The extraordinary news has reached Europe that Zheng Chaolin (Cheng Ch'aolin), a leader of the Chinese Trotskyists, was freed on June 5 this year, together with his wife Wu Jingru (Wu Ching-ju), herself an old revolutionary, who voluntarily shared his last seven years of captivity.
He and Wu were allocated a flat in the city center by the Shanghai Municipality.
Since the fall of the so-called Gang of Four the new government has released many thousands of alleged "rightists" imprisoned in the late fifties and numerous people arrested during and after the Cultural Revolution (although new arrests in recent months may signal the beginnings of a reversal of this flow). Even several hundred Kuomintang war criminals were freed by Deng in 1975.
What distinguishes Zheng's release from those of the "rightists" is that he is a victim not of the Maoists but of the Party as a whole. His arrest took place in 1952, before the polarization of the Party into factions, and so the responsibility for his imprisonment cannot be given to the Maoists alone. It is therefore justified to demand (although perhaps naive to expect) some sort of explanation from the Peking leaders of Zheng's experience that goes beyond the usual denunciation of the "radicals."
Zheng Chaolin was a founding member both of the Chinese CP and of its relatively influential Trotskyist offshoot. He has spent nearly half his life in jail, first as a "dangerous revolutionary" under the Kuomintang and then as a "counterrevolutionary" under the CP. Traditionally, August Blanqui, who spent 33 of his 75 years behind bars, has been considered as the "record-holder" for political prisonership. Now Zheng has beaten that record by one year.
His many years in jail under the CP were a standing mockery of the view, fashionable at least until recently in some radical circles, that China practiced a libertarian style of communism, qualitatively different from the Soviet one.
Zheng's case was recently taken up by Amnesty International, although at the time of the campaign Amnesty had no firm proof that he was still a prisoner or even that he was still alive. They were also unaware that Zheng's 72 year old wife, Wu Jingru (also known as Wu Jingzhen), had joined her husband in 1972, after he was transferred to a labor-camp in Pudong, on the east bank of the Huangpu River in Shanghai. Earlier Zheng had occupied a cell in the infamous Ward Road Jail, as it used to be known in the days of the Shanghai International Settlement.
In Pudong Zheng's conditions improved somewhat. He enjoyed greater freedom (including his own room) and could even earn a small income from teaching English to fellow camp inmates, although both he and Wu suffered persecution when the Gang of Four was at its peak. Wu's reason for applying to the authorities to join her husband was partly that she was too ill to attend to herself, being blind and paralyzed. Her health has recently worsened, and she frequently collapses.
The tragedy of this old couple is all the more appalling when one learns something about their past.
Zheng Chaolin entered revolutionary politics in Paris after World War I, when he joined with other young Chinese émigrés to found the famous French section of the Chinese CP, which ranked in terms of the glittering array of talent it assembled with the newly-founded party in China. Among Zheng's Paris comrades were Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yi (later foreign minister in Peking) and Li Weihan (later head of the party's united-front work).
Zheng, who was born in 1901, went to France as a worker-student in 1920, and in 1923 was among the first Chinese to study in Moscow at the University for the Toilers of the East. In 1924 he returned to China to become secretary of the party propaganda department and coeditor of Guide Weekly, the main party publication. He was a talented linguist, mastering several European languages besides his native Chinese, and was responsible for translating Bukharin and Preobrazhensky's ABC of Communism into Chinese. This work immediately established itself as the standard text for a whole generation of revolutionaries. Zheng also won prominence as a writer and contributor to party journals.
During the summer of 1927 Zheng was appointed to the important Hubei Provincial Committee of the CP, which was directly responsible for leading the revolutionary struggles in the Yangtse tri-city of Wuhan during those stormy months. Zheng was also among the fewer than twenty delegates to the CP's August 1927 emergency conference, which represented a decisive turning-point in party affairs.
Among party workers in Wuhan was Wu Jingru, a young Yunnanese woman born into a rich Gunming Mandarin family in 1907. At the age of 19 Wu started work in the party's agitation and propaganda department and "married" Zheng (without formal ceremony or registration, as was then the fashion among radical youth in China) sometime in 1927.
After the defeat of the revolution in the same year, the couple moved to Shanghai, then in the grip of a regime of bloody terror. In Shanghai Zheng worked under Qu Qiubai as chief editor of the party journal Bolshevik, simultaneously organizing the underground activities of left-wing writers and artists in Shanghai. Wu undertook dangerous clandestine assignments for the party, dodging the military patrols and the political police of Chiang Kaishek.
The defeat of 1927 led many of the dwindling band of Communists in the Chinese towns to question the strategy of the party and of the Moscow-based Comintern behind it. In Moscow itself a Trotskyist current developed among the Chinese students, claiming the support of about half of them. Many of these Chinese Trotskyists were arrested and died in Soviet labor camps, but a handful made their way back to China and took with them secret documents outlining the views and proposals of the Left Opposition. In China they won the support of a large number of party activists, among them Chen Duxiu (Ch'en Tu-hsiu), the founder of the Chinese Communist movement, who had earlier been made scapegoat for the failure of the Comintern's strategy for China.
Zheng and Wu enthusiastically declared themselves for the Trotskyist line, and were among the eighty-one signatories of the political platform of the Chen Duxiu group in 1929. After their expulsion from the official party, they directed their ener gies toward building an independent Trotskyist tendency.
In 1931 Zheng was elected to the Central Committee of the Left Opposition of the Chinese CP, as the new body called itself. In May of the same year both he and Wu were arrested by the Kuomintang, along with most other Trotskyist leaders. Wu was released after several months of interrogation and maltreatment, but Zheng was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
During the early 1930s Wu courageously maintained liaison between the underground Trotskyists and their imprisoned leaders, particularly Chen Duxiu. From 1934 to 1936 she ran a vocational school for women in Shanghai, through which she won new sympathizers for the revolutionary cause from among women activists.
In 1938, after completing seven years of his sentence, Zheng was freed from prison during a general amnesty proclaimed after the outbreak of war with Japan. His condition was extremely weak, and he retired for a while to a village in Anhui, where Wu tended him back to good health. During this period in the countryside Wu gave birth to the couple's only child, a son, who they named Frei [German for "free"] in an internationalist gesture to celebrate Zheng's new-found freedom. Frei died in Shanghai of tuberculosis at the age of four.
After Zheng's recuperation, the couple moved back to Shanghai in 1940, where they actively participated in the underground anti-Japanese resistance. Wu headed one of the two workers' schools run by the Trotskyists (under the very noses of the Japanese occupiers) in the workers' district of west Shanghai. This school, nominally an ordinary, privately-financed primary school, was run entirely by women, who taught children from workers' families during the day and adults during the evening. The school was the source of no few proletarian recruits to the Trotskyist resistance.
During the Japanese occupation Zheng busied himself among other things translating Marxist literature into Chinese. He also wrote a biography of Chen Duxiu, a history of Chinese reformism, and a political novel entitled Dialogue of Three Travelers.
After the war Wu continued her educational activities, while Zheng directed his main effort to editing The New Banner, a fortnightly revolutionary journal published in Shanghai.
In 1949, after a split in the Chinese Trotskyist movement, Zheng became leader of the International Workers Party. Its membership never exceeded a few hundred, and its life was cut short not long after the CP's victory on a national scale in the same year, although Zheng, Wu and others fought bravely to keep the party functioning under worsening conditions.
Zheng's old friends in the new government, recognizing his considerable talents, contacted him through Li Weihan, who knew Zheng in Paris, and urged him to compromise with them, but he refused.
On the night of December 22, 1952, Chinese Communist security forces arrested between two and three hundred Trotskyists and their sympathizers—among them Zheng and Wu—in a nationwide raid. After a secret trial, Wu was sentenced to five years in prison.
On her release in 1957 she was paralyzed in both legs. She had long broken with her rich relatives, and found herself homeless. Fortunately she was given a room by one of her old neighbors in Shanghai, and existed on small sums of money remitted to her by friends in Hong Kong.
Of the fate of the Trotskyists other than Zheng and Wu, some of whom have been adopted as political prisoners by branches of Amnesty International, nothing is known. It is possible that some were among the seven other people released at the same time as Zheng. If still alive, many of them will have reached a rather advanced age.
Why did Zheng spend more than a quarter of a century of his life behind bars under the Communists? He stood accused of no crime other than his political beliefs. He had devoted his whole adult life to the service of the revolution. His friends knew him as a gentle man, more a martyr than a hero, motivated solely by an indomitable love for humanity.
One is driven to conclude that Deng Xiaoping waited until his old friend's energies were sapped by age and sickness before intervening to secure his release. This is, of course, a devastating comment on the pretensions of the post-Mao leaders to represent socialist democracy and legality, although Deng's action is to be wel comed as a humanitarian gesture.
Zheng's release must be seen in the context of the whole wave of recent rehabilitations, but it may be that Amnesty International's campaign was a decisive factor in it. If so, this would indicate a new and very welcome sensitivity in Peking to the pressures of world public opinion