by Philip Short
At the time, nobody objected to this memorable formulation. Lominadze himself acknowledged that the Nanchang insurrection had put army units at the Party's disposal which would help ‘assure the success’ of the Autumn Harvest Uprising.33 Very quickly, however, that judgement was revised. The Hunanese leaders were warned against ‘putting the cart before the horse’. Popular insurrection must come first, the Politburo ruled; military force, second. Mao's dictum about political power – ‘gun-barrel-ism’, as it would later be called – was viewed more sceptically. It ‘did not quite accord’ with the opinion of the Centre, the Standing Committee decided ten days later. The masses were the core of the revolution; the armed forces, at most, auxiliary.34
For young Chinese radicals in the 1920s, this was no idle debate. Throughout the last decade, China had been devastated by men for whom political and every other kind of power grew from the barrel of a gun: the warlords. How a political force could control a military one was a burning issue, made fiercer by the communists’ recent experience with the Guomindang, whose civilian leadership had signally failed to master its own generals. Added to that was the insurrectionary myth of 1917, which held that popular uprisings were somehow more ‘revolutionary’ than military conquest; that military power could be used to defend revolutionary gains, but the initial spark must come from the peasants and workers themselves throwing off their chains. Moreover, Qu Qiubai maintained, this was precisely what the peasants were waiting for: all the Party had to do was ‘light the fuse’, and unquenchable rural revolution would explode across southern China.35
The provincial leaders charged with carrying out the insurrection knew better. Local Party officials in Hubei sent in a steady stream of discouraging reports about peasant demoralisation. In Hunan, one committee member said bluntly that the peasants had no stomach for a fight; all they wanted was good government, whatever its political complexion. Mao agreed. Had the communists acted in the spring, the situation would have been different. But after three months in which their rural networks had been driven underground or dismantled, and the peasants had been bludgeoned into submission through a general blood-letting of appalling ferocity, to stage uprisings without military support was to court disaster. ‘With the help of one or two regiments, the uprising can take place,’ Mao warned. ‘Otherwise it will inevitably fail … To [think otherwise] is sheer self-deception.’36
Unsurprisingly, given this divergence of views. Mao's revised plan, which was presented to the Standing Committee in Wuhan on August 22, fell far short of the Centre's expectations.
In his written proposals, he tried to disguise his intentions, assuring his Politburo colleagues that although the uprising would need to be ‘kindled’ by two regiments of regular troops, the workers and peasants would be ‘the main force’; that while it would ‘start’ in Changsha, ‘southern and western Hunan would rise up simultaneously’; and that ‘if by any chance it should prove impossible to take [all of] southern Hunan at present’, a fall-back plan was in place for an uprising in just three southern counties.37 But either they saw through him, or the young provincial committee member who had brought the Hunan documents to Wuhan, along with a verbal proposal that the uprising begin on August 30 – ten days earlier than planned – spilled the beans. In any event, the plan was rejected. Changsha was a legitimate starting-point, the Standing Committee acknowledged, but:
First, both your written report and the verbal report … reveal that your preparations for a peasant uprising in the [surrounding] counties are extremely feeble, and that you are relying on outside military force to seize Changsha. This sort of one-sided emphasis on military strength makes it appear that you have no faith in the revolutionary strength of the masses. This can only lead to military adventurism. Secondly, in your preoccupation with Changsha work, you have neglected the Autumn Harvest Uprising in other areas – for example, your abandonment of the plan for south Hunan … Furthermore, as events have turned out, you will not have two regiments [of regular troops] at your disposal [because they will not be available].38
The Politburo's reading of Mao's intentions was absolutely correct. He had indeed abandoned the idea of a province-wide uprising, being convinced that the whole venture would fail unless all available forces were concentrated on Changsha.39 The news that regular troops would not after all be available for the attack on the provincial capital merely strengthened that conviction. In Hubei, the provincial leadership, faced with a similar dilemma, bent reluctantly to the Centre's will.40 Mao, who had seen the Chen Duxiu leadership wrongly reject his views on the peasant movement in the spring, was not about to yield in the autumn to what he saw as the wrong views of Qu Qiubai. After a week spent bolstering the courage of the provincial committee, including a reluctant Peng Gongda, he penned a robust reply – stating in effect that Hunan would do as it saw fit – and despatched the unfortunate Peng to deliver it:
With regard to the two mistakes pointed out in [your] letter, neither facts nor theory are at all compatible with what you say … The purpose in deploying two regiments in the attack on Changsha is to compensate for the insufficiency of the worker-peasant forces. They are not the main force. They will serve to shield the development of the uprising … When you say that we are engaging in military adventurism … this truly reflects a lack of understanding of the situation here, and constitutes a contradictory policy which pays no attention to military affairs while at the same time calling for an armed uprising of the popular masses.
You say that we pay attention only to the work in Changsha and neglect other places. This is absolutely untrue … [The point is that] our force is sufficient only for an uprising in central Hunan. If we launched an uprising in every county, our force would be dispersed and [then] even the [Changsha] uprising could not be carried out.41
No record has survived of the Standing Committee discussion when Peng arrived with this message of defiance. But on September 5, the Party Centre gave vent to its frustration in an angry counterblast:
The Hunan Provincial Committee … has missed a number of opportunities for furthering insurrection among the peasantry. It must [now] at once act resolutely in accordance with the Central plan, and build the main force of the uprising on the peasants themselves. No wavering will be permitted … In the midst of this critical struggle the Centre instructs the Hunan Provincial Committee to implement Central resolutions absolutely. No wavering will be permitted.42
By then, however, as the Standing Committee well knew, this was too late to have the slightest effect. The ‘Central plan’ it spoke of, which had been sent to Changsha a few days earlier, had laid out an even more elaborate programme, drawn up by Qu Qiubai, for a general insurrection in which co-ordinated popular uprisings, carried out in the name of a so-called ‘Hunan and Hubei Sub-Committee of the Revolutionary Committee of China’, would lead to the capture, first of county towns, then of provincial capitals, and finally the whole of China.43 To Mao, it bore no relation to the available resources, and he simply ignored it.44
While Peng was in Wuhan, he left for Anyuan, where he established a Front Committee and began gathering his forces for the assault on Changsha, the centre-piece of the limited action the provincial Party committee had approved.45
These comprised a regiment of about a thousand regular troops, formerly part of the GMD's National Revolutionary Army (renamed by Mao the 1st Regiment), which had defected to the communists and was now based at Xiushui, near the Jiangxi–Hubei border, 120 miles north-east of Changsha; a poorly armed peasant force (the 3rd Regiment), at Tonggu, a small town in the mountains on the Jiangxi–Hunan border; and, at Anyuan itself, a mixed unit of about a thousand unemployed miners (who had lost their jobs when the labour movement was crushed in 1925), and members of the local West Jiangxi Peasant Self-Defence Force (the 2nd Regiment). Together they made up the 1st Division of what the Politburo had agreed should be called the 1st Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army.46
By September 8, the timetable for the insurrect
ion had reached the different units (and had also, unknown to Mao, been betrayed to the Changsha authorities). At his orders, the Guomindang banner was discarded. Local tailors in Xiushui worked through the night making what the troops called ‘axe and sickle’ flags, the first ever carried by a Chinese communist army. Next day, the railway lines to Changsha were sabotaged and the 1st Regiment set out for Pingjiang, fifty miles north-east of the capital.47
At that point an event occurred which might have changed not just the course of the uprising but the future of China. As Mao and a companion were travelling from Anyuan to Tonggu, they were captured by Guomindang militiamen near the mountain village of Zhangjiafang:
The Guomindang terror was then at its height and hundreds of suspected Reds were being shot [Mao recalled years later], I was ordered to be taken to the militia headquarters, where I was to be killed. Borrowing several tens of dollars from [my] comrade, however, I attempted to bribe the escort to free me. The ordinary soldiers were mercenaries, with no special interest in seeing me killed, and they agreed to release me. But the subaltern in charge refused to permit it. I therefore decided to attempt to escape, but I had no opportunity to do so until I was within about 200 yards of the militia headquarters. At that point I broke loose and ran into the fields.
I reached a high place, above a pond, with some tall grass surrounding it, and there I hid until sunset. The soldiers pursued me, and forced some peasants to help them search. Many times they came very near, once or twice so close that I could almost have touched them, but somehow I escaped discovery, although half-a-dozen times I gave up hope, feeling certain I would be recaptured. At last, when it was dusk, they abandoned the search. At once I set off across the mountains, travelling all night. I had no shoes and my feet were badly bruised. On the road I met a peasant who befriended me, gave me shelter and later guided me to the next district. I had seven dollars with me, and used this to buy some shoes, an umbrella and food. When at last I reached [Tonggu] safely, I had only two copper [cash] in my pocket.48
This episode seemed to exhaust whatever good luck Mao had left. The 1st Regiment marched into an ambush set by a local force which coveted its superior weapons, and two of its three battalions were wiped out. The following day, September 12, Mao's 3rd Regiment occupied the small town of Dongmen, ten miles inside the Hunan border. But there the advance stalled. Provincial government troops counter-attacked, and the insurgents were driven back into Jiangxi where, two days later, Mao learned of the disaster that had befallen the 1st Regiment. That night he sent a message to the provincial committee, recommending that the workers’ insurrection which was to have been launched in Changsha on the morning of September 16 be called off.
Next day, Peng Gongda endorsed his proposal, and to all intents and purposes the uprising was over. There was still one last piece of bad news to come. The 2nd (Anyuan) Regiment, after seizing Liling, a small county seat on the railway line, just inside the provincial border, proceeded as planned to Liuyang to await Mao's forces. When they failed to appear, it attacked alone on September 16 but was repulsed. The following day the regiment was surrounded and wiped out to the last man.
The failure could hardly have been more complete.
Of the 3,000 men who had started out eight days earlier, only half remained, the rest lost through desertion, treachery or combat. Mao himself had been captured and barely escaped with his life. The insurgents had managed to occupy two or three small towns along the provincial border, but none for more than twenty-four hours. Changsha itself had never been remotely threatened.49
For three days, they argued over what to do next. Yu Sadu, the 1st Regiment's deputy commander, wanted to regroup and make a fresh attempt to seize Liuyang. But Mao and Lu Deming, the most experienced military officer in the force, disagreed. Early in August, when Qu Qiubai's newly elected Politburo had met for the first time in Wuhan, Mao had told Lominadze that if the insurrection in Hunan were defeated, the surviving forces ‘should go up the mountains’. On September 19, the Front Committee, after an all-night meeting in the border village of Wenjiashi, approved this course. Next day, Mao called a meeting of the whole army outside the local school, where he announced that the attack on Changsha was being abandoned.IV The struggle, he told them, was not over. But at this stage their place was not in the city. They needed to find a new rural base where the enemy was weaker. On September 21, they set out, heading south.50
In Hubei and elsewhere, the uprisings were equally unsuccessful. The insurrectionary army that left Nanchang lost 13,000 of its 21,000 men in two weeks, mostly through desertion. By the time the survivors reached the coast, their spirit had been broken. At the beginning of October, most of the leaders, including He Long, Ye Ting, Zhang Guotao and Zhou Enlai (who by then had to be carried on a stretcher), made their way to a fishing village, ‘hired boats and simply fled to Hong Kong’ – even in those days a refuge for rebellious Chinese.51 The expedition, Zhang acknowledged later, was ‘politically and militarily very juvenile’ and had pitiful results.52 Only two small military units survived more or less intact: one linked up with Peng Pai's forces in Hailufeng; the other, under Zhu De and his young deputy, Chen Yi, reached an accommodation with a local warlord and based itself in northern Guangdong.53
In November, the Politburo met in Shanghai to take stock. The Party's ‘general line’ and insurrectionary strategy, it declared, had been ‘entirely correct’. The uprisings had failed only because they had been carried out from ‘a purely military viewpoint’ and insufficient attention had been paid to mobilising the masses.
Punishments were then announced. The Hunan leaders were held to have relied excessively on ‘local bandits and a handful of motley troops’. At Lominadze's insistence, Mao was dismissed from the Politburo, although he was apparently allowed to retain his membership of the Central Committee. Peng, whom the Comintern's Changsha agent, Kuchumov, accused of ‘cowardice and deception’, lost all his posts and was only allowed to remain in the Party ‘on probation’. Blame for the collapse of the Nanchang forces was attributed to Zhang Guotao, who was also removed from the Politburo, and to Tan Pingshan, the Chairman of the Nanchang Revolutionary Committee, who was expelled from the Party. Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan were let off with reprimands.54
It was the Chinese leaders’ first experience of Bolshevik discipline, Stalinist-style.
Because the basic policy was held to be correct, these decisions paved the way for another round of doomed uprisings, which reached its climax in Canton in December. There the insurrectionist forces, backed by 1,200 cadets from a Guomindang officers’ training unit, commanded by Ye Jianying, held out for nearly three days. But in the massacre that followed, thousands of Party-members and sympathisers were killed. To save bullets, groups of them were roped together, taken out to sea on barges and thrown overboard. Five Soviet officials at the consulate were put up against a wall and shot. Soon afterwards, all Soviet missions in China were ordered to close.55
Yet even this was not enough to deter the Politburo. In a year which had seen Party membership collapse from 57,000 in May to 10,000 by December, each new setback became cause to stoke still higher the fires of militancy and revolutionary ardour. Stalinists like Lominadze, Kuchumov in Changsha and Heinz Neumann in Canton, added fuel to the flames. But the underlying reason was frustration with the failed alliance with the Guomindang, which caught up the Party's leaders and rank and file alike in a furious spiral of ever-increasing radicalisation.
The following spring, all that remained from this explosion of pent-up revolutionary fervour were a few isolated communist hold-outs in the poorest and most inaccessible regions, many of them situated along the fault-lines where two or more provinces met and the authorities’ writ did not run: in northern Guangdong; on the Hunan–Jiangxi border; in north-eastern Jiangxi; on the Hunan–Hubei border; in the Hubei–Henan–Anhui border triangle; and on Hainan Island in the far south.56
For the next three years, the politics of the Chinese Communi
st Party would be forged through a quadrilateral struggle between Moscow, the Politburo in Shanghai, the provincial Party committees, and the communist military leaders in the field, over two key issues: the relationship between rural and urban revolution; and between insurrection and armed struggle.
Mao would play a key role in these crucial debates. But in the autumn of 1927, his immediate concern was survival.
On September 25, four days after setting out from Wenjiashi, his little army was attacked in the hill country south of Pingxiang. The divisional commander, Lu Deming, was killed. The 3rd Regiment was scattered, and two or three hundred peasant troops and a quantity of equipment were lost. The remainder regrouped in the mountain village of Sanwan, twenty-five miles north of the massif of Jinggangshan.
There Mao reorganised his forces, consolidating the remnants of the division into a single regiment – the ‘1st Regiment, 1st Division, of the First Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army’ – and appointing political commissars, modelled on the system which General Blyukher's Soviet military advisers had developed for the GMD army, based on Russian practice. Each squad had its Party group; each company, a Party branch; and each battalion, a Party committee.57 All were under the leadership of the Front Committee, of which Mao remained Secretary.
But the originality of the changes made at Sanwan lay elsewhere. Most of Mao's previous experience had been as a political theorist. His only direct exposure to mass struggle had been as a labour organiser in Changsha, and as an observer of the Hunan peasant movement. Now, for the first time in his life, he found himself having to motivate and lead a ragged, undisciplined band of some 700 Guomindang mutineers, armed workers and peasants, vagabonds and bandits, which somehow had to be transformed into a coherent revolutionary force capable of resisting a vastly superior enemy.
To that end, he announced two policies which laid the basis for a very different army from any other existing in China at that time. In the first place, it was to be an all-volunteer force. Any man who wished to leave, Mao told them, was free to do so and would be given money for the journey. Those who stayed were promised that officers would no longer be permitted to beat them, and that soldiers’ committees would be formed in each unit to ventilate grievances and ensure that democratic practices were followed. Secondly, Mao said, the soldiers would be required to treat civilians correctly. They must speak politely; pay a fair price for what they bought; and never take so much as ‘a solitary sweet potato’ belonging to the masses.58
