Special Section: Comrade Chiang Ch'ing Tells Her Story

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instructed to walk along a specified route in the company of a male student. They were to cling close to one another as if they were lovers, but to proceed cautiously, to be on the alert for spies and agents, and to watch for the agreed signals. The scheme worked, and she was delivered over to men directly representing the Party. Her case was prepared, and by February she became a member.

That spring, she remembered, some friends who knew nothing about what was happening to her in a political way started calling her by the nickname Erh Kan-tzu, literally Two Stalks, because her legs were skinny and she strutted about on them in brave style. She had lost weight because she was subsisting on very little, eating almost nothing, just two shao-ping (wheat-flour pancakes common to North China) a day. And she cut corners in other ways. Why was she so concerned about saving money? "To pay off Li Ta-chang!" she responded brightly, refusing to elaborate, but implying that for her at least there was a price on Party membership.

SHANGHAI: IN DANGER

Soon Chiang Ch'ing joined thousands of China's new-left generation of writers and dramatists who were drawn to cosmopolitan Shanghai. In the 1930s leftists lived in constant fear of the so-called White Terror imposed by the Nationalist secret police.

Nonetheless, Chiang Ch'ing immediately set about to join the small and weak local Communist Party. Leftist art circles were dominated, among others, by future Cultural Commissar Chou Yang, an orthodox party functionary. (Chou was eventually purged in the Cultural Revolution.) Chou and his coterie, Chiang Ch'ing recalled with great bitterness, kept her on the edges of the Communist organization during her four years in Shanghai. She never became a member of the secret inner-party circle. For a while the party placed her in a job as a night school instructor in a Y.W.C.A. literacy program. One night, however, a Nationalist informer apparently pointed her out to the police, who ordered her to leave Shanghai immediately. Witke describes her nocturnal flight from the city:

She walked quickly, running whenever she could. As she passed through neighborhoods, undoubtedly cutting a bizarre figure, there were other attempts to waylay her. She escaped. Soon she reached the city limits, with the countryside just ahead. Breathless and weary, she sped down the road. Suddenly rough hands seized her from behind and pinned her down. With all her might she struggled to break away but failed. "I'm being kidnapped!" she screamed over and over again at the top of her lungs. That was in vain, for beyond the city limits there was no one to hear her. She had assumed that her captors were police, but when she studied them more closely she saw that they too were dressed in the civilian style of secret agents. As they proceeded along the dark road, she tumbled off the roadway, intentionally leaping into a paddy field. Before the men regained control of her she slipped her secret document, the application form from the Shanghai Party organization, out of the corner of her waistcoat. As fast as possible, she stuffed it into her mouth, chewed it vigorously, and swallowed. The sensation of paper passing into her system was peculiar to say the least. Yet she knew that she had destroyed all visible evidence of that incriminating affiliation.

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