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For his fifth campaign (October 1933 to October 1934) Chiang Kai-shek sealed south China's Soviets with a ring of forts, mobilized a million men. Defeated in open battle, the Communists decided on a fantastic escape. Leaving a skeleton force at the front, they moved south & west on the night of Oct. 16, 1934, before Chiang Kai-shek's army got wind of their retreat. With them went thousands of peasants, a mule caravan carrying dismantled machinery, Singer sewing-machines, printing equipment. In forced marches, they crossed twelve provinces, over the 16,000-ft. passes of the Tibet mountains, through the swampy wastes of the grasslands in west China, twice missed annihilation by a hair in crossing treacherous, enemy-held rivers. On Oct. 20, 1935. 368 days after their evacuation of south China, the 20,000 survivors of the Red Army arrived in the small Soviet of Shensi.
Edgar Snow left Soviet China two months before Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped, three months before the Communists and the Generalissimo began their elaborate hatchet-burying in preparing to fight Japan. He prophesies flatly that the Communist-Kuomintang alliance "concludes an epoch of revolutionary warfare and begins a new era." Newspaper readers following the Japanese advance might conclude that the new era is to be one of Japanese dominance. Not so, says Edgar Snow. He quotes Mao's prophecy that even though Japan should occupy half of China and blockade the coast, "we would still be far from defeated." As in fighting Chiang Kaishek, Communist Mao would retreat & retreat, luring the lengthening Japanese columns into the interior, trusting that time and guerrilla tactics would finally snap the tightening thread of Japanese morale.
-*Some of the photographs he took were published in LIFE, Jan. 25 & Feb. 1.
-*Red Star Over China contains a brief, complicated but convincing account of the Sian Mutiny. Last week a detailed study of this affair was published by Snow's sub-correspondent James Bertram (FIRST ACT IN CHINA, Viking, $3) which gives a sympathetic portrait of The Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang. captor of Chiang Kaishek.