by Philip Short
He looked in a pretty bad way. His thinness seemed to make his body even longer than it actually was. He was pale, and his complexion had an unhealthy, greenish tinge. I was afraid that he had contracted tuberculosis, as so many of our comrades had done, or would do, at one time or another in their lives.131
During the autumn, from Mao's point of view, the situation went from bad to worse. Money stopped arriving from GMD headquarters, and work at the Shanghai committee ground to a halt.132 He began to suffer from neurasthenia – a form of depression, marked by chronic insomnia, headaches, dizziness and high blood pressure – which would plague him for the rest of his life.133 His relations with the rest of the CCP leadership, which had rarely been easy, deteriorated further.134 The Fourth Congress, which he was organising, was postponed until the following January because Voitinsky was away in Moscow.135 Finally, in October, there was yet another political shift in Beijing, which brought to power Feng Yuxiang, an independent warlord known as the Christian General because he baptised his troops with a fire hose. Feng appointed the hated Anfu leader, Duan Qirui, as head of government, and invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing for talks on national reconciliation.
To Mao, Sun's acceptance of this invitation was the last straw. Over the previous two years, he had seen the labour movement collapse; the liberal, progressive elite, silenced; and the CCP locked into policies which appeared to have no chance of success. Now the Guomindang was reverting, in the Central Committee's words, to ‘the same old game of militarist politics’ that had failed so often in the past.
Towards the end of December, barely a fortnight before the CCP's Fourth Congress was to open, Mao set out for Changsha, accompanied by Yang Kaihui, her mother and their two children, who had joined him in Shanghai in the summer.136 Officially, he had been granted leave of absence due to ill-health. But, as his doctor, Li Zhisui, would note many years later, Mao's neurasthenia was always political in nature: ‘The symptoms became much more severe at the beginning of a major political struggle.’137 Only this time it was a different kind of struggle: Mao was undergoing a crisis of faith.
As 1925 began, and his erstwhile comrades met to chart the future of a Party which now boasted 994 members, Mao celebrated the Chinese New Year at the Yangs’ old family home where, ten years earlier, as a student at First Normal, he had come to sit at the feet of his beloved ethics teacher, Kaihui's father. The wheel seemed to have turned full circle. He had no contact with his old friends in Changsha, or with the provincial CCP or Guomindang committees there. When the Fourth Congress met, he was not re-elected to the Central Committee and he no longer played any role in the Hunan provincial committee. To all intents and purposes, his withdrawal from politics was complete. In February he set out with the family for Shaoshan, taking with him several crates full of books. He was sick, Kaihui told their neighbours. For three months, from winter until late spring, Mao saw no one except members of his family and fellow villagers.138 It was a return to the beginning, to the peasant roots from which, as an ambitious young intellectual, he had tried to free himself. Yet it was there, among the companions of his childhood, that he discerned the first glimmerings of a new, and more hopeful, way forward.
To the Chinese communists, in the first half of the 1920s, the peasants barely existed. They were, as they had been for centuries, part of the background of Chinese life, an unvarying yellow wash against which great events, and great men, were depicted, larger than life, on the endless scroll of Chinese history.
When Lenin, at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920, derided as utopian the idea that a proletarian party could win power in a backward country without forging a strong relationship with the peasantry,139 the urban intellectuals who would form the future leadership of the Chinese party responded with stony silence. Two years later, under the prodding of the Comintern, the Second CCP Congress acknowledged that China's 300 million peasants were ‘the most important factor in the revolutionary movement’, but made clear that the CCP had no intention of leading them. Its task was to organise the workers; the peasants must liberate themselves.140 Chen Duxiu, the Party's General Secretary, was persuaded during a visit to Moscow in November 1922 that the peasants were potentially ‘a friendly army … which the CCP cannot afford to ignore’,141 and at the Third CCP Congress, the following summer, the Party's thinking had evolved sufficiently for ‘workers and peasants’ to be bracketed together as the two classes whose interests the CCP must at all times support.142
By then, a young man named Peng Pai, the scion of a wealthy landlord family, had led the peasants in a successful seizure of power in Hailufeng, in eastern Guangdong, which would defy all the authorities’ attempts to suppress it for the next five years.143 But Peng was not yet a Party member and had carried out his activities entirely alone.144 His movement, in full spate only 150 miles from where the Congress was meeting, did not get a mention.145
Mao had shown interest even earlier in the role the peasantry might play. In April 1921, he had written an article for Gongchandang entitled ‘An Open Letter to the Peasants of China’, describing a revolt the previous autumn in the area around the Anyuan mines, where the peasants had broken into landlords’ dwellings, feasting on the delicacies they found there, seizing grain and in some cases torching the buildings afterwards. ‘It is exactly like the first rays of sunshine from the East after a pitch-black night,’ he had declared. If peasants all over China would follow their example, ‘Communism will release you from all suffering so that you may enjoy unprecedented good fortune.’146 Two years later, in the spring of 1923, he had sent two communists from the Shuikoushan lead-mine back to their home villages to investigate the prospects for peasant associations in Hunan.III Zhang Guotao remembered him telling the Third Congress that in Hunan there were ‘few workers and even fewer GMD and CCP members, whereas the peasants there filled the mountains and fields’.147 With their long history of revolt and insurrection, Mao argued, the peasants could become a powerful ally in the national revolution. Chen Duxiu agreed, and a decision was taken to try to unite ‘tenant-peasants and rural labourers to … oppose the warlords and strike down corrupt officials and local tyrants’.148 But no attempt was made to put it into practice.
The Comintern's frustration at the obtuseness of the Chinese comrades where the peasants were concerned was shown vividly in a directive which reached Shanghai shortly after the Congress ended:
The National Revolution in China … will necessarily be accompanied by an agrarian revolution among the peasantry … This revolution can only be successful if the basic masses of the Chinese population, the small peasants, can be attracted to take part. Thus, the central point of all policy is precisely the peasant question. To ignore this fundamental point for any reason whatsoever means to fail to understand the whole importance of the socioeconomic basis upon which alone a successful struggle … can be carried out.149
This too fell on deaf ears, as did subsequent appeals.
There were reasons for the CCP's obstinacy. To the young, mostly bourgeois intellectuals who made up the Party leadership, industry, however primitive, was by definition modern. The new working class in the cities, exploited and downtrodden though it might be, was the proper standard-bearer for the bright new society this modern world would engender. The peasants, in contrast, represented all that was most backward and benighted in China. Mao himself, despite his rural origins, confessed that as a young man he regarded them as ‘stupid and detestable people’. Their revolts, even when successful, as at the end of the Yuan and the Ming dynasties, were capable of producing a new emperor but never a new system. Party workers, one report noted in 1923, ‘do not like the rural areas. They would rather starve than return to the villages.’150 Far from being the wave of the future, the peasantry were the amorphous core of the dark legacy of Confucian empire that the revolution had to sweep away.
In Shaoshan, this began to change.
At first, Mao was so lacking in energy that he did little except read bo
oks and receive social calls from neighbours, who discussed ‘family matters and local events’. But a few weeks later, through the intermediary of a young clansman named Mao Fuxuan, he encouraged some of the poorer peasants to form an association. Yang Kaihui set up a peasant night school, a pared-down version of the workers’ school Mao had organised as a student at First Normal, to teach reading, arithmetic, politics and current events.151 Three months later, in another village in the same county, a former Anyuan coalminer named Wang Xianzong formed a second peasant association.152
These small-scale, grass-roots experiments might have continued indefinitely, and probably inconclusively, had it not been for the actions of a unit of British-officered settlement police, 600 miles down the Yangtse in Shanghai.153
There, on May 30, 1925, an incident occurred that set off an explosion of nationalist fervour not seen since the May Fourth movement six years before. The fuse had been lit two weeks earlier when Japanese guards fired on a group of Chinese workers during a strike at a textile plant, killing a communist organiser. In the protests which followed, six students were arrested, triggering more marches and rallies urging their release. The British Police Commissioner ordered that the demonstrations be stopped before the authorities lost control. Further arrests were made. Each day the crowds grew angrier, and the atmosphere more menacing. Shortly after half past three on a warm, muggy Saturday afternoon, in the city's main shopping street, Nanking Road, the officer-in-charge at the central police station, a British inspector, fearing that his men were about to be overrun, ordered Chinese and Sikh constables to open fire. The volley left four demonstrators dead and upwards of fifty wounded, of whom eight later succumbed to their wounds. Rioting followed, in which ten more Chinese died, and a general strike was declared.
Anti-British and anti-Japanese demonstrations broke out all over China. In Canton, troops in the foreign concession opened fire on the protesters with machine-guns, killing more than fifty, winding still tighter the spiral of anger and hatred, and provoking a sixteen-month-long strike against the British authorities in Hong Kong, which by the time it ended had crippled the colony's trade.
When the news reached Changsha that weekend, workers and students poured on to the streets and began chanting anti-foreign slogans. The Dagongbao rushed out a special edition. On Tuesday, 20,000 people attended a rally at which an All-Hunan ‘Avenge the Shame’ Association was founded and a boycott of British and Japanese goods declared. Three days later, a reported 100,000 people marched through the city, plastering every wall with posters calling for the expulsion of the imperialists, the abrogation of the unequal treaties and, most disturbing of all for the provincial authorities, an end to warlord rule. It was the biggest demonstration Changsha had ever seen. Governor Zhao Hengti responded as he usually did, sending troops with loaded weapons to quarantine the schools, imposing a 24-hour curfew and putting up notices warning that ‘disturbers of the peace’ would be shot. But the ‘Avenge the Shame’ Association was able to maintain its activities, and when the students left for the summer holidays, they continued the campaign in their home districts.154
The effect on Mao was electric, and he plunged back into the political fray.
In mid-June, he founded a CCP branch in Shaoshan, with Mao Fuxuan as Secretary. Socialist Youth League and Guomindang branches followed. The peasant night-school movement spread rapidly. Peasant ‘Avenge the Shame’ branches were formed. A young GMD provincial committee staff member named He Erkang (an ex-student of the preparatory school attached to Mao's old Self-Study University and, like many Hunanese GMD activists, also a CCP member) came down from Changsha to help, and on July 10, the inaugural meeting of the grandly named ‘Xiangtan County West Second District “Avenge the Shame” Association’ was held in Shaoshan. Mao made a speech denouncing British and Japanese imperialism, and afterwards the meeting resolved to boycott all foreign goods. Officially sixty-seven delegates attended, but virtually the entire adult population of Shaoshan and of several neighbouring hamlets, some 400 people in all, came along to watch.
Finally, in early August, all this patient spadework began to pay off. A drought had set in, and, as always, the local landlords were hoarding rice in order to create a shortage. After a meeting at Mao's house, the Shaoshan peasant association sent two of its members to petition for the granaries to be opened. Not only was their plea rejected, but they were told that the grain was to be shipped to the city where it would command higher prices, just as Mao remembered his own father doing. On his instructions, Mao Fuxuan and another local CCP member led several hundred peasants, armed with hoes and bamboo carrying-poles, who forced the landlords to sell the grain locally, and at a fair price.155
In the epic scale of the Chinese revolution, it was a minimal event, seemingly of no consequence whatever in the greater scheme of things. But it was the first such movement in Hunan since the smashing of the Yuebei association two years earlier. Within days similar conflicts broke out in other villages. Before the month was out more than twenty peasant associations had been formed in Xiangtan county and the surrounding area.156 At that point, word of Mao's activities reached Zhao Hengti, who sent a terse secret telegram to the Xiangtan County Defence Bureau: ‘Arrest Mao Zedong immediately. Execute him on the spot.’ The order was seen by a clerk who knew Mao's family, and a messenger was sent post-haste to warn him. With that, Mao's days as a peasant organiser came to an abrupt end. He set out the same afternoon for Changsha, disguised as a doctor, travelling in a closed sedan chair.157
With him went the conviction that the Comintern had been right: China's peasants were a force the nationalist movement would neglect at its peril. The revolution would succeed, Mao concluded, once it was able to mobilise the huge, untapped reservoir of peasant discontent against the classes which oppressed them.
In a poem written while in hiding in Changsha at the beginning of September, he reflected sombrely on the magnitude of the task that lay ahead:
A hundred boats battle the current.
Eagles strike at the endless void,
Fish hover in the shallow bottoms,
All creatures strive for freedom under the frosty sky.
Baffled by this immensity,
I ask the vast expanse of earth,
Who, then, controls the rise and fall of fortunes?158
In a strikingly nostalgic passage, he went on to lament the passing of those ‘glorious years’ when he and his student companions, ‘with the scholar's idealistic fervour, upright and fearless, spoke out unrestrainedly’ and ‘counted as dung and dust the high and mighty of the day’. Then they had been convinced they had the answers to all of China's problems. Now, at the age of thirty-one, the blithe certitudes of youth were gone.
In the seven months Mao spent at Shaoshan, the complexion of Chinese politics changed dramatically. Sun Yat-sen had died in March 1925, leaving behind a testament urging his followers to uphold the decisions of the First Guomindang Congress, which had underwritten the united front, and to support the alliance with Russia. Wang Jingwei, who headed the party's left wing, emerged as Sun's likely successor, triggering a conservative backlash which before the year was out would see the right-wing rump, known as the ‘Western Hills Group’, mount a failed leadership challenge. Wang's support surged with the great wave of anti-imperialist fervour provoked by the May 30 Incident, which sent young radicals flocking to join both the Guomindang and the Communist Party. Soon afterwards his chief rival, Hu Hanmin, was banished to Moscow, allegedly suspected of complicity in the assassination that summer of the veteran GMD radical, Liao Zhongkai; while Chiang Kai-shek, now Canton garrison commander, began to build a base of support in the newly created National Revolutionary Army. The result was a party that was not only much more powerful than it had been when the year began, but which had also moved sharply leftward.159
That alone would have been enough to commend the GMD to Mao, living clandestinely in Changsha, as he conferred with Xia Xi and other former protégés, an
d pondered what to do next.160 But other factors were pushing him the same way. At Shaoshan, Mao had become convinced that his political instincts a year earlier had been correct. Ultimately China's salvation would come through class struggle, waged by the Communist Party leading the country's workers and peasants in the violent overthrow of their oppressors. But until that day dawned, the Guomindang, which could operate legally where the communists could not, which had its own army, trained and paid for by the Russians, and a secure territorial base in Guangdong, was far better placed than the CCP to carry the revolution forward. Accordingly, Mao's peasant night schools did not try to teach Marxism, they taught Sun Yat-sen's ‘Three Principles of the People’ – nationalism, democracy and socialism. Mao's efforts at party-building, after he resumed political activity in June, were geared more to helping the Guomindang than the CCP or the Youth League.161 His new political creed was set out in a resumé he wrote later that year.
I believe in Communism and advocate the social revolution of the proletariat. The present domestic and foreign oppression cannot, however, be overthrown by the forces of one class alone. I advocate making use of the national revolution in which the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie [the peasantry] and the left-wing of the middle bourgeoisie co-operate to carry out the Three People's Principles of the Chinese Guomindang in order to overthrow imperialism, overthrow the warlords, and overthrow the comprador and landlord classes [allied with them] … and to realise the joint rule … [of these three revolutionary classes], that is, the rule of the revolutionary popular masses.162
