5 Red Theater

People were already moving down toward the open-air stage, improvised from an old temple, when I set out with the young official who had invited me to the Red Theater. It was Saturday, two or three hours before sunset, and all Pao An seemed to be going.

Cadets, muleteers, women and girl workers from the uniform and shoe factory, clerks from the cooperatives and from the soviet post office, soldiers, carpenters, villagers followed by their infants, all began streaming toward the big grassy plain beside the river, where the players were performing. It would be hard to imagine a more democratic gathering——something like old-time Chautauqua.

No tickets were sold, there was no "dress circle, "and there were no preferred seats. Goats were grazing on the tennis court not far beyond. I noticed Lo Fu, general secretary of the Politburo of the Central Committee, Lin Piao, Lin Po-chu (Lin Tsu-han), the commissioner of finance, Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and other officials and their wives scattered through the crowd, seated on the springy turf like the rest. No one paid much attention to them once the performance had begun.

Across the stage was a big pink curtain of silk, with the words "People's Anti-Japanese Dramatic Society"in Chinese characters as well as Latinized Chinese, which the Reds were promoting to hasten mass education. The program was to last three hours. It proved to be a combination of playlets, dancing, singing, and pantomime——a kind of variety show, or vaudeville, given unity chiefly by two central themes：anti-Nipponism and the revolution. It was full of overt propaganda and the props were primitive. But it had the advantage of being emancipated from cymbal-crashing and falsetto singing, and of dealing with living material rather than with meaningless historical intrigues that are the concern of the decadent Chinese opera.^[1]

What it lacked in subtlety and refinement it partly made up by its robust vitality, its sparkling humor, and a sort of participation between actors and audience. Guests at the Red Theater seemed actually to listen to what was said：a really astonishing thing in contrast with the bored opera audience, who often spent their time eating fruit and melon seeds, gossiping, tossing hot towels back and forth, visiting from one box to another, and only occasionally looking at the stage.

The first playlet was called Invasion. It opened in a Manchurian village in 1931, with the Japanese arriving and driving out the "non-resisting"Chinese soldiers. In the second scene Japanese officers banqueted in a peasant's home, using Chinese men for chairs and drunkenly making love to their wives. Another scene showed Japanese dope peddlers selling morphine and heroin and forcing every peasant to buy a quantity. A youth who refused to buy was singled out for questioning.

"You don't buy morphine, you don't obey Manchukuo health rules, you don't love your 'divine' Emperor P'u Yi, "^[*] charged his tormentors. "You are no good, you are an anti-Japanese bandit！"And the youth was promptly executed.

A scene in the village market place showed small merchants peacefully selling their wares. Suddenly Japanese soldiers arrived, searching for more "anti-Japanese bandits."Instantly they demanded passports, and those who had forgotten them were shot. Then two Japanese officers gorged themselves on a peddler's pork. When he asked for payment they looked at him in astonishment. "You ask for payment? Why, Chiang Kai-shek gave us Manchuria, Jehol, Chahar, the Tangku Truce, the Ho-Umetsu Agreement, and the Hopei-Chahar Council without asking a single copper！And you want us to pay for a little pork！"Whereupon they impaled him as a "bandit."

In the end, of course, all that proved too much for the villagers. Merchants turned over their stands and umbrellas, farmers rushed forth with their spears, women and children came with their knives, and all swore to "fight to the death"against the Jih-pen-kuei—— the "Japanese devils."

The little play was sprinkled with humor and local idiom. Bursts of laughter alternated with oaths of disgust and hatred for the Japanese. The audience got quite agitated. It was not just political propaganda to them, nor slapstick melodrama, but the poignant truth itself. The fact that the players were mostly youths in their teens and natives of Shensi and Shansi seemed entirely forgotten in the onlookers' absorption with the ideas presented.

The substratum of bitter reality behind this portrayal, done as a sort of farce, was not obscured by its wit and humor for at least one young soldier there. He stood up at the end, and in a voice shaking with emotion cried out："Death to the Japanese bandits！Down with the murderers of our Chinese people！Fight back to our homes！"The whole assembly echoed his slogans mightly. I learned that this lad was a Manchurian whose parents had been killed by the Japanese.

Comic relief was provided at this moment by the meandering goats. They were discovered nonchalantly eating the tennis net, which someone had forgotten to take down. A wave of laughter swept the audience while some cadets gave chase to the culprits and salvaged this important property of the recreation department.

Second number on the program was a harvest dance, daintily performed by a dozen girls of the Dramatic Society. Barefoot, clad in peasant trousers and coats and fancy vests, with silk bandannas on their heads, they danced with good unison and grace. Two of these girls, I learned, had walked clear from Kiangsi, where they had learned to dance in the Reds' dramatic school at Juichin. They had genuine talent.

Another unique and amusing number was called the "United Front Dance, "which interpreted the mobilization of China to resist Japan. By what legerdemain they produced their costumes I do not know, but suddenly there were groups of youths wearing sailors' white jumpers and caps and shorts——first appearing as cavalry formations, next as aviation corps, then as foot soldiers, and finally as the navy. Their pantomime and gesture, at which Chinese are born artists, very realistically conveyed the spirit of the dance. Then there was something called the "Dance of the Red Machines."By sound and gesture, by an interplay and interlocking of arms, legs, and heads, the little dancers ingeniously imitated the thrust and drive of pistons, the turn of cogs and wheels, the hum of dynamos——and visions of a machine-age China of the future.

Between acts, shouts arose for extemporaneous singing by people in the audience. Half a dozen native Shensi girls——workers in the factories——were by popular demand required to sing an old folk song of the province, accompaniment being furnished by a Shensi farmer with his homemade guitar. Another "command"performance was given by a cadet who played the harmonica, and one was called upon to sing a favorite song of the Southland. Then, to my utter consternation, a demand began that the wai-kuo hsin-wen chi-che——the foreign newspaperman——strain his lungs in a solo of his own！

They refused to excuse me. Alas, I could think of nothing but fox trots, waltzes, La Bohème, and "Ave Maria, "which all seemed inappropriate for this martial audience. I could not even remember "The Marseillaise."The demand persisted. In extreme embarrassment I at last rendered "The Man on the Flying Trapeze."They were very polite about it. No encore was requested.

With infinite relief I saw the curtain go up on the next act, which turned out to be a social play with a revolutionary theme——an accountant falling in love with his landlord's wife. Then there was more dancing, a "Living Newspaper"dealing with some late news from the Southwest, and a chorus of children singing "The International."Here the flags of several nations were hung on streamers from a central illuminated column, round which reclined the young dancers. They rose slowly, as the words were sung, to stand erect, clenched fists upraised, as the song ended.

The theater was over, but my curiosity remained. Next day I went to interview Miss Wei Kung-chih, director of the People's Anti-Japanese Dramatic Society.

Miss Wei was born in Honan in 1907 and had been a Red for ten years. She originally joined a propaganda corps of the political training school (where Teng Hsiao-p'ing was director) of the Kuominchun, "Christian General"Feng Yu-hsiang's army, but when Feng reconciled himself to the Nanking coup d'êtat in 1927 she deserted, along with many young students, and became a Communist in Hankow. In 1929 she was sent to Europe by the Communist Party and studied for a while in France, then in Moscow. A year later she returned to China, successfully ran the Kuomintang blockade around Red China, and began to work at Juichin.

She told me something of the history of the Red Theater. Dramatic groups were first organized in Kiangsi in 1931. There, at the famous Gorky School (under the technical direction of Yeh Chien-ying^[*]) in Juichin, with over 1, 000 students recruited from the soviet districts, the Reds trained about sixty theatrical troupes, according to Miss Wei. They traveled through the villages and at the front. Every troupe had long waiting lists of requests from village soviets. The peasants, always grateful for any diversion in their culture-starved lives, voluntarily arranged all transport, food, and housing for these visits.

In the South, Miss Wei had been an assistant director, but in the Northwest she had charge of the whole organization of dramatics. She made the Long March from Kiangsi, one of the very few soviet women who lived through it. Theatrical troupes were created in Soviet Shensi before the southern army reached the Northwest, but with the arrival of new talent from Kiangsi the dramatic art apparently acquired new life. There were about thirty such traveling theatrical troupes there now, Miss Wei told me, and others in Kansu. I was to meet many later on in my travels.

"Every army has its own dramatic group, "Miss Wei continued, "as well as nearly every district. The actors are nearly all locally recruited. Most of our experienced players from the South have now become instructors."

I met several Young Vanguards, veterans of the Long March, still in their early teens, who had charge of organizing and training children's dramatic societies in various villages.

"Peasants come from long distances to our Red dramatics, "Miss Wei proudly informed me. "Sometimes, when we are near the White borders, Kuomintang soldiers secretly send messages to ask our players to come to some market town in the border districts. When we do this, both Red soldiers and White leave their arms behind and go to this market place to watch our performance. But the higher officers of the Kuomintang never permit this, if they know about it, because once they have seen our players many of the Kuomintang soldiers will no longer fight our Red Army."

What surprised me about these dramatic "clubs"was that, equipped with so little, they were able to meet a genuine social need. They had the scantest properties and costumes, yet with these primitive materials they managed to produce the authentic illusion of drama. The players received only their food and clothing and small living allowances, but they studied every day, like all Communists, and they believed themselves to be working for China and the Chinese people. They slept anywhere, cheerfully ate what was provided for them, walked long distances from village to village. From the standpoint of material comforts they were unquestionably the most miserably rewarded thespians on earth, yet I hadn't seen any who looked happier.

The Reds wrote nearly all their own plays and songs. Some were contributed by versatile officials, but most of them were prepared by story writers and artists in the propaganda department. Several Red dramatic skits were written by Ch'eng Fang-wu, a well-known Hunanese author whose adherence to Soviet Kiangsi in 1933 had excited Shanghai. More recently Ting Ling, ^[*] China's foremost woman author, had added her talent to the Red Theater.

There was no more powerful weapon of propaganda in the Communist movement than the Reds' dramatic troupes, and none more subtly manipulated. By constant shifts of program, by almost daily changes of the "Living Newspaper"scenes, new military, political, economic, and social problems became the material of drama, and doubts and questionings were answered in a humorous, understandable way for the skeptical peasantry. When the Reds occupied new areas, it was the Red Theater that calmed the fears of the people, gave them rudimentary ideas of the Red program, and dispensed great quantities of revolutionary thoughts, to win the people's confidence. During the Reds' 1935 Shansi expedition, for example, hundreds of peasants heard about the Red players with the army, and flocked to see them.

The whole thing was "propaganda in art"carried to the ultimate degree, and plenty of people would say, "Why drag art into it?"Yet in its broadest meaning it was art, for it conveyed for its spectators the illusions of life, and if it was a naive art it was because the living material with which it was made and the living men to whom it appealed were in their approach to life's problems also naive. For the masses of China there was no fine partition between art and propaganda. There was only a distinction between what was understandable in human experience and what was not.

One could think of the whole history of the Communist movement in China as a grand propaganda tour, and the defense, not so much of the absolute Tightness of certain ideas, perhaps, as of their right to exist. I was not sure that they might not prove to be the most permanent service of the Reds, even if they were in the end defeated and broken. For millions of young peasants who had heard the Marxist gospel preached by those beardless youths, thousands of whom were now dead, the old exorcisms of Chinese culture would never again be quite as effective. Wherever in their incredible migrations destiny had moved these Reds, they had vigorously demanded deep social changes——for which the peasants could have learned to hope in no other way——and they had brought new faith in action to the poor and the oppressed.

However badly they had erred at times, however tragic had been their excesses, however exaggerated had been the emphasis here or the stress there, it had been their sincere and sharply felt propagandist aim to shake, to arouse, the millions of rural China to their responsibilities in society; to awaken them to a belief in human rights, to combat the timidity, passiveness, and static faiths of Taoism and Confucianism, to educate, to persuade, and, no doubt, at times to beleaguer and coerce them to fight for "the reign of the people"——a new vision in rural China——to fight for a life of justice, equality, freedom, and human dignity, as the Communists saw it. Far more than all the pious but meaningless resolutions passed at Nanking, this growing pressure from a peasantry gradually standing erect in a state of consciousness, after two millenniums of sleep, could force the realization of a vast mutation over the land.^[2]

What this "communism"amounted to in a way was that, for the first time in history, thousands of educated youths, stirred to great dreams themselves by a universe of scientific knowledge to which they were suddenly given access, "returned to the people, "went to the deep soil-base of their country, to "reveal"some of their new-won learning to the intellectually sterile countryside, the dark-living peasantry, and sought to enlist its alliance in building a "more abundant life."Fired by the belief that a better world could be made, and that only they could make it, they carried their formula——the ideal of the commune——back to the people for sanction and support. And to a startling degree they seemed to be winning it. They had brought to millions, by propaganda and by action, a new conception of the state, society, and the individual.

I often had a queer feeling among the Reds that I was in the midst of a host of schoolboys, engaged in a life of violence because some strange design of history had made this seem infinitely more important to them than football games, textbooks, love, or the main concerns of youth in other countries. At times I could scarcely believe that it had been only this determined aggregation of youth, equipped with an Idea, that had directed a mass struggle for ten years against all the armies of Nanking. How had the incredible brotherhood arisen, banded together, held together, and whence came its strength? And why had it perhaps, after all, failed to mature, why did it still seem fundamentally like a mighty demonstration, like a crusade of youth? How could one ever make it plausible to those who had seen nothing of it?

Then Mao Tse-tung began to tell me something about his personal history, and as I wrote it down, night after night, I realized that this was not only his story but an explanation of how communism grew——a variety of it real and indigenous to China——and why it had won the adherence and support of thousands of young men and women. It was a story that I was to hear later on, with rich variations, in the life stories of many other Red leaders. It was a story people would want to read, I thought.

^[*]See BN.

^[*]See BN.

^[*]See BN.