Youth and Revolution. I
VOLUME 154
NUMBER 5
NOVEMBER 1934
BY VINCENT SHEEAN
DURING the winter of 1926-27, after adventures as a foreign correspondent ranging from Geneva and the League to Persia and the Rif, I came to think, reading the contradictory and sketchy reports in the London and Paris papers, that the Chinese Revolution in its present stage was an event — a whole school of events — that I could hardly bear to miss. Certain kinds of events to which newspapers gave their attention had had this effect on me for years, and had to be explained (when I thought of it) by the antique fancy that newspaper men, like fire horses, could never outgrow their instinct for the ‘game.’ It seems to me now that this was no explanation, for the events that aroused my firehorse instinct were not, actually, the ones the newspapers found most interesting. The events that aroused in me the desire to attend, to witness, were invariably those in which large numbers of men were engaged in some difficult enterprise involving a fundamental idea — an idea of race, class, or even of nation. In what looked like the impending triumph of the Chinese Revolution there was an event of the exact kind that excited my imagination to the utmost. Without regard to what kind of job I might do in China, I wanted above all to get there; and eventually, with the help of the North American Newspaper Alliance, I did.
I
I arrived in China at the most fateful moment of the national revolution, that in which the victors surveyed the field and took stock of themselves. It was not a good moment for a journalist: from the professional point of view, I was too late. The capture of Shanghai and the sack of Nanking had been the high points of interest for the newspapers in America, and by the time I got to Shanghai the ‘story,’ as we say in the language of the trade, was already fading into obscurity. Moreover, the particular kind of personal exploit that my employers wanted of me — what they called, in their cabled instructions, ‘personal adventures’ — proved impossible in a country where, so far as I could discover, all the inhabitants when treated with courtesy were invariably courteous and kind. I made various attempts to encounter ‘ personal adventures’ in parts of China from which all foreigners had fled, and never got so much as a harsh word out of any Chinese. Consequently the whole result of my experience in China was, so far as my newspapers were concerned, flat failure.
Copyright 1934, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.
But from another point of view, the one adopted in this narrative, the experience was richer in consequences than any other I have to record. Here, for the first time, I began to approach the fundamental meaning of those vast disturbances that had fascinated me (in part unconsciously) for years — began to be able to discern the general under the particular, to take what Borodin called ‘the long view.’ In my first direct meeting with the Bolshevik philosophy in action (even in rather circumscribed action) I was disturbed by the precision with which it answered the questions I had begun to think unanswerable — the questions of a sensible relationship between one life and the many. Whether the Bolshevik solutions were the correct ones was another matter, which might take a long time to determine, but they were at least solutions, and represented the effort of human thought to bring order into the chaos that on every side oppressed and appalled the imagination.
I do not mean to say, of course, that I had known nothing about the Communist view of life before I went to China. I had as much acquaintance with it as most people have, — perhaps more, — and had even read a certain amount of its literature, including huge indigestible lumps of Karl Marx. But the difference between an academic acquaintance with Communism and an actual perception of its spirit is very great. The step required to pass from the first state to the second is so easy that it may be accomplished in a moment, and so difficult that it may involve the effort of a lifetime. It may be compared, I think, to the step by which, at an equally momentous frontier in literature, we pass into the world created by the Divina Commedia.
Every schoolboy knows about the Divina Commedia: how Dante, having lost his way in a dark wood, was found by Vergil and conducted into the depths of Hell, rising from there to Purgatory and to the circles of Paradise, through which he was led by the blessed Beatrice. But this knowledge of the vast, perfect poem is no knowledge at all; it is like being told in the schoolroom that Paris is the capital of France, a bald statement that can only become a living fact when we have smelled the acacias and eaten the food and investigated the literature that make it true. With Dante the difficulty of the language supplies another barrier (even for Italians); but when the step has at last been taken, the barrier passed, we enter a world in which all parts of the structure of existence are so related and harmonized, so subjugated to a sovereign system, that its ordered beauty and majesty give us the sensation of a new form of life, as if we had moved off into space and taken up our abode, for a time, on another star.
Such miraculous translations are rare and difficult; it took me thirty-four years to set foot inside the world of Dante. The world of Lenin (which is, in effect, all around us) can be entered in a moment, but only if the disposition of circumstances, persons, influences, can conquer the laziness of a bourgeois mind. The required combinations occurred for me at Hankow, and were given force and form, particularly, by Michael Borodin and Rayna Prohme.
II
But before I went up the river to Hankow I had to make the acquaintance of the parts of the Chinese revolutionary movement that had already begun to be corrupted by power — the counter-revolutionary group of Shanghai and Nanking. Its position was interesting and typical; some such position is always assumed by middleclass revolutionaries at the moment of triumph, and Chiang Kai-shek, the shrewd young man, was even then engaged in the Kerensky-like manœuvres that were to make him President (so to speak) of China.
It might be useful to recall, just here, what the course of the Chinese national revolution had been up to 1927. It was a long, slow, cumulative movement, the awakening of a giant; it had been going on for thirty-odd years. Its original organization was the work of the great revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, whose power to move and convince throngs of people had made him the natural leader of the whole South, and, for a time, of all China. In 1911, with the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty, Sun Yat-sen had been proclaimed President of China at Nanking, but, robbed of the actual power by the clever reactionary, Yuan Shih-kai, had retired to Canton to establish there the central point, the focus, for all revolutionary activity. Even in Canton, Sun Yat-sen’s career was checkered; he was always being driven out and returning in triumph.
In 1923, pursuing their announced policy of friendliness to all Asiatic national movements, the Bolsheviks (through Joffe, their ambassador at Peking) made an agreement with Sun Yat-sen by which they were to supply him with military and political advisers, money and munitions. From this point onward the development of the Cantonese revolutionary movement was rapid and overwhelmingly successful. The Bolsheviks had given Sun Yat-sen what he needed, an army. They also moulded, to some extent, the ideas of the movement, although Sun Yat-sen himself never became a Communist, and always, apparently, believed that it would be possible for China to assume the forms of an organized industrial society without going through any kind of class warfare. Sun Yat-sen himself died in 1925, but the movement, becoming increasingly social and economic, with an intensive labor propaganda, became harder to resist after his death than it had been before. The various war lords who governed China on the feudal system dreaded it, and with reason, for it was by its nature inimical to them even when it made use of their services.
Finally, in 1927, the armies of Canton had swept all the way up to the Yangtze-kiang, had taken Hankow, Shanghai, and Nanking, and with them the revenues of the richest part of China. The capture of Nanking, about two weeks before I arrived in Shanghai, had been marked by a collapse of discipline; certain of the Cantonese troops had run wild in the city, looting, raping, and killing. These incidents — ‘the Nanking outrages’ — had been promptly avenged by an Anglo-American bombardment of the city, in which numerous noncombatants were killed. Antiforeign feeling, always very strong among the Chinese revolutionaries, was at a high pitch indeed, and all foreigners had been ordered (by their own governments) to leave the interior of China and concentrate at Shanghai and Tientsin. The Cantonese movement had, practically speaking, won its victory, for it was only a question of time until the remaining war lords (the chief of whom was old Chang Tso-lin, supported by the Japanese) would be swept out of the way by the better trained and equipped soldiers, and by the enormously persuasive propaganda, from the South.
This moment of triumph was inevitably the one in which the two elements among the Cantonese victors would separate. Genuine revolutionaries — those who wished to change the conditions of life in China, and not simply the forms or names of government— found themselves obliged to cling to the Left Wing of the Kuomintang, in which Russian influence was paramount. The others — those who took part in the revolution for their own advantage, or were prevented by the tenacity of middle-class ideas from wishing to disturb the established arrangement of wealth — collected around the treasuries of Shanghai and Nanking, under the patronage of the Chinese bankers of those cities and their new ally, Chiang Kai-shek. The Left Wing had its capital at Hankow, and the Right Wing at Nanking. The division was not yet open and public, and the Kuomintang (People’s Party — Sun Yat-sen’s old organization) kept up a pretense of unity for some time, but the opposition of the two tendencies was too glaring to be denied in private talk, and constituted, in fact, the chief immediate problem of the revolution.
I went, first, to see Mr. T. V. Soong. He was a young man of about my own age, trained at Harvard, intelligent, competent, and honest, and had been Minister of Finance for the Cantonese government. The same post had been assigned to him at Hankow and also at Nanking, but at the precise moment of my arrival he had resigned it. He continued resigning it for years, only to take it up again, until he became a kind of permanent Minister of Finance in all the Kuomintang governments. His usefulness came not only from the confidence inspired by his known capacity and honesty, but from his relationship to the semi-divine figure of Sun Yat-sen: he was a brother of the great man’s widow. When I arrived in Shanghai he was living in Sun Yat-sen’s house in the French Concession, the house given the old hero by the city for a permanent refuge in his turbulent career.
Mr. Soong — ‘T, V.,’ as he was always called — received me well. He spent some time explaining to me the difficulties of his own position, a problem that always worried him a good deal. As I came to know T. V. rather better in the following months, I grew to regard him as the most typical Liberal I had ever known — honest, worried, puzzled, unable to make up his mind between the horrors of capitalist imperialism and the horrors of Communist revolution. If China had only been America, his happiness would have been complete, for he could have pretended not to know about the horrors. But in China it was impossible to step out of doors without seeing evidence, on every hand, of the brutal and inhuman exploitation of human labor by both Chinese and foreigners. T. V. was too sensitive and too idealistic not to be profoundly moved by such spectacles. And yet he had an equally nervous dread of any genuine kind of revolution; crowds frightened him, labor agitation and strikes made him physically ill, and the idea that the rich might ever be despoiled filled him with alarm. During a demonstration in Hankow one day his motor car was engulfed by a mob and one of its windows was broken. He was, of course, promptly rescued by his guards and removed to safety, but the experience had a permanent effect on him — gave him the nervous dislike for mass action that controlled most of his political career and threw him at last, in spite of the sincerity of his idealism, into the camp of the reactionaries. He was an amiable, cultivated, and charming young man, but he had no fitness for an important rôle in a great revolution. On the whole, I believe he realized it, and was made more miserable by that fact than by any other.
III
Hankow, Wuchang, Hanyang, the three great cities called, together, Wuhan, blackened the flat shores of the river early on the fifth day of my journey from Shanghai. Of the three cities, Hankow was the most important, although not the largest. It was the one in which the foreigners had built their own city, in concessions taken from the Chinese in the nineteenth century. The Germans, Russians, and Americans having been counted out for assorted reasons, the foreign city consisted, in 1927, of the British, French, and Japanese Concessions — or, practically, of the first two, since the Japanese Concession was almost indistinguishable from the Chinese town.
My first interviews were with Borodin and Chen, whose names were best known in the world at large as representatives of the point of view of Hankow, of the Left Kuomintang. Borodin had never sought public attention and disliked giving interviews, but by this time it was no longer possible for him to avoid them. Eugene Chen loved public attention as a cat loves milk, and was at his best in an interview, rolling forth his grand, oratorical sentences with long pauses so that they might be written down in detail. Both Borodin and Chen used English, not only with representatives of the press, but in their communications with each other and with most of the other members of the Hankow government, for neither had a good command of Chinese. Chen was Foreign Minister, the spokesman for all his colleagues, and so could freely exercise his gifts as a proclamation-monger. Borodin, chief of the Russian advisers, tried to avoid speaking for the Hankow government, and restricted himself as much as he could, with interviewers whom he did not know, to discussions of principle.
My first impressions of both Borodin and Chen were overlaid by a mass of later impressions, by a whole tangle of experience in China and Russia in which they figured, and yet that first view of them in Hankow still seems to me clear and substantially correct. Borodin, a large, calm man with the natural dignity of a lion or a panther, had that special quality of being in, but above, the battle that seems to me to deserve, in itself and without regard to the judgment of the world, the name of greatness. His slow, resolute way of talking, his refusal to be hurried or to get excited, his insistence upon the fundamental lines of action that determined detailed events, gave a spacious and deliberate character to his conversation, lifting it far above the shallowness of journalism and the hysteria of politics. He seemed to take ‘the long view’ by nature, by an almost physical superiority of vision.
As I knew him better I perceived — or, rather, he showed me — how his political philosophy made breadth and elevation inevitable in the mind that understood it. He was an Old Bolshevik; that is, he had been a member of the Leninist school since its underground days before the war. His exile had been spent in the United States, where he acquired a better immediate knowledge of the industrial system than was common among Bolshevik intellectuals. He had returned to Russia in 1917, to ‘party work,’ and had been entrusted with the Chinese mission in 1923. His whole adult life had been spent in the service of a system of thought in which the immediate event was regarded as meaningless unless related to other events on both sides in point of time; in which the individual was valued by his relationship to his fellow beings; in which the most important of processes was held to be the comprehension, however disagreeable, of cause and effect. Such ways of thinking were required by the Bolshevik system, and the mind exercised in them through years of activity had no time or room for egotism, pettiness, fussiness, immediate hysteria. If one disregarded the economic structure (Marxian economics) with which the Bolshevik mind was preoccupied, it could be seen that the method of thought in itself was ‘good’ — produced, as in the case of Borodin, a clear, calm, and comprehensive view of life.
Borodin himself would have attributed the quality I have called greatness (the quality of being in, but above, the battle) to the political philosophy and to nothing else. He would have said that the philosophy gave ‘historical perspective,’ and that historical perspective, once thoroughly understood, enabled the mind to inhabit a clearer air. But as, during the succeeding months, I came to know a number of other Communists more or less well, I was obliged to conclude that this was not so. However adequately they may have learned their political philosophy, it did not always lift them above the mud in which we flounder; a Communist could be just as stupid, petty, and egotistical as any bourgeois. Borodin would have said that such a Communist was not a good Communist — which, although probably true, demolished the idea that an acquired political philosophy was alone enough to raise human beings to the highest power of which they were capable in the conduct of life. The political philosophy had to be thoroughly understood, articulated, and applied, made into a constant medium in which the good Communist could live as the saints lived in God, as the fish live in the sea. Something like this must have happened before ‘the long view’ and the reasoned plan of existence came to be Borodin’s native element, from which he could look calmly upon the chaos of immediate events; but since it worked for him and not for others, there must also have been in his nature, from the beginning, an aptitude for reflection, a capacity for detached thought, superior to the aptitudes and capacities of other men who professed the same beliefs without thereby coming a shade nearer the stars.
IV
The door at the end of the darkened reception room on the second floor of the Ministry of Finance opened, and in came a small, shy Chinese lady in a black silk dress. In one of her delicate, nervous hands she held a lace handkerchief, in the other my note of introduction from T. V. Soong, given me in Shanghai. When she spoke, her voice almost made me jump, it was so soft, so gentle, so unexpectedly sweet. The shutters had been closed to keep out the heat, and I could not see her until she had come quite near me. Then, looking down in bewilderment, I wondered who on earth she could be. Did Madame Sun Yat-sen have a daughter of whom I had never heard? It honestly did not occur to me that this exquisite apparition, so fragile and timorous, could be the actual lady herself, the most celebrated woman revolutionary in the world.
‘You saw my brother in Shanghai,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Tell me, how is he?’
It was Madame Sun.
For a good ten minutes we were at sea. She struggled to overcome her own timidity with but little help from my side, for I was experiencing the complicated disorders described in the fine cockney phrase ‘struck all of a heap.’ I was ‘struck all of a heap’ by Madame Sun, a heap compounded of many things: her loveliness, her gentleness, the shy purity of her voice and eyes; my own incompetence and clumsiness; and, perhaps the most confusing of all, the utter unexpectedness of the event.
I had heard an enormous number of things about her, most of them lies. The American newspapers had surpassed themselves on the subject. According to them, Madame Sun was ‘China’s Joan of Arc’; she was the leader of a Chinese ‘woman’s battalion’; she was this, that, and the other thing, depending on the fantasies of the headline writers. The notion that she had actually led troops in battle was so widespread that even in China some of the foreigners believed it. In Shanghai this grotesque legend was complicated by more offensive lies, in which her personal character and motives were attacked — a favorite method of political argument in the treaty ports. Although I had sense enough not to believe most of the stories about her, they must have made, collectively, some kind of impression, for I had certainly expected to meet something formidable. And instead, here I was face to face with a childlike figure of the most enchanting delicacy, only too plainly trembling with terror at the sight of me. Never had I felt so big and clumsy, so hopelessly barbarian.
But Madame Sun was aided by a number of characteristics that always enabled her, with an effort, to conquer her own timorousness — not only with me, that is, but in the general conduct of life. She had endless reserves of dignity, a dignity so natural and certain that it deserved the name of stateliness. The same quality can occasionally be observed in royal princes or princesses of Europe, especially in the older ones; but with them it is a clear result of lifelong training. Madame Sun’s stateliness was of a different, a more intrinsic quality; it came, so to speak, from the inside out, instead of being put on like a harness. She also possessed moral courage to a rare degree, which could keep her steadfast and unflinching in the presence of any grave peril. Her loyalty to the name of Sun Yat-sen, to the duty she felt she owed it, was able to withstand trials without end. These qualities — dignity, loyalty, moral courage — gave her character an underlying strength that could, at times, overcome the impressions of fragility and shyness created by her physical appearance, and endow her figure with the sternest aspect of heroism. Death itself could not intimidate her; poverty and exile, the fury of her own family and the calumnies of the world, were unable to bend her inflexible will toward courses she felt to be wrong. She was, in a truer sense than the merely physical one intended by the headline writers, ‘China’s Joan of Arc,’ but you had to know her for a good while before you realized the power of the spirit beneath that exquisite, tremulous envelope.
Madame Sun was born Rosalind Soong (Soong Ching-ling), of a family of rich Shanghai merchants. The Soongs belonged to the very comprador class attacked by the Chinese Revolution — the class that had grown rich in traffic with the foreigners, and had strong economic interests in the maintenance of the old régime. Soong Ching-ling was educated in the United States (in Wesleyan College, at Macon, Georgia) and returned to China when she was nineteen. It was then that the Tsung Li met, fell in love with, and married her. He was a great deal older than she was, but he had all the magic of a name that had already assumed symbolic significance in China; and whatever his other qualities may have been, Sun Yat-sen must have possessed a rare and wonderful power of personal influence. Few men in history have had his gift of commanding devotion. In his long, adventurous life, which reads like the invention of a romantic writer, he was constantly being saved from death or disaster by the extraordinary fidelity of his friends. The last of his faithful followers was his second wife, his present widow, who was to carry her loyalty to his person and his ideals (quixotically, perhaps) far beyond the grave.
Madame Sun’s friends used sometimes to discuss a question suggested by the contrast between her natural shyness, her love of privacy, and the public rôle she was obliged to play. It was this: what might have been the development of her life if she had never met Sun Yat-sen? A theory advanced was that, left to herself, she would have married ‘ well ’ and spent her time in all the private dignity and family self-sufficiency of a rich Chinese lady in Shanghai. It is possible. But no character can be studied in this way after the events that shaped it have taken their place in the ordered memory of the past. A fusion has occurred; single strands of character no longer mean anything; the nexus alone can be made to yield some of the secrets of a human personality. The nexus in this case was the marriage, which subjected Soong Ching-ling in her first youth to the most powerful influence of revolutionary idealism China has ever known. She traveled with Sun Yat-sen, acted as his secretary, participated with him in mass meetings and party councils, public triumphs and secret flights. She learned to share his passionate indignation at injustice of every kind, his determination to organize and prolong the revolt of the masses until the whole country had been brought under a national party dictatorship for the three objectives of his revolution — the San Min Chu I: Democracy, Nationalism, Social Welfare.
These experiences, these ideas, transformed the shy young girl, the possible fine lady, into a woman with a character of tempered steel. When Sun Yat-sen died she took her place in the Central Executive Committee and the other governing bodies of the Kuomintang, and in spite of her dislike for debate, public speaking, or public appearances, she performed her duties to the party without complaint. At the time of my arrival in China, in the open schism in the party, she had already resolutely taken her place with the faction of the Left Kuomintang and its Communist minority.
That was Madame Sun when I first saw her. The tragic events of the following months, the massacre of the Communists, the crushing of the labor movement in blood, were to arouse her indignation to such a pitch that she seemed, almost before one’s eyes, to take on stature. Without physical or intellectual power, by sheer force of character, purity of motive, sovereign and consistent honesty, she became heroic. In the clamorous wreck and ruin of the Chinese Revolution, this phenomenon was one of the most extraordinary: generals and orators fell to pieces, yielded, fled, or were silent, but the one revolutionary who could not be crushed and would not be still was the fragile little widow of Sun Yat-sen. A ‘doll,’ they used to call her sometimes in the treaty ports. The world would be a less painful object of contemplation if it contained a few more such ‘dolls.’
So I thought then, as now I think.
And still I had not yet seen Rayna Prohme.
(To be continued)