Red Star over China (5 page)

What were the Chinese Communists like? In what way did they resemble, in what way were they unlike, Communists or Socialists elsewhere? The tourist asked if they wore long beards, made noises with their soup, and carried homemade bombs in their briefcases. The serious-minded wanted to know whether they were “genuine” Marxists. Did they read
Capital
and the works of Lenin? Had they a thoroughly Socialist economic program? Were they Stalinites or Trotskyites? Or neither? Was their movement really an organic part of the World Revolution? Were they true internationalists? “Mere tools of Moscow,” or primarily nationalists struggling for an independent China?

Who were these warriors who had fought so long, so fiercely, so courageously, and—as admitted by observers of every color, and privately among Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's own followers—on the whole so invincibly? What made them fight like that? What held them up? What was the revolutionary basis of their movement? What were the hopes and aims and dreams that had made of them the incredibly stubborn warriors—incredible compared with the history of compromise that is China—who had endured hundreds of battles, blockade, salt shortage, famine, disease, epidemic, and finally the Long March of 6,000 miles, in which
they crossed twelve provinces of China, broke through thousands of Kuomintang troops, and triumphantly emerged at last into a new base in the Northwest?

Who were their leaders? Were they educated men with a fervent belief in an ideal, an ideology, and a doctrine? Social prophets, or mere ignorant peasants blindly fighting for an existence? What kind of man was Mao Tse-tung,
^*
No. 1 “Red bandit” on Nanking's list, for whose capture, dead or alive, Chiang Kai-shek offered a reward of a quarter of a million silver dollars?
^†
What went on inside that highly priced Oriental head? Or was Mao really already dead, as Nanking officially announced? What was Chu Teh‡ like—the commander-in-chief of the Red Army, who life had the same value to Nanking? What about Lin Piao,
^‡
the twenty-eight-year-old Red tactician whose famous First Red Army Corps was said never to have suffered a defeat? Where did he come from? Who were the many other Red leaders repeatedly reported dead, only to reappear in the news—unscathed and commanding new forces against the Kuomintang?

What explained the Red Army's remarkable record of resistance for nine years against vastly superior military combinations? Lacking any industrial base, big cannon, gas, airplanes, money, and the modern techniques which Nanking had utilized in its wars against them, how had these Reds survived, and increased their following? What military tactics did they use? How were they instructed? Who advised them? Were there some Russian military geniuses among them? Who led the outmaneuver-ing, not only of all Kuomintang commanders sent against them but also of Chiang Kai-shek's large and expensive staff of German advisers, headed first by General von Seeckt and later by General von Falkenhausen?

What was a Chinese soviet like? Did the peasants support it? If not, what held it together? To what degree did the Reds carry out “socialism” in districts where they had consolidated their power? Why hadn't the Red Army taken big cities? Did this prove that it wasn't a genuine proletarian-led movement, but fundamentally remained a peasant rebellion? How was it possible to speak of “communism” or “socialism” in China, where over 80 per cent of the population was still agrarian, where industrialism was still in infant garments—if not infantile paralysis?

How did the Reds dress? Eat? Play? Love? Work? What were their marriage laws? Were women “nationalized,” as Kuomintang publicists asserted? What was a Chinese “Red factory”? A Red dramatic society?
How did they organize their economy? What about public health, recreation, education, “Red culture”?

What was the strength of the Red Army? Half a million, as the Comintern publications boasted? If so, why had it not seized power? Where did it get arms and munitions? Was it a disciplined army? What about its morale? Was it true that officers and men lived alike? If, as Generalissimo Chiang announced in 1935, Nanking had “destroyed the menace of Communist banditry,” what explained the fact that in 1937 the Reds occupied a bigger single unified territory (in China's most strategic Northwest) than ever before? If the Reds were finished, why did Japan demand, as the famous Third Point of Koki Hirota (Foreign Minister, 1933–36), that Nanking form an anti-Red pact with Tokyo and Nazi Germany “to prevent the bolshevization of Asia”? Were the Reds really “anti-imperialist”? Did they want war with Japan? Would Moscow support them in such a war? Or were their fierce anti-Japanese slogans only a trick and a desperate attempt to win public sympathy, the last cry of demoralized traitors and bandits, as the eminent Dr. Hu Shih nervously assured his excited students in Peking?

What were the military and political perspectives of the Chinese Communist movement? What was the history of its development? Could it succeed? And just what would such success mean to us? To Japan? What would be the effect of this tremendous mutation upon a fifth (some said a fourth) of the world's inhabitants? What changes would it produce in world politics? In world history? How would it affect the vast British, American, and other foreign investment in China? Indeed, had the Reds any “foreign policy” at all?

Finally, what was the meaning of the Communists' offer to form a “national united front” in China, and stop civil war?

For some time it had seemed ridiculous that not a single non-Communist observer could answer those questions with confidence, accuracy, or facts based on personal investigation. Here was a story, growing in interest and importance every day; here was
the
story of China, as newspaper correspondents admitted to each other between dispatches sent out on trivial side issues. Yet we were all woefully ignorant about it. To get in touch with Communists in the “White” areas was extremely difficult.

Communists, over whose heads hung the sentence of death, did not identify themselves as such in polite—or impolite—society. Even in the foreign concessions, Nanking kept a well-paid espionage system at work. It included, for example, such vigilantes as C. Patrick Givens, former chief Red-chaser in the British police force of Shanghai's International Settlement. Inspector Givens was each year credited with the arrest—and subsequent imprisonment or execution, after extradition from the Settlement
by the Kuomintang authorities—of scores of alleged Communists, the majority of them between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He was only one of many foreign sleuths hired to spy upon young Chinese radicals and hunt them down in their own country.

We all knew that the only way to leam anything about Red China was to go there. We excused ourselves by saying,
“Mei yu fa-tzu”
—“It can't be done.” A few had tried and failed. It was believed impossible. People thought that nobody could enter Red territory and come out alive.

Then, in June, 1936, a close Chinese friend of mine brought me news of an amazing political situation in Northwest China—a situation which was later to culminate in the sensational arrest of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and to change the current of Chinese history. More important to me then, however, I learned with this news of a possible method of entry to Red territory. It necessitated leaving at once. The opportunity was unique and not to be missed. I decided to take it and attempt to break a news blockade nine years old.

It is true there were risks involved, though the reports later published of my death—“killed by bandits”—were exaggerated. But against a torrent of horror stories about Red atrocities that had for many years filled the subsidized vernacular and foreign press of China, I had little to cheer me on my way. Nothing, in truth, but a letter of introduction to Mao Tse-tung, chairman of the Soviet Government.
¹
All I had to do was to find him. Through what adventures? I did not know. But thousands of lives had been sacrificed in these years of Kuomintang-Communist warfare. Could one foreign neck be better hazarded than in an effort to discover why? I found myself somewhat attached to the neck in question, but I concluded that the price was not too high to pay.

In this melodramatic mood I set out.

It was early June and Peking wore the green lace of spring, its thousands of willows and imperial cypresses making the Forbidden City a place of wonder and enchantment, and in many cool gardens it was impossible to believe in the China of breaking toil, starvation, revolution, and foreign invasion that lay beyond the glittering roofs of the palaces. Here well-fed foreigners could live in their own little never-never land of whisky-and-soda, polo, tennis, and gossip, happily quite unaware of the pulse of humanity outside the great city's silent, insulating walls—as indeed many did.

And yet during the past year even the oasis of Peking had been invaded by the atmosphere of struggle that hovered over all China. Threats of Japanese conquest had provoked great demonstrations of the people, especially among the enraged youth. A few months earlier I had stood under the bullet-pitted Tartar Wall and seen ten thousand students gather, defiant of the gendarmes' clubbings, to shout in a mighty chorus: “Resist Japan! Reject the demands of Japanese imperialism for the separation of North China from the South!”

All Peking's defensive masonry could not prevent reverberations of the Chinese Red Army's sensational attempt to march through Shansi to the Great Wall—ostensibly to begin a war against Japan for recovery of the lost territories. This somewhat quixotic expedition had been promptly blocked by eleven divisions of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's crack new army, but that had not prevented patriotic students from courting imprisonment and possible death by massing in the streets and uttering
the forbidden slogans: “Cease civil war! Cooperate with the Communists to resist Japan! Save China!”
^*

One midnight I climbed aboard a dilapidated train, feeling a little ill, but in a state of high excitement. Excitement because before me lay a journey of exploration into a land hundreds of years and hundreds of miles removed from the medieval splendors of the Forbidden City: I was bound for “Red China.” And a little ill because I had taken all the inoculations available. A microbe's-eye view of my bloodstream would have revealed a macabre cavalcade; my arms and legs were shot with smallpox, typhoid, cholera, typhus, and plague germs. All five diseases were prevalent in the Northwest. Moreover, alarming reports had lately told of the spread of bubonic plague in Shensi province, one of the few spots on earth where it was endemic.

My immediate destination was Sianfu—which means “Western Peace.” Sianfu was the capital of Shensi province, it was two tiresome days and nights by train to the southwest of Peking, and it was the western terminus of the Lunghai railway. From there I planned to go northward and enter the soviet districts, which occupied the very heart of Ta Hsi-pei, China's Great Northwest. Lochuan, a town about one hundred fifty miles north of Sianfu, then marked the beginning of Red territory in Shensi. Everything north of it, except strips of territory along the main highways, and some points which will be noted later, was already dyed Red. With Lochuan roughly the southern, and the Great Wall the northern, extremities of Red control in Shensi, both the eastern and western Red frontiers were formed by the Yellow River. Coming down from the fringes of Tibet, the wide, muddy stream flows northward through Kansu and Ninghsia, and above the Great Wall into the province of Suiyuan—Inner Mongolia. Then after many miles of uncertain wandering toward the east it turns southward again, to pierce the Great Wall and form the boundary between the provinces of Shensi and Shansi.

It was within this great bend of China's most treacherous river that the soviets then operated—in northern Shensi, northeastern Kansu, and southeastern Ninghsia. And by a strange sequence of history this region almost corresponded to the original confines of the birthplace of China. Near here the Chinese first formed and unified themselves as a people, thousands of years ago.

In the morning I inspected my traveling companions and found a youth and a handsome old man with a wisp of gray beard sitting opposite me, sipping bitter tea. Presently the youth spoke to me, in formalities at
first, and then inevitably of politics. I discovered that his wife's uncle was a railway official and that he was traveling with a pass. He was on his way back to Szechuan, his native province, which he had left seven years before. But he was not sure that he would be able to visit his home town after all. Bandits were reported to be operating near there.

“You mean Reds?”

“Oh, no, not Reds, although there are Reds in Szechuan, too. No, I mean bandits.”

“But aren't the Reds also bandits?” I asked out of curiosity. “The newspapers always call them Red bandits or Communist bandits.”

“Ah, but you must know that the editors must call them bandits because they are ordered to do so by Nanking,” he explained. “If they called them Communists or revolutionaries that would prove they were Communists themselves.”

“But in Szechuan don't people fear the Reds as much as the bandits?”

“Well, that depends. The rich men fear them, and the landlords, and the officials and tax collectors, yes. But the peasants do not fear them. Sometimes they welcome them.” Then he glanced apprehensively at the old man, who sat listening intently, and yet seeming not to listen. “You see,” he continued, “the peasants are too ignorant to understand that the Reds only want to use them. They think the Reds really mean what they say.”

“But they don't mean it?”

“My father wrote to me that they did abolish usury and opium in the Sungpan [Szechuan], and that they redistributed the land there. So you see they are not exactly bandits. They have principles, all right. But they are wicked men. They kill too many people.”