“They say all Christians are cannibals — because we like to eat the body and drink the blood of our God! They sometimes draw pictures of our Lord on the cross as a crucified pig! All this stirs up hatred against missionaries, and it is no secret that many brave men and women have been martyred in China. So when you travel in the mountains it’s sometimes wise to wear Chinese clothes like these. Then the bandits hiding on the mountaintops, with luck, will mistake you for a Chinese. If not, you might be robbed or kidnapped — or worse.”
The missionary’s face had become stern; now his voice deepened abruptly, taking on a commanding tone. “But whenever a missionary dies, another must be ready to step forward and take his place. Volunteers are needed to dedicate their lives to that vast, unfortunate country. Otherwise China will never be saved!”
Jakob stared fixedly at the exotically clad figure. As the missionary paused to survey his audience, the ten-year-old boy fancied that the steady blue gaze rested on him alone for a second or two before moving on. After removing the long-gown the missionary began speaking again, but this time Jakob neither heard the words nor saw his shabby surroundings. In his mind’s eye he was surveying a distant land of towering mountain ranges thronged with writhing dragons and surging hordes of Chinese bandits armed to the teeth. Through the chaos and confusion he himself was striding, proud, straight-backed, and bronzed like the missionary by the merciless Asian sun. Braving all dangers, he was seeing into the ground to a depth of six feet on every side, he was finding gold everywhere without effort and turning lead into silver at will. Bandits and dragons retreated on all sides in whichever direction he advanced, powerless to prevent him from “saving” China virtually single-handed.
Jakob emerged from his daydream only when his father shook him gently by the shoulder. He looked up to find his mother smiling at him. The audience had begun rising from their seats and a wooden collecting box was being passed around. At its approach Jakob plunged his hand into his trouser pocket to pull out two copper pennies. Holding them on his palm, he looked questioningly at his mother.
“That’s your tram fare home, Jakob,” she chided gently.
“But can’t I give it for China?” The boy shifted anxiously from foot to foot. “You could give your fares too — and we could walk home, couldn’t we?”
“It’s pouring with rain, lad,” said his father. “And we’ve got nearly two miles to go.”
“But Papa,” he pleaded, “we should try to help save China, shouldn’t we?”
His mother reached out and brushed the fringe of fair hair from his eyes. The expression in them was eager, endlessly hopeful. “Jakob’s right,” she said, opening her own purse and dropping three pennies into the collecting box. “Our need is not as great as China’s.”
On the way out of the mission hail they passed close to the animated group of people pressing around the missionary speaker. He was bending over a box, putting away the mandarin’s gown and other Chinese curios that he had brought for display. Looking up unexpectedly, he caught Jakob staring at him and their eyes met; immediately the face of the missionary broke into a broad smile and one eye closed slowly in a conspiratorial wink.
Jakob grinned shyly in return and rushed into the street, tugging a flat cap from his pocket. Taking the hands of both his parents, he hurried across the slippery cobblestones between them, oblivious to the heavy rain. Inspired anew by the intimacy of the missionary’s wink, in his mind he had already reentered the mysterious mountains and dragon lairs of China. During the long, drenching walk home he reveled in a giddy succession of blood stirring adventures of the imagination, and by the time the family reached the door of their modest terraced house, without his realizing it, a fierce spark had been ignited inside Jakob. It would smolder on almost unnoticed for several years before being fanned into the bright blaze of a conscious ambition — and the pursuit of that ambition, fired in a drab, back- Street mission hail, would ultimately shape his fate and determine the course of his adult life.
* * *
At that same hour seven thousand miles away in the real China, a faint breeze was nudging a canopied sampan across the sparkling waters of Nan Hu lake at Chiahshing, south—west of Shanghai. On board the fifty-foot craft lounged a dozen Chinese young men pretending that they were there to enjoy the tranquil beauty of the placid, lotus-fringed lake. In the shade of the woven cocoa-palm awning they made a show of idly sipping wine from porcelain beakers and dabbing chopsticks at dishes of spiced Nan flu fish they had purchased from a lakeside food vendor. But whenever their boat drifted out of range of the other pleasure sampans plying the lake, sheafs of documents were quietly drawn out of scuffed satchels beneath their seats by each of the young men: their bodies straightened, their expressions became alert and their false indolence evaporated in a moment as they began again to argue and debate with one another in low passionate voices.
They were dressed in well—worn gowns or tunics of a variety of native cloths that, along with their differing dialects, indicated that they had made long journeys from widely separated cities Shanghai, Peking, Changsha, Wuhan, Canton, Tsinan. Their faces, intelligent, educated, in some cases scholarly, betrayed the intellectual heritage they shared. Most were obviously the sons of mandarins, landlords and other bourgeois families and all were in their twenties or early thirties: without exception their eyes bore the bright gleam common to young men who imagine they have a mission in life to fulfill.
One of the group, a tall gaunt Hunanese seemed to set himself apart. His pale blue gown was crumpled and creased, his thick black hair unwashed and far longer than any of the others and this gave him an unkempt and gipsy-like air. Dirt was visible beneath his fingernails, his face bore a dark smudge on one cheek and even when the discussion intensified, he continued to loll against the gunwale of the sampan, trailing one hand abstractedly in the water.
Whenever he turned his head to look at one of the speakers however, the focus of his gaze was unusually sharp and penetrating and from time to time, while still staring into the green waters of the lake, he shook his mane of hair dramatically as though to express his pent up disagreement with what was being proposed.
“Comrade Mao Tse-tung! You’ve said almost nothing.” The note of mild reproof in the voice of the round—faced Chinese presiding over the meeting from the head of a narrow plank table, was unmistakable as he addressed the reclining figure. ‘If we are to succeed here today at long last in our efforts to found a Communist Party for all China, every delegate attending should make his views clearly known. So tell us — do we have your support for the majority proposal to base the Party statutes on those of the experienced Russian Bolshevik Party or not?”
The long-haired Hunanese continued peering silently into the lake for so long that the other delegates thought he would decline to reply. Then he smote the surface of the water sharply with the palm of his hand and sat up fixing his gaze intently on the chairman.
“Comrade Chang, I am twenty—seven years old. I can’t wait a hundred years to overthrow the militarists and foreign imperialists who have enslaved China! I want action today! Tomorrow! I want to see things happen soon with my own eyes!’ He drew a long, slow breath, struggling to subdue the force of his feelings. ‘My admiration for the revolution of the Russia Bolsheviks is boundless. But China isn’t Russia. They urge us first to organize the workers in our cities to overthrow capitalism and set up a dictatorship of the proletariat — but our country is so backward that we have few city workers. Are we forgetting that out of every hundred Chinese there are eighty peasants? The burden of our revolution should be borne by all the people of China, not just a few.”
“We are all impatient to hasten the revolution that will save our country, Comrade Mao,” said the chairman quietly. “But we must exercise caution at all times. ‘We shall gain the most benefit at present if we organize our new party on Bolshevik principles and affiliate ourselves to the Communist International. If we report regularly to Moscow on our progres
s we shall receive guidance, help and support from men who made a successful revolution in their own country four years ago.”
“Have you forgotten already that this founding congress itself almost ended in disaster in Shanghai?” asked one of the other delegates. “If we had not been constantly vigilant the police informer would have betrayed our secret meeting place in the French Concession before we made our escape. Our presence on this sampan in the middle of a lake far from prying ears and eyes should remind us above all else to be cautious and patient.”
The chairman nodded his appreciation. “May we take it that the delegate from Hunan now approves the proposal to follow the example of the Russian Bolsheviks and organize our party accordingly?”
For a moment the young Hunanese hesitated. Then he relaxed and stretched his long body slowly along the gunwale once more. “I approve the proposal,” he said shortly, without looking up.
The chairman shuffled the papers in front of him and in a low voice began to read our pre—written drafts of the founding statutes for the Kong Ch’an Tang, the Communist Party of China. The drone of discussion resumed immediately but the unkempt delegate did not attempt to join in. Instead he leaned over the side and dragged his fingers in the water once more: the brooding expression returned to his face and as the sampan drifted on toward the setting sun, he continued to gaze restlessly about himself as though seeking inspiration in the surface clusters of red and white lotus flowers, the pine trees that marked the lake’s shoreline and the distant misty shadows of China’s southern mountains.
PART ONE
The Marchers Gather
1931
In 1931 China was politically dislocated and seething with unrest. Western nations were continuing to exercise a humiliating form of colonial rule over many “treaty port” areas that they had seized in the mid-nineteenth century, and an unfinished revolution had deteriorated after two confused decades into a Communist- Nationalist civil war. The revolution of 1911 had been sparked above all else by the ever-increasing intrusion into China by foreign powers. This had proved a particularly traumatic experience for a proud nation possessed of four thousand years of recorded history and a deep conviction of the inherent superiority of its civilization. China’s very name, Chung Kuo — meaning “middle kingdom” or “central country” — reflected this ancient sense of authority, and its emperors had been accustomed since earliest times to receive annual tribute of silver and other gifts from neighboring Asian countries.
But neither the philosophies of China’s great sages, the cultural refinements of its mandarin scholars, nor its large armies could provide any defense against those Western nations who burst forth from Europe during the nineteenth century, newly strengthened by the industrial revolution, to colonize much of the rest of the world. China’s gold, jade, silk, and tea provided irresistible commercial bait — and its massive population of four hundred million, a quarter of mankind, constituted the biggest single potential market in the world. With their steel steamships, mass-manufactured weapons, railways, and telegraphs, the Europeans cowed backward nations on all continents, and by the end of the nineteenth century, exploitation of an enfeebled China had become a mad scramble among the colonial powers. Britain, which first forced China to open its ports to foreign trade after the Opium War of 1840, had set up a colony proper in Hong Kong. Shanghai, Canton, and Tientsin became the other major foreign- ruled coastal enclaves where Europeans enjoyed the security and protection of their own national laws and police forces: railway and mining concessions and other trading privileges were also extorted from China’s helpless imperial governments. In addition, the many treaties imposed on Peking forced the Chinese to grant foreign evangelists wide-ranging rights. The number of missionaries entering the country increased rapidly in the wake of the colonialist penetration, and churches, schools, orphanages, and hospitals were set up both in the treaty ports and in many parts of the interior. The numbers of Chinese converted to Christianity always remained small in comparison with the missionary effort and the size of the population — but this did nothing to lessen the fervor of the missionaries themselves. Even the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which resulted in the ritual massacre of many European missionaries and their wives and children along with thousands of Chinese Christian converts, did not drive out the foreign evangelists.
The overthrow of China’s last emperor a few years later, in 1911, succeeded in ending more than two thousand years of imperial rule. However, this republican revolution, led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, was not able to restore China’s pride and independence. Instead it plunged the nation into a state of prolonged political turmoil. Outside the foreign-ruled treaty ports, power passed immediately to the remnants of the imperial army, whose commanders became feared regional warlords. Reactionary mandarins and feudal landowners as a result retained the same stranglehold on the people throughout China that they had held under the emperors. Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, which had been founded in 1893, welcomed Communists into its ranks as well as all other Nationalists, but it was unable to assert its authority because it lacked effective military forces. Close links were developed with Moscow, and in the early 1920s the Kuomintang began training its own armies. After the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925, however, his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, broke with the Russian Bolsheviks, drove out the Communists, who had founded their own party in 1921, and turned the Kuomintang into a right-wing movement. In 1927 Chiang finalized the breach by staging a brutal massacre of thousands of Communist workers in Shanghai. The Kuomintang’s own armies then swept northward to Peking, subduing or winning over the regional warlords one by one, and a triumphant proclamation was issued announcing that China had been unified under “Generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek.
The authority of Chiang’s government based in Nanking was not accepted, however, by the Communists; the bulk of them had already retreated deep into the mountainous rural regions of central and southern China to set up their own administrative areas, which they called soviets. About 80 percent of China’s population were virtually landless peasants, and in their soviets the Communists were satisfying an age-old grievance by executing landlords and distributing their fields to those who toiled in them. As a result, peasant volunteers had begun flocking to their banners, and large-scale civil war developed when Chiang Kai-shek moved his Nationalist armies against these soviets. But the Communists, although inferior in numbers and arms, resisted stubbornly by means of skillful guerrilla war strategies. As 1931 dawned, none of today’s perspectives was discernible amid the turmoil of the time. In particular, no hint of the strength and determination possessed by China’s Communists had been allowed to filter to the outside world through the Nationalist military blockades. Consequently China’s gigantic stew of complex causes and ambitions continued to lure many white Western adventurers into its midst. Fortune seekers of every kind thronged the relatively safe treaty ports, fascinated by the opportunities and excitements that a great and ancient country in ferment presented. The braver ones occasionally ventured beyond the international concession areas, and among those who did, none showed more courage than the men and women who traveled deep into the dangerous heartlands of China without protection — as missionaries.
1
Several hundred Pakhoi hogs imprisoned in willow-twig cages on the open afterdeck of the Tomeko Maru squealed with fright as the wind-lashed East China Sea buffeted the ten-thousand-ton Japanese freighter with gathering force. The ship was nearing the end of its seven-week voyage from Tilbury to Shanghai, and the cages had been stacked in layers five and six deep by coolies who had jog- trotted them to the wharves at Pakhoi, close to the Hainan Strait. Only narrow aisles had been left between the stacked cages, and ducks and barnyard fowl piled on top of them in smaller baskets were beginning to squawk anxiously in their turn as the wind rose.
The clamor increased when a young Chinese man and woman, attired in smart Western clothes, paused in their stroll around the deck and
walked in among the cages to talk casually with the grimy deck coolie tending the animals. A sallow-faced European who had been walking in the opposite direction stopped when he noticed the incongruously dressed Asians conversing together. Moving quickly into the lee of a suspended lifeboat, he continued to watch the little group discreetly from a position where he could not be seen.
In his second-class cabin close beneath the stern, Jakob Kellner lay on his narrow bunk reading a Chinese language primer, trying to ignore the noise of the frightened hogs and the constant clatter and thump of the vessel’s rudder that penetrated the cabin’s bulkheads. The boy whose imagination had been fired by a sunburned China missionary in a dismal church hail had grown into a tall, lean, serious-faced young man. At twenty, Jakob was now well over six feet tall — his long angular frame had yet to fill out but his shoulders were broad and straight. His face was determined and strong-jawed, his short, neatly parted hair had retained the fairness inherited from his Swiss father, and the eager impetuosity that had led him to donate his tram fare to China ten years before was still evident in the alertness of his expression. But the long voyage from Tilbury had already made him restless, and as the ship began to roll more noticeably, his attention wandered from the look.
Beyond the porthole the dragon-backed coastline of Fukien was faintly visible in the gathering twilight; the northbound freighter had passed through the broad Formosa Strait and the sight of China’s jagged southeastern mountain ranges quickened the realization in Jakob that soon he would at last set foot on Chinese soil. Landfall in Shanghai was now less than twenty-four hours away, and as he stared out through the porthole at the indistinct knuckles of land, Jakob wondered for the thousandth time on the voyage what he would encounter when he stepped ashore. At the thought that he would know for certain next day, a fist of excitement tightened in the pit of his stomach. Feeling an irresistible urge just to gaze at the enigmatic coastline of which he had dreamed for so long, Jakob flung the book aside, put on his jacket, and left the cramped cabin, heading for the foot of the nearest companionway that led up to the afterdeck.
Anthony Grey Page 2