Red Star over China (34 page)

“Another source of income is from voluntary contributions of the people. Revolutionary patriotic feeling runs very high where war is on and the people realize that they may lose their soviets. They make big voluntary contributions of food, money, and clothing to the Red Army. We derive some income also from state trade, from Red Army lands, from our own industries, from the cooperatives, and from bank loans. But of course our biggest revenue is from confiscations.”

“By confiscation,” I interrupted, “you mean what is commonly described as loot?”

Lin laughed shortly. “The Kuomintang calls it loot. Well, if taxation of the exploiters of the masses is loot, so is the Kuomintang's taxation of the masses. But the Red Army does no looting in the sense that White armies loot. Confiscations are made only by authorized persons, under the direction of the Finance Commission. Every item must be reported by inventory to the government, and is utilized only for the general benefit of society. Private looting is heavily punished. Just ask the people if Red soldiers take anything without paying for it.”

“Well, you are quite right. The answer to that naturally would depend on whether you asked a landlord or a peasant.”

“If we did not have to conduct incessant war,” Lin continued, “we could easily build a self-supporting economy here. Our budget is carefully made, and every possible economy is practiced. Because every soviet official is also a patriot and a revolutionary, we demand no wages, and we can exist on but little food. It will probably surprise you to know how small our budget is. For this whole area
^*
our present expenditure is only about $320,000 per month. This represents goods value as well as money value. Of this sum, from 40 to 50 per cent comes from confiscations, and 15 or 20 per cent comes from voluntary contributions, including cash raised by the Party among our supporters in the White districts.
^†
The rest of our revenue is derived from trade, economic construction, Red Army lands, and bank loans to the government.”

The Reds claimed to have devised a squeeze-proof machinery of budgeting, of receipts and disbursements. I read part of Lin Tsu-han's
Outline for Budget Compilation,
which gave a detailed description of the system and all its safeguards. Its integrity seemed to be based primarily on collective control of receipts and disbursements. From the highest organ down to the village, the treasurer was accountable, for both payments and collections, to a supervising committee, so that juggling of figures for individual profit was extremely difficult. Commissioner Lin was very proud of his system, and asserted that under it any kind of squeeze was effectively impossible. It may have been true. Anyway, it was obvious that in the Red districts the real problem as yet was not one of squeeze, in the traditional sense, but of squeezing through. Despite Lin's cheerful optimism, this was what I wrote in my diary after that interview:

“Whatever Lin's figures may mean exactly, it is simply a Chinese miracle, when one remembers that partisans have been fighting back and
forth across this territory for five years, that the economy maintains itself at all, that there is no famine, and that the peasants on the whole seem to accept soviet currency, with faith in it. In fact this cannot be explained in terms of finance alone, but is only understandable on a social and political basis.

“Nevertheless, it is perfectly clear that the situation is extremely grave, even for an organization that exists on such shoestrings as the Reds feed upon, and one of three changes must shortly occur in soviet economy: (1) some form of machine industrialization, to supply the market with needed manufactures; (2) the establishment of a good connection with some modern economic base in the outside world, or the capture of some economic base on a higher level than the present one (Sian or Lanchow, for example); or (3) the actual coalescence of such a base, now under White control, with the Red districts.”

The Reds did not share my pessimism. “A way out is sure to be found.” And in a few months it was. The “way out” appeared in the form of an “actual coalescence.”

Lin didn't seem to be “getting ahead” financially very fast himself, by the way. His “allowance” as Commissioner of Finance was five dollars a month—Red money.

I called him “Old Hsu” because that was what everyone in the soviet districts called him—Lao Hsu, the Educator—for, although sixty-one was only just an average age for most high government officials elsewhere in the Orient, in Red China he seemed a sort of hoary grandfather by contrast with others. Yet he was no specimen of decrepitude. Like his sexagenarian crony, Hsieh Chu-tsai (and you could often see this pair of white-haired bandits walking along arm-in-arm like middle-school lads), he had an erect and vigorous step, bright and merry eyes, and a pair of muscular legs that had carried him across the greatest rivers and mountain ranges of China on the Long March.

Hsu Teh-li had been a highly respected professor until at the age of fifty he amazingly gave up his home, four children, and the presidency of a normal school in Changsha to stake his future with the Communists. Born in 1877 near Changsha, not far from P'eng Teh-huai's birthplace, he was the fourth son in a poor peasant family. By various sacrifices his parents gave him six years of schooling, at the end of which he became a schoolteacher under the Manchu regime. There he remained till he was twenty-nine, when he entered the Changsha Normal College, graduated, and became an instructor in mathematics—a discipline in which he was self-taught.

Mao Tse-tung was one of his students in the normal school (Hsu said he was terrible in math), and so were many youths who later became Reds. Hsu himself had a role in politics long before Mao knew a republican from a monarchist. He still bore that mark of combat from feudal politics in days of the empire, when he cut off the tip of his little finger to
demonstrate his sincerity in begging by petition that a parliament be granted the people. After the first revolution, when for a while Hunan had a provincial parliament, Old Hsu was a member of it.

He accompanied the Hunanese delegation of “worker-students” to France after the war, and he studied a year at Lyons, where he paid his way by odd-time work in a metal factory. Later he was a student for three years at the University of Paris, earning his tuition then by tutoring Chinese students in mathematics. Returning to Hunan in 1923, he helped establish two modern normal schools in the capital, and for four years enjoyed some prosperity. Not till 1927 did he become a Communist and an outcast from bourgeois society.

During the Nationalist Revolution, Hsu T'eh-li was active in the provincial Kuomintang, but he sympathized with the Communists. He openly preached Marxism to his students. When the “purgation” period began he was a marked man; he had to do the disappearing act, and, having no connection with the Communist Party, he had to find a haven on his own. “I had wanted to be a Communist,” he told me rather wistfully, “but nobody ever asked me to join. I was already fifty, and I concluded that the Communists considered me too old.” But one day a Communist sought out Hsu in his hiding place and asked him to enter the Party. He told me he wept then to think that he was still of some use in building a new world.

The Party sent him to Russia, where he studied for two years. On his return he ran the blockade to Kiangsi; soon afterwards he became assistant commissioner of education, under Ch'u Ch'iu-pai, and after Ch'u was killed, the Executive Committee appointed Hsu in his place. Since then he had been Lao Hsu, the Educator. And surely his varied experience—life and teaching under monarchist, capitalist, and Communist forms of society—seemed to qualify him for the tasks that faced him. He certainly needed all that experience, and more, for those tasks were so great that any Western educator would have despaired. But Old Hsu was too young to be discouraged.

One day when we were talking he began humorously to enumerate some of his difficulties. “As nearly as we can estimate,” he asserted, “virtually nobody but a few landlords, officials, and merchants could read in the Northwest before we arrived. The illiteracy seemed to be about 95 per cent. This is culturally one of the darkest places on earth. Do you know the people in north Shensi and Kansu believe that water is harmful to them? The average man here has a bath all over only twice in his life—once when he is born, the second time when he is married. They hate to wash their feet, hands, or faces, or cut their nails or their hair. There are more pigtails left in this part of China than anywhere else.

“But all this and many other prejudices are due to ignorance, and it's my job to change their mentality. Such a population, compared with Kiangsi, is very backward indeed. There the illiteracy was about 90 per cent, but the cultural level was very much higher, we had better material conditions to work in, and many more trained teachers. In our model
hsien,
Hsing Ko, we had over three hundred primary schools and about eight hundred schoolteachers—which is as many as we have of both in all the Red districts here. When we withdrew from Hsing Ko, illiteracy had been reduced to less than 20 per cent of the population.

“Here the work is very much slower. We have to start everything from the beginning. Our material resources are very limited. Even our printing machinery has been destroyed, and now we have to print everything by mimeograph and stone-block lithograph. The blockade prevents us from importing enough paper. We have begun to make paper of our own, but the quality is terrible. But never mind these difficulties. We have already been able to accomplish something. If we are given time we can do things here that will astonish the rest of China. We are training scores of teachers from the masses now, and the Party is training others. Many of them will become voluntary teachers for the mass-education schools. Our results show that the peasants here are eager to learn when given the chance.

“And they are not stupid. They learn very quickly, and they change their habits when they are given good reasons for doing so. In the older soviet districts here you won't see any girl children with bound feet and you will see many young women with bobbed hair. The men are gradually cutting off their queues now and a lot of them are learning to read and write from the Young Communists and the Vanguards.”

Hsu explained that under the emergency soviet educational system there were three sections: institutional, military, and social. The first was run more or less by the soviets, the second by the Red Army, the third by Communist organizations. Emphasis in all of them was primarily political—even the smallest children learned their first characters in the shape of simple revolutionary slogans, and then worked forward into stories of conflict between the Reds and the Kuomintang, landlords and peasants, capitalists and workers, and so on, with plenty of heroics about the Young Communists and the Red Army, and promises of an earthly paradise in the soviet future.

Under institutional education the Reds already claimed to have established about two hundred primary schools, and they had one normal school for primary teachers, one agricultural school, a textile school, a trade-union school of five grades, and a Party school with some four hundred students. Courses in all the technical schools lasted only about six months.

Greatest emphasis naturally was on military education, and here much had been achieved in two years, despite all the handicaps of the beleaguered little state. There were the Red Army University, the cavalry and infantry schools, and two Party training schools, already described. There was a radio school, and a medical school, which was really for training nurses. There was an engineering school, where students received the rudimentary training of apprentices. Like the whole soviet organization itself, everything was very provisional and designed primarily as a kind of rear-line activity to strengthen the Red Army and provide it with new cadres. Many of the teachers were not even middle-school graduates. What was interesting was the collective use of whatever knowledge they had. These schools were really Communist, not only in ideology but in the utilization of every scrap of technical experience they could mobilize, to “raise the cultural level.”

Even in social education the soviet aims were primarily political. There was no time or occasion to be teaching farmers literature or flower arrangement. The Reds were practical people. To the Lenin clubs, the Communist Youth leagues, the Partisans, and the village soviets they sent simple, crudely illustrated
Shih-tzu
(“Know Characters”) texts, and helped mass organizations form self-study groups of their own, with some Communist or literate among them as a leader. When the youths, or sometimes even aged peasants, began droning off the short sentences, they found themselves absorbing ideas along with their ideographs. Thus, entering one of these little “social education centers” in the mountains, you might hear these people catechizing themselves aloud:

“What is this?”

“This is the Red Flag.”

“What is this?”

“This is a poor man.”

“What is the Red Flag?”

“The Red Flag is the flag of the Red Army.”

“What is the Red Army?”

“The Red Army is the army of the poor men!”

And so on, right up to the point where, if he knew the whole five or six hundred characters before anyone else, the youth could collect the red tassel or pencil or whatever was promised. When farmers and farmers' sons and daughters finished the book they could not only read for the first time in their lives, but they knew who had taught them, and why. They had grasped the basic fighting ideas of Chinese communism.

In an effort to find a quicker medium for bringing literacy to the masses, the Communists had begun a limited use of Latinized Chinese. They had worked out an alphabet of twenty-eight letters by which they
claimed to be able to reproduce nearly all Chinese phonetics, and had written and published a little pocket dictionary with the commonest phrases of Chinese rendered into polysyllabic, easily readable words. Part of the paper
Hung Ssu Chung Hua (Red China)
was published in
Latin-hua
and Old Hsu was experimenting with it on a class of youngsters he had picked up in Pao An. He believed that the complicated Chinese characters would eventually have to be abandoned in education on a mass scale, and he had many arguments in favor of his system, on which he had been working for years.