Letter to Frank Glass 16

Trotsky’s letter to Frank Glass (Li Furen) in Shanghai is by way of a reply to Chen Duxiu’s letter to Trotsky (the second document in this selection) of November 3, 1938, which Glass had forwarded on Chen’s behalf on January 19, 1939. Trotsky had expressed worries about Chen’s physical security as early as 1937, and had become even more worried after April 1938, when Wang Ming and Kang Sheng started up a campaign in China to slander Chen as a “paid agent of Japan”. He was therefore keen to get Chen to America, where he would be both safe and able (so Trotsky hoped) to play the same role in the Fourth International as the Japanese Katayama Sen had played in the Third. In a letter accompanying Chen’s, Glass, commenting on Trotsky’s efforts to persuade Chen to seek sanctuary in the United States, had said that Chen “does not believe as Crux [Trotsky] did that he is in imminent personal danger from the Stalinists or the Kuomintang [Guomindang]” (since, as he says, the numbers and present influence of the Fourth Internationalists in China “are not such as to invite strong attack”. ¹⁷ According to one source, Chen did not rule out a sojourn in the United States, and even tried to obtain a passport; he desisted only because his health deteriorated and, moreover, because it soon became clear to him that the Guomindang would under no circumstances let him leave China. ¹⁸ But Wang Fanxi, Chen’s collaborator and correspondent in those years, believes this assertion to be untrue. Trotsky died in Mexico, at the hands of an assassin, on August 20, 1940.