by Philip Short
The Central Committee's letter makes too pessimistic an appraisal … The [January] campaign against Jinggangshan represented the high-water mark of the counter-revolutionary tide. But there it stopped, and since then [it] has gradually receded while the revolutionary tide has gradually risen … In the present chaotic situation, we can lead the masses only if we have positive slogans and a positive spirit.139
Dispersing the army, Mao said, was ‘an unreal view’ and smacked of ‘liquidationism’, which was as grave an error as the adventurism of Qu Qiubai. He and Zhu De would of course accept new assignments, if needed, but in that case ‘capable replacements’ must be sent. In the meantime, they intended to press on with their plans for guerrilla warfare in Jiangxi and Fujian, for which the prospects, Mao declared, were so bright that there was even a realistic hope of ‘closing in on [the Jiangxi capital] Nanchang’. The current rifts between the warlords, he argued, portended the disintegration of Guomindang rule, and the Red Army should aim to establish an independent soviet regime in Jiangxi and the adjacent regions of western Fujian and Zhejiang ‘within a time-limit of one year’.
This proposal would soon provoke charges that Mao, too, harboured ‘adventurist’ tendencies, and he later acknowledged that setting a time-limit had been a mistake.140 But while he was over-optimistic, his analysis was not fundamentally wrong. An independent soviet regime far bigger than any other in China would indeed be set up in Jiangxi, although it would take more than a year to do it.
Mao's belief that he was a better judge of policy than the leadership in Shanghai was reflected in his rebuttal of another key point in Zhou Enlai's letter. ‘The Party's major task at present’, Zhou had written, ‘is to establish and develop the Party's proletarian foundations, chiefly among the … industrial workers.’141 This was true, Mao replied, but
the struggle in the countryside, the establishment of soviets in small areas and … the expansion of the Red Army are prerequisites for aiding the struggle in the cities and hastening the revolutionary upsurge. [While] therefore it would be the greatest mistake to abandon the struggle in the cities and sink into rural guerrillaism, it would also, in our opinion, be a mistake – should any of our Party members hold such views – to fear the development of the power of the peasants lest it outstrip the workers’ leadership … For the revolution in semi-colonial China will fail only if the peasant struggle is deprived of the leadership of the workers; it will never suffer just because the peasant struggle develops in such a way as to become more powerful than the workers. The Sixth Congress has pointed out the mistake of neglecting the peasant revolution.142
A year later, the argument over rural versus urban revolution would become another major source of discord between Mao and the Party leadership. But, for now, Zhou let it pass. As reports of the Red Army's new victories came in, the recall order was also rescinded, and in June, when Mao's letter finally arrived, the Politburo acknowledged that the dispersal plan had been a mistake.143
However, there was a sequel.
Mao's personal belief in dialectics as the motive force of history, in which the blackest part of the night always comes just before dawn, had been strengthened in the traumatic months following the abandonment of Jinggangshan, when the Red Army had appeared on the verge of collapse, only to pull itself together and emerge from the ordeal stronger, and in a more favourable position, than before. But not everyone in the Fourth Army had rationalised the loss of the border area so easily. Many shared the Centre's bleak assessment of the prospects for the revolution, and argued that the army should continue to wage flexible guerrilla warfare, as it had since the end of January, rather than try to set up a permanent base.
At Yudu, in mid-April, these issues were debated at an enlarged leadership meeting. With support from Peng Dehuai, Mao's line carried the day. It was agreed that the Fourth Army would try to establish itself in west Fujian, while Peng's forces returned to west Jiangxi to reoccupy the Jinggangshan. The target of creating an independent soviet regime in Jiangxi within a year was overwhelmingly approved.144
But the appearance of unity was deceptive. Over the course of the next month, a deep cleavage developed between Mao and his supporters, on the one hand, and the majority of army commanders, most of whom identified themselves with Zhu De, on the other.
The rift sprang in part from the different histories of the two forces which had come together to form the Red Army a year earlier. Mao's troops had learned their military skills building up the Jinggangshan base area. Zhu De's men had been constantly on the move, from Nanchang to Swatow; then in northern Guangdong; and finally in southern Hunan. Their origins predisposed them to different forms of warfare. But it also reflected Mao's firm belief, proclaimed in his very first political address on the Jinggangshan – when he posed the question, ‘How much longer can the Red flag be upheld?’ – that setting up Red base areas was the only realistic route to nationwide revolution.145
The disagreement over strategy was fundamental. But other, more personal, quarrels also played the part. Mao was an autocrat, as even He Zizhen admitted.146 Now, as on Jinggangshan the previous autumn, complaints were heard about his ‘patriarchal style of rule’, ‘the dictatorship of the Secretary’ and ‘excessive centralisation of power’. This time Mao's opponents were more circumspect. Rather than attacking him directly they focused on the role of the Party in military affairs, arguing that ‘[it] is running too many things’, and that, with the growth of the Red Army since the fall of Tingzhou in March 1929, ‘the Front Committee cannot keep track of everything’.147
This was a problem of Mao's own making. At the beginning of February, in the darkest days after the flight from Jinggangshan, the Military Committee, which Zhu De had headed, had been abolished. Not long afterwards, at Mao's suggestion, the regiments had been replaced by columns. The result was to reduce very markedly the power of the military headquarters. Zhu and his colleagues had no wish to be reduced to ciphers in Mao's political machine, and began demanding loudly that the Military Committee be restored.148
Into this political snakepit walked a naive, highly opinionated, young communist named Liu Angong, who had been sent by Zhou Enlai to act as liaison officer to the Fourth Army, with a request that he be given a suitably responsible post. Liu had just returned from the Soviet Union, where he had learned that Leninist theory held the answers to every possible Chinese problem.149
Mao may at first have seen Liu as a potential ally, or at least as a potential tool. After a rancorous meeting near Yongding, in Fujian, at the end of May, he informed Zhou that the Military Committee was being re-established with Liu as Secretary and head of the army's Political Department. The advantage of this to Mao was that it prevented Zhu De from taking back the secretaryship. Increasingly, in Mao's eyes, the contest was becoming a power struggle between Zhu, whom he accused privately of harbouring ‘long-suppressed ambitions’, and himself.150
But Mao's attempt to finesse the dispute backfired. Liu's first act, when the new committee was set up, was to enlarge its role at the expense of the Front Committee. By the time the leadership next met, at Baisha on June 8, Mao had concluded that a full-scale confrontation was inevitable. The Front Committee, he said bitterly, was ‘neither living nor dead’; it was expected to take responsibility for the Fourth Army, but without the power to direct it. In these circumstances, Mao announced, they must find someone else to be Secretary. He intended to resign.151
This was bluff – and, at first, it seemed it would succeed. The meeting resolved, by thirty-six votes to five, to abolish the Military Committee which had been re-established only a week before. However, it decided that the broader issues of strategy and leadership should be left to a full-scale Fourth Army Party Congress, the first to have been convened for eight months. When this body met, two weeks later, in a local school, requisitioned for the purpose, it was chaired not by Mao but by Chen Yi.
Mao was accused of ‘patriarchal tendencies’ and his work style vigorously c
riticised. Zhu De's conduct was likewise censured. Mao's counter-charge that the army was lapsing into a ‘roving bandit mentality’, by persisting in guerrilla warfare without trying to consolidate fixed base areas, was dismissed as ‘not a real issue’; and his proposal of two months earlier, to try to occupy the whole of Jiangxi ‘within a year’, was now held to be a mistake. When the new Front Committee was elected, Mao and Zhu both remained members, Mao as Party Representative and Zhu as Army Commander. But Chen Yi took the post of Secretary. For the third time since retreating to the mountains, twenty-one months before, Mao had gone into eclipse.152
While the political row was coming to a head, He Zizhen, then nineteen, gave birth to a daughter. As they could not keep the baby with them, she did as other women in the Red Army had to, and half an hour after the infant was born, gave it to a peasant family to look after, with a packet containing fifteen silver dollars. She wrote later that she did not weep.153
For the next five months, Mao stood aside from the work of the Fourth Army leadership. The pretext was ill-health, but it was more psychological than physical. As He Zizhen put it: ‘he was sick – and he was upset, which made him sicker.’154 That did not stop him spending July with the West Fujian Special Committee, advising them how to build up their new base area, which he hoped to link with south Jiangxi to form the core of the province-wide soviet that he had spoken of at Yudu.155 But he refused to have anything to do with the Front Committee's plans for a renewed guerrilla campaign, provoking a spectacular row with Chen Yi, which ended with them both, pale with rage, screaming at each other.156
Faced with Mao's intransigence, the Front Committee decided at the end of July that Chen should go to Shanghai to ask the Centre to arbitrate, leaving Zhu as acting Secretary in his place.157
A few days later, Mao contracted malaria, and withdrew to a remote hamlet in the mountains. There he and He Zizhen lived in a small bamboo hut, which he arranged as a scholar's retreat, naming it the ‘Hall of the Wealth of Books’, written on a wooden board suspended over the door.158
His decision to remove himself from the fray, a tactic he would use often in his career, quickly proved its value. Even before Chen Yi reached Shanghai, the Politburo had received copies of the Congress resolutions, together with a letter Mao had written setting out his view of the dispute – and had concluded that the delegates had acted wrongly. On August 21, a directive was sent to Zhu's headquarters, emphasising the importance of centralised Party leadership, implicitly approving Mao's efforts to expand the Party Secretary's role, which, it declared, was ‘absolutely not a patriarchal system’, and pointing out that ‘the Red Army is not just a fighting organisation, but has propaganda and political responsibilities’.159
The chief blame for the mess was attributed to the unfortunate Liu Angong, who was accused of stirring up factionalism and told to return to Shanghai, only to die in battle before the order could be carried out.160
At the end of September, when Zhu received this missive, he called another Army Congress and sent word to Mao to attend. Mao refused, saying: ‘I cannot just casually return.’ The Congress then sent him a letter, formally requesting him to return as Front Committee Secretary. This time he came, but had himself carried in on a stretcher to show he was in no state to work – an incident which had unintended consequences, for garbled reports of his condition reached Moscow the following spring, prompting the Comintern to publish his obituary. Three weeks later, Chen Yi returned, with yet another Central Committee document, which he himself had drafted and Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan had approved. This condemned ‘the narrow view of those military comrades who think that in the revolution the Red Army is all that matters’, but held that Mao was wrong to want to build up fixed base areas immediately and criticised his plan to seize the whole of Jiangxi within a year. On the crucial question of his relationship with Zhu, the Central Committee refused to take sides, blaming them equally for their ‘mistaken work methods’. These consisted, it said, of ‘adopting positions opposite in form and debating with each other’; ‘doubting each other, and assessing each other from a standpoint that is far from a political standpoint’; and ‘not being open in what they do’ – in plain language, squabbling like children. Mao, it said, should remain Front Committee Secretary; but he and Zhu must correct their errors and learn to work together sensibly.161
This letter, together with a note from the Front Committee, asking him to return at once, reached Mao in West Fujian in the last week of October. He ignored it.
That had nothing to do with his malaria; by then the local county committee had managed to get him some quinine, and he was cured. He was making a political point. Three times in the past two years his colleagues – first the Central Committee; then, the Hunan provincial leadership; and now, the Front Committee – had cast him into political limbo. This time they would have to be sure that they wanted him before he would agree to come back. For the next month he spent his days discussing land reform with local peasants, and the evenings in another of his episodic attempts to learn English.
On November 18, after a disastrous campaign in Guangdong in which the army lost a third of its strength, Zhu De and Chen Yi wrote to him a second time. Again, he did not respond. A week later, the entire Front Committee formally requested him ‘kindly to come back and take charge of our work’, and sent a detachment of troops as an escort. This time, he relented. On November 26, he resumed work.162
Although Mao had assured the Party Centre that there would be ‘absolutely no problem’ in unifying the Fourth Army's thinking ‘under the Central Committee's correct guidance’ (implying that he would work to reconcile differing points of view),163 he proceeded ruthlessly to consolidate his own position, hammering home his personal interpretation of the Central documents and omitting what he did not like.
The conference he called in December 1929 at Gutian, a village in western Fujian, would serve as a model for the ‘rectification campaigns’ which in later years were Mao's preferred method of fashioning the Party's collective mind in the image of his own. For ten days, the participants met in small groups, guided by branch secretaries and political commissars, to ‘dig out the roots of different mistaken ideas, discuss the harm they had caused and decide how to correct them’. Mao, as Secretary, had the main role in deciding which ideas were ‘mistaken’ and which ‘correct’. Unsurprisingly, those of Zhu De and his followers were mostly in the former category.164
The opening section of Mao's political report, entitled ‘The Problem of Correcting Erroneous and Non-Proletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party’, set the tone for all that followed. It castigated ‘the purely military viewpoint’; the ‘pernicious root of ultrademocracy’, which showed up as ‘an individualistic aversion to discipline’; and the need for ‘military comrades’ at all times to be guided by, and to report to, the Party.165 Nine years later, Mao would make the same point more succinctly: ‘the Party commands the gun: the gun shall never be allowed to command the Party.’166
Without mentioning Zhu by name, Mao flayed the army leaders unmercifully for tolerating feudal practices, and for ‘grossly deficient military skills’. Corporal punishment, he complained, was still rampant, especially among officers of the Second Column (formed from Zhu's old 28th Regiment), where brutality had reached such a point that there had been three suicides, and the men said bitterly: ‘Officers do not beat soldiers; they beat them to death.’ Prisoners were maltreated; deserters, shot; and sick and wounded Red Army men left to die – all in flagrant violation of Party principles.167
The Central directive made Mao's leadership unassailable. But it did nothing to change his views on the issue which had triggered the dispute in the first place – whether to wage guerrilla warfare, or to secure fixed revolutionary bases – as he made clear a few days later in a private letter to Lin Biao. The Central Committee, he argued, was too pessimistic, just as it had been a year earlier when it had proposed that the Red Army be dispersed. The contradictions
in Chinese society in general, and between the warlords in particular, were growing so acute that ‘a single spark can start a prairie fire’ – and this would happen ‘very soon’:
Marxists are not fortune-tellers … But when I say there will soon be a high tide of revolution in China, I am emphatically not speaking of something which, in the words of some people ‘is possibly coming’, something illusory, unattainable, and devoid of significance for action. It is like a ship far out at sea, whose masthead can already be seen at the horizon from the shore; it is like the morning sun in the East whose shimmering rays are visible from a high mountain top; it is like a child about to be born, moving restlessly in its mother's womb.168
In writing these lines, Mao was totally at odds with Party policy, which held that no new revolutionary upsurge was discernible.169 The same Central directive that had restored him to power had warned the Front Committee specifically against reading too much into contradictions between the warlords. But, unknown to him, in the intervening two months, Party policy had changed.
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All through 1929, China and Russia had been at loggerheads over the status of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, which was under joint Russian and Chinese administration. Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government in Nanjing, backed by the new Manchurian leader, Zhang Xueliang, wanted this dual system ended. In May, Chinese police raided the Soviet consulates in Harbin, Tsitsihar and other Manchurian cities (which had continued operating after those in China itself were closed), and seized documents showing that Soviet officials were continuing to promote communist subversion. In July, a number were deported, and soon afterwards all remaining consular ties were broken.
