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Zheng Chaolin, Selected Writings, 1942–1998

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Published Dec 2022

Zheng Chaolin

Volume Editors: Gregor Benton and John Sexton
Zheng Chaolin helped found the Chinese Communist Party’s European branch in Paris in 1922 and its Trotskyist Opposition in Shanghai in 1931. He held the world record in political imprisonment – seven years under Chiang Kai-shek (as a revolutionary) and 27 under Mao (as a ‘counterrevolutionary’), thus beating by a year Auguste Blanqui’s previous record. After joining the revolution in his teens, his commitment never wavered. Born in 1901, he died in 1998, so his life was coterminous with the century and a dramatic embodiment of its vicissitudes. This book is record of his contribution to revolutionary thought in China.

Biographical Note

Gregor Benton is Emeritus Professor in Modern Chinese History at Cardiff University. He has published more than a score of books on China and other subjects. His principal research areas are modern Chinese history, dissent under communism, Chinese Trotskyism, and Chinese diaspora.

John Sexton is a researcher and translator. His publications include Alliance of Adversaries (Brill and Haymarket, 2018–19). His book on foreigners who took part in China’s revolutions will be published by Verso in spring 2023.

Readership

Students and scholars of Marxism, revolution, and ‘third-world’ politics, and historians of modern China.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Gregor Benton

1 ABC of Permanent Revolution (1942)
tr. John Sexton

2 Commemorating Comrade Chen Duxiu (1942)
tr. Donald Gasper

3 Love and Politics (1945)
tr. Gregor Benton

4 Discussion on Problems of Revolution (1946–79)
tr. Sean A. James

5 State Capitalism (1950)
ed. and with an introduction by Walter Daum

6 Poems on Political Themes (1958–90)
tr. and with explanatory notes by Gregor Benton

7 Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists (1980–1)
tr. Gregor Benton

8 On Chinese Cadreism (1985)
tr. Kevin Lin

9 The Young Karl Marx and the Theory of Alienation (1988)
tr. Gregor Kneussel

10 Reflections on the 1989 Tian’anmen Incident (June 20, 1989)
tr. Tsim Shum Kow, ed. and with an introduction by Owen Miller

11 The October Revolution, Thermidor, and the Stalinist Mode of Capitalism (1991)
tr. Yang Yang

12 On Cadreism (c. 1992)
tr. Huang Ting

13 Letters across the Sea (1996–8)
tr. and with explanatory notes by Gregor Benton

Appendices
Zheng Chaolin’s Life and Death
Obituary of Zheng Chaolin by Wang Fanxi
A Self-Description at the Age of Ninety (written 1 May 1990)
References
Index