While PG was checking some facts for his post about Red Star Over China which appears immediately below this one, he found the following account from The China Daily:
A senior at Yenching University in Beijing (then Beiping) in 1936, I was preparing for the mid-June final exams when the American journalist Edgar Snow revealed to me his secret plans to head for northern Shaanxi.
He had just been granted permission by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to visit the revolutionary base. Snow and I became close friends because of his hearty support for the Beiping student movement in December, which called on the nation to rise in resistance against Japanese invasion.
He asked me if I was willing to be his interpreter, because his Chinese was not good enough to carry out his reporting task.
What an opportune offer! We progressive students had closely followed the news of the Red Army, and the thought of going to northern Shaanxi to join the Red Army had run through my mind.
. . . .
A few days after Snow left, Helen [Snow, Edgar Snow’s wife] notified me she had received a cable from her husband that I could take off as planned. I slipped out of the campus with a small leather suitcase. I left everything in my dorm intact and informed no one, classmate or relative, of my departure.
. . . .
I looked for Snow as previously arranged. He was staying at the Xijing (West Capital) Inn, the only modern and top-class hotel in town then. When I entered his room, I met another Westerner. Snow introduced him as George Hatem, an American physician.
Like Snow, Hatem had been recommended by Madam Soong Ching Ling to visit northern Shaanxi. Hatem was to devote his entire life to the development of public health in the Soviet region and later in New China. We became close friends too.
Snow and Hatem left for Yenan on a military truck, accompanied by a colonel of the Northeast Army and a CPC liaison officer in the Northeast Army.
I stayed behind to wait for the next underground liaison man to take me to northern Shaanxi.
. . . .
There were CPC liaison men working at Yang’s headquarters. They partly facilitated travels between Xi’an and Bao’an, where the headquarters of the Red Army was located.
But there were also the secret agents of the Kuomintang’s Central Army and its special forces for the “extermination of the Communist bandits.”
I was staying on the hotel’s second floor. One day, two thugs who claimed to be from the Kuomintang’s provincial department came upstairs and wanted to force their way into my room.
I blocked the door and chit-chatted with them. I mentioned a classmate of mine being the daughter of a high-ranking Kuomintang general and my mission to survey the local banking sector. They were impressed and I was able to send them away along with two other plainclothes men downstairs.
Three days later, I set off with three others, riding in a military truck. We were all dressed in uniforms that resembled those of the colonel of the Northeast Army who accompanied us.
The distance from Xi’an to Yenan was about 300 kilometres, so the trip took us more than two days by truck. We finally reached the area guarded by the Red Army after passing through various check-points and later walking in darkness and hunger for 20 kilometres.
. . . .
On July 21, I was elated to see Zhou Enlai, for whom I had long cherished respect. He was then vice-chairman of the Military Commission of the CPC’s Central Committee.
Brandishing a thick beard and dressed in a grey army uniform, he extended his hand to welcome us with a smile.
We arrived at Bao’an County (Zhidan County today) after a day’s journey and I was reunited with Snow and Hatem.
Snow told me he had had several interviews with Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao spoke mostly about the current situation in China and the CPC’s efforts to form a national united front in the fight against Japanese aggression, as well as its preparations for national resistance. He also told Snow his personal history.
Snow felt he had gathered a rich load of information. In fact, he had already used up several notebooks. Afraid that he might have missed out on some major policy issues and names of people and places, he wanted me to help him check and make enquiries, if necessary.
Along with another colleague, I went to see Chairman Mao.
Mao told me he had received the journal with Lu Xun’s letter forwarded by Zhou Enlai, and he was very happy that Lu Xun had made such a high evaluation of the Red Army’s struggles.
. . . .
At the town of Wuqi, where the Red Army’s arsenal and several factories were situated, and at its maintenance base, Helianwan, Snow interviewed many workers, managerial personnel and engineers. He took exhaustive notes of the answers he got, including those about the women workers’ pay and maternity leave.
In late August, Snow was about to head for the front in Ningxia. There, the Red Army was confronted by 200,000 Kuomintang troops and battles were frequent. I accompanied Snow when he went to say goodbye to Chairman Mao. Snow suggested that he take a photo of the Chairman.
As we stepped out of the cave, Mao looked quite smart in the sun. His clothes were neat but his hair was somewhat ruffled. So Snow took off his own brand new army cap with the red star and suggested the Chairman wear it. This was a shot that Snow was most proud of and which had become well known to most Chinese people.
. . . .
During the interviews, Snow explored into CPC’s national salvation programme, its military strategy and tactics, its united front policy and measures, its policy towards prisoners of war, its policy towards ethnic minorities, its religious policy, its stand on the land revolution, on the marriage system, its policy on industry and commerce, its logistics and so on and so forth.
He told me that he had found answers to all of the 90 questions he had listed before his trip.
He said he’d gathered many lively impressions and gained a much deeper understanding of the Red Army and they were totally different from the bandits that Chiang Kai-shek tried to make them out to be.
. . . .
Early in September of 1936, news came that one of Chiang Kai-shek’s crack armies had moved from Zhengzhou, Henan Province, to Xi’an and Lanzhou. This was a clear Kuomintang attempt to form an encirclement to crack down on the coming junction of the Red Army’s three main forces.
Snow must therefore leave northern Shaanxi before any possible interruption of the road to Xi’an, otherwise he might not be able to return to Beijing and use the precious materials he had gathered through his interviews to write his envisioned book.
On September 7, Snow was getting ready to leave Yuwangbao for Bao’an. It was time for Snow, Hatem and I to part company. While the horses and guides were waiting, the three of us warmly embraced one another.
The first thing Snow did after returning to Beiping was to send dispatches to newspapers in the United States and Britain.
Snow’s book, “Red Star over China,” was translated into Chinese in 1938 by a few underground Communists and published in the foreign concession in Shanghai by a publisher pen-named Fu She.
To escape Kuomintang’s censorship, it was renamed “Travels to the West” to look like a travelogue. Widely distributed and read by progressive intellectuals, it became a powerful weapon against Kuomintang’s news blackout and its baseless anti-Communist smears.
Link to the rest at The China Daily
Here’s a copy of the photo of Mao wearing Snow’s cap mentioned in the OP:
I’m by no means an expert on modern China (post Yuan), but I have studied traditional China extensively. I still keep the traditional 13 Confucian classics on my shelves.
I observed long ago that traditional Chinese culture with its emphasis on devotion to collective gain for extended family groups was more effective platform for corporate capitalism than European culture. I came to that conclusion in the 70s. I am astounded that I was correct.
As for Xi being an uncrowned emperor, I would say he is closer to a traditional dynastic emperor than anything else. Emperors reigned, at least in theory, through heavenly mandate, which was an expression of the loyalty of the populace as expressed through the mass of the bureaucracy. Quite different from European divine right of kings or the will of the voters of the enlightenment. The current communist party in China is far closer to the traditional Chinese bureaucracy than anything Marx or Lenin imagined.
Dynastic emperors always had trouble with dissidents because they could claim the heavenly mandate as soon as a large enough group felt slighted. The emperor, or his bureaucracy, always tried to suppress these groups, until they couldn’t, usually due to outside events which caused poverty and hardship for large enough groups to de-legitimize the current dynasty.
What it amounts to is that emperors ruled as long as they kept most of the empire prosperous and fell when prosperity was disrupted. During the Ching, the disruption was European gun boats and enforced trade. The Ming was disrupted by the Manchu invasion, the Sung by the Mongol invasion.
Will the current dynasty be disrupted by western trade? Who knows. I suspect Xi’s primary concern is to tamp corruption down and prosperity up, like all effective traditional emperors. I suspect Xi’s perceived threat from Hong Kong is the level of prosperity achieved there, not democratic ideals.
A very interesting time was around 1440. The Chinese had been sending out huge fleets to explore the world. I have read naval architects who claim the West didn’t match that technology for another 200 years.
And then they stopped, destroyed their own fleet, and severely curtailed any ocean-going shipping. Nobody outside attacked. Had they kept on course, Europe wouldn’t have had any gunboats.
That collective gain for extended family groups, and the extended nation has to be defined. It can be defined many different ways, but the choice is critical.
I think that shows the fundamental difference in outlook, from what I understand Chinese culture views China as the centre of the world so from their view, there was really no need to go off to barbarian countries because The heart of civilisation was in China, and anything they needed, they could trade for.
they also weren’t in the habit of setting up colonies either, when they conquered territory they preferred to make places like Korea into vassal states rather than flood there own people in to settle those regions, which kept a particular geographical cohesion to the society .
That was mid-Ming dynasty. There has been a lot of debate on why the voyages were abandoned because they were apparently quite successful and profitable. Glancing over the debates reminds me of how similarly convoluted and opaque are the workings of the Chinese communist party of today and the traditional Chinese bureaucracy.
Another interesting point along the same lines is the number of books printed in traditional China. The facts are murky and it has been a long time since I studied this stuff, but I recall reading somewhere that the number of books published per year in China was greater than the cumulative total of books in existence in Europe until sometime in the 17th or 18th century. I also seem to recall that Marco Polo commented in the 13th century that the beggars in the streets in Beijing were better fed and educated than the nobles of Europe, although I was unable to find the passage when I searched for a few minutes just now.
My point is not to underestimate China. The current government is shaping up to look like a traditional dynasty, which were capable of a great deal.
One theory I’ve seen is the “Mandarins” killed the trade fleets because they were successful and looked like a threat to the status quo, in the form of riches they couldn’t control.
Much like how Congress and Nixon shut down Apollo because it wasn’t a simple one-and-done but a long term stream of disruption via innovation. They’d seen too much for comfort already.
(And then PCs came out and they were swamped by an even bigger wave and one they couldn’t influence, much less manage. Though tbey tried. And still do.)
Success is often its own punishment when bureaucrats feel threatened.
That’s one theory and a plausible one, but there are several others.
The leader of the mission was a eunuch and many eunuchs were involved. It’s hard to imagine today, but at that time and place, eunuchs were often men of action, independent of family ties, and prepared to take risks and perform tasks that others would not face. They were also regarded with great suspicion and curbing their power was a thing.
Another theory suggests the Manchus were beginning to put pressure on the northern borders and imperial attention was shifting toward stabilizing the area.
For me, none of the theories are adequate. It seems as if in only a few decades, the spirit of the age shifted from exploration to introspection, which reflects your analogy with the Apollo program.
I read an article in the NYT this morning that I thought relevant to this discussion: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/opinion/sunday/china-xi-foreign-policy.html
My takeaway was that Xi’s foreign policy is, unlike the Comintern, more for strengthening his grasp on the mandate of heaven (tianming) than desire to export China’s ideology, which is a quite traditional stance.
As an aside: interesting how (at least) two of the most authoritarian regimes relied so strongly on the sexless. No dynastic ambitions or divided loyalties to worry about. I wonder how prevalent the practice was in other cultures.
Something to file away for worldbuilding.
As for Xi… What little pushback he’s getting is mostly over the Belt and Road gambit and the confrontation it has fomented with the US and its closest allies. The argument being that he’s moving too fast on too many fronts at once. Plus the amount of money he’s throwing around has other local uses. In other words, he’s too involved in foreign affairs.
On the other hand, the xenophobes are thrilled. If anything they think he’s moving too slow. He did miss a good opportunity when the russians took Crimea…
Belt and Road are so similar to Zheng He’s voyages, it’s chilling.
Did the voyages take control of other nations’ ports?
Or seek to encircle India with military bases?
Same territory, different objectives.
Not harmless.
There has been a lot of debate on why the voyages were abandoned because they were apparently quite successful and profitable.
I confess I haven’t found a good explanation. It seems the Chinese are conflicted on the question.
…or don’t want to speak of it.
From the point of view of today it wasn’t exactly their wisest move. Not something they’d like to dig up. 🙂
Another book that is essential to read is this take-down of Howard Zinn’s A-historical classic, A People’s History of the United States. The book is widely used, both in high school and college.
My biggest concern about forcing students to read biased books is not ALSO giving them the other side.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/09/book-review-debunking-howard-zinn/
A History of The American People by Paul Johnson is a good alternative.
Over the length of my life (68 years), one thing I’ve learned is that the division between “Good Revolutionary Party” and “Evil Repressive Totalitarian Party” is thinner than you might imagine.
One reason that formerly Western-style governments become repressive over time is that they do so in response to Revolutionary Violence, Revolutionary Lies, and Revolutionary Refusal to Participate in Democratic Inventions – like voting, for example. If you were facing public bombings, attacks by Revolutionary Supporters on perceived enemies, and rampant destruction of private and public property, you might find yourself in a similar place.
The proof that Revolutionary movements are not composed of idealists with squeaky-clean motivations?
Red China was worse – MUCH worse – than what preceded it.
Was or is?
The only difference between Mao and the uncrowned Emperor is the latter has high tech tools and more money to exert totalitarian control.
Same goals, better efficiency, more toads helping him. Especially from outside.
Which uncrowned emperor would you be referring to? Xi Jinping?
Agreed. Xi has nearly unlimited power, tech resource (thanks to companies that want to take advantage of China’s vast market, China has stolen a sizable proportion of our technology), and the willingness to use brutally oppressive measures against those citizens he considers to be political threats.
Worse yet: Xi is exporting the tools of technological repression throughout SouthAm and Africa. And few even call him on it. Going after Huawei is waaayyy overdue.
You have to go back a century (Yuan Shikai) to find somebody in China comparable to Xi. (Even Mao had limits.) Xi probably won’t take a crown but for all intents and purposes he is Emperor now that he eliminated term limits and minimized factionalism.
Who is the uncrowned Emperor?
Who else?
Xi.
He’s collected all the attributes of an emperor except the crown. And that might yet come if he lives long enough.
Does that mean that the people of China should not revolt against their government, after all if the people revolted last time and they got red China, who’s to say that a modern revolution wouldn’t replace the current Chinese system with something much worse.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the current Chinese government is pretty awful but I also think that a revolution in China would be disastrous for the rest of the world, it could lead to hundreds of millions of refugees pouring out of that country into the rest of the world, and in any revolutionary war, different factions will take control and who knows what that means in the case of a nuclear armed state like China.
A revolt in China today wouldn’t be a revolution.
It would be a massacre.
To get anything meaningful you would need the inland provinces to all simultaneously rise up and at that point it would be a civil war, not a revolution.
It would also be a good thing.
Barring a major catastrophe (a major quake, massive tsunami, or asteroid impact) it is strictly a matter of SF. Right now the main challenge to the Chinese Communist Party is overeach. And for that the west needs to confront them, not align with them like Italy.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/italy-joins-china-belt-road-initiative-190321170015949.html
There has already been a revolution in China. Does modern China look anything like a communist state? Communism has been defeated, and replaced by a very different system.
The world’s communists never were particularly enthused by communism in China. Communism was supposed to be a revolution by industrial workers. There had never been any provision for an agrarian revolution.
But, Chinese communism has now been supplanted just as thoroughly as the Imperial system.
“Communist” states like Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc, never were actually communist in the proper economic sense. Just like none of the “socialist” regimes and parties out there actually are socialist.
They’re *all* single-party collectivist authoritarians that differ only in presentation and camouflage; the tappings they wrap themselves in. It’s a political label in this context, not economic.
The most accurate term would be single party kleptocracies. Or, in some countries *aspiring* single-party collectivist authoritarians.
Call them whatever. China today doesn’t look anything like what Mao’s revolution made.
I don’t know, it seems to me that the reason why the ccp is so successful and holds together so well is that it allows prosperity for the middle-class, whereas in many other countries the middle-class is shrinking.
I think Italy will do what’s in their own best interest, if that means allying with China then they usually see some benefit in that, The age of western countries being aligned on particular issues is gone and so is the age of the single superpower it seems.
“He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.” B. Franklin.
Italian “leaders” ard signing up with China because the country is as bankrupt as Greece but won’t admit it, so they need cash to keep up the pretense a bit longer, at any cost. They’ll soon learn the cost. Like when they have to pay back tbe loans at gun point. Or surrender ports and whatever.
https://qz.com/1223768/china-debt-trap-these-eight-countries-are-in-danger-of-debt-overloads-from-chinas-belt-and-road-plans/
As for China, that so-called middle class “prosperity” from the sweatshops and endless government debt…? It will end soon enough. At which point they’ll have neither liberty nor prosperity, but a few wars to deal with. “Fortunately” they have millions of “Incels” to serve as cannon fodder.
Our western ideas about freedom and liberty come from the enlightenment tradition, which was itself pre-empted by Protestantism and that in turn was the result of the Renaissance.
My point is that the current understandings that we have arose in a particular cultural context, one which the Chinese culture has nothing analogous to.
Or to put it another way, the western villain in mainstream movies is the Nazis or the USSR, basically authoritarian regimes whereas the Chinese nightmare is an absence of order and stability, and considering the wreckage of various failed democratic states which litter the Middle East, I can’t say that they’re completely wrong in that assessment.
Even if communism hadn’t arisen in China, China today would still be a fairly authoritarian regime simply because that’s how Confucianism is best implemented, asking them to give that up would be telling them to let go of their unique culture which has allowed them to survive relatively intact for thousands of years.
In isolation, yes.
But in contact with tbe outside world?
Tianamen, Taiwan, and Hong Kong suggest the chinese are as capable of wanting and enjoying freedom as anybody else.
This despite the institutionalized ideologies of confusianism and party subservience. Which aren’t the same thing.
Japan, Korea, and most of southeast Asia are more or less free despite tbeir own religious roots.
One thing tbat has always bothered me about paifist non-interventionist is the underlying assumption that freedom is only for those who already have it. That autboritarian regimes should be allowed to fester and grow on their own, without challenge.
Live and let die.
That way lies Panem. 🙁
considering the wreckage of various failed democratic states which litter the Middle East, I can’t say that they’re completely wrong in that assessment.
I don’t think any Middle East states other than Israel have ever attained the status of democratic states. The implementation of democracy failed, so they never became democratic states.
I don’t see how the cultures of those countries are compatible with democracy.
They aren’t and never have been.
That is, after all, the land of “one man, one vote, once”.
They were doing it even before the soviets, going back to the 7th century. One absolutist following another. Even when they adopt the trappings of secularity they never abandon the absolutist mindset. That is where the wreckage comes from, not the trappings.
(As in: Modi never intended to give up power.)
China from 1900 to 1940 is a great story, especially the 1930s. The maneuvering of Chiang, Mao, and Stalin is classic. Snow’s book is a great start along with anything related to the Long March.
And it’s a depressing story once you get into the “Great Leap Forward”, the Cultural Revolution, and such.
A better starting date would be about 1850 with the Taiping rebellion. Then there’s the Opium wars, the Boxer rebellion, and a whole lot more.
BTW, if you want to get depressed about China in the 1930’s, watch the Chinese drama series The River (name might be a bit different, that’s a Chinese friend’s translation; I can’t find a link via searching but watched it on KTSF a long time ago) about Shanghai in the 1930’s. Pretty much everyone comes to a bad end, except the manipulative, scheming, selfish main character.
The British discovered they really liked tea, and truly amazing events followed.
Google really, really, likes Yuan.