* have spent the greater part of my life and effort in the struggle for socialism and against Stalinism.'
Wang Fan-hsi 1907-2002 Din Wong
Born in 1907 in Hsia-shih (between became politicised in high school at a momentous turning point in Chinese history - the May Fourth movement.
As a student at Peking University in 1925, Wang Fan-hsi joined the Chinese Communist Party, at a time when the CCP was under instruction from the Comintern to subordinate itself to the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang KMT) and Chiang Kai-shek in a fatally opportunist interpretation of the united front tactic.
After the betrayal and massacre of workers in Canton and Shanghai by Chiang Kai-shek in 1926-7, Wang Fan-hsi was sent to Wuhan, the power base of the 'Left' Nationalist leader, Wang Ching-wei with whom the Chinese Communist Party, under Wang Fan-hsi -orders from Moscow, now made an alliance.
He watched with growing unease as the Party once again agreed to the surrender of arms by trade unionists and workers' militia to the local garrison as a mark of their 'loyalty to the nationalist government, just as they had in Shanghai.
In 1928, Wang Fan-hsi arrived in Moscow for military training at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, then in the thick of Stalin's campaign against Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Persuaded by Trotsky's analysis of the failure of the 2nd revolution, he joined, and soon became one of the organisers of the clandestine group of Chinese Left Oppositionists.
When he returned to China in 1929, Wang worked as an aide to Chou En-lai in Shanghai until he was expelled from the CCP. He then worked for the unification of the 4 opposition groups to overcome their divisions regarding the nature of the coming revolution and the slogan for a constituent assembly.
Unfortunately, soon after he was elected ... • with Chen Tu-hsiu to the leadership of the unified opposition group, Wang was arrested and jailed for 3 years by the Nationalists.
Not deterred by this, he returned to Shanghai and, in collaboration with the South African communist Frank Glass and the American Harold Isaacs, threw his energy into rebuilding the Trotskyist organisation and publishing theoretical and political periodicals.
Just before the outbreak of war with the Japanese, he was kidnapped by KMT special service agents and endured another jail term. Under interrogation, despite torture, Wang refused to divulge the names and addresses of his comrades and was put in solitary confinement.
This period, described by Wang as the darkest days of his life, was cut short only by the action of a sympathetic jailer who unlocked his cell before fleeing from the approaching Japanese army.
Back in Japanese occupied Shanghai, Wang and his comrades resumed political activity under very difficult circumstances and at great risks to their lives. Their efforts centred on education, propaganda, writing, translation and the publication of Trotsky's work.
When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, •... the Trotskyists were able, despite a split in their ranks and a ban by the KMT government, to take some advantage of the situa tion in the cities where the CP's concentration on the countryside had left a virtual vacuum in the leadership of the urban working classes.
When a CCP military victory seemed certain, however, Wang was sent to Hong Kong to set up a new co-ordinating centre. Un-welcomed by the British, he was deported to Macau where he stayed until he came to England in 1975
In Macau, having lost his family, relatives, comrades and friends, Wang recollected his part in the Chinese revolution and reflected on the defeat of the Chinese Trotskyist
but the victory opened a new repression of Trotskyists works, studies on Mao Tse-tung's thoughts and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He also wrote several plays. Despite years of hand to mouth existence, perilous threats to his life and prison terms that were most injurious to his health, Wang was unshaken in his political beliefs. The terms of his exile in Britain did not allow him to be politically active, yet he kept up extensive political correspondence with revolutionaries around the world and, ever forward-looking he encouraged and inspired, a new generation of radical Chinese youth in Hong Kong and Britain in the seventies and eighties With the recent partial rehabilitation of Chen Tu-hsiu in China, Wang's Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary and a new edition of his Study on the Thoughts of Mao have also now been pub lished, although with restricted availability, in China.
If the downfall of Stalinism vindicated his commitment to the programme of Trotskyism, the emergence of a new workers' movement in China and of the anti-capitalist movement globally, confirmed his continuing political optimism and enthusiasm.
An internationalist till his last, he was still enquiring about the progress of the anti-war? and anti-capitalist movements even in his very last days. A modest and un-embittere comrade, generous and scrupulousty fair to others in the Chinese Trotskyist movement