by Philip Short
Stalin's patience snapped.
In a stinging letter of denunciation, which reached Shanghai in mid-November, the Comintern accused Li Lisan of having implemented an anti-Marxist, anti-Comintern, un-Bolshevik, un-Leninist line. Recalled to Moscow in disgrace, he made an abject and well-publicised confession, not to be heard from again for another fifteen years.
Mao's own views during this period are not easy to fathom. He plainly did believe that the revolution was gaining ground, both at home and abroad. The newspapers that fell into the communists’ hands spoke of the Great Depression in the United States, a surge of industrial unrest in Europe and anti-imperialist uprisings in Asia and Latin America. On the other hand, his public insistence that autumn that ‘the revolutionary upsurge in the entire nation is rising higher every day’207 was belied by his prudence in action. After the capture of Jian, he repeatedly held back colleagues who were convinced that Li Lisan was right and that their first duty was to seize Nanchang and then press on to Wuhan.208 Their first task, Mao countered, was to seize power in one province, Jiangxi: the rest would follow later.209
The debate over Li's dream of nationwide conquest was cut short when Chiang Kai-shek announced that he would crush the ‘Red menace’ in Jiangxi, once and for all, in the coming six months. He planned to use 100,000 men, a vastly greater force than the Guomindang had ever assembled for an anti-communist campaign before. However, he now faced a very different army from the war-weary contingent of half-starved guerrillas who had been driven in disarray from Jinggangshan in the winter of 1928. Then Mao's and Peng Dehuai's men together numbered fewer than 4,000, only half of whom had guns; the rest had carried spears, or fought with staves and cudgels. Now the First Front Army had 40,000 troops, most of whom were equipped with modern rifles.210
From a conventional military standpoint, their quality left a good deal to be desired. Most were illiterate peasants. Orders had to be posted: ‘Don't shit all over the place!’ and ‘Don't rifle the pockets of prisoners!’211 Yet, from this primitive material, in the year since the Gutian conference, Red Army political workers had forged a highly motivated and increasingly sophisticated fighting force.
Literacy campaigns were conducted. Discipline was strengthened. A system of appraisal and promotion was introduced for the officer corps. Recruits had to be ‘between 16 and 30 years old; at least 4 feet 11 inches tall; and in good health with no serious diseases.’212 It was a measure of the difficulty of the task that Mao found it necessary to explain:
The reason [for these requirements] is that those with eye ailments are unable to aim and shoot; those who are deaf are unable to distinguish orders; those with a collapsed nose mostly have hereditary syphilis and are susceptible to [other] contagious diseases; those who stutter are unable to carry out the communications tasks of a soldier. As for those with [other] ailments, not only does their weak physical condition make them unable to fight, but there is a danger that they will spread their diseases to others.213
On the battlefield, first-aid stations were set up and auxiliary units charged with burying the dead. Supply and transport departments were formed, responsible for the baggage trains and field kitchens. Reconnaissance, map-making, intelligence and security sections were established.
From June 1930 onwards, detailed military orders were issued by Zhu De and Mao once or several times a day, setting out the order of battle; marching plans; instructions for posting sentries; arrangements for river crossings; and all the other paraphernalia needed to keep twenty regiments on the move. Senior officers were assigned aides-de-camp, and field telephones began to replace the couriers and flag-signallers that had been the only means of battlefield communication before.214
Only in one respect was the Red Army still desperately inferior to its Guomindang adversaries: military technology. After the failed assault on Changsha, Mao issued standing instructions for the capture of enemy radio sets (and operators, to train Red Army signallers in how to use them); and machine-gun and mortar sections were set up with captured enemy weapons. But as the Comintern noted, it remained ‘poorly armed; extremely feebly supplied with war matériel; and exceptionally badly off when it comes to ordnance and artillery’.215
In 1930, thanks partly to ‘the Li Lisan line’, the Red Army's tactics had begun to shift from guerrilla to mobile warfare. But to meet the challenge posed by Chiang's proposed encirclement campaign, a new strategy was needed. On October 30, at an enlarged meeting of the Front Committee in a small village near Luofang, on the Yuan River, seventy-five miles south-west of Nanchang, Mao outlined for the first time the principle of ‘luring the enemy in deep’. Like many profound ideas, it was in essence extremely simple – little more than an extension of the tactic Mao had devised on the Jinggangshan: ‘When the enemy advances, we withdraw; when the enemy tires, we attack.’ In its new form, this became: ‘Lure the enemy deep into the Red Area, wait until they are exhausted and annihilate them!’216 The corollary, Mao explained later, was ‘the tactic of protracted war’:
The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we just will not do it. The enemy has internal conflicts. He just wants to defeat us and then to return to his own internal battles … We will let him stew, and then, when his own internal problems become acute, we will smite him a mighty blow.217
The new strategy did not lack critics. Some argued that it was a negation of the offensive policy advocated by Li Lisan (as, indeed, it was), incompatible with the idea of a ‘rising revolutionary tide’ – which Mao continued to proclaim – and with the directive to attack key cities. Others, with good reason, feared the havoc the nationalists would wreak in the areas they overran. However, Zhu De supported Mao, and, with some misgivings, the Front Committee approved the plan, which was conveyed to military commanders next day.218
For six weeks, Chiang's armies, harassed by local Red Guards, trailed the communist forces as they withdrew across the rugged hill country of central Jiangxi, never giving battle, abandoning one after another the counties they had occupied during the summer – first Jishui and Jian, then Yongfeng, Le'an and Donggu – in a slow, zigzag retreat towards the south, where peasant support for the Red forces was strongest.
At the beginning of December, Chiang himself arrived in Nanchang. Two additional divisions were despatched to seal the Fujian border, while the main force, in four columns, formed a slowly tightening arc, 150 miles long, across the middle of Jiangxi, in the centre of which, near the village of Huangpi, less than ten miles from the nationalist front line, the communist forces silently waited.
Their first chance came on Christmas Eve, two days before Mao's thirty-seventh birthday. Peng Dehuai's forces (now the Third Army Group) were sent north to lie in wait for Chiang's 50th Division, commanded by Tan Daoyuan. But Tan's men, sensing a trap, halted their advance. After four days, the plan was abandoned.
The entire Front Army then wheeled left towards Longgang, a small town thirteen miles to the south-west, where the other nationalist vanguard unit, Zhang Huizan's 18th Division, had arrived on the 29th. The communist forces moved into position that night, and at 10 a.m. next morning, a general offensive began. Five hours later it was all over: Zhang himself and his two brigade commanders were captured, along with 9,000 other prisoners, 5,000 rifles and thirty machine-guns.219 When the news reached Tan Daoyuan, he ordered a hasty retreat. But on January 3, the Front Army caught up with him, and at Dongshao, thirty miles to the north-east, took another 3,000 prisoners and large quantities of arms and equipment, including, to Mao's delight, a complete signals unit, which two weeks later became the basis of the Red Army's first radio section. It relied on hand-cranked generators and cat's-whiskers, but it was the most advanced technology of the day.220
Zhang Huizan was executed and his head placed on a wooden board, to be floated down the Gan River to Nanchang, to taunt Chiang Kai-shek.221
Mao, more than anyone, had reason to be pleased. Not only had his new strategy of ‘luring the enemy in deep’ succeeded better
than anyone had dared hope, but in December he had learned that the Third Plenum had restored him to alternate membership of the Politburo, a position he had last held at the time of the Autumn Harvest Uprising, three years before.222
It was too good to last.
In the middle of January 1931, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, Xiang Ying, by far the most senior leader ever to visit the base area, arrived unannounced at Mao's headquarters at Xiaobu, in the mountains north of Huangpi, to inform him that a new Central Bureau, headed by Zhou Enlai, had been established, with supreme authority over the soviet base areas not just in Jiangxi but all over China. The good news was that Mao, who had known nothing of this decision, had been appointed acting Secretary of the Central Bureau two months earlier. The bad news was that Xiang was now going to replace him.223
Xiang was a former labour organiser, four years older than Mao. He had been elected a Standing Committee member at the Sixth Congress as part of the drive to increase the number of workers in the leadership. His mission was simple: to bring the base area back under direct Central Committee control. On January 15, Xiang ordered the dissolution of the Front Committee, which was Mao's principal power base, and of the Revolutionary Committee, which Mao also headed, and removed or replaced him in his other main posts.224
However, the changes were deceptive. Xiang had seniority on his side, Mao had the Front Army behind him. The result was a compromise. Xiang assumed the appearance of power but Mao retained a good part of its substance.
The situation was complicated further by developments in Shanghai, where Stalin had sent his China specialist, Pavel Mif, to convene another Central Committee plenum to expose and denounce the disgraced Li Lisan. Unknown to both Xiang and Mao, this Fourth Plenum had approved a resolution, which soon became required reading for all Party members, condemning Li's errors in extremely harsh terms. It had also made personnel changes. Mao was not affected. Nor was the Party's nominal leader, Xiang Zhongfa, who remained General Secretary. Zhou Enlai, too, had survived, not for the last time, by deftly switching sides. But Qu Qiubai had been dismissed, and Xiang Ying, while remaining in the Politburo, lost his post on the Standing Committee.
The key appointment, however, was of a stocky, rather jowly young man named Wang Ming, who was catapulted to full Politburo membership without having previously been even a member of the Central Committee.225
Wang, then aged twenty-six, was the leading figure among a group of Chinese students who had graduated from Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, where Mif was Rector, and returned to Shanghai the previous winter. Others in the group were appointed to head key Central Committee departments. Variously known as the ‘28 Bolsheviks’, ‘Stalin's China Section’, or simply the ‘Returned Students’, they were to become the dominant force in the leadership for the next four years.226
The first reports of Li Lisan's disgrace reached the base area in March 1931, followed, three weeks later, by a Central delegation led by Ren Bishi, whom Mao's Russian Studies Society had sent, a decade earlier, as a sixteen-year-old student to Moscow.227 Ren, who had joined the Politburo in January, brought with him the texts of the Fourth Plenum resolutions and a directive from the new Party Centre stating that the General Front Committee, with Mao as Secretary, should remain the supreme Party organ in Jiangxi pending a review of the Central Bureau's activities. The Revolutionary Committee was also reinstated, giving Mao, as Committee Chairman, and Zhu De, as Commander-in-Chief, nominal authority over soviet and military work not only in Jiangxi, but in all the Red base areas.228 This was not because the new leadership in Shanghai had any special regard for Mao; indeed, it would quickly become clear that the reverse was true. But it distrusted Xiang Ying, who was too closely associated with Li Lisan and the old Third Plenum group. By elevating Mao, it sought to curb Xiang's powers.229
At this juncture, Chiang Kai-shek launched his second encirclement campaign. This time he had assembled 200,000 troops, twice as many as in the winter. The strategy was much the same as before. The nationalists’ main army, Chiang's ‘hammer’, advanced towards the base area from the north-west, planning to crush the Red Army against the ‘anvil’ of warlord forces, pre-positioned on the Guangdong and Fujian borders to block escape routes to the south and east. This time, however, the nationalist commanders moved more cautiously, reinforcing the areas they occupied before each new advance.230
Mao and Zhu De had been observing these preparations since February.231 But there had been disagreement with Xiang Ying over whether the tactic of ‘luring the enemy in deep’ was feasible when the disparity in numbers was so great, and since neither side could prevail, no clear counter-strategy was defined. The arrival of the ‘Fourth Plenum Delegation’, as Ren Bishi's group was known, muddied the waters further. They proposed that the Red Army should abandon the base area altogether and withdraw into southern Hunan. Mao and Zhu De disagreed. The other leaders were divided, some resurrecting the old argument that the Red forces should be dispersed.232
As the debate continued, Chiang's columns rolled inexorably south. Already, in late March, the Red Army had pulled back its main forces to Ningdu county, not far from the area where the decisive battles of the first encirclement had been fought.233 There, in the village of Qingtang, matters came to a head.
On April 17, 1931, an enlarged meeting of the Central Bureau passed a series of resolutions harshly criticising Xiang Ying's leadership, and praising Mao's efforts to oppose ‘the Li Lisan line’. Next day, Mao got his way on military strategy, too. Withdrawal was ruled out, and the meeting resolved ‘to make the Jiangxi base area the foundation of a national soviet area’.234 The Front Army began moving northward, to confront the enemy where Chiang's deployment was weakest, in the hill country near Donggu, while Mao began drawing up plans for an ambitious counter-offensive to punch through enemy lines and march north-east towards Fujian.
Almost exactly a month later, he watched from a white-walled Buddhist temple on the highest peak of the Baiyunshan, the White Cloud Mountains, ten miles west of Donggu, as units of Zhu De's First Army Group poured down the hillsides to attack two Guomindang divisions. After an hour, at a prearranged signal, Peng Dehuai's troops struck at their flanks. More than 4,000 prisoners were taken, along with 5,000 rifles, fifty machine-guns, twenty mortars, and another nationalist signals unit, complete with operators. Over the next two weeks, the Red Army fought four more large-scale engagements, culminating, at the end of May, in the capture of Jianning, in Fujian, a hundred miles to the east. By then altogether 30,000 nationalist troops had been put out of action and 20,000 rifles had been captured. The second encirclement had been torn to shreds, and Chiang's commanders ordered a general retreat.235
After this, there was no more argument about the tactics the Red Army should follow. Mao and the military commanders were given a free hand.
However, the very scale of their success nearly proved their undoing. As long as ‘the Reds’ could be dismissed as just another group of bandits, Chiang was not too concerned if, for a while, they went unpunished. But a Red Army capable of defeating his best generals was a very different matter. While the nationalist high command in Nanchang continued to trumpet ‘military successes’, Chiang hastily brought in reinforcements. By the end of June, he had amassed 300,000 men, half as many again as in April, for a third ‘communist suppression campaign’.236
Mao and the rest of the leadership were now caught wrong-footed. He had known since the end of May, when the second campaign was defeated, that a third offensive would follow. But he grossly underestimated the speed with which Chiang would turn his men round. In late June, the Red Army was scattered all across western Fujian, where it had been sent to ‘mobilise the masses and raise funds’, a task that became ever more important as the communist forces expanded. On the 28th, Mao was still counting on having another two or three months for fund-raising and laying in provisions. On the 30th, this was cut to ten days, and before the week was out, an ‘emergency circular’ had
been issued, warning that the third campaign was imminent, that it would be ‘extremely cruel’, and that everyone would have to work ten times harder than before if victory was to be achieved.237
In the next two months, the Red Army came close to total destruction.
The nationalists, this time under Chiang Kai-shek's personal command, advanced very slowly southwards in a vast pincer movement, consolidating the areas they occupied with defensive fortifications and taking pains to ensure that no division became isolated and thereby vulnerable to communist attack.238
For the first ten days, the Red Army command scrambled to get its forces together and into some kind of battle order. In mid-July, they began withdrawing southward, hoping to persuade Chiang's eastern column, which followed them down the Fujian border, that they were fleeing into Guangdong. Then at Rentian, just north of Ruijin, the main force doubled back and headed west into northern Yudu county, trying to stay out of sight of Chiang's reconnaissance planes by using village paths and barrow-tracks, far from the main highways. Mao's plan was to lie in ambush and hit the weakest of Chiang's western units near Donggu, forcing the eastern column to come to their aid while the Red Army headed for Fujian, attacking the enemy's rear. Given the lack of preparation, it was probably the best Mao could do. But it was too similar to his strategy during the second campaign. This time Chiang was not fooled so easily.
After occupying Ningdu and Ruijin, the nationalist eastern column halted its southward march and began moving west. As they moved deeper into the base area, they were harassed constantly by local Red Guards, who blew bugles and fired old-fashioned muskets to prevent them sleeping at night, set booby-traps along the mountain trails, sabotaged communications lines and ambushed the sick and wounded. The nationalist commanders responded in kind. Zhu De remembered ‘finding villages burned to ashes, and the corpses of civilians lying where they had been shot, cut down or beheaded; even children and the aged. Women lay sprawled on the ground where they had been raped before or after being killed.’
