Red Star over China (Edgar Snow)

Red Star over China
Author	Edgar Snow
Written in	1938
Type	Book
Source	Anna's Archive

Introduction by Dr. John K. Fairbank

Red Star Over China is a classic because of the way in which it was produced. Edgar Snow was just thirty and had spent seven years in China as a journalist. In 1936 the Chinese Communists had just completed their successful escape from Southeast China to the Northwest, and were embarking upon their united-front tactic. They were ready to tell their story to the outside world. Snow had the capacity to report it. Readers of the book today should be aware of this combination of factors.

Edgar Snow was born in Kansas City in 1905, his forebears having moved westward by degrees from North Carolina to Kentucky and then into Kansas territory. In 1928 he started around the world. He reached Shanghai, became a journalist, and did not leave the Far East for thirteen years. Before he made his trip to report the Chinese Communists, he had toured through famine districts in the Northwest, traversed the route of the Burma Road ten years before it was operating, reported the undeclared war at Shanghai in 1932, and become a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post. He had become a friend of Mme. Sun and had met numerous Chinese intellectuals and writers. Settling in Peking in 1932, he and his wife lived near Yenching University, one of the leading Christian colleges which had been built up under American missionary auspices. As energetic and wide-awake young Americans, the Snows had become widely acquainted with the Chinese student movement against Japanese aggression in late 1935. They had studied Chinese and developed a modest fluency in speaking. In addition to publishing his account of the Japanese aggression, Far Eastern Front, Edgar Snow had also edited a collection of translations of modern Chinese short stories, Living China.

Thus in the period when the Japanese expansion over Manchuria and into North China dominated the headlines, this young American had not only reported the events of the day but had got behind them into some contact with the minds and feelings of Chinese patriotic youth. He had proved himself a young man of broad human sympathy, aware of the revolutionary stirrings among China’s intellectuals, and able to meet them with some elementary use of the Chinese language. More than this, Ed Snow was an activist, ready to encourage worthy causes rather than be a purely passive spectator. Most of all, he had proved himself a zealous factual reporter, able to appraise the major trends of the day and describe them in vivid color for the American reading public.

In 1936 he stood on the western frontier of the American expansion across the Pacific toward Asia, which had reached its height after a full century of American commercial, diplomatic, and missionary effort. This century had produced an increasing American contact with the treaty ports, where foreigners still retained their special privileges. Missionaries had pushed into the rural interior among China’s myriad villages and had inspired and aided the first efforts at modernization. In the early 1930’s American foundations and missionaries both were active in the movement for "rural reconstruction,” the remaking of village life through the application of scientific technology to the problems of the land. At the same time, Chinese students trained in the United States and other Western countries stood in the forefront of those modern patriots who were becoming increasingly determined to resist Japanese aggression at all costs. Western-type nationalism thus joined Western technology as a modern force in the Chinese scene, and both had been stimulated by the American contact.

Despite all these developments, however, the grievous problems of China’s peasant villages had only begun to be attacked under the aegis of the new Nationalist Government at Nanking. Harassed by Japanese aggression, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang were absorbed in a defense effort which centered in the coastal treaty ports and lower Yangtze provinces, with little thought or motive for revolutionary change in the rural countryside. Meanwhile, in 1936, the Chinese Communists were known generally as "Red bandits,” and no Western observer had had direct contact with their leadership or reported it to the outside world. With the hindsight of a third of a century, it may seem to us now almost incredible that so little could have been known about Mao Tse-tung and the movement which he headed. The Chinese Communist Party had a history of fifteen years when Edgar Snow journeyed to its head quarters, but the disaster which had overtaken it in the 1920’s had left it in a precarious state of weakness.

When he set out for the blockaded Red area in the Northwest in June, 1936, with an introduction from Mme. Sun Yat-sen, he had an insight into Chinese conditions and the sentiments of Chinese youth which made him almost uniquely capable of perceiving the powerful appeal which the Chinese Communist movement was still in the process of developing. Through the good will of the Manchurian army forces at Sian, who were psychologically prepared for some kind of united front with the Communists, Snow was able to cross the lines, reach the Communist capital, then at Pao An (even farther in the Northwest than the later capital at Yenan), and meet Mao Tse-tung just at the time when Mao was prepared to put himself on record.

After spending four months and taking down Mao Tse-tung’s own story of his life as a revolutionist, Snow came out of the blockaded Red area in October, 1936. He gave his eye-opening story to the press in articles, and finished Red Star Over China on the basis of his notes in July, 1937.

The remarkable thing about Red Star Over China was that it not only gave the first connected history of Mao and his colleagues and where they had come from, but it also gave a prospect of the future of this little-known movement which was to prove disastrously prophetic. It is very much to the credit of Edgar Snow that this book has stood the test of time on both these counts—as a historical record and as an indication of a trend.

Preface to the Revised Edition

Travels and events described in this book took place in 1936 and 1937 and the manuscript was completed in July, 1937, to the sound of gunfire by Japanese troops outside the walls of Peking, where I lived. Those guns of July in China opened eight years of Sino-Japanese battle which merged with the Second World War. The same guns also heralded the ultimate Communist victory in China which profoundly altered the balance of power, both inside and outside what was formerly called "the Communist camp.”

In time and space this report concerned an isolated fighting force in an area far removed from the West on the eve of its greatest catastrophe. The League of Nations had been destroyed when it failed to halt Japan’s conquest of Manchuria in 1931–33. In 1936 the Western "Allies” permitted Hitler, still a cardboard Napoleon, to reoccupy the Rhineland without a fight. They impotently watched Mussolini seize Ethiopia. They then imposed an arms embargo against Spain under the hypocrisy of neutralism, which denied the Republic the means to defend itself against reactionary generals led by Franco, who had the open support of thousands of imported Nazi and Fascist troops and planes. They thus encouraged Hitler and Mussolini to form an alliance ostensibly aimed at Russia but clearly intended to subjugate all of Western Europe. In 1938 Hitler was allowed to swallow Austria. He was then rewarded, by Chamberlain and Daladier, with Czechoslovakia as the price of "peace in our time.” In compensation they soon received the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Such was the international environment of China when this journey was undertaken. Domestic conditions inside that disintegrating society are defined in the text. In 1936 I had already lived in China for seven years and I had, as a foreign correspondent, traveled widely and acquired some knowledge of the language. This was my longest piece of reportage on China. If it has enjoyed a more useful life than most journalism it is because it was not only a "scoop” of perishable news but likewise of many facts of durable history. It won sympathetic attention also perhaps because it was a time when the Western powers, in self-interest, were hoping for a miracle in China. They dreamed of a new birth of nationalism that would keep Japan so bogged down that she would never be able to turn upon the Western colonies—her true objectives. Red Star Over China tended to show that the Chinese Communists could indeed provide that nationalist leadership needed for effective anti-Japanese resistance. How dramatically the United States’ policy-making attitudes have altered since then is suggested by recalling that condensations of this report originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and Life magazine.

Other circumstances contributed to prolong the utility of this book. I had found Mao Tse-tung and other leaders at an especially favorable moment, in a lull between long years of battle. They gave me a vast amount of their time, and with unprecedented frankness provided more personal and impersonal information than any one foreign scribe could fully absorb. After my second visit to see Mao Tse-tung, in 1939, all the Red bases in Northwest China were blockaded by Nationalist troops, in their rear, and cut off by Japanese occupation around the guerrilla areas. For another five years, while no foreign newsmen were able to reach Yenan, the Red capital, these reports remained a unique source.

Much of this work is history seen from a partisan point of view, of course, but it is history as lived by the men and women who made it. It provided not only for non-Chinese readers, but also for the entire Chinese people—including all but the Communist leaders themselves—the first authentic account of the Chinese Communist Party and the first connected story of their long struggle to carry through the most thoroughgoing social revolution in China’s three millenniums of history. Many editions were published in China, and among the tens of thousands of copies of the Chinese translations some were produced entirely in guerrilla territory.

I do not flatter myself that I had much to do with imparting to this volume such lessons of international application as may be drawn from it. For many pages I simply wrote down what I was told by the extraordinary young men and women with whom it was my privilege to live at age thirty, and from whom I learned (or had the chance to learn) a great deal.,

In 1937, when Red Star Over China first appeared, in England, there were practically no sources of documentation for most of the material presented here. Today many foreign China specialists—helped or led by Chinese scholars of different political colorations—have produced dozens of works of varying importance and quality. With an abundance of new information available, aided by my own and others’ wisdom of hindsight, many improvements might be made in the text to minimize its limitations—and yet deprive it of whatever original value it may possess. Therefore it was my intention to leave it as first written except for corrections of typographical errors and mistakes of spelling or of factual detail. That hope has not proved wholly practicable and departures from its fulfillment are acknowledged below.

Since Red Star Over China was completed under conditions of war I did not have the opportunity to see or correct galley proofs of the first edition. Nor have I been able to do so with subsequent editions until now. In extenuation for one kind of mistake: my handwritten field notes contained many names previously unknown to me, and I could not always get them down in Chinese characters. Phonetic transliterations into English resulted in misspellings as judged by Wade-Giles standards. These have now been (I hope) uniformly corrected.

Aside from that kind of conformance I have widely altered former present-tense verbs to past tense in order to eliminate many seeming anachronisms and make the story more accessible to contemporary readers. Where the book quotes or paraphrases the testimony of others, the wording of the original text has generally been preserved—to avoid tampering with a priori historical material—even when it conflicts with more believable information now available. In a few instances where secondary material has been proved manifestly inaccurate I have cut or corrected, rather than perpetuate known errors. In either case readers may refer to the Biographical Notes or the Notes to this edition to supplement or modify some textual facts or opinions. Here and there (with a certain macabre sense of looking backward on myself) I have reworked lines which the passage of time—or murky writing in the first instance—has made unintelligible to me. The great bulk of the volume, all the happenings, the main travel notes, interviews, and Mao Tse-tung’s—remain intact.

Such liberties as I have taken in shortening, condensing, or discarding tedious accounts of a few matters no longer of importance helped to make room for the chronology, an epilogue, new footnotes, some heretofore unpublished documents, chapter commentaries, and some fascinating lessons of history in the form of biographical sequels to the early life stories of the truly extraordinary people first introduced here. Cuts of paragraphs and even whole pages necessitated composing new transitional passages. Such "spin-ins” are confined to knowledge available to me no later than 1937, and the same applies to page footnotes—but not to the end-of-book materials, of course.

Doubtless this tome would not have suffered (and the reader would have profited) if I had omitted several whole chapters. Revision was not easy, and I daresay someone less connected with the subject could have done it with less pain to himself and with more grace for the reader.

And so, salutations and thanks to all persons mentioned in this book for their help and permission to use their remarks and photographs, especially Mao Tse-tung; to John Fairbank, for taking one more look at these ancient spoor, to Peter J. Seybolt for a reappraisal against a background of far wider perspective than we could know in the thirties; to Enrica Collotti Pischel, for painstaking scholarship in translating into Italian and bringing up to date the 1965 edition (Stella rossa sulla Cina) which inspired this effort; and to Mary Heathcote, Trudie Schafer, and Lois Wheeler for assistance and encouragement in general.

Chronology: 125 Years of Chinese Revolution

I. Last Days of the Monarchy

1840–42 The "Opium Wars,” during which Great Britain forcibly opens China to foreign trade. They are followed by the granting of territorial concessions and rights of inland navigation and missionary activity. The British take Hongkong.

1860 China accepts Russian annexation of eastern Siberia.

1864 Near-victorious T’ai-p’ing (Great Peace) Rebellion crushed by Sino-Manchu forces under General Tseng Kuo-fan, helped by British army regulars and mixed European and American mercenaries. Chinese revolution "postponed sixty years.” Following French penetration and seizure of Indochina (1862), encroachments increasingly reduce the Manchu-Chinese Empire to semicolonial status.

1866 Sun Yat-sen (founder of Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, 1912) born in Kwangtung province.

1868 Czarist Russia annexes Bokhara and begins penetration toward Chinese Turkestan.

1869 Suez Canal completed.

1870 Lenin born. 1874 Churchill born.

1879 Ch’en Tu-hsiu (first general secretary, 1921–27, of Kungch’antang, or Chinese Communist Party) born in Anhui province. Rapid expansion of French and British colonial empires in Africa.

1883–85 Franco-Chinese War. Chinese troops in Indochina, defending Peking’s claim to suzerainty there, are defeated. France also acquires new territorial-political concessions in China. Britain ends China’s suzerainty in Burma.

1889 Cecil Rhodes establishes British South African Company.

1893 Mao Tse-tung born in Hunan province. France extends its Indo-chinese colonial power to Laos and Cambodia.

1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. China forced to cede Taiwan (Formosa) to Japan and abandon ancient claims to suzerainty over Korea.

1898 "Hundred Days Reform” under Emperor Kuang Hsu. Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi imprisons Kuang Hsu and returns to power, to remain real ruler till her death (1909). United States defeats Spain, takes Philippines.

1899 "Open Door” doctrine proclaimed by U.S.A.; "equal opportunity” for foreign powers in the economic and commercial "development” of China.

1900 So-called Boxer Rebellion. Antiforeign uprising. Allied reprisals include mass executions, crushing indemnities, new concessions, legalized foreign garrisons between Tientsin and Peking, etc. Czarist Russia takes China’s port of Talien (Dairen), builds naval base (Port Arthur), acquires railway concessions across China’s three northeastern provinces (Manchuria). Mao Tse-tung works as laborer on his father’s farm.

1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance.

1901–05 Russo-Japanese War. Japan gets Port Arthur, Dairen, Russia’s concessions in South Manchuria (China), and additional "rights.” Dr. Sun Yat-sen forms revolutionary Alliance Society in Tokyo.

1905 First Russian Revolution.

1911 Republican revolution (the "First Revolution”) overthrows Manchu power in Central and South China. At Nanking, Sun Yat-sen declared president of provisional government, first Chinese Republic. Student Mao Tse-tung joins rebel army; resigns after six months, thinking "revolution over.”

II. The Republic and the Warlords (1912–27)

1912 Rulers of Manchu Dynasty formally abdicate. Sun Yat-sen resigns in favor of Yuan Shih-k’ai, as president of the Republic of China. Peking is its capital. Kuomintang (Nationalists) dominates first parliament, forms cabinet. Italy takes Libya.

1912–14 Provisional constitution and parliament suspended by militarist Yuan Shih-k’ai, who becomes dictator. Japan imposes "Twenty-one Demands,” their effect to reduce China to vassal state. Yuan Shih-k’ai accepts most of the demands. Cabinet resigns. European war begins. Japan seizes Tsingtao, German colony in China. Mao first studies books by Western scholars.

1915 New Youth (Hsin Ch’ing-nien) magazine, founded by Ch’en Tu-hsiu, becomes focus of revolutionary youth, and popularizes written vernacular (pai-hua) language; death knell of Confucian classicism. Mao Tse-tung becomes New Youth contributor, under pseudonym. Yuan Shih-k’ai attempts to re-establish monarchy, with himself as emperor.

1916 Second (Republican) Revolution: overthrow of "Emperor” Yuan Shih-k’ai by "revolt of the generals” led by Tsai O. Nullification of Yuan’s acceptance of Japan’s "Twenty-one Demands.” Era of warlords begins.

1917 Peking "shadow government” declares war on Germany. Generalissimo Sun Yat-sen, heading separate provisional regime in Canton, also declares war. In Hunan, Mao Tse-tung becomes co-founder of radical youth group, New People’s Study Society. The October Revolution occurs in Russia.

1918 End of First World War. Mao Tse-tung graduates from Hunan First Normal School, aged twenty-five. He visits Peking; becomes assistant to Li Ta-chao, librarian of Peking University. Li Ta-chao and Ch’en Tu-hsiu establish Marxist study society, which Mao joins. All three later become founders of Chinese Communist Party.

1918–19 175,000 laborers sent overseas to help allies; 400 "Work-Study” student interpreters include Chou En-lai. Mao Tse-tung accompanies students to Shanghai. Back in Hunan, Mao founds Hsiang Chiang Review, anti-imperialist, antimilitarist, pro-Russian Revolution.

1919 May Fourth Movement. Nationwide student demonstrations against Versailles Treaty award of Germany’s China concessions to Japan. Beginning of modern nationalist movement. Hungarian (Bela Kun) Communist-led social revolution suppressed.

1920 Mao Tse-tung organizes Hunan Branch of Socialist Youth Corps; among its members, Liu Shao-ch’i. Mao marries Yang K’ai-hui, daughter of his esteemed ethics professor at normal school. Mao helps found Cultural Book Study Society. League of Nations established.

1921 Chinese Communist Party formally organized at First Congress, Shanghai. Mao participates; is chosen secretary of CP of Hunan. Ts’ai Ho-sen, Chou En-lai, and others form Communist Youth League in Paris. Revolution in Mongolia.

1922 Sun Yat-sen agrees with Lenin’s representative to accept Soviet aid and form united front with CCP; Communists may now hold joint membership in Kuomintang, led by Sun. Washington Conference restores Germany’s colony to China.

III. Nationalist (or Great) Revolution: Kuomintang-Communist United Front (1923–27)

1923 Agreement between Sun Yat-sen and Adolf Joffe provides basis for KMT-CCP-CPSU alliance. At Third Congress of CCP, in Canton, Mao Tse-tung elected to Central Committee and chief of organization bureau.

1924 First Congress of Kuomintang approves admission of Communists. Mao Tse-tung elected an alternate member, Central Executive Committee, Kuomintang. Lenin dies.

1925 Mao returns to Hunan, organizes peasant support for Nationalist (Liberation) Expedition. Writes his first "classic,” Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society (published 1926). Sun Yat-sen dies. Russian advisers choose Chiang Kai-shek as commander-in-chief. "Universal suffrage” in Japan.

1926 Nationalist Revolutionary Expedition launched from Canton under supreme military command of Chiang Kai-shek. Mao, back in Canton, becomes deputy director Kuomintang Peasant Bureau and Peasant Movement Training Institute; he heads agit-prop department. Nationalist-Communist coalition forces conquer most of South China. Communist-led Indonesian revolution suppressed by Dutch.

IV. First Communist-Nationalist Civil War (1927–37)

1927 Stalin victorious over Trotsky. In March, Mao Tse-tung publishes his Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan; calls poor peasants "main force” of revolution, demands confiscation of landlords’ land. Thesis rejected by Communist Party Central Committee. In April, Chiang Kai-shek leads anti-Communist coup, "beheads Party”; Communist membership reduced, by four-fifths, to 10,000. Ch’en Tu-hsiu deposed as CCP secretary. Party driven underground. Mao leads peasant uprising in Hunan (August); defeated, he flees to mountain stronghold, Chingkangshan. Nanchang Uprising also defeated. Retreat to countryside. Canton (Commune) Uprising fails. P’eng P’ai leads survivors to Hailufeng and sets up Hailufeng Soviet (1927). Sukarno forms Indonesian Nationalist Party.

1928 Chiang Kai-shek establishes nominal centralized control over China under National Government (a Kuomintang, one-party dictator ship). Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh join forces at Chingkangshan, Hunan, form first "Red Army” of China and local soviet. Paris Peace Pact signed by the great powers, renouncing war "as an instrument of national policy.”

1929 Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh conquer rural territories around Juichin, Kiangsi, where a soviet government is proclaimed. Communist Politburo, dominated by Li Li-san, remains hidden in foreign-controlled Shanghai. Stock market crash in New York.

1930 Conflict between Mao’s "rural soviet movement” and Politburo leader Li Li-san, who favors urban insurrections. Red Army led by Mao and P’eng Teh-huai captures Changsha, capital of Hunan, then withdraws. Second assault on Changsha a costly failure. Li Li-san discredited by Moscow. Chiang Kai-shek launches first major offensive against the Reds. Mao Tse-tung’s wife and sister executed in Changsha. Gandhi leads nonviolent civil disobedience in India.

1931 Spain declares a Republic. Meeting underground in January, in Shanghai, Central Committee of CCP elects Wang Ming (Ch’en Shao-yu) general secretary and chief of Party. All-China Congress of Chinese Soviets, convened in deep hinterland at Juichin, elects Mao Tse-tung chairman of the first All-China Soviet Government, Chu Teh military commander. In September, Japan begins conquest of Manchuria; Chiang Kai-shek suspends his third "annihilation campaign” against Red Army. End of Great Famine (1929–31) in Northwest China; estimated dead, five to ten million. Wang Ming goes to Moscow. Po Ku heads Shanghai Politburo.

1932 Japan attacks Shanghai, defended by Nineteenth Route Army; unsupported by Chiang Kai-shek, it retreats to Fukien province. Chiang authorizes Tangku Truce, to end Sino-Japanese hostilities. He renews offensive against Kiangsi Soviet; Reds declare war on Japan. Police in Shanghai International Settlement help Chiang Kai-shek extirpate Red underground. Politburo chiefs Po Ku, Lo Fu, Liu Shao-ch’i, and Chou En-lai join Mao in Kiangsi Soviet. Roosevelt elected President of U.S.

1933 Nineteenth Route Army rebels and offers alliance to Reds, which is rejected. Chiang Kai-shek destroys Nineteenth R.A., begins a new campaign against Soviet China. Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.

1934 Second All-China Soviet Congress re-elects Mao Tse-tung chairman, but Party leadership falls to "Twenty-eight Bolsheviks.” Red Army changes tactics and suffers decisive defeats. Main forces and party cadres retreat to West China.

1935 Politburo meets in Tsunyi, Kweichow, in January; elects Mao Tse-tung effective leader of the Party and army during Long March to Northwest China. In July, Kiangsi Red forces reach Szechuan and join troops under Politburo member and Party co-founder Chang Kuo-t’ao, driven from soviet areas north of Yangtze River. In enlarged meeting of Politburo, Chang Kuo-t’ao disputes Mao’s policy and leadership. Red forces divide; Mao leads southern forces into new base in Northwest China, after one year of almost continuous marching, totaling 6,000 miles. (Chang Kuo-t’ao follows him a year later.) Japan demands separation of two North China provinces, under "autonomous” regime. Japanese troops move into Chinese Inner Mongolia, set up bogus "independent” state. December 9 student rebellion in Peking touches off wave of anti-Japanese national patriotic activity. Italy seizes Ethiopa.

1936 Mao Tse-tung, interviewed by the author in Pao An, Shensi, tells his life story and his account of the revolution, and offers to end civil war to form a united front against Japan. Mao lectures to the Red Army University; his On the Tactics of Fighting Japanese Imperialism and Strategic Problems in Chind’s Revolutionary War become doctrinal basis of new stage of united front against Japan. Spurning Communists’ offer of a truce (first made on August 1, 1935), Chiang Kai-shek mobilizes for "final annihilation” of Reds in Northwest.

The Sian Incident, in December: Chiang Kai-shek "arrested” by his deputy commander-in-chief, Chang Hsueh-liang, exiled Man-churian leader. Marshal Chang insists that Chiang accept national united front against Japan. Following Chiang Kai-shek’s release, and undeclared truce in civil war, Kuomintang opens negotiations with CCP and its "anti-Japanese government” based in Yenan, Shensi.

V. "United Front” Against Japan: The Great Patriotic, or Anti-Japanese, War (1937–45)

1937 In July, Japan massively invades China. Agreement signed for joint Nationalist-Communist war of resistance against Japan. Chinese Soviet Government dissolved but continues as autonomous regional regime; Red Army becomes Eighth Route and New Fourth armies under Chiang’s nominal command. Mao writes theoretical works, On Contradiction and On Practice. Italy leaves the League of Nations.

1938 Mao outlines Communists’ wartime political and military ends and means in On the New Stage, On the Protracted War, and Strategic Problems in the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War. Chang Kuo-t’ao, expelled from the CCP, enters Kuomintang areas. Mao becomes un disputed leader of Party. Japanese armies overwhelm North China. Nationalists retreat to west. Communists organize partisans far behind Japanese lines. Nazi Germany annexes Austria and Czechoslovakia.

1939 Mao’s On the New Democracy outlines class basis of united front, intimates future coalition government structure. Rapid expansion of Communist cadres and military forces. Hitler-Stalin pact. Germany attacks Poland. With outbreak of European war, China’s struggle begins to merge with the Second World War. Yenan blockaded by Nationalist troops.

1940–41 Breakdown of practical cooperation between Communists and Nationalists follows Chiang Kai-shek’s attack on New Fourth Army. Ch’en Yi becomes its commander. After Pearl Harbor, Kuomintang relies on American aid while Communists vigorously expand guerrilla areas.

1942 CCP "rectification” campaign centers on Wang Ming and Moscow-trained "dogmatists”; Mao’s "native” leadership enhanced.

1943 Mao Tse-tung credited (by Liu Shao-ch’i) with having "created a Chinese or Asiatic form of Marxism.” Attraction of "New Democracy” proves widespread among peasants and intellectuals; Kuomintang morale and fighting capacity rapidly decline. Chou En-lai claims 800,000 Party members, a half-million troops and trained militia, in "liberated areas” exceeding 100 million population. Fascism collapses in Italy. By decree, Stalin abolishes the Comintern.

1944 U.S. Army "observers” arrive in Yenan, Communist "guerrilla” capital. Allied landing in Normandy. President Roosevelt re-elected.

1945 Seventh National Congress of CCP (April) claims Party membership of 1,200,000, with armed forces of 900,000. Germany defeated. Russia enters Far Eastern war; signs alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Mao’s report On Coalition Government becomes formal basis of Communist demands to end Kuomintang dictatorship. After V-E Day, Communist-led forces flood North China and Manchuria, competing with American-armed Nationalists. U.S. Ambassador Hurley flies Mao Tse-tung to Chungking to negotiate with Chiang Kai-shek. Yalta Pact promises Taiwan to China. Death of Roosevelt. Truman uses atomic bomb on Hiroshima. End of Second World War.

VI. Second Communist-Nationalist Civil War (1946–49)

1946 Nationalists and Communists fail to agree on "coalition government”; in June the Second Civil War, called by the Communists the War of Liberation, begins. Under Soviet Russian Occupation, Eastern Europe "goes Red.”

1947 Mao’s The Present Situation and Our Tasks outlines strategic and tactical plans, calling for general offensive against Nationalists. Truman Doctrine proclaimed in Greece.

1948 Despite U.S. aid to Nationalists, their defeat in Manchuria is overwhelming. Yugoslavia is expelled from Cominform, postwar successor to the Comintern.

1949 As his armies disintegrate, Chiang Kai-shek flees to Taiwan. Over the rest of China the People’s Liberation Army is victorious. In March, the Central Committee of the CCP, led by Mao, arrives in Peking. Atlantic Pact (NATO) proclaimed. U.S. "White Paper” blames Chiang’s "reactionaries” for "loss of China.”

VII. The Chinese People’s Republic (1949–)

1949 Based on Mao’s The People’s Democratic Dictatorship, a People’s Political Consultative Conference is convened, in form representing workers, peasants, intellectuals, national bourgeoisie. Chinese People’s Government organized, with Mao elected chairman. On October 1, Chinese People’s Republic formally proclaimed in Peking. Mao announces foreign policy of "leaning to one side” (toward U.S.S.R.). Great Britain, Soviet Russia, Norway, The Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland recognize the new government; the United States withdraws its diplomats from China. Mao Tse-tung leaves for Moscow—his first trip abroad. U.S. Communist Party leaders convicted of advocating violent overthrow of the government.

1950 Mao concludes Sino-Soviet treaty of alliance; Stalin grants China $300,000,000 loan. Korean War breaks out (June) and Chinese "Volunteers” intervene (October). India proclaims independence.

1951–52 With Soviet aid, Chinese resistance in Korea continues. American forces, barred from carrying war into China by U.N. and Allied policies, hold positions at Thirty-eighth Parallel in Korea. First hydrogen bomb exploded (1952) by U.S.A.

1953 Stalin dies. Korean armistice signed. U.S. forms alliance with Chiang Kai-shek, making Taiwan U.S. protectorate. Peking announces First Five-Year Plan. Soviet grants support for 156 large-scale Chinese projects. Moscow agrees to liquidate Soviet-Chinese joint enterprises and withdraw all troops from China. Rosenbergs executed in the U.S.

1954 Khrushchev first visits Peking. Land reform (redistribution) completed. Agricultural cooperatives lay basis for collectivization (1957). State establishes partnerships with remaining private enterprise, preliminary to complete nationalization (1957). Geneva Accords end French power in Indochina and recognize independence of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Under the influence of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the Eisenhower administration takes "note” of Geneva Accords, but begins intervention in support of Ngo Dinh Diem.

1955 At Bandung Conference (twenty-nine Afro-Asian nations) China seeks broader anti-imperialist role against U.S. and allies. China’s "foreign aid” program competes with that of U.S.S.R. Warsaw Pact signed by U.S.S.R. and East European satellites.

1956 Khrushchev denounces Stalin at Twentieth Congress of CPSU. He proclaims end of personality cult and beginning of collective leadership. "Hundred Flowers” period invites criticism of CCP from dissatisfied Chinese intellectuals. Hungarian revolt; Peking backs suppression. China publishes important Maoist thesis, On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, acknowledging continued "contradictions” within and between socialist states.

1957 Mao’s On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People defines limitations of criticism in relation to the Party; advances thesis of "unity-criticism-unity” as dialectical process to isolate "enemies of socialism” and peacefully resolve "nonantagonistic” conflicts of interest between the state, the Party, and "the people.” Russia agrees to supply sample atom bomb to China and help in nuclear weapons development. Sputnik launched. At November conference in Moscow, Mao discerns a "turning point”: the "East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind.” He contends socialist forces outbalance capitalist forces. Thesis disputed by Russians. Breakup of Sino-Soviet unity begins.

1958 China announces Second Five-Year Plan. Year of the "Great Leap Forward” and People’s Communes. Peking’s threat to liberate Taiwan provokes Sino-American crisis. Khrushchev withholds unconditional nuclear support for China, and Peking declines to place Chinese forces under Soviet military command. Sino-Soviet differences develop. First U.S. space satellite launched.

1959 During October anniversary celebrations Khrushchev again visits Peking, where he declares "imperialist war is not inevitable.” His advocacy of "peaceful coexistence” with "American imperialism” is sharply rejected by Chinese. China gets no A-bomb and Mao loses confidence in Khrushchev. Tibetan rebellion. Dalai Lama flees to India. During China’s disputes with India and Indonesia, Khrushchev offers aid to the latter. He disparages Chinese people’s communes. Castro takes power in Cuba. As U.S. increases armed intervention, aimed to separate South Vietnam from the Republic, President Ho Chi Minh backs People’s Liberation War in the South.

1960 In July, Moscow recalls all Soviet advisers from China, cancels more than 300 contracts, withdraws technical help. At Moscow international Party conference (November), Sino-Soviet "contradictions” intensify. Chinese openly identify Khrushchev as "revisionist.” Russians accuse Mao of seeking "world holocaust.” Massive crop failure and industrial dislocation in China. As Sino-Indian frontier incidents grow serious, Khrushchev plays neutral role, continues economic aid to India. John F. Kennedy elected U.S. President.

1961 At Twenty-second Soviet Party Congress in Moscow, Chou En-lai walks out when Khrushchev bans Albanian Party. Using texts from the newly published (1960) Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. IV, Peking’s Party press proclaims Maoist and antirevisionist theses "true Marxism-Leninism.” Chinese replace Soviet advisers in Albania. Berlin Wall built.

1962 Sino-Soviet clashes on both state and Party levels foreshadow wide international ideological fight. Kennedy-Khrushchev duel over Cuba. When Khrushchev withdraws missiles from Cuba, Peking ridicules him for "adventurism” and "capitulationism.” Sino-Indian border incidents climaxed by Chinese assault, driving Indians from 35,000 square miles of territory. Chinese troops withdraw, unilaterally create "demilitarized zone,” call for peaceful negotiation. U.N. intervenes in the Congo.

1960–63 Following the disruption of the Chinese economy caused by dislocations during the "Great Leap Forward,” by withdrawal of Soviet aid, and by a series of natural calamities, the People’s Republic slowly recovers from near-famine conditions.

1963 In final defiance of Peking’s demand for a militant international "united front against American imperialism,” Moscow signs nuclear test-ban treaty with United States, makes "peaceful coexistence” cardinal aim of Soviet foreign policy. Sino-Soviet split now reflected in intraparty cleavages in many countries. Mutual recriminations reinforced by open publication of past charges and countercharges by CCP and CPSU. Peking steps up drive for ideological leadership among "third world” Asian-African-Latin American revolutionary forces; Moscow strives to hold following among European parties. Premier Chou En-lai visits African countries. Mao Tse-tung issues declaration calling upon "the people of the world” to unite against American imperialism and support American Negro struggles. President Kennedy assassinated.

1964 Breakdown in Soviet-Chinese party and state relations becomes nearly complete. As France recognizes China, Communist split paralleled by Western split. Chinese offensive on two fronts—American imperialism and Soviet revisionism—has some success in dividing both camps. Two years of good harvests and new trade ties with Europe and Japan strengthen Chinese economy. Foreign Minister Ch’en Yi publicly expresses doubts concerning value of Sino-Soviet military alliance; China may no longer count on Russian aid. Mao urges Japanese socialists to recover territories lost to Russia and criticizes Soviet "imperialism” for encroachments on Chinese territories.

After fifteen years, achievements of Chinese revolution in uniting and modernizing China widely conceded even by enemies. In rivalry with Russia, and despite exclusion from United Nations, China becomes major power with which—according to General de Gaulle—United States must negotiate in order to end war in Southeast Asia. Mao Tse-tung, following a century of China’s humiliation as a weak and backward nation, emerges as the first Asian political leader to attract significant world following. China explodes its first "nuclear device.”

South Vietnamese Government, backed by the United States and badly defeated by growing forces of the National Liberation Front, verges on disintegration before proneutralist and propeace elements.

1965 President Johnson, soon after his January inauguration, moves American combat troops into Vietnam to prevent a neutralist coup in Saigon. In February he orders massive bombing of North Vietnam. Peking announces its readiness to intervene in support of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam if President Ho Chi Minh demands it, but in an interview with the author in January, Chairman Mao declares that China will not go to war against the United States unless China is directly attacked. In July, Lin Piao, China’s Minister of Defense, publishes a declaration, "Long Live the Victory of the People’s War!” which calls upon the underdeveloped nations, likened to the "rural areas of the world,” to join forces against American and Western imperialism, the "cities of the world.”

China explodes its second nuclear device.

The United Nations vote on the admission of the People’s Republic ends in a 47–47 tie, with Great Britain for the first time voting in favor of seating Peking. Lacking majority support, the move is once more defeated.

1966 U.S. forces in Vietnam approach 500,000 men, and American bombing of North Vietnam spares few tagets except inner metropolitan areas of Hanoi and Haiphong. Russia sends North Vietnam aircraft, weapons, and technical personnel; China supplies small arms and food.

China launches a "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (GPCR) under Mao Tse-tung, with Lin Piao named as his "close comrade-in-arms.” China prepares for an expected American invasion. An unprecedented purge attacks "bourgeois” and "revisionist” elements in the CCP. Chinese agriculture continues to improve, while scientific advances include the world’s first synthesis of protein (insulin) and benzine.

1967 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution develops into an attack on Liu Shao-ch’i, chairman of government and former first deputy Party leader, and on Teng Hsiao-p’ing, general secretary of the Party, as foremost among "those in the Party in authority who are taking the capitalist road.” Profound intraparty struggle intensifies.

As the GPCR took foreign political experts on China by complete surprise, so China’s explosion of a hydrogen bomb—twenty-six months after atomic fission was achieved—nonpluses foreign military and scientific savants. The same step had taken the U.S. more than seven years; France, after eight years of effort, had yet to test its first H-bomb.

Dean Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State, appeals for world sympathy for Johnson’s armed intervention and massive bombing in Vietnam as necessary in order to contain "a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons,” but no European power offers to help Rusk. China’s own official policy still calls for an international agreement to destroy all nuclear weapons—an invitation ignored by the U.S. On December 19, in a message to Vietnam’s National Liberation Front presidium, Mao advises "the fraternal South Vietnamese people” to "rest assured that your struggle is our struggle.” China detonates its seventh nuclear device, in the rapid development of a system of deterrents which could enhance her immunity from nuclear attack if China became directly engaged with U.S. ground forces in eastern Asia.

1968 In January, during an intelligence-gathering tour off the North Korean coast, the U.S. ship Pueblo is boarded by North Korean sailors and surrenders. In the ensuing crisis China calls for a united front among revolutionary parties in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and North Korea in support of the Vietnamese. (North Korea has a military alliance with the U.S.S.R. and the CPR.) The Pueblo incident makes it manifest that durable peace between China and the U.S. remains impossible while any part of Asia is subject to armed American intervention.

A Note on Chinese Pronunciation

It is not necessary to strangle over the pronunciation of Chinese names if one observes a few simple rules in the rather arbitrary but workable Wade-Giles System of transliteration (romanization) of the language into English. Each Chinese character represents only one sound and homonyms are innumerable. Chinese is monosyllabic, but combinations of characters in the spoken language may form a single idea or equivalent of one foreign word, and thus in a sense the spoken language is polysyllabic. Chinese surnames come first, given names (usually two words) follow, as in Teng Hsiao-p’ing. Aspirates are represented in this book by apostrophes; they indicate a soft consonantal sound. Examples:

Chi (as in Chi Chao-t’ing) is pronounced "Gee,” but Ch’i (as in Liu Shao-ch’i) sounds like "Chee.” Chin is exactly our "chin.”

Chu is like "Ju,” in Chu Teh, but Ch’u equals "Chew.”

Tsung is "dzung”; ts’ung with the "ts” as in "Patsy.”

Tai is our word sound "die”; Tai— "tie.”

Pai is "buy” and p’ai is "Pie.”

Kung is like "Gung” (-a Din); Kung with the "k” as in "kind.”

J is the equivalent of "r” but roll it, as rrrun.

H before an s, as in hsi, is the equivalent of an aspirate but is often dropped, as in Sian for Hsian. One may ignore the "h” and still be understood.

Single Chinese words are always pronounced as monosyllables. Thus: Chiang is not "Chee-yi-ang” but a single sound, "Geeang.” Mao is not "May-ow” but pronounced like a cat’s "miaow” without the "i.” Chou En-lai is "Joe Un-lie,” but the last syllable of his wife’s given name, Ying-ch’ao, sounds like "chow.”

Vowels in Chinese are generally short or medium, not long and flat. Thus T’ang sounds like "dong,” never like our "tang.” Tang is "tong.”

a as in father
e—run
eh—hen	There is also a "ü” as in German and an "ê” as in
i—see	French. I have omitted Wade’s umlaut and circumflex
ih—her	markings, which are found in European
o—look	latini-zations of Chinese.
ou—go	u—soon

These sounds indicate Chinese as spoken in kuo-yu, the northern (Peking, mandarin) speech, which is now the national language, taught in all schools. Where journalism has already popularized misspellings or variants in other dialects, such as Chiang Kai-shek for Chiang Chieh-shih, etc., I have followed the familiar version.

Chinese words frequently encountered in place names are: sheng—province; hsien— county; hsiang—township; ching (or king)—capital; ch’eng—city; ts’un—village; chiang (kiang)—great river; ho—river; hu—lake; k’ou—mouth; pei—north; nan—south; tung—east; hsi (or si)—west; chung—central; shan—mountain. Such words combine in the following examples: Peking (properly, Pei-ching, pronounced "Bay-ging”), meaning "northern capital.” Peking was renamed "Pei-p’ing (Peiping or, erroneously, Peping), "northern peace” (or tranquillity), by the Kuomintang regime, which made its seat in Nanking (southern capital), but the historic name remained in general use and was formally restored in 1949.

Shantung means East of the mountains.

Shansi— West of the mountains.

Hankow—Mouth of the Han (river).

Sian—Western Peace (tranquillity).

Hopei—North of the (Yellow) river.

Hunan—South of the lakes.

Yunnan—South of the clouds.

Kiangsi—West of the river.

There is also a "ü” as in German and an "é” as in French. I have omitted Wade’s umlaut and circumflex markings, which are found in European latini-zations of Chinese.

Part One: In Search of Red China

Some Unanswered Questions

During my seven years in China, hundreds of questions had been asked about the Chinese Red Army, the Soviets, and the Communist movement. Eager partisans could supply you with a stock of ready answers, but these remained highly unsatisfactory. How did they know? They had never been to Red China.

The fact was that there had been perhaps no greater mystery among nations, no more confused an epic, than the story of Red China. Fighting in the very heart of the most populous nation on earth, the Celestial Reds had for nine years been isolated by a news blockade as effective as a stone fortress. A wall of thousands of enemy troops constantly surrounded them; their territory was more inaccessible than Tibet. No one had voluntarily penetrated that wall and returned to write of his experiences since the first Chinese soviet was established in southeastern Hunan, in November, 1927.

Even the simplest points were disputed. Some people denied that there was such a thing as a Red Army. There were only thousands of hungry brigands. Some denied even the existence of soviets. They were an invention of Communist propaganda. Yet Red sympathizers extolled both as the only salvation for all the ills of China. In the midst of this propaganda and counterpropaganda, credible evidence was lacking for dispassionate observers seeking the truth. Here are some of the unanswered questions that interested everyone concerned with politics and the quickening history of the Orient:

Was or was not this Red Army of China a mass of conscious Marxist revolutionaries, disciplined by and adhering to a centralized program and a unified command under the Chinese Communist Party? If so, what was that program? The Communists claimed to be fighting for agrarian revolution, and against imperialism, and for soviet democracy and national emancipation. Nanking said that the Reds were only a new type of vandals and marauders led by "intellectual bandits.” Who was right? Or was either one?

Before 1927, members of the Communist Party were admitted to the Kuomintang, but in April of that year there began a great "purgation.” Communists, as well as unorganized radical intellectuals and thousands of organized workers and peasants, were executed on an extensive scale under Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of a Right coup d’état which seized power, to form a "National Government” at Nanking. Since then it had been a crime punishable by death to be a Communist or a Communist sympathizer, and thousands had paid that penalty. Yet thousands more continued to run the risk. Thousands of peasants, workers, students, and soldiers joined the Red Army in armed struggle against the military dictatorship of the Nanking regime. Why? What inexorable force drove them on to support suicidal political opinions? What were the fundamental quarrels between the Kuomintang and the Kungch’antang?*

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.

Slow Train to "Western Peace”

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.”

Then surprisingly the graybeard lifted his gentle face and with perfect composure made an astonishing remark. "Sha pu kou!” he said. "They don’t kill enough!” We both looked at him flabbergasted.

Unfortunately the train was nearing Chengchow, where I had to transfer to the Lunghai line, and I was obliged to break off the discussion. But I have ever since wondered with what deadly evidence this Confucian-looking old gentleman would have supported his startling contention. I wondered about it all the next day of travel, as we climbed slowly through the weird levels of loess hills in Honan and Shensi, and until my train—this one still new and very comfortable—rolled up to the new and handsome railway station at Sianfu.

Soon after my arrival I went to call on General Yang Hu-ch’eng,* Pacification Commissioner of Shensi province. Until a couple of years before, General Yang had been undisputed monarch of those parts of Shensi not controlled by the Reds. A former bandit, he rose to authority via the route that had put many of China’s ablest leaders in office, and on the same highway he was said to have accumulated the customary fortune. But recently he had been obliged to divide his power with several other gentlemen in the Northwest. For in 1935 the "Young Marshal,” Chang Hsueh-liang,* who used to be ruler of Manchuria, had brought his Tungpei (Manchurian) army into Shensi, and assumed office in Sianfu as supreme Red chaser in these parts—Vice-Commander of the National Bandit-Suppression Commission. And to watch the Young Marshal had come Shao Li-tzu,* an acolyte of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The Hon. Shao was Governor of Shensi.

A delicate balance of power was maintained between these figures—and still others. Tugging strings behind all of them was the redoubtable Generalissimo himself, who sought to extend his dictatorship to the Northwest and liquidate not only the Communist-led revolution but also the troops of old Yang Hu-ch’eng and young Chang Hsueh-liang, by the simple process of using each to destroy the other—three acts of a brilliant politico-military drama the main stratagem of which Chiang evidently believed was understood only by himself. And it was that error in calculation—a little too much haste in pursuit of the purpose, a little too much confidence in his adversaries’ stupidity—which was in a few months to land Chiang Kai-shek a prisoner in Sianfu, at the mercy of all three.

I found General Yang^† in a newly finished stone mansion, just completed at a cost of $50,000. He was living in this many-chambered vault—the official home of the Pacification Commissioner—without a wife. Yang Hu-ch’eng, like many Chinese in this transitional period, was burdened with domestic infelicity, for he was a two-wife man. The first was the lily-footed wife of his youth, betrothed to him by his parents in Pucheng. The second, as vivacious and courageous a woman as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, was a pretty young mother of five children, modern and progressive, a former Communist, they said, and the girl that Yang had chosen himself. It seemed, according to the missionaries, that when he opened his new home each of his wives had presented him with the same minimum demand. Each detested the other; each had borne him sons and had the right to be legal wife; and each resolutely refused to move into the stone mansion unless the other stayed behind.

To an outsider the case looked simple: a divorce or a third wife was the obvious solution. But General Yang had not made up his mind and so he still lived alone. His dilemma was a not uncommon one in modern China. Chiang Kai-shek had faced a similar issue when he married rich, American-educated Soong Mei-ling, who as a Methodist was not prepared to accept polygamy. Chiang had finally divorced his first wife (the mother of his son Ching-kuo*) and pensioned off his two concubines. The decision was highly approved by the missionaries, who had ever since prayed for his soul. Nevertheless, this way out—a newfangled idea imported from the West—was still frowned upon by many Chinese. Old Yang, having risen from the people, was probably less concerned over the disposal of his soul than the traditions of his ancestors.

And it must not be supposed that Yang’s early career as a bandit necessarily disqualified him as a leader. Such assumptions could not be made in China, where a career of banditry in early youth often indicated a man of strong character and purpose. A look at Chinese history showed that some of China’s ablest patriots were at one time or another labeled bandits. The fact was that many of the worst rogues, scoundrels, and traitors had climbed to power under cover of respectability, the putrid hypocrisy of Confucian maxims, and the priestcraft of the Chinese Classics—though they had very often utilized the good strong arm of an honest bandit in doing so.

General Yang’s history as a revolutionary suggested a rugged peasant who might once have had high dreams of making a big change in his world, but who, finding himself in power, looked vainly for a method, and grew weary and confused, listening to the advice of the mercenaries who gathered around him. But if he had such dreams he did not confide them to me. He declined to discuss political questions, and courteously delegated one of his secretaries to show me the city. He was also suffering from a severe headache and rheumatism when I saw him, and in the midst of his sea of troubles I was not one to insist upon asking him nettling questions. On the contrary, in his dilemma he had all my sympathy. So after a brief interview with him I discreetly retired, to seek some answers from the Honorable Governor, Shao Li-tzu.

Governor Shao received me in the garden of his spacious yamen, cool and restful after the parching heat of Sian’s dusty streets. I had last seen him six years before, when he was Chiang Kai-shek’s personal secretary, and at that time he had assisted me in an interview with the Generalissimo. Since then he had risen rapidly in the Kuomintang. He was an able man, well educated, and the Generalissimo had now bestowed upon him the honors of a governorship. But poor Shao, like many another civil governor, did not rule much beyond the provincial capital’s gray walls—the outlying territory being divided by General Yang and the Young Marshal.

The Hon. Shao had once been a "Communist bandit” himself. He had played a pioneer role in the Chinese Communist Party. In those days it was fashionable to be a Communist and nobody was very sure exactly what it meant, except that many bright young men were Communists. Later on he had recanted; after 1927 it had become very clear what it meant, and one could have one’s head removed for it. Shao then became a devout Buddhist, and subsequently displayed no further signs of heresy. He was one of the most charming gentlemen in China.1

"How are the Reds getting along?” I asked him.

"There are not many left. Those in Shensi are only remnants.”

"Then the war continues?” I asked.

"No, at present there is little fighting in north Shensi. The Reds are moving into Ninghsia and Kansu. They seem to want to connect with Outer Mongolia.”

He shifted the conversation to the situation in the Southwest, where insurgent generals were then demanding an anti-Japanese expedition. I asked him whether he thought China should fight Japan. "Can we?” he demanded. And then the Buddhist governor told me exactly what he thought about Japan—not for publication—just as every Kuomintang official would then tell you his opinion of Japan—not for publication.

A few months after this interview poor Shao was to be put on the spot on this question of war with Japan—along with his Generalissimo—by some rebellious young men of Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang’s army, who refused to be reasonable and take "maybe some day” for an answer any longer. And Shao’s diminutive wife—a returned student from Moscow and a former Communist herself—was to be cornered by some of the insurrectionists and make a plucky fight to resist arrest.

But Shao revealed no premonition of all this in our talk, and, an exchange of views having brought us perilously near agreement, it was time to leave. I had already learned from Shao Li-tzu what I wanted to know. He had confirmed the word of my Peking informant, that fighting had temporarily halted in north Shensi. Therefore it should be possible to go to the front, if properly arranged.

Some Han Bronzes

Some six months after my arrival in Sianfu the crisis in the Northwest was to explode in a manner nobody had anticipated, so that the whole world was made dramatically aware of an amazing alliance between the big army under Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang and the "bandits” whom he had been ordered, as deputy commander-in-chief of the Communist-Suppression Forces, to destroy. But in June, 1936, the outside world was still in complete ignorance of these strange developments, and even in the headquarters of Chiang Kai-shek’s own Blueshirt gendarmes, who controlled the Sianfu police, nobody knew exactly what was taking place. Some 300 Communists were imprisoned in the city’s jail, and the Blueshirts were hunting for more. An atmosphere of extreme tension prevailed. Spies and counterspies were everywhere.

But there is no longer any necessity to remain covert about those exciting days, with the secrets of which I was perforce entrusted, so here it can be told.

I had never seen a Red Army man before I arrived in Sianfu. The man in Peking who had written for me in invisible ink the letter addressed to Mao Tse-tung was, I knew, a Red commander; but I had not seen him. The letter had reached me through a third person, an old friend; but besides this letter I had only one hope of a connection in the Northwest. I had been instructed simply to go to a hotel in Sianfu, take a room there, and await a visit from a gentleman who would call himself Wang, but about whom I knew nothing else. Nothing—except that he would arrange for me to enter the Red districts by way of the private airplane, I was promised, of Chang Hsueh-liang!

A few days after I put up in the hotel a large, somewhat florid and rotund, but strongly built and dignified Chinese, wearing a long gray silk gown, entered my open door and greeted me in excellent English. He looked like a prosperous merchant, but he introduced himself as Wang, mentioned the name of my Peking friend, and otherwise established that he was the man I awaited.

In the week that followed I discovered that Wang alone was worth the trip to Sianfu. I spent four or five hours a day listening to his yarns and reminiscences and to his more serious explanations of the political situation. He was wholly unexpected. Educated in a missionary school in Shanghai, he had been prominently identified with the Christian community, had once had a church of his own, and (as I was later to learn) was known among the Communists as Wang Mu-shih—Wang the Pastor. Like many successful Christians of Shanghai, he had been a member of the Ch’ing Pang,* and he knew everyone from Chiang Kai-shek (also a member) down to Tu Yueh-sheng, the Ch’ing Pang chieftain. He had once been a high official in the Kuomintang, but I cannot even now disclose his real name.¹

For some time, Pastor Wang, having deserted his congregation and officialdom, had been working with the Reds. How long I do not know. He was a kind of secret and unofficial ambassador to the courts of various militarists and officials whom the Communists were trying to win over to understanding and support of their "anti-Japanese national front” proposals. With Chang Hsueh-liang, at least, he had been successful. And here some background is necessary to illuminate the basis of the secret understanding which had at this time been reached.

Chang Hsueh-liang was until 1931 the popular, gambling, generous, modern-minded, golf-playing, dope-using, paradoxical warlord-dictator of the 30,000,000 people of Manchuria, confirmed in the office he had inherited from his ex-bandit father Chang Tso-lin by the Kuomintang Government at Nanking, which had also given him the title Vice-Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of China. In September, 1931, Japan set out to conquer the Northeast, and Chang’s reverses began. When the invasion commenced, Young Marshal Chang was in the Peking Union Hospital, below the Wall, recovering from typhoid, and in no condition to meet this crisis alone. He leaned heavily on Nanking and on his blood-sworn "elder brother,” Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo. But Chiang Kai-shek, who lacked adequate means to fight Japan—and the Reds—urged reliance on the League of Nations. Chang Hsueh-liang took the Generalissimo’s counsel and Nanking’s orders. As a result he lost his homeland, Manchuria, after only token resistance was offered by his retreating troops. Nanking propaganda had made it appear that the nonresistance policy was the Young Marshal’s idea, whereas the record showed that it was the government’s explicit order. The sacrifice enabled the Generalissimo to hold his own shaky regime together in Nanking and begin a new annihilation campaign against the Reds.

That was how the Manchurian troops, known in China as the Tung-pei (pronounced "Dungbei,” and meaning "Northeastern”) Army, moved south of the Great Wall into China proper. The same thing happened when Japan invaded Jehol. Chang Hsueh-liang was not in the hospital then, but he should have been. Nanking sent no support to him, and made no preparations for defense. The Generalissimo, to avoid war, was ready to see Jehol fall to Japan, too—and so it did. Chang Hsueh-liang got the blame, and docilely played the goat when somebody had to resign to appease an infuriated populace. It was Chiang or Chang—and the latter bowed and departed. He went to Europe for a year "to study conditions.”

The most important thing that happened to Chang Hsueh-liang while he was in Europe was not that he saw Mussolini and Hitler and met Ramsay MacDonald, but it was that for the first time in several years he found himself a healthy man, cured of the dope habit. Some years before he had taken up opium, as many Chinese generals did, between battles. To break himself of the habit was not easy; his doctor assured him he could be cured by injections. He was freed of the craving of opium, all right, but when the doctor got through with him the Young Marshal was a morphine addict.

When I first met Chang at Mukden, in 1929, he was the world’s youngest dictator, and he still looked fairly well. He was thin, his face somewhat drawn and jaundiced-looking, but his mind was quick and energetic, he seemed full of exuberance. He was openly anti-Japanese, and he was eager to perform miracles in driving Japan from China and modernizing Manchuria. Several years later his physical condition was much worse. One of his doctors in Peking told me that he was spending $200 a day on "medicine”—a special preparation of morphine which theoretically could be "tapered off.”

But in Shanghai, just before he left for Europe, Chang Hsueh-liang began to cure himself of the drug habit. When he returned to China in 1934 his friends were pleased and amazed: he had put on weight and muscle, there was color in his cheeks, he looked ten years younger, and people saw in him traces of the brilliant leader of his youth. He had always possessed a quick, realistic mind, and now he gave it a chance to develop. At Hankow he resumed command of the Tungpei Army, which had been shifted to Central China to fight the Reds. It was a tribute to his popularity that, despite his errors of the past, his army enthusiastically welcomed him back.

Chang adopted a new routine—up at six, hard exercise, daily drill and study, simple food and Spartan habits, and direct personal contact with the subalterns as well as officers of his troops, which still numbered about 140,000 men. A new Tungpei Army began to emerge. Skeptics gradually became convinced that the Young Marshal had again become a man worth watching, and took seriously the vow he had made on his return: that his whole life would be devoted to the task of recovering Manchuria, and erasing the humiliation of his people.

Meanwhile, Chang had not lost faith in the Generalissimo. In their entire relationship Chang had never wavered in his loyalty to the older man, whose regime he had three times saved from collapse, and in whose judgment and sincerity he placed full confidence. He evidently believed Chiang Kai-shek when he said he was preparing to recover Manchuria, and would yield no more territory without resistance. In 1935 Japan’s militarists continued their aggression: the puppet regime of east Hopei was set up, part of Chahar was annexed, and demands were made for the separation of North China from the South, to which Nanking partly acquiesced. Ominous discontent rumbled among the Young Marshal’s officers and men, especially after his troops were shifted to the Northwest to continue to wage an unpopular civil war against the Red Army, while Japanese attrition continued almost unopposed.

After months of fighting the Reds in the South, several important realizations had come to the Young Marshal and some of his officers: that the "bandits” they were fighting were in reality led by able, patriotic, anti-Japanese commanders; that this process of "Communist extermination” might last for many more years; that it was impossible to resist Japan while the anti-Red wars continued; and that meanwhile the Tungpei Army was rapidly being reduced and disbanded in battles which were to it devoid of meaning.

Nevertheless, when Chang shifted his headquarters to the Northwest, he began an energetic campaign against the Reds. For a while he had some success, but in October and November, 1935, the Tungpei Army suffered serious defeats, reportedly losing two whole divisions (the 101st and 109th) and part of a third (110th). Thousands of Tungpei soldiers "turned over” to the Red Army. Many officers were also taken captive, and held for a period of "anti-Japanese tutelage.”

When those officers were released, and returned to Sian, they brought back to the Young Marshal glowing accounts of the morale and organization in the soviet districts, but especially of the Red Army’s sincerity in wanting to stop civil war, unify China by peaceful democratic methods, and unite to oppose Japanese imperialism. Chang was impressed. He was impressed even more by reports from his divisions that the sentiment throughout the whole army was turning against war with the Reds, whose slogans—"Chinese must not fight Chinese!” and "Unite with us and fight back to Manchuria!”—were infecting the rank and file of the entire Tungpei Army.

In the meantime, Chang himself had been strongly influenced to the left. Many of the students in his Tungpei University had come to Sian and were working with him, and among these were some Communists. After the Japanese demands in Peking of December, 1935, he had sent word to the North that all anti-Japanese students, regardless of their political beliefs, could find haven in Sianfu. While anti-Japanese agitators elsewhere in China were being arrested by agents of the Nanking government, in Shensi they were encouraged and protected. Some of Chang’s younger officers had been much influenced by the students also, and when the captured officers returned from the Red districts and reported that open anti-Japanese mass organizations were flourishing there, and described the Reds’ patriotic propaganda among the people, Chang began to think more and more of the Reds as natural allies rather than enemies.

It was at this point, early in 1936, Pastor Wang told me, that he one day called on Chang Hsueh-liang and opened an interview by declaring: "I have come to borrow your airplane to go to the Red districts.”

Chang jumped up and stared in amazement. "What? You dare to come here and make such a request? Do you realize you can be shot for this?”

The Pastor elaborated. He explained that he had contacts with the Communists and knew things which Chang should know. He talked for a long time about their changing policies, about the necessity for a united China to resist Japan, about the Reds’ willingness to make big concessions in order to influence Nanking to resist Japan, a policy which the Reds realized they could not, alone, make effective. He proposed that he should arrange for a further discussion of these points between Chang and certain Red leaders. And to all of this, after his first surprise, Chang listened attentively. He had for some time been thinking that he could make use of the Reds: they also evidently believed they could make use of him; very well, perhaps they could utilize each other on the basis of common demands for an end to civil war and united resistance to Japan.

The Pastor did, after all, fly to Yenan, north Shensi, in the Young Marshal’s private airplane. He entered Soviet China and returned with a formula for negotiation. And a short time later Chang Hsueh-liang himself flew up to Yenan, met Chou En-lai,* and after long and detailed discussion with him became convinced, according to Wang, of the Reds’ sincerity, and of the sanity and practicability of their proposals for a united front.

First steps in the implementation of the Tungpei-Communist agreement included the cessation of hostilities in Shensi. Neither side was to move without notifying the other. The Reds sent several delegates to—Sianfu, who put on Tungpei uniforms, joined Chang Hsueh-liang’s staff, and helped reorganize political training methods in his army. A new school was opened at Wang Ch’u Ts’un, where Chang’s lower officers went through intensified courses in politics, economics, social science, and detailed and statistical study of how Japan had conquered Manchuria and what China had lost thereby. Hundreds of radical students flocked to Sian and entered another anti-Japanese political training school, at which the Young Marshal also gave frequent lectures. Something like the political commissar system used in Soviet Russia and by the Chinese Red Army was adopted in the Tungpei Army. Some aging higher officers inherited from the Manchurian days were sacked; to replace them Chang Hsueh-liang promoted radical younger officers, to whom he now looked for his main support in building a new army. Many of the corrupt sycophants who had surrounded Chang during his "playboy” years were also replaced by eager and serious-minded students from the Tungpei University.

Such changes developed in close secrecy, made possible by Chang’s semiautonomy as a provincial warlord. Although the Tungpei troops no longer fought the Reds, there were Nanking troops along the Shansi-Shensi border and in Kansu and Ninghsia, and some fighting continued in those regions. No word of the truce between Chang and the Communists crept into the press. And although Chiang Kai-shek’s spies in Sian knew that something was fermenting, they could get few details of its exact nature. Occasional trucks arrived in Sian carrying Red passengers, but they looked innocuous; they all wore Tungpei uniforms. The occasional departure of other trucks from Sian to the Red districts aroused no suspicion; they resembled any other Tungpei trucks setting off for the front.

It was on just such a truck, Pastor Wang confided to me soon after my arrival, that I would myself be going to the front. The journey by plane was out: too much risk of embarrassment to the Young Marshal was involved, for his American pilots might not hold their tongues if a foreigner were dumped on the front and not returned.

One morning the Pastor called on me with a Tungpei officer—or at any rate a youth wearing the uniform of a Tungpei officer—and suggested a trip to the ancient Han city outside Sian. A curtained car waited for us in front of the hotel, and when we got in I saw in a corner a man wearing dark glasses and the Chung Shan uniform of a Kuomintang official. We drove out to the site of the old palace of the Han Dynasty,* and there we walked over to the raised mound of earth where the celebrated Han Wu Ti once sat in his throne room and "ruled the earth.” Here you could still pick up fragments of tile from those great roofs of over 2,000 years ago.

Pastor Wang and the Tungpei officer had some words to exchange, and stood apart, talking. The Kuomintang official, who had sat without speaking during our long dusty drive, came over to me and removed his dark glasses and his white hat. I saw that he was quite young. Under a rim of thick, glossy hair a pair of intense eyes sparkled at me. A mischievous grin spread over his bronzed face, and one look at him, without those glasses, showed that the uniform was a disguise, that this was no sedentary bureaucrat but an out-of-doors man of action. He was of medium height and looked slight of strength, so that when he came close to me and suddenly took my arm in a grip of iron I winced with surprise. There was a pantherish grace about the man’s movements, I noticed later, a lithe limberness under the stiff formal cut of the suit.

He put his face close to mine and grinned and fixed his sharp, burning eyes on me and held my two arms tightly in that iron grip, and then wagged his head and comically screwed up his mouth—and winked! "Look at me!” he whispered with the delight of a child with a secret. "Look at me! Look at me! Do you recognize me?”

I did not know what to think of the fellow. He was so bubbling over about something that his excitement infected me, and I felt foolish because I had nothing to say. Recognize him? I had never met a Chinese like him in my life! I shook my head apologetically.

He released a hand from my arm and pointed a finger at his chest. "I thought maybe you had seen my picture somewhere,” he said. "Well, I am Teng Fa,” he offered—"Teng Fa!”^† He pulled back his head and gazed at me to see the effect of the bombshell.

Teng Fa? Teng Fa… why, Teng Fa was chief of the Chinese Red Army’s Security Police. And something else, there was $50,000 on his head!

Teng danced with pleasure when he disclosed his identity. He was irrepressible, full of amusement at the situation: he, the notorious "Communist bandit,” living in the very midst of the enemy’s camp, thumbing his nose at the spies that hovered everywhere. And he was overjoyed at seeing me—he literally hugged me repeatedly—an American who was voluntarily going into the "bandit” areas. He offered me everything. Did I want his horse? Oh, what a horse he had, the finest in Red China! His pictures? He had a wonderful collection and it was all mine. His diary? He would send instructions to his wife, who was still in the soviet areas, to give all this and more to me. And he kept his word.

What a Chinese! What a Red bandit!

Teng Fa was a Cantonese, the son of a working-class family, and had once been a foreign-style cook on a Canton-Hongkong steamer. He had been a leader of the great Hongkong shipping strike, when he was beaten in the chest and had had some ribs broken by a British constable who did not like pickets. And then he had become a Communist, and entered Whampoa, and taken part in the Nationalist Revolution, until after 1927 he had joined the Red Army in Kiangsi.

We stood for an hour or more on that height, talking and looking down on the green-shrouded grave of an imperial city. How incongruous and yet how logical it was that this place should seem to the Communists the one rendezvous where we four could safely meet, the exact spot where, two millenniums ago, Han Wu Ti had ruled a united China, and so successfully consolidated a people and a culture from the chaos of warring states that their descendants, ever since, had been content to call themselves Sons of Han.

It was here that Teng told me who would escort me to the Red districts, how I would travel, how I would live in Red China, and assured me of a warm welcome there.

"Aren’t you afraid for your head?” I asked as we drove back to the city.

"Not any more than Chang Hsueh-liang is,” he said. "I’m living with him.”

Through Red Gates

We left Sianfu before dawn, the high wooden gates of the once "golden city” swinging open and noisily dragging their chains before the magic of our military pass. In the half-light of predawn the big army trucks lumbered past the airfield from which expeditions set out for daily reconnaissance and bombing over the Red lines.

To a Chinese traveler every mile of this road northward from Sianfu evokes memories of the rich and colorful pageant of his people. It seemed not inappropriate that the latest historical mutation in China, the Communist movement, should choose this locale in which to work out a destiny. In an hour we were being ferried across the Wei River, in whose rich valley Confucius’ ancestors* developed their rice culture and formulated traditions still a power in the folk myth of rural China today. And toward noon we had reached Ts’un Pu. It was near this battle-mented city that the towering and terrible figure who first "unified” China—the Emperor Ch’in Shih Huang Ti—was born some 2,200 years ago. The Emperor Ch’in first consolidated all of the ancient frontier walls of his country into what remains today the most stupendous masonry on earth—the Great Wall of China.,

Opium poppies nodded their swollen heads, ready for harvest, along the newly completed motor road—a road already deeply wrinkled with washouts and ruts, so that at times it was scarcely navigable even for our six-ton Dodge truck. Shensi had long been a noted opium province. During the great Northwest Famine, which a few years before had taken a toll of 3,000,000 lives, American Red Cross investigators attributed much of the tragedy to the cultivation of the poppy, forced upon the peasants by provincial monopolies controlled by greedy warlords. The best land being devoted to the poppy, in years of drought there was a serious shortage of millet, wheat, and corn, the staple cereals of the Northwest.

I spent the night on a clay K’ang * in a filthy hut at Lochuan, with pigs and donkeys quartered in the next room, and rats in my own, and I’m sure we all slept very little. Next morning, a few miles beyond that city, the loess terraces rose higher and more imposing, and the country was weirdly transformed.

The wonderful loess lands, which cover much of Kansu, Shensi, Ninghsia, and Shansi provinces, account for the marvelous fertility of these regions (when there is rainfall), for the loess furnishes an inexhaustible porous topsoil tens of feet deep. Geologists think the loess is organic matter blown down in centuries past from Mongolia and from the west by the great winds that rise in Central Asia. Scenically the result is an infinite variety of queer, embattled shapes—hills like great castles, like rows of mammoth, nicely rounded scones, like ranges torn by some giant hand, leaving behind the imprint of angry fingers. Fantastic, incredible, and sometimes frightening shapes, a world configurated by a mad god—and sometimes a world also of strange surrealist beauty.

And though we saw fields and cultivated land everywhere, we seldom saw houses. The peasants were tucked away in those loess hills also. Throughout the Northwest, as has been the habit of centuries, men lived in homes dug out of the hard, fudge-colored cliffs—yao-fang, or "cave houses,” as the Chinese call them. But they were no caves in the Western sense. Cool in summer, warm in winter, they were easily built and easily cleaned. Even the wealthiest landlords often dug their homes in the hills. Some of them were many-roomed edifices gaily furnished and decorated, with stone floors and high-ceilinged chambers, lighted through rice-paper windows opened in the walls of earth also athwart the stout, black-lacquered doors.

Once, not far from Lochuan, a young Tungpei officer, who rode beside me in the cavorting track, pointed to such a yao-fang-ts’un—a cave village. It lay only a mile or so distant from the motor road, just across a deep ravine.

"They are Reds,” he revealed. "One of our detachments was sent over there to buy millet a few weeks ago, and those villagers refused to sell us a catty of it. The stupid soldiers took some by force. As they retired the peasants shot at them.” He swung his arms in an arc including everything on each side of the highway, so carefully guarded by dozens of pao-lei— hilltop machine-gun nests—manned by Kuomintang troops. "Hung-fei” he said, "everything out there is Red-bandit territory.”

I gazed toward the spaces indicated with keener interest, for it was into that horizon of unknown hill and upland that I intended, within a few hours, to make my way.

On the road we passed part of the 105th Division, all Manchurians, moving back from Yenan to Lochuan. They were lean and sturdy youths, most of them taller than the average Chinese soldier. At a roadside inn we stopped to drink tea, and I sat down near several of them who were resting. They were just returning from Wa Ya Pao, in north Shensi, where there had been a skirmish with the Reds. I overheard scraps of conversation between them. They were talking about the Reds.

"They eat a lot better than we do,” one argued.

"Yes—eat the flesh of the lao-pai-hsing!” * another replied.

"Never mind that—a few landlords—it’s all to the good. Who thanked us for coming to Wa Ya Pao? The landlords! Isn’t it a fact? Why should we kill ourselves for these rich men?”

"They say more than three thousand of our Tungpei men are with them now. …”

"Another thing on their side. Why should we fight our own people, when none of us want to fight anybody, unless it’s a Japanese, eh?”

An officer approached and this promising conversation came to an end. The officer ordered them to move on. They picked up their rifles and trudged off down the road. Soon afterwards we drove away.

Early in the afternoon of the second day we reached Yenan, where north Shensi’s single road fit for wheeled traffic came to an end—about 400 li,^† more or less, south of the Great Wall. It was a historic town: through it, in centuries past, had come the nomadic raiders from the north, and through it swept the great Mongol cavalry of Genghis Khan, in its ride of conquest toward Sianfu.

Yenan was ideally suited for defense. Cradled in a bowl of high, rock-ribbed hills, its stout walls crawled up to the very tops. Attached to them now, like wasps’ nests, were newly made fortifications, where machine guns bristled toward the Reds not far beyond. The road and its immediate environs were then held by Tungpei troops, but until recently Yenan had been completely cut off. The Reds had turned upon their enemy the blockade which the Generalissimo enforced against themselves, and hundreds reportedly had died of starvation.

The long Red siege of Yenan* had been lifted a few weeks before I arrived, but signs of it were still evident in the famished-looking inhabitants and the empty shelves or barred doors of shops. Little food was available and prices were alpine. What could be bought at all had been secured as a result of a temporary truce with the Red partisans. In return for an agreement not to take the offensive against the soviet districts on this front, the soviet peasants now sold grain and vegetables to the hungry anti-Red troops.

I had my credentials for a visit to the front. My plan was to leave the city early next morning, and go toward the "White” lines, where the troops were merely holding their positions, without attempting any advance. Then I meant to branch off on one of the mountain lanes over which, I had been told, merchants smuggled their goods in and out of the soviet regions.

To state precisely the manner in which, just as I had hoped, I did pass the last sentry and enter no man’s land, might have caused serious difficulties for the Kuomintang adherents who assisted me on my way. Suffice it to say that my experience proved once more that anything is possible in China, if it is done in the Chinese manner. For by seven o’clock next morning I had really left the last Kuomintang machine gun behind, and was walking through the thin strip of territory that divided "Red” from "White.”

With me was a single muleteer, who had been hired for me by a Manchurian colonel in Yenan. He was to carry my scant belongings—bedding roll, a little food, two cameras and twenty-four rolls of film—to the first Red partisan outpost. I did not know whether he himself was a Red bandit or a White bandit—but bandit he certainly looked. All this territory having for several years alternately been controlled by armies of both colors, it was quite possible for him to have been either—or perhaps both.

For four hours we followed a small winding stream and did not see any sign of human life. There was no road at all, but only the bed of the stream that rushed swiftly between high walls of rock, above which rose swift hills of loess. It was the perfect setting for the blotting-out of a too inquisitive foreign devil. A disturbing factor was the muleteer’s frequently expressed admiration of my cowhide shoes.

"Tao-la!” he suddenly shouted around his ear, as the rock walls at last gave way and opened out into a narrow valley, green with young wheat. "We have arrived!”

Relieved, I gazed beyond him and saw in the side of a hill a loess village, where blue smoke curled from the tall clay chimneys that stood up like long fingers against the face of the cliff. In a few minutes we were there.

A young farmer who wore a turban of white toweling on his head and a revolver strapped to his waist came out and looked at me in astonishment. Who was I and what did I want?

"I am an American journalist,” I said in conformance with the instructions Wang the Pastor had given me. "I want to see the local chief of the Poor People’s League.”

He looked at me blankly and replied, "Hai p’a!”

Hai p’a in any Chinese I had ever heard had only one meaning: "I’m afraid.” If he is afraid, I thought to myself, what the devil am I supposed to feel? But his appearance belied his words: he looked completely self-assured. He turned to the lofu and asked him who I was.

The muleteer repeated what I had said, adding a few flourishes of his own. With relief, I saw the young farmer’s face soften and then I noticed that he was really a good-looking young man, with fine bronzed skin and good white teeth. He did not seem to belong to the race of timid peasants of China elsewhere. There was a challenge in his sparkling merry eyes, and a certain bravado. He slowly moved his hand away from his revolver butt and smiled.

"I am that man,” he said. "I am the chief. Come inside and drink some hot tea.”

These Shensi hill people had a dialect of their own, full of slurred colloquialisms, but they understood pai-hua or mandarin Chinese, and most of their own speech was quite comprehensible to an outlander. After a few more attempts at conversation with the chief, he began to show understanding, and we made good progress. Occasionally into our talk, however, would creep this hai p’a business, but for a while I was too disconcerted to ask him just what he feared. When I finally did probe into the matter, I discovered that hai p’a in the dialect of the Shensi hills is the equivalent of pu chih-tao in mandarin Chinese. It simply means "don’t understand.” My satisfaction at this discovery was considerable.

Seated on a felt-covered k’ang I told my host more about myself and my plans. In a short time he seemed reassured. I wanted to go to An Tsai—the county seat—where I then believed Soviet Chairman Mao Tse-tung to be. Could he give me a guide and a muleteer?

Certainly, certainly, he agreed, but I should not think of moving in the heat of day. The sun had already climbed to its zenith, it was really very hot, I looked tired, and, meanwhile, had I eaten? Actually I was ravenous, and without any further ceremony I accepted this invitation to a first meal with a "Red bandit.” My muleteer was anxious to return to Yenan, and, paying him off, I bade him good-by. It was a farewell to my last link with the "White” world for many weeks to come. I had crossed the Red Rubicon.

I was now at the mercy of Mr. Liu Lung-huo—Liu the Dragon Fire, as I learned the young peasant was called—and likewise at the mercy of his tough-looking comrades, who had begun to drift in from neighboring you-fang. Similarly clad and armed, they look at me curiously and laughed at my preposterous accent.

Liu offered me tobacco, wine, and tea, and plied me with numerous questions. He and his friends examined with close interest, interrupted by exclamations of approval, my camera, my shoes, my woolen stockings, the fabric of my cotton shorts, and (with lengthy admiration) the zipper on my khaki shirt. The general impression seemed to prevail that, however ridiculous it might look, the ensemble evidently served its purposes well enough. I did not know just what "communism” might mean to these men in practice, and I was prepared to see my belongings rapidly "redistributed”—but instead I was given the foreign-guest treatment.

In an hour a vast platter of scrambled eggs arrived, accompanied by steamed rolls, boiled millet, some cabbage, and a little roast pork. My host apologized for the simplicity of the fare, and I for an inordinate appetite. Which latter was quite beside the point, as I had to punt my chopsticks at a lively pace to keep up with the good fellows of the Poor People’s League.

Dragon Fire assured me that An Tsai was "only a few steps,” and though I was uneasy about it I could do nothing but wait, as he insisted. When finally a youthful guide appeared, accompanied by a muleteer, it was already past four in the afternoon. Before leaving, I ventured to pay Mr. Liu for his food, but he indignantly refused.

"You are a foreign guest,” he explained, "and you have business with our Chairman, Mao. Moreover, your money is no good.” Glancing at the bill I held out to him, he asked, "Haven’t you any soviet money?” When I replied in the negative, he counted out a dollar’s worth of soviet paper notes. "Here—you will need this on the road.”

Mr. Liu accepted a Kuomintang dollar in exchange; I thanked him again, and climbed up the road behind my guide and muleteer.

Ahead of me was a narrow escape and an incident which was later to nourish the rumor that I had been kidnaped and killed by bandits. And as a matter of fact, bandits—not Red but White—were already trailing me behind those silent walls of loess.

The Road to the Red Capital

Chased by White Bandits

"Down with the landlords who eat our flesh!”

"Down with the militarists who drink our blood!”

"Down with the traitors who sell China to Japan!”

"Welcome the United Front with all anti-Japanese armies!”

"Long live the Chinese Revolution!”

"Long live the Chinese Red Army!”

It was under these somewhat disturbing exhortations, emblazoned in bold black characters, that I spent my first night in Red territory.

But it was not in An Tsai and not under the protection of any Red soldiers. For, as I had feared, we did not reach An Tsai that day, but by sunset had arrived only at a little village that nestled in the curve of a river, with hills brooding darkly on every side. Several layers of slate-roofed houses rose up from the lip of the stream, and it was on their mud-brick walls that the slogans were chalked. Fifty or sixty peasants and staring children poured out to greet my caravan of one donkey.

My young emissary of the Poor People’s League decided to deposit me here. One of his cows had recently calved, he said; there were wolves in the neighborhood, and he had to get back to his charges. An Tsai was still ten miles distant and we could not get there easily in the dark. He turned me over for safekeeping to the chairman of the local branch of the Poor People’s League. Both guide and muleteer refused any compensation for their services—either in White money or in Red.

The chairman was a youth in his early twenties who wore a faded blue cotton jacket under a brown, open face, and a pair of white trousers above a pair of leathery bare feet. He welcomed me and was very kind. He offered me a room in the village meeting house, and had hot water brought to me, and a bowl of millet. But I declined the dark, evil-smelling room and petitioned for the use of two dismantled doors. Laying these on a couple of benches, I unrolled my blankets and made my bed in the open. It was a gorgeous night, with a clear sky spangled with northern stars, and the waters in a little fall below me murmured of peace and tranquillity. Exhausted from the long walk, I fell asleep immediately.

When I opened my eyes again dawn was just breaking. The chairman was standing over me, shaking my shoulder.

"What is it?”

"You had better leave a little early. There are bandits near here, and you ought to get to An Tsai quickly.”

Bandits? He was not talking about Reds, he meant "White bandits.” I got up without further persuasion. I did not want anything to happen to me so ridiculous as being kidnaped by White bandits in Soviet China.

White bandits were in the Kuomintang’s terminology called min-t’uan, or "people’s corps,” just as Red bandits were in soviet terminology called yu-chi-tui, "roving bands”—Red partisans. In an effort to combat peasant uprisings, the min-t’uan forces had increasingly been organized by the Kuomintang. They functioned as an organic part of the pao-chia system, an ancient method of controlling the peasantry which was now being widely imposed by both the Kuomintang in China and the Japanese in Manchukuo.

Pao-chia literally means "guaranteed armor.” One chia consisted of approximately ten families, with a headman supposedly elected but usually appointed by the local magistrate. One pao was made up of approximately ten chia. The combined pao-chia was held collectively responsible to the district magistrate (hsien chang), a government appointee, for any offense committed by any member of the roughly hundred-family unit,. It was the chia headman’s duty to report any "rebel son” in his group, otherwise he would be punished for any irregularity. By such means the Mongols and Manchus had pacified rural China—and it was not a popular means, especially among the poor.

As a measure for preventing the organization of peasant protest it was almost unbeatable. Since headmen of the pao-chia were nearly always rich farmers, landlords, pawnbrokers, or moneylenders—most zealous of subjects—naturally they were not inclined to "guarantee” any tenant or debtor peasants of a rebellious turn of mind. Yet not to be guaranteed was a serious matter. An unguaranteed man could be thrown in jail on any pretext, as a "suspicious character.”

This meant in effect that the whole peasantry was placed at the mercy of the gentry, who at any time could ruin a man by refusing to guarantee him. Among the functions of the pao-chia, and a very important one, was the collection of taxes for the maintenance of the min-t’uan, or militia. The min-t’uan was selected, organized, and commanded by the landlords and gentry. Its primary duties were to fight communism, to help collect rents and share-crop debts, to collect loans and interest, and to support the local magistrates’ efforts to gather in the taxes.

Hence it happened that, when the Red Army occupied a territory, its first as well as its last enemy was the min-t’uan. For the min-t’uan had no base except in the landlords who paid them, and they lost that base when the Reds came in. Class war in China was best seen in the struggles between min-t’uan and Red partisans, for here very often was a direct armed conflict between landlords and their former tenants and debtors. Min-t’uan mercenaries numbered hundreds of thousands and were most important auxiliaries of the some 2,000,000 nominally anti-Red troops of China.

Now, although there was a truce between the Red Army and the Kuomintang Army on this front, attacks by the min-t’uan on the Red partisan brigades continued intermittently. In Sian, Lochuan, and Yenan I had heard that many landlords who had fled to these cities were now financing or personally leading the White bandits to operate in the soviet border districts. Taking advantage of the absence of the main Red forces, they made retaliatory raids into Red territory, burning and looting villages and killing peasants. Leaders were carried off to the White districts, where generous rewards were given for such Red captives by the landlords and White officers.

Interested primarily in revanche and quick cash returns on their adventures, the min-t’uan were credited with the most destructive work of the Red-White wars. I, at any rate, had no wish to test out the White bandits’ "foreign policy” on myself. Although my belongings were few, I feared that the little cash and clothing I had, together with my cameras, would prove prizes too tempting for them to overlook, if it required only the erasure of a lone foreign devil to possess them.

After hastily swallowing some hot tea and wheat cakes, I set off with another guide and muleteer contributed by the chairman. For an hour we followed the bed of the stream, occasionally passing small cave villages, where heavy-furred dogs growled menacingly at me and child sentinels came out to demand our road pass. Then we reached a lovely pool of still water set in a natural basin hollowed from great rocks, and there I saw my first Red warrior.

He was alone except for a white pony which stood grazing beside the stream, wearing a vivid silky-blue saddle-blanket with a yellow star on it. The young man had been bathing; at our approach he jumped up quickly, pulling on a sky-blue coat and a turban of white toweling on which was fixed a red star. A Mauser hung at his hip, with a red tassel dangling bravely from its wooden combination holster-stock. With his hand on his gun he waited for us to come up to him, and demanded our business from the guide.

"I have come to interview Mao Tse-tung,” I said. "I understand he is at An Tsai. How much farther have we to go?”

"Chairman Mao?” he inquired slowly. "No, he is not at An Tsai.” Then he peered behind us and asked if I were alone. When he convinced himself that I was, his reserve dropped from him, he smiled as if at some secret amusement, and said, "I am going to An Tsai. IΓll just go along with you to the district government.”

He walked his pony beside me and I volunteered more details about myself, and ventured some inquiries about him. I learned that he was in the political defense bureau, and was on patrol duty along this frontier. And the horse? It was a "gift” from Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang. He told me that the Reds had captured over 1,000 horses from Chang’s troops in recent battles in north Shensi. I learned further that he was called Yao, that he was twenty-two years old, and that he had been a Red for six years.

In a couple of hours we had reached An Tsai, which lay opposite the Fu Ho, a subtributary of the Yellow River. A big town on the map, An Tsai turned out to be little but the pretty shell of its wall. The streets were completely deserted and everything stood in crumbling ruins.

"The town was completely destroyed over a decade ago by a great flood,” Yao explained. "The whole city went swimming.”

An Tsai’s inhabitants had not rebuilt the city, but lived now in the face of a great stone cliff, honeycombed with yao-fang, a little beyond the walls. Upon arrival we discovered, however, that the Red Army detachment stationed there had been dispatched to chase bandits, while members of the district soviet had gone to Pai Chia P’ing, a nearby hamlet, to render a report to a provincial commissioner. Yao volunteered to escort me to Pai Chia P’ing—"Hundred Family Peace”—which we reached at dusk.

I had already been in soviet territory a day and a half, yet I had seen no signs of wartime distress, had met but one Red soldier, and a populace that universally seemed to be pursuing its agrarian tasks in complete composure. Yet I was not to be misled by appearances. I remembered how, during the Sino-Japanese War at Shanghai in 1932, Chinese peasants had gone on tilling their fields in the very midst of battle, with apparent unconcern. So that when, just as we rounded a corner to enter "Hundred Family Peace,” and I heard blood-curdling yells directly above me, I was not entirely unprepared.

Looking toward the sound of the fierce battle cries, I saw, standing on a ledge above the road, in front of a row of barracklike houses, a dozen peasants brandishing spears, pikes and a few rifles in the most uncompromising of attitudes. It seemed that the question of my fate as blockade runner—whether I was to be given the firing squad as an imperialist, or to be welcomed as an honest inquirer—was about to be settled without further delay.

I must have turned a comical face toward Yao, for he burst into laughter. "Pu p’a” he chuckled. "Don’t be afraid. They are only some partisans—practicing. There is a Red partisan school here. Don’t be alarmed!”

Later on I learned that the curriculum for partisans included this rehearsal of ancient Chinese war cries, just as in the days of feudal tourneys described in one of Mao Tse-tung’s favorite books, the Shut Hu Chuan.* And having experienced a certain frigidity of spine as an unwitting subject of the technique, I could testify that it was still very effective in intimidating an enemy.

I had just sat down and begun an interview with a soviet functionary to whom Yao had introduced me in Pai Chia P’ing, when a young commander, wearing a Sam Browne belt, stumbled up on a sweating horse and plunged to the ground. He looked curiously at me. And it was from him that I heard the full details of my own adventure.

The new arrival was named Pien, and he was commandant of the An Tsai Red Guard. He announced that he had just returned from an encounter with a force of about a hundred min-t’uan. A little peasant boy—a "Young Vanguard”—had run several miles and arrived almost exhausted at An Tsai, to warn them that min-t’uan had invaded the district. And that their leader was a really white bandit!—a foreign devil—myself!

"I at once took a mounted detachment over a mountain short cut, and in an hour we sighted the bandits,” Pien recounted. "They were following you”—he pointed at me—"only about two li behind. But we surrounded them, attacked in a valley, and captured some, including two of their leaders, and several horses. The rest escaped toward the frontier.” As he concluded his brief report, some of his command filed into the courtyard, leading several of the captured mounts.

I began to wonder if he really thought I was leading the min-t’uan. Had I escaped from Whites—who, had they seized me in no man’s land, undoubtedly would have called me a Red—only to be captured by the Reds and accused of being a White?

But presently a slender young officer appeared, ornamented with a black beard unusually heavy for a Chinese. He came up and addressed me in a soft, cultured voice. "Hello,” he said, "are you looking for somebody?”

He had spoken in English!

And in a moment I learned that he was the notorious Chou En-lai.

The Insurrectionist

After I had talked for a few minutes with Chou En-lai and explained who I was, he arranged for me to spend the night in Pai Chia P’ing, and asked me to come next morning to his headquarters in a nearby village.

I sat down to dinner with a section of the communications department, which was stationed here, and met a dozen young men who were billeted in Pai Chia P’ing. Some of them were teachers in the partisan school, one was a radio operator, and some were officers of the Red Army. Our meal consisted of boiled chicken, unleavened whole-wheat bread, cabbage, millet, and potatoes, of which I ate heartily. But, as usual, there was nothing to drink but hot water and I could not touch it. I was parched with thirst.

The food was served—delivered is the word—by two nonchalant young lads wearing uniforms several sizes too large for them, and peaked Red caps with long bills that kept flapping down over their eyes. They looked at me sourly at first, but after a few minutes I managed to provoke a friendly grin from one of them. Emboldened by this success, I called to him as he went past.

"Wei [hey]!,” I called, "bring us some cold water.”

The youth simply ignored me. In a few minutes I tried the other one, with no better result.

Then I saw that Li K’e-nung,^* head of the communications section, was laughing at me behind his thick-lensed goggles. He plucked my sleeve. "You can call him "little devil,” he advised, "or you can call him ‘comrade’ [t’ung-chih]—but you cannot call him wei! In here everybody is a comrade. These lads are Young Vanguards, and they are here because they are revolutionaries and volunteer to help us. They are not servants. They are future Red warriors.”

Just then the cold (boiled) water did arrive.

"Thank you,” I said apologetically, "—comrade!”

The Young Vanguard looked at me boldly. "Never mind that,” he said, "you don’t thank a comrade for a thing like that!”

I had never before seen so much personal dignity in any Chinese youngsters. This first encounter was only the beginning of a series of surprises that the Young Vanguards were to give me, for as I penetrated deeper into the soviet districts I was to discover in these red-cheeked "little Red devils”—cheerful, gay, energetic, and loyal—the living spirit of an astonishing crusade of youth.

It was one of those Sons of Lenin, in fact, who escorted me in the morning to Chou En-lai’s headquarters. That turned out to be a bombproof hut (half cave) surrounded by many others exactly like it, in which farmers dwelt undismayed by the fact that they were in a battle area, and that in their midst was the Red commander of the Eastern Front.* The quartering of a few troops in the vicinity did not seem to have disturbed the rustic serenity. Before the quarters of Chou En-lai, for whose head Chiang Kai-shek had offered $80,000, there was one sentry.

Inside I saw that the room was clean, but furnished in the barest fashion. A mosquito net hanging over the clay k’ang was the only luxury observable. A couple of iron dispatch boxes stood at the foot of it, and a little wooden table served as desk. Chou was bending over it reading radiograms when the sentry announced my arrival.

"I have a report that you are a reliable journalist, friendly to the Chinese people, and that you can be trusted to tell the truth,” said Chou. "This is all we want to know. It does not matter to us that you are not a Communist. We will welcome any journalist who comes to see the soviet districts. It is not we, but the Kuomintang, who prevent it. You can write about anything you see and you will be given every help to investigate the soviet districts.”

Evidently the "report” about me had come from the Communists’ secret headquarters in Sian. The Reds had radio communication with all important cities of China, including Shanghai, Hankow, Nanking, and Tientsin. Despite frequent seizures of Red radio sets in the White cities, the Kuomintang had never succeeded in severing urban-rural Red communications for very long. According to Chou, the Kuomintang had never cracked the Red Army’s codes since they first established a radio department, with equipment captured from the White troops.

Chou’s radio station, a portable wireless set powered by a manually operated generator, was erected only a short distance from his headquarters. Through it he was in touch with all important points in the soviet areas, and with every front. He even had direct communication with Commander-in-Chief Chu Teh, whose forces were then stationed hundreds of miles to the southwest, on the Szechuan-Tibetan border. There was a radio school in Pao An, temporary soviet capital in the Northwest, where about ninety students were being trained as radio engineers. They picked up the daily broadcasts from Nanking, Shanghai, and Tokyo, and furnished news to the press of Soviet China.

Chou squatted before his little desk and put aside his radiograms—mostly reports (he said) from units stationed at various points along the Yellow River, opposite Shansi province, the Reds’ Eastern Front. He began working out a suggested itinerary for me. When he finished he handed me a paper containing items covering a trip of ninety-two days.

"This is my recommendation,” he said, "but whether you follow it is your own business. I think you will find it an interesting journey.”

But ninety-two days! And almost half of them to be spent on foot or horseback. What was there to be seen? Were the Red districts so extensive as that? As it turned out, I was to spend much longer than he had suggested, and in the end to leave with reluctance because I had seen so little.

Chou promised me the use of a horse to carry me to Pao An, three days distant, and arranged for me to leave the following morning, when I could accompany part of the communications corps that was returning to the provisional capital. I learned that Mao Tse-tung and other soviet functionaries were there now, and Chou agreed to send a radio message to them telling of my arrival.

As we talked I had been studying Chou with deep interest; like many Red leaders, he was as much a legend as a man. Slender and of medium height, with a slight wiry frame, he was boyish in appearance despite his long black beard, and had large, warm, deep-set eyes. A certain magnetism about him seemed to derive from a combination of personal charm and assurance of command. His English was somewhat hesitant and difficult. He told me he had not used it for five years. The account below is based on notes of our conversation at that time.

Chou was born in 1899 in Huai-an, Kiangsu, in what he called a "bankrupt mandarin family.” His mother was a native of Shaohsing, Chekiang province. Chou was given (at the age of four months) to the family of his father’s younger brother. The brother was about to die without issue when Chou’s father, to assure him of male posterity (on the family tablets), presented him with En-lai to rear as his own son. "My aunt became my real mother when I was a baby,” said Chou. "I did not leave her for even one day until I was ten years old—when she and my natural mother both died.”

Chou’s paternal grandfather was a scholar who served as a magistrate in Huai-an county, North Kiangsu, during the Manchu Dynasty. It was there that Chou spent his childhood, while his father, Chou Yun-liang, who had passed the imperial examinations, vainly waited for a magistry; he died while Chou was still an infant. His foster mother (whom Chou called "mother”) was highly literate, and that was not general then among officials’ wives. Still more uncommon, she liked fiction and "forbidden”* stories of past rebellions, to which she introduced Chou as a child. His early education was in a family school under a private tutor who taught classical literature and philosophy, to prepare one for official life. After his "two mothers” died Chou was sent to live with another aunt and uncle—his father’s older brother, who was also an official—in Fengtien (Mukden, Shenyang) Manchuria. He began to read illegal books and papers written or inspired by such reformists as Liang Ch’i-ch’ao.

At the age of fourteen Chou entered Nankai Middle School, in Tientsin. The monarchy had been overthrown and Chou now fully "came under the influence of the Kuomintang” or Nationalist Party founded by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Japan had provided hospitality to Sun Yat-sen during his agitation against the monarchy. Sun still found refuge there as he prepared to overthrow corrupt warlords who had seized the republic. Chou himself went to Japan in 1917, the year he graduated from Nankai Middle School. While learning Japanese, Chou was an "auditor student” at Waseda University in Tokyo, and at the University of Kyoto. He also became widely acquainted with revolution-minded Chinese students in Japan during his eighteen months there, and kept in touch, through letters and reading, with events in Peking.

In 1919 the former director of Nankai Middle School, Chang Poling, became chancellor of the newly organized Nankai University of Tientsin. Chou left Japan to enroll there at Chang’s invitation. Meanwhile his relatives—"a spendthrift lot,” Chou called them—had become so impoverished that they could provide no support for Chou’s college plans. Chang Po-ling gave Chou a job that paid enough to meet costs of tuition, lodging, and books. "During my last two years at Nankai Middle School I had received no help from my family. I lived on a scholarship which I won as best student in my class. In Japan I had lived by borrowing from my friends. Now at Nankai University I became editor of the Hsueh-sheng Lien-ho Huí Pao (Students’ Union Paper), which helped cover some expenses.” Chou managed to do that despite five months spent in jail in 1919, as a leader of Nankai’s student rebellion which grew out of the May Fourth movement.*

During that period Chou helped to form the Chueh-wu Shih, or Awakening Society, a radical group whose members later became, variously, anarchists, Nationalists, and Communists. (One of them was Teng Ying-ch’ao,^† whom Chou was to marry in 1925.) The Awakening Society existed until the end of 1920, when four of its founders, led by Chou, went to France as part of the Work-Study program organized by Ch’en Tu-hsiut and other Francophiles.

"Before going to France,” said Chou, "I read translations of the Communist Manifesto; Kautsky’s Class Struggle; and The October Revolution. These books were published under the auspices of the New Youth (Hsin Ch’ing-nien), edited by Ch’en Tu-hsiu. I also personally met Ch’en Tu-hsiu as well as Li Ta-chao†—who were to become founders of the Chinese Communist Party.” (Chou made no reference to any meeting with Mao Tse-tung at that time.)

"I sailed for France in October, 1920. On the way I met many Hunanese students who were members of the Hsin-Min Hsueh-hui (the New People’s Study Society), organized by Mao Tse-tung. Among these were Ts’ai Ho-sent and his sister, Ts’ai Ch’ang,† who organized the first China Socialist Youth Corps in France in 1921. In 1922 I became a member-founder of the [Chinese] Communist Youth League and began to work full time for that organization. ^‡ After two years I went to London, where I spent two and a half months. I did not like it. Then I went to Germany and worked there for a year, helping to organize.^§ Our Communist Youth League had sent delegates to Shanghai in 1922, to request admission to the Party, formed the year before. Our petition being granted, the CYL became formally affiliated with the Party, and thus I became a Communist. Founder-members of the CYL in France who became Party members in this way included Ts’ai Ho-sen, Ts’ai Ch’ang, Chao Shih-yen, Li Fu-ch’un,† Li Li-san,† Wang Jo-fei, and the two sons of Ch’en Tu-hsiu—Ch’en Yen-nien and Ch’en Ch’iao-nien. Ch’en Yen-nien later became a ricksha puller in order to organize rickshamen in Shanghai. During the counterrevolution he was captured and badly tortured before he was killed. His brother was executed at Lunghua a year later—1928.

"Among members of our Chinese Students Union in France more than four hundred joined the CYL. Fewer than a hundred joined the anarchists and about a hundred became Nationalists.”

Financial support for Chinese students in France came from the Sino-French Educational Association and from Tsai Yuan-p’ei and Li Shih-tseng. "Many old and patriotic gentlemen,” said Chou, "privately helped us students, and with no personal political aims.”2 Chou’s own financial backer while in Europe was Yen Hsiu, a founder of Nankai University. Unlike some Chinese students, Chou did no manual labor in France, except for a brief period at the Renault plant, when he studied labor organization. After a year with a private tutor, learning the French language, he devoted his entire time to politics. "Later on,” Chou told me, "when friends remarked that I had used Yen Hsiu’s money to become a Communist, Yen quoted a Chinese proverb, ‘Every intelligent man has his own purposes!’”

In France, London, and Germany, Chou spent three years. On his return to China he stopped briefly for instructions in Moscow. Late in 1924 he arrived in Canton, where he became Chiang Kai-shek’s deputy director of the political department of Whampoa Academy. (While still in Paris Chou had been elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. In Canton he was also elected secretary of the Kwang-tung provincial Communist Party—paradox of a strange alliance!) At Whampoa, Chou’s real boss was the Russian adviser, General Vasili Bluecher,^* known in Canton as Galin.

Under the skillful guidance of Galin, and of the Russians’ chief political adviser, Mikhail Borodin,^* Chou En-lai built up a circle of cadet disciples known as the League of Military Youth, which included Lin Piao and other future generals of the Red Army. His influence was further enhanced when, in 1925, he was appointed political commissar of the Nationalists’ first division, which suppressed a revolt near Swatow—an occasion Chou utilized to organize labor unions in that port. In March, 1926, Kuomintang-Communist tension resulted in Chiang’s first anti-Communist blow. He succeeded in ending the practice of dual-party membership and removed many Communists from Whampoa posts. Chou En-lai remained, however, on Chiang Kai-shek’s orders.

During 1926 the Northern Expedition got under way, with Chiang Kai-shek as commander-in-chief selected jointly by the Kuomintang and the Communists. Chou En-lai was ordered to prepare an insurrection and help the Nationalist Army seize Shanghai. Within three months the Communist Party had organized 600,000 workers and was able to call a general strike, but it was a fiasco. Unarmed and untrained, the workers did not know how to go about "seizing the city.”

Underestimating the significance of the first and then of a second strike, the northern warlords cut off a number of heads but failed to halt the labor movement, while Chou En-lai learned by practice "how to lead an uprising.” Chou and such Shanghai labor leaders as Chao Tse-yen, Chao Shih-yen, Ku Shun-chang, and Lo Yi-ming now succeeded in organizing 50,000 pickets. With Mausers smuggled into the city an "iron band” of 300 marksmen was trained, to become the only armed force these Shanghai workers had.

On March 21, 1927, the revolutionists called a general strike which closed all the industries of Shanghai. They first seized the police stations, next the arsenal, then the garrison, and after that, victory. Five thousand workers were armed, six battalions of revolutionary troops created, the warlord armies withdrew, and a "citizens’ government” was proclaimed. "Within two days,” said Chou, "we won everything but the foreign concessions.”

The International Settlement (jointly controlled by Britain, the U.S., and Japan) and the French Concession which adjoined it were never attacked during the third insurrection; otherwise the triumph was complete—and short-lived. The Nationalist Army, led by General Pai Chung-hsi, was welcomed to the city by the workers’ militia. Then on April 12 the Nationalist-Communist coalition abruptly ended when Chiang Kai-shek set up a separate regime in Nanking, to lead one of history’s classic counterrevolutions.

In the French Concession and the International Settlement, Chiang’s envoys had secretly conferred with representatives of the foreign powers. They reached agreements to cooperate against the Chinese Communists and their Russian allies—until then also Chiang’s allies. Given large sums by Shanghai’s bankers, and the blessings of the foreign authorities, including guns and armored cars, Chiang was also helped by powerful Settlement and Concession underworld leaders. They mobilized hundreds of professional gangsters. Installed in the foreigners’ armored cars, and attired in Nationalist uniforms, the gangsters carried out a night operation in coordination with Chiang’s troops, moving in from the rear and other flanks. Taken by complete surprise by troops considered friendly, the militiamen were massacred and their "citizens’ government” bloodily dissolved.

And thus it happened that Chou En-lai, after a remarkably lucky escape, began his life as a fugitive from Kuomintang assassins and a leader of the revolution which finally raised the Red banner in China.

Dozens of Chou En-lai’s close co-workers in the Shanghai Uprising were seized and executed. Chou estimated the toll of the "Shanghai Massacre” at 5,000 lives.3 He himself was captured by Chiang Kai-shek’s Second Division, and General Pai Chung-hsi, (later ruler of Kwangsi) issued an order for his execution. But the brother of the division commander had been Chou’s student at Whampoa, and he helped Chou to escape.

The Insurrectionist fled to Wuhan ^* and then to Nanchang, where he helped organize the August First Uprising. Senior member of the Politburo at the time, Chou was secretary of the Front Committee that directed the uprising, which was a fiasco. Next he went to Swatow and held it for ten days against assaults from both foreign gunboats and the native troops of militarists. With the failure and defeat of the Canton Commune, Chou was obliged to work underground—until 1931, when he succeeded in "running the blockade” and entered the soviet districts of Kiangsi and Fukien. There he was made political commissar to Chu Teh, commander-in-chief of the Red Army. Later Chou became vice-chairman of the revolutionary military council, an office he still held when I met him. There had been years of exhausting struggle in the South, and then the Long March. … But of Chou’s further story, and of the scenes and events already mentioned, I was shortly to learn more, and in a broader context, from Mao Tse-tung and others.

Chou left me with an impression of a cool, logical, and empirical mind. In his days at Nankai (I had heard from one of his classmates there) Chou had often taken feminine leads in school plays. There was nothing effeminate about the tough, bearded, unsentimental soldier I met in Pai Chia P’ing. But there was charm—one quality in the mixed ingredients that were to make Chou Red China’s No. 1 diplomat.

Something About Ho Lung

Next morning at six I set out with a squad of about forty youths of the communications corps, who were escorting a caravan of goods to Pao An.

I found that only myself, Fu, Chin-kuei, an emissary from the Wai-chiaopu—the Reds’ own "Foreign Office”—and Li Chiang-lin, a Red commander, were mounted. It may not be precisely the word: Fu had a privileged perch on a stout but already heavily laden mule; Li Chiang-lin rode an equally overburdened ass; and I was vaguely astride the lone horse, which at times I could not be quite sure was really there at all.

My animal had a quarter-moon back and a camel gait. His enfeebled legs wobbled so that I expected him at any moment to buckle up and breathe his last. He was especially disconcerting as we crept along the narrow trails hewn from steep cliffs that rose up from the river bed we followed. It seemed to me that any sudden shift of my weight over his sunken flanks would send us both hurtling to the rocky gorge below.

Li Chiang-lin laughed down from his pyramid of luggage at my discomfiture. "That’s a fine saddle you are sitting, t’ung-chih, but what is that underneath it?”

At his gibe I could not resist commenting: "Just tell me this, Li Chiang-lin, how can you fight on dogs like these? Is this how you mount your Red Cavalry?”

"Pu-shih! No, you will see! Is your steed huai-la? ^* Well, it’s just because we have bad ones like this at the rear that our cavalry is unbeatable at the front! If there is a horse that is fat and can run, not even Mao Tse-tung can keep him from the front! Only the worn-out dogs we use in our rear. And that’s how it is with everything: guns, food, clothing, horses, mules, camels, sheep—the best go to our Red fighters! If it’s a horse you want, t’ung-chih, go to the front!”

But men? Li explained that it was easier to spare a good man from the front than a good horse.

And Commander Li was a good man, a good Bolshevik and a good storyteller. He had been a Red for ten years, and was a veteran of the Nanchang Uprising of 1927, when communism first became an independent force in China. As I rode, walked, panted and thirsted up and down the broken hills of Shensi beside Commander Li, he recounted incidents and anecdotes one after another, and sometimes, when pressed again and again, even stooped to talk about himself.

A Hunanese, Li had been a middle-school student when he joined the Kuomintang and began to take part in the Great Revolution. He must have entered the Communist Party in the early 1920’s; he had worked as a labor organizer with Teng Fa in Hongkong during the great seamen’s strike of 1922. He said that in 1925 he had been sent, as part of a Communist-led delegation, to see Ho Lung,* who already had a reputation as a bandit leader. Li’s reminiscences are here presented as part of the Red Army legend.

"Ho Lung’s men were not bandits, even then,” Li told me, as we sat resting one day beneath some trees that stood beside a cool stream. "His father had been a leader in the Ke Lao Hui,^† and Ho Lung inherited his prestige, so that he became famous throughout Hunan when still a young man. Many stories are told by the Hunanese of his bravery as a youth.

"His father was a military officer in the Ch’ing Dynasty, and one day he was invited to a dinner by his fellow officers. He took his son, Ho Lung, with him. His father was boasting of Ho Lung’s fearlessness, and one of the guests decided to test it out. He fired off a gun under the table. They say that Ho Lung did not even blink!

"When we met him he had already been commissioned in the provincial army. He then controlled a territory through which rich opium caravans had to pass from Yunnan to Hankow, and he lived by taxing them, and did not rob the people. His followers did not rape or carouse, like the troops of many warlord armies, and he did not let them smoke opium. They kept their rifles clean. But it was the custom there to offer opium to guests. Ho Lung himself did not smoke, but when we arrived he had opium pipes and opium brought to the k’ang, and over these we talked about revolution.

"The head of our propaganda committee was Chou Yi-chung, a Communist, who had some family connection with Ho Lung. We talked to him for three weeks. Ho Lung had not had much education, except in military affairs, but he was not an ignorant man.

"We established a Party training school in his army, with Chou Yi-sung—who was later killed—as leader. Although it was a Kuomintang Nationalist training school, most of the propagandists were Communists. Many students entered the school and later became political leaders. Besides Ho Lung’s army, the school furnished political commissioners for the Third Division, under Yuan Tso-ming, who was then commander of the Left Route Army. Yuan Tso-ming was assassinated by agents of T’ang Sheng-chih, and the Third Division was given to Ho Lung. His enlarged command was called the Twentieth Army, which became part of the main Fourth Group Army * under the Left Kuomintang general, Chang Fa-kuei.”

"What happened to Ho Lung after the Nanchang Uprising?”

"His forces were defeated. He and Chu Teh next moved to Swatow. They were defeated again. The remnant of his army went into the interior, but Ho Lung escaped to Hongkong. Later he smuggled himself to Shanghai, and then, disguised, he returned to Hunan.

"It is said of Ho Lung that he established a soviet district in Hunan with one knife. This was early in 1928. Ho Lung was in hiding in a village, plotting with members of the Ke Lao Hui, when some Kuomintang tax collectors arrived. Leading a few villagers, he attacked the tax collectors and killed them with his own knife, and then disarmed the tax collectors’ guard. From this adventure he got enough revolvers and rifles to arm his first peasants’ army.”

Ho Lung’s fame in the Elder Brother Society extended over all China. The Reds said that he could go unarmed into any village of the country, announce himself to the Elder Brother Society, and form an army. The society’s special ritual and language were quite difficult to master, but Ho Lung had the highest "degrees” and was said to have more than once enlisted an entire Ke Lao Hui branch in the Red Army. His eloquence as a speaker was well known in the Kuomintang. Li said that when he spoke he could "raise the dead to fight.”

When Ho Lung’s Second Front Red Army finally withdrew from the Hunan soviet districts, in 1935, its rifles were reported to number more than 40,000, and this army underwent even greater hardships in its own Long March to the Northwest than the main forces from Kiangsi. Thousands died on the snow mountains, and thousands more starved to death or were killed by Nanking bombs. Yet so great was Ho Lung’s personal magnetism, and his influence throughout rural China, Li said, that many of his then stayed with him and died on the road rather than desert, and thousands of poor men along the route of march joined in to help fill up the dwindling ranks. In the end he reached eastern Tibet, where he finally connected with Chu Teh, with about 20,000 men—most of them barefoot, half-starved, and physically exhausted. After several months of recuperation, his troops were now on the march again, into Kansu, where they were expected to arrive in a few weeks.

"What does Ho Lung look like?” I asked Li.

"He is a big man, and strong as a tiger. He never gets tired. They say he carried many of his wounded men on the march. Even when he was a Kuomintang general he lived as simply as his men. He cares nothing about personal possessions—except horses. He loves horses. Once he had a beautiful horse that he liked very much. It was captured by some enemy troops. Ho Lung went to battle to recover that horse. He got it back!

"Although he is impetuous, Ho Lung is very humble. Since he joined the Communists he has been faithful to the Party, and has never broken Party discipline. He always asks for criticism and listens carefully to advice. His sister is much like him—a big woman, with large [unbound] feet. She has led Red troops in battle herself—and carried wounded men on her back. So has Ho Lung’s wife.”

Ho Lung’s hatred of the rich had become legendary in China. It was said that landlords and gentry used to flee without further ado, even from places well guarded by Nanking troops, if Ho Lung was reported as far away as 200 li—for he was famous for the swiftness of his movements.

Once Ho Lung arrested a Swiss missionary named Bosshard, and a military court "sentenced” him to eighteen months’ imprisonment for alleged espionage. The Reverend Bosshard’s sentence had still not been completed when Ho Lung began the Long March, but he was ordered to move with the army. He was finally released during the march, when his sentence expired, and was given traveling expenses to Yunnanfu. Rather to most people’s surprise, the Reverend Bosshard brought out few harsh words about Ho Lung. On the contrary, he was reported to have remarked, "If the peasants knew what the Communists were like, none of them would run away.”*

It was the noon halt, and we decided to bathe in the cool, inviting stream. We got in and lay on a long, flat rock, while the shallow water rippled over us in cool sheets. Some peasants went past, driving a big cloud of sheep before them; overhead the sky was clear and blue. There was nothing but peace and beauty here, and it was that odd midday moment when the world for centuries has been like this, with only peace, beauty and contentment.

I asked Li Chiang-lin if he were married.

"I was,” he said slowly. "My wife was killed in the South, by the Kuomintang.”

Red Companions

North Shensi was one of the poorest parts of China I had seen, not excluding western Yunnan. There was no real land scarcity, but there was in many places a serious scarcity of real land—at least real farming land. Here in Shensi a peasant could own as much as 100 mou* of land and yet be a poor man. A landlord in this country had to possess at least several hundred mou of land, and even on a Chinese scale he could not be considered rich unless his holdings were part of the limited and fertile valley land, where rice and other valued crops could be grown.

The farms of Shensi could have been described as slanting, and many of them also as slipping, for landslides were frequent. The fields were mostly patches laid on the serried landscape, between crevices and small streams. The land seemed rich enough in many places, but the crops grown were strictly limited by the steep gradients, in both quantity and quality. There were few genuine mountains, only endless broken hills. Their sharp-angled shadowing and coloring changed miraculously with the sun’s wheel, and toward dusk they became a magnificent sea of purpled hilltops with dark velvety folds running down, like the pleats on a mandarin skirt, to ravines that seemed bottomless.

After the first day I rode little, not so much out of pity for the languishing nag, but because everyone else marched. Li Chiang-lin was the oldest warrior of the company. Most of the others were lads in their teens, hardly more than children. One of these was nicknamed "Lao Kou,” the Old Dog, and walking with him I asked why he had joined the Reds.

He was a southerner and had come all the way from the Fukien soviet districts, on the Red Army’s six-thousand-mile expedition which foreign military experts refused to believe possible. Yet here was Old Dog, seventeen years old, and actually looking fourteen. He had made that march and thought nothing of it. He said he was prepared to walk another 25,000 li if the Red Army did.

With him was a lad nicknamed Local Cousin, and he had walked almost as far, from Kiangsi. Local Cousin was sixteen.

Did they like the Red Army? I asked. They looked at me in genuine amazement. It had evidently never occurred to either of them that anyone could not like the Red Army.

"The Red Army has taught me to read and to write,” said Old Dog. "Here I have learned to operate a radio, and how to aim a rifle straight. The Red Army helps the poor.”

"Is that all?”

"It is good to us and we are never beaten,” added Local Cousin. "Here everybody is the same. It is not like the White districts, where poor people are slaves of the landlords and the Kuomintang. Here everybody fights to help the poor, and to save China. The Red Army fights the landlords and the White bandits and the Red Army is anti-Japanese. Why should anyone not like such an army as this?”

There was a peasant lad who had joined the Reds in Szechuan, and I asked him why he had done so. He told me that his parents were poor farmers, with only four mou of land (less than an acre), which wasn’t enough to feed him and his two sisters. When the Reds came to his village, he said, all the peasants welcomed them, brought them hot tea and made sweets for them. The Red dramatists gave plays. It was a happy time. Only the landlords ran. When the land was redistributed his parents received their share. So they were not sorry, but very glad, when he joined the poor people’s army.

Another youth, about nineteen, had formerly been an ironsmith’s apprentice in Hunan, and he was nicknamed "T’ieh Lao-hu,” the Iron Tiger. When the Reds arrived in his district, he had dropped bellows, pans, and apprenticeship, and, clad only in a pair of sandals and trousers, hurried off to enlist. Why? Because he wanted to fight the masters who starved their apprentices, and to fight the landlords who robbed his parents. He was fighting for the revolution, which would free the poor. The Red Army was good to people and did not rob them and beat them like the White armies. He pulled up his trouser leg and displayed a long white scar, his souvenir of battle.

There was another youth from Fukien, one from Chekiang, several more from Kiangsi and Szechuan, but the majority were natives of Shensi and Kansu. Some had "graduated” from the Young Vanguards, and (though they looked like infants) had already been Reds for years. Some had joined the Red Army to fight Japan, two had enlisted to escape from slavery,* three had deserted from the Kuomintang troops, but most of them had joined "because the Red Army is a revolutionary army, fighting landlords and imperialism.”

Then I talked to a squad commander, who was an "older” man of twenty-four. He had been in the Red Army since 1931. In that year his father and mother were killed by a Nanking bomber, which also destroyed his house, in Kiangsi. When he got home from the fields and found both his parents dead he had at once thrown down his hoe, bidden his wife good-by, and enlisted with the Communists. One of his brothers, a Red partisan, had been killed in Kiangsi in 1935.

They were a heterogeneous lot, but more truly "national” in composition than ordinary Chinese armies, usually carefully segregated according to provinces. Their different provincial backgrounds and dialects did not seem to divide them, but became the subject of constant good-natured raillery. I never saw a serious quarrel among them. In fact, during all my travel in the Red districts, I was not to see a single fist fight between Red soldiers, and among young men I thought that remarkable.

Though tragedy had touched the lives of nearly all of them, they were perhaps too young for it to have depressed them much. They seemed to me fairly happy, and perhaps the first consciously happy group of Chinese proletarians I had seen. Passive contentment was the common phenomenon in China, but the higher emotion of happiness, which implies a feeling of positiveness about existence, was rare indeed.

They sang nearly all day on the road, and their supply of songs was endless. Their singing was not done at a command, but was spontaneous, and they sang well. Whenever the spirit moved him, or he thought of an appropriate song, one of them would suddenly burst forth, and commanders and men joined in. They sang at night, too, and learned new folk tunes from the peasants, who brought out their Shensi guitars.

What discipline they had seemed almost entirely self-imposed. When we passed wild apricot trees on the hills there was an abrupt dispersal until everyone had filled his pockets, and somebody always brought me back a handful. Then, leaving the trees looking as if a great wind had struck through them, they moved back into order and quick-timed to make up for the loss. But when we passed private orchards, nobody touched the fruit in them, and the grain and vegetables we ate in the villages were paid for in full.

As far as I could see, the peasants bore no resentment toward my Red companions. Some seemed on close terms of friendship, and very loyal—a fact probably not unconnected with a recent redivision of land and the abolition of taxes. They freely offered for sale what edibles they had, and accepted soviet money without hesitation. When we reached a village at noon or sunset the chairman of the local soviet promptly provided quarters, and designated ovens for our use. I frequently saw peasant women or their daughters volunteer to pull the bellows of the fire of our ovens, and laugh and joke with the Red warriors, in a very emancipated way for Chinese women—especially Shensi women.

On the last day, we stopped for lunch at a village in a green valley, and here all the children came round to examine the first foreign devil many of them had seen. I decided to catechize them.

"What is a Communist?” I asked.

"He is a citizen who helps the Red Army fight the White bandits and the Japanese,” one youngster of nine or ten piped up.

"What else?”

"He helps fight the landlords and the capitalists!”

"But what is a capitalist?” That silenced one child, but another came forward: "A capitalist is a man who does not work, but makes others work for him.” Oversimplification, perhaps, but I went on:

"Are there any landlords or capitalists here?”

"No!” they all shrieked together. "They’ve all run away!”

"Run away? From what?”

"From our RED ARMY”!

"Our” army, a peasant child talking about "his” army? Well, obviously it wasn’t China, but, if not, what was it? Who could have taught them all this?

I was to learn who it was when I examined the textbooks of Red China, and met old Santa Claus Hsu Teh-li,* once president of a normal school in Hunan, now Soviet Commissioner of Education.

In "Defended Peace”

Soviet Strong Man

Small villages were numerous in the Northwest, but towns of any size were infrequent. Except for the industries begun by the Reds it was agrarian and in places semipastoral country. Thus it was quite breathtaking to ride out suddenly on the brow of the wrinkled hills and see stretched out below me in a green valley the ancient walls of Pao An, which means "Defended Peace.”*

Pao An was once a frontier stronghold, during the Chin and T’ang dynasties, against the nomadic invaders to the north. Remains of its fortifications, flame-struck in that afternoon sun, could be seen flanking the narrow pass through which once emptied into this valley the conquering legions of the Mongols. There was an inner city, still, where the garrisons were once quartered; and a high defensive masonry, lately improved by the Reds, embraced about a square mile in which the present town was located.

Here at last I found the Red leader whom Nanking had been fighting for ten years—Mao Tse-tung, chairman of the "Chinese People’s Soviet Republic,” to employ the official title which had recently been adopted. The old cognomen, "Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Republic,” was dropped when the Reds began their new policy of struggle for a united front.

Chou En-lai’s radiogram had been received and I was expected. A room was provided for me in the "Foreign Office,” and I became temporarily a guest of the soviet state. My arrival resulted in a phenomenal increase of the foreign population of Pao An. The other Occidental resident was a German known as Li Teh T’ung-chih1—the ‘Virtuous Comrade Li.’ Of Li Teh, the only foreign adviser ever with the Chinese Red Army, more later.

I met Mao soon after my arrival: a gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure, above average height for a Chinese, somewhat stooped, with a head of thick black hair grown very long, and with large, searching eyes, a high-bridged nose and prominent cheekbones. My fleeting impression was of an intellectual face of great shrewdness, but I had no opportunity to verify this for several days. Next time I saw him, Mao was walking hatless along the street at dusk, talking with two young peasants and gesticulating earnestly. I did not recognize him until he was pointed out to me—moving along unconcernedly with the rest of the strollers, despite the $250,000 which Nanking had hung over his head.

I could have written a book about Mao Tse-tung. I talked with him many nights, on a wide range of subjects, and I heard dozens of stories about him from soldiers and Communists. My written interviews with him totaled about twenty thousand words. He told me of his childhood and youth, how he became a leader in the Kuomintang and the Nationalist Revolution, why he became a Communist, and how the Red Army grew. He described the Long March to the Northwest and wrote a classical poem about it for me. He told me stories of many other famous Reds, from Chu Teh down to the youth who carried on his shoulders for over 6,000 miles the two iron dispatch boxes that held the archives of the Soviet Government.

The story of Mao’s life was a rich cross-section of a whole generation, an important guide to understanding the sources of action in China, and I have included that full exciting record of personal history, just as he told it to me.^* But here my own impressions of him may be worth recording.

There would never be any one "savior” of China, yet undeniably one felt a certain force of destiny in Mao. It was nothing quick or flashy, but a kind of solid elemental vitality. One felt that whatever there was extraordinary in this man grew out of the uncanny degree to which he synthesized and expressed the urgent demands of millions of Chinese, and especially the peasantry. If their "demands” and the movement which was pressing them forward were the dynamics which could regenerate China, then in that deeply historical sense Mao Tse-tung might possibly become a very great man. Meanwhile, Mao was of interest as a personality, apart from his political life, because, although his name was as familiar to many Chinese as that of Chiang Kai-shek, very little was known about him, and all sorts of strange legends existed about him. I was the first foreign newspaperman to interview him.

Mao had the reputation of a charmed life. He had been repeatedly pronounced dead by his enemies, only to return to the news columns a few days later, as active as ever. The Kuomintang had also officially "killed” and buried Chu Teh many times, assisted by occasional corroborations from clairvoyant missionaries. Numerous deaths of the two famous men, nevertheless, did not prevent them from being involved in many spectacular exploits, including the Long March. Mao was indeed in one of his periods of newspaper demise when I visited Red China, but I found him quite substantially alive. There were good reasons why people said that he had a charmed life, however; although he had been in scores of battles, was once captured by enemy troops and escaped, and had the world’s highest reward on his head, during all these years he had never once been wounded.

I happened to be in Mao’s house one evening when he was given a complete physical examination by a Red surgeon2—a man who had studied in Europe and who knew his business—and pronounced in excellent health. He had never had tuberculosis or any "incurable disease,” as had been rumored by some romantic travelers. His lungs were completely sound, although, unlike most Red commanders, he was an inordinate cigarette smoker. During the Long March, Mao and Li Teh had carried on original botanical research by testing out various kinds of leaves as tobacco substitutes.

Ho Tzu-ch’en, Mao’s second wife,³ a former schoolteacher and a Communist organizer herself, had been less fortunate than her husband. She had suffered more than a dozen wounds, caused by splinters from an air bomb, but all of them were superficial. Just before I left Pao An the Maos were proud parents of a new baby girl. He had two other children by his former wife, Yang K’ai-hui,^* the daughter of his favorite professor. She was killed in Changsha in 1930 at the order of General Ho Chien, warlord of Hunan province.

Mao Tse-tung was forty-three years old when I met him in 1936. He was elected chairman of the provisional Central Soviet Government at the Second All-China Soviet Congress, attended by delegates representing approximately 9,000,000 people then living under Red laws.^† Here, incidentally, it may be inserted that Mao Tse-tung estimated the maximum population of the various districts under the direct control of the Soviet Central Government in 1934 as follows: Kiangsi Soviet, 3,000,000; Hupeh-Anhui-Honan Soviet, 2,000,000; Hunan-Kiangsi-Hupeh Soviet, 1,000,000; Kiangsi-Hunan Soviet, 1,000,000; Chekiang-Fukien Soviet, 1,000,000; Hunan-Hupeh Soviet, 1,000,000; total, 9,000,000. Fantastic estimates ranging as high as ten times that figure were evidently achieved by adding up the entire population in every area in which the Red Army or Red partisans had been reported as operating. Mao laughed when I quoted him the figure of "80,000,000” people living under the Chinese soviets, and said that when they had that big an area the revolution would be practically won. But of course there were many millions in all the areas where Red partisans had operated.

The influence of Mao Tse-tung throughout the Communist world of China was probably greater than that of anyone else. He was a member of nearly everything—the revolutionary military committee, the political bureau of the Central Committee, the finance commission, the organization committee, the public health commission, and others. His real influence was asserted through his domination of the political bureau,* which had decisive power in the policies of the Party, the government, and the army. Yet, while everyone knew and respected him, there was—as yet, at least—no ritual of hero worship built up around him. I never met a Chinese Red who drooled "our-great-leader” phrases,^† I did not hear Mao’s name used as a synonym for the Chinese people, but still I never met one who did not like "the Chairman”—as everyone called him—and admire him. The role of his personality in the movement was clearly immense.

Mao seemed to me a very interesting and complex man. He had the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant, with a lively sense of humor and a love of rustic laughter. His laughter was even active on the subject of himself and the shortcomings of the soviets—a boyish sort of laughter which never in the least shook his inner faith in his purpose. He was plain-speaking and plain-living, and some people might have considered him rather coarse and vulgar. Yet he combined curious qualities of naivete with incisive wit and worldly sophistication.

I think my first impression—dominantly one of native shrewdness—was probably correct. And yet Mao was an accomplished scholar of Classical Chinese, an omnivorous reader, a deep student of philosophy and history, a good speaker, a man with an unusual memory and extraordinary powers of concentration, an able writer, careless in his personal habits and appearance but astonishingly meticulous about details of duty, a man of tireless energy, and a military and political strategist of considerable genius. It was interesting that many Japanese regarded him as the ablest Chinese strategist alive.

The Reds were putting up some new buildings in Pao An, but accommodations were very primitive while I was there. Mao lived with his wife in a two-room yao-fang with bare, poor, map-covered walls. He had known much worse, and as the son of a "rich” peasant in Hunan he had also known better. The Maos’ chief luxury (like Chou’s) was a mosquito net. Otherwise Mao lived very much like the rank and file of the Red Army. After ten years of leadership of the Reds, after hundreds of confiscations of property of landlords, officials, and tax collectors, he owned only his blankets and a few personal belongings, including two cotton uniforms. Although he was a Red Army commander as well as chairman, he wore on his coat collar only the two red bars that are the insignia of the ordinary Red soldier.

I went with Mao several times to mass meetings of the villagers and the Red cadets, and to the Red theater. He sat inconspicuously in the midst of the crowd and enjoyed himself hugely. I remember once, between acts at the Anti-Japanese Theater, there was a general demand for a duet by Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao, the twenty-eight-year-old president of the Hung Chung Ta-hsueh (Red Army University) and formerly a famed young cadet on Chiang Kai-shek’s staff. Lin blushed like a schoolboy and got them out of the "command performance” by a graceful speech, calling upon the women Communists for a song instead.

Mao’s food was the same as everybody’s, but being a Hunanese he had the southerner’s ai-la, or "love of pepper.” He even had pepper cooked into his bread. Except for this passion, he scarcely seemed to notice what he ate. One night at dinner I heard him expand on a theory of pepper-loving peoples being revolutionaries. He first submitted his own province, Hunan, famous for the revolutionaries it has produced. Then he listed Spain, Mexico, Russia, and France to support his contention, but laughingly had to admit defeat when somebody mentioned the well-known Italian love of red pepper and garlic, in refutation of his theory. One of the most amusing songs of the "bandits,” incidentally, was a ditty called "The Hot Red Pepper.” It told of the disgust of the pepper with his pointless vegetable existence, waiting to be eaten, and how he ridiculed the contentment of the cabbages, spinach, and beans with their invertebrate careers. He ends up by leading a vegetable insurrection. "The Hot Red Pepper” was a great favorite with Chairman Mao.

He appeared to be quite free from symptoms of megalomania, but he had a deep sense of personal dignity, and something about him suggested a power of ruthless decision when he deemed it necessary. I never saw him angry, but I heard from others that on occasions he had been roused to an intense and withering fury. At such times his command of irony and invective was said to be classic and lethal.

I found him surprisingly well informed on current world politics. Even on the Long March, it seems, the Reds received news broadcasts by radio, and in the Northwest they published their own newspapers. Mao was exceptionally well read in world history and had a realistic conception of European social and political conditions. He was very interested in the Labour Party of England, and questioned me intensely about its present policies, soon exhausting all my information. It seemed to me that he found it difficult fully to understand why, in a country where workers were enfranchised, there was still no workers’ government. I was afraid my answers did not satisfy him. He expressed profound contempt for Ramsay MacDonald, whom he designated as a han-chien—an archtraitor of the British people.

His opinion of President Roosevelt was rather interesting. He believed him to be anti-Fascist, and thought China could cooperate with such a man. He asked innumerable questions about the New Deal, and Roosevelt’s foreign policy. The questioning showed a remarkably clear conception of the objectives of both. He regarded Mussolini and Hitler as mountebanks, but considered Mussolini intellectually a much abler man, a real Machiavellian, with a knowledge of history, while Hitler was a mere will-less puppet of the reactionary capitalists.

Mao had read a number of books about India and had some definite opinions on that country. Chief among these was that Indian independence would never be realized without an agrarian revolution. He questioned me about Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Suhasini Chattopadhyaya, and other Indian leaders I had known. He knew something about the Negro question in America, and unfavorably compared the treatment of Negroes and American Indians with policies in the Soviet Union toward national minorities. He was interested when I pointed out certain great differences in the historical background of the Negro in America and that of minorities in Russia.

Mao was an ardent student of philosophy. Once when I was having nightly interviews with him on Communist history, a visitor brought him several new books on philosophy, and Mao asked me to postpone our engagements. He consumed those books in three or four nights of intensive reading, during which he seemed oblivious to everything else. He had not confined his reading to Marxist philosopers, but also knew something of the ancient Greeks, of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Rousseau, and others.

I often wondered about Mao’s own sense of responsibility over the question of force, violence, and the "necessity of killing.” He had in his youth had strongly liberal and humanistic tendencies, and the transition from idealism to realism evidently had first been made philosophically. Although he was peasant-born, he did not as a youth personally suffer much from oppression of the landlords, as did many Reds, and, although Marxism was the core of his thought, I deduced that class hatred was for him probably an intellectually acquired mechanism in the bulwark of his philosophy, rather than an instinctive impulse to action.

There seemed to be nothing in him that might be called religious feeling. He was a humanist in a fundamental sense; he believed in man’s ability to solve man’s problems. I thought he had probably on the whole been a moderating influence in the Communist movement where life and death were concerned.

Mao worked thirteen or fourteen hours a day, often until very late at night, frequently retiring at two or three. He seemed to have an iron constitution. That he traced to a youth spent in hard work on his father’s farm, and to an austere period in his schooldays when he had formed a kind of Spartan club with some comrades. They used to fast, go on long hikes in the wooded hills of South China, swim in the coldest weather, walk shirtless in the rain and sleet—to toughen themselves. They intuitively knew that the years ahead in China would demand the capacity for withstanding great hardship and suffering.

Mao once spent a summer tramping all over Hunan, his native province. He earned his bread by working from farm to farm, and sometimes by begging. Another time, for days he ate nothing but hard beans and water—again a process of "toughening” his stomach. The friendships he made on country rambles in his early youth were of great value to him when, some ten years later, he began to organize thousands of farmers in Hunan into the famous peasant unions which became the first base of the soviets, after the Kuomintang broke with the Communists in 1927.

Mao impressed me as a man of considerable depth of feeling. I remember that his eyes moistened once or twice when he was speaking of dead comrades, or recalling incidents in his youth, during the rice riots and famines of Hunan, when some starving peasants were beheaded in his province for demanding food from the yamen. One soldier told me of seeing Mao give his coat away to a wounded man at the front. They said that he refused to wear shoes when the Red warriors had none.

Yet I doubted very much if he would ever command great respect from the intellectual elite of China, perhaps not entirely because he had an extraordinary mind, but because he had the personal habits of a peasant. The Chinese disciples of Pareto might have thought him uncouth. Talking with Mao one day, I saw him absent-mindedly turn down the belt of his trousers and search for some guests—but then it is just possible that Pareto might have done a little searching himself if he had lived in similar circumstances. But I am sure that Pareto would never have taken off his trousers in the presence of the president of the Red Army University—as Mao did once when I was interviewing Lin Piao. It was extremely hot inside the little cave. Mao lay down on the bed, pulled off his pants, and for twenty minutes carefully studied a military map on the wall—interrupted occasionally by Lin Piao, who asked for confirmation of dates and names, which Mao invariably knew. His nonchalant habits fitted with his complete indifference to personal appearance, although the means were at hand to fix himself up like a chocolate-box general or a politician’s picture in Who’s Who in China.

Except for a few weeks when he was ill, he walked most of the 6,000 miles of the Long March, like the rank and file. He could have achieved high office and riches by "betraying” to the Kuomintang, and this applied to most Red commanders. The tenacity with which these Communists for ten years clung to their principles could not be fully evaluated unless one knew the history of "silver bullets” in China, by means of which other rebels were bought off.

I was able to check up on many of Mao’s assertions, and usually found them to be correct. He subjected me to mild doses of political propaganda, but it was interesting compared to what I had received in nonbandit quarters. He never imposed any censorship on me, in either my writing or my photography, courtesies for which I was grateful. He did his best to see that I got facts to explain various aspects of soviet life.

Basic Communist Policies

What were the fundamental policies of the Chinese Reds? I had a dozen or more talks on this subject with Mao Tse-tung and other leading Communists. But before one examined their policies it was necessary to have some conception of the nature of the long struggle between the Communists and Nanking. To comprehend even the recent events in the Reddening Northwest one had first to look at a few facts of history, as they looked to Chinese Communists.

In the following paragraphs I have paraphrased, in part, the comments of Lo Fu (Chang Wen-t’ien),* the English-speaking general secretary of the Communist Party Politburo, whom I interviewed in Pao An.

The Chinese Communist Party was founded only in 1921 (an event reserved for more detailed discussion in a later context). It grew rapidly until 1923, when a two-party alliance was formed with Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang (commonly called the Nationalist Party). Dr. Sun had independently reached an entente with the Russian Communist Party, under Lenin, which offered Sun material and political help. Neither the Kungch’antang (Chinese Communist Party) nor the Kuomintang held power at the time, but Sun was supported by provincial warlords in South China. They permitted Sun to set up a provisional all-China government in Canton, in rivalry to the Peking Government, which was backed by a coterie of northern warlords and was recognized by the foreign powers. From 1923 onward the Kuomintang was reorganized with the help of Russian political advisers, along lines of the party of Lenin. With Sun’s concurrence, some members of the young Chinese Communist Party also joined the Kuomintang. Sun Yat-sen was a nationalist patriot whose ambition was to recover China’s sovereign independence; beyond that, his concepts of social revolution (as expressed in his Three Principles of the People) were a vague mixture of reform capitalism and socialism. The Communists supported Sun’s national independence aspirations but they aimed ultimately at a proletarian dictatorship.

Moscow had at first (1918-22) tried to advance Russian revolutionary interests in the Far East by working with the Peking warlords. In 1921–22 the Comintern reassessed the value of potential allies in China after its delegate, Henricus Sneevliet,* returned with a favorable report on the prospects of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Completely disillusioned after Western rejection of his plans (at the Washington Conference, 1921–22) for the "international development of China,” Dr. Sun now welcomed Russian offers of aid extended through the Comintern’s agent, Adolf Joffe. A complete reorientation of Soviet policy began with the Sun-Joffe agreement. In the Sun-Joffe joint statement (January 26, 1923), which became the basis of the three-way alliance (Kuomintang-Chinese Communist-Soviet Russia), it was agreed that "conditions do not exist here [in China] for the successful establishment of communism or socialism,” while the "chief and immediate aim of China is the achievement of national union and national independence,” in the struggle for which the Chinese "could depend on the aid of Russia.” When Mikhail Borodin arrived in Canton late in 1922, to become Sun’s adviser and head of the Soviet mission, he held dual positions as a delegate of the Soviet Politburo and as delegate of the Comintern, itself already an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. (Inherent in this dualism from the outset were contradictions between Russian national interests and the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, which were never resolved.)

The durability of the alliance, as far as Chinese Communists were concerned, depended upon the continued acceptance by the Kuomintang of two major objectives. The first recognized the necessity for an anti-imperialist policy—the recovery of complete political, territorial, and economic sovereignty by revolutionary action. The second demanded an internal policy of "antifeudalism and antimilitarism”—the overthrow of landlords and warlords, and the construction of new forms of social, economic, and political life, which both the Communists and the Kuomintang agreed must be "democratic” in character.

"Democratic” was a word used by Dr. Sun to cover his paternalistic concept of a revolution in which the "people” or masses were to achieve "modernization” under the "tutelage” of his Nationalist Party. For the Communists the concept was a "bourgeois-democratic” revolution that could be manipulated, by stages, toward socialism, under the "hegemony” of their party. The two-party government formed at Canton consisted only of members of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang—which from 1924 to 1927 included Communists. It was never more "legal” or "democratic” than its own organic structure. Communist membership in Kuomintang central organs was limited to one-third of the total.

The Communists regarded the successful fulfillment of Dr. Sun’s "bourgeois-democratic” revolution as a necessary preliminary to the Socialist society later to be established. Their position in support of a "democratic national independence and liberation” movement seemed logical.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, before the revolution was completed. Cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Kungch’antang came to an end in 1927. From the Communist viewpoint, the Nationalist Revolution could also be said to have ended then. The right wing of the Kuomintang, dominated by the new militarism, and supported by certain foreign powers, the treaty-port * bankers, and the landlords, broke away from the Left Kuomintang Government at Hankow. It formed a regime at Nanking under Chiang Kai-shek which the Communists and the majority of the Kuomintang at that time regarded as "counterrevolutionary,” that is, against the "bourgeois-democratic revolution” itself.

The Kuomintang soon reconciled itself to the Nanking coup d’etat, ^† but communism became a crime punishable by death. What the Reds conceived to be the two main points of nationalism—the anti-imperialist movement and the democratic revolution—were in practice abandoned. Militarists’ civil wars and, later, intensive war against the rising agrarian revolution ensued. Many thousands of Communists and former peasant-union and labor leaders were killed. The unions were suppressed. An "enlightened dictatorship” made war on all forms of opposition. Even so, quite a number of Communists survived in the army, and the Party held together throughout a period of great terrorism. In 1937, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars in civil war against them, the Red armies occupied in the Northwest the largest (though sparsely populated) connected territory ever under their complete control.

Of course the Reds believed that the decade of history since 1927 had richly validated their thesis that national independence and democracy (which the Kuomintang also set as its objective) could not be achieved in China without an anti-imperialist policy externally, and an agrarian revolution internally. To see why communism steadily increased its following, especially among patriotic youth, and why at the moment it still projected upon the screen of history the shadows of great upheaval and change in the Orient, one had to note its main contentions. What were they?

First of all, the Reds argued that, after Nanking split the living forces of the revolution, China rapidly lost much ground. Compromise followed compromise. The failure to realize agrarian reforms resulted in widespread discontent and open rebellion from the rural population in many parts of the country. General conditions of poverty and distress among the rural populace seriously worsened. China now had some passable motor roads, an excellent fleet of airplanes, and a New Life movement,* but reports came in daily of catastrophes which in China were considered more or less routine. Even as I was writing this chapter, for example, the press brought this appalling news from Central and West China:

"Famine conditions continue to be reported in Honan, Anhui, Shensi, Kansu, Szechuan, and Kweichow. Quite evidently the country faces one of the most severe famines of many years, and thousands have already died. A recent survey by the Szechuan Famine Relief Commission discovered that 30,000,000 people are now in the famine belt of that province, where bark and ‘Goddess-of-Mercy’ earth † are being consumed by tens of thousands. There are said to be over 400,000 famine refugees in Shensi, over 1,000,000 in Kansu, some 7,000,000 in Honan, and 3,000,000 in Kweichow. The famine in Kweichow is admitted by the official Central News to be the most serious in 100 years, affecting sixty districts of the province.”¹

Szechuan was one of the provinces where taxes had been collected sixty years or more in advance, and thousands of acres of land had been abandoned by farmers unable to pay rents and outrageous loan interest. In my files were items, collected over a period of six years, showing comparable distress in many other provinces. There were few signs that the rate of frequency of these calamities was diminishing.

While the mass of the rural population was rapidly going bankrupt, concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a small number of landlords and land-owning usurers increased in proportion to the general decline of independent farming.* Sir Frederick Leith-Ross was reported to have said that there was no middle class in China, but only the incredibly poor and the very rich. Enormous taxes, the share-crop method, and the whole historical system of social, political, and economic relationships described by Dr. Karl August Wittfogel as the "Asiatic mode of production,” contrived to leave the landless peasantry constantly heavily in debt, without reserves, and unable to meet such crises as draught, famine, and flood.

Mao Tse-tung, when a secretary of the Kuomintang’s Committee on the Peasant Movement in 1926 (and a candidate to the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang),^† supervised the collection of land statistics for areas in twenty-one provinces. He asserted that this investigation indicated that resident landlords, rich peasants, officials, absentee landlords, and usurers, about 10 per cent of the whole rural population, together owned over 70 per cent of the cultivable land in China. About 15 per cent was owned by middle peasants. But over 65 per cent of the rural population, made up of poor peasants, tenants, and farm workers, owned only from 10 to 15 per cent of the total arable land.²

"These statistics were suppressed after the counterrevolution,” according to Mao. "Now, ten years later, it is still impossible to get any statement from Nanking on land distribution in China.”

The Communists alleged that rural bankruptcy had been accelerated by the Kuomintang’s policy of "nonresistance to imperialism”—in particular, Japanese imperialism. As a result of Nanking’s "no-war policy” against Japan, China had lost to Japanese invaders about a fifth of her national territory, over 40 per cent of her railway mileage, 85 per cent of her unsettled lands, a large part of her coal, 80 per cent of her iron deposits, 37 per cent of her finest forest lands, and about 40 per cent of her national export trade. Japan now controlled over 75 per cent of the total pig iron and iron-mining enterprises of what remained of China, and over half of the textile industry of China. The conquest of Manchuria also robbed China of its own best market as well as its most accessible raw materials. In 1931, Manchuria took more than 27 per cent of its total imports from other Chinese provinces, but in 1935 China could sell Man-chukuo only 4 per cent of those imports. It presented Japan with the region of China best suited for industrial development—and enabled her to prevent that development and shuttle the raw materials to her own industries. It gave to Japan the continental base from which she could inexorably continue her aggression in China. Such changes, many felt, completely wiped out the benefits of any reforms that Nanking might be able to claim to its credit for generations in the future—even provided the rest of China remained intact.

And what was achieved by Nanking’s nine years of war against the Reds? The Northwest junta had recently summarized the results in a manifesto opposing preparations for the sixth anti-Red "final annihilation” drive.* It reminded us that Manchuria had gone to Japan during one "final-annihilation” drive, Shanghai had been invaded during another, Jehol had been given up during the third, East Hopei lost during still another, and the sovereignty of Hopei and Chahar provinces had been badly impaired during the fifth "remnant-bandit extermination.”

Of course Nanking could not stop civil war as long as the Reds continued to attempt to overthrow the government by force. In April, 1932, when the Chinese Soviet Republic declared war against Japan, it had offered to combine with anti-Japanese elements. Again in January, 1933, it had proposed to unite with "any armed force” in a "united front from below.” There was no real offer, however, to compromise with Chiang Kai-shek.³ By mid-1936 the Communists (and the Comintern) had radically changed their position. In a search for broad national unity, they included the Kuomintang and even Chiang Kai-shek. The Chinese Communist Party now promised to unite its Red Army and the soviet districts under the sovereignty of the Kuomintang Central Government, provided that the latter would agree to "establish democratic representative government, resist Japan, enfranchise the people, and guarantee civil liberties to the masses.”^† In other words, the Reds were ready to "remarry” the Kuomintang if it would return to the "bourgeois-nationalist” program of anti-imperialism and antifeudalism. But of these two basic aims they realized that the fight for national survival was paramount, and must be conducted even at the expense of modifying the internal struggle over the land question; that class antagonisms might have to be sublimated in, certainly could not be satisfied without, the successful solution of the external struggle against Japan.

To quote Mao in his interview with me:

"The fundamental issue before the Chinese people today is the struggle against Japanese imperialism. Our soviet policy is decisively conditioned by this struggle. Japan’s warlords hope to subjugate the whole of China and make of the Chinese people their colonial slaves. The fight against the Japanese invasion, the fight against Japanese economic and military conquest—these are the main tasks that must be remembered in analyzing soviet policies.

"Japanese imperialism is not only the enemy of China but also of all people of the world who desire peace. Especially it is the enemy of those peoples with interests on the Pacific Ocean, namely, the American, British, French, and Soviet Russian nations. The Japanese continental policy, as well as naval policy, is directed not only against China but also against those countries. …

"What do we expect from the foreign powers? We expect at least that friendly nations will not help Japanese imperialism, and will adopt a neutral position. We hope that they will actively help China to resist invasion and conquest.”

In using the word "imperialism,” the Communists sharply distinguished between Japan and friendly and nonaggressive democratic capitalist powers. Mao Tse-tung explained:

"Concerning the question of imperialism in general we observe that among the great powers some express unwillingness to engage in a new world war, some are not ready to see Japan occupy China: countries such as America, Great Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium. Then there are countries permanently under the menace of the aggressive powers, such as Siam, the Philippines, Central American countries, Canada, India, Australia, the Dutch Indies, etc.—all more or less under the direct threat of Japan. We consider them our friends and invite their cooperation. …

"So, except for Japan and those countries which help Japanese imperialism, the categories mentioned above can be organized into antiwar, antiaggression, anti-Fascist world alliances. … In the past, Nanking has received much help from America, England, and other countries. Most of these funds and supplies have been used in civil war. For every Red soldier killed, Nanking has slain many peasants and workers. According to a recent article by the banker Chang Nai-ch’i it has cost the Chinese people about $80,000 for every Red soldier killed by Nanking.* Such ‘help’ therefore does not seem to us to have been rendered to the Chinese people.

"Only when Nanking determines to cease civil war and to fight against Japanese imperialism, and unites with the people’s revolution to organize a democratic national defense government—only then can such help be of real benefit to the Chinese nation.”

I asked Mao whether the soviets were in favor of canceling unequaltreaties. He pointed out that many of these unequal treaties had, in effect, already been destroyed by the Japanese, especially in the case of Manchuria. But as for the future attitude of a representative government in China, he declared:

"Those powers that help or do not oppose China in her war of independence and liberation should be invited to enjoy close friendly relations with China. Those powers which actively assist Japan should naturally not be given the same treatment: for example, Germany and Italy, which have already established special relations with Manchukuo, and cannot be regarded as powers friendly to the Chinese people.

"With friendly powers, China will peacefully negotiate treaties of mutual advantage. With other powers China is prepared to maintain cooperation on a much broader scale. … So far as Japan is concerned, China must by the act of war of liberation cancel all unequal treaties, confiscate all Japanese imperialist holdings, and annul Japan’s special privileges, concessions, and influence in this country. Concerning our relations with other powers, we Communists do not advocate any measure that may place at disadvantage the world position of China in her struggle against Japanese imperialism.

"When China really wins her independence, then legitimate foreign trading interests will enjoy more opportunities than ever before. The power of production and consumption of 450,000,000 people is not a matter that can remain the exclusive interest of the Chinese, but one that must engage the many nations. Our millions of people, once really emancipated, with their great latent productive possibilities freed for creative activity in every field, can help improve the economy as well as raise the cultural level of the whole world. But the productive power of the Chinese people has in the past scarcely been touched; on the contrary, it has been suppressed—both by native militarists and Japanese imperialism.”

Finally I asked, "Is it possible for China to make anti-imperialist alliances with democratic capitalist powers?”

"Anti-imperialist, anti-Fascist alliances,” replied Mao, "are in the nature of peace alliances, and for mutual defense against war-making nations. A Chinese anti-Fascist pact with capitalist democracies is perfectly possible and desirable. It is to the interest of such countries to join the anti-Fascist front in self-defens. …

"If China should become completely colonized it would mean the beginning of a long series of terrible and senseless wars. A choice must be made. For itself, the Chinese people will take the road of struggle against its oppressors, and we hope also that the statesmen and people of foreign nations will march with us on this road, and not follow the dark paths laid down by the bloody history of imperialism. …

"To oppose Japan successfully, China must also seek assistance from other powers. This does not mean, however, that China is incapable of fighting Japan without foreign help! The Chinese Communist Party, the Soviet Government, the Red Army, and the Chinese people are ready to unite with any power to shorten the duration of this war. But if none join us we are determined to carry on alone.”

Did the Reds really imagine that China could defeat Japan’s mighty war machine? I believed that they did. What was the peculiar shape of logic on which they based their assumption of triumph? It was one of dozens of questions I put to Mao Tse-tung.

On War with Japan

On July 16, 1936, I sat on a square, backless stool inside Mao Tse-tung’s residence. It was after nine at night, "Taps” had been sounded and nearly all lights were out. The walls and ceiling of Mao’s home were of solid rock; beneath was a flooring of bricks. Cotton gauze extended halfway up windows also hollowed from stone, and candles sputtered on the square, unpainted table before us, spread with a clean red-felt cloth. Mrs. Mao was in an adjoining room making compote from wild peaches purchased that day from a fruit merchant. Mao sat with his legs crossed, in a deep shelf hewn from the solid rock, and smoked a Chien Men cigarette.

Seated next to me was Wu Liang-p’ing,^* a young soviet "functionary” who acted as interpreter in my "formal” interviews with Mao Tse-tung. I wrote down in full in English Mao Tse-tung’s answers to my questions, and these were then translated into Chinese and corrected by Mao, who is noted for his insistence upon accuracy of detail. With the assistance of Mr. Wu, the interviews were retranslated into English, and because of such precautions I believe these pages to contain few errors of reporting. They were, of course, the strictly partisan views of the leader of the Chinese Communists—views being made known to the Western world for the first time.

Wu Liang-p’ing, to whom I am indebted for much assistance in gathering material, was the son of a rich landlord in Fenghua, Chiang Kai-shek’s native district in Chekiang. He had fled from there some years ago when his father, apparently an ambitious burgher, wished to betroth him to a relative of the Generalissimo. Wu was a graduate of Ta Hsia University, in Shanghai. There Patrick Givens, chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of the British-controlled police of the International Settlement, had arrested Wu Liang-p’ing. Charged with Communist activity, Wu spent two years in the Settlement’s Ward Road Jail. He had studied in France, England, and Russia, was twenty-six years old, and for his energetic labors as a Communist received his uniform, room, and food—the latter consisting chiefly of millet and noodles.

Mao began to answer my first question, about Communist policy toward Japan, which was this: "If Japan is defeated and driven from China, do you think that the major problem of ‘foreign imperialism’ will in general have been solved here?”

"Yes. If other imperialist countries do not act like Japan, and if China defeats Japan, it will mean that the Chinese masses have awakened, have mobilized, and have established their independence. Therefore the main problem of imperialism will have been solved.”

"Under what conditions do you think the Chinese people can exhaust and defeat the forces of Japan?” I asked.

He replied: "Three conditions will guarantee our success: first, the achievement of the National United Front against Japanese imperialism in China; second, the formation of a World Anti-Japanese United Front; third, revolutionary action by the oppressed peoples at present suffering under Japanese imperialism. Of these, the central necessity is the union of the Chinese people themselves.”

My question: "How long do you think such a war would last?”

Mao’s answer: "That depends on the strength of the Chinese People’s Front, many conditioning factors in China and Japan, and the degree of international help given to China, as well as the rate of revolutionary development in Japan. If the Chinese People’s Front is powerfully homogeneous, if it is effectively organized horizontally and vertically, if the international aid to China is considerable from those governments which recognize the menace of Japanese imperialism to their own interests, if revolution comes quickly in Japan, the war * will be short and victory speedily won. If these conditions are not realized, however, the war will be very long, but in the end, just the same, Japan will be defeated, only the sacrifices will be extensive and it will be a painful period for the whole world.”

Question: "What is your opinion of the probable course of development of such a war, politically and militarily?”

Answer: "Two questions are involved here—the policy of the foreign powers, and the strategy of China’s armies.

"Now, the Japanese continental policy is already fixed and is well known. Those who imagine that by further sacrifices of Chinese sovereignty, by making economic, political, or territorial compromises and concessions, they can halt the advance of Japan, are only indulging in Utopian fancy. Nanking has in the past adopted erroneous policies based on this strategy, and we have only to look at the map of East Asia to see the results of it.

"But we know well enough that not only North China but the Lower Yangtze Valley and our southern seaports are already included in the Japanese continental program. Moreover, it is just as clear that the Japanese navy aspires to blockade the China seas and to seize the Philippines, Siam, Indochina, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. In the event of war, Japan will try to make them her strategic bases, cutting off Great Britain, France, and America from China, and monopolizing the seas of the southern Pacific. These moves are included in Japan’s plans of naval strategy, copies of which we have seen. And such naval strategy will be coordinated with the land strategy of Japan.

"Many people think it would be impossible for China to continue her fight against Japan once the latter had seized certain strategic points on the coast and enforced a blockade. This is nonsense. To refute it we have only to refer to the history of the Red Army. In certain periods our forces have been exceeded numerically some ten or twenty times by the Kuomintang troops, which were also superior to us in equipment. Their economic resources many times surpassed ours, and they received material assistance from the outside. Why, then, has the Red Army scored success after success against the White troops and not only survived till today but increased its power?

"The explanation is that the Red Army and the Soviet Government had created among all people within their areas a rocklike solidarity, because everyone in the soviets was ready to fight for his government against the oppressors, because every person was voluntarily and consciously fighting for his own interests and what he believed to be right. Second, in the struggle of the soviets the people were led by men of ability, strength, and determination, equipped with deep understanding of the strategic, political, economic, and military needs of their position. The Red Army won its many victories—beginning with only a few dozen rifles in the hands of determined revolutionaries—because its solid base in the people attracted friends even among the White troops as well as among the civilian populace. The enemy was infinitely our superior militarily, but politically it was immobilized.

"In the anti-Japanese war the Chinese people would have on their side greater advantages than those the Red Army has utilized in its struggle with the Kuomintang. China is a very big nation, and it cannot be said to be conquered until every inch of it is under the sword of the invader. If Japan should succeed in occupying even a large section of China, getting possession of an area with as many as 100 or even 200 million people, we would still be far from defeated. We would still have left a great force to fight against Japan’s warlords, who would also have to fight a heavy and constant rear-guard action throughout the entire war.

"As for munitions, the Japanese cannot seize our arsenals in the interior, which are sufficient to equip Chinese armies for many years, nor can they prevent us from capturing great amounts of arms and ammunition from their own hands. By the latter method the Red Army has equipped its present forces from the Kuomintang: for nine years they have been our ‘ammunition carriers.’ What infinitely greater possibilities would open up for the utilization of such tactics as won our arms for us if the whole Chinese people were united against Japan!

"Economically, of course, China is not unified. But the uneven development of China’s economy also presents advantages in a war against the highly centralized and highly concentrated economy of Japan. For example, to sever Shanghai from the rest of China is not as disastrous to the country as would be, for instance, the severance of New York from the rest of America. Moreover, it is impossible for Japan to isolate all of China: China’s Northwest, Southwest, and West cannot be blockaded by Japan.

"Thus once more the central point of the problem becomes the mobilization and unification of the entire Chinese people and the building up of a united front, such as has been advocated by the Communist Party ever since 1932.”

Question: "In the event of a Sino-Japanese war, do you think there will be a revolution in Japan?”

Answer: "The Japanese revolution is not only a possibility but a certainty. It is inevitable and will begin to occur promptly after the first severe defeats suffered by the Japanese Army.”

Question: "Do you think Soviet Russia and Outer Mongolia would become involved in this war, and would come to the assistance of China? Under what circumstances is that likely?”

Answer: "Of course the Soviet Union is also not an isolated country. It cannot ignore events in the Far East. It cannot remain passive. Will it complacently watch Japan conquer all China and make of it a strategic base from which to attack the U.S.S.R.? Or will it help the Chinese people to oppose their Japanese oppressors, win their independence, and establish friendly relations with the Russian people? We think Russia will choose the latter course.

"We believe that once the Chinese people have their own government and begin this war of resistance and want to establish friendly alliances with the U.S.S.R., as well as other friendly powers, the Soviet Union will be in the vanguard to shake hands with us. The struggle against Japanese imperialism is a world task and the Soviet Union, as part of that world, can no more remain neutral than can England or America.”

Question: "Is it the immediate task of the Chinese people to regain all the territories lost to Japanese imperialism, or only to drive Japan from North China, and all Chinese territory beyond the Great Wall?”

Answer: "It is the immediate task of China to regain all our lost territories, not merely to defend our sovereignty south of the Great Wall. This means that Manchuria must be regained. We do not, however, include Korea, formerly a Chinese colony,* but when we have re-established the independence of the lost territories of China, and if the Koreans wish to break away from the chains of Japanese imperialism, we will extend them our enthusiastic help in their struggle for independence. The same thing applies for Taiwan [Formosa].² As for Inner Mongolia, which is populated by both Chinese and Mongolians, we will struggle to drive Japan from there and help Inner Mongolia to establish an autonomous state.” ^†

Question: "In actual practice, how could the Soviet Government and the Red Army cooperate with the Kuomintang armies in a war against Japan? In a foreign war it would be necessary for all Chinese armies to be placed under a centralized command. Would the Red Army agree, if allowed representation on a supreme war council, to submit to its decisions both militarily and politically?”

Answer: "Yes. Our government will wholeheartedly submit to the decisions of such a council, provided it really resists Japan.”

Question: "Would the Red Army agree not to move its troops into or against any areas occupied by Kuomintang armies, except with the consent or at the order of the supreme war council?”

Answer: "Yes. Certainly we will not move our troops into any areas occupied by anti-Japanese armies—nor have we done so for some time past. The Red Army would not utilize any wartime situation in an opportunist way.”

Question: "What demands would the Communist Party make in return for such cooperation?”

Answer: "It would insist upon waging war, decisively and finally, against Japanese aggression. In addition it would request the observance of the points advanced in the calls for a democratic republic and the establishment of a national defense government.”*

Question: "How can the people best be armed, organized, and trained to participate in such a war?”

Answer: "The people must be given the right to organize and to arm themselves. This is a freedom which Chiang Kai-shek has in the past denied to them. The suppression has not, however, been entirely successful—as, for example, in the case of the Red Army. Also, despite severe repression in Peking, Shanghai, and other places, the students have begun to organize themselves and have already prepared themselves politically. But still the students and the revolutionary anti-Japanese masses have not yet got their freedom, cannot be mobilized, cannot be trained and armed. When the contrary is true, when the masses are given economic, social and political freedom, their strength will be intensified hundreds of times, and the true power of the nation will be revealed.

"The Red Army through its own struggle has won its freedom from the militarists to become an unconquerable power. The anti-Japanese volunteers have won their freedom of action from the Japanese oppressors and have armed themselves in a similar way. If the Chinese people are trained, armed, and organized they can likewise become an invincible force.”

Question: "What, in your opinion, should be the main strategy and tactics to be followed in this ‘war of liberation’?”

Answer: "The strategy should be that of a war of maneuver, over an extended, shifting, and indefinite front: a strategy depending for success on a high degree of mobility in difficult terrain, and featured by swift attack and withdrawal, swift concentration and dispersal. It will be a large-scale war of maneuver rather than the simple positional war of extensive trench work, deep-massed lines and heavy fortifications. Our strategy and tactics must be conditioned by the theater in which the war will take place, and this dictates a war of maneuver.

"This does not mean the abandonment of vital strategic points, which can be defended in positional warfare as long as profitable. But the pivotal strategy must be a war of maneuver, and important reliance must be placed on guerrilla and partisan tactics. Fortified warfare must be utilized, but it will be of auxiliary and secondary strategic importance.”

Here it may be inserted that this sort of strategy in general seemed to be rather widely supported also among non-Communist Chinese military leaders. Nanking’s wholly imported air force provided an impressive if costly internal police machine, but few experts had illusions about its long-range value in a foreign war. Both the air force and such mechanization as had taken place in the central army were looked upon by many as costly toys incapable of retaining a role of initiative after the first few weeks, since China lacked the industries necessary to maintain and replenish either an air force or any other highly technical branch of modern warfare.

Pai Chung-hsi, Li Tsung-jen,* Han Fu-chu, Hu Tsung-nan, Ch’en Ch’eng, Chang Hsueh-liang, Feng Yu-hsiang, and Ts’ai T’ing-k’ai were among the leading Nationalist generals who seemed to share Mao’s conviction that China’s sole hope of victory over Japan must rest ultimately on superior maneuvering of great masses of troops, divided into mobile units, and the ability to maintain a protracted defense over immense partisan areas.

Mao Tse-tung continued:

"Geographically the theater of the war is so vast that it is possible for us to pursue mobile warfare with the utmost efficiency and with a telling effect on a slow-moving war machine like Japan’s, cautiously feeling its way in front of fierce rear-guard actions. Deep concentration and the exhausting defense of a vital position or two on a narrow front would be to throw away all the tactical advantages of our geography and economic organization, and to repeat the mistake of the Abyssinians. Our strategy and tactics must aim to avoid great decisive battles in the early stages of the war, and gradually to break the morale, the fighting spirit, and the military efficiency of the living forces of the enemy. …

"Besides the regular Chinese troops we should create, direct, and politically and militarily equip great numbers of partisan and guerrilla detachments among the peasantry. What has been accomplished by the anti-Japanese volunteer units of this type in Manchuria is only a very minor demonstration of the latent power of resistance that can be mobilized from the revolutionary peasantry of all China. Properly led and organized, such units can keep the Japanese busy twenty-four hours a day and worry them to death.

"It must be remembered that the war will be fought inside China. This means that the Japanese will be entirely surrounded by a hostile Chinese people. The Japanese will be forced to move in all their provisions and guard them, maintaining troops along all lines of communications, and heavily garrisoning their bases in Manchuria and Japan as well.

"The process of the war will present to China the possibility of capturing many Japanese prisoners, arms, ammunition, war machines, and so forth. A point will be reached where it will become more and more possible to engage Japan’s armies on a basis of positional warfare, using fortifications and deep entrenchment, for, as the war progresses, the technical equipment of the anti-Japanese forces will greatly improve, and will be reinforced by important foreign help. Japan’s economy will crack under the strain of a long, expensive occupation of China and the morale of her forces will break under the trial of a war of innumerable but indecisive battles. The great reservoirs of human material in the revolutionary Chinese people will still be pouring men ready to fight for their freedom into our front lines long after the tidal flood of Japanese imperialism has wrecked itself on the hidden reefs of Chinese resistance.

"All these and other factors will condition the war and will enable us to make the final and decisive attacks on Japan’s fortifications and strategic bases and to drive Japan’s army of occupation from China.

"Japanese officers and soldiers captured and disarmed by us will be welcomed and will be well treated. They will not be killed. They will be treated in a brotherly way. Every method will be adopted to make the Japanese proletarian soldiers, with whom we have no quarrel, stand up and oppose their own Fascist oppressors. Our slogan will be: ‘Unite and oppose the common oppressors, the Fascist leaders.’ Anti-Fascist Japanese troops are our friends, and there is no conflict in our aims.”*

It was past two o’clock in the morning and I was exhausted, but I could see no signs of fatigue on Mao’s thoughtful face. He alternately walked up and down between the two little rooms, sat down, lay down, leaned on the table, and read from a sheaf of reports in the intervals when Wu translated and I wrote. Mrs. Mao also was still awake. Suddenly both of them bent over and gave an exclamation of delight at a moth that had languished beside the candle. It was a really lovely thing, with wings shaded a delicate apple-green and fringed in a soft rainbow of saffron and rose. Mao opened a book and pressed this gossamer of color between its leaves.

Could such people really be thinking seriously of war?

$2,000,000 in Heads

There were many things unique about the Red Army University.

Its president was a twenty-eight-year-old army commander who (Communists said) had never lost a battle. It boasted, in one class of undergraduates, veteran warriors whose average age was twenty-seven, with an average of eight years of fighting experience and three wounds each. Was there any other school where "paper shortage” made it necessary to use the blank side of enemy propaganda leaflets for classroom notebooks? Or where the cost of educating each cadet, including food, clothing, all institutional expenses, was less than $15 silver per month? Or where the aggregate value of rewards offered for the heads of various notorious cadets exceeded $2,000,000?

Finally, it was probably the world’s only seat of "higher learning” whose classrooms were bombproof caves, with chairs and desks of stone and brick, and blackboards and walls of limestone and clay.

In Shensi and Kansu, besides ordinary houses, there were great cave dwellings, temple grottoes and castled battlements hundreds of years old. Wealthy officials and landlords built these queer edifices a thousand years ago, to guard against flood and invasion and famine, and here hoarded the grain and treasure to see them through sieges of each. Many-vaulted chambers, cut deeply into the loess or solid rock, some with rooms that held several hundred people, these cliff dwellings made perfect bomb shelters. In such archaic manors the Red University found strange but safe accommodation.

Lin Piao, the president, was introduced to me soon after my arrival, and he invited me to speak one day to his cadets. He suggested the topic: "British and American policies toward China.” When he arranged a "noodle dinner” for the occasion it was too much for me, and I succumbed.

Lin Piao was the son of a factory owner in Hupeh province, and was born in 1908. His father was ruined by extortionate taxation, but Lin managed to get through prep school, and became a cadet in the famous Whampoa Academy at Canton. There he made a brilliant record. He received intensive political and military training under Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang’s chief adviser, the Russian General Bluecher. Soon after his graduation the Nationalist Expedition began, and Lin Piao was promoted to a captaincy. By 1927, at the age of twenty, he was a colonel in the noted Fourth Kuomintang Army, under Chang Fa-kuei. And in August of that year, after the Right coup d’état at Nanking, he led his regiment to join the Twentieth Army under Ho Lung and Yeh T’ing* in the Nanchang Uprising, which began the Communists’ armed struggle for power.

With Mao Tse-tung, Lin Piao shared the distinction of being one of the few Red commanders never wounded. Engaged on the front in more than a hundred battles, in field command for more than ten years, exposed to every hardship that his men had known, with a reward of $100,000 on his head, he was as yet unhurt.

In 1932, Lin Piao was given command of the First Red Army Corps, which then numbered about 20,000 rifles. It became, according to general opinion among Red Army officers, their "most dreaded force,” chiefly because of Lin’s extraordinary talent as a tactician. The mere discovery that they were fighting the First Red Army Corps was said to have sometimes put a Nanking army to rout.

Like many able Red commanders, Lin had never been outside China, and spoke and read no language but Chinese. Before the age of thirty, however, he had already won recognition beyond Red circles. His articles in the Chinese Reds’ military magazines, Struggle and War and Revolution, had been republished, studied, and criticized in Nanking military journals, and also in Japan and Soviet Russia. He was noted as the originator of the "short attack”—a tactic on which General Feng Yu-hsiang had commented. To the Reds’ skillful mastery of the "short attack” many victories of the First Army Corps were said to be traceable.

With Commander Lin and his faculty I journeyed one morning a short distance beyond the walls of Pao An to the Red Army University. We arrived at recreation hour. Some of the cadets were playing basketball on the two courts set up; others were playing tennis on a court laid down on the turf beside the Pao An River, a tributary of the Yellow River. Still other cadets were playing table tennis, writing, reading new books and magazines, or studying in their primitive "clubrooms.”

This was the First Section of the University, in which there were some 200 students. Altogether, Hung Ta, as the school was known in the soviet districts, had four sections, with over 800 students. There were also, near Pao An, and under the administrative control of the education commissioner, radio, cavalry, agricultural, and medical-training schools. There was a Communist Party school* and a mass-education training center.

Over 200 cadets assembled to hear me explain "British and American policies.” I made a crude summary of Anglo-American attitudes, and agreed to answer questions. It was a great mistake, I soon realized, and the noodle dinner hardly compensated for my embarrassment.

"What is the attitude of the British Government toward the formation of the pro-Japanese Hopei-Chahar Council, and the garrisoning of North China by Japanese troops?”

"What are the results of the N.R.A. policy in America, and how has it benefited the working class?”

"Will Germany and Italy help Japan if a war breaks out with China?”

"How long do you think Japan can carry on a major war against China if she is not helped by other powers?”

"Why has the League of Nations failed?”

"Why is it that, although the Communist Party is legal in both Great Britain and America, there is no workers’ government in either country?”

"What progress is being made in the formation of an anti-Fascist front in England? In America?”

"What is the future of the international student movement, which has its center in Paris?”

"In your opinion, can Leith-Ross’s visit to Japan result in Anglo-Japanese agreement on policies toward China?”

"When China begins to resist Japan, will America and Great Britain assist China or Japan?”

"Please tell us why America and Great Britain keep their fleets and armed forces in China if they are friends of the Chinese people?”

"What do the American and British workers think of the U.S.S.R.?”

No small territory to cover in a two-hour question period! And it was not confined to two hours. Beginning at ten in the morning, it continued till late in the afternoon.

Afterwards I toured the various classrooms and talked with Lin Piao and his faculty. They told me something of the conditions of enrollment in their school, and showed me printed announcements of its courses, thousands of copies of which had been secretly distributed throughout China. The four sections of the academy invited "all who are determined to fight Japanese imperialism and to offer themselves for the national revolutionary cause, regardless of class, social, or political differences.” The age limit was sixteen to twenty-eight, "regardless of sex.” "The applicants must be physically strong, free from epidemic diseases,” and also—rather sweeping—"free from all bad habits.”

In practice, I discovered, most of the cadets in the First Section were battalion, regimental, or division commanders or political commissars of the Red Army,* receiving advanced military and political training. According to Red Army regulations, every active commander or commissar was supposed to spend at least four months at such study during every two years of active service.

The Second and Third sections included company, platoon, and squad commanders—experienced fighters in the Red Army—as well as new recruits selected from "graduates of middle schools or the equivalent, unemployed teachers or officers, cadres of anti-Japanese volunteer corps, and anti-Japanese partisan leaders, and workers who have engaged in organizing and leading labor movements.” Over sixty middle-school graduates from Shansi had joined the Reds during their expedition to that province.

Classes in the Second and Third sections lasted six months. The Fourth Section was devoted chiefly to "training engineers, cavalry cadres, and artillery units.” Here I met some former machinists and apprentices. Later on, as I was leaving Red China, I was to meet, entering by truck, eight new recruits for the "bandit university” arriving from Shanghai and Peking. Lin Piao told me that they had a waiting list of over 2,000 student applicants from all parts of China. At that time every cadet had to be "smuggled” in.

The curriculum varied in different sections of Hung Ta. In the First Section political lectures included these courses: Political Knowledge, Problems of the Chinese Revolution, Political Economy, Party Construction, Tactical Problems of the Republic, Leninism and Historical Foundations of Democracy, and Political and Social Forces in Japan. Military courses included: Problems of Strategy in the War with Japan, Maneuvering Warfare (against Japan), and the Development of Partisan Warfare in the Anti-Japanese War.

Special textbooks had been prepared for some of these courses. Some were carried clear from the soviet publishing house in Kiangsi, where (I was told) more than eight hundred printers were employed in the main plant. In other courses the materials used were lectures by Red Army commanders and Party leaders, dealing with historical experiences of the Russian and the Chinese revolutions, or utilizing material from captured government files, documents and statistics.

These courses at Hung Ta perhaps suggested a reply to the question, "Do the Reds really intend to fight Japan?” It sufficed to show how the Reds foresaw and actively planned for China’s "war of independence” against Japan—a war which they regarded as inevitable unless, by some miracle, Japan withdrew from the vast areas of China already under the wheels of Nippon’s military juggernaut.

That the Reds were fully determined to fight, and believed that the opening of the war would find them first on the front, was indicated not only in the impassioned utterances of their leaders, in grim practical schooling in the army, and in their proposals for a "united front” with their ten-year enemy, the Kuomintang, but also by the intensive propagandizing one saw throughout the soviet districts.

Playing a leading part in this educative mission were the many companies of youths known as the Jen-min K’ang-Jih Chu-She, or People’s Anti-Japanese Dramatic Society, who traveled ceaselessly back and forth in the Red districts, spreading the gospel of resistance and awakening the slumbering nationalism of the peasantry.

It was to one of the performances of this astonishing children’s theater that I went soon after my first visit to the Red Army University.

Red Theater

People were already moving down toward the open-air stage, improvised from an old temple, when I set out with the young official who had invited me to the Red Theater. It was Saturday, two or three hours before sunset, and all Pao An seemed to be going.

Cadets, muleteers, women and girl workers from the uniform and shoe factory, clerks from the cooperatives and from the soviet post office, soldiers, carpenters, villagers followed by their infants, all began streaming toward the big grassy plain beside the river, where the players were performing. It would be hard to imagine a more democratic gathering—something like old-time Chautauqua.

No tickets were sold, there was no "dress circle,” and there were no preferred seats. Goats were grazing on the tennis court not far beyond. I noticed Lo Fu, general secretary of the Politburo of the Central Committee, Lin Piao, Lin Po-chu (Lin Tsu-han), the commissioner of finance, Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and other officials and their wives scattered through the crowd, seated on the springy turf like the rest. No one paid much attention to them once the performance had begun.

Across the stage was a big pink curtain of silk, with the words "People’s Anti-Japanese Dramatic Society” in Chinese characters as well as Latinized Chinese, which the Reds were promoting to hasten mass education. The program was to last three hours. It proved to be a combination of playlets, dancing, singing, and pantomime—a kind of variety show, or vaudeville, given unity chiefly by two central themes: anti-Nipponism and the revolution. It was full of overt propaganda and the props were primitive. But it had the advantage of being emancipated from cymbal-crashing and falsetto singing, and of dealing with living material rather than with meaningless historical intrigues that are the concern of the decadent Chinese opera.1

What it lacked in subtlety and refinement it partly made up by its robust vitality, its sparkling humor, and a sort of participation between actors and audience. Guests at the Red Theater seemed actually to listen to what was said: a really astonishing thing in contrast with the bored opera audience, who often spent their time eating fruit and melon seeds, gossiping, tossing hot towels back and forth, visiting from one box to another, and only occasionally looking at the stage.

The first playlet was called Invasion. It opened in a Manchurian village in 1931, with the Japanese arriving and driving out the "non-resisting” Chinese soldiers. In the second scene Japanese officers banqueted in a peasant’s home, using Chinese men for chairs and drunkenly making love to their wives. Another scene showed Japanese dope peddlers selling morphine and heroin and forcing every peasant to buy a quantity. A youth who refused to buy was singled out for questioning.

"You don’t buy morphine, you don’t obey Manchukuo health rules, you don’t love your ‘divine’ Emperor P’u Yi,” ^* charged his tormentors. "You are no good, you are an anti-Japanese bandit!” And the youth was promptly executed.

A scene in the village market place showed small merchants peacefully selling their wares. Suddenly Japanese soldiers arrived, searching for more "anti-Japanese bandits.” Instantly they demanded passports, and those who had forgotten them were shot. Then two Japanese officers gorged themselves on a peddler’s pork. When he asked for payment they looked at him in astonishment. "You ask for payment? Why, Chiang Kai-shek gave us Manchuria, Jehol, Chahar, the Tangku Truce, the Ho-Umetsu Agreement, and the Hopei-Chahar Council without asking a single copper! And you want us to pay for a little pork!” Whereupon they impaled him as a "bandit.”

In the end, of course, all that proved too much for the villagers. Merchants turned over their stands and umbrellas, farmers rushed forth with their spears, women and children came with their knives, and all swore to "fight to the death” against the Jih-pen-kuei— the "Japanese devils.”

The little play was sprinkled with humor and local idiom. Bursts of laughter alternated with oaths of disgust and hatred for the Japanese. The audience got quite agitated. It was not just political propaganda to them, nor slapstick melodrama, but the poignant truth itself. The fact that the players were mostly youths in their teens and natives of Shensi and Shansi seemed entirely forgotten in the onlookers’ absorption with the ideas presented.

The substratum of bitter reality behind this portrayal, done as a sort of farce, was not obscured by its wit and humor for at least one young soldier there. He stood up at the end, and in a voice shaking with emotion cried out: "Death to the Japanese bandits! Down with the murderers of our Chinese people! Fight back to our homes!” The whole assembly echoed his slogans mightly. I learned that this lad was a Manchurian whose parents had been killed by the Japanese.

Comic relief was provided at this moment by the meandering goats. They were discovered nonchalantly eating the tennis net, which someone had forgotten to take down. A wave of laughter swept the audience while some cadets gave chase to the culprits and salvaged this important property of the recreation department.

Second number on the program was a harvest dance, daintily performed by a dozen girls of the Dramatic Society. Barefoot, clad in peasant trousers and coats and fancy vests, with silk bandannas on their heads, they danced with good unison and grace. Two of these girls, I learned, had walked clear from Kiangsi, where they had learned to dance in the Reds’ dramatic school at Juichin. They had genuine talent.

Another unique and amusing number was called the "United Front Dance,” which interpreted the mobilization of China to resist Japan. By what legerdemain they produced their costumes I do not know, but suddenly there were groups of youths wearing sailors’ white jumpers and caps and shorts—first appearing as cavalry formations, next as aviation corps, then as foot soldiers, and finally as the navy. Their pantomime and gesture, at which Chinese are born artists, very realistically conveyed the spirit of the dance. Then there was something called the "Dance of the Red Machines.” By sound and gesture, by an interplay and interlocking of arms, legs, and heads, the little dancers ingeniously imitated the thrust and drive of pistons, the turn of cogs and wheels, the hum of dynamos—and visions of a machine-age China of the future.

Between acts, shouts arose for extemporaneous singing by people in the audience. Half a dozen native Shensi girls—workers in the factories—were by popular demand required to sing an old folk song of the province, accompaniment being furnished by a Shensi farmer with his homemade guitar. Another "command” performance was given by a cadet who played the harmonica, and one was called upon to sing a favorite song of the Southland. Then, to my utter consternation, a demand began that the wai-kuo hsin-wen chi-che—the foreign newspaperman—strain his lungs in a solo of his own!

They refused to excuse me. Alas, I could think of nothing but fox trots, waltzes, La Bohème, and "Ave Maria,” which all seemed inappropriate for this martial audience. I could not even remember "The Marseillaise.” The demand persisted. In extreme embarrassment I at last rendered "The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” They were very polite about it. No encore was requested.

With infinite relief I saw the curtain go up on the next act, which turned out to be a social play with a revolutionary theme—an accountant falling in love with his landlord’s wife. Then there was more dancing, a "Living Newspaper” dealing with some late news from the Southwest, and a chorus of children singing "The International.” Here the flags of several nations were hung on streamers from a central illuminated column, round which reclined the young dancers. They rose slowly, as the words were sung, to stand erect, clenched fists upraised, as the song ended.

The theater was over, but my curiosity remained. Next day I went to interview Miss Wei Kung-chih, director of the People’s Anti-Japanese Dramatic Society.

Miss Wei was born in Honan in 1907 and had been a Red for ten years. She originally joined a propaganda corps of the political training school (where Teng Hsiao-p’ing was director) of the Kuominchun, "Christian General” Feng Yu-hsiang’s army, but when Feng reconciled himself to the Nanking coup d’état in 1927 she deserted, along with many young students, and became a Communist in Hankow. In 1929 she was sent to Europe by the Communist Party and studied for a while in France, then in Moscow. A year later she returned to China, successfully ran the Kuomintang blockade around Red China, and began to work at Juichin.

She told me something of the history of the Red Theater. Dramatic groups were first organized in Kiangsi in 1931. There, at the famous Gorky School (under the technical direction of Yeh Chien-ying*) in Juichin, with over 1,000 students recruited from the soviet districts, the Reds trained about sixty theatrical troupes, according to Miss Wei. They traveled through the villages and at the front. Every troupe had long waiting lists of requests from village soviets. The peasants, always grateful for any diversion in their culture-starved lives, voluntarily arranged all transport, food, and housing for these visits.

In the South, Miss Wei had been an assistant director, but in the Northwest she had charge of the whole organization of dramatics. She made the Long March from Kiangsi, one of the very few soviet women who lived through it. Theatrical troupes were created in Soviet Shensi before the southern army reached the Northwest, but with the arrival of new talent from Kiangsi the dramatic art apparently acquired new life. There were about thirty such traveling theatrical troupes there now, Miss Wei told me, and others in Kansu. I was to meet many later on in my travels.

"Every army has its own dramatic group,” Miss Wei continued, "as well as nearly every district. The actors are nearly all locally recruited. Most of our experienced players from the South have now become instructors.”

I met several Young Vanguards, veterans of the Long March, still in their early teens, who had charge of organizing and training children’s dramatic societies in various villages.

"Peasants come from long distances to our Red dramatics,” Miss Wei proudly informed me. "Sometimes, when we are near the White borders, Kuomintang soldiers secretly send messages to ask our players to come to some market town in the border districts. When we do this, both Red soldiers and White leave their arms behind and go to this market place to watch our performance. But the higher officers of the Kuomintang never permit this, if they know about it, because once they have seen our players many of the Kuomintang soldiers will no longer fight our Red Army.”

What surprised me about these dramatic "clubs” was that, equipped with so little, they were able to meet a genuine social need. They had the scantest properties and costumes, yet with these primitive materials they managed to produce the authentic illusion of drama. The players received only their food and clothing and small living allowances, but they studied every day, like all Communists, and they believed themselves to be working for China and the Chinese people. They slept anywhere, cheerfully ate what was provided for them, walked long distances from village to village. From the standpoint of material comforts they were unquestionably the most miserably rewarded thespians on earth, yet I hadn’t seen any who looked happier.

The Reds wrote nearly all their own plays and songs. Some were contributed by versatile officials, but most of them were prepared by story writers and artists in the propaganda department. Several Red dramatic skits were written by Ch’eng Fang-wu, a well-known Hunanese author whose adherence to Soviet Kiangsi in 1933 had excited Shanghai. More recently Ting Ling,* China’s foremost woman author, had added her talent to the Red Theater.

There was no more powerful weapon of propaganda in the Communist movement than the Reds’ dramatic troupes, and none more subtly manipulated. By constant shifts of program, by almost daily changes of the "Living Newspaper” scenes, new military, political, economic, and social problems became the material of drama, and doubts and questionings were answered in a humorous, understandable way for the skeptical peasantry. When the Reds occupied new areas, it was the Red Theater that calmed the fears of the people, gave them rudimentary ideas of the Red program, and dispensed great quantities of revolutionary thoughts, to win the people’s confidence. During the Reds’ 1935 Shansi expedition, for example, hundreds of peasants heard about the Red players with the army, and flocked to see them.

The whole thing was "propaganda in art” carried to the ultimate degree, and plenty of people would say, "Why drag art into it?” Yet in its broadest meaning it was art, for it conveyed for its spectators the illusions of life, and if it was a naive art it was because the living material with which it was made and the living men to whom it appealed were in their approach to life’s problems also naive. For the masses of China there was no fine partition between art and propaganda. There was only a distinction between what was understandable in human experience and what was not.

One could think of the whole history of the Communist movement in China as a grand propaganda tour, and the defense, not so much of the absolute Tightness of certain ideas, perhaps, as of their right to exist. I was not sure that they might not prove to be the most permanent service of the Reds, even if they were in the end defeated and broken. For millions of young peasants who had heard the Marxist gospel preached by those beardless youths, thousands of whom were now dead, the old exorcisms of Chinese culture would never again be quite as effective. Wherever in their incredible migrations destiny had moved these Reds, they had vigorously demanded deep social changes—for which the peasants could have learned to hope in no other way—and they had brought new faith in action to the poor and the oppressed.

However badly they had erred at times, however tragic had been their excesses, however exaggerated had been the emphasis here or the stress there, it had been their sincere and sharply felt propagandist aim to shake, to arouse, the millions of rural China to their responsibilities in society; to awaken them to a belief in human rights, to combat the timidity, passiveness, and static faiths of Taoism and Confucianism, to educate, to persuade, and, no doubt, at times to beleaguer and coerce them to fight for "the reign of the people”—a new vision in rural China—to fight for a life of justice, equality, freedom, and human dignity, as the Communists saw it. Far more than all the pious but meaningless resolutions passed at Nanking, this growing pressure from a peasantry gradually standing erect in a state of consciousness, after two millenniums of sleep, could force the realization of a vast mutation over the land.2

What this "communism” amounted to in a way was that, for the first time in history, thousands of educated youths, stirred to great dreams themselves by a universe of scientific knowledge to which they were suddenly given access, "returned to the people,” went to the deep soil-base of their country, to "reveal” some of their new-won learning to the intellectually sterile countryside, the dark-living peasantry, and sought to enlist its alliance in building a "more abundant life.” Fired by the belief that a better world could be made, and that only they could make it, they carried their formula—the ideal of the commune—back to the people for sanction and support. And to a startling degree they seemed to be winning it. They had brought to millions, by propaganda and by action, a new conception of the state, society, and the individual.

I often had a queer feeling among the Reds that I was in the midst of a host of schoolboys, engaged in a life of violence because some strange design of history had made this seem infinitely more important to them than football games, textbooks, love, or the main concerns of youth in other countries. At times I could scarcely believe that it had been only this determined aggregation of youth, equipped with an Idea, that had directed a mass struggle for ten years against all the armies of Nanking. How had the incredible brotherhood arisen, banded together, held together, and whence came its strength? And why had it perhaps, after all, failed to mature, why did it still seem fundamentally like a mighty demonstration, like a crusade of youth? How could one ever make it plausible to those who had seen nothing of it?

Then Mao Tse-tung began to tell me something about his personal history, and as I wrote it down, night after night, I realized that this was not only his story but an explanation of how communism grew—a variety of it real and indigenous to China—and why it had won the adherence and support of thousands of young men and women. It was a story that I was to hear later on, with rich variations, in the life stories of many other Red leaders. It was a story people would want to read, I thought.

Genesis of a Communist

Childhood

On the five or six sets of questions I had submitted on different matters, Mao had talked for a dozen nights, hardly ever referring to himself or his own role in some of the events described. I was beginning to think it was hopeless to expect him to give me such details: he obviously considered the individual of very little importance. Like other Reds I met he tended to talk only about committees, organizations, armies, resolutions, battles, tactics, "measures,” and so on, and seldom of personal experience.

For a while I thought this reluctance to expand on subjective matters, or even the exploits of their comrades as individuals, might derive from modesty, or a fear or suspicion of me, or a consciousness of the price so many of these men had on their heads. Later on I discovered that that was not so much the case as it was that most of them actually did not remember personal details. As I began collecting biographies I found repeatedly that the Communist would be able to tell everything that had happened in his early youth, but once he had become identified with the Red Army he lost himself somewhere, and without repeated questioning one could hear nothing more about him, but only stories of the Army, or the Soviets, or the Party—capitalized. These men could talk indefinitely about dates and circumstances of battles, and movements to and from a thousand unheard-of places, but those events seemed to have had significance for them only collectively, not because they as individuals had made history there, but because the Red Army had been there, and behind it the whole organic force of an ideology for which they were fighting. It was an interesting discovery, but it made difficult reporting.

One night when all other questions had been satisfied, Mao turned to the list I had headed "Personal History.” He smiled at a question, "How many times have you been married?”—and the rumor later spread that I had asked Mao how many wives he had. He was skeptical, anyway, about the necessity for supplying an autobiography. But I argued that in a way that was more important than information on other matters. "People want to know what sort of man you are,” I said, "when they read what you say. Then you ought also to correct some of the false rumors circulated.”

I reminded him of various reports of his death, how some people believed he spoke fluent French, while others said he was an ignorant peasant, how one report described him as a half-dead tubercular, while others maintained that he was a mad fanatic. He seemed mildly surprised that people should spend their time speculating about him. He agreed that such reports ought to be corrected. Then he looked over the items again, as I had written them down.

"Suppose,” he said at last, "that I just disregard your questions, and instead give you a general sketch of my life? I think it will be more understandable, and in the end all of your questions will be answered just the same.”

During the nightly interviews that followed—we were like conspirators indeed, huddled in that cave over the red-covered table, with sputtering candles between us—I wrote until I was ready to fall asleep. Wu Liang-p’ing sat next to me and interpreted Mao’s soft southern dialect, in which a chicken, instead of being a good substantial northern chi, became a romantic ghii, and Hunan became Funan, and a bowl of ch’a turned into ts’a, and many much stranger variations occurred. Mao related everything from memory, and I put it down as he talked. It was, as I have said, retranslated and corrected, and this is the result, with no attempt to give it literary excellence, beyond some necessary corrections in the syntax of the patient Mr. Wu:

"I was born in the village of Shao Shan, in Hsiang T’an hsien* Hunan province, in 1893.¹ My father’s name was Mao Jen-sheng [Mao Shun-sheng], and my mother’s maiden name was Wen Ch’i-mei.

"My father was a poor peasant and while still young was obliged to join the army because of heavy debts. He was a soldier for many years. Later on he returned to the village where I was born, and by saving carefully and gathering together a little money through small trading and other enterprise he managed to buy back his land.

"As middle peasants then my family owned fifteen mou^† of land. On this they could raise sixty tan* of rice a year. The five members of the family consumed a total of thirty-five tan—that is, about seven each—which left an annual surplus of twenty-five tan. Using this surplus, my father accumulated a little capital and in time purchased seven more mou, which gave the family the status of ‘rich’ peasants. We could then raise eighty-four tan of rice a year.

"When I was ten years of age and the family owned only fifteen mou of land, the five members of the family consisted of my father, mother, grandfather, younger brother, and myself. After we had acquired the additional seven mou, my grandfather died, but there came another younger brother. However, we still had a surplus of forty-nine tan of rice each year, and on this my father steadily prospered.

"At the time my father was a middle peasant he began to deal in grain transport and selling, by which he made a little money. After he became a ‘rich’ peasant, he devoted most of his time to that business. He hired a full-time farm laborer, and put his children to work on the farm, as well as his wife. I began to work at farming tasks when I was six years old. My father had no shop for his business. He simply purchased grain from the poor farmers and then transported it to the city merchants, where he got a higher price. In the winter, when the rice was being ground, he hired an extra laborer to work on the farm, so that at that time there were seven mouths to feed. My family ate frugally, but had enough always.

"I began studying in a local primary school when I was eight and remained there until I was thirteen years old. In the early morning and at night I worked on the farm. During the day I read the Confucian Analects and the Four Classics. My Chinese teacher belonged to the stern-treatment school. He was harsh and severe, frequently beating his students. Because of that I ran away from the school when I was ten. I was afraid to return home for fear of receiving a beating there, and set out in the general direction of the city, which I believed to be in a valley somewhere. I wandered for three days before I was finally found by my family. Then I learned that I had circled round and round in my travels, and in all my walking had got only about eight li ^† from my home.

"After my return to the family, however, to my surprise conditions somewhat improved. My father was slightly more considerate and the teacher was more inclined to moderation. The result of my act of protest impressed me very much. It was a successful ‘strike’.

"My father wanted me to begin keeping the family books as soon as I had learned a few characters. He wanted me to learn to use the abacus. As my father insisted upon this I began to work at those accounts at night. He was a severe taskmaster. He hated to see me idle, and if there were no books to be kept he put me to work at farm tasks. He was a hot-tempered man and frequently beat both me and my brothers. He gave us no money whatever, and the most meager food. On the fifteenth of every month he made a concession to his laborers and gave them eggs with their rice, but never meat. To me he gave neither eggs nor meat.

"My mother was a kind woman, generous and sympathetic, and ever ready to share what she had. She pitied the poor and often gave them rice when they came to ask for it during famines. But she could not do so when my father was present. He disapproved of charity. We had many quarrels in my home over this question.

"There were two ‘parties’ in the family. One was my father, the Ruling Power. The Opposition was made up of myself, my mother, my brother, and sometimes even the laborer. In the ‘united front’ of the Opposition, however, there was a difference of opinion. My mother advocated a policy of indirect attack. She criticized any overt display of emotion and attempts at open rebellion against the Ruling Power. She said it was not the Chinese way.

"But when I was thirteen I discovered a powerful argument of my own for debating with my father on his own ground, by quoting the Classics. My father’s favorite accusations against me were of unfilial conduct and laziness. I quoted, in exchange, passages from the Classics saying that the elder must be kind and affectionate. Against his charge that I was lazy I used the rebuttal that older people should do more work than younger, that my father was over three times as old as myself, and therefore should do more work. And I declared that when I was his age I would be much more energetic.

"The old man continued to ‘amass wealth,’ or what was considered to be a great fortune in that little village. He did not buy more land himself, but he bought many mortgages on other people’s land. His capital grew to two or three thousand Chinese dollars.*

"My dissatisfaction increased. The dialectical struggle in our family was constantly developing, ^† One incident I especially remember. When I was about thirteen my father invited many guests to his home, and while they were present a dispute arose between the two of us. My father denounced me before the whole group, calling me lazy and useless. This infuriated me. I cursed him and left the house. My mother ran after me and tried to persuade me to return. My father also pursued me, cursing at the same time that he commanded me to come back. I reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if he came any nearer. In this situation demands and counterdemands were presented for cessation of the civil war. My father insisted that I apologize and k’ou-t’ou* as a sign of submission. I agreed to give a one-knee k’ou-t’ou if he would promise not to beat me. Thus the war ended, and from it I learned that when I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained meek and submissive he only cursed and beat me the more.

"Reflecting on this, I think that in the end the strictness of my father defeated him. I learned to hate him, and we created a real united front against him. At the same time it probably benefited me. It made me most diligent in my work; it made me keep my books carefully, so that he should have no basis for criticizing me.

"My father had had two years of schooling and he could read enough to keep books. My mother was wholly illiterate. Both were from peasant families. I was the family ‘scholar.’ I knew the Classics, but disliked them. What I enjoyed were the romances of Old China, and especially stories of rebellions. I read the Yo Fei Chuan[the Yo Fei Chronicles], Shui Hu Chuan [The Water Margin], Fan T’ang [Revolt Against the Tang], San Kuo[the Three Kingdoms] and Hsi Yu Chi [Travels in the West, the story of Hsuan Tsang’s seventh-century semilegendary pilgrimage to India] while still very young, and despite the vigilance of my old teacher, who hated these outlawed books and called them wicked. I used to read them in school, covering them up with a Classic when the teacher walked past. So also did most of my schoolmates. We learned many of the stories almost by heart, and discussed and rediscussed them many times. We knew more of them than the old men of the village, who also loved them and used to exchange stories with us. I believe that perhaps I was much influenced by such books, read at an impressionable age.

"I finally left the primary school when I was thirteen and began to work long hours on the farm, helping the hired laborer, doing the full labor of a man during the day and at night keeping books for my father. Nevertheless, I succeeded in continuing my reading, devouring everything I could find except the Classics. This annoyed my father, who wanted me to master the Classics, especially after he was defeated in a lawsuit because of an apt Classical quotation used by his adversary in the Chinese court. I used to cover up the window of my room late at night so that my father would not see the light. In this way I read a book called Sheng-shih Weiyen [Words of Warning],* which I liked very much. The author, one of a number of old reformist scholars, thought that the weakness of China lay in her lack of Western appliances—railways, telephones, telegraphs, and steamships—and wanted to have them introduced into the country. My father considered such books a waste of time. He wanted me to read something practical like the Classics, which could help him in winning lawsuits.

"I continued to read the old romances and tales of Chinese literature. It occurred to me one day that there was one thing peculiar about such stories, and that was the absence of peasants who tilled the land. All the characters were warriors, officials, or scholars; there was never a peasant hero. I wondered about this for two years, and then I analyzed the content of the stories. I found that they all glorified men of arms, rulers of the people, who did not have to work the land, because they owned and controlled it and evidently made the peasants work it for them.

"My father was in his early days, and in middle age, a skeptic, but my mother devoutly worshiped Buddha. She gave her children religious instruction, and we were all saddened that our father was an unbeliever. When I was nine years old I seriously discussed the problem of my father’s lack of piety with my mother. We made many attempts then and later on to convert him, but without success. He only cursed us, and, overwhelmed by his attacks, we withdrew to devise new plans. But he would have nothing to do with the gods.

"My reading gradually began to influence me, however; I myself became more and more skeptical. My mother became concerned about me, and scolded me for my indifference to the requirements of the faith, but my father made no comment. Then one day he went out on the road to collect some money, and on his way he met a tiger. The tiger was surprised at the encounter and fled at once, but my father was even more astonished and afterwards reflected a good deal on his miraculous escape. He began to wonder if he had not offended the gods. From then on he showed more respect to Buddhism and burned incense now and then. Yet when my own backsliding grew worse, the old man did not interfere. He prayed to the gods only when he was in difficulties.

"Sheng-shih Wei-yen [Words of Warning] stimulated in me a desire to resume my studies. I had also become disgusted with my labor on the farm. My father naturally opposed me. We quarreled about it, and finally I ran away from home. I went to the home of an unemployed law student, and there I studied for half a year. After that I studied more of the Classics under an old Chinese scholar, and also read many contemporary articles and a few books.

"At this time an incident occurred in Hunan which influenced my whole life. Outside the little Chinese school where I was studying, we students noticed many bean merchants coming back from Changsha. We asked them why they were all leaving. They told us about a big uprising in the city.

"There had been a severe famine that year, and in Changsha thousands were without food. The starving sent a delegation to the civil governor to beg for relief, but he replied to them haughtily, ‘Why haven’t you food? There is plenty in the city. I always have enough.’ When the people were told the governor’s reply, they became very angry. They held mass meetings and organized a demonstration. They attacked the Manchu yamen, cut down the flagpole, the symbol of office, and drove out the governor. Following this, the Commissioner of Internal Affairs, a man named Chang, came out on his horse and told the people that the government would take measures to help them. Chang was evidently sincere in his promise, but the Emperor disliked him and accused him of having intimate connections with ‘the mob.’ He was removed. A new governor arrived, and at once ordered the arrest of the leaders of the uprising. Many of them were beheaded and their heads displayed on poles as a warning to future ‘rebels.’

"This incident was discussed in my school for many days. It made a deep impression on me. Most of the other students sympathized with the ‘insurrectionists,’ but only from an observer’s point of view. They did not understand that it had any relation to their own lives. They were merely interested in it as an exciting incident. I never forgot it. I felt that there with the rebels were ordinary people like my own family and I deeply resented the injustice of the treatment given to them.

"Not long afterward, in Shao Shan, there was a conflict between members of the Ke Lao Hui,* a secret society, and a local landlord. He sued them in court, and as he was a powerful landlord he easily bought a decision favorable to himself. The Ke Lao Hui members were defeated. But instead of submitting, they rebelled against the landlord and the government and withdrew to a local mountain called Liu Shan, where they built a stronghold. Troops were sent against them and the landlord spread a story that they had sacrificed a child when they raised the banner of revolt. The leader of the rebels was called P’ang the Millstone Maker. They were finally suppressed and P’ang was forced to flee. He was eventually captured and beheaded. In the eyes of the students, however, he was a hero, for all sympathized with the revolt.

"Next year, when the new rice was not yet harvested and the winter rice was exhausted, there was a food shortage in our district. The poor demanded help from the rich farmers and they began a movement called ‘Eat Rice Without Charge.’* My father was a rice merchant and was exporting much grain to the city from our district, despite the shortage. One of his consignments was seized by the poor villagers and his wrath was boundless. I did not sympathize with him. At the same time I thought the villagers’ method was wrong also.

"Another influence on me at this time was the presence in a local primary school of a ‘radical’ teacher. He was ‘radical’ because he was opposed to Buddhism and wanted to get rid of the gods. He urged people to convert their temples into schools. He was a widely discussed personality. I admired him and agreed with his views.

"These incidents, occurring close together, made lasting impressions on my young mind, already rebellious. In this period also I began to have a certain amount of political consciousness, especially after I read a pamphlet telling of the dismemberment of China. I remember even now that this pamphlet opened with the sentence: ‘Alas, China will be subjugated!’ It told of Japan’s occupation of Korea and Taiwan, of the loss of suzerainty in Indochina, Burma, and elsewhere. After I read this I felt depressed about the future of my country and began to realize that it was the duty of all the people to help save it.

"My father had decided to apprentice me to a rice shop in Hsiang Tan, with which he had connections. I was not opposed to it at first, thinking it might be interesting. But about this time I heard of an unusual new school and made up my mind to go there, despite my father’s opposition. This school was in Hsiang Hsiang hsien, where my mother’s family lived. A cousin of mine was a student there and he told me of the new school and of the changing conditions in ‘modem education.’ There was less emphasis on the Classics, and more was taught of the ‘new knowledge’ of the West. The educational methods, also, were quite ‘radical.’

"I went to the school with my cousin and registered. I claimed to be a Hsiang Hsiang man, because I understood that the school was open only to natives of Hsiang Hsiang. Later on I took my true status as a Hsiang T’an native when I discovered that the place was open to all. I paid 1,400 coppers here for five months’ board, lodging, and all materials necessary for study. My father finally agreed to let me enter, after friends had argued to him that this ‘advanced’ education would increase my earning powers. This was the first time I had been as far away from home as fifty li. I was sixteen years old.

"In the new school I could study natural science and new subjects of Western learning. Another notable thing was that one of the teachers was a returned student from Japan, and he wore a false queue. It was quite easy to tell that his queue was false. Everyone laughed at him and called him the ‘False Foreign Devil.’

"I had never before seen so many children together. Most of them were sons of landlords, wearing expensive clothes; very few peasants could afford to send their children to such a school. I was more poorly dressed than the others. I owned only one decent coat-and-trousers suit. Gowns were not worn by students, but only by the teachers, and none but ‘foreign devils’ wore foreign clothes. Many of the richer students despised me because usually I was wearing my ragged coat and trousers. However, among them I had friends, and two especially were my good comrades. One of those is now a writer, living in Soviet Russia.*

"I was also disliked because I was not a native of Hsiang Hsiang. It was very important to be a native of Hsiang Hsiang and also important to be from a certain district of Hsiang Hsiang. There was an upper, lower, and middle district, and lower and upper were continually fighting, purely on a regional basis. Neither could become reconciled to the existence of the other. I took a neutral position in this war, because I was not a native at all. Consequently all three factions despised me. I felt spiritually very depressed.

"I made good progress at this school. The teachers liked me, especially those who taught the Classics, because I wrote good essays in the Classical manner. But my mind was not on the Classics. I was reading two books sent to me by my cousin, telling of the reform movement of K’ang Yu-wei. One was by Liang Ch’i-ch’ao,^† editor of the Hsin-min Ts’ung-pao [New People’s Miscellony]. I read and reread those books until I knew them by heart. I worshiped K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, and was very grateful to my cousin, whom I then thought very progressive, but who later became a counterrevolutionary, a member of the gentry, and joined the reactionaries in the period of the Great Revolution of 1925–27.

"Many of the students disliked the False Foreign Devil because of his inhuman queue, but I liked hearing him talk about Japan. He taught music and English. One of his songs was Japanese and was called ‘The Battle on the Yellow Sea.’ I still remember some charming words from it:

The sparrow sings,

The nightingale dances,

And the green fields are lovely in the spring.

The pomegranate flowers crimson,

The willows are green-leaved,

And there is a new picture.

At that time I knew and felt the beauty of Japan, and felt something of her pride and might, in this song of her victory over Russia.* I did not think there was also a barbarous Japan—the Japan we know today.

"This is all I learned from the False Foreign Devil.

"I recall also that at about this time I first heard that the Emperor and Tzu Hsi, the Empress Dowager, were both dead, although the new Emperor, Hsuan Tung [P’u Yi], had already been ruling for two years. I was not yet an antimonarchist; indeed, I considered the Emperor as well as most officials to be honest, good, and clever men. They only needed the help of K’ang Yu-wei’s reforms. I was fascinated by accounts of the rulers of ancient China: Yao, Shun, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, and Han Wu Ti, and read many books about them.^† I also learned something of foreign history at this time, and of geography. I had first heard of America in an article which told of the American Revolution and contained a sentence like this: ‘After eight years of difficult war, Washington won victory and built up his nation.’ In a book called Great Heroes of the World, I read also of Napoleon, Catherine of Russia, Peter the Great, Wellington, Gladstone, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Lincoln.”

Days in Changsha

Mao Tse-tung continued:

"I began to long to go to Changsha, the great city, the capital of the province, which was 120 li from my home. It was said that this city was very big, contained many, many people, numerous schools, and the yamen of the governor. It was a magnificent place altogether. I wanted very much to go there at this time, and enter the middle school for Hsiang Hsiang people. That winter I asked one of my teachers in the higher primary school to introduce me there. The teacher agreed, and I walked to Changsha, exceedingly excited, half fearing that I would be refused entrance, hardly daring to hope that I could actually become a student in this great school. To my astonishment, I was admitted without difficulty. But political events were moving rapidly and I was to remain there only half a year.

"In Changsha I read my first newspaper, Min-li-pao [People’s Strength], a nationalist revolutionary journal which told of the Canton Uprising against the Manchu Dynasty and the death of the Seventy-two Heroes, under the leadership of a Hunanese named Huang Hsing. I was most impressed with this story and found the Min-li-pao full of stimulating material. It was edited by Yu Yu-jen, who later became a famous leader of the Kuomintang. I learned also of Sun Yat-sen at this time, and of the program of the T’ung Meng Hui.* The country was on the eve of the First Revolution. I was so agitated that I wrote an article, which I posted on the school wall. It was my first expression of a political opinion, and it was somewhat muddled. I had not yet given up my admiration of K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao. I did not clearly understand the differences between them. Therefore in my article I advocated that Sun Yat-sen must be called back from Japan to become president of the new government, that K’ang Yu-wei be made premier, and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao minister of foreign affairs!*

"The anti-foreign-capital movement began in connection with the building of the Szechuan-Hankow railway, and a popular demand for a parliament became widespread. In reply to it the Emperor decreed merely that an advisory council be created. The students in my school became more and more agitated. They demonstrated their anti-Manchu sentiments by a rebellion against the pigtail, ^† One friend and I clipped off our pigtails, but others, who had promised to do so, afterward failed to keep their word. My friend and I therefore assaulted them in secret and forcibly removed their queues, a total of more than ten falling victim to our shears. Thus in a short space of time I had progressed from ridiculing the False Foreign Devil’s imitation queue to demanding the general abolition of queues. How a political idea can change a point of view!

"I got into a dispute with a friend in a law school over the pigtail episode, and we each advanced opposing theories on the subject. The law student held that the body, skin, hair, and nails are heritages from one’s parents and must not be destroyed, quoting the Classics to clinch his argument. But I myself and the antipigtailers developed a countertheory, on an anti-Manchu political basis, and thoroughly silenced him.

"After the Wuhan Uprising occurred, ^‡ led by Li Yuan-hung, martial law was declared in Hunan. The political scene rapidly altered. One day a revolutionary appeared in the middle school and made a stirring speech, with the permission of the principal. Seven or eight students arose in the assembly and supported him with vigorous denunciation of the Manchus, and calls for action to establish the Republic. Everyone listened with complete attention. Not a sound was heard as the orator of the revolution, one of the officials of Li Yuan-hung, spoke before the excited students.

"Four or five days after hearing this speech I determined to join the revolutionary army of Li Yuan-hung. I decided to go to Hankow with several other friends, and we collected some money from our classmates. Having heard that the streets of Hankow were very wet, and that it was necessary to wear rain shoes, I went to borrow some from a friend in the army, who was quartered outside the city. I was stopped by the garrison guards. The place had become very active, the soldiers had for the first time been furnished with bullets, and they were pouring into the streets.

"Rebels were approaching the city along the Canton-Hankow railway, and fighting had begun. A big battle occurred outside the city walls of Changsha. There was at the same time an insurrection within the city, and the gates were stormed and taken by Chinese laborers. Through one of the gates I re-entered the city. Then I stood on a high place and watched the battle, until at last I saw the Han* flag raised over the yamen. It was a white banner with the character Han in it. I returned to my school, to find it under military guard.

"On the following day, a tutu ^† government was organized. Two prominent members of the Ke Lao Hui [Elder Brother Society] were made tutu and vice-tutu. These were Chiao Ta-feng and Chen Tso-hsing, respectively. The new government was established in the former buildings of the provincial advisory council, whose chief had been T’an Yen-k’ai, who was dismissed. The council itself was abolished. Among the Manchu documents found by the revolutionaries were some copies of a petition begging for the opening of parliament. The original had been written in blood by Hsu Teh-li, who is now commissioner of education in the Soviet Government. Hsu had cut off the end of his finger, as a demonstration of sincerity and determination, and his petition began, ‘Begging that parliament be opened, I bid farewell [to the provincial delegates to Peking] by cutting my finger.’

"The new tutu and vice-tutu did not last long. They were not bad men, and had some revolutionary intentions, but they were poor and represented the interests of the oppressed. The landlords and merchants were dissatisfied with them. Not many days later, when I went to call on a friend, I saw their corpses lying in the street. T’an Yen-k’ai had organized a revolt against them, as representative of the Hunan landlords and militarists.

"Many students were now joining the army. A student army had been organized and among these students was T’ang Sheng-chih.* I did not like the student army; I considered the basis of it too confused. I decided to join the regular army instead, and help complete the revolution. The Ch’ing Emperor had not yet abdicated, and there was a period of struggle.

"My salary was seven yuan a month—which is more than I get in the Red Army now, however—and of this I spent two yuan a month on food. I also had to buy water. The soldiers had to carry water in from outside the city, but I, being a student, could not condescend to carrying, and bought it from the water peddlers. The rest of my wages were spent on newspapers, of which I became an avid reader. Among journals then dealing with the revolution was the Hsiang Chiang Jih-pao [Hsiang River Daily News]. Socialism was discussed in it, and in these columns I first learned the term. I also discussed socialism, really social-reformism, with other students and soldiers. I read some pamphlets written by Kiang K’ang-hu about socialism and its principles. I wrote enthusiastically to several of my classmates on this subject, but only one of them responded in agreement.

"There was a Hunan miner in my squad, and an ironsmith, whom I liked very much. The rest were mediocre, and one was a rascal. I persuaded two more students to join the army, and came to be on friendly terms with the platoon commander and most of the soldiers. I could write, I knew something about books, and they respected my ‘great learning.’ I could help by writing letters for them or in other such ways.

"The outcome of the revolution was not yet decided. The Ch’ing had not wholly given up power, and there was a struggle within the Kuomintang concerning the leadership. It was said in Hunan that further war was inevitable. Several armies were organized against the Manchus and against Yuan Shih-k’ai.^† Among these was the Hunan army. But just as the Hunanese were preparing to move into action, Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shih-k’ai came to an agreement, the scheduled war was called off, North and South were ‘unified,’ and the Nanking Government was dissolved. Thinking the revolution was over, I resigned from the army and decided to return to my books. I had been a soldier for half a year.

"I began to read advertisements in the papers. Many schools were then being opened and used this medium to attract new students. I had no special standard for judging schools; I did not know exactly what I wanted to do. An advertisement for a police school caught my eye and I registered for entrance to it. Before I was examined, however, I read an advertisement of a soap-making ‘school.’ No tuition was required, board was furnished and a small salary was promised. It was an attractive and inspiring advertisement. It told of the great social benefits of soap making, how it would enrich the country and enrich the people. I changed my mind about the police school and decided to become a soap maker. I paid my dollar registration fee here also.

"Meanwhile a friend of mine had become a law student and he urged me to enter his school. I also read an alluring advertisement of this law school, which promised many wonderful things. It promised to teach students all about law in three years and guaranteed that at the end of this period they would instantly become mandarins. My friend kept praising the school to me, until finally I wrote to my family, repeated all the promises of the advertisement, and asked them to send me tuition money. I painted a bright picture for them of my future as a jurist and mandarin. Then I paid a dollar to register in the law school and waited to hear from my parents.

"Fate again intervened in the form of an advertisement for a commercial school. Another friend counseled me that the country was in economic war, and that what was most needed were economists who could build up the nation’s economy. His argument prevailed and I spent another dollar to register in this commercial middle school. I actually enrolled there and was accepted. Meanwhile, however, I continued to read advertisements, and one day I read one describing the charms of a higher commercial public school. It was operated by the government, it offered a wide curriculum, and I heard that its instructors were very able men. I decided it would be better to become a commercial expert there, paid my dollar and registered, then wrote my father of my decision. He was pleased. My father readily appreciated the advantages of commercial cleverness. I entered this school and remained—for one month.

"The trouble with my new school, I discovered, was that most of the courses were taught in English, and, in common with other students, I knew little English; indeed, scarcely more than the alphabet. An additional handicap was that the school provided no English teacher. Disgusted with this situation, I withdrew from the institution at the end of the month and continued my perusal of the advertisements.

"My next scholastic adventure was in the First Provincial Middle School. I registered for a dollar, took the entrance examination, and passed at the head of the list of candidates. It was a big school, with many students, and its graduates were numerous. A Chinese teacher there helped me very much; he was attracted to me because of my literary tendency. This teacher lent me a book called the Yu-p’i Tung-chien [Chronicles with Imperial Commentaries], which contained imperial edicts and critiques by Ch’ien Lung.*

"About this time a government magazine exploded in Changsha. There was a huge fire, and we students found it very interesting. Tons of bullets and shells exploded, and gunpowder made an intense blaze. It was better than firecrackers. About a month later T’an Yen-k’ai was driven out by Yuan Shih-k’ai, who now had control of the political machinery of the Republic. T’ang Hsiang-ming replaced T’an Yen-k’ai and he set about making arrangements for Yuan’s enthronement [in an attempted restoration of the monarchy, which speedily failed].

"I did not like the First Middle School. Its curriculum was limited and its regulations were objectionable. After reading Yu-p’i T’ung-chien I had also come to the conclusion that it would be better for me to read and study alone. After six months I left the school and arranged a schedule of education of my own, which consisted of reading every day in the Hunan Provincial Library. I was very regular and conscientious about it, and the half-year I spent in this way I consider to have been extremely valuable to me. I went to the library in the morning when it opened. At noon I paused only long enough to buy and eat two rice cakes, which were my daily lunch. I stayed in the library every day reading until it closed.

"During this period of self-education I read many books, studied world geography and world history. There for the first time I saw and studied with great interest a map of the world. I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and Darwin’s Origin of Species, and a book on ethics by John Stuart Mill. I read the works of Rousseau, Spencer’s Logic, and a book on law written by Montesquieu. I mixed poetry and romances, and the tales of ancient Greece, with serious study of history and geography of Russia, America, England, France, and other countries.

"I was then living in a guild house for natives of Hsiang Hsiang district. Many soldiers were there also—’retired’ or disbanded men from the district, who had no work to do and little money. Students and soldiers were always quarreling in the guild house, and one night this hostility between them broke out in physical violence. The soldiers attacked and tried to kill the students. I escaped by fleeing to the toilet, where I hid until the fight was over.

"I had no money then, my family refusing to support me unless I entered school, and since I could no longer live in the guild house I began looking for a new place to lodge. Meanwhile, I had been thinking seriously of my ‘career’ and had about decided that I was best suited for teaching. I had begun reading advertisements again. An attractive announcement of the Hunan Normal School now came to my attention, and I read with interest of its advantages: no tuition required, and cheap board and cheap lodging. Two of my friends were also urging me to enter. They wanted my help in preparing entrance essays. I wrote of my intention to my family and I received their consent. I composed essays for my two friends, and wrote one of my own. All were accepted—in reality, therefore, I was accepted three times. I did not then think my act of substituting for my friends an immoral one; it was merely a matter of friendship.

"I was a student in the normal school for five years, and managed to resist the appeals of all future advertising.1 Finally I actually got my degree. Incidents in my life here, in the Hunan Provincial First Normal [Teachers’ Training] School, were many, and during this period my political ideas began to take shape. Here also I acquired my first experiences in social action.

"There were many regulations in the new school and I agreed with very few of them. For one thing, I was opposed to the required courses in natural science. I wanted to specialize in social sciences. Natural sciences did not especially interest me, and I did not study them, so I got poor marks in most of these courses. Most of all I hated a compulsory course in still-life drawing. I thought it extremely stupid. I used to think of the simplest subjects possible to draw, finish up quickly and leave the class. I remember once, drawing a picture of the ‘half-sun, half-rock,’^* which I represented by a straight line with a semicircle over it. Another time during an examination in drawing I contented myself with making an oval. I called it an egg. I got 40 in drawing, and failed. Fortunately my marks in social sciences were all excellent, and they balanced my poor grades in these other classes.

"A Chinese teacher here, whom the students nicknamed ‘Yuan the Big Beard,’ ridiculed my writing and called it the work of a journalist. He despised Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, who had been my model, and considered him half-literate. I was obliged to alter my style. I studied the writings of Han Yu, and mastered the old Classical phraseology. Thanks to Yuan the Big Beard, therefore, I can today still turn out a passable Classical essay if required.

"The teacher who made the strongest impression on me was Yang Ch’ang-chi,2 a returned student from England, with whose life I was later to become intimately related. He taught ethics, he was an idealist and a man of high moral character. He believed in his ethics very strongly and tried to imbue his students with the desire to become just, moral, virtuous men, useful in society. Under his influence I read a book on ethics translated by Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei and was inspired to write an essay which I entitled ‘The Energy of the Mind.’ I was then an idealist and my essay was highly praised by Professor Yang Ch’ang-chi, from his idealist viewpoint. He gave me a mark of 100 for it.

"A teacher named T’ang used to give me old copies of Min Pao [People’s Journal], and I read them with keen interest. I learned from them about the activities and program of the T’ung Meng Hui. One day I read a copy of the Min Pao containing a story about two Chinese students who were traveling across China and had reached Tatsienlu, on the edge of Tibet. This inspired me very much. I wanted to follow their example; but I had no money, and thought I should first try out traveling in Hunan.

"The next summer I set out across the province by foot, and journeyed through five counties. I was accompanied by a student named Hsiao Yu.³ We walked through these five counties without using a single copper. The peasants fed us and gave us a place to sleep; wherever we went we were kindly treated and welcomed. This fellow, Hsiao Yu, with whom I traveled, later became a Kuomintang official in Nanking, under Yi Pei-ch’i,⁴ who was then president of Hunan Normal School. Yi Pei-ch’i became a high official at Nanking and had Hsiao Yu appointed to the office of custodian of the Peking Palace Museum. Hsiao sold some of the most valuable treasures in the museum and absconded with the funds in 1934.⁵

"Feeling expansive and the need for a few intimate companions, I one day inserted an advertisement in a Changsha paper inviting young men interested in patriotic work to make a contact with me. I specified youths who were hardened and determined, and ready to make sacrifices for their country. To this advertisement I received three and one half replies. One was from Lu Chiang-lung, who later was to join the Communist Party and afterwards to betray it. Two others were from young men who later were to become ultrareactionaries. The ‘half reply came from a noncommittal youth named Li Li-san. Li listened to all I had to say, and then went away without making any definite proposals himself, and our friendship never developed.^*

"But gradually I did build up a group of students around myself, and the nucleus was formed of what later was to become a society* that was to have a widespread influence on the affairs and destiny of China. It was a serious-minded little group of men and they had no time to discuss trivialities. Everything they did or said must have a purpose. They had no time for love or ‘romance’ and considered the times too critical and the need for knowledge too urgent to discuss women or personal matters. I was not interested in women. My parents had married me when I was fourteen to a girl of twenty, but I had never lived with her—and never subsequently did. I did not consider her my wife and at this time gave little thought to her. Quite aside from the discussions of feminine charm, which usually play an important role in the lives of young men of this age, my companions even rejected talk of ordinary matters of daily life. I remember once being in the house of a youth who began to talk to me about buying some meat, and in my presence called in his servant and discussed the matter with him, then ordered him to buy a piece. I was annoyed and did not see that fellow again. My friends and I preferred to talk only of large matters—the nature of men, of human society, of China, the world, and the universe!

"We also became ardent physical culturists. In the winter holidays we tramped through the fields, up and down mountains, along city walls, and across the streams and rivers. If it rained we took off our shirts and called it a rain bath. When the sun was hot we also doffed shirts and called it a sun bath. In the spring winds we shouted that this was a new sport called ‘wind bathing.’ We slept in the open when frost was already falling and even in November swam in the cold rivers. All this went on under the title of ‘body training.’ Perhaps it helped much to build the physique which I was to need so badly later on in my many marches back and forth across South China, and on the Long March from Kiangsi to the Northwest.⁶

"I built up a wide correspondence with many students and friends in other towns and cities. Gradually I began to realize the necessity for a more closely knit organization. In 1917, with some other friends, I helped to found the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui. It had from seventy to eighty members, and of these many were later to become famous names in Chinese communism and in the history of the Chinese Revolution. Among the better-known Communists who were in the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui were Lo Man (Li Wei-han), now secretary of the Party Organization Committee; Hsia Hsi,* now in the Second Front Red Army; Ho Shu-heng, who became high judge of the Supreme Court in the Central Soviet regions and was later killed by Chiang Kai-shek (1935); Kuo Liang, a famous labor organizer, killed by General Ho Chien in 1930; Hsiao Chu-chang,^† a writer now in Soviet Russia; Ts’ai Ho-sen, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, killed by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927; Yeh Li-yun, who became a member of the Central Committee, and later ‘betrayed’ to the Kuomintang and became a capitalist trade-union organizer; and Hsiao Chen, a prominent Party leader, one of the six signers of the original agreement for the formation of the Party, who died not long ago from illness. The majority of the members of the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui were killed in the counterrevolution of 1927.^‡

"Another society that was formed about that time, and resembled the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui, was the ‘Social Welfare Society’ of Hupeh. Many of its members also later became Communists. Among them was Yun Tai-ying, who was killed during the counterrevolution by Chiang Kai-shek. Lin Piao, now president of the Red Army University, was a member. So was Chang Hao, now in charge of work among White troops [those taken prisoner by the Reds]. In Peking there was a society called Hu Sheh, some of whose members later became Reds. Elsewhere in China, notably in Shanghai, Hangchow, Hankow, and Tientsin,^§ radical societies were organized by the militant youth then beginning to assert an influence on Chinese politics.

"Most of these societies were organized more or less under the influences of Hsin Ch’ing-nien [New Youth], the famous magazine of the literary renaissance, edited by Ch’en Tu-hsiu.⁷ I began to read this magazine while I was a student in the normal school and admired the articles of Hu Shih and Ch’en Tu-hsiu very much. They became for a while my models, replacing Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Kang Yu-wei, whom I had already discarded.

"At this time my mind was a curious mixture of ideas of liberalism, democratic reformism, and Utopian socialism. I had somewhat vague passions about ‘nineteenth-century democracy,’ utopianism, and old-fashioned liberalism, and I was definitely antimilitarist and anti-imperialist.

"I had entered the normal school in 1912. I was graduated in 1918.”

Prelude to Revolution

During Mao’s recollections of his past I noticed that an auditor at least as interested as I was Ho Tzu-ch’en, his wife. Many of the facts he told about himself and the Communist movement she had evidently never heard before, and this was true of most of Mao’s comrades in Pao An. Later on, when I gathered biographical notes from other Red leaders, their colleagues often crowded around interestedly to listen to the stories for the first time. Although they had all fought together for years, very often they knew nothing of each other’s pre-Communist days, which they had tended to regard as a kind of Dark Ages period, one’s real life beginning only when one became a Communist.

It was another night, and Mao sat cross-legged, leaning against his dispatch boxes. He lit a cigarette from a candle and took up the thread of the story where he had left off the evening before:

"During my years in normal school in Changsha I had spent, altogether, only $160—including my numerous registration fees! Of this amount I must have used a third for newspapers, because regular subscriptions cost me about a dollar a month, and I often bought books and journals on the newsstands. My father cursed me for this extravagance. He called it wasted money on wasted paper. But I had acquired the newspaper-reading habit, and from 1911 to 1927, when I climbed up Ching-kangshan, I never stopped reading the daily papers of Peking, Shanghai, and Hunan.

"In my last year in school my mother died, and more than ever I lost interest in returning home. I decided, that summer, to go to Peking. Many students from Hunan were planning trips to France, to study under the ‘work and learn’ scheme, which France used to recruit young Chinese in her cause during the World War. Before leaving China these students planned to study French in Peking. I helped organize the movement, and in the groups who went abroad were many students from the Hunan Normal School, most of whom were later to become famous radicals. Hsu T’eh-li was influenced by the movement also, and when he was over forty he left his professorship at Hunan Normal School and went to France. He did not become a Communist, however, till 1927.

"I accompanied some of the Hunanese students to Peking. However, although I had helped organize the movement, and it had the support of the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui, I did not want to go to Europe. I felt that I did not know enough about my own country, and that my time could be more profitably spent in China,. Those students who had decided to go to France studied French then from Li Shih-tseng, who is now president of the Chung-fa [Sino-French] University, but I did not. I had other plans.

"Peking seemed very expensive to me. I had reached the capital by borrowing from friends, and when I arrived I had to look for work at once. Yang Ch’ang-chi, my former ethics teacher at the normal school, had become a professor at Peking National University. I appealed to him for help in finding a job, and he introduced me to the university librarian. He was Li Ta-chao, who later became a founder of the Communist Party of China, and was afterwards executed by Chang Tso-lin.* Li Ta-chao gave me work as assistant librarian, for which I was paid the generous sum of $8 a month.

"My office was so low that people avoided me. One of my tasks was to register the names of people who came to read newspapers, but to most of them I didn’t exist as a human being. Among those who came to read I recognized the names of famous leaders of the renaissance movement, men like Fu Ssu-nien, Lo Chia-lun, and others, in whom I was intensely interested. I tried to begin conversations with them on political and cultural subjects, but they were very busy men. They had no time to listen to an assistant librarian speaking southern dialect.

"But I wasn’t discouraged. I joined the Society of Philosophy, and the Journalism Society, in order to be able to attend classes in the university. In the Journalism Society I met fellow students like Ch’en Kung-po, who is now a high official at Nanking;¹ T’an P’ing-shan, who later became a Communist and still later a member of the so-called ‘Third Party’; and Shao P’iao-p’ing. Shao, especially, helped me very much. He was a lecturer in the Journalism Society, a liberal, and a man of fervent idealism and fine character. He was killed by Chang Tso-lin in 1926.

"While I was working in the library I also met Chang Kuo-t’ao,* now vice-chairman of the Soviet Government; K’ang P’ei-ch’en, who later joined the Ku Klux Klan in California [!!!—E.S.]; and Tuan Hsi-p’eng, now Vice-Minister of Education in Nanking. And here also I met and fell in love with Yang K’ai-hui. She was the daughter of my former ethics teacher, Yang Ch’ang-chi, who had made a great impression on me in my youth, and who afterwards was a genuine friend in Peking.

"My interest in politics continued to increase, and my mind turned more and more radical. I have told you of the background for this. But just now I was still confused, looking for a road, as we say. I read some pamphlets on anarchy, and was much influenced by them. With a student named Chu Hsun-pei, who used to visit me, I often discussed anarchism and its possibilities in China. At that time I favored many of its proposals.

"My own living conditions in Peking were quite miserable, and in contrast the beauty of the old capital was a vivid and living compensation. I stayed in a place called San Yen-ching ["Three-Eyes Well”], in a little room which held seven other people. When we were all packed fast on the k’ang there was scarcely room enough for any of us to breathe. I used to have to warn people on each side of me when I wanted to turn over. But in the parks and the old palace grounds I saw the early northern spring, I saw the white plum blossoms flower while the ice still held solid over Pei Hai ["the North Sea”].^† I saw the willows over Pei Hai with the ice crystals hanging from them and remembered the description of the scene by the T’ang poet Chen Chang, who wrote about Pei Hai’s winter-jeweled trees looking ‘like ten thousand peach trees blossoming.’ The innumerable trees of Peking aroused my wonder and admiration.

"Early in 1919 I went to Shanghai with the students bound for France. I had a ticket only to Tientsin, and I did not know how I was to get any farther. But, as the Chinese proverb says, ‘Heaven will not delay a traveler,’ and a fortunate loan of ten yuan from a fellow student, who had got some money from the Auguste Comte School in Peking, enabled me to buy a ticket as far as P’u-k’ou. On the way to Nanking I stopped at Ch’u Fu and visited Confucius’ grave. I saw the small stream where Confucius’ disciples bathed their feet and the little town where the sage lived as a child. He is supposed to have planted a famous tree near the historic temple dedicated to him, and I saw that. I also stopped by the river where Yen Hui, one of Confucius’ famous disciples, had once lived, and I saw the birthplace of Mencius. On this trip I climbed T’ai Shan, the sacred mountain of Shantung, where General Feng Yu-hsiang retired and wrote his patriotic scrolls.

"But when I reached P’u-k’ou I was again without a copper, and without a ticket. Nobody had any money to lend me; I did not know how I was to get out of town. But the worst of the tragedy happened when a thief stole my only pair of shoes! Ai-ya! What was I to do? But again, ‘Heaven will not delay a traveler,’ and I had a very good piece of luck. Outside the railway station I met an old friend from Hunan, and he proved to be my ‘good angel.’ He lent me money for a pair of shoes, and enough to buy a ticket to Shanghai. Thus I safely completed my journey—keeping an eye on my new shoes. At Shanghai I found that a good sum had been raised to help send the students to France, and an allowance had been provided to help me return to Hunan. I saw my friends off on the steamer and then set out for Changsha.

"During my first trip to the North, as I remember it, I made these excursions:

"I walked around the lake of T’ung Ting, and I circled the wall of Paotingfu. I walked on the ice of the Gulf of Pei Hai. I walked around the wall of Hsuchou, famous in the San Kuo [Three Kingdoms], and around Nanking’s wall, also famous in history. Finally I climbed T’ai Shan and visited Confucius’ grave. These seemed to me then achievements worth adding to my adventures and walking tours in Hunan.

"When I returned to Changsha I took a more direct role in politics. After the May Fourth Movement* I had devoted most of my time to student political activities, and I was editor of the Hsiang River Review, the Hunan students’ paper, which had a great influence on the student movement in South China. In Changsha I helped found the Wen-hua Shu-hui [Cultural Book Society], an association for study of modern cultural and political tendencies. This society, and more especially the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui, were violently opposed to Chang Ching-yao, then tuchun of Hunan, and a vicious character. We led a general student strike against Chang, demanding his removal, and sent delegations to Peking and the Southwest, where Sun Yat-sen was then active, to agitate against him. In retaliation for the students’ opposition, Chang Ching-yao suppressed the Hsiang River Review.

"After this I went to Peking, to represent the New People’s Study Society and organize an antimilitarist movement there. The society broadened its fight against Chang Ching-yao into a general antimilitarist agitation, and I became head of a news agency to promote this work. In Hunan the movement was rewarded with some success. Chang Ching-yao was overthrown by T’an Yen-k’ai, and a new regime was established in Changsha. About this time the society began to divide into two groups, a right and left wing—the left wing insisting on a program of far-reaching social and economic and political changes.

"I went to Shanghai for the second time in 1919. There once more I saw Ch’en Tu-hsiu.* I had first met him in Peking, when I was at Peking National University, and he had influenced me perhaps more than anyone else. I also met Hu Shih at that time, having called on him to try to win his support for the Hunanese students’ struggle. In Shanghai I discussed with Ch’en Tu-hsiu our plans for a League for Reconstruction of Hunan. Then I returned to Changsha and began to organize it. I took a place as a teacher there, meanwhile continuing my activity in the New People’s Study Society. The society had a program then for the ‘independence’ of Hunan, meaning, really, autonomy. Disgusted with the Northern Government, and believing that Hunan could modernize more rapidly if freed from connections with Peking, our group agitated for separation. I was then a strong supporter of America’s Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door.

"T’an Yen-k’ai was driven out of Hunan by a militarist called Chao Heng-t’i, who utilized the ‘Hunan independence’ movement for his own ends. He pretended to support it, advocating the idea of a United Autonomous States of China, but as soon as he got power he suppressed the democratic movement with great energy. Our group had demanded equal rights for men and women, and representative government, and in general approval of a platform for a bourgeois democracy. We openly advocated these reforms in our paper, the New Hunan. We led an attack on the provincial parliament, the majority of whose members were landlords and gentry appointed by the militarists. This struggle ended in our pulling down the scrolls and banners, which were full of nonsensical and extravagant phrases.

"The attack on the parliament was considered a big incident in Hunan, and frightened the rulers. However, when Chao Heng-t’i seized control he betrayed all the ideas he had supported, and especially he violently suppressed all demands for democracy. Our society therefore turned the struggle against him. I remember an episode in 1920, when the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui organized a demonstration to celebrate the third anniversary of the Russian October Revolution. It was suppressed by the police. Some of the demonstrators had attempted to raise the Red flag at that meeting, but were prohibited from doing so by the police. The demonstrators pointed out that, according to Article 12 of the Constitution, the people had the right to assemble, organize, and speak, but the police were not impressed. They replied that they were not there to be taught the Constitution, but to carry out the orders of the governor, Chao Heng-t’i. From this time on I became more and more convinced that only mass political power, secured through mass action, could guarantee the realization of dynamic reforms.*

"In the winter of 1920 I organized workers politically for the first time, and began to be guided in this by the influence of Marxist theory and the history of the Russian Revolution. During my second visit to Peking I had read much about the events in Russia, and had eagerly sought out what little Communist literature was then available in Chinese. Three books especially deeply carved my mind, and built up in me a faith in Marxism, from which, once I had accepted it as the correct interpretation of history, I did not afterwards waver. These books were the Communist Manifesto, translated by Ch’en Wang-tao and the first Marxist book ever published in Chinese; Class Struggle, by Kautsky; and a History of Socialism, by Kirkup. By the summer of 1920 I had become, in theory and to some extent in action, a Marxist, and from this time on I considered myself a Marxist. In the same year I married Yang K’ai-hui.”^†

The Nationalist Period

Mao was now a Marxist but not a Communist, because as yet there did not exist in China an organized Communist Party. As early as 1919 Ch’en Tu-hsiu had established contact with the Comintern through Russians living in Peking, as had Li Ta-chao. It was not until the spring of 1920 that Gregori Voitinsky, an authorized representative of the Communist International, reached Peking, in the company of Yang Ming-chai, a member of the Russian Communist Party who acted as his interpreter. They conferred with Li Ta-chao and probably also met members of Li’s Society for the Study of Marxist Theory. In the same year the energetic and persuasive Jahn Henricus Sneevliet,1 a Dutch agent of the Third International—Ti-san Kuo-chi, in Chinese—came to Shanghai for talks with Ch’en Tu-hsiu, who was conferring with serious Chinese Marxists there. It was Ch’en who, in May, 1920, summoned a conference that organized a nuclear Communist group. Some members of it became (with Li Ta-chao’s group in Peking, another group set up in Canton by Ch’en, groups in Shantung and Hupeh, and Mao’s group in Hunan) conveners of a Shanghai conference the following year that (with the help of Voitinsky) summoned the first Chinese Communist Party congress.

When one remembered, in 1937, that the Chinese Communist Party was still an adolescent in years, its achievements could be regarded as not inconsiderable. It was the strongest Communist Party in the world, outside of Russia, and the only one, with the same exception, that could boast an army of its own.

Another night, and Mao carried on his narrative:

"In May of 1921 I went to Shanghai to attend the founding meeting of the Communist Party. In its organization the leading roles were played by Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Li Ta-chao, both of whom were among the most brilliant intellectual leaders of China. Under Li Ta-chao, as assistant librarian at Peking National University, I had rapidly developed toward Marxism, and Ch’en Tu-hsiu had been instrumental in my interests in that direction too. I had discussed with Ch’en, on my second visit to Shanghai, the Marxist books that I had read, and Ch’en’s own assertions of belief had deeply impressed me at what was probably a critical period of my life.

"There was only one other Hunanese* at that historic meeting [the First National Congress of the Party] in Shanghai. Others present were Chang Kuo-t’ao, now vice-chairman of the Red Army military council; Pao Hui-sheng; and Chou Fu-hai.² Altogether there were twelve of us. In Shanghai [those elected to] the Central Committee of the Party included Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Chang Kuo-t’ao, Ch’en Kung-po, Shih Tseng-tung (now a Nanking official), Sun Yuan-lu, Li Han-chun (killed^† in Wuhan in 1927), Li Ta,+ and Li Sun (later executed). The following October the first provincial branch of the Party was organized in Hunan and I became a member of it. Organizations were also established in other provinces and cities. Members in Hupeh included Tung Pl-wu^‡ (now chairman of the Communist Party School in Pao An), Hsu Pai-hao, and Shih Yang (executed in 1923). In the Shensi Party were Kao Chung-yu (Kao Kang‡) and some famous student leaders. In [the Party branch of] Peking were Li Ta-chao (executed, with nineteen other Peking Communists, in 1927), Teng Chung-hsia (executed by Chiang Kai-shek in 1934), Lo Chung-lun, Liu Jen-ching (now a Trotskyite), and others. In Canton were Lin Po-chu (Lin Tsu-han), now Commissioner of Finance in the Soviet Government, and P’eng P’ai^‡ (executed in 1929). Wang Chun-mei and Teng En-ming were among the founders of the Shantung branch.

"Meanwhile, in France, a Chinese Communist Party^§ had been organized by many of the worker-students there, and its founding was almost simultaneous with the beginning of the organization in China. Among the founders of the Party [CYL] there were Chou En-lai, Li Li-san, and Hsiang Ching-wu, the wife of Ts’ai Ho-sen. Lo Man (Li Wei-han) and Ts’ai Ho-sen were also founders of the French branch. A Chinese Party was organized in Germany, but this was somewhat later; among its members were Kao Yu-han, Chu Teh (now commander-in-chief of the Red Army), and Chang Sheng-fu (now a professor at Tsinghua University). In Moscow the founders of the branch were Ch’u Ch’iu-pai* and others, and in Japan there was Chou Fu-hai.

"In May, 1922, the Hunan Party, of which I was then secretary, ^† had already organized more than twenty trade unions among miners, railway workers, municipal employees, printers, and workers in the government mint. A vigorous labor movement began that winter. The work of the Communist Party was then concentrated mainly on students and workers, and very little was done among the peasants. Most of the big mines were organized, and virtually all the students. There were numerous struggles on both the students’ and workers’ fronts. In the winter of 1922, Chao Heng-t’i, civil governor of Hunan, ordered the execution of two Hunanese workers, Huang Ai and Pang Yuan-ch’ing, and as a result a widespread agitation began against him. Huang Ai, one of the two workers killed, was a leader of the right-wing labor movement, which had its base in the industrial-school students and was opposed to us, but we supported them in this case, and in many other struggles. Anarchists were also influential in the trade unions, which were then organized into an All-Hunan Labor Syndicate. But we compromised and through negotiation prevented many hasty and useless actions by them.

"I was sent to Shanghai to help organize the movement against Chao Heng-t’i. The Second Congress of the Party was convened in Shanghai that winter [1922], and I intended to attend. However, I forgot the name of the place where it was to be held, could not find any comrades, and missed it. I returned to Hunan and vigorously pushed the work among the labor unions. That spring there were many strikes for better wages and better treatment and recognition of the labor unions. Most of these were successful. On May 1, a general strike was called in Hunan, and this marked the achievement of unprecedented strength in the labor movement of China.

"The Third Congress of the Communist Party was held in Canton in [May] 1923 and the historic decision was reached to enter the Kuomintang, cooperate with it, and create a united front against the northern militarists.3 I went to Shanghai and worked in the Central Committee of the Party. Next spring [1924] I went to Canton and attended the First National Congress of the Kuomintang. In March, I returned to Shanghai and combined my work in the executive bureau [Central Committee] of the Communist Party with membership in the executive bureau [Central Executive Committee] of the Kuomintang of Shanghai. The other members of this bureau then were Wang Ching-wei^* (later premier at Nanking) and Hu Han-min, with whom I worked in coordinating the measures of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang. That summer the Whampoa Military Academy was set up. Galin became its adviser, other Soviet advisers arrived from Russia, and the Kuomintang-Communist Party entente began to assume the proportions of a nationwide revolutionary movement. The following winter I returned to Hunan for a rest⁴—I had become ill in Shanghai—but while in Hunan I organized the nucleus of the great peasant movement of that province.

"Formerly I had not fully realized the degree of class struggle among the peasantry, but after the May 30th Incident [1925],^† and during the great wave of political activity which followed it, the Hunanese peasantry became very militant. I left my home, where I had been resting, and began a rural organizational campaign. In a few months we had formed more than twenty peasant unions, and had aroused the wrath of the landlords, who demanded my arrest. Chao Heng-t’i sent troops after me, and I fled to Canton. I reached there just at the time the Whampoa students had defeated Yang Hsi-ming, the Yunnan militarist, and Lu Tsung-wai, the Kwangsi militarist, and an air of great optimism pervaded the city and the Kuomintang. Chiang Kai-shek had been made commander of the First Army and Wang Ching-wei chairman of the government, following the death of Sun Yat-sen in Peking.

"I became editor of the Political Weekly, a publication of the propaganda department of the Kuomintang [headed by Wang Ching-wei]. It later played a very active role in attacking and discrediting the right wing of the Kuomintang, led by T’ai Chi-t’ao. I was also put in charge of training organizers for the peasant movement [the Peasant Movement Training Institute‡], and established a course for this purpose which was attended by representatives from twenty-one different provinces, and included students from Inner Mongolia. Not long after my arrival in Canton I became chief of the agit-prop department of the Kuomintang, and candidate for the Central Committee. Lin Tsu-han was then chief of the peasant department of the Kuomintang, and T’an P’ing-shan, another Communist, was chief of the workers’ department.

"I was writing more and more, and assuming special responsibilities in peasant work in the Communist Party. On the basis of my study and of my work in organizing the Hunan peasants, I wrote two pamphlets, one called Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society and the other called The Class Basis of Chao Heng-t’i, and the Tasks Before Us.5 Ch’en Tu-hsiu opposed the opinions expressed in the first one, which advocated a radical land policy and vigorous organization of the peasantry, under the Communist Party, and he refused it publication in the Communist central organs. It was later published in Chung-kuo Nung-min [The Chinese Peasant], of Canton, and in the magazine Chung-kuo Ch’ing-nien [Chinese Youth]. The second thesis was published as a pamphlet in Hunan. I began to disagree with Ch’en’s Right-opportunist policy about this time, and we gradually drew further apart, although the struggle between us did not come to a climax until 1927.

"I continued to work in the Kuomintang in Canton until about the time Chiang Kai-shek attempted his first coup d’état there in March, 1926. After the reconciliation of left- and right-wing Kuomintang and the reaffirmation of Kuomintang-Communist solidarity, I went to Shanghai, in the spring of 1926. The Second Congress of the Kuomintang was held in May of that year, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek.^* In Shanghai I directed the Peasant Department of the Communist Party, and from there was sent to Hunan, as inspector of the peasant movement [for both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party].^† Meanwhile, under the united front of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, the historic Northern Expedition began in the autumn of 1926.

"In Hunan I inspected peasant organization and political conditions in five hsien—Changsha, Li Ling, Hsiang T’an, Hung Shan and Hsiang Hsiang—and made my report [Report on an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan6] to the Central Committee, urging the adoption of a new line in the peasant movement. Early next spring, when I reached Wuhan, an interprovincial meeting of peasants was held, and I attended it and discussed the proposals of my thesis, which carried recommendations for a widespread redistribution of land. At this meeting were P’eng P’ai, Fang Chih-min,^* and two Russian Communists, Jolk [York?] and Volen, among others. A resolution was passed adopting my proposal for submission to the Fifth Congress of the Communist Party. The Central Committee, however, rejected it.

"When the Fifth Congress of the Party was convened in Wuhan in May, 1927, the Party was still under the domination of Ch’en Tu-hsiu. Although Chiang Kai-shek had already led the counterrevolution and begun his attacks on the Communist Party in Shanghai and Nanking, Ch’en was still for moderation and concessions to the Wuhan Kuomintang. Overriding all opposition, he followed a Right-opportunist petty-bourgeois policy. I was very dissatisfied with the Party policy then, especially toward the peasant movement. I think today that if the peasant movement had been more thoroughly organized and armed for a class struggle against the landlords, the soviets would have had an earlier and far more powerful development throughout the whole country.

"But Ch’en Tu-hsiu violently disagreed.^† He did not understand the role of the peasantry in the revolution and greatly underestimated its possibilities at this time. Consequently the Fifth Congress, held on the eve of the crisis of the Great Revolution, failed to pass an adequate land program. My opinions, which called for rapid intensification of the agrarian struggle, were not even discussed, for the Central Committee, also dominated by Ch’en Tu-hsiu, refused to bring them up for consideration. The Congress dismissed the land problem by defining a landlord as ‘a peasant who owns over 500 mou of land’^‡—a wholly inadequate and unpractical basis on which to develop the class struggle, and quite without consideration of the special character of land economy in China. Following the Congress, however, an All-China Peasants’ Union was organized and I became first president of it.

"By the spring of 1927 the peasant movement in Hupeh, Kiangsi, and Fukien, and especially in Hunan, had developed a startling militancy, despite the lukewarm attitude of the Communist Party to it, and the definite alarm of the Kuomintang. High officials and army commanders began to demand its suppression, describing the Peasants’ Union as a ‘agabond union,’ and its actions and demands as excessive. Ch’en Tu-hsiu had withdrawn me from Hunan, holding me responsible for certain happenings there, and violently opposing my ideas.*

"In April, the counterrevolutionary movement had begun in Nanking and Shanghai, and a general massacre of organized workers had taken place under Chiang Kai-shek. The same measures were carried out in Canton. On May 21, the Hsu K’o-hsiang Uprising occurred in Hunan. Scores of peasants and workers were killed by the reactionaries. Shortly afterwards the Left Kuomintang at Wuhan annulled its agreement with the Communists and ‘expelled’ them from the Kuomintang and from a government which quickly ceased to exist.

"Many Communist leaders were now ordered by the Party to leave the country, go to Russia or Shanghai or places of safety. I was ordered to go to Szechuan. I persuaded Ch’en Tu-hsiu to send me to Hunan instead, as secretary of the Provincial Committee, but after ten days he ordered me to return at once, accusing me of organizing an uprising against T’ang Sheng-chih, then in command at Wuhan. The affairs of the Party were now in a chaotic state. Nearly everyone was opposed to Ch’en Tu-hsiu’s leadership and his opportunist line. The collapse of the entente at Wuhan soon afterwards brought about his downfall”.

The Soviet Movement

A conversation I had with Mao Tse-tung concerning the much-disputed events of the spring of 1927 seemed to me of sufficient interest to mention here. It was not part of his autobiography, as he told it to me, but it was important to note as a personal reflection on what was a turning-point experience in the life of every Chinese Communist.

I asked Mao whom he considered most responsible for the failure of the Communist Party in 1927, the defeat of the Wuhan coalition government, and the whole triumph of the Nanking dictatorship. Mao placed the greatest blame on Ch’en Tu-hsiu, whose "wavering opportunism deprived the Party of decisive leadership and a direct line of its own at a moment when further compromise clearly meant catastrophe.”

After Ch’en, the man he held responsible for the defeat was Mikhail Markovich Borodin, chief Russian political adviser, who was answerable directly to the Soviet Politburo. Mao explained that Borodin had completely reversed his position, favoring a radical land redistribution in 1926, but strongly opposing it in 1927, without any logical support for his vacillations. "Borodin stood just a little to the right of Ch’en Tu-hsiu,” Mao said, "and was ready to do everything to please the bourgeoisie, even to the disarming of the workers, which he finally ordered.” M. N. Roy, the Indian delegate to the Comintern, "stood a little to the left of both Ch’en and Borodin, but he only stood.” He "could talk,” according to Mao, "and he talked too much, without offering any method of realization.” Mao thought that, objectively, Roy had been a fool, Borodin a blunderer, and Ch’en an unconscious traitor.

"Ch’en was really frightened of the workers and especially of the armed peasants. Confronted at last with the reality of armed insurrection, he completely lost his senses. He could no longer see clearly what was happening, and his petty-bourgeois instincts betrayed him into panic and defeat.”

Mao asserted that Ch’en was at that time complete dictator of the Chinese Party, and took vital decisions without even consulting the Central Committee. "He did not show other Party leaders the orders of the Comintern,” according to Mao, "or even discuss them with us.”1 But in the end it was Roy who forced the break with the Kuomintang. The Comintern sent a message to Borodin ordering the Party to begin a limited confiscation of the landlords’ land. Roy got hold of a copy of it and promptly showed it to Wang Ching-wei, then chairman of the Left Kuomintang Government at Wuhan. The result of this caprice² is well known. The Communists were expelled from the Kuomintang by the Wuhan regime, which soon afterward collapsed, having lost the support of regional warlords, who now sought safety in compromises with Chiang Kai-shek. Borodin and other Comintern agents fled to Russia, and arrived there in time to see the Opposition crushed and Trotsky’s "permanent revolution” discredited, while Stalin set out in earnest to "build socialism [Stalinism?] in one country.”

Mao did not think that the counterrevolution would have been defeated in 1927 even if the Communist Party had carried out a more aggressive policy of land confiscation and created Communist armies from among the workers and peasants before the split with the Kuomintang. "But the soviets could have got an immense start in the South, and a base in which, afterwards, they would never have been destroyed.”

In his narrative of himself Mao had now reached the beginning of the soviets, which arose from the wreckage of the revolution and struggled to build a victory out of defeat. He continued:

"On August 1, 1927, the Twentieth Army, under Ho Lung and Yeh T’ing, and in cooperation with Chu Teh, led the historic Nanchang Uprising,³ and the beginning of what was to become the Red Army was organized. A week later, on August 7, an extraordinary meeting [Emergency Conference] of the Central Committee of the Party deposed Ch’en Tu-hsiu as secretary. I had been a member of the political bureau of the Party since the Third Conference at Canton in 1924, and was active in this decision, and among the ten other members present at the meeting were: Ts’ai Ho-sen, P’eng P’ai, Chang Kuo-t’ao and Ch’u Ch’iu-pai.^* A new line was adopted by the Party, and all hope of cooperation with the Kuomintang was given up for the present, as it had already become hopelessly the tool of imperialism and could not carry out the responsibilities of a democratic revolution. The long, open struggle for power now began.

"I was sent to Changsha to organize the movement which later became known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising. My program there called for the realization of five points: (1) complete severance of the provincial Party from the Kuomintang, (2) organization of a peasant-worker revolutionary army, (3) confiscation of the property of small and middle, as well as great, landlords, (4) setting up the power of the Communist Party in Hunan, independent of the Kuomintang, and (5) organization of soviets. The fifth point at that time was opposed by the Comintern, and not till later did it advance it as a slogan.

"In September we had already succeeded in organizing a widespread uprising, through the peasant unions of Hunan, and the first units of a peasant-worker army were formed. Recruits were drawn from three principal sources—the peasantry itself, the Hanyang miners, and the insurrectionist troops of the Kuomintang. This early military force of the revolution was called the ‘First Division of the First Peasants’ and Workers’ Army.’ The first regiment was formed from the Hanyang miners.* A second was created among the peasant guards in P’ing Kiang, Liu Yang, Li Ling and two other hsien of Hunan, and a third from part of the garrison forces of Wuhan, which had revolted against Wang Ching-wei. This army was organized with the sanction of the Hunan Provincial Committee, but the general program of the Hunan Committee and of our army was opposed by the Central Committee of the Party, which seemed, however, to have adopted a policy of wait-and-see rather than of active opposition.

"While I was organizing the army and traveling between the Hanyang miners and the peasant guards, I was captured by some min-t’uan, working with the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang terror was then at its height and hundreds of suspected Reds were being shot. I was ordered to be taken to the min-t’uan headquarters, where I was to be killed. Borrowing several tens of dollars from a comrade, however, I attempted to bribe the escort to free me. The ordinary soldiers were mercenaries, with no special interest in seeing me killed, and they agreed to release me, but the subaltern in charge refused to permit it. I therefore decided to attempt to escape, but had no opportunity to do so until I was within about two hundred yards of the min-t’uan headquarters. At that point I broke loose and ran into the fields.

"I reached a high place, above a pond, with some tall grass surrounding it, and there I hid until sunset. The soldiers pursued me, and forced some peasants to help them search. Many times they came very near, once or twice so close that I could almost have touched them, but somehow I escaped discovery, although half a dozen times I gave up hope, feeling certain I would be recaptured. At last, when it was dusk, they abandoned the search. At once I set off across the mountains, traveling all night. I had no shoes and my feet were badly bruised. On the road I met a peasant who befriended me, gave me shelter and later guided me to the next district. I had seven dollars with me, and used this to buy some shoes, an umbrella, and food. When at last I reached the peasant guards safely, I had only two coppers in my pocket.

"With the establishment of the new division, I became chairman of its Party Front Committee, and Yu Sha-t’ou, a commander of the garrison troops at Wuhan, became commander of the First Army. Yu, however, had been more or less forced to take the position by the attitude of his men; soon afterwards he deserted and joined the Kuomintang. He is now working for Chiang Kai-shek at Nanking.

"The little army, leading the peasant uprising, moved southward through Hunan. It had to break its way through thousands of Kuomintang troops and fought many battles, with many reverses. Discipline was poor, political training was at a low level, and many wavering elements were among the men and officers. There were many desertions. After Yu Sha-t’ou fled, the army was reorganized when it reached Ningtu. Ch’en Hao was made commander of the remaining troops, about one regiment; he, too, later on betrayed. But many in that first group remained loyal to the end, and are today still in the Red Army—men such as Lo Jung-huan,* political commissar of the First Army Corps, and Yang Li-san, now an army commander. When the little band finally climbed up Chingkang-shan they numbered in all only about one thousand.⁴

"Because the program of the Autumn Harvest Uprising had not been sanctioned by the Central Committee, because also the First Army had suffered some severe losses, and from the angle of the cities the movement appeared doomed to failure, the Central Committee now definitely repudiated me.^† I was dismissed from the Politburo, and also from the Party [General] Front Committee. The Hunan Provincial Committee also attacked us, calling us ‘the rifle movement.’ We nevertheless held our army together at Chingkangshan, feeling certain that we were following the correct line, and subsequent events were to vindicate us fully. New recruits were added and the division filled out again. I became its commander.

"From the winter of 1927 to the autumn of 1928, the First Division held its base at Chingkangshan. In November, 1927, the first soviet was set up in Tsalin [Ch’aling] on the Hunan border, and the first soviet government was elected.* Its chairman was Tu Chung-pin. In this soviet, and subsequently, we promoted a democratic program, with a moderate policy, based on slow but regular development. This earned Chingkangshan the recriminations of putschists in the Party, who were demanding a terrorist policy of raiding, and burning and killing of landlords, in order to destroy their morale. The First Army Front Committee refused to adopt such tactics, and were therefore branded by the hotheads as ‘reformists.’ I was bitterly attacked by them for not carrying out a more ‘radical’ policy.

"Two former bandit leaders near Chingkangshan, named Wang Tso and Yuan Wen-t’sai, joined the Red Army in the winter of 1927. This increased the strength to about three regiments. Wang and Yuan were both made regimental commanders and I was army commander. These two men, although former bandits, had thrown in their forces with the Nationalist Revolution, and were now ready to fight against the reaction. While I remained on Chingkangshan they were faithful Communists, and carried out the orders of the Party. Later on, when they were left alone at Chingkangshan, they returned to their bandit habits. Subsequently they were killed by the peasants, by then organized and sovietized and able to defend themselves.

"In May of 1928, Chu Teh arrived at Chingkangshan and our forces were combined. Together we drew up a plan [at the first Maoping Conference†] to establish a six-hsien soviet area, to stabilize and consolidate gradually the Communist power in the Hunan-Kiangsi-Kwangtung border districts, and, with that as a base, to expand over greater areas. This strategy was in opposition to recommendations of the Party, which had grandiose ideas of rapid expansion. In the army itself Chu Teh and I had to fight against two tendencies: first, a desire to advance on Changsha [the capital of Hunan] at once, which we considered adventurism; second, a desire to withdraw to the south of the Kwangtung border, which we regarded as ‘retreatism’ [capitulationism]. Our main tasks, as we saw them then, were two: to divide the land, and to establish soviets. We wanted to arm the masses to hasten those processes. Our policy called for free trade [with the White areas], generous treatment of captured enemy troops, and, in general, democratic moderation.

"A representative meeting [the second Maoping Conference] was called at Chingkangshan in the autumn of 1928, and was attended by delegates from soviet districts north of Chingkangshan. Some division of opinion still existed among Party men in the soviet districts concerning the points mentioned above, and at this meeting differences were thoroughly aired. A minority argued that our future on this basis was narrowly limited, but the majority had faith in the policy, and when a resolution was proposed declaring that the soviet movement would be victorious, it was easily passed. The Party Central Committee, however, had not yet given the movement its sanction. This was not received till the winter of 1928, when the report of proceedings at the Sixth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held in Moscow, reached Chingkangshan.

"With the new line adopted at that Congress, Chu Teh and I were in complete agreement.5 From that time on, the differences between the leaders of the Party and the leaders of the soviet movement in the agrarian districts disappeared. Party harmony was re-established.

"Resolutions of the Sixth Congress summarized the experience of the 1925–27 revolution and the Nanchang, Canton, and Autumn Harvest uprisings. It concluded with approval of the emphasis on the agrarian movement. About this time Red armies began to appear elsewhere in China. Uprisings had occurred in western and eastern Hupeh, in the winter of 1927, and these furnished the basis for new soviet districts. Ho Lung in the west and Hsu Hai-tung^* in the east began to form their own worker-peasant armies. The latter’s area of operations became the nucleus of the Oyuwan Soviet,^† to which later on went Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien* and Chang Kuo-t’ao. Fang Chih-min and Hsiao Shih-ping had also begun a movement along the northeastern frontier of Kiangsi, adjacent to Fukien, in the winter of 1927, and out of this later developed a powerful soviet base. After the failure of the Canton Uprising, P’eng P’ai had led part of the loyal troops to Hailufeng, and there formed a soviet, which, following a policy of putschism, was soon destroyed. Part of the army, however, emerged from the district under the command of Ku Ta-chen,^* and made connections with Chu Teh and myself, later on becoming the nucleus of the Eleventh Red Army.

"In the spring of 1928, partisans became active in Hsingkuo and Tungku in Kiangsi, led by Li Wen-lung and Li Shao-tsu. This movement had its base around Kian, and these partisans later became the core of the Third Army, while the district itself became the base of the Central Soviet Government. In western Fukien soviets were established by Chang Ting-ch’eng,* Teng Tzu-hui,^† and Hu Pei-teh, who afterwards became a Social Democrat.

"During the ‘struggle v. adventurism’ period at Chingkangshan, the First Army had defeated two attempts by White troops to retake the mountain. Chingkangshan proved to be an excellent base for a mobile army such as we were building. It had good natural defenses, and grew enough crops to supply a small army. It had a circuit of 500 li and was about 80 li in diameter. Locally it was known otherwise, as Ta Hsiao Wu Chin [Big-Little Five Wells], the real Chingkangshan being a nearby mountain, long deserted, and got its name from five main wells on its sides—ta, hsiao, shang, hsia, and chung or big, small, upper, lower, and middle wells. The five villages on the mountain were named after these wells.

"After the forces of our army combined at Chingkangshan there was a reorganization, the famous Fourth Red Army was created, and Chu Teh was made commander, while I became political commissar. More troops arrived at Chingkangshan after uprisings and mutinies in Ho Chien’s army, in the winter of 1928, and out of these emerged the Fifth Red Army, commanded by P’ng Teh-huai.^† In addition to P’ng there were Teng P’ing, killed at Tsunyi, Kweichow, during the Long March, Huang Kuo-nu, killed in Kwangsi in 1931, and T’ien Teh-yuan.

"Conditions on the mountain, with the arrival of so many troops, were becoming very bad. The troops had no winter uniforms, and food was extremely scarce. For months we lived practically on squash. The soldiers shouted a slogan of their own: ‘Down with capitalism, and eat squash!’—for to them capitalism meant landlords and the landlords’ squash. Leaving P’eng Teh-huai at Chingkangshan, Chu Teh broke through the blockade established by the White troops, and in January, 1929, our first sojourn on the embattled mountain ended.

"The Fourth Army now began a campaign through the south of Kiangsi which rapidly developed successfully. We established a soviet in Tungku, and there met and united with local Red troops. Dividing forces, we continued into Yungting, Shangheng, and Lung Yen, and established soviets in all those counties. The existence of militant mass movements prior to the arrival of the Red Army assured our success, and helped to consolidate soviet power on a stable basis very quickly. The influence of the Red Army now extended, through the agrarian mass movement and partisans, to several other hsien, but the Communists did not fully take power there until later on.

"Conditions in the Red Army began to improve, both materially and politically, but there were still many bad tendencies. ‘Partisanism,’ for example, was a weakness reflected in lack of discipline, exaggerated ideas of democracy, and looseness of organization. Another tendency that had to be fought was ‘vagabondage’—a disinclination to settle down to the serious tasks of government, a love of movement, change, new experience and incident. There were also remnants of militarism, with some of the commanders maltreating or even beating the men, and discriminating against those they disliked personally, while showing favoritism to others.

"Many of the weaknesses were overcome after the convening of the Ninth Party Conference of the Fourth Red Army, held in west Fukien [at Ku-t’ien]6 in December, 1929. Ideas for improvements were discussed, many misunderstandings leveled out, and new plans were adopted, which laid the foundations for a high type of ideological leadership in the Red Army. Prior to this the tendencies already described were very serious, and were utilized by a Trotskyist faction in the Party and military leadership to undermine the strength of the movement. A vigorous struggle was now begun against them, and several were deprived of their Party positions and army command. Of these Liu En-k’ang, an army commander, was typical. It was found that they intended to destroy the Red Army by leading it into difficult positions in battles with the enemy, and after several unsuccessful encounters their plans became quite evident. They bitterly attacked our program and everything we advocated. Experience having shown their errors, they were eliminated from responsible positions and after the Fukien Conference lost their influence.

"This conference prepared the way for the establishment of the soviet power in Kiangsi. The following year was marked with some brilliant successes. Nearly the whole of southern Kiangsi fell to the Red Army. The base of the central soviet regions had been established.

"On February 7, 1930, an important local Party conference was called in south Kiangsi to discuss the future program of the soviets. It was attended by local representatives from the Party, the army, and the government. Here the question of the land policy was argued at great length, and the struggle against ‘opportunism,’ led by those opposed to redistribution, was overcome. It was resolved to carry out land redistribution and quicken the formation of soviets. Until then the Red Army had formed only local and district soviets. At this conference it was decided to establish the Kiangsi Provincial Soviet Government. To the new program the peasants responded with a warm, enthusiastic support which helped, in the months ahead, to defeat the extermination campaigns of the Kuomintang armies.”

Growth of the Red Army

Mao Tse-tung’s account had begun to pass out of the category of "personal history,” and to sublimate itself somehow intangibly in the career of a great movement in which, though he retained a dominant role, you could not see him clearly as a personality. It was no longer "I” but "we”; no longer Mao Tse-tung, but the Red Army; no longer a subjective impression of the experiences of a single life, but an objective record by a bystander concerned with the mutations of collective human destiny as the material of history.

As his story drew to a close it became more and more necessary for me to interrogate him about himself. What was he doing at that time? What office did he hold then? What was his attitude in this or that situation? And my questioning, generally, evoked such references as there are to himself in this last chapter of the narrative:

"Gradually the Red Army’s work with the masses improved, discipline strengthened, and a new technique in organization developed. The peasantry everywhere began to volunteer to help the revolution. As early as Chingkangshan the Red Army had imposed three simple rules of discipline upon its fighters, and these were: prompt obedience to orders; no confiscations whatever from the poor peasantry; and prompt delivery directly to the government, for its disposal, of all goods confiscated from the landlords. After the 1928 Conference [second Maoping Conference] emphatic efforts to enlist the support of the peasantry were made, and eight rules were added to the three listed above. These were as follows:

"1. Replace all doors when you leave a house;*

"2. Return and roll up the straw matting on which you sleep;

"3. Be courteous and polite to the people and help them when you can;

"4. Return all borrowed articles;

"5. Replace all damaged articles;

"6. Be honest in all transactions with the peasants;

"7. Pay for all articles purchased;

"8. Be sanitary, and, especially, establish latrines a safe distance from people’s houses.

"The last two rules were added by Lin Piao. These eight points were enforced with better and better success, and today are still the code of the Red soldier, memorized and frequently repeated by him.^† Three other duties were taught to the Red Army, as its primary purpose: first, to struggle to the death against the enemy; second, to arm the masses; third, to raise money to support the struggle.

"Early in 1929 several groups of partisans under Li Wen-lung and Li Shao-tsu were reorganized into the Third Red Army, commanded by Wang Kung-lu, and with Ch’en Yi as political commissar. During the same period, part of Chu Pei-teh’s min-t’uan mutinied and joined the Red Army. They were led to the Communist camp by a Kuomintang commander, Lo P’ing-hui,^‡ who was disillusioned about the Kuomintang and wanted to join the Red Army. He is now commander of the Thirty-second Red Army of the Second Front Army. From the Fukien partisans and nucleus of regular Red troops the Twelfth Red Army was created under the command of Wu Chung-hao, with T’an Chen-lin as political commissar. Wu was later killed in battle and replaced by Lo P’ing-hui.

"It was at this time that the First Army Corps was organized, with Chu Teh as commander and myself as political commissar. It was composed of the Third Army, the Fourth Army commanded by Lin Piao, and the Twelfth Army, under Lo P’ing-hui. Party leadership was vested in a Front Committee, of which I was chairman. There were already more than 10,000 men in the First Army Corps then, organized into ten divisions. Besides this main force, there were many local and independent regiments, Red Guards and partisans.

"Red tactics, apart from the political basis of the movement, explained much of the successful military development. At Chingkangshan four slogans had been adopted, and these give the clue to the methods of partisan warfare used, out of which the Red Army grew. The slogans were:

"1. When the enemy advances, we retreat!

"2. When the enemy halts and encamps, we trouble them!

"3. When the enemy seeks to avoid a battle, we attack!

"4. When the enemy retreats, we pursue!

"These slogans [of four characters each in Chinese] were at first opposed by many experienced military men, who did not agree with the type of tactics advocated. But much experience proved that the tactics were correct. Whenever the Red Army departed from them, in general, it did not succeed. Our forces were small, exceeded from ten to twenty times by the enemy; our resources and fighting materials were limited, and only by skillfully combining the tactics of maneuvering and guerrilla warfare could we hope to succeed in our struggle against the Kuomintang, fighting from vastly richer and superior bases.

"The most important single tactic of the Red Army was, and remains, its ability to concentrate its main forces in the attack, and swiftly divide and separate them afterwards. This implied that positional warfare was to be avoided, and every effort made to meet the living forces of the enemy while in movement, and destroy them. On the basis of these tactics the mobility and the swift, powerful ‘short attack’ of the Red Army was developed.*

"In expanding soviet areas in general the program of the Red Army favored a wavelike or tidal development, rather than an uneven advance, gained by ‘leaps’ or ‘jumps,’ and without deep consolidation in the territories gained. The policy was pragmatic, just as were the tactics already described, and grew out of many years of collective military and political experience. These tactics were severely criticized by Li Li-san, who advocated the concentration of all weapons in the hands of the Red Army, and the absorption of all partisan groups. He wanted attacks rather than consolidation; advances without securing the rear; sensational assaults on big cities, accompanied by uprisings and extremism. The Li Li-san line dominated the Party then—outside soviet areas—and was sufficiently influential to force acceptance, to some extent, in the Red Army, against the judgment of its field command. One result of it was the attack on Changsha and another was the advance on Nanchang. But the Red Army refused to immobilize its partisan groups and open up its rear to the enemy during these adventures.

"In the autumn of 1929 the Red Army moved into northern Kiangsi, attacking and occupying many cities, and inflicting numerous defeats on Kuomintang armies. When within striking distance of Nanchang the First Army Corps turned sharply west and moved on Changsha. In this drive it met and joined forces with P’eng Teh-huai, who had already occupied Changsha once, but had been forced to withdraw to avoid being surrounded by vastly superior enemy troops. P’eng had been obliged to leave Chingkangshan in April, 1929, and had carried out operations in southern Kiangsi, resulting in greatly increasing his troops. He rejoined Chu Teh and the main forces of the Red Army at Juichin in April, 1930, and after a conference it was decided that P’eng’s Third Army should operate on the Kiangsi-Hunan border, while Chu Teh and I moved into Fukien. It was in June, 1930, that the Third Army and the First Army corps re-established a junction and began the second attack on Changsha. The First and Third Army corps were combined into the First Front Army, with Chu Teh as commander-in-chief and myself as political commissar. Under this leadership we arrived outside the walls of Changsha.

"The Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Committee was organized about this time, and I was elected chairman. The Red Army’s influence in Hunan was widespread, almost as much so as in Kiangsi. My name was known among the Hunanese peasants, for big rewards were offered for my capture, dead or alive, as well as for Chu Teh and other Reds. My land* in Hsiang T’an was confiscated by the Kuomintang. My wife and my sister, as well as the wives of my two brothers, Mao Tse-min and Mao Tse-t’an,^† and my own sons were all arrested by Ho Chien [the warlord governor]. My wife (K’ai-hui) and my sister (Tse-hung) were executed.¹ The others were later released. The prestige of the Red Army even extended to my own village, in Hsiang T’an, for I heard the tale that the local peasants believed that I would be soon returning to my native home. When one day an airplane passed overhead, they decided it was I. They warned the man who was then tilling my land that I had come back to look over my old farm, to see whether or not any trees had been cut. If so, I would surely demand compensation from Chiang Kai-shek, they said.

"But the second attack on Changsha proved to be a failure. Great reinforcements had been sent to the city and it was heavily garrisoned; besides, new troops were pouring into Hunan in September to attack the Red Army. Only one important battle occurred during the siege, and in it the Red Army eliminated two brigades of enemy troops. It could not, however, take the city of Changsha, and after a few weeks withdrew to Kiangsi.²

"This failure helped to destroy the Li Li-san line and saved the Red Army from what would probably have been a catastrophic attack on Wuhan, which Li was demanding. The main tasks of the Red Army then were the recruiting of new troops, the sovietization of new rural areas, and, above all, the consolidation under thorough soviet power of such areas as already had fallen to the Red Army. For such a program the attacks on Changsha were not necessary and had an element of adventure in them. Had the first occupation been undertaken as a temporary action, however, and not with the idea of attempting to hold the city and set up a state power there, its effects might have been considered beneficial, for the reaction produced on the national revolutionary movement was very great. The error was a strategic and tactical one, in attempting to make a base of Changsha while the soviet power was still not consolidated behind it.”

To interrupt Mao’s narrative for a moment: Li Li-san was a Hunanese and a returned student from France. He divided time in Shanghai and Hankow, where the Communist Party had "underground” headquarters—only after 1930 was the Central Committee transferred to the soviet districts. Li dominated the Chinese Party from 1929 to 1930, when he was removed from the Politburo and sent to Moscow. Like Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Li Li-san lacked faith in the rural soviets, and urged that strong aggressive tactics be adopted against strategic big capitals like Changsha, Wuhan, and Nan-chang. He wanted a "terror” in the villages to demoralize the gentry, a "mighty offensive” by the workers, risings and strikes to paralyze the enemy in his bases, and "flank attacks” in the north, from Outer Mongolia and Manchuria, backed by the U.S.S.R.*

To continue:

"But Li Li-san overestimated both the military strength of the Red Army at that time and the revolutionary factors in the national political scene. He believed that the revolution was nearing success and would shortly have power over the entire country. This belief was encouraged by the long and exhausting civil war then proceeding between Feng Yu-hsiang and Chiang Kai-shek, which made the outlook seem highly favorable to Li Li-san. But in the opinion of the Red Army the enemy was making preparations for a great drive against the soviets as soon as the civil war was concluded, and it was no time for possibly disastrous putsch-ism and adventures. This estimate proved to be entirely correct.

"With the events in Hunan, the Red Army’s return to Kiangsi, and especially after the capture of Kian, ‘Lilisanism’ was overcome in the army; and Li himself, proved to have been in error, soon lost his influence in the Party. There was, however, a critical period in the army before ‘Lilisanism’ was definitely buried. Part of the Third Corps favored following out Li’s line, and demanded the separation of the Third Corps from the rest of the army. P’eng Teh-huai fought vigorously against this tendency, however, and succeeded in maintaining the unity of the forces under his command and their loyalty to the high command. But the Twentieth Army, led by Liu Teh-ch’ao, rose in open revolt, arrested the chairman of the Kiangsi Soviet, arrested many officers and officials, and attacked us politically, on the basis of the Li Li-san line.3 This occurred at Fu T’ien and is known as the Fu T’ien Incident. Fu T’ien being near Kian, then the heart of the soviet districts, the events produced a sensation, and to many it must have seemed that the fate of the revolution depended on the outcome of this struggle. However, the revolt was quickly suppressed, due to the loyalty of the Third Army, to the general solidarity of the Party and the Red troops, and to the support of the peasantry. Liu Teh-ch’ao was arrested, and other rebels disarmed and liquidated. Our line was reaffirmed, ‘Lilisanism’ was definitely suppressed, and as a result the soviet movement subsequently scored great gains.

"But Nanking was now thoroughly aroused to the revolutionary potentialities of the soviets in Kiangsi, and at the end of 1930 began its First Extermination Campaign^* against the Red Army. Enemy forces totaling over 100,000 men began an encirclement of the Red areas, penetrating by five routes, under the chief command of Lu Ti-p’ing. Against these troops the Red Army was then able to mobilize a total of about 40,000 men. By skillful use of maneuvering warfare we met and overcame this First Campaign, with great victories. Following out the tactics of swift concentration and swift dispersal, we attacked each unit separately, using our main forces. Admitting the enemy troops deeply into soviet territory, we staged sudden concentrated attacks, in superior numbers, on isolated units of the Kuomintang troops, achieving positions of maneuver in which, momentarily, we could encircle them, thus reversing the general strategic advantage enjoyed by a numerically greatly superior enemy.

"By January, 1931, this First Campaign had been completely defeated. I believe that this would not have been possible except for three conditions achieved by the Red Army just before its commencement. First, the consolidation of the First and Third Army corps under a centralized command; second, the liquidation of the Li Li-san line; and third, the triumph of the Party over the anti-Bolshevik (Liu Teh-ch’ao) faction and other active counterrevolutionaries within the Red Army and in the soviet districts.

"After a respite of only four months, Nanking launched its Second Campaign, under the supreme command of Ho Ying-ch’in, now Minister of War. His forces exceeded 200,000 men, who moved into the Red areas by seven routes. The situation for the Red Army was then thought to be very critical. The area of soviet power was very small, resources were limited, equipment scanty, and enemy material strength vastly exceeded that of the Red Army in every respect. To meet this offensive, however, the Red Army still clung to the same tactics that had thus far won success. Admitting the enemy columns well into Red territory, our main forces suddenly concentrated against the Second Route of the enemy, defeated several regiments, and destroyed their offensive power. Immediately afterwards we attacked in quick succession the Third Route, the Sixth, and the Seventh, defeating each of them in turn. The Fourth Route retreated without giving battle, and the Fifth Route was partly destroyed. Within fourteen days the Red Army had fought six battles, and marched eight days, ending with a decisive victory. With the break-up or retreat of the other six routes the First Route Army, commanded by Chiang Kuang-nai and Ts’ai T’ing-k’ai, withdrew without any serious fighting.

"One month later, Chiang Kai-shek took command of an army of 300,000 men ‘for the final extermination of the "Red bandits.”’ He was assisted by his ablest commanders: Ch’en Ming-shu, Ho Ying-ch’in, and Chu Shao-liang, each of whom had charge of a main route of advance. Chiang hoped to take the Red areas by storm—a rapid ‘wiping-up’ of the ‘Red bandits.’ He began by moving his armies 80 li a day into the heart of soviet territory. This supplied the very conditions under which the Red Army fights best, and it soon proved the serious mistake of Chiang’s tactics. With a main force of only 30,000 men, by a series of brilliant maneuvers, our army attacked five different columns in five days. In the first battle the Red Army captured many enemy troops and large amounts of ammunition, guns and equipment. By September the Third Campaign had been admitted to be a failure, and Chiang Kai-shek in October withdrew his troops.

"The Red Army now entered a period of comparative peace and growth. Expansion was very rapid. The First Soviet Congress was called on December 11, 1931, and the Central Soviet Government was established, with myself as chairman. Chu Teh was elected commander-in-chief of the Red Army. In the same month there occurred the great Ningtu Uprising, when more than 20,000 troops of the Twenty-eighth Route Army of the Kuomintang revolted and joined the Red Army. They were led by Tung Chen-t’ang and Chao Po-sheng. Chao was later killed in battle in Kiangsi, but Tung is today still commander of the Fifth Red Army—the Fifth Army Corps having been created out of the troops taken in from the Ningtu Uprising.

"The Red Army now began offensives of its own. In 1932 it fought a great battle at Changchow, in Fukien, and captured the city. In the South it attacked Ch’en Chi-t’ang at Nan Hsiang, and on Chiang Kai-shek’s front it stormed Lo An, Li Chuan, Chien Ning and T’ai Ning. It attacked but did not occupy Kanchow. From October, 1932, onward, and until the beginning of the Long March to the Northwest, I myself devoted my time almost exclusively to work with the Soviet Government, leaving the military command to Chu Teh and others.

"In April, 1933, began the fourth and, for Nanking, perhaps the most disastrous of its ‘extermination campaigns.’* In the first battle of this period two divisions were disarmed and two divisional commanders were captured. The Fifty-ninth Division was partly destroyed and the Fifty-second was completely destroyed. Thirteen thousand men were captured in this one battle at Ta Lung P’ing and Chiao Hui in Lo An Hsien. The Kuomintang’s Eleventh Division, then Chiang Kai-shek’s best, was next eliminated, being almost totally disarmed; its commander was seriously wounded. These engagements proved decisive turning points and the Fourth Campaign soon afterwards ended. Chiang Kai-shek at this time wrote to Ch’en Ch’eng, his field commander, that he considered this defeat ‘the greatest humiliation’ in his life. Ch’en Ch’eng did not favor pushing the campaign. He told people then that in his opinion fighting the Reds was a ‘lifetime job’ and a ‘life sentence.’ Reports of this coming to Chiang Kai-shek, he removed Ch’en Ch’eng from the high command.

"For his fifth and last campaign, Chiang Kai-shek mobilized nearly one million men and adopted new tactics and strategy. Already, in the Fourth Campaign, Chiang had, on the recommendation of his German advisers, begun the use of the blockhouse and fortifications system. In the Fifth Campaign he placed his entire reliance upon it.

"In this period we made two important errors. The first was the failure to unite with Ts’ai T’ing-k’ai’s army in 1933 during the Fukien Rebellion. The second was the adoption of the erroneous strategy of simple defense, abandoning our former tactics of maneuver. It was a serious mistake to meet the vastly superior Nanking forces in positional warfare, at which the Red Army was neither technically nor spiritually at its best.4

"As a result of these mistakes, and the new tactics and strategy of Chiang’s campaign, combined with the overwhelming numerical and technical superiority of the Kuomintang forces, the Red Army was obliged, in 1934, to seek to change the conditions of its existence in Kiangsi, which were rapidly becoming more unfavorable. Second, the national political situation influenced the decision to move the scene of main operations to the Northwest.⁵ Following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and Shanghai, the Soviet Government had, as early as February, 1932, formally declared war on Japan. This declaration, which could not, of course, be made effective, owing to the blockade and encirclement of Soviet China by the Kuomintang troops, had been followed by the issuance of a manifesto calling for a united front of all armed forces in China to resist Japanese imperialism. Early in 1933 the Soviet Government announced that it would cooperate with any White army on the basis of cessation of civil war and attacks on the soviets and the Red Afmy, guarantee of civil liberties and democratic rights to the masses, and arming of the people for an anti-Japanese war.⁶

"The Fifth Extermination Campaign began in October, 1933. In January, 1934, the Second All-China Congress of Soviets was convened in Juichin, the soviet capital, and a survey of the achievements of the revolution took place. Here I gave a long report, and here the Central Soviet Government, as its personnel exists today, was elected. Preparations soon afterwards were made for the Long March. It was begun in October, 1934, just a year after Chiang Kai-shek launched his last campaign—a year of almost constant fighting, struggle and enormous losses on both sides.

"By January, 1935, the main forces of the Red Army reached Tsunyi, in Kweichow. For the next four months the army was almost constantly moving and the most energetic combat and fighting took place. Through many, many difficulties, across the longest and deepest and most dangerous rivers of China, across some of its highest and most hazardous mountain passes, through the country of fierce aborigines, through the empty grasslands, through cold and through intense heat, through wind and snow and rainstorm, pursued by half the White armies of China, through all these natural barriers, and fighting its way past the local troops of Kwangtung, Hunan, Kwangsi, Kweichow, Yunnan, Sikang, Szechuan, Kansu, and Shensi, the Red Army at last reached northern Shensi in October, 1935, and enlarged its base in China’s great Northwest.*

"The victorious march of the Red Army, and its triumphant arrival in Kansu and Shensi with its living forces still intact, was due first to the correct leadership of the Communist Party, and second to the great skill, courage, determination, and almost superhuman endurance and revolutionary ardor of the basic cadres of our soviet people. The Communist Party of China was, is, and will ever be faithful to Marxism-Leninism, and it will continue its struggles against every opportunist tendency. In this determination lies one explanation of its invincibility and the certainty of its final victory.”⁷

The Long March

The Fifth Campaign

Here I could not even outline the absorbing and then only fragmentarily written history of the six years of the soviets of South China—a period that was destined to be a prelude to the epic of the Long March. Mao Tse-tung had told briefly of the organic development of the soviets and of the birth of the Red Army. He had told how the Communists built up, from a few hundred ragged and half-starved but young and determined revolutionaries, an army of several tens of thousands of workers and peasants, until by 1930 they had become such serious contenders for power that Nanking had to hurl its first large-scale offensive against them. The initial "annihilation drive,” and then a second, a third, and a fourth were net failures. In each of those campaigns the Reds destroyed many brigades and whole divisions of Kuomintang troops, replenished their supplies of arms and ammunition, enlisted new warriors, and expanded their territory.

Meanwhile, what sort of life went on beyond the impenetrable lines of the Red irregulars? It seemed to me one of the amazing facts of our age that during the entire history of the soviets in South China not a single "outside” foreign observer had entered Red territory—the only Communist-ruled nation in the world besides the U.S.S.R. Everything written about the southern soviets by foreigners was therefore secondary material. But a few salient points seemed now confirmable from accounts both friendly and inimical, and these clearly indicated the basis of the Red Army’s support. Land was redistributed and taxes were lightened. Collective enterprise was established on a wide scale; by 1933 there were more than 1,000 soviet cooperatives in Kiangsi alone. Unemployment, opium, prostitution, child slavery, and compulsory marriage were reported to be eliminated, and the living conditions of the workers and poor peasants in the peaceful areas greatly improved. Mass education made much progress in the stabilized soviets. In some counties the Reds attained a higher degree of literacy among the populace in three or four years than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries. In Hsing Ko, the Communists’ model hsien, the populace was said to be nearly 80 per cent literate.

"Revolution,” observed Mao Tse-tung, "is not a tea party.” That "Red” terror methods were widely used against landlords and other class enemies—who were arrested, deprived of land, condemned in "mass trials,” and often executed—was undoubtedly true, as indeed the Communists’ own reports confirmed.2 Were such activities to be regarded as atrocities or as "mass justice” executed by the armed poor in punishment of "White” terror crimes by the rich when they held the guns? Never having seen Soviet Kiangsi, I could add little, with my testimony, to an evaluation of second-hand materials about it, or to the usefulness of this book, which is largely limited to the range of an eyewitness. For that reason I decided to omit from this volume some interview material concerning Soviet Kiangsi which the reader would be entitled to regard as self-serving, in the absence of independent corroboration.³ Speculation on the southern soviets in any case was now a matter chiefly of academic interest. For late in October, 1933, Nanking mobilized for the fifth and greatest of its anti-Red wars, and one year later the Reds were finally forced to carry out a general retreat. Nearly everyone then supposed it was the end, the Red Army’s funeral march. How badly mistaken they were was not to become manifest for almost two years, when a remarkable comeback, seldom equaled in history, was to reach a climax with events that put into the hands of the Communists the life of the Generalissimo, who for a while really had believed his own boast—that he had "exterminated the menace of communism.”

It was not until the seventh year of the fighting against the Reds that any notable success crowned the attempts to destroy them. The Reds then had actual administrative control over a great part of Kiangsi, and large areas of Fukien and Hunan. There were other soviet districts, not physically connected with the Kiangsi territory, located in the provinces of Hunan, Hupeh, Honan, Anhui, Szechuan, and Shensi.

Against the Reds, in the Fifth Campaign, Chiang Kai-shek mobilized about 900,000 troops, of whom perhaps 400,000—some 360 regiments—actively took part in the warfare in the Kiangsi-Fukien area, and against the Red Army in the Anhui-Honan-Hupeh (Oyuwan) area. But Kiangsi was the pivot of the whole campaign. Here the regular Red Army was able to mobilize a combined strength of 180,000 men, including all reserve divisions, and it had perhaps 200,000 partisans and Red Guards, but altogether could muster a firing power of somewhat less than 100,000 rifles, no heavy artillery, and a very limited supply of grenades, shells, and ammunition, all of which were being made in the Red arsenal at Juichin.

Chiang adopted a new strategy to make the fullest use of his greatest assets—superior resources, technical equipment, access to supplies from the outside world (to which the Reds had no outlet), and some mechanized equipment, including an air force that had come to comprise nearly 400 navigable war planes. The Reds had captured a few of Chiang’s airplanes, and they had three or four pilots, but they lacked gasoline, bombs, and mechanics. Instead of an invasion of the Red districts and an attempt to take them by storm of superior force, which had in the past proved disastrous, Chiang now used the majority of his troops to surround the "bandits” and impose on them a strict economic blockade.

And it was very costly. Chiang Kai-shek built hundreds of miles of military roads and thousands of small fortifications, which were made connectable by machine-gun or artillery fire. His defensive-offensive strategy and tactics tended to diminish the Reds’ superiority in maneuvering, and emphasized the disadvantages of their smaller numbers and lack of resources.

Chiang wisely avoided exposing any large body of troops beyond the fringes of his network of roads and fortifications. They advanced only when very well covered by artillery and airplanes and rarely moved more than a few hundred yards ahead of the noose of forts, which stretched through the provinces of Kiangsi, Fukien, Hunan, Kwantung, and Kwangsi. Deprived of opportunities to decoy, ambush, or outmaneuver their enemy in open battle, the Reds began to place their main reliance on positional warfare—and the error of this decision, and the reasons for it, will be alluded to further on.

The Fifth Campaign was said to have been planned largely by Chiang Kai-shek’s German advisers, notably General von Falkenhausen of the German Army, who was then the Generalissimo’s chief adviser. The new tactics were thorough, but they were also very slow and expensive. Operations dragged on for months and still Nanking had not struck a decisive blow at the main forces of its enemy. The effect of the blockade, however, was seriously felt in the Red districts, and especially the total absence of salt. The little Red base was becoming inadequate to repel the combined military and economic pressure being applied against it. Considerable exploitation of the peasantry must have been necessary to maintain the astonishing year of resistance which was put up during this campaign. At the same time, it must be remembered that their fighters were peasants, owners of newly acquired land. For land alone most peasants in China would fight to the death. The Kiangsi people knew that return of the Kuomintang meant return to the landlords.

Nanking believed that its efforts at annihilation were about to succeed. The enemy was caged and could not escape. Thousands supposedly had been killed in the daily bombing and machine-gunning from the air, as well as by "purgations” in districts reoccupied by the Kuomintang. The Red Army itself, according to Chou En-lai, suffered over 60,000 casualties in this one siege. Whole areas were depopulated, sometimes by forced mass migrations, sometimes by the simpler expedient of mass executions. Kuomintang press releases estimated that about 1,000,000 people were killed or starved to death in the process of recovering Soviet Kiangsi.

Nevertheless, the Fifth Campaign proved inconclusive. It failed to destroy the "living forces”* of the Red Army. A Red military conference was called at Juichin, and it was decided to withdraw, transferring the main Red strength to a new base.

The retreat from Kiangsi evidently was so swiftly and secretly managed that the main forces of the Red troops, estimated at about 90,000 men, had already been marching for several days before the enemy headquarters became aware of what was taking place. They had mobilized in southern Kiangsi, withdrawing most of their regular troops from the northern front and replacing them with partisans. Those movements occurred always at night. When practically the whole Red Army was concentrated near Yutu, in southern Kiangsi, the order was given for the Great March, which began on October 16, 1934.

For three nights the Reds pressed in two columns to the west and to the south. On the fourth they advanced, totally unexpectedly, almost simultaneously attacking the Hunan and Kwangtung lines of fortifications. They took these by assault, put their astonished enemy on the run, and never stopped until they had occupied the ribbon of blockading forts and entrenchments on the southern front. This gave them roads to the south and to the west, along which their vanguard began its sensational trek.

Besides the main strength of the army, thousands of Red peasants began this march—old and young, men, women, children, Communists and non-Communists. The arsenal was stripped, the factories were dismantled, machinery was loaded onto mules and donkeys—everything that was portable and of value went with this strange cavalcade. As the march lengthened out, much of this burden had to be discarded, and the Reds told me that thousands of rifles and machine guns, much machinery, much ammunition, even much silver, lay buried on their long trail from the South. Some day in the future, they said, Red peasants, now surrounded by thousands of policing troops, would dig it up again. They awaited only the signal—and the war with Japan might prove to be that beacon.

After the main forces of the Red Army evacuated Kiangsi, it was still many weeks before Nanking troops succeeded in occupying the chief Red bases. Thousands of peasant Red Guards continued guerrilla fighting. To lead them, the Red Army left behind some of its ablest commanders: Ch’en Yi, Su Yu,* T’an Chen-lin, Hsiang Ying, Fang Chih-min, Liu Hsiao,* Teng Tzu-hui, Ch’u Ch’iu-pai, Ho Shu-heng, and Chang Ting-ch’eng. They had only 6,000 able-bodied regular troops, however—and 20,000 wounded, sheltered among the peasants.⁴ Many thousands of them were captured and executed, but they managed to fight a rear-guard action which enabled the main forces to get well under way before Chiang Kai-shek could mobilize new forces to pursue and attempt to annihilate them on the march. Even in 1937 there were regions in Kiangsi, Fukien, and Kweichow held by these fragments of the Red Army, and that spring the government announced the beginning of another anti-Red campaign for a "final clean-up” in Fukien.⁵

A Nation Emigrates

Having successfully broken through the first line of fortifications, the Red Army set out on its epochal year-long trek to the west and to the north, a varicolored and many-storied expedition describable here only in briefest outline. The Communists told me that they were writing a collective account of the Long March, with contributions from dozens who made it, which already totaled about 300,000 words.1 Adventure, exploration, discovery, human courage and cowardice, ecstasy and triumph, suffering, sacrifice, and loyalty, and then through it all, like a flame, an undimmed ardor and undying hope and amazing revolutionary optimism of those thousands of youths who would not admit defeat by man or nature or God or death—all this and more seemed embodied in the history of an odyssey unequaled in modern times.

The Reds themselves generally spoke of it as the "25,000-li March,” and with all its twists, turns and countermarches, from the farthest point in Fukien to the end of the road in far northwest Shensi, some sections of the marchers undoubtedly did that much or more. An accurate stage-by-stage itinerary prepared by the First Army Corps^* showed that its route covered a total of 18,088 li, or 6,000 miles—about twice the width of the American continent—and this figure was perhaps the average march of the main forces. The journey took them across some of the world’s most difficult trails, unfit for wheeled traffic, and across the high snow mountains and the great rivers of Asia. It was one long battle from beginning to end.

Four main lines of defense works, supported by strings of concrete machine-gun nests and blockhouses, surrounded the soviet districts in Southwest China, and the Reds had to shatter those before they could reach the unblockaded areas to the west. The first line, in Kiangsi, was broken on October 21, 1934; the second, in Hunan, was occupied on November 3; and a week later the third, also in Hunan, fell to the Reds after bloody fighting. The Kwangsi and Hunan troops gave up the fourth and last line on November 29, and the Reds swung northward into Hunan, to begin trekking in a straight line for Szechuan, where they planned to enter the soviet districts and combine with the Fourth Front Army there, under Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien. Between the dates mentioned above, nine battles were fought. In all, a combination of 110 regiments had been mobilized in their path by Nanking and by the provincial warlords Ch’en Ch’i-tang, Ho Chien, and Pai Chung-hsi.

During the march through Kiangsi, Kwangtung, Kwangsi, and Hunan, the Reds suffered very heavy losses. Their numbers were reduced by about one-third by the time they reached the border of Kweichow province. This was due, first, to the impediment of a vast amount of transport, 5,000 men being engaged in that task alone. The vanguard was very much retarded, and in many cases the enemy was given time to prepare elaborate obstructions in the line of march. Second, from Kiangsi an un-deviating northwesterly route was maintained, which enabled Nanking to anticipate most of the Red Army’s movements.

Serious losses as a result of these errors caused the Reds to adopt new tactics in Kweichow. Instead of an arrowlike advance, they began a series of distracting maneuvers, so that it became more and more difficult for Nanking planes to identify the day-by-day objective of the main forces. Two columns, and sometimes as many as four columns, engaged in a baffling series of maneuvers on the flanks of the central column, and the vanguard developed a pincerlike front. Only the barest and lightest essentials of equipment were retained, and night marches for the greatly reduced transport corps—a daily target for the air bombing—became routine.

Anticipating an attempt to cross the Yangtze River into Szechuan, Chiang Kai-shek withdrew thousands of troops from Hupeh, Anhui, and Kiangsi and shipped them hurriedly westward, to cut off (from the north) the Red Army’s route of advance. All crossings were heavily fortified; all ferries were drawn to the north bank of the river; all roads were blocked; great areas were denuded of grain. Other thousands of Nanking troops poured into Kweichow to reinforce the opium-soaked provincials of warlord Wang Chia-lieh, whose army in the end was practically immobilized by the Reds. Still others were dispatched to the Yunnan border, to set up obstacles there. In Kweichow, therefore, the Reds found a reception committee of a couple of hundred thousand troops, and obstructions thrown up everywhere in their path. This necessitated two great countermarches across the province, and a wide circular movement around the capital.

Maneuvers in Kweichow occupied the Reds for four months, during which they destroyed five enemy divisions, captured the headquarters of Governor Wang and occupied his foreign-style palace in Tsunyi, recruited about 20,000 men, and visited most of the villages and towns of the province, calling mass meetings and organizing Communist cadres among the youth. Their losses were negligible, but they still faced the problem of crossing the Yangtze. By his swift concentration on the Kweichow-Sze-chuan border, Chiang Kai-shek had skillfully blocked the short, direct roads that led to the great river. He now placed his main hope of exterminating the Reds on the prevention of this crossing at any point, hoping to push them far to the southwest, or into the wastelands of Tibet. To his various commanders and the provincial warlords he telegraphed: "The fate of the nation and the party depends on bottling up the Reds south of the Yangtze.”

Suddenly, early in May, 1935, the Reds turned southward and entered Yunnan, where China’s frontier meets Burma and Indochina. A spectacular march in four days brought them within ten miles of the capital, Yunnanfu, and warlord Lung Yun (Dragon Cloud) frantically mobilized all available troops for defense. Chiang’s reinforcements meanwhile moved in from Kweichow in hot pursuit. Chiang himself and Mme. Chiang, who had been staying in Yunnanfu, hastily repaired down the French railway toward Indochina. A big squadron of Nanking bombers kept up their daily egg-laying over the Reds, but on they came. Presently the panic ended. It was discovered that their drive on Yunnanfu had been only a diversion carried out by a few troops. The main Red forces were moving westward, obviously with the intention of crossing the river at Lengkai, one of the few navigable points of the Upper Yangtze.

Through the wild mountainous country of Yunnan, the Yangtze River flows deeply and swiftly between immense gorges, great peaks in places rising in defiles of a mile or more, with steep walls of rock lifting almost perpendicularly on either side. The few crossings had all been occupied long ago by government troops. Chiang was well pleased. He now ordered all boats drawn to the north bank of the river and burned. Then he started his own troops, and Lung Yun’s, in an enveloping movement around the Red Army, hoping to finish it off forever on the banks of this historic and treacherous stream.

Seemingly unaware of their fate, the Reds continued to march rapidly westward in three columns toward Lengkai. The boats had been burned there, and Nanking pilots reported that a Red vanguard had begun building a bamboo bridge. Chiang became more confident; this bridge-building would take weeks. But one evening, quite unobtrusively, a Red battalion suddenly reversed its direction. On a phenomenal forced march it covered eighty-five miles in one night and day, and in late afternoon descended upon the only other possible ferry crossing in the vicinity, at Chou P’ing Fort. Dressed in captured Nanking uniforms, the battalion entered the town at dusk without arousing comment, and quietly disarmed the garrison.

Boats had been withdrawn to the north bank—but they had not been destroyed. (Why spoil boats, when the Reds were hundreds of li distant, and not coming there anyway? So the government troops may have reasoned.) But how to get one over to the south bank? After dark the Reds escorted a village official to the river and forced him to call out to the guards on the opposite side that some government troops had arrived and wanted a boat. Unsuspectingly one was sent across. Into it piled a detachment of these "Nanking” soldiers, who soon disembarked on the north shore—in Szechuan at last. Calmly entering the garrison, they surprised guards who were peacefully playing mah-jong and whose stacked weapons the Reds took over without any struggle.

Meanwhile the main forces of the Red Army had executed a wide countermarch, and by noon of the next day the vanguard reached the fort. Crossing was now a simple matter. Six big boats worked constantly for nine days. The entire army was transported into Szechuan without a life lost. Having concluded the operation, the Reds promptly destroyed the vessels and lay down to sleep. When Chiang’s forces reached the river, two days later, the rear guard of their enemy called cheerily to them from the north bank to come on over, the swimming was fine. The government troops were obliged to make a detour of over 200 li to the nearest crossing, and the Reds thus shook them from their trail. Infuriated, the Generalissimo now flew to Szechuan, where he mobilized new forces in the path of the oncoming horde, hoping to cut them off at one more strategic river—the great Tatu.

The Heroes of Tatu

The crossing of the Tatu River was the most critical single incident of the Long March. Had the Red Army failed there, quite possibly it would have been exterminated. The historic precedent for such a fate already existed. On the banks of the remote Tatu the heroes of the Three Kingdoms and many warriors since then had met defeat, and in these same gorges the last of the T’ai-p’ing rebels, an army of 100,000 led by Prince Shih Ta-k’ai, was in the nineteenth century surrounded and completely destroyed by the Manchu forces under the famous Tseng Kuo-fan. To warlords Liu Hsiang and Liu Wen-hui, his allies in Szechuan, and to his own generals in command of the government pursuit, Generalissimo Chiang now wired an exhortation to repeat the history of the Tai-p’ing.

But the Reds also knew about Shih Ta-k’ai, and that the main cause of his defeat had been a costly delay. Arriving at the banks of the Tatu, Prince Shih had paused for three days to honor the birth of his son—an imperial prince. Those days of rest had given his enemy the chance to concentrate against him, and to make the swift marches in his rear that blocked his line of retreat. Realizing his mistake too late, Prince Shih had tried to break the enemy encirclement, but it was impossible to maneuver in the narrow terrain of the defiles, and he was erased from the map.

The Reds determined not to repeat his error. Moving rapidly northward from the Gold Sand River (as the Yangtze there is known) into Szechuan, they soon entered the tribal country of warlike aborigines, the "White” and "Black” Lolos of Independent Lololand. Never conquered, never absorbed by the Chinese who dwelt all around them, the turbulent Lolos had for centuries occupied that densely forested and mountainous spur of Szechuan whose borders are marked by the great southward arc described by the Yangtze just east of Tibet. Chiang Kai-shek could well have confidently counted on a long delay and weakening of the Reds here which would enable him to concentrate north of the Tatu. The Lolos’ hatred of the Chinese was traditional, and rarely had any Chinese army crossed their borders without heavy losses or extermination.

But the Reds had already safely passed through the tribal districts of the Miao and the Shan peoples, aborigines of Kweichow and Yunnan, and had won their friendship and even enlisted some tribesmen in their army. Now they sent envoys ahead to parley with the Lolos. On the way they captured several towns on the borders of independent Lololand, where they found a number of Lolo chieftains who had been imprisoned as hostages by provincial Chinese warlords. Freed and sent back to their people, these men naturally praised the Reds.

In the vanguard of the Red Army was Commander Liu Po-ch’eng,* who had once been an officer in a warlord army of Szechuan. Liu knew the tribal people, and their inner feuds and discontent. Especially he knew their hatred of Chinese, and he could speak something of the Lolo tongue. Assigned the task of negotiating a friendly alliance, he entered their territory and went into conference with the chieftains. The Lolos, he said, opposed warlords Liu Hsiang and Liu Wen-hui and the Kuomintang; so did the Reds. The Lolos wanted to preserve their independence; Red policies favored autonomy for all the national minorities of China. The Lolos hated the Chinese because they had been oppressed by them; but there were "White” Chinese and "Red” Chinese, just as there were "White” Lolos and "Black” Lolos, and it was the White Chinese who had always slain and oppressed the Lolos. Should not the Red Chinese and the Black Lolos unite against their common enemies, the White Chinese? The Lolos listened interestedly. Slyly they asked for arms and bullets to guard their independence and help Red Chinese fight the Whites. To their astonishment, the Reds gave them both.

And so it happened that not only a speedy but a politically useful passage was accomplished. Hundreds of Lolos enlisted with the "Red” Chinese to march to the Tatu River to fight the common enemy. Some of those Lolos were to trek clear to the Northwest. Liu Po-ch’eng drank the blood of a newly killed chicken before the high chieftain of the Lolos, who drank also, and they swore blood brotherhood in the tribal manner. By this vow the Reds declared that whosoever should violate the terms of their alliance would be even as weak and cowardly as the fowl.

Thus a vanguard divison of the First Army Corps, led by Lin Piao, reached the Tatu Ho. On the last day of the march they emerged from the forests of Lololand (in the thick foliage of which Nanking pilots had completely lost track of them), to descend suddenly on the river town of An Jen Ch’ang, just as unheralded as they had come into Chou P’ing Fort. Guided over narrow mountain trails by the Lolos, the vanguard crept quietly up to the little town and from the heights looked down to the river bank, and saw with amazement and delight one of the three ferryboats made fast on the south bank of the river! Once more an act of fate had befriended them.

How had it happened? On the opposite shore there was only one regiment of the troops of General Liu Wen-hui, the co-dictator of Szechuan province. Other Szechuan troops, as well as reinforcements from Nanking, were leisurely proceeding toward the Tatu, but the single regiment meanwhile must have seemed enough. A squad should have been ample, with all boats moored to the north. But the commander of that regiment was a native of the district; he knew the country the Reds must pass through, and how long it would take them to penetrate to the river. They would be many days yet, he could have told his men. And his wife, one learned, had been a native of An Jen Ch’ang, so he must cross to the south bank to visit his relatives and his friends and to feast with them. Thus it happened that the Reds, taking the town by surprise, captured the commander, his boat, and their passage to the north.

Sixteen men from each of five companies volunteered to cross in the first boat and bring back the others, while on the south bank the Reds set up machine guns on the mountainsides and over the river spread a screen of protective fire concentrated on the enemy’s exposed positions. It was May. Floods poured down the mountains, and the river was swift and even wider than the Yangtze. Starting far upstream, the ferry took two hours to cross and land just opposite the town. From the south bank the villagers of An Jen Ch’ang watched breathlessly. They would be wiped out! But wait. They saw the voyagers land almost beneath the guns of the enemy. Now, surely, they would be finished. And yet … from the south bank the Red machine guns barked on. The onlookers saw the little party climb ashore, hurriedly take cover, then slowly work their way up a steep cliff overhanging the enemy’s positions. There they set up their own light machine guns and sent a downpour of lead and hand grenades into the enemy redoubts along the river.

Suddenly the White troops ceased firing, broke from their redoubts, and fled to a second and then a third line of defense. A great murmur went up from the south bank and shouts of "Hao!” drifted across the river to the little band who had captured the ferry landing. Meanwhile the first boat returned, towing two others, and on the second trip each carried eighty men. The enemy had fled. That day and night, and the next, and the next, those three ferries of An Jen Ch’ang worked back and forth, until at last nearly a division had been transferred to the northern bank.

But the river flowed faster and faster. The crossing became more and more difficult. On the third day it took four hours to shift a boatload of men from shore to shore. At this rate it would be weeks before the whole army and its animals and supplies could be moved. Long before the operation was completed they would be encircled. The First Army Corps had now crowded into An Jen Ch’ang, and behind were the flanking columns, and the transport and rear guard. Chiang Kai-shek’s airplanes had found the spot, and heavily bombed it. Enemy troops were racing up from the southeast; others approached from the north. A hurried military conference was summoned by Lin Piao. Chu Teh, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and P’eng Teh-huai had by now reached the river. They took a decision and began to carry it out at once.

Some 400 li to the west of An Jen Ch’ang, where the gorges rise very high and the river flows narrow, deep, and swift, there was an iron-chain suspension bridge called the Liu Ting Chiao—the Bridge Fixed by Liu.* It was the last possible crossing of the Tatu east of Tibet. Toward this the barefoot Reds now set out along a trail that wound through the gorges, at times climbing several thousand feet, again dropping low to the level of the swollen stream itself and wallowing through waist-deep mud. If they captured the Liu Ting Chiao the whole army could enter central Szechuan. If they failed they would have to retrace their steps through Lololand, re-enter Yunnan, and fight their way westward toward Likiang, on the Tibetan border—a detour of more than a thousand li, which few might hope to survive.

As their main forces pushed westward along the southern bank, the Red division already on the northern bank moved also. Sometimes the gorges between them closed so narrowly that the two lines of Reds could shout to each other across the stream; sometimes that gulf between them measured their fear that the Tatu might separate them forever, and they stepped more swiftly. As they wound in long dragon files along the cliffs at night their 10,000 torches sent arrows of light slanting down the dark face of the imprisoning river. Day and night these vanguards moved at double-quick, pausing only for brief ten-minute rests and meals, when the soldiers listened to lectures by their weary political workers, who over and over again explained the importance of this one action, exhorting each to give his last breath, his last urgent strength, for victory in the test ahead of them. There could be no slackening of pace, no halfheartedness, no fatigue. "Victory was life,” said P’eng Teh-huai; "defeat was certain death.”

On the second day the vanguard on the right bank fell behind. Szechuan troops had set up positions in the road, and skirmishes took place. Those on the southern bank pressed on more grimly. Presently new troops appeared on the opposite bank, and through their field glasses the Reds saw that they were White reinforcements, hurrying to the Bridge Fixed by Liu. For a whole day these troops raced each other along the stream, but gradually the Red vanguard, the pick of all the Red Army, pulled away from the enemy’s tired soldiers, whose rests were longer and more frequent, whose energy seemed more spent, and who were perhaps none too anxious to die for a bridge.

The Bridge Fixed by Liu was built centuries ago, and in the manner of all bridges of the deep rivers of western China. Sixteen heavy iron chains, with a span of some 100 yards or more, were stretched across the river, their ends imbedded on each side under great piles of cemented rock, beneath the stone bridgeheads. Thick boards lashed over the chains made the road of the bridge, but upon their arrival the Reds found that half this wooden flooring had been removed, and before them only the bare iron chains swung to a point midway in the stream. At the northern bridgehead an enemy machine-gun nest faced them, and behind it were positions held by a regiment of White troops. The bridge should, of course, have been destroyed, but the Szechuanese were sentimental about their few bridges; it was not easy to rebuild them, and they were costly. Of Liu Ting it was said that "the wealth of the eighteen provinces contributed to build it.” And who would have thought the Reds would insanely try to cross on the chains alone? But that was what they did.

No time was to be lost. The bridge must be captured before enemy reinforcements arrived. Once more volunteers were called for. One by one Red soldiers stepped forward to risk their lives, and, of those who offered themselves, thirty were chosen. Hand grenades and Mausers were strapped to their backs, and soon they were swinging out above the boiling river, moving hand over hand, clinging to the iron chains. Red machine guns barked at enemy redoubts and spattered the bridgehead with bullets. The enemy replied with machine-gunning of his own, and snipers shot at the Reds tossing high above the water, working slowly toward them. The first warrior was hit, and dropped into the current below; a second fell, and then a third. But as others drew nearer the center, the bridge flooring somewhat protected these dare-to-dies, and most of the enemy bullets glanced off, or ended in the cliffs on the opposite bank.

Probably never before had the Szechuanese seen fighters like these—men for whom soldiering was not just a rice bowl, and youths ready to commit suicide to win. Were they human beings or madmen or gods? Was their own morale affected? Did they perhaps not shoot to kill? Did some of them secretly pray that these men would succeed in their attempt? At last one Red crawled up over the bridge flooring, uncapped a grenade, and tossed it with perfect aim into the enemy redoubt. Nationalist officers ordered the rest of the planking torn up. It was already too late. More Reds were crawling into sight. Paraffin was thrown on the planking, and it began to burn. By then about twenty Reds were moving forward on their hands and knees, tossing grenade after grenade into the enemy machine-gun nest.

Suddenly, on the southern shore, their comrades began to shout with joy. "Long live the Red Army! Long live the Revolution! Long live the heroes of Tatu Ho!” For the enemy was withdrawing in pell-mell flight. Running full speed over the remaining planks of the bridge, through the flames licking toward them, the assailants nimbly hopped into the enemy’s redoubt and turned the abandoned machine gun against the shore.

More Reds now swarmed over the chains, and arrived to help put out the fire and replace the boards. And soon afterwards the Red division that had crossed at An Jen Ch’ang came into sight, opening a flank attack on the remaining enemy positions, so that in a little while the White troops were wholly in flight—either in flight, that is, or with the Reds, for about a hundred Szechuan soldiers here threw down their rifles and turned to join their pursuers. In an hour or two the whole army was joyously tramping and singing its way across the River Tatu into Szechuan. Far overhead angrily and impotently roared the planes of Chiang Kai-shek, and the Reds cried out in delirious challenge to them.

For their distinguished bravery the heroes of An Jen Ch’ang and Liu Ting Chiao were awarded the Gold Star, highest decoration in the Red Army of China.

Across the Great Grasslands

Safely across the Tatu, the Reds struck off into the comparative freedom of western Szechuan, where the blockhouse system had not been completed, and where the initiative rested largely in their own hands. But hardships between battles were not over. Another 2,000 miles of marching, studded by seven great mountain ranges, still lay ahead of them.

North of the Tatu River the Reds climbed 16,000 feet over the Great Snowy Mountain, and in the rarefied air of its crest looked to the west and saw a sea of snow peaks—Tibet. It was already June, and in the lowlands very warm, but as they crossed the Ta Hsueh Shan many of those poorly clad, thin-blooded southerners, unused to the high altitudes, perished from exposure. Harder yet to ascend was the desolate Paotung Kang Mountain, up which they literally built their own road, felling long bamboos and laying them down for a track through a tortuous treacle of waist-deep mud. "On this peak,” Mao Tse-tung told me, "one army corps lost two-thirds of its transport animals. Hundreds fell down and never got up.”

They climbed on. The Chung Lai range next, and more lost men and animals. Then they straddled the lovely Dream Pen Mountain, and after it the Big Drum, and these also took their toll of life. Finally, on July 20, 1935, they entered the rich Moukung area, in northwest Szechuan, and connected with the Fourth Front Army and the soviet regions of the Sung-pan. Here they paused for a long rest, took assessment of their losses, and re-formed their ranks.

The First, Third, Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Army corps, which had begun the journey in Kiangsi nine months earlier with about 90,000 armed men, could now muster beneath their hammer-and-sickle banners about 45,000. Not all had been lost, strayed, or captured. Behind the line of march in Hunan, Kweichow, and Yunnan the Red Army had, as part of its tactics of defense, left small cadres of regular troops to organize partisan groups among the peasantry, and create disturbances and diversionist activity on the enemy’s flanks. Hundreds of captured rifles had been distributed along the route, and stretching clear from Kiangsi to Szechuan were new zones of trouble for the Kuomintang forces. Ho Lung still held his little soviet area, in northern Hunan, and had been joined there by the army of Hsiao K’eh. The numerous newly created partisan detachments began working slowly toward that region. Nanking was not to dislodge Ho Lung for a whole year, and then only after he had been ordered by Red Army headquarters to move into Szechuan, an operation which he would complete—via Tibet—against amazing obstacles.

The journey of the Kiangsi Reds thus far had provided them with much food for reflection. They had won many new friends and made many bitter enemies. Along their route they had provisioned themselves by "confiscating” the supplies of the rich—the landlords, officials, bureaucrats, and big gentry. Finance Commissioner Lin Tsu-han told me that such seizures were systematically carried out according to soviet laws, and that only the confiscation department of the finance commission was empowered to distribute the goods that were taken. It husbanded the army’s resources, was informed by radio of all confiscations made, and assigned quantities of provisions for each section of the marchers, who often made a solid serpentine of fifty miles or more curling over the hills.

There were big "surpluses”—more than the Reds could carry—and these were distributed among the local poor. In Yunnan the Reds seized thousands of hams from rich packers there, and peasants came from miles around to receive their free portions—a new incident in the history of the ham industry, said Mao Tse-tung. Tons of salt were likewise distributed. In Kweichow many duck farms were seized from the landlords and officials and the Reds ate duck until, in the words of Wu Liang-p’ing, they were "simply disgusted with duck.” From Kiangsi they had carried Nanking notes, and silver dollars and bullion from their state bank, and in poor districts in their path they used this money to pay for their needs. Land deeds were destroyed, taxes abolished, and the poor peasantry armed.

Except for their experiences in western Szechuan, the Reds told me they were welcomed everywhere by the mass of the peasantry. Their Robin Hood policies were noised ahead of them, and often the "oppressed peasantry” sent groups to urge them to detour and "liberate” their districts. They had little conception of the Red Army’s political program, of course; they only knew that it was "a poor man’s army,” said Wu Liang-p’ing. That was enough. Mao Tse-tung told me laughingly of one such delegation which arrived to welcome "Su Wei-ai Hsien-sheng”—Mr. Soviet!* These rustics were no more ignorant, however, than the Fukien militarist Lu Hsing-pang, who once posted a notice throughout his fiefdom offering a reward for the "capture, dead or alive, of Su Wei-ai.” Lu announced that this fellow had been doing a lot of damage everywhere, and must be exterminated.

In Maoerhkai and Moukung the southern armies rested for three weeks, while the revolutionary military council, and representatives of the Party and the Soviet Government, discussed plans for the future. It may be recalled that the Fourth Front Red Army, which had made its base in Szechuan as early as 1933, had originally been formed in the Honan-Hupeh-Anhui soviet districts. Its march across Honan to Szechuan had been led by Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien and Chang Kuo-t’ao, two veteran Reds, of whom something more is said later on. Remarkable successes—and tragic excesses—had marked their campaigns in Szechuan, the whole northern half of which had once been under their sway. At the time of its junction in Moukung with the southern Bolsheviks, Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien’s army numbered about 50,000 men, so that the combined Red force concentrated in western Szechuan in July, 1935, was nearly 100,000.

Here the two armies divided, part of the southerners continuing northward while the rest remained with the Fourth Front Army in Szechuan. There was disagreement abut the correct course to pursue. Chang Kuo-t’ao and Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien favored remaining in Szechuan and attempting to reassert Communist influence south of the Yangtze. Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh, and the majority of the Politburo were determined to continue into the Northwest. The period of indecision was ended by two factors. First was an enveloping movement by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, moving into Szechuan from the east and from the north, which succeeded in driving a wedge between two sections of the Red Army. Second was the rapid rise of one of the hurried rivers of Szechuan, which then physically divided the forces, and which suddenly became impassable. There were other factors of intraparty struggle involved which need not be discussed here.¹

In August, with the First Army Corps as vanguard, the main forces from Kiangsi continued the northward march, leaving Chu Teh and Li Hsien-nient^† with Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien and Chang Kuo-t’ao. The Fourth Front Army was to remain here and in Tibet for another year, and be joined by Ho Lung’s Second Front Army,* before making a sensational march into Kansu. Leading the Red cavalcade that in August, 1935, moved toward the Great Grasslands, on the border of Szechuan and Tibet, were Commanders Lin Piao, P’eng Teh-huai, Tso Ch’uan,^† Ch’en Keng,† Chou En-lai, and Mao Tse-tung, most of the officials from the Kiangsi Central Government, and a majority of the members of the Central Committee of the Party. They began this last phase of the march with about 30,000 men.

The most dangerous and exciting travel lay before them, for the route they chose led through wild country inhabited by the independent Mantzu tribesmen and the nomadic Hsifan, a warring people of eastern Tibet. Passing into the Mantzu and Tibetan territories, the Reds for the first time faced a populace united in its hostility to them, and their sufferings on this part of the trek exceeded anything of the past. They had money but could buy no food. They had guns but their enemies were invisible. As they marched into the thick forests and jungles and across the headwaters of a dozen great rivers, the tribesmen withdrew from the vicinity of the march. They stripped their houses bare, carried off all edibles, drove their cattle and fowl to the plateaus, and simply disinhabited the whole area.

A few hundred yards on either side of the road, however, it was quite unsafe. Many a Red who ventured to forage for a sheep never returned. The mountaineers hid in the thick bush and sniped at the marching "invaders.” They climbed the mountains, and when the Reds filed through the deep, narrow, rock passes, where sometimes only one or two could move abreast, the Mantzu rolled huge boulders down to crush them and their animals. Here were no chances to explain "Red policy toward national minorities,” no opportunities for friendly alliance. The Mantzu Queen had an implacable traditional hatred for Chinese of any variety, and recognized no distinctions between Red and White. She threatened to boil alive anyone who helped the travelers.

Unable to get food except by capturing it, the Reds were obliged to make war for a few cattle. Mao told me that they had a saying then, "To buy one sheep costs the life of one man.” From the Mantzu fields they harvested green Tibetan wheat, and vegetables such as beets and turnips—the latter of an enormous size that would "feed fifteen men,” according to Mao Tse-tung. ^‡ On such meager supplies they equipped themselves to cross the Great Grasslands. "This is our only foreign debt,” Mao said to me humorously, "and some day we must pay the Mantzu and the Tibetans for the provisions we were obliged to take from them.” Only by capturing tribesmen could they find guides through the country. But of these guides they made friends, and after the Mantzu frontier was crossed many continued the journey. Some of them were now students in the Communist Party school in Shensi, and might one day return to their land to tell the people the difference between "Red” and "White” Chinese.

In the Grasslands there was no human habitation for ten days. Almost perpetual rain falls over this swampland, and it was possible to cross its center only by a maze of narrow footholds known to the native mountaineers who led the Reds. More animals were lost, and more men. Many foundered in the weird sea of wet grass and dropped from sight into the depth of the swamp, beyond reach of their comrades. There was no firewood; they were obliged to eat their wheat green and vegetables raw. There were no trees for shelter, and the lightly equipped Reds carried no tents. At night they huddled under bushes tied together, which gave but scant protection against the rain. But from this trial, too, they emerged triumphant—more so, at least, than the White troops, who pursued them, lost their way, and turned back with only a fraction of their number intact.

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

Red Star in the Northwest

The Shensi Soviets: Beginnings

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.

Chang the Corpulent proceeded to collect evidence to prove that Liu Chih-tan had not followed the "Party line.” He "tried” Liu, and demanded his resignation from all posts. Liu Chih-tan did not put Mr. Chang against a wall as an interloper for presuming to criticize him, but retired from all active command and went, Achilles-like, to sulk in his cave in Pao An. Mr. Chang also ordered the arrest and imprisonment of more than a hundred other "reactionaries” in the Party and the army and quietly sat back, well satisfied with himself.

It was into this queer scene that the vanguard of the southern Reds, the First Army Corps, headed by Lin Piao, Chou En-lai, P’eng Teh-huai, and Mao Tse-tung, entered in October, 1935. According to my local informants in Pao An, Mao and his Politburo called for a re-examination of evidence, found most of it baseless, discovered that Chang Ching-fu had exceeded his orders and been misled by "reactionaries” himself. They reinstated Liu and all his confederates. Chang the Corpulent was himself arrested, tried, imprisoned for a term, and later given menial tasks to perform.

Thus it happened that when, early in 1936, the combined Red armies attempted their famous "anti-Japanese” expedition, crossed the river, and invaded neighboring Shansi, Liu Chih-tan was again in command. He distinguished himself in that remarkable campaign during which the Reds occupied over eighteen counties of the so-called "model province” in two months. He was fatally wounded in March, 1936, when he led a raiding party against an enemy fortification, the capture of which enabled the Red Army to cross the Yellow River. Liu Chih-tan was carried back to Shensi and died gazing upon the hills he had roamed and loved as a boy, and among the mountain people he had led along the road he believed in, the road of revolutionary struggle. He was buried at Wa Ya Pao, and the soviets renamed a county of their Red China after him—Chih-tan hsien.

In Pao An I met his widow and his child, a beautiful little girl of six. The Reds had tailored her a special uniform; she wore an officer’s belt, and a red star on her cap. She was the idol of everybody there. Young Liu carried herself like a field marshal and she was mightily proud of her "bandit” father.

But although Liu Chih-tan was the personality around which these soviets of the Northwest grew up, it was not Liu, but the conditions of life itself, which produced this convulsive movement of his people. And to understand whatever success they had had it was necessary not so much just now to look at what these men fought for, as to examine what they fought against.

Death and Taxes

During the great Northwest famine, which lasted roughly for three years and affected four huge provinces, I visited some of the drought-stricken areas in Suiyuan, on the edge of Mongolia, in June, 1929. How many people starved to death in those years I do not accurately know, and probably no one will ever know; it is forgotten now. A conservative semiofficial figure of 3,000,000 is often accepted, but I am not inclined to doubt other estimates ranging as high as 6,000,000.

This catastrophe passed hardly noticed in the Western world, and even in the coastal cities of China, but a few courageous Chinese and foreigners attached to the American-financed China International Famine Relief Commission—including its secretary, Dwight Edwards; O. J. Todd, the American engineer; and a wonderful American missionary doctor, Robert Ingram*—risked their lives in those typhus-infested areas, trying to salvage some of the human wreckage. I spent some days with them, passing through cities of death, across a once-fertile countryside turned into desert wasteland, through a land of naked horror.

I was twenty-three. I had come to the East looking for the "glamor of the Orient,” searching for adventure. This excursion to Suiyuan had begun as something like that. But here for the first time in my life I came abruptly upon men who were dying because they had nothing to eat. In those hours of nightmare I spent in Suiyuan I saw thousands of men, women, and children starving to death before my eyes.

Have you ever seen a man—a good honest man who has worked hard, a "law-abiding citizen,” doing no serious harm to anyone—when he has had no food for more than a month? It is a most agonizing sight. His dying flesh hangs from him in wrinkled folds; you can clearly see every bone in his body; his eyes stare out unseeing; and even if he is a youth of twenty he moves like an ancient crone, dragging himself from spot to spot. If he has been lucky he has long ago sold his wife and daughters. He has also sold everything he owns—the timber of his house itself, and most of his clothes. Sometimes he has, indeed, even sold the last rag of decency, and he sways there in the scorching sun, his testicles dangling from him like withered olive seeds—the last grim jest to remind you that this was once a man.

Children are even more pitiable, with their little skeletons bent over and misshapen, their crooked bones, their little arms like twigs, and their purpling bellies, filled with bark and sawdust, protruding like tumors. Women lie slumped in corners, waiting for death, their black blade-like buttocks protruding, their breasts hanging like collapsed sacks. But there are, after all, not many women and girls. Most of them have died or been sold.

Those were things I myself had seen and would never forget. Millions of people died that way in famine, and thousands more still died in China like that. I had seen fresh corpses on the streets of Saratsi, and in the villages I had seen shallow graves where victims of famine and disease were laid by the dozens. But these were not the most shocking things after all. The shocking thing was that in many of those towns there were still rich men, rice hoarders, wheat hoarders, moneylenders, and landlords, with armed guards to defend them, while they profiteered enormously. The shocking thing was that in the cities—where officials danced or played with sing-song girls—there were grain and food, and had been for months; that in Peking and Tientsin and elsewhere were thousands of tons of wheat and millet, collected (mostly by contributions from abroad) by the Famine Commission, but which could not be shipped to the starving. Why not? Because in the Northwest there were some militarists who wanted to hold all of their railroad rolling stock and would release none of it toward the east, while in the east there were other Kuomintang generals who would send no rolling stock westward—even to starving people—because they feared it would be seized by their rivals.

While famine raged the Commission decided to build a big canal (with American funds) to help flood some of the lands baked by drought. The officials gave them every cooperation—and promptly began to buy for a few cents an acre all the lands to be irrigated. A flock of vultures descended upon this benighted country and purchased from the starving farmers thousands of acres for the taxes in arrears, or for a few coppers, and held it to await tenants and rainy days.

Yet the great majority of those people who died did so without any act of protest.

"Why don’t they revolt?” I asked myself. "Why don’t they march in a great army and attack the scoundrels who can tax them but cannot feed them, who can seize their lands but cannot repair an irrigation canal? Or why don’t they sweep into the great cities and plunder the wealth of the rascals who buy their daughters and wives, the men who continue to gorge on thirty-six-course banquets while honest men starve? Why not?”

I was profoundly puzzled by their passivity. For a while I thought nothing would make a Chinese fight.

I was mistaken. The Chinese peasant was not passive; he was not a coward. He would fight when given a method, an organization, leadership, a workable program, hope—and arms. The development of "communism” in China had proved that. Against the above background, therefore, it should not surprise us to learn that Communists were popular in the Northwest, for conditions there had been no better for the mass of the peasantry than elsewhere in China.

Evidence to that effect had been vividly documented by Dr. A. Stampar,* the distinguished health expert sent by the League of Nations as adviser to the Nanking Government. It was the best thing available on the subject. Dr. Stampar had toured the Kuomintang areas of Shensi and Kansu, and his reports were based on his own observations as well as official data opened for him.

He pointed out that "in the year 240 B.C. an engineer called Cheng Kuo is said to have constructed a system for irrigating nearly a million acres” in the historic Wei Valley of Shensi, cradle of the Chinese race, but that "this system was neglected; the dams collapsed, and, though new works were from time to time carried out, the amount of territory irrigated at the end of the Manchu Dynasty (1912) was less than 20,000 mou”—about 3,300 acres. Figures he obtained showed that during the great famine 62 per cent of the population died outright in one county of Shensi; in another, 75 per cent; and so on. Official estimates revealed that 2,000,000 people starved in Kansu alone—about 20 per cent of the population.

To quote from this Geneva investigator on conditions in the Northwest before the Reds arrived:

"In the famine of 1930 twenty acres of land could be purchased for three days’ food supply. Making use of this opportunity, the wealthy classes of the province [Shensi] built up large estates, and the number of owner-cultivators diminished. The following extract from the report for 1930 of Mr. Findlay Andrew of the China International Famine Relief Commission conveys a good impression of the situation in that year:

"‘… The external appearances of the Province have much improved on those of last year. Why? Because in this particular section of Kansu with which our work deals, death from starvation, pestilence, and sword have doomed during the past two years such large numbers of the population that the very demand for food has considerably lessened.’”

Much land had become waste, much had been concentrated in the hands of landlords and officials. Kansu especially had "surprisingly large” areas of cultivable but uncultivated land. "Land during the famine of 1928–1930 was bought at extremely cheap rates by landowners who, since that period, have realized fortunes by the execution of the Wei Pei Irrigation project” (a famine-relief measure financed by the Commission).

"In Shensi it is considered a mark of honor to pay no land tax, and wealthy landowners are therefore as a rule exempted. … A practice which is particularly undesirable is to claim arrears of taxes, for the period during which they were absent, from the farmers who abandoned their land during famines, the farmers being forbidden to resume possession until their arrears are paid.”

Dr. Stampar found that Shensi farmers (evidently excluding the landlords, who were "as a rule exempted”) had to pay land taxes and surtaxes amounting to about 45 per cent of their income, while other taxes "represent a further 20 per cent”; and "not only is taxation thus fantastically heavy, but its assessment appears to be haphazard and its manner of collection wasteful, brutal, and in many cases corrupt.”

As for Kansu, Dr. Stampar said:

"The revenues of Kansu have during the last five years averaged over eight millions … heavier taxation than in Chekiang, one of the richest and most heavily taxed provinces in China. It will be seen also that this revenue, especially in Kansu, is not drawn from one or two major sources, but from a multitude of taxes each yielding a small sum, scarcely any commodity or productive or commercial activity going untaxed. The amount which the population pays is even higher than is shown by the published figures. In the first place, the tax collectors are able to retain a share—in some cases a very large share—of the amounts collected. In the second place, to the taxes levied by the provincial or hsien governments must be added those imposed by military leaders, which in Kansu province are officially estimated at more than ten millions.*

"A further cause of expense to the population is the local militia [min-t’uan] which), formed originally for defense against the bandits, has in many instances degenerated into a gang living at the cost of the countryside.” Dr. Stampar quoted figures showing that the cost of supporting the min-t’uan ranged from 30 to 40 per cent of the total local government budget—this quite in addition, of course, to the burden of maintaining the big regular armies. These latter, according to Dr. Stampar, had absorbed over 60 per cent of the provincial revenues in both Kansu and Shensi.

A foreign missionary I met in Shensi told me that he had once personally followed a pig from owner to consumer, and in the process saw six different taxes being paid. Another missionary, of Kansu, described seeing peasants knock down the wooden walls of their houses (wood being expensive in the Northwest) and cart it to market to sell in order to pay tax collectors. He said that the attitude of even some of the "rich” peasants, while not friendly when the Reds first arrived, was one of indifference, and a belief that "no government could be worse than the old.”

And yet the Northwest was by no means a hopeless country economically. It was not overpopulated; much of its land was very rich; it could easily produce far more than it could consume; and with an improved irrigation system parts of it might become a "Chinese Ukraine.” Shensi and Kansu had abundant coal deposits. Shensi had oil. Dr. Stampar prophesied that "Shensi, especially the plain in the neighborhood of Sian, may itself become an industrial center of an importance second only to the Yangtze Valley, and needing for its service its own coal fields.” Mineral deposits of Kansu, Chinghai, and Sinkiang, said to be very rich, were scarcely touched. In gold alone, said Stampar, "the region may turn out to be a second Klondike.”

Here, surely, were conditions which seemed overripe for change. Here, surely, were things for men to fight against, even if they had nothing to fight for. And no wonder, when the Red Star appeared in the Northwest, thousands of men arose to welcome it as a symbol of hope and freedom.

But did the Reds, after all, prove any better?

Soviet Society

Whatever it may have been in the South, Chinese communism as I found it in the Northwest might more accurately be called rural equalitarianism than anything Marx would have found acceptable as a model child of his own. This was manifestly true economically, and although in the social, political, and cultural life of the organized soviets there was a crude Marxist guidance, limitations of material conditions were everywhere obvious.

There was no machine industry of any importance in the Northwest. It was farming and grazing country primarily, the culture of which had been for centuries in stagnation, though many of the economic abuses prevalent no doubt reflected the changing economy in the semi-industrialized cities. Yet the Red Army itself was an outstanding product of the impact of "industrialization” on China, and the shock of the ideas it had brought into the fossilized culture here was in a true sense revolutionary.

Objective conditions, however, denied the Reds the possibility of organizing much more than the political framework for the beginnings of a modern economy, of which naturally they could think only in terms of a future which might give them power in the great cities, where they could take over the industrial bases from the foreign concessions and thus lay the foundations for a Socialist society. Meanwhile, in the rural areas their activity centered chiefly on the solution of the immediate problems of the peasants—land and taxes. But Chinese Communists never regarded land distribution as anything more than a phase in the building of a mass base, a stage enabling them to develop the revolutionary struggle toward the conquest of power and the ultimate realization of thoroughgoing Socialist changes. In Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic*, the First All-China Soviet Congress in 1931 had set forth in detail the "maximum program” of the Communist Party of China—and reference to it showed clearly that the ultimate aim of Chinese Communists was a Socialist State of the Marxist-Leninist conception. Meanwhile, however, the social, political, and economic organization of the Red districts had all along been a very provisional affair. Even in Kiangsi it was little more than that. Because the soviets had to fight for an existence from their beginning, their main task was always to build a military and political base for the extension of the revolution on a wider and deeper scale, rather than to "try out communism in China,” which is what some people thought the Reds were attempting in their little blockaded areas.

The immediate basis of support for the Reds in the Northwest was obviously not so much the idea of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” as it was something like the promise of Dr. Sun Yat-sen: "Land to those who till it.”

While theoretically the soviets were a "workers’ and peasants’” government, in actual practice the whole constituency was overwhelmingly peasant in character and occupation, and the regime had to shape itself accordingly. An attempt was made to balance peasant influence, and offset it, by classifying the rural population into these categories: great landlords, middle and small landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, tenant peasants, rural workers, handicraft workers, lumpen proletariat, and a division called tzu-yu chih-yeh chieh, or professional workers—which included teachers, doctors, and technicians, the "rural intelligentsia.”¹ These divisions were political as well as economic, and in the soviet elections the tenant peasants, rural workers, handicraft workers, and so on were given a very much greater representation than the other categories—the aim apparently being to create some kind of democratic dictatorship of the "rural proletariat.”

Within these limitations the soviets seemed to work very well in areas where the regime was stabilized. The structure of representative government was built up from the village soviet, as the smallest unit: above it were the district soviet, the county soviet, and the provincial and central soviets. Each village elected its delegates to the higher soviets clear up to the delegates elected for the Soviet Congress. Suffrage was universal over the age of sixteen, but it was not equal, for reasons mentioned above.

Various committees were established under each of the district soviets. An all-powerful committee, usually elected in a mass meeting shortly after the occupation of a district by the Red Army, and preceded by an intensified propaganda campaign, was the revolutionary committee. It called for elections or re-elections, and closely cooperated with the Communist Party. Under the district soviet, and appointed by it, were committees for education, cooperatives, military training, political training, land, public health, partisan training, revolutionary defense, enlargement of the Red Army, agrarian mutual aid, Red Army land tilling, and others. Such committees were found in every branch organ of the soviets, right up to the Central Government, where policies were coordinated and state decisions made.

Organization did not stop with the government itself. The Communist Party had an extensive membership among farmers and workers, in the towns and in the villages. In addition there were the Young Communists, and under them two organizations which embraced in their membership most of the youth. These were called the Shao-Nien Hsien-Feng Tui and the Erh-T’ung T’uan—the Young Vanguards and the Children’s Brigades. The Communist Party organized the women also into Communist Youth leagues, anti-Japanese societies, nursing schools, weaving schools, and tilling brigades. Adult farmers were organized into the P’in-Min Hui, or Poor People’s Society, and into anti-Japanese societies. Even the Elder Brother Society was brought into soviet life and given open and legal work to do. The Nung-min Tui, or Peasant Guards, and the Yu Chi Tui, or Partisan (Roving) Brigades, were also part of the intensely organized rural political and social structure.

The work of all these organizations and their various committees was coordinated by the Central Soviet Government, the Communist Party, and the Red Army. Here we need not enter into statistical detail to explain the organic connections of these groups, but it can be said in general that they were all skillfully interwoven, and each directly under the guidance of some Communist, though decisions of organization, membership, and work seemed to be carried out in a democratic way by the peasants themselves. The aim of soviet organization obviously was to make every man, woman, and child a member of something, with definite work assigned to him to perform.

Rather typical of the intensity of soviet efforts were the methods used to increase production and utilize great areas of wasteland. I procured copies of many orders, quite astonishing in their scope and common-sense practicality, issued by the land commission to its various branches to guide them in organizing and propagandizing the peasants in the tasks of cultivation. To illustrate: in one of these orders that I picked up in a branch land office, instructions were given concerning spring cultivation, the commission urging its workers to "make widespread propaganda to induce the masses to participate voluntarily, without involving any form of compulsory command.” Detailed advice was offered on how to achieve the four main demands of this planting period, which the previous winter had been recognized by the soviets to be: more extensive utilization of wasteland, and expansion of Red Army land; increased crop yields; greater diversity of crops, with special emphasis on new varieties of melons and vegetables; and expansion of cotton acreage.

Among the devices recommended by this order* to expand labor power, and especially to bring women directly into agricultural production (particularly in districts where the male population had declined as a result of enlistments in the Red Army), the following ingenious instruction suggested the efficiency with which the Reds went about utilizing their available materials:

"To mobilize women, boys, and old men to participate in spring planting and cultivation, each according to his ability to carry on either a principal or an auxiliary task in the labor processes of production. For example, ‘large feet’ [natural feet] and young women should be mobilized to organize production-teaching corps, with tasks varying from land clearance up to the main tasks of agricultural production itself. ‘Small feet’ [bound feet], young boys, and old men must be mobilized to help in weed-pulling, collecting dung, and for other auxiliary tasks.”

But how did the peasants feel about this? The Chinese peasant was supposed to hate organization, discipline, and any social activity beyond his own family. The Reds laughed when that was mentioned. They said that no Chinese peasant disliked organization or social activity if he was working for himself and not the min-t’uan—the landlord or the tax collector. And I had to admit that most of the peasants to whom I talked seemed to support soviets and the Red Army. Many of them were very free in their criticisms and complaints, but when asked whether they preferred it to the old days, the answer was nearly always an emphatic yes. I noticed also that most of them talked about the soviets as wo-menti chengfu—"our government”—and this struck me as something new in rural China.

One thing which suggested that the Reds had their "base” in the mass of the population was that in all the older soviet districts the policing and guarding was done almost entirely by the peasant organizations alone. There were few actual Red Army garrisons in the soviet districts, all the fighting strength of the army being kept at the front. Local defense was shared by the village revolutionary defense corps, peasant guards, and partisans. This fact could explain some of the apparent popularity of the Red Army with the (poor) peasantry, for it was rarely planted down on them as an instrument of oppression and exploitation, like other armies, but was generally at the front, fighting for its food there, and engaged in meeting enemy attacks. On the other hand, the intensive organization of the peasantry created a rear guard and base which freed the Red Army to operate with the extreme mobility for which it was noted.

To understand peasant support for the Communist movement it was necessary to keep in mind the burden borne by the peasantry in the Northwest under the former regime. Now, wherever the Reds went there was no doubt that they radically changed the situation for the tenant farmer, the poor farmer, the middle farmer, and all the "have-not” elements. All forms of taxation were abolished in the new districts for the first year, to give the farmers a breathing space, and in the old districts only a progressive single tax on land was collected, and a small single tax (from 5 to 10 per cent) on business. Second, the Reds gave land to the land-hungry peasants, and began the reclamation of great areas of "wasteland”—mostly the land of absentee or fleeing landlords. Third, they took land and livestock from the wealthy classes and redistributed them among the poor.

Redistribution of land was a fundamental of Red policy. How was it carried out? Later on, for reasons of national political maneuver, there was to be a drastic retreat in the soviet land policy, but when I traveled in the Northwest the land laws in force (promulgated by the Northwest Soviet Government in December, 1935) provided for the confiscation of all landlords’ land and the confiscation of all land of rich peasants that was not cultivated by the owners themselves. However, both the landlord and the rich peasant were allowed as much land as they could till with their own labor. In districts where there was no land scarcity—and there were many such districts in the Northwest—the lands of resident landlords and rich peasants were in practice not confiscated at all, but the wasteland and land of absentee owners was distributed, and sometimes there was a redivision of best-quality land, poor peasants being given better soil, and landlords being allotted the same amount of poorer land.

What was a landlord? According to the Communists’ definition (greatly simplified), any farmer who collected the greater part of his income from land rented out to others, and not from his own labor, was a landlord. By this definition the usurers and t’u-hao* were put in about the same category as landlords, and similarly treated. Usury rates, according to Dr. Stampar, had formerly ranged as high as 60 per cent in the Northwest, or very much higher in times of stress. Although land was very cheap in many parts of Kansu, Shensi, and Ninghsia, cash was unbelievably scarce. In practice it was nearly impossible for a farm worker or tenant with no capital to accumulate enough to buy sufficient land for his family. I met farmers in the Red districts who formerly had never been able to own any land, although rates in some places were as low as two or three dollars (in silver) an acre.*

Classes other than those mentioned above were not subject to confiscatory action, so a big percentage of the farmers stood to benefit immediately by the redistribution. The poorest farmers, tenants, and farm laborers were all provided with land enough for a livelihood. There did not seem to be an attempt to "equalize” land ownership. The primary purpose of the soviet land laws, as explained to me by Wang Kuan-Ian (the twenty-nine-year-old Russian-returned student who was land commissioner for the three Red provinces of the Northwest), was to provide for every person sufficient land to guarantee him and his family a decent livelihood—which was claimed to be the most "urgent demand” of the peasantry.

The land problem—confiscation and redistribution—was greatly simplified in the Northwest by the fact that big estates were formerly owned by officials, tax collectors, and absentee landlords. With the confiscation of these, in many cases the immediate demands of the poor peasantry were satisfied, without much interference with either the resident small landlords or the rich peasants. Thus the Reds not only created the economic base for support in the poor and landless peasantry by giving them farms, but in some cases won the gratitude of middle peasants by abolishing tax exploitation, and in a few instances enlisted the aid of small landlords on the same basis or through the patriotic appeals of the anti-Japanese movement. Several prominent Shensi Communists came from landlord families.

Additional help was given to the poor farmers in the form of loans at very low rates of interest or no interest at all. Usury was entirely abolished, but private lending, at rates fixed at a maximum of 10 per cent annually, was permitted. The ordinary government lending rate was 5 per cent. Several thousand simple agricultural implements made in the Red arsenals, and thousands of pounds of seed grain, were supplied to landless peasants breaking wasteland. A primitive agricultural school had been established, and I was told it was planned to open an animal-husbandry school as soon as an expert in this field, expected from Shanghai, had arrived.

A cooperative movement was being vigorously pushed. These activities extended beyond production and distribution cooperatives, branching out to include cooperation in such novel (for China) forms as the collective use of farm animals and implements—especially in tilling public lands and Red Army lands—and in the organization of labor mutual-aid societies. By the latter device great areas could be quickly planted and harvested collectively, and periods of idleness by individual farmers eliminated. The Reds saw to it that a man earned his new land! In busy periods the system of "Saturday Brigades” was used, when not only all the children’s organizations but every soviet official, Red partisan, Red Guard, women’s organization member, and any Red Army detachment that happened to be nearby, were mobilized to work at least one day a week at farming tasks. Even Mao Tse-tung took part in this work.

Here the Reds were introducing the germs of the drastically revolutionary idea of collective effort—and doing primary education work for some future period when collectivization might become practicable. At the same time, into the dark recesses of peasant mentality there was slowly penetrating the concept of a broader realm of social life. For the organizations created among the peasantry were what the Reds called three-in-one: economic, political, and cultural in their utility.

What cultural progress the Reds had made among these people was by advanced Western standards negligible indeed. But certain outstanding evils common in most parts of China had definitely been eliminated in the score of long-sovietized counties in north Shensi, and a crusade of propaganda was being conducted among inhabitants of newer areas to spread the same elementary reforms there. As an outstanding achievement, opium had been completely eliminated in north Shensi, and in fact I did not see any sign of poppies after I entered the soviet districts. Official corruption was almost unheard-of. Beggary and unemployment did seem to have been, as the Reds claimed, "liquidated.” I did not see a beggar during all my travels in the Red areas. Foot binding and infanticide were criminal offenses, child slavery and prostitution had disappeared, and polyandry and polygamy were prohibited.

The myths of "communized wives” and "nationalization of women” are too patently absurd to be denied, but changes in marriage, divorce, and inheritance were in themselves extremely radical against the background of semifeudal law and practice elsewhere in China. Marriage regulations* included interesting provisions against mother-in-law tyranny, the buying and selling of women as wives and concubines, and the custom of "arranged matches.” Marriage was by mutual consent, the legal age had been moved up sharply to twenty for men and eighteen for women, dowries were prohibited, and any couple registering as man and wife before a county, municipal, or village soviet was given a marriage certificate without cost. Men and women actually cohabiting were considered legally married, whether registered or not—which seemed to rule out "free love.” All children were legitimate under soviet law.

Divorce could also be secured from the registration bureau of the soviet, free of charge, on the "insistent demand” of either party to the marriage contract, but wives of Red Army men were required to have their husbands’ consent before a divorce was granted. Property was divided equally between the divorcees, and both were legally obliged to care for their children, but responsibility for debts was shouldered by the male alone (!), who was also obliged to supply two-thirds of the children’s living expenses.

Education, in theory, was "free and universal,” but parents were obliged to supply their children with food and clothing. In practice, nothing like "free and universal” education had yet been achieved, although old Hsu Teh-li, the commissioner of education, boasted to me that if they were given a few years of peace in the Northwest they would astound the rest of China with the educational progress they would make. Further on I was to learn in more detail what the Communists had done and hoped to do to liquidate the appalling illiteracy of this region, but first it was interesting to know how the government was financing not only the educational program, such as it was, but this whole seemingly simple and yet in its way vastly complex organism which I have called soviet society.

Anatomy of Money

It was imperative for soviet economy to fulfill at least two elementary functions: to feed and equip the Red Army, and to bring immediate relief to the poor peasantry. Failing in either, the soviet base would soon collapse. To guarantee success at these tasks it was necessary for the Reds, even from the earliest days, to begin some kind of economic construction.

Soviet economy in the Northwest was a curious mixture of private capitalism, state capitalism, and primitive socialism. Private enterprise and industry were permitted and encouraged, and private transaction in the land and its products was allowed, with restrictions. At the same time the state owned and exploited enterprises such as oil wells, salt wells, and coal mines, and it traded in cattle, hides, salt, wool, cotton, paper, and other raw materials. But it did not establish a monopoly in these articles, and in all of them private enterprises could, and to some extent did, compete.

A third kind of economy was created by the establishment of cooperatives, in which the government and the masses participated as partners, competing not only with private capitalism, but also with state capitalism! But it was all conducted on a very small and primitive scale. Thus although the fundamental antagonisms in such an arrangement were obvious, and in an economically more highly developed area would have been ruinous, here in the Red regions they somehow supplemented each other.

The Reds defined the cooperative as "an instrument to resist private capitalism and develop a new economic system,” and they listed its five main functions as follows: "to combat the exploitation of the masses by the mer chants; to combat the enemy’s blockade; to develop the national economy of the soviet districts; to raise the economic-political level of the masses; and to prepare the conditions for Socialist construction”—a period in which "the democratic revolution of the Chinese bourgeoisie, under the leadership of the proletariat, may create energetic conditions enabling the transition of this revolution into socialism.”*

The first two of those high-sounding functions in practice meant simply that the cooperative could help the masses organize their own blockade-running corps, as auxiliaries to the blockade-running activity of the government. Trade between Red and White districts was prohibited by Nanking, but by using small mountain roads, and by oiling the palms of border guards, the Reds at times managed to carry on a fairly lively export business. Taking out raw materials from the soviet districts, the transport corps in the service of the state trade bureau or the cooperatives exchanged them for Kuomintang money and needed manufactures.

Consumption, sales, production, and credit cooperatives were organized in the village, district, county, and province. Above them was a central bureau of cooperatives, under the finance commissioner and a department of national economy. These cooperatives were really constructed to encourage the participation of the lowest strata of society. Shares entitling the purchaser to membership were priced as low as fifty cents, or even twenty cents, and organizational duties were so extensive as to bring nearly every shareholder into the economic or political life of the cooperative. While there was no restriction on the number of shares an individual member could buy, each member was entitled to but one vote, regardless of how many shares he held. Cooperatives elected their own managing committees and supervisory committees, with the assistance of the central bureau, which also furnished trained workers and organizers. Each cooperative had departments for business, propaganda, organization, survey, and statistics.

Various prizes were offered for efficient management, and widespread propaganda stimulated and educated the peasants concerning the usefulness of the movement. Financial as well as technical help was furnished by the government, which participated in the enterprises on a profit-sharing basis, like the members. Some $70,000 in non-interest-bearing loans had been invested by the government in the cooperatives of Shensi and Kansu.

Only soviet paper was in use, except in the border counties, where White paper was also accepted. In their soviets in Kiangsi, Anhui, and Szechuan the Reds minted silver dollars, and subsidiary coins in copper, and some also in silver, and much of this metal was transported to the Northwest. But after the decree of November, 1935, when Nanking began the confiscation of all silver in China, and its price soared, the Reds withdrew their silver and held it as reserve for their note issue.

Paper currency in the South, bearing the signature of the "Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Government State Bank,” was excellently printed, on good bank paper. In the Northwest, technical deficiencies resulted in a much cruder issue on poor paper, and sometimes on cloth. Their slogans appeared on all money. Notes issued in Shensi bore such exhortations as: "Stop civil war!” "Unite to resist Japan!” "Long live the Chinese revolution!”

But how could merchants sell articles imported from the White regions for currency which had no exchange value outside the soviet districts? This difficulty was met by the state treasury, which had fixed an exchange rate of soviet $1.21 to Kuomintang $1. Regulations provided that "all goods imported from the White districts, and sold directly to the State Trade Bureau, will be paid for in foreign [Kuomintang] currency; imports of necessities, when not sold directly to the State Trade Bureau, but through cooperatives or by private merchants, shall first be registered with the State Trade Bureau, and proceeds of their sale for soviet currency may be exchanged for White paper; other exchange will be given when its necessity is established.”* In practice this of course meant that all "foreign” imports had to be paid for in "foreign” exchange. But as the value of imported manufactures (meager enough) greatly exceeded the value of soviet exports (which were chiefly raw materials, and were all sold in a depressed market as smuggled goods), there was always a tendency toward a heavy unfavorable balance of payments. In other words, bankruptcy. How was it overcome?

It was not, entirely. As far as I could discover, the problem was met principally by the ingenuity of Lin Tsu-han, the dignified white-haired Commissioner of Finance, whose task was to make Red ends meet. This interesting old custodian of the exchequer had once been treasurer of the Kuomintang, and behind him lay an amazing story.

Son of a Hunanese schoolteacher, Lin Tsu-han was born in 1882, educated in the Classics, attended normal college at Changtehfu, and later studied in Tokyo. While in Japan he met Sun Yat-sen, then exiled from China by the Manchus, and joined his secret revolutionary society, the Tung Meng Hui. When Sun merged his Tung Meng Hui with other revolutionary groups to found the Kuomintang, Lin became a charter member. Later on he met Ch’en Tu-hsiu, was much influenced by him, and in 1922 joined the Communist Party. He continued to work closely with Dr. Sun Yat-sen, however, who admitted Communists to his party, and Lin was in turn treasurer and chairman of the General Affairs Department of the Kuomintang. He was with Sun Yat-sen when he died.

At the beginning of the Nationalist Revolution, Lin was one of the several elders in the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang who held seniority over Chiang Kai-shek. In Canton he was chairman of the Peasant Department and during the Northern Expedition he became political commissar of the Sixth Army, commanded by General Ch’eng Ch’ien—the late chief of staff at Nanking. When Chiang Kai-shek began the extermination of the Communists in 1927, Lin denounced him, fled to Hongkong, and then to Soviet Russia, where he studied for four years in the Communist academy. On his return to China he took passage on the "underground railway” and safely reached Kiangsi. Now a widower, Lin had not seen his grown-up daughter and son since 1927. At the age of forty-five he had abandoned the comfortable assets of his position and staked his destiny with the young Communists.

Into my room in the Foreign Office one morning came this fifty-five-year-old veteran of the Long March, wearing a cheerful smile, a faded uniform, a red-starred cap with a broken peak, and in front of his kindly eyes a pair of spectacles one side of which was trussed up over his ear with a piece of string. The Commissioner of Finance! He sat down on the edge of the k’ang and we began to talk about sources of revenue. The government, I understood, collected practically no taxes; its industrial income must be negligible; then where, I wanted to know, did it get its money?

Lin began to explain: "We say we do not tax the masses, and this is true. But we do heavily tax the exploiting classes, confiscating their surplus cash and goods. Thus all our taxation is direct. This is just the opposite of the Kuomintang practice, under which ultimately the workers and the poor peasants have to carry most of the tax burden. Here we tax less than 10 per cent of the population—the landlords and usurers. We also levy a small tax on a few big merchants, but none on small merchants. Later on we may impose a small progressive tax on the peasantry, but at the present moment all mass taxes have been completely abolished.

"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.

Life Begins at Fifty!

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.

Thus far he wasn’t boasting about results, either with his Latin-hua or his other educational efforts. "The cultural level was so low here it couldn’t be made worse, so naturally we’ve made some progress,” he said. As for the future, he only wanted time. Meanwhile he urged me to concentrate on studying educational methods in the Red Army, where he claimed real revolutionary teaching could be seen.

En Route to the Front

Conversation with Red Peasants

As I traveled beyond Pao An, toward the Kansu border and the front, I stayed in the rude huts of peasants, slept on their mud k’ang (when the luxury of wooden doors was not available), ate their food, and enjoyed their talk. They were all poor people, kind and hospitable. Some of them refused any money from me when they heard I was a "foreign guest.” I remember one old bound-footed peasant woman, with five or six youngsters to feed, who insisted upon killing one of her half-dozen chickens for me.

"We can’t have a foreign devil telling people in the outer world that we Reds don’t know etiquette,” I overheard her say to one of my companions. I am sure she did not mean to be impolite. She simply knew no other words but "foreign devil” to describe the situation.

I was traveling then with Fu Chin-kuei, a young Communist who had been delegated by the Red Foreign Office to accompany me to the front. Like all the Reds in the rear, Fu was delighted at the prospect of a chance to be with the army, and he looked upon me as a godsend. At the same time he regarded me frankly as an imperialist, and viewed my whole trip with open skepticism. He was unfailingly helpful in every way, however, and before the trip was over we were to become very good friends.

One night at Chou Chia, a village of north Shensi near the Kansu border, Fu and I found quarters in a compound where five or six peasant families lived. A farmer of about forty-five, responsible for six of the fifteen little children who scampered back and forth incessantly, agreed to accommodate us, with ready courtesy. He gave us a clean room with new felt on the k’ang, and provided our animals with corn and straw. He sold us a chicken for twenty cents, and some eggs, but for the room would take nothing. He had been to Yenan and he had seen foreigners before, but none of the other men, women, or children had seen one, and they all now came round diffidently to have a peek. One of the young children burst into frightened tears at the astonishing sight.

After dinner a number of the peasants came into our room, offered me tobacco, and began to talk. They wanted to know what we grew in my country, whether we had corn and millet, horses and cows, and whether we used goat dung for fertilizer. (One peasant asked whether we had chickens, and at this our host sniffed contemptuously. "Where there are men, there must be chickens,” he observed.) Were there rich and poor in my country? Was there a Communist Party and a Red Army?

In return for answering their numerous questions, I asked a few of my own. What did they think of the Red Army? They promptly began to complain about the excessive eating habits of the cavalry’s horses. It seemed that when the Red Army University recently moved its cavalry school it had paused in this village for several days, with the result that a big depression had been made in the corn and straw reserves.

"Didn’t they pay you for what they bought?” demanded Fu Chinkuei.

"Yes, yes, they paid all right; that isn’t the question. We haven’t a great amount, you know, only so many tan of corn and millet and straw. We have only enough for ourselves and maybe a little more, and we have the winter ahead of us. Will the cooperatives sell us grain next January? That’s what we wonder. What can we buy with soviet money? We can’t even buy opium!”

This came from a ragged old man who still wore a queue and looked sourly down his wrinkled nose and along the two-foot stem of his bamboo pipe. The younger men grinned when he spoke. Fu admitted they couldn’t buy opium, but he said they could buy in the cooperatives anything else they needed.

"Can we now?” demanded our host. "Can we buy a bowl like this one, eh?” And he picked up the cheap red celluloid bowl (Japanese-made, I suspect) which I had brought with me from Sian. Fu confessed that the cooperatives had no red bowls, but said they had plenty of grain, cloth, paraffin, candles, needles, matches, salt—what did they want?

"I hear you can’t get more than six feet of cloth per man; now, isn’t it so?” demanded one farmer.

Fu wasn’t sure; he thought there was plenty of cloth. He resorted to the anti-Japanese argument. "Life is as bitter for us as for you,” he said. "The Red Army is fighting for you, the farmers and workers, to protect you from the Japanese and the Kuomintang. Suppose you can’t always buy all the cloth you want, and you can’t get opium, it’s a fact you don’t pay taxes, isn’t it? You don’t go in debt to the landlords and lose your house and land, do you? Well, old brother, do you like the White Army better than us, or not?—just answer that question. What does the White Army give you for your crops, eh?”

At this, all complaints appeared to melt away, and opinion was unanimous. "Certainly not, Old Fu, certainly not!” Our host nodded. "If we have to choose, we take the Red Army. A son of mine is in the Red Army, and I sent him there. Does anyone deny that?”

I asked why they preferred the Red Army.

In answer the old man who had sneered at the cooperatives for having no opium gave a heated discourse.

"What happens when the Whites come?” he asked. "They demand such and such amounts of food, and never a word about payment. If we refuse, we are arrested as Communists. If we give it to them we cannot pay the taxes. In any case we cannot pay the taxes! What happens then? They take our animals to sell. Last year, when the Red Army was not here and the Whites returned, they took my two mules and my four pigs. These mules were worth $30 each, and the pigs were full grown, worth $2 each. What did they give me?

"Ai-ya, ai-ya! They said I owed $80 in taxes and rent, and they allowed me $40 for my stock. They demanded $40 more. Could I get it? I had nothing else for them to steal. They wanted me to sell my daughter; it’s a fact! Some of us here had to do that. Those who had no cattle and no daughters went to jail in Pao An, and plenty died from the cold. …”

I asked this old man how much land he had.

"Land?” he croaked. "There is my land,” and he pointed to a hilltop patched with corn and millet and vegetables. It lay just across the stream from our courtyard.

"How much is it worth?”

"Land here isn’t worth anything unless it’s valley land,” he said. "We can buy a mountain like that for $25. What costs money are mules, goats, pigs, chickens, houses, and tools.”

"Well, how much is your farm worth, for example?”

He still refused to count his land worth anything at all. "You can have the house, my animals and tools for $100—with the mountain thrown in,” he finally estimated.

"And on that you had to pay how much in taxes and rent?”

"Forty dollars a year!”

"That was before the Red Army came?”

"Yes. Now we pay no taxes. But who knows about next year? When the Reds leave, the Whites come back. One year Red, the next White. When the Whites come they call us Red bandits. When the Reds come they look for counterrevolutionaries.”

"But there is this difference,” a young farmer interposed. "If our neighbors say we have not helped the Whites that satisfies the Reds. But if we have a hundred names of honest men, but no landlord’s name, we are still Red bandits to the Whites! Isn’t that a fact?”

The old man nodded. He said the last time the White Army was here it had killed a whole family of poor farmers in a village just over the hill. Why? Because the Whites had asked where the Reds were hiding, and this family refused to tell them. "After that we all fled from here, and took our cattle with us. We came back with the Reds.”

"Will you leave next time, if the Whites return?”

"Ai-ya!” exclaimed an elder with long hair and fine teeth. "This time we will leave, certainly! They will kill us!”

He began to tell of the villagers’ crimes. They had joined the Poor People’s League, they had voted for the district soviets, they had given information to the Red Army about the White Army’s movements, two had sons in the Red Army, and another had two daughters in a nursing school. Were these crimes or not? They could be shot for any one of them, I was assured.

But now a barefoot youth in his teens stepped up, engrossed in the discussion and forgetful of the foreign devil. "You call these things crimes, grandfather? These are patriotic acts! Why do we do them? Isn’t it because our Red Army is a poor people’s army and fights for our rights?”

He continued enthusiastically: "Did we have a free school in Chou Chia before? Did we ever get news of the world before the Reds brought us wireless electricity? Who told us what the world is like? You say the cooperative has no cloth, but did we ever even have a cooperative before? And how about your farm, wasn’t there a big mortgage on it to landlord Wang? My sister starved to death three years ago, but haven’t we had plenty to eat since the Reds came? You say it’s bitter, but it isn’t bitter for us young people if we can learn to read! It isn’t bitter for us Young Vanguards when we learn to use a rifle and fight the traitors and Japan!”

This constant reference to Japan and the "traitors” may sound improbable to people who know the ignorance (not indifference) of the mass of the ordinary Chinese peasants concerning Japanese invasions or any other national problems. But I found it constantly recurring, not only in the speech of the Communists but among peasants like these. Red propaganda had made such a wide impression that many of these backward mountaineers believed themselves in imminent danger of being enslaved by the "Japanese dwarfs”—a specimen of which most of them had yet to see outside Red posters and cartoons.

The youth subsided, out of breath. I looked at Fu Chin-kuei and saw a pleased smirk on his face. Several others present called out in approval, and most of them smiled.

The dialogue went on until nearly nine o’clock, long past bedtime. It interested me chiefly because it took place before Fu Chin-kuei, whom the farmers appeared to hold in no awe as a Red "official.” They seemed to look upon him as one of themselves—and indeed, as a peasant’s son, he was.

The last one to leave us was the old man with the queue and most of the complaints. As he went out the door he leaned over and whispered once more to Fu. "Old comrade,” he implored, "is there any opium at Pao An; now, is there any?”

When he had left, Fu turned to me in disgust. "Would you believe it?” he demanded. "That old defile-mother* is chairman of the Poor People’s Society here, and still he wants opium. This village needs more educational work.”

Soviet Industries

A few days northwest of Pao An, on my way to the front, I stopped to visit Wu Ch’i Chen, a soviet "industrial center” of Shensi. Wu Ch’i Chen was remarkable, not for any achievements in industrial science of which Detroit or Manchester need take note, but because it was there at all.

For hundreds of miles around there was only semipastoral country, the people lived in cave houses exactly as their ancestors did millenniums ago, many of the farmers still wore queues braided around their heads, and the horse, the ass, and the camel were the latest thing in communications. Rape oil was used for lighting here, candles were a luxury, electricity was unknown, and foreigners were as rare as Eskimos in Africa.

In this medieval world it was astonishing suddenly to come upon soviet factories, and find machines turning, and a colony of workers busily producing the goods and tools of a Red China.

In Kiangsi the Communists had, despite the lack of a seaport and the handicap of an enemy blockade which cut them off from contact with any big modern industrial base, built up several prosperous industries. They operated China’s richest tungsten mines, for example, annually turning out over one million pounds of this precious ore—secretly selling it to General Ch’en Chi-t’ang’s Kwangtung tungsten monopoly. In the central soviet printing plant at Kian with its eight hundred workers, many books, magazines, and a "national” paper—the Red China Daily News— were published..

In Kiangsi also were weaving plants, textile mills and machine shops. Small industries produced sufficient manufactured goods to supply their simple needs. The Reds claimed to have had a "foreign export trade” of over $12,000,000 in 1933, most of which was carried on through adventurous southern merchants, who made extraordinary profits by running the Kuomintang blockade. The bulk of manufacturing, however, was by handicraft and home industry, the products of which were sold through production cooperatives.

According to Mao Tse-tung, in September, 1933, the soviets had 1,423 "production and distribution” cooperatives in Kiangsi, all owned and run by the people.* Testimony by League of Nations investigators left little doubt that the Reds were succeeding with this type of collective enterprise—even while they were still fighting for their existence. The Kuomintang was attempting to copy the Red system in parts of the South, but results thus far suggested that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to operate such cooperatives under a strictly laissez-faire capitalism.

But in the Northwest I had not expected to find any industry at all. Much greater handicaps faced the Reds here than in the South, for even a small machine industry was almost entirely absent before the soviets were set up. In the whole Northwest, in Shensi, Kansu, Chinghai, Ninghsia and Suiyuan, provinces in area nearly the size of all Europe excluding Russia, the combined machine-industry investment certainly must have been far less than the plant of one big assembly branch of, for instance, the Ford Motor Company.

Sian and Lanchow had a few factories, but for the most part were dependent upon industrial centers farther east. Any major development of the tremendous industrial possibilities of the Northwest could take place only by borrowing technique and machinery from the outside. And if this were true in Sian and Lanchow, the two great cities of the region, the difficulties which confronted the Reds, occupying the even more backward areas of Kansu, Shensi, and Ninghsia, were manifest.

The blockade cut off the Soviet Government from imports of machinery, and from "imports” of technicians. Of the latter, however, the Reds said their supply was ample. Machinery and raw materials were more serious problems. Battles were fought by the Red Army just to get a few lathes, weaving machines, engines, or a little scrap iron. Nearly everything they had in the category of machinery while I was there had been "captured.” During their expedition to Shansi province in 1936, for example, they seized machines, tools, and raw materials, which were carried by mule all the way across the mountains of Shensi, to their fantastic cliff-dwelling factories.

Soviet industries, when I visited Red China, were all handicraft; there was no electric power. They included clothing, uniform, shoe, and paper factories at Pao An and Holienwan (Kansu), rug factories at Tingpien (on the Great Wall), mines at Yung P’ing which produced the cheapest coal* in China, and woolen and cotton-spinning factories in seven hsien—all of which had plans to produce enough goods to stock the 400 cooperatives in Red Shensi and Kansu. The aim of this "industrial program,” according to Mao Tse-min, brother of Mao Tse-tung and Commissioner of People’s Economy, was to make Red China "economically self-sufficient”—strong enough to survive despite the Kuomintang blockade if Nanking refused to accept the Communists’ offers for a united front and a cessation of civil war.

The most important soviet state enterprises were the salt-refining plants at Yen Ch’ih, the salt lakes on the Ninghsia border, along the Great Wall, and the oil wells at Yung P’ing and Yen Ch’ang, which produced gasoline, paraffin, and vaseline, wax, candles, and other by-products on a very small scale. Salt deposits at Yen Ch’ih were the finest in China and yielded beautiful rock-crystal salt in large quantities. Consequently salt was cheaper and more plentiful in the soviet districts than in Kuomintang China, where it was a principal source of government income. After the capture of Yen Ch’ih the Reds won the sympathy of the Mongols north of the Wall by agreeing to turn over part of the production to them, revoking the Kuomintang’s practice of monopolizing the entire output.

North Shensi’s oil wells were the only ones in China, and their output had formerly been sold to an American company which had leases on other reserves in the district. After they had seized Yung P’ing the Reds sank two new wells, and claimed increased production, by about 40 per cent over any previous period, when Yung P’ing and Yen Ch’ang were in "non-bandit” hands. This included increases of "2,000 catties of petrol, 25,000 catties of first-class oil, and 13,500 catties of second-class oil” during a three-month period reported upon. (A few barrels at best.)^†

Efforts were being made to develop cotton growing in areas cleared of poppies, and the Reds had established a spinning school at An Ting, with a hundred women students. The workers were given three hours’ general education daily and five hours’ instruction in spinning and weaving. Upon completion of their course, after three months, students were sent to various districts to open handicraft textile factories. "It is expected that in two years north Shensi will be able to produce its entire supply of cloth.”^‡

But Wu Ch’i Chen had the largest "concentration” of factory workers in the Red districts, and was important also as the location of the Reds’ main arsenal. It commanded an important trade route leading to Kansu, and the ruins of two ancient forts nearby testified to its former strategic importance. The town was built high up on the steep clay banks of a rapid stream, and was made up half of yang-fang, or "foreign houses”—as the Shensi natives still called anything with four sides and a roof—and half of yao-fang, or cave dwellings.

I arrived late at night and I was very tired. The head of the supply commissariat for the front armies had received word of my coming, and he rode out to meet me. He "put me up” at a workers’ Lenin Club—an earthen-floored yao-fang with clean whitewashed walls strung with festoons of colored paper chains encircling a portrait of the immortal Ilyitch.

Hot water, clean towels—stamped with slogans of Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life movement!—and soap soon appeared. They were followed by an ample dinner, with good baked bread. I began to feel better. I unrolled my bedding on the table-tennis court and lighted a cigarette. But man is a difficult animal to satisfy. All this luxury and attention only made me yearn for my favorite beverage.

And then, of all things, this commissar suddenly produced, from heaven knows where, some rich brown coffee and sugar! Wu Ch’i Chen had won my heart.

"Products of our five-year plan!” the commissar laughed.

"Products of your confiscation department, you mean,” I amended.

"They Sing Too Much”

I stayed three days at Wu Ch’i Chen, visiting workers in the factories, "inspecting” their working conditions, attending their theater and their political meetings, reading their wall newspapers and their character books, talking—and getting athletic. I took part in a basketball game on one of Wu Ch’i’s three courts. We made up a scratch team composed of the Foreign Office emissary, Fu Chin-kuei; a young English-speaking college student working in the political department; a Red doctor; a soldier; and myself. The arsenal basketball team accepted our challenge and beat us to a pulp.

The arsenal, like the Red University, was housed in a big series of vaulted rooms built into a mountainside. They were cool, well ventilated, and lighted by a series of shafts sunk at angles in the walls, and had the major advantage of being completely bombproof. Here I found over a hundred workers making hand grenades, trench mortars, gunpowder, pistols, small shells and bullets, and a few farming tools. A repair department was engaged in rehabilitating stacks of broken rifles, machine guns, automatic rifles and submachine guns. But the arsenal’s output was crude work, and most of its products equipped the Red partisans, the regular Red forces being supplied almost entirely with guns and munitions captured from enemy troops.

Ho Hsi-yang, director of the arsenal, took me through its various chambers, introduced his workers, and told me something about them and himself. He was thirty-six, unmarried, and had formerly been a technician in the famous Mukden arsenal, before the Japanese invasion. After September 18, 1931, he went to Shanghai, and there he joined the Communist Party, later on making his way to the Northwest, and into Red areas. Most of the machinists here were also "outside” men. Many had been employed at Hanyang, China’s greatest iron works (Japanese-owned), and a few had worked in Kuomintang arsenals. I met two young Shanghai master mechanics, and an expert fitter, who showed me excellent letters of recommendation from the noted British and American firms of Jardine, Matheson & Co., Anderson Meyer & Co., and the Shanghai Power Company. Another had been foreman in a Shanghai machine shop. There were also machinists from Tientsin, Canton, and Peking, and some had made the Long March with the Red Army.

I learned that of the arsenal’s 114 machinists and apprentices only 20 were married. These had their wives with them in Wu Ch’i Chen, either as factory workers or as party functionaries. In the arsenal trade union, which represented the most highly skilled labor in the Red districts, more than 80 per cent of the members belonged to the Communist Party or to the Communist Youth League.

Besides the arsenal, in Wu Ch’i Chen there were cloth and uniform factories, a shoe factory, a stocking factory, and a pharmacy and drug dispensary, with a doctor in attendance. He was a youth just out of medical training school in Shansi and his young and pretty wife was with him working as a nurse. Both of them had joined the Reds during the Shansi expedition the winter before. Nearby was a hospital, with three army doctors in attendance and filled mostly with wounded soldiers, and there was a radio station, a crude laboratory, a cooperative, and the army supply base.

Except in the arsenal and the uniform factory, most of the workers were young women from age eighteen to twenty-five or thirty. Some of them were married to Red soldiers then at the front; nearly all were Kansu, Shensi, or Shansi women; and all had bobbed hair. "Equal pay for equal labor” was a slogan of the Chinese soviets, and there was supposed to be no wage discrimination against women. Workers appeared to get preferential financial treatment over everybody else in the soviet districts. This included Red commanders, who received no regular salary, but only a small living allowance, which varied according to the weight of the treasury.

Wu Ch’i Chen was headquarters for Miss Liu Ch’un-hsien, aged twenty-nine. A former mill worker from Wusih and Shanghai, she was a student in Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University when she met and married Po Ku (Ch’in Pang-hsien).* From her Moscow days she warmly remembered Rhena Prohm, the improbable red-haired American rebel goddess enshrined in Vincent Sheean’s Personal History. Now Miss Liu was director of the women’s department of the Red trade unions. She said that factory workers were paid $10 to $15 monthly, with board and room furnished by the state. Workers were guaranteed free medical attention (such as it was) and compensation for injuries. Women were given four months of rest with pay during and after pregnancy, and there was a crude "nursery” for workers’ children—but most of them seemed to run wild as soon as they could walk. Mothers could collect part of their "social insurance,” which was provided from a fund created by deducting 10 per cent of the workers’ salaries, to which the government added an equal amount. The government also contributed the equivalent of 2 per cent of the wage output for workers’ education and recreation, funds managed jointly by the trade unions and the workers’ factory committees. There was an eight-hour day and a six-day week. When I visited them the factories were running twenty-four hours a day, with three shifts working.

All this seemed progressive, though perhaps far from a Communistic utopia. That such conditions were actually being realized in the midst of the soviets’ impoverishment was really interesting. How primitively they were being realized was quite another matter. They had clubs, schools, ample dormitories—all these, certainly—but in cave houses with earthen floors, no shower baths, no movies, no electricity. They were furnished food; but meals consisted of millet, vegetables, and sometimes mutton, with no delicacies whatever. They collected their wages and social insurance all right in soviet currency, but the articles they could buy were strictly limited to necessities—and none too much of those.

"Unbearable,” the average American or English worker would say. But I remembered Shanghai factories where little boy and girl slave workers sat or stood at their tasks twelve or thirteen hours a day, and then dropped, in exhausted sleep, to the dirty cotton quilt, their bed, directly beneath their machines. I remembered little girls in silk filatures, and the pale young women in cotton factories sold into jobs as virtual slaves for four or five years, unable to leave the heavily guarded, high-walled premises day or night without special permission. And I remembered that during 1935 more than 29,000 bodies were picked up from the streets and rivers and canals of Shanghai—bodies of the destitute poor, of the starved or drowned babies or children they could not feed.

For these workers in Wu Ch’i Chen, however primitive it might be, here seemed to be a life at least of good health, exercise, clean mountain air, freedom, dignity, and hope, in which there was room for growth. They knew that nobody was making money out of them, I think they felt they were working for themselves and for China, and they said they were revolutionaries! They took very seriously their two hours of daily reading and writing, their political lectures, and their dramatic groups, and they keenly contested for the miserable prizes offered in competitions between groups and individuals in sport, literacy, public health, wall newspapers, and "factory efficiency.” All these things were real to them, things they had never known before, could never possibly know in any other factory of China, and they seemed grateful for the doors of life opened up for them.

It was hard for an old China hand like me to believe, and I was confused about its ultimate significance, but I could not deny the evidence I saw. To present that evidence in detail I would have had to tell a dozen stories of workers to whom I talked; quote from their essays and criticisms in the wall newspapers—written in the childish scrawl of the newly literate—many of which I translated, with the aid of the college student; tell of the political meetings I attended; and of the plays created and dramatized by these workers; and of the many little things that go to make up an "impression.”

As one example, I met an electrical engineer in Wu Ch’i Chen, a man named Chu Tso-chih. He knew English and German very well, he was a power expert, and he had written an engineering textbook widely used in China. He had once been with the Shanghai Power Company, and later with Anderson Meyer & Co. Until recently he had had a practice of $10,000 a year in South China, where he was a consulting engineer and efficiency man, and had given it up and left his family to come up to these wild dark hills of Shensi and offer his services to the Reds for nothing. Incredible! The background of this phenomenon traced to a beloved grandfather, a famous philanthropist of Ningpo, whose deathbed injunction to young Chu had been to "devote his life to raising the cultural standard of the masses.” And Chu had decided the quickest method was the Communist one.

Chu had come into the thing somewhat melodramatically, in the spirit of the martyr and zealot. It was a solemn thing for him; he thought it meant an early death, and he expected everyone else to feel that way. I believe he was a little shocked when he found so much that he considered horseplay going on, and everybody apparently happy. When I asked him how he liked it, he replied gravely that he had but one serious criticism. "These people spend entirely too much time singing!” he complained. "This is no time to be singing!”

With the Red Army

The "Real” Red Army

After two weeks of hacking and walking over the hills and plains of Kansu and Ninghsia I came to Yu Wang Pao, a walled town in southern Ninghsia, which was then the headquarters of the First Front Red Army*—and of its commander-in-chief, P’eng Teh-huai.

Although in a strict military sense all Red warriors might be called "irregulars” (and some people would say "highly irregulars”), the Reds themselves made a sharp distinction between their front armies, independent armies, partisans, and peasant guards. During my first brief travels in Shensi I had not seen any of the "regular” Red Army, for its main forces were then moving in the west, nearly two hundred miles from Pao An. I had planned a trip to the front, but news that Chiang Kai-shek was preparing to launch another major offensive from the south had inclined me toward the better part of valor and an early departure while I could still get past the lines to write my story.

One day I had expressed these doubts to Wu Liang-p’ing, the young soviet official who had acted as interpreter in my long official interviews with Mao Tse-tung. He had been dumfounded. "You have a chance to go to the front, and you wonder whether you should take it? Don’t make such a mistake! Chiang Kai-shek has been trying to destroy us for ten years, and he is not going to succeed now. You can’t go back without seeing the real Red Army!” He had produced evidence to show why I shouldn’t, and it was well that I took his advice.

Perhaps the best way to approach an understanding of these so-called bandits was—statistical. The facts assembled below were furnished from his files by Yang Shang-k’un,* the Russian-speaking, twenty-nine-year-old chairman of the political department of the First Front Red Army. With a few exceptions, this statistical report is confined to matters which I had some opportunity to verify by observation.

First of all, many people supposed the Reds to be a hardbitten lot of outlaws and malcontents. I vaguely had some such notion myself. I soon discovered that the great mass of the Red soldiery was made up of young peasants and workers who believed themselves to be fighting for their homes, their land, and their country.

According to Yang, the average age of the rank and file was nineteen. Although many men with the Reds had fought for seven or eight or even ten years, they were balanced by a vast number of youths still in their middle teens. And even most of the "old Bolsheviks,” veterans of many battles, were only now in their early twenties. The majority had joined the Reds as Young Vanguards, or enlisted at the age of fifteen or sixteen.

In the First Front Army a total of 38 per cent of the men came from either the agrarian working class (including craftsmen, muleteers, apprentices, farm laborers, etc.) or from the industrial working class, while 58 per cent came from the peasantry. Only 4 per cent were from the petty bourgeoisie—sons of merchants, intellectuals, small landlords, and such. In this army over 50 per cent of the troops, including commanders, were members of the Communist Party or the Communist Youth League.

Between 60 and 70 per cent of the soldiers were literate—that is, they could write simple letters and texts, posters, handbills, etc. This was much higher than the average among ordinary troops in the White districts, and it was very much higher than the average in the peasantry of the Northwest. Red soldiers began to study characters in Red texts specially prepared for them, from the day of their enlistment. Prizes were offered (cheap notebooks, pencils, tassels, etc., much valued by the soldiers) for rapid progress and a great effort was made to stimulate the spirit of ambition and competition.

Red soldiers, like their commanders, received no regular salaries. But every enlisted man was entitled to his portion of land, and some income from it. This was tilled in his absence either by his family or by his local soviet. If he was not a native of the soviet districts, however, his remuneration came from a share in the proceeds of crops from "public lands” (confiscated from the "great” landlords), which also helped provision the Red Army. Public lands were tilled by villagers in the local soviets. Such free labor was obligatory, but the majority of the peasants, having benefited in the land redistribution, may have cooperated willingly enough to defend a system that had bettered their livelihood.

The average age of the officers in the Red Army was twenty-four. This included squad leaders and all officers up to army commanders, but despite their youth these men had behind them an average of eight years’ fighting experience. All company commanders or higher were literate, though I met several who had not learned to read and write till after they had entered the Red Army. About a third of the Red commanders were former Kuomintang soldiers. Among Red commanders were many graduates of Whampoa Academy, graduates of the Red Army Academy in Moscow, former officers of Chang Hsueh-liang’s "Northeastern Army,” cadets of the Paoting Military Academy, former Kuominchun (”Christian General” Feng Yu-hsiang’s army) men, and a number of returned students from France, Soviet Russia, Germany, and England. I met only one returned student from America. The Reds did not call themselves ping, or "soldiers”—a word to which much odium was attached in China—but chan-shih, which means "fighters” or "warriors.”

The majority of the soldiers as well as officers of the Red Army were unmarried. Many of them were "divorced”—that is, they had left their wives and families behind them. In several cases I had serious suspicions that the desire for this kind of divorce, in fact, might have had something to do with their joining the army, but this may be a cynical opinion.

My impression, from scores of conversations on the road and at the front, was that most of these "Red fighters” were still virgins. There were few Communist women at the front with the army, and they were nearly all soviet functionaries in their own right or married to soviet officials.

As far as I could see or learn, the Reds treated the peasant women and girls with respect, and the peasantry seemed to have a good opinion of Red Army morality. I heard of no cases of rape or abuse of the peasant women, though I heard from some of the southern soldiers of "sweethearts” left behind them. There was no law against fornication, but any Red Army man who got into difficulties with a girl was expected to marry her. As men far outnumbered women here, the opportunities were few. I saw nothing going on that looked like promiscuity. The Red Army was puritanical in its views on sexual license, and a vigorous daily routine kept the young troops occupied. Very few of the Reds smoked or drank: abstention was one of the "eight disciplines” of the Red Army, and although no special punishment was provided for either vice, I read in the "black column” of wall newspapers several grave criticisms of habitual smokers. Drinking was not forbidden, but drunkenness was unheard of.

Commander P’eng Teh-huai, who had been a Kuomintang general, told me that the extreme youth of the Red Army explained much of its capacity to withstand hardship, and that was quite believable. It also made the problem of feminine companionship less poignant. P’eng himself had not seen his own wife since 1928, when he led an uprising of Kuomintang troops and joined the Reds.

Casualties among Red Army commanders were very high. They customarily went into battle side by side with their men, from regimental commanders down. Joseph Stilwell1 once said to me that one thing alone might explain the fighting power of the Reds against an enemy with vastly superior resources. That was the Red officers’ habit of saying, "Come on, boys!” instead of, "Go on, boys!” During Nanking’s first and second "final annihilation” campaigns, casualties among Red officers were often as high as 50 per cent. But the Red Army could not stand these sacrifices, and later adopted tactics tending somewhat to reduce the risk of life by experienced commanders. Nevertheless, in the Fifth Kiangsi Campaign, Red commanders’ casualties averaged about 23 per cent of the total officer personnel. One could see plenty of evidence of this in the Red districts. Common sights were youths still in their early twenties with an arm or a leg missing, or fingers shot away, or with ugly wounds on the head or anatomy—but still cheerful optimists about their revolution.

Nearly every province in China was represented in the various armies. In this sense the Red Army was probably the only national army in China. It was also the "most widely traveled.” Veteran cadres had crossed parts of eighteen provinces. They probably knew more about Chinese geography than any other army. On their Long March they had found most of the old Chinese maps quite useless, and Red cartographers remapped many hundreds of miles of territory, especially in aboriginal country and on the western frontiers.

In the First Front Army, consisting of about 30,000 men, there was a high percentage of southerners, about one-third coming from Kiangsi, Fukien, Hunan, or Kweichow. Nearly 40 per cent were from the western provinces of Szechuan, Shensi, and Kansu. The First Front Army included some aborigines—Miaos and Lolos—and also attached to it was a newly organized Mohammedan Red Army. In the independent armies the percentage of natives was much higher, averaging three-fourths of the total.

From the highest commander down to the rank and file these men ate and dressed alike. Battalion commanders and higher, however, were entitled to the use of a horse or a mule. I noticed there was even an equal sharing of the delicacies available—expressed, while I was with the Red Army, chiefly in terms of watermelons and plums. There was very little difference in living quarters of commanders and men, and they passed freely back and forth without any formality.

One thing had puzzled me. How did the Reds manage to feed, clothe, and equip their armies? Like many others, I had assumed that they must live entirely on loot. This I discovered to be wrong, as I have already shown, for I saw that they started to construct a self-supplying economy of their own as soon as they occupied a district, and this single fact made it possible for them to hold a base despite enemy blockade. I had also failed to realize on what almost unbelievably modest sums it was possible for a Chinese proletarian army to exist.

The Reds had a very limited output of armaments; their enemy was really their main source of supply. For years the Reds had called the Kuomintang troops their "ammunition carriers,” and they claimed to capture more than 80 per cent of their guns and more than 70 per cent of their ammunition from enemy troops. The regular troops (as distinct from local partisans) I saw were equipped mainly with British, Czechoslovakian, German, and American machine guns, rifles, automatic rifles, Mausers, and mountain cannon, such as had been sold in large quantities to the Nanking Government.*

The only Russian-made rifles I saw with the Reds were the vintage of 1917. These had been captured from the troops of General Ma Hung-kuei, as I heard directly from some of Ma’s ex-soldiers themselves. General Ma, governor of what remained of Kuomintang Ninghsia, had inherited those rifles from General Feng Yu-hsiang, who ruled this region in 1924 and got some arms from Outer Mongolia. Red regulars disdained to use these ancient weapons, which I saw only in the hands of the partisans.

While I was in the soviet districts any contact with a Russian source of arms was physically impossible. The Reds were surrounded by various enemy troops totaling nearly 400,000 men, and the enemy controlled every road to Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang, or the U.S.S.R. I gathered that they would be glad to get some of the manna they were frequently accused of receiving by some miracle from Russia. But it was quite obvious from a glance at the map that, until the Chinese Reds possessed much more territory to the north and to the west, Moscow would be unable to fill any orders, assuming Moscow to be so inclined, which was open to serious doubts.

Second, it was a fact that the Reds had no highly paid and squeezing officials and generals, who in other Chinese armies absorbed most of the military funds. Great frugality was practiced in both the army and the soviets. In effect, about the only burden of the army upon the people was the necessity of feeding and clothing it.

Actually, as I have already said, the entire budget of the Northwest soviets was then only $320,000 a month. Nearly 60 per cent went to the maintenance of the armed forces. Old Lin Tsu-han, the finance commissioner, was apologetic about that, but said that it was "inevitable until the revolution has been consolidated.” The armed forces then numbered (not including peasant auxiliaries) about 40,000 men. This was before the arrival in Kansu of the Second and Fourth Front armies, after which Red territory greatly expanded, and the main Red forces in the Northwest soon approached a total of 90,000 men.

So much for statistics. But to understand why the Chinese Reds had survived all these years it was necessary to get a glimpse of their inner spirit, their morale and fighting will, and their methods of training. And, perhaps still more important, their political and military leadership.

For example, what sort of man was P’eng Teh-huai, for whose head Nanking once offered a reward sufficient to maintain his whole army (if Finance Commissioner Lin’s figures were correct) for more than a month?

Impression of P’eng Teh-huai

The consolidation of command of the First, Second, and Fourth Front Red armies had not yet occurred when I visited the front in August and September. Eight "divisions” of the First Front Red Army were then holding a line from the Great Wall in Ninghsia down to Kuyuan and Ping-liang in Kansu. A vanguard of the First Army Corps was moving southward and westward, to clear a road for Chu Teh, who was leading the Second and Fourth Front armies up from Sikang and Szechuan, breaking through a deep cordon of Nanking troops in southern Kansu. Yu Wang Pao, an ancient Mohammedan walled city in southeast Ninghsia, was headquarters of the First Front Army, and here I found its staff and Commander P’eng Teh-huai.*

P’eng’s career as a "Red bandit” had begun almost a decade before, when he led an uprising in the Kuomintang army of the polygamous warlord-governor, General Ho Chien. P’eng had risen from the ranks and won admission to a military school in Hunan and later on to another school at Nanchang. After graduation he had quickly distinguished himself and secured rapid promotions. By 1927, when he was twenty-eight years old, he was already a brigade commander, and noted throughout the Hunanese army as the "liberal” officer who actually consulted his soldiers’ committee.

P’eng’s influence in the then left-wing Kuomintang, in the army, and in the Hunan military school were serious problems for Ho Chien. In the winter of 1927 General Ho began a drastic purgation of leftists in his troops and launched the notorious Hunan "Peasant Massacre,” in which thousands of radical farmers and workers were killed as "Communists.” He hesitated to act against P’eng, however, because of his widespread popularity. It was a costly delay. In July, 1928, with his own famous First Regiment as nucleus, and joined by parts of the Second and Third regiments and the cadets of the military school, P’eng Teh-huai directed the P’ing Kiang Insurrection, which united with a peasant uprising and established the first Hunan Soviet Government.

Two years later P’eng had accumulated an "iron brotherhood” of about 8,000 followers, and this was the Fifth Red Army Corps. With this force he attacked and captured the great walled city of Changsha, capital of Hunan, and put to rout Ho Chien’s army of 60,000 men—then mostly opium smokers. The Red Army held this city for ten days against counterattacks by combined Nanking-Hunan troops, but was finally forced to evacuate by greatly superior forces, including bombardment by foreign gunboats.

It was shortly afterwards that Chiang Kai-shek began his first "grand annihilation campaign” against the Red bandits. On the Long March of the southern Reds, P’eng Teh-huai was commander of the vanguard First Army Corps. He broke through lines of tens of thousands of enemy troops, captured vital points on the route of advance, and secured communications for the main forces, at last winning his way to Shensi and a refuge in the base of the Northwest soviets. Men in his army told me that he walked most of the 6,000 miles of the Long March, frequently giving his horse to a tired or wounded comrade.

I found P’eng a gay, laughter-loving man, in excellent health except for a delicate stomach—the result of a week’s forced diet of uncooked wheat grains and grass during the Long March, and of semipoisonous food, and of a few days of no food at all. A veteran of scores of battles, he had been wounded but once, and then only superficially.

I stayed in the compound where P’eng had his headquarters in Yu Wang Pao, and so I saw a great deal of him at the front. This headquarters, by the way—then in command of over 30,000 troops—was a simple room furnished with a table and wooden bench, two iron dispatch boxes, maps made by the Red Army, a field telephone, a towel and washbasin, and the k’ang on which his blankets were spread. He had only a couple of uniforms, like the rest of his men, and they bore no insignia of rank. One personal article of attire, of which he was childishly proud, was a vest made from a parachute captured from an enemy airplane shot down during the Long March.

We shared many meals together. He ate sparingly and simply, of the same food his men were given—consisting usually of cabbage, noodles, beans, mutton, and sometimes bread. Ninghsia grew beautiful melons of all kinds, and P’eng was very fond of these. Your pampered investigator, however, found P’eng poor competition in the business of melon eating, but had to bow before the greater talents of one of the doctors on P’eng’s staff, whose capacity had won him the nickname of Han Ch’ih-kua-ti (Han the Melon Eater).

Open, forthright, and undeviating in his manner and speech, quick in his movements, full of laughter and wit, P’eng was physically very active, an excellent rider, and a man of endurance. Perhaps this was partly because he was a nonsmoker and a teetotaler. I was with him one day during maneuvers of the Red Second Division when we had to climb a very steep hill. "Run to the top!” P’eng suddenly called out to his panting staff and me. He bounded off like a rabbit, and beat us all to the summit. Another time, when we were riding, he yelled out a similar challenge. In this way and others he gave the impression of great unspent energy.

P’eng retired late and arose early, unlike Mao Tse-tung, who retired late and also got up late. As far as I could learn, P’eng slept an average of only four or five hours a night. He never seemed rushed, but he was always busy. I remember the morning of the day the First Army Corps received orders to advance 200 li to Haiyuan, in enemy territory: P’eng issued all the commands necessary before breakfast and came down to eat with me; immediately afterwards he started off on the road, as if for an excursion to the countryside, walking along the main street of Yu Wang Pao with his staff, stopping to speak to the Moslem priests who had assembled to bid him good-by. The big army seemed to run itself.

Government airplanes frequently dropped leaflets over Red lines offering from $50,000 to $100,000 for P’eng, dead or alive, but he had only one sentry on duty before his headquarters, and he sauntered down the streets of the city without any bodyguard. While I was there, when thousands of handbills had been dropped offering rewards for himself, Hsu Hai-tung, and Mao Tse-tung, P’eng Teh-huai ordered that they be preserved. They were printed on only one side, and there was a paper shortage in the Red Army. The blank side of these handbills was used later for printing Red Army propaganda.

P’eng was very fond of children, I noticed, and he was often followed by a group of them. Many youngsters, who acted as mess boys, buglers, orderlies, and grooms, were organized as regular units of the Red Army, in the groups called Shao-nien Hsien-feng-tui, or Young Vanguards. I often saw P’eng seated with two or three "little Red devils,” talking seriously to them about politics or their personal troubles. He treated them with great dignity.

One day I went with P’eng and part of his staff to visit a small arsenal near the front, and to inspect the workers’ recreation room, their own Lieh-ning Tang, or Lenin Club. There was a big cartoon, drawn by the workers, on one side of the room. It showed a kimonoed Japanese with his feet on Manchuria, Jehol, and Hopei, and an upraised sword, dripping with blood, poised over the rest of China. The caricatured Japanese had an enormous nose.

"Who is that?” P’eng asked a Young Vanguard whose duty it was to look after the Lenin Club.

"That,” replied the lad, "is a Japanese imperialist!”

"How do you know?” P’eng demanded.

"Just look at his big nose!” was the response.

P’eng laughed and looked at me. "Well,” he said, indicating me, "here is a yang kuei-tzu [foreign devil], is he an imperialist?”

"He is a foreign devil all right,” the Vanguard replied, "but not a Japanese imperialist. He has a big nose, but it isn’t big enough for a Japanese imperialist!”

I pointed out to P’eng that such cartoons might result in serious disillusionment when the Reds actually came into contact with the Japanese and found Japanese noses quite as reasonable as their own. They might not recognize the enemy and might refuse to fight.

"Don’t worry!” said the commander. "We will know a Japanese, whether he has a nose or not.”

Once I went to a performance of the First Army Corps’ Anti-Japanese Theater with P’eng, and we sat down with the other soldiers on the turf below the improvised stage. He seemed to enjoy the plays immensely, and he led a demand for a favorite song. It grew quite chilly, after dark, although it was still late August. I wrapped my padded coat closer to me. In the middle of the performance I suddenly noticed with surprise that P’eng had removed his own coat. Then I saw that he had put it around a little bugler sitting next to him.

I understood P’eng’s affection for these "little devils” later on, when he yielded to persuasion one night and told me something of his childhood. The trials of his own youth might amaze an Occidental ear, but they were typical enough of background events which explained many of the young Chinese who, like him, "saw Red.”

Why Is a Red?

P’eng Teh-huai was born in a village of Hsiang T’an hsien, near the native place of Mao Tse-tung. It was a wealthy farming community beside the blue-flowing Hsiang River, about 90 li from Changsha. Hsiang T’an was one of the prettiest parts of Hunan—a green countryside quilted with deep rice lands and thickets of tall bamboo. More than a million people lived in this one county. Though the soil of Hsiang T’an was rich, the majority of the peasants were miserably poor, illiterate, and "little better than serfs,” according to P’eng. Landlords were all-powerful there, owned the finest lands, and charged exorbitant rents and taxes, for they were in many cases also the officials—the gentry.

Several great landlords in Hsiang T’an had incomes of from forty to fifty thousand tan* of rice annually, and some of the wealthiest grain merchants in the province lived there.

P’eng’s own family were rich peasants. His mother died when he was six, his father remarried, and this second wife hated P’eng because he was a constant reminder of her predecessor. She sent him to an old-style Chinese school, where the teacher frequently beat him. P’eng was apparently quite capable of looking after his own interests: in the midst of one of these beatings he picked up a stool, scored a hit, and fled. The teacher brought a lawsuit against him in the local courts, and his stepmother denounced him.

His father was rather indifferent in this quarrel, but to keep peace with his wife he sent the young stool tosser off to live with an aunt, whom he liked. She put the boy into a so-called modern school. There he met a "radical” teacher, who did not believe in filial worship. One day, when Teh-huai was playing in the park, this teacher came along and sat down to talk with him. P’eng asked whether he worshiped his parents, and whether he thought P’eng should worship his. As for himself, said the teacher, he did not believe in such nonsense. Children were brought into the world while their parents were playing, just as Teh-huai had been playing in this park.

"I liked this notion,” said P’eng, "and I mentioned it to my aunt when I went home. She was horrified, and the very next day had me withdrawn from the evil ‘foreign influence.’” Hearing something of the young man’s objection to filial worship, his grandmother began to pray regularly "on the first and fifteenth of each month, and at festivals, or when it stormed,” for heaven to strike this unfilial child and destroy him.

In P’eng’s own words:

"My grandmother regarded us all as her slaves. She was a heavy smoker of opium. I hated the smell of it, and one night, when I could stand it no longer, I got up and kicked a pan of her opium from the stove. She was furious. She called a meeting of the whole clan and formally demanded my death by drowning, because I was an unfilial child. She made a long list of charges against me.

"The clan was about ready to carry out her demand. My stepmother agreed that I should die, and my father said that since it was the family will, he would not object. Then an uncle, my own mother’s brother, stepped forward and bitterly attacked my parents for their failure to educate me properly. He said that it was their fault and that in this case no child could be held responsible.

"My life was spared, but I had to leave home. I was nine years old, it was cold October, and I owned nothing but my coat and trousers. My stepmother tried to take those from me, but I proved that they did not belong to her, but had been given to me by my own mother.”

Such was the beginning of P’eng Teh-huai’s life in the great world. He got a job first as a cowherd, and next as a coal miner, where he pulled a bellows for fourteen hours a day. Weary of these long hours, he fled from the mine to become a shoemaker’s apprentice, working only twelve hours a day. He received no salary, and after eight months he ran away again, this time to work in a sodium mine. The mine closed; he was forced to seek work once more. Still owning nothing but the rags on his back, he became a dike-builder. Here he had a "good job,” actually received wages, and in two years had saved 1,500 cash—about $12! But he "lost everything” when a change of warlords rendered the currency worthless. Very depressed, he decided to return to his native district.

Now sixteen, P’eng went to call on a rich uncle, the uncle who had saved his life. This man’s own son had just died; he had always liked Teh-huai, and he welcomed him and offered him a home. Here P’eng fell in love with his own cousin, and the uncle was favorably disposed to a betrothal. They studied under a Chinese tutor, played together, and planned their future.

These plans were interrupted by P’eng’s irrepressible impetuosity. Next year there was a big rice famine in Hunan, and thousands of peasants were destitute. P’eng’s uncle helped many, but the biggest stores of rice were held by a great landlord-merchant who profiteered fabulously. One day a crowd of over two hundred peasants gathered at his house, demanding that the merchant sell them rice without profit—traditionally expected of a virtuous man in time of famine. The rich man refused to discuss it, had the people driven away, and barred his gates.

P’eng went on: "I was passing his place, and paused to watch the demonstration. I saw that many of the men were half starved, and I knew this man had over 10,000 tan of rice in his bins, and that he had refused to help the starving at all. I became infuriated, and led the peasants to attack and invade his house. They carted off most of his stores. Thinking of it afterwards, I did not know exactly why I had done that. I only knew that he should have sold rice to the poor, and that it was right for them to take it from him if he did not.”

P’eng had to flee once more for his life, and this time he was old enough to join the army. His career as a soldier began. Not long afterwards he was to become a revolutionary.

At eighteen he was made a platoon commander and was involved in a plot to overthrow the ruling governor—Tuchun Hu. P’eng had been deeply influenced by a student leader in his army, whom the tuchun had killed. Entrusted with the task of assassinating Hu, he entered Changsha, waited for him to pass down the street one day, and threw a bomb at him. The bomb failed to explode. P’eng escaped.

Not long afterwards Dr. Sun Yat-sen became Generalissimo of the allied armies of the Southwest, and succeeded in defeating Tuchun Hu, but was subsequently driven out of Hunan again by the northern militarists. P’eng fled with Sun’s army. Sent upon a mission of espionage by Ch’eng Ch’ien, one of Sun’s commanders, P’eng returned to Changsha, was betrayed and arrested. Chang Ching-yao was then in power in Hunan. P’eng described his experiences:

"I was tortured every day for about an hour in many different ways. One night my feet were bound and my hands were tied behind my back. I was hung from the roof with a rope around my wrists. Then big stones were piled on my back, while the jailers stood around kicking me and demanding that I confess—for they still had no evidence against me. Many times I fainted.

"This torture went on for about a month. I used to think after every torture that next time I would confess, as I could not stand it. But each time I decided that I would not give up till the next day. In the end they got nothing from me, and to my surprise I was finally released. One of the deep satisfactions of my life came some years later when we [the Red Army] captured Changsha and destroyed that old torture chamber. We released several hundred political prisoners there—many of them half-dead from beatings, fiendish treatment, and starvation.”

When P’eng regained his freedom he went back to his uncle’s home to visit his cousin. He intended to marry her, as he still considered himself betrothed. He found that she had died. Re-enlisting in the army, he soon afterwards received his first commission and was sent to the Hunan military school. Following his graduation he became a battalion commander in the Second Division, under Lu Ti-p’ing, and was assigned to duty in his native district.

"My uncle died and, hearing of it, I arranged to return to attend the funeral. On the way there I had to pass my childhood home. My old grandmother was alive, now past eighty, and still very active. Learning that I was returning, she walked down the road ten li to meet me, and begged my forgiveness for the past. She was very humble and very respectful. I was quite surprised by this change. What could be the cause of it? Then I reflected that it was not due to any change in her personal feeling, but to my rise in the world from a social outcast to an army officer with a salary of $200 a month. I gave the old lady a little money, and she sang my praises in the family as a model ‘filial son’!”

I asked P’eng what reading had influenced him. He said that when as a youth he read Ssu-ma Kuang’s* Sze Chih Chien (History of Governing), he began for the first time to have some serious thoughts concerning the responsibility of a soldier to society. "The battles described by Ssu-ma Kuang were completely pointless, and only caused suffering to the people—very much like those that were being fought between the militarists in China in my own time. What could we do to give purpose to our struggles, and bring about a permanent change?”

P’eng read Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and K’ang Yu-wei and many of the writers who had influenced Mao Tse-tung. For a time he had some interest in anarchism. In Ch’en Tu-hsiu’s New Youth he learned of socialism, and from that point he began to study Marxism. The Nationalist Revolution was forming, he was a regimental commander, and he felt the necessity of a political doctrine to give morale to his troops. Sun Yat-sen’s San Min Chu I (Three Principles of the People) "was an improvement over Liang Ch’i-ch’ao,” but P’eng felt that it was "too vague and confused,” although he was by then a member of the Kuomintang. Bukharin’s ABC of Communism seemed to him "for the first time a book that presented a practicable and reasonable form of society and government.”

By 1926 P’eng had read the Communist Manifesto, an outline of Capital, A New Conception of Society (by a leading Chinese Communist), Kautsky’s Class Struggle, and many articles and pamphlets giving a materialist interpretation of the Chinese Revolution. "Formerly,” said P’eng, "I had been merely dissatisfied with society, but saw little chance of making any fundamental improvement. After reading the Communist Manifesto I dropped my pessimism and began working with a new conviction that society could be changed.”

Although P’eng did not join the Communist Party until 1927, he enlisted Communist youths in his troops, began Marxist courses of political training, and organized soldiers’ committees. In 1926 he married a middle-school girl who was a member of the Socialist Youth, but during the revolution they became separated. P’eng had not seen her since 1928. It was in July of that year that P’eng revolted, seized P’ing Kiang, and began his long career as a rebel, or bandit—as you prefer.

He had been pacing back and forth, grinning and joking as he told me these incidents of his youth and struggle, carrying in his hand a Mongolian horsehair fly swatter, which he brandished absent-mindedly for emphasis. A messenger now brought in a sheaf of radiograms, and he suddenly looked the serious commander again as he turned to read them.

"Well, that’s about all, anyway,” he concluded. "That explains something about how a man becomes a ‘Red bandit’!”

Tactics of Partisan Warfare

We sat in the house of a former magistrate, in Yu Wang Pao, in a two-story edifice with a balustraded porch—a porch from which you could look out toward Mongolia, across the plains of Ninghsia.

On the high, stout walls of Yu Wang Pao a squad of Red buglers was practicing, and from a corner of the fortlike city flew a big scarlet flag, its yellow hammer and sickle cracking out in the breeze now and then as though a fist were behind it. We could look down on one side to a clean courtyard, where Mohammedan women were hulling rice and baking. Washing hung from a line on another side. In a distant square some Red soldiers were practicing wall scaling, broad jumping, and grenade throwing.

Although P’eng Teh-huai and Mao Tse-tung were t’ung-hsien-ti, or natives of the same county, they had not met until the Red Army was formed. P’eng spoke with a pronounced southern accent, and machine-gun rapidity. I could understand him clearly only when he spoke slowly and simply, which he was generally too impatient to do. For this interview Huang Hua, whose English was excellent, acted as my interpreter.

"The main reason for partisan warfare in China,” P’eng began, "is economic bankruptcy, and especially rural bankruptcy. Imperialism, landlordism, and militaristic wars have combined to destroy the basis of rural economy, and it cannot be restored without eliminating its chief enemies. Enormous taxes, together with Japanese invasion, both military and economic, have accelerated the rate of this peasant bankruptcy, aided by the landlords. The gentry’s exploitation of power in the villages makes life difficult for the majority of the peasants. There is widespread unemployment in the villages. There is a readiness among the poor classes to fight for a change.

"Second, partisan warfare has developed because of the backwardness of the hinterland. Lack of communications, roads, railways, and bridges makes it possible for the people to arm and organize.

"Third, although the strategic centers of China are all more or less dominated by the imperialists, this control is uneven and not unified. Between the imperialist spheres of influence there are wide gaps, and in these partisan warfare can quickly develop.

"Fourth, the Great Revolution of 1925–27 fixed the revolutionary idea in the minds of many, and even after the counterrevolution in 1927 and the killings in the cities, many revolutionaries refused to submit, and sought a method of opposition. Owing to the special system of joint imperialist-comprador* control in the big cities, and the lack of an armed force in the beginning, it was impossible to find a base in urban areas, so many revolutionary workers, intellectuals, and peasants returned to the rural districts to lead the peasant insurrections. Intolerable social and economic conditions had created the demand for revolution: it was only necessary to give leadership, form, and objectives to this rural mass movement.

"All these factors contributed to the growth and success of revolutionary partisan warfare. They are, of course, quite simply stated, and do not go into the deeper problems behind them.

"Besides these reasons, partisan warfare has succeeded and partisan detachments have developed their invincibility because of the identity of the masses with the fighting forces. Red partisans are not only warriors; they are at the same time political propagandists and organizers. Wherever they go they carry the message of the revolution, patiently explain to the mass of the peasantry the real missions of the Red Army, and make them understand that only through revolution can their needs be realized, and why the Communist Party is the only party which can lead them.

"But as regards the specific tasks of partisan warfare, you have asked why in some places it developed very rapidly and became a strong political power, while in others it was easily and quickly suppressed. This is an interesting question.

"First of all, partisan warfare in China can only succeed under the revolutionary leadership of the Communist Party, because only the Communist Party wants to and can satisfy the demands of the peasantry, understands the necessity for deep, broad, constant political and organizational work among the peasantry, and can fulfill its promises.

"Second, the active field leadership of partisan units must be determined, fearless, and courageous. Without these qualities in the leadership, partisan warfare not only cannot grow, but it must wither and die under the reactionary offensive.

"Because the masses are interested only in the practical solution of their problems of livelihood, it is possible to develop partisan warfare only by the immediate satisfaction of their most urgent demands. This means that the exploiting class must be promptly disarmed.

"Partisans can never remain stationary; to do so is to invite destruction. They must constantly expand, building around themselves ever new peripheral and protective groups. Political training must accompany every phase of the struggle, and local leaders must be developed from every new group added to the revolution. Leaders from the outside can be introduced to a limited extent, but no lasting success can be achieved if the movement fails to inspire, awaken, and constantly create new leaders from the local mass.”

One of the chief reasons why Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang began to respect the Reds (the enemy he had been sent to destroy) was that he had been impressed with their skill at this type of combat, and had come to believe they could be utilized in fighting Japan. After he had reached a kind of truce with them he invited Red instructors to teach in the new officers’ training school opened for his Manchurian army in Shensi, and there the Communist influence rapidly developed. Marshal Chang and most of his officers, bitterly anti-Japanese, had become convinced that it was superior mobility and maneuvering ability on which China would ultimately have to depend in a war with Japan. They were anxious to know all that the Reds had learned about the tactics and strategy of maneuvering warfare during ten years of fighting experience.

Was it possible, I had asked P’eng Teh-huai, to summarize the "principles of Red partisan warfare”? He had promised to do so and had written down a few notes from which he now read. For a fuller discussion of the subject he referred me to a small book written by Mao Tse-tung and published in the soviet districts; but this I was unable to get.*

"There are certain rules of tactics which must be followed,” P’eng explained, "if the newly developing partisan army is to be successful. These we have learned from our long experience, and though they are variable according to conditions, I believe that departures from them generally lead to extinction. The main principles can be summarized under ten points, like this:

"First, partisans must not fight any losing battles. Unless there are strong indications of success, they should refuse any engagement.

"Second, surprise is the main offensive tactic of the well-led partisan group. Static warfare must be avoided. The partisan brigade has no auxiliary force, no rear, no line of supplies and communications except that of the enemy. In a lengthy positional war the enemy has every advantage, and in general the chances of partisan success diminish in proportion to the duration of the battle.

"Third, a careful and detailed plan of attack, and especially of retreat, must be worked out before any engagement is offered or accepted. Any attack undertaken without full knowledge of the particular situation opens the partisans to outmaneuver by the enemy. Superior maneuvering ability is a great advantage of the partisans, and errors in its manipulation mean extinction.

"Fourth, in the development of partisan warfare the greatest attention must be paid to the min-t’uan* the first, last, and most determined line of resistance of the landlords and gentry. The min-t’uan must be destroyed militarily, but must, if at all possible, be won over politically on the side of the masses. Unless the min-t’uan in a district is disarmed it is impossible to mobilize the masses.

"Fifth, in a regular engagement with enemy troops the partisans must exceed the enemy in numbers. But if the enemy’s regular troops are moving, resting, or poorly guarded, a swift, determined, surprise flank attack on an organically vital spot of the enemy’s line can be made by a much smaller group. Many a Red ‘short attack’ has been carried out with only a few hundred men against an enemy of thousands. Surprise, speed, courage, unwavering decision, flawlessly planned maneuver, and the selection of the most vulnerable and vital spot in the enemy’s ‘anatomy’ are absolutely essential to the complete victory of this kind of attack. Only a highly experienced partisan army can succeed at it.

"Sixth, in actual combat the partisan line must have the greatest elasticity. Once it becomes obvious that their calculation of enemy strength or preparedness or fighting power is in error, the partisans should be able to disengage and withdraw with the same speed as they began the attack. Reliable cadres must be developed in every unit, fully capable of replacing any commander eliminated in battle. Resourcefulness of subalterns must be greatly relied upon in partisan warfare.

"Seventh, the tactics of distraction, decoy, diversion, ambush, feint, and irritation must be mastered. In Chinese these tactics are called ‘the principle of pretending to attack the east while attacking the west.’

"Eighth, partisans must avoid engagements with the main force of the enemy, concentrating on the weakest link, or the most vital.

"Ninth, every precaution must be taken to prevent the enemy from locating the partisans’ main forces. For this reason, partisans should avoid concentrating in one place when the enemy is advancing, and should change their position frequently—two or three times in one day or night, just before an attack. Secrecy in the movements of the partisans is absolutely essential to success. Well-worked-out plans for dispersal after an attack are as important as plans for the actual concentration to meet an enemy advance.

"Tenth, besides superior mobility, the partisans, being inseparable from the local masses, have the advantage of superior intelligence, and the greatest use must be made of this. Ideally, every peasant should be on the partisans’ intelligence staff, so that it is impossible for the enemy to take a step without the partisans knowing of it. Great care should be taken to protect the channels of information about the enemy, and several auxiliary lines of intelligence should always be established.”

These were the main principles, according to Commander P’eng, on which the Red Army had built up its strength, and it was necessary to employ them in every enlargement of Red territory. He finished up:

"So you see that successful partisan warfare demands these fundamentals: fearlessness, swiftness, intelligent planning, mobility, secrecy, and suddenness and determination in action. Lacking any of these, it is difficult for partisans to win victories. If in the beginning of a battle they lack quick decision, the battle will lengthen. They must be swift, otherwise the enemy will be reinforced. They must be mobile and elastic, otherwise they will lose their advantages of maneuver.

"Finally, it is absolutely necessary for the partisans to win the support and participation of the peasant masses. If there is no movement of the armed peasantry, there is in fact no partisan base, and the army cannot exist. Only by implanting itself deeply in the hearts of the people, only by fulfilling the demands of the masses, only by consolidating a base in the peasant soviets, and only by sheltering in the shadow of the masses, can partisan warfare bring revolutionary victory.”

P’eng had been pacing up and down the balcony, delivering one of his points each time he returned to the table where I sat writing. Now he suddenly stopped and stood thoughtfully reflecting.

"But nothing, absolutely nothing,” he said, "is more important than this—that the Red Army is a people’s army, and has grown because the people helped us.

"I remember the winter of 1928, when my forces in Hunan had dwindled to a little over two thousand men, and we were encircled. The Kuomintang troops burned down all the houses in a surrounding area of about 300 li, seized all the food there, and then blockaded us. We had no cloth, we used bark to make short tunics, and we cut up the legs of our trousers to make shoes. Our hair grew long, we had no quarters, no lights, no salt. We were sick and half-starved. The peasants were no better off, and we would not touch what little they had.

"But the peasants encouraged us. They dug up from the ground the grain which they had hidden from the White troops and gave it to us, and they ate potatoes and wild roots. They hated the Whites for burning their homes and stealing their food. Even before we arrived they had fought the landlords and tax collectors, so they welcomed us. Many joined us, and nearly all helped us in some way. They wanted us to win! And because of that we fought on and broke through the blockade.”

He turned to me and ended simply. "Tactics are important, but we could not exist if the majority of the people did not support us. We are nothing but the fist of the people beating their oppressors!”

Life of the Red Warrior

The Chinese soldier had had a poor reputation abroad. Many people thought his gun was chiefly ornamental, that he did his only fighting with an opium pipe, that any rifle shots exchanged were by mutual agreement and in the air, that battles were fought with silver and the soldier was paid in opium. Some of that had been true enough of most armies in the past, but the well-equipped first-class Chinese soldier (White as well as Red) was now no longer a vaudeville joke.

There were still plenty of comic-opera armies in China, but in recent years there had arisen a new type of Chinese warrior, who would soon supplant the old. Civil war, especially the class war between Reds and Whites, had been very costly, and often heavily and brutally fought, with no quarter or umbrella truces given by either side. Those ten years of strife in China had, if nothing else, created the nucleus of a fighting force and military brains experienced in the use of modern technique and tactics, which would before long build a powerful army that could no longer be dismissed as a tin-soldier affair.

The trouble had never been with the human material itself. The Chinese could fight as well as any people, as I had learned during the Shanghai War in 1932. Technical limitations disregarded, the trouble had been the inability of the command to train that human material at its disposal and give to it military discipline, political morale, and the will to victory. Therein lay the superiority of the Red Army—it was so often the only side in a battle that believed it was fighting for something. It was the Reds’ greater success at the educative tasks in the building of an army that enabled them to withstand the tremendous technical and numerical superiority of their enemy.

For sheer dogged endurance, and ability to stand hardship without complaint, the Chinese peasants, who composed the greater part of the Red Army, were unbeatable. This was shown by the Long March, in which the Reds took a terrific pummeling from all sides, slept in the open and lived on unhulled wheat for many days, but still held together and emerged as a potent military force. It was also demonstrated by the rigors and impositions of daily life in the Red Army.

The Red troops I saw in Ninghsia and Kansu were quartered in caves, former stables of wealthy landlords, hastily erected barracks of clay and wood, and in compounds and houses abandoned by former officials or garrison troops. They slept on hard k’ang, without mattresses and with only a cotton blanket each—yet these rooms were fairly neat, clean and orderly, although their floors, walls, and ceilings were of whitewashed clay. They seldom had tables or desks, and piles of bricks or rocks served as chairs, most of the furniture having been destroyed or carted off by the enemy before his retreat.

Every company had its own cook and commissariat. The Reds’ diet was extremely simple: millet and cabbage, with a little mutton and sometimes pork, were an average meal, but they seemed to thrive on it. Coffee, tea, cake, sweets of any kind, or fresh vegetables were almost unknown, but also unmissed. Coffee tins were more valued than their contents; nobody liked coffee, it tasted like medicine, but a good tin could be made into a serviceable canteen. Hot water was almost the only beverage consumed, and the drinking of cold water (very often contaminated) was specifically forbidden.

The Red soldier, when not fighting, had a full and busy day. In the Northwest, as in the South, he had long periods of military inactivity, for when a new district was occupied, the Red Army settled down for a month or two to establish soviets and otherwise "consolidate,” and only put a small force on outpost duty. The enemy was nearly always on the defensive, except when one of the periodic big annihilation drives was launched.

When not in the trenches or on outpost duty, the Red soldier observed a six-day week. He arose at five and retired to a "Taps” sounded at nine. The schedule of the day included: an hour’s exercise immediately after rising; breakfast; two hours of military drill; two hours of political lectures and discussion; lunch; an hour of rest; two hours of character study; two hours of games and sports; dinner; songs and group meetings; and "Taps.”

Keen competition was encouraged in broad jumping, high jumping, running, wall scaling, rope climbing, rope skipping, grenade throwing, and marksmanship. Watching the leaps of the Reds over walls, bars, and ropes, you could easily understand why the Chinese press had nicknamed them "human monkeys,” for their swift movement and agile feats of mountain climbing. Pennants were given in group competitions, from the squad up to the regiment, in sports, military drill, political knowledge, literacy, and public health. I saw these banners displayed in the Lenin clubs of units that had won such distinctions.

There was a Lenin Club for every company and for every regiment, and here all social and "cultural” life had its center. The regimental Lenin rooms were the best in the unit’s quarters, but that said little; such as I saw were always crude, makeshift affairs, and what interest they aroused derived from the human activity in them rather than from their furnishings. They all had pictures of Marx and Lenin, drawn by company or regimental talent. Like some of the Chinese pictures of Christ, they generally bore a distinctly Oriental appearance, with eyes like stitches, and either a bulbous forehead like an image of Confucius, or no forehead at all. Marx, whose Chinese moniker is Ma K’e-ssu, was nicknamed by the Red soldiers Ma Ta Hu-tzu, or Ma the Big Beard. They seemed to have an affectionate awe for him. That was especially true of the Mohammedans, who appeared to be the only people in China capable of growing luxuriant beards as well as appreciating them.

Another feature of the Lenin Club was a corner devoted to the study of military tactics, in models of clay. Miniature towns, mountains, forts, rivers, lakes, and bridges were constructed in these corners, and toy armies battled back and forth, while the class studied some tactical problem. Thus in some places you saw the Sino-Japanese battles of Shanghai re-fought, in another the battles on the Great Wall, but most of the models were devoted to past battles between the Reds and the Kuomintang. They were also used to explain the geographical features of the district in which the army was stationed, to dramatize the tactics of a hypothetical campaign, or merely to animate the geography and political lessons which Red soldiers got as part of their military training. In a hospital company’s Lenin room I saw displays of clay models of various parts of the anatomy, showing the effects of certain diseases, illustrating body hygiene, and so on.

Another corner of the club was devoted to character study, and here one saw the notebook of each warrior hanging on its appointed peg on the wall. There were three character-study groups: those who knew fewer than 100 characters; those who knew from 100 to 300; and those who could read and write more than 300 characters. The Reds had printed their own textbooks (using political propaganda as materials of study) for each of these groups. The political department of each company, battalion, regiment, and army was responsible for mass education, as well as political training. Only about 20 per cent of the First Army Corps, I was told, was still hsia-tzu, or "blind men,” as the Chinese call total illiterates.

"The principles of the Lenin Club,” it was explained to me by Hsiao Hua,* the twenty-two-year-old political director of the Second Division, "are quite simple. All the life and activity in them must be connected with the daily work and development of the men. It must be done by the men themselves. It must be simple and easy to understand. It must combine recreational value with practical education about the immediate tasks of the army.”

The "library” of the average Lenin Club consisted chiefly of standard Chinese Red Army textbooks and lectures, a history of the Russian Revolution, miscellaneous magazines which might have been smuggled in or captured from the White areas, and files of Chinese soviet publications like the Red China Daily News, Party Work, Struggle, and others.

There was also a wall newspaper in every club, and a committee of soldiers was responsible for keeping it up to date. The wall newspaper gave considerable insight into the soldier’s problems and a measure of his development. I took down full notes, in translation, of many of these papers. A typical one was in the Lenin Club, Second Company, Third Regiment, Second Division, in Yu Wang Pao, for September 1. Its contents included daily and weekly notices of the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League; a couple of columns of crude contributions by the newly literate, mostly revolutionary exhortations and slogans; radio bulletins of Red Army victories in south Kansu; new songs to be learned; political news from the White areas; and, perhaps most interesting of all, two sections called the red and black columns, devoted respectively to praise and criticism.

"Praise” consisted of tributes to the courage, bravery, unselfishness, diligence, or other virtues of individuals or groups. In the black column comrades lashed into each other and their officers (by name) for such things as failure to keep a rifle clean, slackness in study, losing a hand grenade or bayonet, smoking on duty, "political backwardness,” "individualism,” "reactionary habits,” etc. On one black column I saw a cook criticized for his "half-done” millet; in another a cook denounced a man for "always complaining” about his productions.

Many people had been amused to hear about the Reds’ passion for the English game of table tennis. It was bizarre, somehow, but every Lenin Club had in its center a big ping-pong table, usually serving double duty as dining table. The Lenin clubs were turned into mess halls at chow time, but there were always four or five "bandits,” armed with bats, balls, and the net, urging the comrades to hurry it up; they wanted to get on with their game. Each company boasted a ping-pong champion, and I was no match for them.

Some of the Lenin clubs had record players confiscated from the homes of former officials or White officers. One night I was entertained with a concert on a captured American Victrola, described as a "gift” from General Kao Kuei-tzu, who was then in command of a Kuomintang army fighting the Reds on the Shensi-Suiyuan border. General Kao’s records were all Chinese, with two exceptions, both French. One had on it "The Marseillaise” and "Tipperary.” The other was a French comic song. Both brought on storms of laughter from the astonished listeners, who understood not a word.

The Reds had many games of their own, and were constantly inventing new ones. One, called Shih-tzu P’ai, or "Know Characters Cards,” was a contest that helped illiterates learn their basic hieroglyphics. Another game was somewhat like poker, but the high cards were marked "Down with Japanese Imperialism,” "Down with the Landlords,” "Long Live the Revolution,” and "Long Live the Soviets.” Minor cards carried slogans that changed according to the political and military objectives. There were many group games. The Communist Youth League members were responsible for the programs of the Lenin clubs, and likewise led mass singing every day. Many of the songs were sung to Christian hymn tunes.

All these activities kept the mass of the soldiers fairly busy and fairly healthy. There were no camp followers or prostitutes with the Red troops I saw. Opium smoking was prohibited. I saw no opium or opium pipes with the Reds on the road, nor in any barracks I visited. Cigarette smoking was not forbidden except while on duty, but there was propaganda against it, and few Red soldiers seemed to smoke.

Such was the organized life of the regular Red soldiers behind the front. Not so very exciting, perhaps, but rather different from the propagandists’ tales, from which one might have gathered that tha Reds’ life consisted of wild orgies, entertainment by naked dancers, and rapine before and after meals. The truth seemed to be that a revolutionary army anywhere was always in danger of becoming too puritanical, rather than the contrary.

Some of the Reds’ ideas had now been copied—with much better facilities for realizing them—by Chiang Kai-shek’s crack "new army” and his New Life movement. But one thing the White armies could not copy, the Reds claimed, was. their "revolutionary consciousness.” What this was like could best be seen at a political session of Red troops—where one could hear the firmly implanted credos that these youths fought and died for.

Session in Politics

Finding myself with an idle afternoon, I went around to call on Liu Hsiao, a member of the Red Army political department, with offices in a guardhouse on the city wall of Yu Wang Pao.

By now it was obvious that the Red commanders were loyal Marxists, and were effectively under the guidance of the Communist Party, through its representatives in the political department of every unit of the army. Of course, Mr. Trotsky might have disputed whether they were good Marxists or bad Marxists, but the point was that they were conscious fighters for socialism, in their fashion; they knew what they wanted, and believed themselves to be part of a world movement.

Liu Hsiao was one of the most serious-minded young men I had met among the Reds, and one of the hardest-working. An intensely earnest youth of twenty-five, with an esthetic, intellectual face, he was extremely courteous, gentle, and inoffensive. I sensed an immense inner spiritual pride in him about his connection with the Red Army. He had a pure feeling of religious absolutism about communism, and I believed he would not have hesitated, on command, to shoot any number of "counterrevolutionaries” or "traitors.”

I had no right to break in on his day, but I knew he had orders to assist me in any way possible—he had several times acted as my interpreter—so I made the most of it. I think also that he disliked foreigners, and when later on he gave me a brief biography of himself, I could not blame him. He had been twice arrested and imprisoned by foreign police in his own country.

Liu was an ex-student of Eastview Academy, an American missionary school in Shengchoufu, Hunan. He had been a devout Christian, a fundamentalist, and a good Y.M.C.A. man until 1926 and the Great Revolution. One day he led a student strike, was expelled, and was disowned by his family. Awakened to the "imperialistic basis of missionary institutions” in China, he went to Shanghai, became active in the student movement there, joined the Communist Party, and was imprisoned by police in the French Concession. Released in 1929, he rejoined his comrades, worked under the provincial committee of the Communist Party, was arrested by British police, put in the notorious Ward Road Jail, tortured by electricity to extort a confession, handed over to the Chinese authorities, jailed again, and did not get his freedom till 1931. He was then just twenty years old. Shortly afterwards he was sent by the Reds’ "underground railway” to the Fukien Soviet district, and had ever since been with the Red Army.

Liu agreed to accompany me, and together we found our way to a Lenin Club where there was a political class in session. It was a meeting of a company in the Second Regiment of the Second Division, First Army Corps, and sixty-two were present. This was the "advanced section” of the company; there was also a "second section.” Political education in the Red Army is conducted through three main groups, each of which is divided into the two sections mentioned. Each elects its soldiers’ committee, to consult with its superior officers and send delegates to the soviets. The three groups are for company commanders and higher; squad commanders and the rank and file; and the service corps—cooks, grooms, muleteers, carriers, sweepers, and Young Vanguards.

Green boughs decorated the room, and a big red paper star was fixed over the doorway. Inside were the usual pictures of Marx and Lenin, and on another wall were photographs of Generals Ts’ai Ting-k’ai and Chiang Kuang-nai, heroes of the Shanghai War.* There was a big picture of the Russian Red Army massed in Red Square in an October anniversary demonstration—a photograph torn from a Shanghai magazine. Finally, there was a large lithograph of General Feng Yu-hsiang, with a slogan under it, "Huan Wo Shan Ho”—"Give back our mountains and rivers!”—an old Classical phrase, now revived by the anti-Japanese movement.

The men sat on brick seats, which they had brought with them (one often saw soldier students going to school with notebooks in one hand and a brick in the other), and the class was led by the company commander and the political commissar, both members of the Communist Party. The subject, I gathered, was "Progress in the Anti-Japanese Movement.” A lanky, gaunt-faced youth was speaking. He seemed to be summarizing five years of Sino-Japanese "undeclared war,” and he was shouting at the top of his lungs. He told of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and his own experiences there, as a former soldier in the army of Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang. He condemned Nanking for ordering "nonresistance.” Then he described the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, Jehol, Hopei, Chahar, and Suiyuan. In each case, he maintained, the "Kuomintang dog-party” had retreated without fighting. They had "given the Japanese bandits a fourth of our country.”

"Why?” he demanded, intensely excited, his voice breaking a little. "Why don’t our Chinese armies fight to save China? Because they don’t want to? No! We Tungpei men asked our officers nearly every day to lead us to the front, to fight back to our homeland. Every Chinese hates to become a Japanese slave! But China’s armies cannot fight because of our mai-kuo cheng-fu” (literally, "sell-country government”).

"But the people will fight if our Red Army leads. …” He ended up with a summary of the growth of the anti-Japanese movement in the Northwest, under the Communists.

Another arose, stood at rigid attention, his hands pressed closely to his sides. Liu Hsiao whispered to me that he was a squad leader—a corporal—who had made the Long March. "It is only the traitors who do not want to fight Japan. It is only the rich men, the militarists, the tax collectors, the landlords and the bankers, who start the ‘cooperate-with-Japan’ movement, and the ‘joint-war-against-communism’ slogan. They are only a handful, they are not Chinese.

"Our peasants and workers, every one, want to fight to save the country. They only need to be shown a road. … Why do I know this? In our Kiangsi soviets we had a population of only 3,000,000, yet we recruited volunteer partisan armies of 500,000 men! Our loyal soviets enthusiastically supported us in the war against the traitorous White troops. When the Red Army is victorious over the whole country our partisans will number over ten millions. Let Japan dare to try to rob us then!”

And much more of it. One after another they stood up to utter their hatred against Japan, sometimes emphasizing, sometimes disagreeing with a previous speaker’s remark, sometimes giving their answers to questions from the discussion leaders, making suggestions for "broadening the anti-Japanese movement,” and so on.

One youth told of the response of the people to the Red Army’s anti-Japanese Shansi expedition last year. "The lao-pai-hsing[the people] welcomed us,” he shouted. "They came by the hundreds to join us. They brought us tea and cakes on the road as we marched. Many left their fields to come to join us, or cheer us. … They understood quite clearly who were the traitors and who the patriots—who want to fight Japan, and who want to sell China to Japan. Our problem is to awaken the whole country as we awakened the people of Shansi. …”

One talked about the anti-Japanese student movement in the White districts, another about the anti-Japanese movement in the Southwest, and a Tungpei man told of the reasons why Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang’s Manchurian soldiers refused to fight the Reds any more. "Chinese must not fight Chinese, we must all unite to oppose Japanese imperialism, we must win back our lost homeland!” he concluded with terse eloquence. A fourth spoke of the Manchurian anti-Japanese volunteers, and another of the strikes of Chinese workers in the Japanese mills of China.

The discussion continued for more than an hour. Occasionally the commander or political commissar interrupted to sum up what had been said, to elaborate a point, or to add new information, occasionally to correct something that had been said. The men took brief laborious notes in their little notebooks, and the serious task of thought furrowed their honest peasant faces. The whole session was crudely propagandist, and exaggeration of fact did not bother them in the least. It was self-proselytizing in a way, with materials selected to prove a single thesis. But that it was potent in its effects was manifest. Simple but powerful convictions, logical in shape, were forming in these young, little-tutored minds—credos such as every great crusading army has found necessary in order to stiffen itself with that spiritual unity, that courage, and that readiness to die in a cause, which we call morale.

I interrupted to ask some questions. They were answered by a show of hands. I discovered that of the sixty-two present, nine were from urban working-class families, while the rest were straight from the land. Twenty-one were former White soldiers and six were from the old Manchurian Army. Only eight of this group were married, and twenty-one were from Red families—that is, from families of poor peasants who had shared in the land redistribution under some soviet. Thirty-four of the group were under twenty years of age, twenty-four were between twenty and twenty-five, four were over thirty.

"In what way,” I asked, "is the Red Army better than other armies of China?” This brought half a dozen men to their feet at once.

"The Red Army is a revolutionary army.”

"The Red Army is anti-Japanese.”

"The Red Army helps the peasants.”

"Living conditions in the Red Army are entirely different from the White Army life. Here we are all equals; in the White Army the soldier masses are oppressed. Here we fight for ourselves and the masses. The White Army fights for the gentry and the landlords. Officers and men live the same in the Red Army. In the White Army the soldiers are treated like slaves.”

"Officers of the Red Army come from our own ranks, and win their appointments by merit alone. White officers buy their jobs, or use political influence.”

"Red soldiers are volunteers; White soldiers are conscripted.”

"Capitalist armies are for preserving the capitalist class. The Red Army fights for the proletariat.”

"The militarists’ armies’ work is to collect taxes and squeeze the blood of the people. The Red Army fights to free the people.”

"The masses hate the White Army; they love the Red Army.”

"But how,” I interrupted once more, "do you know the peasants really like the Red Army?” Again several jumped up to answer. The political commissar recognized one.

"When we go into a new district,” he said, "the peasants always volunteer to help our hospital service. They carry our wounded back to our hospitals from the front.”

Another: "On our Long March through Szechuan the peasants brought us grass shoes, made by themselves, and they brought us tea and hot water along the road.”

A third: "When I fought in Liu Chih-tan’s Twenty-sixth Army, in Tingpien, we were a small detachment defending a lonely outpost against the Kuomintang general, Kao Kuei-tzu. The peasants brought us food and water. We did not have to use our men to bring supplies, the people helped us. Kao Kuei-tzu’s men were defeated. We captured some and they told us they had had no water for almost two days. The peasants had poisoned the wells and run away.”

A Kansu peasant soldier: "The people help us in many ways. During battles they often disarm small parties of the enemy, cut their telephone and telegraph wires, and send us news about the movements of the White troops. But they never cut our telephone lines; they help us put them up!”

Another: "When an enemy airplane crashed against a mountain in Shensi recently, nobody saw it but a few farmers. They were armed only with spears and spades, but they attacked the airplane, disarmed the two aviators, arrested them, and brought them to us in Wa Ya Pao!”

Still another: "Last April, in Yen Ch’ang, five villages formed soviets, where I was stationed. Afterwards we were attacked by T’ang En-p’o, and had to retreat. The min-t’uan returned, arrested eighteen villagers, and cut off their heads. Then we counterattacked. The villagers led us by a secret mountain path to attack the min-t’uan. We took them by surprise, and we attacked and disarmed three platoons.”

One youth with a long scar on his cheek got up and told of some experiences on the Long March. "When the Red Army was passing through Kweichow,” he said, "I was wounded with some other comrades, near Tsunyi. The army had to move on; it could not take us along. The doctors bandaged us and left us with some peasants, asking them to look after us. They fed us and treated us well, and when the White troops came to that village they hid us. In a few weeks we recovered. Later on the Red Army returned to that district and captured Tsunyi a second time. We rejoined the army, and some of the young men of the villages went with us.”

Another: "Once we were staying in a village of An Ting [north Shensi] and we were only a dozen men and rifles. The peasants there made bean curd for us, and gave us a sheep. We had a feast and we ate too much and went to sleep, leaving only one sentry on guard. He went to sleep too. But in the middle of the night a peasant boy arrived and woke us up. He had run ten li from [some mountain] to warn us that min-t’uan were there and intended to surround us. The min-t’uan did attack us about an hour later, but we were ready for them and drove them off.”

A bright-eyed lad without a shadow of whisker on his face arose and declared: "I have only this to say. When the White Army comes to a village in Kansu, nobody helps it, nobody gives it any food, and nobody wants to join. When the Red Army comes, the peasants organize, and form committees to help us, and young men volunteer to join. Our Red Army is the people, and this is what I have to say!”

Every youth there seemed to have a personal experience to relate to prove that "the peasants like us.” I wrote down seventeen different answers to that question. It proved so popular that another hour had passed before I realized that these warriors had been delayed long past their dinner call. I apologized and prepared to leave, but one "small devil” attached to the company stood up and said: "Don’t worry about ceremony. We Reds don’t care about going without food when we are fighting, and we don’t care about missing our food when we can tell a foreign friend about our Red Army.”

With the Red Army (Continued)

Hsu Hai-tung, the Red Potter

One morning I went to P’eng Teh-huai’s headquarters and found several members of his staff there, just finishing up a conference. They invited me in and opened a watermelon. As we sat around tables, spitting out seeds on the k’ang, I noticed a young commander I had not seen before.

P’eng Teh-huai saw me looking at him, and he said banteringly, "That’s a famous Red bandit over there. Do you recognize him?” The new arrival promptly grinned, blushed crimson, and in a most disarming way exposed a big cavern where two front teeth should have been. It gave him a childish and impish appearence, and everybody smiled.

"He is the man you have been eager to meet,” supplied P’eng. "He wants you to visit his army. His name is Hsu Hai-tung.”

Of all the Red military leaders of China, probably none was more "notorious,” and certainly none was more of a mystery than Hsu Hai-tung. Scarcely anything was known of him to the outside world except that he had once worked in a Hupeh pottery and that Chiang Kai-shek had branded him a scourge of civilization. Recently Nanking airplanes had visited the Red lines to drop leaflets containing, among other inducements to deserters (including $100 to every Red soldier who brought his rifle with him to the Kuomintang), the following promise:

"Kill P’eng Teh-huai or Hsu Hai-tung and we will give you $100,000 when you join our army. Kill any other bandit leader and we will reward you accordingly.”

And here, poised shyly over a pair of square boyish shoulders, sat that head which Nanking apparently valued no less than P’eng Teh-huai’s.

I acknowledged the pleasure, wondering what it felt like to have a life worth that much to any one of your subordinates, and asked Hsu whether he was really serious about the invitation to visit his army. He was commander of the Fifteenth Red Army Corps, with headquarters then located about 80 li to the northwest, in Yu Wang hsien.

"I already have a room arranged for you in the bell tower,” he responded. "Just let me know when you want to come, and I’ll send an escort for you.”

We made it a bargain on the spot.

And so a few days later, carrying a borrowed automatic (a "confiscation” of my own from a Red officer), I set out for Yu Wang, accompanied by ten Red troopers armed with rifles and Mausers—for in places our road skirted Red positions only a short distance behind the front lines. In contrast with the eternal hills and valleys of Shensi and Kansu, the road we followed—a road that led to the Great Wall and the lonely, beautiful grasslands of Inner Mongolia—crossed high tablelands, striped with long green meadows and dotted with tall bunch grass and softly rounded hills, on which great herds of sheep and goats grazed. Eagles and buzzards sometimes flew overhead. Once a herd of wild gazelles came near us, sniffed the air, and then swooped off with incredible speed and grace around a protecting mountainside.

In five hours we reached the center of Yu Wang, an ancient Mohammedan city of four or five hundred families, with a magnificent wall of stone and brick. Outside the city was a Mohammedan temple, with its own walls of beautiful glazed brick unscarred. But other buildings showed signs of the siege this city had undergone before it was taken by the Reds. A two-story building that had been the magistrate’s headquarters was partly ruined, and its façade was pitted with bullet holes. I was told that this and other buildings on the outskirts had been destroyed by the defending troops of General Ma Hung-kuei when the Red siege had first begun. The enemy had withdrawn from all extramural buildings, after setting fire to them, to prevent the Reds’ occupying them as positions of attack against the city walls.

"When the city fell,” Hsu Hai-tung told me, "there was only a very minor battle. We surrounded and blockaded Yu Wang for ten days. Inside there was one brigade of Ma Hung-kuei’s cavalry and about 1,000 mint’uan. We made no attack at all until the tenth night. It was very dark. We put a ladder on the wall, a company scaled it before the enemy guards discovered it, and then they defended the ladder with a machine gun, while a regiment of our troops mounted the wall.

"There was little fighting. Before dawn we had disarmed all the min-t’uan and surrounded the brigade of cavalry. Only one of our men was killed, and only seven were wounded. We gave the min-t’uan a dollar apiece and sent them back to their farms, and we gave Ma’s men two dollars each. Several hundred of them stayed and enlisted with us. The magistrate and the brigade commander escaped over the east wall while their troops were being disarmed.”

I spent five days with the Fifteenth Army Corps, and found every waking hour intensely interesting.* And of it all nothing was better material, for an "investigator of the soviet regions,” as I was labeled in Yu Wang, than the story of Hsu Hai-tung himself. I talked with him every night when his duties were finished. I rode with him to the front lines of the Seventy-third Division, and I went to the Red theater with him. He told me for the first time the history of the Honan-Anhui-Hupeh Soviet Republic, which had never been fully known. As organizer of the first partisan army of that great Red area, which was second in size only to the Central Soviets of Kiangsi, Hsu Hai-tung knew nearly every detail of its development.

Hsu struck me as the most strongly "class-conscious” man—in manner, appearance, conversation, and background—of all the Red leaders I met. While the majority of the subordinate officers were from the poor peasantry, many of the higher commanders were from middle-class or middle-peasant families or from the intelligentsia. Hsu was a very obvious exception. He was proud of his proletarian origin, and he often referred to himself, with a grin, as a "coolie.” One could tell he sincerely believed that the poor of China, the peasants and the workers, were the good people—kind, brave, unselfish, honest—while the rich had a monopoly of all the vices. It was as simple as that for him, I thought: he was fighting to get rid of the vices. The absolutism of faith kept his cocky comments about his own daredeviltry and his army’s superiority from sounding like vanity and conceit. When he said, "One Red is worth five Whites,” it was to him a statement of irrefutable fact.

He was immensely proud of his army—the men as individuals, their skill as soldiers, as horsemen, and as revolutionaries. He was proud of their Lenin clubs and their artistically made posters—which were really very good. And he was proud of his division commanders, two of whom were "coolies like myself” and one of whom—a Red for six years—was only twenty-one years old.

Hsu valued very highly any act of physical prowess, and it was his regret that eight wounds he had collected in ten years of fighting now slightly handicapped him. He did not smoke or drink, and he still had a slender, straight-limbed body, every inch of which seemed to be hard muscle. He had been wounded in each leg, in each arm, in the chest, a shoulder, and a hip. One bullet had entered his head just below the eye and emerged behind his ear. And yet he still gave the impression of a peasant youth who had but recently stepped out of the rice fields, rolled down his trouser legs, and joined a passing "free company” of warriors.

I found out also about the missing teeth. They had been lost during a riding accident. Galloping along the road one day, his horse’s hoof struck a soldier, and Hsu turned in the saddle to see whether he had been hurt. The horse shied and knocked Hsu into a tree. When he regained consciousness two weeks later, it was to discover that his upper incisors had been left with the tree.

"Aren’t you afraid you’ll be hurt some day?” 1 asked him.

"Not much,” he laughed. "I’ve been taking beatings since I was a child, and I’m used to it by now.”

Like most other combat Reds, he spoke mainly about battles, but his few references to his childhood seemed to me significant.

Hsu Hai-tung was born in 1900 in Huangpi hsien—Yellow Slope county—near Hankow. His family had for generations been potters, and in his grandfather’s day had owned land, but since then, through drought, flood, and taxation, had been proletarianized. His father and five brothers had worked in a kiln at Huangpi and made enough to live. They were all illiterate, but ambitious for Hai-tung, a bright child and the youngest son, and they scraped together the money necessary to send him to school.

"My fellow students,” Hsu told me, "were nearly all the sons of landlords or merchants, as few poor boys ever got to school. I studied at the same desks with them, but many hated me because I seldom had any shoes and my clothes were poor and ragged. I could not avoid fighting with them when they cursed me. If I ran to the teacher for help, I was invariably beaten by him. But if the landlords’ sons got the worst of it and went to the teacher, I was also beaten.

"In my fourth year in school, when I was eleven, I got involved in a ‘rich-against-poor’ quarrel and was driven to a corner by a crowd of ‘rich sons.’ We were throwing sticks and stones, and one I threw cut the head of a child named Huang, son of a wealthy landlord. This boy went off crying, and in a short time returned with his family. The elder Huang said that I had ‘forgotten my birth,’ and he kicked and beat me. The teacher then gave me a second beating. After that I ran away from school and refused to return. The incident made a deep impression on me. I believed from then on that it was impossible for a poor boy to get justice.”

Hsu became an apprentice in a pottery, where he received no wages during his "thanking-the-master years.” At sixteen he was a full journeyman, and the highest-paid potter among three hundred workers. "I can turn out a good piece of pottery as fast as anyone in China,” Hsu smilingly boasted, "so when the revolution is over I’ll still be a useful citizen!”

He recalled an incident that did not increase his love for the gentry: "A traveling theatrical troupe came to our neighborhood, and the workers went to see it. Wives of the gentry and officials were also there. Naturally the workers were curious to see what these closely guarded wives of the great ones looked like, and they kept staring into the boxes. At this the gentry ordered the min-t’uan to drive them out of the theater, and there was a fight. Later on our factory master had to give a banquet for the offended ‘nobility,’ and shoot off some firecrackers, to compensate for the ‘spoiled purity’ of those women who had been gazed upon by the people. The master tried to take the money for this banquet from our wages, but we threatened to strike and he changed his mind. This was my first experience of the power of organization as a weapon of defense for the poor.”

When he was twenty-one, angered by a domestic quarrel, Hsu left home. He walked to Hankow, then made his way to Kiangsi, where he worked for a year as a potter, saved his money, and planned to return to Huangpi. But he caught cholera and exhausted his savings while recovering. Ashamed to return empty-handed, he joined the army, where he was promised $10 a month. He received "only beatings.” Meanwhile the Nationalist Revolution was beginning in the South, and Communists were propagandizing in Hsu’s army. Several of them were beheaded. Disgusted with the warlord army, he deserted with one of the officers, fled to Canton, and joined the Fourth Kuomintang Army under Chang Fa-kuei. There he remained till 1927. He had become a platoon commander.

In the spring of 1927 the Nationalist forces were breaking into left-wing and right-wing groups, and this conflict was especially sharp in Chang Fa-kuei’s army, which had reached the Yangtze River. Siding with the radicals, Hsu was forced to flee, and secretly he returned to Yellow Slope. By now he had become a Communist, having been much influenced by some student propagandists, and in Huangpi he at once began building up a local branch of the Party.

The Right coup d’état occurred in April, 1927, and communism was driven underground. But not Hsu Hai-tung. He organized most of the workers in the potteries, and some local peasants. From these he now recruited the first "workers’ and peasants’ army” of Hupeh. They numbered in the beginning only seventeen men, and they had one revolver and eight bullets—Hsu’s own.

This was the nucleus of what later became the Fourth Front Red Army of 60,000 men, which in 1932 had under its control a sovietized territory the size of Ireland. It had its own post office, credit system, mints, cooperatives, textile factories, and in general a fairly well-organized rural economy. Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, a Whampoa graduate and former Kuomintang officer, became commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army. His political leader was Chang Kuo-t’ao (a founder of the Communist Party who was later to challenge Mao for control of the Central Committee). Together they set up a Chinese type of soviet government in the border areas of three provinces: Hupeh, Anhui, and Honan. The ancient names of those provinces were O, Yu, and Wan. Combining them, the Reds named their interprovincial regime the Oyuwan Soviet and affiliated it with the All-China Soviet Government headed by Mao Tse-tung south of the Yangtze.

Oyuwan withstood several "surroundings” and expanded its territory until October, 1932. By then the Nationalists had succeeded in penetrating far into the richest base area. To avoid encirclement, Chang Kuo-t’ao and Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien withdrew their main forces westward. Hsu Hai-tung was ordered to remain behind, with his Twenty-fifth Army, to regroup scattered partisan units and make a new stand, while the main Nationalist forces pursued the Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien command. Unexpectedly, Hsu Hai-tung’s guerrillas won important victories and once more the Nationalists were forced out of Oyuwan. In 1933 they returned to the offensive and in 1934, coincident with his Fifth Annihilation Campaign in the South, the Generalissimo strangled the little republic to death. At the end of 1934 Hsu Hai-tung led a band of no more than 2,000 men in a breakthrough to the west, finally uniting with Mao Tse-tung’s forces in northern Shensi in 1935.

Besides the economic blockade, daily air bombing, and the construction of a network of thousands of small forts around the Oyuwan area, the Nanking generals evidently pursued a policy of systematic removal or annihilation of the civilian population. During the Fifth Campaign the anti-Red forces in Hupeh and Anhui, then numbering about 300,000, were stiffened with officers whom Chiang Kai-shek had spent a year indoctrinating with anti-Red propaganda in his Nanchang and Nanking military academies. The result was civil war with the intensity of religious wars.

Class War in China

For three days, several hours every afternoon and evening, I had been asking Hsu Hai-tung and his staff questions about their personal histories, about their troops, about the fate of the Oyuwan Soviet Republic, and about their present situation in the Northwest. Then, in answer to my question, "Where is your family now?” Hsu Hai-tung replied matter-of-factly, "All of my clan have been killed except one brother, who is with the Fourth Front Army.”

"You mean killed in fighting?”

"Oh, no; only three of my brothers were Reds. The rest of the clan were executed by Generals T’ang En-p’o and Hsia Tou-yin. Altogether the Kuomintang officers killed sixty-six members of the Hsu clan.”

"Sixty-six!”

"Yes, twenty-seven of my near relatives were executed and thirty-nine distant relatives—everyone in Huangpi hsien named Hsu. Old and young men, women, children, and even babies were killed. The Hsu clan was wiped out, except my wife and three brothers in the Red Army, and myself. Two of my brothers were killed in battle later on.”

"And your wife?”

"I don’t know what happened to her. She was captured when the White troops occupied Huangpi in 1931. Afterwards I heard that she had been sold as a concubine to a merchant near Hankow. My brothers who escaped told me about that, and about the other killings. During the Fifth Campaign, thirteen of the Hsu clan escaped from Huangpi and fled to Lihsiang hsien, but were all arrested there. The men were beheaded; the women and children were shot.”

Hsu noticed the shocked look on my face and grinned mirthlessly. "That was nothing unusual,” he said. "That happened to the clans of many Red officers, though mine had the biggest losses. Chiang Kai-shek had given an order that when my district was captured no one named Hsu should be left alive.”

I wrote many pages of notes of conversations with Hsu and his comrades, notes of dates, places, and detailed accounts of outrages allegedly inflicted on civilians by Nationalist troops in Oyuwan. It would be pointless to repeat the details of the more horrendous crimes reported; like the tragic events in Spain of the same period, they would seem incredible to skeptics who read of them from afar. For the person who has not actually witnessed atrocities, all remains hearsay and suspect; to accept the degradation of any man by man injures our self-esteem. And even if the stories were true, were not the Reds themselves engaged in violence differing only in the choice of class victims? The Kuomintang press, however, had for years been telling only their side of the class-war story. To help fill in the picture for history it should not be unedifying to know what the leaders of this fundamentally "peasant revolution” (as Mao Tse-tung insisted it was) said of their fellow man and saw themselves as fighting against.

During the Fifth Anti-Red Compaign, as already noted, Nationalist officers gave orders in many areas to exterminate the civilian population. This was held to be militarily necessary because, as the Generalissimo remarked in one of his speeches, where the soviets had been long established "it was impossible to tell a Red bandit from a good citizen.” The method appears to have been applied with singular savagery in the Oyuwan Republic, chiefly because some of the leading Kuomintang generals in charge of anti-Red operations were natives of that region, sons of landlords who had lost their land to the Reds, and hence had an insatiable desire for revenge. The population in the soviets had decreased by about 600,000 at the end of the Fifth Campaign.

Red tactics in Oyuwan had depended upon mobility over a wide territory, and at the beginning of every annihilation drive their main forces had moved out of the Red districts, to engage the enemy on its own ground. They had no important strategic bases to defend, and readily moved from place to place, to decoy, divert, distract, and otherwise gain maneuvering advantages. This left the periphery of their "human base” very much exposed, but in the past Kuomintang troops had not killed the farmers and townsmen whom they found peacefully pursuing their tasks in soviet areas they occupied.

In the Fifth Campaign, as in Kiangsi, new tactics were adopted. Instead of engaging the Red Army in the open field, the Nanking troops advanced in heavily concentrated units, behind extensive fortifications, bit by bit penetrating into Red territory, systematically either annihilating or transporting the entire population in wide areas inside and outside the Red borders. They sought to make of such districts a desolate, uninhabited wasteland, incapable of supporting the Red troops if they should later recapture it.

Thousands of children were taken prisoner and driven to Hankow and other cities, where they were sold into "apprenticeships.” Thousands of young girls and women were transported and sold into the factories as slave girls and as prostitutes. In the cities they were palmed off as "famine refugees,” or "orphans of people killed by the Reds.” I remembered that hundreds of them reportedly reached the big industrial centers in 1934. A considerable trade grew up, with middlemen buying the boys and women from Kuomintang officers. It became a very profitable business for a while, but threatened to corrupt the ranks of the army. Missionaries began talking about it, and Chiang Kai-shek was obliged to issue a stern order forbidding this "bribetaking” and ordering strict punishment for officers engaged in the traffic.

"By December, 1933,” said Hsu Hai-tung, "about half of Oyuwan had become a vast wasteland. Over a once rich country there were very few houses left standing, cattle, had all been driven away, the fields were un-kept, and there were piles of bodies in nearly every village that had been occupied by the White troops. Four counties in Hupeh, five in Anhui, and three in Honan were almost completely ruined. In an area some 400 li from east to west and about 300 li from north to south the whole population was being killed or removed.

"During the year’s fighting we recaptured some of these districts from the White troops, but when we returned we found fertile lands had become semideserts. Only a few old men and women remained, and they would tell tales that horrified us. We could not believe such crimes had been committed by Chinese against Chinese.

"In November, 1933, we retreated from T’ien T’ai Shan and Lao Chun Shan, soviet districts where there were then about 60,000 people. When we returned, two months later, we found that these peasants had been driven from their land, their houses had been burned or destroyed by bombing, and there were not more than three hundred old men and a few sickly children in all that region. From them we learned what had happened.

"As soon as the White troops arrived the officers had begun dividing the women and girls. Those with bobbed hair or natural feet had been shot as Communists. Higher officers had looked over the others and picked out pretty ones for their own, and then the lower officers had been given their choice. The rest had been turned over to the soldiers to use as prostitutes. They had been told that these women were ‘bandit wives,’ and therefore they could do what they liked with them.

"Many of the young men in those districts had joined the Red Army, but many of those who remained behind, and even some of the old men, tried to kill the White officers for these crimes. Those who protested were all shot as Communists. The survivors told us that many fights had occurred among the Whites, who had quarreled among themselves about the distribution of women. After they had been despoiled, these women and girls were sent to the towns and cities, where they were sold, only the officers keeping a few pretty ones for concubines.”

"Do you mean to say these were the troops of the National Government?” I asked.

"Yes, they were the Thirteenth Army Corps of General T’ang En-p’o, and the Third Army Corps of General Wang Chun. Generals Hsia Tou-yin, Liang Kuan-yin, and Sung T’ien-tsai were also responsible.”

Hsu told of another district, Huangan hsien, in Hupeh, which the Reds recovered from General Wang Chun in July, 1933: "In the town of Tsu Yun Chai, where there was once a street of flourishing soviet cooperatives and a happy people, everything was in ruins and only a few old men were alive. They led us out to a valley and showed us the scattered bodies of seventeen young women lying half-naked in the sun. They had all been raped and killed. The White troops had evidently been in a great hurry; they had taken the time to pull off only one leg of a girl’s trousers. That day we called a meeting, the army held a memorial service there, and we all wept.

"Not long afterwards, in Ma Cheng, we came to one of our former athletic fields. There in a shallow grave we found the bodies of twelve comrades who had been killed. Their skin had been stripped from them, their eyes gouged out, and their ears and noses cut off. We all broke into tears of rage at this barbaric sight.

"In the same month, also in Huangan, our Twenty-fifth Red Army reached Ao Kung Chai. This had once been a lively place, but it was now deserted. We walked outside the town and saw a peasant’s hut with smoke coming from it, on a hillside, and some of us climbed up to it, but the only occupant was an old man who had apparently gone insane. We walked down into the valley again until we came upon a long pile of dead men and women. There were more than 400 bodies lying there, and they had evidently been killed only a short time before. In some places the blood was several inches deep. Some women were lying with their children still clutched to them. Many bodies were lying one on top of another.

"Suddenly I noticed one of the bodies move, and, going over to it, found that it was a man still alive. We found several more alive after that, altogether more than ten. We carried them back with us and treated their wounds, and they told us what had happened. These people had fled from the town to hide in this valley, and had encamped in the open. Afterwards the White officers had led their troops to the spot, ordered them to put up their machine guns on the mountainsides, and had then opened fire on the people below. They had kept firing for several hours until they thought everybody was dead. Then they had marched away again without even coming down to look at them.”

Hsu said that the next day he led his whole army out to that valley and showed them the dead, among whom some of the soldiers recognized peasants they had known, men and women who must have given them shelter at one time, or sold them melons, or traded at the cooperatives. They were deeply moved. Hsu said that this experience steeled his troops with a stubborn morale and a determination to die fighting, and that throughout the entire twelve months of the last great annihilation drive not a single man had deserted from the Twenty-fifth Army.

"Toward the end of the Fifth Campaign,” he continued, "nearly every house had dead in it. We used to enter a village that seemed empty until we looked into the ruined houses. Then we would find corpses in the doorways, on the floor, or on the k’ang, or hidden away somewhere. Even the dogs had fled from many villages. In those days we did not need spies to watch the enemy’s movements. We could follow them quite easily by the skies filled with smoke from burning towns and hamlets.”

This was a very small part of what I heard from Hsu Hai-tung and others who fought through the terrible year, and finally trekked westward, not their army but its human "base” destroyed, its hills and valleys stained with the blood of its youth, the living heart of it torn out. Later on I talked to many warriors from Oyuwan, and they told tales more pitiful still. They did not like to talk of what they had seen; they did so only under questioning, and it was clear their experiences had permanently marked the matrix of their minds with a class hatred ineradicable for life.

Again one asked whether that meant that the Reds were innocent of atrocity and class revenge themselves. I thought not. It was true that during my four months with them, as far as I could learn from unrestricted but limited inquiry, they had executed but two civilians. It was also true that I did not see a single village or town burned by them, or hear, from the many farmers I questioned, that the Reds were addicted to arson. But my personal experience started and ended with the few months spent with them in the Northwest: what "killing and burning” might have been done elsewhere I could not affirm or deny.

One of the two ill-fated "counterrevolutionaries” mentioned above was not killed by the Reds, but by some Ninghsia Moslems with a strong distaste for tax collectors. Further on it will be told in what manner he met his demise, but first let us see how these Moslems had been ruled.

Four Great Horses

One might say that Chinghai, Ninghsia, and northern Kansu were the prototype of that fantasia of Swift’s, the land of the Houyhnhnms, for they were ruled as the satrapy of Four Great Horses whose fame was widespread in China. Over the areas mentioned power was divided (before the Reds began edging the Houyhnhnms out of considerable portions of their domain) by a family of Mohammedan generals named Ma—the Messrs. Ma Hung-kuei, Ma Hung-ping, Ma Pu-fang, and Ma Pu-ch’ing. And this particular Ma means horse.*

Ma Hung-kuei was governor of Ninghsia, and his cousin, Ma Hung-ping, former governor of the same province, was now ruler of a shifting fiefdom in northern Kansu. They were distantly related to Ma Pu-fang, many-wived son of the famous Mohammedan leader Ma Keh-chin. Ma Pu-fang inherited his father’s toga and in 1937 became the Nanking-appointed Pacification Commissioner of that province, while his brother, Ma Pu-ch’ing, helped out in Chinghai and in addition ruled the great Kansu panhandle which in the west separated Chinghai from Ninghsia. For a decade this distant country had been run like a medieval sultanate by the Ma family, with some assistance from an Allah of their own.

Two of the Great Horses claimed to be nobles, descendants of a Mohammedan aristocracy which sometimes played a decisive role in the history of China’s Northwest. The brothers Ma, like many Moslems in China, had Turkish blood in them. As early as the sixth century a race which we now know as the Turks had become powerful enough on China’s northwest frontier to make important demands on the monarchs of the plains. In a couple of centuries they had built up an empire extending from eastern Siberia across part of Mongolia and into Central Asia. Gradually they filtered southward, and by the seventh century their Great Khan was received almost as an equal at the Court of Yang Ti, last Emperor of the Sui Dynasty. It was this same Turkish Khan who helped the half-Turkish General Li Yuan overthrow the Emperor Yang Ti and establish the celebrated T’ang Dynasty, which for three centuries reigned over Eastern Asia from Ch’ang An (now Sianfu)—then perhaps the most cultured capital on earth.

Mohammedan mosques had already been built in Canton by seafaring Arab traders before the middle of the seventh century. With the advent of the tolerant T’ang power the religion rapidly penetrated by land routes through the Turks of the Northwest. Mullahs, traders, embassies, and warriors brought it from Persia, Arabia, and Turkestan, and the T’ang emperors formed close ties with the caliphates to the west. Especially in the ninth century, when vast hordes of Ouigour Turks (whose great leader Seljuk had not yet been born) were summoned to the aid of the T’ang Court to suppress rebellion, Islamism entrenched itself in China. Following their success, many of the Ouigours were rewarded with titles and great estates and settled in the Northwest and in Szechuan and Yunnan.

Over a period of centuries the Mohammedans stoutly resisted Chinese absorption, but gradually lost their Turkish culture, adopted much that was Chinese, and became more or less submissive to Chinese law. Yet in the nineteenth century they were still powerful enough to make two great bids for power: one when Tu Wei-hsiu for a time set up a kingdom in Yunnan and proclaimed himself Sultan Suleiman; and the last, in 1864, when Mohammedans seized control of all the Northwest and even invaded Hupeh. The latter rebellion was put down after a campaign lasting eleven years. At that time of waning Manchu power the able Chinese General Tso Tsung-t’ang astounded the world by recapturing Hupeh, Shensi, Kansu, and eastern Tibet, finally leading his victorious army across the desert roads of Turkestan, where he re-established Chinese power on that far frontier in Central Asia.

Since then no single leader had been able to unite the Moslems of China in a successful struggle for independence, but there had been sporadic uprisings against Chinese rule, with savage and bloody massacres on both sides. The most serious recent rebellion occurred in 1928, when General Feng Yu-hsiang was warlord of the Northwest. It was under Feng that the Wu-Ma, or "Five Ma,”* combination acquired much of its influence and secured the nucleus of its present wealth and power.

Although theoretically the Chinese considered the Hui or Moslem people one of the five great races of China.† most Chinese seemed to deny Moslem racial separateness, claiming that they had been Sinicized. In practice, the Kuomintang decidedly followed a policy of absorption, even more direct (though perhaps less successful) than that pursued toward the Mongols. The Chinese official attitude toward the Mohammedans seemed to be that they were a "religious minority” but not a "national minority.” However, it was quite evident to anyone who saw them in their own domain in the Northwest that their claims to racial unity and the right to nationhood as a people were not without substantial basis in fact and history.

The Mohammedans of China were said to number about 20,000,000, and of these at least half were concentrated in the provinces of Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, Szechuan, Chinghai, and Sinkiang. In many districts—particularly in Kansu and Chinghai—they were a majority, and in some large areas outnumbered Chinese as much as ten to one. Generally their religious orthodoxy seemed to vary according to their strength of numbers in a given spot, but in the dominantly Mohammedan region of northern Kansu and southern Ninghsia the atmosphere was distinctly that of an Islamic country.

It could be said that the Mohammedans were the largest community left in China among whom religious leaders were the real arbiters of temporal as well as spiritual life, with religion a deciding factor in their culture, politics, and economy. Mohammedan society revolved round the men-huang and the ahun (ameer and mullah), and their knowledge of the Koran and of Turkish or Arabic (scant as it usually was) provided the sources of authority. Mohammedans in the Northwest prayed daily in the hundreds of well-kept mosques, observed Mohammedan feast days, fast days, and marriage and funeral ceremonies, rejected pork, and were offended by the presence of pigs and dogs. The pilgrimage to Mecca was an ambition frequently realized by rich men and ahuns, who thereby strengthened their political and economic power. To many of them pan-Islamism rather than pan-Hanism was an ideal.

Chinese cultural influence was nevertheless very marked. Moslems dressed like Chinese (except for round white caps or ceremonial fezzes worn by the men and white turbans by the women) and all spoke Chinese as the language of daily life (although many knew a few words from the Koran). While markedly Turkish features were common among them, the physiognomy of the majority was hardly distinguishable from that of the Chinese, with whom they had for centuries intermarried. Because of their law that any Chinese who married a Mohammedan must not only adopt the faith but also be adopted into a Mohammedan family, cutting away from his or her own kinsmen, the children of mixed marriages tended to grow up regarding themselves as a species different from their Chinese relatives.

The struggle of three sects among the Chinese Moslems somewhat weakened their unity, and created a convenient alignment for the Chinese Communists to work among them. The three sects were simply the Old, New, and Modern* schools. Old and New had formed a kind of "united front” of their own to oppose the heretical Modern school. The latter nominally advocated giving up many of the ceremonies and customs of Mohammedanism and embracing "science,” but its real objectives were evidently to destroy the temporal power of the mullahs, which the Four Mas found inconvenient. Since it was supported by the Kuomintang, many Mohammedans believed the, Modern school aimed at a so-called "pan-Hanism”—absorption of the national minorities by the Chinese. In the Northwest the Four Mas were leaders of the Modern school. Around them they grouped their own satellites, bureaucrats, and wealthy landowners and cattle barons upon whom their regime depended. And yet the Great Horses were not precisely the men one would expect to lead a reform movement in religion.

Take Ma Hung-kuei, probably the richest and strongest of the quartet. He had numerous wives, was said to own about 60 per cent of the property of Ninghsia city, and had made a fortune in millions from opium, salt, furs, taxes, and his own paper currency. Still, he proved himself modern enough in one sense when he chose his famous "picture bride.” Importing a secretary from Shanghai, he had him gather photographs of eligible educated beauties and made his choice. The price was fixed at $50,000. Old Ma hired an airplane, flew out of the northern dust clouds to Soochow, where he swooped up the latest addition to his harem—a graduate of Soochow Christian University—and then swept back again to Ninghsia like an Aladdin on his carpet, amid a blaze of publicity. That news was well reported by the Kuomintang press at the time, as were some of the "death and taxes” data mentioned below.

A government bulletin published in Ninghsia listed the following taxes collected in that province by General Ma: sales, domestic animals, camels, salt carrying, salt consumption, opium lamps, sheep, merchants, porters, pigeons, land, middlemen, food, special food, additional land, wood, coal, skins, slaughter, boats, irrigation, millstones, houses, wood, milling, scales, ceremonies, tobacco, wine, stamp, marriage, and vegetables.* While this did not exhaust the inventory of petty taxes collected, it was enough to suggest that people had relatively little to fear from the Reds.

Ma Hung-kuei’s method of salt distribution was unique. Salt was not only a monopoly, every person was required to buy half a pound per month, whether he could use it or not. He was not allowed to resell; private trade in salt was punishable by whipping or (according to Mohammedan Reds) even death. Other measures against which the inhabitants protested were the collection of a 30-per-cent tax on the sale of a sheep, cow, or mule, a 25-cent tax on the ownership of a sheep, a dollar tax for the slaughter of a pig, and a 40-cent tax on the sale of a bushel of wheat.

Excessive taxation and indebtedness had forced many farmers to sell all their cattle and abandon their lands. Great areas had been bought up by officials, tax collectors, and lenders at very cheap rates, but much of it remained wasteland because no tenants could be found to work under the tax burden and rents imposed. The concentration of land, cattle, and capital was accelerating and there was a big increase in hired farm laborers. In one district investigated it was found that over 70 per cent of the farmers were in debt, and about 60 per cent were living on food bought on credit.† In the same district 5 per cent of the people reportedly owned from 100 to 200 mou of land, twenty to fifty camels, twenty to forty cows, five to ten horses, five to ten carts, and had from $1,000 to $2,000 in trading capital, while at the same time about 60 per cent of the population had less than 15 mou of land, no livestock other than one or two donkeys, and an average indebtedness of $35 and 366 pounds of grain—much more than the average value of their land.

According to the Communist press, Ma Hung-kuei was suspected of intriguing for Japanese support against the Reds. A Japanese military mission had been established in Ninghsia city, and General Ma had given them permission to build an airfield north of the city, in the Alashan Mongol territory.^‡ Some of the Moslems and Mongols feared an actual armed Japanese invasion.

Such was the picture, as the Reds saw it, which encouraged them to believe that they could "stir up a great wind” that could bring the Ma brothers’ empire toppling in ruins. Ma’s troops might have had little interest in fighting, but it still remained for the Communists to overcome the Moslems’ aversion to cooperating with Chinese, and to offer them a suitable program. This the Reds were trying hard to do, for the strategic significance of the Mohammedan areas was manifest. They occupied a wide belt in the Northwest which dominated the roads to Sinkiang and Outer Mongolia—and direct contact with Soviet Russia. As the Communists themselves saw it:

"There are more than ten million Mohammedans in the Northwest occupying an extremely important position. Our present mission and responsibility is to defend the Northwest and to create an anti-Japanese base in these five provinces, so that we can more powerfully lead the anti-Japanese movement of the whole country and work for an immediate war against Japan. At the same time, in the development of our situation we can get into connection with the Soviet Union and Outer Mongolia. However, it would be impossible to carry out our mission if we failed to win over the Mohammedans to our sphere and to the anti-Japanese front.Ӡ

Communist work among the Mohammedans had begun several years before in the Northwest. Early in 1936, when the Red Army moved across Ninghsia and Kansu toward the Yellow River, vanguards of young Moslems were already propagandizing among the Ninghsia troops, urging the overthrow of the "Kuomintang running-dog” and "traitor to Mohammedanism,” Ma Hung-kuei—and some had lost their heads for it. These were the main promises the Reds made to them:

To abolish all surtaxes.

To help form an autonomous Mohammedan government.

To prohibit conscription.

To cancel old debts and loans.

To protect Mohammedan culture.

To guarantee religious freedom of all sects.

To help create and arm an anti-Japanese Mohammedan army.

To help unite the Mohammedans of China, Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Soviet Russia.

Here, presumably, was something to appeal to nearly every Moslem. Even some of the ahuns reportedly saw in it an opportunity to get rid of Ma Hung-kuei (punishing him for burning the mosques of the Old and New schools), and also a chance to realize an old aspiration—to reestablish direct contact with Turkey through Central Asia. By May, the Communists were claiming that they had achieved what skeptics had said was impossible. They boasted that they had created the nucleus of a Chinese Moslem Red Army.

Moslem and Marxist

One morning I went with an English-speaking member of Hsu Hai-tung’s staff to visit the Moslem training regiment attached to the Fifteenth Army Corps. It was quartered in the compound of a Moslem merchant and official—a thick-walled edifice with Moorish windows looking down on a cobbled street through which filed donkeys, horses, camels, and men.

Inside, the place was cool and neatly kept. Every room had in the center of its brick floor a place for a cistern, connected to a subterranean drain, to be used for bathing. Properly orthodox Moslems showered themselves five times daily, but although these soldiers were still loyal to their faith and obviously made use of the cistern occasionally, I gathered that they did not believe in carrying a good thing to extremes. Still, they easily had the cleanest habits of any soldiers I had seen in China, and carefully refrained from the national gesture of spitting on the floor.

The Reds had organized two training regiments of Mohammedans at the front, both recruited largely from former troops of Ma Hung-kuei and Ma Hung-ping. They were taller and more strongly built than the Chinese, heavier of beard, and darker-skinned, with large black almond-shaped eyes and strong, sharp Caucasian features. They all carried the big sword of the Northwest, and gave a skillful demonstration of various strokes by which you can remove your enemy’s head at one swift blow.

Cartoons, posters, maps, and slogans covered the walls of their barracks. "Down with Ma Hung-kuei!” "Abolish Ma Hung-kuei’s Kuomintang Government!” "Oppose Japan’s building of airfields, map making, and invasion of Ninghsia!” "Realize the Independent Government of the Mohammedan people!” "Build your own anti-Japanese Mohammedan Red Army!”

From this it may be gathered that there was some dissatisfaction with General Ma Hung-kuei among his soldiers, and this seemed to be shared by the Ninghsia peasants. I stopped on the road one morning to buy a melon from a Moslem farmer who had a whole hillside covered with them. He was an engaging old rustic with a jolly face, a humorous manner, and a truly beautiful daughter—so rare an apparition in those parts that I stayed and bought three melons. I asked him if Ma Hung-kuei’s officials were really as bad as the Reds claimed. He threw up his hands comically in indignation, spluttering watermelon seeds between his gums. "Ai-ya! Ai-ya! Ai-ya!” he cried. "Ma Hung-kuei, Ma Hung-kuei! Taxing us to death, stealing our sons, burning and killing! Ma-ti Ma Hung-kuei!” By which last expression he meant you could defile Ma’s mother and it would be too good for him. Everyone in the courtyard laughed. On the other hand, the occasion was hardly appropriate for the old gentleman to offer testimony to Allah in praise of Ma Hung-kuei—if he had been so inclined.

The Moslem soldiers with the Reds ostensibly had been won over by subversive propaganda conducted among Ma’s troops, and by political lectures when they reached the Red camp. I asked one commander why he had joined.

"To fight Ma Hung-kuei,” he said. "Life is too bitter for us Hui-min under Ma Hung-kuei. No family is secure. If a family has two sons, one of them must join his army. If it has three sons, two must join. There is no escape—unless you are rich and can pay the tax for a substitute. What poor man can afford it? Not only that, but every man must bring his own clothes, and his family must pay for his food, fires, and lighting. This costs several tens of dollars a year.”

Although these Red Moslem regiments had been organized less than half a year, they had already achieved considerable "class consciousness,” it seemed. They had read, or heard read, the Communist Manifesto, brief lessons from Class Struggle, and daily political lectures, à la Marxism, on the immediate problems of the Mohammedan people. This instruction was given to them, not by Chinese, but by Mohammedan members of the Communist Party—men who had been through the Reds’ Party school. I was told that more than 90 per cent of Ma Hung-kuei’s troops were illiterate, and that most of the Moslem recruits to the Red Army had been unable to read at all when they joined. Now they were said to know a few hundred characters each, and to be able to study the simple lessons given to them. Out of their two training regiments the Communists hoped to develop cadres for a big Moslem Red Army, to defend the autonomous Moslem republic they dreamed of seeing established in the Northwest. Already nearly 25 per cent of these Moslems had joined the Communist Party.1

With the autonomy slogan the Moslem population could be expected to agree; that had been their demand for many years. Whether the majority of them believed the Reds were sincere in their promises was quite another matter. I doubted it. Years of maltreatment by the Chinese militarists, and racial hatreds between Han and Hui (Chinese and Moslem), had left among them a deep and justified distrust of the motives of all Chinese, and it was unbelievable that the Communists had been able to break down this Moslem skepticism in so short a time.

Such Moslems as cooperated with the Reds probably had reasons of their own. If Chinese offered to help them drive out the Kuomintang, help them create and equip an army of their own, help them get self-government, and help them despoil the rich (they no doubt said to themselves), they were prepared to take the opportunity—and later on turn that army to uses of their own, if the Reds failed to keep their bargain. But it seemed, from the friendliness of the farmers, and their readiness to organize under the Reds, that their program had some attraction, and that their careful policy of respecting Moslem institutions had made an impression.

Among the soldiers themselves it appeared that some of the historic racial animosity was being overcome, or gradually metamorphosed into class antagonism. Thus when I asked some Moslem soldiers whether they thought the Hui and Han peoples could cooperate under a soviet form of government, one replied:

"The Chinese and the Moslems are brothers; we Moslems also have Chinese blood in us; we all belong to Ta Chung Kuo [China], and therefore why should we fight each other? Our common enemies are the landlords, the capitalists, the moneylenders, our oppressive rulers, and the Japanese. Our common aim is revolution.”

"But what if the revolution interferes with your religion?”

"There is no interference. The Red Army does not interfere with Mohammedan worship.”

"Well, I mean something like this. Some of the ahuns are wealthy landlords and moneylenders, are they not? What if they oppose the Red Army? How would you treat them?”

"We would persuade them to join the revolution. But most ahuns are not rich men. They sympatize with us. One of our company commanders was an ahun.”

"Still, suppose some ahuns can’t be persuaded, but join with the Kuomintang to oppose you?”

"We would punish them. They would be bad ahuns, and the people would demand their punishment.”

Meanwhile intensive instruction was going on throughout the First and Fifteenth Army corps to educate the soldiers to an understanding of the Communist policy toward Moslems and their effort to create a "Hui-Han United Front.” I attended several political sessions in which soldiers were discussing the "Mohammedan revolution,” and they were quite interesting. At one session there were long debates, especially about the land question. Some argued that the Red Army should confiscate the land of great Mohammedan landlords; others opposed it. The political commissar then gave a concise statement of the Party’s position, explaining why it was necessary for the Mohammedans themselves to carry on their own land revolution, led by a strong revolutionary organization of their own, with a base in the Moslem masses.

Another company reviewed a brief history of relationships between the Moslems and Chinese, and another discussed the necessity for strict observance of the rules of conduct which had been issued to all soldiers stationed in Mohammedan districts. These latter decreed that Red soldiers must not: enter the home of a Moslem without his consent; molest a mosque or a priest in any way; say "pig” or "dog” before Moslems, or ask them why they don’t eat pork; or call the Moslems "small faith” and the Chinese "big faith.”

Besides these efforts to unite the whole army intelligently behind the Moslem policy of the Reds, there was incessant work with the peasantry. The two Moslem training regiments led in this propaganda, but companies in the Red Army also sent their propaganda corps from house to house, explaining Communist policies and urging the farmers to organize; army dramatic clubs toured the villages, giving Mohammedan plays, based on local situations and incidents of history, and designed to "agitate” the population; leaflets, newspapers, and posters were distributed, written in Chinese and Arabic; and mass meetings were frequently called to form revolutionary committees and village soviets. The peasant, Chinese or Moslem, had a hard squeeze of it to avoid indoctrination to at least some degree. By July several dozen Mohammedan communities in Ninghsia had elected village soviets, and were sending delegates to Yu Wang Pao to confer with Moslem Communists there.

Four months later the Fourth Front Red Army was to cross the Yellow River, move over two hundred miles farther west, and reach Hsuchow, in Ma Pu-fang’s territory, astride the main road to Sinkiang. Early in September enough progress had been made in Ninghsia to convene a meeting of over 300 Moslem delegates from soviet committees elected by the villages then under the Red Army. A number of ahuns, teachers, merchants, and two or three small landlords were among them, but mostly they were poor farmers, members of the wealthier class having fled with the arrival of the "Han bandits.” The meeting of delegates elected a chairman and a provisional Moslem Soviet Government Committee. They passed resolutions to cooperate with the Red Army and accept its offer to help create an anti-Japanese Mohammedan army, and to begin at once the organization of a Chinese-Moslem unity league, a poor people’s league, and a mass anti-Japanese society.

The last item of business attended to by this historic little convention—and I suspect the most important to the peasants there—was the disposal of a Kuomintang tax collector. This man had evidently earned himself considerable enmity before the Reds arrived, and after that he had fled into the neighboring hill villages, to a place called Changchia Cha, and there continued to collect his taxes. It was alleged that he had doubled his levies—and had announced that this was due to the regulations of the new Red government which he claimed to represent! But the Mohammedan farmers learned that the Reds appointed no tax collectors, and half a dozen of them captured this miscreant and brought him into Yu Wang Pao for a mass trial. My personal reaction to the story was that any man who had sufficient nerve to act as an imposter in such a role at such a time had talents that should be preserved. The Moslems thought otherwise. There was no dissenting vote when the delegates took the decision to execute him.

As far as I could learn, he was the only civilian shot during the two weeks I spent in Yu Wang Pao.

War and Peace

More About Horses

On August 29 I rode out to Hung Ch’eng Shui (Red City Waters), a pretty little town in Weichow county, famous for its beautiful fruit gardens of pears, apples, and grapes, irrigated by crystal springs that bubbled through the canals. Here part of the Seventy-third Division was encamped. Not far away was a fortified pass, and a temporary line with no trenches but with a series of small molelike machine-gun nests and round hilltop forts—low-walled earthwork defenses—from which the Reds faced an enemy that had generally withdrawn from five to ten miles to the walled towns. There had been no movement on this front for several weeks, while the Reds rested and "consolidated” the new territory.

Back in Yu Wang again, I found the troops celebrating with a melon feast the radio news from south Kansu that a whole division of Ma Hung-kuei’s Chinese troops had turned over to Chu Teh’s Fourth Front Red Army. Li Tsung-yi, the commander of this Kuomintang division, had been sent to impede Chu Teh’s march to the North. His younger officers, among whom were secret Communists, led an uprising and took some 3,000 troops, including a battalion of cavalry, to join the Reds near Lung Hsi. It was a big blow to the Generalissimo’s defenses in the South, and hastened the northward advance of the two southern armies.

Two days later two of the three divisions of Hsu Hai-tung’s Fifteenth Army Corps were prepared to move again, one column toward the South, to break open a path for Chu Teh, and the other to the West, and the valley of the Yellow River. Bugles began sounding at about three in the morning, and by six o’clock the troops were already marching. I was my self returning to Yu Wang Pao that morning with two Red officers who were reporting to P’eng Teh-huai, and I left the city by the south gate with Hsu Hai-tung and his staff, marching toward the end of the long column of troops and animals that wound like a gray dragon across the interminable grasslands, as far as you could see.

The big army left the city quietly, except for the bark of bugles that never ceased, and gave an impression of efficient command. Plans for the march had been completed days earlier, I was told; every detail of the road had been examined, the enemy’s concentrations were all carefully charted on maps prepared by the Reds themselves, and guards had stopped all travelers from moving across the lines (which the Reds permitted, to encourage trade, except during battles or troop movements), and now they went ahead unknown to the Kuomintang troops, as later surprise captures of enemy outposts were to prove.

With this army I saw no camp followers except thirty or more wild Kansu greyhounds who ran in a closed pack, ranging back and forth across the plain in chase of an occasional distant gazelle or a prairie hog. They barked joyously and scrapped in excellent humor and evidently liked going to war. Many of the soldiers carried their pets along with them. Several had little monks on leashes of string; one had a slate-colored pet pigeon perched on his shoulder; some had little white mice; and some had rabbits. Was this an army? From the youth of the warriors, and the bursts of song that rang down the long line, it seemed more like a prep school on a holiday excursion.

A few li beyond the city an order was suddenly given for a practice air-raid defense. Squads of soldiers left the road and melted into the tall grass, donning their big wide camouflage hats made of grass, and their grass shoulder capes. Machine guns (they had no antiaircraft) were pitched at angles on grassy knolls beside the road in hopeful anticipation of a low-flying target. In a few moments that whole dragon had simply been swallowed up in the landscape, and you could not distinguish men from the numerous clumps of bunch grass. Only the mules, camels, and horses remained visible on the road, and aviators might have taken these for ordinary commercial caravans. The cavalry (which was then in the vanguard, out of sight) had to take it in the neck, however, their only possible precautionary measure being to seek cover if it was available, otherwise merely to scatter as widely as possible, but always remaining mounted. Unmounted during an air raid, these Mongolian ponies were impossible to manage, and a whole regiment could be thrown into complete disorder. The first command to a cavalry unit at the drone of airplanes was "Shangma!” ("Mount horse!”)

The maneuver having been pronounced satisfactory, we marched on.

Li Chiang-lin had been right. The Reds’ good horses were all at the front. Their cavalry division was the pride of the army, and every man aspired to promotion to it. They were physically the pick of the army, mounted on about 3,000 beautiful Ninghsia ponies, fine fleet animals taller and stronger than the Mongolian ponies of North China, with sleek flanks and well-filled buttocks. Most of them had been captured from Ma Hung-kuei and Ma Hung-ping, but three whole battalions of horses had been taken in a battle nearly a year before with General Ho Chu-kuo, commander of Nanking’s First Cavalry Army, including one battalion of all-white animals and one of all-black. They were the nucleus of the First Red Cavalry.

I rode with the Red cavalry several days in Kansu—or more precisely, I walked with it. They lent me a fine horse with a captured Western saddle, but at the end of each day I felt that I had been giving the horse a good time instead of the contrary. This was because our battalion commander was so anxious not to tire his four-legged charges that we two-legged ones had to lead horse three or four li for every one we rode. I concluded that anyone who qualified for this man’s cavalry had to be a nurse, not a mafoo, and an even better walker than rider. I paid them due respect for kindness to animals—no common phenomenon in China—but I was glad to disengage myself and get back to freelance movement of my own, in which occasionally I could actually ride a horse.

I had been grumbling mildly about this to Hsu Hai-tung, and I suspect he decided to play a joke on me. To return to Yu Wang Pao he lent me a splendid Ninghsia pony, strong as a bull, that gave me one of the wildest rides of my life. My road parted with the Fifteenth Army Corps near a big fort in the grassland. There I bade Hsu and his staff good-by. Shortly afterwards I got on my borrowed steed, and from then on it was touch and go to see which of us reached Yu Wang Pao alive.

The trouble with that ride was the wooden Chinese saddle, so narrow that I could not sit in the seat, but had to ride on my inner thighs the whole distance, while the short, heavy iron stirrups cramped my legs.

The road lay level across the plain for over 50 li. In that whole distance we got down to a walk just once. We raced at a steady gallop for the last five miles, and at the finish swept up the main street of Yu Wang Pao with my companions trailing far behind. Before P’eng’s headquarters I slithered off and examined my mount, expecting him to topple over in a faint. He was puffing very slightly and had a few beads of sweat on him, but was otherwise quite unruffled, the beast.

"Little Red Devils"

One morning I climbed the wide, thick, yellow wall of Yu Wang Pao, from the top of which you could look down thirty feet and see at a glance a score of different and somehow incongruously prosaic and intimate tasks being pursued below. It was as if you had pried off the lid of the city. A big section of the wall was being demolished. Walls were impediments to guerrilla warriors like the Reds, who endeavored to come to battle with an enemy in open country and, if they failed there, not to waste men in an exhausting defense of a walled city, where they could be endangered by blockade or annihilation, but to withdraw and let the enemy put himself in that position. The broken wall simplified their work if and when they were strong enough to attempt a reoccupation of the city.

Halfway around the crenellated battlement I came upon a squad of buglers—at rest for once, I was glad to observe, for their plangent calls had been ringing incessantly for days. They were all Young Vanguards, mere children, and I assumed a somewhat fatherly air toward one to whom I stopped and talked. He wore tennis shoes, gray shorts, and a faded gray cap with a dim red star on it. But there was nothing faded about the bugler under the cap: he was rosy-faced and had bright shining eyes. How homesick he must be, I thought. I was soon disillusioned. He was no mama’s boy, but already a veteran Red. He told me that he was fifteen, and had joined the Reds in the South four years ago.

"Four years!” I exclaimed incredulously. "Then you must have been only eleven when you became a Red? And you made the Long March?”

"Right,” he responded with comical swagger. "I have been a hung-chun for four years.”

"Why did you join?” I asked.

"My family lived near Changchow, in Fukien. I used to cut wood in the mountains, and in the winter I went there to collect bark. I often heard the villagers talk about the Red Army. They said it helped the poor people, and I liked that. Our house was very poor. We were six people, my parents and three brothers, older than I. We owned no land. Rent ate more than half our crop, so we never had enough. In the winter we cooked bark for soup and saved our grain for planting in the spring. I was always hungry.

"One year the Reds came very close to Changchow. I climbed over the mountains and went to ask them to help our house because we were very poor. They were good to me. They sent me to school for a while, and I had plenty to eat. After a few months the Red Army captured Changchow, and went to my village. All the landlords and moneylenders and officials were driven out. My family was given land and did not have to pay the tax collectors and landlords any more. They were happy and they were proud of me. Two of my brothers joined the Red Army.”

"Where are they now?”

"Now? I don’t know. When we left Kiangsi they were with the Red Army in Fukien; they were with Fang Chih-min. Now I don’t know.”

"Did the peasants like the Red Army?”

"Like the Red Army, eh? Of course they liked it. The Red Army gave them land and drove away the landlords, the tax collectors, and the exploiters.” (These "little devils” all had their Marxist vocabulary.)

"But really, how do you know they liked the Reds?”

"They made us a thousand, ten thousands, of shoes, with their own hands. The women made uniforms for us, and the men spied on the enemy. Every home sent sons to our Red Army. That is how the lao-pai-hsing treated us.”

Scores of youngsters like him were with the Reds. The Young Vanguards were organized by the Communist Youth League, and altogether, according to the claims of Fang Wen-p’ing, secretary of the CYL, there were then some 40,000 in the Northwest soviet districts. There must have been several hundred with the Red Army alone: a "model company” of them was in every Red encampment. They were youths between twelve and seventeen (really eleven to sixteen by foreign count*), and they came from all over China. Many of them, like this little bugler, had survived the hardships of the march from the South. Many had joined the Red Army during its expedition to Shansi.

The Young Vanguards worked as orderlies, messboys, buglers, spies, radio operators, water carriers, propagandists, actors, mafoos, nurses, secretaries, and even teachers. I once saw such a youngster, before a big map, lecturing a class of new recruits on world geography. Two of the most graceful child dancers I had ever seen were Young Vanguards in the dramatic society of the First Army Corps, and had marched from Kiangsi.

One might wonder how they stood such a life. Hundreds must have died or been killed. In the filthy jail in Sianfu there were over 200 of them, captured doing espionage or propaganda, or as stragglers unable to keep up with the army on its march. But their fortitude was amazing, and their loyalty to the Red Army was the intense and unquestioning loyalty of the very young.

Most of them wore uniforms too big for them, with sleeves dangling to their knees and coats dragging nearly to the ground. They washed their hands and faces three times a day, they claimed, but they were always dirty, their noses were usually running, and they were often wiping them with a sleeve, and grinning. The world nevertheless was theirs: they had enough to eat, they had a blanket each, the leaders even had pistols, and they wore red bars, and broken-peaked caps a size or more too large, but with the red star. They were often of uncertain origin: many could not remember their parents, many were escaped apprentices, some had been slaves,* most of them were runaways from huts with too many mouths to feed, and all of them had made their own decisions to join. Sometimes a whole group of youngsters had run off to the Reds together.

Many stories of courage were told of them. They gave and asked no quarter as children, and many had actually participated in battles. It was said that in Kiangsi, after the main Red Army left, hundreds of Young Vanguards and Young Communists fought beside adult partisans, and even made bayonet charges—so that the White soldiers laughingly said they could grab their bayonets and pull them into their trenches, they were so small and light. Many of the captured "Reds” in Chiang’s reform schools for bandits in Kiangsi were youths from ten to fifteen years old.

Perhaps the Vanguards liked the Reds because among them they were treated like human beings probably for the first time. They ate and lived like men; they seemed to take part in everything; they considered themselves any man’s equal. I never saw one of them struck or bullied. They were certainly "exploited” as orderlies and messboys (and it was surprising how many orders starting at the top were eventually passed on to some Young Vanguard), but they had their own freedom of activity, too, and their own organization to protect them. They learned games and sports, they were given a crude schooling, and they acquired a faith in simple Marxist slogans—which in most cases meant to them simply helping to shoot a gun against the landlords and masters of apprentices. Obviously it was better than working fourteen hours a day at the master’s bench, and feeding him, and emptying his "defile-mother’s” night-bowl.

I remember one such escaped apprentice I met in Kansu who was nicknamed the Shansi Wa-wa—the Shansi Baby. He had been sold to a shop in a town near Hung T’ung, in Shansi, and when the Red Army came he had stolen over the city wall, with three other apprentices, to join it. How he had decided that he belonged with the Reds I did not know, but evidently all of Yen Hsi-shan’s anti-Communist propaganda, all the warnings of his elders, had produced exactly the opposite effect from that intended. He was a fat rolypoly lad with the face of a baby, and only twelve, but he was quite able to take care of himself, as he had proved during the march across Shansi and Shensi and into Kansu. When I asked him why he had become a Red he said: "The Red Army fights for the poor. The Red Army is anti-Japanese. Why should any man not want to become a Red soldier?”

Another time I met a bony youngster of fifteen, who was head of the Young Vanguards and Young Communists working in the hospital near Holienwan, Kansu. His home had been in Hsing Ko, the Reds’ model hsien in Kiangsi, and he said that one of his brothers was still in a partisan army there, and that his sister had been a nurse. He did not know what had become of his family. Yes, they all liked the Reds. Why? Because they "all understood that the Red Army was our army—fighting for the wu-ch’an chieh-chi”—the proletariat. I wondered what impressions the great trek to the Northwest had left upon his young mind, but I was not to find out. The whole thing was a minor event to this serious-minded boy, this little matter of a hike over a distance twice the width of America.

"It was pretty bitter going, eh?” I ventured.

"Not bitter, not bitter. No march is bitter if your comrades are with you. We revolutionary youths can’t think about whether a thing is hard or bitter; we can only think of the task before us. If it is to walk 10,000 li, we walk it, or if it is to walk 20,000 li, we walk it!”

"How do you like Kansu, then? Is it better or worse than Kiangsi? Was life better in the South?”

"Kiangsi was good. Kansu is also good. Wherever the revolution is, that place is good. What we eat and where we sleep is not important. What is important is the revolution.”1

Copybook replies, I thought. Here was one lad who had learned his answers well from some Red propagandist. Next day I was quite surprised when at a mass meeting of Red soldiers I saw that he was one of the principal speakers, and a "propagandist” in his own right. He was one of the best speakers in the army, I was told, and in that meeting he gave a simple but competent explanation of the present political situation, and the reasons why the Red Army wanted to stop civil war and form a "united front” with all anti-Japanese armies.

I met a youth of fourteen who had been an apprentice in a Shanghai machine shop, and with three companions had found his way, through various adventures, to the Northwest. He was a student in the radio school in Pao An when I saw him. I asked whether he missed Shanghai, but he said no, he had left nothing in Shanghai, and that the only fun he had ever had there was looking into the shop windows at good things to eat—which he could not buy.

One "little devil” in Pao An served as orderly to Li K’e-nung, chief of the communications department of the Foreign Office. He was a Shansi lad of about thirteen or fourteen, and he had joined the Reds I knew not how. The Beau Brummell of the Vanguards, he took his role with utmost gravity. He had inherited a Sam Browne belt from somebody, he had a neat little uniform tailored to a good fit, and a cap whose peak he regularly refilled with new cardboard whenever it broke. Underneath the collar of his well-brushed coat he always managed to have a strip of white linen showing. He was easily the snappiest-looking soldier in town. Beside him Mao Tse-tung looked a tramp.

This wa-wa’s name happened by some thoughtlessness of his parents to be Shang Chi-pang. There is nothing wrong with that, except that Chipang sounds very much like chi-pa, and so, to his unending mortification, he was often called chi-pa, which simply means "penis.” One day Chi-pang came into my little room in the Foreign Office with his usual quota of dignity, clicked his heels together, gave me the most Prussian-like salute I had seen in the Red districts, and addressed me as "Comrade Snow.” He then proceeded to unburden his small heart of certain apprehensions. What he wanted to do was to make it perfectly clear to me that his name was not Chi-pa, but Chi-pang, and that between these two there was all the difference in the world. He had his name carefully scrawled down on a scrap of paper, and this he deposited before me.

Astonished, I responded in all seriousness that I had never called him anything but Chi-pang, and had no thought of doing otherwise. He thanked me, made a grave bow, and once more gave that preposterous salute. "I wanted to be sure,” he said, "that when you write about me for the foreign papers you won’t make a mistake in my name. It would give a bad impression to the foreign comrades if they thought a Red soldier was named Chipa!” Until then I had had no intention of introducing Chi-pang into this strange book, but with that remark I had no choice in the matter, and he walked into it right beside the Generalissimo.

One of the duties of the Young Vanguards in the soviets was to examine travelers on roads behind the front, and see that they had their road passes. They executed this duty quite determinedly, and marched anyone without his papers to the local soviet for examination. P’eng Teh-huai told me of being stopped once and being asked for his lu-t’iao by some Young Vanguards, who threatened to arrest him.

"But I am P’eng Teh-huai,” he said. "I write those passes myself.”

"We don’t care if you are Commander Chu Teh,” said the young skeptics: "you must have a road pass.” They signaled for assistance, and several boys came running from the fields to reinforce them.

P’eng had to write out his lu-t’iao and sign it himself before they allowed him to proceed.

Altogether, the "little devils” were one thing in Red China with which it was hard to find anything seriously wrong. Their spirit was superb. I suspected that more than once an older man, looking at them, forgot his pessimism and was heartened to think that he was fighting for the future of lads like those. They were invariably cheerful and optimistic, and they had a ready "hao!” for every how-are-you, regardless of the weariness of the day’s march. They were patient, hardworking, bright, and eager to learn, and seeing them made you feel that China was not hopeless, that no nation was more hopeless than its youth. Here in the Vanguards was the future of China, if only this youth could be freed, shaped, made aware, and given a role to perform in the building of a new world. It sounds somewhat evangelical, I suppose, but nobody could see these heroic young lives without feeling that man in China is not born rotten, but with infinite possibilities of personality.

United Front in Action

In the beginning of September, 1936, while I was at the front in Ninghsia and Kansu, the army under P’eng Teh-huai commenced moving westward toward the Yellow River, and southward toward the Sian-Lanchow highway, to establish connections with Chu Teh’s troops coming up from the South—a maneuver which was to be brilliantly concluded at the end of October, when the combined Red Armies occupied nearly all north Kansu above the Sian-Lanchow highway.

Maps immediately were put up on the wall and the radio began functioning. Messages came in. While P’eng was resting, he called in the Mohammedan peasants and explained the Red Army’s policies to them. An old lady sat and talked with him for nearly two hours, pointing out her troubles. Meanwhile a Red Army harvesting brigade passed by, on its way to reap the crop of a runaway landlord. Since he was a "traitor” his land was subject to confiscation. Another squad of men has been appointed to guard and keep clean the premises of the local mosque. Relations with the peasants seem good. A week ago the peasants in this hsien, who have now lived under the Reds for several months without paying taxes, came in a delegation to present P’eng with six cartloads of grain and provisions as an expression of gratitude for the relief. Yesterday some peasants presented P’eng with a handsome wooden bed—which amused him very much. He turned it over to the local ahun.

Tiao Pao Tzu, September 3. Left Li Chou K’ou, and on the way many peasants came out and brought the soldiers pai ch’a (white tea)—i.e., hot water, the favorite beverage in these parts. Mohammedan schoolteachers came over to bid P’eng good-by and thank him for protecting the school. As we neared Tiao Pao Tzu (now over 100 li west of Yu Wang Pao) some of Ma Hung-kuei’s cavalry, withdrawing from an isolated position, ran into our rear. They were only a few hundred yards from us. Nieh Jung-chen,* chief of staff of the First Army Corps, sent a detachment of headquarters cavalry to chase them, and they galloped off in a whirl of dust. A Red pack train was attacked, and another detachment of soldiers was sent to recover the mules and loads. The caravan returned intact.

Tonight some interesting items of news were posted on the bulletin board. Li Wang Pao is now surrounded, and in a fort near there a trench-mortar shell fell almost directly on Hsu Hai-tung’s headquarters. One Young Vanguard was killed and three soldiers were wounded. In another place nearby, a White platoon commander, reconnoitering the Reds’ position, was captured by a surprise attack party. The Reds slightly wounded him and sent him back to headquarters. P’eng raised hell over the radio because he was wounded. "Not good united-front tactics,” he commented. "One slogan is worth ten bullets.” He lectured the staff on the united front and how to work it out in practice.

Tiao Pao Tzu, September 6. A day of rest and recreation. All commanders of the First Army Corps met at P’eng’s headquarters for a melon feast, while the soldiers rested and had sports and a melon feast of their own. P’eng called a meeting of all company commanders and higher, and there was a political session. They permitted me to attend. A summary of P’eng’s speech follows:

"As for the masses, we must urge them to take the lead in every revolutionary action. We must not touch any Mohammedan landlord ourselves, but we must show the people clearly that they have the freedom to do so, that we will protect their mass organizations that do so, that this is their revolutionary right, that it is the produce of their labor and belongs to them. We must intensify our efforts to raise the political consciousness of the masses. Remember that they have heretofore had no political consciousness except racial hatred. We must awaken a patriotic consciousness in them. We must deepen our work in the Ke Lao Hui and other secret societies and make them active, not merely passive, allies on the anti-Japanese front. We must consolidate our good relations with the ahuns and urge them to take places of leadership in the anti-Japanese movement. We must strengthen the basis of revolutionary power by organizing every Mohammedan youth.”

During the next month the attention of every Red in China was to be focused anxiously upon the series of maneuvers by which, for the first time in the history of the soviets, all the main forces of the Red Army were eventually united and concentrated in a single great area. And here some illumination should be shed upon the leadership of this second great trek from the South—upon Chu Teh, commander-in-chief of the "All China” Red Army, who, after a heartbreaking winter spent on the frozen marches of Tibet, was now pouring the Second and Fourth Front armies into the Northwest.1

Concerning Chu Teh

Li Chiang-lin told me:

As a youth Chu Teh was reckless, adventurous, and courageous, moved by the legends of his people, by the tales of "free companions” of the Shui Hu Chuan, and by the exploits of the heroes of the Romance of Three Kingdoms, who had fought over the fields and mountains of his native Szechuan. He gravitated naturally toward military life. Helped by his family’s political influence, he was accepted in the new Yunnan Military Academy, and he was among the first cadets in China to be given modern military training. Upon graduation from the Yunnan Academy he was commissioned a lieutenant, and entered what the Chinese referred to as the "foreign army”—"foreign” because it used Western methods of drill and tactics, because it did not go into battle accompanied by Chinese musicians, and because for arms it used "foreign spears”—rifles with fixed bayonets on them.

In the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912 this modern army of Yunnan played a prominent role, and Chu Teh, leading a battalion of braves, soon distinguished himself as a warrior of the republic. By 1916, when Yuan Shih-k’ai attempted to restore the monarchy, he was a brigadier general, and his Yunnanese troops under the celebrated Ts’ai O were the first to raise the banner of revolt, which doomed Yuan’s imperial ambitions to defeat. At this time Chu Teh first became known throughout the southern provinces as one of the "four fierce generals” of Ts’ai O.

With his prestige thus established, Chu Teh’s political fortunes pyramided rapidly. He became director of the Bureau of Public Safety in Yunnanfu, and then Provincial Commissioner of Finance. People of Yunnan and Szechuan agreed that there were two things certain about officials: one was that they were corrupt, the other that they were opium smokers. Reared in a region where opium was as commonly smoked as tea was drunk, and where parents customarily spread the drug on sugarcane to soothe their bellowing infants, Chu Teh had inevitably become a smoker. And given office by a bureaucracy which looked upon plunder of public funds as not so much a right but a duty to one’s family, he followed the example of superiors and manipulated the privileges of office to enrich himself and his heirs.

He went in for a harem, too. He was said to have acquired several wives and concubines, and he built for them and his progeny a palatial home in the capital of Yunnan. One might have thought he had everything he desired: wealth, power, love, descendants, poppy dreams, eminent respectability, and a comfortable future in which to preach the proprieties of Confucianism. He had, in fact, only one really bad habit, but it was to prove his downfall. He liked to read books.

Pure realist though he had been till now, there must have been a strain of idealism and genuine revolutionary ardor latent in his character. Influenced by reading, influenced also by a few returned students who occasionally drifted into the backwash of Yunnan, Chu Teh gradually understood that the revolution of 1911 had been for the mass of the people a complete cipher; that it had merely replaced one despotic bureaucracy of exploitation with another. What was more, he seemed to have worried about it—as anyone of feeling, living in Yunnanfu, a city of 40,000 slave girls and boys, might well have done. He was apparently possessed by a sense of shame and simultaneously with an ambition to emulate the popular heroes of the West, and a desire to "modernize” China. The more books he read the more he realized his own ignorance and China’s backwardness. He wanted to study and he wanted to travel.

By 1922 Chu Teh had unburdened himself of his wives and concubines, pensioning them off in Yunnanfu. To one who knew the conservatism of China, and especially the feudal taboos of Yunnan, this act of repudiation of tradition was hardly believable, and indicated in itself a personality of unusual independence and resolution. Leaving Yunnan, he went to Shanghai, where he met many young revolutionaries of the Kuomintang, which he had joined. Here also he came into contact with left-wing radicals, who tended to look upon him condescendingly as an old-fashioned militarist. A corrupt official from feudal Yunnan, a many-wived general, an opium addict—could this also be a revolutionary?

Before this trip Chu Teh had determined to break himself of the drug habit. It was not easy: he had been using opium for a long time. But this man had more steel in his will than his acquaintances supposed. For days he lay almost unconscious as he fought his noxious craving; then, taking a medicine cure along, he boarded a British steamer on the Yangtze and took passage for Shanghai. No opium could be bought or sold on board, and for weeks he sailed down the river, pacing the deck, never going ashore, fighting this hardest battle of his life. But after a month on board he left the ship with clear eyes, a ruddy glow on his cheeks, and a new confidence in his step. After a final hospital cure in Shanghai, he began a new life in earnest. So said his aide, Li Chiang-lin.

Chu Teh was then nearing forty, but he was in excellent health and his mind was eagerly reaching out for new knowledge. Accompanying some Chinese students, he went to Germany, where he lived for a while near Hannover. There he met many Communists, and at this time seems to have seriously taken up the study of Marxism and become enamored of new perspectives opened up by the theory of social revolution. In this study he was chiefly tutored by Chinese students young enough to be his own sons—for he never learned French, he knew only a smattering of German, and he was a poor linguist. One of his student teachers in Germany told me how deadly in earnest he had been; how patiently, ploddingly, stubbornly, he struggled amid the confusion of an impact of a whole new world of ideas to integrate the basic truths and meanings, how great had been the intellectual effort with which he divested himself of all the prejudices and limitations of his traditional Chinese training.

In this way he read some histories of the Great War, and familiarized himself with the politics of Europe. One day a student friend of his* came to see him, talking excitedly about a book called State and Revolution. Chu Teh asked him to help him read it, and thus he became interested in Marxism and the Russian Revolution. He read Bukharin’s ABC of Communism, and his works on dialectical materialism, and then he read more of Lenin. The powerful revolutionary movement then active in Germany swept him, with hundreds of Chinese students, into the struggle for world revolution. He joined the Chinese branch of the Communist Party founded in Germany.

"Chu Teh had an experienced, disciplined, practical mind,” a comrade who knew him in Germany told me. "He was an extremely simple man, modest and unassuming. He always invited criticism; he had an insatiable appetite for criticism. In Germany he lived the simple life of a soldier. Chu Teh’s original interest in communism sprang from his sympathy for the poor, which had also brought him into the Kuomintang. He believed strongly in Sun Yat-sen for a while, because of Sun’s principles advocating land for the tillers, and the limitation of private capital. But not until he began to understand Marxism did he realize the inadequacy of Sun Yat-sen’s program.”

Chu Teh also lived for some time in Paris, where he entered a school for Chinese students which had been established by Wu Tze-hui, a veteran national revolutionary of the Kuomintang. In France and in Germany he sat at the feet of his young German, French, and Chinese instructors, and he humbly listened, quietly interrogated, debated, sought clarity and understanding. "To be modern, to understand the meaning of the revolution,” his youthful tutors kept repeating, "you must go to Russia. There you can see the future.” And again Chu Teh followed their advice. In Moscow he entered the Eastern Toilers’ University, where he studied Marxism under Chinese teachers. Late in 1925 he returned to Shanghai, and from that time on he worked under the direction of the Communist Party, to which he soon gave his fortune.

Chu Teh rejoined his former superior and fellow Yunnanese, General Chu Pei-teh, whose power in the Kuomintang Army was second only to that of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1927, when General Chu Pei-teh’s forces occupied several provinces south of the Yangtze, he made Chu Teh chief of the Bureau of Public Safety in Nanchang, capital of Kiangsi. There also he took command of a training regiment of cadets, and there he made contact with the Ninth Kuomintang Army, stationed farther south in Kiangsi. In the Ninth Army were detachments that had formerly been under his personal command in Yunnan. Thus the stage was prepared for the August Uprising in Nanchang, in which Communist troops first began the long open struggle for power against the Kuomintang.

August 1, 1927, was a day of great decision for Chu Teh. Ordered by his commander-in-chief, Chu Pei-teh, to suppress the insurrection, Chu Teh (who had helped organize it) instead joined with the rebels, renouncing the remaining connections with his past. When, after the defeat of Ho Lung, he headed his police and his training regiment southward with the rebels, the city gates which closed behind him were symbolic of the final break with the security and success of his youth. Ahead of him lay years of unceasing struggle.

Part of the Ninth Army went with Chu Teh also, as the straggling band of revolutionaries swept down to Swatow, captured it, were driven out, and then withdrew again to Kiangsi and Hunan. Among Chu Teh’s chief lieutenants at that time were three Whampoa cadets: Wang Erh-tso (later killed in battle); Ch’en Yi; and Lin Piao, who became president of the Red University.* They did not yet call themselves a Red Army, but renamed themselves only the National Revolutionary Army. After the retreat from Fukien, Chu Teh’s forces were reduced, by desertions and casualties, to 900 men, with a fire power of only 500 rifles, one machine gun, and a few rounds of ammunition each.

In this situation Chu Teh accepted an offer to connect with General Fan Shih-sheng, another Yunnan commander whose big army was then stationed in southern Hunan, and who, though not a Communist, tolerated Communists in his army, hoping to use them politically against Chiang Kai-shek.2 As a Yunnanese he was also inclined to give haven to his fellow provincials. Here Chu Teh’s troops were incorporated as the 140th Regiment, and he became chief political adviser to the Sixteenth Army. And here he had the narrowest escape of his life.

Communist influence in Fan Shih-sheng’s army rapidly increased, and soon an anti-Bolshevik faction, secretly connected with Chiang Kai-shek, planned a coup against Chu Teh. One night he was staying in an inn with only forty of his followers, when he was attacked by a force under Hu Chi-lung, leader of the coup. Shooting began at once, but it was dark and the assassins could not see clearly. When several of them aimed revolvers at Chu Teh’s head he cried out excitedly, "Don’t shoot me, I’m only the cook. Don’t shoot a man who can cook for you!” The soldiers, touched to the stomach, hesitated, and Chu Teh was led outside for closer inspection. There he was recognized by a cousin of Hu Chi-lung, who shouted, "Here is Chu Teh! Kill him!” But Chu Teh pulled out a concealed weapon of his own, shot the man, overcame his guard, and fled. Only five of his men escaped with him.

This incident explained the nickname by which Chu Teh had ever since been known in the Red Army—"Chief of the Cooks.”

Rejoining his regiment, Chu Teh notified Fan Shih-sheng that he was withdrawing, whereupon Fan was said to have presented him with a gift of $50,000 to keep his good will, for the issue against Chiang Kai-shek was still not clearly decided, and free-lance allies like the young Communists, who had considerable influence on many of Fan’s officers and men, were not to be lightly spurned. But in the months ahead the money was to prove inadequate. The little army was now held together almost solely by loyalty to Chu Teh and a few of his commanders. Party affairs were in great confusion, no definite "line” had been established, and military strategy was undecided. Chu’s troops still wore Kuomintang uniforms, but they were in rags; many of them had no shoes; and poor food, or often no food at all, caused steady desertions. But some encouragement had been provided by the news of the Canton Commune, which had suggested a clear line of action. Chu Teh re-formed his army into three sections, calling it the "Peasant Column Army,” and moved to the Hunan-Kiangsi-Kwangtung border, where he united with some bandits led by a radical student, and began a program of tax abolition, redistribution of land, and confiscation of the property of the rich. Yih Chang hsien was occupied as a base, after a bloody struggle, and the young army eked out the winter on squash and political debates.

Meanwhile Mao Tse-tung’s peasant army had marched ingloriously through Hunan, to come at last to sanctuary at Chingkangshan, on the southern Kiangsi-Hunan border, where, with the help of the bandit leaders Wang Tso and Yuan Wen-t’sai, they had occupied two surrounding counties and built up in the mountains a nearly impregnable base. To Chu Teh, not far away, the "Peasants’ and Workers’ Red Army” of Mao Tse-tung sent as delegate his brother, Mao Tse-min. He brought instructions from the Party to unite forces, and news of a definite program of partisan warfare, agrarian revolution, and the building of soviets. When in May, 1928, the two armies combined at Chingkangshan, they were in control of five counties, and had some 50,000 followers. Of these about 4,000 were armed with rifles, some 10,000 being equipped only with spears, swords, and hoes, while the rest were unarmed Party workers, propagandists, or families of the warriors, including a large number of children.

Thus began the famous Chu-Mao combination which was to make history in South China for the next six years. Chu Teh’s ascension as a formidable military leader followed the same curve of growth as the soviets.

At the First Soviet Congress, in 1931, Chu Teh was unanimously elected commander-in-chief of the Red Army. Within two years four army corps had been built up, with a firing power of some 50,000 rifles and hundreds of machine guns, mostly captured from enemy troops, and the soviets controlled vast areas of southern Kiangsi and parts of Hunan and Fukien. Intensified political training had begun, an arsenal had been erected, elementary social-revolutionary economic and political reforms were being realized throughout the soviets, Red Army uniforms were being turned out day and night to equip new partisans, and revolutionary morale was strengthening. In two years more the Red forces had been doubled.

During these years in the South, Chu Teh was in overall military command of combined Red Armies in hundreds of skirmishes, through scores of major battles, and through the brunt of five great annihilation campaigns, in the last of which he faced an enemy with technical offensive power (including heavy artillery, aviation, and mechanized units) estimated at from eight to nine times greater than his own, and resources many, many times exceeding anything at his disposal. However his degree of success or failure is to be measured, it must be admitted that for tactical ingenuity, spectacular mobility, and richness of versatility in maneuver, he established beyond any doubt the formidable fighting power of revolutionized Chinese troops in partisan warfare. The great mistakes of the Red Army in the South were strategic, and for those the political leadership must be held chiefly responsible.

Chu Teh’s devotion to his men was proverbial. Since assuming command of the army he had lived and dressed like the rank and file, had shared all their hardships, often going without shoes in the early days, living one whole winter on squash, another on yak meat, never complaining, rarely sick. He liked to wander through the camp, they said, sitting with the men and telling stories, or playing games with them. He played a good game of table tennis, and a "wistful” game of basketball. Any soldier in the army could bring his complaints directly to the commander-in-chief. Chu Teh took his hat off when he addressed his men. On the Long March he lent his horse to tired comrades, walking much of the way, seemingly tireless.

Popular myths about Chu Teh were said to credit him with miraculous powers: the ability to see 100 li on all sides, the power to fly, and the mastery of Taoist magic, such as creating dust clouds before an enemy, or stirring a wind against them. Superstitious folk believed him invulnerable, for had not thousands of bullets and shells failed to destroy him? Others said he had the power of resurrection, for had not the Kuomintang repeatedly declared him dead, often giving minute details of the manner in which he expired? Millions knew the name Chu Teh in China, and to each it was a menace or a bright star of hope, according to his status in life, but to all it was a name imprinted on the pages of a decade of history.

Back to Pao An

Casuals of the Road

From Ninghsia I turned southward again into Kansu. In four or five days I was back in Holienwan, where I again saw Ts’ai Ch’ang and her husband, Li Fu-ch’un, and had another meal of French cooking with them, and met the young and pretty wife of Nieh Jung-chen, political commissar of the First Army Corps. She had but recently slipped into the soviet districts from the White world, and had now just returned from a visit to her husband, whom she had not seen for five years.

I stayed three days in Holienwan with the supply commissariat, which was quartered in a big compound formerly owned by a Mohammedan grain merchant. Architecturally it was an interesting group of buildings of a generally Central Asian appearance, with flat heavy roofs, and deep Arabic windows set into walls at least four feet thick. As I led my horse into its spacious stables a tall white-bearded man, wearing a faded gray uniform, with a long leather apron that reached to the ground, stepped up and saluted his red-starred cap, while his sunburned face wreathed a toothless smile. He took charge of Ma Hung-kuei, my horse.

How, I wondered, had this grandfather wandered into our boy-scout encampment? I stopped to ask, and forced a story from him. He was from Shansi, and had joined the Red Army during its expedition there. His name was Li, he was sixty-four, and he claimed the distinction of being the oldest Red warrior. Rather apologetically he explained that he was not at the front just then "because Commander Yang thinks I am more useful here at this horse work, and so I stay.”

Li had been a pork seller in the town of Hung T’ung, Shansi, before he became a Red, and he roundly cursed "Model Governor” Yen Hsi-shan and the local officials and their ruinous taxes. "You can’t do business in Hung T’ung,” he said; "they tax a man’s excrement.” When old Li heard the Reds were coming he had decided to join them. His wife was dead, and his two daughters were both married; he had no sons; he had no ties at all in Hung T’ung except his overtaxed pork business; and Hung T’ung was a "dead-man” sort of place, anyway. He wanted something livelier, and so the adventurer had crept out of the city to offer himself to the Reds.

"When I wanted to enlist they said to me, ‘You are old. In the Red Army life is hard.’ And what did I say? I said, ‘Yes, this body is sixty-four years old, it’s true, but I can walk like a boy of twenty, I can shoot a gun, I can do the work of any man. If it’s men you need, I can also serve.’ So they told me to come along, and I marched through Shansi with the Red Army, and I crossed the Yellow River with the Red Army, and here I am in Kansu.”

I smiled and asked him whether it was any better than pork selling. Did he like it?

"Oh-ho! Pork selling is a turtle man’s sort of business! Here is work worth doing. A poor man’s army fighting for the oppressed, isn’t it? Certainly I like it.” The old man fumbled in his breast pocket and brought forth a soiled cloth, which he carefully unwrapped to reveal a worn little notebook. "See here,” he said. "I already recognize over 200 characters. Every day the Red Army teaches me four more. In Shansi I lived for sixty-four years and yet nobody ever taught me to write my name. Is the Red Army good or isn’t it?” He pointed with intense pride to the crude scrawl of his characters that resembled the blots of muddy hen’s feet on clean matting, and falteringly he read off some newly inscribed phrases. And then, as a sort of climax, he produced a stub of pencil and with an elaborate flourish he wrote his name for me.

"I suppose you’re thinking of marrying again,” I joked with him. He shook his head gravely and said no, what with one defile-mother horse after another he had no time to think about the woman problem, and with that he ambled away to look after his beasts.

Next evening, as I was walking through an orchard behind the courtyard, I met another Shansi man, twenty years Li’s junior, but just as interesting. I heard a hsiao-kuei calling out, "Li Pai T’ang! Li Pai T’ang!” and looked in curiosity to see whom he was addressing as the "House-of-Christian-Worship.”* There upon a little hill I found a barber shaving a youth’s head clean as an egg. Upon inquiry I discovered that his real name was Chia Ho-chung, and that he had formerly worked in the pharmacy of an American missionary hospital in P’ing Yang, Shansi. The "little devils” had given him this nickname because he was a Christian, and still said his prayers daily.

Chia pulled up his trousers and showed me a bad wound on his leg, from which he still limped, and he yanked up his coat to display a wound on his belly, where he had also been hit. These, he explained, were souvenirs of battles, and that was why he was not at the front. This hair cutting wasn’t his real job at all: he was either a pharmacist or a Red warrior.

Chia said that two other attendants in that Christian hospital had joined the Reds with him. Before leaving, they had discussed their intention with the American doctor in the hospital, whose Chinese name was Li Jen. Dr. Li Jen was "a good man, who healed the poor without charge and never oppressed people,” and when Chia and his companions asked his advice he had said, "Go ahead. I have heard that the Reds are good and honest men and not like the other armies, and you should be glad to fight with them.” So off they had gone to become red, red Robin Hoods.

"Maybe Dr. Li Jen just wanted to get rid of you,” I suggested.

The barber indignantly denied it. He said he had always got along very well with Li Jen, who was an excellent man. He asked me to tell this Li Jen, if I ever saw him, that he was still alive, well, and happy, and that as soon as the revolution was over he was coming back to take his old job in the pharmacy. I left House-of-Worship with much reluctance. He was a fine Red, a good barber, and a real Christian.

Incidentally, I met several Christians and ex-Christians among the Reds. Many Communists had once been active Christians. Dr. Nelson Fu, head of the Red Army Medical Corps, was formerly a doctor in a Methodist hospital in Kiangsi. Although he volunteered to work with the Reds, and enthusiastically supported them, he still adhered to his faith, and hence had not joined the Communist Party.

In Kiangsi the soviets carried on extensive "anti-God” propaganda. All temples, churches, and church estates were converted into state property, and monks, nuns, priests, preachers, and foreign missionaries were deprived of the rights of citizenship; but in the Northwest a policy of religious toleration was practiced. Freedom of worship was a primary guarantee, in fact. All foreign mission property was protected, and refugee missionaries were invited to return to their flocks.1 The Communists reserved the right to preach antireligious propaganda of their own, holding the "freedom to oppose worship” to be a corollary of the democratic privilege of the freedom to worship.

The only foreigners who took advantage of the new Communist policy toward religious institutions were some Belgian missionaries who were among the great landlords of Suiyuan. They owned one vast estate of 20,000 mou, and another of some 5,000 mou of land near Tingpien, on the Great Wall. After the Red Army occupied Tingpien, one side of the Belgians’ property lay adjacent to soviet territory and the other side was held by White troops. The Reds did not attempt to expropriate the Belgians’ land, but made a "treaty” in which they guaranteed to protect the church property, provided the priests permitted them to organize anti-Japanese societies among the tenants who tilled the land of this big Catholic missionary fiefdom. Another stipulation of the curious agreement provided that the Belgians would dispatch a message from the Chinese Soviet Government to Premier Blum of France, congratulating him on the triumph of the People’s Front.

There had been a series of raids by min-t’uan near Holienwan, and one village only a short distance away had been sacked two nights before I arrived. A band had crept up to the place just before dawn, overpowered and killed the lone sentry, and had then brought up bunches of dry brushwood and set fire to the huts in which about a dozen Red soldiers were sleeping. As the Reds ran out, blinded by the smoke, the min-t’uan had shot them down and seized their guns. Then they had joined with a gang of some 400, most of them armed by the Kuomintang general, Kao Kuei-tzu, who were raiding down from the North and burning farms and villages. The Twenty-eighth Army had sent a battalion out to attempt to round them up, and the day I left Holienwan these young warriors came back after a successful chase.

The battle had occurred only a few li from Holienwan, which the White bandits were said to be preparing to attack. Some peasants had discovered the min-t’uan lair in the inner mountains and, acting on this information, the Reds had divided into three columns, the center one meeting the bandits in a frontal clash. The issue was decided when the two flanking columns of Reds closed in and surrounded the enemy. Some forty min-t’uan were killed, and sixteen Reds, while many on both sides were wounded. The min-t’uan were entirely disarmed, and their two chieftains taken captive.

We passed the battalion returning with their captives as we rode back toward Shensi. A big welcome had been organized in the villages, and the peasants lined the road to cheer the victorious troops. Peasant Guards stood holding their long red-tasseled spears in salute, and the Young Vanguards sang Red songs to them, while girls and women brought refreshments, tea and fruit and hot water—all they had, but it creased the faces of the weary soldiers with smiles. They were very young, much younger than the front-line regulars, and it seemed to me that many who wore bloodstained bandages were no more than fourteen or fifteen. I saw one youth on a horse, half-conscious and held up by a comrade on each side, who had a white bandage around his forehead, in the exact center of which was a round red stain.

There in the midst of this column of youngsters, who carried rifles almost as big as themselves, marched the two bandit chieftains. One of them was a grizzled middle-aged peasant, and one wondered whether he felt ashamed, being led by these warriors all young enough to be his sons. Yet there was something rather splendid about his fearless bearing, and I thought that he was, after all, possibly a poor peasant like the rest, perhaps one who had also believed in something when he fought them, and it was regrettable that he was to be killed. Fu Chin-kuei shook his head when I asked him.

"We don’t kill captured min-t’uan. We educate them and give them a chance to repent, and many of them later become good Red partisans.”

It was fortunate that the Reds had erased this group of bandits, for it cleared our road back to Pao An. We made the trip from the Kansu border in five days, doing more than 100 li on the fifth, but though there was plenty of incident there was no event, and I returned with no trophies except cantaloupes and melons I had bought along the road.

Life in Pao An

Back in Pao An again, I settled down once more in the Waichiaopu—the Foreign Office—where I stayed through late September and half of October. I collected enough biographies to fill a Who’s Who in Red China, and every morning turned up a new commander or soviet official to be interviewed. But I was becoming increasingly uneasy about departure: Nanking troops were pouring into Kansu and Shensi, and were gradually replacing the Tungpei troops everywhere they held a front with the Reds, as Chiang Kai-shek made all preparations for a new annihilation drive from the South and the West. Someone else could write that story. I wished to publish the one I already had. But I wouldn’t be able to do that unless I got out alive, and it took time for my hosts to guarantee a secure passage back over the lines. Unless I got out soon it might prove impossible: the last fissure in the blockade might be closed.

Meanwhile life in Pao An went on tranquilly enough and you would not have supposed that these people were aware of their imminent "annihilation.” Not far from me a training regiment of new recruits was quartered. They spent their time marching and countermarching all day, playing games and singing songs. Some nights there were dramatics, and every night the whole town rang with song, as different groups gathered in barracks or in cave grottoes, yodeling down the valley. In the Red Army University the cadets were hard at work on a ten-hour day of study. A new mass-education drive was beginning in the town, even the "little devils” in the Waichiaopu being subjected to daily lessons in reading, politics, and geography.

As for myself, I lived a holiday life, riding, bathing, and playing tennis. There were two courts, one set up on the grassy meadow, clipped close by the goats and sheep, near the Red University, the other a clay court next door to the cottage of Po Ku, the gangling former Party general secretary, now chairman of the Northwest Branch Soviet Government. Here, every morning, as soon as the sun rose above the hills, I played tennis with three faculty members of the Red University: the German Li Teh, Commissar Ts’ai Shu-fan,* and Commissar Wu Hsiu-ch’uan.* The court was full of stones, it was fatal to run after a fast ball, but the games were nevertheless hotly contested. Ts’ai and Wu both spoke Russian to Li Teh, while I talked to Li Teh in English and to Ts’ai and Wu in Chinese, so that we thus had a trilingual game.

A more corrupting influence I had on the community was my gambling club. I had a pack of cards, unused since my arrival, and one day I got these out and taught Commissar Ts’ai to play rummy. Ts’ai had lost an arm in battle, but it handicapped him very little at either tennis or cards. After he had learned rummy he easily beat me with one hand. For a while rummy was the rage. Even the women began sneaking up to the Waichiaopu gambling club. My mud k’ang became the rendezvous of Pao An’s elite, and you could look around at the candle-lit faces there at night and recognize Mrs. Chou En-lai (Teng Ying-ch’ao), Mrs. Po Ku (Liu Ch’un-hsien), Mrs. K,’ai Feng, Mrs. Teng Fa, and even Mrs. Mao (Ho Tzu-ch’en). It set tongues wagging.

But the real menace to soviet morals didn’t appear till Pao An took up poker. Our tennis quartet started this, alternating nights at Li Teh’s hut and my own base of iniquity in the Foreign Office. Into this sinful mire we dragged such respectable citizens as Po Ku, Li K’e-nung, K’ai Feng, Lo Fu, and others. Stakes rose higher and higher. One-armed Ts’ai Shu-fan finally cleaned up $120,000 from Chairman Po Ku in a single evening, and it looked as if Po Ku’s only way out was embezzlement of state funds. We settled the matter by ruling that Po Ku would be allowed to draw $120,000 on the treasury to pay Ts’ai, provided Ts’ai would use the money to buy airplanes for the nonexistent soviet air force. It was all in matches, anyway—and, unfortunately, so were the airplanes Ts’ai bought.

One-armed Ts’ai was quick-witted, excitable, full of repartee and badinage. He had been a Red for a decade, having joined while he was a railway worker in Hunan. Later on he had gone to Moscow and studied there for two or three years, and found time to fall in love with, and marry, a Russian. Sometimes he looked ruefully at his empty sleeve and wondered whether his wife wouldn’t divorce him when she saw his missing arm. "Don’t worry about a little thing like that,” Professor Wu, who was also a returned Russian student, would comfort him. "If you haven’t had your posterity shot off when you see her again you’ll be lucky.” Nevertheless, Ts’ai kept urging me to send him an artificial arm when I got back to the White world.

This was only one of the impossible requests I had for things to be sent in. Lu Ting-yi* wanted me to buy, equip, and man an air fleet for them from the proceeds of the sale of my pictures of the Reds. Hsu Hai-tung wanted a couple of false teeth to fill in the gap in his gums: he had fallen in love. Everybody had something wrong with his teeth; they hadn’t seen a dentist for years. Most of the older leaders suffered from some kind of ailment, especially from ulcers and other stomach trouble, as a result of years on a dubious diet. But I never heard anybody complaining.

Personally I thrived on the food and put on weight, and my disgust at facing the unvaried menu every day did not prevent me from swallowing embarrassing quantities of it. They made me the concession of steamed bread made from whole-wheat flour, which when toasted was not bad, and occasionally I had pork or mutton shaslik. Besides that I lived on millet—boiled millet, fried millet, baked millet, and vice versa. Cabbage was plentiful, and peppers, onions, and beans. I missed coffee, butter, sugar, milk, eggs, and a lot of things, but I went right on eating millet.

A batch of copies of the North China Daily News arrived for the library one day and I read a recipe for what seemed to be a very simple chocolate sponge cake. I knew Po Ku was hoarding a tin of cocoa in his hut, and I schemed that with some of this, and by substituting pig’s fat for butter, I could make that cake. Accordingly I got Li K’e-nung to write out a formal application to the Chairman of the Northwest Branch Soviet Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic to supply me with two ounces of chocolate. After several days of delay, and hemming and hawing, and doubts and aspersions cast upon my ability to bake a cake anyway, and a lot of unraveling of red tape, and conflicts with the bureaucracy in general, we finally forced those two ounces of cocoa out of Po Ku, and got other materials from the food cooperative. Before I could mix up the batter my bodyguard came in to investigate, and the wretch knocked the cocoa on the ground. Followed more red tape, but finally I got the order refilled and began the great experiment. Why labor the result? Any intelligent hausfrau can foresee what happened. My improvised oven failed to function properly, the cake did not rise, and when I took it off the fire it was a two-inch layer of charcoal on the bottom, and a top still in a state of slimy fluidity. However, it was eaten by the interested onlookers in the Waichiaopu with great relish: there were too many good materials in it to be wasted. I lost immense face and thereafter docilely consumed my millet.

Li Teh compensated by asking me to a "foreign meal” with him. He had a way of getting rice and eggs sometimes, and, being German, he made his own sausages. You could see them swinging in strings, drying outside his door near the main street of Pao An. He was getting ready his winter’s supply. He had also built himself a fireplace and taught his Chinese wife,1 a girl who had come with him from Kiangsi, how to bake. He showed me that the materials were there for tolerable cooking. It was only that the food cooperative (where our meals were cooked in common) didn’t know how it should be done. Mrs. Lo P’ing-hui, wife of a Red Army commander (and the only lily-footed woman who made the Long March), was chief chef of the cooperative, and I think Li Teh’s wife had a pull with her, and that is how he garnered his eggs and sugar.

But Li Teh was more than a good cook and a good poker player. Who was this mystery man of the Chinese soviet district? Had his importance been exaggerated by the Kuomintang General Lo Chou-ying, who, after reading some of Li Teh’s writings found in Kiangsi, described him as the "brain trust” of the Reds? What was his connection with Soviet Russia? How much influence, in fact, did Russia exercise over the affairs of Red China?

The Russian Influence

This volume does not have as one of its primary purposes an examination of relations between the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of Russia, or the Comintern, or the Soviet Union as a whole. No adequate background has been provided here for such a task. But the book would be incomplete without some discussion of these organic connections and their more significant effects on the revolutionary history of China.

Certainly and obviously Russia had for the past dozen or more years been a dominating influence—and particularly among educated youth it had been the dominating external influence—on Chinese thought about the social, political, economic, and cultural problems of the country. This had been almost as true, though unacknowledged, in the Kuomintang areas as it had been an openly glorified fact in the soviet districts. Everywhere in China that youth had any fervent revolutionary beliefs the impact of Marxist ideology was apparent, both as a philosophy and as a kind of substitute for religion. Among such young Chinese, Lenin was almost worshiped, Stalin was the most popular foreign leader, socialism was taken for granted as the future form of Chinese society, and Russian literature had the largest following—Maxim Gorky’s works, for example, outselling all native writers except Lu Hsun, who was himself a great social revolutionary although not a Communist.

And all that was quite remarkable for one reason especially. America, England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and other capitalist or imperialist powers had sent thousands of political, cultural, economic, or missionary workers into China, actively to propagandize the Chinese masses with credos of their own states. Yet for many years the Russians had not had a single school, church, or even a debating society in China where Marxist-Leninist doctrines could legally be preached. Their influence, except in the soviet districts, had been largely indirect. Moreover, it had been aggressively opposed everywhere by the Kuomintang. Yet few who had been in China during that decade, and conscious of the society in which they lived, would dispute the contention that Marxism, the Russian Revolution, and the new society of the Soviet Union had probably made more profound impressions on the Chinese people than all Christian missionary influences combined.

One had to remember that the Chinese Communists’ adherence to the Comintern, and unity with the U.S.S.R., were voluntary, and could have been liquidated at any time by the Chinese from within. The role of the Soviet Union for them had been most potent as a living example that bred hope and faith. The Chinese Reds stoutly believed that the Chinese revolution was not isolated, and that hundreds of millions of workers, not only in Russia but throughout the world, were anxiously watching them, and when the time came would emulate them, even as they themselves had emulated the comrades in Russia. In the day of Marx and Engels it might have been correct to say that "the workers have no country,” but the Chinese Communists believed that, besides their own little bases of power, they had a mighty fatherland in the Soviet Union.

"The Soviet Government in China,” read the Constitution adopted at the first All-China Soviet Congress, "declares its readiness to form a revolutionary united front with the world proletariat and all oppressed nations, and proclaims the Soviet Union, the land of proletarian dictatorship, to be its loyal ally”. How much the words italicized meant to the Chinese soviets, which in truth most of the time were completely isolated geographically, economically, and politically, was hard to understand for any Westerner who had never known a Chinese Communist.

This idea of having behind them a great ally—even though it was less and less validated by demonstrations of positive support from the Soviet Union—was of primary importance to the morale of the Chinese Reds. It imparted to their struggle the universality of a religious cause, and they deeply cherished it. When they shouted, "Long Live the World Revolution!” and "Proletarians of All Lands, Unite!” it was an idea that permeated all their teaching and faith, and in it they reaffirmed their allegiance to the dream of a Socialist world brotherhood.

It seemed to me that these concepts had already shown that they could change Chinese behavior. I never suffered from any "antiforeignism” in the Reds’ attitude toward me. They were certainly anti-imperialist, but racial prejudice seemed to have been sublimated in class antagonism that knew no national boundaries. Even their anti-Japanese agitation was not directed against the Japanese on a racial basis. In their propaganda the Reds constantly emphasized that they opposed only the Japanese militarists, capitalists, and other "Fascist oppressors,” and that the Japanese masses were their potential allies. Indeed, they derived great encouragement from that conviction. This changing of national prejudice from racism to class antagonism was no doubt traceable to the education in Russia of scores of the Chinese Red leaders, who had attended Sun Yat-sen University, or the Red Academy, or some other school for international cadres of communism, and had returned as teachers to their own people.

One example of their internationalism was the intense interest with which the Reds followed the events of the Spanish Civil War. Bulletins were issued in the press, were pasted up in the meeting rooms of village soviets, were announced to the armies at the front. Special lectures were given by the political department on the cause and significance of the Spanish war, and the "people’s front” in Spain was contrasted with the "united front” in China. Mass meetings of the populace were summoned, demonstrations were held, and public discussions were encouraged. It was quite surprising sometimes to find, even far back in the mountains, Red farmers who knew a few rudimentary facts about such things as the Italian conquest of Abyssinia and the German-Italian "invasion” of Spain, and spoke of these powers as the "Fascist allies” of their enemy, Japan. Despite their geographical isolation, these rustics now knew much more about that aspect of world politics, thanks to radio news and wall newspapers and Communist lecturers and propagandists, than the rural population anywhere else in China.

The strict discipline of Communist method and organization had seemingly produced among Chinese Marxists a type of cooperation and a suppression of individualism which the average "Old China Hand,” or treaty-port merchant, or missionary who "knew Chinese psychology” would have found impossible to believe without witnessing for himself. In their political life the existence of the individual was an atomic pulse in the social whole, the mass, and must bend to its will, either consciously in the role of leadership, or unconsciously as part of the material demiurge. There had been disputes and internecine struggles among the Communists, but none severe enough to deal a fatal injury to either the army or the Party.

Had Nanking been able at any time to split their military and political strength into contradictory and permanently warring factions, as it did with all other Opposition groups—as Chiang Kai-shek did with his own rivals for power within the Kuomintang—the task of Communist suppression might have been rewarded with final success. But its attempts were failures. For example, a few years before, Nanking had hoped to utilize the worldwide Stalin-Trotsky controversy to divide the Chinese Communists, but although so-called Chinese "Trotskyites” did appear, they never developed any important mass influence or following.

The Reds had generally discarded much of the ceremony of traditional Chinese etiquette, and their psychology and character were quite different from our old conceptions of Chinese. They were direct, frank, simple, undevious, and scientific-minded. They were also implacable enemies of the old Chinese familism.*

With their zealous adoration of the Soviet Union there had naturally been a lot of copying and imitating of foreign ideas, institutions, methods, and organizations. The Chinese Red Army was constructed on Russian military lines, and much of its tactical knowledge derived from Russian experience. Social organizations in general followed the pattern laid down by Russian Bolshevism. Many Red songs were put to Russian music and widely sung in the soviet districts. Suwei-ai—Chinese for "soviet”—was only one example of many words transliterated directly from Russian into Chinese.

But in their borrowing there was much adaptation; few Russian ideas or institutions survived without drastic changes to suit the milieu in which they operated. The empirical process of a decade eliminated indiscriminate wholesale importations, and also resulted in the introduction of peculiarly Chinese features. A process of imitation and adaptation of the West had, of course, been going on in the bourgeois world of China, too—for there was very little left even of poetry of the ancient feudal heritage, that "scrap material of a great history” as Spengler calls it, which the Chinese were able to use in building either a modern bourgeois or a Socialist society capable of grappling with the vast new demands of the country. While the Reds leaned heavily on Russia for organizational methods with youth, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek not only used Italian bombing planes to destroy them, but also borrowed from the Y.M.C.A. in building his anti-Communist New Life movement.

And finally, of course, the political ideology, tactical line, and theoretical leadership of the Chinese Communists had been under the close guidance, if not positive direction, of the Communist International. Great benefits undoubtedly accrued to the Chinese Reds from sharing the collective experience of the Russian Revolution, and from the leadership of the Comintern. But it was also true that the Comintern could be held responsible for serious reverses suffered by the Chinese Communists in the anguish of their growth.

Chinese Communism and the Comintern

It is possible to divide the history of Sino-Russian relations from 1923 to 1937 roughly into three periods. The first, from 1923 to 1927, was a period of triple alliance between the Soviet Union and the Nationalist revolutionaries, consisting of strange bedfellows aligned under the banners of the Kuomintang and the Communist parties, and aiming at the overthrow by revolution of the then extant government of China, and the restoration of China’s complete sovereignty. That enterprise ended with the triumph of the right-wing Kuomintang, the founding of the National Government at Nanking, the latter’s compromise with the colonial power, and the severance of Sino-Russian relations.

From 1927 to 1933 there was a period of isolation of Russia from (Nationalist) China, and its complete insulation against Russian influence. This era closed when Moscow resumed diplomatic relations with Nanking late in 1933. The third period began with a lukewarm Nanking-Moscow rapprochement, embarrassed considerably by the continued heavy civil war between Nanking and the Chinese Communists. It was to end dramatically early in 1937, when a partial reconciliation was effected between the Communists and the Kuomintang, with new possibilities opened up for Sino-Russian cooperation.

The three periods of Sino-Russian relationship mentioned above accurately reflected also the changes in the character of the Comintern and its stages of transition. It is impossible here to enter into the complex causes, domestic and international, which brought about those changes, both in the Soviet Union and in the Comintern, but it is pertinent to see how in the main they had affected, and were affected by, the Chinese Revolution.

The 1927 crisis of the Chinese Revolution coincided with a crisis in Russia, and in the Comintern, expressed in the struggle between Trotskyism and Stalinism for theoretical and practical control of Russia. Had Stalin been able to advance his slogan, "socialism in one country” much earlier than 1924, had the issue been fought out and had he been able to dominate the Comintern before then, quite possibly the "intervention” in China might never have begun. Such a speculation in any case was idle now. When Stalin did develop his fight, the line in China had already been cast. The active military, political, financial, and intellectual collaboration given to the Chinese Nationalist Revolution was until 1926 under the direction chiefly of Zinoviev, who was chairman of the Communist International. Then from early 1926 onward Stalin became chiefly responsible for the affairs and policies of the Comintern as well as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and it was nowhere disputed that he had tightened his grasp on both organizations ever since.

Thus it was Stalin who led the Comintern that gave the Chinese Communists their tactical line and "directives” in 1926 and during the catastrophe of the spring of 1927. During those fateful months, in which disaster gathered above the heads of the Chinese Communists, Stalin’s line was subjected to continuous bombardment from the Opposition, dominated by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. While he was Comintern chairman, Zinoviev had fully supported the line of Communist cooperation with the Kuomintang, but he violently attacked this same line as carried out by Stalin. Particularly after Chiang Kai-shek’s first "treachery”—the abortive attempt at a coup d’état in Canton in 1926—Zinoviev predicted an inevitable counterrevolution in which the national bourgeoisie would compromise with imperialism and "betray the masses.”

At least a year before Chiang Kai-shek’s second and successful coup d’état, Zinoviev began demanding the separation of the Communists from the Kuomintang, "the party of the national bourgeoisie,” which he now considered incapable of carrying out the two main tasks of the revolution—anti-imperialism, i.e. the overthrow of foreign domination of China, and "antifeudalism,” or the destruction of the landlord-gentry rule in rural China. Just as early, Trotsky began urging the formation of soviets and an independent Chinese Red Army. The Opposition in general foretold the failure of the "bourgeois-democratic” revolution—all they hoped for in this period—if Stalin’s line was continued.

Stalin defended himself, after the debacle, by ridiculing as non-Marxist the Trotskyist contentions that the tactical line of the Comintern had been the main cause of the failure. "Comrade Kamenev,” declared Stalin, "said that the policy of the Communist International was responsible for the defeat of the Chinese Revolution, and that we ‘bred Cavaignacs in China.’ … How can it be asserted that the tactics of a party can abolish or reverse the relation of class forces? What are we to say of people who forget the relation of class forces in time of revolution, and who try to explain everything by the tactics of a party? Only one thing can be said of such people—that they have abandoned Marxism.”

Trotsky required no help from me in framing appropriate replies to Stalin’s self-exculpations, but as his wit had not prevented the earlier destruction of Communist regimes in Hungary and Bavaria, nor the general defeat of the Comintern’s hopes throughout the East, so it did not save the Chinese Communists from a catastrophe which all but destroyed the Party. Only Stalin won—that is, he drove Trotsky from the temple—and consequently Stalin dominated future activities of the Comintern in China—which for a time were practically nil. Russian organs in China were closed, Russian Communists were killed or driven from the country, the flow of financial, military, and political help from Russia dwindled. The Chinese Communist Party was thrown into great confusion, and for a time its interior leadership lost contact with the Comintern. The rural soviet movement and (Mao’s) Chinese Red Army began spontaneously, and they did not, in fact, get much applause from Russia till after the Sixth Congress, when the Communist International gave its postnatal sanction.2

After 1927 it became impossible for Russia to have any direct physical connection with the Chinese Red areas, which had no seaport and were entirely surrounded by a ring of hostile troops. Whereas in the past there had been scores of Comintern workers in China, there were now two or three, often almost isolated from society as a whole, seldom able to risk a stay of more than a few months. Whereas a large flow of Russian gold and arms had formerly gone to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, now a trickle reached the Reds. And whereas the whole Soviet Union had backed the Great Revolution of 1925–27, the Chinese Communist movement was now aided only by a Comintern which could no longer command the vast resources of the "base of the world revolution,” but had to limp along as a kind of poor stepchild which might be officially disinherited whenever it did anything malaprop.

Actual financial help given to the Chinese Reds by Moscow or the Comintern during this decade seemed to have been amazingly small. When Mr. and Mrs. Hilaire Noulens were arrested in Shanghai in 1932 and convicted in Nanking as chief Far Eastern agents of the Comintern, police evidence showed that total outpayments for the whole Orient (not just China) had not at most exceeded the equivalent of about U.S. $15,000 per month. That was a trifle compared with the vast sums poured into China to support Japanese and Nazi-Fascist propaganda. It was rather pitiful also in contrast, for example, with America’s $50,000,000 Wheat Loan to Nanking in 1933—the proceeds of which were of decisive value to Chiang Kai-shek’s civil war against the Reds, according to reports of foreign military observers.

America, England, Germany, and Italy sold Nanking great quantities of airplanes, tanks, guns, and munitions, but of course sold none to the Reds. The American Army released officers to train the Chinese air force, which demolished towns in Red China, and Italian and German instructors actually led some of the most destructive bombing expeditions themselves—as happened on a larger scale in Spain. To Chiang Kai-shek’s aid Germany sent Von Seeckt, and after him Von Falkenhausen, with a staff of Prussian officers who improved Nanking’s technique of annihilation. It seemed that Chiang Kai-shek was propped up for nearly ten years by more important aid than any foreign power gave to the Reds.

Probably the Chinese Reds fought with less material foreign help than any army in modern Chinese history.

That Foreign Brain Trust

There had not been a single foreign adviser with China’s Red Army during the first five years of its existence. Not until 1933 did Li Teh appear in the Kiangsi soviet districts as a German representative of the Comintern, to take a high position both politically and militarily. Yet despite the numerical insignificance of this "foreign influence,” several responsible Communists in the Northwest apparently felt that Li Teh’s advice had been to a great extent responsible for two costly mistakes in the Kiangsi Red republic. The first, as Mao Tse-tung pointed out, was the failure of the Red Army to unite with the Nineteenth Route Army, when the latter arose in revolt against Nanking in the autumn of 1933.

The Nineteenth Route Army, commanded by Generals Chen Ming-hsiu, Ts’ai T’ing-k’ai, and Chiang Kuang-nai, had made an impressive defense of Shanghai against the Japanese attack in 1932, and had demonstrated its strong national-revolutionary character. Transferred to Fukien after the Shanghai Truce, it gradually became a center of political opposition to Nanking’s "nonresistance” policy. Following Nanking’s negotiation of the humiliating Tangku Truce with Japan, the Nineteenth Route Army leaders set up an independent government in Fukien province and started a movement for a democratic republic and the destruction of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime.

The Nineteenth Route Army was one of the few Kuomintang military units never defeated by the Reds, and they had great respect for its fighting ability. Composed mostly of Cantonese, it really reflected in its political character a loosely organized left-wing opposition movement. It was the main military support of several factions on the periphery of the Kuomintang, led by the She-hui Min-chu T’ang, the Chinese Social Democrats.

Sent to Fukien to participate in Communist suppression late in 1932, the Nineteenth Route Army leaders instead quickly built up a base of their own from which to oppose Chiang Kai-shek. They entered into a nonaggression agreement with the Reds and proposed an anti-Nanking, anti-Japanese alliance along much the same lines that were later on evolved in the Northwest between the Manchurian, the Northwestern, and the Communist armies. But instead of cooperating with the Nineteenth Route Army the Reds withdrew their main forces from the Fukien border to western Kiangsi. That left Chiang Kai-shek free to descend from Chekiang into neighboring Fukien with little impediment. The Generalissimo struck before the Nineteenth Route Army was prepared militarily or politically, and quickly quashed the insurgents. The Reds consequently lost their strongest potential allies. There is no doubt that elimination of the Nineteenth Route Army very much facilitated the task of destroying the southern soviets, to which Chiang Kai-shek at once turned with a new confidence early in 1934.

The Reds’ second serious mistake was made in the planning of strategy and tactics to meet Chiang’s new offensive—the Fifth Campaign. In previous campaigns the Reds had relied on superiority in maneuvering warfare, and their ability to take the initiative from Chiang Kai-shek in strong swift concentrations and surprise attacks. Positional warfare and regular fighting had always played minor roles in their operations. But in the Fifth Campaign, according to Red commanders to whom I talked, Li Teh insisted upon a strategy of positional warfare, relegating partisan and guerrilla tactics to auxiliary tasks, and somehow won acceptance for his scheme against (so I was told) "unanimous” opposition of the Red military council.1

But whatever errors of judgment Li Teh may have made, there was little question that his long experience with Chinese fighting methods, and on Chinese terrain, made him one of the best qualified Occidental military authorities on China. And the personal courage of a man who had endured the severe hardships of the Long March commanded admiration and remained a challenge to armchair revolutionaries all over the world. For Li Teh, an outsize foreigner, the Long March had presented some special hardships. He had stomach complaints, and was badly in need of a dentist, but his first problem was to keep supplied with shoes large enough for his enormous number elevens. There did not seem to be any shoes that big in China. For three years he had lived without any contact with Europeans, most of the time without books to read. When I was in Pao An he was delighted to have got hold of a copy of the huge China Year Book, which he carefully digested from cover to cover, including its innumerable tables of statistics—a feat constituting one of the few things he could boast in common with the Year Book editor, H. G. W. Woodhead, C.B.E. This blue-eyed, fair-haired Aryan had not spoken a word of Chinese when he first immersed himself alone with his Oriental comrades, and he still had to conduct all his serious conversations through interpreters or in German, Russian, or French.

It was almost impossible to believe that under any genius of command the Reds could have emerged victorious against the odds that faced them throughout the year of the Fifth Campaign. It was not the phenomenon of foreign support on the side of the Reds, but its presence in a major degree on the side of the Kuomingtang, that characterized the last struggle of the Kiangsi Soviet Republic. Quite clearly the Chinese Red Army was not "officered by Russian Bolsheviks,” "mercenaries of Moscow rubles,” or "puppet troops of Stalin.” Chinese and foreign newspapers during the anti-Red wars used regularly to report how many "corpses of Russian officers” were found on the battlefield after a Kuomintang atttack on the Reds. No foreign corpses were ever produced, yet so effective was this propaganda that many non-Communist Chinese really thought of the Red Army as some kind of foreign invasion.

So much for Kiangsi. During the next two years of the Long March the Reds were almost entirely cut off from contact even with their own Party members in the coastal cities of China, and the Comintern only infrequently got into direct communication with the Red Army. Wang Ming (Ch’en Shao-yu),* the Chinese Party’s chief delegate in Moscow, must have found it very difficult at times to get accurate information even on the location of the main forces of the Red Army for his reports to the Comintern, and some of his articles in lnprecorr^† seemed to reflect that. I happened to be in Pao An one day when some copies of Inprecorr arrived, and I saw Lo Fu, the American-educated secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, eagerly devouring them. He mentioned casually that he had not seen an Inprecorr for nearly three years.

And not until September, 1936, while I was still with the Reds, did the detailed account of the proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, held just a year previously, finally reach the Red capital of China. It was these reports which brought to the Chinese Communists for the first time the fully developed thesis of the international anti-Fascist united-front tactics which were to guide them in their policy during the months ahead, when revolt was to spread throughout the Northwest, and to shake the entire Orient. And once more the Comintern and Stalin were to assert their will in the affairs of China, in a manner that would sharply affect the development of the revolution. I was to view that episode from the sidelines again in Peking.

Farewell to Red China

Two interesting things happened before I left Pao An. On October 9, radio messages from Kansu reached us telling of the successful junction at Huining of the vanguard of the Fourth Red Army with Ch’en Keng’s First Divison of the First Army Corps.1 All the regular Red Army forces were now concentrated in Northwest China with good lines of communications established. Orders for winter uniforms poured into the factories of Pao An and Wu Ch’i Chen. The combined forces of the three armies reportedly numbered between 80,000 and 90,000 seasoned, well-equipped warriors. Celebrations and rejoicing were held in Pao An and throughout the soviet districts. The long period of suspense during the fighting in south Kansu was ended. Everyone now felt a new confidence in the future. With the whole of the best Red troops in China concentrated in a large new territory, and near-by another 100,000 sympathetic troops of the Tungpei Army, whom they had come to think of as allies, the Reds now believed that their proposals for a united front would be heard with keener interest at Nanking.

The second important event was an interview I had with Mao Tse-tung just before I left, in which, for the first time, he indicated concrete terms on the basis of which the Communists would welcome peace with the Kuomintang and cooperation to resist Japan. Some of these terms had already been announced in a manifesto issued by the Communist Party in August. In my conversation with Mao I asked him to explain the reasons for his new policy.²

"First of all,” he began, "the seriousness of Japanese aggression: it is becoming more intensified every day, and is so formidable a menace that before it all the forces of China must unite. Besides the Communist Party there are other parties and forces in China, and the strongest of these is the Kuomintang. Without its cooperation our strength at present is insufficient to resist Japan in war. Nanking must participate. The Kuomintang and the Communist Party are the two main political forces in China, and if they continue to fight now in civil war the effect will be unfavorable for the anti-Japanese movement.

"Second, since August, 1935, the Communist Party has been urging, by manifesto, a union of all parties in China for the purpose of resisting Japan, and to this program the entire populace has responded with sympathy, notwithstanding the fact that the Kuomintang has continued its attacks upon us.

"The third point is that many patriotic elements even in the Kuomintang now favor a reunion with the Communist Party. Anti-Japanese elements even in the Nanking Government, and Nanking’s own armies, are today ready to unite because of the peril to our national existence.

"These are the main characteristics of the present situation in China, and because of them we are obliged to reconsider in detail the concrete formula under which such cooperation in the national liberation movement can become possible. The fundamental point of unity which we insist upon is the national-liberation anti-Japanese principle. In order to realize it we believe there must be established a national defense democratic government. Its main tasks must be to resist the foreign invader, to grant popular rights to the masses of the people, and to intensify the development of the country’s economy.

"We will therefore support a parliamentary form of representative government, an anti-Japanese salvation government, a government which protects and supports all popular patriotic groups. If such a republic is established, the Chinese soviets will become a part of it. We will realize in our areas measures for a democratic parliamentary form of government.”

"Does that mean,” I asked, "that the laws of such a [democratic] government would also apply in soviet districts?”

Mao replied in the affirmative. He said that such a government should restore and once more realize Sun Yat-sen’s final will, and his three "basic principles” during the Great Revolution, which were: alliance with the U.S.S.R. and those countries which treat China as an equal; union with the Chinese Communist Party; and fundamental protection of the interests of the Chinese working class.

"If such a movement develops in the Kuomintang,” he continued, "we are prepared to cooperate with and support it, and to form a united front against imperialism such as existed in 1925–27. We are convinced that this is the only way left to save our nation.”

"Is there any immediate cause for the new proposals?” I inquired. "They must certainly be regarded as the most important decision in your Party’s history in a decade.”

"The immediate causes,” Mao explained, "are the severe new demands of Japan,* capitulation to which must enormously handicap any attempts at resistance in the future, and the popular response to this deepening threat of Japanese invasion in the form of a great people’s patriotic movement. These conditions have in turn produced a change in attitude among certain elements in Nanking. Under the circumstances it is now possible to hope for the realization of such a policy as we propose. Had it been offered in this form a year ago, or earlier, neither the country nor the Kuomintang would have been prepared for it.

"At present, negotiations are being conducted. While the Communist Party has no great positive hopes of persuading Nanking to resist Japan, it is nevertheless possible. As long as it is, the Communist Party will be ready to cooperate in all necessary measures. If Chiang Kai-shek prefers to continue the civil war, the Red Army will also receive him.”

In effect, Mao made a formal declaration of the readiness of the Communist Party, the Soviet Government, and the Red Army, to cease civil war and further attempts to overthrow Nanking by force, and to submit to the high command of a representative central government, provided there was created the political framework in which the cooperation of other parties besides the Kuomintang would be possible. At this time also, though not as part of the formal interview, Mao indicated that the Communists would be prepared to make such changes in nomenclature as would facilitate "cooperation,” without fundamentally affecting the independent role of the Red Army and the Communist Party. Thus, if it were necessary, the Red Army would change its name to National Revolutionary Army, the name "soviets” would be abandoned, and the agrarian policy would be modified during the period of preparation for war against Japan. During the turbulent weeks that lay ahead, Mao’s statement was to have an important influence on events.^*

In the middle of October, 1936, after I had been with the Reds nearly four months, arrangements were finally completed for my return to the White world. It had not been easy. Chang Hsueh-liang’s friendly Tungpei troops had been withdrawn from nearly every front and replaced by Nanking or other hostile forces. There was only one outlet then, through a Tungpei division which still had a front with the Reds near Lochuan, a walled city a day’s motor trip north of Sian.

I walked down the main street of Defended Peace for the last time, and the farther I got toward the gate, the more reluctantly I moved. People popped their heads out of offices to shout last remarks. My poker club turned out en masse to bid the maestro good-by, and some "little devils” trudged with me to the walls of Pao An. I stopped to take a picture of Old Hsu and Old Hsieh, their arms thrown around each other’s shoulders. Only Mao Tse-tung failed to appear; he was still asleep.

"Don’t forget my artificial arm!” called Ts’ai.

"Don’t forget my films!” urged Lu Ting-yi.3

"We’ll be waiting for the air fleet!” laughed Yang Shang-k’un.

"Send me in a wife!” demanded Li K’e-nung.

"And send back those four ounces of cocoa,” chided Po Ku.

The whole Red University was seated out in the open, under a great tree, listening to a lecture by Lo Fu, when I went past. They all came over, and we shook hands, and I mumbled a few words. Then I turned and forded the stream, waved them a farewell, and rode up quickly with my little caravan. I might be the last foreigner to see any of them alive, I thought. It was very depressing. I felt that I was not going home, but leaving it.

In five days we reached the southern frontier, and I waited there for three days, staying in a tiny village and eating black beans and wild pig. It was a beautiful wooded country, alive with game, and I spent the days in the hills with some farmers and Red soldiers, hunting pig and deer. The bush was crowded with huge pheasants, and one day we even saw, far out of range, two tigers streaking across a clearing in a valley drenched with the purple-gold of autumn. The front was absolutely peaceful, and the Reds had only one battalion stationed here.

On the 20th I got through no man’s land safely and behind the Tungpei lines, and on a borrowed horse next day I rode into Lochuan, where a truck was waiting for me. A day later I was in Sianfu. At the Drum Tower I jumped down from beside the driver and asked one of the Reds (who were wearing Tungpei uniforms) to toss me my bag. A long search, and then a longer search, while my fears increased. Finally there was no doubt about it. My bag was not there. In that bag were a dozen diaries and notebooks, thirty rolls of film—the first still and moving pictures ever taken of the Chinese Red Army—and several pounds of Red magazines, newspapers, and documents. It had to be found.

Excitement under the Drum Tower, while traffic policemen curiously gazed from a short distance away. Whispered consultations. Finally it was realized what had happened. The truck had been loaded with gunnysacks full of broken Tungpei rifles and guns being sent for repairs, and my bag, in case of any search, had been stuffed into such a sack also. Back at Hsienyang, on the opposite shore of the Wei River, twenty miles behind us, the missing object had been thrown off with the other loads. The driver stared ruefully at the truck. "T’a ma-ti” he offered in consolation.

It was already dusk, and the driver suggested that he wait till morning to go back and hunt for it. Morning! Something warned me that morning would be too late. I insisted, and I finally won the argument. The truck reversed and returned, and I stayed awake all night in a friend’s house in Sianfu wondering whether I would ever see that priceless bag again. If it were opened at Hsienyang, not only would all my things be lost forever, but that "Tungpei” truck and all its occupants would be huai-la—finished. There were Nationalist gendarmes at Hsienyang.

The bag was found. But my hunch about the urgency of the search had been absolutely correct, for early next morning all traffic was completely swept from the streets, and all roads leading into the city were lined with gendarmes and troops. Peasants were cleared out of their homes along the road. Some of the more unsightly huts were simply demolished, so that there would be nothing offensive to the eye. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was paying a sudden call on Sianfu. It would have been impossible then for our truck to return over that road to the Wei River, for it skirted the heavily guarded airfield.

This arrival of the Generalissimo made an unforgettable contrast with the scenes still fresh in my mind—of Mao Tse-tung, or Hsu Hai-tung, or Lin Piao, or P’eng Teh-huai nonchalantly strolling down a street in Red China. And the Generalissimo did not have a price on his head. But the precautions taken to protect him in Sian were to prove inadequate. He had too many enemies among the very troops who were guarding him.

White World Again

A Preface to Munity

I emerged from Red China to find a sharpening tension between the Tungpei troops of Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who was now not only commander-in-chief of China’s armed forces, but also chairman of the Executive Yuan—a position comparable to that of premier.

I have described* how the Tungpei troops were gradually being transformed, militarily and politically, from mercenaries who had been shipped to half a dozen different provinces to fight the Reds into an army infected by the national patriotic anti-Japanese slogans of its enemy, convinced of the futility of continued civil war, stirred by only one exhortation, loyal to but one central idea—the hope of "fighting back to the old homeland,” of recovering Manchuria from the Japanese who had driven them from their homes and abused and murdered their families. These notions being directly opposed to the maxims then held by Nanking, the Tungpei troops had found themselves with a growing fellow feeling for the anti-Japanese Red Army.

The estrangement had been widened by important occurrences during the four months of my travels. In the Southwest a revolt against Nanking had been led by Generals Pai Chung-hsi and Li Tsung-jen, whose chief political demands were based on opposition to the Nationalist Government’s nonresistance policies. After weeks of near-war, a compromise settlement had finally been reached, but the interim had provided a tremendous stimulus to the anti-Japanese movement throughout China. Three or four Japanese had been killed by angry mobs in various parts of the interior, and Japan had presented to Nanking strong demands for apologies, compensations, and new political concessions. Another Sino-Japanese "incident,” followed by a Japanese invasion, seemed a possibility.

Meanwhile the anti-Japanese movement, led by the left-wing National Salvation Association, was, despite stern measures of suppression, rising in strength everywhere, and considerable mass pressure was being indirectly exerted on Nanking to stiffen its attitude. Such pressure multiplied when, in October, Japanese-led Mongol and Chinese puppet troops, equipped and trained in Japan’s conquered Jehol and Chahar, began an invasion of northern Suiyuan (Inner Mongolia). But the widespread popular demand that this be considered "the last extremity,” and the signal for a "war of resistance” on a national scale, was ignored. No mobilization orders were forthcoming. Nanking’s standing reply remained. "Internal unification”—i.e., extermination of the Reds—must come first. Many patriotic quarters began to urge that the Communists’ proposals for an end to civil war, and the creation of a national front on the basis of "voluntary unification,” be accepted by Nanking, in order to concentrate the entire energies of the people to oppose the common peril of Japan. Proponents of such opinions were arrested as "traitors.”

The highest degree of emotional excitement centered in the Northwest. Few people realized then how closely the anti-Japanese sentiment of the Tungpei Army was connected with the determination to stop the war against the Reds. Sian seemed a long way off to most Chinese as well as to foreigners in the big treaty ports of China, and it was little visited by journalists. An exception was Miss Nym Wales, an American writer, who in October journeyed to Sian and interviewed the Young Marshal. Miss Wales reported:

"The serious anti-Japanese movement in China is formulating itself not in the various ‘incidents’ ranging from North to South, but here in Sianfu among the Northeastern exiles from Manchuria—as one might expect that it logically should. While the movement is being suppressed in other parts of China, in Sianfu it is under the open and enthusiastic leadership of Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang—ardently supported by his troops, if not compelled by them to act in this direction.”*

Reflecting on the significance of her interview with the Young Marshal, Miss Wales wrote:

"In effect, and read in relation to its background, this interview may be interpreted as an attempt to influence Chiang Kai-shek to lead active resistance … implying a threat (in his statement) that ‘only by resistance to foreign aggression [i.e., not by civil war] can the real unification of China be manifested,’ and that ‘if the Government does not obey the will of the people it cannot stand.’ Most significant, this Deputy Commander-in-Chief (second only to Chiang Kai-shek) said that ‘if the Communists can sincerely cooperate to resist the common foreign invader, perhaps it is possible that this problem can be settled peacefully.’ …”

But Chiang Kai-shek plainly underestimated the seriousness of the warning. In October he sent the First Army—his best—to attack the Reds in Kansu, and when he arrived in Sianfu it was for the purpose of completing preliminary plans for his sixth general offensive against the Reds. In Sian and Lanchow arrangements were made to accommodate more than 100 bombers. Tons of bombs arrived. It was reported that poison gas was to be used. This was seemingly the only explanation of Chiang’s queer boast that he would "destroy the remnant Red bandits in a couple of weeks, or at most a month.”*

One thing Chiang must have understood after his October visit to Sian. That was that the Tungpei troops were becoming useless in the war against the Communists. In interviews with Tungpei commanders the Generalissimo could now discern a profound lack of interest in his new offensive. One of Chang Hsueh-liang’s staff told me later that at this time the Young Marshal formally presented to the Generalissimo the program for a national front, cessation of civil war, alliance with Russia, and resistance to Japan. Chiang Kai-shek replied, "I will never talk about this until every Red soldier in China is exterminated, and every Communist is in prison. Only then would it be possible to cooperate with Russia.” A little before this the Generalissimo had rejected a Russian offer of a mutual-defense pact through his then foreign minister, Wang Ching-wei.¹

Now the Generalissimo went back to his headquarters in Loyang and supervised preparations for his new campaign. Twenty divisions of troops were to be brought into the Northwest if necessary. By late November over ten full war-strength divisions had already been concentrated near Tungkuan, outside the historic pass at the gateway to Shensi. Train-loads of shells and supplies poured into Sian. Tanks, armored cars, motor transports were prepared to move after them.

A flame of strong nationalist feeling swept through the country, and the Japanese demanded the suppression of the National Salvation movement, which they held responsible for the anti-Japanese agitation. Nanking obliged. Seven of the most prominent leaders of the organization, all respectable citizens, including a prominent banker, a lawyer, educators, and writers, were arrested. At the same time the government suppressed fourteen nationally popular magazines. Strikes in the Japanese mills of Shanghai, partly in patriotic protest against the Japanese invasion of Suiyuan, were also broken up with considerable violence by the Japanese, in cooperation with the Kuomintang. When other patriotic strikes occurred in Tsingtao, the Japanese landed their own marines, arrested the strikers, occupied the city. The marines were withdrawn only after Chiang had agreed virtually to prohibit all strikes in Japanese mills of Tsingtao in the future.

All those happenings had further repercussions in the Northwest. In November, under pressure from his own officers, Chang Hsueh-liang dispatched his famous appeal to be sent to the Suiyuan front. "In order to control our troops,” this missive concluded, "we should keep our promise to them that whenever the chance comes they will be allowed to carry out their desire of fighting the enemy. Otherwise they will regard not only myself, but also Your Excellency, as a cheat, and thus will no longer obey us. Please give us the order to mobilize at least a part, if not the whole, of the Tungpei Army, to march immediately to Suiyuan as re-enforcements to those who are fulfilling their sacred mission of fighting Japanese imperialism there. If so, I, as well as my troops, of more than 100,000, shall follow Your Excellency’s leadership to the end.” The earnest tone of this whole letter,^* the hope of restoring an army’s lost prestige, were overwhelmingly evident. But Chiang rejected the suggestion. He still wanted the Tungpei Army to fight the Reds.

Not long afterwards, importunate, the Marshal flew his plane to Loyang to repeat the request in person. At this time also he interceded for the arrested leaders of the National Salvation Association. Later on, after the arrest of the Generalissimo, Chang Hsueh-liang recounted that conversation:†

"‘Recently Generalissimo Chiang arrested and imprisoned seven of our National Salvation leaders in Shanghai. I asked him to release those leaders. Now, none of the National Salvation leaders are my friends or relatives, and I do not even know most of them. But I protested at their arrest because their principles are the same as mine. My request that they be released was rejected. To Chiang I then said: "Your cruelty in dealing with the patriotic movement of the people is exactly the same as that of Yuan Shih-k’ai or Chang Tsung-chang.^‡

"‘Generalissimo Chiang replied: "That is merely your viewpoint. I am the Government. My action was that of a revolutionary.”

"‘Fellow countrymen, do you believe this?’

"The question was answered by an angry roar from the assembled thousands.”

But Chang Hsueh-liang’s flight to Loyang at that time had one positive result. The Generalissimo agreed that when he next came to Sian he would explain his plans and strategy to the Tungpei division generals in detail. The Young Marshal returned to await impatiently his superior’s second visit. Before Chiang arrived, however, two occurrences intervened which further antagonized the Northwest.

The first of these was the signing of the German-Japanese anti-Communist agreement, and Italy’s unofficial adherence thereto. Italy had already tacitly recognized Japan’s conquest of Manchuria, in return for which Japan had acknowledged Italy’s control of Abyssinia. The opening of Italian relations with Manchukuo had infuriated the Young Marshal, who had once been pals with Count Ciano. With receipt of this news he denounced both Ciano and Mussolini, and swore to destroy Italian influence in his country. "This is absolutely the end of the Fascist movement in China!” he exclaimed in a speech before his cadets.

Then, in November also, came news of the disaster to Hu Tsung-nan’s famed First Army, which on the 21st suffered a severe defeat from the Reds. General Hu, ablest of Nanking’s tacticians, had for weeks been moving almost unimpeded into northern Kansu. The Reds had slowly withdrawn, refusing battle except in minor skirmishes. But in various ways they propagandized the Nanking troops about the "united front,” trying to persuade them to halt, issuing declarations that the Red Army would attack no anti-Japanese troops, urging the enemy to join them in resisting Japan. "Chinese must not fight Chinese!” The propaganda was to prove highly effective.

General Hu pushed on. The Reds continued to withdraw until they had almost reached Holienwan. Then they decided to retreat no farther; the enemy needed a lesson.* It needed to be shown that the united front also had teeth in it. Suddenly turning, they skillfully maneuvered General Hu’s troops into a valley of loessland, surrounded them at dusk, when the air bombardment had ceased, and at night staged a surprise frontal attack supported by bayonet charges from both flanks. It was zero weather, and the Reds’ bare hands were so cold they could not pull the caps from their hand grenades. Hundreds of them went into the enemy lines using their potato-masher grenades for clubs. The fierce onslaught, led by the First Army Corps, resulted in the complete destruction and disarming of two infantry brigades and a regiment of cavalry, while thousands of rifles and machine guns were captured, and one government regiment turned over intact to join the Reds. General Hu beat a hasty retreat, giving up in a few days all the territory which he had "recovered” over a period of weeks.

The Tungpei generals must have been amused. Was it not just as they had said? Did not the Reds have more punch in them than ever? Did not this inauspicious beginning of the new campaign show how difficult the process of annihilation was going to be? A year, two years, three, and where would they be? Still fighting the Reds. And Japan? In occupation of new and greater areas of Chinese territory. But the obstinate Generalissimo, angered by the humiliation of his best army, censured General Hu and only became more determined to destroy his ten-year enemy.

Into this main theater of events Chiang Kai-shek stepped from his airplane onto the flying field of Sian on December 7, 1936.

Meanwhile, important things had happened on both the right and left wings of the stage. Among the Tungpei commanders an agreement had been reached to present a common request for cancellation of civil war, and resistance to Japan. Into this agreement had come the officers of the army of General Yang Hu-ch’eng, the pacification commissioner of Shensi. General Yang’s army, of about 40,000 men, had even less interest in continuing the war against the Reds than the Tungpei troops. To them it was Nanking’s war, and they saw no good reason for wrecking themselves against the Reds, many of whom were Shensi people like themselves. It was to them also a disgraceful war, when Japan was invading the neighboring province of Suiyuan. General Yang’s troops, known as the Hsipei Chun, or Northwest Army, had some months previously formed a close solidarity with the Tungpei troops, and secretly joined in the truce with the Reds.

The substance of all that surely must have been known to the Premier-Generalissimo. Although he had no regular troops in Sian, a few months earlier some 1,500 of the Third Gendarmes, a so-called "special service” regiment of the Blueshirts, commanded by his nephew, General Chiang Hsiao-hsien, who was credited with the abduction, imprisonment, and killing of hundreds of radicals, had arrived in the city. They had established espionage headquarters throughout the province, and had begun to arrest and kidnap alleged Communist students, political workers, and soldiers. Shao Li-tzu, the Nanking-appointed governor of Shensi, was in control of the police force of the capital. As neither the Young Marshal nor Yang Hu-ch’eng had any troops but bodyguards in the city, the Generalissimo had practical command there.

This situation helped to provoke a further incident. On the 9th, two days after Chiang’s arrival, several thousand students held an anti-Japanese demonstration and started to march to Lintung, to present a petition to the Generalissimo. Governor Shao ordered it to be dispersed. The police, assisted by some of Chiang Kai-shek’s gendarmes, handled the students roughly, and at one stage opened fire on them. Two students were wounded, and as they happened to be children of a Tungpei officer the shooting was especially inflammatory. Chang Hsueh-liang intervened, stopped the fight, persuaded the students to return to the city, and agreed to present their petition to the Generalissimo. Infuriated, Chiang Kai-shek reprimanded Chang for his "disloyalty” in trying "to represent both sides.” Chiang Kai-shek himself wrote that he considered this incident between them the immediate cause of the revolt.

So, despite all the objections and warnings, the Generalissimo summoned a General Staff Congress on the 10th, when final plans were formally adopted to push ahead with the Sixth Campaign. A general mobilization order was prepared for the Hsipei, Tungpei, and Nanking troops already in Kansu and Shensi, together with the Nanking troops waiting at Tungkuan. It was announced that the order would be published on the 12th. It was openly stated that if Marshal Chang refused these orders his troops would be disarmed by Nanking forces, and he himself would be dismissed from his command. General Chiang Ting-wen had already been appointed to replace Chang Hsueh-liang as head of the Bandit Suppression Commission. At the same time reports reached both Chang and Yang that the Blueshirts, together with the police, had prepared a "black list” of Communist sympathizers in their armies, who were to be arrested immediately after publication of the mobilization order.

Thus it was as the culmination of this complicated chain of events that Chang Hsueh-liang called a joint meeting of the division commanders of the Tungpei and Hsipei armies at ten o’clock on the night of December 11. Orders had been secretly given on the previous day for a division of Tungpei troops and a regiment of Yang Hu-ch’eng’s army to move into the environs of Sianfu. The decision was now taken to use these forces to "arrest” the Generalissimo and his staff. The mutiny of 170,000 troops had become a fact.

The Generalissimo Is Arrested

Whatever we may say against its motives, or the political energies behind them, it must be admitted that the coup de théâtre enacted at Sian was brilliantly timed and executed. No word of the rebels’ plans reached their enemies until too late. By six o’clock on the morning of December 12 the whole affair was over. Tungpei and Hsipei troops were in control at Sian. The Blueshirts, surprised in their sleep, had been disarmed and arrested; practically the whole General Staff had been surrounded in its quarters at the Sian Guest House, and was imprisoned; Governor Shao Li-tzu and the chief of police were also prisoners; the city police force had surrendered to the mutineers; and fifty Nanking bombers and their pilots had been seized at the airfield.

But the arrest of the Generalissimo was a bloodier affair. Chiang Kai-shek was staying ten miles from the city, at Lintung, a famous hot-springs resort, which had been cleared of all other guests. To Lintung, at midnight, went twenty-six-year-old Captain Sun Ming-chiu,* commander of the Young Marshal’s bodyguard. Halfway there he picked up two hundred Tungpei troops, and at 3 A.M. drove to the outskirts of Lintung. There they waited till five o’clock, when the first truck, with about fifteen men, roared up to the hotel, was challenged by sentries, and opened fire.

Reinforcements soon arrived for the Tungpei vanguard, and Captain Sun led an assault on the Generalissimo’s residence. Taken by complete surprise, the bodyguards put up a short fight—long enough, however, to permit the astounded Generalissimo to escape. When Captain Sun reached Chiang’s bedroom he had already fled. Sun took a search party up the side of the rocky, snow-covered hill behind the resort. Presently they found the Generalissimo’s personal servant, and not long afterwards came upon the man himself. Clad only in a loose robe thrown over his nightshirt, his bare feet and hands cut in his nimble flight up the mountain, shaking in the bitter cold, and minus his false teeth, he was crouching in a cave beside a great rock.

"Sun Ming-chiu hailed him, and the Generalissimo’s first words were, ‘If you are my comrade, shoot me and finish it all.’ To which Sun replied, ‘We will not shoot. We only ask you to lead our country against Japan.’

"Chiang remained seated on his rock, and said with difficulty, ‘Call Marshal Chang here, and I will come down.’

"‘Marshal Chang isn’t here. The troops are rising in the city; we came to protect you.’

"At this the Generalissimo seemed much relieved, and called for a horse to take him down the mountain. ‘There is no horse here,’ said Sun, * ‘but I will carry you down the mountain on my back.’ And he knelt at Chiang’s feet. After some hesitation, Chiang accepted, and climbed painfully on to the broad back of the young officer. They proceeded solemnly down the slope in this fashion, escorted by troops, until a servant arrived with Chiang’s shoes. The little group got into a car at the foot of the hill and set off for Sian.

"‘The past is the past,’ Sun said to him. ‘From now on there must be a new policy for China. What are you going to do? … The one urgent task for China is to fight Japan. This is the special demand of the men of the Northeast. Why do you not fight Japan, but instead give the order to fight the Red Army?’

"‘I am the leader of the Chinese people,’ Chiang shouted. ‘I represent the nation. I think my policy is correct.’ "^*

In this way, a little bloody but unbowed, the Generalissimo arrived in the city, where he became the involuntary guest of General Yang Hu-ch’eng and the Young Marshal.

On the day of the coup all division commanders of the Tungpei and Hsipei armies signed and issued a circular telegram addressed to the Central Government, to various provincial leaders, and to the people at large. The brief missive explained that "in order to stimulate his awakening” the Generalissimo had been "requested to remain for the time being in Sianfu.” Meanwhile his personal safety was guaranteed. The demands of "national salvation” submitted to the Generalissimo were broadcast to the nation—but everywhere suppressed in the Kuomintang-censored newspapers. Here are the rebels’ eight-points:

1. Reorganize the Nanking Government and admit all parties to share the joint responsibility of national salvation.

2. End all civil war immediately and adopt the policy of armed resistance against Japan.

3. Release the [seven] leaders of the patriotic movement in Shanghai.

4. Pardon all political prisoners.

5. Guarantee the people liberty of assembly.

6. Safeguard the people’s rights of patriotic organization and political liberty.

7. Put into effect the will of Dr. Sun Yat-sen.

8. Immediately convene a National Salvation conference.

To this program the Chinese Red Army, the Chinese Soviet Government and the Communist Party of China immediately offered their support.* A few days later Chang Hsueh-liang sent to Pao An his personal plane, which returned to Sian with three Red delegates: Chou En-lai, vice-chairman of the military council; Yeh Chien-ying, chief of staff of the East Front Army; and Po Ku, chairman of the Northwest Branch Soviet Government. A joint meeting was called between the Tungpei, Hsipei, and Red Army delegates, and the three groups became open allies. On the 14th an announcement was issued of the formation of a United Anti-Japanese Army, consisting of about 130,000 Tungpei troops, 40,000 Hsipei troops, and approximately 90,000 troops of the Red Army.

Chang Hsueh-liang was elected chairman of a United Anti-Japanese Military Council, and Yang Hu-ch’eng vice-chairman. Tungpei troops under General Yu Hsueh-chung had on the 12th carried out a coup of their own against the Central Government officials and troops in Lanchow, capital of Kansu province, and had disarmed the Nanking garrison there. In the rest of Kansu the Reds and the Manchurian troops together held control of all main communications, surrounding about 50,000 Nanking troops in that province, so that the rebels had effective power in all Shensi and Kansu.

Immediately after the incident, Tungpei and Hsipei troops moved eastward to the Shensi-Shansi and Shensi-Honan borders, on instructions from the new Council. From the same Council the Red Army took orders to push southward. Within a week the Reds had moved their "capital” to Yenan city and occupied virtually the whole of north Shensi above the Wei River. A Red vanguard under P’eng Teh-huai was located at San Yuan, a city only thirty miles from Sianfu. Another contingent of 10,000 Reds under Hsu Hai-tung was preparing to move over to the Shensi-Honan border. The Red, Northeastern, and Northwestern troops stood shoulder to shoulder along the Shensi border. While these defensive arrangements proceeded, all three armies issued clear-cut statements declaring their opposition to a new internal war.

Steps were taken at once to carry out the eight points. All orders for war against the Reds were canceled. More than four hundred political prisoners in Sianfu were released. Censorship of the press was removed, and all suppression of patriotic (anti-Japanese) organizations was lifted. Hundreds of students were freed to work among the populace, building united-front organizations in every class. They toured into the villages also, where they began to train and arm the farmers, politically and militarily. In the army the political workers conducted an unprecedented anti-Japanese campaign. Mass meetings were summoned almost daily.

But news of those happenings was suppressed outside the provinces of the Northwest. Editors who dared publish anything emanating from Sian, as even the highly respectable Ta Kung Pao pointed out, were threatened with instant arrest. Meanwhile Nanking’s propaganda machine threw out a smokescreen that further confused an already befuddled public. Dumfounded by the news, the government at Nanking first called a meeting of the Standing Committee (of the Central Executive Committee and the Central Political Council) of the Kuomintang, which promptly pronounced Chang Hsueh-liang a rebel, dismissed him from his posts, and demanded the release of the Generalissimo, failing which punitive operations would begin.

For three days few people knew whether Chiang Kai-shek was dead or alive—except the Associated Press, which flatly announced that Chang Hsueh-liang had described over the radio how and why he had killed him. Few people knew exactly what the rebels planned to do. Nanking cut all communications with the Northwest, and its papers and manifestoes were burned by the censors.

Hundreds of words were deleted from my own dispatches. I made several attempts to send out the eight demands of the Northwest—which might have helped a little to clarify the enigma for Western readers—but the censors let out not a word. Many of the foreign correspondents were themselves completely ignorant of recent happenings in the Northwest. While real news and facts were rigorously suppressed, the Kuomintang and its adherents released to the world some puerile lies which made China appear much more of a madhouse than it really was: The rebels had nailed the chief of police to the city gates; the Reds had occupied Sian, were looting the city and flying Red banners on the walls; Chang Hsueh-liang had been assassinated by his own men. Almost daily it was stated by Nanking that riots were taking place in Sian. The Reds were abducting young boys and girls. Women were being "communized.” The entire Tungpei and Hsipei armies had turned bandit. There was looting everywhere. Chang Hsueh-liang was demanding $80,000,000 ransom for the Generalissimo.*

Many of the wildest rumors circulated had their origin also with the Japanese press in China, and even with high Japanese officials. The Japanese were especially fertile with imaginary "eyewitness” reports of the "Red menace” in Sian. The Japanese also discovered Soviet Russian intrigue behind the coup. But they met their masters in propaganda in Moscow’s press. Izvestia and Pravda went so far in their official disclaimers of responsibility, denunciations of Chang Hsueh-liang, and hosannas to Chiang Kai-shek that they invented a story showing that the Sian affair was jointly inspired by the former Chinese premier, Wang Ching-wei, and "the Japanese imperialists”—a libel so antipodal to the facts that even the most reactionary press in China had not dared to suggest it, out of fear of ridicule. "Prevarication is permissible, gentlemen,” it was Lenin who once exclaimed, "but within limits!”

After the first week of Chiang’s captivity Nanking’s efforts to cork up the facts proved inadequate. Leaks occurred, and then big gaps. The eight-point program was widely published in the surreptitious press, and the public began to realize that the Northwest did not mean to make civil war, but to stop it. Sentiment slowly began to change from fear for the safety of an individual militarist into fear for the safety of the state. Civil war now could not save Chiang, but it might ruin China.

Intrigue for seizure of power had begun in Nanking with the news of Chiang’s capture. Ambitious War Minister Ho Ying-ch’in, closely affiliated with the pro-Japanese "political-science clique” of the Kuomintang, then in high office at Nanking—and against whom the eight-point program was primarily directed—was hot for a "punitive expedition.” In this General Ho was fully supported by the pro-Fascist Whampoa clique, the Blueshirts, the Wang Ching-wei (out-of-office) faction, the Western Hills group, the "C.C.” faction,^† and Nanking’s German and Italian advisers. Their enemies said that they all saw in the situation an opportunity to seize power, relegating the liberal, pro-American, pro-British, pro-Russian, and united-front groups in the Kuomintang to political nonentity. General Ho mobilized twenty Nanking divisions and moved them toward the Honan-Shensi border. He sent squadrons of airplanes roaring over Sianfu, and made tentative thrusts at the rebels’ lines with his infantry. Some of the Nanking planes (anti-Japanese "fiftieth-birthday gifts” to the Generalissimo) experimentally bombed Weinan and Huahsien, inside the Shensi border, and reportedly killed a number of factory workers.

The big question now became this: whether Chiang Kai-shek could, even from his seat of captivity in Sian, still muster enough support in Nanking to prevent the outbreak of an exhausting war which was likely to mean his own political, if not physical, demise. In Nanking and Shanghai his brothers-in-law—T. V. Soong, chairman of the Central Bank of China, and H. H. Kung, acting premier—and Mme. Chiang rallied Chiang’s personal followers and worked frantically to prevent the more reactionary elements in Nanking from initiating an offensive in the name of an "anti-Communist punitive expedition.”

Meanwhile, swift changes of heart were taking place in Sian. Soon after his capture the Generalissimo had begun to realize that perhaps his worst "betrayers” were not in Sian but in Nanking. Contemplating this situation, Chiang Kai-shek must have decided that he did not choose to be the martyr over whose dead body General Ho Ying-ch’in or anybody else would climb to dictatorial power.

Point Counter Point?

During the next three months most of the political involutions created at Sian were completely unraveled, and in the end the scene was radically altered. Great conquests were made and victories won. Great losses and retreats were recorded too. But the duels fought were like those in a Chinese theater betweeen two warriors of old. They fling out bloodcurdling yells, viciously slashing the air but never actually touching each other. In the end, after the loser has acknowledged his demise by languidly draping himself on the floor for a moment, he pulls himself together and stalks from the stage under his own locomotion, a dignified walking corpse.

Such was the fascinating shadowboxing that went on at Nanking. Everybody "won,” and only history was cheated—of a victim.

"Blushing with shame, I have followed you to the capital for the appropriate punishment I deserve, so as to vindicate discipline,” said Chang Hsueh-liang to the Generalissimo, immediately after reaching Nanking.

"Due to my lack of virtue and defects in my training of subordinates,” gallantly responds Chiang, "an unprecedented revolt broke out. … Now that you have expressed repentance, I will request the central authorities to adopt suitable measures for rehabilitation of the situation.”

And what were the rehabilitation measures? How superbly all acts of severity were commuted by acts of conciliation, how fine the adjustment of punishment and compensation. Here was the work of a master in the strategy of compromise, of perfect knowledge of how to split the difference between what the Chinese call yu shih wu ming, the "reality without the name,” and yu ming wu shih, the "name without the reality.”

As Chiang’s first move on returning to Nanking he issued a long statement confessing his inability to prevent the revolt, and his failure as Premier. He immediately ordered the withdrawal of all government troops from Shensi—thus fulfilling his promise to prevent civil war—and offered his resignation (he was to repeat it the traditional three times). In reality he took his resignation no more seriously than did his government, for on December 29 he called an emergency meeting of the standing committee of the Central Executive Committee, and "requested” this highest organ of the Kuomintang to do four important things: to hand over to the Military Affairs Commission (of which he was chairman) the punishment of Chang Hsueh-liang; to delegate to the Military Affairs Commission the settlement of the Northwest problem; to terminate military operations against the rebels; and to abolish "punitive expedition” headquarters which had been set up, during Chiang’s absence, to attack Sian. His "recommendations” were "obeyed.”

On December 31 Chang Hsueh-liang was sentenced by tribunal (at which Chiang was not present) to ten years’ imprisonment and deprivation of civil rights for five years. On the following day he was pardoned.1 And all the time he was the personal guest of Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law and recent envoy to Sian, T. V. Soong. On January 6 the Generalissimo’s Sian headquarters for Bandit Suppression (Anti-Communist Campaign) was abolished. Two days later it was already known that the skids were under Japanese-speaking, Japanese-educated Foreign Minister Chang Chun, important leader of the "political-science clique” in the Kuomintang. Chang Chun had been the principal target of the Northwest in its charges of "pro-Japanese” officials at Nanking. He was replaced by Dr. Wang Chung-hui, British-educated barrister, and a leader of the Ou-Mei P’ai, the anti-Japanese "European-American” clique of Kuomintang politicians, whom the Northwest junta regarded with favor.

Again at Chiang’s request, a plenary session of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee was summoned for February 15. In the past its functions had been easily predictable, and confined to legalizing important changes in Party policy decided in advance by the ruling cliques, which in coalition were the Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship. What were the important changes of policy now to be introduced? Hundreds of resolutions were prepared for presentation to that august body. The great majority dealt with "national salvation.”

During January and early February, Chiang Kai-shek took "sick leave.” He retired, with Chang Hsueh-liang, to rest in the Generalissimo’s country home near Fenghua, his native place in Chekiang. His first resignation rejected, Chiang repeated it. Meanwhile, ostensibly freed from official duties, he had complete command of the settlement of the Northwest issue, complete control of the conversations going on with the Tungpei, Hsipei, and Red Army commanders. Chang Hsueh-liang, "in disgrace,” was at his side, still a virtual prisoner.

On February 10 the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party addressed to the National Government at Nanking, and to the Third Plenary Session, a historic telegram.* It congratulated the government on the peaceful settlement of the Sian affair, and on the "impending peaceful unification” of the country. To the Plenary Session it proposed four important changes in policies: to end civil war; to guarantee freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and to release political prisoners; to invoke a national plan of resistance to Japanese aggression; and to return to the "three principles” of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s will.

If these proposals were adopted, in form or in substance, the Communists stated they were prepared, for the purpose of "hastening national unification and resistance to Japan,” to suspend all attempts to overthrow the government and to adopt the following policies: (1) change the name of the Red Army to the "National Revolutionary Army,” and place it -under the command of Chiang Kai-shek’s Military Affairs Commission; (2) change the name of the Soviet Government to the "Special Area Government of the Repubic of China”; (3) realize a "completely democratic” (representative) form of government within the soviet districts; and (4) suspend the policy of land confiscation and concentrate the efforts of the people on the tasks of national salvation—that is, anti-Nipponism.

But the Plenary Session, when it convened on February 15, took no formal notice of the bandits’ telegram. There was much more important business to be accomplished. Chiang Kai-shek in his first speech to the Session once more recounted, in complete and (for him) impassioned utterance, the whole story of his captivity in Sian. Dramatically he described how he refused to sign any pledge to carry out the rebels’ demands. He told also how the rebels were converted to his own point of view, and were moved to tears by the revelations of patriotism in his confiscated diary. And not until he had said all this did he at last, in a very offhand and contemptuous manner, submit the rebels’ eight demands to the Session. Reiterating its complete confidence in the Generalissimo, the Session rejected his third resignation, condemned Chang Hsueh-liang, and just as casually and contemptuously rejected the impertinent demands.

Meanwhile, however, in its well-trained way, the Central Executive Committee was accomplishing things on its own initiative. Significant above everything else, perhaps, was the opening statement of Wang Ching-wei, second only to Chiang Kai-shek in party leadership. For the first time since the beginning of the anti-Red wars, Comrade Wang made a speech in which he did not say that "internal pacification” (eradication of communism) was the most important problem before the country, in which he did not repeat his famous phrase, "resistance after unification.” The "foremost question” before the country now, he said, was "recovery of the lost territories.” Moreover, the Session actually adopted resolutions to begin by recovering east Hopei and northern Chahar, and abolishing the Japan-made "autonomous” Hopei-Chahar Council. Of course that did not mean that Nanking was to launch a war against Japan. Its significance was simply that further Japanese military aggression in China would meet with armed resistance from Nanking. But that was a real leap forward.

Second, the CEC, again on the Premier’s recommendation, decided to convene on November 12 the long-delayed "People’s Congress,” which was supposed to inaugurate "democracy” in China. More important, the standing committee was authorized to revise the organic laws of the Congress to increase representation of "all groups.” The Generalissimo—through Wang Ching-wei again—announced that the second great problem before the nation was the speedy realization of democracy.

Finally, on the last day of the Session, Chiang Kai-shek made a statement in which he promised greater liberty of speech to all but traitors—and he said nothing about the "intellectual bandits.” He also promised "release of political prisoners who repent.” Very quietly an order went out to the press that no longer were the epithets "Red bandit” and "Communist bandit” to be used. A few prisons began to pour out a trickle of their less important victims.

Then, as if in afterthought, on February 21, last day of the historic Session, a long manifesto was issued, ostensibly to denounce the Communists. The history of ten years of crime and vandalism was recapitulated. Was it not obvious that any talk of "reconciliation” with brigands, thieves, and murderers was out of the question? But all that explosion of wind, it turned out, was actual preparation for the terms of peace which, to the extreme distaste of Tories who still opposed peace at any price, concluded the manifesto.

What were these proposals? The Session offered the Communists a chance "to make a new start in life,” on four conditions: (1) abolition of the Red Army and its incorporation into the national army; (2) dissolution of the "Soviet Republic”; (3) cessation of Communist propaganda that was diametrically opposed to Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s "three principles”; and (4) abandonment of the class struggle. Thus, though phrased in terms of "surrender” instead of "cooperation,” the Kuomintang had accepted the Reds’ basis for negotiation of a "reconciliation.”* Note that those terms still left the Reds in possession of their little autonomous state, their own army, their organizations, their Party, and their "maximum program” for the future. Or so, at least, the Reds could hope. And so, indeed, they did. For on March 15 the Communist Party, the Soviet Government, and the Red Army issued a long manifesto requesting the opening of negotiations with Nanking.

What was the purpose of all these complex maneuvers by Chiang? Obviously they were skillfully interwoven in such a manner as to conciliate the Opposition without weakening the prestige either of himself or of Nanking. Read in their proper sequence, his orders and statements, and the resolutions of the Plenary Session, showed that he partly satisfied the political demands of all groups of the Opposition—just enough to shatter their solidarity and resolution in defying him, but not enough to cause a revolt in the Kuomintang. Civil war had been stopped, and it was clear that Nanking had at last shouldered the task of armed resistance to Japan. Promises of greater political freedom had been made, and a definite date had been set for the realization of "democracy.” Finally, a formula had been proposed by which the Kuomintang and the Communists might at least live together in armed truce, if not in "cooperation.” At the same time the government had nominally rejected the rebels’ demands and the Communists’ proposals for "cooperation.” It was all very wonderful.

One should not fail to note that these conciliatory gestures were forced through by Chiang Kai-shek in the face of considerable antagonism to them in Nanking, and at the conclusion of a terrific personal shock which might have embittered and unbalanced a man less gifted with foresight, and hastened him into precipitate actions of revenge—which, in fact, Chiang’s outraged followers in Nanking demanded. But Chiang was shrewder than they. It was real genius of political strategy that he did not ignore the promises made in Sian, that he took no immediate overt revenge against his captors, that he tactfully employed a policy combining just the right weight of threat with the necessary softening of concession. In that way he eventually succeeded in breaking up the Northwest bloc (his first objective), and peacefully transferred the Tungpei Army from Shensi into Anhui and Honan, while the Hsipei Army of General Yang Hu-ch’eng was reorganized under the central command. In February, Nanking troops were able to occupy Sian and its environs without disturbance or opposition, and in the following month—with his guns at their frontiers—Chiang opened negotiations with the Communists.²

Auld Lang Syne?

During the Sian Incident the Red Army had occupied large new areas. In Shensi it now held the greater part of the province, including nearly everything north of the Wei River. In their some fifty counties—an area between sixty and seventy thousand square miles, or, roughly, twice the size of Austria—the Reds controlled the biggest single realm they had ever ruled. But it was economically poor, very limited in its possibilities of development, and thinly populated, with perhaps less than 2,000,000 inhabitants.

Strategically the area was extremely important. From it the Reds could, if they chose, block the trade ways to Central Asia, or perhaps later themselves make direct connections with Chinese Turkestan (Sinkiang) or Outer Mongolia. It was one of only two Chinese frontiers, and sources of supply, which Japan could not blockade. More than half of Chinese Turkestan, roughly 550,000 square miles in area, was ruled by a warlord seemingly sympathetic to the Chinese Reds and the U.S.S.R. Northeast of it, Outer Mongolia, another 900,000 square miles of former dependency of China—Chinese suzerainty over which was still nominally recognized, even by Russia—was now definitely under the Red banner, as a result of the military alliance (Mutual Defense Pact) concluded with the U.S.S.R. in 1936.

These three regions of Communist control in what could still be called "Greater China” were altogether about a third the size of the former Chinese Empire. Separating them from physical contact with each other were only politically ambiguous buffer districts inhabited by Mongols, Moslems, and frontiersmen whose ties with Nanking were fragile, and against whom the threat of Japanese conquest was a deepening reality. Those areas might later on be brought into the orbit of the "Anti-Japanese United Front,” and under soviet influence. That would close in an immense future Red base extending from Central Asia and Mongolia into the heart of Northwest China. But all that realm was backward, some of it barren steppe and desert, with poor communications, and sparsely populated. It could become a decisive factor in Eastern politics only in close alliance with the advanced industrial and military bases of either the U.S.S.R. or Central China, or both.

Immediate gains of the Chinese Reds were confined to these categories: the cessation of civil war, a certain degree of liberalization and tolerance in Nanking’s internal policies, a stiffening toward Japan, and a partial release of the soviet districts from their long isolation. As a result of negotiations conducted between General Chang Chung, the Generalissimo’s envoy in Sian, and Chou En-lai, the Reds’ delegate there, a number of important changes took place during April, May, and June. The economic blockade was lifted. Trade relations were established between the Red districts and the outside world. More important, communications between the two areas were quietly restored. On the frontiers the Red Star and the Kuomintang White Sun were crossed in symbolic union.

Mail and telegraph services were partly reopened. The Reds purchased a fleet of American trucks in Sian and operated a bus service connecting the principal points in their region. Needed technical materials of all sorts began to pour in. Most precious to the Communists were books. A new Lu Hsun Memorial Library was established in Yenan, and to fill it Communist comrades throughout the country sent in tons of new literature. Hundreds of young Chinese Communists migrated from the great cities to Yenan, the new Red capital in north Shensi. By May over 2,000 students had been accepted for enrollment in the Red University (renamed the "Anti-Japanese University”), and some 500 were in the Communist Party school. Among them were Mongols, Moslems, Tibetans, Formosans, and Miao and Lolo tribesmen. Scores were also studying in a number of technical training institutes.

Enthusiastic young radicals as well as veteran Party workers rolled in from all parts of China, some walking over great distances. By July, despite the rigors of student life, there were so many applicants that no more could be accommodated. Scores were turned back to wait for another term, when the Reds prepared to receive 5,000. Many trained technicians also arrived, and were given work as teachers, or in the "construction plan” which was now begun. In this, perhaps, lay the biggest immediate benefit of peace: a base in which freely to train, equip, and discipline new cadres for the ranks of the revolution and the anti-Japanese war.

Of course, the Kuomintang continued strictly to supervise the Reds’ connections with the outer world. There was less restriction on the movement of Communists now, but there was as yet no open acknowledgment of the fact. Many parties of non-Communist intellectuals also arrived in Red China to investigate conditions there—and many of them stayed on, to work. In June, the Kuomintang itself secretly sent a semiofficial group of delegates, headed by Hsiao Hua, to visit the Red capital. They toured the soviet districts and made appropriate rufescent anti-Japanese speeches before huge mass meetings. They acclaimed the return to the anti-imperialist united front between Communists and the Kuomintang. Nothing of this was allowed to appear in the Kuomintang press, however.

Conditions in the Kuomintang areas also improved for the followers of Lenin. The Communist Party was still nominally illegal, but it became possible to extend its influence and widen its organization, for the oppression somewhat diminished. A small but steady stream of political prisoners was released from the jails. The special gendarmes, the Blueshirts, continued their espionage on Communists, but kidnapings and torture ceased. Word was sent out that Blueshirt activities henceforth should center primarily on "pro-Japanese traitors.” A number of the latter were arrested, and several Chinese agents in Japan’s pay were reported to have been executed.

By May, in an exchange of concessions, the soviets had prepared to adopt the name Special Area Government, and the Red Army had petitioned to be included in the national defense forces as the National Revolutionary Army. Great "all-China” meetings of Party and Red Army delegates were called in May and June. Decisions were made on measures by which the new policies, calling for cooperation with the Kuomintang, could be realized. At these meetings the portraits of Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh, and other Red leaders appeared beside those of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen.

The most important changes in Red policy were the cessation of the practice of confiscation of the landlords’ land, the cessation of anti-Nanking, anti-Kuomintang propaganda, and the promise of equal rights and the voting franchise to all citizens, regardless of their class origin. Cessation of land confiscation did not mean the return of land to the landlords in areas where redistribution had already been realized, but was an agreement to abandon the practice in districts newly brought under Communist control.*

On his side, Generalissimo Chiang agreed to consider the soviet districts part of the "national defense area,” and pay accordingly. The first payment to the Reds ($500,000) was delivered shortly after Chiang Kai-shek’s return to Nanking. Some of the Kuomintang money was used to convert soviet currency, to buy manufactures for their cooperatives, and to purchase needed equipment. The exact monthly allowance from Nanking was still under negotiation—as, indeed, was the whole definitive working agreement for future cooperation—while the storm of Japanese invasion was gathering in the North.

In June the Generalissimo sent his private plane to Sian for Chou En-lai, the Reds’ chief delegate, who flew to Kuling, China’s summer capital. There Chou held further conversations with Chiang Kai-shek and members of the cabinet. Among points discussed was the Communists’ demand for representation in the People’s Congress—the Congress scheduled to adopt a "democratic” constitution—in November. It was reported that an agreement was reached whereby the "Special Area” would be permitted to elect nine delegates on a regional basis.

However, these delegates in all probability would not be known as "Communists.” Nanking had not openly acknowledged the so-called remarriage. It preferred to regard the relationship rather as the annexation of a concubine whose continence had yet to be proved, and one about which, for diplomatic reasons, the less said outside family circles the better. But even this furtive mésalliance was an astounding and open defiance of Japan, unthinkable a few months previously. Meanwhile Japan’s own offer (through Matchmaker Hirota) of a respectable "anti-Red” marriage* with Nanking was finally spurned. In this was perhaps a last and definite indication that Nanking’s foreign policy had undergone a fundamental change.

All that seemed an utterly incomprehensible denouement to many an observer, and serious errors were made in its analysis. After a decade of the fiercest kind of civil war, Red and White suddenly burst into "Auld Lang Syne.” What was the meaning of it? Had the Reds turned White, and the Whites turned Red? Neither one. But surely someone must have won, and someone lost? Yes, China had won, Japan had lost. For it seemed that a final decison in the profoundly complicated internal struggle had been postponed once more, by the intervention of a third ingredient—Japanese imperialism.

Red Horizons

There was an accomplished social scientist named Lenin. "History generally,” he wrote, "and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and ‘subtle,’ than the best parties and the most class-conscious vanguards of the most advanced class imagine. This is understandable, because the best vanguards express the class consciousness, the will, the passion, the fantasy of tens of thousands, while the revolution is made, at the moment of its climax and exertion of all human capabilities, by the class consciousness, the will, the passion, and the fantasy of tens of millions who are urged on by the very acutest class struggle.”*

In what ways had Chinese history proved "richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and ‘subtle,’” than the Communist theoreticians foresaw a decade or so ago? To be specific, why had the Red Army failed to win power in China? In attempting an answer one had to recall again, and keep clearly in mind, the Communist conception of the Chinese revolution, and of its main objectives.

The Communists said that the Chinese capitalist class was not a true bourgeoisie, but a "colonial bourgeoisie.” It was a "comprador class,” an excrescence of the foreign finance and monopoly capitalism which it primarily served. It was too weak to lead the revolution. It could achieve the conditions of its own freedom only through the fulfillment of the anti-imperialist movement, the elimination of foreign domination. But only the workers and peasants could lead such a revolution to its final victory. And the Communists intended that the workers and peasants should not turn over the fruits of that victory to the neo-capitalists whom they were thus to release, as had happened in France, Germany, Italy—everywhere, in fact, except in Russia. Instead, they should retain power throughout a kind of "NEP” period, a brief epoch of "controlled capitalism,” and then a period of state capitalism, followed at last by a speedy transition into Socialist construction, with the help of the U.S.S.R. All that was indicated quite clearly in Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic*

"The aim of the driving out of imperialism, and destroying the Kuomintang,” repeated Mao Tse-tung in 1934,^† is to unify China, to bring the bourgeois democratic revolution to fruition, and to make it possible to turn this revolution into a higher stage of Socialist revolution. This is the task of the soviet.”

At the apex of the Great Revolution (1925–27) there was present the necessary revolutionary mood among both the peasant masses and the proletariat. But there were many differences from the situation which had produced the Russian Revolution. One of these was very great. Survivals of feudalism were even more pronounced in Russia than in China, but China was a semicolonial country, an "oppressed nation,” while Russia was an imperialist country, an "oppressor nation.” In the Russian Revolution the proletariat had to conquer only a single class, its own native bourgeois-imperialist class, while the Chinese revolution had to contend with an indigenous enemy of dual personality—both its own nascent bourgeoisie and the entrenched interests of foreign imperialism. Theoretically, in the beginning, the Chinese Communists expected this dual nature of their enemy to be offset by the dual nature of their own assault, which would be aided by their "proletarian allies” of the world, and the "toilers of the U.S.S.R.”

Nearly half of all the industrial workers of China huddled in Shanghai, under the gunboats of the world’s great powers. In Tientsin, Tsingtao, Shanghai, Hankow, Hongkong, Kowloon, and other spheres of imperialism were probably three-quarters of all the industrial workers, of China. Shanghai provided the classic prototype. Here were British, American, French, Japanese, Italian, and Chinese soldiers, sailors, and police, all the forces of world imperialism combined with native gangsterism and the comprador bourgeoisie, the most degenerate elements in Chinese society, "cooperating” in wielding the truncheon over the unarmed workers.

Rights of freedom of speech, assembly, or organization were denied these workers. Mobilization of the industrial proletariat in China for political action was hardly conceivable as long as the dual system of native and foreign policing power was maintained. Only once in history had it been broken—in 1927—when for a few days Chiang Kai-shek made use of the workers to secure his victory over the northern warlords. But immediately afterwards they were suppressed in one of the demoralizing bloodbaths of history, with the sanctification of the foreign powers and the financial help of foreign capitalists.

The Nanking regime could and did count upon the security of the industrial bases held by the foreign powers in the treaty ports—and on their troops, their guns, their cruisers, and their inland police, the river gunboats—and on their wealth, their press, their propaganda, and their spies. It did not matter that instances of direct participation of these powers in actual warfare against the Red Army were few. They occurred on the occasions when such action was necessary. But their chief services were rendered by policing the industrial workers, by furnishing Nanking with munitions and airplanes, and by entering into a conspiracy which complacently denied the very existence of civil war by the simple device of calling the Communists "bandits,” so that the embarrassing question of "nonintervention committees” (as in the case of Spain) was never even allowed to arise.

Communist leaders were obliged to fall back on the rural districts, where the soviet movement, while retaining the aims and ideology of proletarian class consciousness, in practice assumed a peasant-based national social revolution. In the rural areas the Reds hoped eventually to build up sufficient strength to be able to attack urban bases where foreign influence was less firmly established and later—with the help, they hoped, of the world proletariat—to invest the citadels of foreign power in the treaty ports.

But while the imperialist powers were the objective allies of the Chinese bourgeoisie against communism, the assistance that Communists expected from the world proletariat failed to materialize. Although in the Communist International Programme* it was clearly recognized that successful proletarian movements in semicolonial countries such as China "will be possible only if direct support is obtained from the countries in which the proletarian dictatorship is established” (i.e., in the U.S.S.R.), the Soviet Union in fact did not extend to the Chinese comrades the promised "assistance and support of the proletarian dictatorship” in any degree commensurate with the need. On the contrary, the great help, amounting to intervention, which the Soviet Union gave to Chiang Kai-shek until 1927 had the objective effect of assisting him into power —although, at the same time, it helped create the revolutionary opposition in the Red Army movement that arose later on. Of course, the rendering of direct aid to the Chinese Communists after 1927 became quite incompatible with the position adopted by the U.S.S.R.—for that would have been to jeopardize by the danger of international war the whole program of Socialist construction in one country. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the influence of this factor on the Chinese revolution was very great.

Deprived of material help from an outside ally, the Chinese Communists continued to struggle alone for the "hegemony of the bourgeois revolution,” believing that deep changes in internal and international politics would release new forces in their favor. They were quite mistaken.

The Kuomintang’s power remained relatively secure in the great urban centers, for the reasons mentioned, but in the villages it developed only very slowly. Paradoxically—and dialectically—the rural anemia of the bourgeoisie was traceable to the same source as Nanking’s strength in the cities—to foreign imperialism. For while imperialism was eager enough to "cooperate” in preventing or suppressing urban insurrection, or possibilities of it, at the same time it was objectively engaged—chiefly through Japan, the focus of the system’s point of greatest stress in the Far East—in collecting heavy fees for this service, in the form of new annexations of territory (Manchuria, Jehol, Chahar, and East Hopei), new concessions, and new wealth belonging to China. The great burdens placed upon the Nanking Government by this newest phase of imperialist aggression made it impossible for the Kuomintang to introduce in the rural areas the necessary capitalist "reforms”—commercial banking, improved communications, centralized taxing and policing power, etc.—fast enough to suppress the spread of rural discontent and peasant rebellion. By carrying out a land revolution the Reds were able to satisfy the demands of a substantial peasant following, take the leadership of part of rural China, and even build several powerful bases on an almost purely agrarian economy. But meanwhile they could grow no stronger in the cities, on which their enemies continued to be based.

In this situation, the Communists argued that the Kuomintang’s attacks on the soviets prevented the Chinese people from fulfilling their mission of "national liberation” in driving out the Japanese, and that the Kuomintang’s own unwillingness to defend the country proved the bankruptcy of its leadership. But the enraged Nationalists retorted that the Communists’ attempts to overthrow the government prevented them from resisting Japan, while the continued practice of "Red banditry” in the interior, despite the grave national crisis, retarded the realization of internal reforms. And here in essence was the peculiar stalemate, the fundamental impotence of this period of the Chinese revolution.

Over this decade the imperialist pressure gradually became so severe, the Japanese price for the protection of the interests of the Chinese compradors in the cities became so excessive, that it tended to neutralize the class antagonisms between the Kuomintang, the party of the bourgeoisie and the landlords, and the Kungch’antang, the party of the workers and peasants. It was precisely because of this—and because of the immediate events described in the foregoing chapters—that the Kuomintang and the Communist Party were thus able, after a decade of ceaseless warfare, to reunite in a synthesis expressed in terms of their essential unity on the higher plane of a common antagonism against Japanese imperialism. This unity was not stable; it was not permanent; it might break up again whenever the internal denials outweighed the external ones. But it began a new era.

At the end of a decade of class war the Communists had been forced to abandon temporarily their thesis that "only under the hegemony of the proletariat” could the bourgeois democratic movement develop. Instead it was acknowledged that only "a union of all classes” could achieve those purposes. Its practical significance was the clear recognition of the present leadership—which was here synonymous with power—of the Kuomintang in the national revolution. For the Reds it had certainly to be considered "a great retreat,” as Mao Tse-tung had frankly admitted, from the days in Kiangsi, when they fought "to consolidate the workers’ and peasants’ dictatorship, to extend this dictatorship to the whole country, and to mobilize, organize, and arm the soviets and the masses to fight in this revolutionary war.”* The armed struggle for immediate power had ceased. Communist slogans became these: to support the Central Government, to hasten peaceful unification under Nanking, to realize bourgeois democracy, and to organize the whole nation to oppose Japan.

Practical gains resulting from these concessions have already been discussed. But what guarantees had the Communists that these gains could be held? What guarantees were there that the internal peace would be maintained, that the promised democracy would be realized, that a policy of resistance to Japan would last?

In such periods "it is necessary,” wrote Lenin, "to combine the strictest loyalty to the ideas of communism with the ability to make all necessary compromises, to ‘tack,’ to make agreements, zigzags, retreats, and so on.” And thus, although among the Chinese Communists there was this great shift in strategy, still they believed it was now possible to conduct the contest in a much more favorable atmosphere than in the past. There had been an "exchange of concessions,” as Mao Tse-tung said, and an exchange to which "there are definite limits.”

He continued: "The Communist Party retains the leadership on problems in the soviet districts and the Red Army, and retains its independence and freedom of criticsm in its relations with the Kuomintang. On these points no concessions can be made. … The Communist Party will never abandon its aims of socialism and communism, it will still pass through the stage of democratic revolution of the bourgeoisie to attain the stages of socialism and communism. The Communist Party retains its own program and its own policies.”1

Quite clearly the Kuomintang would utilize to the fullest extent the benefits of the new Communist policy toward itself. With Nanking’s authority recognized by the only political party in China capable of challenging it, Chiang Kai-shek would continue to extend his military and economic power in peripheral areas where warlord influence was still strong, areas such as Kwangsi, Yunnan, Kweichow, and Szechuan. Improving his military position all around the Reds, he would meanwhile extract political concessions from them in return for his temporary toleration. Eventually, by skillful combination of political and economic tactics, he hoped so to weaken them politically that, when the moment was right for the final demand of their complete surrender (which he undoubtedly still aspired to secure), he might isolate the Red Army, fragmentize it on the basis of internal political dissensions, and deal with the recalcitrant remnant as a purely regional military problem.

The Reds were under no delusions about that. Likewise they were under no delusions that the promise of "democracy” could be fulfilled without a continued active opposition of their own. No party of dictatorship in history ever yielded up its power except under the heaviest pressure, and the Kuomintang would prove no exception. The achievement of even the measure of "democracy” now in prospect would have been impossible without the ten-year presence of an armed Opposition. Indeed, without that Opposition no "democracy” would have been necessary, and no state power with the degree of centralization which we now began to witness in China would have been conceivable. For the growth of popular government was, like the maturing of the modern state itself, a manifestation of the need for a power and mechanism in which to attempt to reconcile contradictions inherent in capitalist society—the basic class antagonisms.

These contradictions were not diminishing in China, but rapidly increasing, and, to the extent that they sharpened, the state had to take recognition of them. The achievement of internal peace itself made it inevitable, if that internal peace were to last, that Nanking reflect a wider representation of social stratifications. That did not mean that there was any likelihood of the Kuomintang quietly signing its own death warrant by genuinely realizing bourgeois democracy, and by permitting the Communist Party to compete with it in open election campaigning (for it was quite possible that the vote of the peasantry alone would have given the Communists an overwhelming majority), although that is what the Communists and other parties demanded, and would continue to agitate for. But it did mean that some recognition of peasant demands would have to be made by the tiny minority which monopolized the state economy and policing power. The tentative concession of representation of the soviet areas in the National Congress was an indication of that.

The centripetal spread of economic, political, and social interests, the process of so-called "unification”—the very measures which created the system—at the same time required, for their own preservation, that ever widening groups be focused in the center in an attempt to resolve the insoluble—the deepening conflict of class interests. And the more Nanking tended to represent different and wider class interests throughout the country—the nearer it came to achieving democracy—the more it was forced to seek a solution of self-survival by resistance to the increasingly greedy demands of Japan.

The guarantees of increased Communist influence, the guarantee against future annihilation campaigns, therefore, were seen by the Communists to be inherent in the organic economic, social, and political relationships of the country—precisely those formations which had resulted in the present situation. These were, first of all, a wide popular demand among both the armed and unarmed masses for continued internal unity, for improved livelihood, for popular government, and for resistance to Japan in a common struggle for national freedom. Second, the Communist Party’s "guarantees” lay in the leadership it could continue to give to the movement for those demands throughout the country, and in the actual military and political fighting strength of the Communist Party.

In the spring of 1937 the temporary diminution in Japanese pressure on China, a pause in the invasion of Inner Mongolia, the opening of Anglo-Japanese conversations for "cooperation in China,” and the hopes of the British Government to mediate a Sino-Japanese agreement and a "fundamental peace” in the Far East caused some people to wonder whether the Communist estimate of the political scene was not in error. Was it not reckless gambling to pivot a strategy on the central inevitability of an early Sino-Japanese war? Now that internal peace was established in China, now that the Reds had ceased their attempts to overthrow the Kuomintang, Japan was really turning a conciliatory face to Nanking, it was argued. Japan’s imperialists realized that they had pushed the Chinese bourgeoisie too far and too fast along the road of surrender, with the result that China’s class war was canceled in the universal hatred of Japan. They now saw the wisdom of enforcing a new and friendly policy toward the Chinese bourgeoisie, in order to renew its freedom to engage in internal conflict. And such a Tokyo-Nanking rapprochement would destroy the Communists’ political influence, which was too heavily based on k’ang jih—the "resist Japan” movement.

But history in flood must seek its outlets according to the laws of dynamics. It cannot be forced back into its preflood channels. Japan could not revert to a static policy in China even though Japan’s ablest leaders realized the imperative necessity for a halt. And this Red prescience seemed fully vindicated on July 8 by the Liukochiao Incident. Japanese troops, holding "midnight maneuvers” (quite illegally) on Chinese territory at the town of Wanping, about ten miles west of Peking, claimed to have been fired on by Chinese railway guards. The incident gave the Japanese Army the pretext. By the middle of July the Japanese had rushed some 10,000 troops into the Peking-Tientsin area and had made new imperialist demands, capitulation to which would have meant virtually the acceptance of a Japanese protectorate in North China.

The Communists’ conception of that situation, and of the kindling events which it must set in motion, was that the growing pressure of the whole nation for resistance, not only here but everywhere that new acts of aggression occurred, would oblige Chiang Kai-shek’s regime to take a position in which, if Japan did not reverse her policies and make amends for the past, there was no way out but war. Which meant that there was no way out but war. And the Communists continued to interpret such a war not only as a struggle for national independence, but as a revolutionary movement, "because to defeat imperialism in China means the destruction of one of its most powerful bases” and because the victory of the Chinese revolution itself "will correspond with the victory of the Chinese people against Japanese aggression” (Mao Tse-tung). According to Mao Tse-tung’s analysis of the breaking-point politico-economic tension in Japan, China, and throughout the world, this settlement in human destinies could not be delayed for any important length of time.

The Reds foresaw that in this war it would become necessary to arm, equip, train, and mobilize tens of millions of people in a struggle which could serve the dual surgical function of removing the external tumor of imperialism and the internal cancer of class oppression. Such a war, as they conceived it, could be conducted only by the broadest mobilization of the masses, by the development of a highly politicalized army. And such a war could be won only under the most advanced revolutionary leadership. It could be initiated by the bourgeoisie. It would be completed only by the revolutionary workers and peasants. Once the people were really armed and organized on an immense scale, the Communists would do everything possible to establish a decisive victory over Japan. They would march with the Kuomintang as long as it led the resistance. But they would be prepared to take over this leadership whenever the government faltered, turned "defeatist,” and exhibited a willingness to submit to Japan—a tendency which they anticipated would appear soon after the first great losses of the war.

Probably the Nanking regime fully understood those objectives of the Communists, and hence they would seek out every possible road of compromise; they would, if they could avoid the internal consequences, make further concessions to Japan, at least until the odds seemed very greatly in favor of the regime’s ability not only to enter a war with power, but to emerge from it with that power still intact, and with the internal revolution still in abeyance. But the Communists were sufficiently content with their own analysis of the course of history behind them to be satisfied with the chart of direction which they had chosen for the voyage ahead, through events which would compel Nanking to make a stand for its own survival. They foresaw that Nanking might continue to vacillate, that Japan might continue to feint and maneuver in myriad ways, until the utmost agony of antagonism was reached between the interests of Japanese imperialism and the national interests of China externally, and between the Chinese and Japanese masses and their landlord-gentry rulers internally, until the moment when all the physical restraints and oppressions became utterly intolerable, the barriers of history broke down, the mighty catastrophe bred by imperialism was set loose, Frankenstein-like, to destroy imperialism, and le déluge swept forward.

Thus "capitalism digs its own grave,” thus imperialism would destroy imperialism, in that only a great imperialist war would release the forces that could bring to the Asian masses the arms, the training, the political experience, the freedom of organization, and the mortal weakening of the internal policing power which were the necessary accessories for any conceivably successful revolutionary ascent to power in the relatively near future. Whether or not, even then, the "armed masses” were likely to follow Communist leadership with final success depended upon many variable and unpredictable factors—internal factors first of all, but such factors also as the policies in the East of America, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, and to the very greatest extent the policies of the U.S.S.R.

And that, I believed, was the contour of the Communist picture of the future as China waited for Japan to strike. One might not follow all of it, but this at least seemed certain—that what Lenin had written more than twenty years before was still true: "Whatever may be the fate of the great Chinese revolution, against which various ‘civilized’ hyenas are now sharpening their teeth, no forces in the world will restore the old serfdom in Asia, nor erase from the face of the earth the heroic democracy of the popular masses in the Asiatic and semi-Asiatic countries.”

And another thing seemed equally certain. Neither could the democratic Socialist ideas for which tens of thousands of youths had already died in China, nor the energies behind them, be destroyed. The movement for social revolution in China might suffer defeats, might temporarily retreat, might for a time seem to languish, might make wide changes in tactics to fit immediate necessities and aims, might even for a period be submerged, be forced underground, but it would not only continue to mature; in one mutation or another it would eventually win, simply because (as this book proves, if it proves anything) the basic conditions which had given it birth carried within themselves the dynamic necessity for its triumph.

Epilogue

What had happened to the Chinese of this book in seven years since the Liukochiao Incident, when Japan began her attempt to conquer China in July, 1937? For one thing, the passage of time had vindicated the judgment of Mao Tse-tung and other Communist leaders that the achievement of national unity for the struggle against Japan was more important than any other immediate objective of the revolutionary movement.

In this perspective the Sian Incident now loomed as a happening of decisive importance in contemporary Chinese history. Few remembered how close China came to adherence to the Anti-Comintern pact, just before the Sian affair, but it was now quite clear that after it there came the final parting of the ways between Tokyo and Nanking. Sian made certain that China would be on the anti-Fascist side of the coming world struggle.

In other respects time had confirmed the validity of the ideas for which the revolutionaries whose stories were told in these pages had fought and died. It had brought immense prestige to the survivors, and to their greatly increased following, during the long ordeal now drawing to a close. A revolutionary movement demands of its leader the ability to know a little ahead of anyone else what is going to happen; and in this respect Mao Tse-tung had been so successful that millions of Chinese now reposed as much confidence in his judgment as in that of Chiang Kai-shek.

However they might feel about the Communists and what they now represented, most Chinese would admit that Mao Tse-tung accurately analyzed the internal and international forces involved, and correctly depicted the general shape of events to come. Civil war did end and the Communist Party and the Red Army not only survived but were strengthened. Mao’s suggestion that at a certain stage in the war’ part of the Kuomintang would betray China and turn puppet for the Japanese was long resented; but after the defection of Wang Ching-wei, deputy leader of the KMT and second only to the Generalissimo, it could not be denied that Mao had intimately understood the contradictory elements in the Central Government.

Again, Mao predicted that the war would be long and difficult, and this must be one of the few instances in history in which an advocate of armed struggle did not promise his adherents a speedy triumph. His candor disarmed in advance the kind of defeatism that preys upon shattered illusions. On the other hand Mao helped to build up a more durable self-confidence in the nation by correctly estimating the enormous staying power guaranteed by China’s own human and material resources, when mobilized in a revolutionary way. And he indicated the kind of strategy and tactics which China would have to adopt to hold on until the national war merged with the world war, including Japanese attacks on the British, the French, the Dutch, and the Americans, which he warned were inevitable in a period when many Europeans and Americans thought otherwise.

By 1944 the Chinese Communists provided the leadership in North China for what was much the largest guerrilla organization in the world. Stretching from the Yangtze Valley to the Mongolian steppe, and to the mountains and rivers of southern Manchuria, thousands of villages behind the Japanese lines made up the pattern of this "people’s war.” Its organizers were youths chiefly inspired and trained by the Eighteenth Group Army—the combined Eighth Route and New Fourth armies. These forces were led by Chu Teh, P’eng Teh-huai, and other veterans of the former Red Army of China, who now had behind them an amazing record of survival and growth through seventeen years of difficult civil and national war.

Foreign observers who visited the guerrilla districts in 1943 estimated that behind the Japanese lines the Eighteenth Group Army had organized and given crude training to militia numbering about 7,000,000 people. These were the reserves of the main fighting units. In addition, there were said to be some 12,000,000 members of various anti-Japanese associations which helped to clothe, feed, house, equip, and transport the regular troops, and were their eyes and ears. Official data showed partisan penetration in 455 hsien, or counties, of North China and in 52,800 villages, with a population of more than 60,000,000. From three-fifths to two-thirds of the so-called conquered territory was in guerrilla hands most of the time.

For nearly seven years the Japanese had been trying to exterminate these tireless enemies. Eighth Route regulars numbered hardly 50,000 men in 1937, and diverted only a few divisions of Japanese troops. But that vanguard multiplied in every direction. In 1944 more than half of Japan’s 350,000 troops in China proper (excluding Manchuria) and some 200,000 puppet troops were occupied in defending fortified areas against the Eighteenth Group Army and in fighting punitive actions against it. Japanese military reports put its strength at from 500,000 to 600,000.

In every one of the provinces occupied by the Japanese, which covered an area three times the size of France, partisans had set up village and county councils. They had established four "border” governments in bases held throughout the war, except for brief intervals; and each of these regional governments represented liberated areas of several neighboring provinces. These behind-the-lines regimes performed nearly all the functions of normal administration. They had their own postal system and radio communications. They published their own newspapers, magazines, and books. They maintained an extensive system of schools and enforced a reformed legal code recognizing sex equality and adult suffrage. They regulated rents, collected taxes, controlled trade and issued currency, operated industries, maintained a number of experimental farms, extended agricultural credit, had a grain-rationing system, and in several places had undertaken fairly large afforestation projects.

The defense perimeter held by Japanese troops in China in 1944 was already stabilized before the end of 1939. When the enemy originally moved into the conquered provinces most of the old officials of the Kuomintang Government, as well as its troops, withdrew to the West and South. Behind them the administrative bureaucracy collapsed. In the cities it was replaced by Japanese and their Chinese puppets, but a kind of political vacuum existed in the hinterland towns and villages, the interstices between enemy garrisons. Into that temporary vacuum moved the former Red Army of China—with arms, with teachers, and with faith in the people’s strength.

This movement began with the Generalissimo’s acquiescence. It was made possible first of all, as we have seen, by Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang’s earlier "detention” of the Generalissimo at Sian, in order to persuade him to stop fighting the Reds and unite with them against Japan. After the Japanese invaded North China, an agreement was reached which ended a decade of civil war. This provided that the Red Army should be incorporated into the national forces, that the soviets should be abolished in favor of a government in which all classes would be represented, and that the Communists would abandon the slogans of class warfare and cease confiscating and redistributing the land. The northern Red forces dropped the Red flag and the Red star and accepted the designation "Eighth Route Army.” Southeast of Shanghai other Red remnants under Generals Yeh T’ing and Han Ying were regrouped in 1938 as the "New Fourth Army.”*

Both the Kuomintang and the Kungch’antang now claimed to be the legitimate heirs of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic. Both supported him in the early days of the revolution. Even after 1937, however, there was no agreement over the practical application of Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of "nationalism, livelihood and democracy.” The Communists still regarded Sun as a social revolutionary and demanded a radical interpretation of his principles. Briefly, they wanted a "thoroughgoing democratic revolution,” with equalization of land ownership, universal suffrage, and constitutional government establishing the people’s power, by which they meant the Communist Party and, ultimately, a "proletarian dictatorship.” Since the Kuomintang still drew its chief internal support from the landlord class, it was naturally opposed to radical land reform. In general it wanted to keep economic and political relationships intact and to superimpose its dictatorship on the old Chinese semifeudal structure. If it acknowledged the legality of other parties and their conflicting interpretations, especially if it conceded adult suffrage, that structure would almost certainly be overthrown.

While questions of class power and of the ultimate form of the state and society remained in momentary abeyance, the Communists and Nationalists at least agreed upon the principle of "nationalism” when Japan invaded the country. The Reds then took their military orders from the Generalissimo. In 1937 he sent them into the battle line in North China, where many Kuomintang leaders confidently expected them to be swallowed up in the Japanese drive. They did not disintegrate in that way, however, as some of the northern warlord armies did. They met the attack and were defeated in the cities, but instead of retreating or surrendering they withdrew to the villages and hills and continued fighting.

Infiltrating all the northern provinces with experienced partisan leaders and political organizers, they soon enlisted valuable reinforcements from a thickening stream of refugees fleeing from the cities: students, workers, and various professional men and women, including some intellectuals belonging to the non-Communist liberal political parties, long suppressed by both the Chinese and Japanese regimes. Cut off from the rear, whole divisions of defeated Chinese troops came under Red leadership. In North China the min-t’uan lost its central direction and cohesion when Nationalist regulars were driven out by Japan. Their landlord-gentry paymasters fled, or stayed to make deals with the Japanese, and the militia had to become puppet troops for the Japanese, or flee to Chiang Kai-shek’s territory, or join the Communist-led partisans. Japan served the Communists by destroying or demoralizing the whole rural police-power system with which the old rural landlord-gentry alliance with the urban property owners had been maintained. At the outset it was the disintegration of that police system, rather than victories over the Japanese, that made possible the rapid expansion of the Eighth Route Army. Their rifle power, however, steadily increased. By 1939 their strongholds had become so formidable that the Japanese were compelled to launch a full-dress offensive against them. They went on doing so semiannually from then on.

The first partisan regime entirely inside occupied territory was set up in the mountains of northeastern Shansi, east of the Yellow River, and included areas as far north as Jehol, or Inner Mongolia. Another regime, with its capital in southeast Shansi, directed operations in recovered territory which stretched for over 300 miles across southern Hopei and Shantung eastward to the Yellow Sea. There was a third border region centering in northern Kiangsu, north of Shanghai, which was controlled by the New Fourth Army, with nearly 100,000 troops. A fourth regional government was established in the mountainous country north of the Yangtze River above Hankow, where the borders of Anhui and Hupeh enclose the southern extremity of Honan.

Political and military methods used to organize the people borrowed heavily from the pattern developed in the old soviet districts of north Shensi. After the Soviet Government was abolished in 1937, a "Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Area Government” took its place and the town of Yenan, the so-called "mother of the Chinese partisans,” became its capital. I revisited Yenan in 1939, after the new government was established. It remained until 1944 the last trip made there by any foreign newspaper correspondent, for soon afterwards the region was cut off by the Kuomintang’s military blockade.

On the other side of the Yellow River, behind Japanese lines, the organization of the social, political, and economic life was naturally more difficult than in Yenan, but in general the goals, if not always the degree of success achieved, were comparable. Although newspaper correspondents in Free China were not able to investigate the Shansi and Hopei areas, the various foreigners who escaped from the Japanese in Peking and made their way southward across the guerrilla territory gave fairly complete pictures of the system which prevailed. Among these observers was Professor William Band, of the famous American missionary institution, Yenching University, whom I knew when I lectured there in 1934–35. Another was Professor Michael Lindsay, also of Yenching, whose report of conditions there was published in Amerasia magazine in 1944.* The most comprehensive account of the partisan areas to reach the outside world for some time, it was released for publication by the author’s father, A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol College, Oxford.

According to Professor Lindsay, the partisan governments were elected from candidates nominated directly by the people and their organizations. The Chinese partisans aimed to establish a united front of all groups and hence the Communist Party limited its own members to one-third of the total of any elected body. This peculiar policy was vigorously enforced, according to Lindsay. The purpose was to give representation in the government to both landowners (except absentee landlords) and merchants, but above all to develop political leaders among the poor peasants and workers. It was "education in democracy by practicing democracy,” according to the partisan leaders.

In the mass organizations there were no limitations on Communist leadership, however; and these organizations were the guerrillas’ sinew and life. They included separate unions or associations for farmers, workers, youth, children, and women, and membership in each ran into the millions. Most important of all such organizations were the self-defense corps, the militia, and the Young Vanguards. These were crude but basic military organizations which locally supported the Eighteenth Group Army’s main forces.

G. Martel Hall, former manager of the National City Bank in Peking; who was the last American to escape from the Japanese across the partisan areas, told me that there was simply no other way he could explain the success of the partisan leaders with the peasants, "except through their own incorruptibility and honesty, their energetic patriotism, their devotion to practical democracy, their faith in the common people, and the continuous effort they made to arouse them to action and responsibility.”

Mutual hatred of the Japanese provided the atmosphere in which these zealots exploited the people’s patriotism, but side by side with political reforms went economic and social changes. In the case of women the enforcement of laws like monogamy, freedom of marriage at the age of consent, free education, and suffrage at the age of eighteen won a surprising response. Professor Lindsay said there were over 3,000,000 members of the women’s organizations in the partisan areas. Many women had been elected to village and town councils and large numbers of young girls carried serious political and military responsibilities.

The primary school system operated widely in all the "permanent” guerrilla bases and education was free and compulsory in theory if, because of poverty, seldom attainable in fact. Yet in a few places as high as 80 per cent of the younger children of school age were literate. The basic reform was a drastic reduction in land rent. Land of absentee landlords was tilled in common; the aim was to cultivate all cultivable land. Taxes were collected mainly in grain, and were kept at about 10 per cent of those demanded by the Japanese. Consumer, marketing and industrial cooperatives were widespread. Lindsay stated that there were over 4,000 cooperatives in Shansi and 5,000 in central Hopei alone.

Unimaginable hardships accompanied partisan organization at every step.* While it is true the Japanese failed to destroy the partisan forces, or to stop their increase, they carried out literally thousands of large- and small-scale punitive expeditions against them. They looted and burned thousands of villages, raped the womenfolk and slaughtered countless civilians, in a terror aimed to wipe out all thought of resistance. The guerrillas always found ways to overcome the demoralizing effects of these tactics, but not without sacrifices as bitter as any endured in Russia. It was true that the Japanese were still unable to control any village much beyond the range of their garrisons along North China’s railways and roads, but it was also true that their fortified points had greatly increased and could now be seized only at a heavy cost.

So much for background. How did all this affect American plans to defeat Japan through China?

"After all, you saved the Kuomintang,” a Chinese intellectual in Chungking said to me when I returned to China (1942’43) as a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post. "It is your baby now and you cannot avoid responsibility for its actions.”

He meant simply that American money, arms, and economic aid were given to the Kuomintang authorities, without any conditions concerning policies pursued inside China. American government representatives had several times made it clear to Chungking that we would disapprove of a renewal of civil strife during the joint war against Japan, but Americans had not gone beyond that nor sought to have the blockade lifted against the partisan areas.

Chungking established its blockade against the Eighteenth Group Army when Kuomintang party leaders became increasingly alarmed by the Communists’ success in recovering control of areas behind the Japanese lines. The Generalissimo described their activity as "illegal occupation of the national territory.” The Kuomintang’s War Areas Political and Party Affairs Commission took the position that all the guerrilla administrations were "illegal” and should be abolished to await the re-establishment of the Kuomintang system.

In 1940 some Kuomintang troops engaged the rear echelon of the New Fourth Army while it was moving from its base south of the Yangtze River, near Shanghai, to an area entirely behind the Japanese lines to which it was assigned by the Generalissimo. It was apparently a surprise attack and the partisans were reportedly outnumbered eight to one. The little detachment of about 4,000 was not a combat unit and it was easily encircled and destroyed. General Yeh T’ing, the commander of the New Fourth Army (who was himself not a Communist), was wounded and taken prisoner, and General Han Ying, the field commander, was killed together with many of his staff, some doctors and nurses of the medical battalions, a number of convalescent wounded soldiers, some cadets, men and women students, and some industrial cooperative workers attached to the army.

The incident failed to liquidate the New Fourth Army, whose main forces were already north of the Yangtze River, engaging Japanese troops there, but it was the effective end of Nationalist-Communist collaboration in the field and the beginning of an open struggle for leadership in the joint war against Japan. The Generalissimo ruled that the incident was caused by the New Fourth’s "insubordination” and thenceforth withdrew all aid not only from that army but also from the Eighth Route.

For some months previous to the tragedy no part of the Eighteenth Group Army had been paid. From this time on they not only received no pay or ammunition but were blockaded by a ring of strong government forces from access to supplies in Free China, which they might have purchased or received as gifts from the people. Ironically enough, the Kuomintang troops enforcing this blockade were largely supplied by Soviet Russia. There were two group armies (the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth) engaged exclusively in the blockading enterprise. American officers in 1942 suggested that they were needed in the campaign to recover Burma, but Chungking considered their "policing role” in the Northwest of greater importance and there they remained.

All such facts were known to Americans in China, but probably few at home realized that our lend-lease aid went exclusively to the Kuomintang authorities. We maintained no consular representation in Yenan and no military liaison with the partisans.* All our supplies flown over the Hump into China—modern bombers and fighters, artillery, transport, and ammunition—supported only the one party, of course. Financial aid sent to China by the C.I.O., A.F.L., and Railway Brotherhoods also went exclusively to Kuomintang groups.

What could be done about this "internal affair” of China? Our new treaty with China (1943) renounced extraterritoriality rights and restored full sovereignty to the Chinese Government. Could we now tell the present government how to run its business without being branded neoimperial-ists? But inevitably the war had already caused us to intervene in support of the Kuomintang, in terms of economic and military aid. Was it not merely playing ostrich to pretend that our future economic help to China did not carry implicit political responsibilities of the gravest kind?

Once Japan was defeated, would Chiang Kai-shek then destroy the Communists and their partisan allies? The Kuomintang spent ten fruitless years in the attempt before 1937. Even with the use of American bombers and fighters on his side, the Generalissimo was not likely to secure greater success than the Japanese had had against these experienced guerrilla warriors. It had become a physical impossibility for the Chungking Government to destroy this opposition in anything short of a long and bloody war, fully backed by Allied troops.

By the summer of 1944 it had thus become manifest that the tiny band of youths who raised the Red flag on the lonely mountain of Chingkangshan far back in 1928 had launched a demonstration which evolved into a crusade which finally rose to the stature of a national movement of such scope that no arbiters of China’s destiny could much longer deny its claims to speak for vast multitudes of people.