Red Star over China (48 page)

“We must intensify our educational work among our own troops. In several recent instances our men have violated the united-front policy by firing on troops that we had agreed to permit to withdraw. In other instances men were reluctant to return captured rifles and had to be ordered several times to do so. This is not a breach of discipline, but a lack of confidence in their commanders' orders, showing that the men do not fully understand the reasons for such actions, some men actually accusing their leaders of ‘counterrevolutionary orders.' One company commander received a letter from a White commander and did not even read it, but tore it up, saying, ‘They are all the same, these Whites.' This shows that we must more deeply instruct the rank and file; our first lectures have not made their position clear to them. We must ask for their criticism and make such modifications in our policy as they think necessary after thorough discussion and explanation. We must impress upon them that the united-front policy is no trick to fool the Whites, but that it is a basic policy and in line with the decisions of our Party.

“After the East Attack [into Shansi] many of our comrades, coming here to Kansu and Ninghsia, felt discouraged because the contrast was so great compared with the response we received there. They felt depressed because of the poverty of the country here and the low level of political enthusiasm among the people. Don't be discouraged! Work harder! These people are also brothers, and will respond to the same treatment as other human beings. We must not miss a single opportunity to convince a White soldier or a Mohammedan peasant. We are not working hard enough.

“As for the masses, we must urge them to take the lead in every revolutionary action. We must not touch any Mohammedan landlord ourselves, but we must show the people clearly that they have the freedom to do so, that we will protect their mass organizations that do so, that this is their revolutionary right, that it is the produce of their labor
and belongs to them. We must intensify our efforts to raise the political consciousness of the masses. Remember that they have heretofore had no political consciousness except racial hatred. We must awaken a patriotic consciousness in them. We must deepen our work in the Ke Lao Hui and other secret societies and make them active, not merely passive, allies on the anti-Japanese front. We must consolidate our good relations with the
ahuns
and urge them to take places of leadership in the anti-Japanese movement. We must strengthen the basis of revolutionary power by organizing every Mohammedan youth.”

P'eng's statement was followed by long critical comments from the political commissars of the First and Fifteenth Army corps. Both of them reviewed their efforts in “united-front educational work” and suggested improvements. All commanders took copious notes, and afterwards there was a session of long debate and argument which lasted till dinner. P'eng moved that the two army corps be enlarged by five hundred new enlistments each, and this was seconded and passed unanimously.

After dinner there was a new play by the dramatic club of the First Army Corps, based on experiences of the past week. It portrayed in an amusing way the mistakes of the commanders and men in carrying out the new policy. One scene showed an argument between a commander and a warrior; another between two commanders; a third showed a company commander tearing up a letter he had received from the Whites.

In the second act most of these mistakes were shown corrected and the Red Army and anti-Japanese Moslem Army were marching together, and singing and fighting side by side against the Japanese and the Kuomintang. Seemed magically quick work by the education-through-entertainment department.

During the next month the attention of every Red in China was to be focused anxiously upon the series of maneuvers by which, for the first time in the history of the soviets, all the main forces of the Red Army were eventually united and concentrated in a single great area. And here some illumination should be shed upon the leadership of this second great trek from the South—upon Chu Teh, commander-in-chief of the “All China” Red Army, who, after a heartbreaking winter spent on the frozen marches of Tibet, was now pouring the Second and Fourth Front armies into the Northwest.
¹

Li Chiang-lin told me:

As a youth Chu Teh was reckless, adventurous, and courageous, moved by the legends of his people, by the tales of “free companions” of the
Shui Hu Chuan,
and by the exploits of the heroes of the
Romance of Three Kingdoms,
who had fought over the fields and mountains of his native Szechuan. He gravitated naturally toward military life. Helped by his family's political influence, he was accepted in the new Yunnan Military Academy, and he was among the first cadets in China to be given modern military training. Upon graduation from the Yunnan Academy he was commissioned a lieutenant, and entered what the Chinese referred to as the “foreign army”—“foreign” because it used Western methods of drill and tactics, because it did not go into battle accompanied by Chinese musicians, and because for arms it used “foreign spears”—rifles with fixed bayonets on them.

In the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912 this modern army of Yunnan played a prominent role, and Chu Teh, leading a battalion of braves, soon distinguished himself as a warrior of the republic. By 1916, when Yuan Shih-k'ai attempted to restore the monarchy, he was a brigadier general, and his Yunnanese troops under the celebrated Ts'ai O were the first to raise the banner of revolt, which doomed Yuan's imperial ambitions to defeat. At this time Chu Teh first became known throughout the southern provinces as one of the “four fierce generals” of Ts'ai O.

With his prestige thus established, Chu Teh's political fortunes pyramided rapidly. He became director of the Bureau of Public Safety in
Yunnanfu, and then Provincial Commissioner of Finance. People of Yunnan and Szechuan agreed that there were two things certain about officials: one was that they were corrupt, the other that they were opium smokers. Reared in a region where opium was as commonly smoked as tea was drunk, and where parents customarily spread the drug on sugarcane to soothe their bellowing infants, Chu Teh had inevitably become a smoker. And given office by a bureaucracy which looked upon plunder of public funds as not so much a right but a duty to one's family, he followed the example of superiors and manipulated the privileges of office to enrich himself and his heirs.

He went in for a harem, too. He was said to have acquired several wives and concubines, and he built for them and his progeny a palatial home in the capital of Yunnan. One might have thought he had everything he desired: wealth, power, love, descendants, poppy dreams, eminent respectability, and a comfortable future in which to preach the proprieties of Confucianism. He had, in fact, only one really bad habit, but it was to prove his downfall. He liked to read books.

Pure realist though he had been till now, there must have been a strain of idealism and genuine revolutionary ardor latent in his character. Influenced by reading, influenced also by a few returned students who occasionally drifted into the backwash of Yunnan, Chu Teh gradually understood that the revolution of 1911 had been for the mass of the people a complete cipher; that it had merely replaced one despotic bureaucracy of exploitation with another. What was more, he seemed to have worried about it—as anyone of feeling, living in Yunnanfu, a city of 40,000 slave girls and boys, might well have done. He was apparently possessed by a sense of shame and simultaneously with an ambition to emulate the popular heroes of the West, and a desire to “modernize” China. The more books he read the more he realized his own ignorance and China's backwardness. He wanted to study and he wanted to travel.

By 1922 Chu Teh had unburdened himself of his wives and concubines, pensioning them off in Yunnanfu. To one who knew the conservatism of China, and especially the feudal taboos of Yunnan, this act of repudiation of tradition was hardly believable, and indicated in itself a personality of unusual independence and resolution. Leaving Yunnan, he went to Shanghai, where he met many young revolutionaries of the Kuomintang, which he had joined. Here also he came into contact with left-wing radicals, who tended to look upon him condescendingly as an old-fashioned militarist. A corrupt official from feudal Yunnan, a many-wived general, an opium addict—could this also be a revolutionary?

Before this trip Chu Teh had determined to break himself of the drug habit. It was not easy: he had been using opium for a long time.
But this man had more steel in his will than his acquaintances supposed. For days he lay almost unconscious as he fought his noxious craving; then, taking a medicine cure along, he boarded a British steamer on the Yangtze and took passage for Shanghai. No opium could be bought or sold on board, and for weeks he sailed down the river, pacing the deck, never going ashore, fighting this hardest battle of his life. But after a month on board he left the ship with clear eyes, a ruddy glow on his cheeks, and a new confidence in his step. After a final hospital cure in Shanghai, he began a new life in earnest. So said his aide, Li Chiang-lin.

Chu Teh was then nearing forty, but he was in excellent health and his mind was eagerly reaching out for new knowledge. Accompanying some Chinese students, he went to Germany, where he lived for a while near Hannover. There he met many Communists, and at this time seems to have seriously taken up the study of Marxism and become enamored of new perspectives opened up by the theory of social revolution. In this study he was chiefly tutored by Chinese students young enough to be his own sons—for he never learned French, he knew only a smattering of German, and he was a poor linguist. One of his student teachers in Germany told me how deadly in earnest he had been; how patiently, ploddingly, stubbornly, he struggled amid the confusion of an impact of a whole new world of ideas to integrate the basic truths and meanings, how great had been the intellectual effort with which he divested himself of all the prejudices and limitations of his traditional Chinese training.

In this way he read some histories of the Great War, and familiarized himself with the politics of Europe. One day a student friend of his
^*
came to see him, talking excitedly about a book called
State and Revolution.
Chu Teh asked him to help him read it, and thus he became interested in Marxism and the Russian Revolution. He read Bukharin's
ABC of Communism,
and his works on dialectical materialism, and then he read more of Lenin. The powerful revolutionary movement then active in Germany swept him, with hundreds of Chinese students, into the struggle for world revolution. He joined the Chinese branch of the Communist Party founded in Germany.

“Chu Teh had an experienced, disciplined, practical mind,” a comrade who knew him in Germany told me. “He was an extremely simple man, modest and unassuming. He always invited criticism; he had an insatiable appetite for criticism. In Germany he lived the simple life of a soldier. Chu Teh's original interest in communism sprang from his sympathy for the poor, which had also brought him into the Kuomintang. He believed strongly in Sun Yat-sen for a while, because of Sun's principles advocating land for the tillers, and the limitation of private capital.
But not until he began to understand Marxism did he realize the inadequacy of Sun Yat-sen's program.”

Chu Teh also lived for some time in Paris, where he entered a school for Chinese students which had been established by Wu Tze-hui, a veteran national revolutionary of the Kuomintang. In France and in Germany he sat at the feet of his young German, French, and Chinese instructors, and he humbly listened, quietly interrogated, debated, sought clarity and understanding. “To be modern, to understand the meaning of the revolution,” his youthful tutors kept repeating, “you must go to Russia. There you can see the future.” And again Chu Teh followed their advice. In Moscow he entered the Eastern Toilers' University, where he studied Marxism under Chinese teachers. Late in 1925 he returned to Shanghai, and from that time on he worked under the direction of the Communist Party, to which he soon gave his fortune.

Chu Teh rejoined his former superior and fellow Yunnanese, General Chu Pei-teh, whose power in the Kuomintang Army was second only to that of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1927, when General Chu Pei-teh's forces occupied several provinces south of the Yangtze, he made Chu Teh chief of the Bureau of Public Safety in Nanchang, capital of Kiangsi. There also he took command of a training regiment of cadets, and there he made contact with the Ninth Kuomintang Army, stationed farther south in Kiangsi. In the Ninth Army were detachments that had formerly been under his personal command in Yunnan. Thus the stage was prepared for the August Uprising in Nanchang, in which Communist troops first began the long open struggle for power against the Kuomintang.

August 1, 1927, was a day of great decision for Chu Teh. Ordered by his commander-in-chief, Chu Pei-teh, to suppress the insurrection, Chu Teh (who had helped organize it) instead joined with the rebels, renouncing the remaining connections with his past. When, after the defeat of Ho Lung, he headed his police and his training regiment southward with the rebels, the city gates which closed behind him were symbolic of the final break with the security and success of his youth. Ahead of him lay years of unceasing struggle.

Part of the Ninth Army went with Chu Teh also, as the straggling band of revolutionaries swept down to Swatow, captured it, were driven out, and then withdrew again to Kiangsi and Hunan. Among Chu Teh's chief lieutenants at that time were three Whampoa cadets: Wang Erh-tso (later killed in battle); Ch'en Yi; and Lin Piao, who became president of the Red University.
^*
They did not yet call themselves a Red Army, but renamed themselves only the National Revolutionary Army.
After the retreat from Fukien, Chu Teh's forces were reduced, by desertions and casualties, to 900 men, with a fire power of only 500 rifles, one machine gun, and a few rounds of ammunition each.