Mao

by Philip Short

  Mao urged that the regulations be applied with ‘extreme caution’, since determinations of status were ‘life or death decisions’ for those involved.60 This was a pious hope. As he well knew, the whole thrust of the movement militated against the rational, finely calibrated approach that he had laid down. Land reform, he wrote, was ‘a violent and ruthless class struggle’, the aim of which was ‘to weaken the rich peasants and wipe out the landlords’, and when necessary the ‘big tigers’ among them should be paraded before public meetings, sentenced to death by the masses and killed.61

  In such circumstances caution was the exception. The poor peasants who sat in judgement knew that the more ‘landlords’ and ‘rich peasants’ they were able to winkle out, the more land they would have to ‘redistribute’ to themselves. In many districts, terror-stricken middle peasants fled to the mountains, for fear of being reclassified as rich peasants and rendered destitute.62

  In the event, the movement was cut short, for the entire area was reoccupied by the nationalists less than eighteen months later. But its effects would last far longer. After 1933, in the Red areas, class origin became the ultimate determinant of an individual's worth and fate. From that root grew a poisonous blight that China, was still trying to shake off more than half a century later. In many places, well into the 1980s, grandchildren of landlords and rich peasants found that family status still counted far more than ability, intelligence and hard work in deciding what opportunities were open to them, and what doors irrevocably shut. Even when class factors finally became less important, traces of the old hatreds lingered on.

  The Land Investigation Movement was accompanied by a paranoid drive to wipe out what were termed ‘feudal and superstitious counter-revolutionary organisations’.63 It had close parallels to the earlier campaign to eliminate AB-tuan elements. Mao was once again intimately involved. Large numbers of ‘alien class elements’, he declared, had concealed themselves within local soviet governments and the armed forces to carry out sabotage. ‘It is an urgent task that does not admit of the slightest delay … to launch a final attack on the feudal forces and wipe them out once and for all.’64

  The man chosen to direct the new campaign was the base area's head of Political Security, Deng Fa, a swashbuckling character with an infectious grin, whose twin passions were horse-racing and sharp-shooting. For all his mischievous smile, Deng Fa was a man much feared. His bodyguards carried curved, broad-bladed, executioner's swords, with red tassels on the hilts. In Fujian, in 1931, he had presided over a purge of Social Democrats in which thousands had perished.65 Now, with Mao's approval, he laid the groundwork for many of the practices which would become indelibly associated with later communist political movements.

  Lists of doubtful class elements, ‘landlords, local tyrants and evil gentry’, were circulated for reinvestigation. ‘Denunciation boxes’ were installed in towns and villages, where people could place anonymous notes, informing on their neighbours.66 Legal safeguards were suspended: when people were ‘obviously guilty’, Mao said, they should be executed first and a report made later.67 A still more sinister development, also undertaken with his approbation, was to claim that non-existent organisations had been discovered – such as the ‘Single-minded Society’, the ‘Extermination Brigades’ (at Yudu), and the ‘Secret Watch Brigade’ (at Huichang) – as a pretext for rounding up and interrogating those suspected of disloyalty in the areas where they supposedly operated.68

  Thirty years later, all these techniques, which Mao and Deng Fa pioneered in Jiangxi, continued to flourish under the People's Republic.

  The laws drawn up under Mao's chairmanship proved equally enduring. The ‘Regulations for the Punishment of Counter-revolutionaries’, published in April 1934, listed more than two dozen counter-revolutionary offences, for all but one of which the penalty was death. The crimes listed included, ‘engaging in conversation … to undermine faith in the soviets’ and ‘deliberately transgressing laws’. As though that were not enough, a final catch-all clause specified that ‘any other counter-revolutionary criminal act’, not separately described, would be punished analogously.69 That article remained part of the Chinese legal code until the early 1990s.

  Such practices were not unique to Chinese communism. Catch-all statutes were a legacy of the Chinese Empire, from which the social controls of both the communists and the nationalists stemmed.70 A Guomindang law of 1931 prescribed the death penalty for ‘disturbing the peace’.71 For both, the purpose of law was political: to uphold orthodoxy, not individual rights.

  The election procedures codified at Ruijin at the end of 1931 likewise set a pattern that continued into the People's Republic. The voting age was fixed at sixteen, for both women and men. But the right to vote was limited to ‘correct’ class categories – workers, poor and middle peasants, and soldiers – while merchants, landlords, rich peasants, priests, monks, and other ne'er-do-wells were explicitly excluded. Candidates were nominated by local Party committees on the basis of class status and of ‘political performance’, which Mao explained meant having ‘the right kind of thinking’. Ability came a distant third. Voting was by a show of hands, and an election was considered successful if 90 per cent of the population took part.72

  A quarter of those elected, Mao insisted, must be women.73 This was part of his assault on what he called the ‘feudal-patriarchal ideological system’ of traditional China. In Hunan, five years earlier, he had noted approvingly the prevalence of extra-marital affairs, and even ‘triangular and multilateral relationships’, among poorer women ‘who have to do more manual labour than women of the richer classes’ and therefore had more independence.74 In his report from Xunwu, which was supposed to be about economic matters, he devoted an inordinate amount of space to changing sexual mores, describing at length how young women had become ‘more liberal in their behaviour’, staying out late in the mountains on the pretext of cutting firewood, while ‘affairs between them and their young male friends … increased. Couples “made free” with each other openly in the hills … There were married people in almost every township who had new lovers.’75

  The sensualist in Mao relished women's sexual liberation. But his stress on promoting women had a broader purpose. Half a century before it became a fashionable slogan among Western development theorists, Mao understood that to educate a man was to educate an individual, but to educate a woman was to educate a family.

  Since the key to women's emancipation was a change in the marriage system, for which Mao had been campaigning ever since the May Fourth movement, the first law to be enacted in the new Chinese Soviet Republic – and the first law enacted by the People's Republic, nearly twenty years later – gave men and women equal rights in marriage and divorce.76

  Not everyone was pleased. Peasant husbands complained, ‘The revolution wants to get rid of everything, wives included.’ Some women were so intoxicated by their new freedom that they married three or four times in as many years.77 To preserve military morale, a special clause was inserted for Red Army soldiers, whose wives could seek divorce only if their husbands agreed.78 But the communists’ core constituency, young men from the poorest families, who, under the old system, would not have been able to buy a wife for years, if at all, were delighted with the new arrangements, as were most peasant women. Mao himself regarded it as one of his greatest achievements. ‘This democratic marriage system’, he affirmed, ‘has burst the feudal shackles that have bound human beings, especially women, for thousands of years, and established a new pattern consistent with human nature’.79

  While Mao wrestled with the land reform and his other governmental duties, he remained politically in a twilight zone, neither in power nor entirely in purgatory. In the early spring of 1933, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, ignoring the Centre's ‘forward, offensive line’, defeated Chiang Kai-shek's fourth encirclement campaign by using tactics broadly similar to those Mao had argued for. Several of Chiang's top divisions were severely mauled, and the Red Army too
k 10,000 prisoners. Encouraged, Mao attempted in March, a few weeks after leaving hospital, to resume a minor military advisory role, as a member of the rear echelon of the Central Bureau. Bo Gu immediately put a stop to it.80

  Three months later, Mao asked the Bureau to reconsider the decision it had taken at Ningdu to remove him from the military chain of command, arguing that it had been unjust. Bo retorted that the decision had been entirely correct and that without it, victory over the fourth encirclement would not have been achieved.81

  During the autumn, Mao's position improved somewhat, as his role in the Land Investigation Movement gave him renewed prominence and the campaign against the ‘Luo Ming line’ waned. In September, soon after the start of Chiang Kai-shek's fifth encirclement campaign, he and Zhu De became involved in negotiations with the Fujian-based 19th Route Army, whose commanders had become disaffected by Chiang Kai-shek's refusal to take effective action against the Japanese in Manchuria. In October, a truce was agreed, and a secret communist liaison office was set up at the 19th Route Army's headquarters. Four weeks later, the Fujian leaders proclaimed the establishment of a People's Revolutionary Government, independent of Chiang's Nanjing regime.

  This could, and should, have been a godsend for the Red Army. That summer, Bo Gu had insisted on an exhausting and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to try to expand the soviet base area northward. Chiang, meanwhile, had assembled a force of half-a-million fresh troops, including many of his crack divisions, with 300,000 auxiliaries. Zhu's men, dispersed, demoralised and weary, were no match for the nationalist onslaught. The town of Lichuan, near the Fujian border 120 miles north of Ruijin, which guarded the northern entrance to the base area, soon fell, and Zhu's attempts to recapture it were beaten off with heavy losses.

  Thus, in November, 1933, when Chiang was compelled to withdraw parts of his main force to meet the threat posed by the Fujian rebellion, it seemed that the communists had been rescued in the nick of time.

  However, the Party leaders were suspicious of their new allies’ motives and commitment. Even Mao, who, throughout the Jiangxi period, had urged his colleagues to exploit differences between the warlord forces, was wary about how much support the rebels should be given. The upshot was that when Chiang launched a full-scale invasion of Fujian at the end of December, far sooner than his adversaries had expected, the communist leaders hesitated. By the time the Red Army did finally start offering the 19th Route Army limited aid, it was already defeated, and the nationalists were able to return to the main task at hand, the encirclement campaign.

  During the two months’ respite which the Fujian expedition provided, the Central Committee held its long-delayed Fifth Plenum, which underscored anew the ambivalence of Mao's position. He was elected a full member of the Politburo, a post he had last held in the Party's formative years nearly a decade earlier.II The promotion could hardly have been denied him, given his role as ‘Head of State’ and the continued support he was receiving from Moscow.82 But he was admitted in eleventh and last place in the rank order. Throughout the four-day meeting, Bo Gu and other leaders criticised his ‘right-opportunist views’, and when it ended, it was announced that Zhang Wentian would replace him as head of government, leaving him only a figurehead role as Chairman of the Republic.83

  He showed his contempt for these proceedings, which took place in January 1934, by refusing to attend. This was on the pretext of illness – one of Mao's ‘diplomatic disorders’, Bo Gu mockingly remarked84 – though ill-health did not stop him presiding over the base area's Second National Congress a few days later, at which he delivered a speech lasting nine hours.

  Later Mao would argue that the Fifth Plenum marked the apogee of the Returned Students’ ‘left-deviationist line’.85 Bo's report, which was adopted as the plenum's political resolution, cast caution to the winds, proclaiming that a ‘direct revolutionary situation’, the prerequisite for nationwide insurrection, now existed in China, and that ‘the flames of the revolutionary struggle are blazing across the entire country’.86 Nothing could have been further from the truth. Even as he spoke, Chiang Kai-shek's troops were resuming their inexorable march south.

  The ‘blockhouse tactics’ the nationalists employed in the fifth encirclement were quite different from those of earlier campaigns. This time they built long lines of stone forts, with crenellated battlements and walls up to 20 feet thick, like the watch-towers of medieval Europe, each able to hold a full company of troops and often only a mile or so apart, linked by newly made roads. These ‘turtle shells’, as the communists called them, stretched in a great arc, more than 200 miles long, along the northern and western sides of the base area. As the GMD armies inched forward, local troops consolidated their control of the areas in the rear, while the vanguard built a new line of blockhouses, a few miles in front of the old. Chiang's German military advisers ensured that the strategy was executed with teutonic thoroughness. In the year the campaign lasted, the nationalists built 14,000 blockhouses, hemming the Red Army and the population it defended into a steadily dwindling base.87

  The communists had a German adviser, too. Otto Braun, sent by the Comintern, reached the base area from Shanghai at the end of September 1933. He had spent three years studying conventional warfare at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow.88 But the tactic he proposed, known as ‘short, sharp thrusts’, which called for lightning attacks on nationalist units whenever they left the blockhouses to move forward, proved a total failure.89 It could hardly have been otherwise: Chiang had forced the communists to fight, on his terms, a positional war of attrition in which his forces had a numerical advantage of more than ten to one. Any tactic based on that premise had to fail. The alternative, which Mao suggested at least twice in 1934, was for the entire Red Army to break out to the north or west, and fight outside the blockhouse area, on terrain better suited to its mobile style of warfare, in Zhejiang or Hunan.90 Whether, in the long term, given the nationalists’ overwhelming strength, that would have succeeded any better, is a moot point, for it was never tested. Bo Gu and Braun rejected not only Mao's ideas but all similar proposals as ‘flightist’ and defeatist.91

  As the military pressures escalated, political paranoia resumed. In the army, security officers led execution squads on to the battlefield to ‘supervise’ the fighting. Geng Biao, a 25-year-old regimental commander, recalled what happened when his troops lost control of a key position. ‘I saw [Security Director] Luo Ruiqing coming up, with a Mauser pistol, at the head of an “action team”. My heart skipped a beat. Something nasty was going to happen! At that time … those suspected [of wavering] would be beheaded … Sure enough, [he] came straight up to me and pointed his pistol at my head, demanding loudly: “What the hell's the matter with you? Why did you withdraw?”’92

  Geng was in luck. He was allowed to fight on, and survived to become, years later, China's Ambassador to Moscow. Others were less fortunate. But it was a far cry from the principles of the all-volunteer army that Mao had proclaimed on the Jinggangshan seven years before.

  Civilians fared still worse. Mao's land regulations were abandoned, and a Red pogrom was launched in which thousands of landlords and rich peasants were massacred.93 Tens of thousands fled as refugees to the White areas. In April 1934, the Red Army suffered yet another disastrous defeat, at Guangchang, seventy miles north of Ruijin.94 With military encirclement came economic strangulation. Newly recruited peasant conscripts deserted in droves. As signs of collapse multiplied, acts of sabotage, rumoured or real, by secret society members and clansmen hostile to the communist cause, fuelled new efforts to ‘ferret out counter-revolutionaries’, until the whole area was swept up in a vicious spiral of hatred and despair.

  Soon after the Guangchang defeat, probably in early May, Bo Gu and Zhou Enlai realised that the base area might have to be abandoned. The Comintern was informed. Bo, Zhou and Otto Braun formed a ‘three-man group’ to draw up contingency plans.

  Mao knew nothing of this. The Politburo was kept in
the dark through the summer.95 In any case, he wanted no part in decisions which he could not influence and with which he disagreed. After the Fifth Plenum, he stopped attending Military Commission meetings, and spent the whole of May and June on a visit to the base area's southern counties, as far away as possible from where the real battles were taking place.96 At the end of July, when nationalist bombing raids forced the Party to evacuate Shazhouba, he and He Zizhen moved to an isolated Daoist temple on Yunshishan, ‘Cloud Stone Mountain’, set amid clusters of pine and bamboo in a landscape of fantastically weathered rocks, a few miles further west.97 The Politburo and the Military Commission were installed in another village nearby, but his contacts with them were minimal.98 He was ‘out of the loop’ because he wanted to be.

  Yet already there were straws in the wind that the balance of forces was changing.

  That autumn, Mao's political troubles began to affect his health again. Dr Nelson Fu, a mission-educated physician who headed the Red Army's primitive hospital service, was sufficiently concerned to assign him a permanent medical orderly. In September, in Yudu, he developed a high fever, and for several days was semi-conscious with a temperature of 105 degrees. Dr Fu made the sixty-mile journey there on horseback and diagnosed cerebral malaria, which he cured with massive doses of caffeine and quinine.99

  The man who ordered Dr Fu to go to Yudu was Zhang Wentian, Mao's successor as head of government and formerly Bo Gu's close ally. After the Guangchang defeat, he and Bo had had a fierce row over Otto Braun's military tactics, which Zhang said took no account of the terrain or the disparity of forces. Bo retorted that he was talking like a Menshevik. Over the next four months, as communist strength, dispersed across six fronts, bled away in a debilitating war of attrition, while Bo promoted the slogan, ‘Don't give up a single inch of Soviet territory!’, Zhang's disaffection deepened. When Mao was at Yunshishan, Zhang was the only senior leader to visit him. He no longer concealed his frustration with Bo's dogmatism and inexperience.100