Mao

by Philip Short

  At such times, Mao fell back on the lesson he had drawn from the peasant movement in Hunan in the winter of 1926. ‘To right a wrong,’ he had written then, ‘it is necessary to exceed the proper limits; the wrong cannot be righted without doing so.’ From that standpoint, the blood-purges were regrettable, in future better avoided, but necessary all the same.

  The same was true of the elastic uses to which the term ‘AB-tuan’ was bent. Initially Mao may well have believed, as all the other leaders clearly did, that the AB-tuan posed a genuine threat. But he was not so gullible as to go on believing it when no evidence was ever found (other than confessions obtained under torture) that even one of the tens of thousands who were executed was a real AB-tuan member. ‘Social democrat’, ‘Reorganisationist’, ‘Third party’ – in the end it no longer mattered: they were just names, capable of being stretched to accommodate whatever kind of political deviance the Party leaders wished to attack. The Central Bureau acknowledged as much when it conceded that there had been what it called ‘a mistake in terminology’ during the campaign against AB-tuan.64 That, too, Mao must have concluded, was necessary. At any rate, similar ‘mistakes’ would occur in every political movement that followed.

  I The reference to ‘assassinations’ was not explained, but Mao may have had two incidents in mind: the deaths, that spring, of his old allies from the Jinggangshan, Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo, who were shot in obscure circumstances, allegedly while trying to rebel; and the murder of another long-time supporter, Wan Xixian, some months earlier. In both cases, Jiangxi Party officials were alleged to have been implicated.

  II This was still true in 1999, when the original edition of this book appeared. It is reprinted here because the town was then much as it was in Mao's day. Twenty years later, that is no longer the case: like the rest of China, Futian has changed.

  III This apparently involved a severe beating to the lower part of the body. Such methods were employed not only by the communists, but also in nationalist-ruled areas well into the 1930s. Even modern terms like ‘airplane ride’ (or ‘jetplane ride’, as it was called, thirty-five years later, during the Cultural Revolution), which involved tying a person's hands behind the back, and then hanging him, or her, by the arms from a wooden beam, referred to tortures that had been in use for centuries.

  IV The NKVD was the immediate predecessor of the Soviet KGB (Committee for State Security). During Stalin's purges in the 1930s, NKVD regional directorates were assigned targets for the numbers of ‘enemies of the people’ to be arrested and shot.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Chairman of the Republic

  The defeat of Chiang Kai-shek's third encirclement campaign in September 1931 saw the beginning of another and, this time, much more determined attempt by the Party Centre to bring Mao and the Jiangxi base area firmly under its control.

  The devastation of the Party's urban networks after the defection of Gu Shunzhang had made the Red areas more important than ever. The Comintern had been insisting for over a year that it was there, rather than in China's cities, that the next stage of the struggle would be played out. The arrest and execution of Xiang Zhongfa, the Party's General Secretary, in June, had made leadership changes imperative, and the growing physical danger of operating in Shanghai argued for dispersal.

  Already, in April, senior leaders had been despatched from Shanghai to run the Party committees at E-Yu-Wan and in He Long's west Hunan base area. Later that summer it was decided that Zhou Enlai should embark on his long-delayed journey to Jiangxi, to take over the running of the Central Bureau, while Wang Ming would return to the safety of Moscow as head of the CCP's Comintern delegation. Another Returned Student, Bo Gu, then aged twenty-four, would stay on in Shanghai as acting Party leader until a new congress could be convened.1 At the same time, plans were set in motion to establish a communist government in the Red districts of Jiangxi (now renamed grandly the Central Soviet Base Area), as a first step towards the relocation of the whole of the Central leadership to the province.

  Against this background, Wang Ming, Bo Gu and their allies launched a concerted campaign to undermine Mao's authority. At the end of August – even before the third encirclement had been defeated – the Party Centre fired off a long, ill-tempered directive, accusing him (though not by name) of lacking a clear class stand; being too soft on rich peasants; failing to develop the labour movement; ignoring repeated instructions to set up the planned soviet government; failing to expand the base area; and allowing the Red Army to engage in ‘guerrillaism’.2 When this message reached the base area in October, it caused considerable puzzlement, as well as anger. Not only had Mao and his colleagues just successfully fought off an enemy force ten times stronger than their own, but the Returned Students themselves had earlier castigated Li Lisan for pretending that guerrilla warfare was outdated; and the Comintern that summer, in a highly unusual move, had praised Mao personally for his policies in the base area.

  To Bo Gu in Shanghai, such niceties were of little account. His concern that autumn was not with doctrine but with power.

  In mid-October, he agreed reluctantly that Mao could remain as acting Central Bureau Secretary (a post he had held informally since May) until Zhou Enlai's arrival, but rejected a proposal to promote several of Mao's allies. Shortly after this, when Mao asked for a Politburo member to be sent to head the new soviet government, Bo responded that Mao himself was to take that post.3 In other words, he was to be kicked upstairs – deprived of the major part of his influence in the Party and the army, and given instead a largely honorific administrative position. At the beginning of November, that was precisely what happened. A base area Party Congress was held, which dissolved the General Front Committee that Mao headed and established in its place a Revolutionary Military Commission, chaired by Zhu De, in which he was merely one of twelve members. For good measure he was roundly criticised (though, again, not by name) for ‘narrow empiricism’, which meant stressing practical factors at the expense of Party policy.4

  Two days later, on November 7, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, 600 delegates from Jiangxi and the adjoining base areas gathered in the village of Yeping, about three miles east of the little market town of Ruijin, to proclaim the founding of the Chinese Soviet Republic. They met in the medieval splendour of the Clan Hall of the Xie (the common surname of all the village's inhabitants), amid a grove of ancient, gnarled camphor trees, some a thousand years old. Banners marked with the hammer and sickle were strung between the immense, lacquered wooden pillars. A Red Army parade was held, followed by a torchlit procession, punctuated by the deafening explosions and thick blue smoke of firecrackers.5 ‘From now on,’ Mao declared, ‘there are two totally different states in the territory of China. One is the so-called Republic of China, which is a tool of imperialism … The other is the Chinese Soviet Republic, the state of the broad masses of exploited and oppressed workers, peasants, soldiers and toilers. Its banner is that of overthrowing imperialism; eliminating the landlord class; bringing down the Guomindang warlord government … and striving for genuine peace and unification of the whole country.’6

  The First National Congress of Chinese Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviets, as the new communist parliament was called, named Ruijin as the capital city of the twenty or so Red counties which made up the new Soviet Republic, and appointed Mao state chairman and head of government.7

  To the uninitiated, it must have seemed he was in an enviable position. His new posts gave him a higher formal status than he had ever had before. The Comintern had made clear that it attached enormous importance to the new ‘state’ over which he presided. But Mao had seen off too many efforts to neutralise or control him – Zhou Enlai's attempt in July 1927 to send him to Sichuan; Qu Qiubai's proposal, a month later, that he become an apparatchik in Shanghai, Li Lisan's endeavours, in 1929, to make him leave the Fourth Army – to entertain any illusions about what was being done. True, he was now too important simply to be cast out,
even by the Returned Students and their allies, who had the backing of the Kremlin. But they had been able to move him sideways, out of the main line of decision-making, amputating the roots from which his power stemmed.

  The effects were not long in coming.

  In January, Zhou Enlai, in one of his first acts after replacing Mao as Central Bureau Secretary, called for a fresh attempt to occupy a major city, in pursuance of the oft-stated goal of ‘achieving initial victory in one or several provinces’.8

  Mao was able to convince his colleagues that Nanchang was too difficult a target. But when the Bureau reconvened, after consultations with Bo Gu in Shanghai, a majority of its members favoured an attack on Ganzhou. This, too, Mao opposed, supported by Zhu De. Ganzhou, he argued, was well-defended, had water on three sides, and was regarded by the enemy as ‘a stronghold it cannot afford to lose’, while the Red Army still suffered from the same lack of heavy artillery and other siege equipment that had caused the failure of its attempts to take the city the previous year. This time his arguments were rejected. Peng Dehuai, who favoured the plan, was appointed Front Commander and made clear that he relished the prospect of proving Mao wrong.9

  Ten days later, the Central Bureau held a third meeting, which, in Zhou's absence, Mao chaired. The discussion turned to Japan's invasion of Manchuria the previous September. Bo Gu had interpreted this as ‘a dangerous and concrete step towards an attack on the Soviet Union’. Mao begged to differ, arguing that the invasion had triggered a nationwide tide of anti-Japanese feeling which went beyond traditional class divisions and which the Party should try to exploit. This was the germ of an idea – the anti-Japanese united front, bringing together all classes in China in a patriotic effort of national defence – which, not many years later, would play a key role in the CCP's struggle for power. But, in January 1932, it was far ahead of its time. The whole thrust of the Centre's policies was for a sharpening of class struggle, not a blurring of class lines. Mao's colleagues insisted that the primary consideration, as it had been in 1929 during the Eastern Railway dispute, was the threat to Moscow. Tempers flared. Finally, someone told Mao to his face: ‘Japan occupied Manchuria to attack Russia. If you can't see that, you're a right opportunist.’I There was a silence. Mao got up and stalked out.

  The same day, or soon afterwards, he requested sick leave. It was granted. Wang Jiaxiang, another member of the Returned Student group, took over Mao's sole remaining military post, as head of the Front Army's General Political Department.10 A week later Mao set out with He Zizhen and a few bodyguards for an abandoned temple on Donghuashan, a low volcanic hill about five miles south of Ruijin, where he was to spend his ‘convalescence’.11

  It was an austere, lonely place, well suited to Mao's bleak frame of mind. The sanctuary, a single chamber hewn out of the smooth, black rock, with a stone façade and grey-tiled roof, was dark, cold and very wet, with moss growing from the floor. As so often when he was in political difficulties, Mao's depression affected him physically. He Zizhen found him suddenly older, and he started to lose weight. She worried that the damp would make him worse, and put the young bodyguards to live in the main temple, while she and Mao moved into a cave a few yards away, which was smaller but dry, and had a stone basin where they could wash. Water had to be brought up in wooden pails on a bamboo pole from the valley, a hundred feet below, along a narrow path of shallow steps, scooped out of the rock.

  There was a fine view across the plain, and to the west three ancient pagodas stood like sentinels on the encircling hills. Mao tried to keep himself occupied by writing out poems he had composed on horseback in happier days in the base area. At irregular intervals, Party documents and newspapers were sent up from Ruijin. He could do nothing but wait, in enforced idleness, for his political wounds to heal.

  The new ‘provisional Centre’ in Shanghai, as Bo Gu's leadership was known, was less irrational than it was afterwards made to appear. The fact that it survived at all was a remarkable achievement. At a time when the Comintern's China operation was completely paralysed following the arrest of its representative, Yakov Rudnik (also known as Hilaire Noulens), an Ukrainian intelligence operative who posed as a Belgian trades unionist, Bo and his colleague, Zhang Wentian, another Returned Student in his early thirties, managed to maintain a network of agents which was able successfully to infiltrate the highest levels of Chiang Kai-shek's military command, and to liquidate GMD special services’ operatives and the communist turncoats they recruited.12

  If they were less successful in providing guidance to the communist base areas, which now had a claimed population of five million, it was mainly because of the continuing influence of the leftist thinking that had animated Li Lisan and, before him, Qu Qiubai. That was what had led Bo in January to raise anew the issue of attacking large cities:

  We used to avoid attacking large cities. This strategy was correct in the past but is no longer correct because circumstances have changed. Our task now is to expand [our] territory, link up the separate soviet areas to form a single integrated area, and take advantage of the present favourable political and military conditions to seize one or two important central cities so as to win initial victory for the revolution in one or more provinces.

  Bo's analysis was more sober than that of his disgraced predecessors. But he reached very similar conclusions. The Great Depression, he wrote, had brought the economy in the nationalist-controlled areas to ‘the verge of general collapse’, while the Red Army, having been ‘tempered on the bloody battlefield of the present civil war’ during Chiang's failed encirclement campaigns, was stronger than ever before. The ‘balance of domestic class forces’ had changed, and policy needed to change, too.13

  In one sense, this was not unreasonable. For the past three years, Mao, too, had been calling for ‘victory in one province’. Doing nothing was not an option: an insurgency which rested on its laurels would quickly collapse. Linking up the different Red base areas, which would necessarily involve occupying cities, was as logical a policy as any. The problem was that Bo demanded rigid adherence to what he called the ‘forward, offensive line’,14 and to the overall goal that he had set of occupying Nanchang, Ji'an and Fuzhou (another Jiangxi city), regardless of tactical imperatives. In addition, there was the disparity of forces. The defeat of Chiang Kai-shek's third encirclement had given the Shanghai leaders a grossly inflated impression of the Red Army's strength. Mao and Zhu De knew that now, no less than a year earlier, they still lacked adequate forces to seize well-defended GMD strongholds, which was why they had opposed the attack on Ganzhou. Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian and their followers saw such doubts as proof of opportunism – a flaw, not in the policy, but in those who were reluctant to carry it out.

  One afternoon at the beginning of March, just after the Lantern Festival, Mao's guards saw two horsemen approaching. They turned out be Xiang Ying, who was acting as head of government during Mao's ‘sick leave’, and a bodyguard.

  The attack on Ganzhou, Xiang told him shamefacedly, had been a fiasco. Over a period of three weeks, starting in mid-February, Peng's forces had mounted four exhausting and unsuccessful assaults against the city's defences. Attempts to mine the walls had failed. Two days before, a sortie by nationalist soldiers, which had taken Peng by surprise, had barely been repulsed; and now four divisions of nationalist reinforcements were converging from Ji'an and Guangdong, threatening to cut off his escape. The Military Commission, Xiang said, wanted Mao to end his sick leave and come at once to give them advice.

  Mao did not need to be asked twice. A heavy rainstorm had broken, and He Zizhen asked him to wait. ‘You haven't been well,’ she fussed. ‘If you go out in this, you'll be worse.’ He waved her aside. His ‘sickness’ had gone.15

  By the time Mao reached the army at Jiangkou, a small market town fifteen miles upriver from Ganzhou, Peng had extricated himself from the trap. However, argument continued over where the Front Army should go next. Mao proposed that they make for north-east Jiangxi and dev
elop a new base area along the northern part of the Fujian border, where the enemy was weak and the hill country favourable to the Red Army's style of warfare. But the majority of his colleagues felt this was too much of a departure from the objectives the Centre had set, which were to threaten Ji'an and Nanchang. Peng, still smarting from his defeat, supported them. In the end the meeting decided that the force should be divided: Peng's Third Army Group would head north along the west bank of the Gan River towards Ji'an, while the First Army Group, commanded by Lin Biao, tried to occupy a cluster of three county towns in central Jiangxi, about eighty miles south-east of Nanchang. Mao accompanied Lin's army in his new guise of unofficial adviser, and was soon able to persuade him and his commissar, Nie Rongzhen, that Fujian was a far better target. Lin sent a telegram to this effect to the Military Commission and then marched to Tingzhou, just inside the Fujian border, to await further orders. Mao returned to Ruijin where, at the end of March, he presented his case to the Central Bureau.16

  This time Mao prevailed. Zhou Enlai, who chaired the two-day meeting, had seen his first military venture in the base area, which he had undertaken against Mao's advice, end in an ignominious defeat. Xiang Ying had had the thankless task of summoning Mao back in the midst of that debacle. Peng Dehuai, who might have objected, was absent.17

  Yet Mao's success in getting his way that spring had another, deeper cause.

  The personal chemistry between himself and Zhou Enlai, which was to be of such extraordinary importance for China over the next half-century, emerged clearly for the first time at this meeting in Ruijin.