Red Star over China (50 page)

There had been a series of raids by
min-t'uan
near Holienwan, and one village only a short distance away had been sacked two nights before I arrived. A band had crept up to the place just before dawn, overpowered and killed the lone sentry, and had then brought up bunches of dry brushwood and set fire to the huts in which about a dozen Red soldiers were sleeping. As the Reds ran out, blinded by the smoke, the
min-t'uan
had shot them down and seized their guns. Then they had joined with a gang of some 400, most of them armed by the Kuomintang general, Kao Kuei-tzu, who were raiding down from the North and burning farms and villages. The Twenty-eighth Army had sent a battalion out to attempt to round them up, and the day I left Holienwan these young warriors came back after a successful chase.

The battle had occurred only a few
li
from Holienwan, which the White bandits were said to be preparing to attack. Some peasants had discovered the
min-t'uan
lair in the inner mountains and, acting on this information, the Reds had divided into three columns, the center one meeting the bandits in a frontal clash. The issue was decided when the two flanking columns of Reds closed in and surrounded the enemy. Some forty
min-t'uan
were killed, and sixteen Reds, while many on both sides were wounded. The
min-t'uan
were entirely disarmed, and their two chieftains taken captive.

We passed the battalion returning with their captives as we rode back toward Shensi. A big welcome had been organized in the villages, and the peasants lined the road to cheer the victorious troops. Peasant Guards stood holding their long red-tasseled spears in salute, and the Young Vanguards sang Red songs to them, while girls and women brought refreshments, tea and fruit and hot water—all they had, but it creased the faces of the weary soldiers with smiles. They were very young, much younger
than the front-line regulars, and it seemed to me that many who wore bloodstained bandages were no more than fourteen or fifteen. I saw one youth on a horse, half-conscious and held up by a comrade on each side, who had a white bandage around his forehead, in the exact center of which was a round red stain.

There in the midst of this column of youngsters, who carried rifles almost as big as themselves, marched the two bandit chieftains. One of them was a grizzled middle-aged peasant, and one wondered whether he felt ashamed, being led by these warriors all young enough to be his sons. Yet there was something rather splendid about his fearless bearing, and I thought that he was, after all, possibly a poor peasant like the rest, perhaps one who had also believed in something when he fought them, and it was regrettable that he was to be killed. Fu Chin-kuei shook his head when I asked him.

“We don't kill captured
min-t'uan.
We educate them and give them a chance to repent, and many of them later become good Red partisans.”

It was fortunate that the Reds had erased this group of bandits, for it cleared our road back to Pao An. We made the trip from the Kansu border in five days, doing more than 100
li
on the fifth, but though there was plenty of incident there was no event, and I returned with no trophies except cantaloupes and melons I had bought along the road.

Back in Pao An again, I settled down once more in the Waichiaopu—the Foreign Office—where I stayed through late September and half of October. I collected enough biographies to fill a
Who's Who in Red China,
and every morning turned up a new commander or soviet official to be interviewed. But I was becoming increasingly uneasy about departure: Nanking troops were pouring into Kansu and Shensi, and were gradually replacing the Tungpei troops everywhere they held a front with the Reds, as Chiang Kai-shek made all preparations for a new annihilation drive from the South and the West. Someone else could write that story. I wished to publish the one I already had. But I wouldn't be able to do that unless I got out alive, and it took time for my hosts to guarantee a secure passage back over the lines. Unless I got out soon it might prove impossible: the last fissure in the blockade might be closed.

Meanwhile life in Pao An went on tranquilly enough and you would not have supposed that these people were aware of their imminent “annihilation.” Not far from me a training regiment of new recruits was quartered. They spent their time marching and countermarching all day, playing games and singing songs. Some nights there were dramatics, and every night the whole town rang with song, as different groups gathered in barracks or in cave grottoes, yodeling down the valley. In the Red Army University the cadets were hard at work on a ten-hour day of study. A new mass-education drive was beginning in the town, even the “little devils” in the Waichiaopu being subjected to daily lessons in reading, politics, and geography.

As for myself, I lived a holiday life, riding, bathing, and playing tennis. There were two courts, one set up on the grassy meadow, clipped
close by the goats and sheep, near the Red University, the other a clay court next door to the cottage of Po Ku, the gangling former Party general secretary, now chairman of the Northwest Branch Soviet Government. Here, every morning, as soon as the sun rose above the hills, I played tennis with three faculty members of the Red University: the German Li Teh, Commissar Ts'ai Shu-fan,
^*
and Commissar Wu Hsiu-ch'uan.* The court was full of stones, it was fatal to run after a fast ball, but the games were nevertheless hotly contested. Ts'ai and Wu both spoke Russian to Li Teh, while I talked to Li Teh in English and to Ts'ai and Wu in Chinese, so that we thus had a trilingual game.

A more corrupting influence I had on the community was my gambling club. I had a pack of cards, unused since my arrival, and one day I got these out and taught Commissar Ts'ai to play rummy. Ts'ai had lost an arm in battle, but it handicapped him very little at either tennis or cards. After he had learned rummy he easily beat me with one hand. For a while rummy was the rage. Even the women began sneaking up to the Waichiaopu gambling club. My mud
k'ang
became the rendezvous of Pao An's elite, and you could look around at the candle-lit faces there at night and recognize Mrs. Chou En-lai (Teng Ying-ch'ao), Mrs. Po Ku (Liu Ch'un-hsien), Mrs. K,'ai Feng, Mrs. Teng Fa, and even Mrs. Mao (Ho Tzu-ch'en). It set tongues wagging.

But the real menace to soviet morals didn't appear till Pao An took up poker. Our tennis quartet started this, alternating nights at Li Teh's hut and my own base of iniquity in the Foreign Office. Into this sinful mire we dragged such respectable citizens as Po Ku, Li K'e-nung, K'ai Feng, Lo Fu, and others. Stakes rose higher and higher. One-armed Ts'ai Shu-fan finally cleaned up $120,000 from Chairman Po Ku in a single evening, and it looked as if Po Ku's only way out was embezzlement of state funds. We settled the matter by ruling that Po Ku would be allowed to draw $120,000 on the treasury to pay Ts'ai, provided Ts'ai would use the money to buy airplanes for the nonexistent soviet air force. It was all in matches, anyway—and, unfortunately, so were the airplanes Ts'ai bought.

One-armed Ts'ai was quick-witted, excitable, full of repartee and badinage. He had been a Red for a decade, having joined while he was a railway worker in Hunan. Later on he had gone to Moscow and studied there for two or three years, and found time to fall in love with, and marry, a Russian. Sometimes he looked ruefully at his empty sleeve and wondered whether his wife wouldn't divorce him when she saw his missing arm. “Don't worry about a little thing like that,” Professor
Wu, who was also a returned Russian student, would comfort him. “If you haven't had your posterity shot off when you see her again you'll be lucky.” Nevertheless, Ts'ai kept urging me to send him an artificial arm when I got back to the White world.

This was only one of the impossible requests I had for things to be sent in. Lu Ting-yi
^*
wanted me to buy, equip, and man an air fleet for them from the proceeds of the sale of my pictures of the Reds. Hsu Hai-tung wanted a couple of false teeth to fill in the gap in his gums: he had fallen in love. Everybody had something wrong with his teeth; they hadn't seen a dentist for years. Most of the older leaders suffered from some kind of ailment, especially from ulcers and other stomach trouble, as a result of years on a dubious diet. But I never heard anybody complaining.

Personally I thrived on the food and put on weight, and my disgust at facing the unvaried menu every day did not prevent me from swallowing embarrassing quantities of it. They made me the concession of steamed bread made from whole-wheat flour, which when toasted was not bad, and occasionally I had pork or mutton shaslik. Besides that I lived on millet—boiled millet, fried millet, baked millet, and vice versa. Cabbage was plentiful, and peppers, onions, and beans. I missed coffee, butter, sugar, milk, eggs, and a lot of things, but I went right on eating millet.

A batch of copies of the
North China Daily News
arrived for the library one day and I read a recipe for what seemed to be a very simple chocolate sponge cake. I knew Po Ku was hoarding a tin of cocoa in his hut, and I schemed that with some of this, and by substituting pig's fat for butter, I could make that cake. Accordingly I got Li K'e-nung to write out a formal application to the Chairman of the Northwest Branch Soviet Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic to supply me with two ounces of chocolate. After several days of delay, and hemming and hawing, and doubts and aspersions cast upon my ability to bake a cake anyway, and a lot of unraveling of red tape, and conflicts with the bureaucracy in general, we finally forced those two ounces of cocoa out of Po Ku, and got other materials from the food cooperative. Before I could mix up the batter my bodyguard came in to investigate, and the wretch knocked the cocoa on the ground. Followed more red tape, but finally I got the order refilled and began the great experiment. Why labor the result? Any intelligent
hausfrau
can foresee what happened. My improvised oven failed to function properly, the cake did not rise, and when I took it off the fire it was a two-inch layer of charcoal on the bottom, and a top still in a state of slimy fluidity. However, it was eaten by the interested onlookers in
the Waichiaopu with great relish: there were too many good materials in it to be wasted. I lost immense face and thereafter docilely consumed my millet.

Li Teh compensated by asking me to a “foreign meal” with him. He had a way of getting rice and eggs sometimes, and, being German, he made his own sausages. You could see them swinging in strings, drying outside his door near the main street of Pao An. He was getting ready his winter's supply. He had also built himself a fireplace and taught his Chinese wife,
¹
a girl who had come with him from Kiangsi, how to bake. He showed me that the materials were there for tolerable cooking. It was only that the food cooperative (where our meals were cooked in common) didn't know how it should be done. Mrs. Lo P'ing-hui, wife of a Red Army commander (and the only lily-footed woman who made the Long March), was chief chef of the cooperative, and I think Li Teh's wife had a pull with her, and that is how he garnered his eggs and sugar.

But Li Teh was more than a good cook and a good poker player. Who was this mystery man of the Chinese soviet district? Had his importance been exaggerated by the Kuomintang General Lo Chou-ying, who, after reading some of Li Teh's writings found in Kiangsi, described him as the “brain trust” of the Reds? What was his connection with Soviet Russia? How much influence, in fact, did Russia exercise over the affairs of Red China?

This volume does not have as one of its primary purposes an examination of relations between the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of Russia, or the Comintern, or the Soviet Union as a whole. No adequate background has been provided here for such a task. But the book would be incomplete without some discussion of these organic connections and their more significant effects on the revolutionary history of China.

Certainly and obviously Russia had for the past dozen or more years been a dominating influence—and particularly among educated youth it had been
the
dominating external influence—on Chinese thought about the social, political, economic, and cultural problems of the country. This had been almost as true, though unacknowledged, in the Kuomintang areas as it had been an openly glorified fact in the soviet districts. Everywhere in China that youth had any fervent revolutionary beliefs the impact of Marxist ideology was apparent, both as a philosophy and as a kind of substitute for religion. Among such young Chinese, Lenin was almost worshiped, Stalin was the most popular foreign leader, socialism was taken for granted as the future form of Chinese society, and Russian literature had the largest following—Maxim Gorky's works, for example, outselling all native writers except Lu Hsun, who was himself a great social revolutionary although not a Communist.

And all that was quite remarkable for one reason especially. America, England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and other capitalist or imperialist powers had sent thousands of political, cultural, economic, or missionary
workers into China, actively to propagandize the Chinese masses with credos of their own states. Yet for many years the Russians had not had a single school, church, or even a debating society in China where Marxist-Leninist doctrines could legally be preached. Their influence, except in the soviet districts, had been largely indirect. Moreover, it had been aggressively opposed everywhere by the Kuomintang. Yet few who had been in China during that decade, and conscious of the society in which they lived, would dispute the contention that Marxism, the Russian Revolution, and the new society of the Soviet Union had probably made more profound impressions on the Chinese people than all Christian missionary influences combined.