Memoirs of a Chinese Wang-Fan hsi Columbia University Press, Morningside edition €10.95 Reviewed by Charlie van Gelderen THE new English-language edition of these memoirs should be welcomed by all interested in the Chinese revoluton. rancutary tor revolutionaries who may have missed the first edition published in 1980.
Vang's life-span embracemost the entire history of the communist moverent. Born in 1907, he is now the only one of the founding members of Chinese trotskyism still alive.
Despite his great age and ill-health, he still takes a lively intellectual interest in current events. His only regret, as he wrote to this reviewer, is that cally wew to take pat hy th. cally weak' to take t in the men Massacre and the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe and the Sovict Union.
To do full justice to this book and to the life of its author would require a great deal more space than is available here.
Wang took part in the Chinese revolution of 1925.27 when the young Chinese Communist Party was hamstrung on staun s instructons, Dy ils alliance with the Kuomintang. It ended with the bloody massacre of Communists by Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist forces in Kwantung and Shanghas This new edition is particularly noteworthy because it contains a new short preface by the author, his preface to the French edition, chapter on Thinking in Solitude - left out of the first edition for reasons of space.
In his re-written preface, transator bres benton draws attention to Wang's discussion on democracy with Chen Tu-hsiu. In view of the importance of this question today, it is worthwhile to conclude this review with the full text of Wa Under pretent historical conditions, if the proletariat through its political party cal and economic rule of the bourgeoisie, it must carry out a violent revolution and set up a dictatorship to expropriate the expropriators. io, in nine cases out of ten, it is bound to destroy the bourgeoisie's traditional means of rule - the parliamentary system. To complete such a transformation 'peacefully" through parliament is practically, if not absolutely, impossible.
• A proletarian dictorship set up in such a way neither must nor should destroy the various democratic rights - including habeus corpus; freedom of speech, the press, assembly and right to strike;
etc., etc. - already won by inder the bourgeois lemocratic system.
• The organs of the dictatorship elected by the entire toiling xople should e under the thoroughgoing supervision o he elector by them at all times. The should not be concentrated in one body but spread across several structures so that, there is a system of checks and balances to prevent the emergence of an autocracy or топостасу. under the dictatorship as long as they support the revolution. Whether or not they sup port this condition should bi decided by the workers and casants ín a free ballot be tolerated within the party of the proletariat. Under no circumstances must organisational sanctions, secret-service sanctions be used to deal with dissidents; under no circumstances must thought be made a crime.
• Under no circumstances must proletarian dictatorship Mao's Long March: Wang uncovers hidden history of Chinese marxism become the dictatorship of a single party. Worken parties organised by the Working class and the intelligencia must under no circumstances replace the political power democratically elected by the toilens as a whole. There must be an end to the present system in the communist countries where government is a facade behind which secretaries of the party branches assume direct command. The ruling party's strategic policies must first be discussed and approved by an empowered parliament (or soviet) that includes opposition parties and faction: ,and only then should they be implemented by government; and their implementation must continue to be supervised by parliament.
• Finally... since political democracy is actually a reflec tion of economic democracy and no political democracy is possible under a system of ab solutely centralised economic controf... to create the material base for socialist democracy a system of divided power and self-management within the overall planned economy is essential.
All these points are not in themselves enough to save a revolutionary power from bureaucratie degeneration; but since they are not plucked from the void but rooted in bloody experience, they should: (a) help workers and lad revolutions to win their anti-bureaucratic struggle wuch ne concons tortor democratisation of the dictatorial state have further ripened; (b) enable new revolutionary states from the very patser to avola pureaucratc poisoning