Letter to the Editors
Only very recently did I see the issue of International (Vol.2, no.3) in which my 'memoirs' were published. I was glad to see its publication, but I was rather disappointed to find that there were a lot of inaccuracies— both in factual terms and in the explanation of controversial opinions. I am therefore sending you a table of errata for publication in the next issue of International. In fact, it was not an article written by me, but the transcription of an interview I gave to a Japanese friend three years ago. It was tape-recorded and then he himself transcribed it in Japan. As my English is inadequate, many points in my talk were not correctly understood and therefore not correctly transcribed by my visitor. Basing himself on the original manuscript which I had not yet checked or corrected, Comrade A. edited the 'Memoirs of a Chinese Trotskyist' for International. Hence the numerous inaccuracies. The following are some mistakes of importance:
1. P.27, 2nd col. (a) 4th and 5th lines from the top, 'One of the leading members of the Trotskyist tendency in the Soviet Union' should read: 'One of the leading members of the Trotskyist tendency of Chinese communists in the Soviet Union.' (b) 14th line from the bottom: 'Kiangsi' should be 'Kiangsu'.
2. P. 28, 1st col. (a) 4th line from the top, 'One Voice' should be 'Our Word'. (b) 10th and 11th lines from the top, 'and I was once arrested during that time' should be deleted. (c) 14th and 15th lines from the bottom, '.... some members of the Proletariat Group asked me to join it, but ....' should be deleted. (d) The whole section under the subtitle 'Trotskyism in China' should be replaced by the following:
'At that time, three Trotskyist groups were being formed in Shanghai alongside the group "Our Word", which had already existed for at least one year. One of the three groups was led by Chen Tu-hsiu, founder of the CCP and the General Secretary of the CC of the party during the revolution of 1925-1927, who had got the documents of the Left Opposition of the Russian Communist Party from the returned students from Moscow and became a Trotskyist after he had read them. When he was convinced of the correctness of the Left Opposition, he determined to struggle for it in China and so he wrote the "Open Letter to All Comrades of the CCP", and a collective document called "our collective positions", which was signed by 81 people, most of whom were old cadres who had held positions of responsibility in the CCP. The "Open Letter" is one of the most important documents of the Trotskyist movement in China. It was a criticism of the party and its policies made by the former prominent leading members of the party themselves. After putting out this statement, they began to publish an organ called Proletariat and all the signatories of the "Open Letter" were organised into the "Proletariat Group".
'When I was expelled from the CCP and recovered from my illness, I began to openly work for the Trotskyist tendency. I considered myself as a member of the "Our Word" group, because one year earlier in Moscow we had reached a decision not to establish any separate organisation when we returned to China but to join the organisation which already existed, that is, the "Our Word" group. During the winter of 1930, however, when I actually wanted to take part in the work of the group, "Our Word" had split into two grouplets. One grouplet consisting of those comrades from Peking, in co-operation with Liu Jen-ching, was going to form a new group. As I, like all young Trotskyists of that time, did not quite believe the sincerity of the conversion of Chen Tu-hsiu and his followers to Trotskyism, I did not want to join Chen's group. After some discussion with the Peking comrades and Liu, I decided to work with them by organising ourselves into a separate group and publishing an organ called October.
'Liu Jen-ching was one of the twelve members who attended the Founding Congress of the CCP and once was the General Secretary of the League of the Socialist Youth of China. He returned to China a little earlier than I after he had studied for a few years at the Lenin Institute in Moscow. He returned by the way of Europe and stayed with Trotsky in Turkey for several days. In consultation with Liu, Trotsky drafted the first platform for the Chinese Bolshevik-Leninists, which Liu brought with him to China and with which he contacted Chen Tu-hsiu, trying to win him to the position of the Left Opposition. But Liu did not join Chen's group when it was organised.
'Now we had three groups in China, each claiming to be Trotskyist. They were: "Our Word", "Proletariat" and "October". The fourth and the least important was called "Struggle"; it consisted of a few students returned from Moscow, with Chao Chi and Liu Ying as their leaders.'
(c) 2nd para. from the top, 10th and 11th lines. 'Chen Tu-hsiu himself walked out of the council and withdrew the Proletariat representative', should read: 'Chen Tu-hsiu became impatient, recalled the two representatives, and he and Ying Kuan were sent the Council as new representatives of the Proletariat group.' (f) 3rd para. from the top, 2nd line, 'In his Open Letter', should read: 'In his letter to Chinese comrades.' (g) 1st line from the bottom: 'Chung Chao-lin' should be 'Cheng Chao-lin'.
3. P. 29, 1st col. (a) 1st line from the top, 'Wo Tak' should be 'Chang Chiu (a Hong Kong worker)'. (b) 2nd para. from the bottom, the last sentence 'Now at last, Chen Tu-hsiu expelled him', should be deleted. (c) 2nd para. from the bottom, 5th and 6th lines, 'Po Si-ao, who later quit the party' should read: 'Po Si-liu, who got two and a half years.'
4. P.29, 2nd col. (a) 1st para., 10th line from the top, 'People's Tribune' should be 'People's Forum'. (b) 12th and 13th lines from the bottom, 'Liu Jen-ching came south to Shanghai with four young comrades' should read: 'Liu Jen-ching's four young comrades came south to Shanghai'. (c) 7th line from bottom, 'Liu and the others were sent to ....' should read: 'Liu, who had been arrested in Peking, and the others....'
5. P. 30, 2nd col., 2nd para. from the top, 5th line 'Wangsi' should be 'Kwangsi'.
6. P.31, 1st col. (a) 2nd para. from the top, 5th and 6th lines, 'Chen had by now become spiritually dull, but still had sound political opinions', should read: 'Chen had by now become spiritually depressed, but still...' (b) 2nd para., at the end of it, 'One very ridiculous thing he said was that I should go into the army but should take care always to stand in a safe place', should read: 'i.e. it would be absurd to want to take part in and support the War of Resistance, but in practice to stand outside it.' (c) 3rd para. from the top, 4th line, 'Hupeh province under Song Cha-kyui' should be 'Hopeh province under Soong Che-yuan...'
7. P.31, 2nd col. 2nd para., 5th line from the bottom, 'Chen Tu-hsiu himself finally attended the meeting' should read: 'Chen Tu-hsiu got Comrade Lu Han to attend the meeting...'
8. P.32, 1st col. 2nd para. from the bottom, in the later part of the para., beginning with 'But think of the situation, if we ....' to the last sentence '.... for which we had to prepare ourselves' should be replaced by: '[illegible] think of such a situation, if we are on the war front against the invading [illegible], what should Chinese Trotskyists do then? In my opinion, we only had one alternative: either to abandon our revolutionary programme, and persuade the revolutionary masses to refrain from committing "excesses", to postpone their struggle until the external enemies were defeated and thus help the KMT to surpress the revolution in the name of achieving victory over the Japanese invaders; or to continue the fight for our revolutionary programme by actually standing shoulder to shoulder with and giving a lead to the revolutionary masses in spite of the risk of set-back on the anti-Japanese [illegible]. It was my opinion that if we really meant to continue our revolutionary struggle during the war, not in words but in deeds, we should prepare ourselves to adopt such a position of "revolutionary defeatism", which might in any case be forced on us by objective developments. Needless to say, "revolutionary defeatism" in this sense is not the same as Lenin's concept of "revolutionary defeatism" which can only be applied to wars of an imperialist character. It would be more precise to call the "revolutionary defeatism" I talked about above "revolutionary victory-[illegible] we believed [illegible] war against the Japanese invaders [illegible] only to continue the revolutionary struggle during the war. We opposed the treacherous formula: victory first and then revolution.'
9. P. 32, 2nd col., the last sentence of the 2nd para. from the top: 'On the editorial board too, the majority swung to Peng's position and Chen Chao-lin and I were put in a minority' should read: 'Although on the Editorial Board, Peng's position still remained the minority (2:4).'
10. P.33, 1st col., 2nd para. from the bottom, 9th line, 'Internationalist Communist Party' should be 'Internationalist Workers Party'.
11. P.33, 2nd col. (a) 1st para., the last sentence, 'This last insurrection was organised by Chou En-lai and Chang Cheng-tong . . Chang Cheng-tong [illegible] was [illegible] of retreat [illegible] of our comrades, he is in one of Mao's prisons today', should read: 'This insurrection was organised by Chou En-lai. One of our comrades, Chiang Cheng-tung, who is [illegible] of Mao's [illegible] today, was one of its second rank leaders.' (b) 2nd para., 2nd sentence, 'Peng's group decided to move the leadership of their party to Hong Kong...', should read: 'Peng's [illegible] the leadership of their party to Hong Kong six months [illegible] meeting...'
Fraternally,
15 March 1975.
We apologise to comrade Wang for the long delay in rectifying these mistakes, which resulted both from our previous irregularity of production and the inadvertent omission of his letter from our last issue. —EDS.