Red Star over China (52 page)

Actual financial help given to the Chinese Reds by Moscow or the Comintern during this decade seemed to have been amazingly small. When Mr. and Mrs. Hilaire Noulens were arrested in Shanghai in 1932 and convicted in Nanking as chief Far Eastern agents of the Comintern, police evidence showed that total outpayments for the whole Orient (not just China) had not at most exceeded the equivalent of about U.S.
$15,000 per month. That was a trifle compared with the vast sums poured into China to support Japanese and Nazi-Fascist propaganda. It was rather pitiful also in contrast, for example, with America's $50,000,000 Wheat Loan to Nanking in 1933—the proceeds of which were of decisive value to Chiang Kai-shek's civil war against the Reds, according to reports of foreign military observers.

America, England, Germany, and Italy sold Nanking great quantities of airplanes, tanks, guns, and munitions, but of course sold none to the Reds. The American Army released officers to train the Chinese air force, which demolished towns in Red China, and Italian and German instructors actually led some of the most destructive bombing expeditions themselves—as happened on a larger scale in Spain. To Chiang Kai-shek's aid Germany sent Von Seeckt, and after him Von Falkenhausen, with a staff of Prussian officers who improved Nanking's technique of annihilation. It seemed that Chiang Kai-shek was propped up for nearly ten years by more important aid than any foreign power gave to the Reds.

Probably the Chinese Reds fought with less material foreign help than any army in modern Chinese history.

There had not been a single foreign adviser with China's Red Army during the first five years of its existence. Not until 1933 did Li Teh appear in the Kiangsi soviet districts as a German representative of the Comintern, to take a high position both politically and militarily. Yet despite the numerical insignificance of this “foreign influence,” several responsible Communists in the Northwest apparently felt that Li Teh's advice had been to a great extent responsible for two costly mistakes in the Kiangsi Red republic. The first, as Mao Tse-tung pointed out, was the failure of the Red Army to unite with the Nineteenth Route Army, when the latter arose in revolt against Nanking in the autumn of 1933.

The Nineteenth Route Army, commanded by Generals Chen Ming-hsiu, Ts'ai T'ing-k'ai, and Chiang Kuang-nai, had made an impressive defense of Shanghai against the Japanese attack in 1932, and had demonstrated its strong national-revolutionary character. Transferred to Fukien after the Shanghai Truce, it gradually became a center of political opposition to Nanking's “nonresistance” policy. Following Nanking's negotiation of the humiliating Tangku Truce with Japan, the Nineteenth Route Army leaders set up an independent government in Fukien province and started a movement for a democratic republic and the destruction of Chiang Kai-shek's regime.

The Nineteenth Route Army was one of the few Kuomintang military units never defeated by the Reds, and they had great respect for its fighting ability. Composed mostly of Cantonese, it really reflected in its political character a loosely organized left-wing opposition movement. It
was the main military support of several factions on the periphery of the Kuomintang, led by the She-hui Min-chu T'ang, the Chinese Social Democrats.

Sent to Fukien to participate in Communist suppression late in 1932, the Nineteenth Route Army leaders instead quickly built up a base of their own from which to oppose Chiang Kai-shek. They entered into a nonaggression agreement with the Reds and proposed an anti-Nanking, anti-Japanese alliance along much the same lines that were later on evolved in the Northwest between the Manchurian, the Northwestern, and the Communist armies. But instead of cooperating with the Nineteenth Route Army the Reds
withdrew
their main forces from the Fukien border to western Kiangsi. That left Chiang Kai-shek free to descend from Chekiang into neighboring Fukien with little impediment. The Generalissimo struck before the Nineteenth Route Army was prepared militarily or politically, and quickly quashed the insurgents. The Reds consequently lost their strongest potential allies. There is no doubt that elimination of the Nineteenth Route Army very much facilitated the task of destroying the southern soviets, to which Chiang Kai-shek at once turned with a new confidence early in 1934.

The Reds' second serious mistake was made in the planning of strategy and tactics to meet Chiang's new offensive—the Fifth Campaign. In previous campaigns the Reds had relied on superiority in maneuvering warfare, and their ability to take the initiative from Chiang Kai-shek in strong swift concentrations and surprise attacks. Positional warfare and regular fighting had always played minor roles in their operations. But in the Fifth Campaign, according to Red commanders to whom I talked, Li Teh insisted upon a strategy of positional warfare, relegating partisan and guerrilla tactics to auxiliary tasks, and somehow won acceptance for his scheme against (so I was told) “unanimous” opposition of the Red military council.
¹

But whatever errors of judgment Li Teh may have made, there was little question that his long experience with Chinese fighting methods, and on Chinese terrain, made him one of the best qualified Occidental military authorities on China. And the personal courage of a man who had endured the severe hardships of the Long March commanded admiration and remained a challenge to armchair revolutionaries all over the world. For Li Teh, an outsize foreigner, the Long March had presented some special hardships. He had stomach complaints, and was badly in need of a dentist, but his first problem was to keep supplied with shoes large enough for his enormous number elevens. There did not seem to be any shoes that big in China. For three years he had lived without any contact with Europeans, most of the time without books to read. When
I was in Pao An he was delighted to have got hold of a copy of the huge
China Year Book,
which he carefully digested from cover to cover, including its innumerable tables of statistics—a feat constituting one of the few things he could boast in common with the
Year Book
editor, H. G. W. Woodhead, C.B.E. This blue-eyed, fair-haired Aryan had not spoken a word of Chinese when he first immersed himself alone with his Oriental comrades, and he still had to conduct all his serious conversations through interpreters or in German, Russian, or French.

It was almost impossible to believe that under any genius of command the Reds could have emerged victorious against the odds that faced them throughout the year of the Fifth Campaign. It was not the phenomenon of foreign support on the side of the Reds, but its presence in a major degree on the side of the Kuomingtang, that characterized the last struggle of the Kiangsi Soviet Republic. Quite clearly the Chinese Red Army was not “officered by Russian Bolsheviks,” “mercenaries of Moscow rubles,” or “puppet troops of Stalin.” Chinese and foreign newspapers during the anti-Red wars used regularly to report how many “corpses of Russian officers” were found on the battlefield after a Kuomintang atttack on the Reds. No foreign corpses were ever produced, yet so effective was this propaganda that many non-Communist Chinese really thought of the Red Army as some kind of foreign invasion.

So much for Kiangsi. During the next two years of the Long March the Reds were almost entirely cut off from contact even with their own Party members in the coastal cities of China, and the Comintern only infrequently got into direct communication with the Red Army. Wang Ming (Ch'en Shao-yu),
^*
the Chinese Party's chief delegate in Moscow, must have found it very difficult at times to get accurate information even on the location of the main forces of the Red Army for his reports to the Comintern, and some of his articles in
lnprecorr
^†
seemed to reflect that. I happened to be in Pao An one day when some copies of
Inprecorr
arrived, and I saw Lo Fu, the American-educated secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, eagerly devouring them. He mentioned casually that he had not seen an
Inprecorr
for nearly three years.

And not until September, 1936, while I was still with the Reds, did the detailed account of the proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, held just a year previously, finally reach the Red capital of China. It was these reports which brought to the Chinese Communists for the first time the fully developed thesis of the international anti-Fascist united-front tactics which were to guide them in their
policy during the months ahead, when revolt was to spread throughout the Northwest, and to shake the entire Orient. And once more the Comintern and Stalin were to assert their will in the affairs of China, in a manner that would sharply affect the development of the revolution. I was to view that episode from the sidelines again in Peking.

Two interesting things happened before I left Pao An. On October 9, radio messages from Kansu reached us telling of the successful junction at Huining of the vanguard of the Fourth Red Army with Ch'en Keng's First Divison of the First Army Corps.
¹
All the regular Red Army forces were now concentrated in Northwest China with good lines of communications established. Orders for winter uniforms poured into the factories of Pao An and Wu Ch'i Chen. The combined forces of the three armies reportedly numbered between 80,000 and 90,000 seasoned, well-equipped warriors. Celebrations and rejoicing were held in Pao An and throughout the soviet districts. The long period of suspense during the fighting in south Kansu was ended. Everyone now felt a new confidence in the future. With the whole of the best Red troops in China concentrated in a large new territory, and near-by another 100,000 sympathetic troops of the Tungpei Army, whom they had come to think of as allies, the Reds now believed that their proposals for a united front would be heard with keener interest at Nanking.

The second important event was an interview I had with Mao Tse-tung just before I left, in which, for the first time, he indicated concrete terms on the basis of which the Communists would welcome peace with the Kuomintang and cooperation to resist Japan. Some of these terms had already been announced in a manifesto issued by the Communist Party in August. In my conversation with Mao I asked him to explain the reasons for his new policy.
²

“First of all,” he began, “the seriousness of Japanese aggression: it is
becoming more intensified every day, and is so formidable a menace that before it all the forces of China must unite. Besides the Communist Party there are other parties and forces in China, and the strongest of these is the Kuomintang. Without its cooperation our strength at present is insufficient to resist Japan in war. Nanking must participate. The Kuomintang and the Communist Party are the two main political forces in China, and if they continue to fight now in civil war the effect will be unfavorable for the anti-Japanese movement.

“Second, since August, 1935, the Communist Party has been urging, by manifesto, a union of all parties in China for the purpose of resisting Japan, and to this program the entire populace has responded with sympathy, notwithstanding the fact that the Kuomintang has continued its attacks upon us.

“The third point is that many patriotic elements even in the Kuomintang now favor a reunion with the Communist Party. Anti-Japanese elements even in the Nanking Government, and Nanking's own armies, are today ready to unite because of the peril to our national existence.

“These are the main characteristics of the present situation in China, and because of them we are obliged to reconsider in detail the concrete formula under which such cooperation in the national liberation movement can become possible. The fundamental point of unity which we insist upon is the national-liberation anti-Japanese principle. In order to realize it we believe there must be established a national defense democratic government. Its main tasks must be to resist the foreign invader, to grant popular rights to the masses of the people, and to intensify the development of the country's economy.

“We will therefore support a parliamentary form of representative government, an anti-Japanese salvation government, a government which protects and supports all popular patriotic groups. If such a republic is established, the Chinese soviets will become a part of it. We will realize in our areas measures for a democratic parliamentary form of government.”

“Does that mean,” I asked, “that the laws of such a [democratic] government would also apply in soviet districts?”

Mao replied in the affirmative. He said that such a government should restore and once more realize Sun Yat-sen's final will, and his three “basic principles” during the Great Revolution, which were: alliance with the U.S.S.R. and those countries which treat China as an equal; union with the Chinese Communist Party; and fundamental protection of the interests of the Chinese working class.

“If such a movement develops in the Kuomintang,” he continued, “we are prepared to cooperate with and support it, and to form a united
front against imperialism such as existed in 1925–27. We are convinced that this is the only way left to save our nation.”

“Is there any
immediate
cause for the new proposals?” I inquired. “They must certainly be regarded as the most important decision in your Party's history in a decade.”

“The immediate causes,” Mao explained, “are the severe new demands of Japan,
^*
capitulation to which must enormously handicap any attempts at resistance in the future, and the popular response to this deepening threat of Japanese invasion in the form of a great people's patriotic movement. These conditions have in turn produced a change in attitude among certain elements in Nanking. Under the circumstances it is now possible to hope for the realization of such a policy as we propose. Had it been offered in this form a year ago, or earlier, neither the country nor the Kuomintang would have been prepared for it.