Huang Jiantong

Huang Jiantong Guangxi is a region of unending mountains, numerous ethnic groups, fight- ers, sturdy people, and hard living. It has never produced politicians or think- ers, but it has produced many military strategists. Guangxi soldiers are known for their physical endurance and fighting strength, a product of the extreme poverty of the region, where joining the army is the sole option for many. Then, when a new ruler comes to power and reduces the size of the army, soldiers become bandits, and Guangxi became notorious for its ‘bandit- problem’. To be a scholar in Guangxi is not a promising career. However, between 1931 and 1932, when the Chinese Trotskyist leadership received two heavy blows at the hands of the Guomindang and all were imprisoned, so that its original bases in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tianjin were destroyed, only in Guangxi and Wenzhou was the movement able to revive. In his Memoirs, Wang Fanxi recalled that in those areas several Trotskyist branches were established and became active, and provided cadres for the future development of Trotskyism. In Guangxi, the most important Trotskyist was Shi Tang. I mentioned Shi Tang earlier, in connection with Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, where he was active as a Trotskyist. On 7 November 1927, on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, he was among the Chinese students in Red Square shouting ‘Down with Stalin!’ and ‘Up with Trotsky!’ At the end of 1927, he and Liang Ganqiao were repatriated by Stalin, and he was immediately expelled by the Party’s underground Central Committee. He then published China’s first Trotskyist journal, Our Word, and founded China’s first Trotskyist group, of the same name. He did not attend the Unification Congress in May 1931 and naturally did not gain a post on the Central Executive, but he was not a Peng Shuzhi, so that did not worry him. He was a cultured person who taught and wrote for a living, winning praise both as teacher and writer. After 1932, when the white terror in Shanghai became intense, the entire Trotskyist organisation took flight. Shi Tang escaped to Guangxi, where he resumed teaching. In old China, Guangxi was Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi’s territory. Li and Bai relied on the hardened soldiers of Guangxi. They entered into an apparent alliance with Chiang Kai-shek, but in fact they were his rivals, and occasionally they warred with him. In the early 1930s, they raised their stan- dard against Chiang and attracted many leftists to Guangxi. At the time, Li and Bai had a favourite called Huang Gongdu, who had also studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. Although he had not joined the Trotskyist organisation, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�8��78_0�� Huang Jiantong 119 ideologically he was a staunch Trotskyist. Li Zongren’s wife and her younger brother had also been at Sun Yat-sen University and come under Trotskyist influence, so Trotskyists from other places in China without means of subsis- tence went to Guangxi, Shi Tang among them. In Guangxi, Shi Tang trained numerous aspiring young Trotskyists, including Lin Huanhua, Mao Hongjian, and Mai Junqi. Later, Lin and Mao were sent to Shanghai, where they were made responsible for printing and publishing Trotskyist literature, with out- standing results. Even Lu Xun read their publications, sighed at their fine bind- ing and the neat, careful way in which they had been printed, and wrongly thought they must have had Japanese financial support. Shi Tang’s best-known student was Huang Jiantong. Huang Jiantong, a member of the Zhuang ethnic minority, was born in Wuming in Guangxi in 1918. His father was a teacher in an old-style private school; it was he who initiated his son into learning. In 1935, at the age of seventeen, he went to Nanning to study at the Provincial Teachers’ Training College, where he got to know Shi Tang and, under his influence, became a Trotskyist. In the autumn of 1982, I met Huang Jiantong while working in the Shanghai Historical Studies Institute. Thin as a rake, with barely an ounce of fat on him, he looked as if the wind could blow him over. He was employed at the Institute, and was also responsible for his team-members’ political study. He was very talkative, and at meetings he would always chatter away in his Guangxi- accented Chinese, not always easy to understand. There was a lot of unnoticed talent at the Historical Studies Institute, including many former Guomindang politicians and members of the Guomindang secret service, prominent figures from all walks of life in the old society. Many liked to talk about history and boast of their exploits. Huang Jiantong was the only one who never mentioned his own past. Some of the old politicians and spies who knew about it occasionally raised it, but then he would abruptly stop talking, as if closely guard- ing a secret. Not until a long time later did I learn that Huang Jiantong was a member of the only group not in any way rehabilitated in 1978, when the Chinese Communist Party began a comprehensive review of its history and fully corrected its past mistakes at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Congress – he was a Trotskyist. In 1937, Huang Jiantong went home to Wuming and became a teacher in a national elementary school, where he set up a Trotskyist branch. However, he was soon arrested on charges of organising on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party and encouraging rebellion. As I mentioned before, many Trotskyists were charged and sentenced and even executed by the Guomindang as Communists, yet since the founding of New China, all the Trotskyists left in the country were, without exception, jailed by the Communists. A tragic irony..

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