by Philip Short
CHAPTER SIX
Events Leading to the Horse Day Incident and its Bloody Aftermath
Shortly after 4 a.m. on Tuesday, April 12, 1927, the doleful sound of a river steamer's foghorn echoed across the western districts of Shanghai.1 It was the signal for nationalist troops, supported by a thousand ‘armed labourers’, wearing identical blue denim uniforms with white armbands, on which was inscribed the character gong (labour), to begin moving silently into position around communist strongholds in the working-class Nandao and Zhabei quarters of the city. To facilitate their task, the municipal council had granted the nationalist commander, Bai Chongxi, free passage for his men through the foreign concessions.
As dawn was breaking, a concerted attack began. The ‘labourers’ were actually members of the Green Gang, the dominant Shanghai underworld organisation. The communists, caught unprepared, were outgunned and outfought. Only at the General Labour Union headquarters, and the offices of the Commercial Press, where arms had been stockpiled and communist-led workers were able to barricade themselves in, was serious resistance offered. By late morning, after the army brought up machine-guns and field artillery, that, too, had been crushed. ‘It is too much, perhaps, to say that the communist power is broken,’ the correspondent of The Times reported, ‘but certainly the communists have had a heavy setback.’ The British-officered municipal police estimated that 400 people had been killed, and many more wounded and arrested.
The following day, Zhou Enlai, who was the top-ranking communist then in Shanghai, ordered a general strike, which brought much of the city to a standstill. About a thousand workers, including women and children who worked in the textile mills, then marched to the Military Headquarters to hand in a petition. What happened next was conveyed succinctly by the North China Herald's headline: ‘Horrible Fight in Zhabei: Communists’ Women and Children Placed in Front Line … Soldiers Fire Nonetheless’. The demonstrators, the newspaper noted, had been unarmed; the troops had fired a single volley at a few yards’ range. About twenty people died instantly. Up to 200 others were shot as they fled. Witnesses reported lorry-loads of corpses being taken for burial in mass graves.2 After that, there were no further demonstrations. Chiang Kai-shek and his allies were firmly back in control.I
It is almost impossible to understand why the CCP and the Left- Guomindang did not anticipate Chiang's putsch. Part of the problem was Stalin's insistence that the united front be maintained at all costs. Stalin believed that the Guomindang had a far better chance than the communists of unifying China and weakening Moscow's enemies, the imperialist Powers, and that therefore the Soviet–GMD alliance must be preserved. His strategy for China was realpolitik, rather than revolution. In the process he blinkered the Comintern, which in turn blinkered the CCP.
Yet that was not the whole story. Even allowing for Comintern discipline, the Chinese Party leaders permitted themselves to be lulled in a quite extraordinary manner. For an entire month before the Shanghai coup, they deliberately closed their eyes to mounting evidence that Chiang had turned decisively against them.3 Starting in mid-March, when the GMD's Third Plenum reaffirmed the Left-Guomindang–CCP alliance (signalling an attempt to marginalise Chiang and the GMD-Right within the party apparatus), a systematic pattern of violence, directed against the Left, developed throughout the areas which Chiang's forces controlled. From Chongqing, in far-off Sichuan, to Amoy (Xiamen), on the China Sea coast, the procedure was everywhere the same. Thugs recruited from secret societies (usually linked to the Green Gang), backed up when necessary by troops, smashed the mass organisations of the Left, and new ‘moderate’ groups were hastily set up to replace them.4
Other forces also came into play. Hankou, under Left-GMD rule, had been an economic disaster. Labour militancy forced dozens of Chinese banks to close. Trade was at a standstill. To the wealthy Chinese financiers and industrialists watching nervously from Shanghai, the ‘Red capital’, as Hankou was called, exemplified everything they wanted to avoid.5 If that were not enough, in March a workers’ insurrection in Shanghai itself, ruthlessly controlled by communist pickets supported by thugs from secret societies – ‘black-gowned gunmen’, the London Times called them – offered an alarming foretaste of what communist government might portend.6
In the foreign community, too, pressure was building for action by the Powers to stop the ‘Bolshevik menace’. Lurid accounts of depravity were seized on eagerly. One story, widely reprinted, described how the communists, already well-known for ‘communising wives’, had staged a ‘naked body procession’ of selected women ‘having snow-white bodies and perfect breasts’ through the streets of Hankou. One senses wishful thinking. An American missionary trembled at the consequences ‘if the mad dog of Bolshevism is not checked … but is allowed to jump across the seas to our own beloved America’.7 Another resident remembered: ‘A fear psychology possessed us. We were all to be murdered by our own servants. And the truth was that the first real warnings came from boys and coolies and amahs, who kept repeating: “Plenty trouble – more better go Japan side.”’8
On March 24, an event occurred which raised these fears to fever pitch. When the nationalist armies occupied Nanjing, soldiers looted the American, British and Japanese consulates, and fired on a group of foreigners awaiting evacuation. The British consul was wounded, and two Britons, an American, a French and an Italian priest and a Japanese marine were killed. The ‘Nanking Outrage’, as it was called, convinced Western capitals that the time had come to act.9
Thus by the beginning of April, the Powers and the Shanghai capitalists were both looking for a means to halt the slide into anarchy and chaos. The question on every foreigner's lips was whether Chiang Kai-shek, GMD Commander-in-Chief, but also apparently a man with reservations about the communist cause, would answer to that purpose. ‘Chiang Kai-shek stands at the dividing of the ways,’ wrote the North China Daily News. ‘He … [is] now the only protection of China south of the Yangtse from being submerged by the Communist Party … But if General Chiang is to save his fellow countrymen from the Reds, he must act swiftly and relentlessly. Will he prove himself the man of action and decision? … Or will he, too, go down with China in the Red flood?’10
The answer came in stages, artfully obscured. The Shanghai Chinese business community secretly paid over three million dollars, the first instalment of a ‘loan’, variously estimated at $10 to $25 million, made on the explicit understanding that the communists would be curbed. On April 6, the representatives of the Powers in Beijing authorised the northern government, then controlled by the fiercely anti-communist Manchurian warlord, Zhang Zuolin, to send Chinese police into the Legation quarter to search parts of the Soviet Mission, where many local CCP leaders, including Li Dazhao, had taken refuge. Soviet premises in Tianjin were also searched. In Shanghai, guards were posted at the Soviet consulate, with orders to deny access to all but Russian officials. The Green Gang's leader, Du Yuesheng, whose mentor, ‘Pockmarked Huang’ (Huang Jinrong), had befriended Chiang when he had been a young officer in Shanghai a decade earlier, established a ‘Common Progress Association’, to furnish the so-called ‘armed labourers’ for the coming confrontation. And all the while in neighbouring cities, from Fuzhou to Nanjing, the steady drumbeat of anti-communist repression continued.11
Yet even after all this, when the axe finally fell, ‘the defenders of the revolution’, in one contemporary observer's words, ‘were taken unaware’.12 Not only was no defence prepared, but Wang Shouhua, the young head of the CCP CC Labour Committee and Chairman of the Shanghai General Labour Union – arguably the most important communist leader in the city – accepted, unsuspecting, a dinner invitation on the night of April 11 from Du Yuesheng himself. When he arrived, he was strangled and his body dumped in a shallow grave in wasteland in the suburbs.13
The problem was not a failure of analysis. As early as January, the CC's Central Bureau had warned that an ‘extremely dangerous situation’ would arise in the event of ‘an alliance of
foreign imperialists with the right or moderate wing of the Guomindang’.14 But the Generalissimo had disguised his moves with such consummate skill that no one outside his own inner circle had guessed his true intentions. Foreigners and communists alike were bewildered. In early April, while the North China Daily News was lamenting Chiang's refusal to take a ‘frankly anti-communist’ stand,15 the Central Bureau remained convinced that the attacks on communist-led organisations in the provinces were piecemeal efforts, not the prelude to a full-scale confrontation.16 The bottom line was that, in 1927, the CCP was so wedded to the alliance with the bourgeoisie that it could not conceive of a revolution without it.17
In Hankou, on April 12, Mao spent the morning attending a meeting of the new GMD Land Committee, which was trying to devise a land redistribution policy that would satisfy peasant demands without alienating the GMD's landlord supporters. He was still brimming with optimism after his experiences in Hunan, and urged a radical approach: Let the peasants themselves take action, by refusing to pay rent – legal recognition could come later. He and Qu Qiubai were drawing up similar recommendations for the CCP's Fifth Congress, which was to take place later that month. The new Comintern delegate, Mahendranath (M. N.) Roy, who had just arrived from Moscow, was far more sympathetic to the agrarian revolution than Borodin had ever been. Wang Jingwei was in Hankou, and Chen Duxiu was on his way.18
That afternoon, as the first urgent radio messages began coming in from Shanghai, all these carefully contrived hopes came crashing to the ground.
For the next six days, the CCP Central Bureau met in almost continuous session, while Moscow's two counsellors gave radically differing advice.19 Borodin, supported by Chen Duxiu, called for a ‘strategic retreat’, involving severe restraints on the peasant and labour movement in the territories controlled by the Wuhan government, and an immediate resumption of the Northern Expedition under the command of Tang Shengzhi. He proposed that Tang link up with the Christian General, Feng Yuxiang, in Henan, who was receiving substantial Soviet aid, and mount a joint campaign against the northern forces of Zhang Zuolin. Once Zhang's troops had been defeated, there would be time enough to deal with Chiang Kai-shek and to revive the revolutionary movement that was being temporarily shelved.20 Roy held that this was ‘a betrayal of the peasantry, of the proletariat … and the masses’. The Chinese revolution, he declared, ‘will either win as an agrarian revolution or it will not win at all’. Going north meant ‘collaborating with the very forces of reaction that are betraying the revolution at every step’. Borodin's advice, he concluded, was ‘very dangerous’, and the Party must reject it.21
The dispute brought into the open the fundamental contradiction inherent in Stalin's policy in China. Should the workers and peasants take precedence? Or the alliance with the bourgeoisie?
As the argument raged on, a telegram arrived from Zhou Enlai and the other leaders in Shanghai, urging a third option. Chiang Kai-shek's military position, they said, was far weaker than it seemed. If Tang Shengzhi marched on Nanjing and took ‘resolute punitive action’, Chiang's forces could be defeated. If, on the other hand, indecision continued, he would consolidate his position. Qu Qiubai supported the Shanghai group. Chen Duxiu revived the idea, originally proposed by Sun Yat-sen, of making for the north-west, where the imperialist forces were weakest. Tan Pingshan and Zhang Guotao wanted to march south and reconquer the GMD's old base in Guangdong.22
The futility of all these discussions, and the CCP's impotence, were shown graphically the following weekend, when the Bureau eventually endorsed Roy's position and issued a resolution declaring that, at this stage, to continue the Northern Expedition would be ‘harmful to the revolution’ – only to find that, next day, Wang Jingwei, urged on by Borodin, announced the expedition's imminent resumption.23
Mao did not attend these meetings. His rank was too lowly (he was not even a Central Committee member); and since the row over his report from Hunan, Chen Duxiu had refused to have anything to do with him. But his sympathies were with Roy.24
He spent that month labouring in the GMD Land Committee with a mixed group of young leftists and older, more conservative Guomindang officials, trying to come up with a formula for land redistribution which would satisfy all the different interests in play. The key issue was how extensive land redistribution should be. Should all private land be confiscated, as Mao proposed? Or only holdings in excess of 30 mu (5 acres), a little more than Mao's father had possessed? Or more than 50 or 100 mu, as the older delegates wanted? In the end, this, too, proved a pointless exercise, for even the restrictive version that Mao's drafting committee finally recommended was set aside by the GMD Political Council on the grounds that it might upset the army, many of whose officers were from landowning families.25
Mao's efforts in his own party fared no better. At the Fifth Congress, which opened on April 27, his draft resolution, calling for all land to be confiscated, was shelved without discussion. Lip service was paid to the principle of ‘land nationalisation’, but it was made meaningless because the communists, like the GMD, forbade confiscation from ‘small landlords’, a term which was left prudently undefined.26
By this stage Mao was once again ‘very dissatisfied with Party policy’.27 The feeling was mutual. When the new Central Committee was elected, he scraped in as an alternate member, ranking thirtieth in the Party hierarchy.28 A week later, when the CC Peasant Committee was ‘reorganised’, his position as Secretary was taken by Qu Qiubai, who had been promoted to the Standing Committee of the new Politburo (as the Central Bureau was now called).29 He remained a member of the Peasant Committee and continued to work for the All-China Peasants’ Association.30 But his chances of building throughout China a peasant movement ‘so swift and violent that no power … will be able to suppress it’, as he had written on his return from Hunan, looked increasingly remote.
Meanwhile, the torrent of bad news from other provinces grew into a flood.
In Canton, the right-wing GMD Governor proclaimed martial law. Two thousand communist suspects were rounded up, and scores executed. In Shanghai, the death toll, while never precisely established, was also in the thousands. In all the areas Chiang controlled directly, a ‘Party Purification Campaign’ was launched to root out communists. In Beijing, Li Dazhao, and nineteen of those detained with him during the raid on the Soviet Embassy, were strangled on the orders of Zhang Zuolin.31
By early May, only Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi, whose Governor, Zhu Peide, was a long-time ally of Wang Jingwei, were still under Wuhan's control.
Even more serious was the economic crisis. The militancy of the labour movement had brought the cities to a state of anarchy. Hankou, Hanyang and Wuchang had 300,000 unemployed. The foreign population had dropped from 4,500 to 1,300, and the plight of those that remained was described in The Times under the headline, ‘Red Terror at Hankou’:
The Government is now completely Communist, business is impossible, the labour unions and pickets dominate the city, while the soldiers display an ugly temper and it is unsafe for British [subjects] to appear in the streets. The heads of firms are now the special object of the mob's violence, some having been chased from the streets with bayonets.
Matters were made still worse when the Chinese banks in Canton and Shanghai, on Chiang Kai-shek's orders, suspended dealing with Wuhan. Tax collection ceased; the government printed money without revenue to support it; daily necessities disappeared from the shops. By late April there were even fears of a rice shortage, because the revolutionary authorities in Hunan halted grain exports to try to hold down prices.32
At Borodin's insistence, the GMD Political Council announced a ban on wildcat strikes, and measures to impose ‘revolutionary discipline’ on the labour movement, stabilise the currency, regulate prices and provide relief for the unemployed.33
At that point, the military balance began to tip again. Tang Shengzhi's forces had moved north to link up with Feng Yuxiang's New People's Army in Henan. Only a skeleton garris
on had remained behind in Hubei, which gave Chiang Kai-shek an opportunity to probe Wuhan's defences. In mid-May, General Xia Douyin, the nationalist commander at Yichang, 200 miles upriver, rallied to Chiang's banner and marched on Hankou at the head of a force of 2,000 men. With Chiang's encouragement, other generals nominally loyal to Wuhan deployed their troops behind him. On May 18, Xia's advance guard was reported a few miles from Wuchang. Shopkeepers put up their shutters, and the ferry service across the river was halted. Ye Ting, a communist who had been named acting garrison commander, gathered a few hundred military cadets and men from a training division, and prepared as best he could to give battle. Mao was asked to mobilise the 400 students at the Peasant Movement Institute, each of whom had been given an old-fashioned rifle and rudimentary military training, to patrol the city streets.
Next morning, Ye Ting's improvised force marched out, and Xia's men were routed.34 But the fire which he had lit would not easily be extinguished.
In Changsha, wild rumours began circulating that Wuhan had fallen, Wang Jingwei had fled and Borodin had been executed. Already that spring, factional conflict between leftists and moderate elements had spiralled out of control. In April, several prominent citizens with right-wing or foreign connections, including Ye Dehui, the old, arch-conservative scholar who had helped instigate the 1910 rice riots which had so impressed Mao as a child, had been arrested and shot. Now, clashes broke out between soldiers and peasant association activists. On May 19, the father-in-law of He Jian, Tang Shengzhi's deputy, was beaten by communist demonstrators.35
