Zheng Chaolin was member both of the Chinese CP and of its relatively influential Trotskyist offshoot. He has spent nearly halt his life in jail, first as a revolutionary' under the Kuomintang and then TrOm 1952 'counter-revolutionary' under the CP Traditionally August Blanqui, spent 33 of his 75 years behind bars, has been considered 'record-holder' for political prisonership. Now Zheng has beaten that record by one year.
Infamous Zheng's case was recently taken ur at the time of the campaign Amnesty had no firm proof that he was still a prisoner or even that he was still alive. They were also unaware that Zheng's 72-year-old wife, Wu Jingru, joined her husband in 1972, after he was transferred to a labour-camp in Pudong, on the east bank a founding *dangerous who as the althougł had O Te conditions enjoyed English to Zheng Chaolin and Wu Jingru after iheir release with Japan.
workers' the Talents a few hundred, Zheng's old In 1938, after completing seven years of his sentence, Zheng was freed from prison during a general amnesty proclaimed after the outbreak of war His condition was extremely weak, and he retired for a while to a village in Anhui.
After Zheng's recuperation, the couple moved back to Shanghai in 1940, where they actively participated the underground anti-Japanese resistance. Wu headed one of the two schools run Dy the Trotskyists (under the very noses of Japanese occupiers) in the workers' district of west Shanghai.
After the war Wu continued he educational activities, while Zheng directed his main effort to editing The New Banner, a fortnightly revolutionary journal published in Shanghai In 1949, after a split in the Chinese Trotskyist movement, Zheng became leader of the International Workers Party. Its membership never exceeded and its life was cut short not long after the CP's victory on a national scale in the same year.
friends the government, recognising his considerable talents, contacted him through Li Weihan, who knew Zheng in Paris and urged him to compromise with them. but heretused On the night of 22 December 1952 Chinese Communist security forces DELWCCI Trotskyists and - among them Zheng in a nation-wide raid After a secret trial, Wu was sentenced