The Red Flag Waves
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The Red Flag Waves: A Guide to the Hung-ch'i p'iao-p'iao Collection A publication of the Center for Chinese Studies University of California Berkeley, California 94720 EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Chalmers Johnson, Chairman Professor of Political Science Joyce K. Kallgren, Vice-Chairman Assistant Professor of Political Science (Davis) Cyril Birch Professor of Oriental Languages Shih-hsiang Chen Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature Wolfram Eberhard Professor of Sociology Gregory Grossman Professor of Economics Joseph R. Levenson Sather Professor of History Stanley Lubman Acting Associate Professor of Law Jack M. Potter Associate Professor of Anthropology Robert A. Scalapino Professor of Political Science H. Franz Schurmann Professor of Sociology and History John S. Service Curator of the Library Frederick E. Wakeman Assistant Professor of History © 1968 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-65796 Printed in the United States of America $4.00 Center for Chinese Studies • China Research Monographs UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY / NUMBER THREE The Red Flag Waves: A Guide to the Hung-ch'i p'iao-p'iao Collection ROBERT RINDEN and ROXANE WITKE Contents FOREWORD 5 L INTRODUCTION 7 n. GUIDE 19 Volume I 19 Volume n 28 Volume in 36 Volume IV 48 Volume V 55 Volume VI 65 Volume Vn 69 Volume Vm 73 Volume DC 78 Volume X 82 Volume XI 90 Volume XII 98 Volume Xin 105 Volume XrV Ill VolumeXV 121 Volume XVI 127 m. INDEX 139 Topics 140 Names 146 Foreword In Russia, only nine months elapsed between the faU of the Tsar and the Bolshevik seizure of power; in China, an interval of thirty-eight years sepa rated the collapse of the Dynasty and the final victory of the Communist Party. During this Min Kuo period, 1912-1949, a series of linked wars and revolutions occurred which were of the greatest significance for the coiurse of Chinese and world history—and which evoked human actions and incidents of the highest dramatic proportions. Although scholarly stu dents of modem China have charted accurately these wars, guerrilla struggles, and revolutions, the task remains to recapture the drama of the revolutionary period, to portray living figures deciding between alterna tive courses of action, and to reveal the true complexity of social change in China. The 16-volume Hung-ch'i p'iao-p'iao collection is valuable for these purposes. It is valuable because of the intrinsic importance of the episodes recorded in its volumes and also because of the value of studying Chinese Communist views of their own history—and their warping of that history in response to changing political demands. However, until the prepara tion of this guide to the collection, Hung-ch'i p'iao-p*iao was virtually impossible to use in any systematic manner. Unindexed, composed of articles of varying quality, and written in most instances by unknown figures, it is a conglomerate collection of reminiscences ranging from tales of Chinese in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to analyses of major Chinese Communist battles quoting Commander-in-chief Chu Teh. Articles concemiag Lin Piao, for example, are scattered throughout the 16 volumes and cannot be identified by title. Primarily in order to make the collection more accessible to researchers looking for supplementary historical materials on a particular subject, two scholars of the Center for Chinese Studies have therefore prepared this guide. Robert Rinden began the project as a graduate student in political sci ence at the University of California, Berkeley. His first task was to put together a complete collection. Upon discovery that volumes XI and XTV were unavailable in any American library, the Center for Chinese Studies photocopied the missing volumes from a private collection in Hong Kong. I would like to thank Mr. M. H. Su, vice-director of the Universi ties Service Centre, Hong Kong, for his assistance in obtaining these books. Mr. Rinden, between 1938 and 1964 a Chinese language officer of the United States Foreign Service, having served in Peking, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Saigon, read each volume and wrote an analysis of its contents. Roxane Witke of the Center for Chinese Studies staff then re read the volumes independently and completely rewrote and amplified the manuscript that Mr. Rindenhad originally prepared. Robert Rinden, whoreceived his M.A. degree in political science from Berkeley in 1966, is completing a Ph.D. degree at the University of Colorado. Roxane Witke has contributed articles and reviews to The China Quarterly and is completing a Ph.D. dissertation on "Modem China: Transformation of Attitudes toward Women during the May Fourth Era" for the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley, wheresheis alsoteaching. John S. Service and James Soong of the Center for Chinese Studies prepared the indexes to the Hung-ch'i p'iao-p'iao collection itself and supervisedthe publicationof this guideto its articles. Chalmers Johnson, Chairman Centerfor Chinese Studies Berkeley, California July, 1968 Introduction By ROXANE WITKE "Inside every lao-pai-hsing there's a Red hero struggling to get out." To demonstrate this proposition in their own historical terms, the editors of Hung-ch'i p'iao-p'iao (hereafter HCPP) have published, between 1957 and 1961, sixteen volumes of Chinese revolutionary memoirs, an analysis of which forms the subject of the present volume. China Youth Press, which brought out the HCPP collection, created the role which HCPP was destined to play in contemporary Chinese life. Founded in 1950 as the publishing organ of the Central Committee of the China Youth League, China Youth Press has sustained a continuous dialogue with Chinese youth by soliciting great quantities of their literary production and, in turn, by publishing efforts which serve the regime's current political goals for the younger generation.* Adopting the same pattern, the editorial board of HCPP sent out a broad summons for memoirs of the revolution. The response, the board claims, was over whelming. Tens of thousands of memoirs were submitted, and from these were drawn the approximately 336 selectionswhich constitute the present collection. The literary genesis of the HCPP collection shows the prin ciples of democratic centralism at work: the powers above exhort those below to express themselves voluntarily; orthodoxy, in turn, is imposed upon this voluntary expression by the powers above. In the exchange process, both editors and writers modify one another. Conceived in these terms, HCPP has been a means for discovering the mind of the present generation, and for changing it. As early as 1956 it was becoming evident that although land reform * The term "youth" (cKing-nien) in China Youth Press (Chung-kuo CkHng-nien Ch'u-pan-she) may be misleading, for the press's function is not analogous to that of a Western publisher of juvenile books. Ch'ing-nien appears to have taken on its modem significance around the time of the May Fourth era with the unprecedented generational conflict brought about by the rise of youth as spokesmen for the new generation which sought to usurp social, cultural, and political authority from the older generation. From its beginnings, the COP has employed the term "youth" for its aggressively modem, revolutionary meaning, one of the earliest usages being in Socialist Youth League (1922) and then in the Chinese Communist Youth League (1925). Since then the connotation of youth has been extended by usage in other socialist countries to designate the young revolutionary generation, which we might more realistically define as yoimg adults, up to the age of thirty or so. See James R. Townsend, The Revolutionization of Chinese Youth: A Study of Chung-kuo Ch'ing- nien (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, China Research Monographs No. 1, 1967). and other institutional reforms could alter the mode of production, they alone could not alter what Mao Tse-tung and his supporters have stead fastly regarded as the basic material of die revolution—^the political and ideological content of people's minds. The inadequacies of mere insti tutional reforms became disastrously apparent in the course of the Hundred Rowers Campaign. The shock of discovery of widespread polit ical heterodoxy compelled the Party, during 1957, to reverse its stance of allowing the youth movement relative autonomy. As part of the Anti- Rightist Campaign, the Party sought to draw youth into the struggle for socialist construction. It appears that HCPP, which began publication that same year, was designed as a propaganda device for the ideolog ical mobilization of youth in this stepped-up program of controlled revo lution. By the late nineteen-fifties the lines of generational conflict were be coming more tightly drawn. Whereas the parental generation had been "steeled and tempered" by the continuous threat of internal and external enemies, the younger generation was growing up under relatively stable conditions, which, it was feared, might allow the youth to become "soft" morally and, politically, to sink into revisionism. The crucial prob lem of this post-revolutionary era was therefore to determine how to revolutionize youth politically and ideologically in a non-revolutionary situation. The HCPP collection was contrived for the purpose of pro viding study materials which would serve as a surrogate for real revolu tionary experience. A significant number of memoirs in HCPP were originally brought out by other Peking publishers a year or more earlier than the current HCPP volume, and others appeared at approximately the same time as HCPP in more narrowly focused volumes devoted to single individuals or events. However, the HCPP editors have not thought it important to provide the facts of first publication. That some of the memoirs first ap peared elsewhereindicates that HCPP was not atypical of current literary production.