I joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1925, at Hangchow in Chekiang province. Then I went to Peking and worked in that district. In 1926 I went south to Kwangtung, where I became a political commissar in the army. At that time, the Communist military units were taking part in the Kuomintang’s Northern Expedition against the war-lords. But I did not serve in the army long, because the Party wanted me to go back to Peking. At the time, Peking had not been ‘liberated’, but was under the rule of the Peiyong war-lord, Chang Tso-lin, and his ‘white terror’. The Party considered it was more important to do revolutionary work in the reactionary area than in the Army. At that time I was a student of Peking University. I returned to Peking where I became a leading member of the Party's university committee.
The objective situation and conditions were very favourable, and a growing number of students wanted to enter the Party. In a very short time, the university cell of the Party had a membership of more than two hundred. Then I left the university. After Li Ta-chao and other leaders of the Party were executed in the spring of 1927, I became a member of the Peking district committee of the Party. Then I went to Wuhan, where I was assigned by the Party to work for the revolutionary newspaper Mingkuo Yeh-po. Wuhan was the seat of the ‘Left Kuomintang’ government of Wang Ching-wei. But in the autumn, Wang betrayed the revolution and made a compromise with Chiang Kai-shek. So all the comrades were thrown into confusion. I was soon arrested: I was perhaps the first Communist to be arrested at the time by Wang Ching-wei. I was in prison for one month.
After I was released, the Party sent me to Moscow. I studied in the Eastern University (‘University for Toilers of the Orient’), which contained students of more than seventeen nationalities. It was here that I accepted Trotskyism. This was still in 1927. At that time the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism was most severe and strenuous. When I had come to Moscow, of course, I had not known the difference between the two factions. But when I was at the Eastern University, I studied the documents issued by the central committee of the CPSU. All these were cut and arranged to favour Stalinism, and yet we could read the difference. Basing our judgement on our experience in China, we concluded that the Trotskyists were right. But in the university there was no Trotskyist organization. Then, in the summer of 1928, I was transferred to Sun Yat-sen University, where we began to organize a Trotskyist tendency. At that time, almost all the students of the Eastern University were won over to Trotskyism, and in the Chinese university too Trotskyism was very influential. In the autumn of 1928 we organized a Trotskyist leading committee in the university. This had three members, of whom I was one. We began to organize clandestine work in the Soviet Union, in cooperation with some Russian comrades who were, of course, by then also organizing underground. The situation was very difficult, more difficult than that which we found later in China, because of the GPU. Our clandestine work continued for about one year, from the autumn of 1928 to the summer of 1929. During this period, I was one of the leading members of the Trotskyist tendency in the Soviet Union. I think that at that time there were more than four hundred Chinese Trotskyists, including the comrades in Sun Yat-sen University, those in military schools and some in the Lenin Institute.
Return to China
In the summer of 1929, I applied to be sent back to China. My application was accepted and I arrived in Shanghai in September of that year. At that time, it was a secret that I was a Trotskyist, so I was able to work inside the Party. Before we returned to China, we had a meeting in Moscow to discuss how we should work in China. We decided that we should work within the Party to be the best revolutionaries, so that people might know that we were not mere bourgeois intellectuals interested simply in new theories or other novelties, but genuine revolutionaries. We decided that we must prove ourselves to be real revolutionaries through our work for the Party. In that way we would win the confidence of the comrades and be listened to. We thought that we could convince them and win them to our side only in this way. A group of more than twenty Chinese Trotskyists went back to China with me, via Vladivostok.
When I arrived in Shanghai in September 1929, I was received by Chou En-lai, who at that time was head of both the organizational bureau and the military council of the central committee. I was assigned to work under him, as his assistant in the organizational bureau. So I was put in charge of the Party's work in one of the five districts of Shanghai. Shanghai was the most industrialized city in China, and the work there was directly under the leadership of the central committee rather than under the Kiangsi provincial committee. The Party considered its work in Shanghai to be the most important of all. Under Chou En-lai, there were five assistants, each of whom was assigned to one district of Shanghai. I worked under Chou for about one year.
During this time, I kept secret contact with those Trotskyists who had returned to China before me because they had been expelled from the Party in Moscow. They had been expelled from the Chinese Party at the same time as Trotsky was expelled from the Bolshevik Party, since they had been waging an open struggle against the Stalinists. We, on the other hand, had organized only clandestine activity in Moscow, and they did not discover us. These comrades who had come home before me numbered between thirty and forty. One group of them had gone to Peking, another to Hong Kong, where they had become workers at the Tai-koo Dockyard. Only three of them had come to Shanghai, where they had established a bookshop called New World. I kept secret contact with these three comrades from the bookshop. They organized the Chinese Trotskyists returning from Moscow, and started to publish an organ called Our Voice (Wo-men-te-Hua, the title of which was taken from Trotsky’s pre-revolutionary Paris paper Nashe Slovo). Our Voice was the first Trotskyist publication in China. This was in 1929. At that time I was still working within the Party and devoting all my time to Party work. The situation was very difficult, indeed dangerous, and I was in fact once arrested during that time.
In the winter of 1929, the Moscow underground organization was betrayed and all the Trotskyists were arrested. They were put in prison or sent to Siberia. Nobody was sent back to China. As a result Sun Yat-sen University was closed down, because it was useless for the Stalinists to run the university only to educate Trotskyists. An informer testified in court that all the students of the university were Trotskyists. In this way, I too was discovered to be a Trotskyist. When my secret was discovered, I was sick in hospital. Chou En-lai came to have a talk with me and said: ‘Moscow says that you are a Trotskyist, but we have worked together for a year already and you have done your work very satisfactorily. So you had better make a declaration that you will give up your positions’. I agreed to make a declaration, and the next day a messenger came to take it. In my statement, I said that I was a Trotskyist and that the resolution passed at the Sixth (1928) Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was wrong. But I said that I would abide by the discipline of the Party and accept the decisions of the majority. I said that I wanted to work in the Party and reserved the right to speak at the next congress. The messenger took the statement back and immediately the official Party organ Red Banner announced that I had been expelled. This was how my connection with the Communist Party ended.
Trotskyism in China
I now began to work openly for the Trotskyist tendency. At that time there were three other Trotskyist groups in China besides our group Our Voice. The most influential of the three was the group of eighty-one members led by Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Peng Shu-tse, which had become Trotskyist after reading documents obtained from our group. When they became Trotskyists, these comrades, all of whom had held positions of responsibility in the Communist Party, signed a declaration—written by Ch’en Tu-hsiu—which is one of the most important documents of the history of Trotskyism in China. In it, the former prominent leading members of the Party themselves criticized the Party and its policies. After putting out this statement, they began to publish an organ called Proletariat. When I was expelled from the Party, some members of the Proletariat group asked me to join it. But I considered myself at the time to be a member of Our Voice.
I should explain that when we were working underground in Moscow, we made a decision not to establish a separate organization of our own, but to join and strengthen the Trotskyist organization which already existed in China. But in fact differences, some political, some merely generational, quickly sprang up between the older Trotskyists from the Communist Party leadership—Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Peng Shu-tse, etc.—and the younger Trotskyists like myself. Some of the older comrades showed that they wanted to control the organization, and it was this which led the younger comrades to reject the existing group and form their own, Our Voice.
A third group was called October, founded by Liu Yen-ching. Liu was one of the twelve members who attended the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. At one time general secretary of the Chinese Socialist Youth League, he went to Moscow to study at the Lenin Institute and returned to China a little before me, by way of Europe. He stayed with Trotsky for several days on Prinkipo, and together they drew up the first platform of the Left Opposition in China, which Liu brought back to China with him. When in Moscow, he had attended the meeting of Chinese Trotskyists which decided, as I have already mentioned, that we should participate in the existing organization and not set up a separate group. Liu agreed with the decision at the time, but when he returned to China he did not join the existing group, but instead collaborated with the younger comrades who were to form Our Voice—and this despite the fact that he was himself the oldest and most experienced of the Chinese Trotskyists (as a matter of fact, it was due to his persuasion that Ch’en Tu-hsiu himself was won over to Trotskyism). However, Liu did not actually join Our Voice. He was trying to form a separate group of his own and although at one point he asked me to organize a Peking branch of Our Voice with him, we in fact established an autonomous group in Peking, called October.
In addition to Proletariat, Our Voice and October, there was a fourth group of Chinese Trotskyists at the end of the twenties, formed by four comrades on their return to China and called Struggle.
Unification
We all recognized that this was a bad state of affairs and that it was essential to create a unified Trotskyist organization in China. Trotsky urged us to unite, comparing the Chinese Trotskyists separated because of trifles to a hair split into eight. So we organized a Negotiating Council for Unification. The negotiations took a very long time. Each group expressed different opinions at every meeting of the council. It was really a waste of time, so in the end Ch’en Tu-hsiu himself walked out of the council and withdrew the Proletariat representative. There were of course many reasons why it took so long to negotiate the unification. On the one hand, the older comrades of the Proletariat group looked down on the younger comrades of the other groups: Peng Shu-tse in particular insisted that the question was not one of ‘unification’, but that all the other comrades should join Proletariat. On the other hand, the younger comrades of the other groups were equally prejudiced against the older comrades of Proletariat, holding them responsible for the defeat of the revolution and saying that they had betrayed it. These were the main obstacles to unification.
The person who demanded unification most strenuously was Trotsky himself. In his open letter, he said that although Ch’en Tu-hsiu had been an opportunist when he accepted the Stalinist policy, he had since proved himself to be a very good revolutionary by his declaration to the Chinese Communist Party. Although he was not a great theoretician, he was very experienced and a good observer. Trotsky insisted that it was a big gain for the Trotskyist tendency to have him, and urged us to unify the four organizations. This move of Trotsky’s quickened the process of unification.
On 1 May 1931 the unification congress of Chinese Trotskyists was held at long last. At the congress a Central Committee was elected to lead the new organization. Ch’en Tu-hsiu was general secretary of the Central Committee, and the other members were Chung Chao-lin, Cheng Yen-mao, Wo Tah, Lo Han, Song Fong-cheng and I. Peng Shu-tse was not included, because he had always opposed the unification. The congress only elected him a candidate member, and in fact he did not even attend the unification congress.
Repression
But now a great misfortune befell us. On 24 May all the members of the Central Committee except Ch’en Tu-hsiu were arrested. We spent the first day of our arrest in the International Settlement, under the British authorities but on the next day we were transferred to the hands of the Kuomintang. We had just started to work under the unified leadership when this very severe blow fell. We had been informed on to the Kuomintang by a traitor who had previously been a member of the Proletariat group, and who, as the latter's representative on the Negotiating Council, had always tried to prevent the unification. Now, at last, Ch’en Tu-hsiu expelled him.
We were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, ranging from five to thirteen years. Chung Chao-lin got thirteen years, I got seven. There were other comrades who were arrested at the same time—comrade Lao and the youngest of all the comrades, Po Si-ap, who later quit the Party. Of the Central Committee members, Chung Chao-lin and I are the only ones who are still alive. All the others died: Cheng Yen-mao, who was a Tai-koo Dockyard worker, died in prison; Lo Han was killed in a Japanese bombing raid; Song Fong-cheng died in Peking.
Several months later, Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Peng Shu-tse organized a provisional committee to carry on the work, but this lasted only about one year. All the members of the provisional committee once again were arrested by the Kuomintang. After this, the only member left to work for the organization in Shanghai was Cheng Chi-chang, who had been one of my fellow-students at Peking University. He took charge of all the work, reorganizing those comrades who had lost contact. He was in reality the most important person in the Trotskyist movement in the period from 1932 to 1934.
In 1934, some new comrades, who had been under the leadership of Liu Yen-ching in Peking, came into the organization. At that time, Liu Yen-ching was working with two foreign comrades, Harold Isaacs (by the way, it is Liu Yen-ching who is referred to by the initials, LJC, in the preface to the current edition of Isaacs’ famous book The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution) and Frank Glass. Frank had already been a Trotskyist for some time when he came to Shanghai, but Isaacs, when he arrived to start a newspaper called People’s Tribune, had been sympathetic to Stalinism. The turning-point as far as Isaacs’ political evolution was concerned came with the arrest of Chen Tu-hsiu. One of the Stalinists who were Isaacs’ friends at the time asked him to write an article describing Ch’en Tu-hsiu as a man who had been bribed to work for the interests of Japanese imperialism. Isaacs was a very honest man and this incident made him extremely angry. It was from this moment that his political positions began to change. Under the influence of Frank Glass, he finally became sympathetic to Trotskyism. He gave his own printing press to our organization. He then went to Peking to collect material about the Chinese revolution of 1925-7. He asked Liu Yen-ching to translate this material from Chinese for him, and it was in this way that Liu came to work with Isaacs on his book The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. It was after this, in 1934, that Liu Yen-ching came south to Shanghai with four young comrades, and they worked together with Frank Glass and Cheng Chi-chang to reorganize Trotskyist activity. But after only a few months, before they had been able to do anything serious, all of them except Cheng Chi-chang and Frank Glass were arrested. Liu and the others were sent to Nanking. I was still in prison at the time. Liu Yen-ching was transferred to a penitentiary where they asked him to [recant]. After he was released from the penitentiary, we considered him a traitor. He served in the Kuomintang Army in Sian, as an instructor to brainwash arrested communists. He was a really miserable fellow!
Reorganization
At the end of 1934 I was released, together with comrade Lao. We had actually served four years of our sentences, when there was an amnesty. We returned to Shanghai—I myself after a short rest at my home in the country. In Shanghai, Cheng Chi-chang introduced me to Frank D. Glass, who told me that he wanted to do something to help the Chinese comrades to get the work going again. I wrote to Ch’en Tu-hsiu in Nanking prison, and after some time he agreed to my proposal to start something with help from Frank Glass. We reorganized a new leading committee. Of course, this was not an elected committee, because there were only a few comrades left. We got some activists—Cheng Chi-chang, Frank Glass (whose pseudonym was Li Fu-jen), Yen Kua and Chang Cheng-tong, a worker who had been one of the organizers of the Shanghai insurrection in 1926, a very good comrade who is still in Mao’s prisons—and formed the new committee. We began to publish two papers, one agitational called Struggle (Tou-chang), the other a theoretical journal called Spark. Both were published monthly. These were the only Trotskyist publications in China that really counted, because they lasted for many years, from the spring of 1935 until 1942, when a split occurred in the organization. These two papers were printed in a very primitive fashion, because we could not find any printing house willing to produce them. So we had to set up our own printing press, so to speak, with the help of the type which Harold Isaacs had donated. Isaacs, as I have already mentioned, gave us his printing press after he changed his political positions and stopped publishing People's Tribune. But we could not work the machine, so we sold it—very cheaply—and kept the type. We then made frames to hold the type and used it as a kind of mimeograph. The money we got from Frank Glass was our entire source of income, and all of it went into this printing operation. Each month, Frank Glass gave us one hundred dollars, which was a quarter of his salary. He lived in the French section of Shanghai, in Sanchong Road, and of course as a foreigner he had to live more or less as he had done in his own country—much better than the ordinary Chinese lived—and this cost a lot. Thus giving us a quarter of his salary represented a heavy burden on him. But at that time there were no jobs to be had, so we had no possible source of money except Frank. We managed to write a few articles for the left press, but this was by no means continuous. All the comrades were extremely poor, and one could say that one of the characteristics of Chinese Trotskyists was tremendous poverty.
The Popular Front
By 1936 Struggle had a clandestine circulation of between two and three hundred. Given the harsh Kuomintang repression, we could only give the paper to people we could really trust. It was about this time, as the Communist Party was developing its policy of united front with the Kuomintang, that some differences appeared to be developing between the Party and some of the intellectuals influenced by it, notably Lu Hsün. The latter expressed doubts about the new policy, insisting that it was wrong to abandon the class position and make friends with the enemy of yesterday. A heated discussion ensued between Lu Hsün and Chou Yang, who supported the Moscow popular front policy. Lu Hsün did not reject the idea of a united front as such, but there were differences on how to enforce it. In the field of literature, these differences were reflected in two alternative slogans: Chou Yang was for a ‘literature of national defence’, while Lu Hsün was for a ‘literature of the masses for revolutionary struggle’. We thought, wrongly as it turned out, that Lu Hsün might be won over as a result of the differences. So we sent him a copy of Struggle, which had printed many articles criticizing the popular front. Although, as I have described, our paper was printed in the most primitive way, Lu Hsün sent us back a letter in which he said that it was very beautifully printed and hinted that he suspected we had got money from the Japanese imperialists!
Once we had succeeded in establishing our two papers on a firm footing and had restarted the work in Shanghai, we wanted to re-establish contact with other branches of the organization. Trotskyists were active in Peking, Kwangsi, Wenchow county in Chekiang, and above all in Hong Kong. It was in 1936, just at the time when Cheng Chi-chang was sending our letter to Lu Hsün, that Frank Glass and I went to Hong Kong to re-establish contact with the comrades there, to help them reorganize their activity and launch a paper. With our assistance, they began to publish a roughly printed paper called Star.
In Prison Again
In 1937 I was arrested once again by the Kuomintang, this time on my own. They had discovered the relationship between Glass and myself, but they did not know where I lived. It was very easy to find out where a foreigner lived, so they put a watch on Frank Glass's home and followed anybody who visited him. This was how they caught me—in May 1937. Glass then went back to the United States. But Cheng Chi-chang and the other comrades were still safe and continued to publish the papers of the organization. I was sent to a secret prison in Nanking, run by the Chungtong. I should explain that the Kuomintang had two departments specializing in counter-revolutionary activities—the Chungtong or ‘bureau for statistics and investigation’ under the Kuomintang central committee, which dealt with all civilian political offences; and the Kungtong, under the Kuomintang’s military committee, which served the same purpose with respect to military offenders. These departments were organized in imitation of Hitler's methods, and specialists were in fact sent to Germany to study the scientific methods of dealing with revolutionaries in use there. I spent seven months in the Chungtong’s prison. Although material conditions were a little better than in ordinary prisons, the brutal psychological pressure and torture were unbelievable. Every cell was solitary, just big enough for a bed and a toilet, nothing more. No reading of any kind was allowed. The only written words I saw during those eight months were those printed on a box of toothpaste. One of the reasons I have a nervous disease and my hands shake is because of the torture in that prison. They would call one from one’s cell to work at any time of night or day—midnight was a favourite time. It was forbidden to ask questions. Of course, there was no trial. The only way to get out of this prison was to capitulate, give up your political views and agree to work for the Kuomintang to help suppress the revolution. Thus the only alternatives were to be spiritually destroyed or, ultimately, to be physically destroyed and die in prison. There was no fixed term for one’s imprisonment, so that the only possible way out was to agree to serve the Kuomintang. One was free to do this and walk out of the prison at any time. That was how the Chungtong's prison was, and it was just like hell.
At the end of November 1937, when the Japanese Army approached to within a few miles of Nanking, I could hear the sound of shelling very clearly from my cell. Every day, all day long, Japanese aeroplanes flew over the city dropping bombs. But, of course, we prisoners were not allowed to take shelter even during a raid; if the prison had been hit we would have died in our cells. It was at this time that the second united front between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party was formed and as a result all the other prisoners except me were set free, since they were all Communists. I became the only inmate in the prison. I remember that it was on the last day of November that the last remaining prison officer came to my cell and told me that he was leaving the prison. He said that I could go too. He was a very good fellow. He gave me two dollars, because I was penniless. So I walked into the city and found a friend and borrowed twenty dollars. As a war refugee, I climbed on a refugee train to Hankow. This was just a few days before the Japanese Army entered Nanking and carried out the notorious Nanking Massacre. Even on the day I was set free, the streets and alleys of the city were littered with dead and dying, victims either of the bombing raids or—as was especially the case with refugees who had come south from Shanghai—of starvation or disease. It was a very miserable scene.
As a refugee, I went to Wuchang. I arrived there at the beginning of December, and found Ch’en Tu-hsiu. He received me very warmly and asked me to live in his home. We had discussions which lasted for many days, covering every question. Ch’en had by now become spiritually dull, but still had sound political opinions. I proposed that we should try to publish a legal paper in Wuchang, but Ch’en said that this would be useless. He suggested that I should enlist in the army. One very ridiculous thing he said was that I should go into the army but should take care always to stand in a safe place. At all events, he said that it was necessary for us to take arms.
Opening in the Army
At that time there was, in fact, a very good opportunity for us to begin armed struggle. For there was a general named Hu Chi-fong, a divisional commander in Hupeh Province under Song Cha-kyui, whose brigade was commanded by Chi Sing-wang. Hu was seriously wounded in battle and sent back to Wuchang to recuperate. When I was in Wuchang, Hu Chi-fong was on the point of going back to the army, since he had recovered. During his stay in Wuchang he had read many books, and he was a man of intelligence—a man who thought for himself. So he had thought of many reasons why the army had suffered so many defeats at the hands of the Japanese imperialists. He had come to be disillusioned with the Kuomintang, to think that it had degenerated. So he wanted to find some way out of this situation. Of course, he had known the name of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, and moreover his brother was a friend of Ch’en’s. So he found the latter in Wuchang and had a talk with him. He proposed that Ch’en send some of his ‘disciples’ to the army, in order to give the soldiers of his brigade a ‘patriotic education’. Of course, he was simply a ‘patriot’ himself. Ch’en thought it was a very good opportunity. Hu's brigade did not directly belong to the Kuomintang, but was under the command of General Fong Yu-chang, who was a warlord independent of Chiang Kai-shek and thus not dominated by the Kungtong. That was why Ch’en Tu-hsiu thought it was a very good chance. At last we decided to go with him and Hu Chi-fong accepted us. Po Si-lau and I and another comrade named Chang Fo-ti were to go there first. The brigade was the 179th Division of the army, stationed at that time on the southern bank of the Yellow River. I was to be chief of staff of this division, and Po was to be an aide. Of course, it was forbidden by the Kuomintang to have political people like us in the army, and our roles as ‘chief of staff’ and ‘aide’ were a necessary cover. We got train tickets and were to start the next day. However, on the night prior to our departure, Hu Chi-fong was suddenly dismissed at the insistence of the Kuomintang, because they had discovered his relationship with Ch’en Tu-hsiu and us. Maybe he was informed on by other commanders. In any case, we lost contact with him.
By the way, we heard the name of Hu Chi-fong again later. This time he was a commander of the Kuomintang Army in the battle for Seechau, in the course of which about half-a-million Kuomintang soldiers were captured by the People’s Liberation Army. Hu, who was garrisoned at Seechau, played an important part in the Communist victory by rebelling against the Kuomintang and going over to the Red Army. When the People’s Republic was established, he was appointed a member of the military commission, and continues to work under Mao Tse-tung. Therefore, I think we were right in judging that he wanted to do something and that it was possible for us to intervene. He was, of course, simple-minded, but he wanted to do something for the revolution. So I think that if we had gone with him to the army, we could have done something valuable.
Possible Allies
Ch’en Tu-hsiu had another proposal. He said that there was no longer a Trotskyist organization in China. Some organized forces did, in fact, exist—some comrades working for Trotskyism in Shanghai—but Ch’en thought there was no perspective in the current method of work. He proposed that we take another path, namely, to work together with so-called ‘democratic’ groups, such as the Salvation Society, the Democratic League and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party—at that time generally known as the ‘third party’. These groups took a seemingly neutral position between the CP and the Kuomintang. They consisted of intellectuals (some of them bourgeois) and other left-wing elements. Ch’en proposed that we should cooperate with these groups, and work among the masses influenced by them. At the time, these groups had a certain mass following, especially the Salvation Society. I did not agree with Ch’en. I thought that this would be just another form of popular front. Ch’en wanted me to be our representative at the meeting with these groups. The latter were going to have a meeting attended by representatives from each, in order to negotiate a united front. I refused. After that, I stayed with Ch’en only a short time and then left Wuchang. I first went to Hong Kong and then to Shanghai. My family was in Shanghai and my old friends, such as Chen Chi-chang and other comrades, were there too. By the way, Ch’en Tu-hsiu himself finally attended the meeting in Wuchang with the three democratic groups. But the three groups did not want to take common action with Ch’en and were soon won over by the CP. So nothing came of this initiative.
When I went to Shanghai, the comrades there asked me to join them again, and I went on to the editorial board of the paper Struggle. At that time the editorial board was playing the role of the organization’s Central Committee. By the way, in the Chinese Trotskyist movement an elected Central Committee only existed once. This was the CC which was formed at the Founding Congress, and which was destroyed in less than a month after it was formed. After that, the leadership was always assumed by provisional committees or something of the sort. At all events, in 1937, when I went to Shanghai, this editorial board was playing the role of the CC. On the editorial board were Peng Shu-tse, Chen Chi-chang, Chen Chao-lin, comrade Lau and I. We continued to publish Struggle until the signs of American intervention into the Sino-Japanese war began to appear. We worked very amicably and there were no incidents worth mentioning.
Debate on the War
In 1939 I wrote an article to discuss what kind of attitude we should take if the United States intervened in the Sino-Japanese war, i.e. whether the character of the war would change or not. My view was that if the American Army intervened in the war and became the main opponent of Japanese imperialism, then the war would change its character and become a war between Japan and the United States, with China as a junior partner on the American side. I said that we should define our attitude to the war accordingly. I did not specify how our attitude should change. I did not think the matter through. I just raised the question.
At that time Peng Shu-tse was in Hong Kong. The remaining members of the editorial board agreed with me, but when Peng returned he expressed objections. He insisted that however much the American Army might dominate its Chinese partner, the war would not change its character. Thus differences began to emerge between us. But the discussion did not deepen, and other questions overshadowed the main point I had raised. Chen Chao-lin said we should go over to a policy of revolutionary defeatism if there was American intervention in the Sino-Japanese war. Peng Shu-tse said that there would be no question of revolutionary defeatism, even if the American Army intervened, and that our attitude should be one of defence. I thought at the time that if we were really to participate in the revolution, if we were to command some armed forces and intended to carry out our revolutionary programme, then the essence of our attitude should be revolutionary defeatism. But think of this situation. If we are on the front in the war against the Japanese army and a revolutionary situation arises in the area under Chinese control, we Trotskyists fight against the Kuomintang. Then the Chinese armed forces may be crushed by the Japanese army. In this case, all ‘patriots’ will say that we are traitors to China. I thought that there were only two alternatives open to us: either to abandon our revolutionary programme and cooperate with the Kuomintang for victory on the front, or to continue to fight for our revolutionary programme despite possible temporary defeats for China on the front. I thought that we should take up a policy of revolutionary defeatism—but only if we really meant it. This could not be a question of an attitude written down on a sheet of paper. If that was all that was involved, it would have been really easy. One could always be consistent, because no facts would come into the matter. But it was clear from the situation that the question was a concrete, urgent one, for which we had to prepare ourselves.
The real choice, as I have said, was whether we should abandon our revolutionary programme or keep on our struggle despite a possible temporary defeat this might help to provoke on the front. I thought that we should certainly continue our revolutionary struggle. In the existing situation, to overthrow the Kuomintang regime was absolutely necessary if we were to maintain our revolutionary struggle for a real victory over Japanese imperialism. I thought it was wrong to aim for victory in war first and revolution only second. In essence, Comrade Chen Chao-lin agreed with me. But, of course, Lenin's position on defeatism had been formulated in the context of a reactionary war, not in a progressive war. This posed big difficulties as to how to raise and how to formulate our revolutionary slogan. The positions taken on this by Chen Chao-lin and by me were different. I thought that we should emphasize the importance of victory over Japanese imperialism but say that for the weaker, Chinese side the most powerful potential weapon was revolution, including spreading revolution to the Japanese soldiers. This represented the best way forward for the Chinese revolution. So, as I saw it, my attitude was not ‘revolutionary defeatism’, but rather in one sense ‘revolutionary victoryism’. In other words, my view was, in essence, that only revolution can achieve a real victory over imperialism.
Unfortunately, I do not think that Peng Shu-tse thought about the question very seriously. He simply said that in Lenin’s opinion one should take an attitude of revolutionary defeatism to a reactionary war, but support a progressive war. He insisted these two should not be confused. Finally, the difference on the editorial board crystalized into a balance of forces of four to two. Chen Chao-lin, Chen Chi-chang and Lau agreed with me; Peng Shu-tse and Liu Chau-liang opposed us. On the editorial board therefore, we were the majority and Peng was in the minority. But some time later a meeting was held in Shanghai, attended by more than twenty comrades. At this meeting, the question was discussed and the majority was reversed. Li Fu-jen (Frank Glass) helped Peng to some extent to achieve this. At the time there was a Pacific Bureau of the Fourth International (or perhaps of the SWP—I cannot recall) which specifically dealt with the countries in the Pacific area. Frank spoke for this Pacific Bureau, and proposed a resolution about the Chinese question which was quite similar to Peng’s position. He said that even if the United States intervened in the Sino-Japanese war, our attitude towards Chinese participation should not change in any way. This was the key point on which he insisted. The resolution was passed, which gave authority to Peng’s point of view. Before the meeting, the majority had supported our position, but because of the authority of Li Fu-jen’s resolution the majority swung over to support Peng. On the editorial board, too, the majority swung to Peng’s position and Chen Chao-lin and I were put in a minority.
The Split
This did not in itself mean a split of the organization. The minority demanded to continue discussion upon the question in the internal bulletin, and that the discussion should be printed in Struggle. Peng refused this demand, saying that we could not continue discussion endlessly and that we should support the majority now that the question had been resolved at the meeting. Even in the internal bulletin, just two or three issues were allowed for us to discuss the question and then an end was put to that. We asked for more issues of the internal bulletin for the question, and proposed that our articles on this question should be printed in Struggle under our own names—not, of course, as an official position. Editorials would put the official line, while signed articles would only represent the positions of their authors. At all events, we insisted that the question should continue to be discussed openly in Struggle. We demanded that one-eighth of the space in Struggle should be devoted to discussion, in the form of a ‘discussion column’. Peng said this was impossible. Then we decided to publish our own mimeographed paper entitled Internationalist. Peng said that the minority had violated discipline, but he did not expel us. He said that the organization had split and that the entire responsibility lay with the minority.
Around this time, the Japanese Army occupied the international settlement in Shanghai and the situation was becoming worse and worse. So Liu Chau-liang and other comrades dispersed. Liu left Shanghai, Peng changed his name and became a professor in a Christian university in Shanghai. The minority continued to publish Internationalist under the Japanese occupation, but Struggle ceased to appear, once Liu Chau-liang and Peng were no longer there to produce it.
On D-Day, when the Japanese Army surrendered, many comrades came back to Shanghai from inland districts—Chongking, Kwangming, etc. This was the first time they learnt that there was a difference of opinion among us, and indeed a de facto split. They asked both sides what the differences were, and took sides accordingly. Events had moved so fast that the Kuomintang was not able to establish a firm domination. There was an interlude of something like democracy in Shanghai, and this situation continued from August 1945 to 1949 when the Red Army arrived. Taking advantage of this situation, both groups—Peng's and mine—were growing. Students and workers were recruited—though especially students. Both groups published magazines. Peng’s group published a theoretical journal Chu-chang (Truth) and a youth journal Youth and Women. We published a journal called New Banner, which was printed and sold at newspaper stands. (New Banner was banned by the Kuomintang after its sixteenth issue as a ‘reactionary’ paper, but we continued to publish it for four issues clandestinely, in mimeographed form.) During this period there was no attempt from either side to reunify the two groups.
But we did cooperate to some extent. For instance, Chen Chao-lin wrote two or three articles for Truth. Then in 1948 Peng began to organize a new party, the Revolutionary Communist Party. We organized a new party a few months later—in April 1949, only one month before the Communist Army entered Shanghai. We called it the Internationalist Communist Party. Its membership was predominantly young, so that it was something like the present Seventies Biweekly group in Hong Kong, though less confused. Most of the young members had previously been sympathetic to Stalinism. We had about sixty or seventy members in Shanghai, and over two hundred in the country as a whole. I cannot tell exactly how large the majority was at the time, but it might have had three hundred members in the whole country.
After Communist Victory
When the Communist army took Nanking and approached Shanghai, where we had a certain mass base, we discussed what slogan we should raise. Throughout the two groups, there was only one comrade, Yung Kua, who may be in one of Mao's prisons if he is still alive, who said that we should raise the slogan ‘Welcome the Liberation Army’. His argument was that the masses wanted to welcome the liberation army, and that we should not isolate ourselves from them but should go through experiences with them. The rest of us were opposed to any such slogan. On the other hand, we also thought it important to move with the masses, so that we equally rejected any such slogan as ‘Fight against the Liberation Army’ or ‘Do not let the Liberation Army enter’. It was necessary to warn the masses that if they relied upon the Liberation Army, they would soon be disillusioned. But the important thing was for us to encourage the masses to organize their own power, independently from the Liberation Army. Of course, at that time Shanghai was under Kuomintang domination. So what we were saying meant that we had to rely upon our own force to overthrow the Kuomintang in the city. (In 1926, when the Kuomintang Army—which was still playing a revolutionary role in unifying the country and destroying the power of the warlords—was approaching Shanghai from the South, while it was still several miles distant the Communist Party organized a workers’ insurrection in the city. Thus when the army came to Shanghai, power was in the hands of the workers. This insurrection was organized by Chou En-lai and Chang Cheng-tong. Chang Cheng-tong was, of course, one of our comrades. He is in one of Mao's prisons today.)
In May 1949, the Communist Army arrived at the Yangtze River and approached Shanghai. Peng's group decided to move the leadership of their party to Hong Kong, and most cadres of the majority moved there, together with Peng himself. However, most members of the majority had no relatives with whom to stay in Hong Kong, or had jobs and families to support; they therefore could not move and remained in China, forming local councils in Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces. The majority stopped publishing their journals when the leadership moved to Hong Kong, and could not continue any coordinated activity. Most of the members lost all contact with the leadership. Thus the majority was unable to make advantage of the situation after the Communist Army entered Shanghai.
The minority, for its part, remained in Shanghai, Peking, Kwangsi and Chekiang (Hangchow), and continued to publish its paper. Just Lau and I went to Hong Kong to organize our group there. Even after the Communists took Shanghai, our organization still continued to grow. Indeed, it grew very rapidly with the CP in power. We began to publish a new clandestine journal, Marxist Youth. Chen Chao-lin and the other comrades told me that this new journal really caught on among the youth, who had welcomed the People’s Liberation Army but began very quickly to become disillusioned, and therefore sought contact with us. Thus it was especially among the youth that our organization grew during the three years which elapsed between the Communist take-over in Shanghai and 1952, when comrades of the minority were arrested all over China. (Some young members went too far and wanted to launch armed struggle. They were arrested and shot.) Disillusion with CP rule had set in very rapidly among the youth, who had expected too much. We were in a position to make big gains. But in 1952 the Communists arrested all our comrades. I cannot understand why they had tolerated us for three years. I suppose that at first they had other enemies more important than us. At any rate, in this period they contented themselves with making such famous Chinese Trotskyists as Liu Yen-ching and the Marx scholar Li-chi write declarations denouncing the Fourth International and supporting Mao Tse-tung. That was all—and in return they gave them jobs. (Li-chi translated the Marx/Engels correspondence and Liu taught in a school.) But by the time three years had passed, they found us very dangerous, because we were growing so rapidly; so they launched an anti-Trotskyist witch-hunt. In one night, on 22-3 December 1952, throughout China all the Trotskyists were arrested. We estimate that between two and three hundred were taken, including sympathizers and relatives. A typical case was that of my own nephew. About one month after his arrest, they called my brother to the police station to take away his body. From 1952 to the time of the Cultural Revolution, there was no Trotskyist movement worth mentioning in China.
Mao and Revolution
Immediately after Mao’s victory, most of the comrades were surprised and asked themselves why we had failed and Mao succeeded—something the Chinese Trotskyists had never thought possible. How to explain this simple fact was the main problem. Peng Shu-tse, Liu Chau-liang and others just did not see the fact. They insisted that nothing new had happened. At the end of 1949 they said that Mao dared not fight against the bourgeoisie or confiscate its property. They said that he would inevitably seek a compromise with the bourgeois class, make it concessions, and ultimately surrender to it. Peng and Liu closed their eyes to reality.
Chen Chao-lin, for his part, said that Mao's army was not a communist army and that its success only represented a victory for state capitalism. He said that Mao’s party could not succeed; that they might expropriate the capitalists but that it would not be for socialism but for state capitalism. I myself initially wrote a pamphlet arguing that Mao's victory was that of the bureaucracy. I said that this bureaucracy was a new class, and the victory was that of a bureaucratic collectivism. But I held this position for a short period only. I soon reconsidered and concluded that the new regime was a deformed workers’ state.
Peng has never explicitly changed his position. But if he too now maintains that the present regime is a deformed workers’ state, how does he arrive at this conclusion? He has never explained. Perhaps he attributes everything to the role of the Soviet Army? At first he refused to accept the fact of the revolution at all. Later he said that there had been a revolution but this had nothing to do with Mao's policy. It was achieved only by the Soviet Army, because the latter gave arms to Mao's troops while the imperialists did not have sufficient arms to resist Mao’s advance. This may be the key to Peng’s position—but he never really explains.
Formerly we simply identified Mao Tse-tung with Stalin. But in reality there is a difference. Mao is, of course, a Stalinist. But he must be seen in the context of Chinese reality, undergoing the pressures of the Chinese revolution since the twenties, making a whole series of alterations to traditional Stalinism. When, in 1934, Mao made a united front for the second time with the Kuomintang, we said he had surrendered and knelt down before Chiang Kai-shek, that he had abandoned all class struggle. But we were mistaking his tactical manoeuvres for his strategy. Mao has always been very much a tactician. At that time, he said that he would halt the agrarian revolution; but in reality he continued to push it forward. He continued his class policy. We said that Mao’s party was not a class party, not a workers’ party, but a petty-bourgeois peasant party which could never carry out a revolution. But this was to misjudge the real character of the Chinese Communist Party. The latter was, of course, a bureaucratized party, but it retained some positive features. First of all, the Communists lived among the masses—and from this point of view they had the advantage over us, who were almost entirely cut off from the masses. Although the masses with whom the CP lived were peasants and not workers, it did nevertheless live and struggle with them. And in China the poor peasantry was and is a revolutionary force. We Trotskyists underestimated this revolutionary force of the poor peasantry of China. We dogmatically said that we should go to the workers and direct the peasantry only through the workers. We insisted upon an indirect contact with the peasantry, saying that we could never lead the peasantry ourselves. We thought that if we went directly to the peasantry, we would degenerate into a peasant party. We acted according to our dogma. But we were wrong. If we consider this question with the advantage of hindsight, we can see that if we had had, in that reactionary period of the early thirties, some connection with the peasantry, we could have gone to the villages and carried out revolutionary work there. Like the CP we could have pushed forward the agrarian revolution, and could have led peasants’ risings and armed struggles.
Our Mistakes
Thus the first point to be made concerns our misjudgement of the real character of the CP. Although it was a degenerate party, it was still a party capable of leading a revolution, because it acted amongst the masses. What is a proletarian party? It can be defined by many criteria—the proletarian social origin of the membership being only one of these. Many parties composed of workers are reformist, some even bourgeois. Therefore we cannot decide whether the party is proletarian or not by the criterion of the class composition of the membership. I think the most important criterion is the party’s political programme. If the programme stands for socialist revolution, for permanent revolution and for Leninist principles of organization, then we may speak of a workers’ party—even if only a few of the members are workers, and the leaders are petty-bourgeois intellectuals. The second point is that we dogmatically thought that we could lead the peasantry only through the workers, so we had to stay in the cities. We would work among the workers, and then the workers’ political influence would be extended over the peasantry—that was our position. This was wrong. We should have gone to the villages, agitated among and organized the peasantry, and engaged in armed struggle. For the third point on which we were wrong was that we did not understand the importance of armed struggle. In reality, when the peasantry revolted, it always developed into an armed struggle. There could be no peaceful outcome.
In countries like China it was very difficult to build a Party under the severe Kuomintang rule. We did our best and many comrades sacrificed themselves for revolution. But if we had realized earlier, especially during the war, that our attitude was a dogmatic one, we could have had many opportunities to organize really important forces. For example, I have already recounted how we missed the opportunity of gaining a foothold in the army via Ch’en Tu-shiu’s prestige. But if we had persisted, we could have got a second chance and a third. However, we never sought that kind of chance. When I returned to Shanghai from Wuchang, I reported to the editorial board there about our attempt to penetrate the army. Then all the members agreed with me that we should take up arms, including Peng Shu-tse. But when discussion began to take place on the editorial board, Peng described my abortive attempt as a crime, a mistake, ‘military adventurism’.
We should not and must not blame our opponents for our own failures. When Mao's policy was wrong, we must of course make the correct criticisms. We must analyse scientifically to what extent the CP was degenerate. But it is wrong to exaggerate—to exaggerate is to deceive yourself. We always said that Mao's party was a petty-bourgeois party. But, according to the theory of permanent revolution, no petty-bourgeois party can ever lead a proletarian revolution. Then there is a contradiction between the fact and the theory. The real point is that we misjudged reality.