Yesterday (May 17) was the 7th anniversary of the death of Si Ma Lu, an expert in Chinese Communist Party history and founder of the Chinese Scholars Association, and the association held an online memorial service. Several experts and scholars praised Sima Lu as “the longest-written anti-communist writer” and “his record of the history of the CCP has filled the gap between the contemporary history and modern history of the CCP”, while he once called himself “the earliest Maoist in China”. “Fortunately, he soon realized that the basic policy of the CCP was to “kill people and cross the border” and quickly fled the CCP.
According to Radio Free Asia, Sima Lu passed away on March 28, 2021, and yesterday was the anniversary of his death. At an online memorial service organized by the Chinese Scholars Association, Su Xiaokang, chief writer of the television film “River Elegy” and an exiled Chinese author, called Sima Lu a prophet of exiles who spent his life fleeing the Chinese Communist Party, a demon, an anomaly and a freak in recent human history. “He calls himself an orphan of the May Fourth. He is a dissident of the most respectable age. He is the oldest qualified exile. He was the longest-writing anti-communist literary figure, the founder of the first anti-communist publication. He was a man of letters who had overtaken all the Yan’an literati.”
Sima Lu (formerly Ma Yi) joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1937 at the age of 18, became librarian of the Yan’an Anti-Japanese Military and Political University at the age of 19, and served as director of the Yan’an office of the Xinhua Daily at the age of 20. In his reminiscence article, he claimed that he was probably the earliest Maoist in China.
He once admired Mao so much that he even imitated Mao’s voice and recited Mao’s language, so much so that he was mistakenly identified as a Hunanese some years after he left Yan’an.
But after witnessing the brutality of the Party struggle in Yan’an, he fled in 1943. He once noted that “Mao Zedong used countless people in his life and was used by countless others before and after his death. His body was used by a part of him, and his soul was split into different people; such as Lin Biao, the Gang of Four with Deng, and even the rulers of China today.”
He had also pointed out that “this Party is a Party that completely dominates the actions of its members by orders, a militarized Party, a secret service Party. Every member of the Party, without reservation or return, obeys the Party discipline. The basic policy of the Party is the four words ‘kill and cross over’.”
According to Pei Yiran, vice dean of the College of Humanities of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and president of the Independent Chinese PEN Association, Sima Lu followed human instincts between instincts and doctrines, went out and searched for his soul in a sea of red disasters glorifying Marxism-Leninism, and achieved “a fortunate life in unfortunate times.”
The former executive director of the Chinese Scholars Association, Chen Bukong, also said that if Sima Lu had not quit the CCP in the 1940s, he might have ended up like Wang Shiwei because of his goodness and integrity during the Yan’an Rectification Movement, or he would have been killed during the Anti-Rightist Movement or the Cultural Revolution.
Chen Bukong praised Sima Lu’s historical contribution, “He had a lot of contact with the top echelons of the Communist Party and became an anti-communist historian. Given that the CCP buried its history and had no real history, Sima Lu’s record of the CCP’s history filled the gap between the contemporary and modern history of the CCP.”
After leaving the mainland, Sima Lu published Eighteen Years of Struggle, The Essence of Chinese Communist Party History and Documents, a biography of Qu Qubai, A Theory of China’s Peaceful Evolution, Contemporary Chinese Politics, Dreams of the Red Chamber and Political Figures, founded Prospect and hosted the journal Exploration.
“I gained a lot from his magazine Outlook,” said Jin Zhong, editor-in-chief of Open magazine, “He (Sima Lu) defined the Chinese Communist Party in three words: warlordism, rogueism and barbaric authoritarianism, which is the essence of the Chinese Communist Party. While ordinary scholars merely quote materials and state their sources, he not only quotes but also publishes the full text of the literature.”
Jin Zhong said that Sima Lu’s party history is written in a unique way, and the documentary materials are extremely rich. He also revealed that in the 1980s, after the death of Mao Zedong, the CCP tried to acquire Sima Lu’s materials but was refused.
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