per <<you like history>>
topping off this letter written by grandpa Message 33958534 that said Message 34171452 which might be picked up as and when appropriate
TO THE CENTRAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF
THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS:
MY DEAR COMRADES,
AS I LIE HERE, WITH A MALADY THAT IS BEYOND MEN'S SKILL, MY THOUGHTS TURN TO YOU AND TO THE FUTURE OF MY PARTY AND MY COUNTRY.
YOU ARE THE HEAD OF A UNION OF FREE REPUBLICS WHICH IS THE REAL HERITAGE THAT THE IMMORTAL LENIN HAS LEFT TO THE WORLD OF THE OPPRESSED PEOPLES. THROUGH THIS HERITAGE, THE VICTIMS OF IMPERIALISM ARE DESTINED TO SECURE THEIR FREEDOM AND DELIVERANCE FROM AN INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM WHOSE FOUNDATIONS LIE IN ANCIENT SLAVERIES AND WARS AND INJUSTICES.
I AM LEAVING BEHIND ME A PARTY WHICH I HAD HOPED WOULD BE ASSOCIATED WITH YOU IN THE HISTORIC WORK OF COMPLETELY LIBERATING CHINA AND OTHER EXPLOITED COUNTRIES FROM THIS IMPERIALIST SYSTEM. FATE DECREES THAT I MUST LEAVE THE TASK UNFINISHED AND PASS IT ON TO THOSE WHO, BY REMAINING TRUE TO THE PRINCIPLES AND TEACHINGS OF THE PARTY, WILL CONSTITUTE MY REAL FOLLOWERS.
I HAVE THEREFORE ENJOINED THE KUOMINTANG TO CARRY ON THE WORK OF THE NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT IN ORDER THAT CHINA MAY BE FREED FROM THE SEMI-COLONIAL STATUS WHICH IMPERIALISM IMPOSED UPON HER. TO THIS END I HAVE CHARGED THE PARTY TO KEEP IN CONSTANT TOUCH WITH YOU; AND I LOOK WITH CONFIDENCE TO THE CONTINUANCE OF THE SUPPORT THAT YOUR GOVERNMENT HAS HERETOFORE EXTENDED TO MY PARTY.
IN BIDDING FAREWELL TO YOU, DEAR COMRADES, I WISH TO EXPRESS THE FERVENT HOPE THAT THE DAY MAY SOON DAWN WHEN THE U. S. S. R. WILL GREET, AS A FRIEND AND ALLY, A STRONG AND INDEPENDENT CHINA AND THAT THE TWO ALLIES MAY TOGETHER ADVANCE TO VICTORY IN THE GREAT STRUGGLE FOR THE LIBERATION OF THE OPPRESSED PEOPLES OF THE WORLD.
WITH FRATERNAL GREETINGS.
a new article with these words attributed to same grandpa who was quite good with the pen
In his eulogy, Li Weichen recited Eugene’s words: “More than 50 years ago, when I was still a child, I loved walking alone under the moonlight, especially in the coconut grove by the sea. Listening to the waves, I often thought to myself that I wanted to go far beyond the island. I always thought that one day I could make a meaningful contribution to this big world. I thought of China, but China was conquered by the Qing Dynasty, which my parents refused to succumb to...I had made no contribution to China and I was always in angst.”
trinidadexpress.com
Eugene Chen: a forgotten Trinidadian
Selwyn Cudjoe
Photo courtesy Wellesley College
Part I
In 1944, when news reached Trinidad that Eugene Chen had died from neurasthenia in China, Chien Chiao (the Chinese homonym for Trinidad), a Trinidad Chinese community journal, made the following announcement: “Eugene Chen (1879(sic)-1944), Trinidad’s greatest son and for many years Chinese Foreign Minister, died from a heart attack in Shanghai this year. Born of humble parentage in San Fernando, he practiced as a solicitor in the courts of the colony before going abroad.” (December 1944).
I suspect that many of our citizens do not know who Eugene Chen is. He is someone with whom Trinbagonians should be acquainted. In October 2021, Walton (Wally) Look Lai, one of our more brilliant scholars, published an excellent biography, West Meets East: The Life of Eugene Chen (1875–1944), that centred on Chen’s life in China. It did not receive the public attention it deserved.
Chen’s father, Chan Kam, was born in China. After he left China, he migrated to Martinique where he married into a Chinese immigrant family called Elang-Shao-Long, but rechristened Longchallon by the French authorities. In the 1860s he immigrated to San Fernando, Trinidad, where his son, Eugene Bernard Acham, was born in 1875 . He later changed his name to Eugene Chen or Chen Yu-Jen in Chinese.
Chen studied at the Borough schools in San Fernando, after which he went to St Mary’s College in Port of Spain, where he received his high school education. After graduating from St Mary’s, he became an articled clerk at the solicitor firm of Edgar Maresse Smith, “a well-known local mixed-race lawyer of radical sympathies and a prominent and controversial reformer of that generation”. (West Meets East.)
In 1889 he married Alphonsine Agatha Ganteaume, the daughter of Francois Ganteaume, a French Creole planter, and his African cook. Eugene and Agatha had eight children, four of whom survived. Percy Lionel (b. 1901); Sylvia (b. 1905), who later changed her first name to Silan; and Jack (b. 1908) were born in Trinidad. The last girl, Yolanda or Yulan (b. 1913), was born in London.
In 1896 Chen qualified as a solicitor. He was also an active participant in the Port of Spain literary scene and attended many of the public lectures at Victoria Institute where many Trinidad intellectuals gathered. Arthur Young, a visiting Chinese journalist who interviewed local residents about Chen’s background in 1928, noted: “He was an omnivorous reader. His library, crammed with classical and legal works in expensive covers, furnished the vintages that his thirsty mind craved. He quaffed deeply after office hours. In this way, he acquired the intellectual culture which many inferred was Oxford-inspired, but in reality, was self-made.”
To an observant reader, this sounds like the intellectual training that college students at the time received. It is a mode of education that CLR James experienced at Queen’s Royal College from 1910 to 1918, which he described in Beyond a Boundary.
Like many of our earlier intellectuals and activists, Chen found Trinidad intellectually stifling. After more than ten years of successful legal practice in Trinidad, he moved to London with his family in 1911. “It was claimed later on that he had gotten into severe financial difficulties in Trinidad that year, and was being pressed by local banks and commercial firms with the threat of bankruptcy proceedings”. (West Meets East.)
In Trinidad Chen showed little interest in Chinese politics although his father was a veteran of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), “the Hakka peasant social movement which swept southern China and almost toppled the Manchu Ching dynasty.” Once news of the outbreak of the Chinese Revolution reached him in London, he and his two friends “travelled to China to volunteer their services to the motherland”. They arrived in China in 1912.
Once Chen got there he became active in Chinese political affairs. He edited the Peking Gazette from October 1914 to November 1917, but was imprisoned in 1916 for his fierce ideas. The Peking Gazette advertised itself as “the only paper published in China in the English language that is owned as well as edited by Chinese” while Chen established himself “as one of the foremost independent journalists and political critics in Peking”.
After 1918, Chen became a staunch supporter of Sun Yat-Sen, the leader of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party of China, and later joined the party. That same year he became the editor of the Shanghai Gazette and travelled to Canton, Paris, and London on behalf of Sun Yat-Sun between 1918 and 1921. They became close friends and collaborators.
In 1919, Chen was selected by the Chinese government to represent China at the Paris Peace Conference, a formal meeting of the victorious Allies and Germany to set the peace terms after the end of World War I. The refusal of the China delegation to sign the Versailles treaty on June 28 had devastating consequences for President Wilson and US politics.
Ultimately, the US Senate “refused to ratify the Versailles treaty and all its bright ideas like the Wilson-inspired League of Nations”. Look Lai claims that a letter that Chen sent to William Borah, a Republican member of the US Senate that was published in all of the major US newspapers, was mainly responsible for the US not signing the treaty.
This victory must have been a bit heady for this country boy from Trinidad, who did not even speak a word of Chinese. After the conference, he travelled to London to reunite with his family who were very proud of “his new-found status in far off China... In 1920, he attended the inauguration of the League of Nations in Geneva as a member of the Chinese delegation. He did not return to China until July 1921”.
trinidadexpress.com
Eugene Chen: a forgotten Trinidadian
Selwyn Cudjoe
Photo courtesy Wellesley College
Part II
Between 1921 and 1925, the year of Sun Yat-sen’s death, Eugene Chen was on top of his game. He was described as “Sun Yat-sen’s personal representative and spokesman in Shanghai” while the US Consul General in Shanghai described him as “one of the ablest, if not the most able, of Chinese political writers”. (Look Lai, West Meets East.)
In 1923, Sun Yat-sen and Adolph Joffe, a representative of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, worked out a major agreement, the Sun-Joffe Manifesto, which provided a basis for the cooperation between the Kuomintang (KMT) and their Russian allies. Joffe agreed “the Soviets would support Sun’s programme to unify China and would renegotiate the unequal treaties forced on China by imperialist Russia”. (Encyclopedia Britannica.) Look Lai claims this manifesto was drafted by Chen.
In 1926 Chen served as an acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Nationalist Government and assumed the substantial post in 1927. In February 1927 he negotiated the Hankow agreement, better known as the Chen-O’Malley Agreement, with Owen O’Malley, the British Charge d’Affaires, which dissolved the British concessions they held in Hankow, China, in favour of a new Chinese administration.
Chien Chiao, the Chinese journal in Trinidad, wrote that this “marked the first real Chinese diplomatic triumph over the Western powers”. (December 1944.) Si-lan Chen, taking pride in her father’s achievement, gushed in her autobiography: “Everyone regarded this as magnificent proof of Father’s diplomatic skills.” (Footnote to History).
When the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek repudiated the Communist influence in China in 1927 and staged a bloody coup that purged the leftists out of the KMT, Chen was forced to flee to Moscow to save his life.
Agatha Ganteaume, Chen’s first wife, died of cancer in Trinidad in 1926. In 1930, Chen met Chang Li Ying (Georgette), a young Paris-based Chinese student who later became a pioneer of modern Singaporean art, whom he married. She was 24 years old, a year older than Si-lan, and Eugene was 54 years of age.
Eugene was reluctant to tell his children about his marriage which, it was rumoured, was arranged by Madame Sun Yat-sen. Si-lan wrote to her father to find out the truth surrounding his marriage. Eugene assured her that Madame Sun Yat-sen had nothing to do with his decision and told her that his marriage “will leave quite unaltered all family relations and, in the future as in the past, you and others may count on my assistance whenever needed”.
When Eugene and Georgette returned to China in May 1931, there were many conflicts within the Nationalist party. Several members resented Chiang Kai-shek’s growing authoritarianism and his undermining of the party’s democracy. Chen joined the forces on the left who opposed Chiang Kai-shek and was named Foreign Minister a short-lived Canton Nationalist Government.
This set off a storm of racism against Eugene from the KMT right wing. The Shanghai branch of the Nationalist party attacked him in a nasty way. They described him as “a foreigner posing as a Chinese”, a mulatto scribe who had been “a mere echo of Borodin”, still “in the pay of the Soviets”.
They added: “Having acquired a Chinese mate after discarding your coloured partner, you are trying to win yourself back into the graces of the Canton rebels by the violence of your drivel pen.
“But think not that the insolent, bizarre, colourful Negro phraseology which attracted notice in 1926 and 1927, because your blood and temperament were then unknown, would again serve today when your antecedents are so well established.”
They advised him to “go back to his native Trinidad, return to the hearth of your black wife and children, and think no more of imposing yourself on the people of China, or interfering with their domestic politics”.
Chen remained in the short-lived Canton opposition government until it collapsed in 1931. Three years later, he participated in another leftist military opposition government in the province of Fukien, but that was crushed by Chiang’s military in short order.
Chen was expelled from the party for this act of rebellion in 1934 and a warrant was issued for his arrest. To evade his being arrested, he and Georgette returned to Europe where they lived until 1938. In July 1937 Japan invaded China, thereby initiating the Sino-Japanese war (1937–45). The Japanese forces massacred more than 300,000 civilians within two weeks.
Chen appealed publicly to President Theodore Roosevelt to come to Chinese aid. He ended his appeal: “Even though China’s faith in the pledged words of the white races of Europe and America may seem to have been mistaken, I persist in believing that betrayal is not yet a creed, and honour is still prized in the United States, in England, and in France.” His idealism had not left him.
Eugene and Georgette returned to Hong Kong in April 1938. Eugene spent the next three years “as a private figure, commenting publicly and frequently in the press and lecturing at university campuses in Hong Kong on the progress of the war and foreign policy”.
In December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and invaded Hong Kong. They placed Eugene and Georgette under house arrest from 1942 to 1944 and moved them to Shanghai. Georgette revealed later: “Much as the Japanese disagreed with his views, the majority seemed to admire his independent attitude, and the more expressive ones even went so far as to declare their approval.”
Eugene died on May 20, 1944, while he was working on a document of what he thought post-war Asia should look like. After he died, Georgette “spent ten minutes tearfully making her last sketch of Eugene, then his body was removed to the Wan Guo funeral home of the Jing’an temple.” (West Meets East.)
https://trinidadexpress.com/opinion/columnists/eugene-chen-a-forgotten-trinidadian/article_a46f2ed4-c07a-11ed-8b53-7356acee74d9.html
Eugene Chen: a forgotten Trinidadian
Selwyn Cudjoe
Photo courtesy Wellesley College
Part III
Walton Look Lai has written an indispensable book about the life of Eugene Chen and the important role he played in Chinese history between the 1920s and 1940s, the full flowering of Chen’s career. Chen, a shrewd diplomat, possessed a superior command of the English language which he used as a weapon against his internal antagonists within the party and external foes.
However, Look Lai glossed over the important part that Trinidad played in Chen’s early development. Chen stood out as a pupil at St Mary’s College and articled under Edgar Maresse Smith, a progressive figure in Trinidad. He must have picked up some of Smith’s radical tendencies.
Chen was also a student of JJ Thomas, author of Froudacity (1889), and a prominent member of Trinidad’s literary establishment at the end of the 19th century. He was also a nationalist at the time, using poetry and literary criticism to express his national pride. I argued in Beyond Boundaries, “Interestingly enough, this unfurling of the nationalist banner was being led by two brilliant Trinidadians who were of Chinese origin.” Charles Assee was the other Chinese poet. Much of Chen’s polemics were honed during this period.
Although Look Lai offers a good description of Chen’s family life, a reader can profit immensely from reading Footnote to History that is written by Chen’s daughter, Si-lan Chen, who offers a more intimate look at her father’s life. Although she speaks warmly about him, she also noted his aloofness from the family. While he took care of them financially, he spent so much time away that they hardly knew him.
Si-lan was aware of her African heritage that came from her mother. She says: “It took a desperate love to survive the stinking holds of the African ship. This is how my remote ancestors arrived in his American home.” This might be one reason why the British authorities were so scared when she visited and gave dance recitals in Trinidad in 1940-41.
Eugene, the eldest son of the family, was his mother’s favourite. Look Lai notes the consternation of Eugene’s parents when he announced his intention to marry a black woman. Si-lan offers another take on it. She says: “The Chinese are extremely race-conscious, rarely marrying outside their own race. When my father announced his intentions towards Agatha Ganteaume, there was a storm of protest from my family and relations. My mother possessed a square jaw, and my father was also obstinate, so they were married.”
Eugene’s boldness, self-confidence and cosmopolitanism revealed him to be a quintessential Trinidadian/West Indian. He promised to write a biography on Sun Yat-sen “which will contain a full chapter dealing with the last days of the dead leader, with pen pictures of a few of the figures who threw their shadows across the death scene”.
Chen’s political life mirrored that of George Padmore (born Malcolm Nurse), another Trinidadian who found himself at the pinnacle of power in Russia’s political hierarchy. WM Warren of the University of London wrote in 1972: “Perhaps the best indication of the dizzy heights he reached was his membership of the Comintern Commission set up to investigate the charges of ultra-left deviation levelled by Mao Tse-tung against Li Li-san” (Pan-Africanism or Communism).
That both Chen and Padmore reached such great heights within the international political arena spoke of an audaciousness that is prominent among West Indians. Marcus Garvey did a similar thing in African American politics. Like these other outstanding scholar-activists, Chen possessed “the revolutionary desire to make history and the writer’s impulse to describe it and grasp its meaning” (Pan-Africanism or Communism).
In his eulogy, Li Weichen recited Eugene’s words: “More than 50 years ago, when I was still a child, I loved walking alone under the moonlight, especially in the coconut grove by the sea. Listening to the waves, I often thought to myself that I wanted to go far beyond the island. I always thought that one day I could make a meaningful contribution to this big world. I thought of China, but China was conquered by the Qing Dynasty, which my parents refused to succumb to...I had made no contribution to China and I was always in angst.”
Such a statement suggests Chen had not suddenly thought about China when he became an adult. Eugene was inspired by his father taking part in affairs of his motherland. Other Chinese whose parents came to Trinidad as a result of their participation in the Taiping revolution attest that they were inspired by their parents’ revolutionary example.
Look Lai ends his biography on the following note: “A few years after the dramatic movement on October 1st 1949, when Mao Tse-tung, with Madame Sun Yat-sen standing at his side, proclaimed to China and the world at Tienanmen Square, ‘The Chinese people have stood up!’ Chou En-lai authorised a memorial tombstone for Eugene Chen (Chen Youren) to be erected at the Babaoshan cemetery in Peking, where the revolutionary heroes of the Chinese Revolution are honoured.”
Chen is mainly remembered in China today as the revolutionary foreign minister of the 1927 Hankow (Wuhan) government who commanded world attention at the time of the Chen-O’Malley negotiations. He is also remembered as the leader who, while under house arrest, resisted coercive Japanese attempts to co-opt him into their wartime government.
Look Lai has written a powerful, well-researched book, but it was not as well-crafted as his previous work, Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar (1993) which is more engaging. It would have been stronger if he had paraphrased the longer quotations that interrupted the flow of his narrative. Nonetheless, Look Lai has presented us with a fascinating work that we need to study and embrace.
—Prof Cudjoe’s e-mail address is scudjoe@wellesley.edu.
He can be reached
@ProfessorCudjoe. |
