Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  The first partisan regime entirely inside occupied territory was set up in the mountains of northeastern Shansi, east of the Yellow River, and included areas as far north as Jehol, or Inner Mongolia. Another regime, with its capital in southeast Shansi, directed operations in recovered territory which stretched for over 300 miles across southern Hopei and Shantung eastward to the Yellow Sea. There was a third border region centering in northern Kiangsu, north of Shanghai, which was controlled by the New Fourth Army, with nearly 100,000 troops. A fourth regional government was established in the mountainous country north of the Yangtze River above Hankow, where the borders of Anhui and Hupeh enclose the southern extremity of Honan.

  Political and military methods used to organize the people borrowed heavily from the pattern developed in the old soviet districts of north Shensi. After the Soviet Government was abolished in 1937, a “Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Area Government” took its place and the town of Yenan, the so-called “mother of the Chinese partisans,” became its capital. I revisited Yenan in 1939, after the new government was established. It remained until 1944 the last trip made there by any foreign newspaper correspondent, for soon afterwards the region was cut off by the Kuomintang’s military blockade.

  On the other side of the Yellow River, behind Japanese lines, the organization of the social, political, and economic life was naturally more difficult than in Yenan, but in general the goals, if not always the degree of success achieved, were comparable. Although newspaper correspondents in Free China were not able to investigate the Shansi and Hopei areas, the various foreigners who escaped from the Japanese in Peking and made their way southward across the guerrilla territory gave fairly complete pictures of the system which prevailed. Among these observers was Professor William Band, of the famous American missionary institution, Yenching University, whom I knew when I lectured there in 1934–35. Another was Professor Michael Lindsay, also of Yenching, whose report of conditions there was published in Amerasia magazine in 1944.* The most comprehensive account of the partisan areas to reach the outside world for some time, it was released for publication by the author’s father, A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol College, Oxford.

  According to Professor Lindsay, the partisan governments were elected from candidates nominated directly by the people and their organizations. The Chinese partisans aimed to establish a united front of all groups and hence the Communist Party limited its own members to one-third of the total of any elected body. This peculiar policy was vigorously enforced, according to Lindsay. The purpose was to give representation in the government to both landowners (except absentee landlords) and merchants, but above all to develop political leaders among the poor peasants and workers. It was “education in democracy by practicing democracy,” according to the partisan leaders.

  In the mass organizations there were no limitations on Communist leadership, however; and these organizations were the guerrillas’ sinew and life. They included separate unions or associations for farmers, workers, youth, children, and women, and membership in each ran into the millions. Most important of all such organizations were the self-defense corps, the militia, and the Young Vanguards. These were crude but basic military organizations which locally supported the Eighteenth Group Army’s main forces.

  G. Martel Hall, former manager of the National City Bank in Peking; who was the last American to escape from the Japanese across the partisan areas, told me that there was simply no other way he could explain the success of the partisan leaders with the peasants, “except through their own incorruptibility and honesty, their energetic patriotism, their devotion to practical democracy, their faith in the common people, and the continuous effort they made to arouse them to action and responsibility.”

  Mutual hatred of the Japanese provided the atmosphere in which these zealots exploited the people’s patriotism, but side by side with political reforms went economic and social changes. In the case of women the enforcement of laws like monogamy, freedom of marriage at the age of consent, free education, and suffrage at the age of eighteen won a surprising response. Professor Lindsay said there were over 3,000,000 members of the women’s organizations in the partisan areas. Many women had been elected to village and town councils and large numbers of young girls carried serious political and military responsibilities.

  The primary school system operated widely in all the “permanent” guerrilla bases and education was free and compulsory in theory if, because of poverty, seldom attainable in fact. Yet in a few places as high as 80 per cent of the younger children of school age were literate. The basic reform was a drastic reduction in land rent. Land of absentee landlords was tilled in common; the aim was to cultivate all cultivable land. Taxes were collected mainly in grain, and were kept at about 10 per cent of those demanded by the Japanese. Consumer, marketing and industrial cooperatives were widespread. Lindsay stated that there were over 4,000 cooperatives in Shansi and 5,000 in central Hopei alone.

  Unimaginable hardships accompanied partisan organization at every step.* While it is true the Japanese failed to destroy the partisan forces, or to stop their increase, they carried out literally thousands of large- and small-scale punitive expeditions against them. They looted and burned thousands of villages, raped the womenfolk and slaughtered countless civilians, in a terror aimed to wipe out all thought of resistance. The guerrillas always found ways to overcome the demoralizing effects of these tactics, but not without sacrifices as bitter as any endured in Russia. It was true that the Japanese were still unable to control any village much beyond the range of their garrisons along North China’s railways and roads, but it was also true that their fortified points had greatly increased and could now be seized only at a heavy cost.

  So much for background. How did all this affect American plans to defeat Japan through China?

  “After all, you saved the Kuomintang,” a Chinese intellectual in Chungking said to me when I returned to China (1942’43) as a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post. “It is your baby now and you cannot avoid responsibility for its actions.”

  He meant simply that American money, arms, and economic aid were given to the Kuomintang authorities, without any conditions concerning policies pursued inside China. American government representatives had several times made it clear to Chungking that we would disapprove of a renewal of civil strife during the joint war against Japan, but Americans had not gone beyond that nor sought to have the blockade lifted against the partisan areas.

  Chungking established its blockade against the Eighteenth Group Army when Kuomintang party leaders became increasingly alarmed by the Communists’ success in recovering control of areas behind the Japanese lines. The Generalissimo described their activity as “illegal occupation of the national territory.” The Kuomintang’s War Areas Political and Party Affairs Commission took the position that all the guerrilla administrations were “illegal” and should be abolished to await the re-establishment of the Kuomintang system.

  In 1940 some Kuomintang troops engaged the rear echelon of the New Fourth Army while it was moving from its base south of the Yangtze River, near Shanghai, to an area entirely behind the Japanese lines to which it was assigned by the Generalissimo. It was apparently a surprise attack and the partisans were reportedly outnumbered eight to one. The little detachment of about 4,000 was not a combat unit and it was easily encircled and destroyed. General Yeh T’ing, the commander of the New Fourth Army (who was himself not a Communist), was wounded and taken prisoner, and General Han Ying, the field commander, was killed together with many of his staff, some doctors and nurses of the medical battalions, a number of convalescent wounded soldiers, some cadets, men and women students, and some industrial cooperative workers attached to the army.

  The incident failed to liquidate the New Fourth Army, whose main forces were already north of the Yangtze River, engaging Japanese troops there, but it was the effective end of Nationalist-Communist collaboration in the field and the beginning of an open
struggle for leadership in the joint war against Japan. The Generalissimo ruled that the incident was caused by the New Fourth’s “insubordination” and thenceforth withdrew all aid not only from that army but also from the Eighth Route.

  For some months previous to the tragedy no part of the Eighteenth Group Army had been paid. From this time on they not only received no pay or ammunition but were blockaded by a ring of strong government forces from access to supplies in Free China, which they might have purchased or received as gifts from the people. Ironically enough, the Kuomintang troops enforcing this blockade were largely supplied by Soviet Russia. There were two group armies (the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth) engaged exclusively in the blockading enterprise. American officers in 1942 suggested that they were needed in the campaign to recover Burma, but Chungking considered their “policing role” in the Northwest of greater importance and there they remained.

  All such facts were known to Americans in China, but probably few at home realized that our lend-lease aid went exclusively to the Kuomintang authorities. We maintained no consular representation in Yenan and no military liaison with the partisans.* All our supplies flown over the Hump into China—modern bombers and fighters, artillery, transport, and ammunition—supported only the one party, of course. Financial aid sent to China by the C.I.O., A.F.L., and Railway Brotherhoods also went exclusively to Kuomintang groups.

  What could be done about this “internal affair” of China? Our new treaty with China (1943) renounced extraterritoriality rights and restored full sovereignty to the Chinese Government. Could we now tell the present government how to run its business without being branded neoimperial-ists? But inevitably the war had already caused us to intervene in support of the Kuomintang, in terms of economic and military aid. Was it not merely playing ostrich to pretend that our future economic help to China did not carry implicit political responsibilities of the gravest kind?

  Once Japan was defeated, would Chiang Kai-shek then destroy the Communists and their partisan allies? The Kuomintang spent ten fruitless years in the attempt before 1937. Even with the use of American bombers and fighters on his side, the Generalissimo was not likely to secure greater success than the Japanese had had against these experienced guerrilla warriors. It had become a physical impossibility for the Chungking Government to destroy this opposition in anything short of a long and bloody war, fully backed by Allied troops.

  By the summer of 1944 it had thus become manifest that the tiny band of youths who raised the Red flag on the lonely mountain of Chingkangshan far back in 1928 had launched a demonstration which evolved into a crusade which finally rose to the stature of a national movement of such scope that no arbiters of China’s destiny could much longer deny its claims to speak for vast multitudes of people.

  Notes to the 1968 Edition

  Part One: In Search of Red China

  Chapter 1: Some Unanswered Questions

  1. Written in invisible ink, the letter was given to me by Hsu Ping, then a professor at Tungpei University. In 1966, as for some years earlier, Hsu Ping was deputy secretary of the United Front Department of the CCP CC. In 1960, K’e Cheng-shih, then mayor of Shanghai, told me he had written the letter, which was authorized by Liu Shao-ch’i. (K’e died in 1965.) Liu Shao-ch’i was chief of the underground North China Bureau of the CC, and his first deputy was P’eng Chen. Others in his branch CC included Hsu Ping, Po I-po, Ch’en Po-ta, Hsiang Ching, Huang Hua, and Yao I-lin. See Biographical Notes—hereafter BN—pages 451–511. Abbreviations are given on page 441.

  Chapter 2: Slow Train to “Western Peace”

  1. T’ai Chi-tao and Shao Li-tzu were Marxist-oriented members of the Kuomintang who formed a Communist study-group nucleus in Shanghai with Ch’en Tu-hsiu in 1920. Neither man joined the organization of the first CC in July, 1921. During the Second Civil War (1946’49), Shao Li-tzu supported the Communists against Chiang Kai-shek, and helped form the People’s Republic of China. In 1967 he still held a seat in the NPC. See BN.

  Chapter 3: Some Han Bronzes

  1. A genuine pastor, he was Wang Hua-jen, a member of the national executive committee of the Chinese Red Cross.

  Part Two: The Road to the Red Capital

  Chapter 2: The Insurrectionist

  1. This account, based on an interview with Chou En-lai and his comrades, was quite incomplete, but in 1936 it was fresh news to the outside world. Kyo Gizors, hero of La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate) by Andre Malraux, was said to have been based on Chou En-lai’s role in this period. “Things happened quite otherwise,” according to Chou. See BN.

  2. Concerning such “old and patriotic gentlemen,” see Benjamin Schwartz’s penetrating study, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, 1964).

  3. Other sources give lower estimates. For example, Harold Isaacs mentions 400 to 500 killed. (Mao Tse-tung told me in 1960 that Chiang Kai-shek’s sudden “purge” in Shanghai and other centers, which caught the Party unprepared, killed about 40,000 members.) Isaacs holds Stalin and the CMT largely responsible for the Shanghai deaths, since they refused to break with the KMT even after Chiang’s men had begun killing Communists prior to the “Shanghai Massacre.” See Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, pp. 165–185.

  Chapter 3: Something About Ho Lung

  1. Inaccuracies in this colorful version of Ho Lung’s life notwithstanding, it does parallel the main facts, and seems worth preserving as a contemporary firsthand impression by a comrade-in-arms. See BN.

  Part Three: In “Defended Peace” Chapter 1: Soviet Strong Man

  1. Properly Li T’eh, or Li T’e, according to Wade, but throughout the text Otto Braun’s Chinese nom de guerre is transliterated as Braun himself wrote it. See BN.

  2. The remarkable Ma Hai-teh. See BN.

  3. Not including a family-arranged betrothal, which Mao ignored. In 1937 Ho Tzu-ch’en and Mao were divorced and in 1939 Mao married Chiang Ch’ing (Lan P’ing). See BN.

  Chapter 2: Basic Communist Policies

  1. From Democracy, Peking, May 15, 1937, a brief-lived English-language anti-imperialist and anti-Nazi publication, edited by John Leaning. Among its associate editors (besides myself) were J. Leighton Stuart, president of Yen-ching University and later U.S. Ambassador to Nationalist China, and Soong Ch’ing-ling.

  2. See The Agrarian Reform Law of the People’s Republic of China (Peking, 1952), and Ch’en Po-ta, A Study of Land Rent in Pre-Liberation China. Communist figures on tenancy have been questioned by J. Lossing Buck and other foreign agriculturalists. See Bibliography. For Ch’en Po-ta, see also BN.

  3. Part of this paragraph has been revised from my original text in order to include facts not fully known to me in 1937. The CCP until 1935 aimed at a complete overthrow of Kuomintang leadership and held that a “united front from below” could succeed only under its leadership of the masses against both the Kuomintang and the imperialists. The CC changed its policy at the Tsunyi Conference in January, 1935, when Mao Tse-tung proposed a united front to include all anti-Japanese elements (with Chiang Kai-shek and the right-wing KMT still excluded, however) and sought approval of that line from the CMT. In August, 1935, the CEC of the CMT adopted an anti-Fascist international-united-front line reconcilable with the Tsunyi decisions and going beyond them to include the national bourgeoisie. On that line the CCP built its united-front proposals of 1936. See Part Four, Chapter 6, note 3, and Wang Ming, BN.

  Chapter 3: On War with Japan

  1. Mao’s strategic views set forth here paraphrased his report to Party activists at Wayapao, in north Shensi, immediately following an important Politburo meeting held there, December, 1935, and formed the embryo of his later works, “Problems of Strategy in the Guerrilla War Against Japan,” “Problems of War and Strategy,” and “On Protracted War.” See Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung. These concepts, followed throughout the war against Japan, outline a general strategy of “people’s war” which Mao later held valid against American ar
med expansion in Asia.

  2. Since Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang had always placed Taiwan among “lost territories” to be brought back under China’s sovereignty, it seems hardly likely that Mao intended to concede future “independence” there. The CCP had never officially done so.

  Chapter 5: Red Theater

  1. The “decadent” and “meaningless” Chinese opera died hard. Thirty years later the GPCR drafted opera stars wholesale to produce modern plays in forms which would “serve the people” by dramatizing revolution and the Thought of Mao Tse-tung, and which were not susceptible to undesirable historical analogies. The Red Lantern, a play of the 1960’s popularized during the GPCR, was in content basically the same play as Invasion, of 1936—lacking only the comic relief of the marauding goats. (See Chiang Ch’ing, BN.)

  2. In his speech at the inception of the CPR (October, 1949) Mao Tse-tung declared, “China has at last stood up.”

  Part Four: Genesis of a Communist

  Chapter 1: Childhood

  1. Mao did not mention the day of his birth, later reported as December 26. In 1949 Mao called upon the CC to ban the naming of provinces, streets, and enterprises after leaders and to forbid the celebration of their birthdays. See Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking, 1961), IV, 38.

  Chapter 2: Days in Changsha

  1. Mao was nineteen when he entered First Teachers’ Training School, which was for scholarship students only, who were expected to become primary-school teachers. “Humanism was the guiding principle, with emphasis on moral conduct, physical culture, and social activities. The First Teachers’ Training School was the only Western-style building in Changsha. … ‘I have never been to a university,’ Mao recalled, ‘nor have I studied abroad. The groundwork of my knowledge and scholarship was laid at the First Teachers’ Training School, which was a good school’” (Jerome Ch’en, Mao and the Chinese Revolution, p. 32).