An Oppositionist for Life: Memoirs of the Chinese Revolutionary Zheng Chaolin (review)

6oo China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998© 1998 by University ofHawai'i Press Zheng Chaolin. An Oppositionistfor Life: Memoirs ofthe Chinese Revolutionary Zheng Chaolin. Edited and translated by Gregor Benton. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997. xxi, 330 pp. Hardcover $49·95> 0-391-03966-0. Paperback $18.50, 0-391-03967-9. (Original was published in Chinese as Huiyilu [Beijing, 1986].) Thanks to Gregor Benton's able translation, Zheng Chaolin's memoirs give us a snapshot of the ideology, personalities, and events that buffeted the leadership counsels during the formative years of the Chinese Communist Party. Zheng also provides a unique look into the history of those communists who left the Party and became members of the leftist opposition. Zheng's memoirs are nowhere near as long or as detailed as the previously translated writings of Zhang Guotao (which also give an insider's view of many of the same events), but as Benton notes in his informative introduction to this work, Zheng, unlike Zhang, is scrupulous in explaining how he derived the views he presents and conscientious about discussing where his memory may be faulty or uncertain. He appears to have little interest in glorifying or exaggerating his own role. Most of these memoirs were written between 1944 and 1945 during one of the few periods after the early 1930s in which Zheng was not in prison. He stopped writing in February 1945 because ofhis grief over the deadi of his only son. Following the communist victory in 1949, Zheng heroically decided to remain in China, knowing that he was in danger but refusing to abandon the notion that he should be considered anything other than a loyal communist. On December 22, 1952, Zheng and the few hundred other Trotskyites who had remained in China were rounded up and thrown into jail. Zheng remained there until 1979. According to Benton, Zheng probably has the dubious distinction ofhaving been the longest serving political prisoner in the world. During Zheng's imprisonment, most ofhis poems, translations, and various essays were destroyed. Somehow a copy ofhis memoirs was preserved. The Chinese published a few limited editions of this work in the 1980s, but they restricted access to the book to officials and researchers and deleted the fascinating chapter titled "Love and Politics." Benton's translation includes this chapter, as well as a supplementary autobiographical sketch that Zheng wrote in 1990, on the occasion ofhis ninetiedi birthday, and a further sketchy account by the author ofhis life in prison. The chapter deleted in the Chinese editions, "Love and Politics," is one of the most important parts of the book. It is here that Zheng details the complicated sexual politics among the top leaders of the Party. Zheng not only describes the Reviews 601 personal feuds that helped fuel some ofthe later ideological splits, but he also casts an interesting light on the difficulties experienced by many ofthe early Party leaders in breaking with the patriarchal values ofthe world against which they rebelled . In late 1925, for instance, Zheng reports that the Party intervened when Cai Hesen reported to the Central Committee that his lover, Xiang Jingyu, had fallen in love with Peng Shuzhi. After Xiang refused to choose between die two men, Chen Duxiu, then die Party leader, decided diat she had to go to Moscow witii Cai Hesen. Cai and Peng nonetheless became sworn enemies. Moreover, the couple broke up after reaching Moscow, and Cai then wooed away Li Lisan's wife, creating, according to Zheng, the basis ofdie antagonism between these two men. Zheng, of course, reports much more than gossip about the early Party leaders . He became a political radical while a work-study student in France along with Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping (though he does not mention knowing Deng). He gives us some interesting insights into the metamorphosis ofhis generation, noting , for instance, how, when he went offto France in 1919, he was still a fairly traditional student from Fujian untouched even by die New Culture Movement. On shipboard, he was introduced for the first time to the ideas of Chen Duxiu. A few months later, he became an ardent supporter. By 1921...