[Lu Xun stands as a giant of world literature. Here we excerpt part of his reply to a Trotskyist who sent him a letter and some publications in the midst of a Japanese occupation of China.]

"I take it that the main drift of your letter is contained in these two points: You consider Stalin and his colleagues bureaucrats, and the proposal of Mao Zedong and others--'Let all parties unite to resist Japan'--as a betrayal of the cause of revolution.

"I certainly find this 'confusing.' For do not all the successes of Stalin's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics show the pitifulness of Trotsky's exile, wanderings and failure which 'forced' him in his old age to take money from the enemy? . . . He may not feel so good, though, because now the Soviet Union has triumphed. Facts are stronger than rhetoric; and no one expected such pitiless irony. Your 'theory' is certainly much loftier than that of Mao Zedong: yours is high in the sky, while his is simply on the ground. But admirable as such loftiness, it will unfortunately be just the thing welcomed by the Japanese aggressors. Hence I fear that it will drop down from the sky, and when it does it may land on the filthiest place on earth." --June 9, 1936
Lu Xun, Selected Works Vol. IV. Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang, trans. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), pp. 281-2.