Book
Review, China Quarterly, 1998
Chen Duxiu's Last Articles and Letters, 1937-1942
Edited and translated by Gregor Benton. Foreword by Wang Fanxi.
Curzon Press. Great Britain. 1998. Photographs, glossary. Text
102 pages. Nine appendices of 40 pages. Price: 40 Pounds (approximately
$68 USD) hardback. ISBN 0 7007 0618 6
Since
1979, the study of Chen Duxiu, the early leader of the Chinese
Community Party, and the advocate of Chinese Trotskyism, has created
a minor publishing industry and a flurry of international conferences.
Gregor Benton, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University
of Leeds, is the paramount spokesman and analyst of the Chinese
Trotskyist movement. His book of translations and careful annotations
provide the first English language recognition and significance
of the last five years of Chen's life, the period from 1937 to
1942.
Before
1979, the Chinese Communist Party line denied, minimized or denounced
Chen's revolutionary leadership. Orthodox Party historians blamed
Chen for aligning the Communist movement with the Guomindang,
and thus precipitating the disasters in Shanghai, Wuhan and the
subsequent near destruction of the Communist Party. Angry at Chen
for organizing the Chinese Trotskyist Party in 1929, the Communist
Party expelled him, and labeled him as an "opportunist,"
and later a spy for the Japanese. In 1933, he was jailed by the
Guomindang. After his release in 1937, Chen's health was poor
and he lived in enforced seclustion. It was during this time when
he foreswore his allegiances to any ism that he wrote the articles
and letters to his friends and colleagues on which this book is
based. He died in 1942 and was buried on the estate of a friend's
home in Sichuan.
The
translations reveal a man obsessed with the future of democracy
not only in China but in the world. The Hitler-Stalin Pact had
united the two most aggressive fascist states in a powerful military
juggernaut that might solidify a fascist world order for centuries
to come. In his attacks on any ideological dogma, Chen found little
comfort in political parties and their doctrinaire policies regarding
military and revolutionary strategies that opposed democracy,
and that refused to recognize the need to fight fascism. Chen
stressed that he was an iconoclast, and a voice against unreasonable
authority. He preferred to be thought of as "an oppositionist
for life. 11
The
appendices include powerful tributes to Chen by his Trotskyist
associates--Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi. Rare correspondence
between Chen and Leon Trotsky is included. Chen's panegyric on
the death of Cai Jiemin (Cai Yuanpei), President of Beijing University
during the May Fourth Movement, provides great historical documentation
to the lives of both men. Finally, Gao Yu-han's Oration at Chen's
funeral creates a rare sense of the personality and the meaning
of Chen's life. Benton's hagiographic study stirs our imagination
to utopias wished, friendships unfullfilled, and the determined
will of one man to change the Chinese Revolution.
The
book has substantial value to those scholars and political followers
who wish to reevaluate the life of a revolutionary. Professor
Benton has compiled a work that suggests, not totally convincingly,
that Chen, had he lived longer. "would have returned. . .
to the positions of Lenin and Trotsky." (P.x). Throughout
Benton's introductions to each translation there is a subtle,
recurrent intimation that Chen remained a Trotskyist to the end.
One might seek other historical answers. Was Chen's political
ideology a "third way" for Marxist theory and practice
in China? Would it have matured into an international socialist
system which combined the best of bourgeois and proletarian democracy?
Was his iconoclasm deeply dependent on the political oppositionist
policies that Trotskyism provided?
The
translations and their annotations, and the inclusion of rare
photographs are a model of excellent scholarship.
