Red Star over China (13 page)

The influence of Mao Tse-tung throughout the Communist world of China was probably greater than that of anyone else. He was a member of nearly everything—the revolutionary military committee, the political bureau of the Central Committee, the finance commission, the organization committee, the public health commission, and others. His real influence was asserted through his domination of the political bureau,
^*
which had decisive power in the policies of the Party, the government, and the army. Yet, while everyone knew and respected him, there was—as yet, at least—no ritual of hero worship built up around him. I never met a Chinese Red who drooled “our-great-leader” phrases,
^†
I did not hear Mao's name used as a synonym for the Chinese people, but still I never met one who did not like “the Chairman”—as everyone called him—and admire him. The role of his personality in the movement was clearly immense.

Mao seemed to me a very interesting and complex man. He had the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant, with a lively sense of humor and a love of rustic laughter. His laughter was even active on the subject of himself and the shortcomings of the soviets—a boyish sort of laughter which never in the least shook his inner faith in his purpose. He was plain-speaking and plain-living, and some people might have considered him rather coarse and vulgar. Yet he combined curious qualities of naivete with incisive wit and worldly sophistication.

I think my first impression—dominantly one of native shrewdness—was probably correct. And yet Mao was an accomplished scholar of Classical Chinese, an omnivorous reader, a deep student of philosophy and history, a good speaker, a man with an unusual memory and extraordinary powers
of concentration, an able writer, careless in his personal habits and appearance but astonishingly meticulous about details of duty, a man of tireless energy, and a military and political strategist of considerable genius. It was interesting that many Japanese regarded him as the ablest Chinese strategist alive.

The Reds were putting up some new buildings in Pao An, but accommodations were very primitive while I was there. Mao lived with his wife in a two-room
yao-fang
with bare, poor, map-covered walls. He had known much worse, and as the son of a “rich” peasant in Hunan he had also known better. The Maos' chief luxury (like Chou's) was a mosquito net. Otherwise Mao lived very much like the rank and file of the Red Army. After ten years of leadership of the Reds, after hundreds of confiscations of property of landlords, officials, and tax collectors, he owned only his blankets and a few personal belongings, including two cotton uniforms. Although he was a Red Army commander as well as chairman, he wore on his coat collar only the two red bars that are the insignia of the ordinary Red soldier.

I went with Mao several times to mass meetings of the villagers and the Red cadets, and to the Red theater. He sat inconspicuously in the midst of the crowd and enjoyed himself hugely. I remember once, between acts at the Anti-Japanese Theater, there was a general demand for a duet by Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao, the twenty-eight-year-old president of the Hung Chung Ta-hsueh (Red Army University) and formerly a famed young cadet on Chiang Kai-shek's staff. Lin blushed like a schoolboy and got them out of the “command performance” by a graceful speech, calling upon the women Communists for a song instead.

Mao's food was the same as everybody's, but being a Hunanese he had the southerner's
ai-la,
or “love of pepper.” He even had pepper cooked into his bread. Except for this passion, he scarcely seemed to notice what he ate. One night at dinner I heard him expand on a theory of pepper-loving peoples being revolutionaries. He first submitted his own province, Hunan, famous for the revolutionaries it has produced. Then he listed Spain, Mexico, Russia, and France to support his contention, but laughingly had to admit defeat when somebody mentioned the well-known Italian love of red pepper and garlic, in refutation of his theory. One of the most amusing songs of the “bandits,” incidentally, was a ditty called “The Hot Red Pepper.” It told of the disgust of the pepper with his pointless vegetable existence, waiting to be eaten, and how he ridiculed the contentment of the cabbages, spinach, and beans with their invertebrate careers. He ends up by leading a vegetable insurrection. “The Hot Red Pepper” was a great favorite with Chairman Mao.

He appeared to be quite free from symptoms of megalomania, but he had a deep sense of personal dignity, and something about him suggested a power of ruthless decision when he deemed it necessary. I never saw him angry, but I heard from others that on occasions he had been roused to an intense and withering fury. At such times his command of irony and invective was said to be classic and lethal.

I found him surprisingly well informed on current world politics. Even on the Long March, it seems, the Reds received news broadcasts by radio, and in the Northwest they published their own newspapers. Mao was exceptionally well read in world history and had a realistic conception of European social and political conditions. He was very interested in the Labour Party of England, and questioned me intensely about its present policies, soon exhausting all my information. It seemed to me that he found it difficult fully to understand why, in a country where workers were enfranchised, there was still no workers' government. I was afraid my answers did not satisfy him. He expressed profound contempt for Ramsay MacDonald, whom he designated as a
han-chien
—an archtraitor of the British people.

His opinion of President Roosevelt was rather interesting. He believed him to be anti-Fascist, and thought China could cooperate with such a man. He asked innumerable questions about the New Deal, and Roosevelt's foreign policy. The questioning showed a remarkably clear conception of the objectives of both. He regarded Mussolini and Hitler as mountebanks, but considered Mussolini intellectually a much abler man, a real Machiavellian, with a knowledge of history, while Hitler was a mere will-less puppet of the reactionary capitalists.

Mao had read a number of books about India and had some definite opinions on that country. Chief among these was that Indian independence would never be realized without an agrarian revolution. He questioned me about Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Suhasini Chattopadhyaya, and other Indian leaders I had known. He knew something about the Negro question in America, and unfavorably compared the treatment of Negroes and American Indians with policies in the Soviet Union toward national minorities. He was interested when I pointed out certain great differences in the historical background of the Negro in America and that of minorities in Russia.

Mao was an ardent student of philosophy. Once when I was having nightly interviews with him on Communist history, a visitor brought him several new books on philosophy, and Mao asked me to postpone our engagements. He consumed those books in three or four nights of intensive reading, during which he seemed oblivious to everything else. He had not confined his reading to Marxist philosopers, but also knew something
of the ancient Greeks, of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Rousseau, and others.

I often wondered about Mao's own sense of responsibility over the question of force, violence, and the “necessity of killing.” He had in his youth had strongly liberal and humanistic tendencies, and the transition from idealism to realism evidently had first been made philosophically. Although he was peasant-born, he did not as a youth personally suffer much from oppression of the landlords, as did many Reds, and, although Marxism was the core of his thought, I deduced that class hatred was for him probably an intellectually acquired mechanism in the bulwark of his philosophy, rather than an instinctive impulse to action.

There seemed to be nothing in him that might be called religious feeling. He was a humanist in a fundamental sense; he believed in man's ability to solve man's problems. I thought he had probably on the whole been a moderating influence in the Communist movement where life and death were concerned.

Mao worked thirteen or fourteen hours a day, often until very late at night, frequently retiring at two or three. He seemed to have an iron constitution. That he traced to a youth spent in hard work on his father's farm, and to an austere period in his schooldays when he had formed a kind of Spartan club with some comrades. They used to fast, go on long hikes in the wooded hills of South China, swim in the coldest weather, walk shirtless in the rain and sleet—to toughen themselves. They intuitively knew that the years ahead in China would demand the capacity for withstanding great hardship and suffering.

Mao once spent a summer tramping all over Hunan, his native province. He earned his bread by working from farm to farm, and sometimes by begging. Another time, for days he ate nothing but hard beans and water—again a process of “toughening” his stomach. The friendships he made on country rambles in his early youth were of great value to him when, some ten years later, he began to organize thousands of farmers in Hunan into the famous peasant unions which became the first base of the soviets, after the Kuomintang broke with the Communists in 1927.

Mao impressed me as a man of considerable depth of feeling. I remember that his eyes moistened once or twice when he was speaking of dead comrades, or recalling incidents in his youth, during the rice riots and famines of Hunan, when some starving peasants were beheaded in his province for demanding food from the yamen. One soldier told me of seeing Mao give his coat away to a wounded man at the front. They said that he refused to wear shoes when the Red warriors had none.

Yet I doubted very much if he would ever command great respect from the intellectual elite of China, perhaps not entirely because he had
an extraordinary mind, but because he had the personal habits of a peasant. The Chinese disciples of Pareto might have thought him uncouth. Talking with Mao one day, I saw him absent-mindedly turn down the belt of his trousers and search for some guests—but then it is just possible that Pareto might have done a little searching himself if he had lived in similar circumstances. But I am sure that Pareto would never have taken off his trousers in the presence of the president of the Red Army University—as Mao did once when I was interviewing Lin Piao. It was extremely hot inside the little cave. Mao lay down on the bed, pulled off his pants, and for twenty minutes carefully studied a military map on the wall—interrupted occasionally by Lin Piao, who asked for confirmation of dates and names, which Mao invariably knew. His nonchalant habits fitted with his complete indifference to personal appearance, although the means were at hand to fix himself up like a chocolate-box general or a politician's picture in
Who's Who in China.

Except for a few weeks when he was ill, he walked most of the 6,000 miles of the Long March, like the rank and file. He could have achieved high office and riches by “betraying” to the Kuomintang, and this applied to most Red commanders. The tenacity with which these Communists for ten years clung to their principles could not be fully evaluated unless one knew the history of “silver bullets” in China, by means of which other rebels were bought off.

I was able to check up on many of Mao's assertions, and usually found them to be correct. He subjected me to mild doses of political propaganda, but it was interesting compared to what I had received in nonbandit quarters. He never imposed any censorship on me, in either my writing or my photography, courtesies for which I was grateful. He did his best to see that I got facts to explain various aspects of soviet life.

What were the fundamental policies of the Chinese Reds? I had a dozen or more talks on this subject with Mao Tse-tung and other leading Communists. But before one examined their policies it was necessary to have some conception of the nature of the long struggle between the Communists and Nanking. To comprehend even the recent events in the Reddening Northwest one had first to look at a few facts of history, as they looked to Chinese Communists.

In the following paragraphs I have paraphrased, in part, the comments of Lo Fu (Chang Wen-t'ien),
^*
the English-speaking general secretary of the Communist Party Politburo, whom I interviewed in Pao An.

The Chinese Communist Party was founded only in 1921 (an event reserved for more detailed discussion in a later context). It grew rapidly until 1923, when a two-party alliance was formed with Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang (commonly called the Nationalist Party). Dr. Sun had independently reached an entente with the Russian Communist Party, under Lenin, which offered Sun material and political help. Neither the Kungch'antang (Chinese Communist Party) nor the Kuomintang held power at the time, but Sun was supported by provincial warlords in South China. They permitted Sun to set up a provisional all-China government in Canton, in rivalry to the Peking Government, which was backed by a coterie of northern warlords and was recognized by the foreign powers. From 1923 onward the Kuomintang was reorganized with the help of Russian political advisers, along lines of the party of Lenin. With Sun's
concurrence, some members of the young Chinese Communist Party also joined the Kuomintang. Sun Yat-sen was a nationalist patriot whose ambition was to recover China's sovereign independence; beyond that, his concepts of social revolution (as expressed in his
Three Principles of the People)
were a vague mixture of reform capitalism and socialism. The Communists supported Sun's national independence aspirations but they aimed ultimately at a proletarian dictatorship.

Moscow had at first (1918-22) tried to advance Russian revolutionary interests in the Far East by working with the Peking warlords. In 1921–22 the Comintern reassessed the value of potential allies in China after its delegate, Henricus Sneevliet,
^*
returned with a favorable report on the prospects of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Completely disillusioned after Western rejection of his plans (at the Washington Conference, 1921–22) for the “international development of China,” Dr. Sun now welcomed Russian offers of aid extended through the Comintern's agent, Adolf Joffe. A complete reorientation of Soviet policy began with the Sun-Joffe agreement. In the Sun-Joffe joint statement (January 26, 1923), which became the basis of the three-way alliance (Kuomintang-Chinese Communist-Soviet Russia), it was agreed that “conditions do not exist here [in China] for the successful establishment of communism or socialism,” while the “chief and immediate aim of China is the achievement of national union and national independence,” in the struggle for which the Chinese “could depend on the aid of Russia.” When Mikhail Borodin arrived in Canton late in 1922, to become Sun's adviser and head of the Soviet mission, he held dual positions as a delegate of the Soviet Politburo and as delegate of the Comintern, itself already an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. (Inherent in this dualism from the outset were contradictions between Russian national interests and the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, which were never resolved.)