by Philip Short
Wang Jiaxiang, who had been wounded during the fourth encirclement, and now had to be carried everywhere on a litter with mortar fragments embedded in his body, was another Politburo member sympathetic to Mao's cause.
Bo Gu at first gave instructions that the three men should be assigned to different units during the Red Army's ‘strategic transfer’, as the abandonment of the base area was euphemistically termed, but for reasons that are unclear, later relented and let them travel together.101 It was a political misjudgement which was to cost him dear.
But Zhang and Wang were essentially bit-players. The man Mao really needed to win over was Zhou Enlai. During the disastrous battles at Guangchang, Zhou had been pushed aside, and Bo himself had taken over as General Political Commissar.102 From then on, Mao cultivated him assiduously. During his tour of the southern counties in June, he sent Zhou a careful briefing on the military situation along the south Fujian front. That autumn, he compiled a handbook on guerrilla warfare, which Zhou arranged to have issued as a Military Commission directive. It was Zhou who had approved Mao's request to go to Yudu in September, where he drew up a security report on the districts which were to serve as the main staging area for the Red army as it gathered for the move west.103 But Zhou was a cautious man. He had had his fingers burnt once before defending Mao. As long as Bo Gu had the Comintern's backing, he was not disposed to mount a challenge.
Thus, when Mao, accompanied by his bodyguards, set out from Yudu's East Gate, late on the afternoon of Thursday, October 18, 1934, for the crossing point on the Gan River, everything was still to play for.
After seven years of warfare, three of them as Head of State of the Chinese Soviet Republic, his future was as uncertain as ever. All his worldly possessions amounted to two blankets, a cotton sheet, an oilcloth, an overcoat, a broken umbrella and a bundle of books. He crossed the river by torchlight, as darkness was falling, with what mixed feelings at leaving the base area can only be imagined. An armada of small boats plied the wide, slow muddy waters. It took three days before the entire column, more than 40,000 troops and a similar number of officials and bearers, was safely on the other side.104 He Zizhen, who was pregnant again, had left Ruijin earlier as part of the nurses’ contingent, one of only twenty women, all senior leaders’ wives, who were allowed to take part. In order to accompany Mao, she had had to steel herself to leave behind their son, now nearly two years old. Xiao Mao, as the little boy was called, was given to his old wet nurse to be looked after. But in the whirlwind of destruction that engulfed the area after the communists withdrew, he was moved for safety to another family. There, all trace of him was lost. After 1949, an exhaustive search was undertaken. Xiao Mao was never found.105 With his abandonment, another small part of Mao's humanity withered on the vine.
I This was the term Stalin was then using against Bukharin and other members of the Soviet ‘anti-Party bloc’. It was therefore an extremely serious political accusation, implying systematic opposition to Party policy.
II Mao was one of the five members of the Bureau of the Central Committee, as the Politburo was initially called, from June 1923 to the end of 1924. He returned to the leadership as an alternate member of the CC in May 1927, and was a Politburo alternate from August to November of that year. In June 1928, he was re-elected a full CC member, a position he held continuously for the next forty-eight years. At the Third Plenum in September 1930, he rejoined the Politburo as an alternate member. From the summer of 1931, following the arrest and execution of Xiang Zhongfa, until the convocation of the Fifth Plenum, the Politburo ceased to function (although, confusingly, its members retained Politburo status). It was replaced by the provisional Centre, whose leaders, Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian, were not Politburo members. In the spring of 1933, they took charge of the base area's Central Bureau, which ceased to exist when the Politburo was formally reconstituted in January 1934.
CHAPTER TEN
In Search of the Grey Dragon: The Long March North
While the Red Army marched and fought its way across southern China, half a world away in Europe, the cockpit of the Powers, the dread forces that had emerged from the carnage of the Great War were making the opening moves, during that baleful autumn of 1934, in a brutal quest for power that would soon ignite a human holocaust on an altogether different scale. In the elegant spa of Bad Wiessee, an hour's drive from Munich, the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, chose the pre-dawn hours of June 30 to launch a blood-purge of the Sturm Abteilung, the brown-shirted storm-troopers who had helped him to power but had since become an obstacle, arguably the final obstacle, to uniting the Nazis, and the nation, behind the Führer and his ideas. From the murderous seeds sown that night grew the practice of the Nazi extermination camps where more than six million Jews, gipsies, homosexuals, communists and other ‘undesirables’ perished.1 Five months later, Stalin followed suit. On the afternoon of December 1, a lone assassin entered the Communist Party's regional headquarters in Leningrad and shot dead Stalin's putative, and too popular, rival, Sergei Kirov. It was the signal for the Great Purge, which, over the next five years, swept away in a cleansing fire more than a million old Bolsheviks, Trotskyists, Bukharinites, Red Army commanders, party functionaries, secret police, and opponents, real and presumed, of every political stripe, and sent ten times that number into labour camps, where many also perished. On that scale of things, Mao's campaign against the AB-tuan in Jiangxi four years earlier was but a distant foretaste, an amuse-gueule before a blood-feast.
But the event for which 1934 is remembered above all, the trigger for the infernal machinery of the far greater slaughter to come, occurred in a much more remote land. On December 5, fighting broke out between Ethiopians and troops from Italian Somaliland in a dispute over water wells at Walwal, a small oasis in the Ogaden Desert. Six days later, as Mao and his comrades gathered for the fateful meeting at Tongdao that paved the way for his resumption of power, Mussolini presented an ultimatum demanding reparations. The Walwal Incident, as it was known, became the pretext for Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, which led in turn to the formation of the Axis linking Italy, Germany and later, Japan, and put the last nail in the coffin of the League of Nations, created a decade earlier expressly to prevent such crises escalating into war.
Neither the communists, in China or in Moscow, nor the imperialist Powers themselves, saw clearly where these shifts were leading. But ever since Japan's occupation of Manchuria, in which the other Powers had acquiesced, Russia had felt menaced. It had already been defeated once by Japan, in 1905, and memories were still fresh of the depredations of the Japanese army in Siberia after 1918. From 1931 onward, Moscow and its acolytes began chanting a new tune. The main danger now, they declared, was not that contradictions within the imperialist camp would lead to a new world war, but that the Powers, led by Japan, would wage an imperialist war against Russia. This was the basis for the Comintern slogan, ‘Defend the Soviet Union!’, which Bo Gu and Li Lisan had echoed so faithfully. It was to be realised by creating a ‘united front from below,’ in which the world communist movement was to mobilise non-communist support for an anti-imperialist, anti-Japanese crusade, while refraining from formal alliances with bourgeois political parties, regarded as irredeemably compromised.
In the world beyond the base area, the Western democracies’ appeasement of Germany, Italy and Japan continued until the underlying political realities had become so hideously distorted by the triumph of fear and greed over principle that communist Russia and Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression pact.
In Ruijin, it was all far simpler. For the next five years, the Party's propaganda to the White areas was dominated by the claim that the communists would fight Japan, but Chiang Kai-shek would not. That was untrue: Chiang had begun preparing for war with Japan as early as 1932. But he was determined to finish off the communists first, and while he did so, he made concession after humiliating concession to the Japanese aggressors.2 That allowed Mao to say that the Guomindang was acting as the ‘ru
nning dog of imperialism,’ selling out China's national interests by ‘shameless non-resistance.’3 So long as Chiang and his allies were in power, opposing Japan would be impossible; therefore the first task of all true patriots was to overthrow the GMD regime. In April 1932, the Chinese Soviet Republic issued a formal declaration of war against the Tokyo government and called for the formation of an ‘anti-Japanese Volunteer Army’. Mao and Zhu De offered to sign a truce with any nationalist commander who agreed to stop fighting the communists and oppose Japan instead. In August 1934, when Red Army units broke out of the base area for a diversionary operation in Zhejiang, the Party described them as an ‘anti-Japanese vanguard’ on their way to fight the invaders in the north.4
Among educated Chinese, these gestures, empty though they were, struck a chord. That Japan's aggression had gone unpunished was a terrible humiliation. However much Chiang Kai-shek might argue that the communists were the greater threat, he had failed to defend the country's honour.
On the other hand, Chiang held power. The communists did not. As they marched out of Jiangxi, and out of the newspaper headlines, to become little more than a footnote to the great events elsewhere, their calls for unity against the Japanese menace seemed to many increasingly irrelevant. ‘Communism in China is dying,’ wrote Chiang's amanuensis, Tang Leang-li. The treaty-port press agreed. ‘If the government follows up the campaign along the lines adopted in Jiangxi,’ the Shanghai China Weekly Review concluded, ‘the whole thing will collapse into plain banditry.’5
Only the Japanese correspondents took a more sombre view, arguing that from the safety of the remote interior, the communists would pose a far more formidable challenge than they ever had from the coast.6 Japan, of course, had its own agenda. Anything that made the Guomindang's hold on China seem more tenuous comforted its imperial ambitions. Yet the Japanese were right about the communists, just as the communists would prove right about Japan.
When the Red Army halted at Zunyi, in January 1935, Mao achieved for the first time a dominant position in the Party leadership because his colleagues recognised that he had been right when everyone else (Bo Gu, Zhou Enlai and Otto Braun, in particular) had been wrong. Had the base area not fallen; had Bo Gu been less insecure and more willing to heed advice; had the Red Army not been so badly mauled in the botched crossing of the Xiang River; had Braun been less of a dictator, Mao's hour might not have come. They turned to him because every other recourse had failed.
Unlike the many earlier occasions when he had languished in disgrace, to find himself resurrected almost overnight, this time his eclipse had been partial and his return was similarly veiled. Officially, he was, and remained, Chairman of the now abandoned Chinese Soviet Republic. The only formal change in his position was his promotion to the Standing Committee of the Politburo, and his designation as chief military adviser to Zhou Enlai (the role that Zhou had tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain for him at the Ningdu conference, two years earlier). There was also a second, more important, difference. This time he was competing not for a subordinate position, as political commissar of an army or secretary of a border region. Now at the age or forty-one, he was aiming for the top.
If Tongdao was the first step, Zunyi and the meetings that followed in the spring of 1935 were the first stage in a conquest of power which Mao had the good sense to realise could only be accomplished slowly. Between Standing Committee member and leader of the Party yawned a political gulf which others had tried to cross and failed. Between Zunyi and the north-west, the communists’ eventual destination, lay a desperate military campaign that none of them could be confident of winning.
The Red Army, in Zunyi, was down to 30,000 men, from 86,000 who had set out three months earlier. It had not gained a major victory for more than a year. That it had survived at all was due less to its own military prowess than to the instinct for self-preservation of the warlords along the way, who had preferred to stand aside and let the communists pass, rather than risk their strength for their nominal ally, and real rival, Chiang Kai-shek.7
Mao's first task, therefore, was to try to restore military morale.
This proved even harder than he had thought. The Zunyi meeting itself came to an abrupt end when the military commanders had to race back to their units to fend off an attack by warlord troops advancing from the south.8 In the next five weeks, the Red Army suffered a further series of dismal reverses. An attempt to cross the Jinshajiang, the River of Golden Sand, in the upper reaches of the Yangtse, to set up a new base area in Sichuan, almost turned into a disaster on the scale of the Xiang River defeat. The army marched into an ambush by combined Sichuan and Guizhou warlord units. By the time it had fought its way out, another 3,000 men had been lost.9
As the army retreated, with the enemy in hot pursuit, a moment came that He Zizhen had been dreading. She went into labour with her fourth child. They stopped at an abandoned hut and she gave birth in the litter in which she was being carried. The baby, a girl, was left with a peasant family nearby. Knowing this time that the separation would be final, she did not even pause to give the child a name.10
Finally, at the end of February, the communists’ luck turned. The battle of Loushan Pass allowed them to retake Zunyi, capturing 3,000 prisoners and routing two Guomindang divisions led by one of Chiang's top commanders.11 Mao's relief, and exultation, produced one of his loveliest poems:
The west wind blows cold. From afar,
In the frosty air, the wild geese call in the morning moonlight,
In the morning moonlight,
The clatter of horses’ hooves rings sharp,
And the bugle's note is muted.
Say not the strong pass has an iron guard,
Today, with a single step, we shall cross the summit,
We shall cross the summit!
There the hills are blue as the sea,
And the dying sun like blood.12
That spring, the Red Army became once again the ‘Zhu–Mao Army’, with Zhu De as Commander-in-Chief, Mao as Political Commissar, and a new ‘three-man group’ of Zhou, Mao and his ally, the wounded Wang Jiaxiang, still carried on a litter, providing strategic guidance.13 Its old designation, the First Front Army, was restored.14 Orthodox military tactics were abandoned. For the next two months, Mao engaged in a dazzling, pyrotechnic display of mobile warfare, criss-crossing Guizhou and Yunnan, that left pursuing armies bemused, confounded Chiang Kai-shek's planners and perplexed even many of his own commanders. Four times they crossed the Chishui, the Red River, between Guizhou and Sichuan, before marching south in a vast arc, passing within a few miles of the provincial capital, Guiyang, where Chiang had established his headquarters, and then threatening Yunnan's chief city, Kunming, 400 miles away in the south-west, only to swing north again, finally crossing the Upper Yangtse where it was least expected, at the beginning of May.15
Mao himself called the Guizhou strategy the proudest moment of his military career.16 In Shanghai, the China Weekly Review admitted: ‘The Red forces have brainy men. It would be blind folly to deny it.’17 A Guomindang garrison commander said tersely: ‘They had Chiang Kai-shek by the nose.’18
Chiang's spokesmen scrambled to cover up the government's embarrassment. It was announced that Zhu De had been killed; that his men were guarding his body, wrapped in a shroud of red silk; that the ‘notorious chieftain, Mao Tse-tung’ was gravely ill, being carried on a stretcher; that the ‘Red remnants’ had been smashed.19 But by then the Red Army was already out of reach, encamped outside the walled county town of Huili, thirty-five miles north of the river, secure in the knowledge that every boat for a hundred miles had been made fast on the northern bank, and that Chiang's Yunnanese troops had neither the means nor the will for pursuit.
There, at an enlarged Politburo meeting, Mao berated those who had doubted him: Lin Biao and his commissar, Nie Rongzhen, who had complained that Mao's tortuous odyssey was exhausting their men to no purpose and had suggested that Peng Dehuai should take operational c
ommand instead; Peng himself, always itching for a fight, who had accepted that idea rather too readily; Liu Shaoqi and Yang Shangkun, who had proposed that the army should stop wandering and try to set up a fixed base; and no doubt others besides. Lin Biao, the youngest, still only twenty-seven, was let off with a scolding. ‘You're nothing but a baby!’ Mao told him. ‘What the hell do you know? Can't you see it was necessary for us to march along the curve of the bow?’ Peng, as usual, got most of the blame, and made a mild self-criticism. But, in his hour of triumph, Mao could afford to be magnanimous. His aim at Huili was to unite the Party and military leadership behind him for the trials yet to come. They, on their side, had to recognise that, once again, he had been proved right and they had been proved wrong.20
The campaign had not been without cost. The Red Army now numbered little more than 20,000 men.21 Yet Mao had extricated them from a situation which many had felt was hopeless. Never again, after Huili, would the corps commanders and the Party leaders accompanying the First Front Army challenge Mao's strategic judgements, or his leadership.
The problem remained, however, where the Red Army should go next. As the ‘March to the West’ had become the ‘Long March’, one improvised destination after another had been jettisoned. The Politburo's plans to link up with He Long in north-west Hunan; to set up a new base around Zunyi; to establish soviet areas in southern Sichuan, in the Yunnan–Guizhou–Sichuan border region and now in south-west Sichuan, all had been found wanting. The soldiers, and their officers, needed reassurance that their leaders knew where they were headed. At Huili, at long last, a clear decision was taken. They were to go due north, to link up with Zhang Guotao's Fourth Front Army, which had set out three years earlier from E-Yu-Wan and was now based in northern Sichuan.22
