Red Star over China (18 page)

“Every army has its own dramatic group,” Miss Wei continued, “as well as nearly every district. The actors are nearly all locally recruited. Most of our experienced players from the South have now become instructors.”

I met several Young Vanguards, veterans of the Long March, still in their early teens, who had charge of organizing and training children's dramatic societies in various villages.

“Peasants come from long distances to our Red dramatics,” Miss Wei proudly informed me. “Sometimes, when we are near the White borders, Kuomintang soldiers secretly send messages to ask our players to come to some market town in the border districts. When we do this, both Red soldiers and White leave their arms behind and go to this market place to watch our performance. But the higher officers of the Kuomintang never permit this, if they know about it, because once they have seen our players many of the Kuomintang soldiers will no longer fight our Red Army.”

What surprised me about these dramatic “clubs” was that, equipped with so little, they were able to meet a genuine social need. They had the scantest properties and costumes, yet with these primitive materials they managed to produce the authentic illusion of drama. The players received only their food and clothing and small living allowances, but they studied every day, like all Communists, and they believed themselves to be working for China and the Chinese people. They slept anywhere, cheerfully ate what was provided for them, walked long distances from village to village. From the standpoint of material comforts they were unquestionably the most miserably rewarded thespians on earth, yet I hadn't seen any who looked happier.

The Reds wrote nearly all their own plays and songs. Some were contributed by versatile officials, but most of them were prepared by story writers and artists in the propaganda department. Several Red dramatic skits were written by Ch'eng Fang-wu, a well-known Hunanese author whose adherence to Soviet Kiangsi in 1933 had excited Shanghai. More recently Ting Ling,
^*
China's foremost woman author, had added her talent to the Red Theater.

There was no more powerful weapon of propaganda in the Communist
movement than the Reds' dramatic troupes, and none more subtly manipulated. By constant shifts of program, by almost daily changes of the “Living Newspaper” scenes, new military, political, economic, and social problems became the material of drama, and doubts and questionings were answered in a humorous, understandable way for the skeptical peasantry. When the Reds occupied new areas, it was the Red Theater that calmed the fears of the people, gave them rudimentary ideas of the Red program, and dispensed great quantities of revolutionary thoughts, to win the people's confidence. During the Reds' 1935 Shansi expedition, for example, hundreds of peasants heard about the Red players with the army, and flocked to see them.

The whole thing was “propaganda in art” carried to the ultimate degree, and plenty of people would say, “Why drag art into it?” Yet in its broadest meaning it was art, for it conveyed for its spectators the illusions of life, and if it was a naive art it was because the living material with which it was made and the living men to whom it appealed were in their approach to life's problems also naive. For the masses of China there was no fine partition between art and propaganda. There was only a distinction between what was understandable in human experience and what was not.

One could think of the whole history of the Communist movement in China as a grand propaganda tour, and the defense, not so much of the absolute Tightness of certain ideas, perhaps, as of their right to exist. I was not sure that they might not prove to be the most permanent service of the Reds, even if they were in the end defeated and broken. For millions of young peasants who had heard the Marxist gospel preached by those beardless youths, thousands of whom were now dead, the old exorcisms of Chinese culture would never again be quite as effective. Wherever in their incredible migrations destiny had moved these Reds, they had vigorously demanded deep social changes—for which the peasants could have learned to hope in no other way—and they had brought new faith in action to the poor and the oppressed.

However badly they had erred at times, however tragic had been their excesses, however exaggerated had been the emphasis here or the stress there, it had been their sincere and sharply felt propagandist aim to shake, to arouse, the millions of rural China to their responsibilities in society; to awaken them to a belief in human rights, to combat the timidity, passiveness, and static faiths of Taoism and Confucianism, to educate, to persuade, and, no doubt, at times to beleaguer and coerce them to fight for “the reign of the people”—a new vision in rural China—to fight for a life of justice, equality, freedom, and human dignity, as the Communists saw it. Far more than all the pious but meaningless resolutions passed at Nanking, this growing pressure from a peasantry gradually standing erect
in a state of consciousness, after two millenniums of sleep, could force the realization of a vast mutation over the land.
²

What this “communism” amounted to in a way was that, for the first time in history, thousands of educated youths, stirred to great dreams themselves by a universe of scientific knowledge to which they were suddenly given access, “returned to the people,” went to the deep soil-base of their country, to “reveal” some of their new-won learning to the intellectually sterile countryside, the dark-living peasantry, and sought to enlist its alliance in building a “more abundant life.” Fired by the belief that a better world could be made, and that only they could make it, they carried their formula—the ideal of the commune—back to the people for sanction and support. And to a startling degree they seemed to be winning it. They had brought to millions, by propaganda and by action, a new conception of the state, society, and the individual.

I often had a queer feeling among the Reds that I was in the midst of a host of schoolboys, engaged in a life of violence because some strange design of history had made this seem infinitely more important to them than football games, textbooks, love, or the main concerns of youth in other countries. At times I could scarcely believe that it had been only this determined aggregation of youth, equipped with an Idea, that had directed a mass struggle for ten years against all the armies of Nanking. How had the incredible brotherhood arisen, banded together, held together, and whence came its strength? And why had it perhaps, after all, failed to mature, why did it still seem fundamentally like a mighty demonstration, like a crusade of youth? How could one ever make it plausible to those who had seen nothing of it?

Then Mao Tse-tung began to tell me something about his personal history, and as I wrote it down, night after night, I realized that this was not only his story but an explanation of how communism grew—a variety of it real and indigenous to China—and why it had won the adherence and support of thousands of young men and women. It was a story that I was to hear later on, with rich variations, in the life stories of many other Red leaders. It was a story people would want to read, I thought.

On the five or six sets of questions I had submitted on different matters, Mao had talked for a dozen nights, hardly ever referring to himself or his own role in some of the events described. I was beginning to think it was hopeless to expect him to give me such details: he obviously considered the individual of very little importance. Like other Reds I met he tended to talk only about committees, organizations, armies, resolutions, battles, tactics, “measures,” and so on, and seldom of personal experience.

For a while I thought this reluctance to expand on subjective matters, or even the exploits of their comrades as individuals, might derive from modesty, or a fear or suspicion of me, or a consciousness of the price so many of these men had on their heads. Later on I discovered that that was not so much the case as it was that most of them actually did not remember personal details. As I began collecting biographies I found repeatedly that the Communist would be able to tell everything that had happened in his early youth, but once he had become identified with the Red Army he lost himself somewhere, and without repeated questioning one could hear nothing more about
him,
but only stories of the Army, or the Soviets, or the Party—capitalized. These men could talk indefinitely about dates and circumstances of battles, and movements to and from a thousand unheard-of places, but those events seemed to have had significance for them only collectively, not because they as individuals had made history there, but because the Red Army had been there, and behind it the whole organic force of an ideology for which they were fighting. It was an interesting discovery, but it made difficult reporting.

One night when all other questions had been satisfied, Mao turned to the list I had headed “Personal History.” He smiled at a question, “How many times have you been married?”—and the rumor later spread that I had asked Mao how many wives he had. He was skeptical, anyway, about the necessity for supplying an autobiography. But I argued that in a way that was more important than information on other matters. “People want to know what sort of man you are,” I said, “when they read what you say. Then you ought also to correct some of the false rumors circulated.”

I reminded him of various reports of his death, how some people believed he spoke fluent French, while others said he was an ignorant peasant, how one report described him as a half-dead tubercular, while others maintained that he was a mad fanatic. He seemed mildly surprised that people should spend their time speculating about him. He agreed that such reports ought to be corrected. Then he looked over the items again, as I had written them down.

“Suppose,” he said at last, “that I just disregard your questions, and instead give you a general sketch of my life? I think it will be more understandable, and in the end all of your questions will be answered just the same.”

During the nightly interviews that followed—we were like conspirators indeed, huddled in that cave over the red-covered table, with sputtering candles between us—I wrote until I was ready to fall asleep. Wu Liang-p'ing sat next to me and interpreted Mao's soft southern dialect, in which a chicken, instead of being a good substantial northern
chi,
became a romantic
ghii,
and
Hunan
became
Funan
, and a bowl of
ch'a
turned into
ts'a,
and many much stranger variations occurred. Mao related everything from memory, and I put it down as he talked. It was, as I have said, retranslated and corrected, and this is the result, with no attempt to give it literary excellence, beyond some necessary corrections in the syntax of the patient Mr. Wu:

“I was born in the village of Shao Shan, in Hsiang T'an
hsien
^*
Hunan province, in 1893.
¹
My father's name was Mao Jen-sheng [Mao Shun-sheng], and my mother's maiden name was Wen Ch'i-mei.

“My father was a poor peasant and while still young was obliged to join the army because of heavy debts. He was a soldier for many years. Later on he returned to the village where I was born, and by saving carefully and gathering together a little money through small trading and other enterprise he managed to buy back his land.

“As middle peasants then my family owned fifteen
mou
^†
of land. On
this they could raise sixty
tan
^*
of rice a year. The five members of the family consumed a total of thirty-five
tan
—that is, about seven each—which left an annual surplus of twenty-five
tan.
Using this surplus, my father accumulated a little capital and in time purchased seven more
mou
, which gave the family the status of ‘rich' peasants. We could then raise eighty-four
tan
of rice a year.

“When I was ten years of age and the family owned only fifteen
mou
of land, the five members of the family consisted of my father, mother, grandfather, younger brother, and myself. After we had acquired the additional seven
mou
, my grandfather died, but there came another younger brother. However, we still had a surplus of forty-nine
tan
of rice each year, and on this my father steadily prospered.

“At the time my father was a middle peasant he began to deal in grain transport and selling, by which he made a little money. After he became a ‘rich' peasant, he devoted most of his time to that business. He hired a full-time farm laborer, and put his children to work on the farm, as well as his wife. I began to work at farming tasks when I was six years old. My father had no shop for his business. He simply purchased grain from the poor farmers and then transported it to the city merchants, where he got a higher price. In the winter, when the rice was being ground, he hired an extra laborer to work on the farm, so that at that time there were seven mouths to feed. My family ate frugally, but had enough always.

“I began studying in a local primary school when I was eight and remained there until I was thirteen years old. In the early morning and at night I worked on the farm. During the day I read the Confucian Analects and the Four Classics. My Chinese teacher belonged to the stern-treatment school. He was harsh and severe, frequently beating his students. Because of that I ran away from the school when I was ten. I was afraid to return home for fear of receiving a beating there, and set out in the general direction of the city, which I believed to be in a valley somewhere. I wandered for three days before I was finally found by my family. Then I learned that I had circled round and round in my travels, and in all my walking had got only about eight
li
^†
from my home.