(The following statement was issued by the World Congress of the Fourth
International in November 1979.]
The World Congress of the Fourth
International hails the release of twelve
Trotskyists imprisoned for twentyseven years in the People's Republic of
China. It salutes the memory of the revolutionary militant Wu Jingru, who died recently at the age of seventy-two.
She was freed on June 5, 1979, together with her husband, Zheng Chaolin, aged seventy-eight. A member of the first generation of Chinese Communists, he was imprisoned for seven years by the
Kuomintang regime and rearrested in
1952, despite having dedicated his entire life to the revolution.
The World Congress demands a full clarification of the situation of the
At liberty, Comrade Wu found herself isolated in an inhospitable Shanghai. Ties with relatives and friends had been lost or broken. Her former landlady gave her shelter, and comrades in Hong Kong helped out, enabling her to survive a very difficult time.
Even this existence with its meager satisfactions was not to last long. In the mid 1960g, the Mao-inspired "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution"
engulfed
China with its violence and ideological terror. Since Comrade Wu had been in prison as a "counterrevolutionary" and her husband was a leader of a "counterrevolutionary gang," she became a target of repeated "criticism and struggle" actions by the consciously vicious Maoists and the equally violent but deceived "Red Guards."
By that time, Comrade Wu was suffering from partial paralysis and impairment of vision amounting almost to blindness, but the heroes of the "cultural revolution" did not spare her on that account. At intervals they dragged her from her attic room in a dilapidated building and down to the street where they reviled and defamed her and even resorted to physical abuse. Each time, after being subjected to such "criticism," the frail woman had to be carried back to her room by her landlady's son, who had known her since he was a child and knew she was no "counterrevolutionary."
many Trotskyists who were arrested in the early 1950s and who have not been heard from for a long time. Many of them have surely died in prison. The Chinese bureaucracy continues to keep silent about their fate. The full truth about them must be made public!
The World Congress demands the lifting of the slanderous charges of "counterrevolutionary" that were used to justify the arbitrary arrest of the Trotskyists. All restrictions on the activities of those who have just been freed must also be lifted. This twofold battle for the political rehabilitation of revolutionary Marxists and for their right to be active and to defend their political ideas and program is part of the overall fight of the Chinese working masses to regain possession of the real history of the Communist movement and the revolution in China, and to establish genuine socialist democracy.
The year 1972, when the Maoist rampage reached its finale, brought a radical change in Comrade Wu's situation. Her husband and some other Trotskyists were moved from the regular prison to a "labor reform camp" in the Pudong district of Shanghai. Comrade Wu was ordered to move there and stay with her husband. There she remained for seven years, until June 5 of last year, when she and her husband (as well as twelve other Trotsky. ists) were allowed to leave the camp. The couple were allotted a suburban apartment.
The authorities also restored "full citizenship" rights to the exprisoners. They could resume contact with surviving relatives and correspond with friends elsewhere. Thus for the first time in 27 years, Comrade Wu Jungru was able to look forward to a more normal life of a human being. It was not to be. She was cheated. Her death is a grievous loss. We, her comrades, derive comfort, however, from contemplating her useful life and her devotion to the cause of socialism.
Comrade Wu joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1927 as the second Chinese revolution was surging to its crest. She was then twenty years old and an active participant in the class struggle of the workers in Wuhan, working closely with Zheng Chaolin, whom she later married. When the revolution went down to defeat, due to the opportunist policies foisted on the CCP by the Stalin-Bukharin leadership of the Communist International, she went to Shanghai to engage in clandestine revolutionary work. The party split in 1930 and Comrade Wu went with the expelled Trotskyists. In 1931 she was arrested for the first time by the Kuomintang police, together with Zheng Chaolin, but was released after a brief jail term. Zheng was given 15 years. After that, as a Trotskyist-communist, Comrade Wu devoted herself entirely to revolutionary educational work, which was her special bent. Her efforts were directed especially toward working women and children of the working class. She labored in this field until her arrest by the secret police of the Peking regime in 1952.
Such a curriculum vitae may appear very simple and ordinary, characteristic of countless unsung revolutionary activists. No dramatic exploit attaches to Wu Jingru's name. Nor was she noted for any written contribution. Neither in the CCP written contribution. Neither in the CCr nor later in the Trotskyist movement, neither during the period when she worked within the organizations, nor in the years when she worked among the nonparty masses, did she ever acquire or seek any official title or hold any office. She did have leadership qualities, however, and was a good administrator, as shown in her educational labors. Yet she preferred to remain a rank-and-filer. This may be explained by the fact that she was repelled by the careerism evident even among supposed revolutionists, especially when the Wang Ming group dominated the CCP. She and Zheng Chaolin were both completely free of personal ambition and adamantly opposed to bureaucratism and careerism.
Though a very gentle person, Comrade Wu was strong-willed and possessed great fortitude, perseverance, and courage. Having fixed her course and chosen her road, she kept to her way unfalteringly, undaunted by hardships, difficulties and dangers. Ever since I had come to know her in 1931, I never knew her to waver or regret her decision.
In her private and personal concerns and choices, Comrade Wu again showed her fidelity to the course she had chosen. It could be said, in fact, that the two aspects of her life, the political and the personal, were really one-one and indivisible. She was born into a rich family in the southwest province of Yunnan in the year 1907. The family wealth meant that she would always have a place of retreat. When the revolution was defeated in 1927, many disillusioned young men and women who had joined the revolution went home- "returned prodigals"-reintegrating them-
WU JINGRU
selves into their families and compromising their principles. But not Comrade Wu. She continued her revolutionary activities under the dangerous conditions of Kuomintang reaction. Following the 1931 arrests, she remained in Shanghai to provide liaison between the comrades in prison and those on the outside.
In 1952 and after, when the Trotskyists were imprisoned by the Mao regime, Comrade Wu spurned an opportunity to "rehabilitate" herself by divorcing her "counterrevolutionary" husband and coming to terms with her parental family. Instead, she hewed to the revolutionary principles that had become a veritable part of her being. Resisting every temptation, she remained true to herself to the end, an exemplar of the indomitable spirit of the Trotskyist revolutionary vanguard.