Red Star over China (66 page)

Our statistics were lost during the Long March, but my report before the Second All-Soviet Congress
^*
contained a full account of the progress made in education, both through the people's mass-education movement, and through the regular school system maintained by the soviets. …

In Shensi and Kansu there has also been established a Society for the Liquidation of Illiteracy. The cultural level here was formerly much lower than in Kiangsi, and great tasks of education still face us today. … In order to hasten the liquidation of illiteracy here we have begun experimenting with
Hsin-Wen-Tzu
—Latinized Chinese.
It is now used in our Party school, in the Red Academy, in the Red Army, and in a special section of the
Red China Daily News. We believe Latinization is a good instrument with which to overcome illiteracy. Chinese characters are so difficult to learn that even the best system of rudimentary characters, or simplified teaching, does not equip the people with a really efficient and rich vocabulary.
Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon the Chinese character altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate.
We are now widely using Latinization, and if we stay here for three years the problem of illiteracy will have been largely overcome. …

Following are excerpts from 1939 interviews never fully published outside China, where they appeared in the
China Weekly Review,
Shanghai, January 13 and 20,1940. (Italics added.)

Yenan, September
25,1939

“We Are Never Reformists”

S
NOW
: Because the Communist Party of China has abandoned propaganda emphasizing class struggle, abolished its soviets, submitted to leadership of the Kuomintang and the Kuomintang Government, adopted the
San Min Chu I
[Dr. Sun Yat-sen's
Three Principles of the People],
ceased confiscating the property of landlords and capitalists, and stopped (overt)
organizational work and propaganda in Kuomintang areas, many people now assert that Chinese Communists are in fact no longer social revolutionaries but mere reformists—bourgeois in methods and in aims. How do you answer such claims?

M
AO
:
We are always social revolutionaries; we are never reformists.
There are two main objectives in the thesis of the Chinese revolution. The first consists of the realization of the tasks of a national democratic revolution. The other is social revolution. The latter must be achieved, and completely achieved. For the present the revolution is national and democratic in the character of its aims,
but after a certain stage it will be transformed into social revolution.
The present “becoming” of the social revolutionary part in the thesis of the Chinese revolution will turn into its “being”—unless our work in the present phase is a failure, in which case there is no early possibility of social revolution.

Preparation for Counterattack

S
NOW
: In what stage, according to your theory of the “Protracted War,” is Chinese resistance at the present time? Has the stage of “stalemate” been reached?

M
AO
: Yes, the war is in a stage of stalemate, but with certain qualifications. Under the condition of a new international situation, and under the condition that Japan's position is becoming more difficult, while China will not seek a reconciliation, the war is in a stage of stalemate … the meaning of which (for us) is preparation for a counterattack.

On the Nazi-Soviet Pact

S
NOW
: I read your comment on the signature of the Soviet-German pact. You seem to think it unlikely that the Soviet Union can be drawn into the European War. … Do you think the U.S.S.R. would remain neutral, as long as it is not attacked, even if Nazi Germany appears to be near victory?

M
AO
: The Soviet Union will not participate in this war, because both sides are imperialists, and it is simply robber war with justice on neither side. Both sides are struggling for the balance of power and rule over the peoples of the world. Both are wrong, and the Soviet Union will not become involved in this kind of war, but will remain neutral. … As for the outcome of the present European war, the Soviet Union cannot be frightened by the threat of the victorious power to herself, whether it is England or Germany. Whenever the Soviet Union is attacked it will have the support of the peoples of various countries, and of the national minorities in colonial and semi-colonial countries. …

On Soviet Economic Cooperation with Hitler

I had submitted a long list of written questions for perusal by Mao in advance. At this point I interpolated a question outside that list, asking why, if Germany was imperialist and no different from Britain and France, the
Soviet Union should participate in Germany's imperialist adventure to the extent of making available to Germany Russia's great reserves of wheat, oil, and other war materials. Why, incidentally, did Russia continue to lease oil lands to Japan in Sakhalin, or to give Japan fishing rights? The latter were of great value in enabling Japan to export large quantities of fish, and thus establish foreign credits with which to buy munitions and carry on a “robber imperialist” war against the “national liberation movement” of “semicolonial China.”

Mao replied that it was an extremely complicated question, and could not be answered until one saw the end of the policy. The conditions under which the Soviet Union was selling oil to Japan were not clear to him. In any case, the Soviet Union was supplying neither Germany nor Japan with any war instruments, and to maintain ordinary trade did not make her a participant in the war.

I asked whether there was any difference, in modern war, between supplying a belligerent with fuel for tanks or airplanes and supplying the tanks and planes themselves. Why was the United States a participant in Japan's imperialist invasion of China because she sold Japan the raw materials of war, but the Soviet Union not a participant in Germany's imperialist war in Europe, nor Japan's war in Asia, when she supplied the same kind of materials to the two combatants?

Mao conceded that the distinction between trade in war materials and trade in war instruments was not great. What mattered, he said, was whether the country in question was really supporting revolutionary wars of liberation. In that judgment there was no question where the U.S.S.R. stood. She had given positive support to revolutionary wars in China, in 1925–27, in Spain, and in China at present.
The Soviet Union would always be on the side of just revolutionary wars
but would not take sides in imperialist war, though she might maintain ordinary trade with all belligerents.

On the Question of Poland

M
AO
: The Nazi invasion of Poland presented the Soviet Union with this problem: whether to permit the whole Polish population to fall victim to Nazi persecution, or whether to liberate the national minorities of Eastern Poland. The Soviet Union chose to follow the second course of action.

In Eastern Poland there is a vast stretch of territory inhabited by 8,000,000 Byelo-Russians and 3,000,000 Ukrainians. This territory was forcibly seized from the young Soviet Socialist Republics as the price of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and fell under the domination of the reactionary Polish Government. Today the Soviet Union, no longer weak and young, takes back its own, and liberates them. …

Pao
An,
July
25, 1936

Mao Praises Fellow Leaders

As a kind of postscript to the end of his account of the Long March, Mao attributed its successful conclusion to the “correct leadership” of the Party and
then singled out eighteen comrades by name. As the remarks seemed somewhat anticlimactic to the main account I did not use them, but today these sentences may be of some historical interest. Attention need hardly be called to the order in which Mao listed the names, to the fact that they included men with whom Mao had but recently struggled and against whom he would struggle again, and to the names omitted.

M
AO
: Another reason for its [the Party's] invincibility lies in the extraordinary ability and courage and loyalty of the human material, the revolutionary cadres. Comrades Chu Teh, Wang Ming, Lo Fu, Chou En-lai, Po Ku, Wang Chia-hsiang, P'eng Teh-huai, Lo Man, Teng Fa, Hsiang Ying, Hsu Hai-tung, Ch'en Yun, Lin Piao, Chang Kuo-t'ao, Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien, Ch'en Chang-hao, Ho Lung, Hsiao K'eh—and many, many excellent comrades who gave their lives for the revolution—all these, working together for a single purpose, have made the Red Army and the soviet movement. And these and others yet to come will lead us to ultimate victory.

In 1960 Mao Tse-tung told the author that there had been about 50,000 Communists at the start of Chiang Kai-shek's counterrevolution. “After the killings” only about 10,000 were left. By 1960 there were about 800 survivors of all the years between. By and large, Mao said, China was being run and for some years would be run by those 800. About one-fourth of the 800 were members or alternate members of the Central Committee.
^*
At the summit several dozen made up the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Party Central Committee. In 1968 most of them still were the men and women introduced in
Red Star Over China.

The data given below is not intended to indicate by its length or inclusion the relative Party rank of the individual listed so much as to help readers trace the subsequent careers of persons introduced in
Red Star.
Those best known under their Party names are here alphabetized accordingly. The figures in parentheses following each name refer to the book page on which the person is first mentioned. Abbreviations used are given on page 441. In some instances additional biographical details supplied to the author at first hand, but not included in the original edition of this book, are taken from
Random Notes on Red China.
Sketches of many of the persons listed have now been published in several biographical dictionaries, notably
Biographical Dictionary of Republican China (BDRC)
(Columbia University Press, N.Y., 1967).

Bluecher, General Vasili
(p. 74), alias Galin, chief Soviet military adviser to the KMT 1925–27. He returned to Russia and was later either executed or died a prisoner in Siberia.

Borodin, Mikhail Markovich
(p. 74), after returning to Russia in 1927,
edited the
Moscow Daily News.
In Stalin's last days of paranoia, Borodin was exiled and died in prison camp. He was posthumously “rehabilitated” under Khrushchev. (See
Part Four
,
Chapter 5
, note 1.)

Braun
, Otto. See Li Teh.

Chang Hsueh-liang
(p. 43) was born in Liaoning, Manchuria, in 1898. Despite an official sentence, followed by an official “pardon,” Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek held Marshal Chang his personal prisoner from 1936 onward. When Chiang fled to Taiwan he took Chang with him. In 1963, Chang was reportedly permitted some very limited “freedom to move” outside his home. To date (1968) Marshal Chang has never been able to tell his version of the Sian Incident. In Taiwan he was reported to have become a leading authority, as a research scholar, on the Ming Dynasty.

Chang Kuo-t'ao
(p. 152) was Mao Tse-tung's most important rival for Party leadership in 1934–36. He was born in Chishui, Kiangsi, in 1897, in a rich landlord family. A student leader while at Peking University (Pei-ching Ta Hsueh), 1916–20, Chang met Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Li Ta-chao
(qq.v.)
there during the period when Mao Tse-tung was also influenced by them toward Marxism. One of the twelve founders of the CCP (July, 1921), Chang at once entered the Party CC as secretary of the Orgburo. He helped set up the railway workers' union of North China and a 1923 strike in which eighty members were executed. After the Party reorganization at the Fifth Congress of the CCP, Chang was elected to the Party PB, again heading the Orgburo.

Chang participated in the Nanchang Uprising (August 1, 1927) and the Canton Commune. In 1928 he attended the Sixth CCP Congress in Moscow and remained in the U.S.S.R. three years. Again in the PB in Shanghai, in 1931, he was sent to lead Communist partisan groups north of the Yangtze River and was elected one of two vice-chairmen of the All-China Soviet Government of which Mao Tse-tung was chairman. Chang's sphere of operational influence lay in partisan bases formed in the Honan-Hupeh-Anhui (Oyuwan) border areas, where he became chief commissar of the Red Army. His top military commander was Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien, and an important subordinate was Hsu Hai-tung
(qq.v.).
Forced to abandon Central China (1932) he moved to the Shensi-Szechuan border areas. In 1934 he was driven by KMT troops into western Szechuan.

Two main columns of Red forces met in June, 1935, in the middle of the Long March. Mao led the southern group, Chang Kuo-t'ao those in retreat from north of the Yangtze. A decisive duel arose between them. Chang and his supporters in the CC refused to recognize Mao's supreme authority as “chairman,” as decided by an enlarged PB-CC meeting at Tsunyi, 1935. Chang opposed Mao's strategic plans to move to Shensi and wished to seek a compromise peace with the KMT. He also insisted that Mao was violating the CMT “line,” that the Tsunyi Conference was illegal, and that a new CC plenum must be called to unseat Mao. According to Chang Kuo-t'ao, Mao had already been thrice reprimanded
by the CC and thrice expelled by it (John E. Rue,
Mao Tse-tung in Opposition,
Stanford, 1966, pp. 8–9). Following events described in
RSOC
, Chang divided the Red Army, keeping his troops (Fourth Front Army) in west Szechuan, and detaining (?) Chu Teh, while Mao led the First Front Army to Shensi. A year later, badly pressed, he was obliged to move north. While crossing the Yellow River his columns were nearly annihilated. Chang and Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien barely managed to reach Yenan, leaving their scattered forces under the command of Li Hsien-nien (
q.v.
).