PART TWO THE REVOLUTIONARY

10 ENTERING THE GUOMINDANG

Sun Yat-sen endorsed the decision of the CCP Central Executive Committee to enter the Guomindang.¹ At Chen Duxiu's request, Li Dazhao and Lin Boqu, a Communist Party activist who had extensive ties with the Guomindang leadership, began negotiations with Sun Yat-sen. Recalling these later, Li Dazhao wrote that they discussed “the question of the rebirth of the Guomindang in order to achieve the rebirth of China.” In other words, they discussed reorganizing the Guomindang in both a political and organizational sense, including admitting communists into its ranks. In early September 1922, Sun welcomed Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Cai Hesen, and Zhang Tailei into his party.²

On September 4, 1922, a meeting of Guomindang central and provincial leaders in Shanghai discussed the question of reorganizing the party. Communists also took part. Sun Yat-sen appointed a special nine-member commission, including Chen Duxiu, to compose a draft program and statutes for the Guomindang. Meanwhile, Sun entered into intensive correspondence with Adolf Joffe, a leading Russian Bolshevik who had come to Beijing in August at the head of a Soviet diplomatic mission.

The Comintern also strived to soften the negative attitude of the communists to the Guomindang. In the fall of 1922, Chen Duxiu was summoned to Moscow in the company of the effusive leftist Liu Renjing. They attended the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International, held in November and December. Chen and Liu met with the leaders of the ECCI and discussed the tactics of the anti-imperialist united front. Trying to change Chen's mind, Comintern officials even elected him a member of the congress's Commission on the Eastern Question.³ The upshot was that soon after Chen Duxiu and Liu Renjing returned to China, the Chinese communists retired the slogan “democratic front” and replaced it with a call to establish an “anti-imperialist, national revolutionary front.”

On January 1, 1923, Sun Yat-sen published a declaration on reorganizing the Guomindang. The next day a meeting was convened in Shanghai on party affairs and the party program and statutes were published. Sun Yat-sen's famous Three Principles of the People were given a new and more radical formulation. Sun stressed anti-imperialism, defense of the rights of workers, and the democratic transformation of China.⁴ He invited Chen Duxiu, Zhang Tailei, Lin Boqu, and the Cantonese communist Tan Pingshan, who had also earlier been a member of the Revolutionary Alliance, to work in the central and regional apparatuses of the Guomindang.

On January 26, Sun and Joffe issued a joint declaration in which the Soviet representative assured Sun that in the struggle for national renewal and full independence “China enjoys the widest sympathy of the Russian people and can count on the support of Russia.” Both sides expressed their “complete agreement on Chinese-Russian relations” and emphasized that “at present the communist order or even the Soviet system cannot be introduced into China” because of the absence of the necessary conditions.⁵ Sun's rapprochement with the CCP and Soviet Russia continued with growing intensity as the troops of local militarists who were loyal to him drove the forces of Chen Jiongming, who had betrayed Sun, out of Canton into the eastern part of Guangdong. In February, Sun returned to Canton to head a southern Chinese government there.

Although these events shaped the context of his subsequent rise to power, Mao played no part in them. He continued working in Hunan until April 1923, organizing strikes and workers' demonstrations in Changsha and neighboring districts. On October 24, 1922, Kaihui gave birth to their firstborn, whom they named Anying. Mao himself selected the name when Kaihui returned home with the newborn. Looking happily at his wife, he asked, “Well, what shall we name the baby?” Then, without awaiting her answer, he said, “Let him be Anying.” (An means “the bank of a river”; ying means “hero.”) “The Hero Who Reaches the Shore of Socialism. What do you say?”⁶ Kaihui agreed. She was happy.

Mao had no time, however, to take care of his son. Party work fully occupied him. The situation in China changed dramatically when on February 7, the militarist Wu Peifu, who had masqueraded as a “friend of the workers,” carried out a bloody reprisal against striking railroad workers. Thirty-two people were killed and more than two hundred wounded. A wave of “white” terror engulfed Henan and Hebei provinces. Many trade unions and workers' clubs were smashed. Mao had to react. Demanding that the guilty be punished, on February 8 he organized a general strike on the Changsha–Wuchang railroad. On the same day a memorial meeting was held that attracted more than twenty thousand workers and students. Meetings were also held in many urban trade unions and a large demonstration took place at the Anyuan mines.

On March 29, the Special Xiang District Committee, headed by Mao, and public organizations in Changsha sponsored a large-scale anti-Japanese demonstration. Some sixty thousand people paraded along the streets of the city that day as part of a national campaign coinciding with the expiration of the Japanese lease of the Chinese ports of Lüshun (Port Arthur) and Dalian. Once again Chinese public opinion demanded the annulment of the extortionate Twenty-One Demands.⁷

Mao's actions stretched the patience of the Hunan governor beyond his breaking point. In April, Zhao Hengti cracked down on the union leaders and issued a separate order for the arrest of Mao Zedong.⁸ Mao had to flee.

Happily, in January 1923, the Central Executive Committee of the CCP had already decided to recall Mao from Changsha. Chen Duxiu invited him to work in the central party apparatus in Shanghai. Both Maring and Chen were extremely satisfied with Mao's activities in Hunan and awarded him this promotion. In a November 1922 letter to Zinoviev, Joffe, and Voitinsky, Maring praised the party organization in Hunan as the best in China.⁹ Now Mao faced the task of disseminating the Hunan experience throughout the country.

Li Weihan, Mao's old friend from the Renovation of the People Study Society, was appointed in his place. Packing his few belongings, Mao left for Shanghai by boat. He was loath to part with his wife and son. Kaihui was pregnant again and no one knew how long they would be parted.

When Mao arrived in Shanghai a week later, Chen Duxiu was not there. He had left for Canton in March to establish direct links with Sun Yat-sen. Mao headed for the Central Executive Committee in Zhabei, the dirty, smoky, and noisy workers' district of Shanghai. The CEC was also preparing to move. The Comintern had decided that the central apparatus of the party should relocate to Canton, following its chairman. In early June, Mao, accompanied by Maring, set off for the south.¹⁰

There, sheltered by Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese communists were able to operate openly for the first time. For Mao, it seemed, the secret meetings and passwords were a thing of the past. He was now preoccupied with legal work connected to establishing the united front. In Changsha, influenced by telegrams and letters from the Central Executive Committee, Mao had already begun to change his negative attitude toward the Guomindang. Practical experience was also decisive. Mao had been shaken by the bloody carnage inflicted upon the Hankou railway workers by Wu Peifu and the crushing of the trade union organizations in Hubei, Henan, and Hebei. He was particularly affected by the collapse of the workers' movement in Hunan as a result of Zhao Hengti's reactionary policies. He could not help but notice that Sun Yat-sen and his Three Principles of the People were sympathetic to the workers' movement. In January 1922, Sun's Canton government had provided considerable assistance to striking Chinese workers and seamen in Hong Kong. The seamen's strike, which was anti-imperialist in nature, relied on the solidarity of the entire population of Guangdong province, including the national bourgeoisie, and achieved partial success. The Hankou railway workers, who were spurred on by the communists, received no support from other social forces and were defeated.

For the first time Mao publicly expressed his support for the anti-imperialist alliance, on April 10, 1923, several days before departing Changsha. On the pages of Xin shidai (New age), the journal published by the Self-Study University, he said:

If we analyze the influential factions within the country, there are only three: the revolutionary democratic faction, the non-revolutionary democratic faction, and the reactionary faction. The main body of the revolutionary democratic faction is, of course, the Guomindang; the rising Communist faction is cooperating with it …… The Communist Party has temporarily abandoned its most radical views in order to cooperate with the relatively radical Guomindang …… This [situation] is the source of peace and unification, it is the mother of revolution, it is the magic potion of democracy and independence. Everyone must be aware of this.¹¹

However, Mao did not become a staunch advocate of the united front like Maring and the ECCI. For now he said nothing about the entry of communists into the Guomindang. But the isolation of the Communist Party and the workers, and the profound crisis of the trade union movement, plunged him into depression; he saw the alliance with the Guomindang, even though not ideal, as a way out of the situation. Meeting with Maring in Shanghai, Mao could not restrain his gloomy thoughts. Maring reported that Mao was depressed by the fact that in all of Hunan with its population of thirty million, there were no more than thirty thousand organized workers. Maring wrote that Mao was “at the end of his latin with labororganization [sic] and was so pessimistic that he saw the only salvation of China in the intervention by Russia,” proposing that Soviet Russia should build a “military base” in northwest China. Moreover, he supposed that “in Chinese conditions the old tradition of a patriarchal society still strong …… [W]e cannot develop a modern mass party neither comm[unist] nor nationalist.”¹²

In Canton, however, Mao cheered up. The turning point was the Third Congress of the Communist Party, held legally from June 12 through June 20, 1923, in the eastern outskirts of Canton. Chen Duxiu chaired the forum while Maring played an active role. The 40 delegates who assembled in this quiet setting, in what looked like an uninhabited house, represented 420 members of the CCP, of whom one-quarter (110) were in prison.¹³ Since the Second Congress the party had more than doubled in size, adding 225 members. The CCP was mostly male—there were only 19 women in it—and dominated by intellectuals. There were just 164 worker members. Party cells were operating in Guangdong, Shanghai, Beijing, Changsha, Anyuan, Tangshan, Jinan, Hangzhou, Hankou, at the Changxingdian railroad station near Beijing and the Pukou railroad station near Nanjing, and also overseas in Moscow.¹⁴ (The Moscow cell was composed of Chinese students at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East [KUTV in Russian abbreviation], a special educational institution established by the Comintern in 1921.)¹⁵ Mao's was the most active of all the cells and the largest, containing more than half the party members. It was the only one that merited praise from Chen Duxiu, who singled it out in his report: “We may say that only the comrades from Hunan have done good work.”¹⁶

There were particularly heated disputes over the tactics and form of the united front, and Mao had to delve deep into the details, which he found difficult at first. In Hunan there had been far fewer members of the Guomindang than there were communists, and no one had been working on the united front. In China generally, in most of the places where the CCP was active, the influence of the Guomindang was minuscule. Sun Yat-sen's party was based in Canton and had a relatively large organization in Shanghai, but elsewhere the members of the Guomindang were few and far between. Sun was a “big cannon,” said representatives from the periphery. He produced a loud noise, but little else.¹⁷ Why, then, did everyone have to join the Guomindang? Just what organization would they join when Guomindang branches could be counted on the fingers of one hand? It would be foolish for the communists themselves to establish Guomindang organizations and then join them.

Important figures in the party, including Zhang Guotao and Cai Hesen, voiced these arguments. They no longer objected on principle to the tactic of entering the Guomindang, but, as Cai Hesen later recalled, they didn't want “to go too far in that direction.” Completely at odds with them were Maring, supported by Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Zhang Tailei, and several other delegates obedient to Moscow. They believed it necessary “to criticize the Guomindang for its feudal tactics,” but at the same time they should “push and guide this party onto the path of revolutionary propaganda, and form a left wing of workers and peasants inside it.” Thus it was necessary “to develop the Guomindang throughout the whole country.”¹⁸ Maring and Chen Duxiu advanced the slogan “Let everyone work in the Guomindang.”¹⁹

On this issue Mao supported Zhang Guotao and Cai Hesen.²⁰ He had been friends with Cai for many years and was influenced by Cai to a certain degree. Moreover, at the beginning of the congress he was unable to shake his pessimism regarding the prospects for the development in China of mass parties and the workers' movement. Yet his position was not as uncompromising as that of Zhang and Cai, and for now he was obviously ambivalent. During the discussion he asserted that the “Komintan [Guomindang] is dominated by Petit-Bourgeoisie …… Petit-Bourgeoisie can for the present time lead [the revolution]. That is why we should join Komintan …… We should not be afraid of joining.”²¹ Yet, at the crucial moment during the roll call, he voted against the resolution of Chen Duxiu. When the resolution obligating the communists to help expand Guomindang organizations throughout China was adopted by a vote of twenty-one for and seventeen opposed, he “lightheartedly announced his acceptance of the decision of the majority.”²² This despite the resolution's emphasis on the need to “establish a strongly centralized party as the headquarters of the national revolutionary movement” and acknowledgment that only the Guomindang could play that role. The Communist Party, the resolution declared, could not turn into a mass organization in the near future “since the working class was not yet a powerful force.”²³

That Mao in the end withdrew his objections was not forgotten. Evidently at the initiative of Maring and Chen Duxiu, for the first time Mao was made a member of the Central Executive Committee, consisting of nine members and five candidate, or nonvoting, members. During the election for members of the CEC he received thirty-four votes. Only Chen, who was elected unanimously, and Cai Hesen and Li Dazhao received more votes than Mao.²⁴ Moreover, Mao joined the exclusive Central Bureau, consisting of just five persons, a kind of Politburo headed by Chen.²⁵ Most important, Mao was chosen as head of the Organizational Department and secretary of the CEC. In the latter capacity he replaced Zhang Guotao, who was dropped because of his sharp opposition to the line of the ECCI. In other words, Mao was the second leading figure in the party.

For the first time in his life he was on an equal footing with his teacher. Now he was not only a journalist but also a communist functionary on a nationwide scale. He became known in Moscow as “unquestionably an able worker,” as Solomon Vil'de (pseudonym Vladimir), a Soviet agent in Shanghai, wrote in a letter to Voitinsky.²⁶

At this congress Mao first became seriously engaged with the peasant question, an issue that was entirely new to him, but one that was to become indissolubly linked with his name. Of course, he was well acquainted with the destitute life of Chinese villages, but until then he had never been seriously involved with organizing the peasantry. In Hunan, only twice under his leadership had attempts been made to organize landless peasants against large landowners, but without results. He and Tan Pingshan were included on a commission charged with drafting a resolution on the peasant question. He also took part in discussions concerning the party's policy regarding the peasantry. Unlike many others at the congress, Mao unexpectedly manifested a keen understanding of the problem. He asserted, “[I]n any revolution the peasant problem was the most important problem …… The KMT [Guomindang] had built something of a foundation in Kwangtung [Guangdong] …… due to its possession of armies composed of peasants. If the CCP would concern itself with the peasant movement and mobilize the peasants, it would not be difficult for the Party to build a situation similar to that in Kwangtung.”²⁷ At the time almost no one paid attention to these prophetic words. The resolution adopted by the delegates was amorphous and pretentious. “The resolution of the Third Congress of our party,” it declared, “asserts the necessity of uniting small peasants, renters, and agricultural laborers to struggle against the imperialists who control China, to overthrow the militarists and the venal officials, to crush local bandits and lieshen [evil gentry] in order to defend the interests of the peasantry and advance the cause of the national revolutionary movement.”²⁸ A directive from the ECCI to the Third Congress, sent from Moscow on May 24 but not received until July 18, soon confirmed that the peasant movement had to be engaged seriously. It stated in unambiguous terms that “the central issue in politics is precisely the peasant question.”²⁹

This formulation was the work of Nikolai Bukharin, a candidate member of the Bolshevik Politburo who was actively involved in the work of the Comintern. For now, however, this was only a paper declaration; the Chinese communists did not translate it into action. For some time even Mao's speech on the peasant question at the Third Congress remained inconsequential.

The only Chinese communist sympathizer who had begun to organize the peasantry as early as the spring of 1922 was Peng Pai, from Guangdong. “It is a useless waste of effort,” his friends argued; “the peasantry is extremely dispersed and incapable of being organized and impervious to propaganda because of their ignorance.”³⁰ Peng Pai succeeded in founding several peasant unions in eastern Guangdong, but when they launched a rent reduction campaign in 1923 Chen Jiongming crushed them.³¹

After the Third Congress, in the aftermath of the defeat of the workers' and peasants' movements, many though not all communists were attracted by the idea of working in the Guomindang. The CEC of the CCP even drafted a plan to extend Guomindang party organizations to all important points in north and central China.³²

Mao, too, was apparently euphoric about creating a united front. While the Third Congress was still in session, during free moments he along with Li Dazhao and Zhang Tailei began to talk with Tan Yankai about the possibility of forming an alliance.³³ Tan, the former governor of Hunan who was a sworn enemy of Zhao Hengti, lived just a two-minute walk from where the congress was meeting; he had a luxurious three-story house. He was a Guomindang member in good standing with Sun Yat-sen. Therefore, an alliance with him would be very advantageous to the Chinese communists. Soon after the Congress, Mao himself joined the Guomindang.³⁴ He also enthusiastically supported the idea of sending Tan Zhen, one of Sun Yat-sen's comrades in arms, to Hunan to organize Guomindang cells there. He sent a directive to Li Weihan, via Tan Zhen, insisting that the Xiang district Communist Party committee provide full assistance to Sun's emissary.³⁵

The Soviet Bolsheviks likewise actively assisted the formation of an anti-imperialist front in China. In March 1923, Moscow fulfilled Sun Yat-sen's request by providing two million gold rubles in financial assistance “to work for the unification and national independence of China.” On May 1, Joffe so informed Sun Yat-sen, emphasizing that Moscow requested the head of the South China government to “preserve the strictest confidentiality regarding all of our assistance.”³⁶ In June 1923, the first group of five military advisers left the USSR for Canton. Their task was to help Sun Yat-sen create his own Guomindang army. From the perspective of CCP leaders, including Mao Zedong, this should be a “new” and genuinely “people's” army that employed “new methods and a new spirit of friendship to defend the republic.” They called on Sun Yat-sen to do this.³⁷

On July 31, at Stalin's suggestion, the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) decided to send Mikhail Borodin, an old Bolshevik and leading member of the ECCI, to China as political adviser to Sun Yat-sen.³⁸ He was to synchronize his position of “high adviser to the Guomindang” with his responsibilities as the Comintern's new representative to the CEC of the CCP, replacing Maring.

Mikhail Borodin was born in 1884, and became a member of the Bolshevik party in 1903. He knew Lenin well, fought in the first Russian revolution (1905), and took part in the Fourth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, held in Stockholm in 1906. Afterward, he and his family emigrated abroad, first to England and then the United States, until 1918. From living abroad Borodin conveyed the impression of being very Westernized. “A tall, commanding presence with a leonine head,” is how Song Meiling, Sun Yat-sen's sister-in-law, remembered Borodin, drawing attention to the impeccable good manners that marked his appearance. He was a man “with a shock of neatly coiffed, long, slightly wavy dark brown mane that came down to the nape of his neck,” she recalled, “with an unexaggerated but ample mustache that French generals of that time feigned …… Speaking in a resonantly deep, clear, unhurried, baritone voice of mid-America intonation without a trace of Russian accent, he lowered still more his voice into a slow basso profundo when emphasizing the importance of a certain point he was making. He was a man who gave the impression of great control and personal magnetism.”³⁹

“A man of few words, he preferred to listen than to speak, and he offered his point of view to others in brief phrases and rejoinders,” is how Sergei Dalin, a secret agent for Soviet Russia, remembered him.⁴⁰ Unlike Comrade Philipp (Maring), Borodin was more patient with the Chinese communists. In this way, according to Zhang Guotao, “he was not to be taken on the same level as Maring.”⁴¹ Borodin's real surname was Gruzenberg, but like everyone in the Comintern he changed his name many times. The Chinese would call him Bao Luoting or Bao guwen (Adviser Bao).

On August 16, Sun Yat-sen dispatched a special mission to the USSR headed by Chiang Kai-shek, a man he trusted, an energetic general and member of the republican movement from the days of the Revolutionary Alliance. Also sent on the mission were another Guomindang member and two communists, including Zhang Tailei. The delegation arrived in Moscow on September 2, and over the next three months became acquainted with the structure of party organs, including the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party; studied the functioning of the soviets; visited military units; and met with leading figures in the Soviet Union, including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Georgy Chicherin.⁴² General Chiang, thirty-six years old, trim, smart, and well educated, made a very positive impression on the Moscow leaders. He held leftist views at the time and strived to demonstrate his “closeness” to the Bolsheviks.⁴³ Realizing that his mail was being inspected by the Russian authorities, in one letter to his wife he made a point of mentioning that he was reading Marx's Capital in his spare time. “I find the first half of this work very heavy-going,” he noted, “but the second half is both profound and entrancing.” In another letter, he enthused, “I enjoyed Mr. Trotsky, whose essential qualifications for being a revolutionary are patience and activity.” After this, Comintern officials clearly intimated their hope that Chiang would become a member of the Communist Party. Not objecting in principle, Chiang replied he would first have to obtain permission from Sun. (He had no intention of joining any communist party, although he really was a leftist at this time.)⁴⁴

At Chiang's request, in November 1923 the ECCI drafted a new resolution on the national question in China and on the Guomindang, incorporating a new interpretation of Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People. The Comintern offered the Guomindang a logical program for an anti-imperialist, national democratic revolution, the key feature of which was the call for a radical agrarian revolution and the nationalization of industry.⁴⁵ After the ECCI adopted this resolution on November 28, it was transmitted to Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang submitted it to Sun Yat-sen, who, at least formally, accepted almost all of the Comintern's recommendations, with the exception of the proposal on the agrarian question. Sun used the ECCI resolution as the basis of the second section of the manifesto that would be approved at the First Congress of the Guomindang in January 1924.

Borodin and Lev Karakhan, the Soviet government's envoy to the Beijing government, arrived in China at the end of August 1923. Karakhan remained in Beijing while Borodin proceeded to Canton via Shanghai, arriving in early October. Soon additional Soviet political and military advisers arrived to serve the government of South China.⁴⁶ In discussions with them Sun Yat-sen displayed a lively interest in the experience of party, state, and military construction in Soviet Russia as well as in Russia's position in international affairs. Borodin made a particularly positive impression upon him. The result was that in November, Sun published the Manifesto on Reorganizing the Guomindang and a new draft party program. On December 1, at a conference in Canton, he spoke about reorganizing the Guomindang into a mass party that relied not only on the army, but also on the civilian population. He said, in part:

Now our good friend Borodin has come to us from Russia …… [T]he Russians succeeded in the course of one revolution of fully realizing their ideas, the creation of a revolutionary government that grows stronger by the day …… They were victorious, because the entire party, assisted by the army, took part in the struggle. We must learn from Russia its methods, its organization, its way of training party members; only then can we hope for victory.⁴⁷

By this time Mao Zedong had left Canton. At the end of July, at Chen Duxiu's request he returned to Shanghai. Along with his friends Cai Hesen, Luo Zhanglong, and Xiang Jingyu, he settled in Zhabei, in the northern part of town, on a small lane near Xiangshanlu (Aromatic mountain street), which was anything but aromatic. In early September the Central Executive Committee of the party returned to Shanghai from Canton. Despite growing cooperation with the Guomindang, Chen Duxiu preferred to keep his distance from Sun Yat-sen,⁴⁸ obviously not wishing to turn the CEC of the CCP into “a vassal of the KMT [Guomindang].”⁴⁹ The CEC was located in the same house where Mao, Cai, Luo, and Xiang were living.

As before, all of Mao's energies were absorbed in the work of the united front. “The present political problem in China,” he wrote, “is quite simply the problem of the national revolution. To use the might of the people to overthrow the warlords and also to overthrow foreign imperialism, which colludes with the warlords in their evil acts—such is the historic mission of the Chinese people …… We must all have faith that the one and only way to save oneself and the nation is the national revolution.”⁵⁰ In mid-September, Mao went to Changsha to help establish a branch of the Guomindang.⁵¹ In the two and a half months since Tan Zhen, Sun Yat-sen's emissary, had arrived in Hunan, nothing had happened. The Hunanese communists had sabotaged the attempt to establish a Guomindang organization there. Even Mao found it difficult to overcome the resistance of his old comrades. Among other things, he lacked the means to conduct organizational work, and he needed “at least about a hundred yuan a month.”⁵² His task was further complicated by the outbreak of a new war between Zhao Hengti and Tan Yankai. In September the situation further deteriorated when General Wu Peifu intervened in the conflict on the side of Zhao. Mao, of course, sympathized with Tan, but Tan lost. The province once more plunged into an abyss of terror. Zhao Hengti declared martial law, closed the Self-Study University, and dispersed the Federation of Trade Unions. He personally ordered the arrest of Mao Zedong and other leaders of the labor movement.⁵³ Working deep underground, Mao was forced to use one of his pseudonyms, Mao Shishan (“Stone Mountain”), a variant of one of his childhood names.⁵⁴ The only source of joy for Mao was his family. Anying was a healthy growing boy and on November 13, Kaihui gave birth to another son, whom they named Anqing (“The Youth Who Reaches the Shore of Socialism”).

While Mao was in Changsha, the November 1923 plenum of the CCP Central Executive Committee was held in Shanghai. The plan to establish Guomindang party organizations in north and central China had failed. Only one had been established, in Beijing. The membership of the Communist Party itself had contracted by three-fourths; only about one hundred members remained. Chen Duxiu himself acknowledged that the party was going through a crisis. The plenum condemned “leftist distortions” of the united front policy and adopted a resolution concerning the actual participation of communists in the reorganization of the Guomindang. A resolution approved by the plenum, titled “A Plan for Developing the National Movement,” emphasized that communists should join existing Guomindang organizations while retaining their membership in the CCP and establish Guomindang organizations where none existed, especially in north and central China.⁵⁵

The plenum also demanded that communists and Socialist Youth League members create their own clandestine organizations within the united front, the members of which were obligated to follow the leadership of the CCP in all of their political statements and actions. The communists' task was to struggle to “occupy a central position in the Guomindang.”⁵⁶

The effort to reorganize the Guomindang slowly moved forward as Sun prepared to hold a Unification Congress of the GMD in late January 1924. By this time, thanks to Mao's efforts, a Guomindang organization had finally been established in Hunan, with three local cells: one in Changsha and two others, in Ningxiang and Anyuan.⁵⁷ By the end of December there were already some five hundred Guomindang members in Hunan, but among them the Communist Party members were the most active. They were also the overwhelming majority of the members of the executive committee of the provincial organization, seven of nine.⁵⁸ It was no accident, therefore, that at the end of the year Mao was picked as one of the delegates from the Hunan Guomindang organization to the party congress.

Again he had to leave his family and, as before, it pained him to say good-bye to his wife. But this time his melancholy was even stronger. On the eve of his departure there had been some sort of unpleasant scene between him and Kaihui; something had happened, but what it was we do not know. He boarded the steamship for Shanghai and gazed at Changsha fading into the distance. His lips whispered:

With a wave of my hand I'm off.

How painful to exchange glances.

Bitter feelings torment us still.

Your brow betrays the residue of anger

Hot tears linger in your eyes.

I know that letter is the cause of our estrangement.

But clouds and fog don't last forever,

and you and I, the two of us together,

are all that matter in this world.

That people often suffer in this world is true.

What concern is that of ours?

Does Heaven know or care?

This morning hoarfrost paves the eastern road,

A sliver moon illuminates the pond and half the sky.

And yet alone and desolate am I.

The ship's horn cleaves my heart in two.

I journey solo to the farthest climes.

Let's cut the bitter threads of melancholy.

Forceful as an avalanche on Kunlunⁿ⁸ or a cleansing wind,

Let us unfold our wings once more

and soar into the azure sky.⁵⁹

贺新郎·别友
毛泽东

挥手从兹去。
更那堪凄然相向，苦情重诉。
眼角眉梢都似恨，热泪欲零还住。
知误会前番书语。
过眼滔滔云共雾，算人间知己吾和汝。
人有病，天知否？
今朝霜重东门路，照横塘半天残月，凄清如许。
汽笛一声肠已断，从此天涯孤旅。
凭割断愁丝恨缕。要似昆仑崩绝壁，又恰象台风扫寰宇。
重比翼，和云翥。

¹ See S. Kalachev (S. N. Naumov), “Kratkii ocherk istorii Kitaiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii” (Brief History of the Chinese Communist Party), Kanton (Canton), no. 10 (1927): 51; Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 260.

² Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 260; Xu Yuandong et al., Zhongguo gongchandang lishi jianghua (Lectures on CCP History) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1982), 36.

³ See Biulleten' IV Kongressa Kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala (Bulletin of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International), no. 20 (November 29, 1922), 18.

⁴ See Zou Lu, Zhongguo guomindang shigao (An Outline History of the Chinese Guomindang) (Changsha: Minzhi shuju, 1931), 345–48.

⁵ I. F. Kurdiukov et al., eds., Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniia, 1917–1957: Sbornik dokumentov (Soviet-Chinese Relations, 1917–1957: A Documentary Collection) (Moscow: Izd-vo vostochnoi literatury, 1959), 64–65.

⁶ Quoted from Ma, Hongse diyi jiazu (The First Red Family), 29.

⁷ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. I, 111.

⁸ See Wu, Mao Zedong guanghui licheng dituji (Atlas of Mao Zedong's Glorious Historical Path), 29.

⁹ Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China, vol. 1, 345.

¹⁰ Wu, Mao Zedong guanghui licheng dituji (Atlas of Mao Zedong's Glorious Historical Path), 31, 32.

¹¹ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 157, 159, 161.

¹² Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China, vol. 1, 448–49; vol. 2, 589–90, 616–17.

¹³ See Zhonggong “sanda” ziliao (Materials from the Third Congress of the CCP), 155.

¹⁴ See Ibid., 128.

¹⁵ For more details, see Daria A. Spichak, Kitaiskii avangard Kremlia: Revoliutsionery Kitaia v moskovskikh shkolakh Kominterna (1921–1939) (Chinese Vanguard of the Kremlin: Revolutionaries of China in Moscow Comintern Schools [1921–1939]) (Moscow: “Veche,” 2012), 58–59.

¹⁶ Zhonggong “sanda” ziliao (Materials from the Third Congress of the CCP), 62.

¹⁷ Alexander V. Pantsov's interview with former Chinese communist Wang Fanxi in Leeds, England, July 17, 1992.

¹⁸ Cai He-sen, “Istoriia opportunizma v Kommunistecheskoi partii Kitaia” (The History of Opportunism in the Communist Party of China), Problemy Kitaia (Problems of China), no. 1 (1929): 4.

¹⁹ Quoted from Sladkovskii, Noveishaia istoriia Kitaia, 1917–1927 (Contemporary History of China, 1917–1927), 140.

²⁰ See Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 308.

²¹ Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China, vol. 2, 580.

²² Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 311.

²³ Zhonggong “sanda” ziliao (Materials from the Third Congress of the CCP), 81, 82.

²⁴ See ibid., 132.

²⁵ Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 114.

²⁶ See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 1, 238. See also Soviet Plot in China (Peking: Metropolitan Police Headquarters, 1927), document no. 13.

²⁷ Quoted from Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 309.

²⁸ Zhonggong “sanda” ziliao (Materials from the Third Congress of the CCP), 88.

²⁹ M. L. Titarenko, ed., Kommunisticheskii Internatsional i kitaiskaia revoliutsiia: Dokumenty i materialy (The Communist International and the Chinese Revolution: Documents and Materials) (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 39.

³⁰ Peng Pai, Zapiski Pen Paia (Notes of Peng Pai), trans. A. Ivin (Moscow: Zhurnal'nogazetnoe ob”edinenie, 1938), 9.

³¹ See Sladkovskii, Noveishaia istoriia Kitaia, 1917–1927 (Contemporary History of China, 1917–1927), 166.

³² Zhonggong “sanda” ziliao (Materials from the Third Congress of the CCP), 103–4.

³³ Ibid., 157.

³⁴ See Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, xxx.

³⁵ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 115.

³⁶ See Voprosy istorii KPSS (Problems of history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), no. 10 (1966): 34; Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China, vol. 2, 526.

³⁷ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 165.

³⁸ See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 1, 240.

³⁹ Jiang Song Meiling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek), Yu Baoluoting tanhua huiyilu (Conversations with Mikhail Borodin) (Taibei: Yuancheng wenhua tushu gongyingshe, 1976), 12–13.

⁴⁰ Dalin, Kitaiskie memuary, 1921–1927 (Chinese Memoirs, 1921–1927), 149.

⁴¹ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 519.

⁴² See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 1, 255–314; Chiang Chung-cheng (Chiang Kai-shek), Soviet Russia in China: A Summing Up at Seventy, trans. under the direction of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, revised, enlarged edition, with maps (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958), 21–27; Ch'en Chieh-ju, Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past: The Memoirs of His Second Wife (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 130–37.

⁴³ Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 1, 261.

⁴⁴ Chen Chieh-ju, Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past, 131, 133, 136.

⁴⁵ See Kommunist (Communist), no. 4 (1966): 12–14.

⁴⁶ See A. I. Cherepanov, Zapiski voennogo sovetnika v Kitae (Notes of a Military Adviser in China), 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 30–72. See also Alexander Ivanovich Cherepanov, Notes of a Military Adviser in China, trans. Alexandra O. Smith (Taipei: Office of Military History, 1970), 10–37.

⁴⁷ Sun Yat-sen, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Selected Works), 2nd ed., revised and expanded (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), 327.

⁴⁸ Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 116, 118.

⁴⁹ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 315.

⁵⁰ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 179, 181, 182.

⁵¹ Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 118.

⁵² Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 193.

⁵³ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 119; Angus W. McDonald Jr., The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution: Elites and the Masses in Hunan Province, China, 1911–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 58, 120, 205; Short, Mao, 144.

⁵⁴ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 194.

⁵⁵ Zhonggong “sanda” ziliao (Materials from the Third Congress of the CCP), 103–4, 120.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 121.

⁵⁷ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 118.

⁵⁸ See McDonald, The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution, 137.

⁵⁹ Mao, Oblaka v snegu (Clouds in the Snow), 14–15.