Red Star over China (14 page)

The durability of the alliance, as far as Chinese Communists were concerned, depended upon the continued acceptance by the Kuomintang of two major objectives. The first recognized the necessity for an anti-imperialist policy—the recovery of complete political, territorial, and economic sovereignty by revolutionary action. The second demanded an internal policy of “antifeudalism and antimilitarism”—the overthrow of landlords and warlords, and the construction of new forms of social, economic, and political life, which both the Communists and the Kuomintang agreed must be “democratic” in character.

“Democratic” was a word used by Dr. Sun to cover his paternalistic concept of a revolution in which the “people” or masses were to achieve
“modernization” under the “tutelage” of his Nationalist Party. For the Communists the concept was a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution that could be manipulated, by stages, toward socialism, under the “hegemony” of their party. The two-party government formed at Canton consisted only of members of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang—which from 1924 to 1927 included Communists. It was never more “legal” or “democratic” than its own organic structure. Communist membership in Kuomintang central organs was limited to one-third of the total.

The Communists regarded the successful fulfillment of Dr. Sun's “bourgeois-democratic” revolution as a necessary preliminary to the Socialist society later to be established. Their position in support of a “democratic national independence and liberation” movement seemed logical.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, before the revolution was completed. Cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Kungch'antang came to an end in 1927. From the Communist viewpoint, the Nationalist Revolution could also be said to have ended then. The right wing of the Kuomintang, dominated by the new militarism, and supported by certain foreign powers, the treaty-port
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bankers, and the landlords, broke away from the Left Kuomintang Government at Hankow. It formed a regime at Nanking under Chiang Kai-shek which the Communists and the majority of the Kuomintang at that time regarded as “counterrevolutionary,” that is, against the “bourgeois-democratic revolution” itself.

The Kuomintang soon reconciled itself to the Nanking
coup d'etat
,
^†
but communism became a crime punishable by death. What the Reds conceived to be the two main points of nationalism—the anti-imperialist movement and the democratic revolution—were in practice abandoned. Militarists' civil wars and, later, intensive war against the rising agrarian revolution ensued. Many thousands of Communists and former peasant-union and labor leaders were killed. The unions were suppressed. An “enlightened dictatorship” made war on all forms of opposition. Even so, quite a number of Communists survived in the army, and the Party held together throughout a period of great terrorism. In 1937, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars in civil war against them, the Red armies occupied in the Northwest the largest (though sparsely populated) connected territory ever under their complete control.

Of course the Reds believed that the decade of history since 1927 had richly validated their thesis that national independence and democracy
(which the Kuomintang also set as its objective) could not be achieved in China without an anti-imperialist policy externally, and an agrarian revolution internally. To see why communism steadily increased its following, especially among patriotic youth, and why at the moment it still projected upon the screen of history the shadows of great upheaval and change in the Orient, one had to note its main contentions. What were they?

First of all, the Reds argued that, after Nanking split the living forces of the revolution, China rapidly lost much ground. Compromise followed compromise. The failure to realize agrarian reforms resulted in widespread discontent and open rebellion from the rural population in many parts of the country. General conditions of poverty and distress among the rural populace seriously worsened. China now had some passable motor roads, an excellent fleet of airplanes, and a New Life movement,
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but reports came in daily of catastrophes which in China were considered more or less routine. Even as I was writing this chapter, for example, the press brought this appalling news from Central and West China:

“Famine conditions continue to be reported in Honan, Anhui, Shensi, Kansu, Szechuan, and Kweichow. Quite evidently the country faces one of the most severe famines of many years, and thousands have already died. A recent survey by the Szechuan Famine Relief Commission discovered that 30,000,000 people are now in the famine belt of that province, where bark and ‘Goddess-of-Mercy' earth
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are being consumed by tens of thousands. There are said to be over 400,000 famine refugees in Shensi, over 1,000,000 in Kansu, some 7,000,000 in Honan, and 3,000,000 in Kweichow. The famine in Kweichow is admitted by the official Central News to be the most serious in 100 years, affecting sixty districts of the province.”
¹

Szechuan was one of the provinces where taxes had been collected sixty years or more in advance, and thousands of acres of land had been abandoned by farmers unable to pay rents and outrageous loan interest. In my files were items, collected over a period of six years, showing comparable distress in many other provinces. There were few signs that the rate of frequency of these calamities was diminishing.

While the mass of the rural population was rapidly going bankrupt, concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a small number of landlords and land-owning usurers increased in proportion to the general decline
of independent farming.
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Sir Frederick Leith-Ross was reported to have said that there was no middle class in China, but only the incredibly poor and the very rich. Enormous taxes, the share-crop method, and the whole historical system of social, political, and economic relationships described by Dr. Karl August Wittfogel as the “Asiatic mode of production,” contrived to leave the landless peasantry constantly heavily in debt, without reserves, and unable to meet such crises as draught, famine, and flood.

Mao Tse-tung, when a secretary of the Kuomintang's Committee on the Peasant Movement in 1926 (and a candidate to the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang),
^†
supervised the collection of land statistics for areas in twenty-one provinces. He asserted that this investigation indicated that resident landlords, rich peasants, officials, absentee landlords, and usurers, about 10 per cent of the whole rural population, together owned over 70 per cent of the cultivable land in China. About 15 per cent was owned by middle peasants. But over 65 per cent of the rural population, made up of poor peasants, tenants, and farm workers, owned only from 10 to 15 per cent of the total arable land.
²

“These statistics were suppressed after the counterrevolution,” according to Mao. “Now, ten years later, it is still impossible to get any statement from Nanking on land distribution in China.”

The Communists alleged that rural bankruptcy had been accelerated by the Kuomintang's policy of “nonresistance to imperialism”—in particular, Japanese imperialism. As a result of Nanking's “no-war policy” against Japan, China had lost to Japanese invaders about a fifth of her national territory, over 40 per cent of her railway mileage, 85 per cent of her unsettled lands, a large part of her coal, 80 per cent of her iron deposits, 37 per cent of her finest forest lands, and about 40 per cent of her national export trade. Japan now controlled over 75 per cent of the total pig iron and iron-mining enterprises of what remained of China, and over half of the textile industry of China. The conquest of Manchuria also robbed China of its own best market as well as its most accessible raw materials. In 1931, Manchuria took more than 27 per cent of its total imports from other Chinese provinces, but in 1935 China could sell Man-chukuo only 4 per cent of those imports. It presented Japan with the region of China best suited for industrial development—and enabled her to prevent that development and shuttle the raw materials to her own industries. It gave to Japan the continental base from which she could
inexorably continue her aggression in China. Such changes, many felt, completely wiped out the benefits of any reforms that Nanking might be able to claim to its credit for generations in the future—even provided the rest of China remained intact.

And what was achieved by Nanking's nine years of war against the Reds? The Northwest junta had recently summarized the results in a manifesto opposing preparations for the sixth anti-Red “final annihilation” drive.
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It reminded us that Manchuria had gone to Japan during one “final-annihilation” drive, Shanghai had been invaded during another, Jehol had been given up during the third, East Hopei lost during still another, and the sovereignty of Hopei and Chahar provinces had been badly impaired during the fifth “remnant-bandit extermination.”

Of course Nanking could not stop civil war as long as the Reds continued to attempt to overthrow the government by force. In April, 1932, when the Chinese Soviet Republic declared war against Japan, it had offered to combine with anti-Japanese elements. Again in January, 1933, it had proposed to unite with “any armed force” in a “united front from below.” There was no real offer, however, to compromise with Chiang Kai-shek.
³
By mid-1936 the Communists (and the Comintern) had radically changed their position. In a search for broad national unity, they included the Kuomintang and even Chiang Kai-shek. The Chinese Communist Party now promised to unite its Red Army and the soviet districts under the sovereignty of the Kuomintang Central Government, provided that the latter would agree to “establish democratic representative government, resist Japan, enfranchise the people, and guarantee civil liberties to the masses.”
^†
In other words, the Reds were ready to “remarry” the Kuomintang if it would return to the “bourgeois-nationalist” program of anti-imperialism and antifeudalism. But of these two basic aims they realized that the fight for national survival was paramount, and must be conducted even at the expense of modifying the internal struggle over the land question; that class antagonisms might have to be sublimated in, certainly could not be satisfied without, the successful solution of the external struggle against Japan.

To quote Mao in his interview with me:

“The fundamental issue before the Chinese people today is the struggle against Japanese imperialism. Our soviet policy is decisively conditioned by this struggle. Japan's warlords hope to subjugate the whole of
China and make of the Chinese people their colonial slaves. The fight against the Japanese invasion, the fight against Japanese economic and military conquest—these are the main tasks that must be remembered in analyzing soviet policies.

“Japanese imperialism is not only the enemy of China but also of all people of the world who desire peace. Especially it is the enemy of those peoples with interests on the Pacific Ocean, namely, the American, British, French, and Soviet Russian nations. The Japanese continental policy, as well as naval policy, is directed not only against China but also against those countries. …

“What do we expect from the foreign powers? We expect at least that friendly nations will not help Japanese imperialism, and will adopt a neutral position. We hope that they will actively help China to resist invasion and conquest.”

In using the word “imperialism,” the Communists sharply distinguished between Japan and friendly and nonaggressive democratic capitalist powers. Mao Tse-tung explained:

“Concerning the question of imperialism in general we observe that among the great powers some express unwillingness to engage in a new world war, some are not ready to see Japan occupy China: countries such as America, Great Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium. Then there are countries permanently under the menace of the aggressive powers, such as Siam, the Philippines, Central American countries, Canada, India, Australia, the Dutch Indies, etc.—all more or less under the direct threat of Japan. We consider them our friends and invite their cooperation. …

“So, except for Japan and those countries which help Japanese imperialism, the categories mentioned above can be organized into antiwar, antiaggression, anti-Fascist world alliances. … In the past, Nanking has received much help from America, England, and other countries. Most of these funds and supplies have been used in civil war. For every Red soldier killed, Nanking has slain many peasants and workers. According to a recent article by the banker Chang Nai-ch'i it has cost the Chinese people about $80,000 for every Red soldier killed by Nanking.
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Such ‘help' therefore does not seem to us to have been rendered to the Chinese people.

“Only when Nanking determines to cease civil war and to fight against Japanese imperialism, and unites with the people's revolution to organize a democratic national defense government—only then can such help be of real benefit to the Chinese nation.”

I asked Mao whether the soviets were in favor of canceling unequaltreaties.
He pointed out that many of these unequal treaties had, in effect, already been destroyed by the Japanese, especially in the case of Manchuria. But as for the future attitude of a representative government in China, he declared:

“Those powers that help or do not oppose China in her war of independence and liberation should be invited to enjoy close friendly relations with China. Those powers which actively assist Japan should naturally not be given the same treatment: for example, Germany and Italy, which have already established special relations with Manchukuo, and cannot be regarded as powers friendly to the Chinese people.

“With friendly powers, China will peacefully negotiate treaties of mutual advantage. With other powers China is prepared to maintain cooperation on a much broader scale. … So far as Japan is concerned, China must by the act of war of liberation cancel all unequal treaties, confiscate all Japanese imperialist holdings, and annul Japan's special privileges, concessions, and influence in this country. Concerning our relations with other powers, we Communists do not advocate any measure that may place at disadvantage the world position of China in her struggle against Japanese imperialism.