Red Star over China (36 page)

Sian and Lanchow had a few factories, but for the most part were dependent upon industrial centers farther east. Any major development of the tremendous industrial possibilities of the Northwest could take place only by borrowing technique and machinery from the outside. And if this were true in Sian and Lanchow, the two great cities of the region, the difficulties which confronted the Reds, occupying the even more backward areas of Kansu, Shensi, and Ninghsia, were manifest.

The blockade cut off the Soviet Government from imports of machinery, and from “imports” of technicians. Of the latter, however, the Reds said their supply was ample. Machinery and raw materials were more serious problems. Battles were fought by the Red Army just to get a few lathes, weaving machines, engines, or a little scrap iron. Nearly everything they had in the category of machinery while I was there had been “captured.” During their expedition to Shansi province in 1936, for example, they seized machines, tools, and raw materials, which were carried by mule all the way across the mountains of Shensi, to their fantastic cliff-dwelling factories.

Soviet industries, when I visited Red China, were all handicraft; there was no electric power. They included clothing, uniform, shoe, and paper
factories at Pao An and Holienwan (Kansu), rug factories at Tingpien (on the Great Wall), mines at Yung P'ing which produced the cheapest coal
^*
in China, and woolen and cotton-spinning factories in seven
hsien
—all of which had plans to produce enough goods to stock the 400 cooperatives in Red Shensi and Kansu. The aim of this “industrial program,” according to Mao Tse-min, brother of Mao Tse-tung and Commissioner of People's Economy, was to make Red China “economically self-sufficient”—strong enough to survive despite the Kuomintang blockade if Nanking refused to accept the Communists' offers for a united front and a cessation of civil war.

The most important soviet state enterprises were the salt-refining plants at Yen Ch'ih, the salt lakes on the Ninghsia border, along the Great Wall, and the oil wells at Yung P'ing and Yen Ch'ang, which produced gasoline, paraffin, and vaseline, wax, candles, and other by-products on a very small scale. Salt deposits at Yen Ch'ih were the finest in China and yielded beautiful rock-crystal salt in large quantities. Consequently salt was cheaper and more plentiful in the soviet districts than in Kuomintang China, where it was a principal source of government income. After the capture of Yen Ch'ih the Reds won the sympathy of the Mongols north of the Wall by agreeing to turn over part of the production to them, revoking the Kuomintang's practice of monopolizing the entire output.

North Shensi's oil wells were the only ones in China, and their output had formerly been sold to an American company which had leases on other reserves in the district. After they had seized Yung P'ing the Reds sank two new wells, and claimed increased production, by about 40 per cent over any previous period, when Yung P'ing and Yen Ch'ang were in “non-bandit” hands. This included increases of “2,000 catties of petrol, 25,000 catties of first-class oil, and 13,500 catties of second-class oil” during a three-month period reported upon. (A few barrels at best.)
^†

Efforts were being made to develop cotton growing in areas cleared of poppies, and the Reds had established a spinning school at An Ting, with a hundred women students. The workers were given three hours' general education daily and five hours' instruction in spinning and weaving. Upon completion of their course, after three months, students were sent to various districts to open handicraft textile factories. “It is expected that in two years north Shensi will be able to produce its entire supply of cloth.”
^‡

But Wu Ch'i Chen had the largest “concentration” of factory workers in the Red districts, and was important also as the location of the Reds' main arsenal. It commanded an important trade route leading to Kansu, and the ruins of two ancient forts nearby testified to its former strategic importance. The town was built high up on the steep clay banks of a rapid stream, and was made up half of
yang-fang,
or “foreign houses”—as the Shensi natives still called anything with four sides and a roof—and half of
yao-fang,
or cave dwellings.

I arrived late at night and I was very tired. The head of the supply commissariat for the front armies had received word of my coming, and he rode out to meet me. He “put me up” at a workers' Lenin Club—an earthen-floored
yao-fang
with clean whitewashed walls strung with festoons of colored paper chains encircling a portrait of the immortal Ilyitch.

Hot water, clean towels—stamped with slogans of Chiang Kai-shek's New Life movement!—and soap soon appeared. They were followed by an ample dinner, with good
baked
bread. I began to feel better. I unrolled my bedding on the table-tennis court and lighted a cigarette. But man is a difficult animal to satisfy. All this luxury and attention only made me yearn for my favorite beverage.

And then, of all things, this commissar suddenly produced, from heaven knows where, some rich brown coffee and sugar! Wu Ch'i Chen had won my heart.

“Products of our five-year plan!” the commissar laughed.

“Products of your confiscation department, you mean,” I amended.

I stayed three days at Wu Ch'i Chen, visiting workers in the factories, “inspecting” their working conditions, attending their theater and their political meetings, reading their wall newspapers and their character books, talking—and getting athletic. I took part in a basketball game on one of Wu Ch'i's three courts. We made up a scratch team composed of the Foreign Office emissary, Fu Chin-kuei; a young English-speaking college student working in the political department; a Red doctor; a soldier; and myself. The arsenal basketball team accepted our challenge and beat us to a pulp.

The arsenal, like the Red University, was housed in a big series of vaulted rooms built into a mountainside. They were cool, well ventilated, and lighted by a series of shafts sunk at angles in the walls, and had the major advantage of being completely bombproof. Here I found over a hundred workers making hand grenades, trench mortars, gunpowder, pistols, small shells and bullets, and a few farming tools. A repair department was engaged in rehabilitating stacks of broken rifles, machine guns, automatic rifles and submachine guns. But the arsenal's output was crude work, and most of its products equipped the Red partisans, the regular Red forces being supplied almost entirely with guns and munitions captured from enemy troops.

Ho Hsi-yang, director of the arsenal, took me through its various chambers, introduced his workers, and told me something about them and himself. He was thirty-six, unmarried, and had formerly been a technician in the famous Mukden arsenal, before the Japanese invasion. After September
18, 1931, he went to Shanghai, and there he joined the Communist Party, later on making his way to the Northwest, and into Red areas. Most of the machinists here were also “outside” men. Many had been employed at Hanyang, China's greatest iron works (Japanese-owned), and a few had worked in Kuomintang arsenals. I met two young Shanghai master mechanics, and an expert fitter, who showed me excellent letters of recommendation from the noted British and American firms of Jardine, Matheson & Co., Anderson Meyer & Co., and the Shanghai Power Company. Another had been foreman in a Shanghai machine shop. There were also machinists from Tientsin, Canton, and Peking, and some had made the Long March with the Red Army.

I learned that of the arsenal's 114 machinists and apprentices only 20 were married. These had their wives with them in Wu Ch'i Chen, either as factory workers or as party functionaries. In the arsenal trade union, which represented the most highly skilled labor in the Red districts, more than 80 per cent of the members belonged to the Communist Party or to the Communist Youth League.

Besides the arsenal, in Wu Ch'i Chen there were cloth and uniform factories, a shoe factory, a stocking factory, and a pharmacy and drug dispensary, with a doctor in attendance. He was a youth just out of medical training school in Shansi and his young and pretty wife was with him working as a nurse. Both of them had joined the Reds during the Shansi expedition the winter before. Nearby was a hospital, with three army doctors in attendance and filled mostly with wounded soldiers, and there was a radio station, a crude laboratory, a cooperative, and the army supply base.

Except in the arsenal and the uniform factory, most of the workers were young women from age eighteen to twenty-five or thirty. Some of them were married to Red soldiers then at the front; nearly all were Kansu, Shensi, or Shansi women; and all had bobbed hair. “Equal pay for equal labor” was a slogan of the Chinese soviets, and there was supposed to be no wage discrimination against women. Workers appeared to get preferential financial treatment over everybody else in the soviet districts. This included Red commanders, who received no regular salary, but only a small living allowance, which varied according to the weight of the treasury.

Wu Ch'i Chen was headquarters for Miss Liu Ch'un-hsien, aged twenty-nine. A former mill worker from Wusih and Shanghai, she was a student in Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University when she met and married Po Ku (Ch'in Pang-hsien).
^*
From her Moscow days she warmly remembered
Rhena Prohm, the improbable red-haired American rebel goddess enshrined in Vincent Sheean's
Personal History.
Now Miss Liu was director of the women's department of the Red trade unions. She said that factory workers were paid $10 to $15 monthly, with board and room furnished by the state. Workers were guaranteed free medical attention (such as it was) and compensation for injuries. Women were given four months of rest with pay during and after pregnancy, and there was a crude “nursery” for workers' children—but most of them seemed to run wild as soon as they could walk. Mothers could collect part of their “social insurance,” which was provided from a fund created by deducting 10 per cent of the workers' salaries, to which the government added an equal amount. The government also contributed the equivalent of 2 per cent of the wage output for workers' education and recreation, funds managed jointly by the trade unions and the workers' factory committees. There was an eight-hour day and a six-day week. When I visited them the factories were running twenty-four hours a day, with three shifts working.

All this seemed progressive, though perhaps far from a Communistic utopia. That such conditions were actually being realized in the midst of the soviets' impoverishment was really interesting. How
primitively
they were being realized was quite another matter. They had clubs, schools, ample dormitories—all these, certainly—but in cave houses with earthen floors, no shower baths, no movies, no electricity. They were furnished food; but meals consisted of millet, vegetables, and sometimes mutton, with no delicacies whatever. They collected their wages and social insurance all right in soviet currency, but the articles they could buy were strictly limited to necessities—and none too much of those.

“Unbearable,” the average American or English worker would say. But I remembered Shanghai factories where little boy and girl slave workers sat or stood at their tasks twelve or thirteen hours a day, and then dropped, in exhausted sleep, to the dirty cotton quilt, their bed, directly beneath their machines. I remembered little girls in silk filatures, and the pale young women in cotton factories sold into jobs as virtual slaves for four or five years, unable to leave the heavily guarded, high-walled premises day or night without special permission. And I remembered that during 1935 more than 29,000 bodies were picked up from the streets and rivers and canals of Shanghai—bodies of the destitute poor, of the starved or drowned babies or children they could not feed.

For these workers in Wu Ch'i Chen, however primitive it might be, here seemed to be a life at least of good health, exercise, clean mountain air, freedom, dignity, and hope, in which there was room for growth. They knew that nobody was making money out of them, I think they felt they were working for themselves and for China, and they said they were
revolutionaries!
They took very seriously their two hours of daily reading and writing, their political lectures, and their dramatic groups, and they keenly contested for the miserable prizes offered in competitions between groups and individuals in sport, literacy, public health, wall newspapers, and “factory efficiency.” All these things were
real
to them, things they had never known before, could never possibly know in any other factory of China, and they seemed grateful for the doors of life opened up for them.

It was hard for an old China hand like me to believe, and I was confused about its ultimate significance, but I could not deny the evidence I saw. To present that evidence in detail I would have had to tell a dozen stories of workers to whom I talked; quote from their essays and criticisms in the wall newspapers—written in the childish scrawl of the newly literate—many of which I translated, with the aid of the college student; tell of the political meetings I attended; and of the plays created and dramatized by these workers; and of the many little things that go to make up an “impression.”

As one example, I met an electrical engineer in Wu Ch'i Chen, a man named Chu Tso-chih. He knew English and German very well, he was a power expert, and he had written an engineering textbook widely used in China. He had once been with the Shanghai Power Company, and later with Anderson Meyer & Co. Until recently he had had a practice of $10,000 a year in South China, where he was a consulting engineer and efficiency man, and had given it up and left his family to come up to these wild dark hills of Shensi and offer his services to the Reds for nothing. Incredible! The background of this phenomenon traced to a beloved grandfather, a famous philanthropist of Ningpo, whose deathbed injunction to young Chu had been to “devote his life to raising the cultural standard of the masses.” And Chu had decided the quickest method was the Communist one.