by Philip Short
In the last week of July, the communists, exhausted from 300 miles of forced marches through the sweltering heat of the southern summer, stopped to rest in northern Xingguo. There, on the 31st, the main force was ordered to circle round under cover of darkness, get behind the enemy's front-line and launch a night assault on the rearguard of Chiang's western column about fifty miles away. After two gruelling night marches, the men were moving into position when Mao learned that the nationalist commanders had summoned reinforcements and the attack had to be called off.
As the Red Army headed back to Xingguo, nine enemy divisions converged from the north, east and south, hemming them into a narrow salient along the Gan River.
On August 4, Mao and Zhu De decided there was no choice but to try to break out while they still could. One division, accompanied by local Red Guards and peasant militiamen, made a dash westward, as though trying to cross into Hunan, drawing off four nationalist divisions in pursuit. That night, the Red Army's main force squeezed through a gap about twelve miles wide in the ring of encircling forces that had opened up as a result. Two days later, in the first major engagement of the campaign, they defeated two pursuing enemy divisions, and soon afterwards at Longgang, the site of the great communist victory in December, wiped out another large force, taking more than 7,000 prisoners.
But Chiang was getting better at anticipating the Red Army's manoeuvres. Now he sent eight divisions to envelop the communists in a much tighter ring. This time there was no gap.
Again, Mao tried a feint. Part of the First Army Group, pretending to be the main force, made a sortie towards the north. But the ring stayed sealed. The one possible escape route was blocked by a 3,000-foot mountain rearing up between the encampments of two nationalist divisions. The mountain had been left unsecured because it was judged impassable.
That night, under cover of darkness, the entire Red Army, more than 20,000-strong, climbed its precipitous flanks, less than three miles from nationalist sentries, and then raced to find safety in the hill country north of Donggu.
It was an extraordinary feat. But their escape, by a hair's breadth, from complete annihilation, made Mao realise that he was dealing with a much more redoubtable foe than in either of the earlier campaigns. He gave orders for all the heavy baggage to be jettisoned, and for the number of horses to be sharply reduced. The enemy had developed ‘highly mobile forces’, he warned. The Red Army had to be ready for a long, hard struggle involving frequent night marches, where victory would depend on its own mobility surpassing the enemy's ‘not just ten but a hundred times’.
Salvation, however, was at hand. During the summer Chiang Kai-shek's old rivals, Hu Hanmin and Wang Jingwei, had formed an alliance with the Guangdong and Guangxi warlords to set up a government in Canton in opposition to Chiang's regime in Nanjing. At the beginning of September, this new southern government sent troops into Hunan, as ever the pivotal province in any north–south conflict. The threat could not be ignored. The ‘suppression campaign’ in Jiangxi was abandoned to allow Chiang's forces to meet the new menace from the west.
On September 6, Mao and Zhu De watched as the nationalists began to pull out of Xingguo, heading north. In a parting gesture, Chiang announced that he was doubling the rewards on their heads from 50,000 to 100,000 dollars, dead or alive.239
Mao could claim that, once again, his strategy had proved victorious. Seventeen nationalist regiments had been demolished, and 30,000 enemy troops wounded, killed or taken prisoner. The communists had been left in possession of parts of twenty-one counties in southern Jiangxi and west Fujian with a combined population of over two million people. But, unlike the first two campaigns, communist losses this time had also been heavy. Chiang's forces had not been defeated. The Red Army had won by default.240
On September 18, 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria. For the next year Chiang's attention would be occupied elsewhere. But he had unfinished business in Jiangxi. He and the communists both knew that in due course he would return.
Four years had elapsed since the united front with the Guomindang had sundered and the Communist Party had embraced a policy of armed insurrection. The four main players in the communist revolution in that time – Qu Qiubai, Li Lisan, Zhou Enlai and Mao – had in common an unswerving belief that the revolution would succeed, and China would one day be a communist state.
Their differences had been over method and timing. But in a revolution, method and timing are all.
Qu, the consumptive young writer, lover of Tolstoy and Turgenev, and Li Lisan, whose whole life was communism, both believed in an imminent revolutionary firestorm. Qu, in a memorable letter from a Guomindang prison in 1935, shortly before his execution, wrote that had he remained Party leader, he would have committed the same errors as Li. ‘The only difference’, he declared, ‘would be that I could not have been so reckless as he was; that is, I would not have had his courage.’241
Li's misguided obsession with ‘the revolutionary high tide’ left the communists far stronger than they were before he took power. Zhou Enlai, already emerging as the indispensable executive, served with discrimination and skill whatever Moscow ‘line’ happened to prevail at the time. Mao, while not immune to romantic visions, as witness the ‘prairie fire’ he conjured up before the young Lin Biao, was the most down-to-earth of the four and it was his views which prevailed.
By 1931, the two major strategic issues they had argued over – the primacy of the Red Army in the revolutionary struggle, and the relationship between city and countryside – had both been resolved in Mao's favour. The Fourth Plenum vindicated his opposition to Li Lisan just as the Sixth Congress, two-and-a-half years earlier, had vindicated his opposition to Qu Qiubai. Li's (and Zhou's) policies, the plenum acknowledged, had ‘totally overlooked the necessity of consolidating the base areas’. They had ‘considered guerrilla warfare outdated’, and ‘issued premature, adventurist and dogmatic orders to the Red Army to attack big cities’.242 Mao could not have put it better himself.
In future, the Comintern decided that summer, the Red Army would be the principal motor of the revolution, ‘the core around which the revolutionary forces of workers and peasants are … consolidated and organised’. The Party's chief tasks, it added, were to strengthen the army still further, to expand and consolidate the Red base areas, to set up a Chinese soviet government, and to organise the workers and peasants in the Guomindang-ruled ‘white areas’.243 Since the peasant movement had ‘far outstripped’ the revolutionary movement in the cities, urban work was to be geared to supporting the soviet districts in the countryside.
Workers’ uprisings no longer got even a mention.244
I A CCP Front Committee was the supreme Party organ providing overall guidance to the military units under its control. It had authority over the Military Committee, responsible for military strategy and tactics, and over the local Party committee (at county or special district level) in its area of operations. It was, itself, however, subordinate to the provincial committee in the province where it operated. Thus in Nanchang, Zhou’s Front Committee was (theoretically, at least) under the authority of the Jiangxi Party committee. In Guangdong, it had to answer to the Canton Party committee.
II Seven of the ten marshals of the People's Liberation Army named in 1955 were veterans of the insurrectionary force at Nanchang. The anniversary of the uprising is now celebrated in China as marking the PLA's foundation.
III The Mensheviks (literally, ‘minority faction’) split from the Bolshevik majority of the Russian communist movement in 1902 over the issue of class violence. Soviet communists used the term ‘Menshevism’ to denote any form of right-wing opposition or advocacy of class reconciliation.
IV There was a curious postscript. He Jian, who, in Tang Shengzhi's absence, was acting GMD commander in Hunan, sent soldiers to Shaoshan soon afterwards to desecrate the graves of Mao's parents, in the belief that if Mao were shown to be an unfilial son, whose actions had brought shame on his ancestors, the Red
Army would suffer defeat. According to local legend, a peasant took them to the graves of a landlord's parents, which they dug up instead.
V The loyalties of the troops and militias who fought against the communists at this time were frequently blurred, and to describe them simply as ‘nationalist’ or ‘GMD’ forces would be misleading. In the late 1920s, and in some cases well into the 1930s, most such units obeyed local or provincial warlords who, while broadly supporting Chiang Kai-shek, retained considerable independence, allowing them to ignore and, on occasion, directly to oppose, the policies of Chiang and his national army commanders.
VI In January 1928, the CCP Hunan provincial committee had been subjected to such severe repression that it had virtually ceased to exist, so, faute de mieux, the South Hunan Special Committee (even though its members were then under criticism for ‘incorrect and unproletarian political tendencies’) was acting in its place. The repeated physical liquidation of CCP committees in the provinces during this period, and the dearth of qualified senior officials to replace them, meant that Party veterans like Mao often worked under hierarchical superiors who were inexperienced, incompetent, or both. Zhou Lu, despite his grand title of ‘Head of the Military Affairs Department of the South Hunan Special Committee’, was a nonentity. ‘Special committees’ had been set up in all the southern provinces to guide Party work (especially the fomenting of insurrections) in their geographical areas. They were subordinate to the respective provincial committees (where these existed), but had a measure of operational autonomy as well. In theory, Hunan, early in 1928, had Southern and Eastern special committees; Jiangxi had South-Western, Eastern and Northern committees. Some existed only on paper and others operated sporadically.
VII The provincial committee was re-established in March and thereafter reclaimed from the South Hunan Special Committee its authority over the border area. Unfortunately, as Mao was to discover, his new masters were even younger and less experienced than the old.
VIII In 1972, a cache of documents was found at the former home in Changsha of one of Yang Kaihui's aunts. Among them was a letter from 1929 in which Kaihui wrote of learning of Mao's infidelity. Parts of the letter, the original of which is held in the Central Party Archives, have been damaged by damp and insects and are illegible. Its existence has never been officially disclosed.
IX Yang Kaiming was Yang Kaihui's cousin. It was through him, on his return to Changsha in the winter of 1928, that she learned of Mao's relationship with He Zizhen. He was arrested the following year and executed in February 1930.
X Mao set great store by the intelligence he obtained from government newspapers, perhaps a throwback to his newspaper reading habits as a schoolboy and subsequently an editor during the May Fourth movement. He Zizhen recalled Red Army expeditions into enemy territory whose sole aim was to procure newspapers for Mao. In the winter of 1928, during the blockade he paid peddlers to bring in newspapers disguised as wrapping paper for their wares.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Futian: Loss of Innocence
The reappraisal of strategy that was forced on the Chinese leadership after 1927 by the practical needs of the revolution and the imperatives of survival was accompanied by fundamental change in the nature of the Party itself.
They described this process, approvingly, as ‘Bolshevisation’, and to an extent, the label was apt: they did make a conscious attempt to emulate Bolshevik practices; to instil Leninist discipline; to create an effective, centralised, political machine. But other factors were at work, too. Stalin's campaigns against Trotsky and Bukharin offered a model of intra-party strife which the Chinese Party dutifully replicated, expelling Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi as Trotskyists in late 1929; and He Mengxiong and Luo Zhanglong (Mao's close friend since their student days in Changsha), as rightists fifteen months later.1 These tendencies were reinforced by the brutality of the Chinese revolution: White terror in the cities (where, from mid-1927 on, communists were mercilessly hunted down and killed); White terror in the countryside (where warlord soldiers and landlord militias routinely torched villages suspected of harbouring communist sympathisers); and the constant threat, in the Red areas, of nationalist encirclement and destruction.
In the early years, the violence fostered by Guomindang reprisals and Party sectarianism was usually directed outwards. The ‘black-gowned gunmen’ brought in to act as enforcers during the Shanghai strikes of 1927 were ostensibly acting against ‘yellow union leaders’, who advocated class compromise; the widespread ‘burning and killing’ which accompanied Qu Qiubai's armed uprisings was, in theory, designed to force waverers to come over to the communist side.
By the time of the Sixth Congress, in mid-1928, such coercive tactics were condemned as counter-productive.2 When Mao's forces took Tingzhou in April 1929, he reassured the Central Committee that news reports of the Red Army burning down 500 houses and killing more than a thousand townspeople were ‘all nonsense and unworthy of credence’, that in fact ‘only five people were killed, all of them most reactionary’ and five houses had been burned down. Terror, Mao argued (as he had in his report on Hunan in the winter of 1926), was indispensable to the communist cause, and Red execution squads must be formed ‘to massacre the landlords and the despotic gentry as well as their running dogs without the slightest compunction’. But the use of terror should be directed exclusively against class enemies.3
Notwithstanding such caveats, the distinction between enemy and friend gradually became blurred. Inevitably, sooner or later, the methods applied to the one would be used against the other.
The flashpoint was reached in February 1930, at the enlarged Front Committee conference at Pitou. It had been called by Mao primarily to discuss Li Lisan's decision to launch attacks on cities, but a good part of the meeting was spent considering a much more parochial issue: the state of the Party in the adjacent districts of Donggu and Ji'an. A notice issued by Mao a week later, in the name of the Front Committee, explained:
There is a severe crisis in the Party in western and southern Jiangxi. It consists in the fact that the local leading organs of the Party at all levels are filled with landlords and rich peasants, and the Party's policy is completely opportunist. If we do not thoroughly clean up this situation, not only will it be impossible to carry out the Party's great political tasks but the revolution will suffer a fundamental defeat. [We] call on all revolutionary comrades … to overthrow the opportunist political leadership, eliminate the landlords and rich peasants … and see to it that the Party is rapidly Bolshevised.4
The problems concealed behind this jargon were twofold. The local leaders resented Mao's efforts to impose the centralised control of a Front Committee dominated by non-Jiangxi men, mainly Hunanese; they were also unenthusiastic about the harsh new land reform policies which Mao and the other outsiders were promoting to the detriment of their own families and clans.5
To Mao, they were ‘mountaintop-ists’, who put the interests of their small area ahead of those of the Party as a whole, and they had to be brought into line.
The meeting therefore decreed the dissolution of the existing Party hierarchy in the area, and the formation of a new South-West Jiangxi Special Committee, headed by Liu Shiqi, a young Hunanese communist who was married to He Zizhen's sister, He Yi (and was therefore Mao's brother-in-law).6 A second, secret directive ordered the execution of four of the founders of the South-West Jiangxi Party, known locally as the ‘Four Great Party officials’, to serve as an example to others.7
Why did Mao decide that the unwritten rule against killing Party comrades must be broken? There is a clue in the resolution he wrote at Gutian, six weeks earlier, when he warned that those in the Party and the Red Army who manifested an ‘individualistic aversion to discipline’ were acting in a manner that was ‘objectively counter-revolutionary’.8 This was a pure Stalinist notion, which Mao would subsequently develop into a subtler, more flexible theory of ‘contradictions between the enemy and ourselves’ (antagonistic contradicti
ons) and ‘contradictions among the people’ (which were non-antagonistic).9 But in 1930 it was already ample justification for considering that communists who obstructed the policies that the Party laid down, whatever their reason for doing so, had become part of ‘the enemy’ and should be treated as such. Since their guilt was political, the judicial process was irrelevant except as theatre to educate the masses. In such cases Party leaders, Mao included, would proclaim that the accused should be ‘openly tried and sentenced to death by execution’ (no other verdict being possible since that was what had already been decided).10
Judicial independence had never been a strong point in China, but whatever little there might have been, Bolshevism now extinguished.
In this sense, Mao's espousal of revolutionary violence within the Party was just one more step on the road he had begun travelling a decade earlier, when he had concluded that Marxism – the same political philosophy that, as an idealistic young student, he had rejected as too extreme and too violent – could alone save China. The taboo against killing had been eroded in stages: first in theory, when Mao had defended the peasant jacqueries in Hunan; then in practice, a year later, when he had to lead troops into battle. Now, in 1930, the definition of ‘enemy’ became more diffuse and malleable.
That ‘one more step’ for Mao was to have extraordinary consequences for the Party and army organisations that he led.
