by Philip Short
Less than two months after the May plenum, on July 9, 1926, the Revolutionary Army, numbering about 75,000 men, set out on the long-awaited campaign which was to crush the warlords and finally reunify China under the Guomindang flag.194
It had been launched hurriedly to take advantage of events in Hunan, where the local army commander, Tang Shengzhi, who had staged a successful rebellion and declared in favour of the south, was facing attack from Wu Peifu's northern troops. The decision to back Tang proved well-founded (at least in the short term), for by the end of the month Hunan was in southern hands, and Chiang, as Commander-in-Chief, resplendent in a light grey military cloak and a panoply of new titles and powers, installed himself in Changsha.195 With him went the Soviet advisers, now led by General Vasily Blyukher, the original head of the Soviet military mission, who had returned to replace Kuibyshev. He and Chiang got on well, and the ‘Generalissimo’, as he would later be known, whose military skills were limited, was wise enough to leave questions of tactics in Blyukher's experienced hands.
Mao, along with other Central Executive Committee members, went to the parade ground to see the troops depart, but otherwise he stayed aloof from GMD politics.196
Instead, he immersed himself in his work with the peasantry, who, as he had anticipated, soon began playing a significant part in the southern forces’ advance. After the Revolutionary Army passed through Xiangtan, he sent fifty students from the Training Institute to Shaoshan, to see the peasant associations in action.197 A month later, he published an article in the GMD Peasant Committee journal, Nongmin yundong (Peasant Movement), where for the first time he explicitly identified the landlords as the principal obstacle to revolutionary change, and the peasants as the principal instrument by which they would be overthrown:
Right down to the present day, there are still a number of people, even within the revolutionary party, who do not understand … that the greatest adversary of revolution in an economically backward semi-colony is the feudal-patriarchal class (the landlord class) in the villages … [This] class constitutes the only solid basis for the ruling class at home and for imperialism abroad. Unless this basis is shaken, it will be absolutely impossible to shake the superstructure built upon it. The Chinese warlords are merely the chieftains of this rural feudal class. To say that you want to overthrow the warlords but do not want to overthrow the feudal class in the countryside is quite simply to be unable to distinguish between the trivial and the important, the essential and the secondary.198
For the revolution to succeed, Mao argued, the peasants had to be liberated and the power of the landlords smashed.
The implication was that all else, including the proletariat, was secondary. Far from trying to disguise this, Mao offered a robust defence. The class struggle of the peasantry, he wrote, was ‘different in nature from the workers’ movement in the cities’. The latter was at that stage directed not at destroying the political position of the bourgeoisie but merely at obtaining trade union rights. The peasants, on the other hand, were locked in an elemental battle for survival:
Hence, although we are all aware that the workers, students and middle and small merchants in the cities should rise and strike fiercely at the comprador class and directly resist imperialism, and although we know that the progressive working class in particular is the leader of all revolutionary classes, yet if the peasants do not rise and fight in the villages to overthrow the privileges of the feudal-patriarchal landlord class, the power of the warlords and of imperialism can never be hurled down root and branch.
Mao had developed this analysis gradually over a period of many months. The notion that the peasantry were, as he now put it, ‘the central problem of the national revolution’, dated back to the previous December.199 In January he had described the big landlords as ‘the real foundation of imperialism and the warlords, the only secure bulwark of feudal and patriarchal society, the ultimate cause for the emergence of all counter-revolutionary forces’200 – a phrase which Borodin had seized on and used in a report to a high-ranking Soviet mission a month later.201
But if Mao was not alone in concluding that the feudalism of the Chinese countryside was the chief obstacle to change, no one else had tried, as he now did, to explore the implications of this thesis and take it to its logical conclusion – which was as unacceptable ideologically to the CCP as it was, on practical grounds, to the Guomindang.
The Nongmin yundong article was omitted from the official canon of Mao's works, when compilations began to appear in the 1940s and 1950s; it was simply too unorthodox. Yet beneath the subsequent veneer of ideological rectitude, the communist triumph, more than twenty years later, did come, as he had described, through mobilising the peasantry, not the urban proletariat.
While Mao was thus engaged in fashioning the intellectual underpinnings of his future strategy, the peasant organisers which his institute had trained – most of them CCP members using the Guomindang's name as a cover – fanned out into the countryside to foment rural revolts. In many areas, they found the ground already well prepared. A year earlier, the owners of the Anyuan coalmines had finally lost patience with the labour movement which Li Lisan and Liu Shaoqi had built up and ordered an assault on the Workers Club by 1500 garrison troops armed with machineguns. A number of miners were killed, their leader was executed and most of the rest of the workforce dismissed and forced to return to their villages. They included some 300 communists – at that time almost a third of the Party's national membership – who set up peasant associations in their home areas. In Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi, these groups played a vital role in opening the way for the nationalist armies.
Events moved swiftly, too, on the battlefield.202 On August 12, Chiang Kai-shek convened a military conference in Changsha at which it was decided that Tang Shengzhi, now installed as Hunan's GMD Governor, should lead a mixed force of his own and Chiang's units against the expedition's next target, Wuhan. Wu Peifu himself took command of the northern forces, but his men were no match for the southerners and Tang captured Hankou and Hanyang on September 6 and 7. The third of Wuhan's three cities, Wuchang, held out against the besiegers until October 10, when Chiang's men suborned one of the defending commanders. Then, for two nerve-racking weeks, the southern offensive stalled, until finally, in November, the city of Nanchang fell, giving the southern armies and their allies a clean sweep of Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi. Guangxi was already part of the nationalist camp and Guizhou had switched sides in July. Of all the provinces contiguous to Guangdong, only the northern half of Fujian was still in hostile hands, and that fell in December.
Throughout this period, the CCP leadership had been well and truly marginalised. In September, the Canton Party committee, arguing that the success of the Northern Expedition showed that the real power in the Guomindang was held by the conservatives, called for a reappraisal of the Centre's policy of uniting with the GMD-Left, arguing (correctly, as events turned out) that its leaders were an unprincipled congeries, without ideological unity, banding together to defend their own interests only because they ‘could not co-operate with the [GMD-] Centre and Right’.203 Chen Duxiu found himself yet again in the invidious position of having to defend a united front which privately he detested, but which the Comintern insisted must continue.204
Mao's sympathies were with the Canton group. Like them, he had seen at first-hand how supine and self-interested the GMD leftists really were. Like them, too, he saw the Northern Expedition as a huge step forward for the revolutionary cause.205 At a GMD conference in October, called to approve the move of the nationalist capital from Canton to Hankou, he despaired at the hypocrisy of men who in one breath solemnly promised an end to the extortion of land taxes years in advance, and in the next confessed apologetically that this year, exceptionally, because the party had run out of funds, it would have to continue after all.206 By then, he already knew that Canton held no future for him. His stint at the Training Institute had ended, and he was effectively out of a job.
Once again, the peasants were to prove Mao Zedong's salvation.
The explosion of peasant activism that followed the Northern Expedition had finally made the CCP leaders realise that the peasant movement was important, and that it was being led entirely under the Guomindang banner. On November 4, Chen Duxiu proposed that the Central Bureau draw up a rural work programme that would meet peasant demands without creating ‘too great a distance’ over the issue between the CCP and the Left-GMD and risking ‘a premature split’.207 The question, as it had been for Chiang Kai-shek, six months earlier, was who should be put in charge? In September, Mao's article in Nongmin yundong, calling for class war against the landlords, had caught the eye of Qu Qiubai who, despite its departures from Leninist orthodoxy, read it with approval.208 Qu was close to Voitinsky, and counted as one of the most influential members of the Shanghai leadership. He apparently concluded that Mao would be a useful ally.
A few days later, Mao took ship for Shanghai, while Yang Kaihui, now pregnant with their third child, returned with the family to Hunan. On November 15, 1926, the Central Bureau announced that he had been appointed Secretary of the CCP CC's Peasant Movement Committee.209
So ended twenty-three months of political self-exile. It had been a fruitful period. Mao had acquired an undying belief in the revolutionary power of the peasantry, as well as vital skills in operating within the top leadership of a big, complex party machine, learning how to manipulate committees and to haggle over the fine print of party resolutions. Yet after his long dalliance with the effete charms of the Left-GMD, it must have been a relief to discover that he could still find himself a niche, albeit a narrow one, within the Party fold. From now on his primary loyalty would be not just to ‘communism’, in the abstract, as he had written in 1925, but to the growing body of Chinese men and women who, notwithstanding hesitations and setbacks, were attempting to bring it about.
Ten days after his appointment, Mao set out for Wuhan, which the GMD-Left, advised by Borodin, had designated the nationalists’ new provisional capital and where the CPC Peasant Movement Committee would be based. He travelled via Nanchang, which Chiang Kai-shek had made his headquarters, and there witnessed the first storm-clouds gathering in the protracted struggle that was to develop between Chiang and the GMD-Left for control of the party and its strategy.210
During the autumn, Chiang's position as Commander-in-Chief had come under pressure from Tang Shengzhi, whose stature had been bolstered by his successes in Hunan and at Hankou and Hanyang. At the beginning of December, Tang's challenge had receded. None the less, Chiang felt obliged to agree to a new modus vivendi with the Left, whereby his military leadership would be confirmed, but his political role would be restricted and Wang Jingwei would be invited to return as head of government.211
The Communist leaders – most of whom had now grudgingly accepted that the alliance with the Guomindang had in fact strengthened their cause – saw the split between Nanchang and Wuhan as an opportunity to draw closer to the GMD-Left. At a CC plenum in Hankou in mid-December, Chen Duxiu argued that the Nationalist Party's left wing was an essential buffer, preventing direct conflict breaking out between the communists and the GMD-Right. The Left, he acknowledged, was often ‘weak, vacillating and inconsistent’. But negating it in the hope that something better would providentially appear was like ‘refusing to eat bean curd and vegetables because next week there might be meat and fish’. The Party's strategy, Chen argued, was correct. Communists must work discreetly in the background, bolstering the GMD-Left's support against what was now termed the ‘new right’ (the former GMD-Centre), led by Chiang Kai-shek; and, as the Comintern insisted, they must avoid controversial measures – such as the forced redistribution of land to the peasantry – which might impair the alliance. ‘The [GMD] Left's existence’, the plenum declared in its final resolution, ‘is the key to our co-operation with the Guomindang.’212
This cautious optimism stemmed in part from the phenomenal growth in the CCP's membership over the previous two years. From fewer than a thousand at the time of the Fourth Congress in January 1925, this had jumped to 7,500 a year later (in the wake of the May 30 Incident); and to 30,000 by December 1926, thanks largely to the Northern Expedition. Equally important, about 1,000 unit commanders, political workers and staff officers in the National Revolutionary Army were Communist Party members, whom the CCP Military Committee, headed by Zhou Enlai, was now beginning to organise into regimental ‘nuclei’, or secret Party cells.213
The trouble with the strategy which Chen Duxiu, at the behest of the Comintern, had espoused – ‘playing the coolie’, in Borodin's phrase; ‘Right-capitulationism’, as Chen's critics would call it – was that it assumed that the GMD-Left, with no army of its own and, at best, notional support from Tang Shengzhi, could somehow compel Chiang Kai-shek to submit to its control. Mao put his finger on it during the plenum debate, in which he participated as a non-voting member in his capacity as head of the Peasant Committee. ‘The Right has troops,’ he said, ‘the Left has none; even with a single platoon, the Right would be stronger than the Left.’ That observation earned him a stinging rebuke from Chen, who said the remark was ‘absurd’ but offered no substantive rebuttal.214
As the weeks passed and the nature of the split became clearer, the Party Centre acknowledged that its hopes of a left-wing resurgence were not being realised, and that instead the GMD-Right was becoming ‘more and more powerful’.215 But the only answer it could suggest was for the Party to make even greater efforts to reassure the Guomindang, and especially the GMD-Left, that the CCP was a loyal and harmless ally.
Mao, too, in public, hewed closely to this ultra-cautious, conciliatory line. Soon after the December plenum, he left Hankou for Changsha to attend the first Congress of the Hunan Provincial Peasants’ Association. There he assured his audience that ‘the time for us to overthrow the landlords has not yet come’. Rent reductions, a cap on interest rates and higher wages for rural labourers were legitimate demands, he said. But beyond that the national revolution must take priority, and the landlords should be allowed some concessions.216
Within two months, Mao would reject those views totally.
Then he would proclaim, in messianic tones, that the peasant movement was a ‘colossal event’, which would alter the face of China, and that the Party must change its policy completely – or become irrelevant:
In a very short time, several hundred million peasants in China's central, southern and northern provinces will rise like a fierce wind or tempest, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it. They will break through all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will, in the end, send all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local bullies and bad gentry to their graves. All revolutionary parties and all revolutionary comrades will stand before them to be tested, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. To march at their head and lead them? To stand behind them, gesticulating and criticising them? Or to stand opposite them and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose … [but] you are fated to make the choice quickly.217
The extraordinary change in Mao's views – even allowing for hyperbole, the picture he painted was utterly different from anything any Party official had written before – was the result of a month-long journey he made through Xiangtan and four other rural counties in January and early February 1927.
It was a revelation. The reality of the peasant movement, he told the Central Committee on his return, was ‘almost totally different from what we have seen and heard in Hankou and in Changsha’.218 He set out his conclusions in a document which was to become famous as the ‘Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan’. It was an intellectual tour de force, nearly 20,000 words in length and, like Mao's subsequent rural investigations, in Jiangxi in the early 1930s, based on meticulous field research. ‘I called together fact-finding conferences in villages and county towns, which were attended by e
xperienced peasants and by comrades in the peasant movement,’ he reported. ‘I listened attentively … and collected a great deal of material.’219 That autumn and winter, after the passage of the Northern Expedition, the countryside had risen in revolt. The membership of the peasant associations, which stood at 400,000 in late summer, shot up to two million.220 All over central Hunan, the old feudal order collapsed:
The main targets of their attack are the local bullies, the bad gentry and the lawless landlords, but in passing they also hit out against patriarchal ideas and institutions of all kinds … The attack is quite simply tempestuous; those who submit to it survive, and those who resist, perish. As a result, the privileges the feudal landlords have enjoyed for thousands of years are being shattered to pieces … The peasant associations have now become the sole organs of authority … Even trifling matters, such as quarrels between husband and wife, must be brought before [them] for settlement … If a member of a peasant association so much as farts, it is [regarded as] sacred. The association actually dictates everything in the countryside … Quite literally: ‘Whatever it says, goes’.221
