His description of Moscow in 1927-29, seen through the eyes of a foreign Communist, is very interesting. Wang spent two years in Moscow, sent there as a promising revolutionary in 1927. The total failure of Trotskyist parties, frankly analyzed by Wang in the last section of the book, is rooted in that sterile intellectualism. It does not take much imagination to see that Shanghai’s workers might not have been in 1941 extremely keen to spend their time reading Plekhanov and Trotsky. Trotskyist activity during the war against Japan consisted in translations of Marxist classics and their distribution to Shanghai’s workers. Wang mentions that other than for two small units, Trotskyists never managed to field any military force against the Japanese.
This made Trotskyists almost entirely irrelevant in the great struggle that opposed the Japanese, KMT and CCP. For example, after a formal Trotskyist Chinese Communist party was founded in 1931, it immediately broke into four sub-parties, each with hardly a hundred members, and despite a short period of “unification”, done at Trotsky’s insistence, the factions continued to exist. The features of Trotskyism which appear in this book (partly thanks to very candid description by Wang) are dogmatism, heavy emphasis on ideology as against practical action, and factionalism. But perhaps that in China the self-selection was even stronger than elsewhere because China suffered not only from an unjust social system but also from humiliating colonialism. This is not surprising because similar self-selection existed in many countries in those years. But before I go to these topics, I need to note a thing which is not surprising, but is worth mentioning: an extremely high intellectual and moral caliber of the left-wing, and especially Communist, activists in China in the first three decades of the 20th century.
Since the book covers a long period in Chinese and world history there are many things that one can discuss, but I will limit myself to three: Trotskyist movement, Moscow in 1927-29, and Stalinist international politics and Wang’s judgment on Mao.
ZERO SHINKU NO CHOU JAPAN SAVE PROFESSIONAL
(Wang himself worked mostly as writer and translator in order to survive in the 1930s and 1940s-since his “job” of professional revolutionary paid no returns in cash rather the “pay” was in terms of permanent poverty, precarious survival, and many years in jail, punctuated by torture by Kuomintang goons.) The book is very well and very honestly written, and I suppose also very well translated since the text flows easily. Wang survived both physically and without being thrown in jail (as most Chinese Trotskyists were by either the Kuomintang (KMT) in the 1930s or CCP in 1952) thanks to being transferred to Hong Kong in 1947. The book is written in 1957 and covers one of the most tumultuous periods of Chinese history from 1919 and the May Fourth movement to the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 and final defeat of Trotskyist opposition in 1952. They are mentioned at the end of the book by the Chinese Trotskyist Wang fan-his. These are the words that Mao said to a comrade in 1927 when the Chinese Communist movement was in complete chaos.
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