Wang Hui, "Revolutionary Personality"

Wang Hui, “The Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory:  Commemorating Lenin’s 150th Birthday”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Wang Hui (b. 1959) is China’s best-known New Left thinker and one of China’s most prominent public intellectuals.  Brief biographies of Wang are available here and here.  I would guess that more of his work has been translated into English than any other contemporary Chinese intellectual (and more is on the way; Harvard University Press has commissioned a translation of Wang’s four-volume The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought).  The ready availability of Wang’s work in translation is one reason why he has not been a major focus of our site, but one important example of his work in the past few years is available here.
 
I happened across the present text in late April, when I first began looking for Chinese intellectual commentary on the coronavirus pandemic.  On the Beijing Cultural Review 文化纵横 web feed where the text was originally published on April 21, 2020, Wang’s essay was grouped together with other articles on the pandemic, and he himself mentions it at the end of the first paragraph.  I got straight to work, thinking that I had stumbled on something of a “scoop;”  not everyone likes Wang Hui, but everyone reads him, and while I wish I were above “likes” and “shares,” I’m not.

I quickly became frustrated.  The pandemic is mentioned only in passing, and since commentary on the pandemic was what I was looking for, I lost patience with Wang’s long-winded text, the point of which escaped me.  The pleasure and purpose of translation, after all, lie in understanding and communicating something relatively obscure.  If I cannot pierce the obscurity, then I am doing service neither to Wang nor to those who read the translation.  I set the text aside, something I rarely do.
 
On May 29, 2020, the independent scholar and Liberal thinker Rong Jian 荣剑 (b. 1957) published an online criticism of Wang Hui’s piece, entitled “What Does the ‘Philosophy of Victory’ of the Revolutionary Mean?  Criticizing Wang Hui’s ‘Revolutionary Personality’ and ‘Philosophy of Victory’ 革命者的胜利意味着什么？——评汪晖'革命者人格'和'胜利的哲学.'” Rong’s piece was almost immediately removed from the Internet by China’s censors, but the author altered the text slightly and reposted it on different URLs, and the piece was ultimately seen by hundreds of thousands of readers.  The Wang-Rong debate became an event in China’s intellectual world.  
 
A few days later, Rong Jian published a follow-up critique, entitled “Wang Hui’s ‘Heidegger Moment?’ 汪晖的’海德格尔时刻’?”  This second text repeats many of the criticisms of the first—which basically takes Wang to task for intellectual laziness—but also makes explicit a charge at which he had only hinted in the earlier article:  that Wang (and China’s state-hugging New Left in general) have embraced China’s current regime (and China’s supreme leader) in ways that recall the German philosopher’s controversial engagement with Hitler and Nazism, a charge that is flattering neither to Wang nor…to China’s supreme leader.  I will return to the Wang-Rong debate shortly.
 
Rong Jian’s first critical text brought Wang Hui’s essay out of its original obscurity (at least for me) and into relative focus.  In fact, reading Rong Jian was doubly helpful:  first, it was reassuring to know that Chinese readers also have a hard time with Wang’s verbosity (I have Chinese scholar friends, from China, who prefer to read Wang in English…), and second, Rong’s criticisms of Wang Hui illustrated more clearly what Wang was trying to get at.  I translated Rong Jian and returned to Wang Hui.  Here’s how I read him now.
 
Wang’s text has next to nothing to do with the pandemic; references to the subject appear to have been added merely to appease the editor or to attempt (half-heartedly) to speak to the moment.  Wang’s chief preoccupation is rather the contemporary fate of the socialist revolution, given its seemingly manifest failures in the twentieth century, and as such is consistent with much of his work in recent years.   In fact, what most worries Wang is the evolution of revolutionary political parties away from a posture of revolutionary struggle and toward a posture of statist bureaucratic control, a critique Wang takes from Mao Zedong. 

Indeed, in past writings, Wang has suggested that China has taken this path in the period of reform and opening, although similar developments have occurred in other socialist countries as well.  Wang Hui dreams the nostalgic dream of those “glory days” when inner-party debate and struggle actually meant something, when ideas meant something.  Like Jiang Shigong and many other New Left writers, Wang Hui is seeking a way to renew socialism, and an obvious vehicle for this renewal is Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, although Wang does not mention Xi or his thought directly.
 
My impression is that, at the outset, Wang Hui basically intended to muse yet again on the sorry state of the revolution on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birth, an event largely ignored in China, despite the omnipresence of Lenin’s image.  In other words, he was going engage in a bit of recycling, something virtually inevitable for people who write a great deal.  The particular form the recycling took was inspired by Wang’s reading (or more likely, rereading) about Lenin, particularly adulatory texts like Trotsky’s Lenin, written just after Lenin’s death, which emphasizes Lenin’s extraordinary intelligence, judgement, resolve, and charisma. 

I must admit that reading through the English-language translations of the sources Wang cites in abundance plunged me immediately into what must have been the thrilling world of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the dashing men and women who led it.  My guess is that it was at least in part Wang’s revisiting of this historical moment of “revolutionary romanticism” that prompted his musings about the “revolutionary personality” and his “philosophy of victory,” both of which terms appear to have been coined by Wang for this text.
 
This is a generous reading of Wang Hui, but our world, it seems to me, is in desperate need of something like a revolution, and it does no harm to give Wang Hui a listen.  That said, his message seems to be:  Things have been really bad before, perhaps great men will lead us out of the wilderness once again; if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.  Why this required thirty plus pages is not obvious to me.
 
Rong Jian offers an ungenerous reading of Wang which is both bracing and compelling.  In addition to raking Wang over the coals for his impenetrable prose style, Rong essentially asks the questions that Wang’s editor might have asked, which we might sum up as follows:  socialist revolutions were indeed stirring accomplishments suggestive of other worlds, other possibilities, but they all ended in painful, bloody, seemingly definitive, failures.  Why not discuss both outcomes?  Wang Hui’s vision, says Rong, is at best partial, and he refuses to ask the hard questions or to write for readers who might not already agree with him.
 
In addition, Rong Jian sees Wang’s text as a paean to China’s revolutionary personality of the moment, Xi Jinping, a point that he makes vividly clear in his second essay on Wang’s “Heidegger moment.”  I confess that I don’t know quite what to make of this claim.  It looks to me like Wang wants to have it both ways, in other words to maintain his stance as a critical intellectual and to gain the emperor’s ear, but commenting on his personal motivations is above my pay grade. 
 
One clue is perhaps Wang’s repeated use of the term lingxiu 领袖 for “leader.” The normal term for “leader,” even “Party leader,” is lingdao 领导; lingxiu as a title is a term reserved for exceptional leaders worthy of reverence, such as Mao Zedong and Hua Guofeng (Mao’s chosen successor, reverence for whom proved less enduring).  No Chinese leader since Hua has merited the title of lingxiu, but Chinese media began using the term to refer to Xi beginning in early 2018, as Bill Bishop helpfully notes in his online chronicle, Sinocism.    Wang Hui uses both lingdao and lingxiu repeatedly in his text, and it is true that when they are used as a noun and not a title, they are largely interchangeable and used as stylistic variations.  Rong Jian, by way of contrast, clearly and suggestively pairs lingxiu with Fürher…
 
I will let readers draw their own conclusions.  In the translations of the three texts, I will bold references to leader as lingxiu and leave garden-variety lingdao in plain text.
 
I might mention that Wang Hui would not be the only establishment intellectual to address himself directly to Xi Jinping.  The Mainland New Confucian Chen Ming uses the cloyingly familiar term 习大大 (“Uncle Xi” or “Daddy Xi”) in a text which, like Wang Hui’s, seeks to offer a new narrative for China’s past and future.  Chen does not, however, discuss revolutionary personalities or philosophies of victory, nor imagine world salvation by an exceptional great man.

Thanks to my colleague Timothy Cheek for giving this translation a careful read.
 
Translation
 
The “Modern Prince” and the Revolutionary Personality

With the collapse of the state systems of the Soviet Union and Socialist Eastern Europe, all sorts of social movements have emerged throughout in the world.  The wave of 21st century socialism in Latin America, armed peasant uprisings in Southeast Asia, India, and Nepal, are all attempting to carry forward the heritage of the 20th revolutions, but under new conditions, and their future prospects are uncertain.  Similarly, in advanced capitalist countries or in what are called “transitional” countries, social protests, “occupy” movements, labor movements, and huge waves of resistance have been unable to fundamentally change the “depoliticized” character of the post-Cold War world. 

Social inequalities, financial crises, pandemics, environmental disasters, as well as the crises of governance that have accompanied the process of globalization, have provoked various discussions of the crisis of the capitalist system, yet while omens of decline continue to appear, and “weak links in the chain” are being continually exposed, the political power capable of exploiting this link seems much less powerful than the pandemic. 
 
The political prospect of the contemporary world has yet to shake off the shadow of the failure of the 20th century socialist experiment.  As French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937) has observed, the second sequence of the communist order after the Paris Commune, which extended from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 through the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, consisted of putting the ideas of communism into practice.  In his judgement, the principle elements of this sequence (Marxism, the labor movement, mass democracy, Leninism, vanguard parties, socialist countries) are no longer effective.  “The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it,” he argues.
 
Waves of neoliberalism have given birth to waves of right-wing conservative nationalism and populism, and the most frightening thing about these waves is that the workers who lost their jobs or their social benefits have become supporters of right-wing politics.   When liberals bemoan the rise of populism, the leftist movement should ask itself why it lost the support of the workers of the Rust Belt and fell into powerlessness.  Why do the endless protest movements lack clear political energy, and fall into the traps of racism, xenophobia and identity politics? In addition to the withdrawal of vanguard parties and large-scale class movements, the weakness of leadership, the absence of strategic policy debates in left-wing theory, and the decline in debates about what path will lead us to concrete programs of social change are all major factors.  The political legacy of the 20th century consists of theoretical debates concerning political line, political economy, military strategy, and tactics to obtain hegemony under unfavorable circumstances.
 
How should we understand the leadership or the strength of leadership of a revolution or a revolutionary movement?  In his Prison Diaries, the Italian Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) points out that we should “study The Prince as an historical exemplification of a system of political thought (of the Sorelian myth)—i.e. of a political ideology expressed neither in the form of a cold utopia nor as learned theorizing, but rather by a creation of concrete fantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will. The utopian character of The Prince lies in the fact that the Prince had no real historical existence; he did not present himself immediately and objectively to the Italian people, but was a pure theoretical abstraction—a symbol of the leader and ideal condottiere. However, in a dramatic movement of great effect, the elements of passion and of myth which occur throughout the book are drawn together and brought to life.”[2] 
 
He further argues that:  “Machiavelli discusses what the Prince must be like if he is to lead a people to found a new State; the argument is developed with rigorous logic, and with scientific detachment. In the conclusion, Machiavelli merges with the people, becomes the people; not, however, some “generic” people, but the people whom he, Machiavelli, has convinced by the preceding argument—the people whose consciousness and whose expression he becomes and feels himself to be, with whom he feels identified.”
 
Gramsci argues that “the modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual,” instead “it is the political party—the first cell in which there come together the germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total. In the modern world, only those historico-political actions which are immediate and imminent, characterized by the necessity for lightning speed, can be incarnated mythically by a concrete individual.” 

Political parties are the soul of modern politics.  However, given the natural relations that exist between modern political parties and national power, the processes of the staticization of political parties 政党国家化, the bureaucratization of political parties, the depoliticization of political parties, and their tendency toward opportunism have all been part of the history of political parties.  Today, the organizational framework of political parties and their position within state systems remain stable, but the conditions permitting the existence of genuine political parties [of the sort imagined by Gramsci] are no longer to be found. 

Those who are familiar with the tortuous histories of the Russian revolution and the Chinese revolution have also discovered that those individuals and party leaders who fulfilled their mission in a mythic way at imminent moments cannot be fully equated with the political party system itself:  in many critical historical moments, Lenin, Mao Zedong and other revolutionary leaders often found themselves opposed to this political party and its guiding line, and only achieved hegemony after protracted and sometimes bitter theoretical and political struggles.

These continual theoretical struggles and struggles over the proper line were at the heart of Lenin’s leadership style, which insisted that even under the most dangerous, difficult conditions, it is necessary to uphold democracy within the Party, and that suppressing public, frank debate within the Party, setting aside criticism and self-criticism, amounts to suppressing the principle of democratic centralism at the heart of Party life. At the beginning of What is to be Done?, written in 1901-1902, Lenin cites a passage from a letter to Marx on June 24, 1852 by Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864), one of the pioneers of the social-democratic movement in Germany, in which Lassalle noted that:  “Internal party struggle gives the party strength and vitality, and when a party is unclear about itself and its boundaries, this is the clearest sign of the weakness of a party; parties consolidate themselves by purging themselves…” 

If we go through the history of Lenin’s theoretical struggles, we find a long list of his enemies within the party:  Bernstein, Plekhanov, Alexander, Potresov, Maslov, Zinoviev, Kautsky, Luxembourg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Stalin…In his later years, Mao Zedong went so far as to set himself against his entire party system, claiming that he stood with the people.  Although these are symbolic examples, they illustrate nonetheless that in particular periods or moments, there can be deep tensions and even antagonisms or separation between revolutionaries—even revolutionary leaders—and their party systems.  Leaders with revolutionary personalities (although this quality is not limited to leaders) are those who push political parties to renew themselves, and who rebuild the political strength that undergirds the relations between the political party and the people.  This is why the three-way relationship among political parties, the people, and the leader, is pregnant with tension, and the revolutionary personality is the crucial link to maintain and improve this complicated relationship through dedicated struggle.
 
Gramsci related the question of hegemony to two forms of the leadership function of social groups, one being the form of [political] “rule” and the other being “spiritual and moral leadership.”  In the revolution of the proletariat, the political party seizes hegemony by embodying the will of the people, and at the same time embodies the people’s will by seizing hegemony.  Nonetheless, for progressive political parties, the process of seizing “spiritual and moral leadership,” as well as cultural leadership, is at the same time accompanied by a process of fierce theoretical struggle within the political party which serves to reestablish their own goals, programs, and strategies.  Revolutionary leadership also emerges in the course of this process, serving the political purpose of remaking the political party.

Against the backdrop of declining worker movements, class-based political parties, and socialist countries, exploring anew the question of the revolutionary personality (and particularly the personality of a revolutionary leader) is not without significance for those hoping to promote the repoliticalization of the contemporary world.  In the Chinese revolution, the most classic examples of this are the birth of a leadership group with Mao Zedong as its core, and the publication of a series of texts such as “On Protracted War,” “On Contradiction,” and “On New Democracy.”  But in the 21st century, because global and regional conditions are no longer the same, the early experience of the Russian revolution and the Chinese revolution will be difficult to replicate.
 
In 2008 and 2009, I had the occasion to do in-depth research in camps and villages in Nepal and Venezuela, which allowed me to compare these two countries ruled by left-wing political parties and their political movements.  The Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) is a political party with an experience of ten years of people’s war and the maturity that brings, something that Hugo Chavez (1954-2013) did not have.  Chavez’s political party was a rapidly organized tool put together for the purposes of an election, lumping together all sorts of people. 

Chavez himself was a politician and charismatic leader with a certain theoretical vision and tactical prowess, who used direct interaction with the people to break through the barriers of a bureaucratized political power, and sought to maintain his political radicalism through land reform and the nationalization the petroleum industry.  The weaknesses of Chavez’s politics derived from the weakness of his political party and his resulting over-reliance on charismatic leadership. 
 
By way of contrast, the Nepal Communist Party, which has entered the period of parliamentary struggle, is a political organization hardened  by “ten years of people’s war,” and has a solid popular base, a body of cadres, an organizational structure and military power, yet this more mature political party has been unable to produce a leader with far-reaching vision, firm viewpoints and strategic agility, nor has it produced mature theories and strategies concerning the relationship between the contemporary world and the Nepali situation.  In a framework of parliamentary politics, a radical political party eventually loses its popular foundation, and its leader is unable to restructure the people’s politics through interaction with the people, which inevitably results in the failure of political debate.

The historical conditions of Nepal and Venezuela are different.  Nepal is located in South Asia, has been heavily influenced by Hinduism, and the caste system and land ownership system have constrained the country’s development.  Venezuela is in South America, and has been impacted by the heritage of the colonial economy, with oil production concentrated in the hands of the compradors, and most of the land in the form of latifundia, with the plantation economy dominated by the production of coffee, to the extent that there is almost no real agriculture.  Over the course of the last decade or so, the situations of the two countries have changed greatly. 
 
Looking at the different experiences of Nepal and Venezuela from a comparative perspective in the context of conditions affecting the evolution of mature political hegemony, what I see, from the perspective of the relationship between the leader, political parties, and the people, are certain symptoms that recall China’s political crisis in the 1960s:  the political parties merged with the state, producing a gradual shift from a mass movement leadership to a bureaucratic system characterized by distinctions between rulers and the ruled. 

To maintain the organic relationship between the party and the people, Mao Zedong relied on his personal prestige, calling on the people to wage war on the party-state system.  Mao’s personal prestige reached great heights as a mass movement, but his actions did not achieve the proper levels of tension and interaction between leader, party, and people, meaning that the relationship among these three was no longer organic.   As a result, state logic achieved a position of dominance, and to carry forward the organizational and mobilizational power of the revolutionary period, the Party had to be further absorbed by, or directly transformed into, the state mechanism. 

That China was able, during a state of emergency, to exert extraordinary mobilizational and organizational power is closely related to this revolutionary tradition, but instead of seeing the political party at the base of this power as Gramsci’s “modern prince,” we should instead acknowledge that it was instead the state mechanism.  Debates about the failure of the Cultural Revolution have swirled for half a century, but the crux of the issue is that the proper tension between the leader, the political party, and the people disappeared.  The fracturing of this relationship is also the chief reason for the failure or transformation of socialist countries in the 20th century.
 
When I started writing this essay on commemorating Lenin, I first thought about his theories concerning uneven development and weak links during the era of imperialism.  These theories provided direction to China’s twentieth-century revolution.  Yet when I started reading and thinking about these issues, I was instead captivated by a particular type of personality, a revolutionary personality from that era embodied by Lenin. Over the long history of the Chinese revolution, Lenin’s image was constructed on two fronts—his revolutionary personality and his theory of Eastern revolution—and the two are connected. 

How should we understand the revolutionary personality?  In discussing the moral power of Vera Zasulich (1849-1919), the Russian revolutionary writer, Trotsky observed:  For her, the idea of a “revolutionary” had a particular significance transcending class.  He gave the example of the occasion when he was talking to Zasulich about “bourgeois democratic revolutionaries,” which she disputed, saying “’But no,’ with a touch of annoyance or rather of vexation. ‘Not bourgeois and not proletarian, but simply revolutionary. Naturally one can say petty bourgeois revolutionaries, she added, if you attribute to the petty bourgeoisie everything you cannot otherwise dispose of ....’”[3] 
 
The revolutionary personality has a unique power, and can use this huge capacity to push the revolution forward even when social and political conditions are not ripe.  In this sense, “a revolutionary is a revolutionary.”  On January 17, 1926, at a meeting commemorating the two-year anniversary of Lenin’s death, Li Dazhao, CCP founder and Marxist theorist, gave a speech discussing Lenin and Sun Yat-sen, the two revolutionary leaders, together, and began with the question of the revolutionary personality:

“Thinking about Lenin leads to me to think about Sun Yat-sen, and we can compare the two.  Sun Yat-sen had a great personality, which is admitted by everyone, not only his friends and his followers, but even his enemies.  Lenin had a great personality, which is admitted by everyone, not only his friends and his followers, but even his enemies.  Non-communists in Russia often are opposed to communism, but they worship Lenin nonetheless.  In terms of their revolutionary spirit, the two men share common points:  in the face of reactionary events, Lenin was never discouraged or despondent.  As for Sun, when the second revolution failed, and he had to flee to Tokyo, all of his entourage was discouraged, but Sun said that the revolutionary party had not lost, that there was no need to be discouraged, and that they should instead get back to work.  In this sense, Lenin’s spirit was the same as Sun Yat-sen’s, and both are the spirit of a revolutionary.  We should follow this spirit!” 
 
Li Dazhao noted that the first point shared by Lenin and Sun Yat-sen was:  their revolutionary personality had the capacity to transcend class interests, and was acknowledged not only by friends and believers but by enemies as well.  Another point in common was:  they were eternal revolutionaries who did not fear failure.
 
Lu Xun said something similar.  On March 12, 1926, Lu Xun published “One Year after the Death of Sun Yat-sen” in Guomin xinbao 国民新报, in which he noted:  “I remember last year, not long after Sun Yat-sen died, a few commentators made sarcastic remarks…Regardless, the whole of Sun Yat-sen’s was entirely about the revolution.  When he stepped out into the world, it was for the revolution, and when he failed, it was still the revolution.  When the Republic of China was established, he was not satisfied, he did not relax, but continued to devote himself wholeheartedly to the work of revolution.  Even as death approached, he said, the revolution has not been accomplished.  Keep working, comrades!”
 
He also said:   “He was a complete, eternal revolutionary.  No matter what he was working on, everything was about the revolution.  No matter how in the future people find fault with him, or ignore him, he was finally completely about the revolution.”

A revolutionary is a “whole 全体,” and no matter what he does, it is “always about the revolution.”  This viewpoint is completely in accord with what Trotsky said in “Literature and Revolution,” which Lu Xun summed up as “even if the main topic is not about revolution, its meaning is permeated by new things produced by the revolution.  Otherwise, even if the main topic is revolution, it is not revolutionary art.”  For this reason, if you want to create revolutionary art, you first have to become a revolutionary; if you want to promote revolution, you of course first have to become a revolutionary person.  This is the kind of revolutionary person Sun Yat-sen was:  “He always led the new revolutionaries forward, striving together to advance the complete work of the revolution.” 
 
The “Second Nature” of the Revolutionary Personality
 
In Lenin’s time, in addition to a spirit of sacrifice and personal cultivation, the revolutionary personality also exhibited a capacity to seize the principle contradictions and engage in action, what we might call a “second nature 第二天性.”  This requires that, at the same time that the leader engages in actual movements and throws himself into tense theoretical work, he must also seize the moment in all its complexity to persuade and even defeat the erroneous viewpoints within his camp, even as he imagines revolutionary strategies and tactics. 

As Trotsky noted: “In the Iskra,[4] I believe, Lenin for the first time expressed the thought, that in the complicated chain of political action one must always seek out the central link for the moment in question in order to seize it and give direction to the whole chain. Later, too, Lenin returned to this thought quite often, even to the same picture of the chain and the ring. This method passed from the sphere of the conscious, as it were, into his unconsciousness and finally became second nature.”[5]  Lenin’s overall analysis of a trend as well as his concrete grasp of a situation always followed his understanding of the decisive “link” in the concrete circumstances, to the point that when taking specific actions, he often set aside things that directly or indirectly came into conflict with his central mission.  “This ‘defect’ was only the reverse side of his faculty of the greatest inward mobilization of all his forces, and exactly this faculty made him the greatest revolutionary of history.”[6] 
 
To highlight the central link in a greater chain of political activities, and to point out the direction in which that chain is moving, might be called the ability to judge the era 时代判断力.  In January, 1915, in an essay entitled “Under a False Flag,” Lenin described a method for discerning the characteristics of an era.  “We are undoubtedly living at the juncture of two epochs, and the historic events that are unfolding before our eyes can be understood only if we analyze, in the first place, the objective conditions of the transition from one epoch to the other. Here we have important historical epochs; in each of them there are and will always be individual and partial movements, now forward now backward; there are and will always be various deviations from the average type and mean tempo of the movement. We cannot know how rapidly and how successfully the various historical movements in a given epoch will develop, but we can and do know which class stands at the hub of one epoch or another, determining its main content, the main direction of its development, the main characteristics of the historical situation in that epoch, etc. Only on that basis, i.e., by taking into account, in the first place, the fundamental distinctive features of the various 'epochs' (and not single episodes in the history of individual countries), can we correctly evolve our tactics; only a knowledge of the basic features of a given epoch can serve as the foundation for an understanding of the specific features of one country or another.”[7] 

The opposite of Lenin's way of judging an era is:  confusing the nature and developmental direction of the era, obscuring its central strength, and then using strategies or tactics that might have been appropriate under the conditions of other times in a completely different context, which gives rise to dogmatic or empirical opportunism of the left, or the right, or which is left in essence and right in substance.
 
The “second nature” of a revolutionary personality is not an abstract internationalism or a pure concept, but an internationalism deeply rooted in national life.  On April 23, 1920, Trotsky published an essay in Pravda, celebrating Lenin’s 50th birthday.  What is interesting is that this short essay was not focused on internationalism, but rather on Lenin’s “profoundly nationalist nature:”  “His roots are deep in modern Russian history, he draws it up into himself, gives it its highest expression, and precisely in this way attains the highest levels of international action and world influence.”[8] 

Trotsky argued that in addition to mastery of dialectical materialism, a revolutionary leader also “needed that mysterious creative power that we call intuition: the ability to grasp appearances correctly at once, to distinguish the essential and important from the unessential and insignificant, to imagine the missing parts of a picture, to weigh well the thoughts of others and above all of the enemy, to put all this into a united whole and the moment the ‘formula’ for it comes to his mind, to deal the blow. This is intuition to action. This intuition also merges with what the Russians call sensitivity.”[9]
 
Trotsky realized that this emphasis on Lenin’s "national" characteristics might surprise people, and he explained:  “To be able to direct such a revolution, without precedent in the history of peoples, as is now taking place in Russia, it is most evidently necessary to have an indissoluble organic connection with the main strength of popular life, a connection which springs from the deepest roots.”  “Just because the social revolution, that has long had its international theoretical expression, found for the first time in Lenin its national embodiment, he became, in the true sense of the word, the revolutionary leader of the proletariat of the world.”[10] 

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is a vivid illustration of his capacity to understand an era.  This book has little direct relationship to China, but its theoretical analysis provided the premise for the renewal of the Chinese revolution.  If we say that the inequality of the imperialistic world system produced this system’s “weak link,” then the division created within China by the competition among the various great powers supplied the “weak link” for domestic revolution. 

“It is the great speculative coup of international capitalism not fully ripened for international co-operation, but still hampered by the necessity under which the groups of capitalists lie, of using national feelings and policies to push their special interests,” so that at the same time that “the joint attack of Western Powers in China,”[11] they were also competing against and contending with one another inside China,  and these proxy wars led to China's civil wars and division.  International competition among great powers such as France, Russia, Germany, England, Japan, and the United States was accompanied by the process of dividing up their spheres of influence in China.

The purpose of both was to establish monopolies of investment and development in different regions through political and military forces to obtain excess profits. For this reason, during the era of imperialism there existed two weak links:  one is what Lenin called "the "absolute law of capitalism," which is the “imbalance of economic and political development," “from which we arrive at the conclusion that socialism can first achieve victory in a small number of capitalist countries, or even in a single capitalist country.”[12]

The other weak link is due to the imbalance in domestic political and economic development and the contradiction between imperialist agents within the oppressed nation, the latter providing the conditions for the survival and development of the Chinese revolutionary forces in the vast rural and provincial borders and peripheral areas.

These “weak links” not only point out the fragilities of the ruling order, they also suggest that the system can be defeated.  For this reason, “weak links” rely on the creation of revolutionary strength, and cannot exist independently.  The revolutionary forces of the 20th century did not exist independently within a single country or region, but were instead movement of nations, classes, and regions that developed out of these “weak links” and had profound international connections. 

In other words, if there are no revolutionary forces and revolutionary theories dedicated to breaking through the ruling system, there will be no “weak links;” if the “weak link” in the capitalist international system cannot “link up with” the “weak links” in domestic structures of domination, it is also difficult to arrive at a revolutionary strategy and tactics.  In terms of revolutionary power, if we see imperialism as merely an economic phenomenon, and not one also based on the political and military competition produced by economic demands, and if we fail to understand that there is no clear distinction between the old imperialism and the new imperialism, then there is no way to arrive at concrete strategies and policies to resist imperialism.  In this sense, in the absence of concrete revolutionary strategies and policies, weak links do not become “weak links.”  For this reason, who, ultimately, is the force of revolution, or the source giving rise to this force, is the prerequisite for discerning the “weak links.”
 
Today, we are completely familiar with Lenin’s analysis of East Asian questions and the Chinese revolution from about the time of the 1905 Revolution in Russia and the 1911 Revolution in China.  His arguments concerning national self-determination and imperialism, developed before and after the outbreak of the First World War, and his depiction of "an advanced Asia and  backward Europe", incorporated East Asian problems—from the Balkan crisis to the Chinese revolution—into his analysis of most recent stage of global capitalism.  In his famous " The Right of Nations to Self-Determination," Lenin says:  “In Eastern Europe and Asia the period of bourgeois-democratic revolutions did not begin until 1905. The revolutions in Russia, Persia, Turkey and China, the Balkan wars—such is the chain of world events of our period in our ‘Orient’.”[13]  In fact, from the perspective of nationalism, the Russian Revolution in internally connected to the process of the “Asian Awakening.”

However, prior to the Northern Expedition (1924-1927), with very few exceptions, few people attempted to link the Russian Revolution the Chinese Revolution in a more concrete way, even among Russian and Chinese leaders.  They might have agreed with Lenin's theory of unbalanced development in the era of imperialism and with his theory of weak links, but never thought to explore this theory in the context of the rise of revolutionary forces in China.  For example, M. N. Roy (1887-1954), the Indian revolutionary and Comintern member, opposed Lenin’s united front policy and believed that Sun Yat-sen was a conspirator and a reactionary.   At the Far East Workers’ Conference (held in Moscow, in January of 1922), the Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev (1883-1930) was extremely dissatisfied with Sun Yat-sen’s request for American assistance, and strongly criticized the bourgeois style of the Guomindang. 

In 1925, the international Communist leader Karl Radek (1885-1939), who later served as the president of Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, published an article in Pravda to commemorate the death of Sun Yat-sen,  and specifically mentioned the following facts:  “One day in 1916, in the middle of World War I, some Bolsheviks met in Bern to discuss the issue of national self-determination.  At the meeting, Lenin suddenly proposed that the Bolshevik Party ally itself with the Chinese revolution.  At the time, the idea sounded like a madman’s dream!  But imagine the Russian proletariat fighting side by side with hundreds of millions of Chinese. Some of the five or six Bolsheviks at the meeting imagined that if they lived long, they might see this dream come true.”  Even Trotsky only became interested in this in the 1920s, especially after the Shanghai workers’ uprising.

But Lenin’s vision was completely different.  In his memoirs, Radek notes that:  “In 1918, When China and Russia were still separated by the Czechs, the Social Revolutionary Party, and Alexander Kolchak (1874-1920), Lenin once inquired among the Chinese laborers who emigrated to Russia if they could put him in touch with the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen.  Now we have established contact with the Chinese people.  Today our mission to the Chinese revolutionaries is to expand our contact with hundreds of millions of people.”  It was due to Lenin’s influence that the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, held between November 1922 and February 1923, adopted the "Overview of the Eastern Question," and after analyzing the innate defects of the Chinese Communist Party, advocated the cooperation between the two parties and the establishment of United Front policy.” 

In January of 1923, Adolf Joffe (1883-1927), the representative of the Soviet government, met with Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai, and they issued the “Sun-Joffe Agreement,” which, while acknowledging Sun’s views that communism and the Soviet system were not appropriate for China at the time, officially launched the first GMD-CCP alliance and the Guomindang policies of “allying with Russia, allying with the Communists, and supporting the workers and peasants.”  Thanks to his grasp of the overall characteristics of the imperialist era and his concrete understanding of the different social conditions in Russia and China, Lenin bridged the clear differences between Sun’s political program and the Chinese revolution and the larger communist movement as a whole, and discovered the potential of the Chinese revolution and its compatibility with the Russian revolution.
 
This point profoundly influenced Li Dazhao and the first generation of Chinese Communist Party members.  Their internationalism and worldview were similarly grounded in the realities of the lives of their people.  In the speech mentioned above that Li Dazhao gave commemorating the second anniversary of Lenin’s death, Li expressed an opinion that is unthinkable from the perspective of a “pure” Marxist or Communist:

“Leninism is the theory and strategy of the proletarian revolution in the age of imperialism.  Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles [Zhongshanism 中山主义 in the text, sometimes translated as “Sunism”] is the theory and strategy of the oppressed national revolutions in the era of imperialism.  In terms of theory and strategy, the two are consistent.  So we can say that Leninism is the Three People’s Principles and the Three People’s Principles are Leninism!  The goal of both is revolution…and there is no difference between the lofty ideals and great personalities of the two.” 
 
Li Dazhao, who was China’s most accomplished Marxist and its most committed communist at the time, observed that “if Sun Yat-sen had been born in Russia, he would have been a Lenin; if Lenin had been born in China, he would have been a Sun Yat-sen!  On the surface, their ideas look to be different, but in fact it is the two environments that are different.  Sun Yat-sen and Lenin have the same goals, and it is a pity that the environment in China did not allow Sun to be as successful as Lenin!”  Li Dazhao is not effacing or confusing the differences between Lenin’s and Sun’s revolutionary leadership, but rather, based on the political logic growing out the mutual relationship between the world situation and domestic conditions, he is discovering linkages and points of commonality among differences and even antagonisms.  In the process of identifying common enemies, he is expanding the links between comrades and friends, forming a broad front.
 
On April 28, 1927, two weeks after Chiang Kai-shek launched the Shanghai Massacre, Li Dazhao was hanged by the warlord Zhang Zuolin in Beijing.  Five months later saw the failure of the Autumn Harvest Uprising  Revolution led by Mao Zedong, and Mao retreated to the Jingangshan region in Jiangxi, where he established the first revolutionary base and China’s Red government.  Or, in other words, under the guidance of Lenin’s “weak link” theory, Mao initiated a new phase in China’s revolution.  Unlike Lenin’s focus on the imbalance between countries within the international imperialist system, Mao’s looked at the domestic manifestations of this unbalanced system.  The starting point of his analysis was China’s uniqueness: 

“The long-term survival inside a country of one or more small areas under Red political power completely encircled by a White regime is a phenomenon that has never occurred anywhere else in the world.  There are special reasons for this unusual phenomenon.  It can exist and develop only under certain conditions.”[14]  Mao subjects this uniqueness to a systemic analysis:  first, imperialism rules China indirectly rather than directly, which means that there is a protracted war and division in China between White and Red political regimes.  This is the uniqueness of China’s national situation, which is different from that of imperialist countries, as well as that of colonies directly under imperialism, that is, an imbalanced state of development.
 
Next, the condition making possible the existence of Red political power was not only the existence of many poor and miserable peasants (this was the overall stage of development in this period, a product of both capitalist and non-capitalist productive forces) and even more important was the existence of revolutionary experience and mobilization in some regions.  Third, the long-term existence of small Red areas depended on the existence of a national revolutionary context.  Fourth, if there is no "relatively strong formal Red Army," and there are only local Red militia, it would not result in territorial division, and especially not long-term territorial division. 

Finally, if there was no effective revolutionary organization, or even if there was an effective revolutionary organization that commits frequent errors, Red political power could not exist.  In fact, at the time, Mao’s analysis was not understood by the highest leadership of the CCP, and his text not only provided strategies and tactics for actual battles, but also struggles and debates with other theoretical arguments within the Party.

Mao Zedong’s strategy and tactics drew on Lenin’s theoretical analysis of the era of imperialism, and the title of Mao’s article, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire” recalls the title of the Russian journal Iskra [which means “spark]”.  In the vast rural areas of China, armed struggle and land revolution combined military struggle, social transformation, the United Front, and regime building, all of which forged an unprecedented military force organized around the peasants.  This was the people’s war. 

The people’s war is not a purely military concept but rather a political notion.  In the unique conditions of 20th century China, the people’s war was a process culminating in the creation of a new political agency, as well as a process creating a political form and a mode of expression for this new agency.  In the course of the people’s war, the representative nature of modern political parties was completely transformed, and we saw the birth of a people’s agency with peasants as the chief player and the worker-peasant alliance as its political outer shell. 

This in turn stimulated the production and transformation of all forms of politics (including governments, political parties, farmers unions, workers unions, etc., in the Border Areas).  The main principles of the people’s war included:  first, that war can only be waged by mobilizing and relying on the masses; second, that not only must we have a strong regular army, we also need local armed groups and militia; third, that the category of citizen-soldier 兵民 requires a political process that is closely related to military struggle and centered on land reform and political construction.
 
In the process of fighting against the coronavirus, the Communist Party of China made a striking appeal to this tradition, characterizing the fight against the epidemic as "a people's war, an total war, a defensive war."  The term “defensive war” is a definition of the goal of the battle, while the “people's war” and the “total war” are characterizations of the nature of the struggle.  A people’s war takes the form of group defense and group control, including communities such as families and work units, individuals, and various levels of government, and an total war signals that the struggle is a comprehensive mobilization of national systems and capacities.  In the 20th century, people’s war was the basic means to overcome the general warfare of imperialist countries, so people’s war and total war were antagonistic, but in the 21st century, when the epidemic prompted full national mobilization, political parties once again resorted to the model of people’s war, creating a new type of vertical and horizontal social mobilization.

In the first phase of the epidemic, more than 40,000 medical personnel were dispatched from various provinces across the country to support Wuhan.  Jiangsu province alone sent medical 13 teams from cities, neighborhoods, villages, schools, factories and businesses, forming basic units fighting the virus.  Without the people’s war, the state system often slides into the bad habits of bureaucratism and formalism.  In the early period, China promptly informed the WHO and other countries, including the United States, about the situation in China, supplying relatively accurate research results. 

However, the disease control system failed to operate properly, and the local bureaucracy was insensitive to the unprecedented outbreaks and made misjudgments, clinging to its habits of suppressing public opinion and slowing the fight against the virus in favor of the logic of stability and economic development.  Comprehensive and effective anti-epidemic mobilization was effected under the direct intervention of the central government.  Unlike the people’s wars of the 20th century, the people’s war against the virus was carried out within the framework of the country’s total war. Its goal was to stop the virus through popular mobilization and scientific prevention and control, and not to generate new political subjects.
 
Under emergency conditions, protecting people’s lives and meeting people’s daily needs are the first priorities, and capital appreciation and expansion retreat to a secondary position.  Under such circumstances, the rarely seen energy of the people's war was rejuvenated, providing the greatest guarantee for the victory in the first stage of the campaign against the virus.  Many Western critics attributed the success of China’s efforts to “totalitarianism,” but they failed to discern the energy of the people's war within the system of national mobilization, nor did they understand the complex relationship between people's war and total war. 

Can this energy, deployed in times of emergency against fires, earthquakes and epidemics, break through its fate of serving merely as a tool of mobilization and revive the people’s sense of intiative and capability? Can it once again create the unity of the “modern monarch” and the people?  Under contemporary conditions (economic, technological, media, etc.), can this energy bridge the gaps in political and social forms, and provide impetus for their renewal?
 
At a time when the media and the intellectual elite are discussing how the pandemic will change the future world order, this is a historical lesson that needs to be learned once again:  If there is no new politics there is no new order.  For this reason, the question remains:  What is to be done?
 
The Perpetual Revolutionary and the “Philosophy of Victory”
 
Depression and melancholy accompany every failure and loss of hope.  While historians, philosophers, and grieving observers look back on the 20th century from the perspective of failure, should we not also think about the completely new understandings of failure and victory that were born out of, developed with, and transformed the consciousness of the century?
 
When Lenin died, the Soviet Union was still an infant in swaddling clothes, and as a revolutionary actor, the changes in policy that he had implemented alternated between failure and victory, with more failures than victories.  “If from Lenin’s numerous strategic lessons we wish to remember something with especial clearness, let it be what he calls the policy of the great changes: Today on the barricades and tomorrow in the seat in the Third Duma, today a summons to world revolution, to the international October revolution, and tomorrow negotiations…to sign the disgraceful peace of Brest-Litovsk.”  “And when the sound of the storm reaches here from the west, and it will resound, then whatever burdens us, bookkeeping, calculation, and NEP, we will answer without hesitation and without delay: We are revolutionaries from head to foot, we were so, we remain so, we shall remain so to the end (thunderous applause, standing ovation).”[15] 
 
The Chinese revolution has developed a rich vein of reflection about defeat and victory, a form of thinking that has redefined the revolution itself from within the revolutionary process.  For this reason, the further one gets from the inner vision of the Chinese revolution, the harder it is to grasp the dialectical relationship between failure and victory.  Lu Xun’s “literature of resisting despair 反抗绝望的文学,” and Mao Zedong’s “philosophy of going from victory to victory 从胜利走向胜利的哲学” are two literary/philosophical explanations of the “philosophy of victory” that grow out of the Chinese revolutionary process’s experience of hope and despair, failure and victory. 

In my view,  a “philosophy of victory” is a kind of historical reflection produced by integrating the self completely into the collective struggle, combined with the strategic reflection of the revolutionary agent.  Sacrifice and tragedy are subsumed into a successful program of action, which thoroughly dispenses with the feelings of loneliness, boredom, dejection, and hopeless exhaustion found in literature and thought since the May Fourth era.  A “philosophy of victory” is born out of the cruel and tragic history of collective struggle, and takes the form of strategic reasoning, in the face of failure, which finds the road to victory. 

Failure is not only the mother of success, but also the logical starting point of a “philosophy of victory.”  Starting from failure means finding new “weak links” from a position of difficulty, seeking out strategies to defeat the enemy, and, in the process of creating this new situation, remaking the relationship between the self and the enemy.  In fact, the entire process is one of reconstructing the self and reconstructing agency.
 
Mao Zedong’s “Why Can Red Political Power Exist in China” (May 10, 1928), “The Struggle in the Jinggang Mountains,” (November 25, 1928), and “A Single Spark Can Light a Prairie Fire,” (January 5, 1930), among others, represent the birth of a “philosophy of victory,” providing a kind of optimism for later writers by describing the twists and turns of the revolutionary process which proceeds "from victory to victory" and in which "the future is bright, although the path is tortuous."  In August of 1949, on the eve of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong looked back on China’s history since 1840, and proclaimed, in an irrefutable fashion:  “How different is the logic of the imperialists from that of the people!  Make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again…till their doom—that is the logic of the imperialists and all reactionaries the world over…Fight, fail, fight again, fail again…till their victory; that is the logic of the people, and they too will never go against this logic.”[16]
 
From the angle of rebuilding agency, this struggle, this passage from failure to victory, is not only the logic of the people, but is also a process of creating the revolutionary agency of the people.  Our resistance struggles since the Opium War were not accomplished by one group of people, and there were important differences in agency in the many instances of historical struggle, the logic of struggle-failure-struggle built them into an increasingly mature and powerful "people" who went from struggle and defeat to victory.  For this reason, the purpose of a “philosophy of victory” is to carry out the will of the people.
 
The true measure of failure is not failure itself, but instead whether the logic of struggle continues to exist.  Lu Xun defined Sun Yat-sen as a “perpetual revolutionary,” by which he meant a revolutionary defined by continuous failure. "Victory" is not presented as a final result, but as a process of continuous struggle that is not defeated by failure.  A “philosophy of victory” is optimistic because it is always in a dialectical relationship with the hardships it faces, it is always in a dialectical relationship with the strategic actions rooted in this understanding. 

Victory is not in an abstract future or in an abstract utopia, but is rather in the dialectical analysis and specific practice of comparing ourselves with the enemy forces.  A “philosophy of victory” is a philosophy of action, but it is not voluntarism.  Just the opposite, it puts the will to win and the analysis of the situation, especially the analysis of the contrast between us and the enemy, into a juxtaposition of confrontation and transformation, and actively participates in this confrontation and transformation
 
Lu Xun’s “literature against despair” rejects a worldview of optimism, but is not opposed to collective struggle; it never invests hope in subjectivity, but tries to explore the path to the future in the real world.  There are clear differences between a “literature against despair” and a “literature of optimism,” but there are certain commonalities with a “philosophy of victory.”  The “philosophy of victory” of the Chinese revolution was born in hardship and blood, the product of an analysis of a situation of failure which was completely unfavorable to the forces of revolution.  The villages, and not the cities, the border areas, and not the center, were where revolutionary strategy had to be developed, but this new definition of space derived from a situation of failure and of the disparity between the forces of the revolution and the forces of the enemy. 

The logic of victory is in continued action, exploration and struggle, which is not the same as blind optimism or starry-eyed hope.  The metamorphosis of a “philosophy of victory,” or the transformation of a “philosophy of victory” into any type of “optimistic literature,” lies precisely in abandoning the analysis of this wholly unfavorable situation of failure, and subsequently abandoning truly strategic and concrete policy thinking.  Once such thinking is abandoned, the action may lose its direction, placing hope in the inevitability of victory or an abstract future.

The result is to confirm the truthfulness of “despair” by burying “hope” in “falseness, “thus blocking the future dimension contained in the "rebellion against despair."  This is not the logic of victory, but instead a blind logic, which all too easily becomes a logic of “losing one’s bearings 转向,” in which despair replaces the outcome of fighting despair.   A “literature of hope” or an “optimistic literature” is an illusion, while a “literature that resists despair” and a “philosophy of victory” are based in action.
 
Revolutionaries embody the personalization of the themes of "resisting despair" and "onward toward victory," and are truly like “mythic figures” (which is why they are so often dishonored in this “mortal plane”), but if you will allow me to imitate Gramsci, the fullest expression of this "myth" is not a political party or its leader, but instead the one who promotes the real action of organized strength, indicating that the collective will is already in effect.  This type of personality can only be born in action, and even in hopeless situations, he can inspire people to persevere and discover the future, thereby promoting the political maturity of the movement.
 
Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, written in 1901-1902, is precisely what a “philosophy of victory” should be:  in unfavorable circumstances, you carry out an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the unique features of the era, the tasks at hand and your basic objectives, and then, through theoretical study and strategic debate, which promotes the coordination of the theoretical, political, and practical economic aspects of the entire struggle, arrive at a concrete strategic analysis that dialectically unifies short-term and ultimate goals. What Is To Be Done? is a statement that defines a program for action and an orientation toward victory. 

In this post-revolutionary and post-political party era, the point of raising yet again the question of the revolutionary personality as part of the heritage of twentieth century politics is absolutely not to revive the cult of personality or the role of the individual, but rather to provide inspiration and motivation for political innovation and action.  In an era when a political system built on party politics is plunged into a general crisis, from both a national and a world perspective, in the face of various new factors and conditions that are already part of our reality, is not constantly asking “what is to be done?” which forces us to explore the possibility of a new political, economic and social system, the very inspiration of this great legacy?
 
Notes
 
[1] 汪晖, “革命者人格与胜利的哲学——纪念列宁诞辰150周年”，first published on April 21, 2020, on the Beijing Cultural Review web feed, the post titled “Why Remember Lenin Today?  Written on the 150th Anniversary of Lenin’s Birth 今天，为什么纪念列宁？写在列宁诞生150周年之际.” The version available on the Guancha website is more user-friendly. 
 
[2] Translator’s note:  The English translations of this and subsequent citations to Gramsci are all drawn from http://abahlali.org/files/gramsci.pdf . 
 
[3] Translator’s note:  Leon Trotsky, Lenin (1925).  English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/lenin/index.htm .
 
[4] Translator’s note:  Iskra (The Spark) was a political newspaper of Russian socialist emigrants established in 1900  as the official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
 
[5] Translator’s note:  Leon Trotsky, Lenin (1925).  English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/lenin/index.htm . 
 
[6] Ibid.
 
[7] Translator’s note:  V. I. Lenin, “Under a False Flag” (1917).  English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/mar/x01.htm .
 
[8] Translator’s  note:  Leon Trotsky, “On His Fiftieth Birthday” (1920).  Translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/04/lenin.html .
 
[9] Translator’s note:  Leon Trotsky, Lenin (1925).  English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/lenin/index.htm , although the last sentence is not included in this translation.
 
[10] Ibid.
 
[11] Translator’s note:  John A. Hobson, Imperialism, A Theory, translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/hobson/1902/imperialism/index.htm .

[12] Translator’s note:  Wang Hui cites “On a Slogan for a United States of Europe,” a translation of which is available online here, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/23.htm , but I do not find the passage Wang cites. 
 
[13] Translator’s note:  V. I. Lenin, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914).  English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ .
 
[14] Translator’s note:  Mao Zedong, “Why is it that Red Political Power can Exist in China,” English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/sw-in-pdf/sw-flp-1965-v1.pdf  p. 64.
 
[15] Translator’s note:  Leon Trotsky, Lenin (1925).  English translation of both citations taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/lenin/index.htm , although I do not find applause and ovation in the online translation.
 
[16] Translator’s note:  Mao Zedong, “Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle,” English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/sw-in-pdf/sw-flp-1965-v4.pdf  p. 428.