China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (21 page)

In his first dispatch for the
Times,
he wrote about
Xian, the government-controlled city that the delegation passed through on their way to the Communist headquarters. “
The police state features of Xian were evident at every step,” he wrote later, noting that the street on
which the Communists’
Eighth Route Army office could be found “was empty of people—such was the [KMT] surveillance that anyone daring to walk there might be suspected of secret contact with the Com-munists.”

In Xian also, the KMT minders produced a
deserter from the Eighth Route Army, but this initiative became a propaganda flop when it turned out he had escaped from a CCP area because he refused to work clearing land and planting crops, which was one of the Eighth Route Army’s duties. He was caught twice trying to escape, but said he wasn’t jailed or beaten, only “criticized”—so much for the KMT accusations of “savagery” on the part of the Communists.

On the Xian part of the trip,
Harrison Forman of the
New York Herald Tribune
wrote in a book published in 1945, “
We learned later that special rickshaw-men, who insisted that we make use of their services, were assigned to the Guest House. When we refused to ride, they followed us wherever we went.” Once, as Forman was returning to the Guest House, somebody handed him an envelope. Inside it was
a dissenter’s proclamation denouncing the Kuomintang tyranny and informing Forman of the extraordinary precautions that had been taken by the government “to deceive you, to blockade you, and to watch you.” A fund of $5 million had been appropriated, the document said, involving hundreds of agents who will be in the guise of “translators, ushers, servants, and roomboys.” The writer identified himself as “a lodger and citizen of Xian” fighting for the “cause of freedom.” He also expressed confidence that Communism can never control China because “any party who wants to have the whole power, and thus deprive the other of his rights and liberty, will sustain a crushing defeat.”

From Xian, the
journalistic party crossed the Yellow River “on a huge barge-like wooden boat,” Epstein recounted, rowed by sixteen men squatting on their haunches and singing the “Yellow River Cantata,” a patriotic hymn composed in Yenan in 1939. Now the journalists were in “
another world.” There were “no flags, no banners, no regimented people jumping up and down with joy as though we visitors were Roosevelt and Churchill combined.” Their first night was spent in a cave village where they were met by an unpretentious Communist general—“so different … from the tailored-uniformed and white-gloved officers of the Kuomintang.” The next day they headed off on horseback for a visit to their first Communist troops—“sweaty, sun-bronzed boys with toothsome smiles” armed with captured Japanese weapons slung over
their shoulders, reinforcing the idea that the Communists were waging spirited, full-scale, successful guerrilla war against the Japanese. The land, Epstein reports, had been transformed by the CCP leadership, specifically by
Wang Zhen, the general who was escorting them. “
Every once-barren hilltop and terraced slope seemed to be cultivated with millet or beans or flax or cotton.” Epstein, who had never before traveled to the region and therefore had no firsthand knowledge of what it was like before the Communists arrived, wrote: “There was no cotton here at all before the blockade and people dressed in rags for a couple of years, but not any more.” All these “newly fruitful lands” would be turned over to the people, Epstein wrote, who didn’t have to pay any of their crops in taxes to support the soldiers.

In Kulin, the first town the reporters reached, they met the local magistrate, a man, Epstein reported, who was illiterate before the Communists came but was now able to write simple reports. A sixty-year-old labor hero was “trotted out,” a formerly landless man who told the reporters how much his life had improved. He noted that the magistrate had carried manure out to the fields in the last planting season, “
and who had ever heard of a magistrate in the old days doing that kind of work.”

There is something almost laughable in an American journalist praising the Communists for having “no regimented people jumping up and down for joy” and failing, in books he published long after the Communists took power, to note the ceremonies of mass fealty to the deified Mao that became a standard aspect of life under Chinese Communist rule. China became a place where factory workers literally did a “
loyalty dance” at the beginning of every day, a bit of choreography performed before a portrait of the “Beloved Chairman,” where mass rallies of teenagers took place in which they held up copies of a little red book of Mao quotations in a sort of salute, where factories produced hundreds of millions of badges printed with Mao’s image to be worn by virtually every person in the country. But Epstein remained a Communist supporter all his life, working for years in the People’s Republic of China as the editor of one of the country’s main propaganda journals,
China Today
. He was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and seems never to have been bothered by a blatant double standard.

But if some of the journalists who wrote about Mao and Yenan were fellow travelers, most of them, including Edgar and
Helen
Snow,
Jack Belden, and Harrison Forman, and most of the others on that 1944 press tour, weren’t.
Among them were
Maurice Votaw, who, while working for the Associated Press, was an employee of the central government’s information office, and
Gunther Stein of the
Christian Science Monitor.
“
Everything is open and above board,” Forman wrote in the
New York Herald Tribune,
“with absolutely no control or restrictions on movements, discussions, interviews, visits, and photographs.” Stein struck what was becoming a common theme when he wrote, “
The men and women pioneers of Yenan were truly new humans in spirit, thought, and action … in a brand-new well-integrated society that [had] never been seen before anywhere.”

The notion that the “Chinese Soviets” were not all that red and only sought a higher degree of democracy gained currency among other shrewd, discerning analysts who were not the sort to fall for political fairy tales. Yet they did. In 1942, two years before the beginning of the
Dixie Mission and only a few months after Pearl Harbor, John Davies was referring to the Chinese Communists in dispatches as “agrarian democrats” while John Service wrote that the
CCP, which, he said, was seeking simple democracy, was “
much more American than Russian in form and spirit.”

It became something of a trope in State Department reporting on China to refer to the Communists as “
so-called Communists,” or to Yenan as the “so-called Communist area,” as Secretary of State
Cordell Hull himself did in a memo to Ambassador Clarence Gauss in June 1944. Even Patrick Hurley, no opponent of Chiang and certainly no leftist of the Smedley or Epstein stripe, used this locution. In a letter to Roosevelt shortly after his arrival in China, Hurley, brimming with confidence that he could bring the two Chinese sides together in a coalition government, dismissed Chiang’s concerns about “so-called Communists,” passing along to the American president an assurance that Soviet foreign minister
Vyacheslav Molotov had given him in Moscow, namely that while some impoverished Chinese called themselves Communists, “they were related to Communism in no way at all.”

Molotov’s characterization echoed that of Stalin himself, who told the American ambassador in Moscow, Averill Harriman, that the Chinese were “not real Communists” but “
margarine Communists,” though, Stalin added, they were real patriots and wanted to fight the Japanese. It may have been strange for Americans to pick up this vocabulary from the likes of Stalin and Molotov, but, after all, Stalin was an ally and there was an inclination to believe him.

Mao and company
also gave credibility to Stalin’s description of them. They never appeared to be ideologues, true believers in a revolutionary doctrine. They were friendly, relaxed, and good-humored with their American guests, dining with them, talking late into the night, drinking what they called tiger bone wine (distilled whiskey made from sorghum soaked, in the absence of tigers, in beef bones), putting on plays that
Brooks Atkinson, who had been the
Times
drama critic before going to China, praised highly. Some members of the Dixie Mission went on
regular hunting expeditions deep in the mountains with
Zhu De, who was always given the first shot.
On Saturday nights, there were al fresco dances when the weather was warm—a legacy of
Agnes Smedley and the dance lessons she gave Mao—held in a grove of fruit trees called the Pear Orchard, during which Mao and the other Communist leaders moved around the floor with pigtailed local girls while scratchy music played on an old phonograph.

In his book, Forman describes a visit to the
Lu Xun College of Arts and Literature, the main cultural institution in Yenan. Lu Xun was China’s most famous twentieth-century writer, an iconoclast and freethinker and the leading figure in Shanghai’s League of Left-Wing Writers, which was close to the Communists and opposed to the KMT. Lu died in 1936, and it is a matter of intense debate whether he wouldn’t have despised Maoism at least as much as he did Chiang Kai-shek.

At the Lu Xun College of Arts and Literature, Forman found some three hundred artists and writers happily creating plays, stories, and songs under Mao’s beneficent guidance. “The Communists take their culture seriously,” he wrote. “Artists, writers, musicians, educators, dramatists, and newspapermen meet regularly, to discuss their poems frankly and criticize each other and their work.” But it wasn’t always this way, Forman informs his readers. Most of the artists and writers came from Shanghai, and “their highly westernized culture was pretty far from peasant folklore of hinterland China,” which made it “almost impossible for them not to look down upon the ignorant peasants, the workers and soldiers, who retorted by rejecting them.”

“
Far-seeing Mao Zedong observed this and decided that it was no good,” Forman says. “Calling a meeting of all cultural workers, he flayed them for their high and mighty airs, warned them of retrogression and decay if they persisted.” Forman concludes that “Yenan’s literati took
Mao Tze-tung’s words to heart with amazing good results,” adjusting to “new conditions, a new society … created by and for the peasant, the worker, and the soldier.” As for Mao himself, Forman concluded, after interviewing the chairman, he “
is no unapproachable oracle, not the sole fount of all wisdom and guidance, his words unquestioned law.” His words are just “taken as a basis for discussion and final approval by a committee of Party leaders who are certainly no rubber-stampers.”

Mao assured Forman of the CCP’s democratic aspirations and its admiration of western values. “
We are not striving for the social and political Communism of Soviet Russia,” he told him. “Rather, we prefer to think of what we are doing as something that Lincoln fought for in your
Civil War: the liberation of slaves.” Mao may have been aware of Snow’s use of the word “Lincolnesque” to describe him in
Red Star.
Mao further assured Forman that “
we believe in and practice democracy,” in contrast with what Mao called the “one-party dictatorship as practiced by the Kuomintang today.”

The Dixie Mission
had closer relations with senior Chinese military officers than any Americans have had with the Chinese Communists command before or since. There were regular meetings with virtually all the men who would lead the People’s Liberation Army in the civil war against the Kuomintang and against American troops during the Korean War. Among them was Zhu De, the Communists’ commander in chief, who always impressed visitors with what Davies called his peasant shrewdness and “
tremendous character.” Among the other future senior military leaders who rubbed shoulders with the Dixie Mission Americans was
Lin Biao, who was, until his death in a mortal struggle for power with Mao in 1979, the chairman’s closest comrade-in-arms, the man who propagated the
Little Red Book
of Mao quotations and put the military behind Mao’s
Cultural Revolution. Before that, he was one of the principal commanders of Communist troops in the civil war and a planner, with Peng Dehuai, whom the Americans also got to know in Yenan, of the surprise Chinese offensive in the Korean War that inflicted one of the worst defeats ever experienced by American forces in any war. Colonel David Barrett was deeply impressed by Lin, who, he said, “could not but make a strong impression on anyone who met him.” He was polite, Barrett remembered, but among the less openly affable of the Communist leaders, smiling little but clearly “
a first rate soldier”
whom “I would have been glad to serve under … except of course in fighting against my own or a friendly country.”