Anthony Grey
Page 46
Jakob searched her face with despairing eyes. “But why did you come if you didn’t feel some hope for the future?”
“I came to say thank you,” said Mei-ling softly, dropping her gaze. “For coming to our aid in the grasslands.”
“I didn’t do it only for Abigail.”
“I know.”
Jakob drew in his breath slowly. “Mei-ling, when we first met on the ship, I had a curious feeling. And every time you looked at me that feeling grew stronger. There was something wonderful in your expression — it was as though both of us knew inside ourselves that our lives would lead along a single path.”
“Perhaps you imagine that was so after all that’s happened.”
“No, I dreamed often of you. They were tortured dreams. But after the Great Snow Mountains I think I understand. My dreams were strange reflections of the love I felt for you right from the beginning.” He hesitated, then leaned impulsively toward her. “We could be married — it would make everything right.”
Mei-Iing looked directly at him again, her expression becoming suddenly uneasy. “So much is in turmoil in China, Jakob. Everything is new . . . I’m frightened of love — it seems like a drug that numbs the senses —“
The sound of whimpering broke in on their conversation and they looked around to find that Abigail had wakened. At once Mei-ling swung down from her mount and hurried to the pack mule. Reaching into the saddle basket, she stroked the infant girl’s face tenderly with her hand until the whimpering ceased. At almost a year old, Abigail was thin and pale, but now that she was awake she sat upright in the seat, straining against her straps, and there was a lively expression in her blue eyes. For a moment Mei-ling stood looking at her, biting her lip; then Abigail smiled and reached out for her with both arms. Jakob felt a lump come into his throat as he watched Mei-ling embrace his daughter, speaking a few soothing words to her as she did so. Abigail responded at once with a little torrent of excited, unintelligible Chinese sounds and Jakob noticed then that Mei-ling became very still, taking care to keep her back turned to him.
“There’s water and goat’s milk in the other basket,” she said at last, speaking over her shoulder in a muffled voice. “But you must get her to the mission at Sanmo as soon as possible.”
When she handed him the leading rein of the pack mule, Mei-ling’s manner was cool and impersonal and she hurried back to her own mule to remount in silence. From the saddle she looked down at Jakob, her eyes glistening with tears. He thought she would speak again but instead she tossed her head suddenly and urged the mule down the bank into the stream. Jakob watched her splash back to the far bank, fighting down the urge to run after her. Riding very straight in the saddle, she rejoined her orderly and they jogged quickly away up the steep track leading north. Jakob watched until they became minute silhouettes on the high ridge, but Mei-ling faded gradually from his sight among the misshapen towers of yellow loess without once looking back.
During his ride to Sanmo, Jakob saw few people. Curious, dark faced children ran out of the cave dwellings hewn from the hard loess hillsides whenever he passed through a village, and peasants in the terraced fields raised their turbaned heads to stare at the unfamiliar sight of a white European traveling alone with a baby on a mule. But fearing that his strength might give out before he reached the mission, Jakob spoke to nobody and stopped only once, around midmorning. In the shade of some rocks he unstrapped his daughter and lifted her from the mule to feed her with the goat’s milk. But although holding Abigail in his arms moved him silently to tears, she cried in his unfamiliar embrace and he did not linger long.
In the early afternoon he led the pack mule over a high ridge to find the walled town of Sanmo nestling in the bend of a gray river far below. Half an hour later, as he neared its gates, he saw a crowd of long-robed men and women gathered before a compound of whitewashed buildings outside the battlemented walls. On seeing him approach, the people began swarming along the dusty road in his direction, shouting and waving joyfully. One bewhiskered European leading several others was familiar and as the crowd converged around his mules, Laurence Franklin, smiling hugely in his relief, reached up with both arms to help Jakob down from the saddle.
“The Lord be praised!” cried Franklin, flinging both arms ecstatically around Jakob. “The Lord be praised!”
Jakob sagged in Franklin’s embrace, his strength suddenly gone. Pointing to the saddle basket on the pack mule, he explained weakly that his daughter needed attention and he watched a gray-haired Englishwoman lift the infant tenderly from the basket.
“You’ve both been preserved — it’s a miracle!” said Franklin in astonishment, guiding Jakob toward a sedan chair carried by two coolies. “Matthew Barlow was right!”
Sinking gratefully into the chair, Jakob allowed himself to be carried to the mission compound among the excited group of European and Chinese Christians.
“The Lord be praised,” exclaimed Franklin again, unable to suppress the joy welling up in him.
“The Lord be praised,” echoed Jakob in a weak voice. “The Lord be praised.”
PART FIVE
The Marchers Falter
1957
The little ragged band of exhausted Red Army survivors who tramped into northern Shensi at the heels of Mao Tse-tung in October 1935 became, in the decades that followed, the living legends of China’s revolution. Only 5,000 or so out of the 100,000 who had begun the epic 6,000-mile fighting retreat from the Kiangsi Central Soviet in the southeast a year earlier endured to find shelter in the loess caves of the northwest, close to the Great Wall. But because a preponderant number of the survivors were trained Party officials — cadres — they formed the heroic core of China’s Communist Party for the next half-century and more. Countless legends of courage and self-sacrifice grew up around the marchers’ exploits, imbuing the revolution with an almost mythological glamour: consequently, the Long March — Ch’ang Ch’eng — played a deeply significant role in accelerating the Communists toward their unexpectedly early conquest of the Chinese mainland fourteen years later.
A more important factor in their immediate survival, however, was the Japanese invasion: new Kuomintang encirclements would almost certainly have finished off the shrunken Communist armies after the Long March had Japan not launched its forces into northern China in July 1937 to begin the all-out onslaught that engulfed the mainland in war until 1945. When the remnants of Mao’s Red Army arrived in the Shensi-Kansu soviet area, it was held by a small Communist force of only 8,000 troops. The base, tiny in comparison with the ill-fated central-southern soviets, had been built up by painstaking guerrilla methods over several years, but even when the northward retreat of all the Communist forces ended a year later, in the autumn of 1936, the survivors there totaled no more than 30,000. Chang Kuo-tao, who had come so close to unseating Mao as leader in the summer of 1935, had lost large sections of his Fourth Front Army: only a thousand or so of his troops eventually reached the safety of Shensi, and after facing disciplinary charges on his arrival, Chang defected to the Kuomintang. The Second Front Army, under Ho Lung, made its own Long March northward from its Hunan base, covering a similar route to Mao’s — but only 10,000 out of 35,000 of these troops survived the hardships.
These setbacks prompted Mao Tse-tung to seek a new united front with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, and Chiang agreed to join forces with the Communists after being sensationally kidnapped by pro-coalition warlord forces in the famous Sian Incident of December 1936. Thereafter the Long March survivors donned Nationalist uniforms and were reorganized as the Eighth Route Army under overall Kuomintang command. This truce, however, was never more than fragile, and Japan’s armies swept across the map, capturing the major cities and strategic coastal areas by the end of 1938. In the face of these swift offensives, Chiang Kai-shek retreated deep into China’s vast interior, moving his seat of government from Nanking to Chungking, in the south. west, and gradually the war against the invaders developed into a
stalemate. Mao Tse-tung and the Communist leadership in their turn made themselves comfortable in cave houses amid the loess hills of Shensi at Yenan. In this remote and romantic rebel capital close to the burial site of China’s founding emperor, they set up a revolutionary university, which attracted idealistic and patriotic youths from all China’s great cities. For the next eleven years Yenan became the cradle of China’s revolution. Under the protection of the united front with the Nationalists, the Communists rapidly built up their strength, employing skillful patriotic propaganda to recruit the northern peasants. Guileful guerrilla strategies were used to harass the Japanese without risking big losses, and consequently the Eighth Route Army mushroomed in size from 45,000 men in 1937 to 150,000 the next year. By the time the Second World War ended seven years later, it embraced more than half a million men, and when Japan surrendered after the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mao’s Communist divisions controlled two hundred thousand square miles of territory and a population of nearly twenty million people. By contrast, political and military corruption had become commonplace on the Kuomintang side: lack of action had further undermined the morale of the four million men under arms, and when the civil war burst into life again in 1946, China’s disgruntled peasants continued to flock to Mao’s banners. By 1948 the Red Army matched the American-aided Kuomintang forces with four million soldiers, and guerrilla strategies gave way to mobile positional warfare. The Communists quickly won Manchuria and most of northern China; in early 1949 Peking was surrendered peacefully to preserve its ancient treasures; and the Red Army swept triumphantly south to cross the Yangtze and seize the other major cities one by one. Chiang Kai-shek, supported by the United States, retreated with half a million troops to the offshore island of Taiwan, then called Formosa, and set up his Nationalist government there.
On October 1, 1949, in a historic speech from Peking’s Gate of Heavenly Peace, Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and over the next seven or eight years Mao and his comrades of the Long March changed the old China beyond recognition. Heading a strict Communist government that pretended to be a coalition of various patriotic parties, Mao succeeded in imposing a purposeful nationwide discipline. Vast peasant work forces were successfully mobilized to overcome the ancient scourges of flood and famine: dikes, dams, and reservoirs were rapidly built to restrain the great rivers and conserve water against drought. A sweeping land reform program abolished all private farming and introduced a collective system of agricultural cooperatives under which households pooled their labor, land, tools, and animals. Internationally China’s prestige and self-confidence were boosted when her forces fought the armies of the United States and other Western nations to a draw in the Korean War, which broke out in 1950. Allied diplomatically and ideologically with the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic also received vital technical assistance from the Russians in laying new industrial foundations. Some sections of China’s population of six hundred million, however, suffered grievously during this period — several hundred thousand rural landlords were murdered during early stages of the land reform program, and many small capitalists who stayed to help build the economy were victimized when the state eventually took over their businesses. But overall the new rulers in Peking enjoyed a period of widespread popular support during the early fifties. After harrowing decades of invasion, civil war, famine, corruption, poverty. and disease, the Communist regime had substantially improved the living conditions of the vast majority.
This honeymoon period, however, was to prove a brief one:
invisible conflicts that would eventually plunge the country into a great new tragedy were already at work among the Party leaders, and in 1957 the first signs of the chaos to come began to surface. They grew out of the denunciation of Joseph Stalin by the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a Party congress in Moscow in January 1956. This sparked popular revolts against the Communist regimes in Hungary and Poland, and the speed with which the Hungarian party collapsed following criticisms by intellectuals horrified Mao Tse-tung. Not long afterward Mao made a landmark speech inviting Chinese academics, students, and members of the other coalition parties to give free voice to any criticisms they had of Communist policy. His intent, it seems, was to uncover and defuse any latent Hungarian-style resentment by open discussion, and he employed a classical Chinese quotation to make his point. “Let a Hundred Flowers bloom!” he proclaimed. “Let a Hundred Schools of Thought contend!” The avalanche of criticism that this invitation unleashed shocked the Peking leadership deeply, and in mid-1957 they launched a ruthless “rectification campaign,” during which many intellectuals were arrested and sent to labor camps. But news of these dramatic events filtered through to the West only in disjointed fragments. Few noncommunist visitors had been allowed across China’s borders since 1949, and for information of what was happening to a quarter of all mankind, the outside world depended largely on the efforts of a community of “China watchers” — journalists, diplomats, writers — based in Hong Kong, the British crown colony perched on China’s southern coast. As the little-understood Hundred Flowers campaign unfolded, every broadcast from China’s many radio stations, every tattered provincial newspaper smuggled over the border, and every refugee struggling out through the “Bamboo Curtain” was being examined minutely in that tiny British enclave on the rim of the old Celestial Kingdom.
1
Abigail Kellner caught her first adult glimpse of China through a port window of a BOAC Constellation 749 as it circled downward out of high clouds a few miles west of [long Kong Island. The serpentine coastline and a range of rolling hills writhing away to the northwest were only faintly visible beyond the New Territories in the afternoon haze, but Abigail’s gaze remained riveted on the distant landscape until the Constellation’s nose swung south again. Then, as the airliner flew lower and began its run in toward Kai Tak Airport, densely packed shack colonies housing the latest refugees from Communism caught her eye on both sides of the spectacular jade green harbor. The crowded waterway itself was alive with vast numbers of junks, sampans, and ferries as well as ocean-going ships; great wedges of moored craft rafted together seemed to choke bays and inlets; boats and buildings alike were bedecked with fluttering lines of tattered washing; and even before she saw any people, Abigail had an impression of the Crown Colony of Hong Kong as a seething, jam-packed, overcrowded community.
All along the waterfronts, modern buildings were springing up, and as the airliner drew abreast of Victoria Peak, Abigail saw that clusters of tall radio-receiving aerials jutted from the rocky summit. Among those aerials, she guessed, would be one or two erected by her father to serve the research organization he had founded in the colony seven years earlier. Straining toward the Communist mainland, they were almost certainly at that very moment plucking invisible Chinese broadcasts from the shimmering air for the Kellner Research Institute.
From her father’s infrequent letters she knew that a team of his Chinese translators would be crouching over high-powered radio receivers in work huts close to the foot of the masts, recording and monitoring around the clock every word picked up from Peking and each of Communist China’s provincial capitals. Written transcripts of these broadcasts, he had told her, were translated into English and pored over by his small staff of analysts before being collated with translations of every significant newspaper report they were able to lay their hands on from inside China. Interviews with refugees were transcribed and analyzed with equal meticulousness to help the Kellner Institute build up a day-by-day, week-by-week picture of life behind the Bamboo Curtain. The products of these researches — daily, weekly, and monthly bulletins — were eagerly sought after, both in Hong Kong and far beyond its borders, by journalists, diplomats, academic Sinologists, and other subscribers anxious to keep track of what was happening to the world’s biggest and most isolated nation.
This thought made Abigail lift her eyes again in the direction of the bare, haze-shr
ouded mountains that she was able to see intermittently through gaps in the hills that rose behind Kowloon in the New Territories. In the misty heat, the outer ramparts of China’s vast landmass seemed to her to possess a mysterious, brooding quality, and sitting beside the round window of the airliner-she felt suddenly very small and insignificant. Although she knew without doubt that she had been born in that strange and enigmatic country twenty-three years earlier, her first conscious sight of it left her feeling incredulous. Had she really come close to death almost daily in this remote part of the world during the first, unknowing year of her life? Could she have traveled thousands of miles across this alien landscape concealed in a peasant’s shoulder basket? How could a defenseless infant have survived in all that ‘wildness below the Constellation’s glittering propellers when armies were swarming across a strife-torn land, killing, looting, and burning in a bloody civil war?
Confronted at last by the intimidating physical majesty of China, she felt that the sketchy accounts of her miraculous survival that she had been given were more than ever the stuff of dreams. Because she had beer) brought up by her grandparents at their home in Manchester’s Moss Side, she had known nothing at all of her early adventures until she was eleven. She had retained few memories of her father during that period, due to his prolonged absence on active service during the Second World War, and in a well-meaning attempt to-spare a young girl’s feelings, grandparents had told her merely that her mother had died in China soon after she was born. They had also said that before returning to England, her father had been forced to make a long journey with her across China to escape the effects of the civil war. But fearing further details might distress her, they had avoided all mention of his capture by the Communists and the trials and sufferings which she had unknowingly shared.