3

I stayed three days at Wu Ch'i Chen, visiting workers in the factories, "inspecting"their working conditions, attending their theater and their political meetings, reading their wall newspapers and their character books, talking——and getting athletic. I took part in a basketball game on one of Wu Ch'i's three courts. We made up a scratch team composed of the Foreign Office emissary, Fu Chin-kuei; a young English-speaking college student working in the political department; a Red doctor; a soldier; and myself. The arsenal basketball team accepted our challenge and beat us to a pulp.

The arsenal, like the Red University, was housed in a big series of vaulted rooms built into a mountainside. They were cool, well ventilated, and lighted by a series of shafts sunk at angles in the walls, and had the major advantage of being completely bombproof. Here I found over a hundred workers making hand grenades, trench mortars, gunpowder, pistols, small shells and bullets, and a few farming tools. A repair department was engaged in rehabilitating stacks of broken rifles, machine guns, automatic rifles and submachine guns. But the arsenal's output was crude work, and most of its products equipped the Red partisans, the regular Red forces being supplied almost entirely with guns and munitions captured from enemy troops.

Ho Hsi-yang, director of the arsenal, took me through its various chambers, introduced his workers, and told me something about them and himself. He was thirty-six, unmarried, and had formerly been a technician in the famous Mukden arsenal, before the Japanese invasion. After September 18, 1931, he went to Shanghai, and there he joined the Communist Party, later on making his way to the Northwest, and into Red areas. Most of the machinists here were also "outside"men. Many had been employed at Hanyang, China's greatest iron works (Japanese-owned), and a few had worked in Kuomintang arsenals. I met two young Shanghai master mechanics, and an expert fitter, who showed me excellent letters of recommendation from the noted British and American firms of Jardine, Matheson & Co., Anderson Meyer & Co., and the Shanghai Power Company. Another had been foreman in a Shanghai machine shop. There were also machinists from Tientsin, Canton, and Peking, and some had made the Long March with the Red Army.

I learned that of the arsenal's 114 machinists and apprentices only 20 were married. These had their wives with them in Wu Ch'i Chen, either as factory workers or as party functionaries. In the arsenal trade union, which represented the most highly skilled labor in the Red districts, more than 80 per cent of the members belonged to the Communist Party or to the Communist Youth League.

Besides the arsenal, in Wu Ch'i Chen there were cloth and uniform factories, a shoe factory, a stocking factory, and a pharmacy and drug dispensary, with a doctor in attendance. He was a youth just out of medical training school in Shansi and his young and pretty wife was with him working as a nurse. Both of them had joined the Reds during the Shansi expedition the winter before. Nearby was a hospital, with three army doctors in attendance and filled mostly with wounded soldiers, and there was a radio station, a crude laboratory, a cooperative, and the army supply base.

Except in the arsenal and the uniform factory, most of the workers were young women from age eighteen to twenty-five or thirty. Some of them were married to Red soldiers then at the front; nearly all were Kansu, Shensi, or Shansi women; and all had bobbed hair. "Equal pay for equal labor"was a slogan of the Chinese soviets, and there was supposed to be no wage discrimination against women. Workers appeared to get preferential financial treatment over everybody else in the soviet districts. This included Red commanders, who received no regular salary, but only a small living allowance, which varied according to the weight of the treasury.

Wu Ch'i Chen was headquarters for Miss Liu Ch'un-hsien, aged twenty-nine. A former mill worker from Wusih and Shanghai, she was a student in Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University when she met and married Po Ku (Ch'in Pang-hsien).^[*] From her Moscow days she warmly remembered Rhena Prohm, the improbable red-haired American rebel goddess enshrined in Vincent Sheean's Personal History. Now Miss Liu was director of the women's department of the Red trade unions. She said that factory workers were paid $10 to $15 monthly, with board and room furnished by the state. Workers were guaranteed free medical attention (such as it was) and compensation for injuries. Women were given four months of rest with pay during and after pregnancy, and there was a crude "nursery"for workers' children——but most of them seemed to run wild as soon as they could walk. Mothers could collect part of their "social insurance, "which was provided from a fund created by deducting 10 per cent of the workers' salaries, to which the government added an equal amount. The government also contributed the equivalent of 2 per cent of the wage output for workers' education and recreation, funds managed jointly by the trade unions and the workers' factory committees. There was an eight-hour day and a six-day week. When I visited them the factories were running twenty-four hours a day, with three shifts working.

All this seemed progressive, though perhaps far from a Communistic utopia. That such conditions were actually being realized in the midst of the soviets' impoverishment was really interesting. How primitively they were being realized was quite another matter. They had clubs, schools, ample dormitories——all these, certainly——but in cave houses with earthen floors, no shower baths, no movies, no electricity. They were furnished food; but meals consisted of millet, vegetables, and sometimes mutton, with no delicacies whatever. They collected their wages and social insurance all right in soviet currency, but the articles they could buy were strictly limited to necessities——and none too much of those.

"Unbearable, "the average American or English worker would say. But I remembered Shanghai factories where little boy and girl slave workers sat or stood at their tasks twelve or thirteen hours a day, and then dropped, in exhausted sleep, to the dirty cotton quilt, their bed, directly beneath their machines. I remembered little girls in silk filatures, and the pale young women in cotton factories sold into jobs as virtual slaves for four or five years, unable to leave the heavily guarded, high-walled premises day or night without special permission. And I remembered that during 1935 more than 29, 000 bodies were picked up from the streets and rivers and canals of Shanghai——bodies of the destitute poor, of the starved or drowned babies or children they could not feed.

For these workers in Wu Ch'i Chen, however primitive it might be, here seemed to be a life at least of good health, exercise, clean mountain air, freedom, dignity, and hope, in which there was room for growth. They knew that nobody was making money out of them, I think they felt they were working for themselves and for China, and they said they were revolutionaries！ They took very seriously their two hours of daily reading and writing, their political lectures, and their dramatic groups, and they keenly contested for the miserable prizes offered in competitions between groups and individuals in sport, literacy, public health, wall newspapers, and "factory efficiency."All these things were real to them, things they had never known before, could never possibly know in any other factory of China, and they seemed grateful for the doors of life opened up for them.

It was hard for an old China hand like me to believe, and I was confused about its ultimate significance, but I could not deny the evidence I saw. To present that evidence in detail I would have had to tell a dozen stories of workers to whom I talked; quote from their essays and criticisms in the wall newspapers——written in the childish scrawl of the newly literate——many of which I translated, with the aid of the college student; tell of the political meetings I attended; and of the plays created and dramatized by these workers; and of the many little things that go to make up an "impression."

As one example, I met an electrical engineer in Wu Ch'i Chen, a man named Chu Tso-chih. He knew English and German very well, he was a power expert, and he had written an engineering textbook widely used in China. He had once been with the Shanghai Power Company, and later with Anderson Meyer & Co. Until recently he had had a practice of $10, 000 a year in South China, where he was a consulting engineer and efficiency man, and had given it up and left his family to come up to these wild dark hills of Shensi and offer his services to the Reds for nothing. Incredible！The background of this phenomenon traced to a beloved grandfather, a famous philanthropist of Ningpo, whose deathbed injunction to young Chu had been to "devote his life to raising the cultural standard of the masses."And Chu had decided the quickest method was the Communist one.

Chu had come into the thing somewhat melodramatically, in the spirit of the martyr and zealot. It was a solemn thing for him; he thought it meant an early death, and he expected everyone else to feel that way. I believe he was a little shocked when he found so much that he considered horseplay going on, and everybody apparently happy. When I asked him how he liked it, he replied gravely that he had but one serious criticism. "These people spend entirely too much time singing！"he complained. "This is no time to be singing！"

^[*]See BN.