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Title: Leon Trotsky on China by Leon Trotsky, Peng Shu-Tse ISBN: 0-87348-835-0 Publisher: Pathfinder Press Pub. Date: September, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: A very useful book, particulary for anyone from Asia
Comment: If you want to understand the world of today you have to work at understanding how it got to be the way it is. This is one of those books that is critical to doing that, I don't say that lightly. This book is what is known as a primary source. It is the record of one, actually several, of the crucial political battles of the last century, told by some of the leading participants in their own words. It is not a history written decades later by someone to explain what went wrong, but a record of a battle as it progressed.

Reading this book you get a better understanding of the following: How it was that the domestic and foreign policy of the new Soviet Union began to deteriorate from a revolutionary one to one that put the narrow needs of day to day diplomacy and deal making first. How the Chinese Communist Party was formed and how it developed. What type of revolution was it's leadership trying to make? Why were the U.S., England, Japan and France so hostile to it? How and why did the Stalinists and Maoists gain leadership and themselves come into being? And much else.

This book is made up of an impressive number of documants, speeches and reports principally by Trotsky, one of the central leaders of the Russian revolution who would not sell out and died fighting Stalin and the destruction of the revolution. The introduction adds much to the book in bringing things up to date. I think this book is useful for historians, anyone wanting to know more about China and the revolution there, and any revolutionaries of today who want to learn from one of the best. It can be particularly useful to political minded workers and young people from Asia

Rating: 5
Summary: Sadly, needed to day
Comment: What impresses me about this book is Trotsky's impassioned duty and determination to build a world revolution of the oppressed and to clear the way for the working people of China from the waste, confusion, and defeats that Stalinism of the Stalin and Mao varieties have imposed on them.

Thirty years ago many people would have thought reading a book about the liberation of a country from semicolonialism would no longer be necessary as we enter the 21st Century. However, it seems that lead by the USA, the imperialist powers of Western Europe and Japan are in a growing drive to deepen their control over countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Sadly, the lessons in this book drawn from the struggle of peasants and workers in China in the first 40 years of this century, are becoming more and more applicable around the world.

Rating: 5
Summary: Lessons from great revolutionary experiences
Comment: The Chinese Revolution was one of the great developments of the 20th century, and the challenges and lessons it provides remain of great importance today. Imperialism and imperialist war, colonialism, revolutionary Marxism vs. Stalinism and Maoism, concepts of armed struggle, mass struggle, of constructing a revolutionary party, the character of a workers and peasants government, of a workers-peasant alliance-- all were tested in the turbulent, living experience of social crisis, repression, war and massive worker and peasant uprisings.

This lengthy collection brings together the writings of Leon Trotsky on China from 1925 to his death in 1940. Trotsky was, along with V. I. Lenin, a central leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the early years of the Communist International. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Trotsky led the fight against the degeneration of that revolution and the rise of a conservative, privileged bureaucracy headed by Josef Stalin. Revolutionary policies in China at the time were at the heart of the differences between revolutionaries and Stalinists. Trotsky gives detailed and extensive analysis very useful today, both for the issues covered and as an example of how to use the Marxist method to orient revolutionary fighters in the living world.

The collection includes a substantial introduction by long-time Chinese revolutionary Peng Shu-tse, covering the history of China during these years, which I found useful for putting Trotsky's writings in context.

Also recommended: The Chinese Communist Party in Power, by Peng Shu-tse; The History of the Russian Revolution, by Leon Trotsky; and Capitalism's World Disorder, by Jack Barnes.