Chinese Reds

RED STAR OVER CHINA--Edgar Snow-- Random House ($3).

In Man's Fate Andre Malraux told the fearful story of a few days in Shanghai that shook the Eastern world--the period in the fall of 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek broke with his Communist allies and the Chinese revolution ended in a swirl of arrests, assassinations, executions, torture. Malraux's account was fiction, but to Occidental readers it seemed far more real than the wild and contradictory newspaper reports of what happened to the remnants of the Chinese Communists.

In left-wing versions, the Communists set up a Soviet government in south China, defeated five armies that Chiang Kai-shek sent against them, and ruled 80 million people with unparalleled benevolence. According to Chiang Kaishek, they degenerated into marauding bandits who were completely wiped out in a series of anti-Red campaigns. But in both right & left reports, Soviet China seemed less a geographical and political reality than a wandering country like Swift's floating Laputa. At one time this nomad-land was located in Hunan Province in the interior, then in Kiangsi in southeast China. When Chiang Kai-shek's army took Juichin, its capital, in 1934, Soviet China disappeared, only to pop up a year later in the northwest. A comparable feat would have been for Mexican revolutionists, defeated in Yucatan, to move their capital to British Columbia--except that the Mexicans would have far better roads for their anabasis.

Last year Edgar Snow, 31-year-old, Missouri-born Far Eastern correspondent of the New York Sun and London Daily Herald, got into Soviet China by means of such melodramatic dodges as a letter written in invisible ink, meetings with Soviet spies in Chiang Kai-shek's army, a night trip through the front lines. Last week, in a 474-page volume* that John Gunther (Inside Europe) called "as good a job of reporting as has ever been done," he gave U. S. readers the results of his four months' observation of Soviet China, his nine years' experience in the Far East. The first correspondent to get inside Red China's lines, Edgar Snow was also the first to interview its leaders, the first to get photographs of Chinese Soviet life, the first to see its army in action, the first to get from its leaders a story of its 6,000-mile "Long March" from Kiangsi to Shensi. As a piece of journalistic enterprise Red Star Over China ranks with John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World, tells a story scarcely less sensational.

By no means so vividly written as Reed's masterpiece, Red Star Over China is slowed down by essays on Chinese history, discussions of education and propaganda, accounts of critical battles fought in inaccessible country. Delighting in the ramifications of Chinese politics, Edgar Snow seems to step aside to discuss every war lord who fought Chiang Kaishek, made peace with him, got mad, led a campaign against the Reds or accepted an alliance with them to fight Japan.

But if Snow's book is less exciting than Reed's, its material was gathered under even more difficult conditions. On his way to Soviet territory, Snow traveled first to Sian where, six months later, Chiang Kai-shek was to be kidnapped.* He found Communist sympathizers all over the place, a Red Army commander, with a price on his head, on the staff of Chiang Kai-shek's commander. After he had gone through the Red lines he was followed (although he did not know it) by roving White "bandits" bent on robbery. The Reds received reports that a crazy "foreign devil'' was leading an attack on them by marching a mile ahead of his troops. First Soviet citizens to whom Snow spoke--a farmer and a local official--said cheerfully, "Hai p'a," which Snow thought meant "I'm afraid." Snow did not know what they were afraid of, finally discovered that in Shensi dialect "Hai p'a" means "I don't understand."

Snow found Soviet China a territory about the size of England. He was welcomed by wiry, black-bearded Red Commander Chou Enlai, scion of a Mandarin family, one-time head of Whampoa Academy (Chiang Kai-shek's officers' training school), who suggested a 92-day itinerary, gave Snow permission to write as he pleased. Astonished at the youthfulness of the Red Army personnel (average age of its officers was 24, of its rank & file, 19), Snow was more astonished by the background of Red Army leaders. One was Commander-in-Chief Chu Teh, an "old-shoe sort of man" now past 50, once a powerful politician adept at the chess game of Chinese politics, who became a revolutionist in 1922 and gave his fortune to the Reds. Another was Lin-Piao, 29-year-old head of the Red Academy and conceded to be one of the greatest military strategists in China, who had been a colonel in Chiang Kai-shek's army at 20.

But the Red leader who made the greatest impression on Snow was 44-year- old Mao Tse-tung, "Lincolnesque" Chairman of the Chinese People's Soviet Government, a peasant who turned classical scholar, organized the Communist Party in China, and became as well-known to Chinese as Chiang Kai-shek when Chiang Kai-shek put a price of $250,000 on his head. Evenings, perched on a stool inside Mao's solid-stone hut, Snow slowly took down Mao's patiently dictated autobiography. Incorporated into Red Star Over China, it makes a valuable document in its own right. When Chiang Kai-shek broke with the Communists in 1927, Mao organized the Soviet in Hunan Province. Despite the internal feuds and contradictory policies of the Comintern, the Hunan Soviet lasted from 1930 to 1934, and with only 40,000 men stood off four attacks by Chiang Kai-shek's armies. For this success, Mao had a succinct reason: The misery of the peasants, whose desperate lot (their taxes were collected as far as 60 years in advance) led them to support the Reds' guerrilla warfare.

For his fifth campaign (October 1933 to October 1934) Chiang Kai-shek sealed south China's Soviets with a ring of forts, mobilized a million men. Defeated in open battle, the Communists decided on a fantastic escape. Leaving a skeleton force at the front, they moved south & west on the night of Oct. 16, 1934, before Chiang Kai-shek's army got wind of their retreat. With them went thousands of peasants, a mule caravan carrying dismantled machinery, Singer sewing-machines, printing equipment. In forced marches, they crossed twelve provinces, over the 16,000-ft. passes of the Tibet mountains, through the swampy wastes of the grasslands in west China, twice missed annihilation by a hair in crossing treacherous, enemy-held rivers. On Oct. 20, 1935. 368 days after their evacuation of south China, the 20,000 survivors of the Red Army arrived in the small Soviet of Shensi.

Edgar Snow left Soviet China two months before Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped, three months before the Communists and the Generalissimo began their elaborate hatchet-burying in preparing to fight Japan. He prophesies flatly that the Communist-Kuomintang alliance "concludes an epoch of revolutionary warfare and begins a new era." Newspaper readers following the Japanese advance might conclude that the new era is to be one of Japanese dominance. Not so, says Edgar Snow. He quotes Mao's prophecy that even though Japan should occupy half of China and blockade the coast, "we would still be far from defeated." As in fighting Chiang Kaishek, Communist Mao would retreat & retreat, luring the lengthening Japanese columns into the interior, trusting that time and guerrilla tactics would finally snap the tightening thread of Japanese morale.

-*Some of the photographs he took were published in LIFE, Jan. 25 & Feb. 1.

-*Red Star Over China contains a brief, complicated but convincing account of the Sian Mutiny. Last week a detailed study of this affair was published by Snow's sub-correspondent James Bertram (FIRST ACT IN CHINA, Viking, $3) which gives a sympathetic portrait of The Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang. captor of Chiang Kaishek.

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