The Long March

Mao, founder of the Jiangxi Soviet Government, Zhu De, the Commander of the Red Army, and other senior Party leaders all spoke during the Congress. What they said was mostly beyond her – for example, she did not know where Tibet was and why Mao mentioned it in his report on the Soviet Government. But she was really fired up by Mao's conclusion:

Our Congress is the supreme organ of state power of the whole country … Our Congress will make the Fifth Campaign end in utter rout, develop the Revolution in the whole of China, extend the territory of the Soviet to all regions ruled by Chiang Kaishek's government, and unfurl the red flag throughout the country. Let us shout: Long live the Second National Soviet Congress! Long live the Soviet New China!

She could not get over this somersault in her life. It was like heaven and earth swapping places. One moment she was a poor country girl; the next she was a member of the supreme body which governed the Soviet. A folksong came to her mind, down to earth but true to her feelings:

Light from lamps is no light

Compared with the brightness of the sun;

Fathers and mothers are dear

But the Communist Party is dearer.

The most important day in Wang's life was 17 April 1934. With her right arm raised before the red flag, she made this solemn pledge to the Communist Party: ‘I will sacrifice myself; I will keep my promises; I will struggle against our enemies; I will fight for the Revolution; I will obey orders, and never betray the Party.’ She knew she would honour this pledge. She was even willing to die; without the Party, her life would not have been worth living. Mao's words on the Red Army Martyrs’ Monument in Ruijin, built in 1932, were engraved on her heart:

In the great fight against imperialism and for land reform, many comrades have gloriously sacrificed themselves. Their sacrifices demonstrate the invincible courage of the proletariat and lay the foundation for the Chinese Soviet Republic. The worker-peasant toiling masses of all China are advancing, marching on the blood these comrades shed, to overthrow the rule of imperialism and Chiang Kaishek's reactionary government and win victory for the Soviet over the whole of China.

Wang was sent to the Party school, where they groomed future leaders, but she had hardly settled in there before she was called to the most urgent task of the moment: the recruitment drive. For the past four years since October 1930, Chiang Kaishek had launched five successive campaigns against the Communist base in Jiangxi. He started with 100,000 men for the First Campaign, thinking he would have no difficulty getting rid of a mere 9,000 Communist guerrillas supported by fewer than two million people, in an area of just 200 square kilometres. He likened the Communists, or the Red Bandits as he called them, to a locust trying to block the way of a cart – they were day–dreaming. But the Red Bandits gave him a taste of their ferocity and skilled guerrilla tactics – 15,000 of his troops were captured in two months.

Exasperated, Chiang threw in more men and arms, and himself flew to Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi. He appointed himself Commander–in–Chief, but only to suffer more humiliating and crushing defeats – he lost nearly 50,000 men to the Red Army in 1931 alone, and another 30,000 in early 1933. After this, he vowed to wipe the Red Bandits out once and for all – they were obviously more than just a nuisance. In July 1933, Chiang began his fifth, and biggest campaign: 500,000 men descended on the Jiangxi Soviet from three directions, equipped with the latest weapons from Germany, Britain and America, and supported by 200 planes with 150 American and Canadian pilots.

Ten months into the Fifth Campaign, the Red Army lost over 50,000 men. On 20 May 1934 the Central Committee of the Party called for more soldiers for the front:

The decisive battles in the coming months will decide whether we live or die. These will be the last and most crucial moments for us to wipe out and kill the enemy. This is total war. Every member of the Communist Party, every worker, and every member of the toiling masses should prepare to shed his last drop of blood at the front.1

The Party called for 50,000 recruits within three months. However, this was not enough, and September saw another urgent campaign with a target of 30,000, with each village, district and county given fixed quotas. Wang was told to go to Gangxi County which had repeatedly failed to reach its target.

Why was she given a hard case like Gangxi? I asked.

‘To test me. To try me. To encourage me. As we say, good iron should be used for the blade.’ I wanted to tell her that the Party chose the right person.

She walked from village to village, accompanied by Liu, the Party secretary of the district, whom she had been assigned to help. What she saw shocked her. The villages were almost haunted, with little sign of life and very few young men around; some were simply abandoned, with the peasants having fled to the areas controlled by Chiang's government. When she went up to an old man in the field for a chat, he yelled at her: ‘You are draining the pond to catch the fish. But you don't understand, there are no fish left in the pond!’ Liu took her aside, explaining that two of his sons had joined the Red Army five years ago and he had not heard from them since. Everyone was doing their best like the old man, Liu promised. The district had about 1,300 men between the ages of 16 and 45, and over 1,000 were either in the army or working for it as porters and labourers; the rest were sick, or they were from landlord and rich peasant families and so could not be trusted to fight for the poor. He did not see how his district could come up with another forty–five men this time. But he would try his hardest.

The deadline came on 27 September, and out of a quota of 4,000 for Gangxi, barely 700 had signed up; Liu's district only came up with twelve. On 28 September she received an urgent message from the Women and Youth Departments in Ruijin. The deadline was extended to 5 October: ‘This is the last deadline and must not be one minute late or a single recruit short.’

I asked what would have happened if she failed to meet the target? Would she lose face, or worse, her job?

She turned around and looked at me, surprised and almost annoyed by the questions.

‘Lose face? You have no idea. People could lose their lives.’ One of her friends had a quota of fifteen in a previous recruitment drive, but she only managed twelve. She was put in prison for sabotaging the Revolution. Her family all thought she was going to be executed: they even prepared her funeral clothes. But she was released after fifteen days, on condition that she would make up for her crime by meeting a double quota next time.

Did she not think the punishment was a bit extreme? The poor woman must have tried.

‘Trying was not enough. You had to succeed,’ Wang quickly corrected me. ‘You know what the Party said: “Failure in enlisting equals helping the enemy!” I did not get it at first, but later I understood. If the Red Army had more soldiers, we would have been able to hold on to the base.’

In their drive to reach the targets, local officials often resorted to extreme measures. Shengli County insisted that all Party officials join up. Overnight many fled to the mountains – some even committed suicide – and there was absolute chaos. In the worst areas of Ruijin, those who refused to join the army were locked in dark rooms with their hands tied behind their backs. And no food was served to them – the soldiers at the front were more deserving. Wang's department received any number of letters from the village women's associations, complaining about the rough way their men had been treated. One letter read: ‘The Party secretary said there was a meeting in the village hall to discuss land issues. Many people turned up. Suddenly two men locked the door. “Sign up for the Red Army, or no one can leave.” It was not until the early hours when some finally agreed, and they were taken off straight away.’ What shocked Wang even more was that some women activists promised sex to any man who would join. They did fill their quotas quickly, but she wondered how long the men would stay in the army.

I had always thought the peasants competed to join the Red Army – after all, it was to defend their land, their homes and their children. Our literature, art, films and school textbooks are full of stories and images of parents signing up their sons, wives persuading their husbands to fight, sisters making uniforms for their brothers, and young women seeing off their lovers to the front. I particularly remembered one metaphor: the Red Army was the fish and the peasants the water. The fish would be dead out of water, and the water would be poorer without the fish. The support of the peasants was the secret weapon of Communist success. As for forced conscription, I had always been told that only Chiang's army used it.

Wang laughed when I told her that. She held out her hands and said: ‘People are different, just like my ten fingers. Many had suffered like me, and they begged to join the Revolution. Recruitment was not difficult at all in the early campaigns. But as the war continued, it got harder and harder. There were not enough men around. Also people thought we were losing so they did not want to die for nothing. That was why we had to work on them.’

Wang was right. After five campaigns by Chiang's troops in five years, both the population and the area in the Jiangxi base had been reduced so drastically that a Red Army officer said it was no wider than an arrow's flight. In one year more than 160,000 men had been drafted into the Red Army just to break the Fifth Campaign. In fact, almost all the able–bodied men had already been enlisted. Mao did his own investigation in Changgang District in late 1933. Out of 407 men between the ages of 16 and 45, 79% were in the Red Army, very much as Party Secretary Liu reported for his district.2 Perhaps the old man in Gangxi County was right: the Party was draining the pond to catch the fish.

‘We had to defend the base at all costs. The survival of the Party required it.’ Wang was adamant.

She had been ordered to deliver her quota of forty–five men in October 1934. For the first time in her life, she was having sleepless nights. But Wang quoted another saying. ‘A man should not be made desperate by his pee.’ She had an idea.

She put on her jacket and went outside. It was drizzling, dark and silent, with not even a dog barking: they had all been killed to stop them giving away the Army's movements. She tiptoed from house to house, alert for the sound of conversation. Suddenly she heard the voice of an old lady:

‘Aya, such a dreadful day! How are the three coping on the mountain? Perhaps you should take them their bamboo hats.’

‘What's the point? They must be soaked by now,’ replied a woman, perhaps her daughter–in-law.

Wang listened for a while, and then crept quietly to another window.

‘Party Secretary Liu is two-faced. In front of comrade Wang, he is all enthusiasm; behind her back, he badmouths the Red Army. What is he playing at?’ asked a young girl.

‘Stupid girl! Secretary Liu is thinking of us. The Red Army has been losing for the last six months. So many are being killed every day. If your brother hadn't deserted and gone into hiding, he would have been cannon fodder by now,’ grumbled a man, who seemed to be the father.

Now she understood what was going on. So there were still fish in the pond, and birds in the mountains. If she could persuade them to come out of hiding, she would not only meet her quota, but also send much-needed men to the front. But what was she going to do with Liu? She thought about it and decided to send a messenger immediately to the county Party headquarters. Then she launched her plan of action.

At the crack of dawn, Wang dispatched a dozen Red Pioneers to the nearby villages, requesting everyone to come to an urgent meeting that evening in Shi Village. Then she went to the house with the three deserters. The old lady and her daughter-in-law looked as if they had had a bad night. Wang inquired about the men in the family and the older woman said that her son was away as a porter for the Red Army, and her two grandsons were fighting at the front. ‘We all do our bit,’ she added, poker-faced.

‘By hiding in the mountains, granny?’ Wang asked.

The old lady lost her nerve, and blurted out: ‘Yes, you give us land, but with no men in the house, what can we do with it?’ She shrieked, pointing to her bound feet and her daughter-in-law's: ‘Thunder will strike women who work in the paddy. When your people called on our sons and husbands to join, they promised to send men to help on the land. Some turned up at the beginning, but they were more trouble than they were worth – you had to feed them and look after them. And soon nobody bothered to come. We haven't got much of a harvest this year. We complained to secretary Liu. He said we should go and loot, or get our men back.’

Wang might have sympathized if she had not pointed to their bound feet. That made her angry. Under the Communists, women could not get married unless they unbound their feet first, yet these women refused to free themselves. She and some other activists once attempted to straighten women's feet by force, but they soon went back to their old ways. In her eyes, they were like parasites, sitting at home waiting for their husbands to work the fields. They only had themselves to blame.

It baffled her how women could fail to support the Revolution. They benefited most – unbound feet, abolition of arranged marriages, violence towards women outlawed, and more roles for them in general. Their very happiness depended on the survival of the Soviet. When the New Marriage Law came out, tens of thousands of women immediately asked for a divorce, remarried and then divorced again. The local officials were so swamped by the paper work, the Party had to pass a decree forbidding men and women from marrying more than three times, and they must live together for at least two months before they could register for divorce.

What surprised me was that Wang did not walk out of her own arranged marriage, as she had persuaded many other women to do. On the contrary, she promised her husband that she would fulfil her wifely duty if he signed up for the Red Army. He did so the very next day, and his happiness was doubled when he was allowed into her bed without having to wait for another two years and honour her mother's request. Why was that?

‘Why not? The Red Army needed all the manpower it could get,’ she said in all seriousness.

‘But you weren't happy with him,’ I said.

‘What's happiness got to do with it? When so many people were suffering, how could you be happy? I couldn't,’ she reminded me, before she went inside to make more tea – her daughter had gone to the market to get things for supper.

A thought did occur to me, fleetingly: did Wang sign her husband up because she knew that would be the surest way of getting rid of him? As we say, bullets are blind. I was wrong. When she returned with the tea and biscuits, Wang said that her husband died from tuberculosis while she was busy recruiting in Gangxi County. He was desperate to prove he was worthy of her affection, and he exerted himself as a scout for the Red Army. His last words were: ‘Without seeing her, I cannot even close my eyes in death.’

I was ashamed I had even contemplated such a thought. It would have been to misjudge Wang entirely. I could not think myself into the degree of dedication she had attained. For her, and many of her generation, personal happiness and physical desire did not count – they were submerged in the excitement she felt for the Revolution. Yes, she had another recruit, and would be praised for it. But her innermost feeling was devotion – to the people and ideals that promised to lift China out of the oppression she saw all around her, and had been subjected to herself. I remembered the slogans and exhortations that filled our school books: ‘Communism is higher than the sky. Sacrifice everything for it.’ For me, they were just slogans; for Wang, it was faith.

My respect for Wang increased later when I pieced together how much she was up against, from memoirs, interviews and government archives of the 1930s – when the Communist Party was still quite open about its strengths and weaknesses. At the time, it was not unusual for women to threaten their husbands with divorce if they signed up for the Red Army. Others went a step further. Ruijin had a hospital for disabled soldiers and it became a favourite haunt for women looking for husbands. Their reasoning was simple: at least their husbands would stay at home. If all else failed, and their husbands were called to the front, they would sleep with any available man. Local women's associations constantly reported to the centre about the problem of ‘women stealing men’. One of the reports read:

Many wives of the soldiers haven't heard from their men since they joined Mao's and Zhu's Army six years ago. Quite a few have asked for divorce, and if we do not grant it, they will make huge scenes and call us all sorts of names. Or they simply go ahead and sleep with other men and have illegitimate children. What is the most appropriate way to solve this problem?3

Wang would have preferred harsh measures – otherwise men would all want to stay at home. Much to her disappointment, the Party amended the Marriage Law: women could ask for a divorce if they did not hear from their husbands for three years, instead of six; and the children they bore in the meantime would be recognized as legitimate ‘because they are the masters of our new society’.

But in the recruitment drive in Shi Village, Wang decided to be tough. She told the old lady and her daughter-in-law to bring in their men from their hiding-places in the mountains – or else they would regret it. She left them in no doubt what the punishments were. ‘We will publicly shame you at the rally tonight. Then we will put posters on your doors, windows and gates, denouncing you as traitors and deserters. All the benefits you have received, food, blankets, clothes and oil, will be returned to the government. And your men will be forced to work on the Red Army soldiers’ land, or be sentenced to a year's hard labour. Please think carefully.’

The grandmother sat in the front row at that night's execution. After Party secretary Liu was shot in the head, the blood trickled towards her feet across the floor. Her legs were shaking like paddy husks, but she struggled to stand up and offered her two grandsons. Many followed, including two women who signed themselves up. Wang had more recruits than her quota. For the first time in many months, a genuine smile lit up her face.

I thought I recognized that smile when Wang recounted the final moment of the story, as if she was back in front of the crowds, encouraging, agitating and judging. There was no pity, no regret and no apology. The confidence that the truth was with her was unshakeable. The Revolution was supposed to be for the masses and they were treated like an inexhaustible mine from which the Party could dig everything they needed. It did not occur to them that the peasants could not bear any more burdens. If their support was crucial for the Revolution, as they were told all the time, perhaps their reluctance and even refusal was part of the reason why the Party and the Red Army had to abandon their base in Jiangxi and begin the Long March, to search for a new one. I doubted Wang ever thought this way. She simply did what the Party told her, and did it very well. As it was, she hardly had time to enjoy her success and report it to the Party, when an urgent message came from Ruijin on the evening of 15 October: ‘Important event. Return at once.’

She set off immediately with the messenger. It was good the moon was almost full, guiding her every step of the way, while she grappled with the mystery of why she had been called back so suddenly. Could it be her delay in meeting the deadline? She had not heard from her boss – it was as if she had been forgotten. She feared she might be thrown in prison, like her friend, or worse, executed.

‘If I had to die, better to die in battle, taking a few enemies with me. That would have been worth it.’ Now her mind was all on battles. Suddenly the thought came to her: was a big battle coming? From the early summer, apart from recruitment, she had taken part in another government campaign to borrow or appropriate grain from the peasants. The target was one million dan of rice – almost the entire autumn harvest in the Soviet. They got there in three months, using much the same methods as the recruitment drive.

At the same time, there was a call for funds: 800,000 silver dollars were issued as government bonds. Everyone must buy them, or donate money. She thought the women's department was very ingenious in asking women to donate their silver jewellery. Perhaps they were inspired by Mao, who noticed this custom in southern Jiangxi. ‘Every woman has silver hairpins and earrings, no matter how poor they are, and bracelets and rings, if they are not starving.’ Women's associations at every level organized task forces and propaganda teams to shame those ‘who are still wearing the symbols of feudalism and bourgeois decadence’. In the end, they collected 220,000 ounces of silver.4

And then, just before she was dispatched to Gangxi County, a memo went out to all counties for 200,000 pairs of extra thick straw sandals and 100,000 rice pouches, to be delivered to the Red Army before 10 October. To her amazement, there was not much resistance; perhaps the peasants would do anything rather than enlist. Some women had written rhymes on pieces of paper and put them inside the sandals; one of them read: ‘With this pair of sandals, you will travel 10,000 li. No matter how high the mountains, and how deep the rivers, you will never stop on the road to revolution.’

Perhaps a big battle was coming. Otherwise, why did the Red Army need so many soldiers, so many pairs of shoes, and so much money and grain, and all for October? ‘That is it,’ she clapped her hands, giving the messenger a fright. ‘As Father would say, “The fish will either be caught in the net or they'll break it and sink the boat.” ’

It was early morning, 16 October, when she arrived back in Ruijin. She went straight to see Liu Ying, the Head of the Youth Department, who had sent for her. ‘You were quick. I didn't think you'd be back tonight,’ Liu said, handing her a towel to wipe the sweat off her face. The sisterly concern in Liu's voice assured her that her worst fears were unfounded. All the same, she offered her apologies for missing the deadline. ‘Don't worry, we're in the same boat.’ Liu patted her on the head. She did not fill her own quota. She was summoned back three days ago to choose six staff to go on a major operation. ‘So, there is a big operation,’ Wang cried out with joy. ‘Whether you can take part or not all depends on the check-up tomorrow morning. Report to the General Hospital at nine o'clock.’

She was in for a shock when she reached the hospital. People were running about, dismantling and packing up heavy medical equipment, or loading medicine into panniers on their shoulders. The wounded were groaning on their beds with no one to see to them, or being carted off on stretchers or helped to hobble away. ‘Why are we breaking the place up?’ she wondered. Wang, and the other 100 girls waiting for their check-up, only added to the chaos by chattering nervously and giggling, like a flock of sparrows that could not stop chirping.

The doctors drew blood with a needle, listened to her chest down a tube with a cold metal disc at the end, hit her knees with a wooden hammer, and then asked her to lift a 20-kilo sack over her head. All the time, her heart was beating so fast she thought she might be ill, though she had never been sick in her life. What really scared her was the big machine which they said could see her insides. Its Chinese name was pronounced Ai-ke-si, which meant ‘If you go near it, you die.’ It was a great relief to come out in one piece, and be told that she was strong as a horse, and they would take her. She should go and get her provisions now and then report to the Cadres’ Battalion of the General Health Department of the Central Column in the afternoon. What was the Central Column? She had no idea, but she knew where to go.