Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  In 1925, Chiang had sent Ching-kuo, then fifteen years old, to a school in Peking. This was a time when Chiang’s star was ascending in a Nationalist Party that was sponsored by Moscow. In no time, the Russians were on to Ching-kuo, and invited him to study in Russia. The young man was very keen. A few months after he arrived in Peking, Ching-kuo was taken to Moscow by a little-known but pivotal figure called Shao Li-tzu, who was a key Red mole inside the Nationalist Party.

  Planting moles was one of the most priceless gifts that Moscow bequeathed to the CCP. Mostly these moles joined the Nationalists in the first half of the 1920s, when Sun Yat-sen, who was courting the Russians, opened his party to the Communists. Infiltration worked on several levels. As well as overt Communists working inside the Nationalist movement, as Mao did, there were also secret Communists, and then a third group, those who had staged fake defections from the CCP. When Chiang split from the Communists in 1927, a large number of these secret agents stayed as “sleepers,” to be activated at the appropriate time. For the next twenty years and more, they were not only able to give the Reds crucial intelligence, they were often in a position to have a substantial influence on policy, as many had meanwhile risen very high in the Nationalist system. Ultimately, the agents played a gigantic role in helping deliver China to Mao — probably a greater role in high-level politics than in any other country in the world. Many remain unexposed even today.

  Shao Li-tzu was one of them. He was actually a founding member of the CCP, but on Moscow’s orders he stayed away from Party activities, and his identity was kept secret even from most Party leaders. When Chiang turned against the Communists in Shanghai in April 1927, Shao wrote the Russians a telegram that was instantly forwarded to Stalin, asking for instructions: “Shanghai disturbs me very much. I cannot be the weapon of counter-revolution. I ask for advice how to fight.”

  For the next twenty-two years, Shao stayed with the Nationalists, occupying many key posts — until the Communist victory in 1949, when he went over to Mao. He died in Peking in 1967. Even under Communist rule, his true face was never revealed, and he is still presented today as an honest sympathizer, not a long-term sleeper.

  It was undoubtedly on Moscow’s instructions that Shao had brought Chiang’s son to Russia in November 1925. When Ching-kuo completed his studies there, in 1927, he was not allowed to leave, and was forced to denounce his father publicly. Stalin was keeping him hostage while telling the world that he had volunteered to stay. Stalin liked to hold hostages. Peggy Dennis, the wife of the US Communist leader Eugene Dennis, described a visit from the Comintern éminence grise Dmitri Manuilsky as she and her husband were about to leave Russia to return to America in 1935: “The bombshell was dropped quietly … Almost casually, Manuilsky informed us that we could not take Tim [their son] back, ‘… We will send him at some other time, under other circumstances.’ ” The Russians never did.

  The fact that Ching-kuo was a hostage was spelled out to his father in late 1931—by none other than his own sister-in-law, Mme Sun Yat-sen (née Soong Ching-ling), who was another Soviet agent. Speaking for Moscow, she proposed swapping Ching-kuo for two top Russian agents who had recently been arrested in Shanghai. Chiang turned the swap down. The arrest of the two agents was a public affair, and they had been openly tried and imprisoned. But Moscow’s offer unleashed a torrent of anguish in Chiang, who thought his son might now be “cruelly put to death by Soviet Russians.” On 3 December 1931 the Generalissimo wrote in his diary: “In the past few days, I have been yearning for my son even more. How can I face my parents when I die [if Ching-kuo is killed]?” On the 14th: “I have committed a great crime by being unfilial [by risking the death of his heir] …”

  Chiang continued to be consumed by anxiety about what might happen to his son, and his anguish and bitterness almost certainly explain an event that happened thousands of kilometers away. At exactly this time, December 1931, Shao Li-tzu’s son was found shot dead in Rome. This son had been taken by Shao to Russia in 1925 as Ching-kuo’s traveling companion. But, unlike Ching-kuo, Shao junior was later allowed to return to China. The Italian press covered this death as a lovers’ tragedy, one paper running the story under the headline “The tragic end of a Chinese who had wounded his lover”—a woman reported as Czech. But Shao and his family were convinced that the murder of his son, which has been covered up by both Nationalist and Communist parties, was carried out by Nationalist agents, and this could only have been done with Chiang’s authorization, as personal vengeance: a son for a son.

  By the time the Long March began, Chiang had devised a carefully crafted swap: the survival of the CCP for Ching-kuo. It was not an offer that could be spelled out. He executed his plan in subtle ways. His scheme was to keep the Reds temporarily confined, and then use the Japanese to break them. Chiang regarded war with Japan as inevitable, and was well aware that Russia wanted this war. Stalin’s most dreaded scenario was that Japan would conquer China, and then, with China’s resources and a porous 7,000-kilometer border, would attack the Soviet Union. Chiang reckoned that once the Sino-Japanese war started, Moscow would be bound to order its Chinese clients to get active against Japan. Until that day, Chiang would allow the Reds to survive, which he hoped would be a big enough quid pro quo to get his son back.

  Chiang did not want the Reds to cling on in the rich heartland of China. His aim was to drive them into a more barren and sparsely populated corner, where he could box them in. The prison he had in mind was the Yellow Earth Plateau in northwest China, mainly the northern part of Shaanxi province. To make absolutely sure that the Reds would walk into his fold, Chiang allowed a Communist base to flourish there, while vigorously stamping out the others elsewhere in China.

  The main person Chiang used to implement this scheme was none other than Shao Li-tzu, the man who had taken Chiang’s son to Russia. Shao was appointed governor of Shaanxi in April 1933. Though Chiang certainly knew Shao’s true colors, he never exposed him, and continued to use him as if he were a bona fide Nationalist. Chiang’s relationship with Shao, as with many other key moles, was an almost unbelievably complex web of intrigue, deceit, bluff and double-bluff that eventually was to spin out of his control and contribute to his downfall.

  Chiang’s calculation was that only a mole could foster a Red pocket, as any authentic Nationalist would destroy it. And, indeed, it was only after Shao was appointed to the area that what had hitherto been a tiny Red guerrilla operation began to grow in Shaanxi (and the edge of Gansu immediately to the west). At the exact moment the Long March began, in mid-October 1934, Chiang came to Shaanxi province for a visit. While publicly calling for the Red “bandits” to be “wiped out,” he allowed the Red base to expand in an unprecedented manner; inside a few months, it had grown to cover 30,000 sq km, with a population of 900,000.

  What Chiang had created was a corral into which he would herd all the different detachments of the Red Army as he drove them out of their various pockets in the heartland of China. His plan was to weaken them significantly along the way, but not kill them off entirely. Chiang later told an American emissary: “I drove the Communists from Jiangxi to … northern Shaanxi, where their number was reduced to a few thousands and they were left unpursued.”

  The way he steered them was by communicating his own deployments by radio, which he knew would be intercepted. The Reds found that “enemy telegrams were constantly intercepted and decoded by us, and our army knew the intentions and movements of the enemy like the back of our hand.” But Chiang declined to change his codes. And the Reds went where there were no enemy troops, or very few.

  In order to make sure that the Reds followed the route he had mapped out, and to rule out any change in their instructions, Chiang decided the eve of the Reds’ departure was the moment to cash in a huge intelligence coup. In June the Nationalists had covertly raided the CCP’s Shanghai radio station, which had been the link between Ruijin and Moscow. For several months, the Nationalists kept the station operating unde
r their control, and then in October they shut it down altogether. The CCP tried to re-establish a link by sending a top radio operator to Shanghai, but he defected as soon as he arrived. Assassins were sent after him. They missed the first time, but managed to kill him in his bed in a German hospital at the second attempt. From now on, Shanghai became largely irrelevant to the CCP, although it remained an important base for Moscow’s secret services.

  THE LONG MARCH was used by Chiang to initiate his Reds-for-son swap. Just before the breakout from the Ruijin base, he sent a request through diplomatic channels asking for his son to be returned. On 2 September 1934 he recorded in his diary that “a formal representation has been made about getting Ching-kuo home.” During the crucial period of the breakout in October — November, Chiang found a way of emphatically telling the Russians he was closing his eyes and letting the Reds go, by not merely absenting himself from the front line, but heading off a thousand kilometers in the opposite direction for a very long forty-day public tour of North China.

  Moscow understood the message. During the precise period between Chiang requesting his son’s release and the day Mao and Co. crossed the Xiang River and were free of Chiang’s blockhouses, Moscow dramatically increased surveillance of its hostage. Ching-kuo, who had previously worked in a village and a Siberian gold mine, was now working in a machinery plant in the Urals. Then, as he later recounted, “from August to November 1934, I was suddenly … placed under the close surveillance of the Russian NKVD [KGB]. Every day I was shadowed by two men.”

  At the beginning of December, just after the Chinese Reds walked past the last blockhouses, Chiang asked for his son again (as the KGB informed Ching-kuo). But the Russians told Chiang that his son did not wish to return. “There is no end to the Russian enemy’s revolting deceit,” Chiang wrote in his diary, although he said he could “cope with it calmly.”

  “I feel I have indeed made progress since I can even shrug off this family calamity.” Chiang knew his son would be safe — if he did more for the Reds.

  Of the other half (amounting to some 40,000), who did not make it past the river, “over 3,000” were killed at the Xiang. The rest were either scattered at the Xiang, or had perished during the preceding six weeks’ trek from illness or exhaustion, or had been casualties of small skirmishes, or had deserted.

  She was the sister of Mme Chiang Kai-shek. The fact that she was a Russian agent remained a secret throughout her long life, and remains little-known to this day. But a secret letter she wrote on 26 January 1937 to Wang Ming, the head of the CCP delegation in Moscow, and her controller, shows her role beyond any doubt. The letter opens: “To Comrade Wang Ming. Dear Comrade: It is necessary for me to inform you the following facts since they may endanger my activities … in China in the near future. I place them before your consideration in the hope that you will advise me as to what course to pursue …” One of the points in her letter was complaints about the American Comintern agent Agnes Smedley, who, Mme Sun said, brought “foreign sympathizers home, with the result that this special house which has been used for important purposes now has been ruined … I forwarded your instructions to isolate her” to the CCP.

  The Nationalist army commander in Shaanxi was a fellow traveler called General Yang Hu-cheng, who had earlier asked to join the Communist Party, and whose relationship to the Reds was known to Chiang. He collaborated well with Shao.

  13. LONG MARCH II: THE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE (1934–35 AGE 40–41)

  BY MID-DECEMBER, Chiang had steered the Long March into Guizhou, the first province he wanted to bring under control. As he had foreseen, the arrival of a Red Army 40,000 strong threw the local warlord into a panic. Chiang “has long wanted to take over Guizhou,” the warlord recalled feeling at the time. “Now, the Central Government Army is coming hot on the heels of the Red Army, and I could not possibly turn him down … I was really in turmoil. Under the circumstances, I decided to place myself under Chiang’s command.” On 19 December, eight divisions of the Central Government Army marched into the provincial capital and at once started building an airport and roads. Soon afterwards, they took over key positions and, as the warlord put it, “turned themselves from guests into masters.”

  Chiang then funneled the Red Army northward to his next target, Sichuan, by blocking off other routes while leaving this passage wide open. Chiang’s plan was to repeat his Guizhou takeover here, and then propel the Reds farther north into Shaanxi. But here things began to deviate from the planned scenario, as Mao started to behave in ways Chiang could not have predicted. Mao was determined not to move into Sichuan. His motive, however, had nothing to do with Chiang, but with his struggle for power within his own Party.

  Mao had started taking active steps to seize the leadership of his Party once the marchers entered Guizhou. This required splitting his Party foes from within. In particular, he had been cultivating two key men with whom he had not previously been on the best of terms: Wang Jia-xiang, nicknamed the “Red Prof,” and Lo Fu, the man who had taken away his job as “prime minister.” Mao had crossed swords with them in the past, but now he buttered them up, as they both had grudges against Party No. 1 Po Ku.

  The two had been students in Moscow with Po, who was the younger man but had leapfrogged over both of them to become their boss, and had sometimes excluded them from decision-making. Po “sidelined me,” Lo Fu said years later, and this drove Lo into Mao’s arms. “I felt I was put in a position completely without power, which I resented bitterly,” Lo recalled. “I remember one day before the departure, comrade Tse-tung had a chat with me, and I told him all my resentment without reserve. From then on, I became close to comrade Tse-tung. He asked me to stick together with him and comrade Wang Jia-xiang — so that way a trio was formed, headed by comrade Mao.”

  The trio traveled together, usually reclining on litters. Bamboo litters were authorized for a few leaders, each of whom was also entitled to a horse, and porters to carry their belongings. For much of the Long March, including the most grueling part of the trek, most of them were carried. Mao had even designed his own transportation. Mrs. Lo Fu recalled him making preparations with the Red Prof, and showing off his ingenuity. “He said: ‘Look, we have designed our own litters … we will be carried.’ He and Jia-xiang looked rather pleased with themselves showing me their ‘works of art’: their kind of litter had very long bamboo poles so it would be easier and lighter to carry climbing mountains. It had a tarpaulin awning … so [the passenger] would be shielded from the sun and the rain.”

  Mao himself told his staff decades later: “On the March, I was lying in a litter. So what did I do? I read. I read a lot.” It was not so easy for the carriers. Marchers remembered: “When climbing mountains, the litter-bearers sometimes could only move forward on their knees, and the skin and flesh on their knees were rubbed raw before they got to the top. Each mountain climbed left a trail of their sweat and blood.”

  Wafted on other men’s shoulders, Mao plotted a coup with Po Ku’s two jealous colleagues. When the road was wide enough, they talked side by side; and on narrow paths, when they had to go in single file, they arranged their litters so that their heads were together. One meeting was held in an orange grove, golden with ripe fruit hanging among bright green leaves. The litter-bearers were taking a break, and had laid down their burdens next to each other. The trio decided to work together to “throw out” Po, along with Braun, the German adviser, and give Mao control of the army. As Mao was still very unpopular, and was not even a member of the Secretariat, the core body, he did not shoot for the top Party slot at this stage. That position was earmarked for Lo Fu, the only member of the trio who was in the Secretariat. The Red Prof’s reward would be full Politburo membership. The trio started to lobby for a meeting to discuss how the Reds had lost their state.

  Po Ku consented to a post-mortem. In fact, he had been feeling so bad about the Reds’ failure that his colleagues thought he might commit suicide, after seeing him repeatedly pointin
g a pistol at himself.

  So a gathering of twenty men, the Politburo and selected military commanders, convened on 15–17 January 1935 in the city of Zunyi in north Guizhou. Much of the meeting was taken up with rehashing the question of responsibility for the collapse of the Red state. Mao’s trio blamed everything on the key pre — Long March leaders, especially Po and Braun.

  It is commonly claimed that Mao became the leader of the Party and the army at the Zunyi meeting — and by majority mandate. In fact, Mao was not made chief of either the Party or the army at Zunyi. Po Ku remained Party No. 1, endorsed by the majority; the consensus was that losing Ruijin could not be blamed on him. Braun, as the only foreigner, provided a convenient scapegoat and was removed from military command. But although Mao’s two co-conspirators proposed that Mao take over, no one else seems to have supported this, and Chou En-lai was reconfirmed as military boss, with “responsibility for final decision-making in military matters.”

  However, Mao did achieve one critical breakthrough at Zunyi: he became a member of the Secretariat, the decision-making core. The previous make-up of this group had been established by Moscow in January 1934. It had seven members, of whom four were on the March: Po Ku, Chou En-lai, Lo Fu, and a man called Chen Yun. The other three were Xiang Ying, Wang Ming, the CCP’s representative in Moscow, and Chang Kuo-tao, leader of what was then the second-largest Red base. At Zunyi, the Red Prof proposed that Mao be brought into the Secretariat. Actually, the Red Prof had no right to make this nomination, as he was not a full Politburo member. But Po Ku was too guilt-ridden and demoralized to oppose Mao’s promotion, and it went through. Moscow was not consulted, as radio contact had been severed.