1936: On the Eve of War and Freedom

Abstract

1936 was indeed a turning point, not just for scholars and revolutionaries but for entire nations and vast continents. For China it was the year that all its disparate forces – Guomindang government and military leaders, the Chinese Communist Party, warlord generals, radical students and National Salvation activists – finally converged on the one path of a united front against Japan.³ For Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen, Liu Lantao and their comrades in Beijing’s Caolanzi prison, 1936 was the year they achieved freedom and took up a new and formative role in the communist revolution.

The year 1936 was a turning point for everybody. The Versailles settlement of 1919 gave way to the overtures of World War II: Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, Mussolini finished the conquest of Ethiopia, they set up the Berlin-Rome Axis, the League of Nations collapsed, civil war began in Spain. Me, I finished my D.Phil (Oxon.) and began to face issues of policy and livelihood.

(John K. Fairbank, Chinabound)¹

I arrived in Tianjin in spring, 1936. The task assigned to me by the Central Committee was to direct the work of the Party organization in north China, … to unite all parties, groups and social strata in north China … to establish an anti-Japanese united front … to devise slogans and forms of struggle suited to the concrete circumstances of an already rising tide in the revolutionary movement (especially among the students and the intelligentsia) …

(Liu Shaoqi, Selected Works)²