Red Star over China (7 page)

When I first met Chang at Mukden, in 1929, he was the world's youngest dictator, and he still looked fairly well. He was thin, his face somewhat drawn and jaundiced-looking, but his mind was quick and energetic, he seemed full of exuberance. He was openly anti-Japanese, and he was eager to perform miracles in driving Japan from China and modernizing Manchuria. Several years later his physical condition was much worse. One of his doctors in Peking told me that he was spending $200 a day on “medicine”—a special preparation of morphine which theoretically could be “tapered off.”

But in Shanghai, just before he left for Europe, Chang Hsueh-liang began to cure himself of the drug habit. When he returned to China in 1934 his friends were pleased and amazed: he had put on weight and muscle, there was color in his cheeks, he looked ten
years younger, and people saw in him traces of the brilliant leader of his youth. He had always possessed a quick, realistic mind, and now he gave it a chance to develop. At Hankow he resumed command of the Tungpei Army, which had been shifted to Central China to fight the Reds. It was a tribute to his popularity that, despite his errors of the past, his army enthusiastically welcomed him back.

Chang adopted a new routine—up at six, hard exercise, daily drill and study, simple food and Spartan habits, and direct personal contact with the subalterns as well as officers of his troops, which still numbered about 140,000 men. A new Tungpei Army began to emerge. Skeptics gradually became convinced that the Young Marshal had again become a man worth watching, and took seriously the vow he had made on his return: that his whole life would be devoted to the task of recovering Manchuria, and erasing the humiliation of his people.

Meanwhile, Chang had not lost faith in the Generalissimo. In their entire relationship Chang had never wavered in his loyalty to the older man, whose regime he had three times saved from collapse, and in whose judgment and sincerity he placed full confidence. He evidently believed Chiang Kai-shek when he said he was preparing to recover Manchuria, and would yield no more territory without resistance. In 1935 Japan's militarists continued their aggression: the puppet regime of east Hopei was set up, part of Chahar was annexed, and demands were made for the separation of North China from the South, to which Nanking partly acquiesced. Ominous discontent rumbled among the Young Marshal's officers and men, especially after his troops were shifted to the Northwest to continue to wage an unpopular civil war against the Red Army, while Japanese attrition continued almost unopposed.

After months of fighting the Reds in the South, several important realizations had come to the Young Marshal and some of his officers: that the “bandits” they were fighting were in reality led by able, patriotic, anti-Japanese commanders; that this process of “Communist extermination” might last for many more years; that it was impossible to resist Japan while the anti-Red wars continued; and that meanwhile the Tungpei Army was rapidly being reduced and disbanded in battles which were to it devoid of meaning.

Nevertheless, when Chang shifted his headquarters to the Northwest, he began an energetic campaign against the Reds. For a while he had some success, but in October and November, 1935, the Tungpei Army suffered serious defeats, reportedly losing two whole divisions (the 101st and 109th) and part of a third (110th). Thousands of Tungpei soldiers “turned over” to the Red Army. Many officers were also taken captive, and held for a period of “anti-Japanese tutelage.”

When those officers were released, and returned to Sian, they brought back to the Young Marshal glowing accounts of the morale and organization in the soviet districts, but especially of the Red Army's sincerity in wanting to stop civil war, unify China by peaceful democratic methods, and unite to oppose Japanese imperialism. Chang was impressed. He was impressed even more by reports from his divisions that the sentiment throughout the whole army was turning against war with the Reds, whose slogans—“Chinese must not fight Chinese!” and “Unite with us and fight back to Manchuria!”—were infecting the rank and file of the entire Tungpei Army.

In the meantime, Chang himself had been strongly influenced to the left. Many of the students in his Tungpei University had come to Sian and were working with him, and among these were some Communists. After the Japanese demands in Peking of December, 1935, he had sent word to the North that all anti-Japanese students, regardless of their political beliefs, could find haven in Sianfu. While anti-Japanese agitators elsewhere in China were being arrested by agents of the Nanking government, in Shensi they were encouraged and protected. Some of Chang's younger officers had been much influenced by the students also, and when the captured officers returned from the Red districts and reported that open anti-Japanese mass organizations were flourishing there, and described the Reds' patriotic propaganda among the people, Chang began to think more and more of the Reds as natural allies rather than enemies.

It was at this point, early in 1936, Pastor Wang told me, that he one day called on Chang Hsueh-liang and opened an interview by declaring: “I have come to borrow your airplane to go to the Red districts.”

Chang jumped up and stared in amazement. “What? You dare to come here and make such a request? Do you realize you can be shot for this?”

The Pastor elaborated. He explained that he had contacts with the Communists and knew things which Chang should know. He talked for a long time about their changing policies, about the necessity for a united China to resist Japan, about the Reds' willingness to make big concessions in order to influence Nanking to resist Japan, a policy which the Reds realized they could not, alone, make effective. He proposed that he should arrange for a further discussion of these points between Chang and certain Red leaders. And to all of this, after his first surprise, Chang listened attentively. He had for some time been thinking that he could make use of the Reds: they also evidently believed they could make use of him; very well, perhaps they could utilize each other on the basis of common demands for an end to civil war and united resistance to Japan.

The Pastor did, after all, fly to Yenan, north Shensi, in the Young
Marshal's private airplane. He entered Soviet China and returned with a formula for negotiation. And a short time later Chang Hsueh-liang himself flew up to Yenan, met Chou En-lai,
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and after long and detailed discussion with him became convinced, according to Wang, of the Reds' sincerity, and of the sanity and practicability of their proposals for a united front.

First steps in the implementation of the Tungpei-Communist agreement included the cessation of hostilities in Shensi. Neither side was to move without notifying the other. The Reds sent several delegates to—Sianfu, who put on Tungpei uniforms, joined Chang Hsueh-liang's staff, and helped reorganize political training methods in his army. A new school was opened at Wang Ch'u Ts'un, where Chang's lower officers went through intensified courses in politics, economics, social science, and detailed and statistical study of how Japan had conquered Manchuria and what China had lost thereby. Hundreds of radical students flocked to Sian and entered another anti-Japanese political training school, at which the Young Marshal also gave frequent lectures. Something like the political commissar system used in Soviet Russia and by the Chinese Red Army was adopted in the Tungpei Army. Some aging higher officers inherited from the Manchurian days were sacked; to replace them Chang Hsueh-liang promoted radical younger officers, to whom he now looked for his main support in building a new army. Many of the corrupt sycophants who had surrounded Chang during his “playboy” years were also replaced by eager and serious-minded students from the Tungpei University.

Such changes developed in close secrecy, made possible by Chang's semiautonomy as a provincial warlord. Although the Tungpei troops no longer fought the Reds, there were Nanking troops along the Shansi-Shensi border and in Kansu and Ninghsia, and some fighting continued in those regions. No word of the truce between Chang and the Communists crept into the press. And although Chiang Kai-shek's spies in Sian knew that something was fermenting, they could get few details of its exact nature. Occasional trucks arrived in Sian carrying Red passengers, but they looked innocuous; they all wore Tungpei uniforms. The occasional departure of other trucks from Sian to the Red districts aroused no suspicion; they resembled any other Tungpei trucks setting off for the front.

It was on just such a truck, Pastor Wang confided to me soon after my arrival, that I would myself be going to the front. The journey by plane was out: too much risk of embarrassment to the Young Marshal was involved, for his American pilots might not hold their tongues if a foreigner were dumped on the front and not returned.

One morning the Pastor called on me with a Tungpei officer—or at any rate a youth wearing the uniform of a Tungpei officer—and suggested a trip to the ancient Han city outside Sian. A curtained car waited for us in front of the hotel, and when we got in I saw in a corner a man wearing dark glasses and the Chung Shan uniform of a Kuomintang official. We drove out to the site of the old palace of the Han Dynasty,
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and there we walked over to the raised mound of earth where the celebrated Han Wu Ti once sat in his throne room and “ruled the earth.” Here you could still pick up fragments of tile from those great roofs of over 2,000 years ago.

Pastor Wang and the Tungpei officer had some words to exchange, and stood apart, talking. The Kuomintang official, who had sat without speaking during our long dusty drive, came over to me and removed his dark glasses and his white hat. I saw that he was quite young. Under a rim of thick, glossy hair a pair of intense eyes sparkled at me. A mischievous grin spread over his bronzed face, and one look at him, without those glasses, showed that the uniform was a disguise, that this was no sedentary bureaucrat but an out-of-doors man of action. He was of medium height and looked slight of strength, so that when he came close to me and suddenly took my arm in a grip of iron I winced with surprise. There was a pantherish grace about the man's movements, I noticed later, a lithe limberness under the stiff formal cut of the suit.

He put his face close to mine and grinned and fixed his sharp, burning eyes on me and held my two arms tightly in that iron grip, and then wagged his head and comically screwed up his mouth—and winked! “Look at me!” he whispered with the delight of a child with a secret. “Look at me! Look at me! Do you recognize me?”

I did not know what to think of the fellow. He was so bubbling over about something that his excitement infected me, and I felt foolish because I had nothing to say. Recognize him? I had never met a Chinese like him in my life! I shook my head apologetically.

He released a hand from my arm and pointed a finger at his chest. “I thought maybe you had seen my picture somewhere,” he said. “Well, I am Teng Fa,” he offered—“Teng Fa!”
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He pulled back his head and gazed at me to see the effect of the bombshell.

Teng Fa? Teng Fa… why, Teng Fa was chief of the Chinese Red Army's Security Police. And something else, there was $50,000 on his head!

Teng danced with pleasure when he disclosed his identity. He was irrepressible, full of amusement at the situation: he, the notorious “Communist bandit,” living in the very midst of the enemy's camp, thumbing his nose at the spies that hovered everywhere. And he was overjoyed at seeing me—he literally hugged me repeatedly—an American who was voluntarily going into the “bandit” areas. He offered me everything. Did I want his horse? Oh, what a horse he had, the finest in Red China! His pictures? He had a wonderful collection and it was all mine. His diary? He would send instructions to his wife, who was still in the soviet areas, to give all this and more to me. And he kept his word.

What a Chinese! What a Red bandit!

Teng Fa was a Cantonese, the son of a working-class family, and had once been a foreign-style cook on a Canton-Hongkong steamer. He had been a leader of the great Hongkong shipping strike, when he was beaten in the chest and had had some ribs broken by a British constable who did not like pickets. And then he had become a Communist, and entered Whampoa, and taken part in the Nationalist Revolution, until after 1927 he had joined the Red Army in Kiangsi.

We stood for an hour or more on that height, talking and looking down on the green-shrouded grave of an imperial city. How incongruous and yet how logical it was that this place should seem to the Communists the one rendezvous where we four could safely meet, the exact spot where, two millenniums ago, Han Wu Ti had ruled a united China, and so successfully consolidated a people and a culture from the chaos of warring states that their descendants, ever since, had been content to call themselves Sons of Han.

It was here that Teng told me who would escort me to the Red districts, how I would travel, how I would live in Red China, and assured me of a warm welcome there.

“Aren't you afraid for your head?” I asked as we drove back to the city.

“Not any more than Chang Hsueh-liang is,” he said. “I'm living with him.”

We left Sianfu before dawn, the high wooden gates of the once “golden city” swinging open and noisily dragging their chains before the magic of our military pass. In the half-light of predawn the big army trucks lumbered past the airfield from which expeditions set out for daily reconnaissance and bombing over the Red lines.

To a Chinese traveler every mile of this road northward from Sianfu evokes memories of the rich and colorful pageant of his people. It seemed not inappropriate that the latest historical mutation in China, the Communist movement, should choose this locale in which to work out a destiny. In an hour we were being ferried across the Wei River, in whose rich valley Confucius' ancestors
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developed their rice culture and formulated traditions still a power in the folk myth of rural China today. And toward noon we had reached Ts'un Pu. It was near this battle-mented city that the towering and terrible figure who first “unified” China—the Emperor Ch'in Shih Huang Ti—was born some 2,200 years ago. The Emperor Ch'in first consolidated all of the ancient frontier walls of his country into what remains today the most stupendous masonry on earth—the Great Wall of China.,