Red Star over China (30 page)

The Red Army now reached the Kansu border. Several battles still lay ahead, the loss of any one of which might have meant decisive defeat. More Nanking, Tungpei, and Moslem troops had been mobilized in southern Kansu to stop their march, but they managed to break through all these blockades, and in the process annexed hundreds of horses from the Moslem cavalry which people had confidently predicted would finish them once and for all. Footsore, weary, and at the limit of human endurance, they finally entered northern Shensi, just below the Great Wall. On October 20, 1935, a year after its departure from Kiangsi, the vanguard of the First Front Army connected with the Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-seventh Red armies, which had already established a small base of soviet power in Shensi in 1933. Numbering fewer than 20,000 survivors now, they sat down to realize the significance of their achievement.
²

The statistical recapitulation
^*
of the Long March is impressive. It shows that there was an average of almost a skirmish a day, somewhere on the line, while altogether fifteen whole days were devoted to major pitched battles. Out of a total of 368 days en route, 235 were consumed in marches by day, and 18 in marches by night. Of the 100 days of halts—many
of which were devoted to skirmishes—56 days were spent in northwestern Szechuan, leaving only 44 days of rest over a distance of about 5,000 miles, or an average of one halt for every 114 miles of marching. The mean daily stage covered was 71
li,
or nearly 24 miles—a phenomenal pace for a great army and its transport to
average
over some of the most hazardous terrain on earth.

According to data furnished to me by Commander Tso Ch'uan, the Reds crossed eighteen mountain ranges, five of which were perennially snow-capped, and they crossed twenty-four rivers. They passed through twelve different provinces, occupied sixty-two cities and towns, and broke through enveloping armies of ten different provincial warlords, besides defeating, eluding, or outmaneuvering the various forces of Central Government troops sent against them. They crossed six different aboriginal districts, and penetrated areas through which no Chinese army had gone for scores of years.

However one might feel about the Reds and what they represented politically (and there was plenty of room for argument), it was impossible to deny recognition of their Long March—the Ch'ang Cheng, as they called it—as one of the great exploits of military history. In Asia only the Mongols had surpassed it, and in the past three centuries there had been no similar armed
migration of a nation
with the exception, perhaps, of the amazing Flight of the Torgut, of which Sven Hedin told in his
Jehol, City of Emperors.
Hannibal's march over the Alps looked like a holiday excursion beside it. A more interesting comparison was Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, when the Grand Army was utterly broken and demoralized.

While the Red Army's March to the Northwest was unquestionably a strategic retreat, forced upon it by regionally decisive defeats, the army finally reached its objective with its nucleus still intact, and its morale and political will evidently as strong as ever. The Communists rationalized, and apparently believed, that they were advancing toward an anti-Japanese front, and this was a psychological factor of great importance. It helped them turn what might have been a demoralized retreat into a spirited march of victory. History has subsequently shown that they were right in emphasizing what was undoubtedly the second fundamental reason for their migration: an advance to a region which they correctly foresaw was to play a determining role in the immediate destinies of China, Japan, and Soviet Russia. This skillful propagandive maneuver must be noted as a piece of brilliant political strategy. It was to a large extent responsible for the successful conclusion of the heroic trek.

In one sense this mass migration was the biggest armed propaganda
tour in history. The Reds passed through provinces populated by more than 200,000,000 people. Between battles and skirmishes, in every town occupied, they called mass meetings, gave theatrical performances, heavily “taxed” the rich, freed many “slaves” (some of whom joined the Red Army), preached “liberty, equality, democracy,” confiscated the property of the “traitors” (officials, big landlords, and tax collectors) and distributed their goods among the poor. Millions of the poor had now seen the Red Army and heard it speak, and were no longer afraid of it. The Reds explained the aims of agrarian revolution and their anti-Japanese policy. They armed thousands of peasants and left cadres behind to train Red partisans who kept Nanking's troops busy. Many thous-sands dropped out on the long and heartbreaking march, but thousands of others—farmers, apprentices, slaves, deserters from the Kuomintang ranks, workers, all the disinherited—joined in and filled the ranks.

Some day someone will write the full epic of this exciting expedition. Meanwhile, as epilogue, I offer a free translation of a classical poem about this 6,000-mile excursion written by Chairman Mao Tse-tung—a rebel who could write verse as well as lead a crusade:

The Red Army
,
never fearing the challenging Long March,
Looked lightly on the many peaks and rivers.
Wu Liang's Range rose, lowered, rippled,
And green-tiered were the rounded steps of Wu Meng.
Warm-beating the Gold Sand River's waves against the rocks,
And cold the iron-chain spans of Tatu's bridge.
A thousand joyous
li
of freshening snow on Min Shan,
And then, the last pass vanquished, Three Armies smiled!
³

While the Communists in Kiangsi, Fukien, and Hunan from 1927 onward gradually built bases for their opposition to Nanking, Red armies appeared in other widely scattered parts of China. Of these the biggest single area was the Honan-Anhui-Hupeh Soviet, which covered a good part of those three rich provinces of the Central Yangtze Valley, and embraced a population of more than 2,000,000 people. The Red Army there began under the command of Hsu Hai-tung, and later on, to lead it came Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien, a graduate of the first class of Whampoa Academy, a former colonel in the Kuomintang Army, and a veteran of the Canton Commune.

Far in the mountains to the northwest of them, another Whampoa cadet, Liu Chih-tan, was laying the foundations for the soviet areas in Shensi, Kansu, and Ninghsia. Liu was a modern Robin Hood, with the mountaineer's hatred of rich men; among the poor he was becoming a name of promise, and among landlords and moneylenders the scourge of the gods.

This chaotic warrior was born in the hill-cradled town of Pao An, north Shensi, the son of a landlord family. He went to high school in Yulin, which stood under the shadow of the Great Wall and was the seat of Shensi's prosperous trade with the caravans of Mongolia. Leaving Yulin, Liu Chih-tan secured an appointment to the Whampoa Academy in Canton, completed his course there in 1926, and became a Communist and a young officer in the Kuomintang. With the Nationalist Expedition
as far as Hankow, he was there when the split occurred in the Kuomin-tang-Communist alliance.

In 1927, following the Nanking
coup d'état,
he fled from the “purgation” and worked secretly for the Communist Party in Shanghai. Returning to his native province in 1928, he re-established connections with some of his former comrades, then in the Kuominchun, the “People's Army,” of General Feng Yu-hsiang. Next year he led a peasant uprising in south Shensi. Although Liu's uprising was sanguinarily suppressed, out of it grew the nucleus of the first guerrilla bands of Shensi.

Liu Chih-tan's career from 1929 to 1932 was a kaleidoscope of defeats, failures, discouragements, escapades, adventure, and remarkable escapes from death, interspersed with periods of respectability as a reinstated officer. Several small armies under him were completely destroyed. Once he was made head of the
min-t'uan
at Pao An, and he used his office to arrest and execute several landlords and moneylenders—strange behavior for a
min-t'uan
leader. The magistrate of Pao An was dismissed, and Liu fled, with but three followers, to a neighboring
hsien.
There one of General Feng Yu-hsiang's officers invited them to a banquet, in the midst of which Liu and his friends disarmed their hosts, seized twenty guns, and made off to the hills, where they soon collected a following of about 300 men.

This little army was surrounded, however, and Liu sued for peace. His offer was accepted, and he became a colonel in the Kuomintang Army, with a garrison post in west Shensi. Again he began an antilandlord movement and again he was outlawed, this time arrested. Owing chiefly to his influence in the Shensi Ke Lao Hui, he was pardoned once more, but his troops were reorganized into a transportation brigade, of which he was made commander. And then for the third time Liu Chih-tan repeated the error of his ways. Some landlords in his district, long accustomed to tax exemption (a more or less “hereditary right” of landlords in Shensi), refused to pay taxes. Liu promptly arrested a number of them, with the result that the gentry rose up in arms and demanded that Sian remove and punish him. His troops were surrounded and disarmed.

Finally he was driven back to Pao An with a price on his head—but followed by many young Communist officers and men from his own brigade. Here at last he set about organizing an independent army under a Red flag in 1931, took possession of Pao An and Chung Yang counties, and rapidly pushed operations in north Shensi. Government troops sent against him very often turned over to the Reds in battle; deserters even drifted across the Yellow River from Shansi to join this outlaw whose daredeviltry, courage, and impetuousness soon won him fame throughout
the Northwest and created the usual legend that he was “invulnerable to bullets.”

Killings of officials, tax collectors, and landlords became widespread. Unleashing long-hushed fury, the armed peasants raided, plundered, carried off captives, whom they held for ransom in their fortified areas, and conducted themselves much like ordinary bandits. By 1932 Liu Chih-tan's followers had occupied eleven counties in the loess hills of northern Shensi, and the Communist Party had organized a political department at Yulin to direct Liu's troops. Early in 1933 the first Shensi Soviet and a regular administration were established, and a program was attempted similar to that in Kiangsi.

In 1934 and 1935 these Shensi Reds expanded considerably, improved their armies, and somewhat stabilized conditions in their districts. A Shensi Provincial Soviet Government was set up, a Party training school established, and military headquarters were located at An Ting. The soviets opened their own bank and post office and began to issue crude money and stamps. In the completely sovietized areas a soviet economy was begun, landlords' land was confiscated and redistributed, all surtaxes were abolished, cooperatives were opened, and a call was sent out by the Party to enlist members to volunteer as teachers for primary schools.

Meanwhile Liu Chih-tan moved well south of the Red base toward the capital. He occupied Lintung, just outside Sianfu, and besieged the city for some days, without success. A column of Reds pushed down to southern Shensi and established soviets in several counties there. They had some bad defeats and reverses in battles with General Yang Hu-ch'eng (later to become the Reds' ally), and they won some victories. As discipline increased in the army, and bandit elements were eliminated, support for the Reds deepened among the peasantry. By the middle of 1935 the soviets controlled twenty-two counties in Shensi and Kansu. The Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Red armies, with a total of over 5,000 men, were now under Liu Chih-tan's command, and could establish contact by radio with the main forces of the Red Army in the South and in the West. As the southern Reds began to withdraw from their Kiangsi-Fukien base, these hill men of Shensi greatly strengthened themselves, until in 1935 Chiang Kai-shek was forced to send his vice-commander-in-chief, Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, to lead a big army against them.

Late in 1934 the Twenty-fifth Red Army, under Hsu Hai-tung, left Honan with some 8,000 men. By October it had reached south Shensi and connected with about 1,000 Red partisans in that area who had been armed by Liu Chih-tan. Hsu encamped for the winter there, helped the partisans to build a regular army, fought several successful battles against
General Yang Hu-ch'eng's troops, and armed peasants in five counties of south Shensi. A provisional soviet government was established, with Cheng Wei-shan, a twenty-three-year-old member of the Central Committee of Shensi province, as chairman, and Li Lung-kuei and Cheng Shan-jui as commanders of two independent Red brigades. Leaving them to defend this area, Hsu Hai-tung then moved into Kansu with his Twenty-fifth Army, and fought his way into the soviet districts through thousands of government troops, capturing five county seats en route and disarming two regiments of Mohammedan troops under General Ma Hung-ping.

On July 25, 1935, the Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-seventh armies united near Yung Ch'ang, north Shensi. Their troops were reorganized into the Fifteenth Red Army Corps, with Hsu Hai-tung as commander and Liu Chih-tan as vice-commander and chairman of the Shensi-Kansu-Shansi Revolutionary Military Committee.
^*
In August, 1935, this army corps met and defeated two divisions of Tungpei (Man-churian) troops, under General Wang Yi-che. New recruits were added and much-needed guns and ammunition.

And now a curious thing occurred.
²
In August there came to north Shensi a delegate of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a stout young gentleman named Chang Ching-fu (Chang Mu-t'ao?). According to my informant, who was then a staff officer under Liu Chih-tan, this Mr. Chang (nicknamed Chang the Corpulent) was empowered to “reorganize” the Party and the army. He was a kind of superinspector.