by Philip Short
When the Third Congress ended, Mao was elected one of nine members of the Central Committee (CC) and, more significantly, Secretary of the newly established Central Bureau, which was responsible for day-to-day Party affairs,I and comprised himself, the General Secretary, Chen Duxiu, and three others: Mao's fellow Hunanese (and fellow founder members of the New People's Study Society), Cai Hesen and Luo Zhanglong; and the head of the Canton Party committee, Tan Pingshan (soon to be replaced by Wang Hebo, a Shanghainese railwayman and union organiser). Mao was put in charge of personnel work, a key post which made him notionally second only to Chen himself.101
The Party had emerged from its tribulations stronger, more centralised, and more Leninist, at least in the organisational sense, than in its first two years. The struggle to overcome the divisions which had driven Chen Duxiu to threaten resignation the previous autumn had tempered the leadership. Being forced to accept Comintern instructions and to submit to the will of the majority had confronted them for the first time with the principles of democratic centralism on which all Bolshevik parties had to operate. Some, like the Marxist scholar, Li Hanjun, who had argued at the First Congress for a loose-knit, decentralised Party, resigned in disgust. But the outline of an orthodox Party structure was now in place, and Chen Duxiu could no longer complain that ‘the Central Committee internally is not organised … [Its] knowledge is also insufficient … [and its] political viewpoint is not sufficiently clear’.102 Even though the new leadership had no more real grasp of Marxist theory than the old, the basis of a common ideology, guiding and uniting its action, was at last discernible.103
For Mao, these few months in the late spring and summer of 1923 marked a turning-point. At the provincial level, in Hunan, he had been able to influence events as a labour leader and a progressive intellectual with close links to the liberal establishment. Except to a small circle of initiates, his role in the Party had been secret. Now he became a full-time cadre, still operating clandestinely, but with a commanding position in the Party's national leadership. His ties to labour, and to the liberal elite, were abandoned.
Intellectually, too, it was a time for exploring new possibilities. The lesson of the ‘February Seventh Massacre’, that the working class alone could not open the road to power, led him for the first time to consider other options: the military route, which he had discussed with Sneevliet in July and mentioned again, a few weeks later, in a letter to Sun Yat-sen, in which he called for the creation of a ‘centralised national-revolutionary army’;104 and the peasant route, which involved mobilising the most numerous and oppressed sections of China's vast population.
For the time being, however, such thoughts were purely speculative, for the route that the Party had chosen was the ‘united front’. Shortly after the Third Congress, Mao joined the Guomindang.105 He would spend the next year and a half trying to make the front succeed.
In the first weeks, the learning curve was steep for both sides. Sun rejected virtually every proposal the communists made. At a meeting in mid-July, Chen, Mao and the other members of the Central Bureau complained: ‘Nothing can be expected [in terms of] the modernisation of the Guomindang … so long as Sun keeps [to] his [present] notion of [what] a political party [should be], and so long as he does not want to make use of the communist elements [to carry out] the work.’ Sneevliet, as the architect of the front, was especially frustrated. Supporting Sun, he grumbled to Joffe, was simply ‘throwing away money’.106
At the same time, having finally accepted the Comintern's thesis that the way to the future lay through a GMD-led national revolution, the CCP leaders seized on every twitch and whimper that seemed to comfort this strategy. Even Mao, who, a few weeks earlier, had derided the very notion that the bourgeoisie would play a leading role, now lauded the Shanghai business community for supporting the anti-militarist cause:
This revolution is the task of all the people … But … the task that the merchants should shoulder in the national revolution is more urgent and more important than the work that the rest of the Chinese people should take upon themselves … The Shanghai merchants have risen and begun to act … The broader the unity of the merchants, the greater will be their influence, the greater their strength to lead the people of the entire nation, and the more rapid the success of the revolution!107
To some extent this must have been tongue-in-cheek. Mao did not really believe, as he claimed, that of all the Chinese people the merchants suffered ‘most keenly, most urgently’ from warlord and imperialist oppression. Nor did he have much confidence that their new-found revolutionary spirit would last. On the other hand, so long as the warlords were the main enemy, the bourgeoisie had to be an ally. For the moment Mao was ready, like the rest of the Party leadership, to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The key issue remained, however, how to force the Guomindang to change its traditional, elitist ways and become a modern party with a genuine mass base.
At the end of July, after the Central Bureau returned to Shanghai, it was decided to employ a Trojan Horse strategy: Party activists would build up from scratch networks of GMD organisations in northern and central China (where none currently existed), so that these new, communist-dominated regional branches could serve as pressure groups to swing the whole party to the left.108 Li Dazhao was charged with carrying out this mission in north China, and in September Mao went secretly to Changsha to do the same in the central provinces.109
Hunan was once again in the throes of civil war. That summer, one of Zhao Hengti's commanders had mutinied. The former Governor, Tan Yankai, who had been biding his time in the south, where he had established links with Sun Yat-sen, seized the opportunity to invade at the head of a ‘bandit-suppressing army’ bent upon Zhao's overthrow. At the end of August, Tan's allies seized Changsha and Governor Zhao was forced to flee for his life. It was this that persuaded Chen Duxiu to grant Mao leave of absence from his new responsibilities as Secretary, naming Luo Zhanglong to act for him while he was away. Mao was evidently delighted. He did not relish the dry, administrative work which was the Secretary's daily fare. Shanghai, a city created by imperialists and capitalists, would always be foreign to him; and back home in Changsha, Yang Kaihui, whom he had not seen since April, was expecting their second child. But even as he travelled up on the steamer, the tide of warfare turned and when he arrived at Changsha he found it once more in Zhao's hands.110
For the next month, the city was under siege and intermittent bombardment. Tan's allies held the west bank of the Xiang River, Zhao's forces the east. To the foreigners, safe in their consular residences, it seemed ‘an opéra-bouffe war’, with the odd, jagged moment of danger to relieve the tedium. For the Chinese it was very different:
In the city the big shops never took down their night shutters, rich men fled or lay in hiding. All feared the officers who walked or rode through the streets carrying the red paddles [the ‘broad arrows’] of life or death, under the power of which they commandeered rice and money. None dared say nay … [for] those who did … were in danger of being marched to the open space near the Customs House where the executioner stood with a long knife to behead them.111
In the countryside, the villages were subjected to an orgy of rape, plunder and arson reminiscent of the worst days of Zhang Jingyao.112 Mao still thought Tan would win, and wrote to the Guomindang's General Affairs Department in Canton that Zhao would be unable to hold his ground.113 Then, one sunlit morning, came the sound of distant gunfire. Wu Peifu had sent troops to shore up Zhao's support, and Tan's men had been routed. The foreigners watched through binoculars as the victorious force returned, ‘carrying-coolies, machine-guns borne in chairs like invalids, soldiers swinging lanterns and straw shoes, officers shielding themselves from the sun with paper parasols’.114
Zhao's victory came at a price. Hunan's role as a buffer between north and south was at an end. Changsha once more felt the heel of northern soldiers’ boots. The liberal elite allied with Tan, on whose protectio
n Mao had relied, were deprived of power and scattered. On Zhao's orders, the Self-Study University was closed, the Labour Federation and the Students’ Union banned, and a warrant issued for Mao's arrest. Two months earlier he had published a long inventory of Zhao's crimes, describing him as ‘an outrageously and unpardonably wicked creature’. From then on he lived under an assumed name, Mao Shishan (‘Mao the Stone Mountain’).115
There could hardly have been a worse moment to try to launch a nationalist party linked to Zhao's defeated adversary. Mao and the Socialist Youth League leader, Xia Xi, who, on his recommendation had been named the Guomindang's preparatory director in Hunan, were able to establish a provisional Party headquarters for the province, with clandestine branches in Changsha, in Ningxiang (through He Shuheng) and at the Anyuan coalmines, where Liu Shaoqi was still in charge. But they were little more than empty shells, operating in total secrecy.116 Mao remained in Hunan until late December, and celebrated his thirtieth birthday with Yang Kaihui, Anying and their second son, Anqing, born six weeks before.117 That his staying on had more to do with his family than any political commitments is clear from a love-poem he wrote for her soon after his departure, which was evidently marred by a quarrel:
A wave of the hand, and the moment of parting has come.
Harder to bear is facing each other dolefully,
Bitter feelings voiced once more.
Wrath looks out from your eyes and brows,
On the verge of tears, you hold them back.
We know our misunderstandings sprang from that last letter.II
Let it roll away like clouds and mist,
For who in this world is as close as you and I?
Can Heaven fathom our human maladies?
I wonder.
This morning frost lies heavy on the road to East Gate,
The waning moon lights up the pool and half the sky – How cold, how desolate!
One wail of the steam whistle has shattered my heart,
Now I shall roam alone to the furthest ends of the earth.
Let us strive to sever those threads of grief and anger,
Let it be as though the sheer cliffs of Mount Kunlun collapsed,
As though a typhoon swept through the universe.
Let us once again be two birds flying side by side,
Soaring high as the clouds118
While Mao had been in Hunan in the autumn and early winter of 1923, the relationship between the Guomindang and the Russians had undergone a transformation. The Soviet leadership had decided that, given Moscow's international isolation, a progressive Chinese regime, even led by a bourgeois party, would be a valuable ally. Mikhail Borodin, a highly regarded revolutionary who had worked with Lenin and Stalin, was named special envoy to Sun Yat-sen. The Guomindang Chief of Staff, Chiang Kai-shek, a slim, slightly cadaverous man in his mid-thirties, went to Moscow to learn about the Red Army, and was treated royally. Although Sun's quixotic proposal for a Russian-led force to attack Beijing from the north – ‘an adventure doomed in advance to failure’, as the Soviet Revolutionary Military Council put it – was firmly rejected, the Russians agreed to finance a military training school and, at a meeting in November, Trotsky himself promised ‘positive assistance in the form of weapons and economic aid’.
Meanwhile in Canton, Counsellor Bao, as Borodin was called, was deftly working his way around the sensitivities of the two Chinese parties over the triangular alliance Moscow was determined to build.
A thoughtful, patient man, nearly forty years old, Borodin was in many respects the opposite of the domineering Sneevliet. He managed to win Sun's trust while persuading both the Guomindang and the communists that each had most to gain from the new relationship that was being put in place. In October, while Borodin was preparing to help Sun fight off yet another attempt by local warlords to unseat him, the old conspirator cabled Chiang in Moscow: ‘It has now been made entirely clear who are our friends and who are our enemies.’119
On that note, the Guomindang convened its first National Congress in Canton on January 20, 1924. Mao had arrived via Shanghai two weeks earlier with a six-member delegation representing the still largely notional Hunan GMD organisation, including Xia Xi and the provincial CCP leader, Li Weihan.120
The congress approved a new constitution, drawn up by Borodin on Leninist lines, emphasising discipline, centralisation and the need to train revolutionary cadres to mobilise mass support; it adopted a more radical political programme, denouncing imperialism as the root cause of China's sufferings; and it called, for the first time, for the development of workers’ and peasants’ movements to promote the revolution.121 The communists, mostly younger, livelier spirits than the nationalist party veterans, made a strong impression. At one session, Mao and Li Lisan reportedly so dominated the proceedings that the older men ‘looked askance, as if to ask, “Where did those two young unknowns come from?”’ The radical leader, Wang Jingwei, one of Sun's companions from the early days of the Tongmenghui, the Revolutionary Alliance, commented afterwards: ‘The young people of the May Fourth movement are something to be reckoned with, after all. Look at the enthusiasm with which they speak, and their energetic attitude.’122
The new GMD Central Executive Committee (CEC), elected by acclamation on Sun Yat-sen's proposal, included three communists among its twenty-four full members: Li Dazhao; Yu Shude from Beijing; and the Canton CCP leader, Tan Pingshan, who was also named Director of the Organisation Department, one of the most powerful positions in the party, and in that capacity became one of the three members of the CEC's Standing Committee, together with the party Treasurer, Liao Zhongkai, representing the left wing of the Guomindang, and Dai Jitao, representing the right. Mao was appointed one of seventeen alternate (or non-voting) CEC members, seven of whom were communists, including Lin Boqu, a fellow Hunanese who became Director of the GMD Peasant Department; a young literary lion named Qu Qiubai, who had worked in Moscow as correspondent of the progressive Beijing newspaper, Chenbao, and was now Borodin's assistant in Canton; and Zhang Guotao, who had apparently put aside his reservations about the two parties’ unnatural alliance.123
In mid-February Mao moved back to Shanghai, where he shared a house in Zhabei, not far from Bubbling Well Road, in the northern part of the International Settlement, with Luo Zhanglong, Cai Hesen and Cai's girlfriend, Xiang Jingyu.124 For the rest of the year he had a double workload, serving as Secretary for the CCP Central Bureau, which operated from the same address under cover of being a Customs Declaration Office, providing secretarial services for Chinese businesses which had to deal with the foreign-controlled Customs Administration;125 and carrying out similar duties for the Guomindang's Shanghai Executive Committee, with an office in the French concession. The latter was responsible for the work of GMD branches in the four provinces of Anhui, Jiangxi, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, as well as in the city itself.126
This was not the easiest of roles. Despite the best efforts of Borodin in Canton, and of Voitinsky, who was now back in Shanghai as Comintern representative, replacing Hendricus Sneevliet, friction between the two parties intensified. GMD conservatives, not without reason, saw the CCP as a fifth column. In late April or early May 1924, they obtained a copy of a secret Central Committee resolution, ordering communists within the Guomindang to establish a system of tight-knit ‘party fractions’, to transmit and implement Party directives and to prepare for an eventual communist takeover of the party. The right-wing GMD Control Commission began moves to impeach the communist leadership.127 Mao, Cai Hesen and Chen Duxiu argued that the alliance with the GMD had failed and the united front should be broken, but were told by Voitinsky that this was unacceptable to Moscow. The Comintern ordered the resolution annulled, and Sun Yat-sen eventually ruled in favour of maintaining the status quo, but even Borodin grew concerned that an anti-communist coalition was forming which was only deterred from taking action by the fear of losing Russian aid.128
In July, Chen and Mao issued a secret Central Committ
ee circular, reaffirming the ‘bloc within’ strategy laid down by the Third Congress a year earlier, but noting that it was proving ‘extremely difficult’ to carry out:
Overt and covert attacks on us and attempts to push us out have been mounting daily on the part of a majority of Guomindang members … Only a very few Guomindang leaders, such as Sun Yat-sen and Liao Zhongkai, have not yet made up their minds to break with us, but they, too, certainly do not wish to offend the right-wing elements … For the sake of uniting the revolutionary forces, we must absolutely not allow any separatist words or actions to emerge on our side, and we must try our best to be tolerant and co-operate with them. [At the same time] … we cannot tolerate non-revolutionary rightist policies without correcting them.129
That set the tone for communist tactics throughout the next three years. So long as the united front held, the CCP would not be permitted to reject it. Rather, at the Comintern's behest, it would increasingly bend over backwards to accommodate its nationalist partners. But not all of them. The most important decision to emerge during the summer of 1924 was that the Guomindang must be treated as a divided party, having a left wing, with which the communists could ally themselves, and a right wing, which could not be won over and must be fought by all means at their disposal.
The problem with this approach was summed up by Mao in a pithy Chinese folk-saying, ‘Chongshuang diehu’, meaning literally, ‘duplicate bed, duplicate household’.130 In other words, if the front were simply a means for the Party to associate itself with a pro-communist Guomindang Left which shared the same ideas and goals, one or the other was redundant. The question was, which one?
The CCP seemed to be going nowhere. Recruitment was painfully slow. The labour movement was at a standstill. Despite all the Comintern's propaganda depicting the proletariat as thirsting after communist policies, Chinese workers had little interest in politics and communist energies were being dissipated in sterile turf battles for survival. Some prominent communists that summer decided their own Party was the one bed too many and resigned to pursue Guomindang careers. Mao never quite took that step. But as the year wore on he became increasingly despondent. A young Hunanese communist named Peng Shuzhi, visiting Shanghai after three years spent studying in Moscow, found him morose and apathetic:
