X
The Japanese planes came now and then, seeking for something they could destroy. They hated this place above all others in China, for it was not only the capital of an enemy country, it was the headquarters of an idea and an ideal more dangerous than any government or any army; something which threatened, not merely the Japanese government and army, but its social system; a challenge to the wealthy clique which owned Japan, and made slaves of the Japanese people as well as of the Chinese. One of the most interesting discoveries the American couple made in Yenan was the Japanese People’s Emancipation League, composed of prisoners of war who had elected to espouse the cause of their captors, to receive the Red education, and to aid the guerrillas in undermining the morale of the Jap Armies. This was the familiar Communist technique; and Laurel said: “Perhaps it is the only way that war will be ended in the world.” Her husband replied: “Watch out, and don’t be seduced by Red propaganda!”
Yenan was the center from which all this propaganda went out to four hundred million Chinese. Yenan was the captital of the Border Government and the headquarters of its army. Lanny had come to realize what tremendous forces that movement had; not merely the Balu Chün, the regular Eighth Route Army, but the irregulars, the guerrillas, well organized and keeping up incessant resistance in every province of this immense land. The Japs were supposed to have the whole of northeastern China, but it wasn’t so; they had only the ports, the navigable rivers, and the railroads, plus as much territory as they could reach by short marches; all the rest was in the hands of the Chinese partisans, who were continually raiding, sabotaging, destroying. The Japs would send punitive expeditions, which would wipe out whole villages; as soon as they left, the peasants would start rebuilding—and meantime the partisans would be raiding at some other spot.
“Where do they get the supplies?” Lanny asked. The answer was that everything came from the enemy; arms, ammunition, food—they even got a tank now and then. The Japs could not guard every place, and the little handful they left behind would be overwhelmed in the night. “Everything they have becomes ours,” said one of the generals.
The reason this could go on was that the whole peasant population was with the partisans; for the first time in the history of this land, the people had an army which they regarded as their own. The armies of the war lords had plundered even their own provinces, and had been hated and feared by their own people; but the Red Army educated as it went. “So it can never be put down,” said Mao Tse-tung, its cool-headed political leader, chairman of the Party. “It may be scattered, but it will reassemble. It may be wiped out, but it will spring up again.”
XI
Mao had assented readily to the desire of the two visitors to pay a call upon him. Like everybody else, he and his family lived in caves, but there was a compound in front where his bodyguard stayed—he was a man ardently sought by the enemy and there were many prices upon his head. The interview was at night, and the visitors were driven to the place in a rather rickety truck. The high gate of the compound squeaked on its wooden hinges, and Han, proud and happy, gave the password; they were escorted into the reception room of this cave, which had a red brick floor and whitewashed walls. The room was lighted by only one candle, set in a cup.
When their host rose, they saw that he was a large man, with a full face, thick black hair, and a kindly expression. He wore baggy homespun trousers and jacket, and during the interview he smoked bad homegrown cigarettes. The visitors thought that they had never met a more unassuming person. He did not speak English, and had his own interpreter; he would wait until a question had been translated, and then he would reply, one short sentence at a time, pausing until that had been put into English for the guests. He was a very serious man, and quiet as a Buddha; he had no nervous gestures and his tone was low and mild. Sitting in the shadows, he had the aspect of an oracle.
He explained the revolution to which his Party was dedicated. Three-quarters of the Chinese people were peasants, and they had been in the grip of landlords who took from half to three-quarters of their produce; that was virtual slavery, and the Party was pledged to restore the land to those who worked it. After that had been accomplished, they were a Party of democracy complete and without reservation. Yes, they were willing that the former landlords should have votes, on equal terms with everybody else. “The landlord vote will never carry an election,” said Chairman Mao, with a smile.
First of all came the task of driving out the Japanese invader; that was another and even worse kind of landlord, and there would never be any peace in East Asia until the Japanese peasants had abolished landlordism in their country and set up their own people’s party. Mao wanted to know how well, if at all, this fact was understood in America; for a while he became the interviewer, and Lanny and Laurel answered questions. Lanny explained that there was the same struggle going on in America; there were landlords there, too, and they dominated politics and political thinking. “Of course with us land means natural resources, coal and oil and minerals—”
“With us, also,” put in the other.
“The Republican Party is the party of those vested interests, including the great industrialists, those who control the corporations which own the land and its natural wealth, the patents, all the secrets and the machinery of production. The Democratic Party is groping its way to a solution of this problem, but it is very far from sharing or even understanding collectivist ideas.”
“Does President Roosevelt understand them?”
“He has such an active mind, I should hesitate to say there is any social problem he does not understand—with the help of his wife, perhaps. But he is more or less a prisoner of the politicians from the southern part of our country, which is governed by a land-owning aristocracy very much as you had here in China. That is why his administration will send help to Chiang Kai-shek, but will look upon your movement with suspicion.”
“And yet they call themselves Democratic?” inquired the Chinese leader.
“In our country,” explained the visitor, “we draw a sharp distinction in the spelling of that word. When it is spelled with a capital letter, it means a group of respectable capitalist-minded politicians. When it is spelled with a small letter, it means something very dangerous, and the large-letter politicians would put it in jail if they could.”
Said Mao Tse-tung: “When I was a peasant child and was told that the world was round, I assumed that the people down there must be standing on their heads. And now it seems that perhaps the child was right.”
XII
The thing which interested these visitors most in Yenan was the educational system, which had made it the cultural center of the nation. In this poor and backward province of Shensi alone there were now more than a thousand mass-education schools, and in Yenan were several high schools and universities, besides technical academies, and—of all things in the midst of war—an art school. At all these the Budd couple were honored guests, and their fame spread from one to another.
The K’ang Ta means “University of Resistance,” and its students were learning to fight Japanese imperialism while at the same time encouraging the Japanese people against their oppressors. This university had been greatly reduced in size, Lanny was told, because the Central Chinese Government had made so much trouble for the students trying to get to it. Now there were only two thousand students in Yenan, while the rest, about ten thousand, had been moved to the “occupied” parts of China; that is to say, to the guerrilla-held “islands” of the northeast. What a topsy-turvy situation, that students preparing to fight a foreign foe would be more afraid of their own government than of the foe!
Most fascinating to Laurel was the Nü Ta, the women’s university. This occupied about two hundred caves, extending all the way around two mountains, with a highway serving it, and stairs here and there leading to the valley below. Edgar Snow, who had visited it a couple of years previously, had called it a “College of Amazons.” Now it had close to a thousand
students, and taught them everything from the care of babies to the complexities of English spelling. All around were terraced fields, and in these the students worked for two hours daily, rising at dawn.
They all wore blue cotton uniforms, straw sandals, and army caps. Lanny saw no rouge or lipstick in Yenan, and he did not miss it. Many of the women were married, but they were only allowed to be with their husbands on Saturday nights; the other nights they studied. Most of them were daughters of workers or peasants, but there were a few playfully known as “the capitalists.” One was pointed out as the daughter of a Shanghai millionaire who had made his fortune out of “Tiger Balm,” a patent medicine which was supposed to cure all the ills that Chinese flesh is heir to.
Everything was free at this university except bedding and uniforms. The cost to the government of maintaining it—reckoning in American money—amounted to about forty cents per student per month. Lanny had never seen such serious young folk, and he contrasted them in his mind with American students as he had known them—their minds occupied with football and jazz, petting parties and fraternity politics. His wife suggested: “Perhaps we are going to find that the war has made some difference at home.”
XIII
In the shelter of their guest chamber the two troglodytes discussed the sights they had seen and the conclusions to be drawn from them. Was this Communist stage one through which all civilizations had to pass? Or did it apply only to the backward peoples? And if so, what were the advanced peoples going to make of it, and how were they to get along with it? Lanny said: “Yenan poses a problem to the capitalist world, and it won’t be settled by this war. If the powers permit this to succeed, the news of it will spread to India, to Burma, Indo-China, Java—all the places where the dark-skinned peoples live in poverty and toil for the benefit of white masters.”
“Are you afraid that I will become a Communist, Lanny?” asked his wife, abruptly.
“Get the facts, and make up your own mind. But I hope you won’t become fanatical, as I fear my sister Bess has.”
“I gather that you haven’t been able to make up your own mind altogether.”
“I am like a man who looks at one side of a coin and then at the other, and they are different, and he can’t decide which is the coin. I see co-operation, and that delights me; then I see repression, and that repels me. Which is the coin?”
“These people don’t seem repressed, dear.”
“I know; but you forget the people who aren’t here, who were killed or driven out. Those we meet are doing what they believe in; but there is no room for any who believe differently and might like to say so.”
“Do we want to go off to some blissful tropic island and live until this class struggle has been fought out?”
“No, but I can’t help wishing that political and economic problems might be settled by free discussion and majority consent. At least I feel bound to advocate that method for my own country, and for all others which have established the democratic process.”
“Of course, but you’re not in any of those countries now: you’re in China, which apparently has been governed by despotic emperors and war lords as far back as anybody’s memory goes. You are going to Russia, where some of the tsars were insane and most of them cruel, so far as I can learn.”
“I know, and I tell myself that I can’t have fixed principles, I have to judge each situation on its own merits or lack of them. I say: ‘I will be a Red for Yenan and a democratic Socialist for the United States.’ But the Communists won’t have it that way, and neither will the Socialists; both sides have come to hate the other worse than they hate the capitalists. I have known Socialists so exasperated by Communist dogmatism and arrogance that they have been driven completely into reaction; they still think they are Socialists, but they never say anything about how to get Socialism, they spend all their time denouncing the Reds.”
“The longer I watch things, the more I realize that the world is in a mess,” said the wise lady whom this philosopher had chosen for his wife. “Let us make up our minds that we are going to try to understand all sides, and not expect to find it easy.”
“This war is going to be hard,” replied the husband; “and unless I am mistaken the peace will be harder. World capitalism is going to be even less willing to let the Chinese people go Red than they were to let the Russians go Red after the last war. The whole British Empire will be at stake, and the Dutch, the French, the Belgians—whatever else there is. If the flames of revolt are not extinguished they will spread to the Arabs, and to Africa, North and South.”
“Haven’t we shown how to help a backward people in the Philippines, Lanny?”
“Yes, and I think that would be the answer; but can we get the other great powers to learn from us? And will our own capitalists let us teach them? Won’t we be sending American money and arms to help Chungking put down Yenan, and to help the British and the Dutch to maintain their empires?”
“Let’s win this war first, Lanny!” said the wife.
27
The Desert Shall Rejoice
I
The time had come for Mr. and Mrs. Budd to be moving on. The diet deficiency was beginning to affect the health of both of them; Laurel’s cheeks were pale and she was losing weight. It was a tuberculosis diet, and few white people could live on it; many of the Chinese suffered from the disease. Lanny recalled the case of Thoreau, who had preserved his independence at the expense of his nutrition and had paid this same penalty. There was no sense in paying it unless you had to.
One of Lanny’s first moves upon arriving in Yenan had been to make the acquaintance of two wide-awake Russians who represented Tass, the news agency of the Soviet Union. They received news from their homeland by wireless and transmitted it to the newspapers of China by the national mail system, which was still working in spite of war. Lanny guessed that the pair would be in contact with the Soviet authorities by way of Ulan-Bator, capital of Outer Mongolia.
He explained to them that he was the nephew of Jesse Blackless, Communist deputy in the parliament of the recently deceased French Republic, and now serving as adviser on French affairs to Narkomindel, the Soviet Foreign Office, located in Kuibyshev, to which the government had moved. Also he was brother-in-law to Hansi Robin, the violinist, and half-brother to Bessie Budd Robin, his accompanist, both of whom enjoyed the status of “honored artists of the Soviet Union.” and had gone to Moscow after the attack by the Hitlerite bandits, in order to express sympathy for the Soviet people and give them what encouragement they could. All three of these persons had urged Lanny to come to the Soviet Union, and Jesse Blackless had said that he could obtain the necessary permission. It was for this reason that Mr. and Mrs. Budd had taken the long journey from Hongkong to Yenan. Lanny further explained that his father was the President of Budd-Erling Aircraft, whose planes would soon be going to Russia under lend-lease—if they were not already there.
What he desired was to inform Jesse Blackless that his nephew was in Chungking and desired to enter the Soviet Union. The agents informed him that they had no sending apparatus. They took him to the head of the New China Agency, the Communist news network, who agreed to put a news item on the air, with the reasonable chance that the Moscow monitors would pick up the broadcast. Certainly it was news that the son of Budd-Erling Aircraft had escaped from the Japanese at Hongkong, and had traveled all the way across China and was now in Yenan. His wife, the New York writer who used the pen name of Mary Morrow in the Bluebook magazine, was also news; and likewise the fact that they desired to visit Mr. Budd’s uncle. It was to be expected that the Moscow monitoring station would take the trouble to inform the uncle of the recording of such a broadcast.
II
Lanny knew that bureaucratic wheels grind slowly in all lands, so he didn’t expect an answer for some time. He was agreeably surprised when three days later one of the Tass men handed him a message: “Congratulations will endeavor to arrange transit visas will report Jesse Blackless.
” Then, for a couple of weeks, silence. Lanny had about made up his mind to approach the Yenan authorities and ask them to intervene, when at last came the decision: “Invitation extended come Ulan-Bator transportation from there will be provided Jesse Blackless.”
The Red uncle may not have realized what a task he was setting the newlyweds by his three words of instructions: “Come Ulan-Bator.” This capital of Outer Mongolia lay a thousand miles to the north. First you had to cross the Great Wall, and then you had to cross the Gobi desert, from which came the dust storms that drove everybody in Yenan into hiding in their caves. With every step of the journey you would be moving into greater cold, until, when you finished, you would be almost in Siberia. It was now the end of February, but spring comes late in that region, and to make such a journey would require an expedition.
Their only chance would be to fly, and this Lanny discussed with the Yenan authorities. They had a crude airfield here, but only one small plane that had not been smashed by the Japs—and that one was not in order. Chungking had planes, and sometimes brought in supplies tinder the exchange arrangement, but they wouldn’t have any dealings with private parties. There were several commercial airlines within Central Government territory, but they were never permitted to cross the border into Red territory. Lanny visited the airport, and with Han’s help questioned those in charge, but nobody knew of any plane that was for hire, or of any way to fly to the capital of Outer Mongolia.