The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The Shanghai massacre was followed by a ‘white terror’. Communists were purged from the Guomindang, and the remaining Communists fled to the mountains, where they established Communist ‘base areas’. There were over a dozen of these, but they were far from the centres of power. Comintern blunders seemed to have destroyed the Communist prospects that only two years earlier seemed so rosy.

  But the defeat and the enforced sojourn in the countryside, far away from the Comintern’s influence, were ultimately to be the making of the Chinese Communists. Expelled from the towns and persecuted by the Guomindang, they were forced to refashion themselves.

  IV

  In the winter of 1918 a 25-year-old man from the provinces sat in a crowded lecture hall in Peking University, at that time the centre of the extraordinary intellectual and cultural unrest of the period. He was listening to one of the most Westernizing leaders of the New Culture movement, Hu Shi. At the end of the lecture, excited by these new ideas, he went up to Hu to ask a question. On hearing his strong southern dialect, Hu enquired whether he was really a student, and learning that he was, in fact, only a lowly library assistant at the University, gave him the brush-off.37 The young librarian was Mao Zedong, who had left his native Hunan and was in Beijing for a few months, before his mother’s illness forced him to return home to his ancestral village. Mao was just one of many young, idealistic Chinese, desperate to take part in the revival of their country and learn about new, foreign ideas. And despite his humiliating treatment by Hu, it was in fact his provincial, rural origins that fitted him to adapt those ideas to Chinese soil far better than more educated and sophisticated students.

  The parallels between Mao and Stalin are striking. Both were from lowly backgrounds, and neither had spent much, or any, time in the West, and had to establish themselves amongst more cosmopolitan and better-educated Communists; both were suspicious of the educated intelligentsia (though Mao’s hostility was more extreme); both spent their youths on the periphery of great but declining empires, amidst a politics of angry nationalism, and then made their way, by a tortuous route, to the imperial centre; both were interested in military issues from an early age, and established themselves as leaders during civil wars; both were ruthless political Machiavellians; both were clever but educated only to a relatively low level in a traditional system that stressed the importance of morality and ideology, whether Orthodox or Confucian. And both had a belief in the power of ideas in politics, and were initially on the Radical side of the Marxist movement.

  They were both also stubborn and rebellious, and had developed a deep contempt for their fathers. Mao saw his father as a narrow-minded, greedy tyrant, who exploited the poor; he refused to live with the wife chosen for him, and later he claimed that he had learnt the importance of rebellion from his relations with his father. Mao’s interest in rebels is evident in his love of the Water Margin (also known as All Men are Brothers), the classical Chinese tale of the 108 bandit-‘brothers’ who fought for the poor against unjust officials – a heroic romance reminiscent of the Koba tales Stalin was so attached to. He told the journalist Edgar Snow that he had much preferred them to the Confucian texts, and often read them in class, hidden by a classic when the teacher walked past.38 Mao himself, like Stalin, would have known of peasant bandits near to home. As the Qing Empire decayed, Hunan, like Georgia, had its own bandits: secret brotherhoods that fought the landlords.

  But we should not press the parallels too far. Georgia of the 1870s and 1890s Hunan were very different places. Mao, unlike Stalin, was an eager participant in a movement of cultural revolution against a hierarchical Confucianism – the May 4th movement – and his attitudes to a whole range of issues – family, society, culture – were much more egalitarian and radical than his elder comrade’s.

  Whilst Mao shared Stalin’s sardonic sense of humour and his use of coarse language, he was reserved amongst his peers. People who met him saw an intense, private figure. As the American writer and Manchester Guardian correspondent Agnes Smedley wrote of her first meeting with him in the 1930s:

  His dark, inscrutable face was long, the forehead broad and high, the mouth feminine. Whatever else he might be, he was an aesthete… As [the military leader] Zhu [De] was loved, Mao Zedong was respected. The few who came to know him best had affection for him, but his spirit dwelt within itself, isolating him. In him was none of the humility of Zhu. Despite that feminine quality in him he was as stubborn as a mule, and a steel rod of pride and determination ran through his nature. I had the impression that he would wait and watch for years, but eventually have his way.39

  When he was only eighteen, Mao had an opportunity to emulate his warrior heroes by enlisting in the Republican army in Hunan’s capital, Changsha, to defend the 1911 revolution. He was not involved in the fighting, but he still faced considerable hardships and risks. After six months he was demobilized, and had to decide what to do with his life. He thought about enrolling in a police school, registered as a trainee soap-maker, and enrolled at a business school, which he left when he learnt that the courses were all in English. He passed the exams for a prestigious Middle School, specializing in Chinese history and literature, but found the regime too restrictive and disciplinarian; he finally ended up at a teacher training college, which he enjoyed, graduating in 1918.

  He used his years at the college to extend his reading. At a time when China was in intellectual and political ferment, he was typical of nationalist students of his time in seeking ways to revive China. Like members of the New Culture movement, he believed that the Chinese had to shed their servile mentality. Assertiveness and willpower were the answers. But Mao’s solutions also had a distinctly military colouring, and he continued to see the world through the eyes of the young soldier and reader of heroic romances. In his first article, written in 1917, he wrote:

  Our nation is wanting in strength: the military spirit has not been encouraged. The physical condition of the people deteriorates daily… If our bodies are not strong, we will tremble at the sight of [enemy] soldiers. How then can we attain our goals, or exercise far-reaching influence?40

  The discipline of physical exercise – which Mao himself practised every day – would strengthen the will, and in turn willpower, combined with a proper moral outlook, would give the Chinese the strength to rise up against their imperial oppressors. Unlike the Confucian ‘superior man’, whose deportment was ‘cultivated and agreeable’, exercise had to be ‘savage and rude’.41 Mao was perhaps justifying his own, rather earthy peasant character. But he was also combining a Confucian interest in ethics with a fashionable Social Darwinism imported from the West. Mao’s remedy for national decline was much the same as his French and Russian predecessors’ had been: to destroy the old elitist culture and forge the people into a quasi-military fraternity.

  Like many of his contemporaries, Mao began as a vague anarchist, but it is no surprise that he should have been one of the first to conclude that the Russian ‘extremist party’, as he called it, had the real answers. His observation of what he saw as the corrupt and selfish Hunanese gentry convinced him that any reform that relied on them was hopeless.42 In 1921 he went though the options available to China, and argued that all models – from social reformism to moderate Communism – would fail to change China. Only ‘extreme Communism’ with its ‘methods of class dictatorship’ ‘can be expected to deliver results’.43

  Mao soon became a successful Communist party organizer in Hunan. He embraced the United Front strategy, and worked for the Guomindang in the office of its central Propaganda Department. But after the crisis of 1927, when the Communists were forced out of the towns into the countryside, Mao was well prepared to take advantage of the new conditions. His attention returned to the military, and soon he urged the Communists to build a military force to counter the Guomindang. As he famously declared, ‘We must be aware that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’44

  Mao also had a deep interest in the countrysi
de and its social tensions. He was not sentimental about rural life, but, as his doctor reminisced, ‘Mao was a peasant and he had simple tastes.’45 Like other southern Chinese peasants, he never brushed his teeth, and merely rinsed his mouth with tea (in later life they became completely rotten and black). Foreign visitors were sometimes disconcerted when he took his clothes off in mid-conversation to search for lice.46 From 1925 onwards, Mao became increasingly convinced that the peasantry had to play a decisive revolutionary role. He never abandoned the Marxist doctrine that the working class and the party were the vanguard, and that socialist society would be modern and industrial.47 But he argued that Communist strategy should be focused on the countryside, because the ‘feudal-landlord class’ was the main bulwark of the warlords and the foreign imperialists.48

  Initially, Moscow took a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist line, opposing this emphasis on the peasants. But by the end of 1927, and with the disaster of its United Front policy clear, it had accepted the new strategy. Mao himself established a base in the Jinggang Mountains, before being forced to move it to the Jiangxi–Fujian border in south-western China, near the town of Ruijin. On 7 November 1931, the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, the first Communist state in China was inaugurated: the ‘Jiangxi Soviet Republic’. The ceremony took place in a clan temple outside the capital Ruijin, the regime’s headquarters. A parade was organized, which included a figure symbolizing a ‘British imperialist’ with two prisoners in chains – India and Ireland. Mao, standing with others on a Soviet-style podium and surrounded with red flags and hammers and sickles, was declared President of the new Republic.49

  It was in this period that the party developed the notion of the guerrilla ‘people’s war’, which was to be so important in adapting Communism to the conflicts of the Third World. The Central Committee of the CCP issued a ‘General Outline for Military Work’ in May 1928, which explained the strategy in detail: the Communist ‘Red Army’ was to mobilize local peasants into Red Defence Detachments to fight against local landlord militias and the Guomindang, whilst confiscating land and distributing it to the poor. Meanwhile, the party was to be dominant and would perform ‘agitation and propaganda’ amongst the soldiers; relations between officers and soldiers were to be egalitarian; and efforts were made to exclude the petty-bourgeoisie from the army. The Jiangxi bases were to be the germ of a Communist state, whilst supplying the Red Army and resisting Guomindang incursions.50

  This, then, was a very different model of military organization to the conventional European one – and indeed the one taught by the Soviets at the Huangpu academy. It was paradoxically Chiang Kaishek and the Guomindang who were more impressed by Soviet ideas than the Communists were, and they tried to create a hierarchical, all-encompassing national structure to mobilize the population for military and labour service. According to their baojia system, all households were to be registered through a complex bureaucratic organization supervised by a mixture of central envoys and local elites.

  The Guomindang’s effort had some successes, and was by no means doomed to failure.51 But given the political chaos of the time, the proliferation of armed gangs, and the weakness of central government, its top-down approach was over-ambitious and could easily be frustrated by disobedient local officials. The Communist strategy, in contrast, was a local rather than a national one, and was only likely to succeed at a time of extreme political disruption. But it was effective at knitting together a society pulverized by war, whilst forging disparate military groups into coherent forces.52

  Mao was just one Communist military commander of many, but he became a particularly successful and committed practitioner of the guerrilla ‘people’s war’. He had joined Zhu De, a former mercenary and opium addict who had gone to Germany and then returned, a secret Communist, to train officers in the Guomindang. Mao learnt about military science from him, and together they formed the ‘Fourth Red Army’, which became an effective guerrilla force. Rather than confronting a stronger enemy in conventional battle formation, their strategy was to retreat, luring their enemy into their heartland and attacking them when they were far from their supply lines.

  Meanwhile, Mao applied himself to a thorough sociological analysis of the peasantry. He saw the peasantry as a ‘sea’ of sympathy and sustenance, essential if the Communist fish were to swim freely. But he realized that the crude Marxist class divisions of ‘rich’, ‘middle’ and ‘poor’ peasants would not help him, and might even alienate the rural population. In 1930, therefore, he carried out a massive and exhaustive survey of the peasantry of several areas, including Xunwu;53 he itemized the numbers of shops and the 131 consumer goods available in them, as well as the professions and political attitudes of the inhabitants. He soon concluded that the rich peasants were a tiny, isolated minority; the party could therefore draw ‘on the fat to make up the lean’ – that is, redistributing the land of the rich to the poor – without upsetting the majority.54 Even so, Mao had no qualms about using violence, and organized ‘Red Execution Teams’ to kill landlords and other ‘counter-revolutionaries’.

  Communist rule could therefore be violent and chaotic. The Communist armies that arrived in Jiangxi and other base areas were rag-tag groups of intellectuals, Guomindang defectors, bandits, criminals, workers and peasants. They were then confronted with the task of imposing their control over a fractured political landscape whilst simultaneously trying to resist frequent Guomindang attacks. Meanwhile, secret societies, lineage brotherhoods, rival villages and a plethora of Guomindang and Communist militias all competed for power.

  The leadership itself was also highly divided – as was the norm in the Communist party. Despite Mao’s military success, Moscow and the Shanghai-based Communist party thought him much too revolutionary and undisciplined. In 1929 the Comintern had tried to impose control over the Chinese Communists, by sending Wang Ming and the so-called ‘Returned Students’, trained at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, to run the party, and they in turn were intent on imposing control over this stubborn maverick. They disliked Mao’s preference for informal, guerrilla war, preferring more conventional military action. And they tended to favour attacks on cities to Mao’s rural methods. Mao’s appointment as President of the Jiangxi soviet was actually a clever way of promoting him out of harm’s way.55

  By 1934 Mao had effectively been sidelined by the Muscovite group. Paradoxically, however, it was Chiang Kaishek who came to his rescue. Chiang’s fifth campaign against the Jiangxi republic was successful, and the Communists were forced to flee. The tortuous search for a new base area, which took them from the south-western region of Jiangxi to the northern region of Shaanxi and the city of Yan’an, became known as the Long March. Mao yet again showed his prowess as a military leader and the success of his guerrilla methods, swiftly re-establishing himself as a contender for sole leadership.

  In future years Mao skilfully transformed the Long March into the transcendent moment in Communist mythology. Mao became a Moses, leading his chosen people to the Promised Land, enduring enormous suffering on the way.56 In fact, Mao and the central leadership had a rather more comfortable journey than most, because they were borne in litters (though they did work on intelligence and strategy at night; Mao, like Stalin, was a nocturnal worker). Even so, the Long March was an extraordinary feat. Six thousand miles were covered in a year – about seventeen miles a day, over what was often very difficult terrain. They were pursued by the Guomindang, and were especially vulnerable at river crossings. Of the 86,000 that set off, only a few thousand reached the safety of Yan’an.

  As the Communists fled from Chiang’s armies, more dangerous enemies were gathering their forces. The Japanese, their economy ravaged by the Great Depression, now sought captive markets in China. Meanwhile, of course, Nazism had forced the Comintern to change its line. Moscow now pressed Mao and the Yan’an government to create a Popular Front with the Guomindang in order to resist the Japanese. Mao, unsurprisingly, was hostile to the idea. In 19
36 he gave in to Comintern pressure, however, taking part in campaigns against the Japanese, but he resisted Moscow’s continuing attempts to force him into a close alliance with the nationalists. He insisted on maintaining the independence of the Communist Party, expanding the Communist base areas, and following his tried-and-tested guerrilla tactics.

  The Long March had enhanced Mao’s prestige, but he was still part of a collective leadership, and the Comintern was still trying to assert its authority. Again, Stalin sent Wang Ming to re-establish Moscow’s chain of command and to force Mao to accept the Popular Front policy. For a time Mao was under serious threat; it may be that Stalin was planning to implicate him in a planned trial of Comintern ‘rightists’ in 1938.57 But Mao was rescued by renewed tensions between Chiang and the Communist party, and by the capture of Wang’s capital, Wuhan, by the Japanese – Mao’s strategy of fleeing to distant Yan’an was vindicated. By the end of 1938, Mao had secured Moscow’s support as party leader, though it was only in 1943 that Mao’s dominance was wholly secure. And it was in this period, holed up in Yan’an, that Mao established himself as preeminent leader, and began to forge a new radical Communist amalgam.