Red Star over China (31 page)

Chang the Corpulent proceeded to collect evidence to prove that Liu Chih-tan had not followed the “Party line.” He “tried” Liu, and demanded his resignation from all posts. Liu Chih-tan did not put Mr. Chang against a wall as an interloper for presuming to criticize him, but retired from all active command and went, Achilles-like, to sulk in his cave in Pao An. Mr. Chang also ordered the arrest and imprisonment of more than a hundred other “reactionaries” in the Party and the army and quietly sat back, well satisfied with himself.

It was into this queer scene that the vanguard of the southern Reds, the First Army Corps, headed by Lin Piao, Chou En-lai, P'eng Teh-huai, and Mao Tse-tung, entered in October, 1935. According to my local informants in Pao An, Mao and his Politburo called for a re-examination of evidence, found most of it baseless, discovered that Chang Ching-fu had exceeded his orders and been misled by “reactionaries” himself. They reinstated Liu and all his confederates. Chang the Corpulent was himself arrested, tried, imprisoned for a term, and later given menial tasks to perform.

Thus it happened that when, early in 1936, the combined Red armies attempted their famous “anti-Japanese” expedition, crossed the river, and invaded neighboring Shansi, Liu Chih-tan was again in command. He distinguished himself in that remarkable campaign during which the Reds occupied over eighteen counties of the so-called “model province” in two months. He was fatally wounded in March, 1936, when he led a raiding party against an enemy fortification, the capture of which enabled the Red Army to cross the Yellow River. Liu Chih-tan was carried back to Shensi and died gazing upon the hills he had roamed and loved as a boy, and among the mountain people he had led along the road he believed in, the road of revolutionary struggle. He was buried at Wa Ya Pao, and the soviets renamed a county of their Red China after him—Chih-tan
hsien.

In Pao An I met his widow and his child, a beautiful little girl of six. The Reds had tailored her a special uniform; she wore an officer's belt, and a red star on her cap. She was the idol of everybody there. Young Liu carried herself like a field marshal and she was mightily proud of her “bandit” father.

But although Liu Chih-tan was the personality around which these soviets of the Northwest grew up, it was not Liu, but the conditions of life itself, which produced this convulsive movement of his people. And to understand whatever success they had had it was necessary not so much just now to look at what these men fought for, as to examine what they fought against.

During the great Northwest famine, which lasted roughly for three years and affected four huge provinces, I visited some of the drought-stricken areas in Suiyuan, on the edge of Mongolia, in June, 1929. How many people starved to death in those years I do not accurately know, and probably no one will ever know; it is forgotten now. A conservative semiofficial figure of 3,000,000 is often accepted, but I am not inclined to doubt other estimates ranging as high as 6,000,000.

This catastrophe passed hardly noticed in the Western world, and even in the coastal cities of China, but a few courageous Chinese and foreigners attached to the American-financed China International Famine Relief Commission—including its secretary, Dwight Edwards; O. J. Todd, the American engineer; and a wonderful American missionary doctor, Robert Ingram
^*
—risked their lives in those typhus-infested areas, trying to salvage some of the human wreckage. I spent some days with them, passing through cities of death, across a once-fertile countryside turned into desert wasteland, through a land of naked horror.

I was twenty-three. I had come to the East looking for the “glamor of the Orient,” searching for adventure. This excursion to Suiyuan had begun as something like that. But here for the first time in my life I came abruptly upon men who were dying because they had nothing to eat. In those hours of nightmare I spent in Suiyuan I saw thousands of men, women, and children starving to death before my eyes.

Have you ever seen a man—a good honest man who has worked
hard, a “law-abiding citizen,” doing no serious harm to anyone—when he has had no food for more than a month? It is a most agonizing sight. His dying flesh hangs from him in wrinkled folds; you can clearly see every bone in his body; his eyes stare out unseeing; and even if he is a youth of twenty he moves like an ancient crone, dragging himself from spot to spot. If he has been lucky he has long ago sold his wife and daughters. He has also sold everything he owns—the timber of his house itself, and most of his clothes. Sometimes he has, indeed, even sold the last rag of decency, and he sways there in the scorching sun, his testicles dangling from him like withered olive seeds—the last grim jest to remind you that this was once a man.

Children are even more pitiable, with their little skeletons bent over and misshapen, their crooked bones, their little arms like twigs, and their purpling bellies, filled with bark and sawdust, protruding like tumors. Women lie slumped in corners, waiting for death, their black blade-like buttocks protruding, their breasts hanging like collapsed sacks. But there are, after all, not many women and girls. Most of them have died or been sold.

Those were things I myself had seen and would never forget. Millions of people died that way in famine, and thousands more still died in China like that. I had seen fresh corpses on the streets of Saratsi, and in the villages I had seen shallow graves where victims of famine and disease were laid by the dozens. But these were not the most shocking things after all. The shocking thing was that in many of those towns there were still rich men, rice hoarders, wheat hoarders, moneylenders, and landlords, with armed guards to defend them, while they profiteered enormously. The shocking thing was that in the cities—where officials danced or played with sing-song girls—there were grain and food, and had been for months; that in Peking and Tientsin and elsewhere were thousands of tons of wheat and millet, collected (mostly by contributions from abroad) by the Famine Commission, but which could not be shipped to the starving. Why not? Because in the Northwest there were some militarists who wanted to hold all of their railroad rolling stock and would release none of it toward the east, while in the east there were other Kuomintang generals who would send no rolling stock westward—even to starving people—because they feared it would be seized by their rivals.

While famine raged the Commission decided to build a big canal (with American funds) to help flood some of the lands baked by drought. The officials gave them every cooperation—and promptly began to buy for a few cents an acre all the lands to be irrigated. A flock of vultures descended upon this benighted country and purchased from the starving
farmers thousands of acres for the taxes in arrears, or for a few coppers, and held it to await tenants and rainy days.

Yet the great majority of those people who died did so without any act of protest.

“Why don't they revolt?” I asked myself. “Why don't they march in a great army and attack the scoundrels who can tax them but cannot feed them, who can seize their lands but cannot repair an irrigation canal? Or why don't they sweep into the great cities and plunder the wealth of the rascals who buy their daughters and wives, the men who continue to gorge on thirty-six-course banquets while honest men starve? Why not?”

I was profoundly puzzled by their passivity. For a while I thought nothing would make a Chinese fight.

I was mistaken. The Chinese peasant was not passive; he was not a coward. He would fight when given a method, an organization, leadership, a workable program, hope—
and arms.
The development of “communism” in China had proved that. Against the above background, therefore, it should not surprise us to learn that Communists were popular in the Northwest, for conditions there had been no better for the mass of the peasantry than elsewhere in China.

Evidence to that effect had been vividly documented by Dr. A. Stampar,
^*
the distinguished health expert sent by the League of Nations as adviser to the Nanking Government. It was the best thing available on the subject. Dr. Stampar had toured the Kuomintang areas of Shensi and Kansu, and his reports were based on his own observations as well as official data opened for him.

He pointed out that “in the year 240
B.C.
an engineer called Cheng Kuo is said to have constructed a system for irrigating nearly a million acres” in the historic Wei Valley of Shensi, cradle of the Chinese race, but that “this system was neglected; the dams collapsed, and, though new works were from time to time carried out, the amount of territory irrigated at the end of the Manchu Dynasty (1912) was less than 20,000
mou”
—about 3,300 acres. Figures he obtained showed that during the great famine 62 per cent of the population died outright in one county of Shensi; in another, 75 per cent; and so on. Official estimates revealed that 2,000,000 people starved in Kansu alone—about 20 per cent of the population.

To quote from this Geneva investigator on conditions in the Northwest before the Reds arrived:

“In the famine of 1930 twenty acres of land could be purchased for three days' food supply. Making use of this opportunity, the wealthy
classes of the province [Shensi] built up large estates, and the number of owner-cultivators diminished. The following extract from the report for 1930 of Mr. Findlay Andrew of the China International Famine Relief Commission conveys a good impression of the situation in that year:

“‘… The external appearances of the Province have much improved on those of last year. Why? Because in this particular section of Kansu with which our work deals, death from starvation, pestilence, and sword have doomed during the past two years such large numbers of the population that the very demand for food has considerably lessened.'”

Much land had become waste, much had been concentrated in the hands of landlords and officials. Kansu especially had “surprisingly large” areas of cultivable but uncultivated land. “Land during the famine of 1928–1930 was bought at extremely cheap rates by landowners who, since that period, have realized fortunes by the execution of the Wei Pei Irrigation project” (a famine-relief measure financed by the Commission).

“In Shensi it is considered a mark of honor to pay no land tax, and wealthy landowners are therefore as a rule exempted. … A practice which is particularly undesirable is to claim arrears of taxes, for the period during which they were absent, from the farmers who abandoned their land during famines, the farmers being forbidden to resume possession until their arrears are paid.”

Dr. Stampar found that Shensi farmers (evidently excluding the landlords, who were “as a rule exempted”) had to pay land taxes and surtaxes amounting to about 45 per cent of their income, while other taxes “represent a further 20 per cent”; and “not only is taxation thus fantastically heavy, but its assessment appears to be haphazard and its manner of collection wasteful, brutal, and in many cases corrupt.”

As for Kansu, Dr. Stampar said:

“The revenues of Kansu have during the last five years averaged over eight millions … heavier taxation than in Chekiang, one of the richest and most heavily taxed provinces in China. It will be seen also that this revenue, especially in Kansu, is not drawn from one or two major sources, but from a multitude of taxes each yielding a small sum, scarcely any commodity or productive or commercial activity going untaxed. The amount which the population pays is even higher than is shown by the published figures. In the first place, the tax collectors are able to retain a share—in some cases a very large share—of the amounts collected. In the second place, to the taxes levied by the provincial or
hsien
governments must be added those imposed by military leaders, which in Kansu province are officially estimated at more than ten millions.
^*

“A further cause of expense to the population is the local militia
[min-t'uan]
which), formed originally for defense against the bandits, has in many instances degenerated into a gang living at the cost of the countryside.” Dr. Stampar quoted figures showing that the cost of supporting the
min-t'uan
ranged from 30 to 40 per cent of the total local government budget—this quite in addition, of course, to the burden of maintaining the big regular armies. These latter, according to Dr. Stampar, had absorbed over 60 per cent of the provincial revenues in both Kansu and Shensi.

A foreign missionary I met in Shensi told me that he had once personally followed a pig from owner to consumer, and in the process saw six different taxes being paid. Another missionary, of Kansu, described seeing peasants knock down the wooden walls of their houses (wood being expensive in the Northwest) and cart it to market to sell in order to pay tax collectors. He said that the attitude of even some of the “rich” peasants, while not friendly when the Reds first arrived, was one of indifference, and a belief that “no government could be worse than the old.”

And yet the Northwest was by no means a hopeless country economically. It was not overpopulated; much of its land was very rich; it could easily produce far more than it could consume; and with an improved irrigation system parts of it might become a “Chinese Ukraine.” Shensi and Kansu had abundant coal deposits. Shensi had oil. Dr. Stampar prophesied that “Shensi, especially the plain in the neighborhood of Sian, may itself become an industrial center of an importance second only to the Yangtze Valley, and needing for its service its own coal fields.” Mineral deposits of Kansu, Chinghai, and Sinkiang, said to be very rich, were scarcely touched. In gold alone, said Stampar, “the region may turn out to be a second Klondike.”

Here, surely, were conditions which seemed overripe for change. Here, surely, were things for men to fight against, even if they had nothing to fight
for
. And no wonder, when the Red Star appeared in the Northwest, thousands of men arose to welcome it as a symbol of hope and freedom.