ABSTRACT
This appendix comprises the concluding section of a special study by the veteran Trotskyist Zheng Chaolin (arrested by the Shanghai political police in 1952 and finally freed in 1979, aged 78) on Chen Duxiu’s relationship to Trotskyism; the study was commissioned by Party historians to supplement their planned publication of Zheng’s memoirs, which had been completed (but not published) in 1945 and was unearthed from a government vault in 1979, shortly after Zheng’s release from gaol. In 1986, after sitting for several years on the manuscript of the memoirs and the newly commissioned supplement, Chinese Communist officials finally authorised their publication, in an edition restricted to privileged categories of officials and researchers. On December 11, 1987, Zheng explained in a postscript to the English translation of his memoirs the circumstances under which he had composed the study on Chen Duxiu: “I wrote the appendix ‘Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists’ at the invitation of a certain research institute in 1980, shortly after I had regained my freedom. At the time, public opinion tended to make a distinction between Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists. People said that Chen Duxiu was a good man whose good name should be restored, but they made no evaluation of the Trotskyists. So the aim of this long article is to show that Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists cannot be dealt with separately.” 67
