Red Star over China (11 page)

In the French Concession and the International Settlement, Chiang's envoys had secretly conferred with representatives of the foreign powers. They reached agreements to cooperate against the Chinese Communists and their Russian allies—until then also Chiang's allies. Given large sums by Shanghai's bankers, and the blessings of the foreign authorities, including guns and armored cars, Chiang was also helped by powerful Settlement and Concession underworld leaders. They mobilized hundreds of professional gangsters. Installed in the foreigners' armored cars, and attired in Nationalist uniforms, the gangsters carried out a night operation in coordination with Chiang's troops, moving in from the rear and other flanks. Taken by complete surprise by troops considered friendly, the militiamen were massacred and their “citizens' government” bloodily dissolved.

And thus it happened that Chou En-lai, after a remarkably lucky
escape, began his life as a fugitive from Kuomintang assassins and a leader of the revolution which finally raised the Red banner in China.

Dozens of Chou En-lai's close co-workers in the Shanghai Uprising were seized and executed. Chou estimated the toll of the “Shanghai Massacre” at 5,000 lives.
³
He himself was captured by Chiang Kai-shek's Second Division, and General Pai Chung-hsi, (later ruler of Kwangsi) issued an order for his execution. But the brother of the division commander had been Chou's student at Whampoa, and he helped Chou to escape.

The Insurrectionist fled to Wuhan
^*
and then to Nanchang, where he helped organize the August First Uprising. Senior member of the Politburo at the time, Chou was secretary of the Front Committee that directed the uprising, which was a fiasco. Next he went to Swatow and held it for ten days against assaults from both foreign gunboats and the native troops of militarists. With the failure and defeat of the Canton Commune, Chou was obliged to work underground—until 1931, when he succeeded in “running the blockade” and entered the soviet districts of Kiangsi and Fukien. There he was made political commissar to Chu Teh, commander-in-chief of the Red Army. Later Chou became vice-chairman of the revolutionary military council, an office he still held when I met him. There had been years of exhausting struggle in the South, and then the Long March. … But of Chou's further story, and of the scenes and events already mentioned, I was shortly to learn more, and in a broader context, from Mao Tse-tung and others.

Chou left me with an impression of a cool, logical, and empirical mind. In his days at Nankai (I had heard from one of his classmates there) Chou had often taken feminine leads in school plays. There was nothing effeminate about the tough, bearded, unsentimental soldier I met in Pai Chia P'ing. But there was charm—one quality in the mixed ingredients that were to make Chou Red China's No. 1 diplomat.

Next morning at six I set out with a squad of about forty youths of the communications corps, who were escorting a caravan of goods to Pao An.

I found that only myself, Fu, Chin-kuei, an emissary from the Wai-chiaopu—the Reds' own “Foreign Office”—and Li Chiang-lin, a Red commander, were mounted. It may not be precisely the word: Fu had a privileged perch on a stout but already heavily laden mule; Li Chiang-lin rode an equally overburdened ass; and I was vaguely astride the lone horse, which at times I could not be quite sure was really there at all.

My animal had a quarter-moon back and a camel gait. His enfeebled legs wobbled so that I expected him at any moment to buckle up and breathe his last. He was especially disconcerting as we crept along the narrow trails hewn from steep cliffs that rose up from the river bed we followed. It seemed to me that any sudden shift of my weight over his sunken flanks would send us both hurtling to the rocky gorge below.

Li Chiang-lin laughed down from his pyramid of luggage at my discomfiture. “That's a fine saddle you are sitting,
t'ung-chih,
but what is that underneath it?”

At his gibe I could not resist commenting: “Just tell me this, Li Chiang-lin, how can you fight on dogs like these? Is this how you mount your Red Cavalry?”

“Pu-shih!
No, you will see! Is your steed
huai-la?
^*
Well, it's just because we have bad ones like this at the rear that our cavalry is unbeatable at the front! If there is a horse that is fat and can run, not even Mao
Tse-tung can keep him from the front! Only the worn-out dogs we use in our rear. And that's how it is with everything: guns, food, clothing, horses, mules, camels, sheep—the best go to our Red fighters! If it's a horse you want,
t'ung-chih,
go to the front!”

But men? Li explained that it was easier to spare a good man from the front than a good horse.

And Commander Li was a good man, a good Bolshevik and a good storyteller. He had been a Red for ten years, and was a veteran of the Nanchang Uprising of 1927, when communism first became an independent force in China. As I rode, walked, panted and thirsted up and down the broken hills of Shensi beside Commander Li, he recounted incidents and anecdotes one after another, and sometimes, when pressed again and again, even stooped to talk about himself.

A Hunanese, Li had been a middle-school student when he joined the Kuomintang and began to take part in the Great Revolution. He must have entered the Communist Party in the early 1920's; he had worked as a labor organizer with Teng Fa in Hongkong during the great seamen's strike of 1922. He said that in 1925 he had been sent, as part of a Communist-led delegation, to see Ho Lung,
^*
who already had a reputation as a bandit leader. Li's reminiscences are here presented as part of the Red Army legend.

“Ho Lung's men were not bandits, even then,” Li told me, as we sat resting one day beneath some trees that stood beside a cool stream. “His father had been a leader in the Ke Lao Hui,
^†
and Ho Lung inherited his prestige, so that he became famous throughout Hunan when still a young man. Many stories are told by the Hunanese of his bravery as a youth.

“His father was a military officer in the Ch'ing Dynasty, and one day he was invited to a dinner by his fellow officers. He took his son, Ho Lung, with him. His father was boasting of Ho Lung's fearlessness, and one of the guests decided to test it out. He fired off a gun under the table. They say that Ho Lung did not even blink!

“When we met him he had already been commissioned in the provincial army. He then controlled a territory through which rich opium caravans had to pass from Yunnan to Hankow, and he lived by taxing them, and did not rob the people. His followers did not rape or carouse, like the troops of many warlord armies, and he did not let them smoke opium. They kept their rifles clean. But it was the custom there to offer opium to guests. Ho Lung himself did not smoke, but when we arrived he had
opium pipes and opium brought to the k'ang, and over these we talked about revolution.

“The head of our propaganda committee was Chou Yi-chung, a Communist, who had some family connection with Ho Lung. We talked to him for three weeks. Ho Lung had not had much education, except in military affairs, but he was not an ignorant man.

“We established a Party training school in his army, with Chou Yi-sung—who was later killed—as leader. Although it was a Kuomintang Nationalist training school, most of the propagandists were Communists. Many students entered the school and later became political leaders. Besides Ho Lung's army, the school furnished political commissioners for the Third Division, under Yuan Tso-ming, who was then commander of the Left Route Army. Yuan Tso-ming was assassinated by agents of T'ang Sheng-chih, and the Third Division was given to Ho Lung. His enlarged command was called the Twentieth Army, which became part of the main Fourth Group Army
^*
under the Left Kuomintang general, Chang Fa-kuei.”

“What happened to Ho Lung after the Nanchang Uprising?”

“His forces were defeated. He and Chu Teh next moved to Swatow. They were defeated again. The remnant of his army went into the interior, but Ho Lung escaped to Hongkong. Later he smuggled himself to Shanghai, and then, disguised, he returned to Hunan.

“It is said of Ho Lung that he established a soviet district in Hunan with one knife. This was early in 1928. Ho Lung was in hiding in a village, plotting with members of the Ke Lao Hui, when some Kuomintang tax collectors arrived. Leading a few villagers, he attacked the tax collectors and killed them with his own knife, and then disarmed the tax collectors' guard. From this adventure he got enough revolvers and rifles to arm his first peasants' army.”

Ho Lung's fame in the Elder Brother Society extended over all China. The Reds said that he could go unarmed into any village of the country, announce himself to the Elder Brother Society, and form an army. The society's special ritual and language were quite difficult to master, but Ho Lung had the highest “degrees” and was said to have more than once enlisted an entire Ke Lao Hui branch in the Red Army. His eloquence as a speaker was well known in the Kuomintang. Li said that when he spoke he could “raise the dead to fight.”

When Ho Lung's Second Front Red Army finally withdrew from the Hunan soviet districts, in 1935, its rifles were reported to number more than 40,000, and this army underwent even greater hardships in its own
Long March to the Northwest than the main forces from Kiangsi. Thousands died on the snow mountains, and thousands more starved to death or were killed by Nanking bombs. Yet so great was Ho Lung's personal magnetism, and his influence throughout rural China, Li said, that many of his then stayed with him and died on the road rather than desert, and thousands of poor men along the route of march joined in to help fill up the dwindling ranks. In the end he reached eastern Tibet, where he finally connected with Chu Teh, with about 20,000 men—most of them barefoot, half-starved, and physically exhausted. After several months of recuperation, his troops were now on the march again, into Kansu, where they were expected to arrive in a few weeks.

“What does Ho Lung look like?” I asked Li.

“He is a big man, and strong as a tiger. He never gets tired. They say he carried many of his wounded men on the march. Even when he was a Kuomintang general he lived as simply as his men. He cares nothing about personal possessions—except horses. He loves horses. Once he had a beautiful horse that he liked very much. It was captured by some enemy troops. Ho Lung went to battle to recover that horse. He got it back!

“Although he is impetuous, Ho Lung is very humble. Since he joined the Communists he has been faithful to the Party, and has never broken Party discipline. He always asks for criticism and listens carefully to advice. His sister is much like him—a big woman, with large [unbound] feet. She has led Red troops in battle herself—and carried wounded men on her back. So has Ho Lung's wife.”

Ho Lung's hatred of the rich had become legendary in China. It was said that landlords and gentry used to flee without further ado, even from places well guarded by Nanking troops, if Ho Lung was reported as far away as 200
li
—for he was famous for the swiftness of his movements.

Once Ho Lung arrested a Swiss missionary named Bosshard, and a military court “sentenced” him to eighteen months' imprisonment for alleged espionage. The Reverend Bosshard's sentence had still not been completed when Ho Lung began the Long March, but he was ordered to move with the army. He was finally released during the march, when his sentence expired, and was given traveling expenses to Yunnanfu. Rather to most people's surprise, the Reverend Bosshard brought out few harsh words about Ho Lung. On the contrary, he was reported to have remarked, “If the peasants knew what the Communists were like, none of them would run away.”
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It was the noon halt, and we decided to bathe in the cool, inviting stream. We got in and lay on a long, flat rock, while the shallow water
rippled over us in cool sheets. Some peasants went past, driving a big cloud of sheep before them; overhead the sky was clear and blue. There was nothing but peace and beauty here, and it was that odd midday moment when the world for centuries has been like this, with only peace, beauty and contentment.

I asked Li Chiang-lin if he were married.

“I was,” he said slowly. “My wife was killed in the South, by the Kuomintang.”

North Shensi was one of the poorest parts of China I had seen, not excluding western Yunnan. There was no real land scarcity, but there was in many places a serious scarcity of real land—at least real farming land. Here in Shensi a peasant could own as much as 100 mou
^*
of land and yet be a poor man. A landlord in this country had to possess at least several hundred
mou
of land, and even on a Chinese scale he could not be considered rich unless his holdings were part of the limited and fertile valley land, where rice and other valued crops could be grown.

The farms of Shensi could have been described as slanting, and many of them also as slipping, for landslides were frequent. The fields were mostly patches laid on the serried landscape, between crevices and small streams. The land seemed rich enough in many places, but the crops grown were strictly limited by the steep gradients, in both quantity and quality. There were few genuine mountains, only endless broken hills. Their sharp-angled shadowing and coloring changed miraculously with the sun's wheel, and toward dusk they became a magnificent sea of purpled hilltops with dark velvety folds running down, like the pleats on a mandarin skirt, to ravines that seemed bottomless.

After the first day I rode little, not so much out of pity for the languishing nag, but because everyone else marched. Li Chiang-lin was the oldest warrior of the company. Most of the others were lads in their teens, hardly more than children. One of these was nicknamed “Lao Kou,” the Old Dog, and walking with him I asked why he had joined the Reds.