Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  By 1922 Chu Teh had unburdened himself of his wives and concubines, pensioning them off in Yunnanfu. To one who knew the conservatism of China, and especially the feudal taboos of Yunnan, this act of repudiation of tradition was hardly believable, and indicated in itself a personality of unusual independence and resolution. Leaving Yunnan, he went to Shanghai, where he met many young revolutionaries of the Kuomintang, which he had joined. Here also he came into contact with left-wing radicals, who tended to look upon him condescendingly as an old-fashioned militarist. A corrupt official from feudal Yunnan, a many-wived general, an opium addict—could this also be a revolutionary?

  Before this trip Chu Teh had determined to break himself of the drug habit. It was not easy: he had been using opium for a long time. But this man had more steel in his will than his acquaintances supposed. For days he lay almost unconscious as he fought his noxious craving; then, taking a medicine cure along, he boarded a British steamer on the Yangtze and took passage for Shanghai. No opium could be bought or sold on board, and for weeks he sailed down the river, pacing the deck, never going ashore, fighting this hardest battle of his life. But after a month on board he left the ship with clear eyes, a ruddy glow on his cheeks, and a new confidence in his step. After a final hospital cure in Shanghai, he began a new life in earnest. So said his aide, Li Chiang-lin.

  Chu Teh was then nearing forty, but he was in excellent health and his mind was eagerly reaching out for new knowledge. Accompanying some Chinese students, he went to Germany, where he lived for a while near Hannover. There he met many Communists, and at this time seems to have seriously taken up the study of Marxism and become enamored of new perspectives opened up by the theory of social revolution. In this study he was chiefly tutored by Chinese students young enough to be his own sons—for he never learned French, he knew only a smattering of German, and he was a poor linguist. One of his student teachers in Germany told me how deadly in earnest he had been; how patiently, ploddingly, stubbornly, he struggled amid the confusion of an impact of a whole new world of ideas to integrate the basic truths and meanings, how great had been the intellectual effort with which he divested himself of all the prejudices and limitations of his traditional Chinese training.

  In this way he read some histories of the Great War, and familiarized himself with the politics of Europe. One day a student friend of his* came to see him, talking excitedly about a book called State and Revolution. Chu Teh asked him to help him read it, and thus he became interested in Marxism and the Russian Revolution. He read Bukharin’s ABC of Communism, and his works on dialectical materialism, and then he read more of Lenin. The powerful revolutionary movement then active in Germany swept him, with hundreds of Chinese students, into the struggle for world revolution. He joined the Chinese branch of the Communist Party founded in Germany.

  “Chu Teh had an experienced, disciplined, practical mind,” a comrade who knew him in Germany told me. “He was an extremely simple man, modest and unassuming. He always invited criticism; he had an insatiable appetite for criticism. In Germany he lived the simple life of a soldier. Chu Teh’s original interest in communism sprang from his sympathy for the poor, which had also brought him into the Kuomintang. He believed strongly in Sun Yat-sen for a while, because of Sun’s principles advocating land for the tillers, and the limitation of private capital. But not until he began to understand Marxism did he realize the inadequacy of Sun Yat-sen’s program.”

  Chu Teh also lived for some time in Paris, where he entered a school for Chinese students which had been established by Wu Tze-hui, a veteran national revolutionary of the Kuomintang. In France and in Germany he sat at the feet of his young German, French, and Chinese instructors, and he humbly listened, quietly interrogated, debated, sought clarity and understanding. “To be modern, to understand the meaning of the revolution,” his youthful tutors kept repeating, “you must go to Russia. There you can see the future.” And again Chu Teh followed their advice. In Moscow he entered the Eastern Toilers’ University, where he studied Marxism under Chinese teachers. Late in 1925 he returned to Shanghai, and from that time on he worked under the direction of the Communist Party, to which he soon gave his fortune.

  Chu Teh rejoined his former superior and fellow Yunnanese, General Chu Pei-teh, whose power in the Kuomintang Army was second only to that of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1927, when General Chu Pei-teh’s forces occupied several provinces south of the Yangtze, he made Chu Teh chief of the Bureau of Public Safety in Nanchang, capital of Kiangsi. There also he took command of a training regiment of cadets, and there he made contact with the Ninth Kuomintang Army, stationed farther south in Kiangsi. In the Ninth Army were detachments that had formerly been under his personal command in Yunnan. Thus the stage was prepared for the August Uprising in Nanchang, in which Communist troops first began the long open struggle for power against the Kuomintang.

  August 1, 1927, was a day of great decision for Chu Teh. Ordered by his commander-in-chief, Chu Pei-teh, to suppress the insurrection, Chu Teh (who had helped organize it) instead joined with the rebels, renouncing the remaining connections with his past. When, after the defeat of Ho Lung, he headed his police and his training regiment southward with the rebels, the city gates which closed behind him were symbolic of the final break with the security and success of his youth. Ahead of him lay years of unceasing struggle.

  Part of the Ninth Army went with Chu Teh also, as the straggling band of revolutionaries swept down to Swatow, captured it, were driven out, and then withdrew again to Kiangsi and Hunan. Among Chu Teh’s chief lieutenants at that time were three Whampoa cadets: Wang Erh-tso (later killed in battle); Ch’en Yi; and Lin Piao, who became president of the Red University.* They did not yet call themselves a Red Army, but renamed themselves only the National Revolutionary Army. After the retreat from Fukien, Chu Teh’s forces were reduced, by desertions and casualties, to 900 men, with a fire power of only 500 rifles, one machine gun, and a few rounds of ammunition each.

  In this situation Chu Teh accepted an offer to connect with General Fan Shih-sheng, another Yunnan commander whose big army was then stationed in southern Hunan, and who, though not a Communist, tolerated Communists in his army, hoping to use them politically against Chiang Kai-shek.2 As a Yunnanese he was also inclined to give haven to his fellow provincials. Here Chu Teh’s troops were incorporated as the 140th Regiment, and he became chief political adviser to the Sixteenth Army. And here he had the narrowest escape of his life.

  Communist influence in Fan Shih-sheng’s army rapidly increased, and soon an anti-Bolshevik faction, secretly connected with Chiang Kai-shek, planned a coup against Chu Teh. One night he was staying in an inn with only forty of his followers, when he was attacked by a force under Hu Chi-lung, leader of the coup. Shooting began at once, but it was dark and the assassins could not see clearly. When several of them aimed revolvers at Chu Teh’s head he cried out excitedly, “Don’t shoot me, I’m only the cook. Don’t shoot a man who can cook for you!” The soldiers, touched to the stomach, hesitated, and Chu Teh was led outside for closer inspection. There he was recognized by a cousin of Hu Chi-lung, who shouted, “Here is Chu Teh! Kill him!” But Chu Teh pulled out a concealed weapon of his own, shot the man, overcame his guard, and fled. Only five of his men escaped with him.

  This incident explained the nickname by which Chu Teh had ever since been known in the Red Army—“Chief of the Cooks.”

  Rejoining his regiment, Chu Teh notified Fan Shih-sheng that he was withdrawing, whereupon Fan was said to have presented him with a gift of $50,000 to keep his good will, for the issue against Chiang Kai-shek was still not clearly decided, and free-lance allies like the young Communists, who had considerable influence on many of Fan’s officers and men, were not to be lightly spurned. But in the months ahead the money was to prove inadequate. The little army was now held together almost solely by loyalty to Chu Teh and a few of his commanders. Party affairs were in great confusion, no definite “line” had been establishe
d, and military strategy was undecided. Chu’s troops still wore Kuomintang uniforms, but they were in rags; many of them had no shoes; and poor food, or often no food at all, caused steady desertions. But some encouragement had been provided by the news of the Canton Commune, which had suggested a clear line of action. Chu Teh re-formed his army into three sections, calling it the “Peasant Column Army,” and moved to the Hunan-Kiangsi-Kwangtung border, where he united with some bandits led by a radical student, and began a program of tax abolition, redistribution of land, and confiscation of the property of the rich. Yih Chang hsien was occupied as a base, after a bloody struggle, and the young army eked out the winter on squash and political debates.

  Meanwhile Mao Tse-tung’s peasant army had marched ingloriously through Hunan, to come at last to sanctuary at Chingkangshan, on the southern Kiangsi-Hunan border, where, with the help of the bandit leaders Wang Tso and Yuan Wen-t’sai, they had occupied two surrounding counties and built up in the mountains a nearly impregnable base. To Chu Teh, not far away, the “Peasants’ and Workers’ Red Army” of Mao Tse-tung sent as delegate his brother, Mao Tse-min. He brought instructions from the Party to unite forces, and news of a definite program of partisan warfare, agrarian revolution, and the building of soviets. When in May, 1928, the two armies combined at Chingkangshan, they were in control of five counties, and had some 50,000 followers. Of these about 4,000 were armed with rifles, some 10,000 being equipped only with spears, swords, and hoes, while the rest were unarmed Party workers, propagandists, or families of the warriors, including a large number of children.

  Thus began the famous Chu-Mao combination which was to make history in South China for the next six years. Chu Teh’s ascension as a formidable military leader followed the same curve of growth as the soviets.

  At the First Soviet Congress, in 1931, Chu Teh was unanimously elected commander-in-chief of the Red Army. Within two years four army corps had been built up, with a firing power of some 50,000 rifles and hundreds of machine guns, mostly captured from enemy troops, and the soviets controlled vast areas of southern Kiangsi and parts of Hunan and Fukien. Intensified political training had begun, an arsenal had been erected, elementary social-revolutionary economic and political reforms were being realized throughout the soviets, Red Army uniforms were being turned out day and night to equip new partisans, and revolutionary morale was strengthening. In two years more the Red forces had been doubled.

  During these years in the South, Chu Teh was in overall military command of combined Red Armies in hundreds of skirmishes, through scores of major battles, and through the brunt of five great annihilation campaigns, in the last of which he faced an enemy with technical offensive power (including heavy artillery, aviation, and mechanized units) estimated at from eight to nine times greater than his own, and resources many, many times exceeding anything at his disposal. However his degree of success or failure is to be measured, it must be admitted that for tactical ingenuity, spectacular mobility, and richness of versatility in maneuver, he established beyond any doubt the formidable fighting power of revolutionized Chinese troops in partisan warfare. The great mistakes of the Red Army in the South were strategic, and for those the political leadership must be held chiefly responsible.

  Chu Teh’s devotion to his men was proverbial. Since assuming command of the army he had lived and dressed like the rank and file, had shared all their hardships, often going without shoes in the early days, living one whole winter on squash, another on yak meat, never complaining, rarely sick. He liked to wander through the camp, they said, sitting with the men and telling stories, or playing games with them. He played a good game of table tennis, and a “wistful” game of basketball. Any soldier in the army could bring his complaints directly to the commander-in-chief. Chu Teh took his hat off when he addressed his men. On the Long March he lent his horse to tired comrades, walking much of the way, seemingly tireless.

  Popular myths about Chu Teh were said to credit him with miraculous powers: the ability to see 100 li on all sides, the power to fly, and the mastery of Taoist magic, such as creating dust clouds before an enemy, or stirring a wind against them. Superstitious folk believed him invulnerable, for had not thousands of bullets and shells failed to destroy him? Others said he had the power of resurrection, for had not the Kuomintang repeatedly declared him dead, often giving minute details of the manner in which he expired? Millions knew the name Chu Teh in China, and to each it was a menace or a bright star of hope, according to his status in life, but to all it was a name imprinted on the pages of a decade of history.

  Part Eleven

  Back to Pao An

  1

  Casuals of the Road

  From Ninghsia I turned southward again into Kansu. In four or five days I was back in Holienwan, where I again saw Ts’ai Ch’ang and her husband, Li Fu-ch’un, and had another meal of French cooking with them, and met the young and pretty wife of Nieh Jung-chen, political commissar of the First Army Corps. She had but recently slipped into the soviet districts from the White world, and had now just returned from a visit to her husband, whom she had not seen for five years.

  I stayed three days in Holienwan with the supply commissariat, which was quartered in a big compound formerly owned by a Mohammedan grain merchant. Architecturally it was an interesting group of buildings of a generally Central Asian appearance, with flat heavy roofs, and deep Arabic windows set into walls at least four feet thick. As I led my horse into its spacious stables a tall white-bearded man, wearing a faded gray uniform, with a long leather apron that reached to the ground, stepped up and saluted his red-starred cap, while his sunburned face wreathed a toothless smile. He took charge of Ma Hung-kuei, my horse.

  How, I wondered, had this grandfather wandered into our boy-scout encampment? I stopped to ask, and forced a story from him. He was from Shansi, and had joined the Red Army during its expedition there. His name was Li, he was sixty-four, and he claimed the distinction of being the oldest Red warrior. Rather apologetically he explained that he was not at the front just then “because Commander Yang thinks I am more useful here at this horse work, and so I stay.”

  Li had been a pork seller in the town of Hung T’ung, Shansi, before he became a Red, and he roundly cursed “Model Governor” Yen Hsi-shan and the local officials and their ruinous taxes. “You can’t do business in Hung T’ung,” he said; “they tax a man’s excrement.” When old Li heard the Reds were coming he had decided to join them. His wife was dead, and his two daughters were both married; he had no sons; he had no ties at all in Hung T’ung except his overtaxed pork business; and Hung T’ung was a “dead-man” sort of place, anyway. He wanted something livelier, and so the adventurer had crept out of the city to offer himself to the Reds.

  “When I wanted to enlist they said to me, ‘You are old. In the Red Army life is hard.’ And what did I say? I said, ‘Yes, this body is sixty-four years old, it’s true, but I can walk like a boy of twenty, I can shoot a gun, I can do the work of any man. If it’s men you need, I can also serve.’ So they told me to come along, and I marched through Shansi with the Red Army, and I crossed the Yellow River with the Red Army, and here I am in Kansu.”

  I smiled and asked him whether it was any better than pork selling. Did he like it?

  “Oh-ho! Pork selling is a turtle man’s sort of business! Here is work worth doing. A poor man’s army fighting for the oppressed, isn’t it? Certainly I like it.” The old man fumbled in his breast pocket and brought forth a soiled cloth, which he carefully unwrapped to reveal a worn little notebook. “See here,” he said. “I already recognize over 200 characters. Every day the Red Army teaches me four more. In Shansi I lived for sixty-four years and yet nobody ever taught me to write my name. Is the Red Army good or isn’t it?” He pointed with intense pride to the crude scrawl of his characters that resembled the blots of muddy hen’s feet on clean matting, and falteringly he read off some newly inscribed phrases. And then, as a sort of climax, he produced a stub of pencil
and with an elaborate flourish he wrote his name for me.

  “I suppose you’re thinking of marrying again,” I joked with him. He shook his head gravely and said no, what with one defile-mother horse after another he had no time to think about the woman problem, and with that he ambled away to look after his beasts.

  Next evening, as I was walking through an orchard behind the courtyard, I met another Shansi man, twenty years Li’s junior, but just as interesting. I heard a hsiao-kuei calling out, “Li Pai T’ang! Li Pai T’ang!” and looked in curiosity to see whom he was addressing as the “House-of-Christian-Worship.”* There upon a little hill I found a barber shaving a youth’s head clean as an egg. Upon inquiry I discovered that his real name was Chia Ho-chung, and that he had formerly worked in the pharmacy of an American missionary hospital in P’ing Yang, Shansi. The “little devils” had given him this nickname because he was a Christian, and still said his prayers daily.

  Chia pulled up his trousers and showed me a bad wound on his leg, from which he still limped, and he yanked up his coat to display a wound on his belly, where he had also been hit. These, he explained, were souvenirs of battles, and that was why he was not at the front. This hair cutting wasn’t his real job at all: he was either a pharmacist or a Red warrior.

  Chia said that two other attendants in that Christian hospital had joined the Reds with him. Before leaving, they had discussed their intention with the American doctor in the hospital, whose Chinese name was Li Jen. Dr. Li Jen was “a good man, who healed the poor without charge and never oppressed people,” and when Chia and his companions asked his advice he had said, “Go ahead. I have heard that the Reds are good and honest men and not like the other armies, and you should be glad to fight with them.” So off they had gone to become red, red Robin Hoods.