition, a leader of the left Guomindang, and an opponent of Chiang Kai-shek. In July 1927 he resigned from the Wuhan Government in protest against its decision to expel the Communists. He was arrested and executed by Chiang Kai-shek in 1931 because of his launching of the Third Party and his activities against Chiang's Nanjing Government.

Dong Biwu (Tuna Pi-wu) (1886-1975). Veteran Communist and Central Committee member after 1945. Vice-head of state. Member of the Politburo after 1966.

Dong Yixiang (Tuna I-hsiang). Writer and veteran Communist. Framed by Wang Ming in Xinjiang in 1927 together with Yu Xiusong and others as a "Trotskyist" and sent back to the USSR, where he was executed.

Fan Jinbiao (Fan Chin-piao) (1904-?). A leader of the Zhejiang student movement, he participated in the Northern Expedition as a political commissar and afterward as a leader of the peasant movement in Zhejiang. He became a leader of the Chinese Trotskyists in Moscow and was arrested there and sent to Siberia. He had been rehabilitated by 1955, when he returned to China. Aliases: Fan Wenhui; Alexei Makarovich Forel; Fang Tsing-lu.

Feng Xuefeng (Fen" Hsueh-feng) (1902-74). Poet and critic. Joined the CCP in 1927. A leader of the National Association of Writers and Artists after 1949. Purged in the Cultural Revolution.

Gao Yuhan (Kao Yu-han). Veteran revolutionary and a political instructor at the Huangpu Military Academy. The first Communist openly to attack Chiang Kai-shek. Became a Trotskyist in 1929. Alias: Wang Linggao.

Ge Chonge (Ko Ch'ung-o) (?-1931). Became a Trotskyist in 1927 in Moscow and was sent back to China and expelled from the CCP at the end of the same year. A founder of the Trotskyist movement in northern China. Arrested by the Guomindang in 1931 and died in a Shanghai prison.

Glass, Frank (1901-87). British-born Cecil Frank Glass arrived in China from South Africa in 1930 and worked in Shanghai as a journalist on vari

ous English-language newspapers. He was a radio commentator in Shanghai; his last job there was as an assistant editor of the China Weekly Review. Glass was a leader of the Chinese Trotskyist movement from 1934 to 1938. Aliases: Li Furen (Li Fu-jen); Frank Graves; John Liang.

Gu Shunzhang (Ku Shun-chang) (1895-1935). A worker and leader of the Shanghai insurrections in 1927. Chief of the CCP's "special service" and member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. Arrested by the Guomindang and became one of its most vicious anti-Communist agents. Finally executed by Chiang Kai-shek despite his defection to the Nationalists.

Guan Xiangying (Kuan Hsiang-ying) (1904-46). A printer, who joined the CCP in 1925. A member of the Central Committee until 1928. He Long's political commissar during the anti-Japanese war.

Han Jun (Han Chun) (?-1945). A leader of the younger generation of Chinese Trotskyists. Active among Hongkong workers throughout the period of the Japanese occupation of the colony until his death in 1945.

He Mengxiong (Ho Meng-hsiung) (1898-1931). A labor leader in North China during the 1925-27 revolution. Head of the Organisational Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the CCP after 1927. Leader of those Communists who opposed Wang Ming's Central Committee. Arrested and executed by the Guomindang.

He Zishen (Ho Tzu-shen) (1898-1961). A Beijing student in the early 1920s. Participated in the Northern Expedition. Was active in Hunan and succeeded Mao as Secretary of the Hunan Provincial Committee. Became a Trotskyist in 1929 and spent several years in gaol under the Guomindang. Arrested by the Maoist secret police in 1952; died in prison. Aliases: Zhang Hongdu; He Ziyu.

Hu Feng (1906-85). Alias Zhang Guangren, a disciple of Lu Xun and a well-known independent left-wing leader of the so-called Hu Feng clique. Purged in 1955 by Mao.

Hu Qiuynan (Hu Ch'iu-yuan). One of the Chinese students who returned to China sometime in the early to mid-1930s, after studying in Japan. The majority of these returned students supported the CCP, but a few (notably Hu and Zheng Xuejia) showed some sympathy for Trotskyism. However Hu and his friends very quickly became associated with the Guomindang.

Hu Shi (Hu Shih) (1891-1962). Philosopher and writer. Advocate of the vernacular literature. Collaborator with Chen Duxiu on New Youth. After May Fourth, Hu split with Chen Duxiu and was strongly criticized by the Communists. A supporter of the Guomindang and pro-American.

Hu Zongnan (Hu Tsung-nan) (1895-1962). A Guomindang military leader who became known as the "King of the Northwest."

Huang Jiantong (Huang Chien-t'ung). A leader of the Guangxi Trotskyists. He was released from prison together with Zheng Chaolin in 1979 and died in 1991.

Isaacs, Harold Robert (1910-86). A U.S. journalist who published China Forum in Shanghai in the early 1930s. Influenced by Frank Glass, he became sympathetic to Trotskyism, and in Beijing he wrote The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution with the help of Liu Renjing as his translator. He discussed the text with Trotsky, who wrote an introduction to it. The first (1938) edition was followed by several reprintings with Trotsky's introduction deleted. After Trotsky's assassination in 1940, Isaacs left the Trotskyist movement. He worked for the Columbia Broadcasting Company and Newsweek before entenng academic life in 1950. In 1965 he became professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aliases: Yi Luosheng; Harold Roberts.

Jiang Zhendong (Chiang Chen-tung) (1906-82). A textile worker and veteran Communist. One of the leaders of the Shanghai insurrections of 1927. Became a Trotskyist in 1929. Arrested by the Maoist police in 1952 for his dissident activities. Released from prison in 1979.

Kang Sheng (K'ang Sheng) (1898-1975). An intelligence and security specialist. Trained in Moscow as a henchman for Wang Ming by the Soviet secret police, he became a Mao supporter after getting back to China. He was Mao's main inquisitor in the Cultural Revolution and is depicted as an "ultra-leftist" by the rehabilitated "moderate" Chinese Communist leaders who were his victims.

Kang Yonwei (K'ang Yu-wei) (1858-1927). Leader of the reform movement that culminated in the short-lived Hundred Days Reform of 1898 and a prominent scholar of the New Text School of the Confucian classics.

Katayama Sen (1860-1933). Founded the Japanese Socialist Party in 1906 and later became a Communist. He worked for the Comintern in Moscow from 1921 until death.

Kautsky, Karl (1854-1938). Leader of the German Social Democratic Party. Best known before 1914 as a marxist theoretician. He opposed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 on the grounds that a genuine socialist proletarian revolution could only be achieved by democratic means, that is, by universal suffrage and not by the insurrection of a minority of the nation. He opposed Lenin's theory and practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Kirov, Sergei Mironovich (1886-1934). An old Bolshevik, elected to the Soviet Party's Central Committee in 1923 and to its Politburo in 1930. A staunch supporter of Stalin. His assassination in 1934 was followed by the Moscow trials. Actually it was Stalin himself who masterminded the assassination when he discovered that Kirov was starting to become estranged from him. Stalin then used the assassination as an excuse to persecute his opponents.

Li Dazhao (Li Ta-chao) (1889-1927). One of the founders of the CCP, second only to Chen Duxiu. He was executed in Beijing in 1927.

Li Ji (Li Chi). Known as the first Marxist scholar in China. Author of A Biography of Karl Marx. Became a Trotskyist in 1929. Recanted after 1949.

Li Lisan (Li Li-san) (1899-1967). A veteran Communist and labor organizer, he was elected onto the Politburo in 1927. He was the chief executor of Stalin's ultraleft line in China during the period 1929-30; he was removed from the leadership in 1931 as a scapegoat for its failure. He was detained in Russia until 1945. Attacked during the Cultural Revolution, he reportedly committed suicide.

Li Ping (Li P'ing). Became a Trotskyist in Moscow. Alias: Lektorov.

Li Weihan (Li Wei-han) (1896-1984). Alias Luo Mail He joined the CCP in France in 1922 and was head of the Orgburo in 1936. After 1949 he was mainly in charge of the party's United Front work. He was accused of "antiparty" activity in December 1966 and purged in June 1967.

Li Zhongsan (Li Chung-san). A veteran Guomindang revolutionary, active in northwest China. Work-studied in France and became a Trotskyist in 1929.

Lian Zhengyan (Lien Cheng-yen) (1928-51). A young Trotskyist student in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, shot by the Maoists in 1951.

Liang Ganqiao (Liang Kan-ch'iao). Studied in Moscow after graduating from the Huangpu Military Academy. Active in the Chinese Trotskyist move

ment for a few years but became a leader of Chiang Kai-shek's "Blueshirt Clique. "

Liang Qichao (Liang Ch'i-ch'ao) (1873-1929). A journalist and historian, and a constitutional monarchist who became leader of the so-called "Study Clique" after the downfall of the Qing dynasty.

Liang Si (Liang Ssu) (1912-87). Joined the Trotskyists in 1932 and organized their branch in Shandong, his native province. Later worked underground with the Trotskyists in Beijing and Shanghai. He was successively a peasant, a soldier (in the war against Japan), a worker (in the Chongqing arsenal, whence he was forced to flee after his arrest by the secret police), and, starting in 1946, a seafarer; in exile and retirement in Hongkong, he became a writer, a businessman, and a publisher of Trotskyist literature. Killed in a road accident. Aliases: Sun Liangsi; Bo Chen.

Lin Huanhua. A leader of the student Trotskyists in Guangxi province in the early 1930s. In charge of printing for the Trotskyist center in the mid1930s and a member of the Executive of the Printworkers' Trade Union in Guangzhou until his arrest in December 1952.

Liu Bozhuang (Liu Po-chuang). A "Frugal Study" student who turned to Trotskyism in 1929 but became a professor soon afterward and left the movement.

Liu Jialiang (Liu Chia-liang) (?-1950). Liu Jialiang, Si Chaosheng, and Wang Shuben were three of the leaders of the second generation of Chinese Trotskyists. Liu died in a Vietnamese prison in 1950; Si left the movement long before that; and Wang was executed by the Guomindang in a concentration camp on the eve of their military debacle. Aliases: Yao Ru; Liu Haisheng; Liu Shaoyan.

Liu Jingzhen (Liu Ching-chen) (1902-79). Joined the party and took part in the Revolution of 1925-27. Married Zheng Chaolin and became a Trotskyist together with Chen Duxiu. When Chen was in prison, she acted as a link between him and the surviving underground Trotskyist organization. Arrested by the Communists in 1952, freed five years later, and rejoined her husband Zheng in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution. Released in June 1979 and died in October of the same year. Alias: Wu Jingru.

Liu Renjing (Liu Jen-ching) (1902-87). A founding member of the CCP and general secretary of the Socialist League of Youth, joined the Left Opposition in Moscow, and visited Trotsky in Turkey in 1929. He played a part in organizing the Trotskyist organization in China and helped Harold Isaacs write The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. He was arrested in 1934 and recanted in prison. After 1949 he recanted again, this time to the Maoists. He died in a car accident in 1987. Aliases: Nelsi; Niel Sih; Liu Jingyuan; Lieershi; Xu Yong.

Liu Shaoqi (Liu Shao-ch'i) (1898-1969). A veteran Communist and prominent Chinese labor leader of the CCP from the mid-1940s on. Head of state of the People's Republic of China after 1959, purged in the Cultural Revolution, but rehabilitated in 1979.

Liu Yin, alias Li Maimai. A leader of the Wuhan student movement during the 1925-27 revolution. Studied in Moscow. Active for a while in the Chinese Trotskyist movement, then became a publicist for the Guomindang.

Lominadze, Vissarion (1898-1934). Known as "Stalin's prodigy." Comintern representative in China from July to December 1927. He masterminded the 7 August (1927) Emergency Conference and, together with Heinz Neumann, directed the December 1927 Guangzhou Insurrection. He fell into disfavor after 1930 and committed suicide in 1934.

Long Yun (Lung Yun) (1884-1962). Governor of Yunnan from 1928 to 1945.

Lou Guohua (Lou Kuo-hua) (1906-95). A Communist since 1925, he became a Trotskyist in 1928. He is one of the few survivors of the first generation of Chinese Trotskyists and in Hongkong has been the chief publisher of Trotskyist literature in Chinese. Aliases: Zi Chun; Yi Ding; Shao Yuan; Ze Cheng.

Lou Shiyi (Lou Shih-i) (1905- ). A veteran Communist, left-wing writer, translator into Chinese of several novels (including Mother) by Maxim Gorky, and cousin of the Trotskyist Lou Guohua. He was sentenced to life imprisonment under the Guomindang. He became a leading official in Beijing's People's Press after 1949.

Lu Xun (Lu Hsun) (1881-1936). Modern China's best-known novelist, essayist, and critic, known as "China's Gorky." His original name was Zhou Shuren.

Luo Han (Lo Han) (1898-1941?). Expelled from France in 1921 and joined the CCP in 1922. Active in the Guomindang army until the 20 March Incident (1926). Became a Trotskyist in 1928 in Moscow and a leader of the Chinese Left Opposition. Died in Chongqing during a Japanese air raid.

Luo Oiyuan (Lo Ch'i-yuan) (1893-1931). Leader of the peasant movement in Guangdong, he was arrested in Shanghai in 1931 and executed despite recanting.

Luo Shifan (Lo Shih-fan) ( -1939?). An old Communist who turned to Trotskyism in 1929 together with Chen Duxiu. An activist among the workers, he was at one time close to the "Conciliationists" headed by He Mengxiong. He was arrested together with Chen and sentenced to five years in gaol but was freed early due to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. He died of illness in Hunan, probably in 1939.

Luo Xin (Lo Hsin). A Hongkong worker who became a Trotskyist together with Chen Duxiu.

Luo Zhanglong (Lo Chang-lung) (1897- ). A student leader at Beijing University during the May Fourth Movement of 1919. He joined the CCP when it was formed and became very active in the workers' movement. He was the leader in 1929-30 of the so-called "conciliators." He retired from active politics after his arrest by the Guomindang and was released, probably on condition.

Ma YuEu (Ma Yu-fu). A CCP labor activist who became a Trotskyist in 1929 and defected to the Guomindang two years later.

Mao Hongjian (Mao Hung-chien). A leader of the Guangxi Trotskyists in the early 1930s. A member of the Central Committee of the Internationalist Workers' Party after 1949. He left the movement in 1951.

Mif, Pavel (1901-38). Patron of the so-called Twenty Eight Bolsheviks at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, he was arrested in 1937 and disappeared during the purges.

Ou Fang. With Chen Yimou, Song Fengchun, and Shi Tang, one of the main founders of the first Trotskyist group in China. Returned from Moscow in early 1928. Active among workers in Hongkong. Arrested in 1930 in Shanghai and imprisoned by the Guomindang. Ou and Chen died in prison, while Song and Shi left the movement after their release. In 1931

Chen was elected head of the Organisational Department of the unified Chinese Trotskyist organization.

Pan Wenyu (P'an Wen-yu). A returned student from Moscow and collaborator with Li Lisan, later purged by the Wang Ming group.

Peng Pai (P'eng P'ai) (1896-1929). Leader of the peasant associations in Hailuleng, Guangdong, after 1922. In October 1927 he organized a peasant insurrection and led the armed peasant struggle in that area. After the defeat he fled to Shanghai, where he was arrested and executed by the Guomindang.

Peng Shuzhi (P'eng Shu-chih, also written P'eng Shu-tse) (1896-1983). A returned student from Moscow and a member of the Central Committee of the CCP after 1925. Chief editor of the party organ during the 1925-27 revolution. Expelled together with Chen Duxiu in November 1929, for supporting Trotskyism. Lived for several years in Los Angeles, California, before his death there in 1983. Aliases: Ivan Petrov; Xi Zhao; Nan Guan; Tao Bo; Ou Bo.

Pu Dezhi (P'u Teh-chih) (1905- ). Joined the CCP in 1926 and was active in literature and the "heater. Became a Trotskyist in Moscow in 1928.

Arrested for the second time together with Chen Duxiu in 1932 and released from prison in 1937. See also under Sun Xi. Aliases: Xi Liu; Pu Qingquan.

Qu Qiubai (Ch'u Ch'iu-pai) (1899-1935). A wnter, translator, veteran Communist, and de facto general secretary of the CCP from August 1927 to July 1928. He was executed by Chiang Kai-shek.

Radek, Karl (1885-1939) Went over to Stalin in 1929 and was defendant at the second Moscow trial. He died in prison.

Roy, M. N. (1887-1954). An Indian nationalist and Communist, he went to China in May 1927 as a representative of the Comintern.

Shen Yanbing (Shen Yen-ping) (1896-1981). The pen name of Mao Dun. A veteran Communist and a participant in the Revolution of 1925-27. He became a famous writer, second only to Lu Xun. He was the first minister of culture in the post-1949 Communist government.

Shi Tang (Shih T'ang). See under Ou Fang.

Si Chaosheng (Ssu Ch'ao-sheng). See under Liu Jialiang.

Snow, Edgar (1905-72). Author of Red Star over China, the classic study on the Chinese Soviet movement.

Song Fengchun (Sung Feng-ch'un). See under Ou Fang.

Song Qingling (Soon" Ch'ing-ling) (1892-1981). The widow of Sun Yatsen and a member of the State Council of the Wuhan government. She continued to favor collaboration with the CCP even after the left wing of the Guomindang split with the Communists.

Sun Xi (Sun Hsi). A left-wing writer who joined the Trotskyists. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Sun went to Yunnan with Zhao Ji. After 1949, Sun, Zhao Ji, and Pu Dezhi were arrested and interviewed in Kunming by Zhou Enlai, who urged them to "reform." Pu did so and was freed immediately; Zhao and Sun stood firm and were kept in

gaol—Zhao until 1979 and Sun, too, probably until 1979. Shortly after his release, Sun died. Alias: Sun Xuelu.

Tan Pingshan (T'an P'ing-shan) (1887-1956). An early leader of the CCP, expelled in 1927. He joined the Guomindang in 1937 and later became a supporter of the Revolutionary Committee of the Guomindang, which backed the Beijing government after 1949.

Tao Xisheng (T'ao Hsi-sheng) (1899-19??). A writer, responsible for Chiang Kai-shek's China's Destiny. He became a member of the National Defence Council under Wang Jingwei in 1937 and briefly supported Wang's attempt to conclude a peaceful settlement of the war against Japan.

Wang Changyao (Wang Ch'ang-yao). A returned student from Moscow who became a Trotskyist in the early 1930s. Active in the Beijing student movement before he returned to his native province of Shandong, together with his wife, Zhang Sanjie, to organize an antilajanese guerrilla detachment that was destroyed by the CCP.

Wang Delin (Wang Teh-lin). A leader of the anti-Japanese guerrilla forces in Manchuria after 1931. Wang's units were chiefly active in the southern

part of Jilin province.

Wang Duqing (Wang Tu-ch'ing) (1898-1940). A poet and one of the four founders of the Creation Society. A professor at Zhongshan University

in Guangzhou. He went over to Trotskyism in 1929 together with Chen Duxiu. He died of typhoid.

Wang Fanxi (Wang Fan-hsi) (1907- ). Joined the party in 1925 while a student at Beijing University. Became a Trotskyist in Moscow in 1928. Retumed to China in 1929 and worked for a while as an aide to Zhou Enlai. Worked as a Trotskyist with Chen Duxiu in 1930-31, after being expelled from the party. Was arrested for the first time in 1931 and again in 1937. Spent most of the intervening years in gaol. Has lived in exile since 1949. Aliases: Vasilii Pavlovich Kletkin; Wang Wenyuan; Wang Mingyuan; Lian Gen; Shuang Shan; San Nan; Feng Gang; Shou Yi; Yi De; San Yuan; Hui Quan; Liu Shuxun.

Wang Jingwei (Wang Ching-wei) (1883-1944). A veteran member of the Guomindang and at first leader of its left wing, he later compromised with Chiang Kai-shek and ended up a Japanese puppet.

Wang Kequan (Wang K'o-ch'uan). A Shanghai labor leader and member of the Central Committee of the CCP, he was purged by the Wang Ming

group in 1931 for belonging to the "Conciliationist" grouping. He became an agent of the Guomindang and was murdered by other agents.

Wang Mengzou (Wang Meng-tsou) (1877-1953). A publisher friend of Chen Duxiu and supporter of all progressive movements in China since the beginning of the century.

Wang Ming (1904-1974). The pseudonym of Chen Shaoyu, who was Stalin's main supporter in the CCP. His group dominated the Party after 1931

but was defeated after the Long March. His influence was finally eliminated at the Seventh Congress of the CCP in 1945.

Wang Ruofei (Wang Jo-fei) (1896-1946). He joined the CCP in 1922 and was a member of its Central Committee until 1945. While in Moscow in 1928 as a member of the Chinese delegation to the Comintern, he secretly expressed sympathy for the Trotskyist Opposition.

Wang Shiwei (Wang Shih-wei) (1907-47). A writer and translator, author of the well-known article "The Wild Lily" and a Trotskyist sympathizer. He was the first victim (in Yan'an) of the CCP's repressive literary policy. He was rehabilitated in 1990.

Wang Shuben (Wang Shu-pen) (?-1949). See under Liu Jialiang.

Wang Songjiu (Wang Sung-chiu) (1922-52). A young Trotskyist educator and organizer in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. He was arrested by the Maoist secret police in 1952 and committed suicide in prison.

Wu Jiyan (Wu Chi-yen) (1898-1940). A returned student from Moscow and nephew of Chen Duxiu. He became a Trotskyist in 1929. Alias: Xi Zhi.

Xiang Ying (Hsiang Ying) (1898-1941). An early labor leader, member of

the Politburo, and leader of the remnant military forces in Jiangxi after the Long March. He became vice commander of the New Fourth Army in 1938 and was killed by a traitor after the Wannan Incident of January 1941.

Xiang Zhongfa (Hsiang Zhongfa) (1880-1931). General secretary of the CCP from 1928 to 1931, he was a workers' leader, promoted because of his record in the labor movement and his proletarian credentials at a time when the 1927 defeat was being blamed on the shortage of workers in the party leadership. But he lacked political ability and was largely ignorant of marxist theory. He was executed by Chiang Kai-shek in spite of capitulating after his arrest.

Xiao Changbin (Hsiao Ch'ang-pin). He became a Trotskyist in Moscow in 1927 and was a founder of the Chinese Trotskyist organization. Active in North China, he left the movement in 1931.

Ye Jianying (Yeh Chien-ying) (1898-1986). A professional military man who participated in the Northern Expedition and the Guangzhou Insurrection of December 1927. He was chief of staff of the CCP's Eighth Route Army after 1937. He became defense minister in the Beijing government and was a member of the Politburo's Standing Committee.

Yin Kuan (Yin K'uan) (1897-1967). A veteran Communist who joined the CCP in France, was active in its Shandong Provincial Committee, its Anhui Provincial Committee, and its Jiangsu-Zhejiang Regional Committee in 1925-27, and became a Trotskyist in 1929. He was twice arrested by the Guomindang for his revolutionary activities and was arrested by the Maoists in 1952.

Yu Qiaqing (Yu Ch'ia-ch'ing) (1867-1945). A famous Shanghai capitalist, chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, and a benefactor of Chiang Kai-shek.

Yu Shiyi (Yu Shih-i). A leader of the Shanghai young Trotskyists who was the first to be arrested after 1949 and died in an asylum where he had been sent after developing schizophrenia. Alias: Yu Shouyi.

Yu Xiusong (Yu Hsiu-sung) (1899-1938). A veteran Communist and early leader of the Chinese stgdents in Moscow before Wang Ming. Framed by Wang Ming in Xinjiang in 1937 as a "Trotskyist," he was sent back to the USSR, where he was executed.

Yun Daiying (Yun Tai-ying) (1895-1931). A political instructor at the Huangpu Military Academy and a member of the Central Committee of the CCP, he was one of the most respected leaders of the party among revolutionary youth during the revolution of 1925-27. He was executed by the Guomindang in 1931.

Zhang Bolin (Chang Po-lin) (1876-1951). The liberal founder and president of Tianjin's Nankai University and a prominent Christian educator.

Zhang Dehan (Chang Teh-han) (1918-87). He joined the underground Trotskyist organization in 1939 and carried out educational work among the workers in Shanghai. He was arrested by the Maoist secret police in 1952, released from a labor camp in 1979, and died of illness in 1987.

Zhang Deze (Chang Teh-tse) (1915-44). A lawyer who rendered valuable help to resistance fighters under the Japanese occupation in Shanghai. He joined the underground Trotskyist movement in 1939 and died of tuberculosis.

Zhang Guotao (Chang Kuo-t'ao) (1897-1979). A founder of the CCP and one of the main leaders of the Communist-sponsored labor movement in the 1920s, he directed the Secretariat of the Chinese Labour Unions set up in July 1921. He was leader of the party's Fourth Front Army during the Long March, when he clashed with Mao. He left the party in 1938 and ceased political activity thereafter.

Zhang Shizhao (Chang Shih-chao) (1882-1973). A journalist, educator, government official, and lawyer. Opposed to the New Culture Movement and a bitter enemy of Lu Xun but died a supporter of Maoism.

Zhang Te (Chang T'e). He joined the Trotskyist movement in Moscow in 1927, left it in 1931, and was thereafter a supporter of the Guangxi warlords.

Zhang Yisen (Chang I-sen) (1909-80). The wife of He Zishen, she participated in the Revolution of 1925-27. After its defeat, she remained in the party. She was twice arrested by the Guomindang and served short prison terms. She became a Trotskyist in 1929 and remained so until she was arrested and persecuted in 1952 by the Mao regime. She died in a fit of schizophrenia.

Zhang Zuolin (Chang Tso-lin) (1873-1928). The fiercely anti-Communist warlord leader of Manchuria, known as the Old Marshal.

Zhao Ji (Chao Chi) (1902- ). A veteran Communist who participated in the Northern Expedition as a political commissar and became a Trotskyist in Moscow in 1928. He was active in the early stages of the Trotskyist movement in China.

Zhao Yuanren (Chao Yuanjen, known as Y. R. Chao or Chao Yuen-ren in the West) (1892-1982). An internationally known Chinese linguist.

His memoirs were published in China in 1986. Aliases: Yvon; Marlotov; Lin Chaozhen; Yin Wen; Wang Jian; Shuyan; Lin Yiwen; Jue Min; Yi Yin; Lan Yin; Tang Yushi; Ze Lian.

Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai) (1898-1976). He joined the CCP in France in 1922 and because its most prominent organizer, negotiator, and administrator. He survived all the CCP's internal factional struggles and was premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death.