Red Star over China (53 page)

“At present, negotiations are being conducted. While the Communist Party has no great positive hopes of persuading Nanking to resist Japan, it is nevertheless possible. As long as it is, the Communist Party will be ready to cooperate in all necessary measures. If Chiang Kai-shek prefers to continue the civil war, the Red Army will also receive him.”

In effect, Mao made a formal declaration of the readiness of the Communist Party, the Soviet Government, and the Red Army, to cease civil war and further attempts to overthrow Nanking by force, and to submit to the high command of a representative central government, provided there was created the political framework in which the cooperation of other parties besides the Kuomintang would be possible. At this time also, though not as part of the formal interview, Mao indicated that the Communists would be prepared to make such changes in nomenclature as would facilitate “cooperation,” without fundamentally affecting the independent role of the Red Army and the Communist Party. Thus, if it were necessary, the Red Army would change its name to National Revolutionary Army, the name “soviets” would be abandoned, and the agrarian policy would be modified during the period of preparation for war against Japan. During the turbulent weeks that lay ahead, Mao's statement was to have an important influence on events.
^*

In the middle of October, 1936, after I had been with the Reds nearly four months, arrangements were finally completed for my return to the White world. It had not been easy. Chang Hsueh-liang's friendly Tungpei troops had been withdrawn from nearly every front and replaced
by Nanking or other hostile forces. There was only one outlet then, through a Tungpei division which still had a front with the Reds near Lochuan, a walled city a day's motor trip north of Sian.

I walked down the main street of Defended Peace for the last time, and the farther I got toward the gate, the more reluctantly I moved. People popped their heads out of offices to shout last remarks. My poker club turned out
en masse
to bid the
maestro
good-by, and some “little devils” trudged with me to the walls of Pao An. I stopped to take a picture of Old Hsu and Old Hsieh, their arms thrown around each other's shoulders. Only Mao Tse-tung failed to appear; he was still asleep.

“Don't forget my artificial arm!” called Ts'ai.

“Don't forget my films!” urged Lu Ting-yi.
³

“We'll be waiting for the air fleet!” laughed Yang Shang-k'un.

“Send me in a wife!” demanded Li K'e-nung.

“And send back those four ounces of cocoa,” chided Po Ku.

The whole Red University was seated out in the open, under a great tree, listening to a lecture by Lo Fu, when I went past. They all came over, and we shook hands, and I mumbled a few words. Then I turned and forded the stream, waved them a farewell, and rode up quickly with my little caravan. I might be the last foreigner to see any of them alive, I thought. It was very depressing. I felt that I was not going home, but leaving it.

In five days we reached the southern frontier, and I waited there for three days, staying in a tiny village and eating black beans and wild pig. It was a beautiful wooded country, alive with game, and I spent the days in the hills with some farmers and Red soldiers, hunting pig and deer. The bush was crowded with huge pheasants, and one day we even saw, far out of range, two tigers streaking across a clearing in a valley drenched with the purple-gold of autumn. The front was absolutely peaceful, and the Reds had only one battalion stationed here.

On the 20th I got through no man's land safely and behind the Tungpei lines, and on a borrowed horse next day I rode into Lochuan, where a truck was waiting for me. A day later I was in Sianfu. At the Drum Tower I jumped down from beside the driver and asked one of the Reds (who were wearing Tungpei uniforms) to toss me my bag. A long search, and then a longer search, while my fears increased. Finally there was no doubt about it. My bag was not there. In that bag were a dozen diaries and notebooks, thirty rolls of film—the first still and moving pictures ever taken of the Chinese Red Army—and several pounds of Red magazines, newspapers, and documents. It had to be found.

Excitement under the Drum Tower, while traffic policemen curiously gazed from a short distance away. Whispered consultations. Finally it was
realized what had happened. The truck had been loaded with gunnysacks full of broken Tungpei rifles and guns being sent for repairs, and my bag, in case of any search, had been stuffed into such a sack also. Back at Hsienyang, on the opposite shore of the Wei River, twenty miles behind us, the missing object had been thrown off with the other loads. The driver stared ruefully at the truck.
“T'a ma-ti”
he offered in consolation.

It was already dusk, and the driver suggested that he wait till morning to go back and hunt for it. Morning! Something warned me that morning would be too late. I insisted, and I finally won the argument. The truck reversed and returned, and I stayed awake all night in a friend's house in Sianfu wondering whether I would ever see that priceless bag again. If it were opened at Hsienyang, not only would all my things be lost forever, but that “Tungpei” truck and all its occupants would be
huai-la
—finished. There were Nationalist gendarmes at Hsienyang.

The bag was found. But my hunch about the urgency of the search had been absolutely correct, for early next morning all traffic was completely swept from the streets, and all roads leading into the city were lined with gendarmes and troops. Peasants were cleared out of their homes along the road. Some of the more unsightly huts were simply demolished, so that there would be nothing offensive to the eye. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was paying a sudden call on Sianfu. It would have been impossible then for our truck to return over that road to the Wei River, for it skirted the heavily guarded airfield.

This arrival of the Generalissimo made an unforgettable contrast with the scenes still fresh in my mind—of Mao Tse-tung, or Hsu Hai-tung, or Lin Piao, or P'eng Teh-huai nonchalantly strolling down a street in Red China. And the Generalissimo did not have a price on his head. But the precautions taken to protect him in Sian were to prove inadequate. He had too many enemies among the very troops who were guarding him.

I emerged from Red China to find a sharpening tension between the Tungpei troops of Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who was now not only commander-in-chief of China's armed forces, but also chairman of the Executive Yuan—a position comparable to that of premier.

I have described
^*
how the Tungpei troops were gradually being transformed, militarily and politically, from mercenaries who had been shipped to half a dozen different provinces to fight the Reds into an army infected by the national patriotic anti-Japanese slogans of its enemy, convinced of the futility of continued civil war, stirred by only one exhortation, loyal to but one central idea—the hope of “fighting back to the old homeland,” of recovering Manchuria from the Japanese who had driven them from their homes and abused and murdered their families. These notions being directly opposed to the maxims then held by Nanking, the Tungpei troops had found themselves with a growing fellow feeling for the anti-Japanese Red Army.

The estrangement had been widened by important occurrences during the four months of my travels. In the Southwest a revolt against Nanking had been led by Generals Pai Chung-hsi and Li Tsung-jen, whose chief political demands were based on opposition to the Nationalist Government's nonresistance policies. After weeks of near-war, a compromise settlement had finally been reached, but the interim had provided a tremendous stimulus to the anti-Japanese movement throughout China.
Three or four Japanese had been killed by angry mobs in various parts of the interior, and Japan had presented to Nanking strong demands for apologies, compensations, and new political concessions. Another Sino-Japanese “incident,” followed by a Japanese invasion, seemed a possibility.

Meanwhile the anti-Japanese movement, led by the left-wing National Salvation Association, was, despite stern measures of suppression, rising in strength everywhere, and considerable mass pressure was being indirectly exerted on Nanking to stiffen its attitude. Such pressure multiplied when, in October, Japanese-led Mongol and Chinese puppet troops, equipped and trained in Japan's conquered Jehol and Chahar, began an invasion of northern Suiyuan (Inner Mongolia). But the widespread popular demand that this be considered “the last extremity,” and the signal for a “war of resistance” on a national scale, was ignored. No mobilization orders were forthcoming. Nanking's standing reply remained. “Internal unification”—i.e., extermination of the Reds—must come first. Many patriotic quarters began to urge that the Communists' proposals for an end to civil war, and the creation of a national front on the basis of “voluntary unification,” be accepted by Nanking, in order to concentrate the entire energies of the people to oppose the common peril of Japan. Proponents of such opinions were arrested as “traitors.”

The highest degree of emotional excitement centered in the Northwest. Few people realized then how closely the anti-Japanese sentiment of the Tungpei Army was connected with the determination to stop the war against the Reds. Sian seemed a long way off to most Chinese as well as to foreigners in the big treaty ports of China, and it was little visited by journalists. An exception was Miss Nym Wales, an American writer, who in October journeyed to Sian and interviewed the Young Marshal. Miss Wales reported:

“The serious anti-Japanese movement in China is formulating itself not in the various ‘incidents' ranging from North to South, but here in Sianfu among the Northeastern exiles from Manchuria—as one might expect that it logically should. While the movement is being suppressed in other parts of China, in Sianfu it is under the open and enthusiastic leadership of Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang—ardently supported by his troops, if not compelled by them to act in this direction.”
^*

Reflecting on the significance of her interview with the Young Marshal, Miss Wales wrote:

“In effect, and read in relation to its background, this interview may be interpreted as an attempt to influence Chiang Kai-shek to lead active
resistance … implying a threat (in his statement) that ‘only by resistance to foreign aggression [i.e., not by civil war] can the
real
unification of China be manifested,' and that ‘if the Government does not obey the will of the people it cannot stand.' Most significant, this Deputy Commander-in-Chief (second only to Chiang Kai-shek) said that ‘if the Communists can sincerely cooperate to resist the common foreign invader, perhaps it is possible that this problem can be settled peacefully.' …”

But Chiang Kai-shek plainly underestimated the seriousness of the warning. In October he sent the First Army—his best—to attack the Reds in Kansu, and when he arrived in Sianfu it was for the purpose of completing preliminary plans for his sixth general offensive against the Reds. In Sian and Lanchow arrangements were made to accommodate more than 100 bombers. Tons of bombs arrived. It was reported that poison gas was to be used. This was seemingly the only explanation of Chiang's queer boast that he would “destroy the remnant Red bandits in a couple of weeks, or at most a month.”
^*

One thing Chiang must have understood after his October visit to Sian. That was that the Tungpei troops were becoming useless in the war against the Communists. In interviews with Tungpei commanders the Generalissimo could now discern a profound lack of interest in his new offensive. One of Chang Hsueh-liang's staff told me later that at this time the Young Marshal formally presented to the Generalissimo the program for a national front, cessation of civil war, alliance with Russia, and resistance to Japan. Chiang Kai-shek replied, “I will never talk about this until every Red soldier in China is exterminated, and every Communist is in prison. Only then would it be possible to cooperate with Russia.” A little before this the Generalissimo had rejected a Russian offer of a mutual-defense pact through his then foreign minister, Wang Ching-wei.
¹

Now the Generalissimo went back to his headquarters in Loyang and supervised preparations for his new campaign. Twenty divisions of troops were to be brought into the Northwest if necessary. By late November over ten full war-strength divisions had already been concentrated near Tungkuan, outside the historic pass at the gateway to Shensi. Train-loads of shells and supplies poured into Sian. Tanks, armored cars, motor transports were prepared to move after them.

A flame of strong nationalist feeling swept through the country, and the Japanese demanded the suppression of the National Salvation movement, which they held responsible for the anti-Japanese agitation. Nanking obliged. Seven of the most prominent leaders of the organization, all
respectable citizens, including a prominent banker, a lawyer, educators, and writers, were arrested. At the same time the government suppressed fourteen nationally popular magazines. Strikes in the Japanese mills of Shanghai, partly in patriotic protest against the Japanese invasion of Suiyuan, were also broken up with considerable violence by the Japanese, in cooperation with the Kuomintang. When other patriotic strikes occurred in Tsingtao, the Japanese landed their own marines, arrested the strikers, occupied the city. The marines were withdrawn only after Chiang had agreed virtually to prohibit all strikes in Japanese mills of Tsingtao in the future.

All those happenings had further repercussions in the Northwest. In November, under pressure from his own officers, Chang Hsueh-liang dispatched his famous appeal to be sent to the Suiyuan front. “In order to control our troops,” this missive concluded, “we should keep our promise to them that whenever the chance comes they will be allowed to carry out their desire of fighting the enemy. Otherwise they will regard not only myself, but also Your Excellency, as a cheat, and thus will no longer obey us. Please give us the order to mobilize at least a part, if not the whole, of the Tungpei Army, to march immediately to Suiyuan as re-enforcements to those who are fulfilling their sacred mission of fighting Japanese imperialism there. If so, I, as well as my troops, of more than 100,000, shall follow Your Excellency's leadership to the end.” The earnest tone of this whole letter,
^*
the hope of restoring an army's lost prestige, were overwhelmingly evident. But Chiang rejected the suggestion. He still wanted the Tungpei Army to fight the Reds.