by Philip Short
Zhou, five years Mao's junior, was a leader of great finesse, cool, controlled, never excessive, always seeking to draw the maximum advantage from whatever the situation offered. He was infinitely malleable in the service of ultimate victory, which he regarded as the only worthwhile end.
Mao was often excessive, possessed of exceptional vision, strong convictions and unbounded self-confidence, great subtlety of thought and unerring intuition. After Zhou yielded at Ruijin, Mao probed relentlessly, presenting him with one fait accompli after another as Lin's forces, now effectively under Mao's command, marched further and further to the south-east, in a direction precisely opposite to that which the Centre had laid down. In the process he regained, although fleetingly, a good deal of the freedom of manoeuvre which the Returned Students had tried to remove.18
Their first goal was Longyan, halfway between Jiangxi and the Fujian coast. It was an area Mao knew well: the Gutian conference had been held there in the winter of 1929. On April 10, they defeated the two regiments garrisoning the town and took 700 prisoners. Ten days later Zhangzhou was taken, the first important city the Red Army had captured since the fall of Ji'an, eighteen months earlier.
Mao was elated. Soldiers who fought in the campaign remembered seeing him ride into the city on a white horse, wearing a pale grey peaked army cap, with the communists’ five-pointed red star. In a telegram to Zhou Enlai the day after, he described how the local people ‘rushed out like mad to welcome us’. Zhangzhou was a rich prize, a major trading centre, thirty miles from Amoy, with a population for more than 50,000. The spoils included half-a-million Chinese dollars in cash; arms and ammunition; two nationalist aircraft (which, unfortunately, the communists did not know how to use); and, almost equally valuable as far as Mao was concerned, a rich haul of books from a middle-school library, which were sent back by road to Ruijin in a requisitioned motor-car.19
Bo Gu, however, was greatly displeased.
As details of the Fujian expedition filtered back to Shanghai, the drumbeat of criticism, both of Mao himself, for upsetting the Centre's carefully laid plans for a concerted drive northward, and of the Central Bureau, for allowing it to happen, grew steadily more insistent.20
The Bureau was contrite. At a meeting chaired by Zhou Enlai on May 11, which Mao, still in Zhangzhou, did not attend, it made a grovelling self-criticism, in which it admitted to ‘very serious mistakes’ and promised to ‘correct completely’ its doubts about the need to take big cities and, more generally, its ‘consistent right-opportunist errors’.21
This emollient approach typified Zhou's dealings with the Centre that spring, and set a pattern for the weeks that followed. Mao's reaction could hardly have been more different. ‘I have taken cognizance of your telegram,’ he wrote, after Zhou had passed on to him Bo's criticisms:
The political appraisal and military strategy of the Centre are wholly erroneous. In the first place, after the three [encirclement campaigns] and the Japanese attack, the ruling forces in China … have been dealt a great blow … We must absolutely not exaggerate the strength of the enemy … Secondly, now that the three campaigns are over, our overall strategy should absolutely never repeat the defensive strategy of fighting on interior lines [i.e., inside the Red base areas]. On the contrary, we should adopt the offensive strategy of fighting on exterior lines [in the White areas]. Our task is to take key cities and achieve victory in one province. One would have thought that destroying the enemy was the prerequisite for this … To propose using last year's strategy under present circumstances is right opportunism.22
This was a very impudent message indeed. Mao was deliberately throwing back in Bo Gu's face the very reproaches the Centre had made to him. Shanghai had been complaining for months about ‘underestimating the revolutionary situation’; failing ‘to take advantage of opportunities to develop towards the exterior’; and ‘regarding outdated strategy as forever-correct dogma’, all of which it had condemned as serious right-opportunist errors.23
Bo's reaction is not recorded, but it is safe to assume that he was not much amused. From then on, Mao's relationship with the ‘provisional Centre’ became increasingly envenomed.
After the foray into Fujian, the Central Bureau made greater efforts to restrain Mao, and he was bombarded with messages urging ‘an attacking posture’ and strict adherence at all times to the ‘forward offensive line’. Zhangzhou was abandoned at the end of May, and Mao's forces moved west to deal with warlord units from Guangdong, which had begun threatening the base area's southern flank. In west Fujian, in early June, he was joined by Zhu De and Wang Jiaxiang, who had been sent to ensure that, this time, he obeyed the Bureau's orders. They marched across southern Jiangxi towards Dayu, the tungsten-mining town near the Hunan border where the Zhu–Mao Army had stopped in January 1929 after its break-out from the Jinggangshan. However, despite Zhou Enlai's injunctions to ‘attack the enemy forcefully’, it was another month before the Guangdong regiments had been pushed back across the border.24
By then, Bo and Zhang Wentian were beside themselves. For six months, they had watched their designs systematically frustrated. The failed attack in January on Ganzhou, then Mao's hijacking of the attempt to march north by taking his troops south to Zhangzhou, and now the Guangdong distraction, meant that the half-year from January to July 1932, arguably the best opportunity the communists would ever have for building the southern Red districts into one strong, integrated area, had achieved nothing. The reason, as the front leadership knew, was that to do more than resist incursions, and attack where the enemy was weakest, was beyond the Red Army's powers. But the Shanghai leaders would not believe that.
Between Bo Gu's rigidity and the imperatives of battlefield survival, dialogue had become impossible.
Against this unpromising background, Zhou Enlai, the eternal deal-maker, tried to engineer a trade-off. Bo would get the offensive he wanted against the northern Jiangxi cities, and Zhou himself would go to the front to lead it – but it would be waged as far as possible in accordance with the Front Army's real capabilities, and Mao would be brought onside by restoring him to his old position as General Political Commissar. Mao's ‘experience and strong points’ were needed, Zhou argued. If he were reinstated, he would be ‘encouraged to correct his mistakes’.25
Wang Jiaxiang and Zhu De, who had been won over by Mao's arguments, agreed readily enough. But Ren Bishi and the other Bureau members, who had remained behind in Ruijin to take charge of rear echelon work, had serious misgivings. By the time Zhou secured their agreement, it was almost the middle of August. Bo Gu, ready to try almost anything to get the long-delayed offensive finally under way, gave his approval too.26
Mao proposed that the entire Front Army, operating again as a single force, should march north to occupy the same small cluster of county towns, Le'an, Yihuang and Nanfeng, that were to have been attacked five months earlier, before the expedition into Fujian. They would then try to capture the slightly larger town of Nanchang, which would put them within striking distance of Fuzhou, and ‘in a more advantageous position for taking the key cities on the lower reaches of the Gan River and creating the conditions for seizing Nanchang’.27
The first stage went like clockwork. Le'an, Yihuang and Nanfeng fell, bringing the Front Army 5,000 prisoners and some 4,000 guns. But the next target, Nanchang, was much more strongly defended. Zhu and Mao ordered a withdrawal while Zhou sent a wireless message to Ren Bishi's rear echelon committee, explaining that they intended to wait until the situation turned in their favour. The withdrawal continued, however, and despite more reassuring messages from Zhou, by early September they had retreated all the way to Dongshao, in Ningdu county, sixty miles to the south. The rear echelon committee, seriously alarmed at the turn events were taking, told them bluntly that this was a mistake and they must head back north without delay. That drew an unusually testy response from Zhou, who said the army was tired; that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ for it to rest; and that a move at this sta
ge would open the way for an enemy attack on the base area itself.28
So began a month of increasingly acrimonious exchanges between the two groups of Central Bureau leaders. No longer was it Mao against the rest. Now Zhou, Mao, Zhu and Wang, on one side, argued with Ren Bishi, Xiang Ying, the base area security chief, Deng Fa, and the Youth League leader, Gu Zuolin, on the other.29
At the beginning of October, they gathered in a farmhouse in the tiny mountain village of Xiaoyuan, in northern Ningdu, with Zhou Enlai in the chair, to hammer out their differences. It was to be a traumatic and intensely confrontational four days.30
The rear echelon accused the front leaders of ‘lacking faith in the victory of the revolution and the strength of the Red Army’. The front echelon replied that while the Centre's ‘forward offensive line’ was correct, it had to be carried out taking due account of practical conditions. Mao, in particular, was outspoken in his own defence. To Ren Bishi, Xiang Ying and the others, that merely confirmed what they had suspected from the start: Mao was the root of the problem and only his removal would solve it.
All the old charges levelled against him during the past year were then brought out again, along with a number of new ones. He was a right opportunist, stubbornly opposing the Centre's correct military line. He flouted organisational discipline (a reference to his outburst in May against the Centre's ‘erroneous views’). He had opposed the decision to attack Ganzhou; he had resisted orders to take Fuzhou and Ji'an; and when eventually he did capture Zhangzhou, he had shown his ‘guerrilla mentality’ by spending all his time raising money. Mao, the rear echelon charged, favoured a ‘pure defence line’ of ‘luring the enemy in deep’ and ‘waiting by a tree-stump for the rabbits to dash up and throw themselves against it’. He preferred fighting in remote areas, where the enemy was weakest.
Some of these charges had a basis. Mao did favour a military strategy which was in practice very different from that the Centre had laid down. But as the meeting dragged on, the fact that Mao's views might be correct and the Centre's might be mistaken ceased to be the point at issue. To Xiang Ying and his rear echelon colleagues, Mao was in breach of Party discipline. Therefore he was wrong.
Reaching an agreement on strategy turned out to be relatively simple. Everyone, including Mao, agreed that the Front Army should concentrate its forces against the enemy's weak points, and pick them off one by one so as to defeat the encirclement before the base area itself was threatened. To Mao, that meant fighting in Yihuang, Le'an and Nanfeng. Others favoured a battleground further west. But the principle was sufficiently flexible to accommodate both views.
The real problem arose over what to do about Mao himself. The rear echelon insisted that he be barred from the front altogether. Zhou argued that this was excessive. ‘Zedong’, he said, ‘has many years’ experience of warfare. He's good at fighting battles … and when he's at the front he makes a lot of useful suggestions which are helpful to our efforts.’ The answer, he suggested, would be either for Mao to retain the role of Commissar, but under his (Zhou's) supervision; or for Zhou himself to take over that post while Mao remained at the front as an adviser. Zhu De and Wang Jiaxiang concurred. But Mao was wary of taking responsibility for directing military operations without full power to do so, and the rear echelon also objected. Mao's unwillingness to recognise his errors, they said, meant that if he stayed at the front, he would relapse into his bad old ways. They might have added that Zhou's claimed ability to ‘supervise and control’ him was not particularly convincing given his track record so far.
In the end Zhou devised a masterly compromise. Mao would give up the Commissar's post and act as a military adviser; but, to mollify Ren Bishi and the other rear echelon leaders, he would take ‘indefinite sick leave’ until his presence was required. Then, Zhou hoped, once feelings had cooled, he could quietly resume his duties.
Next day, evidently feeling that the outcome might have been worse, Mao set out for the Red Army hospital at Tingzhou, where he arrived to find He Zizhen about to give birth to their second child, a baby boy.31 But his problems were not to be put behind him so easily. While the Ningdu meeting was in progress, Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian had also met to discuss the situation in Jiangxi. Mao's ‘conservatism and flightism’, they had ruled, were unacceptable. He must leave the front at once and confine himself to government work, and a resolute struggle would have to be waged against his views. Zhou was blamed for failing to stand up to him, and for not using his authority as Bureau Secretary to ensure that the correct line was carried out.
This bombshell reached Ningdu shortly after Mao left. The meeting immediately reconvened, overturned Zhou's compromise and endorsed the Centre's decisions. When Mao learned what had happened he was furious, accusing his colleagues of ‘a judgement in absentia’ undertaken in a ‘high-handed factional manner’. But there was nothing he could do. On October 12, it was announced that Zhou had been appointed General Political Commissar in his place. For the next two years, Mao was excluded from all significant military decision-making.32
That winter, for the second year running, Mao celebrated the Chinese New Year in ill-health and political disfavour. His quarters in a small sanatorium, which he shared with two other senior Party officials who were also suffering from political ailments, were more comfortable than the damp temple at Donghuashan; and his standing among the Party at large was unaltered, for the Ningdu decisions were kept secret. But in other respects his situation was worse.33
Six times, in the twelve years since he had become a communist, he had been pushed aside: once, of his own volition, when his faith in the movement faltered, in 1924; a second time in 1927, after the failure of the Autumn Harvest Uprising; again in 1928, when the newly formed Hunan provincial committee deposed him as Special Committee Secretary on the Jinggangshan; then in 1929, during the dispute over guerrilla tactics with Zhu De; the fifth time at Donghuashan in January 1932; and now, finally, at Ningdu. On all previous occasions, however, he had either had powerful friends, who eventually came to his aid, or he had withdrawn for tactical reasons, prefiguring a return in strength later on. This time he had been forced out by a Central leadership which was implacably hostile to him and which he had needlessly provoked, after a conflict which had seriously weakened those, like Zhou Enlai, who might otherwise have helped him.34
Once again he grew very thin. He Zizhen was alarmed by his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. The story went round afterwards that he had contracted tuberculosis, but in fact it seems to have been the same neurasthenic depression that always afflicted him at such times. He told her bitterly: ‘[It's] as if they want to punish me to death.’35
Soon after arriving at the hospital, Mao had an encounter which cast another long shadow over the year ahead. The acting Secretary of the Fujian provincial committee, Luo Ming, was also undergoing treatment there. Mao talked to him at length about the first three encirclement campaigns, and urged him on his return home to promote flexible guerrilla operations so as to help the Front Army break Chiang's fourth campaign, then about to get under way. Luo transmitted these proposals to his colleagues, and before long the Fujian committee began developing a Maoist guerrilla strategy.
The growing importance of the Central Soviet Base Area, coupled with intensified police surveillance in Shanghai, meanwhile convinced Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian that the time had come to join the rest of the leadership in Ruijin. While travelling through Fujian, Bo, too, encountered Luo Ming, who told him enthusiastically about the new tactics the provincial committee was now using, far better, in his view, than the ‘rigid and mechanical’ directives they had tried to follow in the past. Bo was the last person to appreciate a judgement of this kind. As soon as he reached Ruijin, one of his first acts was to launch a sweeping campaign to root out Mao's influence throughout the soviet districts. Luo's words were distorted to try to prove that he was ‘following an opportunist line’, had made a ‘pessimistic and defeatist appraisal’ of the revolutionary situation, and even
‘openly advocated the abolition of the Party’.36
Soon thousands of officials were under investigation for ‘following the Luo Ming line’, among them four young men, all in their late twenties, who were especially closely identified with Mao: Deng Xiaoping, then Secretary of the Huichang County Committee in southern Jiangxi; Mao's brother, Zetan; his former secretary, Gu Bo; and Xie Weijun, commander of the locally recruited Jiangxi Fifth Independent Division, who had been with Mao since Jinggangshan. In April 1933, they were brought before a denunciation meeting, where they were taunted as ‘country bumpkins’ who did not understand that there was ‘no Marxism in the mountain valleys’. They, in turn, derided their tormentors as ‘gentlemen from a foreign house’ (in other words, from Moscow). All four were dismissed from their posts, along with many others of Mao's supporters.37
By then Mao was back in Yeping, the small village near Ruijin where the leadership had established its headquarters.38
His eminence as Chairman of the Republic meant that he himself was untouched directly by the ‘Luo Ming’ campaign. He also received support from the Comintern, which urged Bo Gu in March to ‘take a conciliatory attitude towards Comrade Mao’, use ‘comradely influence’, and give him full responsibility for governmental work.39 One of the oddities of Mao's position in the late 1920s and early 1930s was that, while his relations with the Chinese leaders whom Moscow promoted to head the CCP were often extremely poor, the Russians themselves took an increasingly positive view of his role. From the Sixth Congress in 1928 onwards, Mao was the only major Chinese leader who was consistently in agreement with Stalin on all three of the key issues in the Chinese revolution: the primary role of the peasantry, of the Red Army and of the rural base areas. In the Kremlin, this had not gone unnoticed. As early as May 1932, the Comintern's Political Secretariat had warned Bo against criticising Mao publicly: disagreements should be aired within the Central Bureau, it said. Zhou Enlai acknowledged the directive and assured Moscow that it would be adhered to. Yet five months later, at the time of the Ningdu meeting which stripped Mao of his military responsibilities, the Comintern's new representative in Shanghai, a German communist named Arthur Ewert, learned that Bo had secretly given instructions for a full-scale public campaign against Mao's views. Ewert countermanded Bo's order, noting: ‘Mao Zedong remains a popular leader. [We] have demanded that disagreements within the leading organs be eliminated.’
