by Edgar Snow
At the age of fourteen Chou entered Nankai Middle School, in Tientsin. The monarchy had been overthrown and Chou now fully “came under the influence of the Kuomintang” or Nationalist Party founded by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Japan had provided hospitality to Sun Yat-sen during his agitation against the monarchy. Sun still found refuge there as he prepared to overthrow corrupt warlords who had seized the republic. Chou himself went to Japan in 1917, the year he graduated from Nankai Middle School. While learning Japanese, Chou was an “auditor student” at Waseda University in Tokyo, and at the University of Kyoto. He also became widely acquainted with revolution-minded Chinese students in Japan during his eighteen months there, and kept in touch, through letters and reading, with events in Peking.
In 1919 the former director of Nankai Middle School, Chang Poling, became chancellor of the newly organized Nankai University of Tientsin. Chou left Japan to enroll there at Chang’s invitation. Meanwhile his relatives—“a spendthrift lot,” Chou called them—had become so impoverished that they could provide no support for Chou’s college plans. Chang Po-ling gave Chou a job that paid enough to meet costs of tuition, lodging, and books. “During my last two years at Nankai Middle School I had received no help from my family. I lived on a scholarship which I won as best student in my class. In Japan I had lived by borrowing from my friends. Now at Nankai University I became editor of the Hsueh-sheng Lien-ho Huí Pao (Students’ Union Paper), which helped cover some expenses.” Chou managed to do that despite five months spent in jail in 1919, as a leader of Nankai’s student rebellion which grew out of the May Fourth movement.*
During that period Chou helped to form the Chueh-wu Shih, or Awakening Society, a radical group whose members later became, variously, anarchists, Nationalists, and Communists. (One of them was Teng Ying-ch’ao,† whom Chou was to marry in 1925.) The Awakening Society existed until the end of 1920, when four of its founders, led by Chou, went to France as part of the Work-Study program organized by Ch’en Tu-hsiut and other Francophiles.
“Before going to France,” said Chou, “I read translations of the Communist Manifesto; Kautsky’s Class Struggle; and The October Revolution. These books were published under the auspices of the New Youth (Hsin Ch’ing-nien), edited by Ch’en Tu-hsiu. I also personally met Ch’en Tu-hsiu as well as Li Ta-chao†—who were to become founders of the Chinese Communist Party.” (Chou made no reference to any meeting with Mao Tse-tung at that time.)
“I sailed for France in October, 1920. On the way I met many Hunanese students who were members of the Hsin-Min Hsueh-hui (the New People’s Study Society), organized by Mao Tse-tung. Among these were Ts’ai Ho-sent and his sister, Ts’ai Ch’ang,† who organized the first China Socialist Youth Corps in France in 1921. In 1922 I became a member-founder of the [Chinese] Communist Youth League and began to work full time for that organization. ‡ After two years I went to London, where I spent two and a half months. I did not like it. Then I went to Germany and worked there for a year, helping to organize.§ Our Communist Youth League had sent delegates to Shanghai in 1922, to request admission to the Party, formed the year before. Our petition being granted, the CYL became formally affiliated with the Party, and thus I became a Communist. Founder-members of the CYL in France who became Party members in this way included Ts’ai Ho-sen, Ts’ai Ch’ang, Chao Shih-yen, Li Fu-ch’un,† Li Li-san,† Wang Jo-fei, and the two sons of Ch’en Tu-hsiu—Ch’en Yen-nien and Ch’en Ch’iao-nien. Ch’en Yen-nien later became a ricksha puller in order to organize rickshamen in Shanghai. During the counterrevolution he was captured and badly tortured before he was killed. His brother was executed at Lunghua a year later—1928.
“Among members of our Chinese Students Union in France more than four hundred joined the CYL. Fewer than a hundred joined the anarchists and about a hundred became Nationalists.”
Financial support for Chinese students in France came from the Sino-French Educational Association and from Tsai Yuan-p’ei and Li Shih-tseng. “Many old and patriotic gentlemen,” said Chou, “privately helped us students, and with no personal political aims.”2 Chou’s own financial backer while in Europe was Yen Hsiu, a founder of Nankai University. Unlike some Chinese students, Chou did no manual labor in France, except for a brief period at the Renault plant, when he studied labor organization. After a year with a private tutor, learning the French language, he devoted his entire time to politics. “Later on,” Chou told me, “when friends remarked that I had used Yen Hsiu’s money to become a Communist, Yen quoted a Chinese proverb, ‘Every intelligent man has his own purposes!’”
In France, London, and Germany, Chou spent three years. On his return to China he stopped briefly for instructions in Moscow. Late in 1924 he arrived in Canton, where he became Chiang Kai-shek’s deputy director of the political department of Whampoa Academy. (While still in Paris Chou had been elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. In Canton he was also elected secretary of the Kwang-tung provincial Communist Party—paradox of a strange alliance!) At Whampoa, Chou’s real boss was the Russian adviser, General Vasili Bluecher,* known in Canton as Galin.
Under the skillful guidance of Galin, and of the Russians’ chief political adviser, Mikhail Borodin,* Chou En-lai built up a circle of cadet disciples known as the League of Military Youth, which included Lin Piao and other future generals of the Red Army. His influence was further enhanced when, in 1925, he was appointed political commissar of the Nationalists’ first division, which suppressed a revolt near Swatow—an occasion Chou utilized to organize labor unions in that port. In March, 1926, Kuomintang-Communist tension resulted in Chiang’s first anti-Communist blow. He succeeded in ending the practice of dual-party membership and removed many Communists from Whampoa posts. Chou En-lai remained, however, on Chiang Kai-shek’s orders.
During 1926 the Northern Expedition got under way, with Chiang Kai-shek as commander-in-chief selected jointly by the Kuomintang and the Communists. Chou En-lai was ordered to prepare an insurrection and help the Nationalist Army seize Shanghai. Within three months the Communist Party had organized 600,000 workers and was able to call a general strike, but it was a fiasco. Unarmed and untrained, the workers did not know how to go about “seizing the city.”
Underestimating the significance of the first and then of a second strike, the northern warlords cut off a number of heads but failed to halt the labor movement, while Chou En-lai learned by practice “how to lead an uprising.” Chou and such Shanghai labor leaders as Chao Tse-yen, Chao Shih-yen, Ku Shun-chang, and Lo Yi-ming now succeeded in organizing 50,000 pickets. With Mausers smuggled into the city an “iron band” of 300 marksmen was trained, to become the only armed force these Shanghai workers had.
On March 21, 1927, the revolutionists called a general strike which closed all the industries of Shanghai. They first seized the police stations, next the arsenal, then the garrison, and after that, victory. Five thousand workers were armed, six battalions of revolutionary troops created, the warlord armies withdrew, and a “citizens’ government” was proclaimed. “Within two days,” said Chou, “we won everything but the foreign concessions.”
The International Settlement (jointly controlled by Britain, the U.S., and Japan) and the French Concession which adjoined it were never attacked during the third insurrection; otherwise the triumph was complete—and short-lived. The Nationalist Army, led by General Pai Chung-hsi, was welcomed to the city by the workers’ militia. Then on April 12 the Nationalist-Communist coalition abruptly ended when Chiang Kai-shek set up a separate regime in Nanking, to lead one of history’s classic counterrevolutions.
In the French Concession and the International Settlement, Chiang’s envoys had secretly conferred with representatives of the foreign powers. They reached agreements to cooperate against the Chinese Communists and their Russian allies—until then also Chiang’s allies. Given large sums by Shanghai’s bankers, and the blessings of the foreign authorities, including guns and armored cars, Chiang was also helped by powe
rful Settlement and Concession underworld leaders. They mobilized hundreds of professional gangsters. Installed in the foreigners’ armored cars, and attired in Nationalist uniforms, the gangsters carried out a night operation in coordination with Chiang’s troops, moving in from the rear and other flanks. Taken by complete surprise by troops considered friendly, the militiamen were massacred and their “citizens’ government” bloodily dissolved.
And thus it happened that Chou En-lai, after a remarkably lucky escape, began his life as a fugitive from Kuomintang assassins and a leader of the revolution which finally raised the Red banner in China.
Dozens of Chou En-lai’s close co-workers in the Shanghai Uprising were seized and executed. Chou estimated the toll of the “Shanghai Massacre” at 5,000 lives.3 He himself was captured by Chiang Kai-shek’s Second Division, and General Pai Chung-hsi, (later ruler of Kwangsi) issued an order for his execution. But the brother of the division commander had been Chou’s student at Whampoa, and he helped Chou to escape.
The Insurrectionist fled to Wuhan * and then to Nanchang, where he helped organize the August First Uprising. Senior member of the Politburo at the time, Chou was secretary of the Front Committee that directed the uprising, which was a fiasco. Next he went to Swatow and held it for ten days against assaults from both foreign gunboats and the native troops of militarists. With the failure and defeat of the Canton Commune, Chou was obliged to work underground—until 1931, when he succeeded in “running the blockade” and entered the soviet districts of Kiangsi and Fukien. There he was made political commissar to Chu Teh, commander-in-chief of the Red Army. Later Chou became vice-chairman of the revolutionary military council, an office he still held when I met him. There had been years of exhausting struggle in the South, and then the Long March. … But of Chou’s further story, and of the scenes and events already mentioned, I was shortly to learn more, and in a broader context, from Mao Tse-tung and others.
Chou left me with an impression of a cool, logical, and empirical mind. In his days at Nankai (I had heard from one of his classmates there) Chou had often taken feminine leads in school plays. There was nothing effeminate about the tough, bearded, unsentimental soldier I met in Pai Chia P’ing. But there was charm—one quality in the mixed ingredients that were to make Chou Red China’s No. 1 diplomat.
3
Something About Ho Lung1
Next morning at six I set out with a squad of about forty youths of the communications corps, who were escorting a caravan of goods to Pao An.
I found that only myself, Fu, Chin-kuei, an emissary from the Wai-chiaopu—the Reds’ own “Foreign Office”—and Li Chiang-lin, a Red commander, were mounted. It may not be precisely the word: Fu had a privileged perch on a stout but already heavily laden mule; Li Chiang-lin rode an equally overburdened ass; and I was vaguely astride the lone horse, which at times I could not be quite sure was really there at all.
My animal had a quarter-moon back and a camel gait. His enfeebled legs wobbled so that I expected him at any moment to buckle up and breathe his last. He was especially disconcerting as we crept along the narrow trails hewn from steep cliffs that rose up from the river bed we followed. It seemed to me that any sudden shift of my weight over his sunken flanks would send us both hurtling to the rocky gorge below.
Li Chiang-lin laughed down from his pyramid of luggage at my discomfiture. “That’s a fine saddle you are sitting, t’ung-chih, but what is that underneath it?”
At his gibe I could not resist commenting: “Just tell me this, Li Chiang-lin, how can you fight on dogs like these? Is this how you mount your Red Cavalry?”
“Pu-shih! No, you will see! Is your steed huai-la? * Well, it’s just because we have bad ones like this at the rear that our cavalry is unbeatable at the front! If there is a horse that is fat and can run, not even Mao Tse-tung can keep him from the front! Only the worn-out dogs we use in our rear. And that’s how it is with everything: guns, food, clothing, horses, mules, camels, sheep—the best go to our Red fighters! If it’s a horse you want, t’ung-chih, go to the front!”
But men? Li explained that it was easier to spare a good man from the front than a good horse.
And Commander Li was a good man, a good Bolshevik and a good storyteller. He had been a Red for ten years, and was a veteran of the Nanchang Uprising of 1927, when communism first became an independent force in China. As I rode, walked, panted and thirsted up and down the broken hills of Shensi beside Commander Li, he recounted incidents and anecdotes one after another, and sometimes, when pressed again and again, even stooped to talk about himself.
A Hunanese, Li had been a middle-school student when he joined the Kuomintang and began to take part in the Great Revolution. He must have entered the Communist Party in the early 1920’s; he had worked as a labor organizer with Teng Fa in Hongkong during the great seamen’s strike of 1922. He said that in 1925 he had been sent, as part of a Communist-led delegation, to see Ho Lung,* who already had a reputation as a bandit leader. Li’s reminiscences are here presented as part of the Red Army legend.
“Ho Lung’s men were not bandits, even then,” Li told me, as we sat resting one day beneath some trees that stood beside a cool stream. “His father had been a leader in the Ke Lao Hui,† and Ho Lung inherited his prestige, so that he became famous throughout Hunan when still a young man. Many stories are told by the Hunanese of his bravery as a youth.
“His father was a military officer in the Ch’ing Dynasty, and one day he was invited to a dinner by his fellow officers. He took his son, Ho Lung, with him. His father was boasting of Ho Lung’s fearlessness, and one of the guests decided to test it out. He fired off a gun under the table. They say that Ho Lung did not even blink!
“When we met him he had already been commissioned in the provincial army. He then controlled a territory through which rich opium caravans had to pass from Yunnan to Hankow, and he lived by taxing them, and did not rob the people. His followers did not rape or carouse, like the troops of many warlord armies, and he did not let them smoke opium. They kept their rifles clean. But it was the custom there to offer opium to guests. Ho Lung himself did not smoke, but when we arrived he had opium pipes and opium brought to the k’ang, and over these we talked about revolution.
“The head of our propaganda committee was Chou Yi-chung, a Communist, who had some family connection with Ho Lung. We talked to him for three weeks. Ho Lung had not had much education, except in military affairs, but he was not an ignorant man.
“We established a Party training school in his army, with Chou Yi-sung—who was later killed—as leader. Although it was a Kuomintang Nationalist training school, most of the propagandists were Communists. Many students entered the school and later became political leaders. Besides Ho Lung’s army, the school furnished political commissioners for the Third Division, under Yuan Tso-ming, who was then commander of the Left Route Army. Yuan Tso-ming was assassinated by agents of T’ang Sheng-chih, and the Third Division was given to Ho Lung. His enlarged command was called the Twentieth Army, which became part of the main Fourth Group Army * under the Left Kuomintang general, Chang Fa-kuei.”
“What happened to Ho Lung after the Nanchang Uprising?”
“His forces were defeated. He and Chu Teh next moved to Swatow. They were defeated again. The remnant of his army went into the interior, but Ho Lung escaped to Hongkong. Later he smuggled himself to Shanghai, and then, disguised, he returned to Hunan.
“It is said of Ho Lung that he established a soviet district in Hunan with one knife. This was early in 1928. Ho Lung was in hiding in a village, plotting with members of the Ke Lao Hui, when some Kuomintang tax collectors arrived. Leading a few villagers, he attacked the tax collectors and killed them with his own knife, and then disarmed the tax collectors’ guard. From this adventure he got enough revolvers and rifles to arm his first peasants’ army.”
Ho Lung’s fame in the Elder Brother Society extended over all China. The Reds said that he could go unarmed into a
ny village of the country, announce himself to the Elder Brother Society, and form an army. The society’s special ritual and language were quite difficult to master, but Ho Lung had the highest “degrees” and was said to have more than once enlisted an entire Ke Lao Hui branch in the Red Army. His eloquence as a speaker was well known in the Kuomintang. Li said that when he spoke he could “raise the dead to fight.”
When Ho Lung’s Second Front Red Army finally withdrew from the Hunan soviet districts, in 1935, its rifles were reported to number more than 40,000, and this army underwent even greater hardships in its own Long March to the Northwest than the main forces from Kiangsi. Thousands died on the snow mountains, and thousands more starved to death or were killed by Nanking bombs. Yet so great was Ho Lung’s personal magnetism, and his influence throughout rural China, Li said, that many of his then stayed with him and died on the road rather than desert, and thousands of poor men along the route of march joined in to help fill up the dwindling ranks. In the end he reached eastern Tibet, where he finally connected with Chu Teh, with about 20,000 men—most of them barefoot, half-starved, and physically exhausted. After several months of recuperation, his troops were now on the march again, into Kansu, where they were expected to arrive in a few weeks.