Our beloved Comrade Xiang Qing(向青) passed away in Macau on July 6, 2022, at the age of 100.
Xiang Qing, whose party names were Maki and Suda, was born in 1922 into a family of educators. At the end of 1937, he began to accept Marxist ideas, and soon came into contact with Trotskyist books and periodicals. In 1939, he began to identify himself as a Trotskyist. He studied at National Southwestern Associated University(國立西南聯合大學) in 1939. After graduating from Guangxi University （廣西大學）in 1947, he went to Hong Kong and joined the Trotskyist organization of the Majority faction of Chinese Communist League (renamed as Revolutionary Communist Party). In early 1951, he sparked a discussion with a new political perspective within the party.He argued the establishment of the People’s Republic of China was on the right track of the first phrase (out of three) revolution in China, and this revolution is possible to further develop into a anti-capitalist revolution that it unavoidably will beyond the boundaries the CCP itself. The transition to an anti-capitalist revolution basically conforms to the direction guided by the traditional Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. In the 1970s, together with Lou Guohua(樓國華) and Wang Fanxi(王凡西), he actively participated in the youth radicalization movement in Hong Kong and influenced a group of progressive youths to join the Trotskyists. In 1977, he joined the Revolutionary Marxist League (RML) as one of the comrades who strongly advocated the great unity of the Trotskyists in Hong Kong. In 1979, he quit the RML because he supported a group of young comrades who were unreasonably suppressed and excluded from the organization, and participated in the establishment of a new Trotskyist organization. Since 2005, he has been in contact with young Trotskyists in Mainland China, communicated with them, and promoted the growth of a new generation of Trotskyists in China. Since 1995, he has supported the minorities of the Fourth International that adhere to the revolutionary line, opposed the opportunistic degeneration of the Fourth International and Trotskyist organizations, and signed the minority “Tendency for a Revolutionary International” in 2017, the position paper adopted by the founding assembly. He is the author of “On China’s Bureaucratic Socialism”, “From Bureaucratic Socialism to Bureaucratic Capitalism in China” (co-authored), and translated (including editing) From Class Society to Communism: An Introduction to Marxism , In Defend of Marxism, The Revolution Betrayed, French Revolution 1968, etc.