Acknowledgements
The author and editor would like to express their gratitude to Sebastian Budgen, Simona Casadio, and Marlou Meems at Brill Publishing for helping to prepare this volume for publication and supporting its progress through several stages. They would also like to thank Kevin Yang, Rebecca Urai Ayon, and other friends and colleagues who have acted as allies in the enterprise and helped in ways too numerous to recount. The author benefited in the early years of his research from advice and encouragement by the Chinese Trotskyist leaders Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin, who in spirited discussions and correspondence in the final years of their lives with both author and editor provided important insights and perspectives regarding the role played by Lu Xun and Trotsky in China’s modern literary movement. Without Wang and Zheng’s help and suggestions, this book would have been impossible to complete in its present form. Nagahori Yūzō was also helped in his research by the late Japanese Trotskyist scholar Professor Sasaki Chikara, of Tokyo University, and by the late Miyoshi Nobukiyo, also a Trotskyist and a good friend of Nagahori while he and Nagahori were students at Tokyo University. In his study on Chinese Trotskyism, Nagahori benefited greatly from his meetings with four veteran Trotskyist survivors in Wenzhou, Chen Jinglin, Chen Liangchu, Chen Yuqi, and Huang Gongyan (of whom only Huang is still alive), who helped provide information about the Trotskyist movement in mainland China in the 1940s and the 1950s. Chen Daotong, the eldest son of the Chinese Trotskyist leader Chen Qichang, martyred by the Japanese occupiers in Shanghai, explained the background to the famous letters that his father wrote to Lu Xun in 1936. All five of these Trotskyist veterans were arrested by the Maoists after 1949 and spent many years in prison under them. Tang Baolin, a scholar at the Institute of Modern Chinese History in Beijing and a pioneer on the Chinese mainland in the field of Chen Duxiu studies and the history of Chinese Trotskyism, also provided commentary and information.