Considered an authentic account of the historical roots of the Tiananmen Square events, Wang Fan-hsi's autobiography, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary, documents events in China for the years 1919 to 1949, and the fate of those who dared challenge the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. Wang participated in the Chinese student movement of his youth, escaped from Kuomintang jailers in 1927, and fled to Moscow. There he discovered Trotsky, was eventually expelled from the Chinese Communist Party for being a Trotskyite, and spent six years in jail.
The original publication of Wang's autobiography in 1950 consisted of only twenty mimeographed copies, to be read chiefly by those Trotskyites who had survived Mau Tse-tung's rise to power. Since then, it has been published in Japanese, French, German, and English. For this second English edition, the author has written a new preface, translator Gregor Benton has revised and updated his introduction, and material cut from the first English edition has been restored. Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary is an extremely important document about past events in China by someone who was there, on the inside.
