4 $2, 000, 000 in Heads

There were many things unique about the Red Army University.

Its president was a twenty-eight-year-old army commander who (Communists said) had never lost a battle. It boasted, in one class of undergraduates, veteran warriors whose average age was twenty-seven, with an average of eight years of fighting experience and three wounds each. Was there any other school where "paper shortage"made it necessary to use the blank side of enemy propaganda leaflets for classroom notebooks? Or where the cost of educating each cadet, including food, clothing, all institutional expenses, was less than $15 silver per month? Or where the aggregate value of rewards offered for the heads of various notorious cadets exceeded $2, 000, 000?

Finally, it was probably the world's only seat of "higher learning"whose classrooms were bombproof caves, with chairs and desks of stone and brick, and blackboards and walls of limestone and clay.

In Shensi and Kansu, besides ordinary houses, there were great cave dwellings, temple grottoes and castled battlements hundreds of years old. Wealthy officials and landlords built these queer edifices a thousand years ago, to guard against flood and invasion and famine, and here hoarded the grain and treasure to see them through sieges of each. Many-vaulted chambers, cut deeply into the loess or solid rock, some with rooms that held several hundred people, these cliff dwellings made perfect bomb shelters. In such archaic manors the Red University found strange but safe accommodation.

Lin Piao, the president, was introduced to me soon after my arrival, and he invited me to speak one day to his cadets. He suggested the topic："British and American policies toward China."When he arranged a "noodle dinner"for the occasion it was too much for me, and I succumbed.

Lin Piao was the son of a factory owner in Hupeh province, and was born in 1908. His father was ruined by extortionate taxation, but Lin managed to get through prep school, and became a cadet in the famous Whampoa Academy at Canton. There he made a brilliant record. He received intensive political and military training under Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang's chief adviser, the Russian General Bluecher. Soon after his graduation the Nationalist Expedition began, and Lin Piao was promoted to a captaincy. By 1927, at the age of twenty, he was a colonel in the noted Fourth Kuomintang Army, under Chang Fa-kuei. And in August of that year, after the Right coup d'êtat at Nanking, he led his regiment to join the Twentieth Army under Ho Lung and Yeh T'ing^[*] in the Nanchang Uprising, which began the Communists' armed struggle for power.

With Mao Tse-tung, Lin Piao shared the distinction of being one of the few Red commanders never wounded. Engaged on the front in more than a hundred battles, in field command for more than ten years, exposed to every hardship that his men had known, with a reward of $100, 000 on his head, he was as yet unhurt.

In 1932, Lin Piao was given command of the First Red Army Corps, which then numbered about 20, 000 rifles. It became, according to general opinion among Red Army officers, their "most dreaded force, "chiefly because of Lin's extraordinary talent as a tactician. The mere discovery that they were fighting the First Red Army Corps was said to have sometimes put a Nanking army to rout.

Like many able Red commanders, Lin had never been outside China, and spoke and read no language but Chinese. Before the age of thirty, however, he had already won recognition beyond Red circles. His articles in the Chinese Reds' military magazines, Struggle and War and Revolution, had been republished, studied, and criticized in Nanking military journals, and also in Japan and Soviet Russia. He was noted as the originator of the "short attack"——a tactic on which General Feng Yu-hsiang had commented. To the Reds' skillful mastery of the "short attack"many victories of the First Army Corps were said to be traceable.

With Commander Lin and his faculty I journeyed one morning a short distance beyond the walls of Pao An to the Red Army University. We arrived at recreation hour. Some of the cadets were playing basketball on the two courts set up; others were playing tennis on a court laid down on the turf beside the Pao An River, a tributary of the Yellow River. Still other cadets were playing table tennis, writing, reading new books and magazines, or studying in their primitive "clubrooms."

This was the First Section of the University, in which there were some 200 students. Altogether, Hung Ta, as the school was known in the soviet districts, had four sections, with over 800 students. There were also, near Pao An, and under the administrative control of the education commissioner, radio, cavalry, agricultural, and medical-training schools. There was a Communist Party school^[*] and a mass-education training center.

Over 200 cadets assembled to hear me explain "British and American policies."I made a crude summary of Anglo-American attitudes, and agreed to answer questions. It was a great mistake, I soon realized, and the noodle dinner hardly compensated for my embarrassment.

"What is the attitude of the British Government toward the formation of the pro-Japanese Hopei-Chahar Council, and the garrisoning of North China by Japanese troops?"

"What are the results of the N.R.A. policy in America, and how has it benefited the working class?"

"Will Germany and Italy help Japan if a war breaks out with China?"

"How long do you think Japan can carry on a major war against China if she is not helped by other powers?"

"Why has the League of Nations failed?"

"Why is it that, although the Communist Party is legal in both Great Britain and America, there is no workers' government in either country?"

"What progress is being made in the formation of an anti-Fascist front in England? In America?"

"What is the future of the international student movement, which has its center in Paris?"

"In your opinion, can Leith-Ross's visit to Japan result in Anglo-Japanese agreement on policies toward China?"

"When China begins to resist Japan, will America and Great Britain assist China or Japan?"

"Please tell us why America and Great Britain keep their fleets and armed forces in China if they are friends of the Chinese people?"

"What do the American and British workers think of the U.S.S.R.?"

No small territory to cover in a two-hour question period！And it was not confined to two hours. Beginning at ten in the morning, it continued till late in the afternoon.

Afterwards I toured the various classrooms and talked with Lin Piao and his faculty. They told me something of the conditions of enrollment in their school, and showed me printed announcements of its courses, thousands of copies of which had been secretly distributed throughout China. The four sections of the academy invited "all who are determined to fight Japanese imperialism and to offer themselves for the national rerevolutionary cause, regardless of class, social, or political differences."The age limit was sixteen to twenty-eight, "regardless of sex.""The applicants must be physically strong, free from epidemic diseases, "and also——rather sweeping——"free from all bad habits."

In practice, I discovered, most of the cadets in the First Section were battalion, regimental, or division commanders or political commissars of the Red Army, ^[*] receiving advanced military and political training. According to Red Army regulations, every active commander or commissar was supposed to spend at least four months at such study during every two years of active service.

The Second and Third sections included company, platoon, and squad commanders——experienced fighters in the Red Army——as well as new recruits selected from "graduates of middle schools or the equivalent, unemployed teachers or officers, cadres of anti-Japanese volunteer corps, and anti-Japanese partisan leaders, and workers who have engaged in organizing and leading labor movements."Over sixty middle-school graduates from Shansi had joined the Reds during their expedition to that province.

Classes in the Second and Third sections lasted six months. The Fourth Section was devoted chiefly to "training engineers, cavalry cadres, and artillery units."Here I met some former machinists and apprentices. Later on, as I was leaving Red China, I was to meet, entering by truck, eight new recruits for the "bandit university"arriving from Shanghai and Peking. Lin Piao told me that they had a waiting list of over 2, 000 student applicants from all parts of China. At that time every cadet had to be "smuggled"in.

The curriculum varied in different sections of Hung Ta. In the First Section political lectures included these courses：Political Knowledge, Problems of the Chinese Revolution, Political Economy, Party Construction, Tactical Problems of the Republic, Leninism and Historical Foundations of Democracy, and Political and Social Forces in Japan. Military courses included：Problems of Strategy in the War with Japan, Maneuvering Warfare (against Japan), and the Development of Partisan Warfare in the Anti-Japanese War.

Special textbooks had been prepared for some of these courses. Some were carried clear from the soviet publishing house in Kiangsi, where (I was told) more than eight hundred printers were employed in the main plant. In other courses the materials used were lectures by Red Army commanders and Party leaders, dealing with historical experiences of the Russian and the Chinese revolutions, or utilizing material from captured government files, documents and statistics.

These courses at Hung Ta perhaps suggested a reply to the question, "Do the Reds really intend to fight Japan?"It sufficed to show how the Reds foresaw and actively planned for China's "war of independence"against Japan——a war which they regarded as inevitable unless, by some miracle, Japan withdrew from the vast areas of China already under the wheels of Nippon's military juggernaut.

That the Reds were fully determined to fight, and believed that the opening of the war would find them first on the front, was indicated not only in the impassioned utterances of their leaders, in grim practical schooling in the army, and in their proposals for a "united front"with their ten-year enemy, the Kuomintang, but also by the intensive propagandizing one saw throughout the soviet districts.

Playing a leading part in this educative mission were the many companies of youths known as the Jen-min K'ang-Jih Chu-She, or People's Anti-Japanese Dramatic Society, who traveled ceaselessly back and forth in the Red districts, spreading the gospel of resistance and awakening the slumbering nationalism of the peasantry.

It was to one of the performances of this astonishing children's theater that I went soon after my first visit to the Red Army University.

^[*]See BN.

^[*]Tung Pi-wu was director of this Party school. (Li Wei-han and K'ang Sheng were to succeed him in that post.) Hsieh Fu-chih was one of the cadets. See BN.

^[*]One of them was Lo Jui-ch'ing. See BN.