About a year after the outbreak of war, many of Yen's opium-smoking soldiers had thrown away their arms and become bandits, but a small part of the arn-iy took refuge in southern Shansi. Here Yen organized a new "Dare To Die Army," and Jung joined as a political director to instill the troops with patriotism. When Yen showed little stomach for a fight, the new army revolted and rushed away to join General Liu Po-cheng in the Taihang Mountains. After a violent spiritual struggle with himself, Jung followed, leaving home with the blessings of his father, but the curses of his luxury-loving wife who refused to join him in the mountains. In the guerrilla areas, Jung met a girl who was traveling the same "Revolutionary road" as he. Obtaining a divorce from his first wife, he married again. In the meantime, five hundred delegates from North China had elected him vice-chairman of the Border Region government.

　　These experiences had not made Jung stern or forbidding, but had given him a puckish sense of humor. He had none of that depressing fanaticism of the newly arrived Peiping students who were inclined to ruffle up their feathers at the slightest criticism of conditions in the Liberated Areas. Perhaps, because of his broad sympathies, he could discuss with perfect detachment the numerous fights between government and Communist party cadres, while at the same time he was able to relate with good-humored relish the difficulties encountered by backwoods officials when they entered captured cities and got their first glimpses of Western civilization, including machinery and flush toilets.

　　But the amazing thing about Jung was the extent of his experiences and his knowledge about them. I spent a great deal of time with him, talking about such a variety of subjects as banking, farm production, handicrafts, marriage, opium and a dozen other subjects ranging from the livelihood of mule-cart men to the relationship of wives to revolution. What made Jung's conversation fascinating was that he had in six years held jobs which brought him into direct contact with all these branches of human activity.

　　He was not necessarily unique, for everyone in the Liberated Areas seemed able to perform more than one job. I remember a cadre (1) of the 8th Route Army who was a political director in a front-line regiment the first time I met him. A week later, after Chiang Kai-shek turned loose the Yellow River into Shantung, I saw this same cadre directing relief work in the flooded areas. Two weeks alter that, he was leading land reform in the villages. A month later, he became mayor of a newly captured city. Though such versatility was not rare, it never ceased to amaze me, for such talents are seldom found in America, belonging more to the period of the Renaissance than to the capitalist age of specialization. The cadres of the 8th Route Army, it seemed, could do almost anything.

　　But how could they raise money to run a war in this backward region without excessive recourse to the printing press or without raising taxes to unprecedented heights? That was the question.

　　"But how can you run a war on eleven million dollars?" I asked Jung. "That doesn't seem possible. You must run it on what you confiscate from the landlords."

　　Jung laughed. "No, that was how the old Red Army ran their Soviet areas. We can carry on with such a small budget for entirely different reasons.

　　"In the first place, most all our cadres are working here out of choice. You may take me as an example. I ran over here because I could not stand conditions in Chiang Kai-shek's areas. I left home, my family and a good job. Such acts of renunciation spring from revolutionary motives. All of us can work for almost nothing and we can exist on little food. In the second place, as you've probably noticed, our government is just a skeleton structuxe. We don't have to support a top-heavy bureaucracy and therefore can keep expenses and taxes low. Thirdly, all of us, not only government cadres, but soldiers too, must engage in some form of production in addition to our regular jobs. Finally, we don't lose all those vast sums of money that the Kuomintang does through squeeze, bribery and corruption. There is almost no chance for squeeze. All payments and collections must go through a supervisory committee so that it's almost impossible to juggle figures. In the villages, the local finance committee must post financial reports on the village bulletin board and anyone has a chance to question these figures. Probably just as important is the fact that we are fighting for idealistic motives. What would be the sense of running away from the corruption of the Kuomintang only to set up the same kind of society here?"

　　While Jung was talking, it occurred to me that he must have a terrible time collecting taxes with such a small staff. Wouldn't the people be likely to cheat the government and make out false returns.

　　"Yes," said Jung, "in the beginning we found many farmers who falsely reported the amounts of their land holdings, while merchants and factory owners reported profits梠f, say, two thousand dollars when they really had profits of five thousand dollars. Having no large staff of tax examiners, we solved this problem by crude democratic methods. Once or twice a year all villages were ordered to hold 'Democratic evaluation meetings" at which owner-farmers, tenants and landlords had to state their incomes in public. At these meetings, a village referee stands about the crowd and asks each farmer individually the amount of his harvest. When he gets an answer, he calls out to the farmer's neighbor: 'Right or wrong?' Since everyone in a village knows each other's affairs intimately, wrong statements are corrected on the spot."

　　In Chiang Kai-shek's areas, sharecroppers had commonly to give from 50 to go per cent of their rice or wheat crop to the landlord. In addition, they were forced to pay innumerable surtaxes, to say nothing of the government land tax. Quite apart from anything Border Region officials told me, I found on independent investigations of my own in the villages that the peasants in the Liberated Areas commonly paid from 8 to 15 per cent of their crop to the government. But that's an end of it. There were no rent payments to landlords and few surtaxes. Because of the general mildness of the agrarian reform, there were no mass grain strikes by the farmers against the government. What was slightly incredible was to find women and children winnowing and sifting their grain to get the best they had for the government. Some families even went so far as to invite neighbors in to criticize the grain they were about to send off to the village office. If the neighbors said it wasn't very high grade, they would winnow it again. If this seems impossible to believe, it must be remembered that the people realized the grain wouldn't go into the hands of city merchants or corrupt officials, but would go to the army where their Sons and lovers were fighting.

　　It ought to be made perfectly clear that while the land tax was mild enough and just and while there were no irregular levies and surtaxes, there were nevertheless requisitions of various kinds on the peasantry. Most of these requisitions were of labor.

　　I have seen peasants conscripted to work on the roads, to plant collectively what land UNRRA tractors had plowed, to furnish carts and mules for transport of grain, to reclaim waste land and tO work on various public projects. I think these men may have given even more in labor hours to the Communists than they gave to Kuomintang officials in Chiang Kai-shek's areas.

　　There was, however, a great difference between this kind of requisition and that practiced in Kuomintang areas. First, labor given in this manner was always for the public good and not for private profit. Secondly, no one was impoverished by requisitions. Any commandeered labor was divided equally among all villagers, whether landlords or tenants. There was, no getting out of labor because of political influence, and government workers contributed free labor as did peasants. Thirdly, there were strict limits on all such requisitions. Fourthly, no grain, outside of the land tax, could be requisitioned without grain tickets. Peasants could use these tickets to get back their grain from the government. Finally, and most important of all, the peasants themselves thought the system just and equable. Whether they were fooled by propaganda is something I leave to the moralists.