Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  P’eng’s career as a “Red bandit” had begun almost a decade before, when he led an uprising in the Kuomintang army of the polygamous warlord-governor, General Ho Chien. P’eng had risen from the ranks and won admission to a military school in Hunan and later on to another school at Nanchang. After graduation he had quickly distinguished himself and secured rapid promotions. By 1927, when he was twenty-eight years old, he was already a brigade commander, and noted throughout the Hunanese army as the “liberal” officer who actually consulted his soldiers’ committee.

  P’eng’s influence in the then left-wing Kuomintang, in the army, and in the Hunan military school were serious problems for Ho Chien. In the winter of 1927 General Ho began a drastic purgation of leftists in his troops and launched the notorious Hunan “Peasant Massacre,” in which thousands of radical farmers and workers were killed as “Communists.” He hesitated to act against P’eng, however, because of his widespread popularity. It was a costly delay. In July, 1928, with his own famous First Regiment as nucleus, and joined by parts of the Second and Third regiments and the cadets of the military school, P’eng Teh-huai directed the P’ing Kiang Insurrection, which united with a peasant uprising and established the first Hunan Soviet Government.

  Two years later P’eng had accumulated an “iron brotherhood” of about 8,000 followers, and this was the Fifth Red Army Corps. With this force he attacked and captured the great walled city of Changsha, capital of Hunan, and put to rout Ho Chien’s army of 60,000 men—then mostly opium smokers. The Red Army held this city for ten days against counterattacks by combined Nanking-Hunan troops, but was finally forced to evacuate by greatly superior forces, including bombardment by foreign gunboats.

  It was shortly afterwards that Chiang Kai-shek began his first “grand annihilation campaign” against the Red bandits. On the Long March of the southern Reds, P’eng Teh-huai was commander of the vanguard First Army Corps. He broke through lines of tens of thousands of enemy troops, captured vital points on the route of advance, and secured communications for the main forces, at last winning his way to Shensi and a refuge in the base of the Northwest soviets. Men in his army told me that he walked most of the 6,000 miles of the Long March, frequently giving his horse to a tired or wounded comrade.

  I found P’eng a gay, laughter-loving man, in excellent health except for a delicate stomach—the result of a week’s forced diet of uncooked wheat grains and grass during the Long March, and of semipoisonous food, and of a few days of no food at all. A veteran of scores of battles, he had been wounded but once, and then only superficially.

  I stayed in the compound where P’eng had his headquarters in Yu Wang Pao, and so I saw a great deal of him at the front. This headquarters, by the way—then in command of over 30,000 troops—was a simple room furnished with a table and wooden bench, two iron dispatch boxes, maps made by the Red Army, a field telephone, a towel and washbasin, and the k’ang on which his blankets were spread. He had only a couple of uniforms, like the rest of his men, and they bore no insignia of rank. One personal article of attire, of which he was childishly proud, was a vest made from a parachute captured from an enemy airplane shot down during the Long March.

  We shared many meals together. He ate sparingly and simply, of the same food his men were given—consisting usually of cabbage, noodles, beans, mutton, and sometimes bread. Ninghsia grew beautiful melons of all kinds, and P’eng was very fond of these. Your pampered investigator, however, found P’eng poor competition in the business of melon eating, but had to bow before the greater talents of one of the doctors on P’eng’s staff, whose capacity had won him the nickname of Han Ch’ih-kua-ti (Han the Melon Eater).

  Open, forthright, and undeviating in his manner and speech, quick in his movements, full of laughter and wit, P’eng was physically very active, an excellent rider, and a man of endurance. Perhaps this was partly because he was a nonsmoker and a teetotaler. I was with him one day during maneuvers of the Red Second Division when we had to climb a very steep hill. “Run to the top!” P’eng suddenly called out to his panting staff and me. He bounded off like a rabbit, and beat us all to the summit. Another time, when we were riding, he yelled out a similar challenge. In this way and others he gave the impression of great unspent energy.

  P’eng retired late and arose early, unlike Mao Tse-tung, who retired late and also got up late. As far as I could learn, P’eng slept an average of only four or five hours a night. He never seemed rushed, but he was always busy. I remember the morning of the day the First Army Corps received orders to advance 200 li to Haiyuan, in enemy territory: P’eng issued all the commands necessary before breakfast and came down to eat with me; immediately afterwards he started off on the road, as if for an excursion to the countryside, walking along the main street of Yu Wang Pao with his staff, stopping to speak to the Moslem priests who had assembled to bid him good-by. The big army seemed to run itself.

  Government airplanes frequently dropped leaflets over Red lines offering from $50,000 to $100,000 for P’eng, dead or alive, but he had only one sentry on duty before his headquarters, and he sauntered down the streets of the city without any bodyguard. While I was there, when thousands of handbills had been dropped offering rewards for himself, Hsu Hai-tung, and Mao Tse-tung, P’eng Teh-huai ordered that they be preserved. They were printed on only one side, and there was a paper shortage in the Red Army. The blank side of these handbills was used later for printing Red Army propaganda.

  P’eng was very fond of children, I noticed, and he was often followed by a group of them. Many youngsters, who acted as mess boys, buglers, orderlies, and grooms, were organized as regular units of the Red Army, in the groups called Shao-nien Hsien-feng-tui, or Young Vanguards. I often saw P’eng seated with two or three “little Red devils,” talking seriously to them about politics or their personal troubles. He treated them with great dignity.

  One day I went with P’eng and part of his staff to visit a small arsenal near the front, and to inspect the workers’ recreation room, their own Lieh-ning Tang, or Lenin Club. There was a big cartoon, drawn by the workers, on one side of the room. It showed a kimonoed Japanese with his feet on Manchuria, Jehol, and Hopei, and an upraised sword, dripping with blood, poised over the rest of China. The caricatured Japanese had an enormous nose.

  “Who is that?” P’eng asked a Young Vanguard whose duty it was to look after the Lenin Club.

  “That,” replied the lad, “is a Japanese imperialist!”

  “How do you know?” P’eng demanded.

  “Just look at his big nose!” was the response.

  P’eng laughed and looked at me. “Well,” he said, indicating me, “here is a yang kuei-tzu [foreign devil], is he an imperialist?”

  “He is a foreign devil all right,” the Vanguard replied, “but not a Japanese imperialist. He has a big nose, but it isn’t big enough for a Japanese imperialist!”

  I pointed out to P’eng that such cartoons might result in serious disillusionment when the Reds actually came into contact with the Japanese and found Japanese noses quite as reasonable as their own. They might not recognize the enemy and might refuse to fight.

  “Don’t worry!” said the commander. “We will know a Japanese, whether he has a nose or not.”

  Once I went to a performance of the First Army Corps’ Anti-Japanese Theater with P’eng, and we sat down with the other soldiers on the turf below the improvised stage. He seemed to enjoy the plays immensely, and he led a demand for a favorite song. It grew quite chilly, after dark, although it was still late August. I wrapped my padded coat closer to me. In the middle of the performance I suddenly noticed with surprise that P’eng had removed his own coat. Then I saw that he had put it around a little bugler sitting next to him.

  I understood P’eng’s affection for these “little devils” later on, when he yielded to persuasion one night and told me something of his childhood. The trials of his own youth might amaze an Occidental ear, but they were typical enough of backgr
ound events which explained many of the young Chinese who, like him, “saw Red.”

  3

  Why Is a Red?

  P’eng Teh-huai was born in a village of Hsiang T’an hsien, near the native place of Mao Tse-tung. It was a wealthy farming community beside the blue-flowing Hsiang River, about 90 li from Changsha. Hsiang T’an was one of the prettiest parts of Hunan—a green countryside quilted with deep rice lands and thickets of tall bamboo. More than a million people lived in this one county. Though the soil of Hsiang T’an was rich, the majority of the peasants were miserably poor, illiterate, and “little better than serfs,” according to P’eng. Landlords were all-powerful there, owned the finest lands, and charged exorbitant rents and taxes, for they were in many cases also the officials—the gentry.

  Several great landlords in Hsiang T’an had incomes of from forty to fifty thousand tan* of rice annually, and some of the wealthiest grain merchants in the province lived there.

  P’eng’s own family were rich peasants. His mother died when he was six, his father remarried, and this second wife hated P’eng because he was a constant reminder of her predecessor. She sent him to an old-style Chinese school, where the teacher frequently beat him. P’eng was apparently quite capable of looking after his own interests: in the midst of one of these beatings he picked up a stool, scored a hit, and fled. The teacher brought a lawsuit against him in the local courts, and his stepmother denounced him.

  His father was rather indifferent in this quarrel, but to keep peace with his wife he sent the young stool tosser off to live with an aunt, whom he liked. She put the boy into a so-called modern school. There he met a “radical” teacher, who did not believe in filial worship. One day, when Teh-huai was playing in the park, this teacher came along and sat down to talk with him. P’eng asked whether he worshiped his parents, and whether he thought P’eng should worship his. As for himself, said the teacher, he did not believe in such nonsense. Children were brought into the world while their parents were playing, just as Teh-huai had been playing in this park.

  “I liked this notion,” said P’eng, “and I mentioned it to my aunt when I went home. She was horrified, and the very next day had me withdrawn from the evil ‘foreign influence.’” Hearing something of the young man’s objection to filial worship, his grandmother began to pray regularly “on the first and fifteenth of each month, and at festivals, or when it stormed,” for heaven to strike this unfilial child and destroy him.

  In P’eng’s own words:

  “My grandmother regarded us all as her slaves. She was a heavy smoker of opium. I hated the smell of it, and one night, when I could stand it no longer, I got up and kicked a pan of her opium from the stove. She was furious. She called a meeting of the whole clan and formally demanded my death by drowning, because I was an unfilial child. She made a long list of charges against me.

  “The clan was about ready to carry out her demand. My stepmother agreed that I should die, and my father said that since it was the family will, he would not object. Then an uncle, my own mother’s brother, stepped forward and bitterly attacked my parents for their failure to educate me properly. He said that it was their fault and that in this case no child could be held responsible.

  “My life was spared, but I had to leave home. I was nine years old, it was cold October, and I owned nothing but my coat and trousers. My stepmother tried to take those from me, but I proved that they did not belong to her, but had been given to me by my own mother.”

  Such was the beginning of P’eng Teh-huai’s life in the great world. He got a job first as a cowherd, and next as a coal miner, where he pulled a bellows for fourteen hours a day. Weary of these long hours, he fled from the mine to become a shoemaker’s apprentice, working only twelve hours a day. He received no salary, and after eight months he ran away again, this time to work in a sodium mine. The mine closed; he was forced to seek work once more. Still owning nothing but the rags on his back, he became a dike-builder. Here he had a “good job,” actually received wages, and in two years had saved 1,500 cash—about $12! But he “lost everything” when a change of warlords rendered the currency worthless. Very depressed, he decided to return to his native district.

  Now sixteen, P’eng went to call on a rich uncle, the uncle who had saved his life. This man’s own son had just died; he had always liked Teh-huai, and he welcomed him and offered him a home. Here P’eng fell in love with his own cousin, and the uncle was favorably disposed to a betrothal. They studied under a Chinese tutor, played together, and planned their future.

  These plans were interrupted by P’eng’s irrepressible impetuosity. Next year there was a big rice famine in Hunan, and thousands of peasants were destitute. P’eng’s uncle helped many, but the biggest stores of rice were held by a great landlord-merchant who profiteered fabulously. One day a crowd of over two hundred peasants gathered at his house, demanding that the merchant sell them rice without profit—traditionally expected of a virtuous man in time of famine. The rich man refused to discuss it, had the people driven away, and barred his gates.

  P’eng went on: “I was passing his place, and paused to watch the demonstration. I saw that many of the men were half starved, and I knew this man had over 10,000 tan of rice in his bins, and that he had refused to help the starving at all. I became infuriated, and led the peasants to attack and invade his house. They carted off most of his stores. Thinking of it afterwards, I did not know exactly why I had done that. I only knew that he should have sold rice to the poor, and that it was right for them to take it from him if he did not.”

  P’eng had to flee once more for his life, and this time he was old enough to join the army. His career as a soldier began. Not long afterwards he was to become a revolutionary.

  At eighteen he was made a platoon commander and was involved in a plot to overthrow the ruling governor—Tuchun Hu. P’eng had been deeply influenced by a student leader in his army, whom the tuchun had killed. Entrusted with the task of assassinating Hu, he entered Changsha, waited for him to pass down the street one day, and threw a bomb at him. The bomb failed to explode. P’eng escaped.

  Not long afterwards Dr. Sun Yat-sen became Generalissimo of the allied armies of the Southwest, and succeeded in defeating Tuchun Hu, but was subsequently driven out of Hunan again by the northern militarists. P’eng fled with Sun’s army. Sent upon a mission of espionage by Ch’eng Ch’ien, one of Sun’s commanders, P’eng returned to Changsha, was betrayed and arrested. Chang Ching-yao was then in power in Hunan. P’eng described his experiences:

  “I was tortured every day for about an hour in many different ways. One night my feet were bound and my hands were tied behind my back. I was hung from the roof with a rope around my wrists. Then big stones were piled on my back, while the jailers stood around kicking me and demanding that I confess—for they still had no evidence against me. Many times I fainted.

  “This torture went on for about a month. I used to think after every torture that next time I would confess, as I could not stand it. But each time I decided that I would not give up till the next day. In the end they got nothing from me, and to my surprise I was finally released. One of the deep satisfactions of my life came some years later when we [the Red Army] captured Changsha and destroyed that old torture chamber. We released several hundred political prisoners there—many of them half-dead from beatings, fiendish treatment, and starvation.”

  When P’eng regained his freedom he went back to his uncle’s home to visit his cousin. He intended to marry her, as he still considered himself betrothed. He found that she had died. Re-enlisting in the army, he soon afterwards received his first commission and was sent to the Hunan military school. Following his graduation he became a battalion commander in the Second Division, under Lu Ti-p’ing, and was assigned to duty in his native district.

  “My uncle died and, hearing of it, I arranged to return to attend the funeral. On the way there I had to pass my childhood home. My old grandmother was alive, now past eighty
, and still very active. Learning that I was returning, she walked down the road ten li to meet me, and begged my forgiveness for the past. She was very humble and very respectful. I was quite surprised by this change. What could be the cause of it? Then I reflected that it was not due to any change in her personal feeling, but to my rise in the world from a social outcast to an army officer with a salary of $200 a month. I gave the old lady a little money, and she sang my praises in the family as a model ‘filial son’!”

  I asked P’eng what reading had influenced him. He said that when as a youth he read Ssu-ma Kuang’s* Sze Chih Chien (History of Governing), he began for the first time to have some serious thoughts concerning the responsibility of a soldier to society. “The battles described by Ssu-ma Kuang were completely pointless, and only caused suffering to the people—very much like those that were being fought between the militarists in China in my own time. What could we do to give purpose to our struggles, and bring about a permanent change?”

  P’eng read Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and K’ang Yu-wei and many of the writers who had influenced Mao Tse-tung. For a time he had some interest in anarchism. In Ch’en Tu-hsiu’s New Youth he learned of socialism, and from that point he began to study Marxism. The Nationalist Revolution was forming, he was a regimental commander, and he felt the necessity of a political doctrine to give morale to his troops. Sun Yat-sen’s San Min Chu I (Three Principles of the People) “was an improvement over Liang Ch’i-ch’ao,” but P’eng felt that it was “too vague and confused,” although he was by then a member of the Kuomintang. Bukharin’s ABC of Communism seemed to him “for the first time a book that presented a practicable and reasonable form of society and government.”

  By 1926 P’eng had read the Communist Manifesto, an outline of Capital, A New Conception of Society (by a leading Chinese Communist), Kautsky’s Class Struggle, and many articles and pamphlets giving a materialist interpretation of the Chinese Revolution. “Formerly,” said P’eng, “I had been merely dissatisfied with society, but saw little chance of making any fundamental improvement. After reading the Communist Manifesto I dropped my pessimism and began working with a new conviction that society could be changed.”