In 1929, a budding American young journalist Edgar Snow and his wife, the Hollywood actress Helen Foster Snow, went to China. Red Star Over China, completed in 1937, was the first publication in the Western world on the Chinese Communists and their base in Yanan. It became a bestseller in the U.S. Snow and his wife went on to publish several more books on the Chinese Communists. These books were published at a time when the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) was struggling to survive after the intensive military campaigns from the Nationalists, and in the midst of intensive military engagements with the Japanese invaders after July 1937. Red Star Over China consists of interviews of many Chinese Communist leaders who rose up to top ranking positions after 1949 when the CCP became the government. It presents to us a picture of the Chinese Communists, their personalities, their intentions and ambitions, their community, and their plans for Chinese society. Although by no means a conclusive report on the Communists, this book helps to gain to better understanding of how viable the Communists were in China, and why they ultimately took over the Chinese government in 1949.

In 1927 the Nationalists formally broke with the Communists and started massacring the latter. In Oct.1934, the extermination campaigns waged by the Nationalists finally forced the Communists to retreat from their military base in southwestern Chinese mountains, going west, crossing the Tibetan plateau, and scaling several snow capped mountains, finally arriving at northwestern China where there was an established Communist base near Yanan, Shaanxi (Shensi, Snow, p.41)Province, in Oct.1935. By then they had trekked for over 6,000 miles, and their number dropped from the 70,000 to 80,000 when they started the retreat, to about 3,000 to 4,000.

The low tide in Chinese Communist history was partly brought about by the policies of Leon Trotsky, one of the top leaders in the Soviet Communist Party and the Third Communist International. Trotsky, whose followers were called the Trotskyites, called for international revolution to overthrow the conservative governments that represented the bourgeois class of factory owners and large businessmen. He visualized industrial workers' leadership in the socialist states to be established, hence the revolutions were to first take place in the cities. In China, the legacy of Trotsky was the many industrial workers' strikes in the cities, which were quickly suppressed by the warlords and later the Nationalists, after the split between the Communists and Nationalists in 1927. After 1935, Chinese Communism primarily focused on the countryside and the mobilization of the peasants through land reform, and had little to do with the Soviet Union (by then, Trotsky was already purged out of the Soviet Communist Party by Joseph Stalin, and one of Trotsky's "crimes" was his strategic mistakes that led to the defeat of Chinese Communists by the Nationalists in the 1920s). Stalin was never enthusiastic about the Chinese Communists because he looked down upon the leadership of the CCP: instead of industrial workers they were primarily from the countryside, and did not fit the Marxist vision for socialist or Communist leaders. After 1927, there was hardly any contact between the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union under Stalin until the late 1930s and 1940s, when connections were resumed but remained tenuous.

After the Communists reached Shaanxi (Shensi) Province in 1935, Chiang Kai-shek used his most capable troops--those from Manchuria under the rule of Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, to exterminate them. The Communists were called the red bandits, and their leaders were hunted for great sums of money. Mao Tse-tung, the political leader of the Communists, and Chu Teh, commander of the Chinese Red Army, were called "Chu-Mao" by the Nationalist controlled newspapers, which sounded like "pig's hair," as they are pronounced the same way in Chinese. Eventually, it was during those campaigns that General Yang Hucheng, native of Shensi Province and Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, of the Nationalists party, decided to ally with the Communists and force Chiang Kai-shek to do so, in order to resist the Japanese.

The road to Yanan, the Communist base, was via Sianfu (Xian), the capital of Shensi Province, then heavily guarded by the Nationalist troops who were dispatched there to exterminate the Communists. But because of the secret agreements reached between the Nationalist generals Yang Hucheng and Chang Hsueh-liang, and the Communists, there was no fighting going on, and Snow was able to go to Yanan via Sianfu without much difficulty. The absence of fighting, however, greatly bothered Chiang Kai-shek, who had to fly into Sianfu in 1936 to intervene, only to be captured by his own troops who forced him to sit down and form a second united front with the Communists against the Japanese.

Shensi Province is located in what the Chinese refer to as northwestern China, although from the map (look for Xi'an (Sianfu), its capital) you would call it central China. Historically this area was called the cradle of Chinese civilization, as the earliest kingdoms in China were built here. In the past 1,000 years, soil erosion has led to large scale desertification in this region, making it one of the poorest regions in China. Poverty, plus excessive taxation, made this region a fertile ground for Communists and their tax reduction,land reform programs. Most of the houses in this area were caves carved out of the mountain sides, which are warm in the winter and cold in the summer. Like most northern Chinese farm houses, the bed in these houses are not wooden and movable, but built with mud bricks on the ground called "kang:" with a stove underneath that can be heated up in the winter (of course it should not be overheated).

After Snow entered the red occupied region, he was impressed by the high spiritedness of the Red soldiers, especially the teens who were called lovingly "Little Red Devils," some of whom participated in the Long March of 1934-35, the simplicity of the lifestyles of Communist leaders such as Chou Enlai, who was going to rise to the position of premier in the People's Republic of China after 1949. He was also impressed by the peasants who felt at ease living with the Red Army and even the Nationalist soldiers whom he eavesdropped who said the Reds ate better and had a just cause.

From Snow's interviews, there gradually emerged a picture where the Communist leaders were largely older, more educated, and often from middle-class or well to do backgrounds, while the young Red soldiers often came from a poverty-stricken rural background. Drawing lessons from their defeat by the Nationalists, the Communists were also gradually developing their own (apart from Soviet dictated) program, which, briefly summarized, were: anti-imperialist, anti-warlord, anti-Nationalist Party/government, alliance with the peasants, reduction of rural tax, and land redistribution.

As the war with Japan drew close, as was the case when Snow interviewed these Communist leaders, including Chou Enlai, Lin Biao, and Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese Communists also came up with a revised agenda: alliance with the Nationalists to form a United Front against Japan, and mobile, guerrilla instead of trench warfare during the early phase of the war when Japan possessed superiority in weapons and military personnel, and gradually changing to positional warfare (trench warfare) after the Japanese were weakened through battles of attrition.

Despite a simplistic lifestyle, the Chinese Soviets in Shensi Province enjoyed an organized and cultured life. There was a Red Army University where students learned the Communist teachings and world affairs, and there was a Red Theatre staged by often professional actors/actresses who came from the Nationalist occupied areas, one of whom was Jiang Qing, a second class movie actress from Shanghai, who would later on become the third Madame Mao Tse-tung in Yenan.

The story of Mao Tse-tung that Snow composed through his long interview with Mao highlighted and was representative of the Chinese Communist leadership. Mao came from a well-to-do peasant family in Shao Shan, Hunan Province, in central China, where his father was both a grain farmer and a grain merchant. Years of confrontation with his father cultivated his rebellious spirit, and from early on he developed a strong sense of justice and sympathy for the poor despite his family background. Formal schooling came to Mao very late, when he was sixteen. But for a long time before that, he had studied classical Chinese in a traditional style tutorial setting, which explains his liking for classical Chinese and classical Chinese style poetry, which he never stopped composing throughout his life. His education at a modern style school first in Hsiang Hsiang, and later in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, was an eye-opening experience for this peasant boy, who had prior been primarily subject to an education in classical Chinese and Buddhism. In both places he was able to read many liberal/revolutionary magazines published in Beijing and Shanghai, as the Gao brothers did in Pa Ching's The Family. Indeed, Mao would fall neatly into the category of a "May Fourth Youth," who thirsted for knowledge to save China, and searched for such knowledge from the West.

Although he was a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, the latter was initially dominated by the better educated in the party, such as Chen Tu-hsiu, once dean of the Humanities at Peking University and founder of the journal New Youth, which the Kao brothers in The Family read avidly. Other leaders of the Party included Li Ta-chao, professor of history at Peking University, Wang Ming and Li Lisan, the latter two both trained at Moscow and faithfully followed Moscow's orders to start the revolution from the cities. There was also Mikhail Borodin, the adviser from the Third Communist International. The revolution from the cities policy continued even after the split of the Nationalists and Communists, when the Nationalists started to ruthlessly massacring the Communists in the cities. Mao and several other branches within the Communist Party shifted their focus to underground guerrilla warfare after 1927 and built the first Chinese Soviet base in Jinggangshan, a mountainous area in Jiangxi Province in southwestern China. Even there, however, Mao's call for a peasant focused revolution was ignored, until the Communist Party was badly defeated by the Nationalists in the early 1930s and had to take a long retreat to northwest China where they would align with an existent red base there to fight against the Japanese and keep close to the Soviet Union. It was right on the Long March, name given to this long migration of the Red Army to northwestern China, that Mao Tse-tung was made leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 1935, and his peasant based instead of city based revolutionary policy was recognized as the official party policy.