问答题 71. What were the Chinese Communists like? In what way did they resemble, in what way were they unlike, Communists or Socialists elsewhere? The tourists asked if they wore long beards, made noises with their soup, and carried homemade bombs in their briefcases. The serious-minded wanted to know whether they were "genuine" Marxists. Did they read Capital and the works of Lenin? Had they a thoroughly Socialist economic program? Were they Stalinists or Trotskyites? Or neither? Were they true internationalists? "Mere tools of Moscow," or primarily nationalists struggling for an independent China?
Who were these warriors who had fought so long, so fiercely, so courageously, and—as admitted by observers of every color, and privately among Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's own followers — on the whole so invincibly? What made them fight like that? What held them up? What was the revolutionary basis of their movement? 72. What were the hopes and aims and dreams that had made of them the incredibly stubborn warriors—incredible compared with the history of compromise that is China—who had endured hundreds of battles, blockade, salt shortage, famine, disease, epidemic, and finally the Long March of 6,000 miles, in which they crossed twelve provinces of China, broke through thousands of Kuomintang troops and triumphantly emerged at last into a new base in the Northwest?
73. Who were their leaders? Were they educated men with a fervent belief in an ideal, an ideology and a doctrine? Social prophets, or mere ignorant peasants blindly fighting for an existence? What kind of man was Mao Tes-Tung, No. 1 "Red bandit" on Nanking's list, for whose capture, dead or alive, Chiang Kai-Shek offered a reward of a quarter of a million silver dollars? What went on inside that highly priced Oriental head7 or was Mao really already dead, as Nanking officially announced? What was Chu Tes like—the commander-in-chief of the Red Army, whose life had the same value to Nanking? Who were the many other Red .leaders repeatedly reported dead, only to reappear in news—unscathed and commanding new forces against the Kuomintang?