Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  2

  Class War in China

  For three days, several hours every afternoon and evening, I had been asking Hsu Hai-tung and his staff questions about their personal histories, about their troops, about the fate of the Oyuwan Soviet Republic, and about their present situation in the Northwest. Then, in answer to my question, “Where is your family now?” Hsu Hai-tung replied matter-of-factly, “All of my clan have been killed except one brother, who is with the Fourth Front Army.”

  “You mean killed in fighting?”

  “Oh, no; only three of my brothers were Reds. The rest of the clan were executed by Generals T’ang En-p’o and Hsia Tou-yin. Altogether the Kuomintang officers killed sixty-six members of the Hsu clan.”

  “Sixty-six!”

  “Yes, twenty-seven of my near relatives were executed and thirty-nine distant relatives—everyone in Huangpi hsien named Hsu. Old and young men, women, children, and even babies were killed. The Hsu clan was wiped out, except my wife and three brothers in the Red Army, and myself. Two of my brothers were killed in battle later on.”

  “And your wife?”

  “I don’t know what happened to her. She was captured when the White troops occupied Huangpi in 1931. Afterwards I heard that she had been sold as a concubine to a merchant near Hankow. My brothers who escaped told me about that, and about the other killings. During the Fifth Campaign, thirteen of the Hsu clan escaped from Huangpi and fled to Lihsiang hsien, but were all arrested there. The men were beheaded; the women and children were shot.”

  Hsu noticed the shocked look on my face and grinned mirthlessly. “That was nothing unusual,” he said. “That happened to the clans of many Red officers, though mine had the biggest losses. Chiang Kai-shek had given an order that when my district was captured no one named Hsu should be left alive.”

  I wrote many pages of notes of conversations with Hsu and his comrades, notes of dates, places, and detailed accounts of outrages allegedly inflicted on civilians by Nationalist troops in Oyuwan. It would be pointless to repeat the details of the more horrendous crimes reported; like the tragic events in Spain of the same period, they would seem incredible to skeptics who read of them from afar. For the person who has not actually witnessed atrocities, all remains hearsay and suspect; to accept the degradation of any man by man injures our self-esteem. And even if the stories were true, were not the Reds themselves engaged in violence differing only in the choice of class victims? The Kuomintang press, however, had for years been telling only their side of the class-war story. To help fill in the picture for history it should not be unedifying to know what the leaders of this fundamentally “peasant revolution” (as Mao Tse-tung insisted it was) said of their fellow man and saw themselves as fighting against.

  During the Fifth Anti-Red Compaign, as already noted, Nationalist officers gave orders in many areas to exterminate the civilian population. This was held to be militarily necessary because, as the Generalissimo remarked in one of his speeches, where the soviets had been long established “it was impossible to tell a Red bandit from a good citizen.” The method appears to have been applied with singular savagery in the Oyuwan Republic, chiefly because some of the leading Kuomintang generals in charge of anti-Red operations were natives of that region, sons of landlords who had lost their land to the Reds, and hence had an insatiable desire for revenge. The population in the soviets had decreased by about 600,000 at the end of the Fifth Campaign.

  Red tactics in Oyuwan had depended upon mobility over a wide territory, and at the beginning of every annihilation drive their main forces had moved out of the Red districts, to engage the enemy on its own ground. They had no important strategic bases to defend, and readily moved from place to place, to decoy, divert, distract, and otherwise gain maneuvering advantages. This left the periphery of their “human base” very much exposed, but in the past Kuomintang troops had not killed the farmers and townsmen whom they found peacefully pursuing their tasks in soviet areas they occupied.

  In the Fifth Campaign, as in Kiangsi, new tactics were adopted. Instead of engaging the Red Army in the open field, the Nanking troops advanced in heavily concentrated units, behind extensive fortifications, bit by bit penetrating into Red territory, systematically either annihilating or transporting the entire population in wide areas inside and outside the Red borders. They sought to make of such districts a desolate, uninhabited wasteland, incapable of supporting the Red troops if they should later recapture it.

  Thousands of children were taken prisoner and driven to Hankow and other cities, where they were sold into “apprenticeships.” Thousands of young girls and women were transported and sold into the factories as slave girls and as prostitutes. In the cities they were palmed off as “famine refugees,” or “orphans of people killed by the Reds.” I remembered that hundreds of them reportedly reached the big industrial centers in 1934. A considerable trade grew up, with middlemen buying the boys and women from Kuomintang officers. It became a very profitable business for a while, but threatened to corrupt the ranks of the army. Missionaries began talking about it, and Chiang Kai-shek was obliged to issue a stern order forbidding this “bribetaking” and ordering strict punishment for officers engaged in the traffic.

  “By December, 1933,” said Hsu Hai-tung, “about half of Oyuwan had become a vast wasteland. Over a once rich country there were very few houses left standing, cattle, had all been driven away, the fields were un-kept, and there were piles of bodies in nearly every village that had been occupied by the White troops. Four counties in Hupeh, five in Anhui, and three in Honan were almost completely ruined. In an area some 400 li from east to west and about 300 li from north to south the whole population was being killed or removed.

  “During the year’s fighting we recaptured some of these districts from the White troops, but when we returned we found fertile lands had become semideserts. Only a few old men and women remained, and they would tell tales that horrified us. We could not believe such crimes had been committed by Chinese against Chinese.

  “In November, 1933, we retreated from T’ien T’ai Shan and Lao Chun Shan, soviet districts where there were then about 60,000 people. When we returned, two months later, we found that these peasants had been driven from their land, their houses had been burned or destroyed by bombing, and there were not more than three hundred old men and a few sickly children in all that region. From them we learned what had happened.

  “As soon as the White troops arrived the officers had begun dividing the women and girls. Those with bobbed hair or natural feet had been shot as Communists. Higher officers had looked over the others and picked out pretty ones for their own, and then the lower officers had been given their choice. The rest had been turned over to the soldiers to use as prostitutes. They had been told that these women were ‘bandit wives,’ and therefore they could do what they liked with them.

  “Many of the young men in those districts had joined the Red Army, but many of those who remained behind, and even some of the old men, tried to kill the White officers for these crimes. Those who protested were all shot as Communists. The survivors told us that many fights had occurred among the Whites, who had quarreled among themselves about the distribution of women. After they had been despoiled, these women and girls were sent to the towns and cities, where they were sold, only the officers keeping a few pretty ones for concubines.”

  “Do you mean to say these were the troops of the National Government?” I asked.

  “Yes, they were the Thirteenth Army Corps of General T’ang En-p’o, and the Third Army Corps of General Wang Chun. Generals Hsia Tou-yin, Liang Kuan-yin, and Sung T’ien-tsai were also responsible.”

  Hsu told of another district, Huangan hsien, in Hupeh, which the Reds recovered from General Wang Chun in July, 1933: “In the town of Tsu Yun Chai, where there was once a street of flourishing soviet cooperatives and a happy people, everything was in ruins and only a few old men were alive. They led us out to a valley and showed us the scatter
ed bodies of seventeen young women lying half-naked in the sun. They had all been raped and killed. The White troops had evidently been in a great hurry; they had taken the time to pull off only one leg of a girl’s trousers. That day we called a meeting, the army held a memorial service there, and we all wept.

  “Not long afterwards, in Ma Cheng, we came to one of our former athletic fields. There in a shallow grave we found the bodies of twelve comrades who had been killed. Their skin had been stripped from them, their eyes gouged out, and their ears and noses cut off. We all broke into tears of rage at this barbaric sight.

  “In the same month, also in Huangan, our Twenty-fifth Red Army reached Ao Kung Chai. This had once been a lively place, but it was now deserted. We walked outside the town and saw a peasant’s hut with smoke coming from it, on a hillside, and some of us climbed up to it, but the only occupant was an old man who had apparently gone insane. We walked down into the valley again until we came upon a long pile of dead men and women. There were more than 400 bodies lying there, and they had evidently been killed only a short time before. In some places the blood was several inches deep. Some women were lying with their children still clutched to them. Many bodies were lying one on top of another.

  “Suddenly I noticed one of the bodies move, and, going over to it, found that it was a man still alive. We found several more alive after that, altogether more than ten. We carried them back with us and treated their wounds, and they told us what had happened. These people had fled from the town to hide in this valley, and had encamped in the open. Afterwards the White officers had led their troops to the spot, ordered them to put up their machine guns on the mountainsides, and had then opened fire on the people below. They had kept firing for several hours until they thought everybody was dead. Then they had marched away again without even coming down to look at them.”

  Hsu said that the next day he led his whole army out to that valley and showed them the dead, among whom some of the soldiers recognized peasants they had known, men and women who must have given them shelter at one time, or sold them melons, or traded at the cooperatives. They were deeply moved. Hsu said that this experience steeled his troops with a stubborn morale and a determination to die fighting, and that throughout the entire twelve months of the last great annihilation drive not a single man had deserted from the Twenty-fifth Army.

  “Toward the end of the Fifth Campaign,” he continued, “nearly every house had dead in it. We used to enter a village that seemed empty until we looked into the ruined houses. Then we would find corpses in the doorways, on the floor, or on the k’ang, or hidden away somewhere. Even the dogs had fled from many villages. In those days we did not need spies to watch the enemy’s movements. We could follow them quite easily by the skies filled with smoke from burning towns and hamlets.”

  This was a very small part of what I heard from Hsu Hai-tung and others who fought through the terrible year, and finally trekked westward, not their army but its human “base” destroyed, its hills and valleys stained with the blood of its youth, the living heart of it torn out. Later on I talked to many warriors from Oyuwan, and they told tales more pitiful still. They did not like to talk of what they had seen; they did so only under questioning, and it was clear their experiences had permanently marked the matrix of their minds with a class hatred ineradicable for life.

  Again one asked whether that meant that the Reds were innocent of atrocity and class revenge themselves. I thought not. It was true that during my four months with them, as far as I could learn from unrestricted but limited inquiry, they had executed but two civilians. It was also true that I did not see a single village or town burned by them, or hear, from the many farmers I questioned, that the Reds were addicted to arson. But my personal experience started and ended with the few months spent with them in the Northwest: what “killing and burning” might have been done elsewhere I could not affirm or deny.

  One of the two ill-fated “counterrevolutionaries” mentioned above was not killed by the Reds, but by some Ninghsia Moslems with a strong distaste for tax collectors. Further on it will be told in what manner he met his demise, but first let us see how these Moslems had been ruled.

  3

  Four Great Horses

  One might say that Chinghai, Ninghsia, and northern Kansu were the prototype of that fantasia of Swift’s, the land of the Houyhnhnms, for they were ruled as the satrapy of Four Great Horses whose fame was widespread in China. Over the areas mentioned power was divided (before the Reds began edging the Houyhnhnms out of considerable portions of their domain) by a family of Mohammedan generals named Ma—the Messrs. Ma Hung-kuei, Ma Hung-ping, Ma Pu-fang, and Ma Pu-ch’ing. And this particular Ma means horse.*

  Ma Hung-kuei was governor of Ninghsia, and his cousin, Ma Hung-ping, former governor of the same province, was now ruler of a shifting fiefdom in northern Kansu. They were distantly related to Ma Pu-fang, many-wived son of the famous Mohammedan leader Ma Keh-chin. Ma Pu-fang inherited his father’s toga and in 1937 became the Nanking-appointed Pacification Commissioner of that province, while his brother, Ma Pu-ch’ing, helped out in Chinghai and in addition ruled the great Kansu panhandle which in the west separated Chinghai from Ninghsia. For a decade this distant country had been run like a medieval sultanate by the Ma family, with some assistance from an Allah of their own.

  Two of the Great Horses claimed to be nobles, descendants of a Mohammedan aristocracy which sometimes played a decisive role in the history of China’s Northwest. The brothers Ma, like many Moslems in China, had Turkish blood in them. As early as the sixth century a race which we now know as the Turks had become powerful enough on China’s northwest frontier to make important demands on the monarchs of the plains. In a couple of centuries they had built up an empire extending from eastern Siberia across part of Mongolia and into Central Asia. Gradually they filtered southward, and by the seventh century their Great Khan was received almost as an equal at the Court of Yang Ti, last Emperor of the Sui Dynasty. It was this same Turkish Khan who helped the half-Turkish General Li Yuan overthrow the Emperor Yang Ti and establish the celebrated T’ang Dynasty, which for three centuries reigned over Eastern Asia from Ch’ang An (now Sianfu)—then perhaps the most cultured capital on earth.

  Mohammedan mosques had already been built in Canton by seafaring Arab traders before the middle of the seventh century. With the advent of the tolerant T’ang power the religion rapidly penetrated by land routes through the Turks of the Northwest. Mullahs, traders, embassies, and warriors brought it from Persia, Arabia, and Turkestan, and the T’ang emperors formed close ties with the caliphates to the west. Especially in the ninth century, when vast hordes of Ouigour Turks (whose great leader Seljuk had not yet been born) were summoned to the aid of the T’ang Court to suppress rebellion, Islamism entrenched itself in China. Following their success, many of the Ouigours were rewarded with titles and great estates and settled in the Northwest and in Szechuan and Yunnan.

  Over a period of centuries the Mohammedans stoutly resisted Chinese absorption, but gradually lost their Turkish culture, adopted much that was Chinese, and became more or less submissive to Chinese law. Yet in the nineteenth century they were still powerful enough to make two great bids for power: one when Tu Wei-hsiu for a time set up a kingdom in Yunnan and proclaimed himself Sultan Suleiman; and the last, in 1864, when Mohammedans seized control of all the Northwest and even invaded Hupeh. The latter rebellion was put down after a campaign lasting eleven years. At that time of waning Manchu power the able Chinese General Tso Tsung-t’ang astounded the world by recapturing Hupeh, Shensi, Kansu, and eastern Tibet, finally leading his victorious army across the desert roads of Turkestan, where he re-established Chinese power on that far frontier in Central Asia.

  Since then no single leader had been able to unite the Moslems of China in a successful struggle for independence, but there had been sporadic uprisings against Chinese rule, with savage and bloody massacres on both sides. The most serious recent rebell
ion occurred in 1928, when General Feng Yu-hsiang was warlord of the Northwest. It was under Feng that the Wu-Ma, or “Five Ma,”* combination acquired much of its influence and secured the nucleus of its present wealth and power.

  Although theoretically the Chinese considered the Hui or Moslem people one of the five great races of China.† most Chinese seemed to deny Moslem racial separateness, claiming that they had been Sinicized. In practice, the Kuomintang decidedly followed a policy of absorption, even more direct (though perhaps less successful) than that pursued toward the Mongols. The Chinese official attitude toward the Mohammedans seemed to be that they were a “religious minority” but not a “national minority.” However, it was quite evident to anyone who saw them in their own domain in the Northwest that their claims to racial unity and the right to nationhood as a people were not without substantial basis in fact and history.

  The Mohammedans of China were said to number about 20,000,000, and of these at least half were concentrated in the provinces of Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, Szechuan, Chinghai, and Sinkiang. In many districts—particularly in Kansu and Chinghai—they were a majority, and in some large areas outnumbered Chinese as much as ten to one. Generally their religious orthodoxy seemed to vary according to their strength of numbers in a given spot, but in the dominantly Mohammedan region of northern Kansu and southern Ninghsia the atmosphere was distinctly that of an Islamic country.

  It could be said that the Mohammedans were the largest community left in China among whom religious leaders were the real arbiters of temporal as well as spiritual life, with religion a deciding factor in their culture, politics, and economy. Mohammedan society revolved round the men-huang and the ahun (ameer and mullah), and their knowledge of the Koran and of Turkish or Arabic (scant as it usually was) provided the sources of authority. Mohammedans in the Northwest prayed daily in the hundreds of well-kept mosques, observed Mohammedan feast days, fast days, and marriage and funeral ceremonies, rejected pork, and were offended by the presence of pigs and dogs. The pilgrimage to Mecca was an ambition frequently realized by rich men and ahuns, who thereby strengthened their political and economic power. To many of them pan-Islamism rather than pan-Hanism was an ideal.