In Issue 46 (December 2011) Daniel Finn discussed the testimony of a Trotskyist who held to his socialist vision against the odds.
When the first edition of Wang Fan-hsi’s Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary was published in the 1950s, he appeared to be the last survivor of an extinct tribe, the Chinese Trotskyists whose organisation had been smashed by Mao Zedong’s dictatorship. When the Communists took power in Beijing in 1949, their Trotskyist opponents went underground and sent Wang to Hong Kong so that he could co-ordinate their activities from comparative safety. But Mao’s secret police soon penetrated the clandestine network and the Trotskyists were carted off to jail, where they would remain for the next quarter of a century. Wang’s memoir was printed in Macau—another colonial enclave off the Chinese mainland where he took shelter after being deported from Hong Kong—in a run of twenty copies. He might well have wondered if anyone would remember the book, or the experiences it describes, in a decade’s time. An epilogue to the first edition summarises the feelings that drove him to compose the memoir:
Having lost my family, comrades-in-arms, relatives, and friends, I have been forced to live in a state of endless political idleness. My life seems to have ground to a halt, or to have lapsed into stagnation. In such a situation one is inevitably inclined to look back over the past. Events and people from bygone days have haunted me like ghosts, gripping my mind. Their memory has stuck—like a fishbone in my throat; I could never feel at ease until I succeeded in dislodging it.
The fact that Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary has been rescued from oblivion owes a great deal to the efforts of Gregor Benton, a left-wing historian of modern China who befriended Wang when his exile eventually carried him to Britain, translated his autobiography and found it a new publisher. It’s also, of course, partly thanks to Wang’s own qualities. When I was reading the book, my partner had a look at the photo on its back cover and remarked that the author had a very kind face. The same impression of a gentle, good-natured man certainly comes across from the pages of this memoir: a man of iron political commitment, who endured privations that most of us can only imagine for the sake of his beliefs, Wang nonetheless seems to have kept his spirit from hardening into bitterness, dogmatism or despair. The author of Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary could not be further from the stereotype of a ruthless, unbending fanatic that was typified by Mao himself.
Even if we didn’t have such a likeable narrator to guide us through events, the book would be essential reading, for Wang has a terrific story to tell about the origins of Chinese communism and the events leading up to the revolution of 1949. He recalls the emergence of Chinese Marxism as an off-shoot of the May 4 Movement which erupted in the years following World War One, rallying Chinese youth behind the call for democracy and intellectual progress. Wang was one of those teenagers swept up by the movement, and it seemed a natural step for him to join the nascent Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which had established itself in the vanguard of progressive thought.
From the start, the CCP was overshadowed by its Comintern advisors: a party which began with a few hundred activists was naturally in awe of its Soviet brother, the leader of the first socialist revolution and self-proclaimed workers’ state. The CCP and its leader Chen Tu-hsiu accepted the strategy laid down by the Comintern, which required the Chinese Communists to form an alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). At first the alliance paid off, enabling the CCP to grow significantly. By the mid-1920s, the party was beginning to establish itself as a serious force with support from the working class of Shanghai and other cities on the eastern coast. But the Soviet advisors who were guiding the CCP’s policy ignored warning signs that the KMT was ready to turn on its allies. When the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek launched a bloody purge of Communists in Shanghai—assisted by the infamous local gangsters—the CCP was almost wiped out.
This was the beginning of Wang’s shift towards the dissenting brand of Communism favoured by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky became a point of reference for CCP members who wanted to learn the lessons of their near-death experience. The leader of the Bolshevik opposition had opposed the Comintern policy on China and blamed Stalin for the debacle: for those unwilling to accept that the Chinese party leadership should take all the blame for a strategy foisted on them by Moscow, Trotskyism offered an alternative political framework. Chen Tu-hsiu himself eventually became a Trotskyist. Wang was recruited by the Chinese Trotskyists during his time at the training school for Asian communists in Moscow. At that time, the approach favoured by Trotsky was for his supporters to work within the existing Communist Parties, and so Wang remained a CCP member for as long as he could. Eventually he was expelled, along with most of his comrades, who then founded a separate organisation.
After the departure of Chen Tu-hsiu and the Trotskyists, the main power struggle in the CCP was between Moscow’s protegé Wang Ming and the little-known rural schoolteacher Mao Zedong. Wang’s account of the rivalry between the two men helps explain a great deal about the future course of the Chinese revolution. He presents Wang Ming as a thuggish mediocrity, slavishly loyal to the ruling group in Moscow and riding on their coat-tails to a position of authority in his own party. Mao, on the other hand, is depicted as a man with his own vision, unwilling to accept orders from the Soviet leadership when they conflicted with his own assessment of the situation in China. Mao, according to Wang, developed an indigenous Chinese brand of Stalinism, just as authoritarian as the original Soviet model, but adapted for the task of making a revolution in China. Mao would not accept that the CCP should simply be an arm of Soviet foreign policy, and often ignored Soviet directives while publicly declaring his loyalty to Moscow.
One of the crucial decisions made by Mao and the CCP was to relocate the base of their struggle from the cities to the countryside, where they could build up their strength far away from the KMT’s machinery of control. The Trotskyists, however, remained largely urban in their focus, and Wang identifies this as one of their biggest mistakes. Already decimated by KMT repression, the Trotskyists then had to endure the consequences of the Japanese invasion which began in 1937. The eastern coastal region was ravaged by Japanese bombardment from land, air and sea, and cities under Japanese rule were subject to oppressive surveillance by the secret police.
To compound these crippling obstacles to growth, the Trotskyists also had to contend with the enmity of the CCP. Wang’s discussion of this relationship is very interesting. He suggests that many CCP activists continued to see the Trotskyists as another tendency in the workers’ movement, a misguided one to be sure, but certainly not the Fascist agents of Soviet propaganda. During his time in a Kuomintang prison in the 1930s, sharing a wing with Communist leaders, Wang was able to enter into discussions with them in a fairly courteous manner. Over time, the poisonous ideology of the Soviet regime filtered down through the ranks of the CCP: Trotskyists were no longer misguided comrades, but mortal enemies to be hunted down and liquidated. Wang recalls the fate of a Trotskyist guerrilla detachment taking part in the struggle against the Japanese occupation, which was wiped out by CCP forces.
Although it is not mentioned by Wang in this book, the experience of neighbouring Vietnam is also revealing. The Vietnamese Trotskyists, whose group was relatively large, actually formed an alliance with Ho Chi Minh’s Communist Party in the 1930s: the two organisations had a joint publication and a common electoral slate, at a time when the Soviet purges were in full swing and Stalinist agents were intent on destroying the POUM in Spain. When news of the alliance reached Moscow, Comintern emissaries were quickly despatched to Indochina with instructions to bring Ho and his comrades into line. The alliance was broken, and by the time of the war against French colonialism a decade later, the Vietnamese Communists had fully embraced the Moscow line: they even found time to gather a hit squad that assassinated Trotskyist leaders who would have been happy to join the struggle of the Vietminh against France. We surely cannot underestimate the damage that was done to left-wing movements around the world by the unnatural, murderous sectarianism that was injected into their lifeblood by the Soviet regime.
When Japan was defeated in the Pacific war by the Allies, the final struggle for mastery over China between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek began. Wang recalls that the Trotskyists, whose depleted organisation still functioned in some urban areas, did not expect the rapid Communist victory in the civil war of the late 1940s, and were caught unprepared. They quickly decided to continue their work as a clandestine party, and Wang went to Hong Kong to act as a contact for the underground activists. Thus he escaped the round-up of Trotskyists who were arrested en masse by the secret police in 1952 and consigned to Mao’s dungeons. The survivors finally emerged from prison in the late 1970s, after Mao’s death and the slight thaw which followed: those few people—including Wang—who had remembered their existence were amazed to discover that they were still alive.
You could have forgiven Wang Fan-hsi for abandoning hope during his long exile. Having witnessed a titanic revolution that displaced the old class of landowners and warlords, only to see the new ruling caste establish a totalitarian system and plunge China into chaos with their disastrous experiments, he might well have concluded that his vision of a truly humane and liberating socialism was not meant for this world. Yet he seems to have retained a tenacious optimism right up to his death in 2003. The edition of the memoir I own, published in 1990, opens with Wang’s reflection on the demise of the Soviet bloc:
Under the new circumstances, even old questions must be freshly pondered and answered in the light of new facts. I have spent much energy considering these questions, and considering the answers that others have given to them. And my conclusion has not changed: I still believe that the bankruptcy of Stalinism is in no way equivalent to the bankruptcy of socialism. Nor do I believe that capitalism is ‘immortal and unending’. On the contrary, I see no reason to change my view that the future of humankind depends on the realisation of true, i.e. non-Stalinist socialism.
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