14 THE PATH TO THE SOVIETS

The main cause of the defeat of the Chinese communists was that throughout all the years of its existence the CCP had remained tightly bound to the Soviet Communist Party and under its powerful control and ideological pressure. Chen Duxiu and the Central Committee lacked freedom of maneuver. In everything they had to ask for instructions from Moscow or, if the situation demanded an immediate resolution, from its representatives such as Voitinsky, Maring, Borodin, or Roy. The Russian bosses, with little understanding of Chinese problems, scanted the opinions of their Chinese colleagues and issued directives concerning core questions about the Chinese revolution. Only the Chinese were bothered. The Comintern moguls prided themselves on being specialists on the revolutionary movements of all countries. Zhang Guotao wrote, “[W]e resented this procedure, feeling that it was unreasonable; but since from the beginning the CC of the CCP had followed the tradition of paying respect to Moscow, we accepted it with silent resignation …… The directives of the Comintern were complied with in all matters whether large or small.” ¹ These directives were often simply impossible to implement. A particularly critical situation developed now when Stalin demanded that the CCP carry out a decisive attack against the “left” Guomindang.

Another factor that accelerated the defeat of the CCP at this time was the explosion of mostly communist-inspired pauper–lumpen proletariat terror in the countryside. The barbaric action of crazed crowds that pillaged and killed both the innocent and the guilty was undoubtedly a serious factor in undermining the united front. These actions were mostly aimed against the petty and medium landlords who were the foundation of the Guomindang, including the “left.” Thus the uprising of Guomindang officers whose families had suffered from the “red” terror was inevitable.

A “white” terror, no less deadly than the “red” terror, now shook Chinese society. The officer corps of the NRA, supported by peasant self-defense forces (mintuan) and members of secret societies that had swung over to their side, carried out the cruelest measures, dreaming only of revenge. In Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Guangdong, and other Guomindang-controlled provinces, rivers of blood flowed. In just the twenty days following Xu Kexiang's coup, more than ten thousand persons were killed in Changsha and surrounding areas. ² Among the victims were many local leaders of the CCP and the peasant associations. Another ten thousand were executed in the counties of Xiangtan (Mao's native place) and Changde. In Xiangtan, the executioners “beheaded the chief of the …… general labor union and kicked his head about with their feet, then filled his belly with kerosene and burned his body.” Peasants in Hubei who belonged to wealthy clans exterminated entire villages with the help of Guomindang troops. They gouged out the eyes of victims, cut out their tongues, cut off their heads, smashed their bones, drew and quartered them, cut off their legs, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive, and branded them with red-hot irons. “In the case of women, they would run string through their breasts and parade them around naked in public, or simply hack them into pieces.” In just three counties of Hubei thousands of people were killed in the first weeks after the coup. ³

From a Western perspective, revenge often took the most improbable forms. Thus General He Jian, whose father had been arrested by the peasant union, sent soldiers to Shaoshan in late 1927 to dig up the bones of Mao's parents from their grave and scatter them on the slopes of the mountains. According to ancient popular belief, this was supposed to have a devastating effect on Mao's own feng shui. He Jian's troops, however, didn't know where Mao's parents were buried so they had to ask for help from the local peasants, who flatly refused to cooperate. When the soldiers threatened them, one local person simply deceived them. He led the punishment squad to the grave of the ancestors of a local tuhao, which they then proceeded to exhume. ⁴

The weakly organized and poorly armed peasant unions collapsed at the first onslaught of Guomindang troops. The peasants who had joined the unions out of fear of the rural lumpen elements that controlled them had no desire to fight against the Guomindang armies for interests that were not their own. At the first favorable opportunity they threw down their pikes and fled. Xu Kexiang was able to establish control over the entire Changsha area even though he had only a thousand troops at his disposal because the multimillion-member peasant unions turned out to be “paper tigers.” ⁵

In this time of troubles, Mao turned out be almost the only major leader of the CCP who assessed the situation soberly. This was his most important contribution to the communist rise to power. His brief trip to Hunan in late June and early July 1927 convinced him that the communists' struggle for power in China could succeed only on condition that the Communist Party create its own military force. All of the political games, the united front, and the mass movement were no more than a farce if that was forgotten. In a militarized China, “political power is obtained from the barrel of the gun.” ⁶ One should not play at rebellion, but retreat in order to organize a Red Army. Where would the communist troops come from? Mao had answered this a long time ago. Naturally, it was those who were capable of “the most steadfast struggle,” the paupers and rural lumpen proletariat.

At a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee in Hankou on July 4, Mao, just back from Hunan, suggested that one possible way to save the party was to order the Hunan peasant union to “go to the mountains,” because in the mountains “it would be possible to establish a military base.” “As soon as the situation changes [Mao was hinting at the inevitable coup by Wang Jingwei] we will be powerless if we don't have armed forces.” Right after the meeting he discussed this question with his closest friend, Cai Hesen. “We can't sit around and wait until somebody works everything out,” he said excitedly. Cai was suffering from asthma, but he shared Mao's indignation. On Mao's initiative he promptly wrote a pointed letter to the Standing Committee of the Politburo demanding that it “work up a military plan.” ⁷

This initiative failed. Chen Duxiu was still in power, and his depression peaked in early July. One more woe was added to his burden. On July 4, his eldest son, Chen Yannian, was executed by the Guomindang in Shanghai. After this Chen faced “an expanse of darkness, and so he himself would have to resort to the course of giving up his position to more capable persons,” wrote Zhang Guotao, who was precisely one of those “capable persons.” ⁸

After Chen's retirement, the new party leadership (Provisional Bureau of the Central Committee) was headed by Mao's protector, Qu Qiubai. ⁿ²¹ Happily for Mao the leaders reexamined his idea of “going to the mountains,” but approved it only as a backup. In the critical situation of summer 1927 the communists needed to retreat. Any attempts to organize a near-term counterattack could only result in new victims, but most of the leaders of the CCP, including Qu Qiubai, still seething with anger, were inclined to action, however foolhardy it was. In mid-August they decided to mount a series of armed ventures in rural Hunan, Hubei, Guangdong, and Jiangxi as well as in the famous Fourth Corps of the Guomindang army. Their desire to spill Guomindang blood was overwhelming. ⁹

The Comintern itself insisted upon the speedy organization of armed uprisings. For the time being its directives spoke not of purely communist ventures, but rather about the need to “raise the masses of the left Guomindang against the upper leadership.” Moscow emphasized that “[o]nly if the revolutionary transformation of the Guomindang turns out in reality to be hopeless, and if this failure coincides with a new and serious upsurge of revolution,” only then would it be necessary to “build soviets.” ¹⁰ In other words, Moscow demanded an uprising against the “traitor” Wang Jingwei under the slogans of the “left” Guomindang.

Such directives must have seemed absurd to any sensible person, but the leadership of the CCP was forced to accept them. The party's catastrophic defeat had not emancipated it from Stalin's influence. On the contrary, the weakened CCP became even more dependent upon Moscow as Stalin laid most of the blame on the CCP leadership. “There is not a single Marxist mind in the Central Committee [of the CCP] capable of understanding the underpinning (the social underpinning) of the events now occurring,” he wrote to his comrades Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikolai Bukharin in early July 1927. At one point Stalin even mused about fortifying the CCP with a special system of “party advisors” attached to the CCP Central Committee and each provincial party organization. From Stalin's perspective, these “nannies” were “necessary at this stage because of the weakness, shapelessness and political amorphousness, and lack of qualification of the current Central Committee [of the Chinese Communist Party].” ¹¹

At the end of June, Stalin had sent one of his most trusted confidants, a Georgian named Lominadze, to China to replace M. N. Roy. ¹² He no longer trusted either Roy or Borodin. Bliukher served as the conduit through which Moscow supplied its Chinese wards with money until the end of August, when the duties of “financier” passed to Lominadze after Bliukher's departure. ¹³ Stalin's new emissary had arrived on July 23 and immediately held talks with Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao, who many years later remembered them as “the worst conversation.”

Vissarion V. Lominadze was a tough character who had joined the revolution at the age of fifteen. A professional revolutionary, he struck everyone who knew him by his disdain for death—his own or others. He entered Stalin's inner circle very early and with his support rose quickly to become a leading figure in the Comintern. Just shy of thirty, he had already savored and been corrupted by the taste of bureaucratic power. Around six feet tall, solidly built, and with thick black hair, Lominadze was an impressive figure even though he blinked very often, whether from nearsightedness or some other reason. ¹⁴ Yet Lominadze's bureaucratic manner and his habit of ordering the CCP leaders about alienated them immediately. Nikolai (or Werner, the two names he used in China) was utterly devoid of Eastern politesse, and he immediately unleashed upon Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao a torrent of baseless accusations. “Lominadze first stated that he was the plenipotentiary of the Comintern, ordered here to correct the many mistakes committed in the past by the personnel of the Comintern and the CC of the CCP in the Chinese revolution,” wrote Zhang Guotao. Lominadze “immediately declared that the CC of the CCP had committed the serious error of rightist opportunism and had violated the directives of the Comintern.” ¹⁵ He demanded that an emergency party conference be convened as soon as possible to reorganize the party leadership.

Naturally, this demand infuriated Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao, but what could they do Comintern discipline bound them hand and foot, and they were desperately in need of Moscow's money. Moreover, they needed Soviet arms for the uprisings they were planning. Luckily, just then the Soviet Politburo adopted a resolution to provide assistance to the CCP, “enough to supply about one corps.” They allotted 15,000 rifles, 10 million rounds of ammunition, thirty machine guns, and four mountain artillery with 2,000 shells, to the tune of 1.1 million rubles. The arms were supposed to be shipped from Vladivostok to a Chinese port that the communists would seize as a result of their armed uprisings. ¹⁶ Therefore, Qu and Zhang had to swallow Lominadze's insult.

That same evening the Central Committee received a letter from the local provincial committee in Hunan. The situation in the province continued to deteriorate despite efforts by the secretary of the party committee, Yi Lirong, an old friend of Mao's, to stabilize it somehow. “After the departure of our secretary Mao Zedong …… the situation in all departments of the provincial committee has become critical,” wrote members of the party committee; “we are hoping [only] for the return of Mao Zedong.” ¹⁷ But Qu Qiubai did not want Mao to leave, because he required his support at the upcoming party conference. He needed Mao as an authority on the peasant question. In late July and early August feverish preparations for armed peasant actions were under way in the Central Committee, and, of course, Mao took part in the planning. The idea was for poor peasants to rise up directly against the landlords during the autumn harvest, when the tenants were theoretically obligated to settle accounts with the landowners. The communists wanted to seduce the poor peasants with the simple, albeit illegal, idea of not paying their debts.

Meanwhile, on the night of July 31–August 1 a carefully prepared CCP uprising took place among NRA troops quartered in Nanchang. These were independent units of the Second Front Army of the NRA, under the overall command of the “left” Guomindang general Zhang Fakui. General Zhang himself, of course, did not participate in the action. Just two days earlier he had attended a meeting of “left” Guomindang members where it was decided to purge the communists from the Second Front Army. Party leadership of the uprising was exercised by Zhou Enlai, as always self-disciplined, energetic, and businesslike, assisted by Zhang Guotao, Peng Pai, and others. (At the time Zhou headed the Military Committee of the CCP Central Committee.) In direct command of the mutineers were the commander of the Twentieth Corps, He Long, an ex-bandit from western Hunan who was now sympathetic to the communists; Ye Ting, a communist and former commander of the famous Independent Regiment of the Fourth Corps; and the head of the Municipal Political Security Bureau, the commander of the Training Regiment of the Ninth Corps, the communist Zhu De.

The twenty thousand or so insurgents succeeded in seizing the city, but they did not intend to remain there. Following the plan developed by the Provisional Bureau of the CCP Central Committee, they were supposed to set off immediately to attack Guangdong and proclaim a new revolutionary government there. On August 3, the insurgent troops, reorganized into the so-called Second National Revolutionary Army under the overall command of He Long, left the city of Nanchang, but their advance south was difficult. In late September and early October 1927, the insurgents suffered a crushing defeat near Swatow in eastern Guangdong, where they had gone to receive arms from the USSR. After this their army disintegrated. He Long fled to Hong Kong; Ye Ting and Peng Pai escaped to Lufeng county in Guangdong province to establish a military base; and Zhu De led a thousand men on a difficult march to the Guangdong-Jiangxi border.

Mao Zedong did not take part in preparations for the Nanchang Uprising, but once he learned about it he was eager to join the insurgents. In early August he even proposed to the Central Committee that he organize a “peasant army” under his command to aid He Long. On August 3, Qu Qiubai promptly appointed him secretary of the Special South Hunan Committee, but later that same day Qu revoked his decision. Further reflection suggested that Mao's plan was unrealistic. ¹⁸

So the “King of Hunan” had to stay in Wuhan. Soon, on August 7, he took part in the Extraordinary Conference of the Central Committee of the CCP, held under conditions of utmost secrecy in the apartment of one of the Soviet advisers to the Wuhan government, Mikhail Razumov, who with his wife was living in the territory of the former Russian concession in Hankou in a quiet neighborhood inhabited mostly by foreigners. (The USSR maintained relations with the Guomindang for a while after the rupture of the united front between the GMD and the CCP, and there were Soviet representatives and even consulates in a number of cities, including Hankou, Changsha, and Canton.) The Razumovs' apartment was on the second floor of a large three-story European-style house. It was to this apartment that Mao Zedong came early on the morning of August 7. Qu Qiubai, who ran the meeting, looked unwell. He had long suffered from tuberculosis, and that illness as well as the events he had just experienced had completely exhausted him. He sprayed saliva when he spoke, as he always did when he was agitated, so it seemed that in the room there was “a thick mist of tuberculosis bacteria.” ¹⁹ Counting Mao, Lominadze, and Qu Qiubai, altogether twenty-five persons took part in the conference, including two other Soviet comrades in addition to “Nikolai.” The room was crowded, stuffy, and hot.

Those present constituted less than 30 percent of the leadership of the party. Chen Duxiu was not invited to the conference even though he was still in town. ²⁰ Instead, three members of the Communist Youth League, one staff member of the Military Committee of the Central Committee, and two local representatives from Hunan and Hubei were invited. ²¹ Most of the participants were people Mao had known for a long time. Only a few may have been unfamiliar. Among these was a new head of the technical secretariat of the Central Committee, a modest but very capable young man of twenty-three who was so diminutive that at scarcely five feet he only came up to Mao's shoulder. A year earlier he had returned to China from the Soviet Union, where he had spent some time studying at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and then spent several months at the Sun Yat-sen University of the Toilers of China. Earlier he had worked and studied in France, where he had gone when he was still a youth. His real name was Deng Xiansheng (Deng “Who Surpasses the Sage”), but at five years old he received a new name—Deng Xixian (Deng “Aspiring to Benevolence”). After arriving in Wuhan to engage in clandestine work, he changed his name to Deng Xiaoping (Deng “Little and Plain”), a very ordinary Chinese given name that was unlikely to attract much attention. Probably Mao paid no attention to this squat little man. ²² But even had his gaze lingered on him, he could not possibly have imagined that after Mao's death this unprepossessing man, the son of a family from eastern Sichuan, would play a decisive role in the fate of Mao's main creation, socialist China.

Presiding over the conference was Li Weihan, a member of the Provisional Bureau and former secretary of the Hunan party committee whom Mao had known for many years. Speaking first, Lominadze sharply criticized the Chinese communists for having committed “major errors,” the roots of which went “very deep.” Then Li Weihan asked those present to express their views.

Mao spoke in support of the Comintern representative. He had long demanded the radicalization of party policy and had often opposed Chen Duxiu. Everyone knew how fiercely he had fought for a thoroughgoing agrarian revolution. Now it seemed his hour had come. He referred to the “errors” of the previous leadership regarding the peasant movement. “The broad masses inside and outside the Party want revolution,” he said, “yet the Party's guidance is not revolutionary; there really is a hint of something counterrevolutionary about it.” To his credit, he never mentioned Chen Duxiu by name. In fact, none of the Chinese at the conference criticized Chen personally. Despite Stalin's negative view of him, Chen remained the “head of the family” in their eyes. Only Lominadze attacked Chen by name. After finishing his critique, Mao addressed the basic tasks of the party. Here for the first time at such a high official level, he voiced his inner thoughts about what had been worrying him most recently, namely, the need to devote exceptional attention to the military factor.

[W]e used to censure [Sun] Yat-sen for engaging only in a military movement, and we did just the opposite, not undertaking a military movement, but exclusively a mass movement …… At present, although we have paid some attention to it, we still have no firm concept about it. The Autumn Harvest Uprising, for example, is simply impossible without military force. Our conference should attach great importance to this issue …… From now on, we should pay the greatest attention to military affairs. We must know that political power is obtained from the barrel of the gun. ²³

This was hardly a trivial statement then, and even sounded somewhat un-Bolshevik. The Comintern had always taught communists that in the revolutionary movement they must primarily rely on the masses, first the industrial workers and then the poor peasants. This accorded with the canons of Marxism. The actual Bolshevik experience of revolution and civil war suggested just the opposite, but the decisive importance of the military factor was ignored. The “great social revolution of the multi-million masses of the Russian proletariat” could not be depicted as some sort of military coup.

After everyone at the conference had spoken, Qu Qiubai delivered a self-critical report. Then they turned to a discussion of three resolutions: on the peasant struggle, the workers' movement, and organizational questions as well as a rather lengthy “Appeal to All Party Members,” which Lominadze had drafted and Qu Qiubai had already translated. Then Mao took the floor again. He spoke for only about five minutes, but his speech had enormous importance because Mao expressed his basic views on the peasant question more holistically than ever before:

1. A criterion must definitely be fixed for big and medium landlords [dizhu]. Otherwise, we will not know who is a big or medium landlord. In my opinion, we could take fifty mu [8.15 acres] as the limit; above fifty mu, whether the land is fertile or barren, it should all be confiscated.

2. The question of small landlords is the central problem of the land question. The difficulty is that, if we do not confiscate the land of the small landlords, then since there are many localities where there are no big landlords, the peasant associations would have to cease their activity. Hence, if we wish basically to abolish the landlord system, we must have a certain method for dealing with the small landlords. At present we must resolve the small landlord question, for this is the only way we can satisfy the people.

3. The problem of owner-peasants. The land rights of rich peasants and middle peasants are not the same. The peasants want to attack the rich peasants, so we must adopt a clear orientation.

4. The bandit problem is an extraordinarily great problem. Because such secret societies are uncommonly numerous, we must have tactics [for dealing with them]. There are some comrades who hold that we can simply use them; this is [Sun] Zhongshan [Sun Yat-sen]'s method, which we should not follow. It suffices that we carry through the agrarian revolution, and then we will certainly be able to lead them. We must definitely regard them as our brothers, and not as guest people [Hakka]. ²⁴

This is how Mao set forth the essence of his basic program for the revolutionary struggle. What he said boils down to this: we must create an army out of bandits, the poorest peasants, paupers, and rural lumpen proletarian elements whom we can attract to our side only by confiscating the land of both the landlords and the peasants. (In the eyes of the rural lumpen proletariat any working farmer might be viewed as a “rich peasant.”) Several months later he would express these thoughts in the laconic formula “Drawing on the plentiful to make up for the scarce, and drawing on the fat to make up for the lean.” He would follow this formula his whole life, with certain variations, of course.

Mao's extremism was so cynical that even Lominadze, hardly noted for being softhearted, objected. “We need to neutralize the urban petty bourgeoisie,” he declared. “If we start to confiscate all the land, the urban petty bourgeoisie will vacillate and turn against us …… As for the question of secret societies raised by Dong [Mao Zedong], we …… will not make use [of such societies]. ²⁵

Lominadze's criticism was offered in a friendly spirit. “Comrade Dong” went a bit too far, but still he was a genuine leftist. He was not like the opportunist Chen Duxiu. The others responded similarly. Cai Hesen, gasping for breath from an attack of asthma, even went so far as to defend his childhood friend. He suggested inducting Mao into the Politburo as a person who “had not agreed with the CC policy on the peasant question” and was “a representative of the tendency that demanded the prompt carrying out of an agrarian revolution.” Therefore, Mao's name was added to the list of members and candidate members for the Provisional Politburo that Lominadze had compiled. Mao was elected as a candidate member of this organ, which was supposed to guide the party until the convening of the regular Sixth Congress, supposedly in six months. Fifteen others were elected to the Provisional Politburo, nine full members and six candidate members, including such familiar names as Qu Qiubai, Li Weihan, Peng Pai, Deng Zhongxia, Zhou Enlai, Zhang Tailei, Zhang Guotao, and Li Lisan. It is interesting to note that Cai Hesen was not among them. ²⁶

Qu Qiubai could be satisfied. The change of leadership had gone smoothly. Chen had been removed once and for all and nobody had openly opposed Lominadze. The majority of communists were accustomed to subordinating themselves to Moscow. Yet many of them were unable to overcome their ingrained reverence for Chen Duxiu, so they merely formally accepted Lominadze's criticism of the founder of the party. Meanwhile, unbeknown to Lominadze, Qu himself secretly visited the “Old Man” late at night to seek his advice on how to handle matters. ²⁷

Soon after the conference, Qu met with Mao and asked him to move to Shanghai and work on the Central Committee. The ECCI, proceeding from a classical Marxist conception of the “world historical role” of the working class, had decided that working-class Shanghai should again become the headquarters of the party. Mao, however, asked to be sent to Hunan. “I don't want to go off to a big city and live there in a big hotel,” he said. “It's better if I go to the countryside, climb up a mountain, and make friends with the forest brothers.” ²⁸ According to Zhang Guotao, Mao “ran a great risk in voluntarily going to Hunan.” The majority of CCP leaders had no burning desire to go to that province. ²⁹ On August 9, the question of Mao's assignment was finally resolved when Qu sent him as a special representative of the Central Committee to organize the Autumn Harvest Uprising. The core action was planned for southern Hunan and a special South Hunan Committee was organized that Mao headed. The newly appointed secretary of the Hunan party committee, the energetic young Peng Gongda, who was also a candidate member of the Provisional Politburo, traveled with Mao. He had made his name by proposing to Chen Duxiu, right after Xu Kexiang's bloody coup, a plan to attack the capital of Hunan with a force of 300,000 armed peasants.

Arriving in Changsha on August 12, Mao found Xu Kexiang engaged in extirpating communism. Of three thousand party members in the local party organization no more than a hundred remained alive. ³⁰ “There is only one way to deal with the Communists,” Xu would say many years later, recalling the past: “namely with toughness, because force is the only thing they understand and of which they are really afraid.” ³¹ Mao had no time to feel his way forward. He had to carry out the specific directive of the party leadership: “Begin uprisings with the aim of bringing about an agrarian revolution and overthrowing the reactionary regime.” ³² He had to coordinate with the new Soviet consul in Changsha, who was the local Comintern representative, Vladimir Kuchumov (pseudonym Mayer, Chinese called him Ma Kefu). ⁿ²² Kuchumov had come to China from Moscow along with Lominadze. ³³

One of the first things Mao did upon arriving in Changsha was meet secretly with the former secretary of the party committee, Yi Lirong. Yi was under attack by his comrades because he was one of the few communists who had dared to openly accuse the Comintern of lacking the courage to admit its “opportunistic” errors in China. ³⁴ Naturally, Lominadze was particularly ill-disposed toward him, but Mao saw no reason to break with an old friend. They agreed to convene a meeting of the provincial committee in the very near future. Then Mao went to Bancang, where his wife and children were living after their return from Wuchang. He tarried there longer than he should have and did not return to Changsha until August 16 or 17. The members of the party committee, who had been vainly awaiting him in the city, finally held the meeting without him on August 16.

When Mao came back to Changsha he was accompanied by his wife, sons, and the old nanny who took care of the children and also looked after Kaihui. This time “Little Dawn” did not want to let him go alone. She may have intuited that not much time remained for them to be together. All six of them returned to the city and settled in Kaihui's father's old house. ³⁵

Immediately upon his return, Mao convened a new meeting of the provincial party committee and delivered a speech outlining the main tasks for organizing the uprising. As he had at the August 7 conference in Hankou, he argued that the main slogan of the CCP should be the total confiscation of the land.

In China there are only a few big landlords, but quite a number of smaller landlords. If we confiscate only the big landlords' land, few landlords will be affected, and the amount of land confiscated will be extremely small. The number of poor peasants demanding land is very great, and if we confiscate the land of the big landlords alone, we cannot satisfy the demands and needs of the peasants. If we want to win over all the peasants, we must confiscate the land of [all] the landlords and distribute it among the peasants. ³⁶

At this meeting he said nothing about the need to confiscate the land of peasant proprietors, but he had not rethought his position. The very next day, in a letter to the Central Committee of the CCP, he insisted,

[T]he Hunanese peasants definitely want a complete solution of the land question …… I propose …… [to] confiscate all the land, including that of small landlords and owner-peasants, take it all into public ownership, and let the peasant associations distribute it fairly to all those in the village who want land, in accordance with the two criteria of “labor power” and “consumption” (in other words, the actual amount of consumption for every household, calculated on the basis of the number of adults and children in the household). ³⁷

He insisted on doing things his way even though he knew very well that the majority of peasants and his beloved rural lumpen proletarians were not demanding land at all. The former dreamed only of reducing taxes and rent; the latter sought to divide other people's belongings. It is possible that he posed the question of a “radical land distribution” only to satisfy part of the neediest paupers, the poorest tenants, and members of the indigent Hakka clans. There were plenty such people in the Chinese countryside; there were 30 million Hakka alone. Nevertheless, this was not the main point. By 1927, Mao's personality was set and he had acquired the habit of leadership. Like many bosses accustomed to giving orders, he had absolutely no doubt about his right to decide the fate of everyone below him. Mao was completely convinced that he knew what was needed better than any peasant. That is why only several days after the idea of the total confiscation of land had been criticized by Lominadze, Mao returned to it, this time in the presence of the Comintern's representative in Hunan, Kuchumov/Mayer. He was already certain at this time that China was ripe for its version of the Bolshevik Revolution. ³⁸ Therefore, there was no need to “indulge” the “landlords” and the “bourgeoisie.”

Mao would continue to push his left radical views in the future. Of course, he would have to maneuver, accommodate, and make detours, but he would never betray his utopian ideals of universal equality. As if insuring himself against the possibility that the “dull-witted” peasantry might actually not respond to his call, at this meeting Mao raised the question of the special importance of the military factor.

[I]f we wish to create and unleash this uprising, it will not do to rely on the power of the peasants alone. There must be military support. With the help of one or two regiments, the uprising can take place; otherwise, it will fail in the end …… If you want to seize political power, to try to do it without the support of military forces would be sheer self-deception. Our Party's mistake in the past has been that it neglected military affairs. Now we should concentrate 60 percent of our energies on the military movement.

In conclusion, Mao again invoked a favorite formula: “We must carry out the principle of seizing and establishing political power on the barrel of a gun.” ³⁹

A majority of the members of the Hunan party committee supported their trusted fellow countryman. Only Yi Lirong expressed caution. “If we confiscate their [the small landlords'] land at the present time,” he explained, “they will certainly join the big landlords in the counterrevolutionary camp. Thus, now is not the time to confiscate the land of the small landlords.” ⁴⁰ But no one wanted to listen to him. Everyone was convinced that now was the time to play the populist card. “The slogans to establish a democratic revolutionary government have turned sour,” they asserted. The communists wanted to rise up under their own banner, not that of the “left” Guomindang, to proclaim the establishment of soviets, and to cut off the heads of anyone who could be considered a landowner. They were completely uninterested in whether the peasants needed this or not. “Our method was to pursue the revolution from above and to extend it from the military to the peasants rather than the other way around,” acknowledged Peng Gongda. ⁴¹

However, the Provisional Politburo, which Lominadze controlled, came out against this. In an urgent letter to Hunanese comrades it characterized Mao's viewpoint regarding the relationship between the military factor and the mass movement as “military adventurism,” adding, “the CC believes that we must rely on the masses. The military should play a secondary role.” Mao's idea of an immediate and full redistribution of land was again rejected. “The main slogan at present is the confiscation of the land of big landlords,” the letter said. The Provisional Politburo also demanded that all work should continue under the banner of the “left” Guomindang. Instructions to change the slogans had not yet arrived from Moscow. Not a single person in the Hunan party committee agreed with this policy, but only when the Politburo categorically demanded the execution of its directives did Mao and his supporters yield. ⁴² As further events demonstrated, however, they had done so only formally. ⁴³

Meanwhile, preparations for the Autumn Harvest Uprising were proceeding at full speed. At the very end of August the Hunan party committee decided to strike the main blow in the central part of the province with the combined forces of a “peasant army,” the remnants of which were located in counties east of Changsha; a regiment of Guomindang troops that was commanded by a member of the Communist Party; and unemployed miners from the Anyuan colliery. The slogans of the uprising were extremely simple: “Execute local reactionaries, confiscate their property, burn down their houses, and destroy traffic and communication services.” The main goal was the seizure of Changsha. A majority of the communists who had been inculcated with the Russian experience could not conceive of revolution without an urban base. Did Mao himself want to attack the provincial capital? Most probably not. According to Peng Gongda's memoirs, Mao insisted on limiting the scale of the uprising. ⁴⁴ He was not interested in the uprising itself; he had long since understood that the current phase of the communist revolution had failed, and that it was past time to gather one's forces and head for the hills. But he had to subordinate himself to the decisions of the Politburo. Not until much later would he be able to impose his own will on his comrades irrespective of what they themselves thought.

Two committees were established to guide the uprising: a Front Committee, which was concerned with purely military matters, and an Action Committee, which coordinated the party committees in the counties where the uprising was to take place. Mao headed the Front Committee, Yi Lirong the Action Committee. At dawn on August 31, Mao left Changsha for the border region between Hunan and Jiangxi where the uprising was slated to begin.

In a rush, he embraced Kaihui for the last time. They agreed that she, the children, and their nanny would go to her mother in Bancang. Before parting she gave him a new pair of straw sandals and asked him to take care of himself. She was concerned because several days earlier, when they had traveled together from Bancang to Changsha, Mao had hurt his leg and was still limping. She didn't accompany him to the train station. Her younger cousin Kaiming volunteered to escort Mao. Did they somehow intuit they would never meet again? Did they understand that on that early morning they were parting forever? Mao left for the Changsha station, where an express train would whisk him away to a new life in which he would become the “great savior of the nation,” “the teacher,” and the “leader.” Kaihui would remain in the past.

For some time she and the children managed to live in comparative safety in her old Bancang home. She was protected by her membership in a respected local clan. None of the local officials or military officers dared to touch the daughter of Yang Changji, the respected teacher and educator. She had little money and occasionally received remittances from Mao's brother Zemin in Shanghai. She pined for her husband and poured out her feelings in verse.

Gray skies, north wind rising, the cold invades my bones.

I think of you always, my lonely wayfarer;

Calm waves can erupt into towering billows.

Has your bad leg fully healed? Do you have warm clothes?

Who will attend your lonely sleep? Who share your sorrow?

Not a letter or even a note from you. No one to ask how you are.

If I had wings, I'd fly to see you.

To pine forever for one's love is torture.

When shall we two meet again? ⁴⁵

Only when the Red Army headed by Mao really began to irritate the Hunanese authorities did they arrest her. In August 1930, soon after the communist troops seized Changsha, General He Jian, the commander of the Guomindang army in Hunan, issued an order for her arrest. A reward of one thousand yuan was offered for her head, and on October 24, 1930, she was behind bars. Her oldest son, Anying, who had just turned eight, was also arrested, along with the devoted family nanny. While she was being arrested, the middle son, Anqing, cried bitterly and clutched the soldiers' overcoats with his small hands. Then one of the soldiers struck him on the head with a heavy object. Poor Anqing fell down and suffered a serious brain concussion. He never recovered from this encounter with the soldiers.

He Jian demanded of Kaihui only that she renounce her husband. He believed that if Mao's wife did this publicly, many communists would surrender to the police. But she refused to betray her beloved. Therefore, she was remanded to a military tribunal despite an appeal for pardon by Cai Yuanpei, the renowned former rector of Peking University, who had responded to a request from Kaihui's mother. The court deliberated for fewer than ten minutes. After asking several formal questions, the judge dipped his writing brush in red ink, made a mark on the protocol of interrogation, and threw it onto the floor. This was the procedure in Chinese courts announcing a death penalty. On the morning of November 14, 1930, they came to her cell to take her to her execution. Anying, who was with her, burst into tears, but she said to him, “What's the matter with you? You are my Hero! My precious, tell papa not to grieve over my death. He should do everything to hasten the victory of the revolution!” Then she added, “I hope that after my death my relatives will not give me a bourgeois burial.”

She was executed by a firing squad in a cemetery in Shiziling, a suburb of Changsha lying to the north of the city gates. This was the same place where her cousin Kaiming had been executed nine months earlier. Eyewitnesses reported she had been conveyed to the place of execution in a rickshaw and that armed soldiers had trotted along on both sides. When she fell, struck by many bullets, one of the executioners quickly removed her shoes and threw them as far as he could. This was always done in China so that the deceased, God forbid, would not come back to haunt his or her killers. Afterward the soldiers returned to their barracks to eat. But suddenly one of the townsmen who had witnessed the execution ran up to say that the “deceased” was showing signs of life. Interrupting their meal, seven of the executioners returned to the execution ground and finished her off. They watched silently as the dying woman convulsively scratched at the black earth with her trembling fingers.

In the evening her body was turned over to her relatives, who conveyed it to Bancang. She was buried not far from her parents' home, on a slope planted in cotton in the shade of young pines. Soon the local underground communists freed Anying and his nanny by bribing the prison guards. A month later, after learning of the death of his wife from the newspapers, Mao sent his mother-in-law thirty silver yuan to erect a gravestone. “The death of Kaihui,” he wrote, “cannot be repaid even should I die a hundred deaths.” ⁴⁶

By this time, however, he had long since been living with another woman, whom he had met just two months after his departure from Changsha. It will be recalled that “the power of the human need for love” was for Mao “greater than that of any other need.” And nothing “except some special force” could stem in him “this surging tide of the need for love.” In the spring of 1929, this new woman gave birth to a daughter. Thus the thirty pieces of silver he had sent for the headstone were purely symbolic.

¹ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 486, 652.

² See McDonald, The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution, 316.

³ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 515–16.

⁴ See Mao Zedong: Biography—Assessment—Reminiscences (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1986), 236–37.

⁵ See Li, The Early Revolutionary Activities of Comrade Mao Tse-tung, 315.

⁶ Stuart R. Schram, ed. Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, vol. 3 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 31; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 208.

⁷ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 11; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 205.

⁸ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 656.

⁹ Ibid., 656–77; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 206; A. M. Grigoriev, Kommunisticheskaia partiia Kitaia v nachal'nyi period sovetskogo dvizheniia (iul' 1927 g.–sentyabr' 1931g.) (The Communist Party of China in the Initial Soviet Movement Period [July 1927–September 1931]) (Moscow: IDV AN SSSR, 1976), 14–16.

¹⁰ M. L. Titarenko et al., eds., VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3 (Moscow: AO “Buklet,” 1999), 73, 75.

¹¹ Lars T. Lih et al., eds., Stalin's Letters to Molotov 1925–1936, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 141, 142.

¹² See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 2, 503, 505.

¹³ Ibid., vol. 3, 72–74.

¹⁴ See M. Buber-Neiman, Mirovaia revoliutsiia i stalinskii rezhim: Zapiski ochevidtsa o deiatel'nosti Kominterna v 1920–1930-kh godakh (The World Revolution and the Stalinist Regime: Notes of an Eyewitness About Comintern Activity in the 1920s and 1930s), trans. A. Yu. Vatlin (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1995), 39.

¹⁵ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 669–70.

¹⁶ Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 72.

¹⁷ Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 206.

¹⁸ See Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 2, 13; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 208; Chen Geng, “Ot Nanchana do Svatou” (From Nanchang to Swatow), in Vsiudu krasnye znamena: Vospominaniia i ocherki o vtoroi grazhdanskoi revoliutsionnoi voine (Red Banners Everywhere: Reminiscences and Sketches of the Second Revolutionary Civil War) (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1957), 13–20.

¹⁹ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 489.

²⁰ Tang Baolin and Li Maosheng, Chen Duxiu nianpu (Chronological Biography of Chen Duxiu) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1988), 335.

²¹ See Zheng Chaolin, Zheng Chaolin huiyilu (Memoirs of Zheng Chaolin) ([Hong Kong], 1982), 149–52; Baqi huiyi (The August 7 Conference) (Beijing: Zhonggongdang shi ziliao chubanshe, 1986), 3–4, 161–72, 175–80, 195–201; Li Weihan, Huiyi yu yanjiu (Reminiscences and Studies), vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggongdang shi ziliao chubanshe, 1986), 156–69; Marcia R. Ristaino, China's Art of Revolution: The Mobilization of Discontent, 1927–1928 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 39–55; Alexander V. Pantsov's interview with staff member of RGASPI, Iu. T. Tutotchkin in Moscow, October 11, 2005.

²² In 1960, Mao will say, “People later used to say that we [Deng and I] met in Wuhan, but I do not remember at all. We might have met, but we certainly did not talk.” Quoted from Leng Buji, Deng Xiaoping zai Gannan (Deng Xiaoping in Southern Jiangxi) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1995), 85.

²³ Baqi huiyi (The August 7 Conference), 57, 58; Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 30–31.

²⁴ Baqi huiyi (The August 7 Conference), 73; Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 32.

²⁵ Baqi huiyi (The August 7 Conference), 74.

²⁶ Cai, Istoriia opportunizma v Kommunistecheskoi partii Kitaia (The History of Opportunism in the Communist Party of China), 68; Baqi huiyi (The August 7 Conference), 44, 200.

²⁷ Alexander V. Pantsov's interview with the former Chinese communist Wang Fanxi in Leeds, England, July 19, 1992.

²⁸ Quoted from Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 209.

²⁹ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 659; vol. 2, 13.

³⁰ See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 79.

³¹ Hsü K'e-hsiang, “The Ma-Jih Incident,” in Li, The Road to Communism, 91.

³² Baqi huiyi (The August 7 Conference), 112.

³³ Alexander V. Pantsov's interview with Iu. T. Tutochkin, staff member of the RGASPI, Moscow, December 19, 2005.

³⁴ See Peng Gongda, “Report on the Progress of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan,” in Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party, 322; Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 33.

³⁵ Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 209–10.

³⁶ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 35. See also Peng, “Report on the Progress of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan,” 323.

³⁷ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 40. See also Peng, “Report on the Progress of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan,” 324, and Snow, Red Star Over China, 163.

³⁸ See Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 39, and Peng, “Report on the Progress of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan,” 326.

³⁹ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 36. See also Peng, “Report on the Progress of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan,” 324.

⁴⁰ Quoted from Peng, “Report on the Progress of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan,” 323.

⁴¹ Ibid., 325, 326. See also Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 39–40.

⁴² Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 37–42; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 210–14.

⁴³ Many years later Mao would tell Edgar Snow, “[T]he general programme of the Hunan Committee and of our army was opposed by the Central Committee of the Party, which seemed, however, to have adopted a policy of wait-and-see rather than of active opposition.” Snow, Red Star Over China, 163.

⁴⁴ See Peng, “Report on the Progress of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan,” 328, 504.

⁴⁵ Mao, Oblaka v snegu (Clouds in the Snow), 103.

⁴⁶ See Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 110–11, 138–39; Ma, Hongse diyi jiazu (The First Red Family), 32–36; Lichnoe delo Yun Shu (Personal File of Yong Shu), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 2799, sheet 4; Mao Zedong shenghuo dang'an (Archives of Mao Zedong's Life), vol. 1, 93–98.

ⁿ²¹ In addition to Qu, the new leadership was made up of Zhang Guotao, Zhang Tailei, Li Weihan, Li Lisan, and Zhou Enlai.

ⁿ²² This name is sometimes erroneously transliterated as Meyer.