The Chinese Trotskyist leader Zheng Chaolin was born in Zhangping, Fujian, in 1901, into a declining old-style landlord family. He died in 1998, making his life almost exactly coterminous with the twentieth century. A dramatic embodiment of the century’s main passions and vicissitudes in China, he spent most of his adult life either fomenting revolution or in jail.
As a child, he read novels about heroic exploits and became dissatisfied with reality. Outwardly, however, he remained a quiet, obedient boy, ready to play the role his father and grandfather expected of him. He would probably have ended up like them – a member of the lower gentry who stayed all his life in Zhangping, a minor county capital in what was, at the time, a remote part of China – but for political developments on a national scale. He was saved from a doubtless dull, parochial existence by May Fourth, the movement for cultural renewal and political revolution that broke out in Beijing in May 1919, as the culmination of the New Cultural Movement that had begun in 1915. This movement inspired the governor of Fujian, Commander Chen Jiongming (an ‘anarchist warlord’, improbably) to order each county magistrate under his control to nominate two or three youngsters to go to Paris, where two of his anarchist comrades had set up a beancurd factory that sustained a work-study scheme. The programme was designed to provide young Chinese with a livelihood while at the same time training them in radical and scientific thinking, so that on their return to China they might act as a revolutionary political yeast. Zheng was among more than thirty young Fujianese chosen to go to France in 1919.
In France, the Marxist Cai Hesen founded a Communist movement among the Chinese work-students. Zheng became a member, and in 1923 went to Moscow to enrol in a Party school. He now spoke good French (the first of his several foreign languages), and steeped himself in Marxist and other political and philosophical writings. Like many Chinese thinkers who discovered Communism in France, he had a broader mind and was a freer, more bohemian spirit than Communist leaders such as Peng Shuzhi (who reached Russia in 1921 and later, in China, became a Trotskyist) or Wang Ming (an arch-Stalinist who rose to power over the Chinese in Russia in 1927). Both Peng and Wang had gone straight to Moscow, without first serving a revolutionary apprenticeship in China.
Zheng stayed for more than a year in Moscow, where (by his own account) he learned no theory and spent most of his time performing ‘individual criticism’ by ‘exposing’ other comrades’ petty-bourgeois or anarchist faults in meetings and having his own failings picked out (he was the main butt of criticism). This constant fault-finding and the system of ‘command and submission’ that obtained in Moscow was Zheng’s most abiding memory of his time in the Soviet capital. However, the experience did not discourage him, it only made him more stubborn. The two criticisms that he was least willing to accept were that he ‘read too much’ (rather than take part in ‘training’ sessions) and that he was friends with a questionable character, the Esperantist Bao Pu, who hobnobbed with Esperantists of other nationalities in Moscow and was thought ‘dangerous’. Zheng was also criticised for wanting to learn Russian: according to Peng Shuzhi, who already had some Russian, it was unnecessary, Chinese was enough. Thus friction arose between Zheng’s broad, questing mind and Peng’s narrow, carping one. This incompatibility survived the passage of both men into the Chinese Trotskyist Opposition in 1931, and lasted until their death.
Back in China in 1924, Zheng was appointed to work as an aide in the Central Committee, where he specialised in editing Party journals and writing for them. After his expulsion from the Party as a Trotskyist in 1929, he became a leader of the Left Opposition and, later, of its offshoots. However, like most Chinese Trotskyists under Chiang Kai-shek, he spent more time in jail than out of it, save during the eight years of Japanese wartime occupation. Then, in 1952, three years into Mao’s Communist revolution, he was arrested by his erstwhile comrades and locked up for the next twenty-seven years.
He spent a total of thirty-four years in prison, first under the Nationalists (as a revolutionary – his jailers saw no difference between him and the Communists) and then, under the Communists, as a counterrevolutionary. No doubt there are political prisoners in history, and perhaps even some today, who have spent longer in jail, but there cannot be many. In revolutionary lore, Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) has always counted as the record-holder for political imprisonment, having spent thirty-three years behind bars for his beliefs, for which he was nicknamed ‘l’enfermé’ (‘the imprisoned one’). Zheng had beaten Blanqui’s record by a year when he finally stepped into conditional freedom in China in 1979, aged seventy-eight, nearly three years after Mao’s death.
Many Chinese Trotskyist leaders were writers, and several were poets; had they been made of rougher, more soldierly stuff, they might have followed a different path after the defeat of the revolution in 1927, when Mao and his comrades took to the hills and most Trotskyists stayed in the towns. Zheng’s Trotskyist comrade Wang Fanxi often said that had Zheng been born in another age, he would have shone as a poet or philosopher. In fact, Zheng’s years in prison and his forced abstention from revolutionary activity gave him the leisure he had previously lacked to compose the poetry he loved. Jail could stop him making revolution, but it could not stop him making poems. In prison, he also wrote other works, including books on ‘cadreism’ (ganbu zhuyi), Mao Zedong Thought, and Stalinism, during a brief period of political relaxation starting in 1964. The books were confiscated and reportedly destroyed when the prison came under military control during the Cultural Revolution,1 but the poems could not be so easily blotted out. Zheng had a phenomenal memory and retained hundreds of poems in his head, starting with prison poems he had composed in the early 1930s and extending through the entire period of his incarceration. This retention was made easier by the strict rhyme schemes and regular metres of the classical Chinese poetry Zheng espoused. (The Communist literary dissident Hu Feng [1906–1985] also memorised hundreds of poems while in prison, and likewise retrieved them from memory after his release.) Perhaps the poems that Zheng had committed to memory were further refined in the process of their retrieval during the 1980s.
In the mid 1970s, together with Zheng’s exiled fellow Trotskyist Wang Fanxi, by then in Leeds, I campaigned for Zheng’s release, publishing articles in the international socialist press and in the Guardian, Le Monde, and the Washington Post and persuading Amnesty International to make him their Prisoner of the Month. In the articles, I pointed out that Zheng had studied in France in the early 1920s alongside Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), who at the time of my writing was China’s newly rehabilitated paramount leader. When we ran the campaign, we did not know whether Zheng was alive or dead. I was astonished and delighted when Wang told me, in June 1979, that the Old Man was not only alive but had been freed.
Sadly, four months and ten days later, his beloved wife Liu Jingzhen, who for twenty-seven years had stood loyally by him awaiting his release, died, ‘seemingly having completed her appointed task’.2
We were under no illusion that our campaign had obtained Zheng’s release, but it might have accelerated it, by jogging Deng Xiaoping’s memory and pricking his conscience at a time when he was freeing political prisoners anyway. (Deng’s daughter later visited Zheng for an interview while she was researching her book on her father, whom Zheng had known in France when Deng was just sixteen.) I secretly met Zheng Chaolin twice in Shanghai in the mid 1980s, once on my own and once in the company of my friend, the Danish Trotskyist Finn Jensen. Finn and I took him a bottle of French cognac (his favourite tipple) and a long tape-recorded message from Wang, which he answered in our presence, also on tape.
My first impression of Zheng at the door of his flat in Shanghai was much like that of the science-fiction writer and biographer Ye Yonglie, who visited him at around the same time: an old man, tiny and bent double, ‘wearing a thick brown ski shirt, a blue woollen cap, and a pair of clamshell cotton-padded shoes’. The two men discussed poetry. In my introduction to his memoirs, I called Zheng ‘modest, frank, argus-eyed, compassionate, broad-minded, humorous, playful, stubborn, inquisitive, inventive, creative, loyal, free from all vanity and pretensions, and with the memory of an elephant’, and described a photograph taken on the eve of his release, showing him and his wife Liu ‘smiling serenely and beatifically’. The Communist poet Lou Shiyi, who was at the same prison as Zheng in Nanjing in the 1930s and liked him despite his Trotskyism, said that after his release he was ‘already an old man, but even so, he was warmly hospitable, tirelessly talkative, and overflowing with high spirits, as if he had sustained not the slightest damage from his trials and tribulations … He reads, he writes, and he receives and instructs an endless flow of comrades researching special issues in the history of the Chinese Communist Party.’ Even his Trotskyist critic Peng Shuzhi, looking back, drew an affectionate picture of him in the 1920s:
Zheng Chaolin was a strapping young fellow with a broad forehead, always smiling and extremely kind-hearted. There is no denying that he was something of a pedant. He had a stammer. And politically, he was rather uninventive. But in his way, he was a linguistic genius, in the very special sense that he could learn at high speed to decipher, read, and render into decent Chinese any language whatsoever, provided that it was at the level of political discourse and provided, above all, that he was never expected to articulate a single sentence or to understand it orally. For example, it only took him a few months in Moscow to disentangle Russian, just as it had taken him only a few months in France to familiarise himself – also at the level of political discourse – with French. To the knowledge – political and bookish – of these two languages he soon added English, German, Italian, and Esperanto.3
Like Mao, Zheng Chaolin combined a belief in radical revolution with a love for poetry in the classical style. In a letter to Lou Shiyi, he explained his aversion to poetry in the modern idiom:
For prose, the literary reform of May Fourth worked. Today no one writes in classical Chinese any more. But for poetry, it failed. The first generation of literary reformers like Chen Duxiu and Lu Xun all wrote poetry in the old style. Poetry needs rules and forms. This is true of poetry (excluding free verse) in all the Western languages. I know of no new-style poetry in Chinese that is broadly read, like Lu Xun’s old-style poems. So I take a very serious attitude to old-style poetry and would never stoop to writing doggerel.
Zheng was part of the same poetic discourse as Mao. Although he composed his poems in prison, he usually shared his imprisonment and poems with other political inmates, including some poets. Even during his years in solitary confinement he often engaged poetically with absent, dead or imagined interlocutors, modelling his work on classical archetypes in the form of matching poems and taking part whenever possible in poetic exchanges (as, for example, on one memorable occasion with his cellmate Yu Shouyi, to rebut Yu’s proposal that Zheng capitulate to the Maoists). After his release in 1979, most of his poems (including some translated in this volume) were part of such exchanges.
Zheng’s poetry has the same technical and formal properties and belongs to the same poetic world as Mao’s, but it inhabits a quite different spiritual and affective world. It has none of Mao’s brash self-regard and grandiloquence, his sense of personal uniqueness and superiority. An unkind view might be that Zheng’s political project was in ruins after 1949 and he had ended up not in power, like Mao, but back in jail, where he spent most of the rest of his life, meaning that he had nothing to boast about. But the truth is that Zheng was by nature a more modest and compassionate man than Mao, and his poetry reflects this difference as well as his defeat and calvary. He never wrote on martial themes, naturally, since he lacked Mao’s experience of warfare. In any case he doubted the wisdom and long-term efficacy of the military road to power. Instead, his poems dwell – far more than Mao’s do – on personal loss and disappointment. Where he did tackle political topics, he cloaked critical or dissident opinions in cryptic language to fool the censor, using classical allusions to hint at the inevitability of great changes ahead (when seas yield to mulberry fields and vice versa – a metaphor that Mao also used). His poems are often bleak and tragic, but he can also make fun of himself and the world.
Most of Zheng’s poems are ci, a lyric form that started in the Tang Dynasty (618–907) and reached its full flowering in the Song (960–1279). Ci are written in strict, pre-defined rhythmic and tonal patterns with a set number of lines that vary in length, each comprising a set number of characters (monosyllabic words or morphemes). The classical precedents on which ci are modelled are songs or cadences, and can be sung. Several hundred ci models are available for copying, each determining the shape of the poems derived from it. Conventionally, poets attach the title, or cipai, of the model to each ci, to show its metre and rhyme scheme. This title is a technical indication of rhyme and tone, a label that does not necessarily say anything about the content of the ci. Most of Zheng’s poems are titled according to their cipai labels and listed by them in the contents page of the book here translated, in which most of the poems first appeared. In a few cases, two poems share the same cipai, although they are on different themes. On rare occasions, Zheng added his own title to explain a poem’s contents. Where he did not, I have added content titles immediately above the cipai title. These titles are mine, except where they are in inverted commas, in which case they are Zheng’s.
Zheng’s choice of ci patterns was constrained by the books available to him in prison. His main source was an anthology of poetry from the Tang and Song dynasties. Another book to which he had access was Jihai zashi zhu (‘Jihai miscellaneous poems’)4 by Gong Zizhen (1792–1841), a reformminded official whose ideas influenced the early generation of Chinese revolutionaries and reformers in the late Qing. Zheng wrote several poems modelled on work by Gong. He also knew a huge number of poems by heart.