by Philip Short
17. Mao told Edgar Snow in 1965 ‘he had never written an essay entitled “Dialectical Materialism”. He thought he would remember if he had’ (The Long Revolution, Hutchinson, London, 1971, p. 207).
18. Wylie, Raymond, F., The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch'en Po-ta and the Search for Chinese Theory, 1935–1945, Stanford University Press, 1980, pp. 55–8. Stuart Schram argues, on the contrary, that some of the passages in ‘Dialectical materialism’ are at variance with Mao's subsequent insistence on the need to make Marxism relevant to Chinese conditions (Mao's Road to Power, 6, p. xxx). On this point I find Wylie's interpretation more convincing.
19. Schram, 3, pp. 419–21.
20. Knight, pp. 132–48; rev. version, SW1, pp. 295–308.
21. Schram, 1, p. 306.
22. Knight, pp. 154–203; rev. version, SW1, pp. 311–46.
23. For example, Zhang Wenru, in ‘Mao Zedong's Critical Continuation of China's Fine Philosophical Inheritance’, Chinese Studies in Philosophy, vol. 23, 3–4, pp. 122–3.
24. Knight, p. 186.
25. Nianpu, 2, p. 10; Knight, p. 78, n. 154.
26. Fogel, Joshua A, Ai Ssu-ch'i's Contribution to the Development of Chinese Marxism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987, p. 30; Wylie, p. 13; and Gong Yuzhi, pp. 161–2.
27. Even the revision of ‘On Contradiction’ for publication in 1951 took Mao far longer than he expected (Schram, Thought of Mao Tse-tung, p. 64), and when eventually it appeared, half the text was new (Schram, Mao's Road to Power, 6, p. xxxii).
28. Nianpu, 2, p. 40. See also Braun, Comintern Agent, pp. 217–18. John Byron and Robert Pack give a colourful account of Wang's return in The Claws of the Dragon (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992, pp. 135–6). Chen Yun had originally been sent from Zunyi to inform the Comintern representative in Shanghai, Arthur Ewert, of the decisions the meeting had taken, but on arrival there he found that Ewert had left and the representation had been closed. Chen reached Moscow in the spring of 1935 and remained there for a year, before travelling to Xinjiang where he served as liaison officer to the local warlord, Sheng Shicai, at that time a Soviet ally (Ezra F. Vogel, ‘Chen Yun: his life’, Journal of Contemporary China, Vol 14, No 45, November 2005, pp. 741–759).
29. Shum Kui-Kwong, The Chinese Communists’ Road to Power: the National United Front, 1935–1945, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 114; and Teiwes, Frederick C, The Formation of the Maoist Leadership: From the Return of Wang Ming to the Seventh Party Congress, Contemporary China Institute, London, 1994, pp. 5–7. Many early accounts of Wang's return, apparently based on Taiwanese sources, allege that he brought with him a directive from Stalin, endorsing Mao's claims to be Party leader while at the same time sharply criticising his ignorance of Marxism. No such directive ever existed.
30. The Politburo held an enlarged session at Luochuan, attended by the principal military commanders, from August 22–25, 1937. This was followed by a Standing Committee meeting, at which Mao also spoke, on August 27. He was reappointed Chairman of the Military Commission, with Zhu De (replacing Zhang Guotao) and Zhou Enlai as his deputies. The same meeting named Zhu Commander-in-Chief of the Eighth Route Army. The full texts of Mao's speeches are not available, but a summary is given in the Nianpu (2, pp. 14–17). See also ‘For the Mobilization of All Our Forces to Achieve Victory in the War of Resistance’, August 25 1937, in Schram, Mao's Road to Power, 6, pp. 27–32.
31. On September 12, Mao warned Peng Dehuai, then Zhu De's deputy, ‘they [the GMD] want to force our Red Army to fight the tough battles’ (Nianpu, 2, p. 20).). See also his telegram to Zhu De, Zhou Enlai and others on August 5 (in Schram, 6, pp. 12–13).
32. Saich, pp. 792–4 (Sept. 21 and 25); Nianpu, 2, pp. 17 (Aug. 27), 21 (Sept. 14), 26-7 (Sept. 30) and 31-2 Oct. 13 and 22); and Saich, Rise to Power, pp. 792–4 (Sept. 21 and 25), 1937.
33. Saich, p. 668; History of the CCP, Chronology, pp. 116–17; CHOC, 13, pp. 639–40. See also Mao's telegram of October 1, in Schram, 6, p. 78.
34. ‘Urgent Tasks of the Chinese Revolution Following the Establishment of Guomindang-Communist Cooperation’, September 29 1937, in Schram, 6, p. 71 [translation modified].
35. Nianpu, 2, pp. 26–7. See also Benton, Mountain Fires.
36. Nianpu, 2, pp. 31 (Oct. 13), 33 (Oct 19) and 37 (Nov. 11 1937).
37. Saich, pp. 795–802; Nianpu, 2, p. 40; Peng Dehuai, Memoirs, pp. 415–19; Shum Kui-Kwong, pp. 115–16.
38. Nianpu, 2, pp. 40–1.
39. Peng Dehuai, p. 418; Teiwes, pp. 7 and 44–5; History of the CCP, Chronology, pp. 120–1. See also Saich, p. 667.
40. Teiwes, p. 8.
41. Ibid., pp. 5–8; Saich, pp. 668–70; Fei Yundong and Yu Guihua, ‘A Brief History of the Work of Secretaries in the Chinese Communist Party (1921–1949)’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 30, 3 [May–June 1997], pp. 13–14.
42. Shum Kui-Kwong, pp. 122–5.
43. Nianpu, 2, p. 51. See also Saich, pp. 802–12.
44. Nianpu, 2, p. 51; Saich, p. 670. The Politburo met from February 27 to March 1.
45. Mao, SW2, pp. 79–112.
46. Ibid., pp. 113–94. See also Schram, Thought of Mao Tse-tung, pp. 206–9.
47. Saich, Rise to Power, p. 670.
48. Nianpu, 2, p. 51. According to Schram, Ren had taken Mao's side at the February Politburo meeting (Mao's Road to Power, 6, p. xlii). Wang none the less agreed that he should be chosen as the emissary.
49. Wang's actual words were: ‘The comrades attending the Politburo meeting had the same views concerning the current situation.’ (Saich, p. 802). See also Shum Kui-Kwong, p. 126.
50. Shum Kui-kwong, p. 126. See also Mao's criticisms of ‘unhealthy phenomena’ under the GMD (SW2, p. 131), and his insistence at the February Politburo meeting (and on other occasions) that the communists ‘should mainly depend on ourselves’ (Nianpu, 2, pp. 48 and 51); Nianpu, 2, p. 66; ZZWX, 11, pp. 514–15 and 518–19; Shum Kui-kwong, p. 134; Liuda yilai – dangnei mimi wenjian, Renmin chubanshe, Beijing, 1981, vol. 1, pp. 946–64. See also Garver, John W. Chinese Soviet Relations, 1937–1945, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 74–5.
51. Lary, Diana, ‘Drowned Earth: The Strategic Breaching of the Yellow River Dyke, 1938’, War in History, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2001, pp. 191–207. Two earlier attempts, on June 5 and 7, failed: a breach was finally opened in the early hours of June 9. The figure of 900,000 dead is given by Edward J. Drea and Hans van de Ven in ‘An Overview of Major Military Campaigns’, p. 34 (Peattie, Mark, Drea and van de Ven [eds.], The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, Stanford University Press, 2011).
52. Saich, p. 671; Shum Kui-kwong, pp. 134–8.
53. Garver (pp. 76–7) gives the best account but compresses the chronology. Teiwes (Formation of the Maoist Leadership, pp. 28–30) regards a Comintern resolution of June 11, criticising ‘the capitulationist tendency of right opportunism’ (which could be taken as referring to the policies of Wang Ming) as marking the crucial shift. In July, Pravda for the first time published Mao's photograph, together with that of Zhu De.
54. Teiwes, p. 29.
55. Nianpu, 2, p. 90. Mao had evidently received word of Moscow's decision by August 3, for on that date the Standing Committee proposed that the full Politburo should meet in enlarged session (the first gathering of the entire leadership since December 1937). When more details arrived, it was decided to hold a CC plenum instead (ibid., p. 84; Saich, p. 671). Wang Ming was told that a new directive had come from Moscow, but not what it contained (Garver, p. 78; Renmin ribao, Dec. 27 1979).
56. Nianpu, 2, p. 90–1.
57. Schram, Mao's Road to Power, 6, pp. 458–541, and Schram, Political Thought, pp. 113–14; For the revised version, see SW2, pp. 209–10.
58. Saich, Rise to Power, p. 672; Nianpu, 2, p. 92. The defence of Wuhan did, however, give Chiang's forces a five-month breathing space to organise their retreat upriver to Chongqing in relatively good order, unlike the undiscipl
ined rout that followed their defeat at Shanghai and Nanjing (see MacKinnon, Stephen R., Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China, University of California Press, 2008).
59. SW2, pp. 213–17 and 219–35.
60. Teiwes, pp. 8–10; Nianpu, 2, p. 98.
61. Nianpu, 2, p. 96.
62. Ibid., p. 97. See also Ye Yonglie, Jiang Qing zhuan, Shidai wenyi chubanshe, Changchun, 1993, pp. 164–5; Wang Fan, Zhe qing zhe shuo, 2, pp. 217–18.
63. Snow, pp. 107, 124 and 132–3.
64. Wang Xingjuan, He Zizhende lu, pp. 224–6.
65. Snow, Helen Foster, Chinese Communists, pp. 250–61; Wales, Yenan Notebooks, pp. 62–4. See also Smedley, Battle Hymn of China, p. 123.
66. Wang Xingjuan, p. 226.
67. MacKinnon, Janice R. and Stephen R., Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 190–1, citing a paper in the archives of Edgar Snow relating Smedley's account of the evening. The wording differs slightly from that given by Ross Terrill in The White Boned Demon, William Morrow, New York, 1984, pp. 144–5, apparently because the former is taken from a Japanese translation of Snow's paper (which appeared in Chūo Kōron, Vol 69, No 7, July 1954), whereas Terrill's version is from the original. In this case, exceptionally, I have preferred the translation for two reasons: firstly because it is virtually complete whereas Terrill quotes only brief extracts – and in the parts that can be compared, there is no difference in meaning; and secondly, because some of Terrill's other claims about this period are mistaken – for example his assertion that Jiang Qing's presence in Yan'an and He Zizhen's ‘overlapped by several months’. I find Smedley's account of the fight between He and Lily Wu, as related by Snow, to be broadly credible both because she was an eyewitness and participant, and because it is consonant with what is known from other sources. Other statements in Snow's paper – whether directly attributed to Smedley or his own comments – are much more doubtful.
68. Ibid., p. 227; see also Ye Yonglie, Jiang Qing zhuan, p. 157. By this time, two months had elapsed since the fateful evening in Smedley's cave. Mao had apparently assumed that He Zizhen would get over it, unaware of her deeper frustration at the way their relationship had changed.
69. Wang Xingjuan, pp. 227–45. For the expulsion of Smedley and Lily Wu, see Snow, Red Star Over China, p. 532. The exact date of He's departure is uncertain, but Zhang Guotao's wife, Ye Ziliao, met her in Xian in September (Zhang Guotao, Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, 2, p. 562); Ye's own account of the meeting (Zhang Guotao furen huiyilu, Hong Kong, 1970, pp. 333–4) is suspect. Jiang Qing's claim to Roxane Witke that He Zizhen beat her children – like much else in her account of those years – was untrue (Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch'ing, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1977, pp. 160–1).
70. Mao's secretary, Ye Zilong, has confirmed Jiang Qing's claim to have arrived in Luochuan during the Politburo conference of late August, 1937, though her description of the entire leadership turning out to greet her is pure fantasy. She was presented to Mao in Yan'an a few days later by the wife of the veteran Jinggangshan commander, Xiao Jingguang (Wang Fan, Zhe qing zhe shuo, 2, pp. 213–15; Witke, p. 146).
71. The foregoing is drawn mainly from Ye Yonglie, Jiang Qing zhuan; Byron and Pack, Claws of the Dragon: Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch'ing, and Terrill, The White Boned Demon. Much of Jiang Qing's early life has been deliberately obscured. During the Cultural Revolution, she devoted an immense amount of time and energy to trying to suppress all record of her activities in Shanghai in the 1930s. This does not, in itself, prove the claims made by her enemies (and, shortly before his death, by Kang Sheng) that she bought her way out of prison by agreeing to work for the GMD. But it is clear that she was concerned about unsavoury episodes in her past which might have caused political embarrassment had they come to light.
72. It was actually not quite so clear-cut. In the spring or early summer of 1938, Mao sent a telegram to He Zizhen in Moscow, asking her, yet again, to return to Yan'an. In her reply, she indicated for the first time that she might be prepared to do so, but not until she had completed her studies in two years’ time. Mao was not prepared to wait (Wang Xingjuan, He Zizhende lu, p. 234).
73. Snow, Helen Foster, Chinese Communists, p. 251.
74. Ye Yonglie, pp. 161–5; Wang Fan, pp. 217–18.
75. Ye Yonglie, pp. 162–3. By dint of repetition, this story has become established truth (see, for example, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 14; Terrill, White Boned Demon, p. 154). There is no contemporary evidence for it and the story only surfaced when Nym Wales referred to it in her 1972 book, The Chinese Communists (p. 252). Significantly she did not mention it in her earlier account, My Yenan Notebooks. November 1938, when Mao and Jiang Qing started openly living together, was the same month that the Comintern formally anointed him as leader of the Chinese Party. Mao was hardly the kind of man to allow others to dictate to him conditions for his own marriage, least of all at the very moment when his political primacy was at last formally confirmed. Moreover Tao Zhu's wife, Zeng Ziyi, quoted him as telling her that Jiang Qing could be more useful to him politically than He Zizhen, which would make no sense if he had already agreed that she would play no political role (Wang Xingjuan, Li Min, He Zizhen yu Mao Zedong, Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1993, p. 188). That Mao should have decided for his own reasons that she should remain in the background is another matter.
76. Wang Fan, pp. 217–18.
77. Ibid.; Ye Yonglie, pp. 148, 162 and 173. Byron and Pack (pp. 147–9) give a highly coloured and often exaggerated account of Kang's role, but their thesis that Kang promoted Jiang Qing's cause to serve his own interests is undoubtedly correct.
78. This is implicit in Jiang Qing's own account of her life to Roxane Witke. See also Ye Yonglie, p. 166.
79. Ye Yonglie, pp. 159–61 and 167.
80. Lyman van Slyke, in the introduction to Schram, Mao's Road to Power, 7, p. xxxix n. 4, claims that Jiang Qing gave both Mao's daughters the family name, Li, because her own original name was Li Shumeng. However, Jiang's relations with Mao's children by his earlier marriages were not close and Mao was sufficiently traditional in his attitudes on such matters to have wanted his children to bear, in some shape or form, his own name rather than his wife's. Li Min herself, in her autobiography, Moi otets Mao Tszedun, says her family name derived from Mao's Party alias. The Confucian phrase from which Mao took the girls' given names is in the Analects, Book IV, 24.
81. Ye Yonglie, pp. 168–9.
82. Ibid., pp. 165 and 171–3.
83. Ibid., pp. 175–7.
84. Ibid.
85. Pantsov and Levine, pp. 329 and 349–50; Wang Xingjuan, He Zizhende lu, p. 239.
86. ‘On the Problem of Cooperation between the GMD and the Communist Party’, April 5 1938, in Schram, 6, pp. 280–86.
87. Yang Kuisong, ‘Nationalist and Communist Guerrilla Warfare in North China’, in Peattie, Drea and van de Ven, The Battle for China, pp. 308–27. The one major exception was the ‘Hundred Regiments’ offensive from August to December 1940, when communist armies under Peng Dehuai launched conventional attacks on Japanese forces in north China (‘Overview of Major Military Campaigns’ in ibid., p. 39). Mao had approved the campaign, whose initial successes helped rebut GMD criticism that the communists were not doing their fair share of the fighting. But it proved to be over-ambitious, and triggered murderous Japanese reprisals in the shape of ‘kill all, burn all, loot all’ operations which devastated the north Chinese countryside for the next two years (see van Slyke in Mao's Road to Power, 7, pp. lxii–lxiv, and pp. 320–21 & 324). By early 1941, the communists had reverted to guerrilla tactics.
88. Shum Kui-kwong, pp. 149 and 154.
89. Yang Kuisong, idem.
90. Mao first used this phrase, which became the Party guideline for communist forces in their dealings with GMD military units, at a Secretariat meeting on Janua
ry 12 1939 (Nianpu, 2, p. 103). It was not made public, however, until eight months later (History of the CCP, Chronology, p. 132).
91. Ibid., p. 739.
92. Interview with Edgar Snow, September 26 1939, in Mao's Road to Power, 7, p. 222.
93. Nianpu, 2, passim; Shum Kui-kwong, pp. 153–4.
94. The following account of the South Anhui Incident and the context in which it occurred draws heavily on Benton, Gregor, The New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance Along the Yangtse and the Huai, 1938–1941, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, esp. Chs 13–16 and Appendix, and on Lyman van Slyke's introduction to Mao's Road to Power, 7, pp. xlii–xlviii & lv–lxi. See also Shum, pp. 184–88; Saich, Rise to Power, pp. 860–3; and History of the CCP (Chronology), pp. 140–2.
95. Benton, p. 592, citing Mao's reaction on January 13. See also the telegram to Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying, January 15 1941, in Mao's Road to Power, 7, p. 637.
96. Yang, From Revolution to Politics, p. 307, n. 3; Saich, pp. 888–90 and 906–12.
97. Benton, New Fourth Army, pp. 590–96.
98. ‘Relations between the Guomindang and the Communist Party at Present; February 14 1941, in Mao's Road to Power, 7, pp. 686–9.
99. Cited in Benton, p. 593.
100. This point is made by van Slyke in Mao's Road to Power, 7, p. lxii.
101. Saich, pp. 910–12 (Oct. 4 1939). By then, a campaign to collect historical texts had been under way for more than a year in preparation for the Seventh Congress, which was to make a ‘basic summation’ of Party history from 1928 onward (Wylie, pp. 74–5).
102. Shum Kui-kwong, pp. 214–15. See also Teiwes, Formation of the Maoist Leadership, p. 10, n. 31.
