by Edgar Snow
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 And then the Buddhist governor told me exactly what he thought about Japan—not for publication—just as every Kuomintang official would then tell you his opinion of Japan—not for publication.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.
3
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 invo
lved, 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.