Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  Yet the great majority of those people who died did so without any act of protest.

  “Why don’t they revolt?” I asked myself. “Why don’t they march in a great army and attack the scoundrels who can tax them but cannot feed them, who can seize their lands but cannot repair an irrigation canal? Or why don’t they sweep into the great cities and plunder the wealth of the rascals who buy their daughters and wives, the men who continue to gorge on thirty-six-course banquets while honest men starve? Why not?”

  I was profoundly puzzled by their passivity. For a while I thought nothing would make a Chinese fight.

  I was mistaken. The Chinese peasant was not passive; he was not a coward. He would fight when given a method, an organization, leadership, a workable program, hope—and arms. The development of “communism” in China had proved that. Against the above background, therefore, it should not surprise us to learn that Communists were popular in the Northwest, for conditions there had been no better for the mass of the peasantry than elsewhere in China.

  Evidence to that effect had been vividly documented by Dr. A. Stampar,* the distinguished health expert sent by the League of Nations as adviser to the Nanking Government. It was the best thing available on the subject. Dr. Stampar had toured the Kuomintang areas of Shensi and Kansu, and his reports were based on his own observations as well as official data opened for him.

  He pointed out that “in the year 240 B.C. an engineer called Cheng Kuo is said to have constructed a system for irrigating nearly a million acres” in the historic Wei Valley of Shensi, cradle of the Chinese race, but that “this system was neglected; the dams collapsed, and, though new works were from time to time carried out, the amount of territory irrigated at the end of the Manchu Dynasty (1912) was less than 20,000 mou”—about 3,300 acres. Figures he obtained showed that during the great famine 62 per cent of the population died outright in one county of Shensi; in another, 75 per cent; and so on. Official estimates revealed that 2,000,000 people starved in Kansu alone—about 20 per cent of the population.

  To quote from this Geneva investigator on conditions in the Northwest before the Reds arrived:

  “In the famine of 1930 twenty acres of land could be purchased for three days’ food supply. Making use of this opportunity, the wealthy classes of the province [Shensi] built up large estates, and the number of owner-cultivators diminished. The following extract from the report for 1930 of Mr. Findlay Andrew of the China International Famine Relief Commission conveys a good impression of the situation in that year:

  “‘… The external appearances of the Province have much improved on those of last year. Why? Because in this particular section of Kansu with which our work deals, death from starvation, pestilence, and sword have doomed during the past two years such large numbers of the population that the very demand for food has considerably lessened.’”

  Much land had become waste, much had been concentrated in the hands of landlords and officials. Kansu especially had “surprisingly large” areas of cultivable but uncultivated land. “Land during the famine of 1928–1930 was bought at extremely cheap rates by landowners who, since that period, have realized fortunes by the execution of the Wei Pei Irrigation project” (a famine-relief measure financed by the Commission).

  “In Shensi it is considered a mark of honor to pay no land tax, and wealthy landowners are therefore as a rule exempted. … A practice which is particularly undesirable is to claim arrears of taxes, for the period during which they were absent, from the farmers who abandoned their land during famines, the farmers being forbidden to resume possession until their arrears are paid.”

  Dr. Stampar found that Shensi farmers (evidently excluding the landlords, who were “as a rule exempted”) had to pay land taxes and surtaxes amounting to about 45 per cent of their income, while other taxes “represent a further 20 per cent”; and “not only is taxation thus fantastically heavy, but its assessment appears to be haphazard and its manner of collection wasteful, brutal, and in many cases corrupt.”

  As for Kansu, Dr. Stampar said:

  “The revenues of Kansu have during the last five years averaged over eight millions … heavier taxation than in Chekiang, one of the richest and most heavily taxed provinces in China. It will be seen also that this revenue, especially in Kansu, is not drawn from one or two major sources, but from a multitude of taxes each yielding a small sum, scarcely any commodity or productive or commercial activity going untaxed. The amount which the population pays is even higher than is shown by the published figures. In the first place, the tax collectors are able to retain a share—in some cases a very large share—of the amounts collected. In the second place, to the taxes levied by the provincial or hsien governments must be added those imposed by military leaders, which in Kansu province are officially estimated at more than ten millions.*

  “A further cause of expense to the population is the local militia [min-t’uan] which), formed originally for defense against the bandits, has in many instances degenerated into a gang living at the cost of the countryside.” Dr. Stampar quoted figures showing that the cost of supporting the min-t’uan ranged from 30 to 40 per cent of the total local government budget—this quite in addition, of course, to the burden of maintaining the big regular armies. These latter, according to Dr. Stampar, had absorbed over 60 per cent of the provincial revenues in both Kansu and Shensi.

  A foreign missionary I met in Shensi told me that he had once personally followed a pig from owner to consumer, and in the process saw six different taxes being paid. Another missionary, of Kansu, described seeing peasants knock down the wooden walls of their houses (wood being expensive in the Northwest) and cart it to market to sell in order to pay tax collectors. He said that the attitude of even some of the “rich” peasants, while not friendly when the Reds first arrived, was one of indifference, and a belief that “no government could be worse than the old.”

  And yet the Northwest was by no means a hopeless country economically. It was not overpopulated; much of its land was very rich; it could easily produce far more than it could consume; and with an improved irrigation system parts of it might become a “Chinese Ukraine.” Shensi and Kansu had abundant coal deposits. Shensi had oil. Dr. Stampar prophesied that “Shensi, especially the plain in the neighborhood of Sian, may itself become an industrial center of an importance second only to the Yangtze Valley, and needing for its service its own coal fields.” Mineral deposits of Kansu, Chinghai, and Sinkiang, said to be very rich, were scarcely touched. In gold alone, said Stampar, “the region may turn out to be a second Klondike.”

  Here, surely, were conditions which seemed overripe for change. Here, surely, were things for men to fight against, even if they had nothing to fight for. And no wonder, when the Red Star appeared in the Northwest, thousands of men arose to welcome it as a symbol of hope and freedom.

  But did the Reds, after all, prove any better?

  3

  Soviet Society

  Whatever it may have been in the South, Chinese communism as I found it in the Northwest might more accurately be called rural equalitarianism than anything Marx would have found acceptable as a model child of his own. This was manifestly true economically, and although in the social, political, and cultural life of the organized soviets there was a crude Marxist guidance, limitations of material conditions were everywhere obvious.

  There was no machine industry of any importance in the Northwest. It was farming and grazing country primarily, the culture of which had been for centuries in stagnation, though many of the economic abuses prevalent no doubt reflected the changing economy in the semi-industrialized cities. Yet the Red Army itself was an outstanding product of the impact of “industrialization” on China, and the shock of the ideas it had brought into the fossilized culture here was in a true sense revolutionary.

  Objective conditions, however, denied the Reds the possibility of organizing much more than the political framework for the beginnings of a modern economy, of whic
h naturally they could think only in terms of a future which might give them power in the great cities, where they could take over the industrial bases from the foreign concessions and thus lay the foundations for a Socialist society. Meanwhile, in the rural areas their activity centered chiefly on the solution of the immediate problems of the peasants—land and taxes. But Chinese Communists never regarded land distribution as anything more than a phase in the building of a mass base, a stage enabling them to develop the revolutionary struggle toward the conquest of power and the ultimate realization of thoroughgoing Socialist changes. In Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic*, the First All-China Soviet Congress in 1931 had set forth in detail the “maximum program” of the Communist Party of China—and reference to it showed clearly that the ultimate aim of Chinese Communists was a Socialist State of the Marxist-Leninist conception. Meanwhile, however, the social, political, and economic organization of the Red districts had all along been a very provisional affair. Even in Kiangsi it was little more than that. Because the soviets had to fight for an existence from their beginning, their main task was always to build a military and political base for the extension of the revolution on a wider and deeper scale, rather than to “try out communism in China,” which is what some people thought the Reds were attempting in their little blockaded areas.

  The immediate basis of support for the Reds in the Northwest was obviously not so much the idea of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” as it was something like the promise of Dr. Sun Yat-sen: “Land to those who till it.”

  While theoretically the soviets were a “workers’ and peasants’” government, in actual practice the whole constituency was overwhelmingly peasant in character and occupation, and the regime had to shape itself accordingly. An attempt was made to balance peasant influence, and offset it, by classifying the rural population into these categories: great landlords, middle and small landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, tenant peasants, rural workers, handicraft workers, lumpen proletariat, and a division called tzu-yu chih-yeh chieh, or professional workers—which included teachers, doctors, and technicians, the “rural intelligentsia.”1 These divisions were political as well as economic, and in the soviet elections the tenant peasants, rural workers, handicraft workers, and so on were given a very much greater representation than the other categories—the aim apparently being to create some kind of democratic dictatorship of the “rural proletariat.”

  Within these limitations the soviets seemed to work very well in areas where the regime was stabilized. The structure of representative government was built up from the village soviet, as the smallest unit: above it were the district soviet, the county soviet, and the provincial and central soviets. Each village elected its delegates to the higher soviets clear up to the delegates elected for the Soviet Congress. Suffrage was universal over the age of sixteen, but it was not equal, for reasons mentioned above.

  Various committees were established under each of the district soviets. An all-powerful committee, usually elected in a mass meeting shortly after the occupation of a district by the Red Army, and preceded by an intensified propaganda campaign, was the revolutionary committee. It called for elections or re-elections, and closely cooperated with the Communist Party. Under the district soviet, and appointed by it, were committees for education, cooperatives, military training, political training, land, public health, partisan training, revolutionary defense, enlargement of the Red Army, agrarian mutual aid, Red Army land tilling, and others. Such committees were found in every branch organ of the soviets, right up to the Central Government, where policies were coordinated and state decisions made.

  Organization did not stop with the government itself. The Communist Party had an extensive membership among farmers and workers, in the towns and in the villages. In addition there were the Young Communists, and under them two organizations which embraced in their membership most of the youth. These were called the Shao-Nien Hsien-Feng Tui and the Erh-T’ung T’uan—the Young Vanguards and the Children’s Brigades. The Communist Party organized the women also into Communist Youth leagues, anti-Japanese societies, nursing schools, weaving schools, and tilling brigades. Adult farmers were organized into the P’in-Min Hui, or Poor People’s Society, and into anti-Japanese societies. Even the Elder Brother Society was brought into soviet life and given open and legal work to do. The Nung-min Tui, or Peasant Guards, and the Yu Chi Tui, or Partisan (Roving) Brigades, were also part of the intensely organized rural political and social structure.

  The work of all these organizations and their various committees was coordinated by the Central Soviet Government, the Communist Party, and the Red Army. Here we need not enter into statistical detail to explain the organic connections of these groups, but it can be said in general that they were all skillfully interwoven, and each directly under the guidance of some Communist, though decisions of organization, membership, and work seemed to be carried out in a democratic way by the peasants themselves. The aim of soviet organization obviously was to make every man, woman, and child a member of something, with definite work assigned to him to perform.

  Rather typical of the intensity of soviet efforts were the methods used to increase production and utilize great areas of wasteland. I procured copies of many orders, quite astonishing in their scope and common-sense practicality, issued by the land commission to its various branches to guide them in organizing and propagandizing the peasants in the tasks of cultivation. To illustrate: in one of these orders that I picked up in a branch land office, instructions were given concerning spring cultivation, the commission urging its workers to “make widespread propaganda to induce the masses to participate voluntarily, without involving any form of compulsory command.” Detailed advice was offered on how to achieve the four main demands of this planting period, which the previous winter had been recognized by the soviets to be: more extensive utilization of wasteland, and expansion of Red Army land; increased crop yields; greater diversity of crops, with special emphasis on new varieties of melons and vegetables; and expansion of cotton acreage.

  Among the devices recommended by this order* to expand labor power, and especially to bring women directly into agricultural production (particularly in districts where the male population had declined as a result of enlistments in the Red Army), the following ingenious instruction suggested the efficiency with which the Reds went about utilizing their available materials:

  “To mobilize women, boys, and old men to participate in spring planting and cultivation, each according to his ability to carry on either a principal or an auxiliary task in the labor processes of production. For example, ‘large feet’ [natural feet] and young women should be mobilized to organize production-teaching corps, with tasks varying from land clearance up to the main tasks of agricultural production itself. ‘Small feet’ [bound feet], young boys, and old men must be mobilized to help in weed-pulling, collecting dung, and for other auxiliary tasks.”

  But how did the peasants feel about this? The Chinese peasant was supposed to hate organization, discipline, and any social activity beyond his own family. The Reds laughed when that was mentioned. They said that no Chinese peasant disliked organization or social activity if he was working for himself and not the min-t’uan—the landlord or the tax collector. And I had to admit that most of the peasants to whom I talked seemed to support soviets and the Red Army. Many of them were very free in their criticisms and complaints, but when asked whether they preferred it to the old days, the answer was nearly always an emphatic yes. I noticed also that most of them talked about the soviets as wo-menti chengfu—“our government”—and this struck me as something new in rural China.

  One thing which suggested that the Reds had their “base” in the mass of the population was that in all the older soviet districts the policing and guarding was done almost entirely by the peasant organizations alone. There were few actual Red Army garrisons in the soviet districts, all the
fighting strength of the army being kept at the front. Local defense was shared by the village revolutionary defense corps, peasant guards, and partisans. This fact could explain some of the apparent popularity of the Red Army with the (poor) peasantry, for it was rarely planted down on them as an instrument of oppression and exploitation, like other armies, but was generally at the front, fighting for its food there, and engaged in meeting enemy attacks. On the other hand, the intensive organization of the peasantry created a rear guard and base which freed the Red Army to operate with the extreme mobility for which it was noted.

  To understand peasant support for the Communist movement it was necessary to keep in mind the burden borne by the peasantry in the Northwest under the former regime. Now, wherever the Reds went there was no doubt that they radically changed the situation for the tenant farmer, the poor farmer, the middle farmer, and all the “have-not” elements. All forms of taxation were abolished in the new districts for the first year, to give the farmers a breathing space, and in the old districts only a progressive single tax on land was collected, and a small single tax (from 5 to 10 per cent) on business. Second, the Reds gave land to the land-hungry peasants, and began the reclamation of great areas of “wasteland”—mostly the land of absentee or fleeing landlords. Third, they took land and livestock from the wealthy classes and redistributed them among the poor.

  Redistribution of land was a fundamental of Red policy. How was it carried out? Later on, for reasons of national political maneuver, there was to be a drastic retreat in the soviet land policy, but when I traveled in the Northwest the land laws in force (promulgated by the Northwest Soviet Government in December, 1935) provided for the confiscation of all landlords’ land and the confiscation of all land of rich peasants that was not cultivated by the owners themselves. However, both the landlord and the rich peasant were allowed as much land as they could till with their own labor. In districts where there was no land scarcity—and there were many such districts in the Northwest—the lands of resident landlords and rich peasants were in practice not confiscated at all, but the wasteland and land of absentee owners was distributed, and sometimes there was a redivision of best-quality land, poor peasants being given better soil, and landlords being allotted the same amount of poorer land.