Red Star over China (69 page)

Even in 1934, when Po Ku and Lo Fu
(gq.v.)
ousted Mao from the PB, and Chou became general commissar of the entire army, he managed to avoid a final break with either Chu Teh or Mao Tse-tung. When, in January, 1935, the turning-point conference at Tsunyi repudiated the Party leadership of Po Ku and Lo Fu, Chou En-lai made a smooth transition into the new supreme military council chaired by Mao Tse-tung. From that time Chou never wavered in his loyalty to Mao's leadership.

After the arrival of the Red Army in the Northwest, Chou increasingly took on the role of chief diplomatist. He negotiated the truce agreement with Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang. That soon led to the Sian Incident, which Chou eventually utilized to extract from Chiang Kai-shek an agreement to end civil war. During the war against Japan, Chou headed Communist delegations accredited to Chiang Kai-shek's government, which moved from Nanking to Hankow and then to Chungking. In 1939 Chou spent six months in Moscow, with Chiang's consent. He returned to Yenan and then went to Chungking to head the Eighth Route (Communist) Army mission there and sit on the Supreme National
Defense Council. His urbane contacts with non-Communist intellectuals and frequent talks with Western diplomats greatly enhanced his own and Yenan's prestige. At the same time Chou also headed the South China Bureau of the Party, which still lacked a legal status.

As KMT-CP relations greatly worsened, Chou returned to Yenan, in 1943, but again was sent to Chungking, in 1944, to negotiate terms of a coalition government. The effort failed, as did peace talks sponsored by General Patrick Hurley, American ambassador, which Chou and Mao attended in Chungking in 1945. At the CCP Seventh Congress in Yenan (1945), where Chou made a lengthy report, he was elected to the PB's five-man secretariat, to a vice-chairmanship, and to the supreme revolutionary military council. He then led the CP's delegation in peace negotiations with the KMT held under General George Marshall's auspices, until all-out civil war was resumed in 1946. Back in Yenan, he worked side by side with Mao, in supreme command. After the fall of Peking, in 1949, Chou set up the apparatus of a new provisional government and became its premier and foreign minister. In 1950 he joined Mao and Stalin in Moscow, to negotiate the thirty-year Sino-Soviet alliance; in 1952 he negotiated the return of Russian concessions in China; and in 1953 he initiated truce talks in Korea.

With the formation of constitutional government under the Chinese People's Republic, Chou became concurrently premier (from 1954) and foreign minister (1954-58). At the Geneva Conference of 1954, Chou won recognition for China's international position. He drew up the Five Principles of Coexistence which, with Indian and Burmese adherence, became the platform of the brief-lived Afro-Asian unity proclaimed at the Bandung Conference of 1955. In the same year he opened up Sino-American ambassadorial talks, which then gave hope of a peaceful settlement of differences. His visits to many Asian countries in 1955 and 1956 further improved China's visage among the ex-colonial peoples. In Europe, Chou's personal intervention (1957) in grave disputes between Moscow and Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, was credited with having restored “solidarity in the Socialist camp led by the Soviet Union”—after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin had introduced a “thaw” in Soviet policies.

Chou relinquished his post of foreign minister to Marshal Ch'en Yi in 1958, but it was Chou who broke the brinkmanship crisis over Taiwan, when he announced China's readiness to resume the suspended Sino-American ambassadorial talks. During the next two years Chou made more moves toward peaceful coexistence by signing treaties of friendship with several neighboring states. Significantly, he failed to settle a boundary dispute with India, over which (1962) a brief war ensued—not unconnected with the breakdown of Sino-Soviet cooperation which became manifest in 1960, and the Kennedy-Khrushchev-Castro confrontation crisis of 1962. Now the pattern of China's diplomacy hardened. As old blocs crumbled, China made strident demands that Communist parties choose
between her and the U.S.S.R. Chou carried out the CC line of independent support of revolutionary wars in many countries, downgrading competitive coexistence and vociferously rejecting all compromise with both American imperialism and Soviet revisionism.

At this writing there is no overt evidence that Chou En-lai ever joined an opposition to Mao's increasingly bitter ideological war with Khrushchev and his heirs in the CPSU. For China, one consequence of the feud was diplomatic immobility, as more and more states and parties opted out of Mao's total irreconcilability with both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. Chou En-lai's two tours of remaining friendly states in Asia and new states in Africa, in 1964 and 1965, climaxed by French recognition of the CPR, marked one apex of China's diplomatic achievement. With intensification of the American-Vietnamese war, coinciding with the GPCR, in 1966, Peking's abrasive Red Guard demonstrations against governments of Socialist as well as non-Socialist states all but ended China's diplomacy for that period—and alienated some of China's most patient friends in the so-called Third World.

After he was confirmed in his position in the Party hierarchy at the eleventh plenary session of the Eighth Congress CC, in August, 1966, Premier Chou's responsibilities, as the center of stable continuity in the CPR, enormously increased. At Red Guard demonstrations he took the salute, standing just below Mao's “closest comrade-in-arms,” Lin Piao. Beyond that, his preoccupation plainly was to hold the administrative machinery together and try to prevent cracks in the Party bureaucratic apparatus from causing disaster. That the trains, planes, engines, workers, farmers, and intellectuals on the whole continued to function, that general civil war had not, at this writing, returned China to its former disunity and quasi-anarchy, redounded to the credit of tireless efforts by Chou. Limitations of GPCR control over the Party apparatus were indicated by the questionable results of the attempts politically to destroy its principal targets, “China's Khrushchev”—meaning President Liu Shao-ch'i, constitutional chief of state—and his CC supporters. It may have been indicative of a coming change in the climate of opinion in China that it was Chou En-lai (often called “the man in the middle”) who in August, 1967, after a mob sacked and burned the British Embassy and assaulted its charge, reportedly ordered the Red Guards to “go home and stay there.”

By 1968, in any case, it still seemed true that no man in China, apart from Mao, held such widespread respect among Party and non-Party people alike, as Chou. It also seemed clear that he would never replace Mao while Mao remained competent. In a China without Mao, however, many foresaw Chou as the pivotal personality in any new leadership of collective responsibility—waiting for a new Mao to arise.

Chou En-lai, Mme.
See Teng Ying-ch'ao.

Chu Teh
(p. 37) was born in Hung, Szechuan, on December 18, 1886, in a family which had emigrated from Kwantung. He was one of thirteen children. He became the commander-in-chief of the Red Army at its
inception in Chingkangshan in 1927, and remained so until after establishment of the PRC (1949).

Chu Teh's extraordinarily adventurous and vigorous life, as told by him to Agnes Smedley (see
The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh,
N.Y., 1956), is a document of rich sociological and historical importance. In 1936, however, practically no accurate information had been published about Chu Teh. The author's notes were gathered from comrades who had fought side by side with Chu Teh for years. It was characteristic of Communist relationships that their knowledge of his personal life was vague or hearsay. For example, the author was told that Chu Teh came from a “family of rich landlords.” In reality his father was an impoverished peasant; at the age of nine Chu Teh was adopted by a prosperous uncle, who helped educate him.

Chu Teh joined the CCP in 1922, in Berlin, through the influence of Chou En-lai. From 1927 onward he was always found beside Mao Tse-tung, as Mao's “third arm,” except for one year when Chu Teh was detained—“by force,” Chu Teh told Miss Smedley—by Chang Kuo-t'ao in western China. It is difficult to imagine Mao's rise and success in the special pattern of peasant-based revolution which he developed without the unvarying loyalty and self-effacing support of Chu Teh.

From 1950 to 1956 Chu Teh was vice-chairman of the CPG of the CPR. In 1956 he became chairman of the NPC. He was for many years the top-ranking marshal in the Communist armed forces. Until 1966 he was a member of the PB standing committee, which consisted of the vice-chairmen and Mao.

Chu Teh was a plain-living man of astonishing physical endurance; at eighty he still played basketball, his favorite sport, which he learned at a Y.M.C.A. in Szechuan and popularized in the army. At the eleventh session of the Eighth Congress CC, Chu Teh was dropped from the PB standing committee although he remained in the PB. During the GPCR he was attacked by schoolboy Red Guards, together with Marshal Ho Lung, his lifelong comrade-in-arms. However, in the October, 1967, anniversary celebrations, Chu Teh appeared beside Mao on the rostrum and was officially listed as a PB member only one step below the level of the standing committee. See Smedley,
The Great Road,
and
BDRC.

Ch'u Ch'iu-pai
(p. 158), second general secretary of the CCP, was born in a bankrupt Kiangsu gentry family in 1889 and was executed on Chiang Kai-shek's order in 1935. His brief political leadership seemed, according to his own “final testament,” a comic error, a “historical misunderstanding”; he considered himself pre-eminently a literary figure, by temperament unsuited to politics.

Ch'u's father abandoned his wife and six children. Ch'u's mother was educated: she taught Ch'iu-pai to write poetry. As a primary school teacher he helped keep the family from starving. When he was seventeen his mother committed suicide. In 1916 Ch'u tried to enroll in Peking National University but could not pay the tuition. He then entered a tuition-free Rus
sian-language school (1916-19) and there also began to learn the politics of revolution. In 1920 he reached Russia as a correspondent for the Peking
Ch'en Pao.
His reports of life in Soviet Russia were collected and became widely read books. In 1922 he joined the CCP branch in Moscow, and entered the CMT's Sun Yat-sen (Eastern Toilers') University as a student and teacher. When Ch'en Tu-hsiu attended the Fourth Congress of the CMT he “discovered” Ch'u and made him his secretary-interpreter. Ch'en brought Ch'u back to China, where he became, at Canton, a member of both the CC of the CCP (1923) and the CEC of the KMT (1924). In 1925 he taught at the Communist-sponsored Shanghai University and participated in the May 30th Incident.

In 1927 Ch'u joined the opposition group which held Ch'en Tu-hsiu responsible for the collapse of the CP-KMT united front. In accordance with new directives from Moscow, surviving CCP leaders in the central China area called an emergency conference (August 7, 1927) after the Nanchang Uprising, which denounced Ch'en Tu-hsiu and elected Ch'u Ch'iu-pai general secretary. Dominated by Lominadze (Stalin's representative), the new leadership called for the Canton Uprising, which swiftly ended in disaster.

In the summer of 1928 Ch'u reappeared in Moscow, and made his report before the Sixth Congress, CCP. Held responsible for “left opportunism,” he was replaced as general secretary by Hsiang Chung-fa (q.v.) He remained in Moscow, wrote polemical articles, and briefly visited CP meetings in Paris and Berlin. He also devised a system of transliterating Chinese into Cyrillic script, which was later adopted by the Russians.

Pavel Mif is said to have secured Ch'u's removal from membership in the CEC of the CMT and the CC after Ch'u joined Chang Kuo-t'ao in a “united front” against Mif's domination. He returned to China late in 1930. For several years Ch'u was an effective leader of the underground League of Left Writers. He wrote extensively, using pseudonyms, and was a protege of Lu Hsun, who was able to give him some sanctuary in the Shanghai French Concession. He translated numerous Russian works and advocated writing which “served the people.” In 1931 Ch'u was rehabilitated in the Party and was elected commissioner of education at the first All-China Soviet Congress, but he was unable to leave Shanghai. (His post was meanwhile filled by Hsu T'eh-li.) In January, 1934, he entered the Kiangsi soviet areas, and there became minister (commissar) of education and art in the Soviet Government of which Mao Tse-tung was chairman.

When the Long March began, Ch'u was ill and remained behind. While attempting to reach Shanghai he was intercepted by Nationalist forces, early in 1935. He was executed in June. Twenty years later his remains were buried in the Peking Cemetery of Revolutionary Heroes. He was regarded as a martyr-hero of the Party. A four-volume collection of his literary works was published in Peking, but not his political writings or his
To-yu-teh Hua (Superfluous Words)
which he wrote as a “last
testament” while in prison. For a detailed commentary, see T. A. Hsia, “Ch'u Ch'iu-pai's Autobiographical Writings,”
China Quarterly
(London, Jan.-March, 1966). In 1967 Red Guard attacks classified Ch'u as a “renegade” and in 1968 the official press vilified him as a bourgeois influence.

Fang Chih-min
(p. 161) was a leader of the Kiangsi provincial CP and organizer of peasant partisan warfare before his capture and execution in 1935. In 1927 he was Kiangsi secretary of both the KMT and the CP. He supported Mao's “peasant line” (rejected by Ch'en Tu-hsiu and the CC in 1927) and led the first peasant detachments in the Kiangsi Autumn Harvest Uprisings. He joined Mao and Chu Teh at Chingkangshang and later he supported Mao's program at the important Ku-t'ien Conference (1930), where Mao laid down basic laws for the development of the Red Army, including great emphasis on local Red Guards. He continued to adhere closely to Mao's views throughout the pre-Long March period. Left behind with the rear guard (see Ch'en Yi, Su Yu, etc.), he was captured by KMT troops. After being paraded through the countryside in a bamboo cage, he was beheaded in 1935.