Wang Fan Hsi

Submitted by martin on 10 January, 2003 - 6:39

From Solidarity 3/21, 11 January 2003
By Cheung Siu Ming
Wang Fan Hsi passed away on 30 December, aged 95, in hospital in Leeds.

We all knew him as Genshu. He first became a Trotskyist in the 1920s when he was sent by the Chinese Communist Party to university in Moscow. He has outlived Stalinism in the USSR, witnessed the political collapse of Maoism, outlived all his Chinese political contemporaries (Zhao En Lai, Mao, Deng Xiao Ping, as well as fellow Chinese Trotskyists). He has inspired several generations of political radicals in Hong Kong as well as everyone on the British far left who has had the opportunity to meet him. He has striven to analyse the movement's political defeat in China, and seriously explored different perspectives including bureaucratic collectivism, without bitterness or resorting to mechanistic formulas and positions commonly held within the disorientated 4th International of the late 40s and early 50s. He has always been scrupulously fair and generous to others in the Chinese Trotskyist movement with different views. His memoirs have been translated into many languages. Unfortunately, the work which he considers as most important, a critique of Mao and Maoism, has not yet been translated into English.
Cheung Siu Ming
A full obituary will appear in the next Solidarity.

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