In the fall of 1936 Agnes Smedley was recuperating in northwest China and working on her book on the Long March when she penned these vignettes for Partisan Review.

‘Vignettes from China’ by Agnes Smedley from Partisan Review. Vol. 3 No. 6. October, 1936.

A MAN passed along the Shanghai streets today, and by chance he was a Japanese. This was chance only, but what transpired was symbolic. For he threw away a cigarette stub and two ricksha coolies saw it and rushed forward to get it. Their long, heavily-veined scrawny hands reached toward the street at the same time. They struck at each other. Then they fell to fighting, and they fought like dogs. They fought for a cigarette stub thrown away by a Japanese. Of course, it was but a chance that the passer-by was Japanese, but this lent intensity to this degraded scene.

On this same day, in another part of the city, this happened: A young ricksha coolie, perhaps blinded by the fearful heat, stumbled and fell, and was struck by a passing tram car. It seems he was killed instantly, for he lay motionless, his face upturned to the sky. The shafts of his ricksha were crushed under the wheels of the tram.

These shafts worried a Japanese policeman who walked over and, without touching the ricksha coolie to see if he were dead or alive, began removing the broken shafts from under the car. After successfully removing the broken wood from the track, the Japanese policeman turned to the prostrate ricksha coolie, grasped him by a leg, and dragged him over to the curb, motioning to the tram that all was well. The car proceeded and the perspiring Japanese stood looking after it. Not once had he bent down to feel the pulse or the heart of the man at his feet, to see if he were alive or dead. It was the tram car and the profit it brings to its owners, that was important.

The prone ricksha coolie was young and strong, a lad of some nineteen or twenty summers. Perhaps he was a peasant from the country, recently come to Shanghai. For youth and strength were still on his body and it seemed that tuberculosis or heart sickness had not yet decimated him. Perhaps he came down from near Soochow where the hungry peasants have again revolted against the high taxes and the looting of the landlords–and where the Nanking Government has sent troops to force them to pay or to die. Many of these peasants have come to Shanghai as ricksha coolies, stevedores, or have become beggars. Now this lad is dead, and a policeman did not even consider it worth while to bend down and see if his heart has ceased to beat.

Today this happened in Shanghai:

Two motor vehicles rolled along a street. The front one was a Japanese truck, with two Japanese marines standing in the back. The truck drove slowly and impeded the progress of a private car in the rear in which sat a foreign white man and a Chinese chauffeur.

Irritated by the slow pace, the foreigner in the private car bent forward and said to his Chinese chauffeur: “Drive around and go home.”

The chauffeur answered: “That’s a Japanese truck.”

“Well, what if it is?”

“I can’t pass a Japanese truck.” “Why not?”

“I can’t. They would be angry.” “Well, let them be angry! Pass! Drive around, I tell you!”

Instead of passing, the chauffeur drew the private car up to the curb, got out, sat down on the curb and began to cry. He cried like a baby.

Later the foreigner said: “A Chinese chauffeur will never pass a Japanese car or truck, or a police car. For generations the common people have been subjected and taught servility and degradation. They must never be presumptuous enough to pass a policeman, an official, or a military man.”

Recently I personally experienced this:

I went up to a motor car station in Shanghai and ordered a taxi. No other person was in the station. There was no taxi at the moment and the Chinese clerk in charge told me I would have to wait for about five minutes. I waited. Within a few minutes a Japanese came up and ordered a taxi. Soon a Japanese woman and two children came up and also ordered a car.

Then the Chinese clerk in charge of the station turned to me and said: “You can have the third car. There are two other people before you!”

“I was here first. These people came after me,” I protested.

“Well, you must take the third car. You must wait,” he repeated.

“What do you mean! I was here first and you are giving this car to these people because they are Japanese.”

The Chinese clerk was frightened. “You must wait,” he repeated to me.

I went up to a taxi that rolled in, but the chauffeur would not allow me to take the car because a Japanese was waiting. There was nothing for me to do but leave the station.

Incidents similar to this I have witnessed in many parts of China. There is today in China a degradation, a servility before the Japanese that is indescribable. The origin of it is to be sought, not in the Chinese masses, but in Nanking. Since the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September, 1931, the Nanking Government and all its officials and military men have told the Chinese people that China is too weak to fight, that it must submit. For five years the whole Chinese press, the schools, and all other public institutions, have taught this demoralizing idea. Vast Chinese armies have retreated before a handful of Japanese. Slowly but surely the poison of fear and servility has seeped into the blood of China. The Japanese no longer need to use guns to conquer the country. All they have to do is to send an unarmed Japanese woman or child, or a Japanese or Korean gangster, and get all they want.

The Japanese know this. They have no fear of any Chinese except the Communists and the Chinese Red Army. These they fear and these forces alone, with their sympathizers, prevent the Japanese from openly occupying the country. Every other Chinese they can scare to death.

The press has just reported this typical incident: Along the Lunghai Railway in Honan Province in Central China, two Japanese got on the train. The Chinese conductor went through the cars and asked for tickets. He asked the Japanese for tickets also. They shrugged their shoulders and replied “May yo” (have not), then turned and gazed placidly out of the window. The conductor asked again but the Japanese replied the same. The conductor shifted from foot to foot, then went away.

Soon a group of armed Chinese railway gendarmes the terror of poor Chinese-came through the car. They halted before the Japanese and asked for their tickets. The two Japanese again shrugged their shoulders, said “May yo,” and gazed placidly out of the window. The gendarmes asked again but the Japanese did not even reply. Like whipped dogs, the gendarmes sneaked away and left the car,–and the Japanese rode without tickets.

The Japanese ride free on the trains of China. The same Chinese gendarmes who will beat a poor Chinese to death if they catch him on a train without a ticket, crawl like worms before a Japanese. Often I have related these incidents to friends. Bitter arguments ensue. “What do you expect?” they ask: “Do you expect these conductors and gendarmes to disobey the Nanking Government? Do you expect them to do what the whole Chinese army is ordered not to do-fight the Japanese on the spot?”

“They could put the Japanese off the train.” “Yes–and the Nanking Government would instruct the Governor of the Province in question to hand the Japanese Consul an official letter of apology, with indemnity.”

Then someone adds: “Why should the Japanese act other than they do? Who is going to stop them?”

“The Red Army and its allies will stop them!” “The Nanking Government wages war on the Red Army to prevent that.”

“For the time being only. Wait. The time will come when it can no longer do that.”

“All right,” reply my friends, “until then the Japanese can do as they please.”

On the Peiping-Tientsin train a short time ago I watched some fifty Japanese and Koreans take possession of a second-class car. They had bags of silver which they were taking out of China. They were not “smuggling” as the press likes to say; they were quite openly taking it out just as they quite openly bring in “smuggled” goods. Chinese coolies had carried the silver onto the train for them, and the armed guards on the car steps had stepped aside politely and allowed them all to pass. Inside, the Chinese conductor opened the compartment doors for them, bowed and smiled a welcome. Later this conductor went through the car again, opened the compartment doors, bowed and smiled and passed on. But when he came to me, he asked for my ticket. He bowed to the Japanese and Koreans in my compartment, smiled, but did not dare ask them for their tickets. In fury, I said to him: “Shame! Shame!”

In my anger I followed him into the corridor and down the car, watching him welcome these gangsters. “Shame on you, a Chinese worker!” I kept saying. He kept his head turned from me, but continued his degradation. The Japanese and Korean gangsters did not even notice him, but took his servility as their right.

Better that a people disappear from the face of the earth than accept such a fate as this. Better that individual Chinese revolt and die on the spot, rather than endure this. That which makes them men is gone. After that, existence has no meaning.

I was passing the Japanese Embassy in Peiping. At the entrance stood one lone Japanese soldier, with fixed gun. The gate opened and Chinese workers, apparently leaving work for the day, passed from the Embassy grounds into the street. They walked single-file, and as they passed this Japanese soldier, they halted, removed their hats, and bowed to the earth. The Japanese soldier stared before him and appeared not even to notice them. A whole line of some twenty Chinese workers passed, bowing to the earth, hats in hand.

It seemed to me that this was worse than death. Chinese workers, once organized, strong and proud, have been beaten down by the Chinese ruling class until they are today like worms before a single Japanese. Their dignity as men is gone.

“Rather death than this!” I protest to others. “They must think of their families,” people reply. “Families–why should Chinese families live to exist in slavery?”

“If they refuse to bow, that Japanese would stick his bayonet through them.”

“Good–rather that, than this degradation.”

“What do you expect of the Chinese common people? For generations their own rulers have treated them exactly as the Japanese treat them today. They have robbed them, looted them, beaten them, killed them, used them as nothing but creatures to make money for them. Now, suddenly, you expect these Chinese to act like men before a foreign invasion.”

Yet the Chinese people do struggle, are not slaves. Else why does the Nanking Government pass Special Emergency Laws against the national liberation movement, wage war on the Red Army, and form an Anti-Red Pact with the Japanese invaders? Why does the Japanese Army hesitate to occupy all China? Not from fear of the Chinese ruling class–but from fear of the Chinese people under the influence of the Communists. That and that alone holds them back. But the Japanese have no fear of the Chinese rulers today. Every time the Japanese ambassador, or some petty Japanese official calls on the Nanking Minister of Foreign Affairs, this latter gentleman gets diarrhea.

The Japanese have killed another of their own countrymen in China. This is the third such murder in recent months and two of them have been in Shanghai. The men killed are all insignificant, unimportant men. The murderers are said by the Japanese to be Chinese, yet no Chinese has been captured.

Everyone knows the Japanese order these killings, that they may use them to exert new pressure on the Nanking Government. Perhaps to get new secret agreements signed. Perhaps to force the withdrawal of Chinese troops from Hopei Province in the North, to get the “right” to station troops in Shantung Province and to take over that Province, to get new economic concessions, or to take over Shanghai. Even now the Japanese use these killings to police the International Settlement of Shanghai. Squads of Japanese marines, armed to the teeth, patrol Shanghai streets where no Japanese live. The British Consul-General of Shanghai aids them in every way. The Germans aid them. The other foreigners bow to them and remark fatalistically that soon the Japanese will take over and run the International Settlement. And with this, they will control the wealth of the Yangtze Valley, and the source of income of the Nanking Government which is and always has been but the tail to this citadel of Far Eastern colonial reaction.

China is sinking-sinking not only physically, but morally, spiritually. Every Chinese under the influence of the Nanking Government is terrified by the Japanese, degraded, servile. Every Chinese under the influence of the Communists, of the Red Army, is filled with contempt and bitter hatred for Nanking and Japan and all their ways.

Partisan Review began in New York City in 1934 as a ‘Bi-Monthly of Revolutionary Literature’ by the CP-sponsored John Reed Club of New York. Published and edited by Philip Rahv and William Phillips, in some ways PR was seen as an auxiliary and refutation of The New Masses. Focused on fiction and Marxist artistic and literary discussion, at the beginning Partisan Review attracted writers outside of the Communist Party, and its seeming independence brought into conflict with Party stalwarts like Mike Gold and Granville Hicks. In 1936 as part of its Popular Front, the Communist Party wound down the John Reed Clubs and launched the League of American Writers. The editors of PR editors Phillips and Rahv were unconvinced by the change, and the Party suspended publication from October 1936 until it was relaunched in December 1937. Soon, a new cast of editors and writers, including Dwight Macdonald and F. W. Dupee, James Burnham and Sidney Hook brought PR out of the Communist Party orbit entirely, while still maintaining a radical orientation, leading the CP to complain bitterly that their paper had been ‘stolen’ by ‘Trotskyites.’ By the end of the 1930s, with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the magazine, including old editors Rahv and Phillips, increasingly moved to an anti-Communist position. Anti-Communism becoming its main preoccupation after the war as it continued to move to the right until it became an asset of the CIA’s in the 1950s.

Access to full issue: https://bu.userservices.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/delivery/01BOSU_INST:AlmaGeneralView/121027668920001161