political instructor said to me: 'You head up a group and go and reconnoitre.' So at night I went to check out the lie of the land. On the second night we took rope ladders and went into the area. The GMD cavalry division were camped up there and we finished them off! After that we went off to Guilin [in the south] and joined up with the First Front Army. That was in 1936, and by then I couldn't tell you how many of us were in a bad way, and a lot of the officers too, it was pitiful. No one looking at us nowadays would have believed that those troops could take the whole of China!
XINRAN: Did you believe it then?
CHANGZHENG: I didn't know a lot about the bigger picture then. Our chiefs treated me well, and wherever we went the poor people treated us well too. I thought that was proof of their common decency. Once we had joined up with the First Front Army, we moved straight off to Yan'an.
XINRAN: Do you know why the Red Army went to Yan'an? Why was Yan'an chosen as a base area?
CHANGZHENG: No one lived in the Great North-West, and the enemy wasn't there either so we could rest and reorganise ourselves. So many had died on the Long March that we had to do that. We had a song:
After we moved up to Yan'an, we didn't get support from ordinary people, so we had to shift for ourselves. Yan'an was so poor that not even Chiang Kai-shek [and the GMD] wanted to go and fight there. We started to produce our own food and clothing. Every morning, the troops went off up into the mountains with their hoes to clear the land for planting. The ground was very hard, and some of the vegetation needed two people to dig it out. By day we prepared the ground, and by night we spun and wove cotton. We had a song which went:
No one nowadays would believe the hardships we suffered then.
I got an anal boil in Yan'an, which didn't heal properly, so I went to see the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune. [14] I said I didn't want a general anaesthetic because I would be out for too long. 'Not to worry,' he said, 'I'll operate at eight, and by nine you'll have come round.' I was just a soldier but he was very sympathetic: he cured my illness, and reduced the awful pain so I wasn't suffering like before. Many of my comrades were cured by Dr Bethune. He was a good man.
XINRAN: Did you see Mao Zedong in Yan'an?
CHANGZHENG: Back then, the troops saw a lot of the chiefs, so I don't remember exact dates and places. But Mao Zedong came to give a speech to the guards training course, and I can still remember that today. He said: 'Your guard duties are extremely important. Now you're guarding the Party Central Committee, and the people of Shaanxi and Gansu, but in the future you'll be guarding the whole of China.' At the end of the course, Zhou Enlai came to talk to us too. Once during the course, there was an air raid by thirty or more enemy planes. There were three or four hundred of us and we helped each other into the caves. After we came out, Yan'an had been flattened, and all those poor old people and children had been left without homes.
XINRAN: Can you tell me who you were guarding in Yan'an?
CHANGZHENG: Kang Shi'en.
XINRAN: Kang Shi'en? The man who was Deputy Chairman of the State Council in the 1980s and died on 21 April 1995?
CHANGZHENG: Uh-huh.
XINRAN: And when did you leave Yan'an?
CHANGZHENG: There was a call to demobilise, but I thought to myself, what will I do if I go back to the poverty of my home? So I didn't demobilise. I left Yan'an with the rest of the troops and we crossed the Yellow River, fought through the Zhangjiakou Pass, then to the Rehe River, and then we arrived in the north-east, and went to Chengde. Me and my old woman, we married in Jilin, in the north-east, and after we got married we set off with the troops to Tianjin, where our eldest daughter was born.
I remember a huge building in Tianjin which housed a department store and the residence of a big GMD official. Our bombs had destroyed this building. The ordinary people said to us: 'Your bombs must have eyes!' After we had taken Tianjin, we went to Shijiazhuang, and then came to Beijing.
XINRAN: Mr Changzheng, can I interrupt you a moment? You say you fought through the Zhangjia Kou Pass. What army were you in then?
CHANGZHENG: I was in the PLA, which started off as the Eighth Route Army, but afterwards everything got called the PLA: the Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and other troops too.
XINRAN: Were you with the Fourth Field Army then? From the places where you fought battles, it sounds like you must have been in Lin Biao's Fourth Field Army.
CHANGZHENG: That's right – the Fourth Field Army.
XINRAN: May I ask you who its chiefs were then?
CHANGZHENG: Generals Wang Ming and Wang Zhen. In Yan'an, it was also General Wang Ming. He was chief when we were clearing new land for cultivation, and he led us to the north-east too.
When the People's Republic of China was established, I attended the founding ceremony in Beijing. There were no trees and paths in front of Tiananmen Gate then, and I watched from an earth embankment on the west side. After the ceremony was over, I went to the suburb of Dongbeiwang. After that, I got a train to Hankou, then Guangxi, then Vietnam. Then I went to Shanghai, Tianjin, Qiqihar and Manchuria. We had an old army friend who was working there as an official. He asked me if I'd like a trip to the Soviet Union. I said I couldn't possibly go, I was still in army uniform. But then I was sent there anyway. When people found out I'd been in the PLA, they were very nice to me. When their chiefs talked, I couldn't understand a thing, but there was one who spoke Chinese, so I could understand him.
I've been on the move for most of my life, going here and there. I went back with the army to Beijing, then Nanjing, then Zhenjiang. Then I got a civilian job and moved to Tianjin.
XINRAN: When did you leave the army?
CHANGZHENG: In 1956. I got transferred from Tianjin to be a researcher at an oil depot, for what is now Great Wall Lubricants, part of Sinopec. I worked there until I retired. The first time I went to the Daqing oilfield, the first oil well, I said to my boss I'd never seen an oil rig, I'd like to go and look. He said, go ahead. So in the evening, off I went. I was at the base of the oil rig and they gave me a quilt, and I spent all night there, carefully watching the drilling. The Daqing oilfield really pulled out all the stops for China. If it hadn't been for Daqing, we couldn't have run our vehicles, or developed our industries. The Americans, the British, even the Soviets had wanted to get a stranglehold on us then. Times were really hard, but we broke through. Just as in the grasslands, we never thought how rosy life would be now, so in the fifties, who would have imagined we would have televisions and fridges? At that time, our idea of a good Western meal was potatoes and roast beef from the Soviet Union!
XINRAN: How did you get to know your wife?
CHANGZHENG: We met in the north-east. After we got there, almost all my army mates found themselves partners and married, and so they introduced me to her. That was 1947. The day we were married, I had just arrived at her parents' house when someone shouted: 'The planes, the planes are coming!' [15] They pulled me into the house and we dashed for the cellar, and that was where we got married, with planes flying overhead, dropping bombs on us. My wife had no wedding dress, we had absolutely nothing. But we've never been parted.
XINRAN: How many children have you got?
CHANGZHENG: Five. Our eldest daughter, then a second daughter, then a son, then a third daughter, then our youngest son.
XINRAN: How do your children's lives compare to yours when you were young?
CHANGZHENG: I don't know. I'm just an army man. It's mainly been my wife who's done all the work. She brought all our kids up.
