Carl Crow Interviews Zhou Enlai in Chungking – A 1939 Article Never Previously Published

Posted: July 8th, 2012 | No Comments »

Today I’m publishing a long article by Carl Crow – The Puzzle of Communism. It’s from 1939 and was never published. I’ve added an introduction and some footnotes at the end to help identify some people he refers to…

The Puzzle of Communism – Introduction – Paul French (2011)

This previously unpublished article by the American journalist, advertising agent and author Carl Crow (1883-1945) was written in the autumn of 1939. Crow, who had lived in Shanghai between 1911 and 1937 but been forced to return to the United States by the Japanese invasion of China, had just returned from a reporting trip for America’s liberal and pro-China Liberty magazine that had taken him from Rangoon, up the Burma Road and, via Kunming, to China’s wartime capital of Chongqing (which Crow knew as Chungking). He had spent several months in the city, months in which Chongqing was the most heavily bombed city on earth to date as the Japanese air force attempted to force China’s surrender. He then returned to America by way of French Indo-China.

While in Chongqing Crow met and interviewed many of the leading players in China’s wartime struggle for national survival, including Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Chiang (Soong May-ling) and the leading representative of the Communists, Zhou En-Lai (referred to by Crow as General Chao En-lai). The interview is one of the few conducted during the War by a foreign journalist with a long familiarity with China and who had personally witnessed the rise of the Communist Party as well as some its key moments, not least the massacre of many communists and their supporters in Shanghai in 1927.

Crow’s aim in this article is primarily to win over the rather reluctant American public of 1939 to the cause of China’s fight against Japanese militarism. Crow believed that isolationism and neutrality, both in terms of the war in Europe and in Asia, was the wrong policy for the United States. Liberty and its editors and owners were also of this opinion. Therefore Crow’s interview is rather glowing and clearly glosses over the fissures and strains in the wartime KMT-CPC ‘United Front’ that Crow was only too aware of in reality. His aim is simply to win American support and aid for China, both at governmental and street level. Had Crow lived beyond 1945 undoubtedly an article such as this would have later been used against him by Senator Joseph McCarthy as the ‘Reds Under the Bed’ and ‘Who Lost China?’ wars commenced in America. Similar articles by others with long acquaintance with China, such as Owen Lattimore and John Powell, were used against them in their House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings.

However, Crow does raise some interesting points with Zhou and maintains that the communist leader did not avoid any questions put to him. As to whether or not Zhou was being disingenuous in terms of future communist economic objectives, agrarian policy, attitudes to foreign investment and relations with the Soviet Union, or whether Crow watered down his answers so as not to unduly alarm an American public naturally wary of communism and communists, is impossible to say. Certainly Crow, a lifelong patriot, democrat and, at that time, a fierce opponent of American neutrality, is being decidedly tongue-in-cheek regarding his comments on the American political system. Despite these problems of interpretation the article does at least show the openness of communication channels between the foreign press and senior communists in Chongqing during the Second World War.

This article is now part of a larger collection of articles, notes, letters, unfinished chapters and other writing and communications by Carl Crow that form part of his archive. This archive is now part of the RAS Shanghai Library at the Sino-British College in Shanghai and is available for members and researchers to use.

THE PUZZLE OF CHINESE COMMUNISM – By Carl Crow (1939)

(the original typed cover page of The Puzzle of Chinese Communism from Crow’s archive)

According to Chinese standards of courtesy and politeness, my question was so abrupt and pointed as to verge on rudeness. I knew this at the time, but I couldn’t help asking it anymore than I could help sneezing once the sneeze had started. I had been talking for almost two hours with General Chao En-lai, who is known all over the world as the Communist leader of China, or rather, the leader of the Communists in China. After I had asked him all of the questions I could think of and he had answered them all carefully and frankly, I impolitely blurted out:

“And now will you tell me why you call yourself ‘a communist’?”

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I did not have to talk to him through an interpreter. If my question had gone through the usual filtering process of translation from English into Chinese, the interpreter would doubtless have corrected my manners by making the question a little more indirect and impersonal. That is the way most interviews in China are managed. There are many Chinese officials who speak and read and write English perfectly, but will only talk to you officially through an interpreter. By doing this, they are able, while the interpreter is putting your question into Chinese, to think up what kind of an answer they are going to give you. Chao En-lai is different.

His English is not perfect, but it is understandable, and he doesn’t need any time to think up what reply he is going to give you. The only other Chinese I ever met who was equally frank and outspoken was Sun Yat-sen, the spiritual father of modern China and the man whom General Chao reveres above all others.

Of the dozen or more Chinese whose names have become world known as a result of the war in the Orient, General Chao is without doubt the most interesting so far for several reasons. Almost every time his name appears in a newspaper dispatch from China, he is referred to as “the communist leader,” and so to the general public has come to symbolize a movement in China, which may be of increasing importance in the years to come.

It may help to explain that in cable dispatches from Chungking, the correspondents no longer refer to communism or to the “Red Army”, these phrases are written into their dispatches by editors in New York.

There are few Americans who point with pride to Communism, but a great many more who view it with alarm. Chao has played, and will undoubtedly continue to play, an important part in the defense against Japanese aggression, and it is equally certain that he will play an important part in the building of the new China which will emerge from the wreckage of the war. He is one of the youngest of the Chinese leaders, and my insurance examiner would consider that he had a long life ahead of him. He is one of a half dozen men who might conceivably take the place of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek if the Japanese should succeed in their threat to capture and behead the Chinese leader. He is now one of the Generalissimo’s most valued and trusted leaders; but a few years ago, the latter had placed a price – a very high price – on his head.

What sort of a man is he? What are his political ideas? Would a strong and independent China be a menace to America and the rest at the world if he and his Party should come into power? Would he add the millions of China to the communist millions of Russia? Would the democratic nations have still greater pressure put on them to choose between Communism and Fascism?

The answer to those questions might hold the key to a great deal of the future history of the world in which China will undoubtedly play an active rather than a passive part. With these ideas in mind, I considered my interview with General Chao so important that I prepared for it as carefully as an undergraduate facing an examination at the end of a school term. I prepared and memorized a lot of questions, some of which I thought he would find it very difficult to answer.

But he answered all of them readily and convincingly – all but the last one. When the motorcar stopped in front of General Chao’s headquarters on one of the most obscure streets in Chungking, I thought there there’d been a mistake, that this could not be the residence of one of the most powerful military leaders of China. There was no display of flags, no sentries at the door, no careful inspection of my credentials and suspicious enquiries as to the nature of my business.

It was as easy and simple as calling on anyone in an American city. A servant took my card and led me to a reception room and gave me the usual ceremonial cup of tea, and a few minutes later General Chao came in alone. Like most of the Chinese leaders, he was lean without being gaunt; but unlike the others, he wore no insignia of rank – his neat uniform showed nothing more than the fact that he was an officer of the Chinese army. He did not mouth the usual stereotyped Chinese apologies for having kept me waiting, for they were not necessary. I had only had time before he came in to notice that the glass in the windows was shattered and a wall a few feet away had been wrecked, and later learned that in the airplane raid of the evening before, bombs had been dropped even nearer to his headquarters than to the house in which I was living, where eight of my neighbors were killed.

By way of making conversation I asked him about his dugout, but he only smiled and said he didn’t think one was necessary as the Japanese aviators were still too busy dropping bombs on women and children to bother about killing soldiers. I was so anxious to get the answers to the questions I had in mind that I am afraid I started the interview rather abruptly, for we had wasted but a few minutes on trivial talk before I told him that I had called on him for the sole purpose of finding out what Chinese communism amounted to. I said that all that most Americans knew about Chinese communism was what they had been told by Japanese propagandists, but that we didn’t like communism of any kind and that while all Americans felt a great sympathy for China because of her valiant fight against the Japanese invaders, there were many who would look on a Chinese victory with a good deal of apprehension if that meant an increase in communist influence in the world. He seemed to find the idea of American fears of Chinese communism highly amusing. He said we had nothing to worry about, and he would be glad to answer any questions, so I started off with, “What are the definite economic objectives of Communism in China?”

I will not attempt to quote him directly. That would be impossible, for I interrupted him and cross-questioned him as rudely as a prosecuting attorney who is trying to pin the guilt on a defendant. He said that they were principally concerned with agrarian reforms. They believed that it was best not only for the farmers but for society as a whole for land to be owned by the people who cultivate it. The cultivation of land by tenants led to social unrest and the creation of classes, which were mutually antagonistic. It was also a wasteful system, for the tenant farmer had no interest either in conserving or improving the soil with the result that farm lands held by landlords soon wear out and become unproductive while those held by peasant proprietors are productive for generations. There was plenty of evidence of this in China where some farms, which had been worked for forty generations, were so worn out that they could only be planted in alternate years.

I couldn’t argue about that for I thoroughly agreed with him, as I think most people would – including a large proportion of landlords. So I hastened on to what I thought would be the catch in this fine idea. “How,” I asked, “did they propose bringing about this ideal state of affairs, by confiscation as had been done in Mexico under communist instigation?”

“Certainly not,” he assured me.

Then he explained that in China the problem of landlord ownership was not so serious as in some other countries, there was no great concentration of land in the hands of a few, and, as a rule, the Chinese farmers had not been oppressed by the landlords. They just didn’t want to see large land holdings develop as they might in the future unless some measures of prevention were taken. The ideal toward which they were working, ownership of his own land by every farmer, should be brought about by an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process. They were in favor of two governmental measures. One was a system of taxation, which would discourage the ownership of farmland by those who did not cultivate it, and the other was the purchase of large tracts by the government and the sale to cultivators on easy terms.

Of course, I suspected an adroit method of confiscation by this tax system, for it would be easy enough for a radical government to tax the landlords so heavily that they would be compelled to sell their lands. But he insisted too this was not a part of their tactics. They believed in respecting the rights of minorities, even if the minority consists of a little group of potentially rapacious landlords.

“How about the investment of foreign capital in China,” I asked. “Will the Communist party oppose it?”

“Of course not,” he said. “We are not waiting for the end of the war to start our program of reconstruction, which is going on hand in hand with our defense against invasion. We would welcome foreign capital right now to help us develop the natural resources of Western China.”

The terrifying specter of Communism in China seemed to be slipping away from me, so I tried another leading question.

“Assuming a Chinese victory,” I said, “and also assuming that the Communist party was completely in power when the time comes to set up a permanent administrative machinery for the government of China, what model would be followed, that of communist Russia or of the United States of America?”

I thought the question was a perfectly sensible one, but he smiled indulgently, as one would smile at a child who has asked a simple question which has a perfectly obvious answer. As a matter of tact, the question was a stupid one. The cogs and cranks of the machinery of government are of but minor importance. There is very little resemblance between the governmental machinery of Great Britain and that of the United States, and yet each of them serves equally well to protect the rights and foster the ideals of a democratic people.

And so General Chao answered the question I should have asked without going into details as to the machinery of government. He said with a great deal of emphasis that China would be a democracy like that of the United States, developed on the basis of the principles laid down in Sun Yat-sen’s “principles of nationalism.” (i)

The governmental machinery would follow Chinese lines but would be more like that of the United States than that of any other country – would certainly not have any remote resemblance to that of Russia. At some length, he explained the great difference between Russia and China. There were no great extremes of wealth and poverty in China as in Russia. While there was a great deal of poverty in China, there was no great wealth. It might be said that all Chinese were poor. China was essentially a democratic country and had always been.

Though ruled for many centuries by successive dynasties of emperors, the idea that “Heaven hears and sees through the people” had always been the dominant political idea. Even the emperors were guided by it – most of them. There was no room for dictators even in the past centuries when the people were not so socially and politically conscious as they are at present. When a ruling dynasty forgot this fundamental maxim of government and emperors became dictators, they started on their decline and in a few generations were overthrown.

Then he laid great emphasis on the statement that one of the essentials of a democracy is the protection of the rights and interests of minority groups. This was the idea of tolerance, which is essentially a Chinese idea.

The communist menace in China seemed to be slipping farther and farther into the distance. I began to feel sorry for some of my friends in New York whose limited scope for moral indignation is completely satisfied by shudders at the menace of Communism or wordy attacks on the present administration. Without communism it might become atrophied and die, so for the benefit of their souls I hopefully pursued the specter.

“When peace comes,” I said, “I presume the Communists will constitute one of the recognized political parties in China – will, for the time at least, be the opposition party to the Kuo Ming Tang (ii). Will conflicts between these two parties hinder the formation of a unified China?”

I was still thinking in terms of American political machinery, of the Democrats who are in power and the Republicans who try to kick them out – of two rival parties, each of whom pilfers ideas shamelessly from the other while loudly denouncing all of its works.

Maybe the Chinese Communists have something to teach us, for apparently they don’t work and think that way. General Chao explained to me that the Kuo Ming Tang party (remember this is the party which a few years ago waged civil war against him and set a price on his head) was a fine and strong organization, doing great work for China. He said it would undoubtedly remain in power for many years to come and that the Communist party would continue to co-operate with it. Somehow this is sounded like Hamilton Fish (iii) praising the Democrats and I told General Chao so.

Quite naturally, he had never heard of the man who can stir the capitalistic rabble so successfully, but I managed to make my meaning clear to him. He frankly confessed himself unable to understand the American system of party government in which the party defeated at the polls is in theoretical opposition to the party, which has been elected and is, in a way, honor bound to defeat all measures which that party proposes. He was familiar with the fight over neutrality legislation in America and was frankly puzzled by the fact that Republican senators lined up against the president for no apparent reason beyond the fact that they were members of an opposing political party. He seemed to think that politicians who obstructed important national measures because of political reasons were traitors to their own country.

In fact, to a great many party workers in America, the political ideas of these Chinese Communists must appear so simple and child like as to be ridiculous. They were so strange to me that it took him a long time to explain them. It appears that the Chinese communists believe that the welfare of the country is of a great deal more importance than the domination of the party which, by and large, does little more than satisfy the personal ambitions of a few of the party leaders.

Their idea is that as the Kuo Ming Tang at the moment is the dominant party and has control of the machinery of government, it is the duty of all patriots to sink their minor political differences and chip in and help the Kuo Ming Tang to do their job of work. Shoulders at the wheel, and no Stillson wrenches thrown into the machinery.

“That, of course, is wartime psychology,” I jeered.

“It would be a great blunder,” he casually replied, “to assume too that when the war is ended the two parties will revert to the strife of former years. There is the great work of reconstruction in China to be carried out, a task which this generation has started, but the rising generation and the one which will follow it will not be able to complete. In this work we need the Kuo Ming Tang and the Kuo Ming Tang needs us. The development of a strong and independent China is of much more importance than any party differences.”

As he answered question after question so reasonably and convincingly, the idea that he and his party might ever be a menace to anyone kept fading out of my mind, but there was one more question on my list and I had to ask it even though I thought I already had the answer.

“There is a general opinion in America,” I said, “that Chinese Communism was manufactured in Russia, that you are really following the Russian model and possibly taking orders from Russia. Is that true?”

“It certainly is not,” he replied with more emphasis than he had used in answering any of my other questions. “Ours is a purely local party, organized in China by Chinese and without the aid or influence of anyone. Like Russian communism, it was inspired by a study of the teachings of Marx, but we follow the interpretation of Marx as given by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. In Russia, the communists preach and promote the class struggle. We do not want strife between classes in China, we do not want to accentuate class differences. What we want is a democratic system of government under which all classes can work together harmoniously. I believe that eventually the whole world will be socialized, that is that it will adopt the principles and ideas of communism, but that it will come about gradually and peacefully and not as the result of a revolution.”

Then he added, with a wry smile, “It will not come about in my time, nor in that of anyone now living.”

It was at this point that I blurted out:

“Why do you call yourself ‘a Communist’?”

His answer was long and involved and I do not pretend to have followed him, for it was full of the technical phrases of Marxist philosophy, which I only half understand. So I have discarded his answer to my question and formulated one of my own.

General Chao believed that at the time the party was organized the communist label was the only one which fit and so it was adopted.  Under the name of Communists, the party suffered cruel persecution – principally by Generalissimo Chiang – and has to its credit some very brilliant accomplishments. Whether or not the name fits them in the eyes of others, it is a name to which they have given their own meaning and interpretation and they are proud of it. And I see no reason why they should not be. There is nothing for the world to be afraid of in Chinese Communism – last year I asked about two hundred prominent Americans for advice as to which party I should join, and in an article in Liberty told about the replies I received.

They were not very convincing; that is to say that at the end of the inquiry I was in just as much doubt as I was at the beginning as to which American party I should support. But if General Chao should organize a political party in America, I am inclined to think that I should join it.

(i)  The Three Principles of the People, also translated as the “Three People’s Principles”, or collectively “San-min Doctrine” was a political philosophy developed by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. The three principles are (a) The Principle of Minzu, commonly rendered as “nationalism”; (b) the Principle of Minquan, usually translated as “democracy” and; (c) the Principle of Mínsheng, usually translated as “the People’s welfare/livelihood”.

(ii)  i.e. the Guomindang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek.

(iii) Hamilton Fish (1808-1893) was an American statesman, initially a Whig and then a Republican, who served as the 16^th Governor of New York, a United States Senator and the United States Secretary of State.

NB: I came across this document while researching Crow in what became my 2005 biography of him, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand (and now in Kindle too). Within the Crow archive were the notes of his 1939/1940 Chungking trip and Burma Road expedition which I later edited and annotated as The Long Road Back to China.

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