Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  By January, 1931, Mif had (with Stalin’s support) established Wang Ming in practical leadership of the CCP PB. In June, 1931, Hsiang Chung-fa’s address was betrayed to KMT police by Ku Shun-chang, a Li Li-san sympathizer. Hsiang was executed in Shanghai. According to KMT police, the PB had Ku Shun-chang’s entire family assassinated. Wang Ming then replaced Hsiang as general secretary in a PB which included Po Ku, Chou En-lai, Lo Fu, Han Ying, Liu Shao-ch’i, Lo Man, Meng Ch’ing-shu (Mme. Wang Ming), and Jen Pi-shih. (Mao was now a member of a CC branch or “Central Bureau” in Kiangsi.) Mif returned to Moscow, to remain in charge of the Chinese section of the CMT. Again the CMT line tended to harness the rural soviets to schemes of seizure of power by the urban proletariat. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (September, 1931), Wang Ming and his wife were recalled to help Mif in Moscow and Po Ku became PB general secretary. The PB now sent Chou En-lai, Chang Kuo-t’ao, Jen Pi-shih, and other members into various rural soviets north and south of the Yangtze, to enforce its directives. In the sanctuary of the foreign-ruled International Settlement of Shanghai, Po Ku maintained underground PB headquarters and sent directives to the 1931 All-Soviet Congress in Kiangsi, which he was unable to attend.

  Hunted by the Shanghai police, who cut off sources of funds from Russia, Po Ku and Lo Fu finally moved the PB headquarters to Soviet Kiangsi late in 1932. They were reinforced by the arrival of a new CMT delegate, Otto Braun, known in China as Li Teh, a German with some military experience. Serious differences which had long divided the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks” from Mao Tse-tung, chairman of the All-Soviet Government, chief commissar of the Red Army, and also a member of the PB, now erupted in a definitive struggle.

  Chou En-lai became commissar general of the Red Army, but as Party general secretary it was Po Ku who matched forces with Mao for overall political leadership. Po Ku, junior to Mao by sixteen years, had never been in battle before he entered Soviet Kiangsi late in 1932, he told me, but he was armed with years of study of theory, dogma, and training in the use of Party control machinery. He also had solid CMT backing, with Li Teh at his side and Wang Ming, in Moscow, sitting in the shadow of Stalin. Strong in practical experience and popular support in the soviets and the armed forces, Mao lacked Po Ku’s fluency in the scripture and techniques of CMT in-fighting, and had to tread warily to avoid open defiance of Moscow.

  Invoking the prestige of the CMT and the “expert” military knowledge of Li Teh (who spoke no Chinese and voiced his views through Po Ku, as interpreter), Po Ku undermined the authority of both Chu Teh and Mao Tse-tung. By late 1933 Mao Tse-tung was excluded from PB policy making. In the defeated opposition, Mao was assigned the task of organizing the economy to meet Nationalist offensives (see SW, I, 129–137). While Chiang Kai-shek was diverted by provincial warlord rebellions, the Red Army expanded and the new PB strategy seemed successful. A debate over whether the Red Army should implement an alliance with the Nationalist Nineteenth Route Army during the Fukien Rebellion was closed out when the PB ruled against active collaboration even with anti-Japanese “bourgeois” armies and continued an uncompromising do-it-alone line, later denounced as left-deviationist.

  Partly for his opposition to the latter policy, Mao was in 1934 also dropped from the all-powerful revolutionary military council, which included Chou En-lai, Po Ku, Li Teh, Lo Fu, Yeh Chien-ying, and Chu Teh. But Chu Teh was now subordinate to Chou En-lai as general commissar of the Red Army. Mao was suspended from the PB and may have been put under surveillance by the newly organized security police (modeled after Stalin’s) headed by Teng Fa.

  In those circumstances Chiang Kai-shek launched his well-prepared Fifth Extermination Campaign which ended in the defeat of the Red Army and the dissolution of Soviet Kiangsi. Mao blamed the catastrophe on the Party’s failure to support the Fukien rebels (1933) and its reliance on positional warfare against Chiang, instead of following his tried and tested guerrilla strategy (as laid down at the Maoping Conferences) of “luring the enemy in deep” and declining major battles except with overwhelming superiority. Pro-Maoist commanders, resentful and distrustful of the seizure of power by the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks,” and “obedient in word, disobedient in action,” may well have sabotaged the fine German battle plans of Li Teh, as he implied in remarks made to me in Pao An in 1936.

  By October, 1934, the Red Army was hemmed into an area confined to six Kiangsi counties and was forced to evacuate its capital, Juichin. Li Teh, Chou En-lai, and Yeh Chien-ying drew up a plan of retreat; their first objective was to join Ho Lung’s forces in Hunan. That plan was thwarted, with heavy losses, and the Reds then turned their columns into weakly defended Kweichow province, where they won a two months’ breathing spell. After they captured Tsunyi, the summer capital, an emergency meeting was demanded by Mao Tse-tung, backed by a majority of the political and military officers of regimental units or higher. At an enlarged conference of officers and PB and CC members, Mao Tse-tung delivered a critique of the leadership which won him majority support. Mao was elected chairman of a new Party revolutionary military council (also termed military affairs committee), with Chou En-lai and Yeh Chien-ying retained. Chu Teh was confirmed field commander of the Red Army. Po Ku remained in the CC PB but was replaced by Lo Fu as general secretary. The office no longer carried the leadership, however; both military and political supreme command were now conceded to the Chu-hsi— “Chairman” Mao. At Tsunyi the historic decisions were taken for the Long March to the Northwest.

  Li Teh made the Long March as a guest adviser, but no longer invoked his CMT authority. In 1936, in Pao An, he told me that “the Chinese after all understand their revolution better than any foreigner could.” Ch’en Yun was sent from Tsunyi to report decisions taken there to the Party in East China (headed by Liu Shao-ch’i?) and to Moscow. After Ch’en Yun’s arrival in Moscow a meeting of the CMT elected Mao Tse-tung to the Central Executive Committee for the first time. Wang Ming continued as a resident delegate there in the CMT but Ch’en Yun was Mao’s spokesman. Mao had won vindication and Stalin’s practical recognition.

  Moscow made no further attempts to intervene directly in Chinese Party affairs—with one exception. That was in December, 1936, during the Sian Incident, when Stalin cabled a threat, via Shanghai, to cut off all connections with the CCP unless it insisted upon Chiang Kai-shek’s release, unharmed, from his captivity by Chang Hsueh-liang in Sian. (See RNORC pp. 1–5.)

  Except for details based on the author’s personal knowledge, the foregoing condensation of extremely complicated history may be filled out and documented by consulting basic research works listed in the Bibliography, especially Benjamin Schwartz’s brilliant pioneer study, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, and John E. Rue’s recent and remarkably thorough interpretation, Mao Tse-tung in Opposition: 1927–35. The CCP’s official version of the period is largely contained in Mao’s 1945 report to the Seventh Congress entitled “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party” (SW, III, 177) and a few other references (SW, I, pp. 114 and 153); and in Hu Chiao-mu’s Thirty Years of the Chinese Communist Party. Wang Ming’s The Two Lines (Moscow, 1932, and Yenan, 1940) contains the main theses of the revolution as advocated and practiced by the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks.”

  4. Here, if not before, see note 3, above.

  5. The possibility of a move to the Northwest was undoubtedly debated at this time, but it was not until the Tsunyi Conference that decisions were taken to move there. See note 3, above.

  6. Such an offer was made and yet it was not implicated in the case of the Nineteenth Route Army, for reasons mentioned in note 3, above.

  7. Mao subsequently published his own close analysis of the tactical and strategic problems of all the Kiangsi campaigns. See SW, Vol. I, and Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung. Communist analyses offered for both victories and defeats during the Kiangsi campaigns never adequately conceded the general strategic handicaps imposed on Chiang Kai-shek by preoccupation with his national defense res
ponsibilities during Japan’s invasion of Manchuria (1931), attack on Shanghai (1932), and military attrition in North China (1933), as well as with the warlords’ war of 1930. For Chiang’s estimate of the importance of such factors, see his Soviet Russia in China, pp. 62–64.

  Part Five: The Long March

  1. This was the first detailed account of the Long March to be published, and was based largely on eyewitness testimony of many participants (reflecting their heroic view of the retreat), as gathered in direct personal interviews. Official and nonofficial versions of the epic have since become available (see Bibliography). The Long March became ever more glorified in Communist propaganda, so that it may be years before fact can entirely be separated from fiction. It is now evident that the plan of retreat was largely improvised until the armies reached Tsunyi, where Mao apparently won approval for his “destination Shensi” concept which became the Long March. By the 1960’s Peking’s new Museum of the Revolution devoted a whole floor to historical relics, montages, and recapitulations of the Long March. The display included a very large electrically illuminated and animated map showing the route of the heroes. Every fifteen minutes a young girl, her hair in a pony tail, picked up a pointer and began to recite a stage-by-stage account of the adventure to ever waiting crowds, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, gathered below her. One of the features of the museum was a motion film made by the author of the arrival of the survivors in Kansu, the only one of the March.

  Chapter 1: The Fifth Campaign

  1. See especially Yang Chien’s The Communist Situation in China, published in Nanking under the auspices of the Kuomintang-sponsored Academy of Sciences. Yang’s report concedes the Communist reforms mentioned, as part of an analysis of Red successes among the poor peasants. For a recapitulation of “Red terror” charges see Chiang Kai-shek’s Soviet Russia in China. Mao Tse-tung’s Report on an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan describes activities carried out by Communist-led peasants against “local bullies,” “bad gentry,” and “corrupt officials” for whom the “only effective” suppression was “to execute … at least some of those whose crimes and wrongdoings are most serious.” (SW, I, 38.)

  2. See note 1, above.

  3. Some very extensive interview material elicited in response to my questions to Wu Liang-p’ing, Hsu T’eh-li, Lo Fu, Chou Hsing, and others concerning matters of life, death, and taxes in Soviet Kiangsi was omitted from this book, for the reason stated—that I had no experience there on which to base a judgment—but was later published in RNORC.

  4. Smedley, The Great Road, p. 309.

  5. These Red remnants, after a rebirth as the New Fourth Army, developed into the very large force that crushed Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in Central China a decade later. See Ch’en Yi, BN.

  Chapter 2: A Nation Emigrates

  1. As far as I know, that “collective account” was never published.

  Chapter 4: Across the Great Grasslands. The dramatic duel between Mao Tse-tung and Chang Kuo-t’ao, to which brief reference was made here, was the last major challenge to Mao’s Party leadership for about three decades. In 1936 I had but fragmentary information concerning the nature of the split. Chang Kuo-t’ao later denied that Chu Teh stayed with him involuntarily. Among others who remained with Chang in Sikang was Li Ching-ch’uan (see BN). In 1960, when I asked Mao Tse-tung what was “the darkest moment of his life,” he said it was the struggle with Chang Kuo-t’ao, when the breakup of the Party and even civil war “hung in the balance.” See Chang Kuo-t’ao, Li Hsien-nien, T’ao Chu, BN. For details of the Mao-Chang struggle and Chang’s flight to KMT China, see RNORC.

  2. The following is partly based on a conversation with Chou En-lai at Pao An; diary record dated September 26, 1936:

  Chou says that the greater part of the Red Army losses took place in Szechuan, Kweichow, and Sikang. Losses due to actual fighting with the Kuomintang forces were less than those from fatigue, sickness, starvation, and attacks from tribesmen.

  About 90,000 armed men left Kiangsi with the main forces. Of these 45,000 had been “lost” by the time the Red Army crossed the Chin-sha River into Szechuan. Meanwhile Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien left the Oyuwan area in 1934, with between 50,000 and 60,000 troops. When he had been in Szechuan six months he increased his forces to more than 100,000. Late in 1935 Ho Lung left Hunan with about 40,000 troops. He reached Sikang with not more than 20,000, more likely 15,000.

  On the arrival of the three armies in Szechuan, therefore, the figures were roughly as follows:

  A total of 160,000 men, of whom more than half were (1935) under Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien and Chang Kuo-t’ao, while the Kiangsi-Hunan forces had lost 70,000 men en route (1934 and 1935).

  In 1935 the First Army Corps (First Front Army) arrived in Shen-pei with about 7,000 men. There it joined Liu Chih-tan’s force of about 10,000. Hsu Hai-tung also came up from Honan in 1935 with 3,000 troops left out of a starting force of 8,000. New enlistments in Shen-pei (north Shensi), Shansi, Kansu and Ninghsia resulted in approximately the following:

  Chou En-lai estimates the present strength of the Second Front and Fourth Front armies now en route to north Kansu, all the survivors from the winter in Sikang, as between 40,000 and 50,000.* What, then, has happened to the rest of the troops?

  FORCES ADDED IN NORTHWEST:

  The above figures would suggest a total combined loss in all Red armies over a period of a little less than two years of about 180,000 men. … My guess would be that the present* Red strength may not exceed 30,000 to 50,000 regulars, with no more than 30,000 rifles.

  Comment added in 1967:

  The peak strength (1934–35) of the three main armies was 230,000, consisting of the First Front Army, commanded by Chu Teh and Mao Tse-tung (90,000), the Second Front Army, commanded by Ho Lung and Hsiao K’e (40,000), and the Fourth Front Army, commanded by Chang Kuo-t’ao and Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien (100,000). Chu Teh’s army was divided at Moukung during the Mao-Chang dispute, after which Mao, P’eng Teh-huai, Chou En-lai and Lin Piao proceeded to Shensi where they arrived with only 7,000 men. A year later Ho Lung and Hsiao K’e reached Szechuan and met Chang Kuo-t’ao’s surviving forces. The two Front armies proceeded northward but not as a coordinated operation. Chu Teh, Ho Lung, and Hsiao K’e arrived at Kansu and were met by P’eng Teh-huai, when their combined regular forces probably were no more than 40,000. Meanwhile, Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, obeying Chang Kuo-t’ao’s orders, followed a different route with the intention of occupying northwestern Kansu and seizing the road to Sinkiang. Hsu’s army was trapped by KMT troops west of Sian, badly mauled, and split in half. The northern column, led by Li Hsien-nien and renamed the West Front Army, proceeded toward Sinkiang. Heavily attacked by Chinese Moslem troops with greatly superior numbers and arms, Li reached Urumchi with only 2,000 survivors. Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien and Chang Kuo-t’ao were cut off from their own remnant forces and arrived in Yenan sick and accompanied only by their personal bodyguards. Rupture of communications and coordination between Chang and Yenan, and then the split between Chang and Chu Teh and Ho Lung—and even some armed skirmishes between the two Party factions—had left the Fourth Front Army isolated and an easy prey. In brief, after my conversation with Chou En-lai, in September, 1936, Chang Kuo-t’ao’s once formidable army of “100,000” virtually disintegrated before his part of the Long March ended early in 1937.

  3. The “three armies” were the First, Second, and Fourth Front (see note 2, above). Mao later rewrote the poem, of which several translations now exist.

  Part: Six: Red Star in the Northwest

  Chapter 1: The Shensi Soviets: Beginnings

  1. Thirty years later Mark Selden published a detailed and absorbing study of the origins of the revolution in Shensi, based on extensive and newly unearthed research data, entitled, “The Guerrilla Movement in Northwest China,” China Quarterly, Nos. 28–29 (Oct.-Dec., 1966, Jan.-March, 1967).

  2. Mao Tse-tung gives a different version of this incident in his SW, Vol. I.


  Chapter 3: Soviet Society

  1. See Mao Tse-tung, “How to Differentiate the Classes in the Rural Areas,” SW, I, 137–139.

  Part Eight: With the Red Army

  Chapter 1: The “Real” Red Army

  1. Joseph W. Stilwell was in 1937 U.S. military attaché in China. He became commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the China-Burma-India theater during the Second World War. See The Stilwell Papers (New York, 1948).

  Part Nine: With the Red Army (Continued)

  Chapter 4: Moslem and Marxist

  1. “Feudal” and “backward” the ruling Ma family indeed was, as this report of three decades ago attests, but to conclude that the Communists easily convinced the Hui-min that they had nothing to fear in a future Socialist state would be greatly to minimize the troubles which lay ahead. Schisms among the Red troops themselves proved as serious as the quarrels then rife among the “three faiths” and the four Mas and their subjects. Such divisions led to serious Red defeats (see Chang Kuo-t’ao, Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien and Li Hsien-nien, BN). Not until the Liberation War were the Ma brothers finally driven from the Northwest.

  The Communists did keep their promises to create autonomous Mohammedan states in Ninghsia and Sinkiang, but religious leaders continued to resist communization. Behind their smoldering discontent, which broke out in sporadic revolts after formation of the CPR, was the Hui-min’s fear of loss of their grazing lands to Chinese farmers, and absorption such as overtook the Mongols of Inner Mongolia. The CCP policy toward minority nationalities was in many respects far more enlightened than anything pursued under the Kuomintang, but ancient quarrels between the Chinese and their frontier peoples were not to be settled in a generation or two. On their part, the Russians exploited signs of instability behind such Chinese frontiers after the breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations from 1960 onward.