An Appeal and a Manifesto issued in memory of Chinese writers butchered by the Kuomintang.

‘Appeal to the World’ by the Left Writers’ League of China from New Masses. Vol. 7 No. 1. June, 1931.

TO ALL WORLD REVOLUTIONARY CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS—
TO ALL WRITERS, ARTISTS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SCIENTISTS OF THE WORLD—
TO ALL THINKERS WORKING FOR HUMAN PROGRESS IN ANY PART OF THE WORLD—

An Appeal and a Manifesto issued in memory of Chinese writers butchered by the Kuomintang, the ruling party in China:

We, the Left Writers’ League of China, a nation-wide organization of Chinese writers of left tendencies or convictions, believing in the emancipation of the workers and peasants of China from feudal, capitalist and imperialist exploitation; believing in the Chinese revolution and the creation of a new and free society, hereby appeal to you in the name of our dead comrades and in the name of those who still live and struggle.

The Kuomintang that has ruled China during the past four years under the name of the Nanking Government, is a dictating party and Government of feudal landlords, of corrupt officials and capitalists, of Shanghai bankers who are tools of international finance, and whose tools are the militarists of Nanking and its allies. Under this reactionary rule the misery of the masses has become unbearable, and instead of any kind of construction, there has been nothing but wars of rival militarists and the continued depression of national economy. For the vast masses there is nothing but brutal exploitation by the ruling class. Nanking officials and agents abroad have used “progressive” phraseology, lying and cheating with every breath, but always purchasing more guns, ammunition, and poison gas for mass murder in China, allying themselves with Fascist elements and shipping new hordes of Fascist and imperialist advisers into the country to help them in their continued dictatorship. In China the burden on the shoulders of the toiling masses has become heavier and heavier until their misery is without parallel in any part of the world or at any time in history. This is the reason they have raised the banner of revolution and are fighting against the present vicious government and system.

The Kuomintang militarists are adopting every method known to feudalists and Fascists to suppress the revolution. Wholesale executions are carried out in the most barbarous manner throughout the country and the White Terror, begun in 1927, continues with unabating ferocity. Millions of innocents, revolutionaries, and Communists, are facing or have already suffered death under the White Terror. The Kuomintang can maintain its rule only by use of this ghastliness, thereby reflecting its fundamental weakness and the collapse of its despotism.

The White Terror is now sweeping over the cultural sections of the Chinese revolution. The Left Writers’ League of China has lost many of its members. Many left writers have been sentenced to from three to seven years imprisonment under conditions that mean certain death after a few months of confinement; they are existing in a living death in dark, feudal Chinese prisons, always in chains and shackles, or in the efficient torture houses of the foreign concessions. Every man and woman now captured is beaten and tortured before being killed, both the Chinese and imperialist foreigners applying torture. Six months ago, a young writer, Comrade Tsung Hui, a member of the Left Dramatic League of China, was shot at Nanking for aiding striking workers in a British factory. All modern social publications, dramas, exhibitions and book-shops have been smashed by the Kuomingtang and the imperialists, and many of our members, still free, are to be arrested. In wholesale executions on February 7th, 1931, we lost five more of our members. Because their execution exposed in this one instance what is taking place throughout China, we lay the facts before all our comrades, friends and sympathizers throughout the world. This is what happened:

On January 17th, the British imperialist police in Shanghai arrested twenty-four young revolutionaries, one a pregnant woman, and five of the number members of the Left Writers’ League of China. The British turned them over to the Kuomintang militarists in Chinese territory, to the Shanghai Woosung Garrison Commanders’ headquarters. There they were tortured half to death in an effort to make them betray their friends and comrades. Refusing, they were taken at midnight on February 7th and slaughtered. First they were forced to dig their own graves. Soldiers were then commanded to bury them alive. ‘ Five were buried alive, but the process was too gruesome for even the soldiers, and the rest of the victims were shot to death and their bodies thrown in on the five already buried. A prisoner in the same prison with them before they were killed, has now told the details of their death. At midnight he heard them being taken from their cells, he said. Then he heard the march of their feet and of soldiers. Then came the strains of “The International,” all of them singing. “I knew they were being taken to their death,” the prisoner said, “because I heard them all begin to sing ‘The International.’ We all were awake in the prison, for the execution grounds is not far. Always we heard their singing, and not once did it stop. Finally we heard a volley of shots. After that but one voice sang “The International.” Then five more shots came through the darkness and we listened. The voice hesitated for a moment, then began again and still we heard “The International.” Then we knew the last man had been killed.”

The five who were members of the Left Writers’ League of China have been known for years to the public as writers and poets.

Li Wei-sen, one of those buried alive, was a young literary genius, a writer on social problems, a translator of great ability; Jou Shih and Hu Yeh-pin had been known for years as short-story writers of a social tendency; Yin Fu was an excellent young poet; Feng Keng was one of the most brilliant and hopeful young women writers that China has ever produced. These youths, the very quintessence of Chinese creative literary ability, always stood in the literary front.

As this is written, another Left short-story writer, Wang Yin-su, has been arrested — and today in China arrest nearly always means death by the most terrible means.

Up to now the prisons have been choked with political prisoners. But the latest method of the Kuomintang is to kill, kill, kill, and leave no Communist alive. To give a few examples: in recent months, in Changsha, Canton, Hankow and Tsinan, Communists who had been sentenced to long years of imprisonment and had already served two or three years of their terms, were suddenly taken out and slaughtered wholesale — merely to kill all Communists. Hankow is nothing but a human butchery with men and women being butchered in the public streets and their bodies left to terrorize the public. Before every revolutionary anniversary there are wholesale slaughters to terrorize the masses. On April 5th, twenty-two political prisoners in Tsinan, Shantung, prison, some of whom had served two or three years of long prison sentences, were taken out and slaughtered. On April 15th the press reported that the Governor of Shantung Province had ordered all prisons to be emptied because they are too crowded; his method was to order that all prisoners who cannot find a business-man to guarantee their good conduct should be killed. On that day, 27 were beheaded and others were to follow.

Despite this fearful White Terror, intelligent and conscious writers and thinkers do not shrink from their duty to the revolution. Facing death and worse than death, they stand side by side with the toiling masses in their struggle for knowledge and emancipation, for the right to carry on propaganda and to organize. Our executed comrades, in common with all Left Writers who still live, were clear in their knowledge that the Chinese masses, the most miserable toilers in the world, need us to help them in the establishment of their power — the Soviet power — that is, the victory of proletarian culture, of Socialism, and new and free society.

Against the Revolution, the Kuomintang grasps its last weapon — the White Terror. Formerly they used the so-called “idealist” swindle — Sun Yat-senism and what they chose to call “National Literature,” as their fig-leaves. After suppressing all Left organizations devoted to social advancement, they formed a “National Culture” organization — headed by the two leading militarists of the country (Chiang. Kai-shek and Chang Hsueh-liang) , who have no “culture” to offer China except that of opium, famine, prostitution, the bullet and the executioner’s knife. Butchers and detectives are controlling the publishing field, permitting only those book-shops and publishing houses to exist who pay regular monthly bribes. We, the revolutionary writers and thinkers, are compelled to work underground, with the butcher’s knife always suspended over our heads. Even the most critical bourgeois writers of somewhat free, liberal tendencies, are suppressed.

We know that the rule of the Kuomintang will mean more and more butchery. Our struggle is a bloody one. Our lives are at stake. To you, comrades, friends, sympathizers, we ask your support through writing, speaking, publishing, through active and determined demonstrations of protest against the White Terror. In your midst live members and agents of the Nanking Government and the Kuomintang murderers, pretending because they are in your countries, to be modern, civilized men and women.

These creatures are butchers — human butchers.

We appeal to you, comrades of all revolutionary cultural organizations, to you writers, artists, philosophers and scientists of the world, to all of you men and women who fight for human progress in one field or the other, to take up a fight against the White Terror in China. The Nanking Government and the Kuomintang suppress all newspapers, news, public speech, assembly, all cables, all truth about conditions in China. We ask you to help us break through their suppression and lies — we ask you to publish and speak the truth. We have here given you but a brief and incomplete statement of the White Terror that has already claimed tens of thousands of workers, peasants, and intellectuals fighting against the old, corrupt and vicious social order, for a new world. We ask your immediate and determined help —

Against the White Terror in China!

Against the direct and indirect oppression of imperialism! Against the arrest and slaughter of writers and thinkers! Against the mass murder of the Nanking Government!

Against the Kuomintang Fascist oppression in the cultural field! We call upon you to help us —

Protest the proletarian literary front in China!
Protect the struggling, exploited Chinese masses!
Protect the Chinese Revolution!

Shanghai, China. LEFT WRITERS’ LEAGUE OF CHINA.
April 19th, 1931.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1931/v07n01-jun-1931-New-Masses.pdf