CHINA: Wang Fanxi's revolutionary life

January 29, 2003
Issue 

BY EVA CHENG

Wang Fanxi died in Leeds, England, on December 30. Born in 1907, Wang became politically active during the anti-imperialist upsurge in China in the 1920s and participated in the revolutionary communist movement there for almost three decades. Long persecuted for his anti-Stalinist activities, even before Communist Party of China (CPC) took power in 1949, Wang was forced into exile in Macao in 1949, where he lived for 26 years. He spent the last 27 years of his life in Leeds.

Wang didn't pass away in obscurity. He was deeply respected by the newer generations of anti-Stalinist fighters in Hong Kong (which was reintegrated back into China in 1997) and beyond.

In exile, Wang produced political analyses of China before and after the revolution 1949 from an anti-Stalinist perspective, providing a valuable source for young Chinese activists. His main work, Wang Fan-hsi: Chinese Revolutionary, Memoirs 1919-1949, is a rare first-hand account by a significant participant in the Chinese revolutions, free from the pressure and bias of having to tell the “victor's” story. It was first translated and published in English in 1980, then in Japanese, French and German.

Terrified, but not totally surprised, by the purges in China since the 1950s, which peaked during the 1960s Cultural Revolution, Wang's main observations were later published in Studies on Mao Tse-tung Thought under the pseudonym of “Shuang Shan”.

One of Wang's most recent analyses, a rebuttal of Tang Baolin's falsifications in his History of Chinese Trotskyism, appeared in Gregor Benton's 1996 book, China's Urban Revolutionaries: Explorations in the History of Chinese Trotskyism, 1921-1952. Throughout his exile, Wang maintained active contact with revolutionaries from anti-Stalinist and Trotskyist traditions, especially those sympathetic to the Fourth International.

Wang was born in Hsia-shih near Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, four years before China's emperor system was overturned by the 1911 revolution. The aftermath of China's first wave of anti-imperialist struggle in 1919 impacted on Wang. Awoken by the massacre of striking workers and students in 1925 in Shanghai, Wang dived into the wave of anti-imperialist mobilisations that swept China between 1925-27 and joined the underground CPC in Beijing. Revolutionary activities then took him to Quangzhou and Wuhan, revolutionary centres of the time.

Under the direction of the Stalin-dominated Comintern, the CPC schematically believed that China was confronting a bourgeois revolution and therefore it must be led by China's bourgeois party, the Kuomintang (KMT), headed by Chiang Kai-shek. In the “united front” with KMT, the CPC was in fact politically subordinate to it. In the wake of repeated massacres of strikers by Chiang's army, the CPC's ranks were left utterly demoralised and confused.

To preserve its forces, hundreds of CPC cadre were sent to Moscow for “study” and recuperation. Wang was one of them. It was late 1927, at the height of the Left Opposition's struggle against Stalin's control of the Soviet leadership. One of the main debates was on the 1925-27 Chinese revolution. A majority of the Chinese party members in Moscow (including Wang) were won to the Left Opposition, which was led by Leon Trotsky.

In Moscow, Wang and his comrades also got a first-hand glimpse of the emerging bureaucratisation of the Russian Revolution and of Stalin's political and organisational intrigues — especially of how Stalin groomed stooges who would later be manoeuvred into leading positions in the CPC. Under Stalin's direction, not only did the CPC refuse to acknowledge the defeat of the 1925-27 revolution, but it pushed workers nearer to Chiang's murderous firing squads by undertaking adventurous “uprisings” to meet its projections of new “revolutionary upsurges”.

Wang and other Chinese oppositionists returned to China in the late 1920s convinced of the need to work within the CPC as a faction to try to win others to their perspective. Wang worked intensely for five years within the CPC, mostly under Zhou Enlai (who would later become Chinese premier, until 1975), before being expelled. Escalating persecution then forced the Chinese Left Opposition to leave the CPC to found the Communist League of China in 1936.

Four rival groups emerged from among the oppositionists in 1930; Wang was a leader of the October group. The groups unified in 1931, but a month later almost the entire leadership body was arrested. The remaining comrades continued to organise. Wang was jailed between 1931-34 — and tortured — and again until the Japanese imperialists launched a full-scale attack on China in 1937.

Despite the setbacks and their group's small size, the united oppositionists were active in some urban areas during the 1930s and drew more people into their ranks. Chen Duxiu, renowned leader of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, also joined them. As a key leader, Wang collaborated closely with Chen at different periods.

Since the late 1930s, the Chinese Trotskyists were able to deepen their political education through periodicals and publications. Wang played a central role in these tasks, leading as well as a political writer and thinker.

In 1941, conflicting assessments of the Pacific war split the Chinese Trotskyists into the Revolutionary Communist Party and the International Workers Party of China. Wang was in the latter. Early in 1949, when the CPC victory was imminent, Wang's group decided to stay in China and fight, but sent Wang to set up a backup coordinating centre outside China in Hong Kong. However, Wang was expelled from there four months later and fled to Macao.

In December 1952, a few hundred of Wang's comrades who were still in China were arrested in one big operation. Their fate remains unknown. Twelve were released in 1979, a few years after Wang was expelled from Macao. In Leeds, his new place of exile, Wang reestablished contact with some of them for the first time in 27 years.

Wang's optimism was impressive. He wrote in 1980: “Now that I'm approaching the end of my life's journey, I cannot but feel happy to find that what appears before me is not the darkness after sunset, but the bright glimmering of daybreak.”

From Green Left Weekly, January 29, 2003.
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