by Philip Short
Some died because their bodies could not assimilate the raw, unmilled grain. Later units, maddened by hunger, picked the undigested kernels from the bloody faeces of those who had gone before, washed them as best they could and ate them.48
The rank and file, southern plainsmen, brought up in the bustling villages of the coast, had the will to live sucked out of them by the paralysing emptiness of the place. Ji Pengfei, later China’s Foreign Minister, then a young medical orderly, recalled: ‘Every morning we had to take a count to see how many were left. We found some who were not dead. Their eyes were open. But they could not rise … We got them to their feet, and they slumped back into the bog, dead.’49 In the crossing of the grasslands, the First Front Army lost as many men as it had in the Snowy Mountains, three months before.
Mao's right column crossed first, taking six days to get from Mowe, at the southern edge of the basin, to Baxi, forty miles across the swamp to the north. Back on dry land, they decisively defeated a Guomindang division which had come over the mountains from the east to block their path, inflicting several thousand casualties.50
By then it was the end of August. Mao's troops halted to rest, while Zhang's left column, sixty miles away on the western edge of the basin, launched its own attempt to cross the morass. But when they reached the Gequ, a tributary of the Yellow River, they found it was in flood and decided to turn back. Zhang announced the decision in a fretful, oddly childish wireless signal, in which he blamed Mao for their plight and ordered both columns to head back towards the south: ‘Facing the endless grasslands and unable to go forward, we will die here if we do nothing. This place is misery … You insisted that we make for [Baxi]. Now look at the result! Going north is not only inopportune, but it will cause all kinds of difficulties.’51
That triggered a furious exchange of radio messages. The Politburo insisted that the original plan be respected. Zhang insisted that it be abandoned. Then, on September 8, he issued an order to Fourth Army officers seconded to the First Army to return to their original units.
The Politburo met that night. Zhou Enlai, still laid low by illness, joined the discussion from his litter. They approved a telegram, pleading in the most conciliatory terms for Zhang to reconsider: ‘We, your brothers, hope that you will think it over again … and go north. This is a critical moment for the Red Army. It demands that all of us be prudent.’52
Next morning, he appeared to back down.
But something about Zhang's message did not quite ring true. Mao's old rival from Jinggangshan, bull-headed Peng Dehuai, sensed a trap and deployed troops secretly in a protective shield around Politburo headquarters. He asked Mao whether they should take the Fourth Army cadres hostage, in case they were attacked. Mao pondered the question, but said no. Two hours later, the Chief of Staff, Ye Jianying, intercepted a second, secret, message from Zhang. It ordered the commander, Xu Xiangqian, and his commissar, Chen Changhao, both Fourth Army stalwarts, to lead the right column back to the south. Between the lines it was implied that if necessary they should use force against anyone who might try to stop them.53
Mao, Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian and Zhou Enlai met again at Peng's First Army headquarters. They agreed that there was now no choice but to strike out on their own. Lin Biao, whose men were at Ejie, twenty miles to the north-west, was ordered to stay where he was, and await developments.
Later Mao would remember that night as a time when the fate of the Red Army hung by a thread.54 In the year that had passed since they left Yudu, they had marched nearly 5,000 miles, fighting more than two hundred battles, across some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world. Their illiterate peasant troops had endured hardships that no other modern army had survived. Conventional military science holds that a unit which loses a quarter of its men is finished as a fighting force. By the time the Red Army emerged from the grasslands, more than nine-tenths of those who had set out had been lost. Yet now, just as the end seemed in sight, the pitiful remnants of this extraordinary sacrifice were about to complete their own destruction by unleashing a bloody conflict among themselves.
At 2 a.m., in pitch darkness, Peng's forces silently moved out. Ye Jianying and Yang Shangkun stole away from Xu's front headquarters to join them, bringing with them a set of maps.
Their flight was soon discovered. Chen Changhao proposed impetuously that troops be sent in pursuit. Xu, dour military man that he was, refused. Instead, another of Zhang's supporters, a brash Returned Student named Li Te, set off with a cavalry escort to try to persuade them to return. Otto Braun, who was with Mao, pulled Li from his horse. The Politburo looked on, bemused, as they screamed at each other in Russian. Mao punctured the tension with an aphorism: ‘You don't tie the bride and groom at the altar,’ he told Li, ‘and you don't stop a family feuding.’ Any Fourth Army man who wished to stay behind could do so, he added, but the First Army would go north.55
Mao and his colleagues sent one last message to Zhang, ordering him to follow them. It concluded: ‘No objections! No delay! No disobedience!’ There was no response.56
While Xu Xiangqian and the rest of the right column made their way back across the grasslands to meet Zhang and a deeply unhappy Zhu De, who would spend the next year with the Fourth Army as a semi-hostage,57 the First Army leaders had other, more pressing concerns. Nationalist troops were advancing in strength from the east. Peng took Zhu's place as commander, while Mao returned to his old post of Political Commissar.58 They now had fewer than 10,000 men. If they allowed themselves to be hemmed in against the marshes, they would risk complete destruction.
At Ejie the situation had become so desperate that Mao revived an idea he had first raised in Sichuan. If they could break through to the north, they would head for the Soviet Union, and try to set up a new base area, with Russian support, on the border of Outer Mongolia or Xinjiang. ‘In the past,’ he acknowledged, ‘the Party Centre opposed such a policy … But things are different now …. We must … break through … and obtain guidance and assistance from the [Communist] International … We are not an independent communist party. It is wrong to refuse absolutely to ask for help … Otherwise we will have to fight a guerrilla war endlessly.’59
It was the first time since the earliest days of the Chinese Party – and it would be the last – that Mao spoke openly of turning to the Soviet Union to save the Chinese revolution from destruction.
In the end, it did not come to that. Two days’ march to the east, at Lazikou Pass, an impregnable, heavily fortified nationalist choke-point on the Bailongjiang, the White Dragon River, where the valley narrowed to a defile only a few yards across, between sheer cliffs more than a thousand feet high, the Red Army scored another of the astonishing military tours de force that would make its name a legend. A twenty-man commando group from Yang Chengwu's regiment climbed the precipitous crags behind, and hurled down grenades from the heights, taking the defenders by surprise. It was the last major battle of the Long March.60 Four days later, on September 21, the First Army entered Hadapu, in southern Gansu, the first Han town they had seen since leaving Yunnan four months earlier. There, from a GMD newspaper, they learned that a communist base area existed in Shaanxi. The plan to make for the Soviet Union was shelved. Instead, the army headed east across Ningxia, to Wuqi, near Bao'an, in the parched highlands of China's far north-west.61
For the next month, they marched 600 miles across a lunar landscape of great conical hills of bare cappucino-coloured soil, as fine as talcum powder, carved like tiered wedding cakes into high terraces, so smooth they seemed to have been cut with a knife, and scarred with huge keyhole-shaped ravines, plunging down hundreds of feet into wide flat canyons below. It was poorer than any part of Han China they had seen before. Every two or three years, the harvest failed from drought or floods. The people lived in caves, cut into the soft loess cliffs. But to the Red Army, it seemed like a rest-cure. There were skirmishes with Moslem cavalry, but after the breakthrough at Lazikou the main GMD armies held back. Messengers went ahea
d to the new base area, which was led by two local men, Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang. They had both been arrested in a purge of suspected counter-revolutionaries, launched by Xu Haidong, a Red Army leader who had reached Shaanxi a few weeks earlier after fighting his way north from the old E-Yu-Wan base area. The Politburo arrived just in time to order their release.62
In this arid, desert country, Mao would spend the next twelve years. On October 22, 1935, a year and four days after he had left Yudu, the March was formally declared to be at an end. Of those who had set out with him, fewer than 5,000 remained.63
During this immense peregrination, the wider world beyond China's borders was not entirely forgotten. In the south-west, the army had put up slogans, calling on Chinese to unite against Japan.64 In June, Mao had learned from the Fourth Army that Japanese forces had moved into Inner Mongolia, and the Politburo had issued a statement condemning Chiang Kai-shek's failure to stop them.65 But it was not until the First Front Army reached Hadapu, in late September, that Mao became aware that the mood in the country was beginning to change, and Chiang's policy of appeasement was finally wearing thin.
That summer, Japan had forced the Guomindang government to withdraw Chinese troops from the vicinity of Beijing and Tianjin; to dismiss provincial officials regarded as hostile to Japan; and to promulgate a humiliating ‘goodwill mandate’, banning expressions of anti-Japanese sentiment. Widespread public anger had resulted.66
Most of this Mao could only guess at. But what he did learn was enough to convince him that the decision to make for Shaanxi had been correct. ‘Zhang Guotao calls us opportunists,’ he told a meeting of regimental commanders in mid-September. ‘Well, who are the opportunists now? Japanese imperialism is invading China, and we are going north to resist Japan.’ A week later the Politburo Standing Committee declared that north Shaanxi would become ‘a new anti-Japanese base.’67 To Mao, that decision was a beacon. After a year of haphazard retreat, the Party finally had a new purpose. His instinct to go north, even if for the wrong reasons, had been proved right. Zhang's decision to go south had been wrong. Mao had matured since the day, eight years earlier, when, in a letter to the Politburo, he had written of ‘jumping for joy’ at a decision which had pleased him. But his elation at the Party's renewed mission, to subdue the Grey Dragon of the East, Japan, was just as strongly felt. In the mountains of southern Ningxia, as he looked out for the first time across the highlands that would take the Red Army to its new home, he expressed his feelings in a poem.
High on the crest of Liupan Mountain,
Our banners flap idly in the western breeze.
Today we hold fast the long cord,
When shall we bind the Grey Dragon?68
Mao was not alone in turning his thoughts to Japan in the autumn of 1935. Stalin was watching the rise of European fascism, and the fledgeling alliance between Berlin, Rome and Tokyo, with growing alarm. At the Comintern's Seventh Congress in July 1935, a new strategy was unveiled: the anti-fascist united front, in which communists and social democrats, formerly deadly rivals, were to join together directly in a common struggle to defend the proletariat, and its champion, the Soviet Union, against the fascist Powers.
In France and Spain, the new policy produced Popular Front governments, bringing together heterogeneous coalitions of anarchists, communists, liberals, socialists and syndicalists.
For the Chinese Party, the road was less clear. On August 1, Wang Ming, the CCP's representative in Moscow, issued a declaration calling for the establishment of a ‘unified government of national defence’ to resist Japan. In China, however, there were no anarchists, liberals and socialists with whom the communists could make common cause. There was only Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang; and Chiang, in Wang Ming's words, was a traitor, a ‘scum with the face of a man and the heart of a beast’, as much an enemy as the Japanese themselves. So while Wang's Moscow declaration reiterated the CCP's long-standing offer to join forces with any White army, including Chiang's own GMD troops, provided they stopped attacking the soviet areas and agreed to fight Japan, in practice it appeared no more likely than before that the offer would be taken up.69
News of these developments reached Shaanxi in mid-November. By then the Red Army had moved south to fight off a Guomindang force from Xian. Another month would elapse before the Politburo met at Wayaobu, a walled county town of one-storey grey-brick houses, fifty miles west of the Yellow River, to discuss the implications of the new strategy.70
There, on Christmas Day, 1935, it passed a resolution marking a shift in political line every bit as dramatic as the change in military strategy approved a year earlier. At Zunyi, the conventional warfare tactics of the Returned Student leadership had been jettisoned. Now at Wayaobu, the Russian-inspired dogmatism that had dominated Party decision-making since the Fourth Plenum in January 1931 was swept aside as well.
In its place came pragmatic, flexible policies, designed to win maximum public support with a minimum of ideological baggage.
The CCP, the resolution declared, could not lead the struggle against Japan and Chiang Kai-shek by relying on the working class alone. The rich peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, even the national bourgeoisie, all had their role to play too. Leftism, not rightism, it went on, was now the main danger to the communist cause. Left ‘closed-doorism’ manifested itself in a reluctance to change tactics to cope with new situations; clinging to policies which were divorced from practice; and ‘an inability to apply Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism to the specific, concrete conditions of China, thus turning them into rigid dogmas’. Party members needed to understand that victory would be achieved when people became convinced that they represented the interests of the majority of Chinese, not by slavishly following ‘empty, abstract communist principles’. To that end, the land and property of rich peasants would no longer be confiscated. Shopkeepers, small capitalists and intellectuals would enjoy the same political rights as workers and peasants, and their economic and cultural freedoms would be protected. Large-scale capitalists would be treated favourably. The ‘Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviet Republic’ would be renamed ‘the Soviet People's Republic’, to signify that all citizens had a place in it.71
The Wayaobu meeting was chaired, and the resolution drafted, not by Mao but by Zhang Wentian. This reflected the formal power structure: Zhang was still acting Party leader. But it was also a political manoeuvre, of the kind at which Mao excelled. As a member of the old Fourth Plenum leadership, who better than Zhang to unveil policies which implicitly condemned everything he and his colleagues had once stood for?72
Approved on the eve of Mao's forty-second birthday, the Wayaobu resolution marked the start of his ideological ascendancy in the Party. Two days later, at a rally of activists, he savoured his success:
The advocates of closed-door tactics say the … forces of the revolution must be pure, absolutely pure, and the road of the revolution must be straight, absolutely straight. Nothing is correct except what is literally recorded in Holy Writ. [They say] the national bourgeoisie is entirely and eternally counter-revolutionary. Not an inch must be conceded to the rich peasants. The yellow trade unions must be fought tooth and nail … Was there ever a cat that did not eat fish [they ask,] or a warlord who was not counter-revolutionary? … It follows, therefore, that closed-doorism is the sole wonder-working magic, while the united front is an opportunist tactic. Comrades, which is right? … I answer without a moment's hesitation: the united front, not closed-doorism. Three-year-olds have many ideas that are right, but they cannot be entrusted with serious national or world affairs because they do not understand them yet. Marxism-Leninism is opposed to [such] ‘infantile disorders’ found in the revolutionary ranks. Like every other activity in the world, revolution always follows a tortuous road, not a straight one … Closed-doorism just ‘drives the fish into deep waters and the sparrows into the thickets’, and it will drive the millions upon millions of the masses … over to the enemy's side.73
There w
as no open criticism at Wayaobu of Bo Gu, Zhou Enlai, or any of the other former leftists. Mao's interest was not to alienate those who had been his adversaries, but to win them over. Zhang's role was to help build a consensus for the hard slog that lay ahead.
Hard slog it was. The Shaanxi base might be a haven of peace after the hardships of the Long March, but it was so poor that even the wretched hill villages of Guizhou and south-west Sichuan looked rich and fertile by comparison, and it was ringed by enemies. Moslem cavalry patrolled the western marches, towards Ningxia and Qinghai. Yan Xishan's White armies held Shanxi, to the east. Zhang Xueliang's North-East Army, which had been expelled from Manchuria by the Japanese, had just been sent to garrison the south. If the Red Army was to survive, let alone prosper, in its new home, it would have to find provisions and recruits, and to neutralise at least one of the hostile forces encircling it.
Even before the Wayaobu conference, Mao had concluded that the weakest point in Chiang's armoury was Zhang Xueliang's Manchurian force.74 Zhang was in his early thirties, the son of a bandit leader who in the early part of the century had fought and killed his way to become one of the most powerful warlords in China. The Young Marshal, as he was widely known, to distinguish him from his father, the Old Marshal, was a ruthless, often devious, sometimes naive young man, who had recently kicked a powerful opium habit. But he was also a patriot. The Old Marshal had been assassinated by Japanese agents. Zhang himself had lost his country to the Japanese, partly because Chiang Kai-shek had encouraged him not to resist them. Zhang's troops had lost their homes. They had no interest in fighting communists. They hated Japan.
From late November 1935, Mao deluged the Young Marshal's commanders with offers of a truce and a joint campaign against the Japanese invaders. ‘We are Chinese,’ he wrote. ‘We eat the same Chinese grain. We live in the same land. The Red Army and the North-East Army are from the same Chinese earth. Why should we be enemies? Why should we kill each other? Today I propose to your honourable army that we cease fighting … and sign a peace accord.’75
