The Long March

SUN SHUYUN

The Long March

To all the men and women on the Long March

MAP

Prologue

ONEDrain the Pond to Catch the Fish

TWOTurtle-shell Power

THREEWater Flowing Upstream

FOURMist over the Xiang River

FIVEHungry Souls

SIXStarting Afresh

SEVENDon't Love Boys, Love Guns

EIGHTFire and Ice

NINEIn Tibetan Lands

TENDust into Gold

ELEVENThe End of the March

TWELVEThe Legion of Death

Epilogue

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Praise

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Every nation has its founding myth. For Communist China it is the Long March, for us a story on a par with Moses leading the exodus out of Egypt. Any Chinese can tell it: how the fledgling Communist Party and its Red Armies, some 200,000 strong, were driven out of their bases in the South in the early 1930s by the Nationalist government under Chiang Kaishek; how, pursued, blocked and harried by their enemies, they chose the only way out – to go where no one could follow, over mountains higher than birds could fly, across rivers where all the boats had been burnt, through swamps and grassland death traps; how Mao steered the course from victory to victory; how, after two years of incredible endurance, courage and hope against impossible odds – and a march of 8,000 miles – the Red Armies reached the barren Yellow Plateau of north-west China. Only a fifth of those who set out arrived – worn out, battered but defiant. In less than a decade, they had fought back, defeated Chiang Kaishek, and launched the New China in the heat of revolution. In Mao's own words:

Has history ever known a long march to equal ours? No, never. The Long March … has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes. The Long March has sown many seeds which will sprout, leaf, blossom and bear fruit, and will yield a harvest in the future. In a word, the Long March has ended with victory for us and defeat for the enemy.

The myth was born, and it remains the enduring emblem of China today. We can hardly escape it. The Long March was enshrined for the nation in the musical extravaganzas East Is Red and Ode to the Long March, and feature films of battles during the March became cinema classics. They took the idealism, optimism and heroism of the Long Marchers and imprinted them on our minds. The myth glowed ever brighter with the help of two major adulatory accounts, both, oddly, by Americans: Edgar Snow's Red Star over China, in 1936, and Harrison Salisbury's Long March: The Untold Stories, in 1985. With the imprimatur of the Chinese Communist Party, they made the myth close to impregnable.

‘If you find it hard, think of the Long March; if you feel tired, think of our revolutionary forebears.’ The message has been drilled into us that we can accomplish any goal set before us by the Party because nothing compares in difficulty with what they did. Decades after the historical one, we have been spurred on to ever more Long Marches – to industrialize China, to feed the largest population in the world, to catch up with the West, to reform the socialist economy, to send men into space, to engage with the 21st century.

Few have challenged or even modestly questioned the myth. It is just part of who we are. But the questions remain. Was Communism the magnet that drew the poor in droves to the Red Army? How did the Red Armies supply themselves with food, weapons and medicine? What happened to the four-fifths of the Marchers who did not reach the end – were they killed in battle, did they succumb to hunger and cold, did they desert, or did they fall victim to their own comrades? Was Mao the great strategist who never lost a battle? How were Mao and the Red Army finally saved? People have begun to ask such questions, but they are earthly matters. The Long March remains the sun in the sky.

Books about the March fill yards of shelves, but they rarely ask all these questions, or provide answers. In 2004, seventy years after it began, I set out over the same route, to discover as much as I could about the realities beyond the myth. There is not much documentation remaining – so many of the records were destroyed as the Armies fled. Quite a few generals have published their memoirs, but real scholarship is rare. Of the 40,000 original survivors, perhaps 500 are still alive, and they are now in their eighties and nineties. Most are just ordinary people who were left behind or managed to reach the end, but they have much to tell us.

I travelled mainly by train and bus. It is still a daunting journey, through areas little changed to this day – inaccessible, and desperately poor and undeveloped – but I saw enough to know that nothing can possibly compare with what the Marchers endured. My challenge was to find survivors and unlock their stories. I marched to the remote corners where they lived, sometimes 10–15 kilometres in a day, and up as high as 18,000 feet. The rough territory made me appreciate what the real Marchers went through, even though I was well fed and equipped, not worn down by a heavy pack, covering great distances day after day, month after month, on an empty stomach, ill-shod and poorly clothed, and ambushed and bombed, in between battles with more mobile and better-armed enemies.

I managed to find more than forty veterans, happily with their memories still fresh, and their spirits undiminished. Once I started talking to them, their stories poured out. Frequently, I would come back for a second or third day; they had so much to tell, and were so keen to tell it. I was intrigued, astonished, moved and inspired. They retain the idealism and optimism that first drove them, and also their doubts, uncertainties and fears. They touch the heart of the Long March: its bravery and sacrifice, its setbacks and suffering, and its self-inflicted wounds. Why so many supported the Communist cause also became very clear – as well as why many did not.

I record here the voices of these men and women. This is the Long March without the embroidery of adulation, and in all its humanity, as it was lived. It is not my story. It is theirs.

ONE Drain the Pond to Catch the Fish

I'm sending you to the Army my man,

You must see the reason why

The Revolution is for us.

I'm sending you to do or die.

Here's a towel I've embroidered

With all my love to say:

Revolution for ever!

The Party you must not betray!

THE SONG pierced the silence of Shi Village, which nestled at the foot of a hill covered in thick bamboo groves. It was mid-October, 1935, in Jiangxi Province, southern China. The autumn harvest was already in and the land surrounding the village was yellow with the stubble of rice stalks, but some fields stood as if wasted, with grass sprouting in the dried-out paddy, already turning brown. A few water buffalo were plodding home, only stopping when they came to their favourite place, the village pond, where they drank, ducks and geese swam, children bathed, women washed their clothes, and where men asked one another about their day. Nearby stood the giant camphor tree, whose overhanging branches gave ample shelter from the rain and intense heat of the South.

Today the water buffalo had the pond to themselves, and only the village ancestor shrine opposite showed signs of life, but not with pious prayers and hypnotic chants offered to the ancestors: only the revolutionary song calling on young men to join the Red Army. Through the imposing entrance topped by grey-tiled eaves, boys carrying spears rushed in and out, looking solemn, as if they had been entrusted with the most important task of their lives. Two young women were putting a table and some benches outside the gate. As the song died away, more women came out, clutching shoes they were making out of cloth, calling their children, while others gathered up firewood from outside the gate, and went home to cook.

‘Nobody is too tired to sing! Keep up the good work!’ called Wang Quanyuan, the young woman who had just emerged from a house nearby. She had on a grey cotton jacket, the kind every soldier wore, tied with a rope round her waist, but its simplicity made her beauty stand out even more. She asked one woman to bring more benches, and then stopped one of the boys who was running by, and whispered something in his ear; nodding eagerly, he took to his heels.

Wang noticed the slogans on the white wall of the shrine, written in black ink but slightly washed out by the summer rain. ‘Down with the Landlords and Evil Gentry!’ ‘Long Live the Communists!’ ‘Long Live the Soviet!’ ‘I mustn't forget to tell them to repaint the slogans’, she murmured to herself, remembering that until four years ago she had no idea what Soviet was. Someone had told her that it was a foreign shop, and others said he was the brother of a famous Communist labour organizer. A warlord definitely thought so: he had posted a notice throughout the villages, offering a reward for the capture, dead or alive, of Mr Soviet. In the local dialect, Soviet was pronounced Su-wei-ai, which meant ‘we’, so perhaps the Soviet was our government, she once thought. Now she was actually working for the youth and women's departments of the Soviet, a government of workers and peasants that had been set up by Mao and his Red Army in southern Jiangxi in 1931. Small as it was, with barely three million people in half a dozen counties, hemmed in on all sides by Chiang Kaishek's Nationalist troops, the Jiangxi Soviet had all the functions of a state. Wang was told that the Communist Party was working to turn the whole of China into a Soviet. That would be the day, Wang smiled, but then became very solemn. ‘Everything hangs on tonight,’ she muttered to herself.

As darkness fell, the bell hanging from the camphor tree rang out. Four giant bamboo torches lit up the pond and the gate of the shrine hall. Women, and a few men, old and young, gathered with several hundred people from nearby villages, summoned by Wang's Red Pioneers. She had also sent for half a dozen militia men from the county Party headquarters; when they finally arrived, Wang stood up and delivered her speech:

‘Sisters and brothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, the Red Army is at its most critical time now, with many wounded every day. But in a war, there is always winning and losing. If we stop fighting just because we have lost a few battles, our Revolution will never succeed and we will always be exploited by the rich. You are strong. Do you want to be trampled on for the rest of your lives? If not, join the Red Army now!’

There was no reply.

Wang nodded to the militia men who were standing close by, and continued: ‘Don't be afraid. We will win. Use your brain. This village has hundreds of poor people, and only one or two landlords. Aren't we more powerful than them? All we need to do is to unite, but there is a traitor who does not want this to happen. He seems to care about you, telling you to keep your men at home, but if we all stay at home, our enemy will come, taking our land and raping our women. Is that what you want?’

‘Of course not!’ shouted the militia men.

‘Then let's bring the traitor out.’ Wang waved her hand. Two militia men appeared from behind the shrine gate, each holding the arm of a man, followed by a third with a pistol in his hand. Silence fell and the villagers looked at each other speechless. The accused was none other than the Party Secretary of their district, Mr Liu. Suddenly, a Red Pioneer raised his arm, shouting, ‘Down with the traitor! Kill the traitor!’

‘Tell me, what do you want done with him?’ Wang asked several times.

‘Kill him,’ yelled a militia man.

‘Kill him now!’ A chorus of voices followed.

Two shots at point blank range and Liu fell to the ground. Wang announced grimly: ‘This will be the fate of anyone who dares to sabotage the Revolution.’

It was hard to believe, when I met Woman Wang, that she had ever done such things, or suffered more than I could bear to think about. She had started as the quintessential supporter of the Revolution. Poverty had made her family sell her into a marriage which she did not want; joining the Communists represented hope. Chosen as one of only thirty women to go with the 1st Army among 86,000 men, she survived and rose to head the Red Army's only women's regiment. A year later, she was captured, raped and given to a Nationalist officer as a concubine – a ‘crime’ for which she was denounced by the Party, remaining under a cloud for the next fifty years. Still, she remained loyal to the Party, which she regarded as dearer to her than her parents. I remember thinking to myself after reading her biography: if there was ever a true Communist faithful, it must be Wang.

What better way to start my journey than by talking to her? I set out in October 2004, exactly seventy years after the Chinese Communist Party and the 1st Army abandoned their base in Jiangxi and began their escape from the Nationalists – the Long March as it became known. From Beijing I took the train, eighteen hours due south, and then after two hours more by bus through green-clad mountains and hills I found myself in Taihe in southern Jiangxi. It was a big town, with a grand new avenue, beautifully surfaced and complete with modern lighting – not many buildings yet, but looking for 21st-century growth. I wondered if I would have trouble finding Wang – after all Taihe had a population of half a million people and all I had was her biography, which I had been re-reading on the train. I took a rickshaw from the longdistance bus stop and mentioned Wang's name hesitantly; I was relieved when the driver told me to take it easy. ‘What a woman! How many went on the Long March from Jiangxi? 80,000? I guess not many of them are left today. Three in this town, and forty in Jiangxi. If you come next year, they will probably all be gone.’ He took me down the big avenue and then into the old quarter. Dusty, narrow, busy and crowded, just like the photographs of provincial towns in the 1930s. I was dropped off next to a dumpling shop with a queue of hungry customers. Behind it was Wang's courtyard, shaded by a pomegranate tree with its dark red fruit just bursting open. Beneath it, there she sat, looking gentle, serene and elegant, belying her 91 years, and without a trace of the toughness of the Red Army commander.

She was not surprised to see me, a complete stranger, walking in off the street and wanting to find out about her past. My copy of her biography was a good enough introduction. She asked me to sit down and called, ‘Another visitor from Beijing!’ A middle-aged woman came out. From what I had read, I assumed she was her adopted daughter – Wang was unable to conceive after the Long March. ‘You shouldn't ask too many questions, she gets too excited. Last week we had a journalist from Beijing, and she talked so much, it made her ill. Anyway, it is all in there,’ she said, referring to the book on my lap. Wang cut her short. ‘They think talking is a waste of breath, but they don't understand. So many men and women died for the good life we live today and I want people to remember that.’ She sent her daughter back inside for another biography, written by a local Party historian. ‘You might not have come across it.’

The daughter came out with the book and a tray of sliced watermelon. ‘Eat now, read later. I will answer all your questions. It will take you a few days – you see, unfortunately, I have had such a long life.’ She took a mouthful of the melon, and smiled, as if it was the rarest fruit in the world and she was tasting it for the first time. Clearly she was keen to talk. She was quick and warm, and over the next three days she opened up like the pomegranates – I heard of the idealism, the hope, the suffering, the sacrifice, the harshness and the courage of her life, like those of so many others. But Wang also painted in some of the shadows of her history, things that were almost against her nature to reveal, and most certainly at odds with the glorious stories of the Long March that I had grown up with.

Wang was born in 1913 in Lufu Village, not far from where she lives now. They barely had enough rice for six months after the landlord took his exorbitant rent. From the age of 5, she roamed the mountains with her sister to collect wild plants to eat. By the time she was 11, her parents found her a husband, who offered to pay off the family debt of 200 kilos of rice. She was in the dark about the arrangement until the wedding day, when her mother dressed her in a bright red outfit, and put her on a palanquin sent by the groom. He was sixteen years older than Wang, slightly retarded, and with so many smallpox scars he was nicknamed Big Smallpox. The villagers said a flower had been planted on a cowpat. When Wang saw him, she fainted, but her mother said the rice was in the pot, and nothing could be done about it.

Her parents’ only request was that he would not consummate the marriage until Wang was 18. Meanwhile, she would work like a slave in his household. But he could not wait for seven years: he slept around and the wife of a blind fortune-teller bore him a son. Gossip spread around the village and Wang was so humiliated that she returned to her parents’ house, hoping they would pity her and annul the marriage. No, you must go back, her mother told her. ‘When you marry a chicken, live with a chicken; when you marry a dog, live with a dog.’ It was fate.

When the Red Army marched into her village in the spring of 1930, she learned it was not fate. ‘Why do the landlords have so much land, while you have none?’ a Red Army officer asked her and her family. ‘Why do they eat fat pork every day, while you don't see one drop of oil for a whole year? Why do they wear silk while you are in rags? It isn't fair! For every one of them, there are ten of us. If we unite, we are bound to win. What do you say? Join us! Join the Revolution!’ She signed up on the spot, and her family received land, salt, rice, ham and tools, all confiscated from the landlords.

She told everyone about the benefits of the Communist Revolution, citing herself and her family as examples. And she did so by using the most popular method in rural Jiangxi – folksongs. She set new words to the old tunes, not the usual love ballads but full of zeal for the Revolution. She was so good, she was given the nickname ‘Golden Throat’. This was one of her favourites:

If we save the mountain, we'll have wood.

If we save the river, we'll have fish to fry.

If we save the Revolution, we'll have our own land.

If we save the Soviet, red flags will fly.

In December 1933, Wang had some unexpected news. Her devotion and success in work with women and young people brought her to Ruijin, the Red capital, as the people's representative for the Second National Congress of the Soviet.

‘Have you visited Ruijin?’ Wang asked me expectantly. I said I was going to after seeing her.

‘You should have gone there first. It was the capital! An old lady like me can wait. You know, we had a saying at the time: up north it is Beijing; down south it is Ruijin.’

She did concede later, although very reluctantly, that Ruijin could not compare with Beijing. It was a typical southern town with good feng shui. The curving Mian River embraced it, and an undulating mountain range shielded it from the west, with a white pagoda overlooking it from the hill to the east. No bigger than an average county town, its four gates and four roads leading in from them crossed at the centre, and 7,000 people lived within its walls. Because Chiang had imposed an economic blockade with his Fifth Campaign, many shops had their shutters down. Local products such as bamboo, paper, nuts and dried vegetables from the mountains could not be shipped out; salt, oil, petrol, cloth and other daily necessities could not come in. Those who broke the embargo were liable to punishment or even execution. The Nationalists reinforced the blockade with a Special Movement Corps, whose members had every incentive to catch the offenders – they were rewarded with 50% of whatever they confiscated.

Wherever there were profits, there were smugglers: salt, medicine, gunpowder and other much-needed items were transported, hidden in coffins, at the bottom of manure baskets and inside bamboo poles. They even managed to bring in an X-ray machine in a coffin, with three dozen men and women pretending to be grieving relatives, crying their eyes out. The warlord of Guangdong also defied the blockade by secretly buying tungsten that was found in abundance within the Soviet. But it was like throwing a cup of water onto flaming firewood. Ruijin was feeling the pinch. Salt was the scarcest commodity; Wang did not taste salt for months, and out of sheer desperation she and her friends scraped the white deposits from the walls of toilets, and even from graveyards, and boiled them down.

Even today she craved salt. ‘I think I'm making up for the shortage all those years ago. You don't know what it's like, as if your body were made of cotton, or you were walking on clouds. I often fell.’ I knew how deprived she felt when she invited me to join her, her daughter, and her two grandchildren for lunch. Had she not explained, I would have thought the daughter had emptied the salt pot when she was cooking. The chicken, the bean curd, the beans and the soup were all so salty that I could barely eat them. I must have drunk a gallon of tea to wash the meal down.

All the hardship of daily life in Ruijin was forgotten when Wang attended the Congress on 22 January 1934. The Hall of Workers and Peasants, specially built for the occasion, took her breath away. She had never seen anything like it. It was not like a Buddhist temple; it was not like the mansions of rich people; it was not like shrine halls, which were normally the most impressive buildings in southern towns and villages. It was very grand, an octagon, the shape of a Red Army cap. Above the imposing main entrance was a big red star with a hammer and sickle on it, the emblem of the Red Army. The impressive scale of the interior matched that of the exterior: it was massive, with two storeys, and it could hold over 2,000 people. She could not understand how they had built it, with a roof but no central pillar. And it was lit by these strange lamps that did not need oil. All it took was for someone to pull down a black handle on the wall, and the hall was flooded with brilliant light.

Wang and the 776 delegates stood inside the hall, listening as a band played a rousing song, the Internationale. A tall, lean man with big eyes came onto the platform, and stood in front of the Communist red flag. The woman next to her whispered that this was Comrade Mao, the man who set up the Soviet. She had hardly registered the fact before Mao said, in his thick Hunan accent: ‘Comrades, on behalf of the Central Executive Committee, I declare the Second National Congress of the Soviet open. On behalf of the Central Executive Committee I give the whole body of delegates the Revolutionary salute!’ There was thunderous applause from all, and Wang clapped so hard, her hands hurt.