by Philip Short
Mao defended the movement against those in the Left-GMD, and even in the Communist Party, who argued that it had become too extreme and too ‘terrible’, and ought to be reined in:
The fact is that the broad peasant masses have risen to fulfil their historical mission … It is fine. It is not terrible at all. It is anything but ‘terrible’ … To give credit where credit is due, if we allot 10 points to the accomplishments of the democratic revolution, then the achievements of the city dwellers and the military rate three points, and [those of] the peasants the remaining seven … True, the peasants are in a sense ‘unruly’ in the countryside … They fine the local bullies and bad gentry, they demand contributions from them and they smash their sedan chairs. Should [such individuals] oppose the peasant association, a mass of people swarm into their houses, slaughtering their pigs and consuming their grain. They may even loll on the ivory-inlaid beds belonging to the young ladies in the households of the local bullies and evil gentry. At the slightest provocation they make arrests, crown the arrested with tall paper hats and parade them through the villages … They have even created a kind of terror in the countryside.
This is what ordinary people call ‘going too far’, or ‘going beyond the proper limits in righting a wrong’, or ‘really too much’. Such talk may seem plausible, but in fact it is wrong …
A revolution is not like inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so ‘benign, upright, courteous, temperate and complaisant’. A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another … If the peasants do not use extremely great force, they cannot possibly overthrow the deeply rooted power of the landlords, which has lasted for thousands of years … All the [peasants’] excessive actions were extremely necessary … To put it bluntly, it is necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror in every rural area … To right a wrong, it is necessary to exceed the proper limits; the wrong cannot be righted without doing so.
What this ‘terror’ should consist of, Mao discussed in the last section of his report. Declaring the smashing of the landlords’ power and prestige to be the central task of the peasants’ struggle, he listed nine different methods they could use, ranging from public denunciation and fines to imprisonment and death: ‘The execution of one … big member of the local gentry or one big local bully reverberates through a whole county and is very effective in eradicating the remaining evils of feudalism,’ he asserted. ‘The only effective way of suppressing the reactionaries is to execute at least one or two in each county … When [they] were at the height of their power, they killed peasants without batting an eyelid … How [then] can one say that the peasants should not now rise and shoot one or two?’
The aims of the revolt were multiple: to reduce land rents and interest rates on debt; to end hoarding so as to bring down grain prices; to disband the landlord militias and replace them with peasant spear corps, equipped with ‘pointed double-edged blades mounted on long shafts … the mere sight of which makes the local tyrants and evil gentry shiver’; and to create a new rural administration, based on village assemblies, which Mao and the provincial party leaders hoped would become the building blocks of a rural front between the peasant associations and the Guomindang. Beyond these economic and political goals, there was also a social agenda. The associations, Mao noted approvingly, opposed opium-smoking and gambling – and also clan and religious authorities:
A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of authorities: (1) the state system (political authority) … (2) the clan system (clan authority) … and (3) the supernatural system (religious authority) … As for women, in addition to being dominated by these three, they are also dominated by men (the authority of the husband). These four authorities – political, clan, religious and male – are the embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideological system, and are the four thick ropes binding the Chinese people, particularly the peasants … The political authority of the landlords is the backbone of all the other systems of authority. [Once it is] overturned, the clan authority, the religious authority and the authority of the husband all begin to totter … [The collapse of] the clan system, superstitious ideas and one-sided concepts of chastity will follow as a natural consequence … It is the peasants who made the idols with their own hands, and when the time comes they will cast the idols aside with their own hands; there is no need for anyone else to do it for them prematurely.
The intensity of Mao's experiences during those few weeks in Hunan was such that the lessons he drew from them would stay with him all his life. Revolution, he now understood, could not be micro-managed. In any revolutionary venture, there would always be excesses, just as there would always be those who lagged behind. He quoted Mencius: ‘Our policy in such matters is, “Draw the bow, but do not release the arrow, having seemed to leap.”’ The leadership could point the direction, but then it was up to the people to carry the revolution forward. Only when disaster threatened (as, in the end, it almost always did) would the leaders have to slam on the brakes.
No less important, and outwardly more dramatic, was Mao's open espousal of violence. When Mao had formed the peasant association at Shaoshan in the summer of 1925, he still believed that change could best be obtained by the cautious, reformist methods that he had advocated at Anyuan. The bankruptcy of that strategy had been shown spectacularly that autumn when the miners’ union had been crushed. By January 1926, Mao was ready to concede that ‘in special circumstances, when we encounter the most reactionary and vicious local bullies and evil gentry … they must be overthrown completely’, but without specifying what that meant. Six months later, he spoke for the first time of using ‘brutal methods’ against counter-revolutionaries, if there were no other way to deal with them.222 Now, in the opening months of 1927, the last ambiguities were removed. If the landlords were the chief obstacle to the revolution and the peasantry the chief instrument for removing them, he concluded, the appropriate method was revolutionary violence – the same violence that, seven years earlier, a younger, more idealistic Mao had rejected when choosing between Marx and Kropotkin. Revolutionary violence was qualitatively different from the violence of war, which was fought over territory and power. It was aimed at men who were enemies not because of what they did, but because of who they were. It came from the same deep well of class hatred which the Bolsheviks had tapped to overthrow the Russian bourgeoisie, and would have similar results.
Mao's report was incendiary, and when it was received at Party headquarters in the last week of February 1927, there was sharp disagreement over whether it should be made public. Qu Qiubai was strongly in favour. Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi had reservations. Mao himself had admitted that the peasant associations, and all other forms of local authority, had been overwhelmed by the force of the movement, and that the countryside was, in his own words, ‘in a state of anarchy’. The Guomindang, Left and Right, was appalled by the reports of blind Red Terror, spiralling out of control, and held the communists responsible. Moreover, it quickly became clear that the killings were not as isolated and exemplary as Mao had claimed: at one point the Party leaders were dismayed to learn that the elderly father of Li Lisan, now a CCP Central Committee member, had been summarily executed by villagers despite a letter from his son to the local peasant association. Only much later did it become known that the report was false.223
Meanwhile, unexpected new instructions arrived from Moscow. Until then the Comintern line, laid down by Stalin himself, had been to hold back the peasant movement, for fear it would undermine the united front with the GMD. Now the Russian leader declared that this had been ‘a profound mistake’.224 The theses of the Comintern's Seventh Plenum, approved in Moscow in mid-December, which were received in Shanghai shortly before Mao's report, insisted on the contrary: ‘The fear that the aggravation of the class struggle in the countryside will weaken the anti-
imperialist front is baseless … The refusal [to promote] the agrarian revolution … for fear of alienating the dubious and indecisive co-operation of a section of the capitalist class, is wrong.’225 Although the theses also made clear that the united front was to be maintained (Stalin, as ever, wanted to have his cake and eat it), the thrust was now much more aggressive, and the Chinese leaders were unsure how to respond.226
In the end, a bastard compromise was reached. The first two parts of Mao's report were published in Xiangdao in March (and reprinted widely by the Comintern, which shared none of the Chinese comrades’ inhibitions about revolutionary violence). But the final section – in which Mao referred to execution rallies and peasants beating landlords to death, and mocked the GMD-Left for ‘talking of arousing the masses day in and day out, and then being scared out of their wits when the masses do arise’ – was omitted. The following month Mao was able to arrange for the full text to be published as a pamphlet in Wuhan, to which Qu Qiubai contributed an enthusiastic preface. The incident solidified his political alliance with Qu, while his relations with Chen became increasingly embittered. ‘If this peasant movement had been more thoroughly organised and armed for a class struggle against the landlords,’ he told Edgar Snow ten years later, ‘the [communist base areas] would have had an earlier and far more powerful development throughout the whole country. But Chen Duxiu violently disagreed. He did not understand the role of the peasantry in the revolution, and greatly underestimated its possibilities.’227
It is true that Chen and the Central Bureau had more pressing problems to contend with. On February 17, 1927, nationalist troops had seized Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang. Next day their advance units were at Songjiang, only twenty-five miles from Shanghai. Believing the city's fall to be imminent, the communist-backed labour unions declared a general strike. But the nationalist advance never came. The Shanghai garrison commander, Li Baozhang, sent execution squads on to the streets to hunt down activists. An American correspondent watched them at work, only a few minutes’ walk from the city's fashionable thoroughfares:
The executioners, bearing broadswords and accompanied by a squad of soldiers, marched their victims to a prominent corner where the strike leaders were forced to bend over while their heads were cut off. Thousands fled in horror when the heads were stuck on sharp-pointed bamboo poles and were hoisted aloft, and carried to the scene of the next execution.228
By this time the Central Bureau and the Soviet advisers had concluded, apparently independently, that compromise with Chiang Kai-shek was impossible, and that the CCP and the GMD-Left, backed by Tang Shengzhi's forces in the army – which the Russians now supported – would have to find a way to ease him out of power. Such an outcome, moreover, appeared feasible. Chiang's own supporters were wavering. His vanity and personal ambition, his ‘Napoleon complex’, as his critics called it, his hostility to Borodin and, most damning of all, reports, which were widely believed, that he was preventing Wang Jingwei's return, cost him crucial moderate support. There was a sense abroad that the focus of the revolution was shifting from Nanchang to Wuhan, and that there was nothing Chiang could do to stop it.229
The balance seemed to tip irrevocably on March 6, 1927, when five of the eight GMD CEC members in Nanchang boarded a steamer for Wuhan. Four days later the GMD's long-awaited Third Plenum opened in Hankou. It was dominated by the GMD-Left and the communists.
Chiang himself and the CEC Standing Committee Chairman, Zhang Jingjiang, refused to attend. In their absence, a new leftist-dominated GMD Political Council was established as the supreme organ of party power, and new measures were promulgated to subordinate the military to civilian control. The Left-Guomindang–CCP alliance started to look like a genuine coalition. Two communists, Tan Pingshan and Su Zhaozheng, a seamen's leader who had helped organise the Hong Kong–Canton strike, were given ministerial portfolios in the new nationalist government, a step which Borodin (and Moscow) had been urging since the beginning of the year. The Northern Expedition resumed. Shanghai surrendered with hardly a shot being fired, and Chiang moved his headquarters there from Nanchang on March 26. Wang Jingwei returned from his exile in Europe. There were widespread hopes that the two men would resume the military–civilian duumvirate that had been shattered by Chiang's coup a year earlier.230
Mao spoke at length at the GMD's Third Plenum, which approved (more readily than his own party) many of the ideas he had brought back from his rural investigation in Hunan, including the establishment of village governments, protected by peasant defence forces; the death penalty or life imprisonment for tyrannical landlords; and, for the first time, the confiscation and redistribution of land belonging to ‘corrupt officials, local bullies, bad gentry and counter-revolutionaries’.
Land, the plenum declared, was ‘the core issue’ for the poor peasants who were the motive force of the revolution, and the party would support their struggle ‘until the land problem has been completely solved’.231 This sounded more radical than it was. The crucial question – how the land issue was to be dealt with – was not addressed. But at least it was now on the agenda, and afterwards Mao threw himself into preparations for launching an All-China Federation of Peasant Associations, a GMD Land Committee, and other bodies which were to be charged with putting the new policies into effect.232
By now Yang Kaihui and the children had joined him. They rented a house in Wuchang, where the Peasant Training Institute had reopened with Mao, once again, as principal. At the beginning of April, their third child, another boy, was born. Mao gave him the name Anlong.233 Life, it seemed, was finally returning to normal.
The same day, April 4, 1927, Wang Jingwei and Chen Duxiu issued a joint statement in Shanghai, affirming their common cause. The declaration, Zhang Guotao wrote later, had a ‘slightly hypnotic effect’, producing a warm glow of nostalgia for CCP–GMD amity.234 True, the air was thick with rumour. The foreign newspapers in the treaty ports bubbled with speculation about a communist coup against Chiang, or a coup by Chiang against the communists.235 Wang and Chen, in their joint statement, dismissed the rumours as fabrications.236 Bukharin wrote in Pravda that while differences were inevitable, there was ‘no place for pessimism’, and Stalin told a closed meeting in Moscow that Chiang Kai-shek had no choice but to support the revolution. Once he had played his role, he would be ‘squeezed out like a lemon and then flung away’. Until that day, communists in both countries would give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘The peasant keeps his old worn-out jade as long as she is necessary,’ Stalin said laconically. ‘He does not drive her away. So it is with us.’237
Plate 1 The earliest known portrait of Mao, as a teenager around the time of the 1911 revolution.
Plate 2 A soldier preparing to shear off a peasant’s queue after the overthrow of the Manchus.
Plate 3 One of the many forms of death by slow execution common in Mao’s youth. These prisoners are being slowly asphyxiated as the weight of their bodies stretches their necks.
Plate 4 The Mao family home at Shaoshan.
Plate 5 Mao at the age of 25, with his mother, Wen Qimei, and his brothers, Zemin, 22, and Zetan, 15, in Changsha in 1919.
Plate 6 Mao’s father, Shunsheng, 1919.
Plate 7 Mao’s close friend, Cai Hesen, who converted him to Marxism.
Plate 8 Mao and other members of the Hunanese delegation in Beijing, petitioning for the removal of Governor Zhang Jingyao in January 1920.
Plate 9 China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen.
Plate 10 and 11 The spiritual fathers of the Chinese Communist Party. Left: Li Dazhao, of Beijing University, whose writings popularised Bolshevism in China. Right: Chen Duxiu, editor of New Youth and the CCP’s first General Secretary.
Plate 12 Mao’s second wife, Yang Kaihui, with their sons, Anying, 3, and Anqing, 2, in 1925.
Plate 13 Mao’s third wife, He Zizhen.
Plate 14 From left: Ren Bishi; Red Army Commander-in-Chief, Zhu De; Political Security director, Deng Fa; Xiang
Ying; Mao; and Wang Jiaxiang, on the eve of the proclamation of the Chinese Soviet Republic at Ruijin in November 1931.
Plate 15 Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Plate 16 Zhou Enlai with Mao in north Shensi in 1937.
I The First and Second Central Committees had consisted of three and five members respectively, with no Central Bureau. The Second Congress, which urged ‘centralisation and iron-like discipline’ to prevent individualism and anarcho-communism, laid down detailed organisational rules, but for the most part these remained a dead letter until the Third Congress, which expanded the CC to nine full members and five alternates.
II Nothing more is known about this letter, or the nature of the quarrel it evoked, but given Mao's references to misunderstandings in the plural and ‘bitter feelings once more’, it was plainly not something his wife easily forgave.
III As a result of their efforts, the Yuebei Peasants' and Workers' Association, the first of its kind in Hunan, was inaugurated in September 1923, just as the former Provincial Governor, Tan Yankai, was mounting an invasion from the south. The association, led by a militant former Anyuan miner, Xie Huaide, attracted more than 10,000 members and campaigned for lower grain prices, rent reductions, and an end to the usurious rates of interest which local landlords extorted for peasant debts. Tan's presence gave the peasants some protection against the landlords’ initial reprisals. But the area was part of the home district of Governor Zhao Hengti, and when at the end of November Tan's men were defeated, Zhao's troops set fire to the peasant association headquarters and the homes of many of its supporters. At least four peasants were killed and dozens more arrested, and the movement soon collapsed.
