Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  While the Red Army’s March to the Northwest was unquestionably a strategic retreat, forced upon it by regionally decisive defeats, the army finally reached its objective with its nucleus still intact, and its morale and political will evidently as strong as ever. The Communists rationalized, and apparently believed, that they were advancing toward an anti-Japanese front, and this was a psychological factor of great importance. It helped them turn what might have been a demoralized retreat into a spirited march of victory. History has subsequently shown that they were right in emphasizing what was undoubtedly the second fundamental reason for their migration: an advance to a region which they correctly foresaw was to play a determining role in the immediate destinies of China, Japan, and Soviet Russia. This skillful propagandive maneuver must be noted as a piece of brilliant political strategy. It was to a large extent responsible for the successful conclusion of the heroic trek.

  In one sense this mass migration was the biggest armed propaganda tour in history. The Reds passed through provinces populated by more than 200,000,000 people. Between battles and skirmishes, in every town occupied, they called mass meetings, gave theatrical performances, heavily “taxed” the rich, freed many “slaves” (some of whom joined the Red Army), preached “liberty, equality, democracy,” confiscated the property of the “traitors” (officials, big landlords, and tax collectors) and distributed their goods among the poor. Millions of the poor had now seen the Red Army and heard it speak, and were no longer afraid of it. The Reds explained the aims of agrarian revolution and their anti-Japanese policy. They armed thousands of peasants and left cadres behind to train Red partisans who kept Nanking’s troops busy. Many thous-sands dropped out on the long and heartbreaking march, but thousands of others—farmers, apprentices, slaves, deserters from the Kuomintang ranks, workers, all the disinherited—joined in and filled the ranks.

  Some day someone will write the full epic of this exciting expedition. Meanwhile, as epilogue, I offer a free translation of a classical poem about this 6,000-mile excursion written by Chairman Mao Tse-tung—a rebel who could write verse as well as lead a crusade:

  The Red Army, never fearing the challenging Long March,

  Looked lightly on the many peaks and rivers.

  Wu Liang’s Range rose, lowered, rippled,

  And green-tiered were the rounded steps of Wu Meng.

  Warm-beating the Gold Sand River’s waves against the rocks,

  And cold the iron-chain spans of Tatu’s bridge.

  A thousand joyous li of freshening snow on Min Shan,

  And then, the last pass vanquished, Three Armies smiled!3

  Part Six

  Red Star in the Northwest

  1

  The Shensi Soviets: Beginnings1

  While the Communists in Kiangsi, Fukien, and Hunan from 1927 onward gradually built bases for their opposition to Nanking, Red armies appeared in other widely scattered parts of China. Of these the biggest single area was the Honan-Anhui-Hupeh Soviet, which covered a good part of those three rich provinces of the Central Yangtze Valley, and embraced a population of more than 2,000,000 people. The Red Army there began under the command of Hsu Hai-tung, and later on, to lead it came Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, a graduate of the first class of Whampoa Academy, a former colonel in the Kuomintang Army, and a veteran of the Canton Commune.

  Far in the mountains to the northwest of them, another Whampoa cadet, Liu Chih-tan, was laying the foundations for the soviet areas in Shensi, Kansu, and Ninghsia. Liu was a modern Robin Hood, with the mountaineer’s hatred of rich men; among the poor he was becoming a name of promise, and among landlords and moneylenders the scourge of the gods.

  This chaotic warrior was born in the hill-cradled town of Pao An, north Shensi, the son of a landlord family. He went to high school in Yulin, which stood under the shadow of the Great Wall and was the seat of Shensi’s prosperous trade with the caravans of Mongolia. Leaving Yulin, Liu Chih-tan secured an appointment to the Whampoa Academy in Canton, completed his course there in 1926, and became a Communist and a young officer in the Kuomintang. With the Nationalist Expedition as far as Hankow, he was there when the split occurred in the Kuomin-tang-Communist alliance.

  In 1927, following the Nanking coup d’état, he fled from the “purgation” and worked secretly for the Communist Party in Shanghai. Returning to his native province in 1928, he re-established connections with some of his former comrades, then in the Kuominchun, the “People’s Army,” of General Feng Yu-hsiang. Next year he led a peasant uprising in south Shensi. Although Liu’s uprising was sanguinarily suppressed, out of it grew the nucleus of the first guerrilla bands of Shensi.

  Liu Chih-tan’s career from 1929 to 1932 was a kaleidoscope of defeats, failures, discouragements, escapades, adventure, and remarkable escapes from death, interspersed with periods of respectability as a reinstated officer. Several small armies under him were completely destroyed. Once he was made head of the min-t’uan at Pao An, and he used his office to arrest and execute several landlords and moneylenders—strange behavior for a min-t’uan leader. The magistrate of Pao An was dismissed, and Liu fled, with but three followers, to a neighboring hsien. There one of General Feng Yu-hsiang’s officers invited them to a banquet, in the midst of which Liu and his friends disarmed their hosts, seized twenty guns, and made off to the hills, where they soon collected a following of about 300 men.

  This little army was surrounded, however, and Liu sued for peace. His offer was accepted, and he became a colonel in the Kuomintang Army, with a garrison post in west Shensi. Again he began an antilandlord movement and again he was outlawed, this time arrested. Owing chiefly to his influence in the Shensi Ke Lao Hui, he was pardoned once more, but his troops were reorganized into a transportation brigade, of which he was made commander. And then for the third time Liu Chih-tan repeated the error of his ways. Some landlords in his district, long accustomed to tax exemption (a more or less “hereditary right” of landlords in Shensi), refused to pay taxes. Liu promptly arrested a number of them, with the result that the gentry rose up in arms and demanded that Sian remove and punish him. His troops were surrounded and disarmed.

  Finally he was driven back to Pao An with a price on his head—but followed by many young Communist officers and men from his own brigade. Here at last he set about organizing an independent army under a Red flag in 1931, took possession of Pao An and Chung Yang counties, and rapidly pushed operations in north Shensi. Government troops sent against him very often turned over to the Reds in battle; deserters even drifted across the Yellow River from Shansi to join this outlaw whose daredeviltry, courage, and impetuousness soon won him fame throughout the Northwest and created the usual legend that he was “invulnerable to bullets.”

  Killings of officials, tax collectors, and landlords became widespread. Unleashing long-hushed fury, the armed peasants raided, plundered, carried off captives, whom they held for ransom in their fortified areas, and conducted themselves much like ordinary bandits. By 1932 Liu Chih-tan’s followers had occupied eleven counties in the loess hills of northern Shensi, and the Communist Party had organized a political department at Yulin to direct Liu’s troops. Early in 1933 the first Shensi Soviet and a regular administration were established, and a program was attempted similar to that in Kiangsi.

  In 1934 and 1935 these Shensi Reds expanded considerably, improved their armies, and somewhat stabilized conditions in their districts. A Shensi Provincial Soviet Government was set up, a Party training school established, and military headquarters were located at An Ting. The soviets opened their own bank and post office and began to issue crude money and stamps. In the completely sovietized areas a soviet economy was begun, landlords’ land was confiscated and redistributed, all surtaxes were abolished, cooperatives were opened, and a call was sent out by the Party to enlist members to volunteer as teachers for primary schools.

  Meanwhile Liu Chih-tan moved well south of the Red base toward the capital. He occupied Lintung, just outside Sian
fu, and besieged the city for some days, without success. A column of Reds pushed down to southern Shensi and established soviets in several counties there. They had some bad defeats and reverses in battles with General Yang Hu-ch’eng (later to become the Reds’ ally), and they won some victories. As discipline increased in the army, and bandit elements were eliminated, support for the Reds deepened among the peasantry. By the middle of 1935 the soviets controlled twenty-two counties in Shensi and Kansu. The Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Red armies, with a total of over 5,000 men, were now under Liu Chih-tan’s command, and could establish contact by radio with the main forces of the Red Army in the South and in the West. As the southern Reds began to withdraw from their Kiangsi-Fukien base, these hill men of Shensi greatly strengthened themselves, until in 1935 Chiang Kai-shek was forced to send his vice-commander-in-chief, Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, to lead a big army against them.

  Late in 1934 the Twenty-fifth Red Army, under Hsu Hai-tung, left Honan with some 8,000 men. By October it had reached south Shensi and connected with about 1,000 Red partisans in that area who had been armed by Liu Chih-tan. Hsu encamped for the winter there, helped the partisans to build a regular army, fought several successful battles against General Yang Hu-ch’eng’s troops, and armed peasants in five counties of south Shensi. A provisional soviet government was established, with Cheng Wei-shan, a twenty-three-year-old member of the Central Committee of Shensi province, as chairman, and Li Lung-kuei and Cheng Shan-jui as commanders of two independent Red brigades. Leaving them to defend this area, Hsu Hai-tung then moved into Kansu with his Twenty-fifth Army, and fought his way into the soviet districts through thousands of government troops, capturing five county seats en route and disarming two regiments of Mohammedan troops under General Ma Hung-ping.

  On July 25, 1935, the Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-seventh armies united near Yung Ch’ang, north Shensi. Their troops were reorganized into the Fifteenth Red Army Corps, with Hsu Hai-tung as commander and Liu Chih-tan as vice-commander and chairman of the Shensi-Kansu-Shansi Revolutionary Military Committee.* In August, 1935, this army corps met and defeated two divisions of Tungpei (Man-churian) troops, under General Wang Yi-che. New recruits were added and much-needed guns and ammunition.

  And now a curious thing occurred.2 In August there came to north Shensi a delegate of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a stout young gentleman named Chang Ching-fu (Chang Mu-t’ao?). According to my informant, who was then a staff officer under Liu Chih-tan, this Mr. Chang (nicknamed Chang the Corpulent) was empowered to “reorganize” the Party and the army. He was a kind of superinspector.

  Chang the Corpulent proceeded to collect evidence to prove that Liu Chih-tan had not followed the “Party line.” He “tried” Liu, and demanded his resignation from all posts. Liu Chih-tan did not put Mr. Chang against a wall as an interloper for presuming to criticize him, but retired from all active command and went, Achilles-like, to sulk in his cave in Pao An. Mr. Chang also ordered the arrest and imprisonment of more than a hundred other “reactionaries” in the Party and the army and quietly sat back, well satisfied with himself.

  It was into this queer scene that the vanguard of the southern Reds, the First Army Corps, headed by Lin Piao, Chou En-lai, P’eng Teh-huai, and Mao Tse-tung, entered in October, 1935. According to my local informants in Pao An, Mao and his Politburo called for a re-examination of evidence, found most of it baseless, discovered that Chang Ching-fu had exceeded his orders and been misled by “reactionaries” himself. They reinstated Liu and all his confederates. Chang the Corpulent was himself arrested, tried, imprisoned for a term, and later given menial tasks to perform.

  Thus it happened that when, early in 1936, the combined Red armies attempted their famous “anti-Japanese” expedition, crossed the river, and invaded neighboring Shansi, Liu Chih-tan was again in command. He distinguished himself in that remarkable campaign during which the Reds occupied over eighteen counties of the so-called “model province” in two months. He was fatally wounded in March, 1936, when he led a raiding party against an enemy fortification, the capture of which enabled the Red Army to cross the Yellow River. Liu Chih-tan was carried back to Shensi and died gazing upon the hills he had roamed and loved as a boy, and among the mountain people he had led along the road he believed in, the road of revolutionary struggle. He was buried at Wa Ya Pao, and the soviets renamed a county of their Red China after him—Chih-tan hsien.

  In Pao An I met his widow and his child, a beautiful little girl of six. The Reds had tailored her a special uniform; she wore an officer’s belt, and a red star on her cap. She was the idol of everybody there. Young Liu carried herself like a field marshal and she was mightily proud of her “bandit” father.

  But although Liu Chih-tan was the personality around which these soviets of the Northwest grew up, it was not Liu, but the conditions of life itself, which produced this convulsive movement of his people. And to understand whatever success they had had it was necessary not so much just now to look at what these men fought for, as to examine what they fought against.

  2

  Death and Taxes

  During the great Northwest famine, which lasted roughly for three years and affected four huge provinces, I visited some of the drought-stricken areas in Suiyuan, on the edge of Mongolia, in June, 1929. How many people starved to death in those years I do not accurately know, and probably no one will ever know; it is forgotten now. A conservative semiofficial figure of 3,000,000 is often accepted, but I am not inclined to doubt other estimates ranging as high as 6,000,000.

  This catastrophe passed hardly noticed in the Western world, and even in the coastal cities of China, but a few courageous Chinese and foreigners attached to the American-financed China International Famine Relief Commission—including its secretary, Dwight Edwards; O. J. Todd, the American engineer; and a wonderful American missionary doctor, Robert Ingram*—risked their lives in those typhus-infested areas, trying to salvage some of the human wreckage. I spent some days with them, passing through cities of death, across a once-fertile countryside turned into desert wasteland, through a land of naked horror.

  I was twenty-three. I had come to the East looking for the “glamor of the Orient,” searching for adventure. This excursion to Suiyuan had begun as something like that. But here for the first time in my life I came abruptly upon men who were dying because they had nothing to eat. In those hours of nightmare I spent in Suiyuan I saw thousands of men, women, and children starving to death before my eyes.

  Have you ever seen a man—a good honest man who has worked hard, a “law-abiding citizen,” doing no serious harm to anyone—when he has had no food for more than a month? It is a most agonizing sight. His dying flesh hangs from him in wrinkled folds; you can clearly see every bone in his body; his eyes stare out unseeing; and even if he is a youth of twenty he moves like an ancient crone, dragging himself from spot to spot. If he has been lucky he has long ago sold his wife and daughters. He has also sold everything he owns—the timber of his house itself, and most of his clothes. Sometimes he has, indeed, even sold the last rag of decency, and he sways there in the scorching sun, his testicles dangling from him like withered olive seeds—the last grim jest to remind you that this was once a man.

  Children are even more pitiable, with their little skeletons bent over and misshapen, their crooked bones, their little arms like twigs, and their purpling bellies, filled with bark and sawdust, protruding like tumors. Women lie slumped in corners, waiting for death, their black blade-like buttocks protruding, their breasts hanging like collapsed sacks. But there are, after all, not many women and girls. Most of them have died or been sold.

  Those were things I myself had seen and would never forget. Millions of people died that way in famine, and thousands more still died in China like that. I had seen fresh corpses on the streets of Saratsi, and in the villages I had seen shallow graves where victims of famine and disease were laid by the dozens. But these were not the most
shocking things after all. The shocking thing was that in many of those towns there were still rich men, rice hoarders, wheat hoarders, moneylenders, and landlords, with armed guards to defend them, while they profiteered enormously. The shocking thing was that in the cities—where officials danced or played with sing-song girls—there were grain and food, and had been for months; that in Peking and Tientsin and elsewhere were thousands of tons of wheat and millet, collected (mostly by contributions from abroad) by the Famine Commission, but which could not be shipped to the starving. Why not? Because in the Northwest there were some militarists who wanted to hold all of their railroad rolling stock and would release none of it toward the east, while in the east there were other Kuomintang generals who would send no rolling stock westward—even to starving people—because they feared it would be seized by their rivals.

  While famine raged the Commission decided to build a big canal (with American funds) to help flood some of the lands baked by drought. The officials gave them every cooperation—and promptly began to buy for a few cents an acre all the lands to be irrigated. A flock of vultures descended upon this benighted country and purchased from the starving farmers thousands of acres for the taxes in arrears, or for a few coppers, and held it to await tenants and rainy days.