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PAUL ENGLE: Why do I bother to be interested in Communist China? First, as one of the great authoritarian countries of the world, everyone should be interested in it. It's going to be a part of our life. As the joke says, a cautious American should learn Russian. An imaginative American should learn Chinese.

I lived in Nazi Germany. I lived in Stalinist Soviet Union. I lived in Pilsudski Poland. And I lived in Mussolini Italy, in brief. Far more than the lives of most Americans, my life has been deeply involved with the authoritarian state. I lived with two German families.

I was with them at the time that the military mobilization cards were given out in 1935, and came home, and people said, what's it like over there? And I said, there's going to be a war. And they said, you're a war monger. And I saw the cards in the hands of the men. And I saw what happened to education and what is rapidly, in this world, becoming a very dangerous and disappearing word, "Privacy."

So it was natural for me to be interested in China. Perhaps, I should add a final argument, which is that I dare not be interested in China. My wife is Chinese. That means two things. It means many things, but two things, essentially-- one, I am the best Fed man in Iowa City. Secondly, it means that anything Chinese has a special meaning for my wife and therefore, for me.

She, herself, was completely involved with the history of contemporary China. As a child. she traveled by boat up the Yangtze River from Wuhan. She was born North of Wuhan on the Yangtze. And there, the river was littered with bombed out Chinese ships. She was bombed and machine gunned. She was on her way to Chongqing, where she went to school, where she was bombed every day by the Japanese who came in at rooftop level because the government-- that was the wartime capital, the government had no anti-aircraft and no fighter planes.

Her father was executed by the Red Army, they don't call it that, they call it the People's Liberation Army, the PLA, on the long march. He was beheaded and his head exhibited on a pole. This is not exactly what our child psychologists would recommend for young girls at the age of 12.

She escaped from Peking when it was surrounded and under attack by the Red Army, took an aged mother, two brothers and two sisters out. The brother was killed in the Air Force. I mentioned all of this only to say that my life is deeply immersed now in China.

Now, why, however, do I feel it is worth your time to listen, to talk about the head of the largest country in the world, which happens to be a communist country? My reasons are as follows. And I think it's important that why I am concerned.

First, in the past, this country has not been very clever about knowing the other side. We were completely stupid and naive about what Hitler really meant. We didn't believe him when he said, I'm going to arm this country and conquer the world. We didn't believe him. He meant it. We didn't believe that handful of Chinese Marxists persecuted on the run. They walked under fire every day for a year. They walked a distance equal to that between Boston and San Francisco and back from San Francisco to Boston, with women, with children. 100,000 left. Southeast China, 19,000 arrived in the Northwest. Nobody took these people seriously.

Chiang Kai-shek had no idea of the nature of Mao. He called him a barefoot bandit. What he didn't know was that Mao had three times his intelligence, three times his culture, three times his courage. You underestimate the enemy, and you are going to lose. I think it's important that these people as well as it is possible to know them. That's my first reason.

My second is an historical reason. I want to try to account for the nature of the success he had. It was not chance. Third, he's the only leader of a revolution in this century who was a literary man. As you certainly know, revolutions are not made by the so-called proletariat. They are made by intellectuals manipulating other people. This was the case in Mao.

My last reason is that he actually is a good poet. And I'm going to show you some of his poems and describe what they mean, the nature of the circumstance about which they were written. I think these are sufficient reasons for talking about this man, who has more people at his disposal than anyone in history ever had. And they are organized to the last little child. It's a dramatic and frightening prospect which we must learn to deal with.

Our educational standards today, as the world shrinks, seemed, to me, pathetic. What are our kids learn about Asia? But that's where the people are. United States is a little country of whites with a percentage of Blacks. But compared to Asia, we don't amount to much, either in geography or in terms of population. We're 225 million, Asia's 3 billion. And when those people are all literate and all armed--

So we're going to talk about Mao. Mao was born in the Southwest-- Southeast, excuse me, of China. He was born in a little village called Shaoshan. Here is a city called Changsha. Shaoshan is south of them. His father was a reasonably well-to-do grain merchant. He was exactly the kind of man who Mao spent his life destroying.

Mao went to Changsha and entered the college there. He spent five years at the college. After that, he was a principal of a primary school. After that, he was a librarian in Peking, at the Peking University Library. Never underestimate librarians. They're very dangerous people. And above all, they're dangerous in the United states, even more than in China. Why? Because we have one of the few systems of libraries-- public, private, state, university, college, high school, which has books of all kinds.

Mao, whose language is that of a highly civilized and imaginative peasant, said about his Peking University experience. Being with all those books was like an ox turned loose in a vegetable garden. He was a tremendous reader. Although, he never lived in the West, and this is a great pity, and this is why I believe so profoundly in getting the young people of the world to move around and to go everywhere possible, and get them to come here from their countries, he read a lot about it. He once said that one of the biggest influences on his life was George Washington, of all people.

Absolutely relevant. Washington conducted guerrilla warfare. He didn't-- he never had an army big enough, really, to stand up and fight the British toe to toe. So he had to do it Indian style, Chinese guerrilla style. You may remember that Mao said, the Revolutionary is the fish swimming in the sea of the people. Fascinating how he took everything he could from the West and turned it into Chinese Marxism.

He's the only leader of a military outfit in history, to my knowledge, to express his tactics in a poem. And I'm going to read it to you. This is a translation, which my wife and I did. These are his tactics.

While West Point United States Military Academy was studying the Napoleonic wars, Mao was enunciating the theory, which was going to cause an army trained by West pointers, all of that disaster and grief in Vietnam. All they had to do was read this little poem, and they would have understood that when they fought the red Chinese, and the red Chinese ran away, it wasn't a victory. If they got away, it was a victory for the Chinese because they were intact as a fighting unit and they just simply went around the edges.

And this is his theory. And it was put into a poem. And we have translated it into English verse.

Enemy advance, we run away. Enemy stop, we delay. Enemy tired, we annoy. Enemy retreat, we destroy.

And this is exactly what happened to the Kuomintang army of Chiang Kai-shek on the mainland of China. It's what happened in Vietnam. It is what is happening in Vietnam this afternoon. And it's all here. You can read about it. It's Mao's language.

I quote him again. Prose, "The ability to run away is precisely one of the characteristics of the guerrillas. Running away is the chief means of escaping from the passive state and regaining the initiative." That ought to be hung in every American army barracks in big letters, because these are the people. These are the people.

Now Mao went to Changsha, to the college, and became a teacher, became a librarian. Very humble little job. He got $2 a month and a bed called a Kong bed, which is to say, a flat area, very desirable in the North Chinese winter, above the stove. The bed was shared by seven young men. And nobody could turn over unless they all turned over.

He then went back to Changsha. He was in love with a woman, the daughter of his teacher, by the way, his ethics and morality teacher. And so he wanted to marry her. So he went back to Changsha, where she was. And they were married. And they had a couple of children.

And then in one of the sweeps of the Kuomintang army, they were both captured. He managed to escape, but she was tortured and executed. She was told, you can live if you will denounce and reject your husband. And like any loyal American wife, she preferred death to speaking ill of her husband.

He married again, a peasant girl by whom he had several children. They participated in the long March. She participated in the Long March with him. She was pregnant. She walked 8,000 miles. She was 18 times wounded, a concept unknown to the Chang or the Soong families who lived in such enormous, withdrawn, and unrealistic opulence.

The children finally had to be left with peasant families in the West of China, Sichuan province. After the war, Mao tried to find his children. They couldn't find them. Somewhere in the West of China today, there are children of Mao Zedong, and nobody knows they're his children, and they don't know they're his children.

Now, I repeat these facts because it's important that you understand a little about his personal life, because this is the least aspect of his career that is known in the West. Finally, this wife was sent to Moscow for medical care, but he divorced her. And he married Jiang Qing, C-H-I-N-G, whom he's married today. And she is the artistic power in China. She's the reason you get these propaganda plays and ballets.

Some of you may have seen The Red Detachment of Women on television or one of the films made under her direction. She was a bit actress in Shanghai. And she's a tough woman. She's just been a little demoted at the last party conference. All right.

He lost-- one of his brothers was captured and executed. He was beheaded. A son of his brother was captured and was buried alive. Simply, a grave was dug, and he's thrown into it alive. And it was covered up. The Kuomintang didn't mess around. Communists didn't mess around. It was one of the cruelest civil wars in history.

Now, what I propose to do from here on, since I assume that you know already the general outline of Mao's career since he took over the government, is to go through some of the poems and relate them to his life. What you have in Mao's poetry is revolutionary doctrine in classical form. It is as if Marx or Engels had written-- or Lenin, more likely, had written classical Russian verse, had written sonnets, for example. The sonnet does exist in Russian. They are, however, full of accounts of places where he lived, places where he fought. And they are all directed to one single point to proving that Mao is the successor to the long tradition of the Chinese emperors and that the Communist Party is the successor to the Chinese state. There is no other.

Let's have a look at the first one. These poems, then, are a, in a sense, political autobiography. There are no personal poems. The letter I only appears once. And this is in reply to a poem written and sent to him by a woman, whose husband had been executed by the Kuomintang.

The first poem is called "Changsha," that's the city where he went to college and where he fought several times with what was then the small Red Army. I will explain a couple of places. The Xiang River is mentioned, H-S-I-A-N-G. The Yangtze is the greatest river of China. And it runs like this, right up into the mountains of Tibet. The Xiang River flows north. Hunan is a province famous for its rice and its hot peppers. And it flows along here and then goes up and joins the Yangtze River from the south.

The Orange Island is a little island in the Xiang River. And the first uprising of the communists in China took place in 1911. It wasn't a communist uprising, by the way, if I said communist wrong. Uprising against the then corrupt government. 43 were killed in the uprising and 27 were captured, and they were all executed. The 72 martyrs of the Yellow Flower Mound, they were called, because the place they were buried.

So Mao is reminiscing back now about the scene of his youth. It was here that his wife was captured and executed. It's an emotional city for Mao. I should also comment that the 1,000 houses that he mentions in the poem refers to the warlords and the major landowning families of the province.

"Standing alone in the cold autumn,

Where the Xiang River flows north on the tip of Orange Island,

Looking at thousands of hills, red all over,

Row after row of woods, all red,

The river is green to the bottom.

100 boats, struggling.

Eagles striking the sky.

Fish gliding under the clear water.

All creatures fight for freedom under the frosty sky.

Bewildered at empty space, I asked the great gray Earth,

Who controls this rise and fall?

Hundreds of friends used to come here.

Remember the old times?

The years of fullness,

When we were students and young, blooming and brilliant,

With the young intellectuals, emotional argument, fist up, fist down,

Fingers pointing at river and mountain, writings full of excitement,

Lords of 1,000 houses merely dung.

Remember still how, in the middle of the stream,

We struck the water, making waves which stopped the running boats?"

Now, my point is that by ignoring the poems of Mao, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, in part, were responsible for their own defeat. They never understood the subtlety of that man. He outthought them every time. He always said, he has three major themes in his poetry-- one, by willpower, man can do anything. Second, man is a part of nature who can change nature. Hence, his conviction, you can change all of China. And third, nothing can stop a motivated people. Love, which the history of China and of Vietnam are perfect examples.

So they never understood what his mind was like. And this is the greatest sin in the world to underestimate your enemy, to have contempt for him as an inferior. Mao walked to the battles of the little Red Army. He walked his 8,000 miles, bombed, shot at over mountains higher than anything in this country. The Kunlun Range, 20,000 feet high. He did it in snow.

Things unknown to the enemy. That is to say, enemy by his definition, the Kuomintang. Chiang went to his battles in a luxurious Pullman car. So far from the battles, it was kept, that he couldn't possibly know what was happening.

In the first battle, the Red Army fought with the First Nationalist Army in the South, Jiangxi province. The nationalist general was captured. He was being carried in a sedan chair. Crazy. Total misreading of how Mao manipulated Marx to make it fit the Chinese scene.

1925 was the date of that poem. He's been writing poetry, that is to say, for 50 years. It's incredible activity for a man who was fighting, organizing, talking, running a country.

The next poem is called "Jinggang [CHINESE]." Jinggang is right here. It's a chain of mountains. [CHINESE] is the Chinese sound for mountain. It's about being attacked by the Nationalist Army. When the battle of Changsha was lost, Mao collected the few survivors and left Changsha and fled into this mountain range. It was full of Buddhist temples. They lived in the temples.

It was winter. They had almost nothing to eat. They had no rice. For a Chinese not to have rice, it is the ultimate misery. There was a slogan among the soldiers about their food. Down with capitalism, eat squash. And when the Chinese is reduced to squash and has no rice, only great courage and great conviction will keep him there.

So this is about 125 miles long, this range. And they went up in there. It was full of wild animals, tigers. They printed propaganda newspaper on the back of Buddhist texts. The Nationalists came from the east and attacked them. They were ambushed. In the poem, you will hear the phrase, [CHINESE]. This is a gorge. And Mao put his troops on three sides of the gorge, and left the opening undefended. And the army came in and these pathetic, illiterate, conscripted peasant boys of the Nationalist Army were slaughtered.

"Below the mountain, their flags flying.

High on the mountain, our bugles blowing.

1,000 circles of the enemy around us. We still stand unmoved."

Now his theme, you see, that I told you about the human will.

"Defense is deadly trench and wall,

But the strongest fort is our will.

From Huangyang Jie, cannon roar crying.

The enemy runs away in the night."

Now, there are many other poems I'm going to skip. They're about places that figured in this part of China, where the Red Army was first organized. Finally, the pressure against Mao and the Red Army became too much. They had to leave the mountain.

What they did was to go down to Zunyi. It's not on the map, it's right about here. And there, they decided they had no choice. The Nationalist Army was closing in. The Nationalist Army had hired German generals. German generals were in very full supply and unemployed after the first world war. They were glad to go to China. And they built a system of blockhouses. And it was an extremely dangerous thing.

So Mao decided that they had to flee. So they organized all of their people and started out from here to walk. This is what's known as the Long March. And they walked along Southern Jiangxi, Southern Hunan, Northern Guangxi, Southern Guizhou, and then a bit of Yunnan, and then they curved north through Sichuan, which is the great empty mountainous province.

There were 100,000, as I said, women, children. They even carried sewing machines. And here, they ran into the first line of blockhouses. 20,000 of them were killed, almost all in a single day. They kept on. We'll read a couple of poems about events in the Long March. And finally, they got across the gorge of the Upper Yangtze and across these great mountains of the Kunlun Range. Mount Everest is the western end of the Kunlun Range. It goes right across Nepal, Tibet, and into China, where-- sorry, where they go out like this, huge ranges.

And then over here, where they went across the great swamps, the grass fields, there, they were attacked not by the Nationalist Army, but by Mongolian tribesmen on horseback. Then they turned east. And there, the few survivors, the 19,000, only 30 women out of several hundred survived. And there, they lived in caves.

Yan'an is in an area with what the geologists call a loess, L-O-E-S-S, and the German word to dissolve soil. Very fine grained clay. There's a lot of loess soil in this part of the United States. It was blown out of Montana and Wyoming.

And they carved big caves. They even put walls in the front, with doors and windows. And they lived there. And there, Mao wrote his Marxist theory. He wrote several poems. The moment they arrived at Yan'an. Mao sat down and wrote a poem. I'll read it to you. It's called "The Long March."

And I said 368 days, they were walking, sometimes, in day, sometimes at night, under attack the entire time, under terrain no one in his right mind would ever dream of trying to walk. People in those high mountains were occasionally simply blown off into space by the intensity of the winds. Mao had to be carried in a litter three times. As I said, his wife was wounded 18 times. And finally, they did get to the relative safety of Yan'an.

There are few things in the poem that are mentioned, which have to be explained. The five ridges, which he calls, merely little ripples, are these points that go out from the Kunlun Range. Wumeng is one of the mountains. The Gold Sand River is the Chinese name for the Upper Yangtze River in the mountains.

Tatu, T-A-T-U, without an apostrophe, the Chinese would pronounce the T as a D, without an apostrophe, it's a T. And there was one of the most dramatic, fantastic events of the whole long March. They were marching up the South branch of the river. The nationalists were marching up the North side, opposite each other. They could call to each other.

The question was this. In the 19th century, there occurred what is called the Taiping rebellion, great uprising of Chinese, almost successful. The Taiping Army stopped right there, where Mao was, to celebrate for a day the birth of their leader's child. That was a great mistake. That day resulted in their being surrounded and destroyed. Mao knew this.

There was a bridge made of chains with planks laid on them, which went across this very high gorge with the river far down. If they didn't cross that bridge, they were going to be surrounded and wiped out. And they should have been. A resourceful and intelligent leader of the other army would certainly have destroyed them. Over and over again, this happened.

They had taken up the planks on the bridge, except toward the other end. And there were machine guns covering the bridge, as well as the Nationalist Army. Mao asked for volunteers. A group of men started out, hand over hand, under these chains. Some of them made it. Some were shot and others just fell the 500 feet into the turbulent river.

When the communists saw that they were determined to attempt this crossing, they threw kerosene on the planks and set them afire. A few men got to the point of the planks, climbed up on the chains, and walked through the fire, the fire of the planks and the fire from the machine guns. And enough of them got across with enough grenades to wipe out the machine guns.

Immediately, they took the planks and put them all back on the bridge. And the entire Red Army crossed over. As happened, many, many of the Nationalist Army joined the Red Army. The history of all of the campaigns, and it's going to be the history of Vietnam.

When Mao finally got to Yan'an, he remembered all of these events. And no one should have survived the March. That 19,000 did is a miracle, will power, the willingness to suffer for a deep conviction, which will yield to nothing. An unmotivated army is not an army. The Red Army was motivated. You can call it propaganda, that's another word. But they believed in what they were doing.

"The Red Army does not fear the Long March toughness,

Thousands of rivers, hundreds of mountains, easy.

The five ridges merely little ripples.

Immense Wumeng Mountain, merely a mound of Earth.

Warmer the cloudy cliffs beaten by Gold Sand River,

Colder the iron chains bridging Dadu River.

Joy over mean mountains, thousands of miles of snow.

When the army crossed, every face smiled."

Now, one of the most interesting of Mao's poems is called "Kunlun" about the mountains. It's a poem full of goodwill, full of yearning for peace. As you know, after the Chinese communists were at Yan'an, they sent an emissary to the Americans, who, in turn, sent a delegation to them. They tried to establish relations with this country, but we did not do it.

The first stanza of the poem is Mao's statement to the mountain. You're too big, arrogant mountain. The second stanza deals with one of his favorite themes, that man must try to change nature and the human world, to cut nature down to human size. This was written in one of the clay caves in Yan'an, Y-E-N-A-N, Yan'an.

"Striking into the sky, out of the Earth, Kunlun monster mountain

Sees all Earth spring colors.

3 million white jade dragons fly up, freezing the sky with deep cold.

Melting in the summer, rivers flood all over.

Men change into fish and turtles.

Who can judge your virtues and evils, all these thousands of years?

Now I say to you, Kunlun.

Don't be so high.

Don't have so much snow.

Leaning against the sky, could I draw a sword and cut you into three pieces?

Give one piece to Europe.

Send one piece to America.

Keep one peace in Asia.

A world in peace, sharing together your heat and your cold."

Interesting poem called "Farewell to the Plague Spirit." This part of Hunan here and this part of Shaanxi here, very flat. It's rice country. This is the rice bowl of China, and full of ponds, full of canals, and full of stagnant, little slow moving streams. Well, that happens in Asia. Also in Africa, by the way. You get a snail, a little water snail. And that snail bears in its soft flesh a disc shaped larva, which is called Schistosoma japonicum. They blamed the Japanese for this little worm.

And this is deadly. If it touches living skin, the little worm creeps out and bores into your skin. It enters the bloodstream. It goes to the liver, and then it breeds in the liver. And you die in great suffering. It was pandemic in Asia. For centuries, whole villages would suddenly be wiped out. Nobody knew why. They called it big belly disease.

And the fascinating thing, today, the basic research on how to inoculate against schistosomiasis, as the disease is called, is being done, of all places, at the University of Iowa. In the College of Medicine, we have, by the way, no liver flukes in our streams. I'm proud to say. But two Chinese who were born there are doing the work, and China is following it very closely.

And interestingly enough, their research is being funded by that well-known charitable organization, the United States Navy, which has obvious reasons for not wanting Americans who are exposed to these rice paddies and so on to be infected. All right. This is about a campaign Mao organized to clear an area of that province of the blood fluke. And it worked. It worked in the usual Chinese way. They got 500,000 people who simply went along, collecting and destroying the snails. And suddenly there are no more snails.

Incidentally, the High Dam at Aswan on the Nile River has now so slowed the waters of the Nile that the schistosomiasis disease is beginning to occur on the upper waters of the Nile in Egypt. It's also in Central Africa, in the tropical part, where the rivers flow slowly. It's interesting that also infected are cattle. And when the disease was studied, it was discovered in that area, ermine, fox, skunks, deer, wild hogs, monkeys, rats, squirrels, rabbits, badger, all were infected with the liver fluke.

All right. Mao wrote a poem about this. And I'm going to read it to you. There are certain references which have to be explained. For example, Hua Tuo was a very, very old Chinese doctor, a very famous doctor. The Cowherd is a constellation in the sky in the Milky Way. It's not a Cowboy. He mentions the five peaks and the three rivers. This is a Chinese poet's way of symbolizing China.

Paper boats, they belong to a spring festival. They would put the boats in the water and then set them afire and let them float in the night. This is the only poem on which Mao has written a comment. I'll read it to you. 1958, reading in the People's Daily of June 30, 1958 about the stamping out of the blood fluke epidemic in Yuqiang. That's the section of the province.

My mind became so turbulent. I could not sleep. This is the only emotional remark that we have been able to find of Mao's. My mind became so turbulent. I could not sleep. A soft breeze blew warmly and the rising sun sparkled on the window. Looking far into the southern sky, I began to write. Why southern sky? Because he was in Peking. The word Peking in Chinese means northern capital, as Nanking means southern capital. So he's in Peking. So he wanted to look at the Yuqiang district. He had to look south, although of course, he could not see it.

"Green water.

Blue mountain.

Beautiful in vain."

Beautiful in vain because of this disease, you see.

"Even that ancient doctor, Hua Tuo, could not have stopped these tiny worms.

Hundreds of villages overgrown with weeds.

Sick people everywhere.

Thousands of desolate houses.

Ghosts singing.

Merely sitting here each day, we travel 80,000 miles on the turning earth,

Exploring the sky, looking at a thousand Milky Ways.

The Cowherd asked what to do about the plague spirit.

The same sorrow and the same joy still float on the flowing waves.

Spring wind, willow leaves in thousand.

600 million in China, all Emperor Yao and Shun.

Red rain of blossoms whirling in waves.

Blue mountains by hard work turned into bridges.

Heaven touching five peaks, pickaxes falling.

Three rivers trembling by iron arms shaken.

May we ask Mr. Plague, where do you want to go?

Paper boats on fire, candles lit the sky burning."

You see, he's a real poet. He's not only a politician. He's a poet who writes about politics. Mao said in a speech in 1945 at Yan'an that literature must be political in content, but as close to perfection in artistic form as possible. And he made fun of people who wrote like posters. He's a man of aesthetic taste. And this poem proves it. Now, I think maybe just one more poem.

The first poem he ever wrote was about Changsha. The next was Jinggang. And in "Jinggang Mountain," remember, he said, "Our strongest fort is our will." In 1965, he wrote the last poem we can find. 40 years later, the same theme as the first, although a much more interesting poem. He'd learned a little in the meantime. Same theme. This poem is not in any of the books published in China.

My wife is a novelist. Her newest novel in Chinese was being serialized in a magazine in Hong Kong called Ming Pao. And looking at a chapter of it when it came one day, she found this new poem of Mao's. So we translated it. I think its meaning is quite clear.

"A long time cherished hope to fly through clouds and once more, visit Jinggang [CHINESE].

Coming a thousand miles to search for the old place all changed by a new look.

Orioles singing, swallow dancing everywhere.

Flowing water bubbling.

Tall trees climbing into the sky.

Huangyang Jie's paths then deadly, now not even steep.

Wind and thunder were violent.

Powerful flags were waving.

Now unshakable on the Earth, the passing of 30 years.

A moment's snap of the thumb.

Now we can pick up the moon in the nine-leveled sky and catch turtles in all five oceans.

Triumphant return with talk and laughter.

Nothing difficult in this world if you keep climbing."