Red Star over China (10 page)

I had never before seen so much personal dignity in any Chinese youngsters. This first encounter was only the beginning of a series of surprises that the Young Vanguards were to give me, for as I penetrated deeper into the soviet districts I was to discover in these red-cheeked “little Red devils”—cheerful, gay, energetic, and loyal—the living spirit of an astonishing crusade of youth.

It was one of those Sons of Lenin, in fact, who escorted me in the morning to Chou En-lai's headquarters. That turned out to be a bombproof hut (half cave) surrounded by many others exactly like it, in which farmers dwelt undismayed by the fact that they were in a battle area, and that in their midst was the Red commander of the Eastern Front.
^*
The quartering of a few troops in the vicinity did not seem to have disturbed the rustic serenity. Before the quarters of Chou En-lai, for whose head Chiang Kai-shek had offered $80,000, there was one sentry.

Inside I saw that the room was clean, but furnished in the barest fashion. A mosquito net hanging over the clay
k'ang
was the only luxury observable. A couple of iron dispatch boxes stood at the foot of it, and a little wooden table served as desk. Chou was bending over it reading radiograms when the sentry announced my arrival.

“I have a report that you are a reliable journalist, friendly to the Chinese people, and that you can be trusted to tell the truth,” said Chou. “This is all we want to know. It does not matter to us that you are not a Communist. We will welcome any journalist who comes to see the soviet districts. It is not we, but the Kuomintang, who prevent it. You can write about anything you see and you will be given every help to investigate the soviet districts.”

Evidently the “report” about me had come from the Communists' secret headquarters in Sian. The Reds had radio communication with all important cities of China, including Shanghai, Hankow, Nanking, and Tientsin. Despite frequent seizures of Red radio sets in the White cities, the Kuomintang had never succeeded in severing urban-rural Red communications for very long. According to Chou, the Kuomintang had never cracked the Red Army's codes since they first established a radio department, with equipment captured from the White troops.

Chou's radio station, a portable wireless set powered by a manually operated generator, was erected only a short distance from his headquarters. Through it he was in touch with all important points in the soviet areas, and with every front. He even had direct communication with Commander-in-Chief Chu Teh, whose forces were then stationed hundreds of miles to the southwest, on the Szechuan-Tibetan border. There was a radio school in Pao An, temporary soviet capital in the Northwest, where about ninety students were being trained as radio engineers. They picked up the daily broadcasts from Nanking, Shanghai, and Tokyo, and furnished news to the press of Soviet China.

Chou squatted before his little desk and put aside his radiograms—mostly reports (he said) from units stationed at various points along the Yellow River, opposite Shansi province, the Reds' Eastern Front. He began working out a suggested itinerary for me. When he finished he handed me a paper containing items covering a trip of ninety-two days.

“This is my recommendation,” he said, “but whether you follow it is your own business. I think you will find it an interesting journey.”

But ninety-two days! And almost half of them to be spent on foot or horseback. What was there to be seen? Were the Red districts so extensive as that? As it turned out, I was to spend much longer than he had suggested, and in the end to leave with reluctance because I had seen so little.

Chou promised me the use of a horse to carry me to Pao An, three days distant, and arranged for me to leave the following morning, when I could accompany part of the communications corps that was returning to the provisional capital. I learned that Mao Tse-tung and other soviet functionaries were there now, and Chou agreed to send a radio message to them telling of my arrival.

As we talked I had been studying Chou with deep interest; like many Red leaders, he was as much a legend as a man. Slender and of medium height, with a slight wiry frame, he was boyish in appearance despite his long black beard, and had large, warm, deep-set eyes. A certain magnetism about him seemed to derive from a combination of personal charm and assurance of command. His English was somewhat hesitant and difficult. He told me he had not used it for five years. The account below is based on notes of our conversation at that time.

Chou was born in 1899 in Huai-an, Kiangsu, in what he called a “bankrupt mandarin family.” His mother was a native of Shaohsing, Chekiang province. Chou was given (at the age of four months) to the family of his father's younger brother. The brother was about to die
without issue when Chou's father, to assure him of male posterity (on the family tablets), presented him with En-lai to rear as his own son. “My aunt became my real mother when I was a baby,” said Chou. “I did not leave her for even one day until I was ten years old—when she and my natural mother both died.”

Chou's paternal grandfather was a scholar who served as a magistrate in Huai-an county, North Kiangsu, during the Manchu Dynasty. It was there that Chou spent his childhood, while his father, Chou Yun-liang, who had passed the imperial examinations, vainly waited for a magistry; he died while Chou was still an infant. His foster mother (whom Chou called “mother”) was highly literate, and that was not general then among officials' wives. Still more uncommon, she liked fiction and “forbidden”
^*
stories of past rebellions, to which she introduced Chou as a child. His early education was in a family school under a private tutor who taught classical literature and philosophy, to prepare one for official life. After his “two mothers” died Chou was sent to live with another aunt and uncle—his father's older brother, who was also an official—in Fengtien (Mukden, Shenyang) Manchuria. He began to read illegal books and papers written or inspired by such reformists as Liang Ch'i-ch'ao.

At the age of fourteen Chou entered Nankai Middle School, in Tientsin. The monarchy had been overthrown and Chou now fully “came under the influence of the Kuomintang” or Nationalist Party founded by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Japan had provided hospitality to Sun Yat-sen during his agitation against the monarchy. Sun still found refuge there as he prepared to overthrow corrupt warlords who had seized the republic. Chou himself went to Japan in 1917, the year he graduated from Nankai Middle School. While learning Japanese, Chou was an “auditor student” at Waseda University in Tokyo, and at the University of Kyoto. He also became widely acquainted with revolution-minded Chinese students in Japan during his eighteen months there, and kept in touch, through letters and reading, with events in Peking.

In 1919 the former director of Nankai Middle School, Chang Poling, became chancellor of the newly organized Nankai University of Tientsin. Chou left Japan to enroll there at Chang's invitation. Meanwhile his relatives—“a spendthrift lot,” Chou called them—had become so impoverished that they could provide no support for Chou's college plans. Chang Po-ling gave Chou a job that paid enough to meet costs of tuition, lodging, and books. “During my last two years at Nankai Middle School I had received no help from my family. I lived on a
scholarship which I won as best student in my class. In Japan I had lived by borrowing from my friends. Now at Nankai University I became editor of the
Hsueh-sheng Lien-ho Huí Pao (Students' Union Paper),
which helped cover some expenses.” Chou managed to do that despite five months spent in jail in 1919, as a leader of Nankai's student rebellion which grew out of the May Fourth movement.
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During that period Chou helped to form the Chueh-wu Shih, or Awakening Society, a radical group whose members later became, variously, anarchists, Nationalists, and Communists. (One of them was Teng Ying-ch'ao,
^†
whom Chou was to marry in 1925.) The Awakening Society existed until the end of 1920, when four of its founders, led by Chou, went to France as part of the Work-Study program organized by Ch'en Tu-hsiut and other Francophiles.

“Before going to France,” said Chou, “I read translations of the
Communist Manifesto;
Kautsky's
Class Struggle;
and
The October Revolution.
These books were published under the auspices of the
New Youth (Hsin Ch'ing-nien),
edited by Ch'en Tu-hsiu. I also personally met Ch'en Tu-hsiu as well as Li Ta-chao†—who were to become founders of the Chinese Communist Party.” (Chou made no reference to any meeting with Mao Tse-tung at that time.)

“I sailed for France in October, 1920. On the way I met many Hunanese students who were members of the Hsin-Min Hsueh-hui (the New People's Study Society), organized by Mao Tse-tung. Among these were Ts'ai Ho-sent and his sister, Ts'ai Ch'ang,† who organized the first China Socialist Youth Corps in France in 1921. In 1922 I became a member-founder of the [Chinese] Communist Youth League and began to work full time for that organization.
^‡
After two years I went to London, where I spent two and a half months. I did not like it. Then I went to Germany and worked there for a year, helping to organize.
^§
Our Communist Youth League had sent delegates to Shanghai in 1922, to request admission to the Party, formed the year before. Our petition being granted, the CYL became formally affiliated with the Party, and thus I became a Communist. Founder-members of the CYL in France who became Party members in this way included Ts'ai Ho-sen, Ts'ai Ch'ang, Chao Shih-yen, Li Fu-ch'un,† Li Li-san,† Wang Jo-fei, and the two sons of Ch'en Tu-hsiu—Ch'en Yen-nien and Ch'en Ch'iao-nien. Ch'en Yen-nien later became a ricksha puller in order to organize rickshamen
in Shanghai. During the counterrevolution he was captured and badly tortured before he was killed. His brother was executed at Lunghua a year later—1928.

“Among members of our Chinese Students Union in France more than four hundred joined the CYL. Fewer than a hundred joined the anarchists and about a hundred became Nationalists.”

Financial support for Chinese students in France came from the Sino-French Educational Association and from Tsai Yuan-p'ei and Li Shih-tseng. “Many old and patriotic gentlemen,” said Chou, “privately helped us students, and with no personal political aims.”
²
Chou's own financial backer while in Europe was Yen Hsiu, a founder of Nankai University. Unlike some Chinese students, Chou did no manual labor in France, except for a brief period at the Renault plant, when he studied labor organization. After a year with a private tutor, learning the French language, he devoted his entire time to politics. “Later on,” Chou told me, “when friends remarked that I had used Yen Hsiu's money to become a Communist, Yen quoted a Chinese proverb, ‘Every intelligent man has his own purposes!'”

In France, London, and Germany, Chou spent three years. On his return to China he stopped briefly for instructions in Moscow. Late in 1924 he arrived in Canton, where he became Chiang Kai-shek's deputy director of the political department of Whampoa Academy. (While still in Paris Chou had been elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. In Canton he was also elected secretary of the Kwang-tung provincial Communist Party—paradox of a strange alliance!) At Whampoa, Chou's real boss was the Russian adviser, General Vasili Bluecher,
^*
known in Canton as Galin.

Under the skillful guidance of Galin, and of the Russians' chief political adviser, Mikhail Borodin,
^*
Chou En-lai built up a circle of cadet disciples known as the League of Military Youth, which included Lin Piao and other future generals of the Red Army. His influence was further enhanced when, in 1925, he was appointed political commissar of the Nationalists' first division, which suppressed a revolt near Swatow—an occasion Chou utilized to organize labor unions in that port. In March, 1926, Kuomintang-Communist tension resulted in Chiang's first anti-Communist blow. He succeeded in ending the practice of dual-party membership and removed many Communists from Whampoa posts. Chou En-lai remained, however, on Chiang Kai-shek's orders.

During 1926 the Northern Expedition got under way, with Chiang Kai-shek as commander-in-chief selected jointly by the Kuomintang and
the Communists. Chou En-lai was ordered to prepare an insurrection and help the Nationalist Army seize Shanghai. Within three months the Communist Party had organized 600,000 workers and was able to call a general strike, but it was a fiasco. Unarmed and untrained, the workers did not know how to go about “seizing the city.”

Underestimating the significance of the first and then of a second strike, the northern warlords cut off a number of heads but failed to halt the labor movement, while Chou En-lai learned by practice “how to lead an uprising.” Chou and such Shanghai labor leaders as Chao Tse-yen, Chao Shih-yen, Ku Shun-chang, and Lo Yi-ming now succeeded in organizing 50,000 pickets. With Mausers smuggled into the city an “iron band” of 300 marksmen was trained, to become the only armed force these Shanghai workers had.

On March 21, 1927, the revolutionists called a general strike which closed all the industries of Shanghai. They first seized the police stations, next the arsenal, then the garrison, and after that, victory. Five thousand workers were armed, six battalions of revolutionary troops created, the warlord armies withdrew, and a “citizens' government” was proclaimed. “Within two days,” said Chou, “we won everything but the foreign concessions.”

The International Settlement (jointly controlled by Britain, the U.S., and Japan) and the French Concession which adjoined it were never attacked during the third insurrection; otherwise the triumph was complete—and short-lived. The Nationalist Army, led by General Pai Chung-hsi, was welcomed to the city by the workers' militia. Then on April 12 the Nationalist-Communist coalition abruptly ended when Chiang Kai-shek set up a separate regime in Nanking, to lead one of history's classic counterrevolutions.