Red Star over China (12 page)

He was a southerner and had come all the way from the Fukien soviet districts, on the Red Army's six-thousand-mile expedition which foreign military experts refused to believe possible. Yet here was Old Dog, seventeen years old, and actually looking fourteen. He had made that march and thought nothing of it. He said he was prepared to walk another 25,000 li if the Red Army did.

With him was a lad nicknamed Local Cousin, and he had walked almost as far, from Kiangsi. Local Cousin was sixteen.

Did they like the Red Army? I asked. They looked at me in genuine amazement. It had evidently never occurred to either of them that anyone could not like the Red Army.

“The Red Army has taught me to read and to write,” said Old Dog. “Here I have learned to operate a radio, and how to aim a rifle straight. The Red Army helps the poor.”

“Is that all?”

“It is good to us and we are never beaten,” added Local Cousin. “Here everybody is the same. It is not like the White districts, where poor people are slaves of the landlords and the Kuomintang. Here everybody fights to help the poor, and to save China. The Red Army fights the landlords and the White bandits and the Red Army is anti-Japanese. Why should anyone not like such an army as this?”

There was a peasant lad who had joined the Reds in Szechuan, and I asked him why he had done so. He told me that his parents were poor farmers, with only four
mou
of land (less than an acre), which wasn't enough to feed him and his two sisters. When the Reds came to his village, he said, all the peasants welcomed them, brought them hot tea and made sweets for them. The Red dramatists gave plays. It was a happy time. Only the landlords ran. When the land was redistributed his parents received their share. So they were not sorry, but very glad, when he joined the poor people's army.

Another youth, about nineteen, had formerly been an ironsmith's apprentice in Hunan, and he was nicknamed “T'ieh Lao-hu,” the Iron Tiger. When the Reds arrived in his district, he had dropped bellows, pans, and apprenticeship, and, clad only in a pair of sandals and trousers, hurried off to enlist. Why? Because he wanted to fight the masters who starved their apprentices, and to fight the landlords who robbed his parents. He was fighting for the revolution, which would free the poor. The Red Army was good to people and did not rob them and beat them like the White armies. He pulled up his trouser leg and displayed a long white scar, his souvenir of battle.

There was another youth from Fukien, one from Chekiang, several more from Kiangsi and Szechuan, but the majority were natives of Shensi
and Kansu. Some had “graduated” from the Young Vanguards, and (though they looked like infants) had already been Reds for years. Some had joined the Red Army to fight Japan, two had enlisted to escape from slavery,
^*
three had deserted from the Kuomintang troops, but most of them had joined “because the Red Army is a revolutionary army, fighting landlords and imperialism.”

Then I talked to a squad commander, who was an “older” man of twenty-four. He had been in the Red Army since 1931. In that year his father and mother were killed by a Nanking bomber, which also destroyed his house, in Kiangsi. When he got home from the fields and found both his parents dead he had at once thrown down his hoe, bidden his wife good-by, and enlisted with the Communists. One of his brothers, a Red partisan, had been killed in Kiangsi in 1935.

They were a heterogeneous lot, but more truly “national” in composition than ordinary Chinese armies, usually carefully segregated according to provinces. Their different provincial backgrounds and dialects did not seem to divide them, but became the subject of constant good-natured raillery. I never saw a serious quarrel among them. In fact, during all my travel in the Red districts, I was not to see a single fist fight between Red soldiers, and among young men I thought that remarkable.

Though tragedy had touched the lives of nearly all of them, they were perhaps too young for it to have depressed them much. They seemed to me fairly happy, and perhaps the first consciously happy group of Chinese proletarians I had seen. Passive contentment was the common phenomenon in China, but the higher emotion of happiness, which implies a feeling of positiveness about existence, was rare indeed.

They sang nearly all day on the road, and their supply of songs was endless. Their singing was not done at a command, but was spontaneous, and they sang well. Whenever the spirit moved him, or he thought of an appropriate song, one of them would suddenly burst forth, and commanders and men joined in. They sang at night, too, and learned new folk tunes from the peasants, who brought out their Shensi guitars.

What discipline they had seemed almost entirely self-imposed. When we passed wild apricot trees on the hills there was an abrupt dispersal until everyone had filled his pockets, and somebody always brought me back a handful. Then, leaving the trees looking as if a great wind had struck through them, they moved back into order and quick-timed to make up for the loss. But when we passed private orchards, nobody touched the fruit in them, and the grain and vegetables we ate in the villages were paid for in full.

As far as I could see, the peasants bore no resentment toward my Red companions. Some seemed on close terms of friendship, and very loyal—a fact probably not unconnected with a recent redivision of land and the abolition of taxes. They freely offered for sale what edibles they had, and accepted soviet money without hesitation. When we reached a village at noon or sunset the chairman of the local soviet promptly provided quarters, and designated ovens for our use. I frequently saw peasant women or their daughters volunteer to pull the bellows of the fire of our ovens, and laugh and joke with the Red warriors, in a very emancipated way for Chinese women—especially Shensi women.

On the last day, we stopped for lunch at a village in a green valley, and here all the children came round to examine the first foreign devil many of them had seen. I decided to catechize them.

“What is a Communist?” I asked.

“He is a citizen who helps the Red Army fight the White bandits and the Japanese,” one youngster of nine or ten piped up.

“What else?”

“He helps fight the landlords and the capitalists!”

“But what is a capitalist?” That silenced one child, but another came forward: “A capitalist is a man who does not work, but makes others work for him.” Oversimplification, perhaps, but I went on:

“Are there any landlords or capitalists here?”

“No!” they all shrieked together. “They've all run away!”

“Run away? From what?”

“From our R
ED
A
RMY
”!

“Our” army, a peasant child talking about “his” army? Well, obviously it wasn't China, but, if not, what was it? Who could have taught them all this?

I was to learn who it was when I examined the textbooks of Red China, and met old Santa Claus Hsu Teh-li,
^*
once president of a normal school in Hunan, now Soviet Commissioner of Education.

Small villages were numerous in the Northwest, but towns of any size were infrequent. Except for the industries begun by the Reds it was agrarian and in places semipastoral country. Thus it was quite breathtaking to ride out suddenly on the brow of the wrinkled hills and see stretched out below me in a green valley the ancient walls of Pao An, which means “Defended Peace.”
^*

Pao An was once a frontier stronghold, during the Chin and T'ang dynasties, against the nomadic invaders to the north. Remains of its fortifications, flame-struck in that afternoon sun, could be seen flanking the narrow pass through which once emptied into this valley the conquering legions of the Mongols. There was an inner city, still, where the garrisons were once quartered; and a high defensive masonry, lately improved by the Reds, embraced about a square mile in which the present town was located.

Here at last I found the Red leader whom Nanking had been fighting for ten years—Mao Tse-tung, chairman of the “Chinese People's Soviet Republic,” to employ the official title which had recently been adopted. The old cognomen, “Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Soviet Republic,” was dropped when the Reds began their new policy of struggle for a united front.

Chou En-lai's radiogram had been received and I was expected. A room was provided for me in the “Foreign Office,” and I became temporarily a guest of the soviet state. My arrival resulted in a phenomenal increase
of the foreign population of Pao An. The other Occidental resident was a German known as Li Teh T'ung-chih
¹
—the ‘Virtuous Comrade Li.' Of Li Teh, the only foreign adviser ever with the Chinese Red Army, more later.

I met Mao soon after my arrival: a gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure, above average height for a Chinese, somewhat stooped, with a head of thick black hair grown very long, and with large, searching eyes, a high-bridged nose and prominent cheekbones. My fleeting impression was of an intellectual face of great shrewdness, but I had no opportunity to verify this for several days. Next time I saw him, Mao was walking hatless along the street at dusk, talking with two young peasants and gesticulating earnestly. I did not recognize him until he was pointed out to me—moving along unconcernedly with the rest of the strollers, despite the $250,000 which Nanking had hung over his head.

I could have written a book about Mao Tse-tung. I talked with him many nights, on a wide range of subjects, and I heard dozens of stories about him from soldiers and Communists. My written interviews with him totaled about twenty thousand words. He told me of his childhood and youth, how he became a leader in the Kuomintang and the Nationalist Revolution, why he became a Communist, and how the Red Army grew. He described the Long March to the Northwest and wrote a classical poem about it for me. He told me stories of many other famous Reds, from Chu Teh down to the youth who carried on his shoulders for over 6,000 miles the two iron dispatch boxes that held the archives of the Soviet Government.

The story of Mao's life was a rich cross-section of a whole generation, an important guide to understanding the sources of action in China, and I have included that full exciting record of personal history, just as he told it to me.
^*
But here my own impressions of him may be worth recording.

There would never be any one “savior” of China, yet undeniably one felt a certain force of destiny in Mao. It was nothing quick or flashy, but a kind of solid elemental vitality. One felt that whatever there was extraordinary in this man grew out of the uncanny degree to which he synthesized and expressed the urgent demands of millions of Chinese, and especially the peasantry. If their “demands” and the movement which was pressing them forward were the dynamics which could regenerate China, then in that deeply historical sense Mao Tse-tung might possibly become a very great man. Meanwhile, Mao was of interest as a personality, apart from his political life, because, although his name was as familiar to many Chinese as that of Chiang Kai-shek, very little was known about
him, and all sorts of strange legends existed about him. I was the first foreign newspaperman to interview him.

Mao had the reputation of a charmed life. He had been repeatedly pronounced dead by his enemies, only to return to the news columns a few days later, as active as ever. The Kuomintang had also officially “killed” and buried Chu Teh many times, assisted by occasional corroborations from clairvoyant missionaries. Numerous deaths of the two famous men, nevertheless, did not prevent them from being involved in many spectacular exploits, including the Long March. Mao was indeed in one of his periods of newspaper demise when I visited Red China, but I found him quite substantially alive. There were good reasons why people said that he had a charmed life, however; although he had been in scores of battles, was once captured by enemy troops and escaped, and had the world's highest reward on his head, during all these years he had never once been wounded.

I happened to be in Mao's house one evening when he was given a complete physical examination by a Red surgeon
²
—a man who had studied in Europe and who knew his business—and pronounced in excellent health. He had never had tuberculosis or any “incurable disease,” as had been rumored by some romantic travelers. His lungs were completely sound, although, unlike most Red commanders, he was an inordinate cigarette smoker. During the Long March, Mao and Li Teh had carried on original botanical research by testing out various kinds of leaves as tobacco substitutes.

Ho Tzu-ch'en, Mao's second wife,
³
a former schoolteacher and a Communist organizer herself, had been less fortunate than her husband. She had suffered more than a dozen wounds, caused by splinters from an air bomb, but all of them were superficial. Just before I left Pao An the Maos were proud parents of a new baby girl. He had two other children by his former wife, Yang K'ai-hui,
^*
the daughter of his favorite professor. She was killed in Changsha in 1930 at the order of General Ho Chien, warlord of Hunan province.

Mao Tse-tung was forty-three years old when I met him in 1936. He was elected chairman of the provisional Central Soviet Government at the Second All-China Soviet Congress, attended by delegates representing approximately 9,000,000 people then living under Red laws.
^†
Here, incidentally,
it may be inserted that Mao Tse-tung estimated the maximum population of the various districts under the direct control of the Soviet Central Government in 1934 as follows: Kiangsi Soviet, 3,000,000; Hupeh-Anhui-Honan Soviet, 2,000,000; Hunan-Kiangsi-Hupeh Soviet, 1,000,000; Kiangsi-Hunan Soviet, 1,000,000; Chekiang-Fukien Soviet, 1,000,000; Hunan-Hupeh Soviet, 1,000,000; total, 9,000,000. Fantastic estimates ranging as high as ten times that figure were evidently achieved by adding up the entire population in every area in which the Red Army or Red partisans had been reported as operating. Mao laughed when I quoted him the figure of “80,000,000” people living under the Chinese soviets, and said that when they had that big an area the revolution would be practically won. But of course there were many millions in all the areas where Red partisans had operated.