Red Star Over China
In his journeys and narrations as described in his book, Red Star Over China (1938), Communist partisans had just completed their escape from the southeastern parts of China, settling in the northwest, and were developing the united front strategy they were to use against their enemies. These Red bandits , as the Nationalist government of General Chiang Kai Shek and his Kuomintang, or one party dictatorial regime called the Communists, waged a war with the Nationalists while trying to evade the armies that were deployed to destroy them at every turn. After a meeting with the commander of the Fourth Red Army, Chou En-Lai, Snow (1938) was asked by En-Lai to come to his station in the next village. Here Snow was served by two young boys, both of them refusing to acknowledge his request for cold water (Edgar Snow 1938 p. 69).
In this scenario, the boys were not regarded as mere children, but as future soldiers in the cause of the Communists. These children displayed a dignity uncommon among youth movements that Snow had encountered. Snow saw these children, heavily involved in the affairs of the Communist armies, as a living testimony of the energy that the movement bought into Chinese society at the time. One of them even served as the guide of Snow to the headquarters of General En-Lai, a bomb proof hut with several others in the immediate area. This fact was not frowned upon by the farmers in the area, which did not seem to intrude into the scenery of the location (Snow 1938, p. 70).
Another seeming strength of the Red forces had over their enemies was in the aspect of communication. The Reds had cultivated communication lines in all the important areas in the country, namely Shanghai, Hankow, Tientsin and Nanjing. Though the White armies of General Kai-Shek had intensified efforts to capture radio sets belonging to the Red armies, the government had never been successful at completely halting the dissemination of information coming from these bases. Also, the codes that were used by the Red forces seemed to be impregnable to the White military ever since the Reds formed their own radio base, ironically, using machines that were captured from White forced (Snow 1938 p. 70).
With the equipment, Red forces were able to monitor all the soviet regions in the country, and more importantly, all the fronts of the armies. General Chou even had direct contact with the Commander in Chief of the Red forces, Chu-Teh, even though the latters forces were located near the Szechuan-Tibet border, hundreds of miles away. Trainees in schools established to provide manpower to the various fonts, receive transmissions from Chinese cities such as Nanjing, Shanghai and even Tokyo, and broadcast the information to Soviet China (Snow 1938 p. 71).
As Snow set out to discover the secrets of the Red armies, his attention was turned to the animals that they used to transport him around. Noticing the animals were beaten up and ragged , Snow commented on the utility of the animals in the crusade of the Red forces. One of the officers accompanying him on his journey, a commander in the Red army, Li Chiang-lin, said that though the army has these old steeds at the rear of the Army, that does not give an accurate estimate of the strength of the Red cavalry at the front lines. In Chiang-lins opinion, all the best that the people have to offer, whether it be food, clothes, or guns, all of these items are for the use of the soldiers of the Red Army (Snow 1938 p. 77).
In the stories of Li, the bandits that they met could not be considered as brigands they were only called by that term on orders of the Nanjing nationalist government. Li began his career when he joined the Kuomintang, then joined the Communist Party approximately in the early part of the 1920s, and was engaged in various activities with the Party. In one of these activities, he met with Ho Lung, the leader termed as a bandit by the Nationalist government. Li avers that Hos forces only levied taxes on the opium caravans that passed through the roads between Hankow and Yunnan. Hos troops did not engage in revelry or debauchery, and he did not allow them to (Snow 1938 p. 78).
Though Hos forces experienced greater hardships in their own Long March, Hos magnetic personality made his men, suffering as they were, to stay with their commander and die rather than abandon him. When he finally arrived at the Tibetan border to meet up with General Chu-Teh, Ho had a force of 20,000 men, many barefoot, hungry and physically drained. After a period of recuperation, they marched on to Kansu, where they expected to arrive in a few weeks time (Snow 1938 p. 80).
Some of the people joined the Red Army so that they can fight against Japan, but still many had various reasons why they joined the Reds. Some enlisted in the Red Army to escape from slavery, others had joined came from disgruntled elements of the Kuomintang army, while still others had enlisted in the belief that the Red forces symbolized a revolutionary cause, fighting against the ills of imperialism and the abuses of the landlords. Though their lives had experienced tragedy in one form or another, they seemed to possess a camaraderie in that all of them, though of different regional backgrounds, did not seem to be divided by these things, but rather a source of additional bonding among them. In this scenario, nationalism was not a driving force, but different causes coming into the consciousness of individuals, binding them to achieve their one goals (Snow 1938 p. 84).
One of the most significant tactics used by the Red Army in times of combat is the capacity of the armies to focus its main body in an assault, then quickly disperse and separate the units. With this practice, positional combat was avoided, and all initiatives were done and exhausted to meet the enemy while they were in transition, and to annihilate them. With this, the infamous short attack of the Red Army was crafted. With regards to the widening of the areas of the soviets, the Red Army was more inclined to exercise a wave or tidal concept, as opposed to the jumps and leaps, absent of the consolidation efforts to strengthen the Communist presence in the area (Snow 1938 p. 174).
As the Japanese military came and occupied the northeast Chinese regions, the Communist Party of China called on the people to wage war against the foreign attackers and to safeguard the motherland. As the Revolution began to reach a new apex, the left wing partisans in the Party blundered on several crucial points in the conduct of their guerrilla wars against the Kuomintang. As the troops of the Kuomintang encircled the bases of the revolutionary movement, the troops of the Red Army had to withdraw from the east to the western portion of China, culminating in what was called as the Long March (Peoples).
By the midpoint of the Long March, after the party had twice tasted defeat after near victories, the CPC assembled at Zunyi. It is here that the most recognized face of the Chinese Communist movement, Mao Zedong, was chosen as the leader of the army as well as the party. That meeting has been considered as a crossroad in the chronology of the Red Army as well as the Chinese Communist Party itself. Mao eventually led the Army from the edge of defeat, out of reach of Kuomintang forces, and founded a base for the revolutionary armies in Yanjan, where the Red Army rested, gathered strength and prepared for a massive return (Peoples).
By the middle of 1937, Japan launched a massive, all-front attack against China. In the succeeding eight years, the Communist Party led the fight against the Japanese invaders. CPC forces, inclusive of the 8th Rote Army and the New 4th Army, burst onto occupied territories and started guerrilla warfare with the invading forces. In eight years, Chinese troops were able to finally repulse the Chinese invasionary force, contributing to the global fight against fascism. After the resolution of the war, the CPC began to craft a new program to bring about the establishment of an sovereign, free and influential Chinese nation. The CPC had initiated talks with the Kuomintang, that the internal strife plaguing the nation should be addressed on the principles of peace, freedom and solidarity (Peoples).
In the book of Snow (1938), Snow narrates the ordeal of the First Division of the Red Army as they settled in the base at Chingkashan. In late 1927, the initial soviet unit was established, with Tu Chung-pin as the first chair of the unit. In the policy followed by the Tsalin soviet, Snow states that the policy was one of gradual development. This policy tact gained the ire of putschists, or hawks, in the CPC. These warmongers called for the focus of the Party with regards to the soviets, on the actions of murder, raiding, and burning of the landlords, in order that the morale of the latter will be severely broken (Snow 1938 p. 167).
The demands of the warlords were substantially rejected by the First Army Front Committee, earning them the label of reformists from the more aggressive branch of the Party. By May of 1928, Chu-Teh came to Chingkashan and both armies were merged. In this conference, at the Maoping enclave, strategies were crafted to create a six-hsien soviet region, in order to slowly centralize and strengthen Communist influence in the Hunan-Kiangsi-Kwantong districts. Using these areas as a base for the Party, the plan is gradually expand the power base unto neighboring areas, to finally extend over the whole of the country (Snow 1938 p. 167).
But in the book of John Maxwell Hamilton, Edgar Snow, a biography (1998), the focus of the discussion is not the plans and strategies of Chu-Teh and Tu, but the success of the soviet and its description as the biggest soviet unit. The account of Hamilton also notes Snows mention of the arrival of the units of Mao Zedongs unit, and the arrival of the units of Chu-Teh and those of Peng-Teh Huai and their men. As the force in the area grew in numbers, they gained enough courage to come down from their mountain stronghold and establish the Chinese Soviet Republic (John Maxwell Hamilton 1998 p. 61). In the book of Jurgen Domes, Peng Te-Huai the man and the image (1985), the account begins with the account of the arrival of the Red Armys 5th Corps in the Chingkashan region, stating that the arrival of Te-huais troops began more than three decades of collaboration between Mao and Te-huais forces. This period, according to Domes (1985) was not always cordial between the two icons (Jurgen Domes 1985 p. 29).
In the account of Domes (1985), it is mentioned that the two armies, Te-huais 5th Corps and the Red Armys 4th Corps, were merged, with Chu-Teh assuming command of the two armies, and Te-Huai gaining the position of deputy commander. Chen Yi took over the position of Director for the corpss political department, and Mao taking the position of political commissar. Soon after this meeting, Peng and his soldiers had to come to the rescue of Mao as Kuomintang soldiers surrounded Mao and his detachment of soldiers. Peng was able to secure Mao and drove the Kuomintang military from him (Domes 1985 p. 29).
In his opinion, Snow believed that the cause of the Communists were credible. In his article Current History, Snow averred that the Communist ideology was no longer part of the imagination of reactionary sectors in the country. In his study of the Communists and their ideology, Snow had collected a sizable amount of information and clippings, all in the name of trying to understand such an isolated sector in Chinese society. The triumphs of the Communists in China, Snow and his friend, Hankow vice consul Edward Clubb, attribute to is the primary objective of the Nationalist armies, which was to rob the people. Snow also declared that the propensity of the Nationalist government to honor their promises to the people also played a part in the rise of the Communists and the trust that the people gave to them (Hamilton 1998 p. 63).
In the aftermath of the Kuangchang massacre, when Chiang Kai Shek encircled the Communist troops in the area, General Kai Shek ordered the extermination of the Communists in the area. This was part of the 5th expunging of Communists in China. As the smoke of battle cleared in the area, more than four thousand Communist soldiers lay dead on the battle field. Some of the Red hierarchy admitted that with the hysteria that the massacre generated, the enemy became desertion, not the military might of the Nationalist armies (Hamilton 1998 p. 94).
Hamilton also included in his accounts the Long March, when Communist forces trekked more than six thousand miles to flee from the onslaught of the Nationalist armies. These soldiers, brutalized by battles with Nationalist units, inclement weather, sickness, difficult terrain, and starvation, traveled across the breadth of China. Many of the reports that funneled its way to the Western media were of a spent and defeated army, not knowing where to go to hide. But it was Clubb that predicted that in the end, the Red Army would climb out of this predicament a stronger, hungrier and more cohesive fighting force (Hamilton 1998 p. 64).
In the description of Arthur Ringwalt, the United States vice consul in Yunnan, as written in the account of Snow (1938), he came to characterize the troops that moved past his station as one under excellent leadership, a high level of morale and possessing an ability to lure recruits into its fold. Meanwhile, media continued a steady stream of negative news about Red atrocities, the most brutal of which was the murder of two American missionaries in Anhwei province. But Nathaniel Pfeiffer, writing in 1935, averred that despite the constant barrage of disconcerting news about the alleged brutalities of the Red armies, that the news coming from China was still insufficient to give an accurate picture of the Chinese Communists (Hamilton 1998 p. 64).
In the introduction done by Dr. John K. Fairbank on Snows book Red Star (1938), Fairbank describes Snow as not only a scribe to the events that unfolded during that time, but was one who sincerely endeavored to understand the thoughts and mindset of the people he was reporting about, the youth in China at the time. Snow, in the words of Fairbank, was a man who encouraged involvement rather than sitting on the fence and watch the events unfold (Snow 1938). Though the recording and information of Snow on his journey may have differed in the interpretation of authors mentioned here, it is made even more credible that the events as narrated by Snow in his won work are still described in detail in the works of the other authors.
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