12 PLAYING WITH CHIANG KAI-SHEK

Enormous changes were occurring in the world outside Shaoshan. On March 12, 1925, Sun Yat-sen died from liver cancer in Beijing, where he had gone to take part in a peace conference to unify the country. He was invited there by Feng Yuxiang, a former client of Wu Peifu, who turned against his patron in October 1924. Feng declared his support for Sun, renamed his own separate army the Guominjun (Nationalist Army) after the Guomindang (Nationalist Party), occupied Beijing, and called for an end to the civil war. Turning to Moscow for help, he was supplied by the Kremlin with a number of well-known Soviet military advisers.

Sun Yat-sen's death was a great loss, but it did not further complicate the general situation in China. A factional struggle for power erupted within the Guomindang, but very quickly the Guomindang “leftists” triumphed. Wang Jingwei, one of Sun's closest collaborators, chief of the Guomindang “leftists,” and head of the Propaganda Department of the CEC, became the leader of the Guomindang and head of the Canton government. Cordial relations continued to develop among General Feng, the Guomindang, and the USSR. At the end of March the “party army” of the “leftist” Chiang Kai-shek established the Canton government's control over eastern Guangdong province, and in June suppressed an uprising by Yunnan and Guangxi troops. Chiang Kai-shek's star was swiftly rising.

On May 30, 1925, an incident in Shanghai provoked a surge of nationalist feeling in China unseen since the May Fourth Movement. British troops fired upon a crowd of Chinese on Nanking Road who were protesting the killing of a communist worker, Gu Zhenghong, by a lone Japanese. The murder of the unfortunate Gu had aroused the whole city. Workers in many factories went on strike and students boycotted classes. On May 24, the day of Gu's funeral, tens of thousands of people held an anti-Japanese demonstration. Everything might have blown over, but in Qingdao on May 28, Chinese militarists, responding to the request of Japanese entrepreneurs, opened fire on workers who had come out in the streets in solidarity with the textile workers of Shanghai. Two demonstrators were killed and sixteen wounded. The reprisal in Qingdao ignited a firestorm. On May 30, about two thousand students gathered on Nanking Road in the center of the International Settlement, shouting, “Down with imperialism!” “Shanghai for the Chinese!” “Return the Settlement!” and “Everyone in China unite!” A number of people were arrested, but around 3 P.M. a large crowd gathered in front of the police station demanding the release of the detainees. The officer in charge snapped and gave the order to fire on the crowd. Ten were killed and dozens wounded.¹ This action evoked a storm of indignation. At a conference of Shanghai trade union activists on May 31, a municipal General Trade Union Council was established, headed by Li Lisan. At his call about two hundred thousand Shanghai workers laid down their tools. In response twenty-six foreign warships entered the Huangpu River and American, British, and Italian marines landed. New bloody clashes resulted in the deaths of 41 Chinese and the wounding of 120.²

The Shanghai massacre marked the beginning of the May Thirtieth Movement, the beginning of the nationalist revolution. Demonstrations, protest meetings, and strikes occurred at foreign enterprises. The public again resorted to a boycott, this time of foreign goods in general. On June 19, workers in Hong Kong came out in support of those in Shanghai and two days later so did the workers in Shamian. More than 250,000 people were on strike. This action was followed by the mass exodus of working people from these colonial centers to Canton and environs. The Guomindang government began to support the strikers. A blockade of Hong Kong and Shamian was declared, and a Hong Kong–Shamian Strike Committee was formed under the leadership of the Workers' Department of the GMD Central Executive Committee. Its chairman was Su Zhaozheng, a Guangdong native, who had just joined the CCP on the eve of the strike, in the spring of 1925. His deputy was Deng Zhongxia.

The anti-imperialist struggle intensified daily, with Canton as its center. The National government of the Republic of China, under the chairmanship of Wang Jingwei, was officially proclaimed on July 1, on the foundation of the Canton government. Wang Jingwei also became the head of the Military Council of the government and the troops loyal to the Guomindang were united into a single National Revolutionary Army (NRA), initially consisting of six corps. Chiang Kai-shek became the commander of the First Corps, composed of Whampoa Academy cadets, and Tan Yankai, the former governor of Hunan, commanded the Second Corps. Zhou Enlai was appointed head of the Political Department of the First Corps. There were quite a few communists in the other corps as well.³ As a revolutionary upsurge swept throughout the country, the CCP-Guomindang alliance began to solidify into an irresistible force.

By July the wave of the patriotic movement reached Shaoshan. Mao quickly organized an “Avenge the Shame Society” on the foundation of the peasant unions, although he did not invent this name. Similar associations were popping up everywhere. In Changsha the organization had been established in early June at a huge anti-imperialist meeting of more than two hundred thousand people. In early July, Mao revived the Shaoshan district branch of the Guomindang that had started the previous year.⁴ At the same secret meeting a district-level “Avenge the Shame Society” was formed from more than twenty small unions. Mao deployed it to wage an intensive anti-imperialist propaganda campaign. He and his comrades organized youth agitation brigades that went to the villages and introduced to peasant audiences the idea of boycotting foreign goods.⁵

In late August, however, Governor Zhao Hengti issued a new order for Mao's arrest. It was less Mao's revolutionary agitation that irked the governor than the campaign Mao had organized against a local bigwig named Chen. Because of a drought in Shaoshan, the peasants, fearing a crop failure, requested that Chen sell them grain from his reserves. Chen refused since he counted on selling his grain at a high price in the city. Mao immediately convened a joint meeting of the communist cell and the peasant union. Two activists were sent off to have a discussion with Chen, but nothing much came of it. Chen was ready to load the grain on a barge bound for Xiangtan. Then, under Mao's command, more than a hundred peasants armed with hoes, wooden staves, and bamboo poles moved under cover of night to the warehouse of the “bloodsucker” Chen. They demanded that the granary be opened and the grain sold at a reasonable price. Chen capitulated but immediately informed the governor. Again Mao had to flee. Friends warned him he would be arrested. By a stroke of good luck, a well-disposed employee in the district administration came across a telegram that his superior had received from Zhao Hengti saying, “Arrest Mao Zedong at once. Execute him on the spot.” He informed Mao. On Shulan's advice Mao left Shaoshanchong in a closed palanquin, disguised as a doctor. Before his departure he strictly instructed his younger brother Zetan not to wait until Zhao Hengti issued an order for his arrest, but to follow him quickly to Canton.

A day later Mao was in Changsha, and in early September he left for the south. He began to be tormented again by an attack of nerves. Succumbing to fear, at one of his night lodgings he burned all of the notes he had made on the road. In the middle of September he finally arrived in Canton, where he spent the next two weeks recuperating in the Dongshan Hospital; his nerves were shot.⁶ Soon Mao Zetan arrived in the southern capital, where he began to work at the Whampoa Academy and in the Guangdong committee of the CCP.⁷

In addition to all the other setbacks, Mao experienced a new blow in October. Friends of his youth Cai Hesen and Xiang Jingyu separated. The scandal had a negative impact on the moral climate in the party as a whole. The union of Cai and Xiang had always been considered a model in the CCP. Mao's friends were among the first who, disdaining bourgeois morality, began living together without any sort of marriage ceremony, long before such free love became fashionable among liberal Chinese youth. They were both reserved, businesslike, serious, and insufferably moral. Many female communists, who were lively and flirtatious, were afraid of Xiang Jingyu, who constantly lectured them about morality. During party meetings, Xiang sometimes publicly scolded Chen Duxiu himself, who was fond of dirty jokes. The women dubbed her “Granny of the Revolution.” Qu Qiubai's wife, the charming Zhihua, who had ditched her unloved first husband for Qu, especially feared Xiang. So the split was like thunder in a clear blue sky. In the middle of September, when Cai was in Beijing, Xiang Jingyu, to her own surprise, was unfaithful to him with the handsome Peng Shuzhi. Zheng Chaolin, Peng's secretary, remembered:

On the evening of the Mid-Autumn Festival we threw a sumptuous dinner …… After the guests had left, I returned to my pavilion room to sleep, but Xiang Jingyu stayed in Peng Shuzhi's room. It was a hot night, and the doors? …… had been left ajar. I awakened to hear Xiang Jingyu …… telling Peng Shuzhi that she loved him.

Presently, she went up to the second floor. Peng came to my room and said, “Something really strange has happened!” He repeated to me what I had just heard Xiang saying.

“I would never have dreamed it,” he told me.

“Don't carry it any further,” I told him. “It could harm the functioning of the organization.” ……

From that day on, Xiang frequently came down from the second floor to talk to Peng Shuzhi, often for hours on end …… [H]e did not discuss the situation with me. He had accepted Xiang Jingyu's love.⁸

Nevertheless, word got out. Xiang herself admitted her infidelity to Cai, who could think of nothing better than to bring up the matter at an expanded session of the Central Executive Committee. The sensational news struck the leading members of the Chinese Communist Party with such force that, according to Zheng Chaolin's reminiscences, at first Chen Duxiu, Qu Qiubai, Zhang Guotao, and other leaders of the CCP were speechless. Finally, Chen Duxiu decided to terminate the affair. The CEC sent Cai and Xiang to Moscow, Cai as CCP representative to the Comintern Executive Committee and Xiang Jingyu to study at KUTV (Communist University of the Toilers of the East). At the end of the session, Chen Duxiu had everyone pledge to keep mum about what had occurred. He especially warned Qu Qiubai to say nothing to Zhihua, but Qu was unable to control himself. Soon the entire party knew. Most of the women, colleagues of Xiang Jingyu, gloated over her misfortune. The opinions of the men were divided. Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao conceived a hatred for Peng Shuzhi and demanded he be expelled from the Central Executive Committee, while Chen Duxiu leaned toward the adulterer and took him under his wing.

There was no repairing this broken cup. As soon as they arrived in Russia, in December 1925, the aggrieved Cai ditched Xiang Jingyu and became infatuated with the wife of Li Lisan. Li Lisan and his wife had accompanied the “model couple” on their journey from Shanghai to Moscow, where Li and Cai were supposed to take part in the Sixth Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI. Along the way, the naive Li asked his wife to be a bit friendlier to the cuckolded Cai. He got more than he bargained for. The result was that Cai and Li's wife began openly living together, Li returned to China by himself, and Xiang Jingyu ultimately took up with a Mongol from KUTV.

None of this would have mattered had it not destabilized the upper echelon of the party, straining personal relations between Cai Hesen on one hand and Peng Shuzhi and Li Lisan on the other.ⁿ¹² There is a sequel to the story. After his mistress's departure, the grief-stricken Peng began drinking and perhaps would have become an alcoholic had not a new passion entered his life in the form of the enchanting Chen Bilan. Unfortunately, before she met Peng she had been involved with another party heavyweight, Luo Yinong, the secretary of the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Regional Party Committee. From then on the spurned Luo became an enemy of Peng Shuzhi.⁹ These personal squabbles distracted the leaders of the CCP from more urgent matters. But the “steadfast communists” who preached “free love” were human beings after all, and the human factor was far from the least important in politics.

Mao Zedong could not help but react to this situation. We don't know if he castigated Xiang Jingyu, but there is no doubt that he empathized with his close friend Cai and condemned Peng Shuzhi. He must have sided with Cai, too, in his clash with Li Lisan. In any case, the love scandal did not help Mao's recuperation. He continued to suffer attacks of nerves. Fortunately, at the very end of December, Kaihui came to Canton with her mother and their children, and they settled into a quiet neighborhood in Dongshan.¹⁰ Mao began to feel like his old self again.

It was impossible for him to play the sick man for long, and even before Kaihui's arrival Mao left the hospital in early October and immersed himself in political activity. Again, as in early 1924, he was overcome by an irrepressible patriotic impulse, again viewing the goals of the nationalist revolution as primary and relegating the tasks of social transformation to the back burner. In the fall of 1925 Mao formulated his political credo as follows:

I believe in Communism and advocate the social revolution of the proletariat. The present domestic and foreign oppression cannot, however, be overthrown by the forces of one class alone. I advocate making use of the national revolution in which the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, and the left wing of the middle bourgeoisie cooperate to carry out the Three People's Principles of the Chinese Guomindang in order to overthrow imperialism, overthrow the warlords, and overthrow the comprador and landlord class (that is to say, the Chinese big bourgeoisie and the right wing of the middle bourgeoisie, who have close ties to imperialism, and the warlords), and to realize the joint rule of the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, and the left wing of the middle bourgeoisie, that is, the rule of the revolutionary popular masses.¹¹

In early October, Wang Jingwei invited him to work in the CEC of the Guomindang and to assume his duties as head of the Propaganda Department. Wang knew Mao as a talented journalist and agitator. Mao soon began to edit the journal of the Propaganda Department, Zhengzhi zhoubao (Political weekly), which he used to disseminate his views on problems of the united front and the national revolution and to attack “rightist” elements in the Guomindang.¹²

The positions he defended dovetailed with those expressed by the leadership of the CCP. He had no disagreements with Chen Duxiu or other members of the CCP Central Executive Committee. Like other leaders of the CCP, periodically he tacked from side to side. It was difficult to work out the politics of the optimal combination of national and social elements. In 1925 the tactical zigzags of the leaders of the CCP generally began to acquire the character of a certain political line, which, naturally, was defined and conceptually grounded in Moscow. Chen Duxiu and the other Chinese communists merely had to submit to it.

The essence of the new policy was as follows. According to the Kremlin theoreticians, from now on the Chinese Communist Party should use its sojourn within the Guomindang not only to transform itself into a mass political organization, but also to radically transform the Guomindang's class and political character by having Guomindang leftists and communists seize power inside the party. Within the framework of the new policy the members of the CCP should use their presence in the GMD to transform this organization into as “leftist” a party as possible, into a “people's (worker-peasant) party.” They should do this first by ousting “representatives of the bourgeoisie” from leading posts and then purging them from the Guomindang. Then they should subject their “petty bourgeois” allies to their influence in order finally to establish the “hegemony of the proletariat” in China, not directly through the Communist Party but via the Guomindang.

The outlines of this new tactical line were sketched in the spring of 1925 by Voitinsky. In itself there was nothing new in Voitinsky's proposal. The leaders of the Chinese communists themselves were the first ones to advocate this line in February 1924. However, they were put in their place then, as Voitinsky himself was not yet ready to approve this policy. Now he believed that a favorable situation had been created inside the Guomindang as a result of the struggle of various intraparty factions over Sun Yat-sen's legacy. In April 1925, Voitinsky was able to present his views to Stalin. He summarized the conversation for the Soviet ambassador in China, Karakhan, on April 22, 1925: “He [Stalin] was very surprised when we explained to him that the communist party has its own organization …… that the communists enjoy the right to criticize inside the Guomindang, and that most of the work of the Guomindang itself is being conducted by our comrades.”¹³ Taken aback by what Voitinsky had told him, Stalin soon provided his assessment of the prospects for the national-revolutionary movement in China. Needless to say, he did not credit Voitinsky for his “revelations.” The authorship of the new concept had to belong to the Leader, not to some mere clerk. The Leader ascribed a universal meaning to his theory, advancing it as a panacea not only for the solution of the problems of China but of the East in general. Precisely as a maneuver that would facilitate the establishment of the hegemony of the Communist Party in the nationalist movement, he began to think of transforming the Guomindang and several other nationalist revolutionary parties of the East into “worker-peasant” or “people's” parties.

It was from this angle of vision that he analyzed the draft resolution of the Fifth Enlarged Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (March–April 1925) on work in India. (The plenum did not adopt a special resolution on China.) In his remarks on that document he singled out the issue of establishing the hegemony of communists in a future Indian “people's party.”¹⁴ Stalin's directives were immediately executed by the ECCI, which quickly conveyed them to China as well.

In May 1925, Stalin addressed this problem openly in a speech at the anniversary of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East:

In countries like Egypt and China where the national bourgeoisie is already split into a party of revolution and a party of appeasement …… the communists must switch from a policy of a national united front to a policy of a revolutionary bloc of workers and the petty bourgeoisie …… [T]his bloc can take the form of a single party, a worker-peasant party like the Guomindang provided, however, that this unique party in reality represents a bloc of two forces—the communist party and the party of the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie. Such a composite party is necessary and expedient if …… it facilitates the actual leadership of the revolution by the communist party.¹⁵

Once more the Executive Committee of the Comintern responded immediately, taking Stalin's ideas as its guide. In this spirit, the Sixth Plenum of the ECCI (February–March 1926) adopted a special “Resolution on the Chinese Question.”

The political emergence of the proletariat provided a powerful impetus to the further development and strengthening of all revolutionary democratic organizations of the country, and in the first place the people's revolutionary party, the Guomindang and the revolutionary government in Canton. The Guomindang …… represents a revolutionary bloc of workers, peasants, the intelligentsia and urban democracy …… in the struggle against foreign imperialists and the military-feudal life-style and for the independence of the country and united revolutionary democratic power.¹⁶

Perhaps Stalin thought he was just developing the previous line. In reality, he was revising it to the point of absurdity. His theory meant that intraparty cooperation with the Guomindang became an end in itself. Stalin figured that the communists would ultimately succeed in ousting “representatives of the bourgeoisie” from leading posts and then from the Guomindang itself, but if a favorable concatenation of circumstances did not occur, that is, if the Guomindang elements turned out to be stronger than the communists, then the communists would have to make concessions to the leaders of the GMD, which would restrict their autonomy and their political independence. All this for the sake of remaining within the Guomindang, the “people's” party, for to exit the Guomindang would be to bury their hopes for transforming this party into a “worker-peasant party.”

This conception of a united front was purely bureaucratic, based almost entirely on armchair calculations about the balance of forces in the Guomindang. As someone extremely skilled in intraparty intrigues, Stalin must have been convinced of the inevitable success of his policy, as he was then occupied with getting rid of his chief antagonists from the leadership of the Bolshevik party. However, this policy could not be effective in China, which was consumed by the flames of nationalist revolution. Unlike the degraded Russian Communist Party, the Guomindang was a revolutionary party and the anticommunist military faction within it was popular not only in the officer corps, but also among significant segments of Chinese society. It was simply impossible to squeeze the members of the group out of their own political organization.

The Chinese communists objectively were the hostages of Stalin's line. They were unable not to accept it, for they were totally dependent upon Soviet financial assistance. However, it was likewise impossible to implement the orders to communize the Guomindang without risking a rupture of the united front.¹⁷ Judging by the reminiscences of Zhang Guotao, a majority of the leaders of the CCP eventually understood this, and therefore was compelled to maneuver, bluff, and twist about.¹⁸ But this did not always help, and the only possible result was defeat.

Initially, nothing presaged such a dramatic turn of events. It seemed that the communists and the Guomindang “leftists” had a real chance to transform the party into a “worker-peasant” party. An anti-imperialist movement gripped the country, the workers' struggle was intensifying, and the apparently “leftist” leaders of the GMD were emphasizing their interest in developing good relations with the CCP, the USSR, and the Communist International. Even though practically the entire officer corps of the NRA and a majority of the GMD leadership belonged to the landlord class, no one even interfered with Mao's radical propaganda inside the Guomindang that the landlord class should be destroyed.¹⁹ It is true that on August 20, the Guomindang “leftist” leader Liao Zhongkai was assassinated by a terrorist, but this only weakened the position of the “rightists.” In response to the killing, Wang Jingwei advanced the slogan “Those who wish to make revolution should move toward the left!”²⁰ The disheartened “rightists” tried to split the Guomindang, convening a separate conference that they called the Fourth Plenum of the Guomindang CEC in the Western Hills outside of Beijing, but nothing came of this. Wang Jingwei, Chiang Kai-shek, Tan Yankai, and many other party leaders, who were supported by the communists, spoke out against the rightists. On November 27, in the name of the Guomindang CEC, Mao drafted an appeal to all comrades in the party that sharply criticized the Western Hills group. On December 5, this appeal was published in the first issue of the Political Weekly. With Bolshevik cynicism it declared that “today's revolution is an episode in the final decisive struggle between the two great forces of revolution and counterrevolution in the world …… We must recognize that in today's situation, he who is not for the revolution is for counterrevolution. There is absolutely no neutral ground in the middle.”²¹

Mao expounded his views much more systematically in a major work, “Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society,” which was published December 1, 1925, in Geming (Revolution), the official journal of the Second Corps of the NRA. Despite its title, the article was hardly a scholarly sociological analysis. At that time no one in the CCP could have seriously analyzed the class structure of China, as there were no leading sociologists or major economists in its ranks.²² But Mao aspired to nothing of the sort. His strictly propagandist article had the concrete political objective of demonstrating that the enemies of the revolution were few in number because of the very nature of Chinese society, and that consequently the “leftist” bloc would inevitably be victorious. For simplicity's sake he divided society into five categories: the large, medium, and petty bourgeoisie, the semiproletariat, and the proletariat. He ignored the fact that he was applying to Chinese society a scheme of class relations in developed capitalist societies that did not fit. He posed a purely political question, “Who are our enemies, who are our friends?” and in the end he answered:

All those in league with imperialism—the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlords, and the reactionary intellectual class, that is, the so-called big bourgeoisie in China—are our enemies. All the petty bourgeoisie, the semiproletariat, and the proletariat are our friends, our true friends. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, its right wing must be considered our enemy; even if it is not yet our enemy, it will soon become so. Its left wing may be considered as our friend—but not as our true friend, and we must be constantly on our guard against it [in another part of the article he wrote: “They are now still in a semi-counterrevolutionary position.”].

Mao also considered the lumpen proletariat (vagabonds) to be “true friends.” He pointed out: “This group of people can fight very bravely; if we can find a way to lead them, they can become a revolutionary force.”

The result was an impressive picture: 395 million friends versus 1 million enemies and 4 million vacillators.²³ Mao did not bother with statistical data concerning the actual composition of various social groups. All of the figures were gross estimates and even his figure for the overall population of China was arbitrary, 400 million, when according to the postal census of 1922 actually it had already reached 463 million. Nor did he burden himself by explaining the actual economic role of various social classes in the system of production relations.²⁴ Nevertheless, the article was popular precisely because of its political character. In February 1926 it was reprinted by the Peasant Department of the Guomindang CEC in its journal Zhongguo nongmin (Chinese peasant).

Mao took an active part in the preparations and proceedings of the Second Guomindang Congress, held in January 1926 soon after Chiang Kai-shek's forces had routed the remnants of the local militarists and occupied all of Guangdong province. He was a member of the credentials commission as well as of the commission drafting resolutions on propaganda and the peasant question. He delivered an extensive report on the results of party propaganda over a two-year period.²⁵ Thus he could take some credit for the fact that the Second Congress took place under the slogan of the ever-strengthening unity of the Communist Party and the “left wing” of the Guomindang. In elections to the new Central Executive Committee Mao was again chosen as a candidate member. The number of communists in this highest organ of the Guomindang increased from ten to thirteen, and seven members of the CCP enjoyed full voting rights compared to only three in the CEC chosen at the First Congress. This was done at the personal instruction of Wang Jingwei. The CCP leaders themselves suggested only two communists for the CEC. Two members of the communist party—Tan Pingshan and Lin Boqu—became members of the Standing Committee of the CEC. One more communist was included in the Central Control Commission of the GMD.

Nothing, it seemed, foreshadowed any complications. During the entire congress, Wang Jingwei “was even more ‘left' than the Communists,” recalled Soviet agent Vera Vishniakova-Akimova.²⁶ Wang's report asserted that both communists and noncommunists were shedding their blood together on the field of battle, that they were united as one and that nothing could divide them.²⁷ The Soviet agent was delighted that “[b]efore the close of the congress one of the members of the presidium unfurled a red banner with a gold inscription, ‘Oppressed peoples of the world unite and throw off the yoke of imperialism'—a gift from the Third International. The ovation continued for several minutes …… The routed rightists kept their silence.”²⁸ Soon after the congress, Mao was confirmed in his post as acting director of the Propaganda Department of the CEC.²⁹ This “leftist celebration” continued right up to the end of March 1926, culminating with a speech by Hu Hanmin, one of the leaders of the GMD, at the Sixth Plenum of the ECCI in Moscow on February 17. This old comrade in arms of Sun said, “There is only one world revolution and the Chinese revolution is a part of it. The teachings of our great leader Sun Yat-sen coincide on essential matters with Marxism and Leninism …… The slogan of the Guomindang is: For the popular masses! This means that workers and peasants must take political power into their own hands.”³⁰ That very month the Central Executive Committee of the Guomindang even addressed an official request to the Presidium of the ECCI asking that the GMD be accepted into the Comintern. The letter stressed that “[t]he Guomindang strives to achieve the task that has confronted the Chinese revolution for thirty years already, namely, the transition from the nationalist to the socialist revolution.”³¹

It was enough to make one's head spin. In February 1926, leaders of the Soviet Communist Party and the Executive Committee of the Communist International seriously examined this request, and a majority of the Politburo of the Central Committee even expressed approval of accepting the GMD as a sympathetic party.³² However, caution prevailed; an evasive reply was drafted to the GMD Central Executive Committee and transmitted to Hu Hanmin.³³ It noted that the Presidium of the ECCI “views the Guomindang as a real ally in the struggle against world imperialism,” and promised to include the question of the Guomindang's entry into the Comintern on the agenda of the forthcoming Sixth Congress of the Communist International if the GMD Committee insisted on pressing the issue.³⁴

Events, however, did not develop in the direction that the Comintern officials and the CCP were pushing them. On the contrary, implementation of the Comintern resolutions aimed at communizing the Guomindang inevitably led to an anti-leftist military coup in Canton, led by Chiang Kai-shek, who in early 1926 began a swift rightward evolution.

Chiang's anticommunist outburst took place on March 20, five days after the end of the Sixth Plenum of the ECCI. The general, whom just three years earlier Comintern officials had invited to join the Communist Party, had long been dubious about the activities of the Soviet and Chinese communists in China. His trip to Russia in the fall of 1923 had led him to the conclusion that the Bolshevik “brand of internationalism and World Revolution are but Czarism by other names, the better to confuse and confound the outside world.”³⁵ Returning to China in late December 1923, Chiang reported to Sun that, “[a]s regards their policy in China, I feel …… they wish ultimately to Sovietize it.”³⁶ Yet, for the time being he wisely concealed his feelings from the public, particularly since he received no response from Sun Yat-sen. Chiang acted so skillfully that even the savvy Borodin considered him among his friends.³⁷ By the spring of 1926, however, Chiang had run out of patience with the activities of a number of Soviet specialists, many of whom behaved arrogantly. He was especially irritated by Corps Commander Nikolai V. Kuibyshev, chief of the South China group of advisers, whose pseudonym in China was Kisanka. Apparently, this Soviet adviser was an arrogant and dull-witted veteran who was intoxicated with his own enormous power. Kisanka, according to Vishniakova-Akimova, openly despised the Chinese military, ignored diplomatic etiquette, and shamelessly tried to place the NRA under his own strict control.³⁸ He ignored Chiang Kai-shek and preferred to deal with Wang Jingwei on all military matters. For his part, Wang used Kisanka to discredit General Chiang. Behind their screen of unity the two leaders of the Guomindang shared a deep mutual antipathy. Chairman Wang could not stand the crude soldier Chiang. The latter was literally nauseated by the full-cheeked blatherer with his heavily pomaded hair. Only Borodin somehow succeeded in maintaining a delicate balance of power in the Guomindang CEC. The misfortune of the Chinese communists derived from their unequivocal support of Wang and Kisanka.

Beginning in late February, those dissatisfied with the “leftist” direction of the government began grouping around Chiang Kai-shek. Thus the personal conflict between General Chiang on one side and Wang Jingwei, Kuibyshev, and Kisanka on the other began to acquire a political coloration. On March 20, Chiang struck. He declared martial law in Canton, arrested a number of communists, and sent troops to surround the residences of the Soviet military advisers. He had deliberately provoked the incident by ordering the commissar of the warship Zhongshan, the communist Li Zhilong, to bring the vessel to the Whampoa Academy. When Li sailed into the roadstead near the school, he was suddenly declared to be a “mutineer,” and a story about a “communist plot” was concocted.³⁹ All over Canton, Chiang's proclamations were posted saying, “I believe in communism and am almost a communist myself, but the Chinese communists have sold out to the Russians and become ‘their dogs.' Therefore, I oppose them.”⁴⁰ What he achieved at once was the removal of Kisanka and his deputies and the return of Bliukher, whom he trusted. The incident ended peacefully. Having achieved his aim, Chiang freed the detainees and even apologized to the remaining Soviet specialists in Canton. At the end of May 1926 Bliukher returned.

Nevertheless, Chiang Kai-shek's coup, unmistakably aimed against both the Chinese and the Soviet communists, signified the establishment of an almost undisguised military dictatorship of the Guomindang “rightists” and centrists in the territory controlled by the National government. Consequently, the position of both the communists and the Guomindang “leftists” grouped around Wang Jingwei was significantly weakened. Wang, reportedly ill, was forced to go abroad. In the villages of Guangdong the peasant unions began to be disarmed. The most serious consequence for the Chinese Communist Party came in the form of a series of demands by Chiang aimed at restricting the political and organizational autonomy of the communists inside the Guomindang. Chiang Kai-shek introduced these demands at the May 1926 plenum of the Guomindang CEC. These included a prohibition on criticizing Sun Yat-sen and his teachings, a limit of one-third on the number of communist members of the CEC and of provincial and municipal Guomindang committees, a prohibition against communists heading departments of the Guomindang CEC, and a prohibition on members of the Guomindang joining the CCP.⁴¹ Soon after the plenum, Chiang gathered all the threads of power in his own hands. He occupied the post of chairman of the Standing Committee of the Guomindang CEC, and he headed the Military Council of the National government and the Department of Military Cadres of the Guomindang CEC. Most important, he was proclaimed the commander in chief of the National Revolutionary Army.⁴²

On the eve of the May plenum, already knowing that Chiang would raise the question of the future status of the CCP in the Guomindang, the Chinese communists asked Moscow, “What is to be done?” Chen Duxiu was inclined to exit the Guomindang, not wishing to sacrifice the independence of the Communist Party. Voitinsky, Trotsky, and Zinoviev agreed, but not Stalin. He rejected any such proposal because it would wreak havoc with his tactical scheme. From the perspective of the Kremlin leader, just a couple of weeks earlier the communists in the “worker-peasant Guomindang” had been on the verge of seizing power. How could one so easily surrender the positions that had been conquered? In Stalin's logic this was tantamount to an unjustifiable surrender to the Guomindang “rightists.”⁴³ Moscow directed the CCP to slow down the tempo of the offensive inside the Guomindang in order to regroup the forces. Stalin recognized the need for “internal organizational concessions to the Guomindang leftists in the sense of reshuffling personnel.”⁴⁴ It was only a matter of the “leftists.”

The Soviet Politburo viewed Chiang's coup as a conflict between the communists and those who objectively were their allies. (At this time no one in the Soviet leadership viewed Chiang Kai-shek as a “rightist.”) Borodin himself, who recognized that the Soviet and Chinese communists had overreached, understood that Chiang Kai-shek's demonstration was in order. He shared his thoughts in a private conversation with Zhang Guotao: “Had Dr. Sun been alive, he would also have taken certain measures to restrain the activities of the CCP.”⁴⁵ Again the Chinese communists had to submit, the more so since in May 1926 the Soviet Politburo had directed the ECCI and the Soviet government “to step up assistance—personnel and financial—to the Communist party of China by all means available.”⁴⁶

Mao, like fellow communists Tan Pingshan and Lin Boqu, who also headed departments of the Guomindang CEC, had to resign his post. According to Zhang Guotao's memoirs, Mao was particularly unhappy and blamed Borodin for this policy of retreat. In a private conversation with Zhang Guotao, Mao referred to Borodin as a “foreign devil.”⁴⁷ The Propaganda Department and the Peasant Department were now headed by men considered Guomindang “leftists,” while Chiang Kai-shek himself headed the Organizational Department.⁴⁸

Mao did not remain without work. In mid-March, four days before the coup, he had been appointed director of the Sixth Session of the Peasant Movement Training Institute, which, as a result of reorganization, now recruited students from all over China. On May 3, a festive ceremony was held to register the new students, of whom there were 327, and on May 15 classes began. Starting in early April he also lectured on the peasant question to classes of party and youth agitators from Guangdong province.⁴⁹ Mao could now devote himself fully to what for all practical purposes had become his main work since the summer of 1925, namely, organizing the Chinese peasantry.

The appointment was not fortuitous. Since his return from Shaoshan, Mao had tirelessly addressed the problems of the peasant movement, written about them in Guomindang publications, and raised them in his speeches. He asserted that

[w]e have concentrated too much on city people and neglected the peasantry …… [T]he more the oppression of the peasants is relieved, the quicker the national revolution will be accomplished …… If we wish to consolidate the foundation of the national revolution, we must, once again, first liberate the peasants …… Only those who endorse the liberation movement of the Chinese peasants are faithful revolutionary members of the party; if not, they are counterrevolutionaries.⁵⁰

Within the Communist Party, Mao had come to be viewed as a real expert on the peasant movement. Even the leaders of the Guomindang, including those of “rightist” orientation, considered the “king of Hunan” (as Mao was jokingly called in CCP circles) an “expert on the peasant question.” In Borodin's words, they themselves “proposed him for membership in the commissions on peasant questions.”⁵¹ As early as January 1926, Mao had published a short article, “Analysis of Various Classes of the Chinese Peasantry and Their Relationship to Revolution,” in the journal Chinese Peasant, directly addressing the situation of the Chinese peasantry. Although this article repeated, sometimes literally, many of the arguments in his previous article on classes in Chinese society, the left wing of the Guomindang welcomed it. Revolutionaries did not need a scholarly treatise but rather a politically pointed, militant, and clear proclamation, which is just what it was. Moreover, unlike the December publication, this article described the social structure of the Chinese village much more clearly. Instead of five categories (large, medium, and petty bourgeoisie, semi-proletariat, and proletariat), Mao now divided rural society into eight parts: large and small landlords (as before he related them directly to the large and the petit bourgeoisie), owner-peasants (petit bourgeoisie), semi-owner peasants (who rented part of their land), sharecroppers (renters with their own agricultural implements), poor peasants (renters lacking their own agricultural implements), farm laborers (for some reason Mao included handicraftsmen in this group), and vagrants. This picture was closer to reality, although it was still far from being accurate. Mao still did not realize that he had exaggerated the degree of capitalist development in the Chinese countryside.

There was one new element in the article. This time Mao spoke with special sympathy about the millions of vagrants who were forced to engage in banditry, to beg alms, or to serve in the armies of militarists. As before, he considered them allies, capable of “fighting very bravely,” but he didn't limit himself to general phrases. “As for the vagrants, we should exhort them to side with the peasants' associations and to join the great revolutionary movement in order to find a solution to the problem of unemployment,” he asserted. “We must never force them to go over to the side of the enemy and become a force in the service of the counterrevolutionaries.”

He still placed his main hope on a “single organization” of five categories of peasants (owner-peasants, semi-owner peasants, sharecroppers, poor peasants, and farm laborers and handicraftsmen). He demanded that they struggle against the entire class of landlords, not just against the largest landowners. (The latter, incidentally, he categorized as those owning more than 500 mu, or about 80 acres, of land.) “Toward the landlord class, we adopt in principle the method of struggle, demanding from them economic and political concessions. In special circumstances, when we encounter the most reactionary and vicious local bullies and evil gentry who exploit the people savagely …… they must be overthrown completely.”⁵²

Around the same time, in a January 1926 article published in Political Weekly, the journal that he edited, Mao again emphasized that the entire landlord class was in the camp of the enemy, along with imperialists, bureaucrats, militarists, and compradors. “Only the alliance of the three classes of the petty bourgeoisie, the semiproletariat, and the proletariat is truly revolutionary,” he summarized, including the vagrants this time in the category of proletariat. The whole article was pointed against the landlords. Mao excoriated the petty “landlords” who, he said, “want revolution in order to get rich, while other classes want revolution to relieve suffering; they want revolution in order to make themselves into a new class of oppressors, while other classes want revolution to achieve their own liberation and to ensure that in the future they will be forever free from class oppression.”⁵³

Such leftism, it will be recalled, was characteristic of this period. Chiang Kai-shek's coup d'état was still more than two months distant. Many CCP leaders agreed with Mao. In October 1925, an enlarged plenum of the CEC of the Chinese Communist Party had defined the course precisely as sharpening “class struggle” in the villages.⁵⁴ This plenum was the first in the history of the party that gave serious attention to agrarian problems and it also resolved to establish a special department on the agrarian question within the Central Executive Committee. (The department was not established until November 1926.)⁵⁵

In the middle of February 1926, pleading illness, Mao turned over the Propaganda Department to his deputy Shen Yanbing, who was later to become famous as the writer Mao Dun, and for the next two weeks conducted an investigation of the peasant movement in northern Guangdong and southern Hunan. Following this activity he gave a speech on problems of the peasantry to cadets of the officers' school of the Second Corps of the Guomindang army.⁵⁶

Having pruned back the communists and the “leftists,” Chiang Kai-shek prepared in earnest to carry out the Northern Expedition, a military campaign conceived by Sun Yat-sen with the aim of subduing the militarists and unifying China. Bliukher, with whom Chiang and the other Chinese generals got on famously, provided the greatest assistance in this matter.

At the end of March, while immediate preparations for the Northern Expedition were under way, Mao had taken part in a meeting of the Peasant Department of the Guomindang CEC, which department at this time was still directed by the communist Lin Boqu. Understanding that the appearance of the NRA would inevitably attract millions of peasants to the national revolution, Mao proposed a resolution committing the activists in the peasant movement to devote more attention to those areas through which the army of the Guomindang would have to pass, including the provinces of Jiangxi, Hubei, Zhili, Shandong, and Henan.⁵⁷ For some reason he didn't mention his native province of Hunan, perhaps because the need to organize the peasant movement in the province directly bordering Guangdong was something nobody doubted.

At the beginning of July, the troops of the National Revolutionary Army, totaling about 100,000 officers and men, moved north. The 150,000-strong Nationalist Army, commanded by Feng Yuxiang, who had declared his support for Sun in October 1924, was objectively their ally. In May 1926, Marshal Feng had even joined the GMD; however, he was unable to help his party comrades because three and a half months before the Northern Expedition he had suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of the northern militarists. Three groups of militarists opposed Chiang Kai-shek. Chief among them, in central China, was Wu Peifu, who had ordered the shooting of the striking Hankou workers on February 7, 1923. In eastern China was Marshal Sun Chuanfang and in northern and northeastern China was Marshal Zhang Zuolin. Wu's and Sun's armies each numbered some 200,000 while Marshal Zhang could field 350,000 men. The forces were obviously unequal, but Chiang Kai-shek was lucky. As early as February 1926, a split occurred in the army of Zhao Hengti, the Hunan governor, which was part of Wu Peifu's group. Tang Shengzhi, the commander of the Fourth Division, rose in rebellion and threw in his lot with the Canton government. Enlisting the support of Canton, Tang attacked General Zhao, forcing him to flee Changsha. At the end of March 1926 Tang proclaimed himself governor of Hunan but was unable immediately to fortify his position in the provincial capital. General Wu moved troops against him, and Tang was forced to abandon the city.

In these circumstances Chiang Kai-shek took the only correct action. On May 19, he sent a 2,000-man regiment—the only one in the Guomindang army led by a communist—into Hunan. This regiment helped Tang Shengzhi master the situation. In early June, Tang's division was reorganized as the Eighth Corps of the NRA. This predetermined the initial success of the Northern Expedition. Just two days after it started out, on July 11, the combined forces of the Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth Corps again seized Changsha. In mid-August, at a meeting between Tang Shengzhi and Chiang Kai-shek, it was decided to continue the Northern Expedition in two columns. The objective of the western column was Wuhan; the eastern column would head for Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province. Chiang Kai-shek himself would lead the eastern column; Tang Shengzhi the western. On August 17, the Northern Expedition resumed.⁵⁸

The unification of the country had begun, but Mao remained in Canton. He could not go to his native Hunan, which had already been liberated by the NRA, because he was overloaded with work. He was constantly being asked to speak about the peasant movement at various meetings. Everyone was expecting a massive revolutionary upsurge in the countryside. Over a period of four months in the Peasant Movement Training Institute, Mao took up three themes: the “peasant question” (23 hours a week), “educational work in the countryside” (9 hours), and geography (4 hours). At the invitation of the peasant committee of the Guangdong provincial party committee of the Guomindang, he lectured on the agrarian question and on the history of the Comintern and the USSR at courses the committee sponsored for military officers. For a week in July, along with the auditors of the Peasant Institute, he was busy with agitation-propaganda work among peasants in northern Guangdong on the border with Hunan; in mid-August in Haifeng district in the east of the province he spent fourteen days supervising students' practical work. At the beginning of September he lectured the cadets at the Whampoa Academy. At the same time, he was editing and preparing for publication a series of brochures on “The Peasant Question.”⁵⁹

He did not change his radical views. He still called for the overthrow of the entire class of landlords, notwithstanding the fact that landlords' sons were heading the armies of the Northern Expedition. “The peasant problem is the central problem of the national revolution,” he affirmed.

If the peasants do not rise up, if they do not join the national revolution and support it, then the national revolution cannot achieve success …… The greatest enemy of revolution in an economically backward semi-colony is the feudal-patriarchal class in the countryside …… If the peasants do not rise and do not struggle in the countryside against the privileges of the feudal-patriarchal landlords, it will be impossible to end the power of the militarists and the imperialists.

The conclusion followed that the main task at present must be “the rapid development of the peasant movement.”⁶⁰ This is what he taught his listeners; this is what he devoted all his efforts to. Nothing, it seemed, could darken the prospects that opened up before the revolution. Millions of oppressed peasants, so it seemed, were ready to smash All Under Heaven.

¹ See Yuriev, Revoliutsiia 1925–1927 gg. v Kitae (The Revolution of 1925–1927 in China), 159–67.

² Ibid., 169, 174.

³ Ibid., 239–41; see Pantsov and Levine, Chinese Comintern Activists: An Analytic Biographic Dictionary (manuscript), 290.

⁴ See McDonald, The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution, 225.

⁵ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 132–34.

⁶ Ibid., 135–37.

⁷ See Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 120.

⁸ Zheng Chaolin, An Oppositionist for Life: Memoirs of the Chinese Revolutionary Zheng Chaolin, trans. Gregor Benton (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 142–43.

⁹ See ibid., 145–47.

¹⁰ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 147.

¹¹ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 237.

¹² Snow, Red Star Over China, 157.

¹³ “Pis'mo G. N. Voitinskogo L. M. Karakhanu ot 22 aprelia 1922 g.” (G. N. Voitinsky's Letter to L. M. Karakhan, April 22, 1925), RGASPI, collection of unsorted documents. The text of the letter was first published in 1994. See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 1, 549–53.

¹⁴ See RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 163, file 177, sheets 1–4.

¹⁵ RGASPI, collection 558, inventory 1, file 2714, sheets 17–18. Pravda (Truth), May 22, 1925. Emphasis added.

¹⁶ Titarenko, Kommunisticheskii Internatsional i kitaiskaia revoliutsiia (The Communist International and the Chinese Revolution), 58, 61. Emphasis added.

¹⁷ For more details, see Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 211–12.

¹⁸ See Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 484–85.

¹⁹ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 227–29, 234–36, 320.

²⁰ Quoted from ibid., 235.

²¹ Ibid., 265, 266.

²² See Ch'ü, My Confessions, 166.

²³ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 249, 260, 261–62.

²⁴ See V-n [S. N. Belen'kii], “Rets. Mao Tsze-dun: Analiz klassov kitaiskogo obshchestva, ‘Kitaiskii krest'ianin,' no. 2, 1 fevralia 1926 g.” (Review of Mao Zedong's “Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society,” Kitaiskii krest'ianin [Chinese Peasant], no. 2, February 1, 1926), Kanton (Canton), 8–9 (1926): 37–43.

²⁵ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 150, 152; Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 310–19.

²⁶ Vishniakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, 175.

²⁷ See Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 479.

²⁸ Vishniakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, 175.

²⁹ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 152, 155, 156.

³⁰ Shestoi rasshirennyi plenum Ispolkoma Kominterna: Stenograficheskii otchet, 17 fevralia–15 marta 1926 (Sixth Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI: Stenographic Report, February 17–March 15, 1926) (Moscow and Leningrad: Gospolitizdat, 1927), 8.

³¹ RGASPI, collection 514, inventory 1, file 168, sheet 219.

³² See Ob”edinennoe zasedanie Prezidiuma Ispolkoma Kominterna i Mezhdunarodnoi Kontrol'noi Komissii, 27 sentiabria 1927 g.: Stenograficheskii otchet (Joint Session of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern and the International Control Commission, September 27, 1927: Stenographic Report), RGASPI, collection 505, inventory 1, file 65, sheet 21. See also L. Trotsky, “Stalin i Kitaiskaia revoliutsiia: Fakty i dokumenty” (Stalin and the Chinese Revolution: Facts and Documents), Biulleten' oppozitsii bol'shevikov-lenintsev (Bulletin of the opposition of the Bolsheviks and Leninists), nos. 15–16 (1925): 8.

³³ See RGASPI, collection 514, inventory 1, file 171, sheets 7–9. See also file 168, sheet 219; “Spravka Raita ‘O vkhozhdenii Gomin'dana v Komintern' ” (Information from Rait “On the entry of the Guomindang into the Comintern”), Ob”edinennoe zasedanie Prezidiuma Ispolkoma Kominterna i Mezhdunarodnoi Kontrol'noi Komissii, 27 sentiabria 1927 g.: Stenograficheskii otchet (Joint Session of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, and the International Control Commission, September 27, 1927: Stenographic Report), sheet 33.

³⁴ RGASPI, collection 514, inventory 1, file 171, sheets 7–9. The text of the letter is also in M. L. Titarenko et al., eds., VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 2 (Moscow: AO “Buklet,” 1996), 131–32.

³⁵ Chiang, Soviet Russia in China, 24.

³⁶ Chen Chieh-ju, Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past, 135–36.

³⁷ See Dan N. Jacobs, Borodin: Stalin's Man in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 278.

³⁸ Vishniakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, 210.

³⁹ See Yuriev, Revoliutsiia 1925–1927 gg. v Kitae (The Revolution of 1925–1927 in China), 312–13.

⁴⁰ Quoted from Cherepanov, Zapiski voennogo sovetnika v Kitae (Notes of a Military Adviser in China), 376.

⁴¹ See RGASPI, collection of unsorted documents. The text adopted by the plenum may be found in Zhongguo guomindang di yi di er ci quanguo daibiao dahui huiyi shiliao (Materials on the History of the First and Second Congresses of the Guomindang), vol. 2 (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1986), 714–15.

⁴² Yuriev, Revoliutsiia 1925–1927 gg. v Kitae (The Revolution of 1925–1927 in China), 320–21; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 165.

⁴³ For more details, see Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 92–93.

⁴⁴ RGASPI, collection 17, inventory 162, file 3, sheet 55. The text of the Politburo resolution was first published in 1996. See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 2, 202. Emphasis added.

⁴⁵ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 508.

⁴⁶ RGASPI, collection 17, inventory 162, file 3, sheets 59, 74; Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 2, 205.

⁴⁷ See Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 510.

⁴⁸ See Yuriev, Revoliutsiia 1925–1927 gg. v Kitae (The Revolution of 1925–1927 in China), 320–21.

⁴⁹ See ibid., 250; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 158, 161, 162–63; Li, The Early Revolutionary Activities of Comrade Mao Tse-tung, 283–84.

⁵⁰ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 319, 343, 358.

⁵¹ Quoted from A. S. Titov, Materialy k politicheskoi biografii Mao Tsze-duna (Materials for a Political Biography of Mao Zedong), vol. 1 (Moscow: IDV AN SSSR, 1969), 123.

⁵² Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 308–9.

⁵³ Ibid., 321, 325.

⁵⁴ See Glunin, Kommunisticheskaia partiia Kitaia nakanune i vo vremia natsional'noi revoliutsii 1925–1927 gg. v Kitae (The Communist Party of China Before and During the 1925–1927 National Revolution), vol. 1, 280–81; Tony Saich, ed., The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 152–58.

⁵⁵ Wang Jianying, ed., Zhongguo gongchandang zuzhi shi ziliao huibian—lingdao jigou yange he chengyuan minglu (Collection of Documents on the History of the CCP Organizations—The Evolution of Leading Organs and Their Personal Composition) (Beijing: Hongqi chubanshe, 1983), 32.

⁵⁶ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 156, 157.

⁵⁷ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 370.

⁵⁸ See Yuriev, Revoliutsiia 1925–1927 gg. v Kitae (The Revolution of 1925–1927 in China), 323–38; Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 520–36; McDonald, The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution, 229–36.

⁵⁹ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 165–69.

⁶⁰ Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong wenji (Works of Mao Zedong), vol. 1 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1993), 37, 39.

ⁿ¹² Following this, rumors circulated within the CCP for a time that Li Lisan, hoping to get rid of his wife, had encouraged her to seduce Cai Hesen. At this time he was supposedly madly in love with her younger sister. Whether this was really true we don’t know, but it is a historical fact that Li and Cai hated each other.