by Philip Short
A number of other conditions were also necessary, he maintained. Red areas could exist only in provinces like Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Guangdong, where strong mass movements had developed during the Northern Expedition, and only if ‘the revolutionary situation in the nation as a whole continues to move forward’ (as Mao insisted was the case in China). They required regular Red Army forces to defend them, and a strong Communist Party to lead them. Even then, he acknowledged, there would be times when it was difficult to hold out: ‘Fighting among the warlords does not go on every day without ceasing. Whenever the White political power in one or more provinces enjoys temporary stability, the ruling class … will surely exert every effort to destroy Red political power.’ But, Mao declared, among the White forces, ‘all compromises can only be temporary; a temporary compromise today prepares the ground for a bigger war tomorrow.’
The correct course at this stage, therefore, Mao argued, was not to career about the country, setting off uprisings which collapsed as soon as the army left, but to concentrate on deepening the revolution in a single area.
When the Congress ended, Mao's policy was approved.
At a time when Jinggangshan was under constant enemy pressure – in the three weeks since Zhu De's arrival, two more sizeable enemy offensives had been thwarted – such a strategy required solid nerves. But Mao was growing more confident in his new role as a military tactician. During the winter Wang Zuo had told him stories about Zhu the Deaf, an old bandit leader whose maxim was: ‘You don't need to fight, all you need to do is circle around’.76 The moral, Mao told his troops, was to stay clear of the enemy's main forces; lead them in circles; and when they were confused and disoriented, strike where they were weakest.
This was summed up in a pithy folk-rhyme, which conveyed the essence of the Red Army's future strategy. In its final form, drawn up by Mao and Zhu, and popularised throughout the army in May, it contained sixteen characters:
Di jin, wo tui, [When the] enemy advances, we withdraw,
Di zhu, wo rao, [When the] enemy rests, we harass,
Di pi, wo da, [When the] enemy tires, we attack,
Di tui, wo zhui. [When the] enemy withdraws, we pursue.77
In the months following, two further principles were laid down:
Concentrate the Red Army to fight the enemy … and oppose the division of forces so as to avoid being destroyed one by one.
In expanding the area under [our control], adopt the policy of advancing in a series of waves and oppose the policy of rash advance.78
The Zhu–Mao Army was still of very uneven quality.[Q3] Zhu's 28th regiment and Mao's 31st were a match for the best warlord units. The tactics they developed, employing speed and mobility to make feints to deceive the enemy, followed by surprise attacks from the rear or on the flanks, won them such a fearsome reputation that their adversaries would often withdraw without giving battle. Notwithstanding Mao's attempts to tighten discipline, gambling, opium use, desertion and pillaging remained widespread problems. But the men had an esprit de corps and cohesiveness which their opponents lacked. The 32nd regiment, based on Yuan Wencai's and Wang Zuo's bandit troops, was less effective but still able to play a defensive role. Only the 29th, composed of homesick Hunanese peasants, was unreformable.79
Meanwhile the guidelines for the army's treatment of civilians, which Mao had first issued after the halt at Sanwan in September 1927, were expanded into what became known as the ‘Six Main Points for Attention’. Soldiers were urged to replace straw bedding and wooden bed-boards after staying at peasant homes overnight; to return whatever they borrowed; to pay for anything they damaged; to be courteous; to be fair in business dealings; and to treat prisoners humanely. Later, two further ‘Points for Attention’ were added by Lin Biao: ‘Don't molest women’ (in early versions, ‘Don't bathe in sight of women’); and, ‘Dig latrines well away from homes and cover them before leaving.’ At the same time, ‘Three Main Rules of Discipline’ were issued: ‘Obey orders’; ‘Don't take anything belonging to the masses’ (the original phrase, ‘not so much as a sweet potato’, was amended to ‘not even a needle or thread’); and, ‘Turn in for public distribution all goods confiscated from landlords and local bullies.’80
The thrust of Mao's revolutionary strategy was thus fundamentally different from the insurrectionary approach of Qu Qiubai. Where Qu believed the old system could be overthrown by the raw fervour of untrained peasants and workers, rising to seize power with their own hands, Mao saw the peasantry as a reservoir of sympathy and support – a ‘sea’, as he would later describe it, in which the ‘fish’ (the Red guerrillas) could swim. Even on Jinggangshan, he noted soberly, few local people volunteered for the Red Army. As soon as the landlords had been toppled and their fields had been divided up, all the peasants wanted was to be left in peace to farm. For the same reason he urged moderation towards the urban petty bourgeoisie, the stall-holders and traders in the small market towns, in order to avoid driving them to oppose the revolution. Excesses were often unavoidable, he acknowledged, and could be a useful means of radicalising public opinion. But, in practice, they were frequently counter-productive: ‘In order to kill people and burn houses, there must be a mass basis … [not just] burning and killing by the army on its own.’ Revolutionary violence was helpful, he argued, only when it had a clear purpose and was backed by a movement strong enough to resist the retribution which would inevitably follow.81
When Zhou Lu had arrived in March, Mao had been severely criticised for these views. His work was ‘too right-wing’, he had been told. He was ‘not killing and burning enough, [and] not carrying out the policy of “turning the petty bourgeois into proletarians and then forcing them to make revolution”.’82 But by then, unknown to Zhou (let alone to Mao), the Politburo in Shanghai was also having second thoughts:
The peasant movement throughout the country [Qu Qiubai wrote in April] seems to feel that, besides killing the gentry, it ‘must’ set houses on fire … Many villages in Hubei have been reduced to ashes. The leader of a certain locality in Hunan proposed burning down an entire county town, taking with him only the things the peasant insurgents needed (stencil machines and so forth), and to kill everyone unless they joined the revolution … This [is a] petty bourgeois tendency … The proletariat was not leading the peasants, but the peasants were leading the proletariat.83
The moderate policies Mao put forward at the First Border Area Party Congress in May came, therefore, at an opportune time. Less than a week later, the new Hunan provincial committee,VII apparently chastened by the fiasco of Zhu De's expedition that spring, agreed that the Zhu–Mao Army should remain based at Jinggangshan, and warned indignantly of the foolishness of ‘burning whole cities’, which allowed Mao to reply, tongue firmly in cheek: ‘The provincial committee points out that it is wrong to burn cities. We shall never commit this mistake again.’84
Soon afterwards the Central Committee approved Mao's strategy too. At the beginning of June, a letter from the base area finally reached Shanghai – the first direct communication since its creation the previous October.85 Most of the leadership was away in Moscow, preparing for the Sixth Party Congress, which the Comintern had decided should be held not in China, where Chiang Kai-shek's ‘White terror’ was in full flood, but in the Soviet Union (where the Russians could also exert tighter control).86 It fell to Li Weihan, Mao's friend from New People's Study Society days, who had been left in charge, to draft the Central Committee's reply. He enthusiastically supported Mao's leadership; proposed that the Front Committee, which Zhou Lu had abolished, be restored; and endorsed Mao's decision to focus on building up the Jinggangshan base as a centre from which to propagate the revolution in both Hunan and Jiangxi – decisions in keeping with the new spirit of realism which would mark the Congress proceedings.87
Two weeks later, the 118 delegates who gathered in a dilapidated old country house near Zvenigorod, forty miles north-west of Moscow, frankly acknowledged that there was no
‘revolutionary high tide’ in China, and no sign that one was imminent.
The Party, they declared, had overestimated the strength of the peasants and workers, and underestimated the forces of reaction. China was still engaged in a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the main tasks were to unify the country against the imperialists; to abolish the landlord system; and to set up soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers, in order ‘to induce the vast, toiling masses to participate in political rule’. Socialist revolution could come later.88
These themes had already been sounded (and in Shanghai had been largely ignored) in a Comintern resolution the previous February, which had also stressed the importance of co-ordinating rural revolution with uprisings in the cities.89 But Bukharin, who was overseeing the proceedings on Stalin's behalf, now introduced an important qualification. ‘[We may] maintain [the slogan of] carrying out uprisings,’ he said. ‘[But] this does not mean that in a country as large as China … the innumerable masses will suddenly rise up in an extremely short period of time … That cannot happen.’ The Chinese leaders needed to steel themselves for an uneven, protracted struggle, in which victories in some areas would be offset by defeats in others. Even then, a long period of preparation was essential before province-wide uprisings could occur.90
Accordingly, the Congress approved a strategy of guerrilla warfare to weaken the Guomindang's hold on the rural areas, and establish local soviets, even if initially only ‘in one county or several townships’. Military power, it declared, was ‘highly significant’ in the Chinese revolution, and the development of the Red Army must be the ‘central issue’ in the countryside.91 By contrast, the doomed heroics of small groups of fanatics, acting with no mass base, were sharply condemned, especially in urban areas. In Bukharin's words:
If uprisings directed by the Party fail once, twice, three times, four times, or are crushed 10 or 15 times, then the working class will say: ‘Hey, you! Listen! You are probably excellent people; nevertheless, please get out of here! You do not deserve to be our leaders.’ … This [kind of] excessive showing off is of no use to a Party, however revolutionary.92
Urban uprisings were not explicitly ruled out. But the whole thrust of Bukharin's speech, and of the Congress resolutions, was that, at this stage at least, the peasantry, not the workers, were the main revolutionary force – the only proviso being that the peasants should be under proletarian leadership to restrain their anarchistic, petty-bourgeois leanings.93
These decisions, Mao wrote later, provided ‘a correct theoretical basis’ for the base areas and the Red Army to develop.94
Neither the Central Committee's letter of early June, nor the Congress resolutions, reached Jinggangshan until several months later. But there were enough straws in the wind to indicate that the Party line had changed. Mao's life changed, too, that summer, but in a different way: he acquired ‘a revolutionary companion’.95
She was eighteen years old, and her name was He Zizhen. A lively, independent-minded young woman, with a slender, boyish figure, the fine features and winning smile of her Cantonese mother, and the literary bent of her father, a local scholar, she had joined the Party at the age of sixteen, becoming the first and for some time the only female Party member in that area while still a student at the local mission school, run by Finnish nuns. As Mao would later find to his cost, she was tough and strong-willed. Zizhen had been the first young woman in the county to cut her hair short, in what was then regarded as a scandalous affront to traditional values; she had mobilised fellow students to burn the statue of the City God in the local temple; and in the summer of 1926, she had fought alongside Yuan's men in a battle against a landlord militia, earning herself the nickname, ‘The Two-Gun Girl General’.
Yuan, who had been a classmate of her elder brother, had introduced her to Mao soon after his arrival, and the following spring she began working as his assistant. She wrote later that when she realised she was falling in love with him, she had tried to hide her feelings. But, one day, Mao caught her gazing at him longingly and realised what had happened. He pulled up a chair, asked her to sit down, and then talked to her of Yang Kaihui and the children whom he had left behind in Changsha. Shortly after that conversation, they started living together.96 Mao had long since declared his disdain for marriage conventions, and on the Jinggangshan there seemed even less reason to heed them. Wang Zuo had three wives. Zhu De, who had left his own wife and small son in Sichuan, six years earlier, also began living with a much younger woman.97
None the less, Mao evidently felt a twinge of guilt at his disloyalty to Yang Kaihui. To justify himself, he told He Zizhen that he had had no news from her and thought she might have been executed. In fact he had made no attempt since the uprising to contact his family in Changsha.98 His decision to take the young woman as his partner seems to have been an almost conscious step in a gradual cutting of the ties that bound him to the world outside, the ‘normal’ world that had been his before the revolution claimed him.
When word reached Kaihui in the winter of 1928 that Mao had acquired a new ‘wife’, she became deeply depressed.VIII In the first years of her marriage, she had been consumed by jealousy of his old flame, Tao Yi, with whom she suspected (apparently wrongly) that he was carrying on an affair. Now, she wrote bitterly, he had abandoned her completely. She had contemplated suicide, she added, but had held back for the sake of their children.
The political respite was soon over. Once more, the cause lay in provincial rivalries. The Jiangxi Party committee had been badgering Mao to attack the city of Jian, seventy miles to the north-east. Now a succession of envoys arrived from Hunan, demanding, each more insistently than the last, that the Fourth Red Army send its main forces to the districts south of Hengyang, for a further attempt at insurrection in the same area where Zhu De had been defeated in March.99
This was not as illogical as it might sound. Hengyang controlled the main corridor from central to southern Hunan. A successful uprising in the area would make it possible to link Hunan and Guangdong – traditionally the two ‘most revolutionary’ provinces – by establishing a new base area in the region where Tan Yankai had stationed his southern armies, a decade earlier, while waiting his chance to attack Changsha. But precisely for that reason, as Mao and Zhu well knew, it was far too well-defended for the Fourth Army to attack.
The Hunan Provincial committee plainly expected Mao to resist, for it informed him that a special emissary, 23-year-old Yang Kaiming,IX was on his way to Jinggangshan to take personal charge of the Border Area Special Committee, adding peremptorily: ‘You must carry out [our instructions] immediately without any hesitation.’ Shortly before he arrived, however, a joint meeting of the Special Committee and the fourth Army's Military Committee, held under Mao's chairmanship on June 30, in the presence of another, even younger, provincial committee representative, twenty-year-old Du Xiujing, voted against the plan to strike into Hunan. In a message to the provincial leadership in Anyuan, Mao warned that, if they went ahead, the entire Fourth Army might be lost.100 Yang evidently did not feel himself strong enough to countermand this decision and for the next two weeks there was an uneasy stand-off.
Word then came that elements of the Hunan and Jiangxi armies were preparing another attack on Jinggangshan. It was decided that Zhu's 28th and 29th regiments should cross into Hunan, to attack the Hunan army's rear. Mao's troops, the 31st and 32nd, would block the Jiangxi units’ advance until Zhu's men could return.
The first part of the battle plan went well enough. But as Zhu was about to march back to link up with Mao's troops, as arranged, Du Xiujing, who was accompanying Zhu's forces, invoked superior Party authority to insist that the provincial committee's original orders must now be carried out. After some discussion, Zhu's two regiments set off for Chenzhou, ninety miles south of Hengyang. The result was exactly as Mao had foreseen. After initial successes, they were routed by Hunan government troops and retreated in disarray into the hills. With the Red Army's main force
absent, Ninggang and two neighbouring counties in the plain were overrun. Yet another letter from the provincial committee then arrived urging Mao to take his remaining forces to support Zhu in southern Hunan. But even as the Border Area Special Committee was discussing this latest instruction, a messenger burst into the meeting room with the news that Zhu had suffered a crushing defeat. The 29th regiment had disintegrated: its Hunanese peasant troops had deserted and fled to their home villages in the region. The 28th was limping back to Jinggangshan.101
The Fourth Army's troubles were not yet over. When Mao set out to join Zhu at Guidong, south-west of Jinggangshan, government troops took advantage of their disarray to launch another attack. This time they came perilously close to occupying the fastness itself.
On August 30, a young communist officer named He Tingying led a single under-strength battalion to hold the narrow pass of Huangyangjie, commanding the heights above Ninggang, against three regiments of the Hunanese Eighth Army and one regiment of Jiangxi troops. The Hunanese units suffered heavy casualties, and by nightfall, when the attack was abandoned, their morale had been broken.102 Mao was moved to take up his writing brush to commemorate the event:
Our defence is like a stern fortress,
Our wills, united, form a yet stronger wall.
The roar of gunfire rises from Huangyangjie,
Announcing the enemy has fled in the night.103
Mao's position was ambiguous. Yang Kaiming had taken over in mid-July as acting Secretary of the Border Area Special Committee. But at Guidong, Mao had engineered the creation of a rival ‘Action Committee’, representing the army, with himself as Secretary.104
