Special Section: Comrade Chiang Ch'ing Tells Her Story

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Ch'ing recalled especially one time when, with pouring rain leaking through the window, she sat motionless on the stone bed by a small oil lamp waiting for her mother, who did not return until the rain stopped at dawn many hours later. She learned to "walk in the dark" in search of her mother when she was five or six, and though ghosts held no terror for her, she developed a violent fear of wolves. She retained the scars caused by a ravenous pack of dogs who attacked her one of those nights.

When Chiang Ch'ing and her mother moved to Tsinan, a city long renowned for its theaters, Chiang Ch'ing found her vocation.

"In 1929 1 was admitted to the Shantung Provincial Experimental Art Theater at Tsinan. This was an art school, where I studied mainly modern drama but also some classical music and drama. I was only 15 then. The school provided free tuition and meals and an allowance of two yuan (about 60 U.S. cents) a month. I studied there only one year, but I learned a lot. I got up before daylight and tried to learn as much as possible. [The curriculum also included the special body movements used in Chinese opera, makeup, costuming, traditional Chinese musical instruments and even the piano, for three months.]

"The school was closed down when Han Fu-ch'ū, the warlord of the Northwestern Army, came to Tsinan. I joined some of the school's teachers and students in organizing a touring theatrical group that went to Peking. I left without telling my mother, only mailing her a letter at the railway station just before the train pulled out.

"That year (1930) I was only 16, and life in Peking was very hard indeed. I was so poorly equipped that I did not even have any underclothes. Although I had taken my family's best quilt with me, I still shivered with cold because its cotton wadding was worn thin from age. That season in Peking there were heavy sandstorms and the nights were dismal. I had not yet come to know politics. I had no notion of the significance of 'Kuomintang' and 'Communist Party.' All I knew was that I wanted to feed myself and that I adored drama."

She would soon find out about the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, which ruled China at that time. Its ramrod-straight young leader was Chiang Kaishek, who by 1928 had succeeded by force of arms in establishing control over the entire country, incorporating dozens of powerful local warlords into a tenuous union. For four years Chiang had endured an uneasy united front with the fledgling Communist Party (founded in 1921), but during his "reunification campaign, "he had broken with it, determined to destroy it. Weaker by far than the Nationalist Party, the Communist Party went underground in the cities while a small faction, led by the then little-known Mao Tse-tung, began a long effort to establish revolutionary bases in remote areas of the Chinese countryside. Meanwhile Chiang Ch'ing, a floundering actress, apprentice playwright and intellectually restless, went to the port city of Tsingtao and made contact with Communist Party members.

In late 1932 Chiang Ch'ing was introduced to Li Ta-chang, then secretary of the Tsingtao Party organization. A day was arranged for three Communist Party members to make a seemingly casual encounter with Chiang Ch'ing on the streets of Tsingtao. She was