Red Star over China (17 page)

Afterwards I toured the various classrooms and talked with Lin Piao and his faculty. They told me something of the conditions of enrollment
in their school, and showed me printed announcements of its courses, thousands of copies of which had been secretly distributed throughout China. The four sections of the academy invited “all who are determined to fight Japanese imperialism and to offer themselves for the national revolutionary cause, regardless of class, social, or political differences.” The age limit was sixteen to twenty-eight, “regardless of sex.” “The applicants must be physically strong, free from epidemic diseases,” and also—rather sweeping—“free from all bad habits.”

In practice, I discovered, most of the cadets in the First Section were battalion, regimental, or division commanders or political commissars of the Red Army,
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receiving advanced military and political training. According to Red Army regulations, every active commander or commissar was supposed to spend at least four months at such study during every two years of active service.

The Second and Third sections included company, platoon, and squad commanders—experienced fighters in the Red Army—as well as new recruits selected from “graduates of middle schools or the equivalent, unemployed teachers or officers, cadres of anti-Japanese volunteer corps, and anti-Japanese partisan leaders, and workers who have engaged in organizing and leading labor movements.” Over sixty middle-school graduates from Shansi had joined the Reds during their expedition to that province.

Classes in the Second and Third sections lasted six months. The Fourth Section was devoted chiefly to “training engineers, cavalry cadres, and artillery units.” Here I met some former machinists and apprentices. Later on, as I was leaving Red China, I was to meet, entering by truck, eight new recruits for the “bandit university” arriving from Shanghai and Peking. Lin Piao told me that they had a waiting list of over 2,000 student applicants from all parts of China. At that time every cadet had to be “smuggled” in.

The curriculum varied in different sections of Hung Ta. In the First Section political lectures included these courses: Political Knowledge, Problems of the Chinese Revolution, Political Economy, Party Construction, Tactical Problems of the Republic, Leninism and Historical Foundations of Democracy, and Political and Social Forces in Japan. Military courses included: Problems of Strategy in the War with Japan, Maneuvering Warfare (against Japan), and the Development of Partisan Warfare in the Anti-Japanese War.

Special textbooks had been prepared for some of these courses. Some were carried clear from the soviet publishing house in Kiangsi, where (I was told) more than eight hundred printers were employed in the main
plant. In other courses the materials used were lectures by Red Army commanders and Party leaders, dealing with historical experiences of the Russian and the Chinese revolutions, or utilizing material from captured government files, documents and statistics.

These courses at Hung Ta perhaps suggested a reply to the question, “Do the Reds really intend to fight Japan?” It sufficed to show how the Reds foresaw and actively planned for China's “war of independence” against Japan—a war which they regarded as inevitable unless, by some miracle, Japan withdrew from the vast areas of China already under the wheels of Nippon's military juggernaut.

That the Reds were fully determined to fight, and believed that the opening of the war would find them first on the front, was indicated not only in the impassioned utterances of their leaders, in grim practical schooling in the army, and in their proposals for a “united front” with their ten-year enemy, the Kuomintang, but also by the intensive propagandizing one saw throughout the soviet districts.

Playing a leading part in this educative mission were the many companies of youths known as the Jen-min K'ang-Jih Chu-She, or People's Anti-Japanese Dramatic Society, who traveled ceaselessly back and forth in the Red districts, spreading the gospel of resistance and awakening the slumbering nationalism of the peasantry.

It was to one of the performances of this astonishing children's theater that I went soon after my first visit to the Red Army University.

People were already moving down toward the open-air stage, improvised from an old temple, when I set out with the young official who had invited me to the Red Theater. It was Saturday, two or three hours before sunset, and all Pao An seemed to be going.

Cadets, muleteers, women and girl workers from the uniform and shoe factory, clerks from the cooperatives and from the soviet post office, soldiers, carpenters, villagers followed by their infants, all began streaming toward the big grassy plain beside the river, where the players were performing. It would be hard to imagine a more democratic gathering—something like old-time Chautauqua.

No tickets were sold, there was no “dress circle,” and there were no preferred seats. Goats were grazing on the tennis court not far beyond. I noticed Lo Fu, general secretary of the Politburo of the Central Committee, Lin Piao, Lin Po-chu (Lin Tsu-han), the commissioner of finance, Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and other officials and their wives scattered through the crowd, seated on the springy turf like the rest. No one paid much attention to them once the performance had begun.

Across the stage was a big pink curtain of silk, with the words “People's Anti-Japanese Dramatic Society” in Chinese characters as well as Latinized Chinese, which the Reds were promoting to hasten mass education. The program was to last three hours. It proved to be a combination of playlets, dancing, singing, and pantomime—a kind of variety show, or vaudeville, given unity chiefly by two central themes: anti-Nipponism and the revolution. It was full of overt propaganda and the props were
primitive. But it had the advantage of being emancipated from cymbal-crashing and falsetto singing, and of dealing with living material rather than with meaningless historical intrigues that are the concern of the decadent Chinese opera.
¹

What it lacked in subtlety and refinement it partly made up by its robust vitality, its sparkling humor, and a sort of participation between actors and audience. Guests at the Red Theater seemed actually to
listen
to what was said: a really astonishing thing in contrast with the bored opera audience, who often spent their time eating fruit and melon seeds, gossiping, tossing hot towels back and forth, visiting from one box to another, and only occasionally looking at the stage.

The first playlet was called
Invasion.
It opened in a Manchurian village in 1931, with the Japanese arriving and driving out the “non-resisting” Chinese soldiers. In the second scene Japanese officers banqueted in a peasant's home, using Chinese men for chairs and drunkenly making love to their wives. Another scene showed Japanese dope peddlers selling morphine and heroin and forcing every peasant to buy a quantity. A youth who refused to buy was singled out for questioning.

“You don't buy morphine, you don't obey Manchukuo health rules, you don't love your ‘divine' Emperor P'u Yi,”
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charged his tormentors. “You are no good, you are an anti-Japanese bandit!” And the youth was promptly executed.

A scene in the village market place showed small merchants peacefully selling their wares. Suddenly Japanese soldiers arrived, searching for more “anti-Japanese bandits.” Instantly they demanded passports, and those who had forgotten them were shot. Then two Japanese officers gorged themselves on a peddler's pork. When he asked for payment they looked at him in astonishment. “You ask for payment? Why, Chiang Kai-shek gave us Manchuria, Jehol, Chahar, the Tangku Truce, the Ho-Umetsu Agreement, and the Hopei-Chahar Council without asking a single copper! And
you
want us to pay for a little pork!” Whereupon they impaled him as a “bandit.”

In the end, of course, all that proved too much for the villagers. Merchants turned over their stands and umbrellas, farmers rushed forth with their spears, women and children came with their knives, and all swore to “fight to the death” against the
Jih-pen-kuei—
the “Japanese devils.”

The little play was sprinkled with humor and local idiom. Bursts of laughter alternated with oaths of disgust and hatred for the Japanese. The audience got quite agitated. It was not just political propaganda to them,
nor slapstick melodrama, but the poignant truth itself. The fact that the players were mostly youths in their teens and natives of Shensi and Shansi seemed entirely forgotten in the onlookers' absorption with the ideas presented.

The substratum of bitter reality behind this portrayal, done as a sort of farce, was not obscured by its wit and humor for at least one young soldier there. He stood up at the end, and in a voice shaking with emotion cried out: “Death to the Japanese bandits! Down with the murderers of our Chinese people! Fight back to our homes!” The whole assembly echoed his slogans mightly. I learned that this lad was a Manchurian whose parents had been killed by the Japanese.

Comic relief was provided at this moment by the meandering goats. They were discovered nonchalantly eating the tennis net, which someone had forgotten to take down. A wave of laughter swept the audience while some cadets gave chase to the culprits and salvaged this important property of the recreation department.

Second number on the program was a harvest dance, daintily performed by a dozen girls of the Dramatic Society. Barefoot, clad in peasant trousers and coats and fancy vests, with silk bandannas on their heads, they danced with good unison and grace. Two of these girls, I learned, had walked clear from Kiangsi, where they had learned to dance in the Reds' dramatic school at Juichin. They had genuine talent.

Another unique and amusing number was called the “United Front Dance,” which interpreted the mobilization of China to resist Japan. By what legerdemain they produced their costumes I do not know, but suddenly there were groups of youths wearing sailors' white jumpers and caps and shorts—first appearing as cavalry formations, next as aviation corps, then as foot soldiers, and finally as the navy. Their pantomime and gesture, at which Chinese are born artists, very realistically conveyed the spirit of the dance. Then there was something called the “Dance of the Red Machines.” By sound and gesture, by an interplay and interlocking of arms, legs, and heads, the little dancers ingeniously imitated the thrust and drive of pistons, the turn of cogs and wheels, the hum of dynamos—and visions of a machine-age China of the future.

Between acts, shouts arose for extemporaneous singing by people in the audience. Half a dozen native Shensi girls—workers in the factories—were by popular demand required to sing an old folk song of the province, accompaniment being furnished by a Shensi farmer with his homemade guitar. Another “command” performance was given by a cadet who played the harmonica, and one was called upon to sing a favorite song of the Southland. Then, to my utter consternation, a demand began that the
wai-kuo hsin-wen chi-che
—the foreign newspaperman—strain his lungs in a solo of his own!

They refused to excuse me. Alas, I could think of nothing but fox trots, waltzes,
La Bohème,
and “Ave Maria,” which all seemed inappropriate for this martial audience. I could not even remember “The Marseillaise.” The demand persisted. In extreme embarrassment I at last rendered “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” They were very polite about it. No encore was requested.

With infinite relief I saw the curtain go up on the next act, which turned out to be a social play with a revolutionary theme—an accountant falling in love with his landlord's wife. Then there was more dancing, a “Living Newspaper” dealing with some late news from the Southwest, and a chorus of children singing “The International.” Here the flags of several nations were hung on streamers from a central illuminated column, round which reclined the young dancers. They rose slowly, as the words were sung, to stand erect, clenched fists upraised, as the song ended.

The theater was over, but my curiosity remained. Next day I went to interview Miss Wei Kung-chih, director of the People's Anti-Japanese Dramatic Society.

Miss Wei was born in Honan in 1907 and had been a Red for ten years. She originally joined a propaganda corps of the political training school (where Teng Hsiao-p'ing was director) of the Kuominchun, “Christian General” Feng Yu-hsiang's army, but when Feng reconciled himself to the Nanking
coup d'état
in 1927 she deserted, along with many young students, and became a Communist in Hankow. In 1929 she was sent to Europe by the Communist Party and studied for a while in France, then in Moscow. A year later she returned to China, successfully ran the Kuomintang blockade around Red China, and began to work at Juichin.

She told me something of the history of the Red Theater. Dramatic groups were first organized in Kiangsi in 1931. There, at the famous Gorky School (under the technical direction of Yeh Chien-ying
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) in Juichin, with over 1,000 students recruited from the soviet districts, the Reds trained about sixty theatrical troupes, according to Miss Wei. They traveled through the villages and at the front. Every troupe had long waiting lists of requests from village soviets. The peasants, always grateful for any diversion in their culture-starved lives, voluntarily arranged all transport, food, and housing for these visits.

In the South, Miss Wei had been an assistant director, but in the Northwest she had charge of the whole organization of dramatics. She made the Long March from Kiangsi, one of the very few soviet women
who lived through it. Theatrical troupes were created in Soviet Shensi before the southern army reached the Northwest, but with the arrival of new talent from Kiangsi the dramatic art apparently acquired new life. There were about thirty such traveling theatrical troupes there now, Miss Wei told me, and others in Kansu. I was to meet many later on in my travels.