Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  Red Star Over China

  Books by Edgar Snow

  Far Eastern

  Front Living China

  Red Star Over China

  The Battle for Asia

  People on Our Side

  The Pattern of Soviet Power

  Stalin Must Have Peace

  Random Notes on Red China

  Journey to the Beginning

  Red China Today: The Other Side of the River

  The Long Revolution

  Edgar Snow

  RED STAR OVER CHINA

  First Revised and Enlarged Edition

  Copyright © 1938, 1944 by Random House, Inc.

  Copyright © 1961 by John K. Fairbank

  Copyright © 1968 by Edgar Snow

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-17724

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9610-1

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  To Grenville Clark

  who was taller than his time

  “Laid sweet in his grave,

  the hope of humanity

  not yet subjugated in him.”

  —Emerson

  Contents

  Introduction by Dr. John K. Fairbank

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  Chronology: 125 Years of Chinese Revolution

  A Note on Chinese Pronunciation

  PART ONE: IN SEARCH OF RED CHINA

  1. Some Unanswered Questions

  2. Slow Train to “Western Peace”

  3. Some Han Bronzes

  4. Through Red Gates

  PART TWO: THE ROAD TO THE RED CAPITAL

  1. Chased by White Bandits

  2. The Insurrectionist

  3. Something About Ho Lung

  4. Red Companions

  PART THREE: IN “DEFENDED PEACE”

  1. Soviet Strong Man

  2. Basic Communist Policies

  3. On War with Japan

  4. $2,000,000 in Heads

  5. Red Theater

  PART FOUR: GENESIS OF A COMMUNIST

  1. Childhood

  2. Days in Changsha

  3. Prelude to Revolution

  4. The Nationalist Period

  5. The Soviet Movement

  6. Growth of the Red Army

  PART FIVE: THE LONG MARCH

  1. The Fifth Campaign

  2. A Nation Emigrates

  3. The Heroes of Tatu

  4. Across the Great Grasslands

  PART SIX: RED STAR IN THE NORTHWEST

  1. The Shensi Soviets: Beginnings

  2. Death and Taxes

  3. Soviet Society

  4. Anatomy of Money

  5. Life Begins at Fifty!

  PART SEVEN: EN ROUTE TO THE FRONT

  1. Conversation with Red Peasants

  2. Soviet Industries

  3. “They Sing Too Much”

  PART EIGHT: WITH THE RED ARMY

  1. The “Real” Red Army

  2. Impression of P’eng Teh-huai

  3. Why Is a Red?

  4. Tactics of Partisan Warfare

  5. Life of the Red Warrior

  6. Session in Politics

  PART NINE: WITH THE RED ARMY (Continued)

  1. Hsu Hai-tung, the Red Potter

  2. Class War in China

  3. Four Great Horses

  4. Moslem and Marxist

  PART TEN: WAR AND PEACE

  1. More About Horses

  2. “Little Red Devils”

  3. United Front in Action

  4. Concerning Chu Teh

  PART ELEVEN: BACK TO PAO AN

  1. Casuals of the Road

  2. Life in Pao An

  3. The Russian Influence

  4. Chinese Communism and the Comintern

  5. That Foreign Brain Trust

  6. Farewell to Red China

  PART TWELVE: WHITE WORLD AGAIN

  1. A Preface to Mutiny

  2. The Generalissimo Is Arrested

  3. Chiang, Chang, and the Reds

  4. “Point Counter Point”

  5. Auld Lang Syne?

  6. Red Horizons

  Epilogue, 1944

  Notes to the Revised Edition

  APPENDICES

  Abbreviations

  Further Interviews with Mao Tse-tung

  Biographical Notes

  Leadership in the Chinese Communist Party

  Bibliography

  Index

  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.