by Philip Short
CHAPTER SEVEN
Out of the Barrel of a Gun
Besso Lominadze did not hit it off with his Chinese charges. He was young, inexperienced, knew little about the world beyond the Soviet Union's borders and appeared to care less. Zhang Guotao remembered meeting him the day he arrived in Wuhan, July 23. It was, he wrote later, ‘the worst conversation in my memory … His character seemed to be that of a spiv after the October Revolution, while his attitude was that of an inspector-general of the Czar … [treating] the intellectuals of the CCP … as serfs.’1
Besso Lominadze was Stalin's man. At the age of twenty-eight, he had been sent to ram down the throats of the Chinese leaders the Comintern's new line, and to ensure that they, not Stalin, were blamed for the egregious failures of the recent past. To Lominadze, Moscow was the fount of all possible wisdom. He came, in Zhang's words, bearing ‘an imperial edict’: all that the vacillating, petty-bourgeois leaders of the Chinese Party had to do was to apply Soviet experience and Comintern directives correctly and the Chinese revolution would triumph, to the greater glory of Russia and those who ruled it. Unlike Borodin, who had spent a lifetime subtly fomenting revolution abroad, or Roy, who had debated agrarian policy with Lenin, Lominadze and the small group of arrogant and insecure young men who came to China with him were simply cogs in Stalin's personal power machine.2 In the second half of 1927, the master of the Kremlin was far less concerned with the future of the Chinese revolution than with being able to show that Trotsky's views were wrong and his own, correct.
The Chinese communists were by this time just starting to pull themselves together after Chen Duxiu's enforced resignation and the united front's collapse.3 The massacre of Party cadres that had begun in Jiangxi in March, accelerated in Shanghai in April and reached its zenith in Hunan in May, was now seen clearly for what it was: the fate of a parasite party which, when its host organism turns against it, has neither the means nor the will for self-defence. Very quickly, therefore, after the July 15 break with the Guomindang, the CCP's new provisional leadership, basing itself on Stalin's order to build a communist-led peasant army, began to sketch out guidelines for an independent strategy.
On July 20, a secret directive on peasant movement tactics, which Mao almost certainly helped to draft, asserted that ‘only if there is a revolutionary armed force can victory be assured in the struggle of the peasants’ associations for political power’, and called on association cadres to give ‘120 per cent of [their] attention to this issue’. It went on to discuss in detail the different means the Party could use to assemble such a force. These included seizing weapons from landlord militias; sending ‘brave and trained members of the peasants’ associations’ to act as a fifth column inside the warlord armies; forming alliances with secret society members; the clandestine training of peasant self-defence forces; and, if all else failed, then, as Mao and Cai Hesen had urged two weeks earlier, ‘going up the mountains’.4
At the same time, the Politburo Standing Committee began preparing for a wave of peasant insurrections in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Guangdong, to be staged during the Autumn Harvest Festival in mid-September, when land rents fell due and seasonal tensions between peasants and landlords would be greatest,5 and for a military uprising in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi, where several communist-officered units in the Guomindang's National Revolutionary Army were based.6
Moscow knew nothing of these plans, and when consulted by an anxious Lominadze, who had no desire to be crucified for yet another débâcle, responded with a delphic double negative: ‘If the uprising has no hope of victory, it would be better not to start it.’7 But by then the Chinese leaders had had enough of the Comintern's studied ambiguities. After the long months of humiliating retreat under Borodin and Chen Duxiu, they were determined to act at almost any price. Ignoring Moscow's reservations, Zhou Enlai, at the head of a specially constituted Front Committee,I ordered the insurrection to commence in the early hours of August 1. Nanchang fell with hardly a shot fired and remained in communist hands for four days – delighting Stalin, for whom it provided a victory to flaunt before the Trotskyist opposition.8
The list of participants read like the Almanac de Gotha of the Communist revolution. Zhu De, afterwards the Red Army's Commander-in-Chief, was Chief of Public Security in Nanchang. He Long, a moustachioed Sichuanese with a colourful history of secret society allegiance, later a communist marshal, commanded the main insurrectionary force. Ye Ting, then a divisional commander, would go on to head the communist New Fourth Army during the war with Japan. Ye's Political Commissar, Nie Rongzhen, and Chief of Staff, Ye Jianying, were also future marshals. So was one of the youngest officers to take part, a slim, rather shy graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy named Lin Biao. He had just turned twenty.II
The communist force, some 20,000 strong, left Nanchang on August 5, heading south, where they hoped, as a communist-inspired proclamation put it, to establish ‘a new base area … outside the spheres of the old and new warlords’, in Guangdong.9
While these events were unfolding, Mao remained in Wuhan, where, on the Comintern's instructions, Qu Qiubai and Lominadze, helped by a young member of the Secretariat named Deng Xixian, subsequently better known by his nom de guerre, Deng Xiaoping, were preparing an emergency Party conference. Its declared purpose was to ‘reorganise [the Party's] forces, correct the serious mistakes of the past, and find a new path’.10
Two days later, twenty-two CCP members, all men, gathered in the apartment of a Russian economic adviser on the upper floor of a large European-style house in the consular district in Hankou. They were told not to leave while the conference was in progress, for fear of attracting unwelcome attention, and to say, should anyone come to the door, that they were holding a shareholders’ meeting.11 Qu was dressed incongruously in a loud flannel shirt. He was ravaged by tuberculosis, and the swollen veins on his face stood out in the suffocating August heat.12 Because of the haste with which the conference had been organised, the need for secrecy and the absence of many leaders in Nanchang, fewer than a third of the Central Committee attended, which, under Party rules, fell short of a quorum. But Lominadze insisted that, in the emergency the Party was now facing, the meeting could take interim decisions, which would be ratified by a congress to be held within the next six months.13
The new strategy which the August 7 Conference endorsed reflected Stalin's instructions of the previous winter and spring, in which he had laid down that there was no contradiction between class struggle against the landlords and national revolution against the warlord regime. The revolution's centre of gravity, Lominadze argued, should shift to the labour unions and the peasant associations; peasants and workers should play a greater role in the Party's leading organs; and a co-ordinated strategy should be developed of armed workers’ and peasants’ insurrections. In this respect, he said, the Nanchang uprising marked ‘a clear turning-point’. The old, irresolute policy of compromise and concessions, followed by the outgoing leadership of Chen Duxiu, had been abandoned.
Lominadze hammered home two other lessons from Moscow. The Comintern's instructions must always be obeyed: by rejecting its guidance in June, the Party leadership had committed not just a breach of discipline but ‘a criminal act’. And since the Party could no longer function openly, even in GMD-ruled areas, it must be refashioned into a militant, clandestine organisation with ‘solid, combative secret organs’.14
Ostensibly to unify thinking, but equally to save Stalin's face, the conference issued a ‘Circular Letter to All Party Members’, containing a lengthy self-criticism which left few of the former leaders unscathed. Chen Duxiu, whom Lominadze (like Roy) charged with Menshevism,III was denounced by name for ‘standing the revolution on its head’, restraining the peasant and labour movements, kowtowing to the Guomindang and abandoning the Party's independence. Tan Pingshan was castigated for his conduct as GMD Minister for Peasant Affairs, when he allegedly ‘abandoned the struggle’ and ‘shamefully … refuse
d to support the rural revolution’. Li Weihan, though not named, was blamed for countermanding the peasants’ attack on Changsha in late May, and Zhou Enlai was reproached for having approved the disarming of workers’ pickets in Wuhan in June. Even Mao was implicitly criticised for having omitted to protest against the GMD's failure to implement land redistribution, and for not having taken a radical enough line in the directives he had drafted for the All-China Peasants’ Association.15
None the less, he found the new team of Lominadze and Qu Qiubai much more to his liking than the Borodin–Chen Duxiu leadership it had replaced. Their explicit stress on class struggle, on the primacy of the peasants and workers as the main engine of revolt, and on the use of armed force, was music to his ears. He also approved of the connection which Lominadze drew between imperialism abroad and feudalism at home.16
Lominadze, in turn, found Mao ‘a capable comrade’, and when the new provisional leadership was announced, he was rewarded by being made a Politburo alternate (returning to that body for the first time since his withdrawal to Shaoshan in January 1925).17 Of the nine full members of the Politburo, four were new appointees with working-class backgrounds, one of whom, Su Zhaozheng, was named to the three-man Standing Committee, together with Qu Qiubai and Li Weihan, in line with Lominadze's insistence that workers play a larger role. Peng Pai, who was with the Nanchang rebels, represented the peasant movement, and Ren Bishi, the Youth League. Zhang Guotao and Cai Hesen, both regarded as moderates, were demoted. Zhang hung on for a few months as an alternate member, while Cai, who had been part of the top leadership since 1922, left to become Secretary of the CCP Northern Bureau.18
Why was Peng Pai, rather than Mao, chosen for full Politburo membership as peasant movement representative? One factor may have been the leadership's hopes of re-establishing a strong base in Guangdong, Peng Pai's home territory. But there was also the problem of Mao's character. He was unconformable. Immediately after Chen Duxiu's fall, Zhou Enlai had tried unsuccessfully to reassign him to Sichuan, partly, it seems, to detach him from his Hunan power base.19 Qu, who had worked with him on the Peasant Committee earlier in the year, had had plenty of opportunity to observe how headstrong and stubborn he could be: a good man to have as an ally – but not as a rival, or a subordinate to try to control.20
Shortly before Lominadze's arrival, Mao had been given responsibility for planning the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan. His first proposal, approved by the Standing Committee on August 1, envisaged the creation of a peasant army, comprising a regiment of regular soldiers from Nanchang, and two regiments, each of about a thousand peasant self-defence force troops, from eastern and southern Hunan. They were to occupy five or six counties in the south of the province, promote agrarian revolution and set up a revolutionary district government. The aim was to destabilise the rule of Tang Shengzhi and He Jian and create ‘centres of revolutionary force’ from which a province-wide peasant uprising would be launched to overthrow them.21
On August 3, the Standing Committee incorporated this plan into its outline for the full four-province Autumn Harvest Uprising, now defined as an ‘anti-rent and anti-tax’ revolt, which it hoped would ultimately lead to the formation of a new revolutionary government covering both Hunan and Guangdong.22
The success of the Nanchang uprising, however, persuaded Qu and Lominadze that the action in Hunan should not be limited to the south but should cover the entire province. Two days later, a revised plan was sought from the Hunan Party committee.
Apparently it was unsatisfactory, for on August 9, Lominadze, acting on advice from the new Soviet consul (and Comintern agent) in Changsha, Vladimir Kuchumov, who had accompanied him from Moscow and used the alias Mayer, declared that the committee – headed by Yi Lirong, Mao's old friend and a former New People's Study Society colleague – was incompetent and needed to be reorganised.23 To Mao's credit, when this issue was raised before the Politburo, he defended Yi and his team, arguing that they had been trying courageously ‘to pick up the pieces in the tragic situation after the [Horse Day Incident]’. But to no avail. Lominadze named another Hunanese, Peng Gongda, who was a Politburo alternate, to be the new provincial Party Secretary.24
On August 12 Mao was appointed Central Committee Special Commissioner for Hunan, and set out for Changsha to begin preparing to get the uprising under way.25 A week later the new, ‘reorganised’ Hunan Party committee, which included, as Lominadze had instructed, ‘a majority of comrades with worker-peasant backgrounds’, held its first meeting, in the presence of Kuchumov, at a house in the countryside near Changsha, to discuss its plan of campaign.
At this point, three problems emerged. The first was relatively minor. Kuchumov briefed the meeting on the latest messages from Hankou, transmitted while Mao was en route, and either he or Mao, or both, concluded – mistakenly, as it turned out – that Stalin had at last authorised the setting-up of worker-peasant soviets on the Russian model as organs of local power. Mao was ecstatic, and wrote to the Central Committee at once:
On hearing this, I jumped for joy. Objectively speaking, the situation in China has long since reached 1917, but formerly everyone held that we were in 1905. This has been an extremely great error. Soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers are wholly adapted to the objective situation … As soon as [their power] is established [in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Guangdong], [it] should rapidly achieve victory in the whole country.26
It followed, he argued, that the time had come for the Party to act in its own name, rather than maintaining the pretence of being in a revolutionary alliance with progressive elements of the discredited GMD. ‘The Guomindang banner has become the banner of the warlords,’ Mao wrote. ‘[It] is already nothing but a black flag, and we must immediately and resolutely raise the Red flag.’
In a province where the peasantry associated the Guomindang emblem, a white sun on a blue ground, with the terrible massacres perpetrated by Xu Kexiang, this was no more than common sense.27 But the issue was politically sensitive because it had become enmeshed in the ongoing dispute between Stalin and Trotsky. In the event, Mao was four weeks ahead of the game. The setting-up of soviets, and the abandonment of the Guomindang flag, were finally approved a month later. In Stalin's Russian paradigm, it was indeed 1917, as Mao claimed, but April, not October.28
The second problem had to do with the perennial question of land confiscation. The August 7 Conference had skirted round this issue.29 Mao had spent several days, after his return to Changsha, canvassing peasant views. He now put forward a far-reaching proposal, which sought to reconcile the Party's policy of ‘land nationalisation’ and the land hunger of the poor. ‘All the land,’ he told the provincial committee, ‘including that of small landlords and owner-peasants … [should be taken] into public ownership’ and redistributed ‘fairly’ (a demand for which, afterwards, endless ink and blood would be spilled) on the basis of each family's labour power and the number of mouths it had to feed. Small landlords and their dependents (but not big landlords) should be included in the share-out, he added, ‘for only thus can the people's minds be set at ease’.30
The question of definitions was of more than passing interest. It was to be the anvil on which argument about land reform, the very core of the Chinese communist revolution, would be hammered out ceaselessly right up to the eve of victory in 1949.
In August 1927, however, Mao's proposals were more radical then even Qu Qiubai's Politburo was ready to accept. In a detailed reply sent off on August 23, the Party Centre told him that, while not wrong in principle, on this issue – as on the question of forming soviets, and not using the GMD flag – he was, at the least, premature. Confiscating small landlord holdings was bound to occur at some point, it declared; but to raise it as a slogan immediately was tactically unwise.31
The third problem to emerge from the debates in Changsha was still more fundamental, and far less easily disposed of, for it went to the heart of the entire strategy of armed insurrection on which Qu Qiubai
and his colleagues were counting to revive the communist cause. Since Stalin's telegram in June, a broad consensus had developed that, to carry forward the revolution, the Party would have to use armed force. But that was as far as the analysis went. Such questions as the form this force would take; the role it should play; how it might be combined with the peasant and worker mass movements and how it should be harnessed to promote the Party's political power, had not been addressed at all. Mao had set out the issue succinctly on August 7 in Hankou:
We used to censure [Sun] Yat-sen for engaging only in a military movement, and we did just the opposite, not undertaking a military movement, but exclusively a mass movement. Both Chiang [Kai-shek] and Tang [Q1][Shengzhi] rose by grasping the gun; we alone did not concern ourselves with this. At present though we have paid some attention to it, we still have no firm concept about it. The Autumn Harvest Uprising, for example, is simply impossible without military force … From now on we should pay the greatest attention to military affairs. We must know that political power is obtained out of the barrel of a gun.32
