At the beginning of the twentieth century a member of the North China Famine Relief Commission characterised the area as a ‘nest of plunderers lost in the wilderness’.4 Since then, things had only become worse. When Otto Braun, a military advisor to the Communists, arrived in Yan’an in October 1935, he found the region a ‘poor calcified land’ racked by ‘years of warlord campaigns, horrific banditry, and terrible harvests and epidemics’.5 He also noted that there were few children under ten still alive. With a population of just 1.4 million people in 1937, Yan’an nonetheless became the cradle of the Chinese Communist revolution.
Only a master technician of violence – Mao Zedong – could have forged in this poor region a force that would triumph in the 1945–9 Chinese Civil War. Luck also played an important part. In 1934, the Nationalists drove the Communists from bases in central China, forcing them on to the 9,000-kilometre trek from central China to the barren wastelands of north Shaanxi province that became known as the Long March. During that time leadership splits became so bad that two central committees claimed supremacy. The survival of the group led by Mao came down to coincidence. In September 1935, according to Mao biographer Alexander Pantsov, ‘Mao and his comrades learned to their surprise’ that a Communist base existed in north Shaanxi just 350 kilometres away. So Mao took the forces loyal to him there.6 The other group, initially larger and stronger, was mauled by Muslim forces in north-west China.
Context was critical. In 1972, when Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei visited China in advance of the normalisation of relations between China and Japan, he met with Mao Zedong in Mao’s study in Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound next to the Forbidden City. During his visit before the meeting, Prime Minister Tanaka had repeatedly apologised for Japan’s invasion of China. Mao’s personal physician recalls in his memoirs that when Tanaka was about to do so again in the meeting, Mao stopped him, saying that ‘the “help” of the Japanese invasion’ had made the Communist victory possible.7 Mao had made similar statements to previous Japanese visitors. In 1956 he told Lieutenant General Endo Saburo, a vice chief of staff of the Kuantung Army, ‘We must thank you. Precisely because you fought this war, you taught the Chinese people, who had been like a sheet of loose sand, to unite.’8 Without the Japanese invasion, the Chinese Communists would have withered away in the barren north-west.
But more than luck and circumstance were needed. In China, there is the notion that there were two Maos, the good Mao who led the Communist revo lution before 1949 and restored China’s pride, and the bad Mao, who was responsible for the purges of the early 1950s, the crushing of dissent in the late 1950s, the terrible famine that followed and the Cultural Revolution. That is too simple. Mao Zedong was never a cuddly liberal or a huggable Communist; he was always a tough revolutionary, who was determined to destroy what he saw as the iniquitous, cruel and diseased China of his day. He was inspirational, charismatic and idealistic, and knew how to speak to village China, but he was also committed to the use of violence, and perfected its use as he learned from experience, not just for the sake of the revolution and the creation of the New China – although that was most certainly true – but to enhance his own personal power.
The Rustification of Communism
Marxism–Leninism came to China as a hyper-urban ideology. In Marxism, urban industrial workers are the social group that drives historical change. Karl Marx could hardly have been more scathing about peasants, dismissing them as ‘the class that represents barbarism in civilisation’,9 or, famously, ‘a sack of potatoes’ forming a millstone around the neck of revolution.10 Revolutions took place in cities rather than in the countryside. The October Revolution began in Petrograd, in 1871 the French Communards took over Paris, and the 1848 revolutions erupted in cities such as Vienna, Paris and Berlin. In 1921, when the Chinese Communist Party was founded, its members were convinced that in China, too, the revolution would begin in the cities, manned by trained industrial workers mobilised by full-time revolutionaries, not by village hoodlums. The big events of recent times in China, including the 1911 Revolution and the May Fourth Movement, had also taken place in urban centres. History happened in the city, not the countryside.
But the Chinese Communists would grow strong not in the cities, but in village China. This was partly, once again, as a result of circumstance. The Nationalists forced the Communists out of China’s cities, first in 1927, when thousands of Communists died in the White Terror that followed the Nationalist victory in the Northern Expedition, and then in the early 1930s, when the Nationalists rolled up Communist secret service organisations, making it impossible for Communist operatives to stay in the cities. The Chinese Communists were forced into the countryside, where they had to make the best of things.
But the rural flavour of Chinese communism was also the result of a growing realisation among intellectuals, scholars and activists in the 1920s and 1930s that the fundamental problems holding China back lay in the countryside, tortured as it was by poverty, famine, drought and epidemics. The anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, who had studied with the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics, outlined the patterns of human relations structured around family and religion in the Chinese countryside. Like the Confucian sage Liang Shuming, the US-educated Christian reformer Jimmy Yen initiated a rural revival movement, promoting tax and rent reform as well as education across north China. They wanted to turn backward peasants into modern citizens. The husband of Pearl Buck, the author of The Good Earth, was the rural economist John Buck, who lived in China from 1915 until 1944. After surveying landholding and rural productivity, he concluded that technological backwardness, not landlordism, was respon sible for rural poverty. The left-wing ‘moral economist’ R. H. Tawney, who spent a year in China, argued that overpopulation and absentee landlordism had severed customary partnership relations between owner and cultivator. In 1931 he concluded, presciently, that ‘the revolution of 1911 was a bourgeois affair. The revolution of the peasants has still to come … it is likely to be unpleasant. It will not, perhaps, be undeserved.’11
In 1937 Deng Tuo, who later became the editor of the Communists’ most important newspaper the People’s Daily, published the 500-page History of Famine Relief in China, which remains fundamental reading for the study of the subject. Deng Tuo trawled though China’s vast storehouse of historical writing to produce a history, ranging from ancient times to the present, about instances of famine, the thinking about the causes of famine and the approaches various governments had adopted to providing famine relief. He studied economics and joined the Communist Party in 1933 when he was just twenty-one years old. As a Marxist, he inevitably rejected the idea that famine was somehow a natural phenomenon and instead argued that relations of production were its fundamental cause.12
But the countryside was not seen just as a problem.13 Chi Pang-yuan’s memoirs turn elegiac when describing her place of birth in Manchuria, where she found support in close and supportive family and village relations. While retelling her life as a refugee, she paints the countryside as a place of astounding beauty offering refuge, human warmth and even laughter. Chen Kewen loved Nanjing, but he sent his family back home to the Guangxi countryside when the war broke out. His sense of duty compelled him to travel with the government to wherever it relocated – Nanjing, Wuhan, Chongqing – but his diary is full of lament about the corruption, carpet-bagging, womanising, self-indulgence and wastefulness he found in these cities. Chiang Kaishek returned to his home town of Xikou, or some place like it, whenever his troubles overwhelmed him. Many writings by Lu Xun, still widely regarded as China’s greatest modern author, are about the alienation from the countryside of a newly urbanised elite who associate their rural home towns with safety, honesty, simplicity and happiness, and urban China with the opposite. Chinese communism drew on such understandings of urban and rural China, and aimed to restore the lost solidarities of village China, not through education but through revolution.
Mao’s epiphany came in early 1927, after the Northern Expedition reached Wuhan and the Nationalists had split into a left-wing faction there and a right-wing faction under Chiang Kaishek in Nanjing. Mao was born in 1893 into a prosperous farming family in Shaoshan, Hunan province.14 As with Chen Kewen and Chi Pang-yuan, modern schools and universities provided the pathways for Mao to move away from Shaoshan, first to the provincial capital of Changsha and then to Beijing and Shanghai. Like Chen Kewen, Mao was swept up by the May Fourth Movement, talking, reading, writing, walking and experimenting with new organisations and new modes of life. He shared the movement’s national self-loathing: ‘[W]e Chinese simply have no idea how to handle a coherent undertaking.’15 Mao represented Hunan at the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, turned professional revolutionary after Soviet financial aid provided stipends to China’s Communists, and until 1925 worked in Hunan to build up the Party’s presence there. When a warrant was issued for his arrest, he was compelled to flee to Canton, where he found a patron in, of all people, Wang Jingwei, who arranged for him to work in the KMT’s propaganda department and at the Peasant Movement Training Institute.16
A month-long tour of the Hunan countryside in January 1927 convinced Mao that the CCP’s rural policy was wrong. That policy was minimalist, calling only for rent reductions rather than land redistribution, so as not to alienate the Nationalists, many of whose members (including officers in the National Revolutionary Army) had substantial interests in the countryside. The CCP’s strategy at this time, when the Nationalists and the Communists were ostensibly working as a united front, focused on seeking to take over the Nationalist Party from within. The Communists therefore restricted their activities to distributing propaganda primarily among urban workers, although they also established peasant associations in Guangdong province. At the same time, they built up their influence in the Nationalist party, the Nationalist government established after the death of Sun Yatsen, and the armed forces being trained by Chiang Kaishek. This policy became increasingly untenable as relations soured between the Nationalists and the Communists, especially after Chiang Kaishek’s coup.
In March 1927, Mao wrote the now celebrated ‘Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan’. Entirely on their own initiative, Mao exalted, the Hunan peasantry were implementing revolution. Peasants were overthrowing ‘local bullies, the bad gentry and the lawless landlords, and in passing they also hit out against patriarchal ideas and institutions of all kinds’.17 They were eradicating the old China’s vices of gambling, opium-smoking, vulgar opera performances, superstition, excessive feasting and banditry. ‘Extreme force’ was being used, Mao admitted, but he defended it, suggesting that revolution was ‘not like inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting a picture’; it was ‘an act of violence by which one class overthrows another’.18 Mao had been convinced of the need for violence from the time he had joined the Party. He declared in a debate with those who put their faith in education that ‘we simply must have a reign of terror’ because the opponents of change, such as warlords, rich businessmen and landlords, would use the forces available to them, including local militias, to crack down before education could do its magic.19 The lesson Mao learned in Hunan was that the violence he believed necessary to bring about revolution could be found most easily in the countryside. He did not want to turn farmers into citizens but peasants into revolutionaries.
Over the next few years, Mao recruited a military force first in the Jing-gang mountains of west Hunan province and then in south Jiangxi province. But he combined militarisation with building rural bases and transforming power structures by redistributing land, constructing new administrative organisations and drawing poor peasants, the youth and women into mass organisations. Some of his fellow Communists objected to building such bases, preferring dispersed guerrilla warfare, but Mao was adamant: ‘People cannot always walk or stand. They must have a place to sit. Bases are the buttocks of the Red Army.’20 Determined to prevent his forces from degenerating into yet another bandit gang, he laid down a set of simple rules to make his soldiers aspire to higher standards of behaviour. These were the ‘Three Rules of Discipline’ (obedience to orders, no confiscations of peasant property and the prompt surrender to higher authority of all things taken from landlords) and ‘Eight Points of Attention’ (politeness, honesty, courtesy to women and so on). This was a kind of New Life movement for beginners. To secure Party control of the Red Army, Mao appointed political commissars right down to platoon level. These commissars were responsible for pastoral care of the troops as well as compliance with Party directives. Given that the Communists survived on sacking towns, confiscating property and demanding ransoms, these principles were acknowledged more in the breach than in the observance.
In his report on the Hunan peasant movement, Mao worried about wealthy families and gentry infiltrating and undermining peasant associations. In 1930, after the Red Army had grown to 60,000 troops, that fear – plus conflicts with Party members with strong local ties, differences with the Shanghai leaders about military strategy and organisation, and his own paranoia about a Nationalist underground network of agents – resulted in Mao ordering a witch-hunt in which thousands of Party and government officials and Red Army officers were executed.21 In this violent period of China’s history, during which one’s enemies were legion if sometimes imagined, Mao was not alone in using violence to defend his position, settle scores and purify his ranks of dissenters. As he would put it later: ‘revolutionary war is an antitoxin that not only eliminates the enemy’s poison but also purges us of our own filth.’22 Throughout his career, Mao regularly adopted violent means to purge the Communist Party, especially prior to major military campaigns, as he did in the 1940s and again several times later. He did so, of course, well before Stalin adopted the systematic use of violence to conduct his purges in the Soviet Union.
In the aftermath of this particular purge, Mao lost much of his power, not only because of its excesses, but also because the CCP leaders, unable to continue operating from Shanghai due to Nationalist suppression, arrived in Jiangxi with grandiose visions of using the Red Army to seize large cities and even whole provinces. Mao believed that the priority should be to consolidate the Jiangxi base area, an attitude his opponents condemned as ‘extreme right opportunism’, ‘kulak deviation’ and ‘guerrillaism’.23 For several years Mao became marginalised. He whiled away the time living with his family in temples on mountain tops, practising the flute and writing poetry. He later recalled: ‘at this time not only a single person, but not even a single devil dared to cross the threshold of my house. All that was left for me was to eat, sleep, and shit. At least they didn’t cut off my head.’24
Mao’s talents as a guerrilla leader could not be denied. In 1930, the Nationalists began the first of five operations to drive the Communists out of Jiangxi and other central China provinces. While CCP leaders called for meeting the Nationalist advance head on, Mao insisted on ‘luring the enemy in deep’, initially by using guerrilla warfare to slow it down and then by concentrating an overwhelming number of fighters on hitting exposed Nationalist units on the flanks and in the rear. Mao summarised this tactic as ‘the enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.’25 Such tactics worked four times, but on the fifth, in 1934, the Nationalists deployed 1 million troops to ring the Jiangxi Soviet with a string of concrete blockhouses, building new ones as they advanced, thus squeezing the trapped Communists ever more until escape became the only option. The Nationalists succeeded in clearing the Communists from central China and forcing them on the Long March.
When the surviving Long Marchers, morose, tired and defeatist, arrived at the town of Zunyi in Guizhou province in January 1935, Mao seized his chance. With the support of backers talked round during the previous months, he charged that the surrender of the Jiangxi base area was the result not of overwhelming Nationalist force
s but of mistaken military strategy. Mao focused his criticism on Otto Braun, a tall, blond Soviet agent of German descent who proved an easy target not only because he was a foreigner but because he did not speak Chinese. The meeting concluded by restoring Mao’s membership of both the Party’s political and military leadership organs. Elated, he told his wife, He Zizhen, that ‘the meeting figured that a Buddha like me might still prove useful’.26 Heavily pregnant with their fifth child, a month later she had to abandon her newborn baby to a local family: children were not allowed on the Long March.
This was the revolutionary school of hard knocks, bound to wash away any last smidgen of sentimentality. Raising a guerrilla force was not difficult in China’s countryside, where weapons were plentiful and for which, to people living close to famine, just a bowl of rice and a few vegetables formed an acceptable offer. Disciplining that force and lashing it to revolution was a different proposition, especially since the local enemies of revolution were fighting over the long term. These years of living in the countryside, in the midst of poverty, constant warfare and factional infighting, taught Mao Zedong and his colleagues much about harnessing the grievances of village China. But they were also aware that they had suffered a near-fatal defeat. The question remained how to translate rural unrest into a powerful force capable of taking power.
Theorising Guerrilla War
When Mao arrived in Yan’an in 1935, he was just one of several CCP leaders. He had established himself a reputation as a guerrilla commander, but otherwise he was considered unextraordinary. He was even regarded as rather peasant-like and boorish. Visitors to Yan’an at the time depicted Mao as busy – hearing reports, issuing orders, attending meetings, hosting visitors and giving lectures – but relaxed. Edgar Snow described him as having ‘the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant, with a lively sense of humour and a love of rustic laughter’ and combining ‘curious qualities of naiveté with the most incisive wit and worldly sophistication’.27 A year later, the British journalist James Bertram marvelled at Mao’s natural charisma: ‘I waited for the oratorical tricks of the demagogue, but … Mao spoke in his homely dialect and with continual lively play of peasant humour, in direct and concrete terms.’28
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