The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh

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THE GREAT ROAD

The Life and Times of Chu Teh

AGNES SMEDLEY

The Great Road was originally published in 1956 by Monthly Review Press, New York.

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 6

Publisher’s Foreword 7

Prelude 18

Book I. The Road’s Beginning 22

Chapter 1 22

Chapter 2 30

Chapter 3 43

Chapter 4 56

Book II. The Road to Revolution 63

Chapter 5 63

Chapter 6 70

Chapter 7 79

Chapter 8 89

Book III. Scourge and Pestilence 97

Chapter 9 97

Chapter 10 108

Chapter 11 113

Chapter 12 119

Book IV. The Quest 126

Chapter 13 126

Chapter 14 132

Book V. On the Great Revolution 145

Chapter 15 145

Chapter 16 157

Book VI. The Agrarian Revolution Begins 168

Chapter 17 168

Chapter 18 173

Chapter 19 179

Chapter 20 184

Chapter 21 193

Chapter 22 202

Book VII. Now Listen Closely to My Song 209

Chapter 23 209

Chapter 24 222

Chapter 25 231

Book VIII. Red Phalanx 238

Chapter 26 238

Chapter 27 244

Chapter 28 248

Book IX. The Long March 256

Chapter 29 256

Chapter 30 265

Chapter 31 265

Chapter 32 265

Book X. Rendezvous With History 265

Chapter 33 265

Chapter 34 265

Chapter 35 265

Book XI. We Have One Secret Weapon 265

Chapter 36 265

Chapter 37 265

Chapter 38 265

Chapter 39 265

Book XII. The Great Road 265

Chapter 40 265

Chapter 41 265

Chapter 42 265

Chapter 43 265

Chapter 44 265

Chronology 265

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 265

Publisher’s Foreword

HISTORIANS of the present are peculiarly fallible. They are circumscribed not only by the unavailability of many facts of varying degrees of relevance but also by the difficulties in the way of achieving a three dimensional stereoscopic view of the facts falling within their field of vision. Yet it is already safe to assert that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 is one of the crucial turning points of the twentieth century, ranking with the October Revolution and the defeat of fascism in World War II in world-historical importance. It has profoundly if not decisively affected the balance of forces between the socialist and non-socialist parts of the world. It has dealt a mortal blow to imperialism in Asia and probably in Africa. It has conclusively shown that a social revolution can be successfully carried through in an economically backward country with only a small modern industrial base and urban proletariat.

Life is richer than any theory, however subtle and complex. The Chinese Communists are Marxists, not Hegelians. When it became clear that the Chinese Revolution could not be contained in the accepted Marxist formulas, they did not say, So much the worse for the Chinese facts. In the midst of their struggle for survival they proceeded to evolve a more flexible and sophisticated theory which enriched Marxism by reflecting and absorbing the stubborn realities of the Chinese scene.

We do not have to await the verdict of future historians to decide that, as far as China was concerned, the Chinese Communists were better Marxists than their foreign mentors, whether Russian, German, French, or Anglo-Saxon. It was one of the paradoxical legacies of imperialism that, because of the prestige attaching to anything foreign—including foreign revolutionaries—in an economically backward country, the Chinese Communist Party had time and again to pay for mistakes for which its foreign advisers were to a considerable, if still undetermined extent responsible. Some of these mistakes, as in the periods immediately preceding the counter-revolutions in Shanghai and Hankow in 1927 and during the Fifth Kuomintang Extermination Campaign in 1933-1934, were almost suicidal in their consequences and entailed great suffering and loss of life. The wheel was to turn full circle, for the Chinese Communists, having thoroughly digested the lessons of the past, showed themselves far less dependent on foreign advice and aid in acquiring power than did the Kuomintang in losing it. There is no need to point the moral for progressives everywhere, whether in the industrially advanced but often politically backward countries or in the colonial and semi-colonial countries still struggling toward national emancipation.

The fallibility of contemporary historians does not reduce their responsibility either to the present generation or to posterity. Like the course of the Chinese Revolution itself, American works on China in the last thirty years have been extremely uneven. It is sad but true that there is still no reasonably comprehensive and dependable book in English on the background and course of the Great Revolution of 1925-1927. Yet the events of those fateful years, in which scores of millions of Chinese began for the first time to take an active part in molding their own lives, are no less fascinating, no less packed with drama and melodrama, no less fraught with historical significance, than the French Revolution from 1789 to 1793. Much Western writing on the subject is dominated by issues often bearing as much on Russian Communist Party history as on China, and its angle of vision tends to suffer from the same kind, if not the same degree, of Europo-centrism as the reminiscences of Old China Hands. For the rest, to this day many Westerners are dependent on Malraux’s Man’s Fate for their impressions of the Great Revolution. Whatever its literary merits—and they are no doubt substantial—Man’s Fate is primarily a story about foreigners in China, or rather in Treaty Port China, and is, moreover, chronologically unreliable. In any case, no conscientious intellectual would want to rely on A Tale of Two Cities or The Gods Are Athirst for his impressions of the French Revolution.

With the 1930s, the record of contemporary historical writing on China began to be much more creditable. A number of Americans have written excellent books either directly on China or with a predominantly China background, although it must be confessed that with one or two exceptions professional historians are not to be found in their ranks and that the stream has been drying up of late. Such outstanding works as Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, Jack Belden’s China Shakes the World, The Stilwell Diaries, and Carlson’s The Chinese Army—the list is not intended to be exhaustive—immediately come to mind.

Agnes Smedley’s works must stand high on any such list. Together they constitute a valuable contribution to the history of the Chinese Revolution. In her own words, she was neither brave nor learned, just historically curious. It says much for her untutored historical curiosity that it was sufficiently strong to enable her to identify herself and grow with the Chinese Revolution.

She has told us something of her own background in Daughter of Earth and Battle Hymn of China. She was born in a north Missouri village in 1893. When she was still quite small, her family moved to a Rockefeller mining camp in Colorado where she acquired a hatred of capitalism with the air she breathed.

She became and remained an aggressive feminist throughout her life. There are few more touching passages in her writings than her description in China Fights Back of her reaction to Chu Teh’s refusal to let her go to the Eighth Route Army anti-Japanese battlefront at Wu Tai Shan in the winter of 1937. Evans Carlson’s diary gives an independent eyewitness account, which is worth quoting in full:

I told Agnes about my trip to the front, and at dinner tonight at 4 p.m. (our usual hour) Agnes asked Chu Teh for permission to go to Wu Tai Shan with me. Both Chu Teh and Jen Peh-hsi demurred. They offered various excuses, said that those who went to the front had to be prepared to shoot.

I’ll shoot! said Agnes. I was raised in the West.

But you are a woman, they objected.

Well, that raised Agnes’ ire. She went for them with all the fire she possesses which is considerable.

I’m not a woman because I want to be, she said. And as an afterthought, she flung out with biting sarcasm, God made me this way!

Well, that brought down the house, for, of course, they were all atheists. (Michael Blankfort, The Big Yankee, Boston, 1947, p. 209.)

But, unlike other less socially minded feminists, she disdained to make a career out of her feminism. The daughter of earth was a working-class mixture of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Florence Nightingale as well as Susan B. Anthony. When, during her endeavors to make up for the stunted education of her childhood (she did not even complete grade school), she came into contact with Indian nationalists in New York City, she threw herself into the Indian independence movement. As this occurred during World War I and as she was wholehearted in whatever she did, she landed in solitary confinement in the Tombs. The British accusation that she was a German agent was as baseless as the charge, rifled from Japanese police files thirty years later, that she was a Chinese Communist agent. In fact, Agnes Smedley never was a Communist. To quote the Battle Hymn of China: For years I listened to Communists with sympathy and in later years in China I gave them my active support, but I could never place my mind and life unquestioningly at the disposal of their leaders. I never believed that I myself was especially wise, but I could not become a mere instrument in the hands of men who believed that they held the one and only key to truth.

It is quickly apparent from her writings that her beliefs and conduct were not the products of complex reasoning processes. She was content to follow her heart, and if her political analyses and judgments of individuals were sometimes unsophisticated, her class instinct, which according to Lenin is the beginning though not the end of political wisdom, stood her in good stead in most situations.

Her eight years in Germany she spent in learning German, studying Indian history and Chinese nationalism, and teaching English for a living. Although much of her energy was taken up by personal problems, she found time to help organize the first German state birth control clinic and to participate in the political life of Indian and Chinese residents in Germany.

Agnes Smedley first went to China at the end of 1928 as the special correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. (Perhaps one should not read too much into the fact that Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow, two of the outstanding American journalists reporting on China, were employed for many years by German and English newspapers.) The Chinese people never had a better American friend. UI always forgot I was not a Chinese myself" was no mere literary pose but the simple expression of the depth of her emotional identification.

Her very first reaction was characteristic. When she saw a policeman kicking a coolie in a street in Harbin, she said to her interpreter, ‘This is the Middle Ages," which is not very different in substance from Tawney’s more deliberate verdict. She traveled south and, making Shanghai her headquarters, became a close friend of the great Chinese author Lu Hsun and of Mao Tun, now the President of the Association of Chinese Writers. Undeterred by threats of physical violence and by numerous attempts at intimidation, she fearlessly reported on Japanese aggression and on the Kuomintang terror. One of her notable successes was her contribution to obtaining the release of the Chinese woman novelist, Ting Ling, from jail after the latter had been kidnapped l>y the Blue Shirts. Her newspaper articles and early books on China provide a much-needed corrective to the stereotyped picture to be found in so many American textbooks on the Far East, a picture of steady social and economic progress in Kuomintang China in the decade between Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of the revolution in 1927 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. China’s Red Army Marches was one of the first books in English to give an account of the growth of the Red Army and of the Soviet Republic in Kiangsi, and it still remains a vivid human document.

Agnes Smedley was never constitutionally strong and she was prone to overtax her reserves of nervous energy. Her health broke down in 1933, and she spent nearly a year recuperating in the Soviet Union. But she could not stay away from China. On revisiting America in 1934 after being away some fifteen years, she found it like a strange planet. Nor could she reconcile herself to staying in Russia, where she could have lived comfortably on the royalties from translations of her writings, and where life...would have been free and easy compared with China. Still far from recovered, she returned to China and was soon advised to convalesce in Sian. The climate there was physically and, towards the end of 1936, politically more salubrious than that of Shanghai. She thus had a ringside seat at the Sian Incident, surely one of the most fantastically complicated and tortuous episodes of recent times. Yet it has an underlying simplicity which saves it from being merely bizarre. Chiang Kai-shek wanted to wipe out the Chinese Communists. The Chinese people wanted to resist the Japanese invaders—and something had to give.

It so transpired that Agnes Smedley was one of the minor casualties at Sian. She was hounded by a Blue Shirt officer and held up by trigger-happy marauding soldiers. But she was as unaffected by such personal mishaps as was Rayna Prohme before her. Needless to say, she was persona non gratissima with the Kuomintang government, and as government troops moved towards Sian early in 1937, she availed herself of the opportunity to spend some time in Yenan, where she met many Chinese Communist leaders. She found the personality of Chu Teh particularly sympathetic and decided to write his biography. In March of 1937, she began the regular series of conversations with him which were to furnish the raw material for The Great Road.

These conversations were never finished. The Sino-Japanese War started in July, and Chu Teh had to leave for the front. Despite her chronic gastric ulcers and a serious back injury, Miss Smedley toured the base hospitals and saw more of Chu Teh in action on the Shansi front towards the end of 1937. Most of 1938 she spent in Hankow where she participated in the drive for international medical aid to the Chinese Army and to the Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps. She was appalled by the scale on which America was providing Japan with the sinews of war and was one of the few who tried to rouse world public opinion against this abominable traffic in death. She also helped in enlisting foreign doctors, including Norman Bethune and a number of Indian and refugee European doctors, for the Eighth Route and other Armies.

Leaving Hankow just before it fell in October 1938, she wore herself out traveling with armies at the front and tirelessly inspecting their hospitals. Her account of the New Fourth Army is justly celebrated. The story of the little devil, Shen Kuo-hua, who was assigned to her as an orderly by the Storm Guerrilla Detachment (its commander, Li Hsien-nien, is now Minister of Finance in the People’s Government at Peking), was included by Hemingway in his anthology of war literature under the title After Final Victory. Perhaps the tribute she cherished most was the one Kuo-hua himself paid her in a little market town the inhabitants of which had never seen a foreigner:

She is a woman and our American friend! She helps our wounded. In Tingjiachun she found a wounded man and fed him and gave him a bath. She even helped him do all his business....Look at her bandaged hand! he demanded, taking my hand in his. She got this when she picked up a pan of hot water while she was bathing a wounded soldier. She is both my father and my mother. If any of you are sick, she will cure you.

Only when hospitalization had become imperative did she consent to go to Hong Kong where she soon resumed her propaganda activities despite local red tape.

Agnes Smedley’s flaming sincerity attracted a wide variety of people. The friendships with Madame Sun Yat-sen, Evans Carlson, and General Stilwell are easily understandable, but her circle also included Major (now General) Dorn, J. B. Powell, and a number of other American correspondents in China, the British Ministry of Information representative in Hong Kong, Donald MacDougall, and the British Ambassador to China, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. Clark Kerr was a minor Scottish laird, an intellectual, a brilliant diplomat, and entirely human. It is hard to fathom why he was transferred from Chungking, where he was doing a superb job in most difficult circumstances, to Moscow, where his special talents found no outlet. Foreign Offices move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform.

The New Fourth Army episode in December 1940-January 1941 brought about a sharp deterioration in the internal situation and heightened the danger of civil war. To return to Kuomintang China and remain ineffectual under the surveillance of Tai Li’s police was impossible for a person of Miss Smedley’s temperament. Accordingly, in the summer of 1941 she decided to go back to the United States, where in Battle Hymn of China she faithfully carried out the testament of the Kwangsi general, Chung Yi: Tell your countrymen....Tell your countrymen. After 1945, she longed to return to China, but with the outbreak of civil war her journey had to be deferred. She hoped to resume her conversations with Chu Teh where they had broken off in 1937. But it was not to be. An incurable illness protracted her stay in England, where she died early in 1950, an exile from her native land and from the country whose cause she had so faithfully served for over twenty years.

Unfortunately, her failing health prevented her from doing much work on her manuscript of The Great Road. What she left was all in first draft which she intended to revise as well as supplement. The reader will notice that there is a complete blank between the end of the Second Kuomintang Extermination Campaign in 1931 and the beginning of the Long March in October 1934, and that the story after the end of 1937, when she stopped seeing Chu Teh (though she continued to receive letters from him), is skimpish and is really only a preliminary sketch. This is easy to understand since her plan to return to China was never fulfilled. Moreover, an adequate post-1937 narrative would have required a summary of Communist-Kuomintang relations, the fluctuating tide of the Sino-Japanese and Civil Wars, and the role of America in Chinese affairs up to the triumph of the People’s Liberation Army; for Chu Teh’s life after 1937 was inseparable from the unfolding national drama. This would have been a major undertaking transcending her original intentions and could only have been carried out in much more propitious circumstances.

The blank between 1931 and 1934 is less comprehensible. In Battle Hymn of China Miss Smedley states that between March and early July, 1937, she had taken down the record of Chu Teh’s life up to 1934 and that she stored her notebooks before departing for the front. It must be inferred either that the notebooks for 1931-1934 were subsequently lost or that she never had a chance to make even a first draft of the material they contained. The former seems more likely, since in the text she has many highly enlightening details on the course of the Long March itself. Perhaps her executors will some day be able to remove any doubts as to the notebooks, which should certainly be preserved if they are ever located. As it is, it is necessary to give a minimum indispensable background to the immediate antecedents of the Long March. [For further detail, see Mao Tse-tung, Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War, Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 175-253; Resolution on Some Questions in the History of Our Party, Selected Works, Vol. IV, pp. 171-218; and Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, pp. 179-188 and 389-392.]

The Red Army had decisively rebuffed the Fourth Extermination Campaign launched by Chiang Kai-shek in the spring of 1933. In two battles, three Kuomintang divisions had been annihilated and more than 10,000 rifles captured. Accordingly, Chiang made the most thoroughgoing preparations for the Fifth Campaign which started in October, 1933, and ended with the departure of the Red Army from Kiangsi in October, 1934, on its epic Long March of 8,000 miles. He mobilized nearly a million men, an air force of nearly 400 planes, and vast supplies for the project. The international situation was very favorable from Chiang’s point of view. He had just received a $50 million Wheat Loan from the RFC, and he enjoyed at least the moral support of all the major powers except the Soviet Union. The strategy of the campaign was planned by his German military advisers, headed by Von Seeckt, former Chief of Staff of the German Army. It was designed to derive the maximum advantage from the Kuomintang Armies’ overwhelming superiority in manpower and in materiel and gradually to throttle the Red Army by a tight economic blockade and by a system of ever-narrowing circles of blockhouses. (A similar system was later adopted by the Japanese but with much less success, partly because they were operating over much larger areas, but mainly because the Communists had learned their lesson in Kiangsi and responded in accordance with the basic Chu-Mao military doctrine.)

What was the situation in the Communist camp in October of 1933? This was precisely the period in which the so-called third Left line associated with Wang Ming and Po Ku was exerting its greatest influence. The provisional Central Committee headed by Po Ku had recently moved its headquarters from Shanghai to the Kiangsi base area and intervened disastrously in military affairs. As a result of its erroneous diagnosis of the overall situation (the situation for an immediate revolution now exists in China; the Fifth Campaign would determine which is the victor and which the vanquished in the contest between the revolutionary way and the colonial way; and so on), it rejected an alliance with the Fukien rebellion led by the patriotic Tsai Ting-kai, whose Nineteenth Route Army had distinguished itself in the fighting at Shanghai in 1932. Much worse, the Committee fell right into the trap set by the German generals and persisted in fighting a passive positional warfare to which the base area’s resources were simply not adapted.

The course of the campaign is described by Mao as follows:

...the enemy advanced by means of the new strategy of building blockhouses, and first occupied Lichwan. However, in the hope of recovering it and halting the enemy beyond the border of the base area, we attacked Siaoshih, which was a strong enemy position in the White area southeast of Lichwan, but again we gained no ground. Then we moved back and forth seeking battle between the enemy’s main forces and his blockhouses and were reduced to a completely passive position. All through the fifth counter-campaign, which lasted a year, we did not show the slightest initiative or dynamic force....We lost the initiative in our first move—certainly the stupidest and worst way of fighting. (Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 232 and 234.)

The Communists simply could not survive in their base area after the losses they endured. They suffered 60,000 casualties in one siege, and the Kuomintang itself admitted that about 1,000,000 people (almost entirely peasants) were killed or starved to death in the process of recovering Soviet Kiangsi (Snow, op. cit., p. 186). Whoever was responsible for the mistakes, there was no alternative but to abandon Kiangsi in order to save the Red Army. The sequel was the famous Long March. [Snow suggests that a Comintern advisory committee in Shanghai must share this responsibility together with Li Teh, the German Communist military adviser, who arrived in Kiangsi in 1933 (op. cit., pp. 389-392). But Snow’s account of their role 19 obscure, not altogether consistent, and admittedly conjectural. There is no reason to doubt that the Chinese Communists utilized Li Teh’s professional knowledge of German General Staff strategy and tactics. Whether his military recommendations were adopted, and, if so, whether it was because of his prestige as a Comintern emissary or because they were supported by the temporarily dominant Po Ku group, is not known. The guess may be hazarded that the Po Ku group exploited Li Teh’s prestige as a foreign military expert to get their own military policy adopted. In any case, the official Resolution on Some Questions in the History of Our Party attaches the blame to the dominance of the third Left line and does not even contain a hint of the subordinate Snow hypothesis that the foreigner, Li Teh, was a convenient scapegoat. Perhaps here too there is a lesson for foreign progressives.]

The history of Agnes Smedley’s repeatedly thwarted attempts to complete her biography of Chu Teh is a sufficient explanation of The Great Road’s unevenness in quality and coverage. This unevenness is somehow in keeping with the biographer’s character and may therefore be aesthetically appropriate.

What is more relevant for students of contemporary history, it does not seriously detract from the book’s importance as a social and historical document of the highest value. Together with Tretiakov’s Chinese Testament and Mao’s autobiography in Snow’s Red Star, it immediately takes its place as a sociological classic. These works are worth more than all the polysyllabic outpourings of the academic sociologists who impose their Max-Weberian abstractions on the void of their ignorance of China. They plunge readers into Chinese society with its vivid diversity and its howling contradictions, and at the same time introduce them to flesh-and-blood individuals who, precisely because of their individuality, typify large social groups. It would be absurd to pretend that Chu Teh is merely a typical Chinese peasant. Yet where can one find a better example of typical, if conflicting, peasant attitudes than in his desire to help on the farm after passing his first—and last—imperial examination and his family’s horror at the blasphemous spectacle of a scholar degrading himself, and therefore his economic value to them, by manual labor?

It would be instructive to compare The Great Road with Chinese Testament in some detail. The latter is the biography of a student in the turbulent years encompassing the 1911 Revolution, the May 4th Movement, and the first Kuomintang-Communist United Front. Like the Tans, the Chus were Szechwanese. Like Tan Shih-hua’s father, Chu Teh was a member of the Ko Lao Hui, the Tung Men Hui, and the Kuomintang, and a participant in the 1911 Revolution and in the defeat of Yuan Shih-kai’s attempted restoration of the monarchy. Both risked their lives many times for the abortive bourgeois-democratic revolution. Like Tan Shih-hua himself, Chu Teh was deeply affected by the nationalist upsurge following the May 4th Movement. Tan, a left-wing Kuomintang student in Peking, decided to complete his education in Moscow. Chu Teh, a minor militarist only recently cured of opium addiction, a rejected applicant for membership in the Communist Party and nearly twenty years Tan’s senior, went to Berlin to find the Great Road.

If Chinese Testament is the biography not merely of Tan Shih-hua but of a whole generation of Chinese students, the early part of The Great Road is the biography not of one but of innumerable Chinese peasant families. There is a striking contrast between Tan’s early years in a lower-gentry household and Chu’s in a peasant family. And the contrast is heightened, not diminished, by the fact that the Tan household’s fortunes were exposed to the vagaries of the father’s clandestine revolutionary activities and that Chu Teh was favored above all other members of his family. The King of Hell’s exactions left Chu Teh with an indelible hatred of landlords for which there was no equivalent in Tan Shih-hua’s upbringing.

Chu’s mother was nameless and face-less, the daughter of a member of a theatrical group. The family was ruled by his grandmother, a matriarch obsessed by the desire to recover the land they had lost; and Chu’s education was planned as a move in the long-term strategy of recovery. Chu was thus able to become an official—true, only a military official, much to his family’s disgust. But he never lost his peasant roots.

It is now generally recognized that one of the main sources of the Chinese Communist strength is their capacity to reflect and anticipate the peasant’s elemental aspirations. Agnes Smedley was guided by a wise instinct in her choice of Chu Teh as a sitter, if only because of his gift for projecting the peasant’s point of view to the nth degree. It was this gift, plus political insight of a very high order, which led him to the conclusion that the peasants of China are the most revolutionary people on earth. It was this gift which enabled him to identify himself so completely with his troops and to organize them for the first time in Chinese history on the basis of what Evans Carlson called Christian principles or ethical indoctrination. Surely there has never been another commander-in-chief who, during his years of service, spun, wove, set type, grew and cooked his own food, wrote poetry and lectured not only to his troops on military strategy and tactics but to women’s classes on how to preserve vegetables.

If The Great Road belongs to the same genus as Chinese Testament as a social document, as a historical document it bears comparison with Red Star Over China. The two books overlap only at certain points, and even here they are complementary rather than competitive. [Snow’s chapter Concerning Chu Teh (pp. 354-363) is the exception to this statement. Here he was at the disadvantage of having to rely on second-hand and unchecked information; hence the description of Chu as this scion of a family of landlords and a number of other inaccuracies.] Snow’s book is unquestionably a classic, and Agnes Smedley’s deserves to become one. There is space here for only a brief mention of some of The Great Road’s historical highlights.

Foreigners who visited Yenan and who now come back from People’s China astonished by the Communists’ moral earnestness are unfamiliar with the strong puritan strain in the Chinese intellectual tradition. This tradition was never entirely submerged. It is apparent in the formation of numerous small groups of young intellectuals, such as the one Chu Teh joined with his fellow-teachers at the Ilunghsien school, who solemnly dedicated their lives to their country: such groups—often almost private secret societies—were a common phenomenon in the two decades before political life had crystallized around the two major parties. It is strongly apparent in Chu Teh’s remarkable mentor and patron, Tsai Ao, about whom one cannot help asking for more. As it is, the details on the 1911 Revolution and the anti-Yuan Shih-kai movement in Szechwan and Yunnan help to fill in a rather vague chapter in modern Chinese history.

Chu Teh’s description of Southwestern warlordism is most useful and it is to be regretted that Miss Smedley did not repeat his account in full. For not only were such warlords as Liu Hsiang, Chang Chun, Teng Hsi-ho, and Yang Sen national as well as provincial figures; but the period 1911-1949, throughout which political power depended on naked force, is unintelligible without a grasp of the nature and roots of warlordism. The theme of unity and division runs like a red thread throughout Chinese history. From 1842 to 1949, under the double stress of foreign encroachments and internal disintegration, it was the theme of division which prevailed. Warlordism, a malignant variation on the theme of division sired and fed by foreign money, was Yuan Shih-kai’s legacy to China. The warlords were militarist politicians, semi-feudal condottieri, who played power politics with their armies and combinations of armies just as the imperialists played power politics with the warlords themselves. However intricate the interplay of these two games, they invariably had one result—the Chinese people got kicked around.

Chiang Kai-shek, like Yuan Shih-kai before him, aspired to become the supreme warlord with all China as his bailiwick—note his reiterated identification of China with himself. The fact that Yuan’s antecedents were in the decadent Manchu Army and Chiang’s in the Shanghai stock market and underworld in no way vitiates the comparison. Many of Chiang’s moves made no sense except in terms of the crazy quilt of warlord intrigues and ambitions, and even his approach to international politics was that of a warlord.

Chu Teh’s first assignment from the Kuomintang on his return from Germany in 1926 was to win over his old associate, the Szechwanese warlord Yang Sen, to the cause of the Northern Expedition, or at least to neutralize him—an assignment which was greatly facilitated by the brazen British bombardment of Wanhsien in eastern Szechwan. But the Kuomintang established a symbiotic relationship with warlordism, which penetrated the Communist ranks when Chang Kuo-tao tried and failed to convert the New Fourth Army into his own private army.

Agnes Smedley’s account of the Civil War from the Nanchang uprising to the end of the Second Extermination Campaign and of the Long March provides a wealth of material for the political as well as for the military historian. The importance of Chu Teh’s contribution to the development of the classical Communist methods of warfare needs no underlining. But there are many other details of absorbing interest. To mention only one or two: There is the strange episode of the Tungku Communist leaders of landlord origin who did everything for the revolution except divide up their own land! To this day, agricultural cooperatives are careful in admitting ex-landlords. There is the story of the Committee to Combat the Counter-Revolution, which from its inception was rooted in the people. This goes far towards explaining why the Chinese security organization has been relatively free from the bureaucratism and abuses which have afflicted its Russian counterpart.

The Long March was the climax of Red Star Over China, and we found ourselves reading and rereading Snow’s version. We are confident that many people will have the same reaction to The Great Road. The Long March is unique in military annals. Compared to it, Hannibal’s march across the Alps fades into the small theater of the antique; and whilst Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was a disastrous fiasco, the Long March was the prelude to final victory. For sheer drama, the scene when the Red Army emerged from the lethal Grass Lands and first came into contact with Chinese peasants on the Kansu border—we touched their houses and the earth, embraced them, and we danced and sang and cried—can only be compared with Xenophon’s Thalassa! Thalassa!

Perhaps the most valuable single contribution of The Great Road from a political point of view is the history of the Chang Kuo-tao deviation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first full account in the English language and for this reason alone the book is required reading. Chang, a foundation member of the Chinese Communist Party and commander of the New Fourth Army, refused to co-operate with the New First Army and wished to stay in Western Szechwan and Sikang, where the Communists would have been cut off from the anti-Japanese struggle and the main stream of political life. To further his plans, he kidnapped and detained Chu Teh and members of his staff for a year. The fate of the Chinese Communist Party hung by a hair. The course of events after 1937 might have been very different if, first, Chang had not been defeated by the Mohammedan warlords of Chinghai as a consequence of his misguided political and military strategy; and if, second, the Communists had not succeeded in winning over the rank and file of the New Fourth Army by their policy of patiently to explain.

The Great Road is not an official biography in any sense. Chu Teh himself provided most of the data for events up to 1937, but the narrative, comments, and interpretation are Agnes Smedley’s and Agnes Smedley’s alone. If she obviously had a great admiration for her subject, it is an admiration shared by many others who have come into contact with him. Evans Carlson said of Chu Teh that he was the only practicing Christian he had ever known besides Carlson’s father, who was a Congregationalist minister. The Belgian Catholic priest, Father Vincent Lebbe, also testified to Chu Teh’s Christian principles. In Twin Stars of China, Carlson wrote that Chu Teh has the kindliness of a Robert E. Lee, the tenacity of a Grant and the humility of a Lincoln. One of General Stilwell’s last private acts in China, in October 1944, was to send Chu Teh his lined jacket. Eighteen months later, when General Marshall was on his mission in China, Stilwell wrote: General Marshall can’t walk on water. It makes me itch to throw down my shovel and get over there and shoulder a rifle with Chu Teh.

After Agnes Smedley’s death, several attempts were made to have The Great Road published in English. But none succeeded. It first saw the light in a Japanese translation in serial, then in book, form. It is our pleasure as well as our privilege to make The Great Road available to the English-speaking public for the first time.

The manuscript has been edited in consultation with Miss Smedley’s executors. In addition to imposing consistency in matters of styling and the spelling of Chinese names, we have made the kind of minor corrections which we feel sure the author herself would have made before sending the manuscript to the printer. But nothing basic has been added to or changed in the text as Miss Smedley left it. A Chronology to assist the reader is appended beginning on page 445 below, and a map showing the main localities which figure in Miss Smedley’s narrative will be found in the end papers at the front and back of the book.

Leo Huberman

Paul M. Sweezy

New York City

June 1956

Prelude

THIS is the story of the first sixty years of the life of General Chu Teh, commander-in-chief of the People’s Liberation Army of China. Though General Chu authorized me to write it, it is not an official biography. Time, distance, and the world-shaking work of the Chinese revolution of which he is one of the chief leaders have precluded any final check by him of my facts and interpretations.

This book was first conceived in January 1937, when I arrived in the ancient town of Yenan, northwestern China, where the old Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army, and the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party which guided that army’s destiny, had just established headquarters. Throughout the seven years which I had lived in China up to that time, the official Chinese press, echoed by the foreign press both in China and abroad, had described General Chu Teh variously as a Red bandit chieftain, a Communist bandit, a murderer, thief and arsonist. They had, however, never attempted to explain why millions of honorable and hard-working peasants, workers, idealistic students and intellectuals had been willing to fight or die for the cause which he espoused.

A thousand legends had been woven about his name, so that I expected, upon arriving in Yenan, to find a fiercely heroic and fire-eating figure, an iron revolutionary whose eloquent tongue could set forests afire. Consumed with curiosity, I went with two friends to his headquarters on the first evening of my arrival in Yenan, and stepped inside the door to his private room.

The first thing I saw was an unpainted table lit by candlelight and piled with books, documents and papers, and the dim outline of a figure in blue-gray cotton uniform who had arisen as we entered.

First, we stood appraising each other. I knew already that he was fifty-one, but I now saw that his face was heavily lined, his cheeks sunken, and that he looked at least ten years older. He had but recently completed the epic Long March of the Red Army and the marks of undernourishment and suffering were on him.

In height he was perhaps five feet eight inches. He was neither ugly nor handsome, and there was nothing whatever heroic or fire-eating about him. His head was round and was covered with a short stubble of black hair touched with gray, his forehead was broad and rather high, his cheekbones prominent. A strong, stubborn jaw and chin supported a wide mouth and a perfect set of white teeth which gleamed when he smiled his welcome. His nose was broad and short and his skin rather dark. He was such a commonplace man in appearance that, had it not been for his uniform, he could have passed for almost any peasant in any village in China.

Men had told me that he was a simple, kindly and very commonplace man, hard-working, and without any interest in making himself a personal hero. All that they said seemed true, yet that term simple seemed true only after a fashion. His eyes, gazing at me, were very watchful and appraising. Unlike the eyes of most Chinese, which are black, his were a deep and soft brown, large, and gleaming with intelligence and awareness. I knew that a revolutionary leader of such long and bitter experience as his could not have remained so very simple and yet survive.

One thing I sensed at once: every inch of him was masculine, from his voice and movements to the flat-footed way in which he stood. As my eyes became accustomed to the murkiness of the room I saw that his uniform was worn and faded from long wear and much washing, and I noted that his face was not immobile, but exceedingly expressive of every emotion that passed through him.

Still recalling the many tales circulated about him I told him of the charges of banditry against him, and expected him to laugh as I did. Instead of laughing, he fell suddenly silent, lowered his head and stared at the earthen floor, and his face became drawn and stark as if from tragedy. In that brief moment I caught a glimpse of some deep and tragic emotion seldom seen by his friends and comrades who spoke of him as a perennially optimistic man. The moment passed, he raised his head and looked at me with level eyes and said:

Banditry is a class question.

I thought of one line in a Western American folk ballad, Some rob with a gun, some with a fountain pen, but held my peace and was soon asking him something about his life. No, he replied to one question, he was not a rich landlord by origin but, instead, the son of a poor peasant family of Szechwan Province. I was to learn later that few or none of his own comrades knew much about his life and that none of them had had time to sit down and write books about him or anyone else.

It was while he was speaking that I conceived the idea of writing his biography, and when he asked me what I wished to do in Yenan I replied: I would like you to tell me the story of your whole life.

Why? he asked, curiously, and I answered:

Because you are a peasant. Eight out of every ten living Chinese are peasants. Not one has ever told his story to the world. If you would tell me your life story, a peasant would be speaking for the first time.

My life is only a small part of the life of the Chinese peasants and soldiers, he remarked. Wait a little, look about and meet others before you decide.

I did as he suggested, and indeed met many men of more dramatic character than General Chu, men whose lives are the stuff from which great literature is made. Chinese peasants, however, are not dramatic, and I clung to my original idea, and in March 1937 we set to work.

As the weeks and months passed, with two or three evenings a week spent writing down what General Chu told me, I sometimes despaired of my task. He came of obscure, illiterate people and there were no letters, books, documents, or diaries to consult. He could not always remember exact dates and, until he was past forty, there was almost no public mention of his existence. He was a very busy man and often seemed to think the details of his childhood unimportant. Chinese family life, his military career, and, finally, his Communist Party discipline and life, had molded him into a collectivist until it was sometimes difficult to know just what he as an individual had thought or done, or just where he left off and the revolution began.

The anti-Japanese war began while we were in the midst of his life story and he went to the front. I therefore put the book aside, but soon left for the front, not only to write a different book but also to observe him in action in so far as this was possible. Therefore, for one year I was able to watch him at work, at play, and at war with Japanese imperialism.

Apart from his multifarious military and political duties, it seemed to me that I had never known any human being with such a tenacious lust for life, nor one so basically democratic. There seemed no aspect of human existence that he did not long to explore and understand. Apart from the evenings of regular work with me in Yenan, he would sometimes drop in to talk with me and with other people who gathered to drink tea in the sunny courtyard of the place where I lived, to eat peanuts, tell tales, sing songs and, as he sometimes said, to boast.

During such idle, friendly moments I would often line everyone up and teach them the Virginia reel. Nothing on earth could keep General Chu from taking part in such dances, and he would swing his partner, do-si-do, and kick up the dust with a gust as great as that of the youngest guard in the line. When I had taught him all I could of folk dancing, he asked me to teach him Western social dancing, which I did.

He danced as he worked—plugging at it patiently, convinced that it was just another means of breaking down old Chinese feudal customs. He liked it, too, but he was not the sort of which great dancers are made, as was one of his generals, the colorful Ho Lung.

Prowling around to see what General Chu was doing, I sometimes found him lecturing in the Red Army Academy, renamed Kangta—the Anti-Japanese Resistance University—or playing basketball with the cadets in the courtyard of the academy. At the front later I often sat on the sidelines as a critic and watched him and his staff officers compete in basketball with some of their headquarters guards. General Chu would often shake his head a little wistfully and remark that the young guards never liked him to play on their side because he wasn’t a very good player.

He loved the theaters and he loved singing, and only necessary work kept him from theatrical performances in Yenan or at the front. In the last years of the Second World War, when the American Military Observer Group in Yenan gave showings of American movies, he was seen at almost every showing, howling at Abbott and Costello who, incidentally, are in the tradition of Chinese clowns and slapstick artists.

On the first evening that he was to work with me I stood with Lily Chang, a young actress who was my Chinese teacher and secretary-interpreter, and waited for him on the terrace before the loess cave rooms which we occupied. Lily was to interpret when I failed to understand Chinese or when the German which both General Chu and I spoke, to some extent, broke down—which was often. As we waited we looked down on the small town of Yenan in the valley below with the Yen River flowing beyond its ancient walls and, beyond the river, the high pagoda on the loess cliff and the broad flat in the valley where the Yen flowed eastward to join the Yellow River, China’s Sorrow. The broad flat, now a drill ground soon to become an airfield, had but recently been turned into a race course. That was when a party of hard-riding, tough Mongols came riding down from the north for a conference with the Red Army, an occasion which caused General Chu to issue warning advice to all women and girls to make themselves scarce or to become very formal lest the guests misunderstand their welcome.

Yet the women and girls, I among them, turned up on that broad flat to watch the horse races between the Mongols and the Red Army cavalry and we wondered at the Mongol riders who had trained their shaggy mounts in swift trotting while they bent far back in the saddles until they were all but lying down on the backs of their horses. A Red Army rider had borrowed my swift pony, given me by General Chu, for the races, and Lily and I had yelled ourselves hoarse as we watched the little pony, like an Arabian steed, falling behind the tank-like Mongolian pony with his flying mane and long tail. The Mongols had now returned to Inner Mongolia, taking Red Army military and political advisers with them. War with Japan was being prepared and the revolution was lapping over into Inner Mongolia.

On the hour set, for he was a punctual man, we saw General Chu coming through the streets of the little town in the valley below. His guard was behind his undistinguished figure and General Chu was turning his head as if in conversation. He walked bent forward a little from the waist and his legs moved in a pumping gait that had carried him over untold thousands of miles of the paths and roads of China. He came up the loess cliff, coughing the hoarse bronchial cough that he had contracted in the mountains of eternal snow of Sikang Province. He halted once and he and the young guard with the automatic at his hip stood looking up the Yen River valley, pointing as they spoke. There was talk in the town of building a dam up the valley to prevent floods and provide irrigation, and to reforest the naked hills and valleys. Their voices came up to us, his deeper and a little hoarse, mingling with the higher and fresh voice of the tall and handsome youth by his side. It occurred to me that three generations were involved in this vast Chinese revolution: General Chu’s, the young guard’s, and the young generation below the teen age.

General Chu and the young guard came on up the hill to our terrace. The peasant family that shared the terrace with us, hearing his voice, came out and greeted him with a loud welcome, peasant to peasant; and he went among them, patting the head of a little boy and taking the baby from the arms of the mother to lift it in the air above him and laugh with it.

In such a manner, and in such a setting, this book began.

Book I. The Road’s Beginning

Chapter 1

SITTING across the little table between us, with the candlelight playing on his lined face, General Chu’s eyes gleamed and he seemed consumed with curiosity to hear what questions I would ask about his life.

Begin at the beginning, I said.

He was born, he began, on a Chinese date which is the equivalent of December 12, 1886, new calendar, near Ilunghsien in Szechwan Province, just twenty-two years after the Taiping Rebellion was crushed by the Manchu court and its foreign allies. He gave the date by the old lunar calendar which the Chinese Communist press later said was November 30th, and which a Chinese writer who started to write his biography—but fell by the wayside—said was December 18th. It may be that General Chu did not know the exact date of his birth; but that he was born, there can be no doubt.

Though he had a regular name in childhood, he said, he was nicknamed Little Dog at birth because boy babies were given animal names to deceive the evil spirits which lie in wait for sons. Girls were so insignificant that even the evil spirits did not molest them.

What do you remember first in life? I asked, and General Chu said, Nothing very important.

‘Tell me the unimportant things," I urged.

He lowered his head and sat in silence for some time, staring at his clasped hands. He then began speaking falteringly—of light, color, sound, high mountains and forests, fragrant wild flowers as big as my outstretched hand, flowers that scented the land for miles around; of sunshine, a running river, and a little lullaby.

His mother sang the lullaby and, to his delight, acted it out with her eyebrows as she sang:

The moon is like an eyebrow,

The moon is curved with two ends dangling.

The moon is like an eyebrow,

The moon is like a sickle.

It’s not like an eyebrow that’s forever frowning.

This lullaby aroused both pleasure and pain in him—pleasure because his mother sang it to him; and, later, pain because she sang it to his baby brother. He had thought it belonged to him alone.

He remembered that