TL;DR The Spartacists’ new history of the Fourth International gives the Chinese Trotskyists one sentence: they wanted a ceasefire in the civil war and opposed the Communist victory. No date, no organisation, no source. We went to the Chinese archives. Half of it is true. One of the two Chinese Trotskyist organisations did adopt an unconditional ceasefire demand, on 13 February 1947, and we can cite the resolution, which is more than the Spartacists do. The other half is contradicted by that same document, which puts the organisation’s sympathy with the Communist-led peasant forces and tells its members in the liberated areas to take up arms beside them against the Guomindang. The Communist Party was itself demanding peace at that date and did not drop the position until October 1947. And the other Chinese Trotskyist organisation, the one that never reached English, had abandoned the peace framing by September 1946 and was telling the Communists to make a deeper revolution and win. Three readers of Chinese checked our translations independently. The reading the argument rests on was queried by one and then confirmed by the other two, including the translator of the standard English editions of Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi. Two further things. The sentence we are answering does not appear in the presentation as delivered; it was added when the text was prepared for print. And its second half is contradicted in English, in the Fourth International’s own journal, in a 1947 report by the leader of the faction that supplied the whole English record.The International Communist League’s account of the Fourth International after the war, published in Spartacist on 29 August, gives the Chinese Trotskyists a single sentence. They advocated a ceasefire in the civil war, it says, and actually opposed the victory of the Communist forces. No date. No organisation named. No source.
I went looking for what stands behind that sentence, and the first thing to report is that the sentence is not simply false. Part of it is true, and I can now cite the document, which is more than the article does. The rest of what I found is the reason this piece exists.
What one sentence has to leave out
Start with the shape of the thing being described. There were two Chinese Trotskyist organisations, not one. They ran separate papers. They split formally in September 1948 and were denouncing each other by name well before that. Between 1945 and 1953 they argued, in print, about the truce, the National Assembly, the coalition government, the land question and the character of the Communist advance, and their positions moved as the war moved.
On the Chinese Marxists Internet Archive, Zheng Chaolin’s collected writings run to roughly 194 documents. Wang Fanxi’s run to 116, Chen Qichang’s to 77, Yin Kuan’s to 44. Peng Shuzi’s run to 33.
Now the English-language record. Every Chinese item carried in the Fourth International’s English bulletins between 1952 and 1968 came through Peng Shuzi or the party he led. The other organisation does not appear at all. The substantial analytical writing on China in Fourth International and the International Socialist Review was done by Europeans and North Americans: the two-part study of the Third Chinese Revolution in 1950 and 1951 is by Ernest Germain, which is Mandel; the 1942 obituary of Chen Duxiu is by Li Fu-jen, which is Frank Glass; the survey that carried most authority in 1963 is an interview article by a Canadian, Ross Dowson, and is called Chinese Revolutionists in Exile.
In English, Peng Shuzi is Chinese Trotskyism. In Chinese he is the fifth largest archive of the thirteen.
That is the error, and it is worth stating precisely because it is not a lie. It is what happens to a movement when nobody reads its language. One faction had a channel abroad; the other did not; and seventy years later a sentence describes the whole current in the words of the half that could be read.
They did not even agree about the Soviet Union
These two organisations did not differ over tactics inside a shared analysis. They differed on the largest theoretical question the movement had.
Peng Shuzi’s side held the Fourth International’s position: a degenerated workers’ state in Russia, deformed workers’ states after 1945, defended against imperialism while their bureaucracies were fought. Zheng Chaolin held that the Soviet Union after 1937, its European satellites and the new China were all state capitalist. He called 1949 a liberation and denied it had abolished capitalist relations, and he kept that view to the end of his life. Wang Fanxi went out to bureaucratic collectivism by way of Shachtman and came back.
Notice what that does to the charge. The man it fits, Peng, is the orthodox one. The man whose writing refutes it, Zheng, is the heretic. A sentence that treats these people as one current exhibiting one sterile orthodoxy has them on opposite sides of the only question on which orthodoxy could be measured.
We are not defending those positions. Zheng’s state capitalism is not ours. Peng’s ceasefire slogan is not ours either. What is being defended is a record against a sentence.
The paper almost nobody in English has heard of
Xin Qi, New Banner, began on 1 June 1946 and ran fortnightly. Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi wrote in almost every issue, usually two or three pieces each, under a rotating stock of pen names: Wang used at least twenty-three across his life, Zheng at least nineteen. It ran to twenty-one issues before the Guomindang banned it. Sixteen survive online in an unbroken run to June 1947, then the archive thins, and the last item held is from October 1948, a month after the split.
Reading that run is not like reading a sect bulletin. There is a book review of a life of Yuan Shikai, a piece on the cost-of-living index, an obituary of the educationalist Tao Xingzhi, reporting on the Shanghai general strike of 23 June and why the movement collapsed after it, an article on the massacre of Chinese in the Dutch Indies, and a running argument with the theoretician Hu Sheng about whether China had to pass through a stage of free capitalism.
Almost none of this reached English, and what has is recent. Gregor Benton and John Sexton’s edition of Zheng Chaolin’s selected writings, published in 2023, carries two of the Xin Qi pieces from August 1946. The rest sits untranslated. Part of the reason is prosaic: the pages are served in an old Chinese character encoding, and a search that assumes Unicode returns nothing. The material has been in the open for years behind a technical accident.
What the documents actually say
Take the charge in two halves.
On the demand to stop the war, the picture is a chronology, not a position. Zheng Chaolin, writing on 1 July 1946 as the June truce expired, argues that only the masses themselves can force the two parties to stop, and couples it to a fully empowered National Assembly elected by universal suffrage. He is scathing about the hope that General Marshall would referee, and says flatly that no country abroad calculates for anyone but itself.
By September 1946 Wang Fanxi has abandoned the frame. Full civil war has broken out, he writes, no pacifist can keep his illusions, and deceived Yan’an is now shouting take up your rifles. A month later Zheng himself publishes a polemic against Hu Sheng in which one of the charges is precisely the illusion that revolution can be completed by peaceful negotiation, and in which he insists that real peace has to pass first through revolutionary war.
Peng Shuzi’s organisation went the other way. In 1947 he printed two slogans, that the Guomindang and Communists cease fire immediately and unconditionally, and that a universally elected assembly be convened to settle the dispute. Chen Bilan printed essentially the same demand later that year. And on 13 February 1947 the Central Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist League adopted a resolution on the civil war which made it policy. Red Mole has published, we think for the first time, an English translation of that resolution.
What the Chinese Trotskyists actually resolved in 1947
Introduction to “Resolution on the Chinese Civil War”
So the first half of the charge is true, of one organisation, from a datable moment. It is also the half that reached English.
Who else was demanding peace in February 1947
Here is the thing the charge, having no date attached, cannot tell you.
The Communist Party was still asking for a negotiated settlement. When the Guomindang broke the January 1946 ceasefire and went over to all-out attack that June, the Communists answered with the formula of armed self-defence, and went on presenting their programme in terms of peace, democracy and unity. They did not call for Chiang’s overthrow until October 1947.
Two qualifications, both from the readers who checked this for us, and both worth having because they cut against a lazy version of the point.
The Communists were not pacifists and nobody should pretend otherwise. Full civil war had resumed in 1946, and by early 1947 they were running major operations and enlarging the areas they held. What they wanted was peace on their own terms. In January 1947 they did not refuse negotiation as such; they called the Guomindang’s terms fraudulent for not conceding their eight conditions, which ran from the punishment of war criminals and the abolition of the 1946 constitution to land reform, the abolition of the unequal treaties and a coalition government.
And the turn, when it came, was narrower than it looks. The Manifesto of the People’s Liberation Army of 10 October 1947 proclaimed the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek and the liberation of all China, and the Central Committee’s instruction of the 27th told the party to carry the revolution through to the end. That ended the willingness to compromise with Chiang. It did not abandon coalition government as an aim. It conceded that military victory was now the road to it.
Set the Trotskyist demand against that and the difference is real but not the one the charge implies. Their ceasefire demand was unconditional where the Communists’ peace terms were conditional. What it was not is a heresy against a party fighting to win, because in February 1947 that party was publicly asking for a settlement too. You may think an unconditional ceasefire a poor demand. You cannot present holding it as the mark of a current that had set itself against the Communist advance.
There is a second thing the missing date conceals. China in 1946 was a country that had been at war for eight years. The Japanese invasion had worn the population out, and the demand to stop fighting was not a doctrine imported by a sect. It was what the exhausted wanted, and every party in the country was manoeuvring around it. Peng’s own article opens by describing exactly that, a peace movement running through the students, the professors, the trade unions and up into the government’s own consultative bodies.
What the resolution says next
Read on in the same paragraph of the February 1947 resolution.
It states that in the civil war the organisation’s sympathy lies with the peasant forces led by the Stalinist party. It declares publicly that however reactionary that leadership is, certain reform policies it carries out have progressive significance, and that peasants defending those meagre gains act justly. And it instructs its members in the liberated areas to stand with the peasants, without hesitation, and resist the Guomindang’s offensive.
Then the ceasefire slogan, in the sentence immediately after, and that sentence turns on where you are standing. Gregor Benton, who has translated Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi into English, renders the join as contrastive and says so flatly: while in Chiang Kai-shek’s rear, the Trotskyists will raise the slogan of an unconditional ceasefire and support every form of anti-war and peace movement among the masses. A native Chinese speaker, reading independently, arrives at the same construction.
So the policy is divided by territory. In the Communist-held areas, take up arms beside the peasants against the Guomindang and use the fighting to expose the leadership’s compromises. In Guomindang territory, agitate for an unconditional ceasefire and back every peace movement the masses throw up. The resolution then separates its own peace slogan from the Guomindang’s, which it calls a cover for suppressing rebellion, and from the Communists’, which it calls a cover for the dead end of military opportunism.
That structure is not an antiquarian curiosity, and one of the readers who checked this for us said why unprompted. His own current applies the same shape to Taiwan now: for peace in mainland China and against Beijing’s war talk, for Taiwan’s right of self-defence. Two faces of one strategy, decided by which side of a line a person is standing on.
Take the territorial clause out and you have the sentence in Spartacist. Nothing has been fabricated. A restricting clause has been dropped, and what it restricted is the half in which Chinese Trotskyists are shooting at the Guomindang.
The refutation was in English all along
While the Chinese material was being read, Gregor Benton’s edition of Zheng Chaolin pointed at a footnote, and the footnote led back to a document we already held.
In July 1947, five months after the resolution, the Chinese section sent a report to the International which was printed in English in Fourth International under the title “Trotskyism in China”. Benton attributes it to Peng Shuzi. It sets out the line the February resolution had adopted, in the same words: after the defeat of Japan, Yankee imperialism with its Guomindang agent became the main enemy, and the whole programme had to be readjusted around that. It records the National Assembly slogan being carried into the street in Wenzhou. It attacks the Xin Qi group by name as deserters with an incurable infantile disease who left their comrades’ publications in a desk drawer.
And it says this. That they showed the deepest sympathy to the war conducted by the Stalinist peasant armies, while never ceasing to point out that the defeat of those armies would be caused by the treacherous policies of their party and of the Kremlin.
Deepest sympathy to the war conducted by the peasant armies. In English. In the theoretical journal of the Fourth International. In 1947. By the leader of the organisation whose material is the entire English-language record of Chinese Trotskyism, in the report that is the single best-known English source on the subject, sitting on the Marxists Internet Archive where anyone can read it in a minute.
The charge that the Chinese Trotskyists opposed the victory of the Communist forces did not require Chinese to check. It required opening the file.
And read now, that sentence is closer to a credit than an indictment. The forecast inside it was wrong, plainly: the armies were not defeated, they won within two years. But the shape of it is the thing the Spartacists say the movement never managed to produce, sympathy with the fight and no confidence in the leadership conducting it, held together in a single clause. The treachery half did not fail either. It came late, and it came for them. In December 1952 the party whose war they had sympathised with arrested two or three hundred of them.
What the record does not contain
Nothing read so far calls for the Communists to be defeated.
Wang Fanxi in August 1946 wants all landlord land and much rich-peasant land confiscated without compensation and handed to peasant committees, carried out immediately and ratified afterwards. In September he says the Communist programme and record are comparatively an improvement, though nowhere near enough to win, and tells the party to drop New Democracy and class collaboration and make a deeper social revolution so that it can move toward victory. One of our readers is clear that the last phrase means what it appears to mean, the Communists and the masses winning. In October he says the point is that the Communist-led peasant forces should not be wiped out. Yin Kuan in May 1948 says American aid cannot destroy the Communists and calls for the Guomindang dictatorship to be overthrown.
The International’s own centre said the same thing at the decisive moment. Its Executive Committee, meeting in April 1949 as the People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yangtze, called Chiang’s downfall a heavy defeat for world imperialism.
One more thing about that sentence
The presentation this article answers was given in Mexico City in July, and the ICL put the recording on its own podcast. Comparing the two, the speech and the article, produces a fact worth setting down carefully.
At the equivalent point in the delivered speech, the passage runs: in China, they insisted that the Communist Party could only betray. Then it moves straight on to Eastern Europe.
The sentence about the Chinese Trotskyists demanding a ceasefire and opposing the Communist victory is not there. It was added when the text was prepared for print.
I do not know why, and there is no need to guess. What can be said is that it entered the record at the one moment in the process when a claim of that kind normally acquires a source, and it did not acquire one. The published version is in other respects the more careful of the two: where the speech says flatly that no section in the colonial world went with the International Committee, the article adds the exception of the Chinese exile group. Someone was checking. This sentence went in unchecked, about the one current in the story with nobody left to answer for it.
The part that is not about documents
The men who wrote Xin Qi were arrested in the mass round-up of December 1952, by the party they had spent 1946 telling to make a deeper revolution. Zheng Chaolin served twenty-seven years. Xiong Andong got a life sentence and was released in 1972. Liu Pingmei came out and spent his last decades arguing that the Chinese Trotskyists had been revolutionaries. Wang Fanxi reached Macau, then Leeds, and died there in 2002 at ninety-five.
What kept the record together was a Hong Kong journal, October Review, which published from 1974 and wrote the obituaries of both sides of the 1948 split, Peng Shuzi’s in 1983 and Wang Fanxi’s in 2002, along with those of the mainland survivors as they died. It is the one institution that treated the whole thing as a single movement. Its own back run before 2000 is not online, which is now the largest hole in anybody’s account of this subject.
A note on how this was done, because it matters
I do not read Chinese well enough for anyone to take my word for any of this, and machine assistance is not a substitute for someone who does. So the readings went out to three people who read the language, independently of each other, with the Chinese set out and a request to contradict us.
They did not simply agree. One challenged the reading the whole argument turns on, holding that the sentence might record where the ceasefire slogan was raised without restricting it there. That challenge was worth more than the confirmations, because it sent the question back out in a narrower form: what work is the contrastive particle doing? The answer came back from a native speaker and from Gregor Benton, who has translated both Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi into English, and they agree that it is contrastive. A second query, on whether the resolution’s word for the Communists’ reform policies should be softened from progressive to something like improvement, was answered the same way, and the stronger reading stands.
That exchange took four days. A sourceless sentence about the Chinese Trotskyists has been circulating in English for about seventy years, and any of the tendencies repeating it could have done the same at any point.
Ends
In September 1946 Wang Fanxi published an article addressed, in its last line, to all sincere communists, asking them to consider his group’s proposal. The proposal was that the Communist Party should stop negotiating, abandon New Democracy, carry through a real land revolution and fight to win.
The party took the advice about winning. Six years later it arrested him and everyone like him.
The Spartacists have that current down as the people who wanted a ceasefire.
Sources. Vincent David, “Fourth International After World War II: Why Trotskyism Fractured”, Spartacist (English edition) No. 71, 29 August 2026, as published at iclfi.org and retrieved 31 August 2026. The sentence about the Chinese Trotskyists that this article answers is quoted from that text. The presentation as delivered is on the ICL’s own podcast; a comparison of the two versions is held in our files. The sentence about the Chinese Trotskyists that this article answers appears in the published article and not in the speech. Chinese documents from the Chinese Marxists Internet Archive: Xin Qi issues 1 to 20 (1946 to 1948) for Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi; Qingnian yu Funü and Xinsheng for Peng Shuzi, Chen Bilan and Yin Kuan; and, in the Fourth International’s Chinese documents section, the statement of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist League of 16 January 1946 and the Resolution on the Chinese Civil War adopted by its Central Standing Committee on 13 February 1947. Archive sizes are counts of documents listed on the relevant author index pages, retrieved 31 August 2026. English-language transmission traced through the International Information Bulletin series inventory and the indexes of Fourth International (1940 to 1956) and the International Socialist Review (1956 to 1970). The April 1949 assessment is the resolution of the Seventh Plenum of the International Executive Committee. Biographical details from the Chinese Marxists Internet Archive author pages and from October Review obituaries reproduced there. Pen-name identifications are from the lists printed on the Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin index pages.
Translations were checked by three readers of Chinese working independently, to whom Red Mole is grateful. The rendering of the decisive clause follows Gregor Benton. The account of the CCP’s negotiating position through 1947, including the eight conditions and the October 1947 turn, is his. “Trotskyism in China: A Report”, Fourth International, July-August 1947, is unsigned in the journal and attributed to Peng Shuzi by Gregor Benton. Zheng’s 1950 essay on state capitalism, with Walter Daum’s introduction and criticism, and Zheng’s Xin Qi articles of August 1946, are translated in Gregor Benton and John Sexton, eds., Zheng Chaolin, Selected Writings, 1942–1998 (Brill, 2023), which is also the source for the ban on the paper after twenty-one issues. As always, comments are welcome. Corrections will be published at redmole.org.