Red Star over China (6 page)

Then surprisingly the graybeard lifted his gentle face and with perfect composure made an astonishing remark.
“Sha pu kou!”
he said. “They don't kill enough!” We both looked at him flabbergasted.

Unfortunately the train was nearing Chengchow, where I had to transfer to the Lunghai line, and I was obliged to break off the discussion. But I have ever since wondered with what deadly evidence this Confucian-looking old gentleman would have supported his startling contention. I wondered about it all the next day of travel, as we climbed slowly through the weird levels of loess hills in Honan and Shensi, and until my train—this one still new and very comfortable—rolled up to the new and handsome railway station at Sianfu.

Soon after my arrival I went to call on General Yang Hu-ch'eng,
^*
Pacification Commissioner of Shensi province. Until a couple of years before,
General Yang had been undisputed monarch of those parts of Shensi not controlled by the Reds. A former bandit, he rose to authority via the route that had put many of China's ablest leaders in office, and on the same highway he was said to have accumulated the customary fortune. But recently he had been obliged to divide his power with several other gentlemen in the Northwest. For in 1935 the “Young Marshal,” Chang Hsueh-liang,
^*
who used to be ruler of Manchuria, had brought his Tungpei (Manchurian) army into Shensi, and assumed office in Sianfu as supreme Red chaser in these parts—Vice-Commander of the National Bandit-Suppression Commission. And to watch the Young Marshal had come Shao Li-tzu,* an acolyte of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The Hon. Shao was Governor of Shensi.

A delicate balance of power was maintained between these figures—and still others. Tugging strings behind all of them was the redoubtable Generalissimo himself, who sought to extend his dictatorship to the Northwest and liquidate not only the Communist-led revolution but also the troops of old Yang Hu-ch'eng and young Chang Hsueh-liang, by the simple process of using each to destroy the other—three acts of a brilliant politico-military drama the main stratagem of which Chiang evidently believed was understood only by himself. And it was that error in calculation—a little too much haste in pursuit of the purpose, a little too much confidence in his adversaries' stupidity—which was in a few months to land Chiang Kai-shek a prisoner in Sianfu, at the mercy of all three.

I found General Yang
^†
in a newly finished stone mansion, just completed at a cost of $50,000. He was living in this many-chambered vault—the official home of the Pacification Commissioner—without a wife. Yang Hu-ch'eng, like many Chinese in this transitional period, was burdened with domestic infelicity, for he was a two-wife man. The first was the lily-footed wife of his youth, betrothed to him by his parents in Pucheng. The second, as vivacious and courageous a woman as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, was a pretty young mother of five children, modern and progressive, a former Communist, they said, and the girl that Yang had chosen himself. It seemed, according to the missionaries, that when he opened his new home each of his wives had presented him with the same minimum demand. Each detested the other; each had borne him sons and had the right to be legal wife; and each resolutely refused to move into the stone mansion unless the other stayed behind.

To an outsider the case looked simple: a divorce or a third wife was
the obvious solution. But General Yang had not made up his mind and so he still lived alone. His dilemma was a not uncommon one in modern China. Chiang Kai-shek had faced a similar issue when he married rich, American-educated Soong Mei-ling, who as a Methodist was not prepared to accept polygamy. Chiang had finally divorced his first wife (the mother of his son Ching-kuo
^*
) and pensioned off his two concubines. The decision was highly approved by the missionaries, who had ever since prayed for his soul. Nevertheless, this way out—a newfangled idea imported from the West—was still frowned upon by many Chinese. Old Yang, having risen from the people, was probably less concerned over the disposal of his soul than the traditions of his ancestors.

And it must not be supposed that Yang's early career as a bandit necessarily disqualified him as a leader. Such assumptions could not be made in China, where a career of banditry in early youth often indicated a man of strong character and purpose. A look at Chinese history showed that some of China's ablest patriots were at one time or another labeled bandits. The fact was that many of the worst rogues, scoundrels, and traitors had climbed to power under cover of respectability, the putrid hypocrisy of Confucian maxims, and the priestcraft of the Chinese Classics—though they had very often utilized the good strong arm of an honest bandit in doing so.

General Yang's history as a revolutionary suggested a rugged peasant who might once have had high dreams of making a big change in his world, but who, finding himself in power, looked vainly for a method, and grew weary and confused, listening to the advice of the mercenaries who gathered around him. But if he had such dreams he did not confide them to me. He declined to discuss political questions, and courteously delegated one of his secretaries to show me the city. He was also suffering from a severe headache and rheumatism when I saw him, and in the midst of his sea of troubles I was not one to insist upon asking him nettling questions. On the contrary, in his dilemma he had all my sympathy. So after a brief interview with him I discreetly retired, to seek some answers from the Honorable Governor, Shao Li-tzu.

Governor Shao received me in the garden of his spacious yamen, cool and restful after the parching heat of Sian's dusty streets. I had last seen him six years before, when he was Chiang Kai-shek's personal secretary, and at that time he had assisted me in an interview with the Generalissimo. Since then he had risen rapidly in the Kuomintang. He was an able man, well educated, and the Generalissimo had now bestowed upon him the honors of a governorship. But poor Shao, like many another civil
governor, did not rule much beyond the provincial capital's gray walls—the outlying territory being divided by General Yang and the Young Marshal.

The Hon. Shao had once been a “Communist bandit” himself. He had played a pioneer role in the Chinese Communist Party. In those days it was fashionable to be a Communist and nobody was very sure exactly what it meant, except that many bright young men were Communists. Later on he had recanted; after 1927 it had become very clear what it meant, and one could have one's head removed for it. Shao then became a devout Buddhist, and subsequently displayed no further signs of heresy. He was one of the most charming gentlemen in China.
¹

“How are the Reds getting along?” I asked him.

“There are not many left. Those in Shensi are only remnants.”

“Then the war continues?” I asked.

“No, at present there is little fighting in north Shensi. The Reds are moving into Ninghsia and Kansu. They seem to want to connect with Outer Mongolia.”

He shifted the conversation to the situation in the Southwest, where insurgent generals were then demanding an anti-Japanese expedition. I asked him whether he thought China should fight Japan. “Can we?” he demanded. And then the Buddhist governor told me exactly what he thought about Japan—not for publication—just as every Kuomintang official would then tell you his opinion of Japan—not for publication.

A few months after this interview poor Shao was to be put on the spot on this question of war with Japan—along with his Generalissimo—by some rebellious young men of Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang's army, who refused to be reasonable and take “maybe some day” for an answer any longer. And Shao's diminutive wife—a returned student from Moscow and a former Communist herself—was to be cornered by some of the insurrectionists and make a plucky fight to resist arrest.

But Shao revealed no premonition of all this in our talk, and, an exchange of views having brought us perilously near agreement, it was time to leave. I had already learned from Shao Li-tzu what I wanted to know. He had confirmed the word of my Peking informant, that fighting had temporarily halted in north Shensi. Therefore it should be possible to go to the front, if properly arranged.

Some six months after my arrival in Sianfu the crisis in the Northwest was to explode in a manner nobody had anticipated, so that the whole world was made dramatically aware of an amazing alliance between the big army under Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang and the “bandits” whom he had been ordered, as deputy commander-in-chief of the Communist-Suppression Forces, to destroy. But in June, 1936, the outside world was still in complete ignorance of these strange developments, and even in the headquarters of Chiang Kai-shek's own Blueshirt gendarmes, who controlled the Sianfu police, nobody knew exactly what was taking place. Some 300 Communists were imprisoned in the city's jail, and the Blueshirts were hunting for more. An atmosphere of extreme tension prevailed. Spies and counterspies were everywhere.

But there is no longer any necessity to remain covert about those exciting days, with the secrets of which I was perforce entrusted, so here it can be told.

I had never seen a Red Army man before I arrived in Sianfu. The man in Peking who had written for me in invisible ink the letter addressed to Mao Tse-tung was, I knew, a Red commander; but I had not seen him. The letter had reached me through a third person, an old friend; but besides this letter I had only one hope of a connection in the Northwest. I had been instructed simply to go to a hotel in Sianfu, take a room there, and await a visit from a gentleman who would call himself Wang, but about whom I knew nothing else. Nothing—except that he would arrange
for me to enter the Red districts by way of the private airplane, I was promised, of Chang Hsueh-liang!

A few days after I put up in the hotel a large, somewhat florid and rotund, but strongly built and dignified Chinese, wearing a long gray silk gown, entered my open door and greeted me in excellent English. He looked like a prosperous merchant, but he introduced himself as Wang, mentioned the name of my Peking friend, and otherwise established that he was the man I awaited.

In the week that followed I discovered that Wang alone was worth the trip to Sianfu. I spent four or five hours a day listening to his yarns and reminiscences and to his more serious explanations of the political situation. He was wholly unexpected. Educated in a missionary school in Shanghai, he had been prominently identified with the Christian community, had once had a church of his own, and (as I was later to learn) was known among the Communists as Wang Mu-shih—Wang the Pastor. Like many successful Christians of Shanghai, he had been a member of the Ch'ing Pang,
^*
and he knew everyone from Chiang Kai-shek (also a member) down to Tu Yueh-sheng, the Ch'ing Pang chieftain. He had once been a high official in the Kuomintang, but I cannot even now disclose his real name.
¹

For some time, Pastor Wang, having deserted his congregation and officialdom, had been working with the Reds. How long I do not know. He was a kind of secret and unofficial ambassador to the courts of various militarists and officials whom the Communists were trying to win over to understanding and support of their “anti-Japanese national front” proposals. With Chang Hsueh-liang, at least, he had been successful. And here some background is necessary to illuminate the basis of the secret understanding which had at this time been reached.

Chang Hsueh-liang was until 1931 the popular, gambling, generous, modern-minded, golf-playing, dope-using, paradoxical warlord-dictator of the 30,000,000 people of Manchuria, confirmed in the office he had inherited from his ex-bandit father Chang Tso-lin by the Kuomintang Government at Nanking, which had also given him the title Vice-Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of China. In September, 1931, Japan set out to conquer the Northeast, and Chang's reverses began. When the invasion commenced, Young Marshal Chang was in the Peking Union Hospital, below the Wall, recovering from typhoid, and in no condition to meet this crisis alone. He leaned heavily on Nanking and on his blood-sworn
“elder brother,” Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo. But Chiang Kai-shek, who lacked adequate means to fight Japan—and the Reds—urged reliance on the League of Nations. Chang Hsueh-liang took the Generalissimo's counsel and Nanking's orders. As a result he lost his homeland, Manchuria, after only token resistance was offered by his retreating troops. Nanking propaganda had made it appear that the nonresistance policy was the Young Marshal's idea, whereas the record showed that it was the government's explicit order. The sacrifice enabled the Generalissimo to hold his own shaky regime together in Nanking and begin a new annihilation campaign against the Reds.

That was how the Manchurian troops, known in China as the Tung-pei (pronounced “Dungbei,” and meaning “Northeastern”) Army, moved south of the Great Wall into China proper. The same thing happened when Japan invaded Jehol. Chang Hsueh-liang was not in the hospital then, but he should have been. Nanking sent no support to him, and made no preparations for defense. The Generalissimo, to avoid war, was ready to see Jehol fall to Japan, too—and so it did. Chang Hsueh-liang got the blame, and docilely played the goat when somebody had to resign to appease an infuriated populace. It was Chiang or Chang—and the latter bowed and departed. He went to Europe for a year “to study conditions.”

The most important thing that happened to Chang Hsueh-liang while he was in Europe was not that he saw Mussolini and Hitler and met Ramsay MacDonald, but it was that for the first time in several years he found himself a healthy man, cured of the dope habit. Some years before he had taken up opium, as many Chinese generals did, between battles. To break himself of the habit was not easy; his doctor assured him he could be cured by injections. He was freed of the craving of opium, all right, but when the doctor got through with him the Young Marshal was a morphine addict.