Lou Guohua (Lou Kuohua) alias Zi Chun, Yi Ding, Shao Yuan, Ze Cheng, died on March 8. He joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1927, accepted Trotskyism in 1929 and books. joined China's first Trotskyist organisation (Womende hua, «Our Word") in 1929.
He was a delegate to the 1931 founding conference of the Left Opposition of the CCP. Arrested by Chiang Kai-Shek's political police, together with almost all the newly elected Executive Committee, he was jailed for six years.
After being freed from prison in 1935 he continued his revolutionary work in the Trotskyist movement. He was forced to spend the after the arrival of the Maoist army in Shanhgai in 1949.
In the late 1950s, when for the revolution. Trotskyists were deported from the colony and Trotskyist literature was suppressed, he established Xinda chubanshe ("Sincere Press"), which subsequently published a dozen or so tries, and even young It was mainly through his contacte and intence ThaT those Hong Kong youth imagine. who in the 1970s inclined to anarchism (and gathered around Qiling niandai 'the Society of Seventies") were won to Trotskyism and tions whatsoever. launched the Revolutionary Marxist League, of which he was a leading member.
Throughout his adult life Lou was a professional revolutionary, but at the same time he was a revolutionary with a profession. That is comrades. not to say that he was an amateur or part-time revoluhe was always had a job at who paid for her burial. Althe same time as working most every member of the earlier generations of our All genuinely revolution- comrades was in one way or ary organisations in poor another his beneficiary. countries, and especially the Apart from being the pubChinese Trotskyist organisa- lisher of the Chinese Trottion, have known financial skyist movement, Lou hardship of a sort that com- Guohua was also a brilliant rades in the developed coun- author in his own right. He was a distinguished authorChinese radicals in present- ity on Lu Xun's work, about day Hong Kong, can hardly which he wrote numerous articles and an important book. In these writings he exNo dues posed how China's Maoist authorities puffed up Lu There were no donations, Xun in order to obscure no dues, and no contribu- Chen Duxiu's founding role in China's New Culture Lou Guohua acted as a Movement of 1915-1921. one-man fund raiser for ChiAlthough Lu Xun was nese Trotskyism. He usually modern China's best-known worked as a salaried acessayist and writer, he actu countant. He was exceedRally played only a supportingly frugal, and saved from Wing role in that seminal his income to help other movement; while Chen Duxiu was renowned as its For example, when com- "Commander-in-Chief." rade Li Cailian died in the CCP in 1921, has been a nonperson since 1931, because he fathered Chinese Trotskyism. This is why the myth of Lu Xun's role in the movement had to be invented.
Lou's book exposed the falsification, quoting extensive evidence.
Slander
He also exposed the Maoists' slander of Chen Duxiu in 1938 as an agent of Japan (to match Stalin's slandering of Trotsky as a Hitler agent); and advanced the hypothesis that Lu Xun's supposed "Letter to the Trotskyists" of the 1936, in which the Trotskyist Chen Oichang and his comrades were accused of treacherously taking money from the Japanese, was written by the Stalinist Feng Xuefeng.
Today both Lou's theses have been confirmed by China, such as the posthumous publication of an article by Hu Feng, Lu Xun's main disciple and the first victim after 1949 of the Maoists' policy on literature and art.
Lou Guohua's death agony lasted two years. Before his final stroke he lost the power of hearing. After this he lost the power of speech. Finally he lost the power of sight and lapsed into unconsciousness ten days before his death. He is survived by his wife, a daughter, and Three cong Lou Guohua was the publisher and "philanthropist" of the Chinese Trotskyist movement.
He remained a Trotskyist and a supporter of the Fourth International until his death. He died loved and respected by the younger generation of Hong Kong radicals.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 81, April 8 1995, Page 13