by Philip Short
Red Army units were instructed to release captured White officers, and to care for the enemy's wounded. In line with this directive, at the beginning of January 1936, Peng Dehuai released an officer named Gao Fuyuan, who had been captured two months earlier. Gao had been a schoolmate of Zhang Xueliang, and when he returned to Zhang's headquarters at Luochuan, a hundred miles south of Wayaobu, he convinced the Manchurian leader that the communists’ offers of co-operation were sincere. A week later, Gao arranged for a message to be dropped to Peng from a nationalist aircraft on a supply run to a Guomindang garrison the communists were besieging. On January 19, Mao's envoy, Li Kenong, arrived at Luochuan to begin negotiations.76
It turned out to be surprisingly easy. The Young Marshal received Li next day, and agreed at once to adopt a ‘passive’ stance in the civil war. The only sticking point concerned Chiang Kai-shek. In Li's negotiating brief, Mao had argued that resisting Japan and opposing the ‘national traitors’ were two sides of the same coin; one was not possible without the other. This the Manchurian leader adamantly rejected. He was ready for a truce with the communists, but not to come out openly against his own Commander-in-Chief.77 By the time the year was out, both men would change their stance, with momentous consequences. But for the time being, they agreed to differ. At the beginning of March, Mao told the Politburo that a verbal accord had been reached on a ceasefire, and Zhang's forward garrisons at Yan'an and Fuxian, south of Wayaobu, were to be treated as friendly forces.78
Five weeks later, Zhou Enlai slipped into Yan'an to talk to the Young Marshal face to face. The meeting, held in a Christian church, lasted most of the night. When Zhou left, just before dawn, they had agreed that the formation of a national government and a unified anti-Japanese national army was the only way forward. Zhang was not yet ready to take an anti-Japanese stand in public, nor would he defy Chiang Kai-shek if he received a direct order to enter areas under Red Army control. But, short of that, the truce would be strictly observed; permanent liaison officers would be appointed; trade between the Red and White areas would be permitted; and the Young Marshal would use his influence with fellow nationalist commanders to secure safe passage for communist units. He even agreed, Zhou reported, to supply the Red Army with arms and ammunition.79
With his southern flank thus secured, Mao was free to pursue the other main task that had been decided at Wayaobu: rebuilding the communists’ military strength after the attrition of the Long March.80
In December 1935, the First Front Army had barely 7,000 men. The local Shaanxi forces, led by Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang, and Xu Haidong's E-Yu-Wan army, each had 3,000. Mao's target was to recruit another 40,000, a quarter of them the following spring. The only realistic way to do this was to mount an expedition across the Yellow River to Shanxi. That carried the risk, as Peng Dehuai pointed out, that they might not be able to get back. Mao went ahead anyway, leaving behind Zhou Enlai and Bo Gu to watch over the Shaanxi base.81
The venture was christened the ‘Eastern Expedition to Resist Japan and Save the Nation’.82 It made good propaganda. But for all Mao's stirring talk of marching to Hebei to confront the invaders, its objectives were much more limited.
The communists did not come within 200 miles of Japanese units during the two-and-a-half months, from late February to early May 1936, that they spent in Shanxi, Instead, they skirmished with Guomindang troops in a narrow area, no more than fifty miles from the river, where they raised 300,000 silver dollars by expropriating landlords, and gained about 8,000 men, half of them peasants recruited from the Shanxi villages, the remainder prisoners of war. That brought Mao's forces back to 20,000 men, about the same number as he had had a year earlier, but still far fewer than there would have been had the communist leadership remained united. The irony of the CCP's position in the spring and summer of 1936 was that, even as it successfully pursued a united front with the Young Marshal's North-East Army, its own forces remained irrevocably split. Zhang Guotao was still in Sichuan, and the bulk of the Red Army was with him.
Here, too, however, there were signs of change. In the first weeks after the separation, Zhang had orchestrated a series of Fourth Army political conferences, which ‘expelled’ Mao, Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian from the Party and elected a new ‘Central Committee’ and ‘Politburo’ with Zhang himself as General Secretary. A message was then sent to Wayaobu, ordering the Shaanxi-based leaders to cease using the ‘false title’ of Party Centre, and to refer to themselves in future as the CCP Northern Bureau.83
Mao, in contrast, acted with great prudence. At Ejie, the day after the split, he had resisted calls for Zhang's expulsion. Though a resolution was passed, denouncing Zhang for ‘crimes of splitting the Red Army’ and ‘right-opportunist and warlord tendencies’, it was not published. When the Long March ended, and Mao consolidated his own position, it was as Chairman of the North-West Bureau of the Military Commission (and, concomitantly, CC Secretary for Military Affairs), with Zhou and Wang Jiaxiang as his deputies, not as Commission Chairman per se. Even after the announcement that Zhang had set up a rival leadership, Mao took no action for more than a month. Only in January 1936, when it became clear that Zhang would not retract, did he finally authorise the release of the Ejie resolution, making the break official.84 By then the Comintern had made clear that it supported the Central Committee based at Wayaobu, that it regarded Mao as one of the ‘standard-bearers’ of world communism and that it rejected Zhang's claim to have set up a rival leadership.85
That spring Zhang's star was already on the wane. The Fourth Army's southern campaign had at first been highly successful. But during the winter, Chiang Kai-shek's forces had counter-attacked and the tide began to turn. While Mao was off on his ‘eastern expedition’, Zhang had suffered two crushing defeats. The Fourth Army had been forced back from the fertile Chengdu plain into the barren, isolated regions bordering Tibet.86
In May, when Mao returned to Wayaobu, he made fresh efforts to woo back the errant force, promising to let bygones by bygones if only Zhang and his men would come to join them in the north. ‘Between you, Comrade Guotao, and we, your brothers, there are no political or strategic differences,’ one emollient Politburo telegram declared. ‘There is no need to discuss the past. Our only duty now … is to unite against Chiang Kai-shek and Japan.’87
Soon afterwards, Zhang's troops were joined by the Second Front Army, formed from units led by Ren Bishi and He Long, who had come together in northern Guizhou two years earlier.II The result was to increase Zhang's military strength, but to dilute his political authority. Gradually the pressure to move north grew stronger. At the beginning of July, the new, combined force reluctantly set off across the grasslands, following the same path to Shaanxi that Mao's First Army had followed a year earlier, with the same terrible losses. There at last, in October 1936, they were met by First Army troops under Peng Dehuai, who had penetrated into Gansu almost as far as Lanzhou. Yet still the deadly game was not quite over. The Fourth Army's main force, more than 20,000-strong, became stranded on the west bank of the Yellow River, cut off by a GMD army which seized the ferry points. Zhang, in his role of General Political Commissar, ordered it to strike out to the west on a suicidal march through the Gansu corridor, where it was cut to ribbons by Moslem cavalry. A year later, the exhausted remnants of that carnage returned to Shaanxi. More than half had perished. The headquarters group, led by Li Xiannian, had been reduced to 400 men.88
A month after Zhang's fateful order, on December 6, 1936, he and Zhu De joined Mao and the rest of the leadership at the Politburo's headquarters in north Shaanxi for a triumphal celebration of unity restored. Next day, Mao was named Chairman of the Military Commission, with Zhang and Zhou Enlai as his deputies.89
The mise-en-scène was fictive. Zhang's challenge to Mao was over. So was his political career. For the last year, since the meeting at Wayaobu, Mao had had the final word in the Politburo. Now he had final control, too, over all 40,000 Red Army men who remained after the g
reat migration from south China to the north. The destruction of the flower of the Fourth Army in the Gansu corridor hastened Zhang's political demise. But he was finished anyway. Fifteen months earlier, at Maoergai, Mao had already warned that when the time was right, Zhang would be required to answer for the errors that he had made.90
While the long struggle with Zhang Guotao was fitfully played out, Mao was stalking a bigger quarry. At the beginning of March 1936, a few days after Zhang Xueliang agreed to a truce, the Politburo authorised peace feelers to the government in Nanjing.91
The purpose, at that stage, was not to try to win over Chiang Kai-shek. He was still counter-revolution personified, the ‘chief traitor and collaborator’, to be opposed no less fiercely than Japan. One inner-Party directive stated bluntly: ‘everyone wants to see traitor Chiang die a terrible death.’92 The aim of the communist proposals was rather to undercut Chiang's policy of ‘internal pacification first, resistance to Japan second’; to strengthen the hand of the anti-Japanese faction of the Guomindang, led by Chiang's brother-in-law, the former Finance Minister, T. V. Soong; and last, but not least, to satisfy Moscow's demands that no stone be left unturned in the search for united front allies. Russia had re-established diplomatic relations with nationalist China in 1933. As the anti-Comintern Axis strengthened, Russian national interests – as distinct from the interests of Russia's CCP allies – made Chiang a potential partner whose armies, in a future war, were not to be ignored.
Mao's proposals were an artful mixture of substance and spin. He laid down three basic conditions: an immediate end to the civil war and free passage for the Red Army through Hebei so that it might ‘check the advance of Japanese imperialism’; the release of political prisoners; and the restoration of political freedoms. To these would later be added internal reforms and the establishment of a government of national defence.93
All over China, hatred of Japan was intensifying. That winter, in what became known as the December Ninth movement, tens of thousands of students, infuriated by Japanese demands for recognition of their conquest of north China, had staged violent demonstrations in Beijing and other cities. The communists compared it to the May Fourth movement, sixteen years before. In the provinces, angry mobs lynched Japanese travellers. Intellectuals flocked to join national salvation associations. For months, the two countries were close to war. Mao calculated that in these circumstances, if the communists talked to the Guomindang, they had nothing to lose. If the talks made progress, the split between the pro- and anti-Japanese factions of the Guomindang would widen. If they broke down, they would be made public, which would enhance the communists’ standing with an urban opinion increasingly enraged by Chiang's policy of appeasement.94
But they did not break down. By the summer, a bewildering array of back channels and secret negotiating mechanisms was in place. In Moscow, nationalist diplomats held discreet meetings with Wang Ming at the CCP's Comintern mission.95 In Nanjing, a communist envoy, disguised as a priest, made contact with Chen Lifu, one of the most powerful men in the Guomindang after Chiang himself. Later Mao sent another, more senior, emissary for talks with Chen in Nanjing and Shanghai. The two sides discussed the possibility of the GMD leaders meeting Zhou Enlai in Hong Kong or Canton.96
As the negotiations progressed, Mao's attitude to Chiang Kai-shek, and to the wider implications of Japanese aggression, underwent a gradual change. By April 1936, he had concluded that the old slogan, Fan-Ri tao-Jiang, ‘Resist Japan, Oppose Chiang’, was counter-productive. ‘Our stand is to oppose Japan and stop the civil war,’ he told Zhang Wentian. ‘Opposing Chiang Kai-shek is secondary.’ A month later he was wondering aloud whether it made sense to go on lumping together all the imperialist powers as a single bloc, when there were obviously growing strains between Japan, on the one hand, and Britain and the United States on the other.97
That led to the decision to allow Edgar Snow to visit the base area, in order to publicise the communist cause in the West. In June, the Red Army gave up Wayaobu, and the Politburo moved its headquarters to Bao'an, a still more remote and impoverished county town in the very heart of the loess country, where the leaders lived in cave-dwellings, cut into a weathered red sandstone cliff overlooking a muddy river.98 There Mao told Snow, in a prophetic interview on July 16:
Those who imagine that by further sacrifices of Chinese sovereignty … they can halt the advance of Japan are only indulging in utopian fancy … The Japanese navy aspires to blockade the China seas, and to seize the Philippines, Siam, Indochina, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. In the event of war, Japan will try to make them her strategic bases … [But] China is a very big nation, and it cannot be said to be conquered until every inch of it is under the sword of the invader. If Japan should succeed in occupying even a large section of China, getting possession of an area with as many as 100 or even 200 million people, we would still be far from defeated … The great reservoirs of human material in the revolutionary Chinese people will still be pouring men, ready to fight for their freedom, into our front lines, long after the tidal flood of Japanese imperialism has wrecked itself on the hidden reefs of Chinese resistance.99
A few days earlier, Chiang had given the first public intimation that his patience with Japan might finally be running out. If Japan tried to force his government to recognise the puppet states it was setting up in North China, adjacent to Manchuria, he warned, the ‘moment of final sacrifice’ would have arrived. The language was prudent, but it marked a change of tone.100
All through the summer and autumn of 1936, the CCP multiplied public and private appeals to the Guomindang and its leaders to sign a truce and join forces against Japan.101 In August, under pressure from Stalin – who by now had belatedly decided that an anti-Japanese alliance between the communists and the Guomindang was vital to Soviet interests – Mao proposed that the CCP–GMD united front that had existed in the 1920s be revived, and that an ‘All-China United Democratic Republic’ be set up, incorporating the Red base areas, which would be subject to the same parliamentary system as the rest of the country.102 ‘For a people being deprived of its national freedom,’ he told Snow, ‘the revolutionary task is not immediate socialism, but the struggle for independence. We cannot even discuss communism if we are robbed of a country in which to practise it.’103 Mao even agreed to change the designation of the Red Army, so as to make it formally part of the nationalist armed forces, under nominal nationalist command. So long as the reality of the Party's control over communist troops and territory was preserved, almost any concession was possible. At the same time, however, he expressed doubts that Chiang's strategy had really changed and predicted that he would continue to waver.104
Mao's reservations proved justified. In October, Chiang reiterated that ‘resistance against Japan requires the suppression of the communists first’. The end of that month saw Mao speaking of the negotiations taking ‘a critical downward turn’.105 Then, at a secret meeting in Shanghai in November, Chen Lifu upped the ante. There would have to be a ceiling on communist troop strength, he said. At first he proposed 3,000 men; then 30,000. Beyond that he would not budge. At a second meeting in Nanjing, Zhou indicated that the communists might be prepared to accept even that condition. But the accord remained stalled.106
The reason soon became clear. Chiang had become convinced that one last push would rid him of the communists, once and for all. On December 4, traffic was cleared from the highway to Xian's well-guarded aerodrome, and police lined the roadside. The Generalissimo was arriving in state to begin final preparations for what was to be his sixth and last, communist encirclement campaign.107 For the previous three months, Zhang Xueliang had been imploring him to end the civil war and allow the North-East Army to fight Japan instead. Now Zhang was given an ultimatum: either fight the Reds, or face immediate transfer to the south.108
Events then moved with bewildering speed.
On Tuesday, December 8, the Japanese War Minister warned that unless China was more accommod
ating, fresh conflict was inevitable. Next day, thousands of students marched in protest to Lintong, a hot springs resort near Xian where Chiang had set up his headquarters. The police opened fire, and several young people were injured.109 On Thursday, the 10th, Mao telegraphed Zhang that negotiations with the nationalists had broken down because of Chiang's ‘excessive demands’. Twenty-four hours later, Mao's secretary, Ye Zilong, received Zhang's reply. It was quite short, he recalled, but when he decoded it he came across a phrase, in classical Chinese, containing two characters whose meaning neither he nor anyone else in the Secretariat could work out. He took it to Mao, who looked at it quickly and smiled. ‘There's good news on the way’, he remembered Mao saying.110
Otto Braun, who lived nearby, awoke next morning, a Saturday, to find Bao'an abuzz with excitement. The field telephone, linking Mao's office to the Politburo and the Military Commission, rang incessantly. Mao himself, who normally worked at night and slept until midday, was already up. A bodyguard told Braun the news, the incredible, sensational news that was spreading through Bao'an like wildfire: Chiang Kai-shek had been arrested shortly before dawn, and was being held at the headquarters of the North-East Army in Xian on the orders of Zhang Xueliang.111
The story, as they gradually pieced it together in the hours that followed, was this. On Friday night, after despatching his mysterious secret telegram to Mao, Zhang had summoned a meeting of about a dozen senior commanders. He ordered them to arrest Chiang's General Staff; to take over the Governor's office; to disarm the police and the Blueshirts, a GMD paramilitary force; and to seize the airport. The head of Zhang's personal bodyguard, a 26-year-old captain, then set off with 200 men for Lintong, where, at 5 a.m., he led the assault on Chiang's quarters. The Generalissimo's guards resisted long enough for him to flee up the rocky, snow-covered hillside behind the resort. There, two hours later, he was discovered in a narrow cave, shivering from the cold, dressed only in a nightshirt, and barely able to talk, having left behind his false teeth in the panic of his flight. From this undignified hiding-place, he was carried down on the young captain's back and driven into the city, where Zhang Xueliang apologised profusely for the treatment he had been made to suffer, assured him of his personal safety, and then repeated the demand that he had been making since the summer: that Chiang change his policy, and resist Japan.112
