Red Star over China (43 page)

When he was twenty-one, angered by a domestic quarrel, Hsu left home. He walked to Hankow, then made his way to Kiangsi, where he worked for a year as a potter, saved his money, and planned to return to Huangpi. But he caught cholera and exhausted his savings while recovering. Ashamed to return empty-handed, he joined the army, where he was promised $10 a month. He received “only beatings.” Meanwhile the Nationalist Revolution was beginning in the South, and Communists were propagandizing in Hsu's army. Several of them were beheaded. Disgusted with the warlord army, he deserted with one of the officers, fled to Canton, and joined the Fourth Kuomintang Army under Chang Fa-kuei. There he remained till 1927. He had become a platoon commander.

In the spring of 1927 the Nationalist forces were breaking into left-wing and right-wing groups, and this conflict was especially sharp in Chang Fa-kuei's army, which had reached the Yangtze River. Siding with the radicals, Hsu was forced to flee, and secretly he returned to Yellow Slope. By now he had become a Communist, having been much influenced by some student propagandists, and in Huangpi he at once began building up a local branch of the Party.

The Right
coup d'état
occurred in April, 1927, and communism was driven underground. But not Hsu Hai-tung. He organized most of the workers in the potteries, and some local peasants. From these he now recruited the first “workers' and peasants' army” of Hupeh. They numbered in the beginning only seventeen men, and they had one revolver and eight bullets—Hsu's own.

This was the nucleus of what later became the Fourth Front Red Army of 60,000 men, which in 1932 had under its control a sovietized territory
the size of Ireland. It had its own post office, credit system, mints, cooperatives, textile factories, and in general a fairly well-organized rural economy. Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien, a Whampoa graduate and former Kuomintang officer, became commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army. His political leader was Chang Kuo-t'ao (a founder of the Communist Party who was later to challenge Mao for control of the Central Committee). Together they set up a Chinese type of soviet government in the border areas of three provinces: Hupeh, Anhui, and Honan. The ancient names of those provinces were O, Yu, and Wan. Combining them, the Reds named their interprovincial regime the Oyuwan Soviet and affiliated it with the All-China Soviet Government headed by Mao Tse-tung south of the Yangtze.

Oyuwan withstood several “surroundings” and expanded its territory until October, 1932. By then the Nationalists had succeeded in penetrating far into the richest base area. To avoid encirclement, Chang Kuo-t'ao and Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien withdrew their main forces westward. Hsu Hai-tung was ordered to remain behind, with his Twenty-fifth Army, to regroup scattered partisan units and make a new stand, while the main Nationalist forces pursued the Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien command. Unexpectedly, Hsu Hai-tung's guerrillas won important victories and once more the Nationalists were forced out of Oyuwan. In 1933 they returned to the offensive and in 1934, coincident with his Fifth Annihilation Campaign in the South, the Generalissimo strangled the little republic to death. At the end of 1934 Hsu Hai-tung led a band of no more than 2,000 men in a breakthrough to the west, finally uniting with Mao Tse-tung's forces in northern Shensi in 1935.

Besides the economic blockade, daily air bombing, and the construction of a network of thousands of small forts around the Oyuwan area, the Nanking generals evidently pursued a policy of systematic removal or annihilation of the civilian population. During the Fifth Campaign the anti-Red forces in Hupeh and Anhui, then numbering about 300,000, were stiffened with officers whom Chiang Kai-shek had spent a year indoctrinating with anti-Red propaganda in his Nanchang and Nanking military academies. The result was civil war with the intensity of religious wars.

For three days, several hours every afternoon and evening, I had been asking Hsu Hai-tung and his staff questions about their personal histories, about their troops, about the fate of the Oyuwan Soviet Republic, and about their present situation in the Northwest. Then, in answer to my question, “Where is your family now?” Hsu Hai-tung replied matter-of-factly, “All of my clan have been killed except one brother, who is with the Fourth Front Army.”

“You mean killed in fighting?”

“Oh, no; only three of my brothers were Reds. The rest of the clan were executed by Generals T'ang En-p'o and Hsia Tou-yin. Altogether the Kuomintang officers killed sixty-six members of the Hsu clan.”

“Sixty-six!”

“Yes, twenty-seven of my near relatives were executed and thirty-nine distant relatives—everyone in Huangpi
hsien
named Hsu. Old and young men, women, children, and even babies were killed. The Hsu clan was wiped out, except my wife and three brothers in the Red Army, and myself. Two of my brothers were killed in battle later on.”

“And your wife?”

“I don't know what happened to her. She was captured when the White troops occupied Huangpi in 1931. Afterwards I heard that she had been sold as a concubine to a merchant near Hankow. My brothers who escaped told me about that, and about the other killings. During the Fifth Campaign, thirteen of the Hsu clan escaped from Huangpi and
fled to Lihsiang
hsien,
but were all arrested there. The men were beheaded; the women and children were shot.”

Hsu noticed the shocked look on my face and grinned mirthlessly. “That was nothing unusual,” he said. “That happened to the clans of many Red officers, though mine had the biggest losses. Chiang Kai-shek had given an order that when my district was captured no one named Hsu should be left alive.”

I wrote many pages of notes of conversations with Hsu and his comrades, notes of dates, places, and detailed accounts of outrages allegedly inflicted on civilians by Nationalist troops in Oyuwan. It would be pointless to repeat the details of the more horrendous crimes reported; like the tragic events in Spain of the same period, they would seem incredible to skeptics who read of them from afar. For the person who has not actually witnessed atrocities, all remains hearsay and suspect; to accept the degradation of any man by man injures our self-esteem. And even if the stories were true, were not the Reds themselves engaged in violence differing only in the choice of class victims? The Kuomintang press, however, had for years been telling only their side of the class-war story. To help fill in the picture for history it should not be unedifying to know what the leaders of this fundamentally “peasant revolution” (as Mao Tse-tung insisted it was) said of their fellow man and saw themselves as fighting against.

During the Fifth Anti-Red Compaign, as already noted, Nationalist officers gave orders in many areas to exterminate the civilian population. This was held to be militarily necessary because, as the Generalissimo remarked in one of his speeches, where the soviets had been long established “it was impossible to tell a Red bandit from a good citizen.” The method appears to have been applied with singular savagery in the Oyuwan Republic, chiefly because some of the leading Kuomintang generals in charge of anti-Red operations were natives of that region, sons of landlords who had lost their land to the Reds, and hence had an insatiable desire for revenge. The population in the soviets had decreased by about 600,000 at the end of the Fifth Campaign.

Red tactics in Oyuwan had depended upon mobility over a wide territory, and at the beginning of every annihilation drive their main forces had moved out of the Red districts, to engage the enemy on its own ground. They had no important strategic bases to defend, and readily moved from place to place, to decoy, divert, distract, and otherwise gain maneuvering advantages. This left the periphery of their “human base” very much exposed, but in the past Kuomintang troops had not killed the farmers and townsmen whom they found peacefully pursuing their tasks in soviet areas they occupied.

In the Fifth Campaign, as in Kiangsi, new tactics were adopted. Instead
of engaging the Red Army in the open field, the Nanking troops advanced in heavily concentrated units, behind extensive fortifications, bit by bit penetrating into Red territory, systematically either annihilating or transporting the entire population in wide areas inside and outside the Red borders. They sought to make of such districts a desolate, uninhabited wasteland, incapable of supporting the Red troops if they should later recapture it.

Thousands of children were taken prisoner and driven to Hankow and other cities, where they were sold into “apprenticeships.” Thousands of young girls and women were transported and sold into the factories as slave girls and as prostitutes. In the cities they were palmed off as “famine refugees,” or “orphans of people killed by the Reds.” I remembered that hundreds of them reportedly reached the big industrial centers in 1934. A considerable trade grew up, with middlemen buying the boys and women from Kuomintang officers. It became a very profitable business for a while, but threatened to corrupt the ranks of the army. Missionaries began talking about it, and Chiang Kai-shek was obliged to issue a stern order forbidding this “bribetaking” and ordering strict punishment for officers engaged in the traffic.

“By December, 1933,” said Hsu Hai-tung, “about half of Oyuwan had become a vast wasteland. Over a once rich country there were very few houses left standing, cattle, had all been driven away, the fields were un-kept, and there were piles of bodies in nearly every village that had been occupied by the White troops. Four counties in Hupeh, five in Anhui, and three in Honan were almost completely ruined. In an area some 400
li
from east to west and about 300
li
from north to south the whole population was being killed or removed.

“During the year's fighting we recaptured some of these districts from the White troops, but when we returned we found fertile lands had become semideserts. Only a few old men and women remained, and they would tell tales that horrified us. We could not believe such crimes had been committed by Chinese against Chinese.

“In November, 1933, we retreated from T'ien T'ai Shan and Lao Chun Shan, soviet districts where there were then about 60,000 people. When we returned, two months later, we found that these peasants had been driven from their land, their houses had been burned or destroyed by bombing, and there were not more than three hundred old men and a few sickly children in all that region. From them we learned what had happened.

“As soon as the White troops arrived the officers had begun dividing the women and girls. Those with bobbed hair or natural feet had been
shot as Communists. Higher officers had looked over the others and picked out pretty ones for their own, and then the lower officers had been given their choice. The rest had been turned over to the soldiers to use as prostitutes. They had been told that these women were ‘bandit wives,' and therefore they could do what they liked with them.

“Many of the young men in those districts had joined the Red Army, but many of those who remained behind, and even some of the old men, tried to kill the White officers for these crimes. Those who protested were all shot as Communists. The survivors told us that many fights had occurred among the Whites, who had quarreled among themselves about the distribution of women. After they had been despoiled, these women and girls were sent to the towns and cities, where they were sold, only the officers keeping a few pretty ones for concubines.”

“Do you mean to say these were the troops of the National Government?” I asked.

“Yes, they were the Thirteenth Army Corps of General T'ang En-p'o, and the Third Army Corps of General Wang Chun. Generals Hsia Tou-yin, Liang Kuan-yin, and Sung T'ien-tsai were also responsible.”

Hsu told of another district, Huangan
hsien,
in Hupeh, which the Reds recovered from General Wang Chun in July, 1933: “In the town of Tsu Yun Chai, where there was once a street of flourishing soviet cooperatives and a happy people, everything was in ruins and only a few old men were alive. They led us out to a valley and showed us the scattered bodies of seventeen young women lying half-naked in the sun. They had all been raped and killed. The White troops had evidently been in a great hurry; they had taken the time to pull off only one leg of a girl's trousers. That day we called a meeting, the army held a memorial service there, and we all wept.

“Not long afterwards, in Ma Cheng, we came to one of our former athletic fields. There in a shallow grave we found the bodies of twelve comrades who had been killed. Their skin had been stripped from them, their eyes gouged out, and their ears and noses cut off. We all broke into tears of rage at this barbaric sight.

“In the same month, also in Huangan, our Twenty-fifth Red Army reached Ao Kung Chai. This had once been a lively place, but it was now deserted. We walked outside the town and saw a peasant's hut with smoke coming from it, on a hillside, and some of us climbed up to it, but the only occupant was an old man who had apparently gone insane. We walked down into the valley again until we came upon a long pile of dead men and women. There were more than 400 bodies lying there, and they had evidently been killed only a short time before. In some places the
blood was several inches deep. Some women were lying with their children still clutched to them. Many bodies were lying one on top of another.

“Suddenly I noticed one of the bodies move, and, going over to it, found that it was a man still alive. We found several more alive after that, altogether more than ten. We carried them back with us and treated their wounds, and they told us what had happened. These people had fled from the town to hide in this valley, and had encamped in the open. Afterwards the White officers had led their troops to the spot, ordered them to put up their machine guns on the mountainsides, and had then opened fire on the people below. They had kept firing for several hours until they thought everybody was dead. Then they had marched away again without even coming down to look at them.”