MIA > Archive > Glass (Li Fu-jen)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 1 No. 10, 16 October 1937, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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The following statement on the latest frame-up against “Chinese Trotskyist agents of Japan”, reported in a Shanghai dispatch to the Daily Worker, is made by comrade Li Fu-jen, member of the Executive Committee of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Trotskyists) of China. He is of course in a position to speak authoritatively on the Stalinist frame-up system which is now being extended to China. – Ed. |
According to what purports to be a cable dispatch from Shanghai printed in the Daily Worker of October 5, the hand of Stalin’s G.P.U., dripping with the blood of murdered revolutionists in the Soviet Union and in Spain, has now reached into China.
The dispatch reports the uncovering of “a Trotskyist plot to knife the Chinese defense against Japanese imperialism in the back by a putsch in Kwangsi province.” Police, it is stated, nipped the alleged plot in the bud by arresting “the entire membership of the local Trotskyist group,” which, in familiar language, is declared to be “made up principally of bandits and other shady elements.”
That we are confronted here with another G.P.U. frame-up is apparent from the entire text of the Daily Worker story. We are told that the Trotskyists were headed by Wang Kun-tuh, “who had wormed his way into the executive committee of the Kuomintang organization in Kwangsi during the period of anti-Communist terror that swept China after 1929.”
No person named Wang-tuh is or ever has been a member of the Communist League of China (Bolshevik-Leninists). Nor has any member of the League ever been a member of the Kwangsi executive committee of the Kuomintang or any other Kuomintang organ. I state these facts as one having personal knowledge of the League’s membership and activity.
Even more decisive is the fact that there is no organization of the Communist League in Kwangsi province and there never has been. The Stalinist practise of dubbing sundry persons (especially its own agents provocateurs) “Trotskyists” is sufficiently well-known in China and other countries. If “Wang” exists at all, the inquisitors of the Kuomintang, with the help of G.P.U. agents (for the Stalinists and the Kuomintang are “allied’’ again) will doubtless secure from him a “confession” implicating the Chinese Bolshevik-Leninists in a plot to sabotage China’s defense against Japan. The methods of the G.P.U. are so stereotyped as to be easily recognizable.
The supposed Wang, moreover, would have had no need to “worm his way” into a Kuomintang organ in the period between 1929 and 1937. For it is admitted even by the Stalinists that the Kuomintang regime at that time pursued what in effect was a pro-Japanese policy. A pro-Japanese plotter could have joined Kuomintang bodies easily and pursued openly the Kuomintang’s own pro-Japanese policy within the party ranks without any fear of evil consequences.
Step by step, the Daily Worker reveals the Stalinist frame-up, or attempted frame-up of the Chinese revolutionists. “The leading Shanghai newspaper, Hsin Ching Jih Pao,” it declares, “called for the rooting out of the Trotskyist traitors.”
“At a time when the entire nation is united in war against our mortal foe,” the paper is quoted as saying, “this despicable gang of Chinese Trotskyists are taking advantage of the sending of troops to the battlefronts to organize a plot in the rear. Is it not clear at whose orders these Trotskyists perform their deeds ... In the name of our country’s future, in the interests of resistance to the aggressor, the Trotskyist spies and traitors must be destroyed.”
The first fact to be noted here is that until the middle of April this year there was no newspaper in Shanghai known as the Hsin Ching Jih Pao. If such an organ has since appeared, it can be nothing else but the organ of the new Popular Front in China, that is, of the Stalinist-Kuomintang coalition. This supposition is borne out by the language quoted above. No bourgeois newspaper, much less a leading bourgeois organ, uses the canned language of Stalinism to castigate the “Trotskyists.” The language is unmistakable as that of a Stalinist or Stalinist-controlled paper.
It may well be, however, that the Daily Worker story foreshadows a frame-up against the organization of the Bolshevik-Leninists in Shanghai.
Just as in Spain the Bolshevik-Leninists have been in the forefront of the fight against fascism, so in China the Communist League has been the consistent advocate of intransigent struggle against Japanese imperialism for China’s national liberation. And just as in Spain our comrades are framed up by the G.P.U. on charges of “conspiring with Franco,” so in China the Bolshevik-Leninists are accused of being “agents of Japanese imperialism.” In both instances the Stalinists lie. And they know that they lie.
Last updated on 19 November 2014