by Edgar Snow
“Ai-ya, ai-ya! They said I owed $80 in taxes and rent, and they allowed me $40 for my stock. They demanded $40 more. Could I get it? I had nothing else for them to steal. They wanted me to sell my daughter; it’s a fact! Some of us here had to do that. Those who had no cattle and no daughters went to jail in Pao An, and plenty died from the cold. …”
I asked this old man how much land he had.
“Land?” he croaked. “There is my land,” and he pointed to a hilltop patched with corn and millet and vegetables. It lay just across the stream from our courtyard.
“How much is it worth?”
“Land here isn’t worth anything unless it’s valley land,” he said. “We can buy a mountain like that for $25. What costs money are mules, goats, pigs, chickens, houses, and tools.”
“Well, how much is your farm worth, for example?”
He still refused to count his land worth anything at all. “You can have the house, my animals and tools for $100—with the mountain thrown in,” he finally estimated.
“And on that you had to pay how much in taxes and rent?”
“Forty dollars a year!”
“That was before the Red Army came?”
“Yes. Now we pay no taxes. But who knows about next year? When the Reds leave, the Whites come back. One year Red, the next White. When the Whites come they call us Red bandits. When the Reds come they look for counterrevolutionaries.”
“But there is this difference,” a young farmer interposed. “If our neighbors say we have not helped the Whites that satisfies the Reds. But if we have a hundred names of honest men, but no landlord’s name, we are still Red bandits to the Whites! Isn’t that a fact?”
The old man nodded. He said the last time the White Army was here it had killed a whole family of poor farmers in a village just over the hill. Why? Because the Whites had asked where the Reds were hiding, and this family refused to tell them. “After that we all fled from here, and took our cattle with us. We came back with the Reds.”
“Will you leave next time, if the Whites return?”
“Ai-ya!” exclaimed an elder with long hair and fine teeth. “This time we will leave, certainly! They will kill us!”
He began to tell of the villagers’ crimes. They had joined the Poor People’s League, they had voted for the district soviets, they had given information to the Red Army about the White Army’s movements, two had sons in the Red Army, and another had two daughters in a nursing school. Were these crimes or not? They could be shot for any one of them, I was assured.
But now a barefoot youth in his teens stepped up, engrossed in the discussion and forgetful of the foreign devil. “You call these things crimes, grandfather? These are patriotic acts! Why do we do them? Isn’t it because our Red Army is a poor people’s army and fights for our rights?”
He continued enthusiastically: “Did we have a free school in Chou Chia before? Did we ever get news of the world before the Reds brought us wireless electricity? Who told us what the world is like? You say the cooperative has no cloth, but did we ever even have a cooperative before? And how about your farm, wasn’t there a big mortgage on it to landlord Wang? My sister starved to death three years ago, but haven’t we had plenty to eat since the Reds came? You say it’s bitter, but it isn’t bitter for us young people if we can learn to read! It isn’t bitter for us Young Vanguards when we learn to use a rifle and fight the traitors and Japan!”
This constant reference to Japan and the “traitors” may sound improbable to people who know the ignorance (not indifference) of the mass of the ordinary Chinese peasants concerning Japanese invasions or any other national problems. But I found it constantly recurring, not only in the speech of the Communists but among peasants like these. Red propaganda had made such a wide impression that many of these backward mountaineers believed themselves in imminent danger of being enslaved by the “Japanese dwarfs”—a specimen of which most of them had yet to see outside Red posters and cartoons.
The youth subsided, out of breath. I looked at Fu Chin-kuei and saw a pleased smirk on his face. Several others present called out in approval, and most of them smiled.
The dialogue went on until nearly nine o’clock, long past bedtime. It interested me chiefly because it took place before Fu Chin-kuei, whom the farmers appeared to hold in no awe as a Red “official.” They seemed to look upon him as one of themselves—and indeed, as a peasant’s son, he was.
The last one to leave us was the old man with the queue and most of the complaints. As he went out the door he leaned over and whispered once more to Fu. “Old comrade,” he implored, “is there any opium at Pao An; now, is there any?”
When he had left, Fu turned to me in disgust. “Would you believe it?” he demanded. “That old defile-mother* is chairman of the Poor People’s Society here, and still he wants opium. This village needs more educational work.”
2
Soviet Industries
A few days northwest of Pao An, on my way to the front, I stopped to visit Wu Ch’i Chen, a soviet “industrial center” of Shensi. Wu Ch’i Chen was remarkable, not for any achievements in industrial science of which Detroit or Manchester need take note, but because it was there at all.
For hundreds of miles around there was only semipastoral country, the people lived in cave houses exactly as their ancestors did millenniums ago, many of the farmers still wore queues braided around their heads, and the horse, the ass, and the camel were the latest thing in communications. Rape oil was used for lighting here, candles were a luxury, electricity was unknown, and foreigners were as rare as Eskimos in Africa.
In this medieval world it was astonishing suddenly to come upon soviet factories, and find machines turning, and a colony of workers busily producing the goods and tools of a Red China.
In Kiangsi the Communists had, despite the lack of a seaport and the handicap of an enemy blockade which cut them off from contact with any big modern industrial base, built up several prosperous industries. They operated China’s richest tungsten mines, for example, annually turning out over one million pounds of this precious ore—secretly selling it to General Ch’en Chi-t’ang’s Kwangtung tungsten monopoly. In the central soviet printing plant at Kian with its eight hundred workers, many books, magazines, and a “national” paper—the Red China Daily News— were published..
In Kiangsi also were weaving plants, textile mills and machine shops. Small industries produced sufficient manufactured goods to supply their simple needs. The Reds claimed to have had a “foreign export trade” of over $12,000,000 in 1933, most of which was carried on through adventurous southern merchants, who made extraordinary profits by running the Kuomintang blockade. The bulk of manufacturing, however, was by handicraft and home industry, the products of which were sold through production cooperatives.
According to Mao Tse-tung, in September, 1933, the soviets had 1,423 “production and distribution” cooperatives in Kiangsi, all owned and run by the people.* Testimony by League of Nations investigators left little doubt that the Reds were succeeding with this type of collective enterprise—even while they were still fighting for their existence. The Kuomintang was attempting to copy the Red system in parts of the South, but results thus far suggested that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to operate such cooperatives under a strictly laissez-faire capitalism.
But in the Northwest I had not expected to find any industry at all. Much greater handicaps faced the Reds here than in the South, for even a small machine industry was almost entirely absent before the soviets were set up. In the whole Northwest, in Shensi, Kansu, Chinghai, Ninghsia and Suiyuan, provinces in area nearly the size of all Europe excluding Russia, the combined machine-industry investment certainly must have been far less than the plant of one big assembly branch of, for instance, the Ford Motor Company.
Sian and Lanchow had a few factories, but for the most part were dependent upon industrial centers farther east. Any major development of the tremendous industrial possi
bilities of the Northwest could take place only by borrowing technique and machinery from the outside. And if this were true in Sian and Lanchow, the two great cities of the region, the difficulties which confronted the Reds, occupying the even more backward areas of Kansu, Shensi, and Ninghsia, were manifest.
The blockade cut off the Soviet Government from imports of machinery, and from “imports” of technicians. Of the latter, however, the Reds said their supply was ample. Machinery and raw materials were more serious problems. Battles were fought by the Red Army just to get a few lathes, weaving machines, engines, or a little scrap iron. Nearly everything they had in the category of machinery while I was there had been “captured.” During their expedition to Shansi province in 1936, for example, they seized machines, tools, and raw materials, which were carried by mule all the way across the mountains of Shensi, to their fantastic cliff-dwelling factories.
Soviet industries, when I visited Red China, were all handicraft; there was no electric power. They included clothing, uniform, shoe, and paper factories at Pao An and Holienwan (Kansu), rug factories at Tingpien (on the Great Wall), mines at Yung P’ing which produced the cheapest coal* in China, and woolen and cotton-spinning factories in seven hsien—all of which had plans to produce enough goods to stock the 400 cooperatives in Red Shensi and Kansu. The aim of this “industrial program,” according to Mao Tse-min, brother of Mao Tse-tung and Commissioner of People’s Economy, was to make Red China “economically self-sufficient”—strong enough to survive despite the Kuomintang blockade if Nanking refused to accept the Communists’ offers for a united front and a cessation of civil war.
The most important soviet state enterprises were the salt-refining plants at Yen Ch’ih, the salt lakes on the Ninghsia border, along the Great Wall, and the oil wells at Yung P’ing and Yen Ch’ang, which produced gasoline, paraffin, and vaseline, wax, candles, and other by-products on a very small scale. Salt deposits at Yen Ch’ih were the finest in China and yielded beautiful rock-crystal salt in large quantities. Consequently salt was cheaper and more plentiful in the soviet districts than in Kuomintang China, where it was a principal source of government income. After the capture of Yen Ch’ih the Reds won the sympathy of the Mongols north of the Wall by agreeing to turn over part of the production to them, revoking the Kuomintang’s practice of monopolizing the entire output.
North Shensi’s oil wells were the only ones in China, and their output had formerly been sold to an American company which had leases on other reserves in the district. After they had seized Yung P’ing the Reds sank two new wells, and claimed increased production, by about 40 per cent over any previous period, when Yung P’ing and Yen Ch’ang were in “non-bandit” hands. This included increases of “2,000 catties of petrol, 25,000 catties of first-class oil, and 13,500 catties of second-class oil” during a three-month period reported upon. (A few barrels at best.)†
Efforts were being made to develop cotton growing in areas cleared of poppies, and the Reds had established a spinning school at An Ting, with a hundred women students. The workers were given three hours’ general education daily and five hours’ instruction in spinning and weaving. Upon completion of their course, after three months, students were sent to various districts to open handicraft textile factories. “It is expected that in two years north Shensi will be able to produce its entire supply of cloth.”‡
But Wu Ch’i Chen had the largest “concentration” of factory workers in the Red districts, and was important also as the location of the Reds’ main arsenal. It commanded an important trade route leading to Kansu, and the ruins of two ancient forts nearby testified to its former strategic importance. The town was built high up on the steep clay banks of a rapid stream, and was made up half of yang-fang, or “foreign houses”—as the Shensi natives still called anything with four sides and a roof—and half of yao-fang, or cave dwellings.
I arrived late at night and I was very tired. The head of the supply commissariat for the front armies had received word of my coming, and he rode out to meet me. He “put me up” at a workers’ Lenin Club—an earthen-floored yao-fang with clean whitewashed walls strung with festoons of colored paper chains encircling a portrait of the immortal Ilyitch.
Hot water, clean towels—stamped with slogans of Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life movement!—and soap soon appeared. They were followed by an ample dinner, with good baked bread. I began to feel better. I unrolled my bedding on the table-tennis court and lighted a cigarette. But man is a difficult animal to satisfy. All this luxury and attention only made me yearn for my favorite beverage.
And then, of all things, this commissar suddenly produced, from heaven knows where, some rich brown coffee and sugar! Wu Ch’i Chen had won my heart.
“Products of our five-year plan!” the commissar laughed.
“Products of your confiscation department, you mean,” I amended.
3
“They Sing Too Much”
I stayed three days at Wu Ch’i Chen, visiting workers in the factories, “inspecting” their working conditions, attending their theater and their political meetings, reading their wall newspapers and their character books, talking—and getting athletic. I took part in a basketball game on one of Wu Ch’i’s three courts. We made up a scratch team composed of the Foreign Office emissary, Fu Chin-kuei; a young English-speaking college student working in the political department; a Red doctor; a soldier; and myself. The arsenal basketball team accepted our challenge and beat us to a pulp.
The arsenal, like the Red University, was housed in a big series of vaulted rooms built into a mountainside. They were cool, well ventilated, and lighted by a series of shafts sunk at angles in the walls, and had the major advantage of being completely bombproof. Here I found over a hundred workers making hand grenades, trench mortars, gunpowder, pistols, small shells and bullets, and a few farming tools. A repair department was engaged in rehabilitating stacks of broken rifles, machine guns, automatic rifles and submachine guns. But the arsenal’s output was crude work, and most of its products equipped the Red partisans, the regular Red forces being supplied almost entirely with guns and munitions captured from enemy troops.
Ho Hsi-yang, director of the arsenal, took me through its various chambers, introduced his workers, and told me something about them and himself. He was thirty-six, unmarried, and had formerly been a technician in the famous Mukden arsenal, before the Japanese invasion. After September 18, 1931, he went to Shanghai, and there he joined the Communist Party, later on making his way to the Northwest, and into Red areas. Most of the machinists here were also “outside” men. Many had been employed at Hanyang, China’s greatest iron works (Japanese-owned), and a few had worked in Kuomintang arsenals. I met two young Shanghai master mechanics, and an expert fitter, who showed me excellent letters of recommendation from the noted British and American firms of Jardine, Matheson & Co., Anderson Meyer & Co., and the Shanghai Power Company. Another had been foreman in a Shanghai machine shop. There were also machinists from Tientsin, Canton, and Peking, and some had made the Long March with the Red Army.
I learned that of the arsenal’s 114 machinists and apprentices only 20 were married. These had their wives with them in Wu Ch’i Chen, either as factory workers or as party functionaries. In the arsenal trade union, which represented the most highly skilled labor in the Red districts, more than 80 per cent of the members belonged to the Communist Party or to the Communist Youth League.
Besides the arsenal, in Wu Ch’i Chen there were cloth and uniform factories, a shoe factory, a stocking factory, and a pharmacy and drug dispensary, with a doctor in attendance. He was a youth just out of medical training school in Shansi and his young and pretty wife was with him working as a nurse. Both of them had joined the Reds during the Shansi expedition the winter before. Nearby was a hospital, with three army doctors in attendance and filled mostly with wounded soldiers, and there was a radio station, a crude laboratory, a cooperative, and the army supply base.
Exce
pt in the arsenal and the uniform factory, most of the workers were young women from age eighteen to twenty-five or thirty. Some of them were married to Red soldiers then at the front; nearly all were Kansu, Shensi, or Shansi women; and all had bobbed hair. “Equal pay for equal labor” was a slogan of the Chinese soviets, and there was supposed to be no wage discrimination against women. Workers appeared to get preferential financial treatment over everybody else in the soviet districts. This included Red commanders, who received no regular salary, but only a small living allowance, which varied according to the weight of the treasury.
Wu Ch’i Chen was headquarters for Miss Liu Ch’un-hsien, aged twenty-nine. A former mill worker from Wusih and Shanghai, she was a student in Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University when she met and married Po Ku (Ch’in Pang-hsien).* From her Moscow days she warmly remembered Rhena Prohm, the improbable red-haired American rebel goddess enshrined in Vincent Sheean’s Personal History. Now Miss Liu was director of the women’s department of the Red trade unions. She said that factory workers were paid $10 to $15 monthly, with board and room furnished by the state. Workers were guaranteed free medical attention (such as it was) and compensation for injuries. Women were given four months of rest with pay during and after pregnancy, and there was a crude “nursery” for workers’ children—but most of them seemed to run wild as soon as they could walk. Mothers could collect part of their “social insurance,” which was provided from a fund created by deducting 10 per cent of the workers’ salaries, to which the government added an equal amount. The government also contributed the equivalent of 2 per cent of the wage output for workers’ education and recreation, funds managed jointly by the trade unions and the workers’ factory committees. There was an eight-hour day and a six-day week. When I visited them the factories were running twenty-four hours a day, with three shifts working.