IN THE LATER TWENTIES, A DECISIVE CHANGE OCCURRED in the way many observers viewed China. Before then, the China refracted in Western minds had been, in most cases, only loosely bonded in time. The spaciousness of the land was echoed by the endless recesses of its past, and even specific historical personages and events were set in the vaguest of chronological frames. Voltaire and O’Neill had needed merely a broadly conceived “Mongol” period as their backdrop. Pinto’s Ming dynasty was always a vague chimera, but Pereira, da Cruz, and Ricci were just as free from concern over current politics. Navarrete and Defoe referred in general terms to the Manchu conquest, as did Anson and Macartney, but the details did not matter to them. Nineteenth-century visitors and missionaries saw the Taiping insurgents and the Boxers as harbingers of menace and death, but rarely paused to inquire into the root causes of their rage. Pearl Buck had characters in Wang Lung’s family refer vaguely to the “war to the north of us” or “to the south of us now and nearer every day,” but the precise components or causes of war were unimportant to her story. Even when Wang Lung at last cuts off his long queue of braided hair, which to many revolutionaries had become a symbol of degraded servitude to Manchu rule, he does it to please the singing girl with whom he is infatuated, not out of political commitment or coercion. And though Segalen’s René Leys was structured loosely around the outbreak of the Chinese anti-Manchu revolution of 1911, it did not illuminate the causes of that revolution save in the most idiosyncratic ways that would deepen the sensual components of his plot.
Starting in the late twenties, observers fascinated by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia began to place China itself within a world revolutionary context, and to trace radical impulses inside China with a new kind of precision. The founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, the massive purging of their ranks in 1927 by the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communists’ subsequent near-miraculous survival in the remotest areas of the Chinese countryside, all drew these watchers into a new appreciation of China’s left-wing forces.
André Malraux was probably the first to bring these stirring events to the attention of a large, popular readership, with his book Man’s Fate (La condition humaine), published in 1933. Malraux, at first glance, would have seemed an unlikely purveyor of this new harsh political realism, since in his earliest work on China he appeared to be completely immersed in the worlds of Chinese exoticism as presented by Loti, Claudel, and Segalen. In The Temptation of the West (La tentation de l’occident), for instance, published in 1926, the twenty-five-year-old Malraux presented China in these terms:
Each spring the Tartar roses, white with purple hearts, cover the Mongolian steppes. There caravans pass; dirty merchants lead tall, shaggy camels, loaded down with round packages which burst open like pomegranates when the caravan halts. Then all the enchantment of this snowy kingdom—stones the color of clear sky or frozen stream, stones that glitter like ice, the pale plumage of gray birds, frost-colored furs, and silver-stamped turquoises—pours out into the merchants’ agile fingers. . . .1
Other images of China that came to him, in the early pages of his book, were those of a land of “opium and dreams,” of “older ghosts,” and “queens fastened to walls by rough arrows,” and one might have thought those would have been enough for him. But though The Temptation of the West is full of such elements, it also shows Malraux’s emerging views of China’s intellectual and social dissonances. In structure, The Temptation of the West is an epistolary novel, built around an exchange of letters between a young Frenchman traveling to China, referred to only as “A.D.,” and Ling, a young Chinese making his first trip to France. Yet though it is essentially plotless, even more so than Goldsmith’s epistolary Citizen of the World, it soon becomes clear that what drives the story forward are the criticisms that A.D. and Ling have for their own and each other’s societies.
As the novel advances, the political references become more pointed. The crux comes when A.D., having arrived in China, is drawn into a conversation with an old Chinese scholar and former political leader named Wang-Loh. Their meeting, appropriately enough for the new age that is dawning, is in the Astor Hotel in Shanghai, and Wang-Loh soon shows A.D. the contempt he feels both for China’s modern youth—“idiots intoxicated on university nonsense”—and for “the bloody comedians” who run the government. But Wang-Loh’s deepest sorrow and anger is for a world in which “with Confucianism in ruins . . . our spirit is gradually becoming empty.” Europe’s only contribution to China had been “in making them realize the senselessness of all thought.”2
Pondering sadly on the letter in which A.D. records this conversation, Ling responds from Paris that he is forced to agree with A.D.’s analysis. But Wang-Loh’s remarks provoke Ling into thinking more carefully about the revolutionary government of Sun Yat-sen in Canton, and the effects on China of the encroaching global culture. Ling writes to his friend:
The South and Central provinces are completely dependent on that strange government at Canton, which holds England in check and venerates the Sages while organizing its propaganda through the cinema; for what we have taken over from the West most rapidly are the forms of its existence. The cinema, electricity, mirrors, phonographs, all have seduced us like new breeds of domestic animals. For the people of the cities, Europe will forever be only a mechanized fairyland.3
And this thought leads Ling to reflections on the possible apocalypse to come:
Our miserable millions are conscious of injustice, not of justice; of suffering, not of happiness. Their disgust with their leaders only helps them understand what they have in common. I await with some curiosity the one who will come and cry to them that he demands vengeance, not justice. The power of a nation is greatly increased once it is based on the ethic of force. What then will be the acts of those who will accept the risk of death in the name of hate alone? A new China is being created which even we cannot understand. Will she be shaken by one of those great collective emotions which several times have convulsed her? More powerful than the chant of prophets, the deep voice of destruction is already heard in the most distant echoes of Asia. . . .4
In 1926 and 1927, the implications of Ling’s projections began to be worked out in real life. Sun Yat-sen, who had forged a united front between the young Chinese Communist Party and his own Nationalists, had died in 1925. His leadership role was taken over—not without bitter dissent—by his protégé Chiang Kai-shek, who in late 1926 led combined revolutionary forces north to reunify the country and purge it of warlords. While the Communist-dominated wing of his forces and their Comintern advisers from the Soviet Union established a governmental base in Hankou on the Yangzi River, Chiang Kai-shek concentrated his attentions on Shanghai. And there, in a murderous but coolly executed coup on April 12, 1927, Chiang’s troops in alliance with local secret society and criminal organizations—and with the acquiescence of the foreign powers who controlled the huge city’s prosperous international settlements—smashed the forces of the Communists and the labor unions.
In his novel Man’s Fate, published in 1933, Malraux set out to explore the emotional significance and moral impact of these events in detail. Though Malraux had never been to China, he had lived for some time in Southeast Asia—he had even been arrested by the French authorities earlier in the twenties for stealing and trying to sell Cambodian antiquities—and he had worked with Vietnamese nationalist and radical groups. So it was easy for him to foster the impression that he had personally been involved in the great revolutionary upheavals of China as well, an impression that he conveyed so skillfully that it took decades for readers to realize he had not been in China at all during that momentous time. In Man’s Fate, which concentrates on Chiang Kai-shek’s 1927 purge of the Shanghai Communist organization—a brief, earlier novel had dealt with the previous stage of the revolution in Canton—Malraux built up a meticulous documentation and chronology of this formative moment of China’s revolutionary struggle, and offered a narrative interpretation in terms of human integrity and commitment that endured until the Communist takeover of 1949, and even after.
The action of Malraux’s entire novel is focused on just six days in the spring of 1927—five of them in Shanghai, and one in Hankou. Each section of the novel is defined by the exact day and hour on which the events unfold, so that the ticking of the clock can always be heard amid the broader din of history. And each character in the novel is introduced at the beginning as if in the cast list of a play, the capsulized descriptions being almost all one needs to anticipate the structure of the plot:
CH’EN TA ERH, Chinese terrorist.
KYO GISORS, half French and half Japanese, one of the organizers of the Shanghai insurrection.
OLD GISORS, Kyo’s father, one-time professor of Sociology at the University of Peking.
MAY GISORS, Kyo’s wife.
BARON DE CLAPPIQUE, a Frenchman, a dealer in antiques, opium and smuggled wares.
KATOV, a Russian, one of the organizers of the insurrection.
FERRAL, President of the French Chamber of Commerce and head of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium.
VALÉRIE, Ferral’s mistress.
MARTIAL, Chief of the Shanghai Police.
KÖNIG, Chief of Chiang Kai-shek’s Police.5
From this list, one important point is immediately apparent: the only major Chinese character in the entire long novel is Ch’en, the Chinese terrorist. The others are all European, except for the half-Japanese Kyo. The revolution, in Malraux’s hands, is thus presented as the manipulation or suppression by Westerners of the raw materials of revolutionary potential. The police forces and the business elite are arrayed against the dedicated revolutionaries and their Comintern advisers, while Ch’en the terrorist exults in his newfound power and loss as a killer, even though it has ended by further removing him from his own people: “Ch’en no longer belonged to China . . . a complete liberty gave him over completely to his mind.” True to this change within him, it is with “an ecstatic joy” that Ch’en runs toward the advancing car and certain death in his attempt to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek.6
Ch’en has moved beyond the ordinary human world, but at least he has been given an identity. The other Chinese who fuel the revolution, by contrast, like those who try to barricade their headquarters against Chiang’s marauding forces, are described by Malraux with similes that place them more in the non-human world of impersonal motion, “formless in the fog, like fish in stirred water,” or “like a nest of insects . . . alive with an activity whose meaning was obscure but whose movement was clear.”7
Even Kyo, the totally committed revolutionary, as he prowled the streets of Shanghai seeking to organize the insurrection,
no longer walked in mud but on a map. The scratching of millions of small daily lives disappeared, crushed by another life. The concessions, the rich quarters, with their rain-washed gratings at the ends of the streets, existed now only as menaces, barriers, long prison walls without windows; these atrocious quarters, on the contrary—the ones in which the shock troops were the most numerous, were alive with the quivering of a multitude lying in wait.8
Ferral, the president of the French Chamber of Commerce, who has decided to throw in his lot with Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists, draws his images of the Chinese from the racing world that he knows so well:
As one racehorse outdistances another, head, neck, shoulders, the crowd was “closing in” on the car, slowly, steadily. Wheelbarrows with babies’ heads sticking out between bowls, Peking carts, rickshaws, small hairy horses, hand-carts, trucks loaded with sixty-odd people, monstrous mattresses piled with a whole household of furniture, bristling with table-legs, giants with cages of blackbirds dangling from the end of their arms which were stretched out to protect tiny women with a litter of children on their backs.9
The character in Man’s Fate who faces death with the greatest courage is Katov, the hardened Comintern revolutionary agent. Instead of racing toward his doom with a wild ecstasy, like Ch’en the terrorist, Katov goes methodically and sadly. His final and overwhelming act of grace has been to give up his own cyanide pills so that the two wounded Chinese comrades lying beside him—fellow members of his “pitiful fraternity”—can die in peace by their own hand and avoid the horrifying torture and execution that otherwise awaits them. This Western sacrifice for China was seen by Malraux as “the greatest gift” that Katov could make; and as Katov is taken off to his death—to be burned alive in the boiler of the armored train waiting in the sidings—the massed Chinese “followed the rhythm of his walk, with love, with dread, with resignation.”10
Malraux’s depiction of China’s anguish and of the Comintern agents’ courage seemed a convincing one to contemporary readers, but Bertolt Brecht for one knew that such depictions of revolutionaries were too simple, and that abstract definitions of the meaning of sacrifice were inadequate. Brecht was born in 1898, and thus was three years older than Malraux. These short three years made a major difference, for Brecht, a native of Bavaria, was just old enough to serve in World War I—on the German side—and though as a student of medicine he was assigned to a military hospital, he saw enough of the war and its consequences to be permanently marked by what he perceived as the follies and hypocrisies of bourgeois societies. His socialism was a curious mixture of the didactic and the personal, not surprising in a man whose own beliefs were influenced not only by Marxism but also by the French poet François Villon of the fifteenth century, and by the Dadaists of his own day. Having completed The Threepenny Opera in 1928, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony in 1930, that same year Brecht completed a dramatic reflection he had been writing on the impact of the Comintern on the Chinese Revolution. The result was the experimental didactic play The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme), first performed in Berlin on December 13, 1930.
Brecht centered his play not on Canton or Shanghai—the focus of Malraux’s Chinese novels, and indeed to most Westerners the focal points of the Chinese Revolution—but on the northern Chinese city of Mukden. He depicted the city as ripe for revolution: even though the reactionaries’ gunboats were patrolling the rivers and their “armored trains on the railway embankments,” there was a swelling tide of discontent in the factories of Mukden. Textile workers went out on strike; the coolies groaned as they skidded in the riverside mud, hauling the heavy grain barges to the city; the wealthy merchants were willing to form a United Front with the workers against the hated foreign imperialists; there were hunger riots among the unemployed. Four agitators—three men and one woman—are dispatched from Moscow to foment revolution in Mukden: to prevent any chance that the gunboats and armored trains might be turned against the Soviet Union, they must not reveal that they have been sent from Moscow. Accordingly, the four are ordered by their control to don masks that will hide their identity. As they prepare to cross over the border into China, their control tells them: “From this moment on, and in all probability until your disappearance, you are unknown workers, fighters. Chinamen, born of Chinese mothers, yellow-skinned, who in sleep and in delirium speak only Chinese.”11
The four are joined by a party member from the frontier station, also masked, who has been chosen as their guide and whom they call “the young comrade.” On the stage, the agitators give a summary of their journey with the young comrade:
We proceeded towards Mukden as Chinamen—four men and a woman—for propaganda purposes and to aid the Chinese Party with the teachings of the Classics and the Propagandists, the ABC of Communism. To bring to the ignorant instruction concerning their condition; to the oppressed, class-consciousness; and to the class-conscious, practical knowledge of the revolution.12
And the chorus echoes approvingly:
He who fights for Communism
Must be able to fight and not
fight
Must tell the truth and not tell
the truth
Render service and not render
service
Place himself in danger and
avoid danger
Be recognizable and be unrecognizable.
He who fights for Communism
has of all virtues only one:
That he fights for Communism.13
The more professional the four Moscow agitators are, the more the young comrade assigned to guide them disobeys their orders and acts on the basis of his own emotions, ravaged by the sufferings he sees. In the eyes of the four agitators he has begun to show a dangerous weakness, he has become “a prey to pity.” The four work swiftly in Mukden to set up party schools, found party cells in the factories, train activists in the city to serve as cadres, and instruct them how to make and distribute party literature. They give lessons to the workers on street combat, conceal typesetting machines in secret rooms, and even woo a wealthy merchant who has “a large following among youth assemblies” and thus could help greatly in “uniting the Party network in the face of capitalist guns.”14
But because of his emotional responses, the young comrade constantly undercuts the four agitators’ work: instead of working methodically and secretly to build a strong revolutionary base, he urges assaults on the local army barracks, the seizing of factories, and an uprising of the unemployed. His precipitate actions split the workers into conflicting camps, and draw the attention of the authorities to the agitators. In his mind, the suffering of the poor is so unendurable that urging restraint on them is a monstrous absurdity, and teaching them revolutionary practice is a waste of time. For the workers already know all there is to know, he cries:
They know: that misfortune doesn’t grow on the breast like leprosy; that poverty doesn’t fall like tiles from the roof; but that misfortune and poverty are the work of Man. Want is cooked in the pots on their stoves, and misery is their only food.15
The four experienced agitators rebuke the young comrade sharply, until finally in rage and frustration he tears to shreds the Communist writings they have given him to distribute. He pulls off the mask that hides his identity, and shouts to the assembled crowds of the miserable that he has come to help them. In somber terms, the four agitators report the sequel to their control:
We watched him, and in the twilight
We saw his naked face
Human, innocent, and without
guile. He had
Torn the mask to bits.
And from their houses came the
Cries of the exploited: “who
Disturbs the sleep of the poor?”
And from an open window a voice
cried:
“There are foreigners out
there! Chase the agitators!”
And so we were discovered!
And at that moment we heard
of riots
In the lower part of the city, and the ignorant waited in the
Assembly houses and the unarmed thronged the streets.
And we struck him down
Raised him up and left the city in haste.16
Once the four agitators have hustled their young comrade out of the city, just ahead of their vengeful pursuers, they shoot him and throw him into a lime pit, so his face will be burned bare of any traces of individuality that might betray them all. “Your work was successful,” their control tells them at the end of their report:
You have propagated
The teachings of the classics
The ABC of Communism
Instructions to the ignorant concerning their condition
Class-consciousness to the oppressed
And to the class-conscious, practical knowledge of the revolution.
And the revolution marches on there too
And there, too, the ranks of fighters are well organized.
We agree with you.
And yet your report shows us what is
Needed to change the world:
anger and tenacity, knowledge and indignation
Swift action, utmost deliberation
Cold endurance, unending perseverance
Comprehension of the individual and comprehension of the
whole:
Taught only by reality can
Reality be changed.17
In a bizarre literalizing of Brecht’s revolutionary drama, six months after the play opened in Berlin, a group of Japanese Army officers in Mukden fabricated a charge of “aggression” by the Chinese troops, and used this excuse to launch major reprisal raids and finally to extend Japanese control over much of the huge, industrially rich region. The Chinese Communists, in the meantime, had been driven out of Shanghai, Hankou, and their other main urban bases, and forced to take shelter in guerrilla bases scattered in the poor mountainous areas of southern-central China. The growth of Japanese power put immense pressures on Chiang Kai-shek, who responded by deciding to purge his country of the Communists first, and to turn against Japan second. Launching assault after assault against the Red base areas, he finally forced the Communist forces to retreat to the north in the autumn of 1934, on the vast and protracted “Long March” that led them at last, with vastly depleted numbers, to a new base in the area around Yan’an, just south of the great bend of the Yellow River. This region was impoverished but had excellent natural defenses, and here the newly emergent leader of the Chinese Communist Party, the Hunan-born peasant Mao Zedong, was able to consolidate his forces, out of the reach of Chiang’s armies, sheltered from the Japanese, and largely incommunicado with the Comintern or the Soviet Union.
The Kansas-born Edgar Snow was a witness to many of these events. Born in 1905 to a family of farmers and printers, Snow had ridden the rails to California, passed through journalism school in Missouri, and lived and worked briefly in New York, before he decided in 1928 to head out to China and try his luck. China had not been a self-conscious choice of destination for him; it was just part of the wild restlessness he felt, “the song of cities” beating in his brain, he told his parents before his departure.18 Though Snow missed the great anti-Communist purges of 1927, he was in Shanghai in 1928, and interviewed many of the Nationalist leaders responsible, as well as some of the opposition. He saw the famines in China in 1931, the effects of the Japanese fighting on the Chinese-Manchurian border later that year, and the Japanese invasion of Shanghai that took place in 1932, a nightmare of violence followed by an uneasy peace settlement that left little doubt that full-scale war must come before too long.
Drawn steadily to sympathy with the leftists in China, Snow was present at the huge 1935 student demonstration in Beiping (as Peking had been called since 1927 when Chiang made Nanjing his capital), and was to learn later that members of the Chinese Communist Party had even used his house for their secret meetings without his knowledge.19 In the summer of 1936, when Mao and his troops had completed the Long March but had not yet completed their final move to Yan’an, Snow was invited to pay a visit to the Communist base area. He accepted at once, despite the dangers, and arrived in July.
Everything about Snow’s experiences in China, and perhaps in his earlier life as well, predisposed him to be a favorable observer of radical ventures in social organization, and that is almost certainly why the invitation was conveyed to him, and why the Communists guided him so considerately through the invading Nationalist forces. Snow did not have Brecht’s knowledge of the Communist Party and its tactics, nor did he have Brecht’s clearheaded political realism. At one stage in The Measures Taken, the young comrade had cried out in frustration, “who is the Party?” and the professional agitators reply:
We are the Party.
you and I and he—all of us.
It is hidden in your clothes, it thinks in your head
Where I live is its home, and where you are attacked it fights.
The Control Chorus added an additional gloss: “It is the vanguard of the masses \ And it lays out its battles \ According to the methods of our classics, which are derived from \ The recognition of reality.”20
Though Snow would not have shared such a view, the Communist leader Mao Zedong was outstandingly shrewd in just this pragmatic “recognition of reality,” and his rise to power had come from his constant adaption of tactics and ideology to circumstances. Mao was especially skilled at drawing on peasant forces to supplement or even replace the urban workers when it was obvious that the major cities were to be denied as bases for the Communists, perhaps for decades. Snow’s portrayal of Mao and his supporters, published in 1937 as Red Star Over China, became a bestseller in both England and the United States, where it sold more than any previous non-fiction book on China, missing selection as the Book-of-the-Month Club main choice by a single vote.21
As Pearl Buck’s book awakened a generation of American readers to the tribulations of Chinese peasant life, so did Snow’s account introduce them to the new forces of Chinese radicalism. Snow—oblivious to any coercive or manipulative sides to party mobilization—was particularly drawn to the manifestations of what he saw as Chinese revolutionary spontaneity. As he wrote of the first Red Army troops with whom he traveled:
Though tragedy had touched the lives of nearly all of them, they were perhaps too young for it to have depressed them much. They seemed to me fairly happy, and perhaps the first consciously happy group of Chinese proletarians I had seen. Passive contentment is the common phenomenon in China, but the higher emotion of happiness, which implies a feeling of positiveness about existence, is rare indeed.
They sang nearly all day on the road, and their supply of songs was endless. Their singing was not done at a command, but was spontaneous, and they sang well. Whenever the spirit moved him, or he thought of an appropriate song, one of them would suddenly burst forth, and commanders and men joined in. They sang at night, too, and learned new fold-tunes from the peasants, who brought out their Shensi guitars.22
The troops not only sang with joyful abandon; they seemed to Snow to have an intuitive respect for property and an inherent code of discipline:
What discipline they had seemed almost entirely self-imposed. When we passed wild apricot trees on the hills there was an abrupt dispersal until everyone had filled his pockets, and somebody always brought me back a handful. Then, leaving the trees looking as if a great wind had struck through them, they moved back into order and quick-timed to make up for the loss. But, when we passed private orchards, nobody touched the fruit in them, and the grain and vegetables we consumed in the villages were paid for in full.23
Snow’s book became the first source in the world to give a detailed appraisal of Mao, and the nature of that appraisal was to have great influence in shaping the image of the Communist leader in the West:
I met Mao soon after my arrival: a gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure, above average height for a Chinese, somewhat stooped, with a head of thick black hair grown very long, and with large, searching eyes, a high-bridged nose and prominent cheekbones. My fleeting impression was of an intellectual face of great shrewdness, but I had no opportunity to verify this for several days. Next time I saw him, Mao was walking hatless along the street at dusk, talking with two young peasants, and gesticulating earnestly. I did not recognize him until he was pointed out to me—moving along unconcernedly with the rest of the strollers, despite the $250,000 which Nanking had hung over his head.24
Even when Snow appeared to be modifying his own praise, the general effect was often to strengthen it:
Do not suppose, first of all, that Mao Tse-tung could be the “saviour” of China. Nonsense. There will never be any one “saviour” of China. Yet undeniably you feel a certain force of destiny in him. It is nothing quick or flashy, but a kind of solid elemental vitality. You feel that whatever there is extraordinary in this man grows out of the uncanny degree to which he synthesizes and expresses the urgent demands of millions of Chinese, and especially the peasantry—those impoverished, underfed, exploited, illiterate, but kind, generous, courageous and just now rather rebellious human beings who are the vast majority of the Chinese people.25
Snow was especially effective in presenting Mao as likable and simple, despite his “native shrewdness” and his wide-ranging scholarship. Mao lived in a simple two-room cave dwelling, carved out of the soft loess soil of North China, just as the local villagers did. As to possessions, Mao apparently had only two cotton uniforms, a mosquito net, and a few books to his name. This reinforced Snow’s sense of Mao’s revolutionary integrity:
Mao seemed to me a very interesting and complex man. He had the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant, with a lively sense of humour and a love of rustic laughter. His laughter was even active on the subject of himself and the shortcomings of the Soviets—a boyish sort of laughter which never in the least shook his inner faith in his purpose. He is plain-speaking and plain-living, and some people might think him rather coarse and vulgar. Yet he combines curious qualities of naïveté with the most incisive wit and worldly sophistication.26
The long series of interviews that Mao gave to Snow on his upbringing, education, and revolutionary experience remain a staple source on Mao for all scholars and historians since that time, even though their content and twist were fully orchestrated by Mao himself. Snow’s conclusion that the Red base area economic structures “might more accurately be called rural equalitarianism than anything Marx would have found acceptable as a model child of his own” perfectly reflected the Communists’ current wishes to court liberal allies, who would have been repelled had they known about the more extremist measures taken.27 As if laying to rest centuries of negative perceptions of China, Snow reported that in the Red areas, beggars were no more, footbinding was banished, infanticide ended, and multiple consorts for men a thing of the past.28
At one stage, Snow had a lengthy interview with the Red Army general Peng Dehuai, who reinforced the contrast with the Nationalist Guomindang by recalling the days of 1928 when the Nationalists practiced scorched-earth policies in areas of the countryside where the Communists were entrenched, destroying all the peasants’ homes and crops in order to drive the Communists out. Peng reported that the tactic failed because the peasants had buried supplies of grain to hide them from the Nationalist tax collectors, and also shared supplies of potatoes and wild roots with the Red troops.29 Such a view of the Nationalist Party’s clumsy authoritarianism found ready responses among foreign observers, especially those who traveled to Chongqing, deep up the Yangzi River in Sichuan province, which Chiang Kai-shek had named the national capital, after the all-out Japanese assault of summer 1937 had precipitated China into a major war.
One of the most articulate of these observers was the American writer Graham Peck. On an earlier visit to China in the 1930s, wrote Peck, he had “sometimes suspected that everyone I watched was obscurely engaged in an enormous practical joke.”30 Now that he had time to examine the life of Chongqing in the early 1940s, he had grown confirmed in that suspicion. Not only was the city itself “a semi-modern, semi-ruined capital crammed up on cliffs,” clearly “a sort of practical joke,”31 but the city’s Chinese residents were obviously in on some secret that eluded the Westerners. For instance, both the rickshaw pullers and their passengers gave a perfect illustration of this as they made their ways through the city’s narrow and tortuously winding streets:
The rickshaws threading through these tangles had been designed for level country. Going uphill on steep grades, the pullers had to bend so far forward that their faces nearly touched the road. They crept upwards at much less than a walking pace but their fares stayed sitting in the carts, lolling contentedly as they smiled that smile. Going downhill, the rickshaw men would balance deep between their shafts, tipping their carts so steeply backward that there was danger of the sitters’ landing in the road on their scalps. Then the pullers would speed alarmingly down the slope, their wide-swinging feet touching the ground only now and then. They smiled at their passengers’ screams.32
The Nationalist troops may not have sung like Snow’s, and their laughter might not be as “boyish” as Mao’s, but they too had their place in the same secret world:
After a while a line of shabby soldiers in gray cotton uniforms and straw sandals came slogging up the hill, technically in double-time, but really mocking the quick step. For all their jogging up and down, they moved forward less rapidly than the burdened housewives. Like soldiers all over China, they were chanting numbers to keep in pace: “One, two, three . . . (step, step, step) . . . four!” When their officer screamed at them to hurry it up, they began chanting faster and faster, out of time, while their feet pounded the road as slowly as ever. They all wore that smile.33
Using this and many other examples, Peck suggested his own version for interpreting China’s predicaments: “The Chinese laughed so much in their touching and annoying way because they sensed they were always victims of forces they could not control.”34 Peck used his metaphor to chip away at the admiring portrayals of Chiang Kai-shek that often circulated in the West, and at the “New Life Movement” which Chiang presented as the heart of his moral reforms—and his ideological alternative to the Communists. This New Life Movement, to Peck, taught the Chinese to have a childlike pattern of dependency on Chiang Kai-shek as the ruler-father, and it was always Chiang’s wealthiest supporters who spoke up most strongly for the reinstitution of Confucian values. “Thus, Chiang’s subjects were children whose parent was always lecturing them on how to improve their lot by being moral and refined, while he indulged in questionable, perhaps criminal, and certainly self-destructive behavior. Many Chinese acted as if they understood this. They naturally wore secret smiles.”35
In Graham Peck’s view, such secret smiles had become the only viable responses to the incessant suffering of the times. In a world in which the revolutionary heroics depicted by Malraux, the revolutionary discipline projected by Brecht, and the revolutionary purity offered by Snow, all seemed to be wearing thin, perhaps the only way back to sanity was by induction into a world of cosmic hilarity.