Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  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.

  2

  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-she
k’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.