It was intensive and rigorous study. The trainees soon recognised that any study of the Chinese revolution would not be complete without reading Mao’s books on military tactics, philosophy, politics and history. ‘He was a frank writer, exploring controversial subjects such as communism and dictatorship, anti-imperialism and ethnological history, and describing the League of Nations as the League of Robbers.’ The trainees were specifically taught that in the massive country that was China there were large swathes of fertile land which provided the people with food and clothing; mountain ranges across its length and breadth with extensive forests and rich mineral deposits which provided the people with wealth; rivers and lakes which provided the people with water, transport and irrigation; and a long coastline which facilitated communication with nations beyond the seas. ‘We learned that, from ancient times, the fore-fathers of the living Chinese people had laboured, lived and multiplied on this vast territory.’
Of particular interest to the trainees was the fact that China bordered on the Soviet Union in the north-east – another communist friend of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). The instructors frequently reminded them that it was an advantage to be adjacent to the Soviet Union and fairly distant from the major imperialist countries in Europe and America. They bemoaned Japanese imperialism which, making use of its geographical proximity, was constantly threatening the very existence of the Chinese people’s revolution.
The trainees began to understand the Chinese nation and its industriousness and stamina, and they absorbed its ardent love of freedom and its rich revolutionary traditions. ‘The history of the Han people, for instance, demonstrated that the Chinese had never submitted to tyrannical rule but had invariably used revolutionary means to overthrow or change it,’ stated Andrew Mlangeni. ‘We learned that in the thousands of years of Han history there had been hundreds of peasant uprisings, great and small, against the dark rule of the landlords and the nobility.’ All the nationalities of China had resisted foreign oppression and had resorted to rebellion to shake it off. Throughout recorded history the Chinese had given birth to many national heroes and revolutionary leaders. To Andrew and his comrades the Chinese nation had a glorious revolutionary tradition and a splendid historical heritage. ‘It reminded us of our own history back in South Africa, and the wars of resistance against colonialism and, later, apartheid. It also reminded us of struggles waged by worker unions, of protests and pickets.’ But Andrew also conceded that China’s economic, political and cultural development had been sluggish for a long time after the transition from slave to feudal society, and he detected a belief among the Chinese elite that it was not the purpose of the imperialist powers to transform feudal China into capitalist China. ‘On the contrary, the Chinese believed the purpose of their colonisers was to make China into their own colony.’
The instructors constantly reminded the trainees about the way the imperialist powers had waged wars of aggression against China: the Opium War launched by Britain in 1839; the war launched by the Anglo-French allied forces in 1857; the Sino-French War of 1884; the Sino-Japanese War of 1894; and the war launched by the allied forces of the eight powers in 1900. They were taught that the history of China’s transformation into a colony by imperialism, in collusion with Chinese feudalism, was at the same time a history of unrelenting and heroic struggle by the Chinese people. Andrew would later learn that the national revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people had a history of over a hundred years if one counted from the Opium War of 1839, or 50 years counting from the revolution of 1911, but he thought it had not yet run its full course or performed its tasks with any signal success. ‘The Chinese people, and above all the ruling Communist Party, had to shoulder the responsibility of resolutely fighting on. Freedom, therefore, would not mean the end of the struggle in South Africa,’ deduced Andrew.
The trainees were made to understand that the enemies of the Chinese revolution were very powerful and included not only imperialists and feudal forces but also, at times, the bourgeois reactionaries who collaborated with them. It was wrong, they were told, to underestimate the strength of the enemies of the revolutionary Chinese people, and it would similarly be wrong for the people of South Africa to underestimate their enemies or to misdirect their enmity to people with whom they should align. In the face of such enemies, the instructors would emphasise, the Chinese revolution could not be other than protracted and ruthless. Only over time could the revolutionary forces be built up and tempered into a power steeled and tenacious, and capable of crushing its enemies. It was therefore put to the trainees that it was wrong to think that the forces of the Chinese revolution could have been built up in the blink of an eye, or that China’s revolutionary struggle could have triumphed overnight. Nor could the Chinese revolution have been achieved through peaceful means. It had to be armed struggle. Enemies had made peaceful activity impossible for the Chinese people and deprived them of all political freedom and democratic rights. ‘By implication, it was the same for South Africa, and to succeed in our struggle we had to follow the Chinese approach. The armed revolution was aimed at fighting the armed counter-revolutionary.’
The training made it clear, however, that placing the emphasis on armed struggle in a revolution did not mean abandoning other forms of struggle. On the contrary, armed struggle could not succeed unless it was coordinated with other forms of struggle. The trainees were made to understand the specific conditions in China; how the methods the Chinese employed were essential to solving its revolutionary problems; and how the Chinese learned to be clear about the targets, the tasks and the motive forces of the Chinese revolution – something, the instructors said, that the South Africans should emulate. Andrew would later admit that Mao’s agrarian socialism and cultural revolution could have been the aspects of Maoism most strongly entrenched in his own ideology. China’s post-liberation programmes, the ‘Five-Year Plan’ of 1953-1958 and the ‘Great Leap Forward’, which were still fresh in Chinese people’s minds at the time, would also play a role in shaping the minds of the trainees in thinking through their own programmes for a liberated South Africa.
By the end of December 1961, when the trainers considered that their charges were ready for the practical skills of guerrilla warfare, they divided them in preparation for the next step of the training that lasted from January to August 1962. First, they were separated according to their level of education, especially in mathematics. Andrew and Nandha Steve Naidoo, the only ones with mathematical skills, were sent to Liaoning Province in the north of China (Naidoo, a member of the Natal Indian Congress and a former student at the University of Natal, was then a student at the London School of Economics). Bordering North Korea, and the last zone to be liberated from imperialist Japan in 1945, Liaoning Province was regarded as the coldest place in China in winter, where everyone wore padded clothes all the time. Here, they were placed at the Shen-Yon military academy, given army uniforms and treated as military personnel in training. The 41-year old Raymond Mhlaba, the 42-year old Abel Patrick Mthembu, the 34-year old Joe Gqabi and the 38-year old Wilton Mkwayi, the other trainees, were sent south, to Nanjing, placed at the headquarters of the Chinese army and trained primarily on guerrilla warfare, footpath traps and the building of bombs sophisticated and rudimentary. For more than nine months they learned guerrilla warfare, its discipline and its ethics. Deep guerrilla warfare became their speciality.
The Shen-Yon military academy, where Andrew Mlangeni and Steve Naidoo were placed, was located at a military base with high-level security. Everyone associated with the base was vetted thoroughly and all – including general workers, chefs and laundry handlers – were ardent members of the Communist Party of China. ‘There was to be no doubt of the loyalty of the person who was employed there – even those who were only delivering supplies,’ said Andrew. He found the Chinese to be very disciplined and tactful in providing assistance to foreign military organisations. He observed that no two movements from different countries could be in one training at any given time. For example, he and Steve Naidoo were at the Liaoning military base for almost a year with the members of the New Zealand Communist Party without knowing this – until their last breakfast, when they were introduced to each other. They had also only become aware in the middle of their training of the exact assistance the Chinese had given to Algeria’s Liberation de Nationale forces; and only once they had completed their training did they hear about the backing of Guinea-Bissau