Nonetheless, Mao Zedong was most unhappy with Peng Dehuai's Hundred Regiments Offensive because, as a result, the Japanese invaders turned their attentions to the rear, where hitherto they had been militarily weak – that part of north China controlled by the CCP. The Japanese countered the CCP forces' guerrilla tactics, cutting the latter off from local militia, by means of the old imperial Neighbourhood Administrative System, tightening local government controls over the population. In order to restrict Eighth Route Army activity, they established areas of no-man's-land and adopted a triple scorched-earth policy of "Kill All, Burn All and Loot All". The result was a massacre of soldiers and civilians alike in north China. The Eighth Route Army suffered severe losses; the commander of its HQ, Zuo Quan, lost his life, while Deputy Chief of Staff Peng Dehuai made a daring breakout of the encirclement and the Eighth Route Army was forced to withdraw from north China.
Different factions may rehash the motives for the Long March for their own political ends, but its results are not in dispute: in the process of the Long March and all the benefits which resulted from it, the CCP acquired a newly formed self-confidence, put its organisation on a firm footing and had the time to train up regular army units. All the People's Republic of China's main leaders, like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping, were on the Long March, as were nine of the army's ten field marshals, the exception being Chen Yi.
During the two years of the Long March, various forces that make up the Red Army fought their way through fourteen provinces, and covered a total distance of around 25,000 li. They crossed a number of remote regions inhabited by national minorities as well as Han Chinese, and faced natural hazards such as great rivers, snow-capped mountains and grasslands, they also evaded encirclement by hundreds of thousands of GMD and local armies, and succeeded in avoiding splits caused by the struggles between the Mao and Bo Gu factions, and between the First Front Army and Zhang Guotao. Out of it a new nucleus of CCP leaders, with Mao Zedong at their head, was gradually formed.
In August 1980, Deng Xiaoping said in an interview with the Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci: "The Zunyi Conference of 1935, called during the famous Long March, established the leadership position of Comrade Mao Zedong within the Party and the army. This marked the formation of the first real leadership of the CCP. Previous leadership structures had been both immature and unstable."
And when Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Maomao, asked her father what the Long March had been like, he replied: "We kept marching!" I believe that this is the instinctive, most truthful and commonest view of the Long March.
One of my ambitions was to find a Red Army survivor of the Long March who had "gone the distance". I was looking for someone who had done it on foot, not a general who had ridden the route on horseback. This was no easy task – of the tens of thousands who had taken part, few were still alive, while even fewer had done the whole march.
I was very lucky. Yan, a Chinese girl studying in the UK, came to see me asking for my help in drawing up a bibliography on Chinese history and culture for her dissertation. When she heard me talk about China Witness, and say that I was looking for an old soldier who had done the entire Long March, she asked, quite forcefully, that I go and interview her ninety-year-old maternal grandfather, who had done just that. "I want people to know what my grandfather contributed and what he went through," she said. "Some people think he's just a political stooge, who gives patriotic lectures for the Party, but I know that he does it because he really believes in it. At the beginning, so many Long Marchers deserted from the Red Army, but he wasn't like that, he marched on to the end." Not wanting to let this young woman down, we pencilled him in as a possible interviewee.
On 2 September 2006, we visited Yan's grandfather in Beijing. I chatted to the old man and his wife, and then their two daughters, the eldest one Yan's mother. Mr Changzheng was an imposing figure, with a round face and rosy cheeks. He talked volubly and punctured our interview with bursts of laughter and occasional renderings of snatches of revolutionary songs from his youth. No wonder people say that music is one of the repositories of memory.
I had not had enough time to do background research on the old soldier, and so I started by putting the safest and commonest Chinese question.
*
XINRAN: Have you eaten?
CHANGZHENG: Yes, I have.
XINRAN: What did you have to eat today?
CHANGZHENG: I had noodles – Beijing noodles with minced pork and bean sauce.
XINRAN: What is your favourite food?
CHANGZHENG: I eat anything.
XINRAN: So what was your favourite food as a child?
CHANGZHENG: As a child? I am from the north of Sichuan province. When I was a child, we were poor, and I didn't get a lot to eat.
XINRAN: Could you tell me how old you are, sir?
CHANGZHENG: On 10 November this year, I'll be ninety-one years old. I was born in 1916, in the mountains of northern Sichuan.
XINRAN: Did you go to school?
CHANGZHENG: When I was in Sichuan I did. I got a year and a half of primary school. My school was far from my home and the teacher was very strict. If you didn't have your satchel on straight, he hit you on the back of the hand. If you didn't know your characters, he hit you on the back of the hand. If you were disruptive, you had to go up to the teacher, stick out your backside and he would give you a hiding. I was terrified, and after a year and a half of this, I ran away home and never went back. At home, I used to cut the grass and collect firewood. When I was thirteen, the Red Army came to my village. The head of a Red Army Propaganda Unit, from Henan, came to the house and tried to recruit me. But I didn't know anything about the Red Army. I knew that the GMD swore at you and knocked you about, but I didn't know what the Red Army were like, so I couldn't make up my mind. He came three times, and after the third time, he took me to the local town to have a look. The Red Army had a company of machine-gunners, they showed me the machine guns, and then they gave me a bowl of rice, with meat too. In the north of Sichuan, we only ate meat at the Chinese New Year.
I went home and told my mother, "They're not bad, the Red Army, I saw their machine guns, they have rice to eat, and meat too, I'd like to join up." My mother didn't stop me so at the age of thirteen, I joined the Red Army, and went away with them.
XINRAN: How many were there in your family then?
CHANGZHENG: My older sister, my younger brother, my younger sister and me, that made four.
XINRAN: You said your family was poor. Just how poor were they?
CHANGZHENG: We didn't have enough food. All we thought about every day was eating, and it was because we could never eat our fill that I told my mother I wanted to join the Red Army. They had food, and so my mother agreed.
When I first joined up – that was 1929 – they didn't make me fight, and so I didn't. When I was fifteen, I started fighting. The head of the Propaganda Unit had said: "Your schoolmates and the friends you play with, you can get them to join up too." So I started talking to them about it, and in the end a new company was set up from our village. When I first started fighting, I didn't have a gun, or any real weapon at all. So we made sticks into martial arts spears, by tying big knives onto the end. When we went into battle that time, we were two Red Army companies, and the GMD had one battalion. In we charged, killed and killed, and wiped out the whole battalion. That was my first battle.
XINRAN: Were you afraid? Afraid of the blood, getting wounded, of death?
CHANGZHENG: No, I wasn't afraid. I was a brave lad, and besides, there were lots of us, not just one or two, so I wasn't afraid. After that battle, they issued us with a gun each. Then we started fighting all over the place. We criss-crossed Sichuan, back and forth, slaughtering the enemy at our gates. Then we went to Jiuzhaigou. We were billeted with the local peasants, and I began to run a high fever. Then the GMD bombers came, and the cottage I was in took a direct hit. It gave me such a fright that the malaria left me, and I wa
s well again!
XINRAN: When did you join the Long March?
CHANGZHENG: In 1934, I set off from my home.
XINRAN: Did you cross the Luding Bridge [on the Dadu River in Sichuan province] while you were on the Long March?
CHANGZHENG: Of course I did. I was carrying a big trunk on my shoulder as we marched, so crossing the bridge was really difficult. It had no guard rails, so I found walking across it really hard. I could see some of the people in front were going to fall, and I wanted to go and help them, but my chief wouldn't let me. He told us on no account to start running or it would be chaos and many more people would fall in. Some of my mates fell in, it was really sad.
We couldn't travel by day, only by night. Once we heard that two generals and their troops had dropped behind. The two generals were the only survivors of an attack. They went up a mountain, and found a temple, and one knelt on the ground by the temple wall and supported the other on his shoulders. Then the one on the top pulled the bottom one up, and the two generals hid behind the big Bodhisattva on the temple wall. When the worshippers had finished burning their incense and gone, they used the incense fire to keep warm. They were smart, they caught up with the rest of the unit after that.
XINRAN: Did you know that, in the West, some people say that a lot of the Red Army didn't do the Long March?
CHANGZHENG: That's rubbish. All of the Red Army regular troops joined the Long March. Some got separated from the rest along the route, or got lost, or died or just disappeared.*11
XINRAN: How many lost their lives during the Long March?
CHANGZHENG: The First, Second and Fourth Front Armies were involved, and each one lost many soldiers, but I don't know exactly how many. After it was over, people said that out of hundreds of thousands only 30,000 were left. I can't be more precise on the numbers than that, I don't think anyone can be.
XINRAN: Did any close comrades of yours die on the Long March, and if so, did you see it with your own eyes?
CHANGZHENG: Of course I did. Every survivor of the Long March lost comrades. A young cousin of mine, he carried arms and ammunition, he was always in the front line when we charged. He didn't die in battle, no, he died on the march. When I went back home, his wife asked, where is he? He died ages ago, I said, and she cried . . .
XINRAN: Some people also believe that the distance wasn't as great as the 25,000 li that we all say nowadays. You participated, so you must know the truth.
CHANGZHENG: If you add up how much everyone did, it definitely was. In some places, we retraced our steps several times, we even crossed the mountains and the grasslands three times. The amount we actually walked really was that far, and the proof of it is the damage I suffered to my feet. Lots of those who survived were left with injured legs and feet like this. Here, look.
*
And I saw a pair of feet which it's hard to find words to describe: the misshapen soles were a mass of scars, and his feet looked as if they were made up of odd bits of skin of different ages.
*
CHANGZHENG: Why did we do the mountains and the grasslands three times? Well, Zhang Guotao didn't go along with the Central Committee leaders, he took the Fourth Front Army away on their own. The GMD chased us, we ran, and that was why we ended up crossing the mountains and grasslands three times. It was a terrible experience, dreadful, something you could never forget in your whole life!
We went through Lazi Kou Pass and got to Jiajing Mountain. It was sunny down below, but the higher we climbed, the more fiercely the wind blew. It was raining too, and the rain was mixed with hail, and as soon as we reached the mountain top, it started to get unbearably cold. We had our hats on – if those big hailstones smashed onto your head, they really hurt. Climbing was hard work for all of us, and then we had to go down again, and that was harder than going up. Some of our comrades didn't take enough care going down, and they rolled over the edge and died! When I think back to all that, it makes me really, really sad. We never knew who would be next. There was an old folk song about Jiajing Mountain, which went:
Mount Jiajing, Mount Jiajing,
Where no birds fly,
No monkeys can climb it,
Only Immortals come down to the world from it.
Jiajing Mountain is four thousand metres above sea level, so we had to be fiercer than the Immortals to climb it. A lot of people died then, because there were no paths on the mountain. We followed animal tracks.
When we crossed the grasslands, we had nothing to eat. Our dried food was all gone, and we had to pull up grass and eat that. When there really was nothing to eat, we ate leather. It was awful, awful, very hard. When it got to night-time, we slept out in the open. Some of our comrades found a mud hole and slept there. They wouldn't wake up in the morning, so they were tied to horses' tails and pulled along. They looked like they were sleepwalking, I saw it with my own eyes.
After the mountains and the grasslands, we started to fight. We hadn't eaten, we hadn't slept properly, and we had to fight, can you believe it? We won that battle too.
So we'd fought well, we got something to eat, and had a sleep, then after that we arrived in Gansu. There we faced another battle on Wuliang Mountain. The GMD had a cavalry division, and on the first day of the battle, my political instructor said to me: "You head up a group and go and reconnoitre." So at night I went to check out the lie of the land. On the second night we took rope ladders and went into the area. The GMD cavalry division were camped up there and we finished them off! After that we went off to Guilin [in the south] and joined up with the First Front Army. That was in 1936, and by then I couldn't tell you how many of us were in a bad way, and a lot of the officers too, it was pitiful. No one looking at us nowadays would have believed that those troops could take the whole of China!
XINRAN: Did you believe it then?
CHANGZHENG: I didn't know a lot about the bigger picture then. Our chiefs treated me well, and wherever we went the poor people treated us well too. I thought that was proof of their common decency. Once we had joined up with the First Front Army, we moved straight off to Yan'an.
XINRAN: Do you know why the Red Army went to Yan'an? Why was Yan'an chosen as a base area?
CHANGZHENG: No one lived in the Great North-West, and the enemy wasn't there either so we could rest and reorganise ourselves. So many had died on the Long March that we had to do that. We had a song:
The struggle is tough,
But we're doing it
To build the North-West Base Area.
We'll overcome all difficulties,
We'll beat the enemy,
We'll wipe out the enemy.
After we moved up to Yan'an, we didn't get support from ordinary people, so we had to shift for ourselves. Yan'an was so poor that not even Chiang Kai-shek [and the GMD] wanted to go and fight there. We started to produce our own food and clothing. Every morning, the troops went off up into the mountains with their hoes to clear the land for planting. The ground was very hard, and some of the vegetation needed two people to dig it out. By day we prepared the ground, and by night we spun and wove cotton. We had a song which went:
Till the wastelands, till the wastelands,
The front-line soldiers need food.
Weave cloth, weave cloth,
The front-line soldiers need clothing.
No one nowadays would believe the hardships we suffered then.
I got an anal boil in Yan'an, which didn't heal properly, so I went to see the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune.*12 I said I didn't want a general anaesthetic because I would be out for too long. "Not to worry," he said, "I'll operate at eight, and by nine you'll have come round." I was just a soldier but he was very sympathetic: he cured my illness, and reduced the awful pain so I wasn't suffering like before. Many of my comrades were cured by Dr Bethune. He was a good man.
XINRAN: Did you see Mao Zedong in Yan'an?
CHANGZHENG: Back then, the troops saw a lot of the chiefs, so I don't remember exact dates and places. But M
ao Zedong came to give a speech to the guards training course, and I can still remember that today. He said: "Your guard duties are extremely important. Now you're guarding the Party Central Committee, and the people of Shaanxi and Gansu, but in the future you'll be guarding the whole of China." At the end of the course, Zhou Enlai came to talk to us too. Once during the course, there was an air raid by thirty or more enemy planes. There were three or four hundred of us and we helped each other into the caves. After we came out, Yan'an had been flattened, and all those poor old people and children had been left without homes.
XINRAN: Can you tell me who you were guarding in Yan'an?
CHANGZHENG: Kang Shi'en.
XINRAN: Kang Shi'en? The man who was Deputy Chairman of the State Council in the 1980s and died on 21 April 1995?
CHANGZHENG: Uh-huh.
XINRAN: And when did you leave Yan'an?
CHANGZHENG: There was a call to demobilise, but I thought to myself, what will I do if I go back to the poverty of my home? So I didn't demobilise. I left Yan'an with the rest of the troops and we crossed the Yellow River, fought through the Zhangjiakou Pass, then to the Rehe River, and then we arrived in the north-east, and went to Chengde. Me and my old woman, we married in Jilin, in the north-east, and after we got married we set off with the troops to Tianjin, where our eldest daughter was born.
I remember a huge building in Tianjin which housed a department store and the residence of a big GMD official. Our bombs had destroyed this building. The ordinary people said to us: "Your bombs must have eyes!" After we had taken Tianjin, we went to Shijiazhuang, and then came to Beijing.
XINRAN: Mr Changzheng, can I interrupt you a moment? You say you fought through the Zhangjia Kou Pass. What army were you in then?