Comrade Chen Tu-hsiu

From The Militant, Vol. X No. 30, 27 July 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

These pictures, just received from China, show (left) the widow of Chen Tu-hsiu (right), renowned Chinese Trotskyist leader, standing beside the latter’s grave in the village of Kiangtsin, Szechwan, where he died on May 24, 1942 at the age of 64.

The late Comrade Chen was not only a world revolutionary figure, but also an illustrious scholar held in the highest esteem by the Chinese people. Renouncing an easy academic life as a professor at the Peking National University, he plunged into the revolutionary struggle and became one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party in 1920, thereafter playing a leading role in the Chinese revolution of 1925–27 which went down to defeat because of the disastrous policy foisted on the youthfur Chinese party by the Stain-Bukharin clique in Moscow.

In 1930, together with several other leading members, Comrade Chen was expelled from the party as a Left Oppositionist. He took part in launching the Chinese Trotskyist movement and was active in it, as an underground revolutionary fighter, until his arrest by the Kuomintang in 1932.

Comrade Chen spent the next five years in prison at Nanking, having been sentenced to a 13-year term on a charge of “endangering the state.” In 1937, when the Japanese armies were approaching Nanking, he was released together with other political prisoners. Imprisonment had seriously undermined his health and he remained a sickly man for the rest of his life.

A biographical article on Comrade Chen Tu-hsiu, sketching his life as a revolutionist and a scholar, was written by Li Fu-jen on the occasion of his death and appeared in the August 1942 issue of the Fourth International.

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