by Philip Short
Unfortunately for them, their return coincided with the news of Li Lisan's disgrace. The new leaders in Shanghai took an extremely harsh attitude towards the Futian events, which were now seen as a manifestation of the ‘anti-Comintern, anti-Party Li Lisan line’, aimed at ‘wiping out the Red Army and destroying the base area’. In April, Liu Di was brought before a court martial, chaired by Zhu De, sentenced to death and beheaded. He was in his early twenties. Li Bofang and two others were also executed.38
The new approach was confirmed at an enlarged Central Bureau meeting, held under the authority of the Fourth Plenum delegation:
The AB-tuan has become a small party within the Communist Party, [carrying out] … counter-revolutionary activities under the flag of revolution. Why has [it] been able [to do this] recently? The main reasons are: [Firstly,] landlords and rich peasants have found it easy to infiltrate the CCP … As the revolution develops … these elements are bound to betray us … [Secondly,] the Party followed the mistaken political line of Li Lisan … [Thirdly,] in the past, we did not pay sufficient attention to the work of purging subversive elements. Captured members of the AB-tuan were shot on the spot instead of being used to dig up further clues … [This] also made it possible for the AB-tuan to expand.39
The Front Committee (under Mao) was praised for following a ‘generally correct’ political line and adopting a class standpoint towards the Futian rebellion. The Central Bureau (under Xiang Ying) was fiercely condemned for its ‘conciliation of the Li Lisan line’, and for its ‘completely wrong’ approach to the Futian events, which had been ‘divorced from a class standpoint’ and had led ‘Party organisations at all levels to relax, soften and diminish the struggle against the AB-tuan’.
Its conclusion that the leading Futian rebels were all ‘important members of the AB-tuan … who carried out a counter-revolutionary rebellion under the flag of the Li Lisan line’ (rather than just misguided comrades, as Xiang Ying had tried to suggest), and the corollary – that the Li Lisan line and the AB-tuan were different sides of the same coin – had enormous advantages for Mao and for the new Party Centre. Mao could now legitimately argue that the purge, far from being directed against factional opponents, was a principled defence of the Party line. The Returned Students in Shanghai, who had been far more influenced by Stalinist practices than previous CCP leaders, saw their priority as the further Bolshevisation of the Party, by which they meant, above all, the rooting out of Li Lisan's supporters and the crushing of localism and dissent – in short, the transformation of the Party into a loyal and obedient Leninist tool. Being able to lump together all forms of opposition under a generic AB-tuan label made that task far easier.
The result was that, from April onwards, the purge resumed more ferociously than ever.40 Despite repeated efforts to centralise investigations through Political Security departments, uneducated, often illiterate, officials in village and township purge committees wielded enormous power.41 Death came on a whim, at the slightest pretext or no pretext at all. A CCP investigator reported:
Those who complained about the Party in their sleep, those who refused to help carry provisions on carrying-poles, those who stayed away from mass rallies, those who failed to show up for Party meetings … were all arrested as AB-tuan members. So great was the terror that most people refused to go to a new job even if the transfer were a promotion … because the risk of being accused of AB-tuan membership was higher if you had newly arrived … In the peak period of [the purge], even talking to another person might lead to suspicion of being an AB-tuan member. Therefore Party members refused to attend meetings unless some higher officials were there to witness what was discussed.
[In the late summer] the Jiangxi Political Security Department proposed arresting every rich peasant [in the base area] for investigation on the grounds that they were probably AB-tuan members … They said quite openly that it was better to kill a hundred innocent people than to leave a truly guilty one at large … On account of such weird views, all organs and revolutionary groups won the freedom to arrest, interrogate and execute counter-revolutionaries. The prevailing mood was to hunt down the AB-tuan in order to prove your loyalty to the revolution.42
When suspects were tortured to reveal details of the ‘networks’ to which they supposedly belonged, they either denounced acquaintances or tried to remember the names of people they had seen working in Party offices. To protect themselves, officials blackened their name-badges, or stopped wearing them altogether. During the third encirclement campaign, there was no time even to carry out interrogations. In some units, a roll-call was taken: those who confessed to being AB-tuan members were granted an amnesty; those who denied any connection were killed.43
In July, the 20th Army units which had fled to Yongyang after the Futian events (and had remained there after the Action Committee leaders gave themselves up in March) were summoned back in extremis to the central base area, to help fight off Chiang Kai-shek's pincer movement. On the 23rd they linked up with Mao's forces at Ping'anzhai, about twenty miles north of Yudu. Their commander, Zeng Bingqun, had been in touch with the Central Bureau, and evidently believed that the political cloud over the contingent had been lifted. Instead, his force was surrounded and disarmed as soon as it arrived. Every officer, from Zeng himself to the humblest assistant platoon leader, was arrested. Ordinary soldiers were dispersed among other Red Army units. In the space of a few hours, the 20th Army ceased to exist. The designation would never be used by a Chinese communist army again.44
A month later Li Wenlin and the other remaining Action Committee leaders, together with Zeng and most of his officer corps, were sentenced to death before a crowd of several thousand people at Baisha, by a tribunal which Mao himself chaired.45
The overall death-toll from the purge in the summer and early autumn of 1931 can only be guessed at. Four hundred officers and men from the 20th Army perished, and probably several hundred from the 35th Army, also locally recruited in Jiangxi, which was purged at about the same time. From other Red Army units, there were many more. In the local Jiangxi Party, 3,400 people were killed in just three of the more than twenty counties. By the beginning of September, a CCP Central Inspector reported that ‘95 per cent of the intellectuals in the south-west Jiangxi Party and Youth League’ had confessed to AB-tuan connections. Today the best-informed Chinese historians say merely that ‘tens of thousands’ died.46
As the year drew to a close, and the tensions generated by the nationalist encirclements eased, the purge subsided and Mao's role in it diminished. In December, renewed and, this time, much more serious efforts were made to impose realistic, institutional controls. A ‘Provisional Procedure for Handling Counter-revolutionary Cases and Establishing Judicial Organs’, intended among other things to ‘safeguard the rights of the masses’, was promulgated in Mao's name. Low-level officials were deprived of the power to order executions, a system of appeals was instituted and the use of torture was condemned. The new rules were often honoured in the breach, and in any case contained plenty of loopholes. Moreover, it was expressly stipulated that class background should be the determining factor in deciding punishment, an approach which would remain ever after a fundamental fault-line in the Chinese communist legal system. Landlords, rich peasants, and those of ‘capitalist origins’ were to be sentenced to death; the ‘masses’ could make a fresh start.47
Then Zhou Enlai arrived from Shanghai to take up his post as substantive Central Bureau Secretary, and in January 1932, for the first time, the scale and conduct of the purge was officially called into question:48
Killing people was regarded as a trifle [the Bureau acknowledged]. The most serious effect of this was that it caused panic in the Party. Even leading organs were affected. This was not a policy … of isolating the [Party's] opponents and winning over the masses who had been deceived by their counter-revolutionary influence – it was just the opposite. It damaged our own revolutionary forces and made those on the class battlefront wav
er. This was a most serious mistake.49
But the complaint was merely against unorganised killing. Both the Bureau and Zhou Enlai himself continued to insist that the campaign against counter-revolutionaries per se remained ‘completely correct’.50 The method needed to be changed, not in order to end it but to make it more efficient.
That spring, executions continued, albeit at a slower pace. In May 1932, Li Wenlin, Zeng Bingqun and three other supposed AB-tuan leaders – who, since their ‘trial’ the previous August, had been paraded before mass meetings in villages all over south-west Jiangxi – were publicly beheaded. Over the next two years, while the purge was idling to a close, the Political Security departments still dealt with 500 cases a month resulting, on average, in 80 to 100 people being shot.51
The killings in Jiangxi were part of a wider pattern. In west Fujian, more than 6,000 Party members and officials were executed on suspicion of being covert Social Democrats. At Peng Dehuai's old base on the Hunan-Jiangxi border, 10,000 were killed.52 In E-Yu-Wan, in the Dabie Mountains about seventy miles north-east of Wuhan, the urbane Beijing University graduate, Zhang Guotao, now a Politburo Standing Committee member and, like Mao, one of the founders of the Party, presided over a purge in which 2,000 ‘traitors, AB-tuan members and Third Party elements’ lost their lives. Chen Changhao, his political commissar, explained:
The revolutionary tide is surging ahead every day … The enemy has already seen how useless its airplanes, guns and machine-guns are. Therefore it is making use of the Reorganisationists, the AB-tuan and the Third Party to infiltrate our soviet area and the Red Army … This is a very vicious plot. It is easy for us to see the enemy attacking with airplanes and guns, but it is not easy for us to see the Reorganisationists, the AB-tuan and the Third Party. How vicious the enemy is.53
After several thousand counter-revolutionaries were purged in the north-east Jiangxi base area, the leftist leader responsible, Zeng Hongyi, moved to north Fujian, where he killed 2,000 more as ‘reformists and AB-tuan’.54
Slowly the purge mentality spread its poison throughout the communist areas. Until 1937, when the political situation changed nationally, beleaguered groups of Red Army men, battling against overwhelming odds, often in unimaginable conditions of deprivation and hardship, turned in on themselves in periodic bouts of blood-letting which, in some cases, killed more of their own comrades than the nationalist armies had.
The pretexts for the purges were always the same: differences over land reform; local or ethnic rivalries; and political issues linked to ‘the Li Lisan line’. So were the techniques: ‘You force him to confess,’ the head of the east Fujian security bureau explained, ‘then he confesses, you believe him and you kill him; or, he does not confess and you kill him.’55 The ultimate cause of the purges was always the same, too. They were always about power – the power of individual leaders to enforce their will, and to ensure that followers followed.
The example of Stalinism, and the influence of Stalinist rhetoric, are part of the explanation for what happened in the Chinese Red base areas in the early 1930s, but only a small part. The great blood-purges in Russia did not start until four years after Futian, with the murder of Kirov in Leningrad. The way in which the CCP leadership was transformed from an idealistic, ineffectual coterie of well-meaning intellectuals, which had fallen apart at the first push from the Guomindang little more than three years before, into a hardened Bolshevik core-group which, in exceptional times, ordered an exceptional slaughter of men and women who later proved to have been perfectly loyal, had far more to do with the situation within China itself.
The crucial factor was the civil war. In most wars, deserters are shot; prisoners are maltreated to obtain information; basic rights are suspended. In the war between the communists and the nationalists, no rules were honoured.
Early in 1931, the head of the Chinese Politburo's security service, Gu Shunzhang, a formidably effective agent who had been trained by the Russian secret police in Vladivostok, was sent to Wuhan to try to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek. He was disguised as a magician. But the GMD special services identified him from a photograph, and in April he was arrested and persuaded to defect. The French intelligence bureau in Shanghai estimated that as a result of his betrayal, several thousand communists were arrested and executed over the next three months. Among them was the Party's figurehead General Secretary, Xiang Zhongfa, who was shot in June.
It was not all one-sided, however. The day after Gu's defection, his family disappeared. Five months later, their naked, headless bodies were discovered, buried under ten feet of earth and concrete, at an empty house in the French concession. The communist agent who had killed them told his GMD captors that they had been executed as a reprisal on the orders of Zhou Enlai. Gu's small son alone had survived, the man said, because he had been unable to bring himself to carry out Zhou's order to kill the child. He then took them to five more houses where further corpses were unearthed, this time of communist cadres whom Zhou had ordered killed to maintain Party discipline. After some three dozen bodies had been disinterred, the settlement police had had enough and ordered the search halted.56
Zhou Enlai's extermination of the family of Gu Shunzhang was the rule, not the exception, in a conflict without quarter.
The Guomindang was just as barbarous. In Hubei, the wife of the Red Army leader, Xu Haidong, was seized by the nationalists and sold as a concubine. More than sixty other members of Xu's clan, including children and infants, were hunted down and killed.57 In November 1930, two months after Mao led the communists’ failed attack on Changsha, his wife, Yang Kaihui, was taken to the execution ground outside the city's Liuyang Gate and shot on the orders of the GMD governor, He Jian. Her family were able to bribe the guards to free Mao's eldest son, Anying, then aged eight, who had been held in prison with her, and he and his two brothers were sent secretly to Shanghai. Anqing, a year younger, was beaten about the head by a soldier during his mother's arrest and suffered permanent brain damage. Soon after they arrived, the youngest boy, Anlong, who had been four when his mother was killed, died of dysentery. Two years later, when the Shanghai Party network was destroyed, the two older boys were left to fend for themselves, living by their wits on the streets.58
In Xu Haidong's base area, E-Yu-Wan, where, in Edgar Snow's phrase, the slaughter attained ‘the intensity of religious wars’, and in other Red areas in the south, the nationalists followed a policy which they called ‘draining the pond to catch the fish’: all the able-bodied men were killed, the villages burned and available grain supplies seized or destroyed. Great swathes of forest were cut down, to hem the guerrillas into mountain fastnesses where whatever moved was shot on sight. Villagers who survived were herded into stockaded settlements of wooded huts in the plains, guarded by soldiers and landlord militia. Women and girls were sold as prostitutes or slaves, until foreign missionaries complained and Chiang Kai-shek banned the practice.
Initially, nationalist troops used their victims’ heads to keep tally; when this proved impracticable (because of the weight), they cut off ears instead. One division was reported to have collected 700 pounds of ears ‘to show its merit’. In Huang'an county, in Hubei, more than 100,000 villagers were killed; in Xin county, in Henan, 80,000. In Peng Dehuai's old base area, on the Hunan–Hubei border, once home to a million people, only 10,000 remained. Twenty years later, ruined villages and human bones were still scattered through the mountains.59
Mao himself saw little of such extremes of devastation. By the time the worst butchery reached Jiangxi, the Red Army had moved on.60 But it informed the social context in which he, and all the communist leaders, moved.
All through Chinese history, which, as Mao knew from his reading of the Song dynasty scholar, Sima Guang, was but ‘a mirror of the present’, rebellions had been suppressed with extraordinary ferocity. Chiang Kai-shek's slaughter in the Red areas was a pale reflection of the bloodshed that took place during the Taiping Rebellion. Chiang's troops collect
ed ears; the seventeenth-century general, Li Zicheng, pacified Sichuan by collecting feet, and when his favourite concubine protested at his cruelty, hers were added to the pile. The nationalists exterminated the families of communist leaders; under the Qing, the families of rebellious scholars and generals were slaughtered up to the ninth degree of consanguinity. Even the use of quotas for purge victims, for all its apparent resemblance to later NKVDIV practices in Russia, had a long history in China.61
The vortex of blood and fear in which the communist struggle was played out was the fruit of this legacy. Separated from wives, families, children (when they were not, like Mao, the indirect cause of their deaths), the young men who headed the Party, none more than forty years old, focused all their energies and allegiance on a single goal: the cause. From this remorseless single-mindedness came a fanatical commitment which left no place for the morality of the normal world outside. In the Red Army, whole regiments were made up of communist orphans whose one desire was for class revenge. Hatred was a powerful weapon, whether directed outwards or at enemies within.
Not every leader responded in the same way. Some, like Gao Jingtang, in E-Yu-Wan, took to the purge like ducks to water, generating a climate of isolation and paranoia so extreme that, in 1937, when the Central Committee tried to renew contact with the guerrillas in the base areas, the first communist envoys to reach them were arrested and shot as spies. Others, like Zhu De's former commissar, Chen Yi, made use of terror sparingly if at all.62
Mao's reaction was more complex. On the one hand, he wanted ‘iron discipline’; on the other, he continued to hold that the Red Army should be an all-volunteer force, actuated by correct ideas, good leadership and example.63 To Mao, Bolshevism was far more than simply a means to win power; it was also an ideological, in a sense, a moral force for China's renewal. Intellectually, he came to terms with the contradiction this posed – between discipline and freedom, force and voluntarism – by affirming the unity of opposites (as he had in his student essays, and would again in Yan'an). But in practice they would always be in conflict. That was as true in Jiangxi in the early 1930s as in every other purge and rectification campaign that he would launch during his long life.
