[104-10173-10134.pdf — page 130]
# KATRACT FROM TES NET INTERNATIONAL 3ET-TER - OCTER 1934(PHELISIND IN NSA YORK.# I Break with the Chinese StalinistsTo the Central Committee of the Chineue Communist Party:The two-year period of my extra-organizational collaboration with the Chinese Communist party has come to an end and the China Forum mitch I founded and edited during that time has been forced to suspend publication. In the interest of our whole movement as well as in my personal interest, I consider it necessary to record here and publish the history of the China Forus and the circumstances of its suspension......XXXXXFror almost the vory baginning of my active work - which I date from the time I began reporting events in China in a communist way - a number of questions presented themselves to me in increasingly forcible fom. These arose originally from my discovery of the gross distortions and exaggeratione which I found to be characteristic ef communia propaganda in China and abroad. I define propaganda as the skillful, clear, accurate and wholly truthful reporting of the facts linked to an incisive, purposive interpretation and a plan of action for dealing with the facts in a revolutionary way. I leamed this from the life and work of Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades who taught us that the truth comes from the masses themselves and that only disaster can result from telling them lies. I have never learned to the contrary that it was my revolutionary duty to work in any other way, although I soon found that the present-day Communist party press, makes a practise of distinguishing between propugand puganda and truth.Examples of exaggeration and distortion most striking to me were naturally those which applied to China, because here I could check allegations with known facts. I first wrote these down to the ignorance or incapacity of individuals. I felt that communist editors ained would putlich accurate facts about Crine if they could set then. Accordingly with a friend I tried to set up an independent mail news service and sent weekly bulletins to papera all over the world giving brief, charp, factual accounts of what was going on. This was in the fall of 1931 after my return from the area of the great Central China floods of that summer. I scarcely understood then why this service failed to secure any response from the communist prese abroad. After about three mon the I had to suspend it for lack of support. It simply aidn't get püblished except in a few organs which were not official Communist party papers, including the New York Militant.It wasn't long before I began to perceive, wit with a deeper etudy of international events and the history of the Chinese vovolution, that a consistent thread ran through the distortions and exaggeratione which I found not only in brief casual reports of current events tut in the solem pronunciamentoes made by delegates before plenums of the B.C.C.I. I discovered that these departures from the truth were made necessary by the official premise that over since the catastrophe of 1927 a mighty, upeur-ging revolutionary covement has been marching forward in China to the very brink of aaizure of power under the leadership of the Chinese Communist party. I discovered that these exaggeraticro were necенвагу сесливе Wie precise was false and along with it all the basic tonets of the