Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  The Reds claimed to have devised a squeeze-proof machinery of budgeting, of receipts and disbursements. I read part of Lin Tsu-han’s Outline for Budget Compilation, which gave a detailed description of the system and all its safeguards. Its integrity seemed to be based primarily on collective control of receipts and disbursements. From the highest organ down to the village, the treasurer was accountable, for both payments and collections, to a supervising committee, so that juggling of figures for individual profit was extremely difficult. Commissioner Lin was very proud of his system, and asserted that under it any kind of squeeze was effectively impossible. It may have been true. Anyway, it was obvious that in the Red districts the real problem as yet was not one of squeeze, in the traditional sense, but of squeezing through. Despite Lin’s cheerful optimism, this was what I wrote in my diary after that interview:

  “Whatever Lin’s figures may mean exactly, it is simply a Chinese miracle, when one remembers that partisans have been fighting back and forth across this territory for five years, that the economy maintains itself at all, that there is no famine, and that the peasants on the whole seem to accept soviet currency, with faith in it. In fact this cannot be explained in terms of finance alone, but is only understandable on a social and political basis.

  “Nevertheless, it is perfectly clear that the situation is extremely grave, even for an organization that exists on such shoestrings as the Reds feed upon, and one of three changes must shortly occur in soviet economy: (1) some form of machine industrialization, to supply the market with needed manufactures; (2) the establishment of a good connection with some modern economic base in the outside world, or the capture of some economic base on a higher level than the present one (Sian or Lanchow, for example); or (3) the actual coalescence of such a base, now under White control, with the Red districts.”

  The Reds did not share my pessimism. “A way out is sure to be found.” And in a few months it was. The “way out” appeared in the form of an “actual coalescence.”

  Lin didn’t seem to be “getting ahead” financially very fast himself, by the way. His “allowance” as Commissioner of Finance was five dollars a month—Red money.

  5

  Life Begins at Fifty!

  I called him “Old Hsu” because that was what everyone in the soviet districts called him—Lao Hsu, the Educator—for, although sixty-one was only just an average age for most high government officials elsewhere in the Orient, in Red China he seemed a sort of hoary grandfather by contrast with others. Yet he was no specimen of decrepitude. Like his sexagenarian crony, Hsieh Chu-tsai (and you could often see this pair of white-haired bandits walking along arm-in-arm like middle-school lads), he had an erect and vigorous step, bright and merry eyes, and a pair of muscular legs that had carried him across the greatest rivers and mountain ranges of China on the Long March.

  Hsu Teh-li had been a highly respected professor until at the age of fifty he amazingly gave up his home, four children, and the presidency of a normal school in Changsha to stake his future with the Communists. Born in 1877 near Changsha, not far from P’eng Teh-huai’s birthplace, he was the fourth son in a poor peasant family. By various sacrifices his parents gave him six years of schooling, at the end of which he became a schoolteacher under the Manchu regime. There he remained till he was twenty-nine, when he entered the Changsha Normal College, graduated, and became an instructor in mathematics—a discipline in which he was self-taught.

  Mao Tse-tung was one of his students in the normal school (Hsu said he was terrible in math), and so were many youths who later became Reds. Hsu himself had a role in politics long before Mao knew a republican from a monarchist. He still bore that mark of combat from feudal politics in days of the empire, when he cut off the tip of his little finger to demonstrate his sincerity in begging by petition that a parliament be granted the people. After the first revolution, when for a while Hunan had a provincial parliament, Old Hsu was a member of it.

  He accompanied the Hunanese delegation of “worker-students” to France after the war, and he studied a year at Lyons, where he paid his way by odd-time work in a metal factory. Later he was a student for three years at the University of Paris, earning his tuition then by tutoring Chinese students in mathematics. Returning to Hunan in 1923, he helped establish two modern normal schools in the capital, and for four years enjoyed some prosperity. Not till 1927 did he become a Communist and an outcast from bourgeois society.

  During the Nationalist Revolution, Hsu T’eh-li was active in the provincial Kuomintang, but he sympathized with the Communists. He openly preached Marxism to his students. When the “purgation” period began he was a marked man; he had to do the disappearing act, and, having no connection with the Communist Party, he had to find a haven on his own. “I had wanted to be a Communist,” he told me rather wistfully, “but nobody ever asked me to join. I was already fifty, and I concluded that the Communists considered me too old.” But one day a Communist sought out Hsu in his hiding place and asked him to enter the Party. He told me he wept then to think that he was still of some use in building a new world.

  The Party sent him to Russia, where he studied for two years. On his return he ran the blockade to Kiangsi; soon afterwards he became assistant commissioner of education, under Ch’u Ch’iu-pai, and after Ch’u was killed, the Executive Committee appointed Hsu in his place. Since then he had been Lao Hsu, the Educator. And surely his varied experience—life and teaching under monarchist, capitalist, and Communist forms of society—seemed to qualify him for the tasks that faced him. He certainly needed all that experience, and more, for those tasks were so great that any Western educator would have despaired. But Old Hsu was too young to be discouraged.

  One day when we were talking he began humorously to enumerate some of his difficulties. “As nearly as we can estimate,” he asserted, “virtually nobody but a few landlords, officials, and merchants could read in the Northwest before we arrived. The illiteracy seemed to be about 95 per cent. This is culturally one of the darkest places on earth. Do you know the people in north Shensi and Kansu believe that water is harmful to them? The average man here has a bath all over only twice in his life—once when he is born, the second time when he is married. They hate to wash their feet, hands, or faces, or cut their nails or their hair. There are more pigtails left in this part of China than anywhere else.

  “But all this and many other prejudices are due to ignorance, and it’s my job to change their mentality. Such a population, compared with Kiangsi, is very backward indeed. There the illiteracy was about 90 per cent, but the cultural level was very much higher, we had better material conditions to work in, and many more trained teachers. In our model hsien, Hsing Ko, we had over three hundred primary schools and about eight hundred schoolteachers—which is as many as we have of both in all the Red districts here. When we withdrew from Hsing Ko, illiteracy had been reduced to less than 20 per cent of the population.

  “Here the work is very much slower. We have to start everything from the beginning. Our material resources are very limited. Even our printing machinery has been destroyed, and now we have to print everything by mimeograph and stone-block lithograph. The blockade prevents us from importing enough paper. We have begun to make paper of our own, but the quality is terrible. But never mind these difficulties. We have already been able to accomplish something. If we are given time we can do things here that will astonish the rest of China. We are training scores of teachers from the masses now, and the Party is training others. Many of them will become voluntary teachers for the mass-education schools. Our results show that the peasants here are eager to learn when given the chance.

  “And they are not stupid. They learn very quickly, and they change their habits when they are given good reasons for doing so. In the older soviet districts here you won’t see any girl children with bound feet and you will see many young women with bobbed hair. The men are gradually cutting off their queues now and a lot of them are learning to read and
write from the Young Communists and the Vanguards.”

  Hsu explained that under the emergency soviet educational system there were three sections: institutional, military, and social. The first was run more or less by the soviets, the second by the Red Army, the third by Communist organizations. Emphasis in all of them was primarily political—even the smallest children learned their first characters in the shape of simple revolutionary slogans, and then worked forward into stories of conflict between the Reds and the Kuomintang, landlords and peasants, capitalists and workers, and so on, with plenty of heroics about the Young Communists and the Red Army, and promises of an earthly paradise in the soviet future.

  Under institutional education the Reds already claimed to have established about two hundred primary schools, and they had one normal school for primary teachers, one agricultural school, a textile school, a trade-union school of five grades, and a Party school with some four hundred students. Courses in all the technical schools lasted only about six months.

  Greatest emphasis naturally was on military education, and here much had been achieved in two years, despite all the handicaps of the beleaguered little state. There were the Red Army University, the cavalry and infantry schools, and two Party training schools, already described. There was a radio school, and a medical school, which was really for training nurses. There was an engineering school, where students received the rudimentary training of apprentices. Like the whole soviet organization itself, everything was very provisional and designed primarily as a kind of rear-line activity to strengthen the Red Army and provide it with new cadres. Many of the teachers were not even middle-school graduates. What was interesting was the collective use of whatever knowledge they had. These schools were really Communist, not only in ideology but in the utilization of every scrap of technical experience they could mobilize, to “raise the cultural level.”

  Even in social education the soviet aims were primarily political. There was no time or occasion to be teaching farmers literature or flower arrangement. The Reds were practical people. To the Lenin clubs, the Communist Youth leagues, the Partisans, and the village soviets they sent simple, crudely illustrated Shih-tzu (“Know Characters”) texts, and helped mass organizations form self-study groups of their own, with some Communist or literate among them as a leader. When the youths, or sometimes even aged peasants, began droning off the short sentences, they found themselves absorbing ideas along with their ideographs. Thus, entering one of these little “social education centers” in the mountains, you might hear these people catechizing themselves aloud:

  “What is this?”

  “This is the Red Flag.”

  “What is this?”

  “This is a poor man.”

  “What is the Red Flag?”

  “The Red Flag is the flag of the Red Army.”

  “What is the Red Army?”

  “The Red Army is the army of the poor men!”

  And so on, right up to the point where, if he knew the whole five or six hundred characters before anyone else, the youth could collect the red tassel or pencil or whatever was promised. When farmers and farmers’ sons and daughters finished the book they could not only read for the first time in their lives, but they knew who had taught them, and why. They had grasped the basic fighting ideas of Chinese communism.

  In an effort to find a quicker medium for bringing literacy to the masses, the Communists had begun a limited use of Latinized Chinese. They had worked out an alphabet of twenty-eight letters by which they claimed to be able to reproduce nearly all Chinese phonetics, and had written and published a little pocket dictionary with the commonest phrases of Chinese rendered into polysyllabic, easily readable words. Part of the paper Hung Ssu Chung Hua (Red China) was published in Latin-hua and Old Hsu was experimenting with it on a class of youngsters he had picked up in Pao An. He believed that the complicated Chinese characters would eventually have to be abandoned in education on a mass scale, and he had many arguments in favor of his system, on which he had been working for years.

  Thus far he wasn’t boasting about results, either with his Latin-hua or his other educational efforts. “The cultural level was so low here it couldn’t be made worse, so naturally we’ve made some progress,” he said. As for the future, he only wanted time. Meanwhile he urged me to concentrate on studying educational methods in the Red Army, where he claimed real revolutionary teaching could be seen.

  Part Seven

  En Route to the Front

  1

  Conversation with Red Peasants

  As I traveled beyond Pao An, toward the Kansu border and the front, I stayed in the rude huts of peasants, slept on their mud k’ang (when the luxury of wooden doors was not available), ate their food, and enjoyed their talk. They were all poor people, kind and hospitable. Some of them refused any money from me when they heard I was a “foreign guest.” I remember one old bound-footed peasant woman, with five or six youngsters to feed, who insisted upon killing one of her half-dozen chickens for me.

  “We can’t have a foreign devil telling people in the outer world that we Reds don’t know etiquette,” I overheard her say to one of my companions. I am sure she did not mean to be impolite. She simply knew no other words but “foreign devil” to describe the situation.

  I was traveling then with Fu Chin-kuei, a young Communist who had been delegated by the Red Foreign Office to accompany me to the front. Like all the Reds in the rear, Fu was delighted at the prospect of a chance to be with the army, and he looked upon me as a godsend. At the same time he regarded me frankly as an imperialist, and viewed my whole trip with open skepticism. He was unfailingly helpful in every way, however, and before the trip was over we were to become very good friends.

  One night at Chou Chia, a village of north Shensi near the Kansu border, Fu and I found quarters in a compound where five or six peasant families lived. A farmer of about forty-five, responsible for six of the fifteen little children who scampered back and forth incessantly, agreed to accommodate us, with ready courtesy. He gave us a clean room with new felt on the k’ang, and provided our animals with corn and straw. He sold us a chicken for twenty cents, and some eggs, but for the room would take nothing. He had been to Yenan and he had seen foreigners before, but none of the other men, women, or children had seen one, and they all now came round diffidently to have a peek. One of the young children burst into frightened tears at the astonishing sight.

  After dinner a number of the peasants came into our room, offered me tobacco, and began to talk. They wanted to know what we grew in my country, whether we had corn and millet, horses and cows, and whether we used goat dung for fertilizer. (One peasant asked whether we had chickens, and at this our host sniffed contemptuously. “Where there are men, there must be chickens,” he observed.) Were there rich and poor in my country? Was there a Communist Party and a Red Army?

  In return for answering their numerous questions, I asked a few of my own. What did they think of the Red Army? They promptly began to complain about the excessive eating habits of the cavalry’s horses. It seemed that when the Red Army University recently moved its cavalry school it had paused in this village for several days, with the result that a big depression had been made in the corn and straw reserves.

  “Didn’t they pay you for what they bought?” demanded Fu Chinkuei.

  “Yes, yes, they paid all right; that isn’t the question. We haven’t a great amount, you know, only so many tan of corn and millet and straw. We have only enough for ourselves and maybe a little more, and we have the winter ahead of us. Will the cooperatives sell us grain next January? That’s what we wonder. What can we buy with soviet money? We can’t even buy opium!”

  This came from a ragged old man who still wore a queue and looked sourly down his wrinkled nose and along the two-foot stem of his bamboo pipe. The younger men grinned when he spoke. Fu admitted they couldn’t buy opium, but he said they could buy in the cooperatives anything else they needed.

  “C
an we now?” demanded our host. “Can we buy a bowl like this one, eh?” And he picked up the cheap red celluloid bowl (Japanese-made, I suspect) which I had brought with me from Sian. Fu confessed that the cooperatives had no red bowls, but said they had plenty of grain, cloth, paraffin, candles, needles, matches, salt—what did they want?

  “I hear you can’t get more than six feet of cloth per man; now, isn’t it so?” demanded one farmer.

  Fu wasn’t sure; he thought there was plenty of cloth. He resorted to the anti-Japanese argument. “Life is as bitter for us as for you,” he said. “The Red Army is fighting for you, the farmers and workers, to protect you from the Japanese and the Kuomintang. Suppose you can’t always buy all the cloth you want, and you can’t get opium, it’s a fact you don’t pay taxes, isn’t it? You don’t go in debt to the landlords and lose your house and land, do you? Well, old brother, do you like the White Army better than us, or not?—just answer that question. What does the White Army give you for your crops, eh?”

  At this, all complaints appeared to melt away, and opinion was unanimous. “Certainly not, Old Fu, certainly not!” Our host nodded. “If we have to choose, we take the Red Army. A son of mine is in the Red Army, and I sent him there. Does anyone deny that?”

  I asked why they preferred the Red Army.

  In answer the old man who had sneered at the cooperatives for having no opium gave a heated discourse.

  “What happens when the Whites come?” he asked. “They demand such and such amounts of food, and never a word about payment. If we refuse, we are arrested as Communists. If we give it to them we cannot pay the taxes. In any case we cannot pay the taxes! What happens then? They take our animals to sell. Last year, when the Red Army was not here and the Whites returned, they took my two mules and my four pigs. These mules were worth $30 each, and the pigs were full grown, worth $2 each. What did they give me?