Red Star over China (61 page)

All such facts were known to Americans in China, but probably few at home realized that our lend-lease aid went exclusively to the Kuomintang authorities. We maintained no consular representation in Yenan
and no military liaison with the partisans.
^*
All our supplies flown over the Hump into China—modern bombers and fighters, artillery, transport, and ammunition—supported only the one party, of course. Financial aid sent to China by the C.I.O., A.F.L., and Railway Brotherhoods also went exclusively to Kuomintang groups.

What could be done about this “internal affair” of China? Our new treaty with China (1943) renounced extraterritoriality rights and restored full sovereignty to the Chinese Government. Could we now tell the present government how to run its business without being branded neoimperial-ists? But inevitably the war had already caused us to intervene in support of the Kuomintang, in terms of economic and military aid. Was it not merely playing ostrich to pretend that our future economic help to China did not carry implicit political responsibilities of the gravest kind?

Once Japan was defeated, would Chiang Kai-shek then destroy the Communists and their partisan allies? The Kuomintang spent ten fruitless years in the attempt before 1937. Even with the use of American bombers and fighters on his side, the Generalissimo was not likely to secure greater success than the Japanese had had against these experienced guerrilla warriors. It had become a physical impossibility for the Chungking Government to destroy this opposition in anything short of a long and bloody war, fully backed by Allied troops.

By the summer of 1944 it had thus become manifest that the tiny band of youths who raised the Red flag on the lonely mountain of Chingkangshan far back in 1928 had launched a demonstration which evolved into a crusade which finally rose to the stature of a national movement of such scope that no arbiters of China's destiny could much longer deny its claims to speak for vast multitudes of people.

Part One: In Search of Red China

Chapter 1: Some Unanswered Questions

1
. Written in invisible ink, the letter was given to me by Hsu Ping, then a professor at Tungpei University. In 1966, as for some years earlier, Hsu Ping was deputy secretary of the United Front Department of the CCP CC. In 1960, K'e Cheng-shih, then mayor of Shanghai, told me he had written the letter, which was authorized by Liu Shao-ch'i. (K'e died in 1965.) Liu Shao-ch'i was chief of the underground North China Bureau of the CC, and his first deputy was P'eng Chen. Others in his branch CC included Hsu Ping, Po I-po, Ch'en Po-ta, Hsiang Ching, Huang Hua, and Yao I-lin. See Biographical Notes—hereafter BN—pages 451–511. Abbreviations are given on page 441.

Chapter 2: Slow Train to “Western Peace”

1
. T'ai Chi-tao and Shao Li-tzu were Marxist-oriented members of the Kuomintang who formed a Communist study-group nucleus in Shanghai with Ch'en Tu-hsiu in 1920. Neither man joined the organization of the first CC in July, 1921. During the Second Civil War (1946'49), Shao Li-tzu supported the Communists against Chiang Kai-shek, and helped form the People's Republic of China. In 1967 he still held a seat in the NPC. See BN.

Chapter 3: Some Han Bronzes

1
. A genuine pastor, he was Wang Hua-jen, a member of the national executive committee of the Chinese Red Cross.

Part Two: The Road to the Red Capital

Chapter 2: The Insurrectionist

1
. This account, based on an interview with Chou En-lai and his comrades, was quite incomplete, but in 1936 it was fresh news to the outside world. Kyo Gizors, hero of
La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate)
by Andre Malraux, was said to have been based on Chou En-lai's role in this period. “Things happened quite otherwise,” according to Chou. See BN.

2
. Concerning such “old and patriotic gentlemen,” see Benjamin Schwartz's penetrating study,
In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West
(Cambridge, 1964).

3
. Other sources give lower estimates. For example, Harold Isaacs mentions 400 to 500 killed. (Mao Tse-tung told me in 1960 that Chiang Kai-shek's sudden “purge” in Shanghai and other centers, which caught the Party unprepared, killed about 40,000 members.) Isaacs holds Stalin and the CMT largely responsible for the Shanghai deaths, since they refused to break with the KMT even after Chiang's men had begun killing Communists prior to the “Shanghai Massacre.” See Isaacs,
The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution,
pp. 165–185.

Chapter 3: Something About Ho Lung

1
. Inaccuracies in this colorful version of Ho Lung's life notwithstanding, it does parallel the main facts, and seems worth preserving as a contemporary firsthand impression by a comrade-in-arms. See BN.

Part Three: In “Defended Peace”
Chapter 1: Soviet Strong Man

1
. Properly Li T'eh, or Li T'e, according to Wade, but throughout the text Otto Braun's Chinese
nom de guerre
is transliterated as Braun himself wrote it. See BN.

2
. The remarkable Ma Hai-teh. See BN.

3
. Not including a family-arranged betrothal, which Mao ignored. In 1937 Ho Tzu-ch'en and Mao were divorced and in 1939 Mao married Chiang Ch'ing (Lan P'ing). See BN.

Chapter 2: Basic Communist Policies

1
. From
Democracy,
Peking, May 15, 1937, a brief-lived English-language anti-imperialist and anti-Nazi publication, edited by John Leaning. Among its associate editors (besides myself) were J. Leighton Stuart, president of Yen-ching University and later U.S. Ambassador to Nationalist China, and Soong Ch'ing-ling.

2
. See
The Agrarian Reform Law of the People's Republic of China
(Peking, 1952), and Ch'en Po-ta, A
Study of Land Rent in Pre-Liberation China.
Communist figures on tenancy have been questioned by J. Lossing Buck and other foreign agriculturalists. See Bibliography. For Ch'en Po-ta, see also BN.

3
. Part of this paragraph has been revised from my original text in order to include facts not fully known to me in 1937. The CCP until 1935 aimed at a complete overthrow of Kuomintang leadership and held that a “united front from below” could succeed only under its leadership of the masses against both the Kuomintang and the imperialists. The CC changed its policy at the Tsunyi Conference in January, 1935, when Mao Tse-tung proposed a united front to include all anti-Japanese elements (with Chiang Kai-shek and the right-wing KMT still excluded, however) and sought approval of that line from the CMT. In August, 1935, the CEC of the CMT adopted an anti-Fascist international-united-front line reconcilable with the Tsunyi decisions and going beyond them to include the national bourgeoisie. On that line the CCP built its united-front proposals of 1936. See
Part Four
,
Chapter 6
, note 3, and Wang Ming, BN.

Chapter 3: On War with Japan

1
. Mao's strategic views set forth here paraphrased his report to Party activists at Wayapao, in north Shensi, immediately following an important Politburo meeting held there, December, 1935, and formed the embryo of his later works, “Problems of Strategy in the Guerrilla War Against Japan,” “Problems of War and Strategy,” and “On Protracted War.” See
Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung.
These concepts, followed throughout the war against Japan, outline a general strategy of “people's war” which Mao later held valid against American armed expansion in Asia.

2
. Since Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang had always placed Taiwan among “lost territories” to be brought back under China's sovereignty, it seems hardly likely that Mao intended to concede future “independence” there. The CCP had never officially done so.

Chapter 5: Red Theater

1
. The “decadent” and “meaningless” Chinese opera died hard. Thirty years later the GPCR drafted opera stars wholesale to produce modern plays in forms which would “serve the people” by dramatizing revolution and the Thought of Mao Tse-tung, and which were not susceptible to undesirable historical analogies.
The Red Lantern,
a play of the 1960's popularized during the GPCR, was in content basically the same play as
Invasion,
of 1936—lacking only the comic relief of the marauding goats. (See Chiang Ch'ing, BN.)

2
. In his speech at the inception of the CPR (October, 1949) Mao Tse-tung declared, “China has at last stood up.”

Part Four: Genesis of a Communist

Chapter 1: Childhood

1
. Mao did not mention the day of his birth, later reported as December 26. In 1949 Mao called upon the CC to ban the naming of provinces, streets, and enterprises after leaders and to forbid the celebration of their birthdays. See
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
(Peking, 1961), IV, 38.

Chapter 2: Days in Changsha

1
. Mao was nineteen when he entered First Teachers' Training School, which was for scholarship students only, who were expected to become primary-school teachers. “Humanism was the guiding principle, with emphasis on moral conduct, physical culture, and social activities. The First Teachers' Training School was the only Western-style building in Changsha. … ‘I have never been to a university,' Mao recalled, ‘nor have I studied abroad. The groundwork of my knowledge and scholarship was laid at the First Teachers' Training School, which was a good school'” (Jerome Ch'en,
Mao and the Chinese Revolution,
p. 32).

2
. Yang had an even greater influence on Mao's early interest in philosophical idealism than is acknowledged here. He was familiar with both Oriental and Western cultures, to a degree then rare among Chinese savants. His family were wealthy landowners of Hunan who could afford to give him a good education in the Chinese Classics and then send him to study for six years in Japan. At the age of thirty he went to Europe for another four years of study in Britain and Germany. That he chose to accept a post in a secondary institution indicated the high standing of the First Teachers' Training School. He went on to a professorship at Peking National University, where he continued to befriend Mao. Versed in Kant, Rousseau, and Spencer, Yang was also a follower of the Hunanese hero-patriot, Wang Fu-chih, a pragmatist philosopher as well as a warrior. Wang's seventeenth-century writings strongly appealed to Mao and other students of Yang who later became Communists, including Ts'ai Ho-sen (see BN). Yang is credited with having introduced Mao to Friedrich Paulsen's A
System of Ethics.
A copy of Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei's translation of that book still exists, with 12,000 words of marginal notes in Mao's handwriting which reveal his admiration of Paulsen's emphasis on discipline, self-control, and will power (Ch'en,
ibid.,
p. 44).

3
. Hsiao Yu (Siao Yu) wrote
Mao Tse-tung and I Were Beggars.
See Bibliography.

4
. Yi gave Mao, his former student, a job as principal of his “model” primary school, a satellite of the Hunan Normal School. Mao taught Chinese literature there until 1922. In 1965 Mao told me that at that time he really had had no ambition in life other than to be a teacher.

5
. Yi Pei-ch'i was himself “responsible” for the theft. He was director of the museum at the time the treasures disappeared, and Hsiao was his assistant. The treasures were later sold in Europe.

6
. In 1966–67, Mao encouraged the Red Guards of the GPCR to emulate such boyhood experiences, and to sally forth on “little Long Marches” of their own.

7
. Mao Tse-tung published an article in
New Youth,
April, 1917, under the pseudonym
Erh-Shih-Pa Hua Sheng
or “Twenty-eight-Stroke Student.” (The three characters of Mao's full name are written with twenty-eight brush strokes.) His article, “A Study of Physical Education,” offers interesting insights into Mao's character at the age of twenty-four. Since the body itself “contains
knowledge and houses virtue,” Mao saw perfect physical fitness as the foundation of mental perfection and, above all,
will power.
His article also glorified “military heroism.” See Stuart Schram's translation,
Une étude de l'éducation physique.

Chapter 3: Prelude to Revolution

1
. Ch'en supported Wang Ching-wei's puppet government under the Japanese, became its premier after Wang's death, and was executed as a traitor by Chiang Kai-shek in 1946.

Chapter 4: The Nationalist Period

1
. Sneevliet had a long Indonesian background, and was a veteran member of the Second International. He supported Lenin's break with the older European Socialist International, to form the Third International. He was active in prewar revolutionary agitation in Indonesia and helped found a Social Democratic Party there. Back in Holland during the Second World War, he perished under the Nazi occupation.

2
. Chou Fu-hai ended by collaborating with the Japanese under the puppet premier, Wang Ching-wei (see BN).

3
. The Third CCP Congress confirmed the Sun-Joffe agreement, whereby Communists were to join the KMT, but the demand of Sneevliet, the CMT representative, that control of the labor movement should be shared with the KMT, was opposed by Chang Kuo-t'ao, then chief of the Orgburo and the Trade-Union Secretariat. Mao at first supported Chang Kuo-t'ao, but after the resolution was passed, by one vote, Mao adopted the Comintern view. Chang lost his post in the Orgburo, Mao succeeded him, and antagonism between the two men increased (Rue,
Mao Tse-tung in Opposition,
p. 38).

4
. In fact Mao's “coordinating” activities were so successful that he was attacked for “rightism” and expelled (for the first time) from the CC. His return to Hunan, “for a rest,” coincided with a reversal in CMT policy, now favoring separate CCP organization of labor. Mao was re-elected to the CC but Chang also recovered Party face (Rue,
ibid).