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8

Across Mountain and Grassland: a Witness to the Long March

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Mr and Mrs Changzheng, in PLA uniform, in their wedding photo, 1947.

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Renewal of their wedding vows, 1997.

MR CHANGZHENG, born in 1916, a witness to the Long March, interviewed in Beijing, capital of China. Mr Changzheng joined the Red Army when he was a teenager, set off on the Long March in 1934 and lost many of his comrades along the way. He describesthe hunger and hardship, and how they crossed the Snow Mountains and walked through the "marshes of death". He cannot understand the new generation questioning the Long March. He and his wife have been married for almost sixty years and have five children; one of their grandchildren is in England.

2006 was the seventieth anniversary of the Long March of the Chinese Peasants and Workers Red Army, and once again the question of whether the Long March really happened became a matter of fierce debate.

I was born into a military family – both my parents spent their lives in the army. Stories about the Long March surrounded me, from the family histories of the senior officers on my father's side, to the stories of my childhood schoolfriends' parents and grandparents, to the history books in my classroom. Then there was the obligatory Long March Memorial Day every five years. It never occurred to me to doubt the existence of the Long March just as I never doubted records of my own life's milestones. However, when, in my early twenties, I began to search for my own identity and to trace our national identity through history, I got differing accounts of the same events – even the people involved, and the places and dates on which they occurred. Faced with these confusing "re-recordings" of history, I began to investigate the truth or falsehood of what I had believed.

The most interesting doubts I have heard concern the following three questions:

1. Was the Long March really 25,000 li*9 long?

2. What was Mao Zedong's involvement in the Long March?

3. Was the "Long March to resist Japan in north China" a policy of the Chinese Communist Party at that time?

1. Was the Long March really 25,000 li long?

Having visited a number of Red Army fighters and Party historians of the older generation, and the new generation of researchers into Chinese history, I heard differing views expressed.

Most of the witnesses I interviewed believed that it was 25,000 li long, or even more. Old army chiefs said that they had marched back and forth, and made a number of long detours. After leaving the Central Soviet Area*10 in Jiangxi, no one knew where to go. It was not like the way things are currently presented, with leaders, plans and directions. In October 1933, the Guomindang (GMD) mobilised nearly a million troops to attack each of the rural base areas held by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and another half-million to carry out a key attack against the Central Soviet Area. CCP chief Bo Gu (real name Qin Bangxian) decided to adopt the proposal of Li De (the German Otto Braun, a military adviser sent by the Comintern)†2 and make this into a decisive struggle between the GMD and the CCP. They decided on a pre-emptive strike against the GMD and committed the entire Red Army to a full onslaught. But there were only around 100,000 regulars in the Central Soviet Area together with a few tens of thousands of guerrilla troops, and these were comprehensively routed soon after the attack began. On 10 October 1934, as the Long March was about to begin, the Central Red Army was by no means clear about its destination, and even after they had left, most of the troops were none the wiser. They simply set off in blind flight.

Soldiers who had participated told me: "We zigzagged back and forth along many different routes and constantly backtracked. We did this to confuse the enemy, so that they would not guess our route, especially in January 1935, after the Red Army had captured Zunyi [in the south] and the CCP Central Committee had called the Enlarged Politburo Conference." The Zunyi Conference stripped Bo Gu and Li De of their leadership powers and resolved that Zhang Wentian would take over from Bo Gu his responsibility for Party and political affairs, and Zhou Enlai would become military commander, with Mao Zedong as second in command. (Shortly thereafter, the military triumvirate of Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong and Wang Jiaxiang was formed.) From then on, Red Army troops used outflanking tactics on their march westward, many of them crossing the Chishui River four times and the Daxue Mountains two or three times. In October 1935, the Central Red Army, making its way north alone, arrived at the town of Wuqi Zhen, now called Wuqi county, in Shaanxi province. It was the first to complete the Long March. The Second Front Army, formed at a later stage of the Long March in 1935, made a journey of nearly 20,000 li, joining up in 1936 with the First and Fourth Front Armies at Jiangtai Fort in Jingning county, Gansu (now Ningxia) province. Subsequently, Zhang Guotao, who opposed the Central Committee's "Northward Route", led the Fourth Front Army southward at the end of 1936, renaming it the West Route Army. Zhang Guotao imagined he could break through to the Soviet Union but in the course of a long and arduous trek, suffered disastrous losses at the hands of local warlord Ma Bufang's Hui Muslim troops. They dared not stop to rest, and many died of exhaustion. Eventually the entire army was annihilated, and there were only 436 survivors.

Long March scholars say that it is entirely possible that the total distance was 25,000 li. Their reasons include the fact that the People's Liberation Army was not simply formed of the Red Army, the Eighth Route Army and the new Fourth Army, but was formed out of an amalgamation of diverse local and national minority armies and remnants of the GMD who surrendered and came over to the other side. So, they argue, the concept of the Long March should not be taken as limited to the route taken by the three main Red Army forces: the Central Red Army, that is the First Front Army; the Second Front Army, formed of the Second and Sixth Red Army Corps combined; and the Fourth Red Army on its own (there was at that time no Third Army). Instead, the concept and the distance of the Long March should also cover all subsidiary marches made, by the 25th Army and the Fifth and Sixth Red Army Corps and other troops.

2. What was Mao Zedong's involvement in the Long March?

I was very young at the time of the Cultural Revolution, but I remember seeing an old academic standing on a platform being "struggled against" and nearly beaten to death by Red Guards for spreading the "vile rumour" that the Long March had not been led by Mao Zedong. I don't know if the professor escaped with his life, but his "crime" often recurred in my thoughts. Why would he dare to say that the glorious achievement of the Long March had not been led by Mao Zedong? During my years as a reporter in search of the real China, this question came into ever sharper focus as I discovered more. Academics and others had been denounced by Red Guards for questioning what were almost accepted as "unalterable" historical facts, for example that Mao Zedong had led the Long March. However, if what that professor said was true, then what was Mao Zedong's involvement in the Long March? In recent years, memoirs, released by China's "opening up" reforms, have appeared which shed fresh light.

Mao Zedong's bodyguard at that time was Wu Jiqing. In 1983, Jiangxi People's Press published his memoirs, At Mao Zedong's Side, in which he recalls not being able to commandeer supplies when the Long March set off because Mao Zedong's name did not appear on the Central Committee's list of columns or formations. Wu Xiuquan, Li De's Russian interpreter, in his Story of my Life, published by PLA Press in 1984, writes: "At the beginning, they planned to leave Mao Zedong behind, and had actually expelled him from the core leadership of the Central Committee and sent him off to do investigative work."

Another bodyguard, Chen Changfeng, in his With Chairman Mao on the Long March (PLA Literature and Arts Press, 1986), records: "From the Gannan Conference of 1931 to the start of the Long March in October 1934, Mao Zedong was in a very difficult position. Even though he was Chair of the Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic, he was in very adverse circumstances, subject to continuous criticism and unjust treatment. He made many proposals which proved correct and effective, but which were condemned as 'ultra-empiricist', 'taking the rich peasant line', 'conservative retreating' and 'right-wing opportunism'. Within a short time, he was even stripped of his job."

However, from the 1993 Memoirs of Kang Keqing comes the following extract: "He [Zhu De] paced the room, and then came over to say to me in a low voice: 'They've now decided to let Mao Zedong come. Our only hope is to have him with us.' I asked about Chen Yi, and he shook his head: 'It's already been decided that he should stay in the Soviet Area to carry on the struggle, and that decision can't be changed.'"

Finally, while conducting these interviews in China, I heard this report: "Xinhua Network, Nanchang, 8 August 2006. Chinese Communist Party historians have now publicly confirmed the following: the first list of Long March participants did not include Mao Zedong's name. When key decisions were taken in September 1934 about which cadres should go and which should stay, Bo Gu and Li De, who were the decision-makers, were at first against allowing Mao Zedong to set off with the Central Committee and the main forces of the Red Army, and in the middle of September dispatched Mao to do investigative work. On the eve of the Long March, whether Mao should stay or go was not merely a matter of his individual safety, but was also connected to the fate of the CCP and the Red Army. Mao Zedong only joined the Long March after Zhou Enlai had argued strongly in his favour, and succeeded in persuading Bo Gu and Li De."

3. Was the "Long March to resist Japan in north China" a policy of the Chinese Communist Party at that time?

That the "Long March to resist Japan in north China" was a Chinese Communist Party policy became an immutable tenet both of my school books and of media propaganda, and in fact was a source of national pride to generations of young Communist Party members. However, I later realised that where "north China" was concerned there was a difference between northeast and north-west, and the Japanese came south from the north-east, while the Long March of 1934–6 went to Shaanxi province in the north-west.

On the night of 7 July 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugouqiao) incident occurred just south-west of Beijing. All-out war broke out as Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. On 17 July, Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Guomindang's military committee, issued the Lushan Declaration: "Once war breaks out, every person, young or old, in the north or in the south, must take up the responsibility of resisting Japan and defending our homeland." On 12 December 1937, 50,000 Japanese troops entered Nanjing, capital of the eastern province of Jiangsu, the then headquarters of GMD resistance against Japan, and began the week-long Great Massacre in which around 300,000 Nanjing troops and civilians were killed. It took until the spring of 1938 for the Japanese Army to advance to the western part of Shanxi province, and by the end of that year they had reached the riverbank opposite northern Shaanxi, the neighbouring province, although they could not muster the strength to cross the Yellow River.

Looked at from another angle, the aim of the "Long March to resist Japan in north China" was to allow CCP members to rest and recoup their strength, and provided a reliably safe and self-sufficient base area in the north-west for the armed resistance against Japan which came later. This, I believe, was one of the reasons why, in the years after 1940, the CCP was able gradually to become the main force in China resisting Japan.

In 1940, the Eighth Route Army under General Peng Dehuai launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive against 40,000 Japanese and their puppet troops, resulting in losses for the Japanese of over 20,000; in 1941, the GMD's General Xue Yue, who had already inflicted heavy losses on the Red Army, annihilated 50,000 Japanese in the Third Changsha Campaign. These victories boosted the morale of the Chinese in their struggle against the Japanese invaders, and there was a gradual increase in strength of other forces not under direct control of either the CCP or the GMD, for instance the Mongolian Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Forces.

Nonetheless, Mao Zedong was most unhappy with Peng Dehuai's Hundred Regiments Offensive because, as a result, the Japanese invaders turned their attentions to the rear, where hitherto they had been militarily weak – that part of north China controlled by the CCP. The Japanese countered the CCP forces' guerrilla tactics, cutting the latter off from local militia, by means of the old imperial Neighbourhood Administrative System, tightening local government controls over the population. In order to restrict Eighth Route Army activity, they established areas of no-man's-land and adopted a triple scorched-earth policy of "Kill All, Burn All and Loot All". The result was a massacre of soldiers and civilians alike in north China. The Eighth Route Army suffered severe losses; the commander of its HQ, Zuo Quan, lost his life, while Deputy Chief of Staff Peng Dehuai made a daring breakout of the encirclement and the Eighth Route Army was forced to withdraw from north China.

Different factions may rehash the motives for the Long March for their own political ends, but its results are not in dispute: in the process of the Long March and all the benefits which resulted from it, the CCP acquired a newly formed self-confidence, put its organisation on a firm footing and had the time to train up regular army units. All the People's Republic of China's main leaders, like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping, were on the Long March, as were nine of the army's ten field marshals, the exception being Chen Yi.

During the two years of the Long March, various forces that make up the Red Army fought their way through fourteen provinces, and covered a total distance of around 25,000 li. They crossed a number of remote regions inhabited by national minorities as well as Han Chinese, and faced natural hazards such as great rivers, snow-capped mountains and grasslands, they also evaded encirclement by hundreds of thousands of GMD and local armies, and succeeded in avoiding splits caused by the struggles between the Mao and Bo Gu factions, and between the First Front Army and Zhang Guotao. Out of it a new nucleus of CCP leaders, with Mao Zedong at their head, was gradually formed.

In August 1980, Deng Xiaoping said in an interview with the Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci: "The Zunyi Conference of 1935, called during the famous Long March, established the leadership position of Comrade Mao Zedong within the Party and the army. This marked the formation of the first real leadership of the CCP. Previous leadership structures had been both immature and unstable."

And when Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Maomao, asked her father what the Long March had been like, he replied: "We kept marching!" I believe that this is the instinctive, most truthful and commonest view of the Long March.

One of my ambitions was to find a Red Army survivor of the Long March who had "gone the distance". I was looking for someone who had done it on foot, not a general who had ridden the route on horseback. This was no easy task – of the tens of thousands who had taken part, few were still alive, while even fewer had done the whole march.

I was very lucky. Yan, a Chinese girl studying in the UK, came to see me asking for my help in drawing up a bibliography on Chinese history and culture for her dissertation. When she heard me talk about China Witness, and say that I was looking for an old soldier who had done the entire Long March, she asked, quite forcefully, that I go and interview her ninety-year-old maternal grandfather, who had done just that. "I want people to know what my grandfather contributed and what he went through," she said. "Some people think he's just a political stooge, who gives patriotic lectures for the Party, but I know that he does it because he really believes in it. At the beginning, so many Long Marchers deserted from the Red Army, but he wasn't like that, he marched on to the end." Not wanting to let this young woman down, we pencilled him in as a possible interviewee.

On 2 September 2006, we visited Yan's grandfather in Beijing. I chatted to the old man and his wife, and then their two daughters, the eldest one Yan's mother. Mr Changzheng was an imposing figure, with a round face and rosy cheeks. He talked volubly and punctured our interview with bursts of laughter and occasional renderings of snatches of revolutionary songs from his youth. No wonder people say that music is one of the repositories of memory.

I had not had enough time to do background research on the old soldier, and so I started by putting the safest and commonest Chinese question.

*

XINRAN: Have you eaten?

CHANGZHENG: Yes, I have.

XINRAN: What did you have to eat today?

CHANGZHENG: I had noodles – Beijing noodles with minced pork and bean sauce.

XINRAN: What is your favourite food?

CHANGZHENG: I eat anything.

XINRAN: So what was your favourite food as a child?

CHANGZHENG: As a child? I am from the north of Sichuan province. When I was a child, we were poor, and I didn't get a lot to eat.

XINRAN: Could you tell me how old you are, sir?

CHANGZHENG: On 10 November this year, I'll be ninety-one years old. I was born in 1916, in the mountains of northern Sichuan.

XINRAN: Did you go to school?

CHANGZHENG: When I was in Sichuan I did. I got a year and a half of primary school. My school was far from my home and the teacher was very strict. If you didn't have your satchel on straight, he hit you on the back of the hand. If you didn't know your characters, he hit you on the back of the hand. If you were disruptive, you had to go up to the teacher, stick out your backside and he would give you a hiding. I was terrified, and after a year and a half of this, I ran away home and never went back. At home, I used to cut the grass and collect firewood. When I was thirteen, the Red Army came to my village. The head of a Red Army Propaganda Unit, from Henan, came to the house and tried to recruit me. But I didn't know anything about the Red Army. I knew that the GMD swore at you and knocked you about, but I didn't know what the Red Army were like, so I couldn't make up my mind. He came three times, and after the third time, he took me to the local town to have a look. The Red Army had a company of machine-gunners, they showed me the machine guns, and then they gave me a bowl of rice, with meat too. In the north of Sichuan, we only ate meat at the Chinese New Year.

I went home and told my mother, "They're not bad, the Red Army, I saw their machine guns, they have rice to eat, and meat too, I'd like to join up." My mother didn't stop me so at the age of thirteen, I joined the Red Army, and went away with them.

XINRAN: How many were there in your family then?

CHANGZHENG: My older sister, my younger brother, my younger sister and me, that made four.

XINRAN: You said your family was poor. Just how poor were they?

CHANGZHENG: We didn't have enough food. All we thought about every day was eating, and it was because we could never eat our fill that I told my mother I wanted to join the Red Army. They had food, and so my mother agreed.

When I first joined up – that was 1929 – they didn't make me fight, and so I didn't. When I was fifteen, I started fighting. The head of the Propaganda Unit had said: "Your schoolmates and the friends you play with, you can get them to join up too." So I started talking to them about it, and in the end a new company was set up from our village. When I first started fighting, I didn't have a gun, or any real weapon at all. So we made sticks into martial arts spears, by tying big knives onto the end. When we went into battle that time, we were two Red Army companies, and the GMD had one battalion. In we charged, killed and killed, and wiped out the whole battalion. That was my first battle.

XINRAN: Were you afraid? Afraid of the blood, getting wounded, of death?

CHANGZHENG: No, I wasn't afraid. I was a brave lad, and besides, there were lots of us, not just one or two, so I wasn't afraid. After that battle, they issued us with a gun each. Then we started fighting all over the place. We criss-crossed Sichuan, back and forth, slaughtering the enemy at our gates. Then we went to Jiuzhaigou. We were billeted with the local peasants, and I began to run a high fever. Then the GMD bombers came, and the cottage I was in took a direct hit. It gave me such a fright that the malaria left me, and I was well again!

XINRAN: When did you join the Long March?

CHANGZHENG: In 1934, I set off from my home.

XINRAN: Did you cross the Luding Bridge [on the Dadu River in Sichuan province] while you were on the Long March?

CHANGZHENG: Of course I did. I was carrying a big trunk on my shoulder as we marched, so crossing the bridge was really difficult. It had no guard rails, so I found walking across it really hard. I could see some of the people in front were going to fall, and I wanted to go and help them, but my chief wouldn't let me. He told us on no account to start running or it would be chaos and many more people would fall in. Some of my mates fell in, it was really sad.

We couldn't travel by day, only by night. Once we heard that two generals and their troops had dropped behind. The two generals were the only survivors of an attack. They went up a mountain, and found a temple, and one knelt on the ground by the temple wall and supported the other on his shoulders. Then the one on the top pulled the bottom one up, and the two generals hid behind the big Bodhisattva on the temple wall. When the worshippers had finished burning their incense and gone, they used the incense fire to keep warm. They were smart, they caught up with the rest of the unit after that.

XINRAN: Did you know that, in the West, some people say that a lot of the Red Army didn't do the Long March?

CHANGZHENG: That's rubbish. All of the Red Army regular troops joined the Long March. Some got separated from the rest along the route, or got lost, or died or just disappeared.*11

XINRAN: How many lost their lives during the Long March?

CHANGZHENG: The First, Second and Fourth Front Armies were involved, and each one lost many soldiers, but I don't know exactly how many. After it was over, people said that out of hundreds of thousands only 30,000 were left. I can't be more precise on the numbers than that, I don't think anyone can be.

XINRAN: Did any close comrades of yours die on the Long March, and if so, did you see it with your own eyes?

CHANGZHENG: Of course I did. Every survivor of the Long March lost comrades. A young cousin of mine, he carried arms and ammunition, he was always in the front line when we charged. He didn't die in battle, no, he died on the march. When I went back home, his wife asked, where is he? He died ages ago, I said, and she cried . . .

XINRAN: Some people also believe that the distance wasn't as great as the 25,000 li that we all say nowadays. You participated, so you must know the truth.

CHANGZHENG: If you add up how much everyone did, it definitely was. In some places, we retraced our steps several times, we even crossed the mountains and the grasslands three times. The amount we actually walked really was that far, and the proof of it is the damage I suffered to my feet. Lots of those who survived were left with injured legs and feet like this. Here, look.

*

And I saw a pair of feet which it's hard to find words to describe: the misshapen soles were a mass of scars, and his feet looked as if they were made up of odd bits of skin of different ages.

*

CHANGZHENG: Why did we do the mountains and the grasslands three times? Well, Zhang Guotao didn't go along with the Central Committee leaders, he took the Fourth Front Army away on their own. The GMD chased us, we ran, and that was why we ended up crossing the mountains and grasslands three times. It was a terrible experience, dreadful, something you could never forget in your whole life!

We went through Lazi Kou Pass and got to Jiajing Mountain. It was sunny down below, but the higher we climbed, the more fiercely the wind blew. It was raining too, and the rain was mixed with hail, and as soon as we reached the mountain top, it started to get unbearably cold. We had our hats on – if those big hailstones smashed onto your head, they really hurt. Climbing was hard work for all of us, and then we had to go down again, and that was harder than going up. Some of our comrades didn't take enough care going down, and they rolled over the edge and died! When I think back to all that, it makes me really, really sad. We never knew who would be next. There was an old folk song about Jiajing Mountain, which went:

Mount Jiajing, Mount Jiajing,

Where no birds fly,

No monkeys can climb it,

Only Immortals come down to the world from it.

Jiajing Mountain is four thousand metres above sea level, so we had to be fiercer than the Immortals to climb it. A lot of people died then, because there were no paths on the mountain. We followed animal tracks.

When we crossed the grasslands, we had nothing to eat. Our dried food was all gone, and we had to pull up grass and eat that. When there really was nothing to eat, we ate leather. It was awful, awful, very hard. When it got to night-time, we slept out in the open. Some of our comrades found a mud hole and slept there. They wouldn't wake up in the morning, so they were tied to horses' tails and pulled along. They looked like they were sleepwalking, I saw it with my own eyes.

After the mountains and the grasslands, we started to fight. We hadn't eaten, we hadn't slept properly, and we had to fight, can you believe it? We won that battle too.

So we'd fought well, we got something to eat, and had a sleep, then after that we arrived in Gansu. There we faced another battle on Wuliang Mountain. The GMD had a cavalry division, and on the first day of the battle, my political instructor said to me: "You head up a group and go and reconnoitre." So at night I went to check out the lie of the land. On the second night we took rope ladders and went into the area. The GMD cavalry division were camped up there and we finished them off! After that we went off to Guilin [in the south] and joined up with the First Front Army. That was in 1936, and by then I couldn't tell you how many of us were in a bad way, and a lot of the officers too, it was pitiful. No one looking at us nowadays would have believed that those troops could take the whole of China!

XINRAN: Did you believe it then?

CHANGZHENG: I didn't know a lot about the bigger picture then. Our chiefs treated me well, and wherever we went the poor people treated us well too. I thought that was proof of their common decency. Once we had joined up with the First Front Army, we moved straight off to Yan'an.

XINRAN: Do you know why the Red Army went to Yan'an? Why was Yan'an chosen as a base area?

CHANGZHENG: No one lived in the Great North-West, and the enemy wasn't there either so we could rest and reorganise ourselves. So many had died on the Long March that we had to do that. We had a song:

The struggle is tough,

But we're doing it

To build the North-West Base Area.

We'll overcome all difficulties,

We'll beat the enemy,

We'll wipe out the enemy.

After we moved up to Yan'an, we didn't get support from ordinary people, so we had to shift for ourselves. Yan'an was so poor that not even Chiang Kai-shek [and the GMD] wanted to go and fight there. We started to produce our own food and clothing. Every morning, the troops went off up into the mountains with their hoes to clear the land for planting. The ground was very hard, and some of the vegetation needed two people to dig it out. By day we prepared the ground, and by night we spun and wove cotton. We had a song which went:

Till the wastelands, till the wastelands,

The front-line soldiers need food.

Weave cloth, weave cloth,

The front-line soldiers need clothing.

No one nowadays would believe the hardships we suffered then.

I got an anal boil in Yan'an, which didn't heal properly, so I went to see the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune.*12 I said I didn't want a general anaesthetic because I would be out for too long. "Not to worry," he said, "I'll operate at eight, and by nine you'll have come round." I was just a soldier but he was very sympathetic: he cured my illness, and reduced the awful pain so I wasn't suffering like before. Many of my comrades were cured by Dr Bethune. He was a good man.

XINRAN: Did you see Mao Zedong in Yan'an?

CHANGZHENG: Back then, the troops saw a lot of the chiefs, so I don't remember exact dates and places. But Mao Zedong came to give a speech to the guards training course, and I can still remember that today. He said: "Your guard duties are extremely important. Now you're guarding the Party Central Committee, and the people of Shaanxi and Gansu, but in the future you'll be guarding the whole of China." At the end of the course, Zhou Enlai came to talk to us too. Once during the course, there was an air raid by thirty or more enemy planes. There were three or four hundred of us and we helped each other into the caves. After we came out, Yan'an had been flattened, and all those poor old people and children had been left without homes.

XINRAN: Can you tell me who you were guarding in Yan'an?

CHANGZHENG: Kang Shi'en.

XINRAN: Kang Shi'en? The man who was Deputy Chairman of the State Council in the 1980s and died on 21 April 1995?

CHANGZHENG: Uh-huh.

XINRAN: And when did you leave Yan'an?

CHANGZHENG: There was a call to demobilise, but I thought to myself, what will I do if I go back to the poverty of my home? So I didn't demobilise. I left Yan'an with the rest of the troops and we crossed the Yellow River, fought through the Zhangjiakou Pass, then to the Rehe River, and then we arrived in the north-east, and went to Chengde. Me and my old woman, we married in Jilin, in the north-east, and after we got married we set off with the troops to Tianjin, where our eldest daughter was born.

I remember a huge building in Tianjin which housed a department store and the residence of a big GMD official. Our bombs had destroyed this building. The ordinary people said to us: "Your bombs must have eyes!" After we had taken Tianjin, we went to Shijiazhuang, and then came to Beijing.

XINRAN: Mr Changzheng, can I interrupt you a moment? You say you fought through the Zhangjia Kou Pass. What army were you in then?

CHANGZHENG: I was in the PLA, which started off as the Eighth Route Army, but afterwards everything got called the PLA: the Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and other troops too.

XINRAN: Were you with the Fourth Field Army then? From the places where you fought battles, it sounds like you must have been in Lin Biao's Fourth Field Army.

CHANGZHENG: That's right – the Fourth Field Army.

XINRAN: May I ask you who its chiefs were then?

CHANGZHENG: Generals Wang Ming and Wang Zhen. In Yan'an, it was also General Wang Ming. He was chief when we were clearing new land for cultivation, and he led us to the north-east too.

When the People's Republic of China was established, I attended the founding ceremony in Beijing. There were no trees and paths in front of Tiananmen Gate then, and I watched from an earth embankment on the west side. After the ceremony was over, I went to the suburb of Dongbeiwang. After that, I got a train to Hankou, then Guangxi, then Vietnam. Then I went to Shanghai, Tianjin, Qiqihar and Manchuria. We had an old army friend who was working there as an official. He asked me if I'd like a trip to the Soviet Union. I said I couldn't possibly go, I was still in army uniform. But then I was sent there anyway. When people found out I'd been in the PLA, they were very nice to me. When their chiefs talked, I couldn't understand a thing, but there was one who spoke Chinese, so I could understand him.

I've been on the move for most of my life, going here and there. I went back with the army to Beijing, then Nanjing, then Zhenjiang. Then I got a civilian job and moved to Tianjin.

XINRAN: When did you leave the army?

CHANGZHENG: In 1956. I got transferred from Tianjin to be a researcher at an oil depot, for what is now Great Wall Lubricants, part of Sinopec. I worked there until I retired. The first time I went to the Daqing oilfield, the first oil well, I said to my boss I'd never seen an oil rig, I'd like to go and look. He said, go ahead. So in the evening, off I went. I was at the base of the oil rig and they gave me a quilt, and I spent all night there, carefully watching the drilling. The Daqing oilfield really pulled out all the stops for China. If it hadn't been for Daqing, we couldn't have run our vehicles, or developed our industries. The Americans, the British, even the Soviets had wanted to get a stranglehold on us then. Times were really hard, but we broke through. Just as in the grasslands, we never thought how rosy life would be now, so in the fifties, who would have imagined we would have televisions and fridges? At that time, our idea of a good Western meal was potatoes and roast beef from the Soviet Union!

XINRAN: How did you get to know your wife?

CHANGZHENG: We met in the north-east. After we got there, almost all my army mates found themselves partners and married, and so they introduced me to her. That was 1947. The day we were married, I had just arrived at her parents' house when someone shouted: "The planes, the planes are coming!"*13 They pulled me into the house and we dashed for the cellar, and that was where we got married, with planes flying overhead, dropping bombs on us. My wife had no wedding dress, we had absolutely nothing. But we've never been parted.

XINRAN: How many children have you got?

CHANGZHENG: Five. Our eldest daughter, then a second daughter, then a son, then a third daughter, then our youngest son.

XINRAN: How do your children's lives compare to yours when you were young?

CHANGZHENG: I don't know. I'm just an army man. It's mainly been my wife who's done all the work. She brought all our kids up.

XINRAN: Do you argue? Are there things you fight about?

CHANGZHENG: We don't fight about anything. She knows how I suffered on the Long March, and the health problems it left me with, and she's very good to me. Now that I'm old, she does everything for me. She gets the food, she's the buyer, the phone-answerer, the messenger, the nurse, the cook, and so on and so on. She has a lot to cope with.

XINRAN: From what I hear, you haven't been idle since you retired, you still give patriotic education classes. Isn't that right?

CHANGZHENG: Yes, that's right. I've taught in primary, secondary, right up to university level – I've lectured at Qinghua University, for instance. I've given more than 430 talks. More than 130,000 people have been at my classes, and I can still remember which schools I've taught at.

XINRAN: Why do you enjoy going to talk to them about your experience?

CHANGZHENG: I'm very concerned about whether or not the next generation understand us. We suffered so much hardship and so many people died. As the new generation grows up, I want them to remember those fallen comrades. They died for us today and they cannot be forgotten.

XINRAN: If your children asked you what were the worst and the happiest things which have happened to you in your life, what would you tell them?

CHANGZHENG: The time when I'm happiest is when I look at my children and grandchildren. That's what makes me happiest. My second daughter has a grandson too, that's my great-grandchild, so the fourth generation has arrived. My childhood may have been hard, but now I'm very fortunate. That's made me think of a song I know. [He begins to sing at the top of his voice]:

Our childhood was steeped in the waters of bitterness,

We follow the Red Army to fight all over China. Hey!

We rush into the forest of guns. Hey!

We run through the rain of bullets. Hey!

We cross the mountains and the grasslands. Hey!

We weave cloth and make clothing. Hey!

We pass our days amid flames and gunpowder smoke. Hey! . . .

Our spirit remains undimmed. Hey!

Our guns will never get old and die. Hey!

New China is springing up.

We're on the road to the Four Modernisations.

Love is everywhere in China

And we will never forget the goodness of the Communist Party. Hey!

XINRAN: You sing well! Do you remember any other songs?

CHANGZHENG: There's "Yellow River":

The wind is moaning,

The horses are neighing,

The Yellow River is thundering . . .

The Yellow River is thundering,

Troops laden with weapons charge forward,

So many heroes fighting the Japanese . . .

We're protecting China, protecting the Yellow River,

Protecting China's mountains, protecting China.

XINRAN: Can your children sing them?

CHANGZHENG: No, they never learned them properly.

XINRAN: You say that things were hard in the past. Your generation suffered so much. What was the worst thing you suffered? And what have you enjoyed most?

CHANGZHENG: It was very hard, but it was for our country. The Party and China have looked after us well. You see, when the People's Republic was established, I went to the ceremony. At the Spring Festival every year, I go to the Great Hall of the People. I've been interviewed by reporters from other countries, and by people from the Army Museum. Canadian reporters were here doing an interview. They said to me: "You can't go to Canada, but your photo can go."

XINRAN: Your songs will go to lots of places in the world too, and everyone will read the words of the songs you have just sung.

CHANGZHENG: What a pity they can't hear me sing.

XINRAN: If you could live your life again, how would you live it? Would you choose the same life as before?

CHANGZHENG: Of course I would.

XINRAN: Would you still follow the Communist Party, and suffer all those hardships?

CHANGZHENG: Ha! If I'd known in advance, of course I wouldn't have. But if we hadn't been through all that, would we have peace today? We were fighting every day, so of course everyone suffered. But because of us, China stopped fighting, so it was well worth suffering for. Otherwise our children and grandchildren would go through what we went through as children. China has developed and changed enormously; this sort of development never happened before.

XINRAN: How do you know China has changed so much?

CHANGZHENG: I like to follow the news, I watch the TV news, I read the Party magazine Qiushi, and the newspapers – the Workers News, People's Daily, Beijing News, Beijing Times and World of the Elderly. My eyesight is good, I can read the small print perfectly. The one I like most is Qiushi.

XINRAN: Why?

CHANGZHENG: Because it's put out by the Central Committee, and there are a lot of study topics.

XINRAN: Have you told your children and grandchildren stories of when you were young?

CHANGZHENG: Yes, I have. They know most of it. My children and grandchildren come and see me on Saturdays and Sundays. These children of mine all understand how to behave properly.

XINRAN: What kind of people would you like your grandchildren to turn into in the future?

CHANGZHENG: Well, that depends on their abilities.

XINRAN: You're ninety years old now. Do you have any unfulfilled wishes?

CHANGZHENG: Ninety years old . . . No I haven't. My health is quite good, and I go out every day to do morning exercises or to do other things, and everyone says I'll easily live to be over a hundred.

XINRAN: What would you like to do most now? If you had the time and energy?

CHANGZHENG: Keep myself fit. When I go out every day I take my dragon-head walking stick given to me at the Great Hall of the People. I do at least 5,000 paces daily, that's 50,000 paces every ten days. I'm not boasting. To get really fit, live a bit longer, see China change. Those are the things that will make me even happier. I go to bed at nine thirty at night, get up at six and eat breakfast. Once I've eaten I go out and do my exercises and my paces. I told the reporter from the China–Japan Friendship Association: "I did the 25,000 li Long March, and now I've walked a new Long March of 25,000 li."

XINRAN: Do you know where your granddaughter Yanyan is now?

CHANGZHENG: I'm not exactly sure where she is. Sometimes she writes to me.

XINRAN: She's in England.

CHANGZHENG: I had heard but I don't know anything about it. Her granny keeps in touch with what she's doing, I don't.

XINRAN: You say that you saw Chairman Mao. Did you know that many people are saying that Mao made mistakes? Do you agree?

CHANGZHENG: I can tell you that Chairman Mao was a very open-minded man. When we were clearing land for cultivation, he planted vegetables too. When we were tending our vegetables, we saw Chairman Mao in the vegetable garden too. Think of that . . . a chairman, tending his vegetables just like a peasant. He did neglect some things though. He didn't even keep an eye on his wife, Jiang Qing. He used to say: "Women are like the weather – they can't be controlled." But he was a terrific man.

XINRAN: Are the cadres nowadays the same as they were before?

CHANGZHENG: Of course not, they're nothing like they were before. You can see it on the news every day. Cadres nowadays do nothing but "eat, take, extort and demand". In the past, whether they were senior cadres or ordinary cadres, they would be disciplined if they did wrong.

XINRAN: Were cadres in the past as corrupt as they are now?

CHANGZHENG: Very few of them were. I think it's because now they don't have much to worry about, and they have a good standard of living. Some cadres develop the wrong attitude to their work – they do a bit and they think they're great. They guzzle huge dinners and gulp down the liquor – that's something I can't get used to. I was asked to give a lecture at Shanghai University, and they invited me to dinner afterwards. I said, "I'm not eating your food. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. When I was on the Long March, we ate roots and leather, and those hardships and those struggles were what I was talking about today. If I come and eat your banquet, then none of my stories would mean anything, would they!?"

XINRAN: How many survivors of the Long March of your age are there in the world?

CHANGZHENG: If you add together those in Chinese cities and villages, there are reported to be only around two thousand of us in total.

*

I accompanied him to the next-door room where he would take a rest. Changzheng's wife watched his hands gripping the dragon-head walking stick, and said to me: "That walking stick has a radio and an alarm – it has everything. He was given it at the ceremony at the Great Hall of the People. His life has not been easy. I suppose you've seen his feet. So many scars – all of them from the Long March. His life has not been easy, not easy at all." She then sat down for a chat with me.

*

XINRAN: He's just told me how well you look after him. You do the main jobs at home, right?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: That's right, I do everything at home myself, I do all the tidying up, I don't need anyone's help.

XINRAN: May I ask how old you are?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: I'm seventy-seven. Thirteen years younger than him. We married in the army. I was a soldier too. We married in 1947.

XINRAN: I'd like to ask you, if I may, how you met your husband.

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: Times were hard back then. Women comrades who had no education, we couldn't think about things like that, so our chiefs did the matchmaking for us! Think of it – a difference of thirteen years between us.

XINRAN: And what did you feel when you first set eyes on him?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: It didn't matter what I thought, we had to do what we were told by our chiefs.

XINRAN: Did you have a boyfriend back then?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: No.

XINRAN: No?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: Well, discipline in the army was very strict, so there was none of that sort of thing. We were in the vehicle unit, we were always on the move so we were always busy.

XINRAN: Where did you join the army?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: In Jilin, where my family were.

XINRAN: You joined in 1947?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: We were a very poor family. My father, his sister-in-law and his older sister all joined up. After they had joined, my father said to me: "Guiying, you join up too. The good thing is they'll give you your meals." My grandmother disagreed. She said: "You must have seen how hard it is being a soldier. It's no life for a girl! If you're all soldiers and the GMD come, they'll kill our whole family!" My mother didn't want me to go either. But I joined up anyway. I hadn't been in the army long, when my chief introduced me to him. At first I wasn't keen, because when he talked I couldn't understand him.

XINRAN: How many of your age group joined up in that way?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: Quite a few. But they checked you very carefully back then. They wouldn't let you in if you were from a rich family. I'd done six years of primary school in the north-east, but then the Japanese devils came, and you couldn't go on at school. Being a soldier was another way of leaving home, wasn't it? So that was how I left my home village.

XINRAN: Your five children, what do they do?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: My oldest daughter worked for Great Wall Lubricants, but she's retired now. The second daughter has been in the army for twenty-one years; she's still a doctor in Sichuan. The third was also in Great Wall Lubricants, and is also retired now. The fourth works in Capital Hospital in Beijing, after being in a commune during the Cultural Revolution. The youngest also became a commune member. None of them were wild, like children in some families, they're all very decent. When they were small, I didn't worry about them. I went out to work, and I brought them up too. I was in the army then, and in my position as a cadre, I could get a nanny. Later on, you could take them to work with you. In 1955, there were too many people in the army, and there were economic problems in the country too. There were cuts, and I was made redundant. I couldn't afford the nanny any more, so after that I took care of the children.

XINRAN: What benefits do you get now?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: I get money from the National Civil Administration Department, but it's a bit of a problem. After I left my job, I did "army dependants support work" for twenty-five years, but I never got a fen for it, except the last two years, when they paid me a little, twenty yuan a month. I've dedicated myself to the army for my whole life and I've hardly got a thing. The government ought to fix up jobs for ex-army people like me. The National Civil Administration Department has regulations for demobbed soldiers, they pay them a few hundred yuan a month, but no one's said straight out what I should get, so I have no income now. But in any case, we've got my husband's house to live in and the children are very good. Everything's fine and I've nothing to complain about.

I'm an impatient sort of person, and if I want to do something, I'm not worried about it being hard work. The grandchildren phone me and say: "Granny, get yourself someone to help, I'll pay for it." But I can still do it on my own, I don't want a maid. I do all the buying, cooking and cleaning myself and getting someone in won't spare me any worries.

XINRAN: What kind of upbringing did you give your children?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: When I was a child we were poor and we had no needle and thread so I had never done needlework. But after I had the children, I did all my own sewing. I got the kids ready for bed and I started work. That meant making everything clean as a whistle, wiping the floor, washing the clothes . . . then I made their clothes. Every winter, the whole family needed two outfits each. I lined the cotton with kapok and slowly stitched it together. When it was done, and nice and clean, then I went to bed. The next evening I did the same again. I didn't take a siesta like everyone else. When we first got a sewing machine, I didn't know how to use it, but I knew I could learn. I practised by sewing bits of rag, old bits of clothes, and kept on going at it, practising on scraps, and that way I taught myself.

XINRAN: There's another question I'd like to ask you. I've visited many couples, but very few husbands have expressed such a high opinion of their wives as yours has. So I'd like to hear what you think about things, since there's a thirteen-year age difference between you. When people get old, they probably think more about what happened in the past, and the further back in the past, the easier it is for them to remember. What part of your life do you think most about? Your childhood, your parents, or the difficulties you had bringing up your children?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: I don't have anything I think about, I don't have any views on that.

XINRAN: Do you never think about your mother when you look at other people, and when you look at your children? Don't you think about when you were little?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: Oh yes, I do. I was the only girl in the family, and I had two elder brothers and one younger. When I joined the army, girls could earn a bit doing cleaning work. I saved it and bought things for them when I went home. The thing I most regret is that my mother didn't live long enough to enjoy our good fortune. We live well now, but she's not here. I often think of her.

XINRAN: When did you last see her?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: I last saw her when she was eighty-three. She died soon after that. I can't bear to think about it. My husband was in the army, and we were a bit better off. I wanted her to come and live with us, but she wouldn't come. She said she was too old-fashioned: since she had a son, it wasn't right to go and live in her daughter's house. My mother had her principles, and she didn't want to be a nuisance. My father worked on the railways and could travel free, so he always used to come and see us, and my mother came several times to fetch him and take him home. But every time she arrived, she'd go straight home with him. Eventually he got too old and retired, and they didn't come any more.

XINRAN: Did you ever hear how they met each other, your mum and dad?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: In those days it was all done by the parents. The old folks paired them up – they'd never met before they married. When my mother talked about it sometimes, she was very against that way of doing things.

XINRAN: How did you help your mother when you were a child?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: Cooking, putting the cotton wadding into quilts, washing, making quilt covers, that kind of thing. I was always tired when I worked, I was always yawning. My dad said to me: "If you're so tired when you work, you'll never finish such a big quilt. If you don't finish it, what are we going to put on the bed at night?" I didn't pay attention, I carried on very slowly with the wadding. I had so little to eat when I was a kid, I was always hungry, and then I was too tired to work. So my mum gave in, and said I could go and be a soldier and save my life. That was how it was at home.

XINRAN: Have you ever talked to your children about how things were then?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: No, I haven't.

XINRAN: Why not?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: Because it makes me too sad. Besides, my children have never wasted money or food like other people's children do. They're good kids, they've never given me any cause for worry.

XINRAN: If anyone asked you what was the hardest time of your life, what would you say?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: When I was at home, before I joined up, that was the hardest. In order to get that bit of schooling, I had to go out weeding in the heat of the day in the summer. I didn't want to go. My mother said: "You're doing it to go to school, aren't you?" So then I went. In those days, boys got sent to school, but no one bothered about the girls. My mother was a capable woman, she reared pigs and sold them, and kept chickens. I remember when I was a kid, before Liberation, there were bandits, they were terrible, scared us to death. We lived in a small house and the bandits tried to get inside. The door was shut and they were banging away on it, which was frightening in the middle of the night. We were so poor then that we didn't even eat dumplings at New Year. I remember when I was a kid, the Japanese devils came and killed the cattle. They hung their hides up outside, and they got covered in flies, but some people still ate the scraps of meat left on them. If pigs and chickens died, no one cared, you ate them because, if you didn't, you starved.

XINRAN: Your husband told us earlier what a hard time he'd had. Has he ever talked to you about it?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: Sometimes about the Long March. Actually, he doesn't need to say anything – you saw his feet, his toenails. The veins are all black and the toes are thickened, all from walking. I was a soldier too, so I know what he went through, and it was all for China.

XINRAN: Was it worth giving all those years of his life, do you think?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: Oh yes. If that generation hadn't made the sacrifice, and we still had what Chairman Mao called the "three mountains" of feudalism, imperialism and the GMD on our backs, then where would we be today? I think it was definitely worth it.

XINRAN: Do you think that young people today understand what your generation went through and what you did?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: Some do, but some don't.

XINRAN: Is there anything else you'd like to tell me? If you had your life again, would you still set up a family with Mr Changzheng?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE: My old man's OK, he's a good man. We've never fought about things, we get on really well. We only fought once. It was in Guangxi, and his office was in our house. Our eldest daughter was squabbling with a friend and he wanted to shout at them, but I wouldn't let him. We only fought that once, and it never happened again. I must have been twenty-two then. In 1997 we had our fiftieth wedding anniversary, and next year it's our diamond anniversary. It's hard to believe we'll have been together sixty years.

XINRAN: You can see his rosy cheeks, and he's in good voice and good heart. He's a credit to you.

*

I was not able to find here the answers to the questions I had been asking about the Long March. If we were lucky and these old people lasted until there was real freedom of speech in China, then we might really be able to prove or disprove some of the stories of the past. But perhaps it was already too late, the old had taken the "real yesterdays" away with them, and that was another loss to the Chinese people.

But the "marital Long March" of these old Red Army soldiers was a success which led me onward.

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