Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  All this seemed progressive, though perhaps far from a Communistic utopia. That such conditions were actually being realized in the midst of the soviets’ impoverishment was really interesting. How primitively they were being realized was quite another matter. They had clubs, schools, ample dormitories—all these, certainly—but in cave houses with earthen floors, no shower baths, no movies, no electricity. They were furnished food; but meals consisted of millet, vegetables, and sometimes mutton, with no delicacies whatever. They collected their wages and social insurance all right in soviet currency, but the articles they could buy were strictly limited to necessities—and none too much of those.

  “Unbearable,” the average American or English worker would say. But I remembered Shanghai factories where little boy and girl slave workers sat or stood at their tasks twelve or thirteen hours a day, and then dropped, in exhausted sleep, to the dirty cotton quilt, their bed, directly beneath their machines. I remembered little girls in silk filatures, and the pale young women in cotton factories sold into jobs as virtual slaves for four or five years, unable to leave the heavily guarded, high-walled premises day or night without special permission. And I remembered that during 1935 more than 29,000 bodies were picked up from the streets and rivers and canals of Shanghai—bodies of the destitute poor, of the starved or drowned babies or children they could not feed.

  For these workers in Wu Ch’i Chen, however primitive it might be, here seemed to be a life at least of good health, exercise, clean mountain air, freedom, dignity, and hope, in which there was room for growth. They knew that nobody was making money out of them, I think they felt they were working for themselves and for China, and they said they were revolutionaries! They took very seriously their two hours of daily reading and writing, their political lectures, and their dramatic groups, and they keenly contested for the miserable prizes offered in competitions between groups and individuals in sport, literacy, public health, wall newspapers, and “factory efficiency.” All these things were real to them, things they had never known before, could never possibly know in any other factory of China, and they seemed grateful for the doors of life opened up for them.

  It was hard for an old China hand like me to believe, and I was confused about its ultimate significance, but I could not deny the evidence I saw. To present that evidence in detail I would have had to tell a dozen stories of workers to whom I talked; quote from their essays and criticisms in the wall newspapers—written in the childish scrawl of the newly literate—many of which I translated, with the aid of the college student; tell of the political meetings I attended; and of the plays created and dramatized by these workers; and of the many little things that go to make up an “impression.”

  As one example, I met an electrical engineer in Wu Ch’i Chen, a man named Chu Tso-chih. He knew English and German very well, he was a power expert, and he had written an engineering textbook widely used in China. He had once been with the Shanghai Power Company, and later with Anderson Meyer & Co. Until recently he had had a practice of $10,000 a year in South China, where he was a consulting engineer and efficiency man, and had given it up and left his family to come up to these wild dark hills of Shensi and offer his services to the Reds for nothing. Incredible! The background of this phenomenon traced to a beloved grandfather, a famous philanthropist of Ningpo, whose deathbed injunction to young Chu had been to “devote his life to raising the cultural standard of the masses.” And Chu had decided the quickest method was the Communist one.

  Chu had come into the thing somewhat melodramatically, in the spirit of the martyr and zealot. It was a solemn thing for him; he thought it meant an early death, and he expected everyone else to feel that way. I believe he was a little shocked when he found so much that he considered horseplay going on, and everybody apparently happy. When I asked him how he liked it, he replied gravely that he had but one serious criticism. “These people spend entirely too much time singing!” he complained. “This is no time to be singing!”

  Part Eight

  With the Red Army

  1

  The “Real” Red Army

  After two weeks of hacking and walking over the hills and plains of Kansu and Ninghsia I came to Yu Wang Pao, a walled town in southern Ninghsia, which was then the headquarters of the First Front Red Army*—and of its commander-in-chief, P’eng Teh-huai.

  Although in a strict military sense all Red warriors might be called “irregulars” (and some people would say “highly irregulars”), the Reds themselves made a sharp distinction between their front armies, independent armies, partisans, and peasant guards. During my first brief travels in Shensi I had not seen any of the “regular” Red Army, for its main forces were then moving in the west, nearly two hundred miles from Pao An. I had planned a trip to the front, but news that Chiang Kai-shek was preparing to launch another major offensive from the south had inclined me toward the better part of valor and an early departure while I could still get past the lines to write my story.

  One day I had expressed these doubts to Wu Liang-p’ing, the young soviet official who had acted as interpreter in my long official interviews with Mao Tse-tung. He had been dumfounded. “You have a chance to go to the front, and you wonder whether you should take it? Don’t make such a mistake! Chiang Kai-shek has been trying to destroy us for ten years, and he is not going to succeed now. You can’t go back without seeing the real Red Army!” He had produced evidence to show why I shouldn’t, and it was well that I took his advice.

  Perhaps the best way to approach an understanding of these so-called bandits was—statistical. The facts assembled below were furnished from his files by Yang Shang-k’un,* the Russian-speaking, twenty-nine-year-old chairman of the political department of the First Front Red Army. With a few exceptions, this statistical report is confined to matters which I had some opportunity to verify by observation.

  First of all, many people supposed the Reds to be a hardbitten lot of outlaws and malcontents. I vaguely had some such notion myself. I soon discovered that the great mass of the Red soldiery was made up of young peasants and workers who believed themselves to be fighting for their homes, their land, and their country.

  According to Yang, the average age of the rank and file was nineteen. Although many men with the Reds had fought for seven or eight or even ten years, they were balanced by a vast number of youths still in their middle teens. And even most of the “old Bolsheviks,” veterans of many battles, were only now in their early twenties. The majority had joined the Reds as Young Vanguards, or enlisted at the age of fifteen or sixteen.

  In the First Front Army a total of 38 per cent of the men came from either the agrarian working class (including craftsmen, muleteers, apprentices, farm laborers, etc.) or from the industrial working class, while 58 per cent came from the peasantry. Only 4 per cent were from the petty bourgeoisie—sons of merchants, intellectuals, small landlords, and such. In this army over 50 per cent of the troops, including commanders, were members of the Communist Party or the Communist Youth League.

  Between 60 and 70 per cent of the soldiers were literate—that is, they could write simple letters and texts, posters, handbills, etc. This was much higher than the average among ordinary troops in the White districts, and it was very much higher than the average in the peasantry of the Northwest. Red soldiers began to study characters in Red texts specially prepared for them, from the day of their enlistment. Prizes were offered (cheap notebooks, pencils, tassels, etc., much valued by the soldiers) for rapid progress and a great effort was made to stimulate the spirit of ambition and competition.

  Red soldiers, like their commanders, received no regular salaries. But every enlisted man was entitled to his portion of land, and some income from it. This was tilled in his absence either by his family or by his local soviet. If he was not a native of the soviet districts, however, his remuneration came from a share in the proceeds of crops from “public lands” (confiscated from the “great” landlords), which also helped provisio
n the Red Army. Public lands were tilled by villagers in the local soviets. Such free labor was obligatory, but the majority of the peasants, having benefited in the land redistribution, may have cooperated willingly enough to defend a system that had bettered their livelihood.

  The average age of the officers in the Red Army was twenty-four. This included squad leaders and all officers up to army commanders, but despite their youth these men had behind them an average of eight years’ fighting experience. All company commanders or higher were literate, though I met several who had not learned to read and write till after they had entered the Red Army. About a third of the Red commanders were former Kuomintang soldiers. Among Red commanders were many graduates of Whampoa Academy, graduates of the Red Army Academy in Moscow, former officers of Chang Hsueh-liang’s “Northeastern Army,” cadets of the Paoting Military Academy, former Kuominchun (”Christian General” Feng Yu-hsiang’s army) men, and a number of returned students from France, Soviet Russia, Germany, and England. I met only one returned student from America. The Reds did not call themselves ping, or “soldiers”—a word to which much odium was attached in China—but chan-shih, which means “fighters” or “warriors.”

  The majority of the soldiers as well as officers of the Red Army were unmarried. Many of them were “divorced”—that is, they had left their wives and families behind them. In several cases I had serious suspicions that the desire for this kind of divorce, in fact, might have had something to do with their joining the army, but this may be a cynical opinion.

  My impression, from scores of conversations on the road and at the front, was that most of these “Red fighters” were still virgins. There were few Communist women at the front with the army, and they were nearly all soviet functionaries in their own right or married to soviet officials.

  As far as I could see or learn, the Reds treated the peasant women and girls with respect, and the peasantry seemed to have a good opinion of Red Army morality. I heard of no cases of rape or abuse of the peasant women, though I heard from some of the southern soldiers of “sweethearts” left behind them. There was no law against fornication, but any Red Army man who got into difficulties with a girl was expected to marry her. As men far outnumbered women here, the opportunities were few. I saw nothing going on that looked like promiscuity. The Red Army was puritanical in its views on sexual license, and a vigorous daily routine kept the young troops occupied. Very few of the Reds smoked or drank: abstention was one of the “eight disciplines” of the Red Army, and although no special punishment was provided for either vice, I read in the “black column” of wall newspapers several grave criticisms of habitual smokers. Drinking was not forbidden, but drunkenness was unheard of.

  Commander P’eng Teh-huai, who had been a Kuomintang general, told me that the extreme youth of the Red Army explained much of its capacity to withstand hardship, and that was quite believable. It also made the problem of feminine companionship less poignant. P’eng himself had not seen his own wife since 1928, when he led an uprising of Kuomintang troops and joined the Reds.

  Casualties among Red Army commanders were very high. They customarily went into battle side by side with their men, from regimental commanders down. Joseph Stilwell1 once said to me that one thing alone might explain the fighting power of the Reds against an enemy with vastly superior resources. That was the Red officers’ habit of saying, “Come on, boys!” instead of, “Go on, boys!” During Nanking’s first and second “final annihilation” campaigns, casualties among Red officers were often as high as 50 per cent. But the Red Army could not stand these sacrifices, and later adopted tactics tending somewhat to reduce the risk of life by experienced commanders. Nevertheless, in the Fifth Kiangsi Campaign, Red commanders’ casualties averaged about 23 per cent of the total officer personnel. One could see plenty of evidence of this in the Red districts. Common sights were youths still in their early twenties with an arm or a leg missing, or fingers shot away, or with ugly wounds on the head or anatomy—but still cheerful optimists about their revolution.

  Nearly every province in China was represented in the various armies. In this sense the Red Army was probably the only national army in China. It was also the “most widely traveled.” Veteran cadres had crossed parts of eighteen provinces. They probably knew more about Chinese geography than any other army. On their Long March they had found most of the old Chinese maps quite useless, and Red cartographers remapped many hundreds of miles of territory, especially in aboriginal country and on the western frontiers.

  In the First Front Army, consisting of about 30,000 men, there was a high percentage of southerners, about one-third coming from Kiangsi, Fukien, Hunan, or Kweichow. Nearly 40 per cent were from the western provinces of Szechuan, Shensi, and Kansu. The First Front Army included some aborigines—Miaos and Lolos—and also attached to it was a newly organized Mohammedan Red Army. In the independent armies the percentage of natives was much higher, averaging three-fourths of the total.

  From the highest commander down to the rank and file these men ate and dressed alike. Battalion commanders and higher, however, were entitled to the use of a horse or a mule. I noticed there was even an equal sharing of the delicacies available—expressed, while I was with the Red Army, chiefly in terms of watermelons and plums. There was very little difference in living quarters of commanders and men, and they passed freely back and forth without any formality.

  One thing had puzzled me. How did the Reds manage to feed, clothe, and equip their armies? Like many others, I had assumed that they must live entirely on loot. This I discovered to be wrong, as I have already shown, for I saw that they started to construct a self-supplying economy of their own as soon as they occupied a district, and this single fact made it possible for them to hold a base despite enemy blockade. I had also failed to realize on what almost unbelievably modest sums it was possible for a Chinese proletarian army to exist.

  The Reds had a very limited output of armaments; their enemy was really their main source of supply. For years the Reds had called the Kuomintang troops their “ammunition carriers,” and they claimed to capture more than 80 per cent of their guns and more than 70 per cent of their ammunition from enemy troops. The regular troops (as distinct from local partisans) I saw were equipped mainly with British, Czechoslovakian, German, and American machine guns, rifles, automatic rifles, Mausers, and mountain cannon, such as had been sold in large quantities to the Nanking Government.*

  The only Russian-made rifles I saw with the Reds were the vintage of 1917. These had been captured from the troops of General Ma Hung-kuei, as I heard directly from some of Ma’s ex-soldiers themselves. General Ma, governor of what remained of Kuomintang Ninghsia, had inherited those rifles from General Feng Yu-hsiang, who ruled this region in 1924 and got some arms from Outer Mongolia. Red regulars disdained to use these ancient weapons, which I saw only in the hands of the partisans.

  While I was in the soviet districts any contact with a Russian source of arms was physically impossible. The Reds were surrounded by various enemy troops totaling nearly 400,000 men, and the enemy controlled every road to Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang, or the U.S.S.R. I gathered that they would be glad to get some of the manna they were frequently accused of receiving by some miracle from Russia. But it was quite obvious from a glance at the map that, until the Chinese Reds possessed much more territory to the north and to the west, Moscow would be unable to fill any orders, assuming Moscow to be so inclined, which was open to serious doubts.

  Second, it was a fact that the Reds had no highly paid and squeezing officials and generals, who in other Chinese armies absorbed most of the military funds. Great frugality was practiced in both the army and the soviets. In effect, about the only burden of the army upon the people was the necessity of feeding and clothing it.

  Actually, as I have already said, the entire budget of the Northwest soviets was then only $320,000 a month. Nearly 60 per cent went to the maintenance of the armed forces. Old Lin Tsu-han, the finance
commissioner, was apologetic about that, but said that it was “inevitable until the revolution has been consolidated.” The armed forces then numbered (not including peasant auxiliaries) about 40,000 men. This was before the arrival in Kansu of the Second and Fourth Front armies, after which Red territory greatly expanded, and the main Red forces in the Northwest soon approached a total of 90,000 men.

  So much for statistics. But to understand why the Chinese Reds had survived all these years it was necessary to get a glimpse of their inner spirit, their morale and fighting will, and their methods of training. And, perhaps still more important, their political and military leadership.

  For example, what sort of man was P’eng Teh-huai, for whose head Nanking once offered a reward sufficient to maintain his whole army (if Finance Commissioner Lin’s figures were correct) for more than a month?

  2

  Impression of P eng Teh-huai

  The consolidation of command of the First, Second, and Fourth Front Red armies had not yet occurred when I visited the front in August and September. Eight “divisions” of the First Front Red Army were then holding a line from the Great Wall in Ninghsia down to Kuyuan and Ping-liang in Kansu. A vanguard of the First Army Corps was moving southward and westward, to clear a road for Chu Teh, who was leading the Second and Fourth Front armies up from Sikang and Szechuan, breaking through a deep cordon of Nanking troops in southern Kansu. Yu Wang Pao, an ancient Mohammedan walled city in southeast Ninghsia, was headquarters of the First Front Army, and here I found its staff and Commander P’eng Teh-huai.*