Red Star over China (41 page)

“Praise” consisted of tributes to the courage, bravery, unselfishness, diligence, or other virtues of individuals or groups. In the black column comrades lashed into each other and their officers (by name) for such things as failure to keep a rifle clean, slackness in study, losing a hand grenade or bayonet, smoking on duty, “political backwardness,” “individualism,” “reactionary habits,” etc. On one black column I saw a cook criticized for his “half-done” millet; in another a cook denounced a man for “always complaining” about his productions.

Many people had been amused to hear about the Reds' passion for the English game of table tennis. It was bizarre, somehow, but every
Lenin Club had in its center a big ping-pong table, usually serving double duty as dining table. The Lenin clubs were turned into mess halls at chow time, but there were always four or five “bandits,” armed with bats, balls, and the net, urging the comrades to hurry it up; they wanted to get on with their game. Each company boasted a ping-pong champion, and I was no match for them.

Some of the Lenin clubs had record players confiscated from the homes of former officials or White officers. One night I was entertained with a concert on a captured American Victrola, described as a “gift” from General Kao Kuei-tzu, who was then in command of a Kuomintang army fighting the Reds on the Shensi-Suiyuan border. General Kao's records were all Chinese, with two exceptions, both French. One had on it “The Marseillaise” and “Tipperary.” The other was a French comic song. Both brought on storms of laughter from the astonished listeners, who understood not a word.

The Reds had many games of their own, and were constantly inventing new ones. One, called
Shih-tzu P'ai,
or “Know Characters Cards,” was a contest that helped illiterates learn their basic hieroglyphics. Another game was somewhat like poker, but the high cards were marked “Down with Japanese Imperialism,” “Down with the Landlords,” “Long Live the Revolution,” and “Long Live the Soviets.” Minor cards carried slogans that changed according to the political and military objectives. There were many group games. The Communist Youth League members were responsible for the programs of the Lenin clubs, and likewise led mass singing every day. Many of the songs were sung to Christian hymn tunes.

All these activities kept the mass of the soldiers fairly busy and fairly healthy. There were no camp followers or prostitutes with the Red troops I saw. Opium smoking was prohibited. I saw no opium or opium pipes with the Reds on the road, nor in any barracks I visited. Cigarette smoking was not forbidden except while on duty, but there was propaganda against it, and few Red soldiers seemed to smoke.

Such was the organized life of the regular Red soldiers behind the front. Not so very exciting, perhaps, but rather different from the propagandists' tales, from which one might have gathered that tha Reds' life consisted of wild orgies, entertainment by naked dancers, and rapine before and after meals. The truth seemed to be that a revolutionary army anywhere was always in danger of becoming too puritanical, rather than the contrary.

Some of the Reds' ideas had now been copied—with much better facilities for realizing them—by Chiang Kai-shek's crack “new army” and
his New Life movement. But one thing the White armies could not copy, the Reds claimed, was. their “revolutionary consciousness.” What this was like could best be seen at a political session of Red troops—where one could hear the firmly implanted credos that these youths fought and died for.

Finding myself with an idle afternoon, I went around to call on Liu Hsiao, a member of the Red Army political department, with offices in a guardhouse on the city wall of Yu Wang Pao.

By now it was obvious that the Red commanders were loyal Marxists, and were effectively under the guidance of the Communist Party, through its representatives in the political department of every unit of the army. Of course, Mr. Trotsky might have disputed whether they were good Marxists or bad Marxists, but the point was that they were conscious fighters for socialism, in their fashion; they knew what they wanted, and believed themselves to be part of a world movement.

Liu Hsiao was one of the most serious-minded young men I had met among the Reds, and one of the hardest-working. An intensely earnest youth of twenty-five, with an esthetic, intellectual face, he was extremely courteous, gentle, and inoffensive. I sensed an immense inner spiritual pride in him about his connection with the Red Army. He had a pure feeling of religious absolutism about communism, and I believed he would not have hesitated, on command, to shoot any number of “counterrevolutionaries” or “traitors.”

I had no right to break in on his day, but I knew he had orders to assist me in any way possible—he had several times acted as my interpreter—so I made the most of it. I think also that he disliked foreigners, and when later on he gave me a brief biography of himself, I could not blame him. He had been twice arrested and imprisoned by foreign police in his own country.

Liu was an ex-student of Eastview Academy, an American missionary school in Shengchoufu, Hunan. He had been a devout Christian, a fundamentalist, and a good Y.M.C.A. man until 1926 and the Great Revolution. One day he led a student strike, was expelled, and was disowned by his family. Awakened to the “imperialistic basis of missionary institutions” in China, he went to Shanghai, became active in the student movement there, joined the Communist Party, and was imprisoned by police in the French Concession. Released in 1929, he rejoined his comrades, worked under the provincial committee of the Communist Party, was arrested by British police, put in the notorious Ward Road Jail, tortured by electricity to extort a confession, handed over to the Chinese authorities, jailed again, and did not get his freedom till 1931. He was then just twenty years old. Shortly afterwards he was sent by the Reds' “underground railway” to the Fukien Soviet district, and had ever since been with the Red Army.

Liu agreed to accompany me, and together we found our way to a Lenin Club where there was a political class in session. It was a meeting of a company in the Second Regiment of the Second Division, First Army Corps, and sixty-two were present. This was the “advanced section” of the company; there was also a “second section.” Political education in the Red Army is conducted through three main groups, each of which is divided into the two sections mentioned. Each elects its soldiers' committee, to consult with its superior officers and send delegates to the soviets. The three groups are for company commanders and higher; squad commanders and the rank and file; and the service corps—cooks, grooms, muleteers, carriers, sweepers, and Young Vanguards.

Green boughs decorated the room, and a big red paper star was fixed over the doorway. Inside were the usual pictures of Marx and Lenin, and on another wall were photographs of Generals Ts'ai Ting-k'ai and Chiang Kuang-nai, heroes of the Shanghai War.
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There was a big picture of the Russian Red Army massed in Red Square in an October anniversary demonstration—a photograph torn from a Shanghai magazine. Finally, there was a large lithograph of General Feng Yu-hsiang, with a slogan under it,
“Huan Wo Shan Ho”
—“Give back our mountains and rivers!”—an old Classical phrase, now revived by the anti-Japanese movement.

The men sat on brick seats, which they had brought with them (one often saw soldier students going to school with notebooks in one hand and a brick in the other), and the class was led by the company commander and the political commissar, both members of the Communist
Party. The subject, I gathered, was “Progress in the Anti-Japanese Movement.” A lanky, gaunt-faced youth was speaking. He seemed to be summarizing five years of Sino-Japanese “undeclared war,” and he was shouting at the top of his lungs. He told of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and his own experiences there, as a former soldier in the army of Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang. He condemned Nanking for ordering “nonresistance.” Then he described the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, Jehol, Hopei, Chahar, and Suiyuan. In each case, he maintained, the “Kuomintang dog-party” had retreated without fighting. They had “given the Japanese bandits a fourth of our country.”

“Why?” he demanded, intensely excited, his voice breaking a little. “Why don't our Chinese armies fight to save China? Because they don't want to? No! We Tungpei men asked our officers nearly every day to lead us to the front, to fight back to our homeland. Every Chinese hates to become a Japanese slave! But China's armies cannot fight because of our
mai-kuo cheng-fu”
(literally, “sell-country government”).

“But the people will fight if our Red Army leads. …” He ended up with a summary of the growth of the anti-Japanese movement in the Northwest, under the Communists.

Another arose, stood at rigid attention, his hands pressed closely to his sides. Liu Hsiao whispered to me that he was a squad leader—a corporal—who had made the Long March. “It is only the traitors who do not want to fight Japan. It is only the rich men, the militarists, the tax collectors, the landlords and the bankers, who start the ‘cooperate-with-Japan' movement, and the ‘joint-war-against-communism' slogan. They are only a handful, they are not Chinese.

“Our peasants and workers, every one, want to fight to save the country. They only need to be shown a road. … Why do I know this? In our Kiangsi soviets we had a population of only 3,000,000, yet we recruited volunteer partisan armies of 500,000 men! Our loyal soviets enthusiastically supported us in the war against the traitorous White troops. When the Red Army is victorious over the whole country our partisans will number over ten millions. Let Japan dare to try to rob us then!”

And much more of it. One after another they stood up to utter their hatred against Japan, sometimes emphasizing, sometimes disagreeing with a previous speaker's remark, sometimes giving their answers to questions from the discussion leaders, making suggestions for “broadening the anti-Japanese movement,” and so on.

One youth told of the response of the people to the Red Army's anti-Japanese Shansi expedition last year. “The
lao-pai-hsing
[the people] welcomed us,” he shouted. “They came by the hundreds to join us. They
brought us tea and cakes on the road as we marched. Many left their fields to come to join us, or cheer us. … They understood quite clearly who were the traitors and who the patriots—who want to fight Japan, and who want to sell China to Japan. Our problem is to awaken the whole country as we awakened the people of Shansi. …”

One talked about the anti-Japanese student movement in the White districts, another about the anti-Japanese movement in the Southwest, and a Tungpei man told of the reasons why Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang's Manchurian soldiers refused to fight the Reds any more. “Chinese must not fight Chinese, we must all unite to oppose Japanese imperialism, we must win back our lost homeland!” he concluded with terse eloquence. A fourth spoke of the Manchurian anti-Japanese volunteers, and another of the strikes of Chinese workers in the Japanese mills of China.

The discussion continued for more than an hour. Occasionally the commander or political commissar interrupted to sum up what had been said, to elaborate a point, or to add new information, occasionally to correct something that had been said. The men took brief laborious notes in their little notebooks, and the serious task of thought furrowed their honest peasant faces. The whole session was crudely propagandist, and exaggeration of fact did not bother them in the least. It was self-proselytizing in a way, with materials selected to prove a single thesis. But that it was potent in its effects was manifest. Simple but powerful convictions, logical in shape, were forming in these young, little-tutored minds—credos such as every great crusading army has found necessary in order to stiffen itself with that spiritual unity, that courage, and that readiness to die in a cause, which we call morale.

I interrupted to ask some questions. They were answered by a show of hands. I discovered that of the sixty-two present, nine were from urban working-class families, while the rest were straight from the land. Twenty-one were former White soldiers and six were from the old Manchurian Army. Only eight of this group were married, and twenty-one were from Red families—that is, from families of poor peasants who had shared in the land redistribution under some soviet. Thirty-four of the group were under twenty years of age, twenty-four were between twenty and twenty-five, four were over thirty.

“In what way,” I asked, “is the Red Army better than other armies of China?” This brought half a dozen men to their feet at once.

“The Red Army is a revolutionary army.”

“The Red Army is anti-Japanese.”

“The Red Army helps the peasants.”

“Living conditions in the Red Army are entirely different from the White Army life. Here we are all equals; in the White Army the soldier
masses are oppressed. Here we fight for ourselves and the masses. The White Army fights for the gentry and the landlords. Officers and men live the same in the Red Army. In the White Army the soldiers are treated like slaves.”

“Officers of the Red Army come from our own ranks, and win their appointments by merit alone. White officers buy their jobs, or use political influence.”

“Red soldiers are volunteers; White soldiers are conscripted.”

“Capitalist armies are for preserving the capitalist class. The Red Army fights for the proletariat.”

“The militarists' armies' work is to collect taxes and squeeze the blood of the people. The Red Army fights to free the people.”

“The masses hate the White Army; they love the Red Army.”

“But how,” I interrupted once more, “do you know the peasants really like the Red Army?” Again several jumped up to answer. The political commissar recognized one.