Chinese Trotskyist Zheng Chaolin (1908-1998)
Implacable opponent of Stalinism
Zheng Chaolin, a veteran of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a Chinese Trotskyist, died on August 1 in Shanghai. He devoted his entire life to the cause of the liberation of the Chinese workers and peasants.
He was at once a writer, a poet, an historian, a linguist and a translator. His achievements were not only numerous but exemplary. He avoided a desultory or dilettantish approach and probed deeply into the essence of things, assiduously perfecting his skills and knowledge.
Naturally, he was first and foremost a faithful and unyielding revolutionary. His efforts and achievements in other fields took as their keynote his revolutionary thinking, and were shot through with his revolutionary spirit.
Chaolin was born Zhangping in Fujian province in 1901, and as a boy he received a traditional Chinese education. In 1919 he went to France as part of a "work study" programme (under which young Chinese students financed their studies by working part-time in French industry), and came under the influence of western thought, particularly the Russian Revolution.
He gradually abandoned his attachment to the philosophy of Confucius and Mencius and even Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi and embraced the ideas propagated by Chen Duxiu and his co-thinkers who advocated democracy and science. Shortly afterwards he embraced Marxism, and very soon progressed from thought to action.
In June 1922, when some young Chinese Marxists living in Europe held a meeting in Paris at which they set up the "Youth Communist Party". Chaolin was among the 18 delegates, who included Zhou Enlai, Zhao Shiyan and Yin Kuan.
In 1923 he was selected to go to Russia to study at Moscow’s University for Toilers of the East. In July 1924 , when the CCP urgently needed cadres as a result of the rapid development of the revolutionary situation in China, he was sent back to China with Chen Yannian and others.
He worked in the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, edited party journals, drafted internal educational materials and external propaganda materials and translated Bukharin’s ABC of Communism, while at the same time teaching at the party school in Shanghai.
From 1925 to 1927, when the Chinese revolution grew apace, he participated in the famous May 30th Movement and in the second and third Shanghai worker’s risings. After Chiang Kai-Shek’s bloody coup on 12 April 1927, Zheng went with the Central Committee to Wuhan, where he took part in the Party’s fifth congress. He was appointed head of the Propaganda Department of the Hubei Provincial Committee.
After the final defeat of the revolution he took part in the party’s famous August 7th conference. Soon afterwards he secretly moved back to Shanghai with the new Central Committee and took charge of the new party organ Bolshevik, as its chief editor.
In 1928 he went to Fujian to reorganise party affairs in the province.
In 1929 he married comrade Liu Jingzhen. Not long afterwards he was arrested for the first time by the Guomindang. Fortunately, his identity was not discovered, and after just over 40 days he was released as a result of the secret intervention of the party.
Between 1929 and 1930 he began to come into contact with Trotsky’s writings on the Chinese Revolution. Deeply impressed, he turned towards Trotskyism, together with Chen Duxiu and others. In May 1931 he, Chen Duxiu and three other comrades represented the Proletariat group at the unification conference of the four Trotskyist groups.
He was elected to the Central Committee and took charge of its Propaganda Department. Not long afterwards, he was arrested by the Guomindang authorities and sentenced to 15 years in prison, though he was released after just seven years, when the Japanese war broke out.
After his release he rested and recuperated for a while in a village in Anhui Province together with his wife, and proof-read and translated the remaining parts of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, a third of which had already been translated by two other Trotskyists in Nanjing prison.
In 1940 , he returned to Shanghai, where he joined the leadership of the Chinese Trotskyist organisation and the editorial branch of the underground paper, Struggle. He translated volumes two and three of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution.
After the outbreak of a new world war in Western Europe in 1939, differences of opinion grew up in the Chinese Trotskyist leadership. These were principally over what attitude to adopt to the Chinese resistance once the Anti-Japanese war in China became caught up in the wider war.
A protracted dispute ensued, and spread from political to organisational issues. As a result the Chinese Trotskyist organisation split in 1942. Chaolin was a leading member of the group later known as the International workers Party of China.
On December 7 1941, the Japanese army occupied Shanghai’s foreign settlements and revolutionary activity directed against the Japanese became extremely difficult. From then until the Japanese defeat in August 1945, Chaolin put his main effort into writing.
Apart from editing Internationalist, the underground Trotskyist journal, he wrote his memoirs and Three Travellers, a collection of political debates in the form of imaginary dialogues. He wrote the ABC of Permanent Revolution and a Critical Biography of Chen Duxiu (uncompleted). To earn a living he also translated some literary works, among them Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara and a book by Andre Gide.
From August 1945 to May 1949, from the Japanese surrender and the civil war between the Guomindang and the CCP to the Communist victory in China, he wrote numerous articles for New Banner, a publicly declared Trotskyist fortnightly which was banned by the Guomindang government after 21 issues.
On the eve of the Communist occupation of Shanghai, the group to which he belonged reorganised as the International Workers Party (IWP) which he helped to lead. In the meantime Chaolin systematically researched the social material of the new China and wrote a pamphlet On State Capitalism.
In the next two to three years the IWP continued its activities under Communist rule, and extended its influence. As a result, on 22 December 1952, its entire membership, together with all the other Chinese Trotskyists and even sympathisers, were rounded up by the Maoist political police.
This development had naturally been foreseen. As a precaution, the other Trotskyist organisation under Peng Shuzhi, had already transferred its leadership to Hong Kong. The IWP also decided to send someone to Hong Kong to set up a liaison station.
However, Chaolin himself refused to go and insisted on staying behind in Shanghai, although he was fully aware of the danger that he faced there. His St Peter-like spirit led him not to a martyr’s grave but to a further 27 years in prison including physical and spiritual abuse.
In June 1979, as a result of changes in the leadership of the CCP and in response to calls by people both inside and outside China (in 1979 he was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International), Chaolin and 11 other survivors of Mao’s gaols were restored to liberty.
In all he spent a total of 34 years behind bars, equalling the record for political imprisonment set by the French Revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui.
Chaolin’s wife Liu Jingzhen died less than half a year after her and Chaolin’s release from a Labour Camp in June 1979. Their son Frei, born in 1938, died in 1945. In his final years, Chaolin was cared for by his great niece.
In the 19 years between his release and his death, Chaolin suffered poor health as a result of his years in prison, but he refused to give in to this. He put enormous effort into reflecting on and writing about events in the world around him.
In those years he achieved three main things.
First, he helped various historians write true histories of the Chinese Revolution and the CCP (including Chinese Trotskyism), to correct distortions made, consciously or unconsciously, and in particular to refute past slanders and distortions directed by the CCP against Chen Duxiu.
Secondly, he reflected independently and systematically on fundamental questions on the Chinese and world Revolution, putting the process and outcome of those reflections into writing in his long essay Cadreism.
Thirdly, he repeatedly demanded of successive congresses of the CCP that they rehabilitate the Chinese Trotskyists, formally declare the Trotskyists (in China and throughout the world) not to be counter-revolutionaries, and to admit that the past suppression of the Trotskyists was wrong.
He recorded his efforts in these regards in writings of more than a million Chinese characters. Unfortunately, so far it has been possible to publish only a small part of them.
Even though Chaolin enjoyed personal freedom after 1979 and was named as a member of the Shanghai Municipal Political Consultative Committee, he was still labelled a "counter-revolutionary" and still suffered from discrimination. In recent years his memoirs were published "internally" (i.e. for restricted readership) and his translation of D. Merezhkovski’s The Gods was republished.
None of his main works, however, which deal with political questions, whether written in prison or after his release, have received permission to be published, because he has all along resolutely maintained his opposition to Stalinism and Maoism.
Of his main writings, only his memoirs have appeared in English, in a volume titled An Oppositionist for Life: Memoirs of the Chinese Revolutionary Zheng Chaolin, published in the USA in 1996 by Humanities Press. From these writings, foreign friends can get some idea of the life of this remarkable Chinese Marxist-Trotskyist.