15 RED BANNER OVER THE JINGGANG MOUNTAINS

Seated on the train on August 31, 1927, Mao first headed for the small town of Zhuzhou, south of Changsha. There he discussed plans for the uprising with members of the local party committee. The communists of Zhuzhou would begin the uprising by blowing up a railway bridge across the Xiang River and creating a series of diversions along the rail line. Then Mao arrived in Anyuan for an important military conference in the village of Zhangjiawan. There the party activists decided to form the so-called First Division of the First Corps of the Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Army, numbering about five thousand men.

Then, overflowing with heroic feelings, Mao set out for Tonggu, north of Anyuan, to inform the pro-communist soldiers and poor peasants of the decision to reorganize their detachments into the Third Regiment of the First Division. He already envisioned himself the leader of the rebels. New verses formed in his mind:

Ours is the Peasant-Worker Revolutionary Army,

on our banners the axe and the sickle emblazoned!ⁿ²³

We shall not halt at the Lushan Mountains,

we'll march to the Xiao River and on to the Xiang.

With all their power the dizhu oppress the people,

the peasants hate them back in kind.

When we gather the harvest, autumn clouds will thicken,

thunderbolts will herald the uprising.¹

Everything seemed to be going well, but along the road, Mao and the county party secretary were stopped unexpectedly by a detachment of local peasant militia (mintuan). The militia had no idea whom they had picked up, but in any case they decided to bring them to their chief. The situation appeared dire. The white terror was still raging, and the two men might simply be shot. This is how Mao recounted this incident to Edgar Snow:

I was ordered to be taken to the min-t'uan [mintuan] headquarters, where I was to be killed. Borrowing several tens of dollars from a comrade, however, I attempted to bribe the escort to free me. The ordinary soldiers were mercenaries, with no special interest in seeing me killed, and they agreed to release me, but the subaltern in charge refused to permit it. I therefore decided to attempt to escape, but had no opportunity to do so until I was within about two hundred yards of the min-t'uan headquarters. At that point I broke loose and ran into the fields.

I reached a high place, above a pond, with some tall grass surrounding it, and there I hid until sunset. The soldiers pursued me and forced some peasants to help them search for me. Many times they came very near, once or twice so close that I could almost have touched them, but somehow I escaped discovery, although half a dozen times I gave up hope, feeling certain I would be recaptured. At last, when it was dusk, they abandoned the search. At once I set off across the mountains, traveling all night. I had no shoes and my feet were badly bruised. On the road I met a peasant who befriended me, gave me shelter and later guided me to the next district. I had seven dollars with me and used this to buy some shoes, an umbrella and food. When at last I reached the peasant guards safely, I had only two coppers in my pocket.²

The carefully prepared uprising, which began on September 9, ended, as could have been expected, in a crushing defeat. Neither the passive peasantry nor the demoralized railroad workers and miners offered any practical support to the rebellious soldiers and officers. “The peasants did not rise up, as their leaders lacked determination,” Peng Gongda wrote.³ Under these circumstances, on September 15 Mao and the members of the Hunan party committee decided on their own not to attack the provincial capital. Senseless actions like that promised nothing but more casualties. It was time to retreat, and not play at being heroes.

Gathering the remnants of their forces in a little town, Wenjiashi, about sixty miles east of Changsha, Mao announced his intention of striking through to the south along the Hunan-Jiangxi border, in the direction of the high mountainous region of Jinggang (literally “wells and ridges”).⁴ This inaccessible massif in the central part of the Luoxiao range had long served as a sanctuary for rebels and bandits. Mao considered it “an excellent base for a mobile army.”⁵ The distinguishing feature of this place was the fantastic combination of mountain peaks jutting into the sky and deep precipices plunging sharply downward, which made it an ideal refuge.

On September 21, the fifteen hundred exhausted fighters, all that remained of the First Division, with red ribbons tied around their necks as the sign of rebellion, set out on their difficult journey. “Discipline was poor, political training was at a low level, and many wavering elements were among the men and officers. There were many desertions,” recalled Mao.⁶ One of the rank-and-file soldiers painted an equally gloomy picture: “Our units were not familiar with the surroundings and lacked adequate preparation. Epidemics of fever, marching during the hottest time of the year, and the lack of bases all led to great losses.”⁷ Not until October 27 did Mao's detachment, having lost a third of its men en route, finally reach the town of Ciping, the main settlement of the Jinggang region. Here they halted at the foot of the tallest mountain in that locale, the 5,700-foot Wuzhishan (Five Peaks Mountain), in a wide valley crisscrossed with rice paddies. All around, wherever one looked, steep mountains covered with evergreens thrust up to the sky.⁸

A month later, on Mao's initiative, two organs of political power were established: a legislative body in the form of an Assembly of Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers' Deputies, and an executive organ, a People's Assembly. For the time being he did not use the word “soviet”—in Chinese, suweiai—but these institutions were in essence soviets. Naturally, he immediately encountered a host of problems. He needed to operate in a new and unknown environment amid an alien population that was often hostile toward their uninvited guests and who, moreover, spoke in a dialect that many of the soldiers, including Mao, did not understand.

In this poor area, far from the provincial administrations of Hunan and Jiangxi, people lived according to their own traditional laws. The economy of the region, in Mao's words, was “still in the age of the mortar and pestle.”⁹ He was referring to the fact that in the mountains a mortar and pestle were used to hull the rice. Only down in the valleys did they have hand-operated mills. Power was exercised by bands of outlaws headed by a certain Yuan Wencai and one Wang Zuo. Six hundred cutthroats armed with ancient pistols, rifles, and swords dominated all of Ningang county, which had a population of 150,000 people.¹⁰ Therefore, before becoming a “citizen of Jinggang,” Mao first had to establish friendly relations with the outlaws who were pillaging this region. He succeeded in doing this, and, in his own words, he became “king of the mountain.”¹¹

The history of Mao's relations with the “brotherhood of the forest” is worth recounting. Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo belonged to dependent, indigent Hakka clans whose ancestors had settled in this region from Guangdong or Fujian when the fertile valleys had already been assimilated. Thus they were not considered natives even though both of them had been born in Jinggang. As a result, Yuan and Wang were not well-disposed to the people in the valley. The local old-timers treated the newer inhabitants with contempt and exploited them mercilessly. This is why in their early youth Yuan and Wang had joined one of the groups of bandits, the madaodui—the Sword Society, composed of “aliens” like themselves. They rose to leading positions in this organization, exacted tribute from the local population, and cruelly punished those who resisted. They decapitated the recalcitrant and displayed the skulls on poles. Yuan played the main role in this society, and Wang respected him as his “elder brother.” Their friendship was sealed in blood.

Mao had just entered Jinggang when, in early October 1927, he sent a respectful letter to Yuan Wencai proposing they meet. He expressed his willingness to present Yuan one hundred rifles as a mark of respect if the latter would allow him to settle in these parts. The bandit, who possessed only sixty decrepit rifles, could hardly refuse such a gift, but his pride would not allow him to take possession of the weapons without paying for them. Upon meeting Mao, Yuan paid him a thousand silver yuan. This was a generous gesture, typically Chinese. Tradition demanded that a host who received tribute had to repay the giver a hundredfold. Otherwise he might “lose face” and the guest might think the host was having problems. Mao appreciated this, and his simplicity and courteousness pleased Yuan. The bandit chief was flattered that such an important man—he had heard that Mao was one of the leaders of the Communist Party—was showing him such attention. Deeply moved, Yuan even informed Mao Zedong that he had become a member of the Communist Party the year before. Although there is no way of knowing if this was true, Mao pretended that he believed it. Through Yuan he also established ties with Wang Zuo, to whom he presented seventy rifles and ample ammunition. The communist leader's erudition strongly impressed the poorly educated Wang Zuo. “Commissar Mao is the most educated man,” he said. “Just speak with him once and you get the feeling that you spent ten years doing nothing but reading books!”¹² It was Wang who advised Mao to base himself in Ciping, which was under Wang's control. The divisional hospital was established in the neighboring settlement of Maoping, Yuan Wencai's hometown. Since Mao was five years older than Yuan and Wang, they called him Mao dage (“Elder Brother Mao”). According to custom, the forming of this bandit brotherhood was celebrated with wine and roast pork.

Not everything went smoothly. Clashes between Mao's troops and Yuan and Wang's bandits occurred. The naturally distrustful Wang Zuo was especially exasperated by these occurrences, and for good reason. “What if Mao robs us of our power,” Wang said as he shared his doubts on one occasion with Yuan. “He will swallow us and not even notice.” So the cunning Yuan thought of a way to bind Mao to them. He introduced Mao to He Zizhen, the attractive sister of an old friend, and recommended her as a reliable interpreter of the local dialect. The girl was just eighteen years old and had only recently joined Yuan's unit. Yuan treated her well, and He Zizhen was on particularly good terms with Yuan's wife. Wang Zuo was also favorably disposed toward her and had given her a Mauser. Zizhen (literal translation “Treasuring Oneself”) had joined the Communist Party at the age of sixteen, and the local party organization had sent her to the Jinggang Mountains soon after the “Whites” had taken power in her home district. She was well read and politically literate, but above all attractive, energetic, lively, and graceful. She had a sweet oval face, large, shining eyes, and delicate skin. Not by accident her childhood name had been Guiyuan (“Round Moon in the Garden of Cassia Trees”). She made a positive impression upon Mao, whom she herself liked even though he was sixteen years older. She knew he was married and had three sons; he had told her so himself. But nothing could stop her; Mao knew how to please women. At the time he was particularly irresistible—very thin, long-haired, with a high forehead and sad, dark eyes. Zizhen was taken with him. He radiated both physical strength and intellectual power, was sensitive, wrote poetry, and was well versed in literature and popular folklore. The youthful He Zizhen had never met anyone like this before. Was this mutual love? Or just sexual attraction? People who knew them are not of one mind.

In the early spring of 1928, Mao asked Zizhen to help him work on some manuscripts. “I can help you only if you don't think my calligraphy is bad,” she said. The next day she came to him. (Mao was working then in a monastery in the mountains.) From that time on they began living together. At the end of May, a kind of “wedding” took place in the presence of the matchmaker Yuan Wencai and his comrades. They ate sweets and nuts. They drank tea. They laughed, joked, and made merry. No one, of course, thought about Kaihui, who at the time was still alive.

But, as it happens, Kaihui learned of her husband's betrayal. For long months she had heard nothing from him and now this! The blow was so strong that Kaihui decided to kill herself and probably would have had it not been for the children.¹³ She bore this insult for two years, right until the end of her life.

Meanwhile, events in the CCP were unfolding stormily. On September 19, Stalin finally decided to officially withdraw the CCP from the Guomindang and begin the communists' struggle to establish soviets in China. Qu Qiubai received the directives the following day via the Soviet consul in Hankou. At the end of September the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party left Hankou by boat for Shanghai, where they continued their activities deep underground.¹⁴ Lominadze soon joined them. In October, another representative of the ECCI, the German communist Heinz Neumann (alias Moritz or Gruber) arrived in Shanghai, then left for Canton via Hong Kong to prepare a new uprising known to history as the Canton Commune. It likewise ended in defeat. Among its numerous victims was Zhang Tailei, Borodin's former interpreter. The white terror and the CCP's adventurist policy exacted a heavy price. By the end of 1927 it had lost about four-fifths of its membership, from almost 58,000 down to 10,000.

This is why many communists, not just Mao, retreated to the countryside in the winter of 1927–28. In distant and inaccessible regions they launched a new struggle under the slogan of soviets. Moscow had dictated this slogan. Still, Mao was the first and as such encountered many problems: the incomprehension of his comrades, the hatred of jealous persons, reproaches of “left deviation,” and accusation of “right deviation.” In September Mao had already been subjected to a devastating critique by Kuchumov, the Soviet consul and Comintern representative, for his refusal to attack Changsha. Kuchumov termed the “inaction” of the Hunan party committee an “exceptionally shameful betrayal and cowardice” and demanded that the Politburo promptly replace the provincial party leadership. The Soviet consul was convinced that the uprising in Changsha could have succeeded had Peng Gongda and Mao Zedong not exhibited a “monstrous example of Chinese-style philistinism.” In response, Qu Qiubai ordered prompt action in Changsha. Simultaneously, he sent to Changsha his plenipotentiary representative, Ren Bishi, who carried out a reshuffling of the leadership of the party committee, although Peng Gongda remained secretary. Ren's efforts, however, had no effect on the situation, and he himself quickly grasped that the “moment for an uprising” in Changsha had “been lost.”¹⁵

Mao was dealt another blow at an enlarged plenum of the Provisional Politburo in Shanghai, held November 7–14, 1927. Two emissaries from Moscow presided over this meeting—Lominadze, who left for Russia on November 10, before the meeting was over, and a representative of the Red International of Trade Unions, Olga Mitkevich. Their intervention predetermined the degree of punishment that the organizers of the inglorious uprisings incurred. Once more Stalin demanded scapegoats and declined to accept any responsibility for mistakes. A resolution adopted by the meeting, “On Political Discipline,” said this about Mao Zedong and his comrades:

In its leadership of the peasant uprising, the Hunan Provincial Committee completely disregarded the tactics of the CC which repeatedly indicated that the main force of the rebellion in Hunan province must be the peasant masses. The CC likewise directly warned the secretary of the provincial committee, Comrade Peng Gongda, against the error of military opportunism and demanded that the provincial committee rectify these mistakes …… . The Enlarged Plenum of the Provisional Politburo of the CC resolves to impose the following correctives on the executive organs of party organizations and on responsible comrades who implemented the abovementioned erroneous policy …… . The following members of the Hunan Provincial Committee—Peng Gongda, Mao Zedong, Yi Lirong, and Xia Minghan—are relieved of their responsibilities as members of the provincial Party committee. Comrade Peng Gongda is relieved of his responsibilities as candidate member of the Politburo and remains in the party on a six-month probationary status …… . Comrade Mao Zedong …… is dismissed from candidate membership in the Provisional Politburo of the CC.¹⁶

It was at this time that the term “Mao Zedongism” was circulated by the Central Committee as a synonym for “military opportunism.”

Mao learned of his dismissal from the Politburo four months later, in early March 1928, when Zhou Lu, a special plenipotentiary from the newly reconstituted party committee of southern Hunan, came to see him. This self-assured young man was convinced of his importance because he headed the South Hunan Military Department.¹⁷ The party committee he represented had been established three months earlier, in December 1927, and the Central Committee had assigned it the task of reorganizing the communist leadership in the Jinggang Mountains. (By this time the All-Hunan Party Committee in Changsha had been almost completely smashed by the Guomindang.)

The leaders in Shanghai could not forgive Mao his independence; on December 31, 1927, they demanded Mao's ouster from the leadership of the Front Committee. The usually restrained Zhou Enlai, secretary of the Military Committee of the Central Committee, expressed particular dissatisfaction with Mao, possibly because he himself was culpable. He had been in charge of the failed Nanchang Uprising. “Mao's troops are just bandits who roam here and there,” Zhou asserted, adding, “Such leaders [as Mao] do not believe in the strength of the popular masses and fall into real military opportunism.”¹⁸ The remaining members of the Hunan party committee agreed with him, asserting that Mao's army was entirely composed of “vagrants.”¹⁹ No less hard (and accurate) were the judgments of Mao's army by the members of the Comintern's Far Eastern Bureau in Shanghai. For example, Alexander Al'brecht, the representative of the secret International Liaison Department of the ECCI, reported to Moscow in late February 1928:

The question of establishing a Red Army is vitally important. Since these armies have neither bases nor supplies, they impose a great burden on the peasantry. Since part of this army is semi-bandit in its origins, for example Mao Zedong's units, with the passage of time they break up and turn the peasants against themselves. Particularly awful is that these armies often go away, leaving the peasants to pay for their attacks against militarist troops.²⁰

News of the party sanctions shook Mao to the core, especially because Zhou Lu, trying to discredit Mao entirely, declared that the Central Committee had expelled Mao from the party. This was a bald-faced lie, but Mao was unable to confirm or deny it. The result was that Zhou Lu dismissed Mao from all of his party work and demoted him to the post of commander of the First Division.ⁿ²⁴ As the “nonparty” commander, Mao was unable to decide not only political questions, but military ones as well, since only the party could lead in all areas. Zhou Lu also dissolved the Front Committee and handed party power in the First Division to the commissar of one of the regiments whom he favored, the twenty-two-year-old He Tingying. Evidently the special plenipotentiary figured that the young and inexperienced secretary would be putty in his hands. But he miscalculated. He Tingying, connected to Mao by their joint participation in the Autumn Harvest Uprising and the difficult march from Wenjiashi to Jinggang, treated Mao like the authoritative leader he was.²¹ Zhou Lu also failed to consider there were others in the First Division besides the youthful He upon whom Mao could rely.

One of the persons Mao most trusted in the Jinggang Mountains was his younger brother Zetan. On the eve of Wang Jingwei's coup, on Mao's advice, Zetan had left Wuhan and set out with the troops of the Fourth Corps for Jiujiang, on the Jiangxi-Hubei border. That is where news of the purge of communists from the “left” Guomindang and the NRA caught up with him. Danger confronted him, and on the advice of the chief of staff of the Fourth Corps, the communist Ye Jianying, he fled to Nanchang, hoping to link up with He Long's troops, which were engaged in the uprising. By the time he got there the communists were gone and Guomindang troops were everywhere. Zetan was stopped by a patrol at the gates of Nanchang. They released him after a brief interrogation. Departing Nanchang, he headed south, and some 120 miles from the city he caught up with the sentries of the rebel army. They took him to Zhou Enlai, who immediately recognized him as Mao's brother. Zetan was sent to work with Ye Ting in the Political Department. Along with others he took part in the storming of Swatow, and then, joining up with Zhu De's forces, he made the difficult march with the troops to the Guangdong-Jiangxi border. There, in the middle of November 1927, Zhu De's soldiers linked up with fighters from one of the battalions of Mao's division who had been wandering in the mountains after being cut off from the main force by Guomindang troops. From them Zhu and Zetan learned about the Autumn Harvest Uprising and about Mao's base area in the Jinggang Mountains. Zhu De decided to establish a link with Mao and sent Zetan to him. A letter from Zhu that Zetan carried said, “We must unite forces and carry out a well-defined military and agrarian policy.”²²

At the end of November, Zetan safely reached Ciping, and the brothers had a warm reunion. Zetan stayed with Mao and helped him with everything. To be sure, for a while he tried to win away He Zizhen, but in vain. Meanwhile, his wife, Zhou Wennan, along with her tiny son, whom she had given birth to six months earlier and had named Chuxiong, was imprisoned in Changsha, where she had been sent after a traitor had denounced her in March 1928. Did Zetan know about this? Perhaps not. But he should have remembered that she was pregnant the last time he had seen her in Wuchang. So he certainly should have assumed that he had become a father sometime in September. The child became seriously ill in prison, was taken from his mother, and placed in the prison clinic to die. However, he survived and several months later was placed in the care of his grandmother. To protect him, the old woman changed his family name from Mao to Zhou. (Only when he turned ten did she tell him who his father was.) Not until July 1930, when Red Army troops briefly seized Changsha, did the wife of Mao's younger brother regain her freedom. By this time the impatient Zetan had already found a new love object. Rejected by Mao's lover, he found solace in her younger sister, the attractive He Yi. In early 1931 they were married.ⁿ²⁵

Something about the Mao brothers was not conducive to family life. The middle brother, Zemin, was also hardly a model husband or father. He abandoned his first wife, Shulan, and their three-year-old child and never saw them again. She, too, suffered a lot. She was arrested twice, first right after Xu Kexiang's mutiny at the end of May 1927. Fortunately, she was released right away. The local people vouched for her and said she had long since been divorced from Mao Zemin. But in May 1929, she was rearrested and thrown into the municipal prison in Changsha. The Red Army freed her in July 1930, as they had Mao Zetan's former wife. She did not leave prison alone, however. She was accompanied by the nine-year-old son of her cell mate, who had implored her to take and educate the child, who was named Huachu. From then on the three of them, Shulan, her daughter Yuanzhi from Mao Zemin, and Huachu, lived together. Shulan made ends meet by working at odd jobs, but by the end of the summer of 1931 she couldn't manage any longer. She set off with the children for Shanghai, where rumor had it her former husband was living with his new wife. But she failed to find Zemin there. Party acquaintances told her truthfully that Zemin and his wife, Xijun, had gone to Hong Kong in July 1931 on orders from the Central Committee. So Shulan had to return home. She was poor, half starved, and of no use to anyone.ⁿ²⁶

All this was not simply due to the heartlessness of the Mao brothers. They were not the only ones to behave this way. Polygamy was quite common in China and even the most fervent partisans of women's liberation among the male members of the Chinese Communist Party possessed a rather contemptuous view of the “gentler sex,” albeit at a subconscious level. They viewed women not so much as comrades but as sex objects. As for children, who even thought about them? Among the paupers and rural lumpen proletarians whose interests the Communist Party represented, children, especially daughters, were often seen as a burden. Of course, unlike with the poor peasants, the callousness of CCP leaders toward their offspring was not exclusively a matter of economics. They simply had no time for children; they had to focus on the main tasks—revolution, civil war, the emancipation of the oppressed masses. In the great scheme of things, the tears of a child, even their own child, were virtually unnoticeable.

Intraparty struggles took much effort, in Mao's case no less than the revolution itself. His new enemy Zhou Lu showed up in Jinggang in March 1928, intoxicated with power. He ordered Mao Zedong to redeploy his forces from Ciping to southern Hunan to support the local peasant movement there. Mao complied. He did not feel in a strong enough position to openly resist the party's representative. Not till a month later, now in eastern Hunan, was he able to persuade Zhou Lu to turn back. There was no peasant movement in Hunan, but Mao had heard rumors that Zhu De's troops had redeployed from Jiangxi to southern Hunan and now were approaching the spurs of the Jinggang Mountains. He had to set out and meet them as soon as possible.

The idea of linking up with Zhu De had preoccupied Mao. Zhu De was a professional soldier as well as a longtime member of the party and commanded a powerful military force numbering more than two thousand soldiers. Back in mid-December 1927, Mao had introduced his plan for unification to the Hunan party committee, which had approved it, as had the Central Committee, which sent a directive to that effect to Zhu De. But it was only now in April 1928 that the prospects for unification looked promising. The historic meeting of the two leaders took place on either April 21 or April 22, 1928, in the hamlet of Linxian, west of Jinggang. After three or four days their forces were completely merged after the Special Hunan Provincial Committee conferred on them the name of the Fourth Corps of the Chinese Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Army, in honor of the famous Fourth Corps of the NRA.²³ (In June 1928, by decision of the CCP Central Committee, the Revolutionary Army was renamed the Red Army.)

In Zhu De, just seven years older than he was, Mao acquired an ideal comrade. Like Mao, Zhu came from peasant stock, in Sichuan province. His Hakka father was much poorer than Mao's father, so much so that, unable to feed himself and his family, he had had to drown five of his own children in a pond with his own hands.²⁴ “I loved my mother, but feared and hated my father,” Zhu De confessed to the American journalist Agnes Smedley in 1937. “I could never understand why my father was so cruel.”²⁵ Luckily, a well-to-do relative of his murderous father took Zhu De in when he was just six years old. He received a superior education. In 1909, when he was twenty-three, Zhu De entered the Yunnan Military Academy, in the capital city of Yunnanfu (now Kunming). That same year Zhu De joined Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary Alliance and devoted all his energies to “the struggle for the republic.”²⁶ He also became a member of the secret mafia-type Elder Brother Society, whose well-articulated network penetrated all layers of Chinese society. Zhu De took an active part in the 1911 Revolution against the Qing dynasty and he rose to be a brigade commander in the forces of one of the Yunnan militarists. In September 1921 he was appointed commissioner of police for Yunnan province. “He acquired several wives and concubines and built a palatial home in the capital of Yunnan,” Edgar Snow wrote. “He had everything he desired: wealth, power, love, descendants, poppy dreams, eminent respectability and a comfortable future. He had, in fact, only one really bad habit, but it was to prove his downfall. He liked to read books.”²⁷ He became so interested in Bolshevism that he abandoned everything and went to Europe, first to France and then to Germany, where he studied military science. There as well he met Zhou Enlai, who convinced him to join the Communist Party in October 1922. In July 1925, Zhu traveled to the Soviet Union and became a student at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), where, under the pseudonym of Danilov, he began studying Bolshevik sociology and economics. Soon he was transferred to one of the secret Soviet military schools, and after he graduated in the summer of 1926 he returned to China. He took part in the Northern Expedition, after which he made a significant contribution to organizing the Nanchang Uprising under the direction of his old friend Zhou Enlai.

He was physically strong, loved to play basketball, and slept with his soldiers on the damp earth; his manner of living and dress was plain. Everyone who knew him was struck by his modesty and pleasant manner. His main virtue was that he was utterly devoid of political ambition. Zhu De recognized Mao's priority in everything concerning politics, while Mao initially did not dispute Zhu's opinions on military matters. Thus this was an ideal combination from every perspective.²⁸

After Zhu and Mao joined forces, they fully agreed on returning to the old Jinggang base in the central part of the Luoxiao range. They established their headquarters in the town of Longshi, north of Ciping. Zhou Lu was no longer an obstacle. Back in Jinggang he had been captured by the Guomindang and executed. The goal that Mao and Zhu De shared was to try to expand their influence into six counties of the Hunan-Jiangxi-Guangdong border region after consolidating their soviet base. In Mao's words, “Our main tasks, as we saw them, were two: to divide the land, and to establish Soviets. We wanted to arm the masses to hasten those processes.”²⁹

Mao's meeting with Zhu De was also noteworthy because it was from Zhu that he learned no one had expelled him from the party. Moreover, Mao soon received word from the Jiangxi Provincial Committee that he had been appointed secretary of the newly formed Hunan-Jiangxi Special Border Area Committee. With the formation of this committee, he had again concentrated in his own hands all of the political and military power in the Jinggang region. Naturally, he was very pleased. (In November 1928, Mao would further strengthen his power when the Central Committee appointed him secretary of the newly revived Front Committee, a special institution that reported directly to the Jiangxi party committee and ranked above the Hunan-Jiangxi Special Border Area Committee.)

Numerous paupers and rural lumpen proletarians, allies of the communists, arrived in Jinggang along with Zhu De's forces. Together they engaged in looting and killing in southern Hunan for several months. The regional economy was so devastated that Zhu De's troops in southern Hunan could feed themselves only by raising and selling opium.³⁰ The communists knew it was bad to traffic in narcotics, but they simply had no other recourse. Thus, while continuing to struggle for the rights of the laboring people, they themselves mercilessly poisoned the people. It was because of these economic difficulties that Zhu De ultimately had to withdraw his troops from southern Hunan and go to Jinggang.

By May 1928, some eighteen thousand fighters had assembled in the Jinggang region. Mao considered the majority of them “messy people with very poor discipline.”³¹ Thus the first order of business was to establish strict control over this armed mob. To do this without the ability to supply them regularly with provisions and clothing was impossible. Medicine was also urgently needed. No less than a third of the troops in Jinggang were sick or wounded. It was also necessary to organize the production of weapons and ammunition. There were only two thousand rifles and a few machine guns for the eighteen thousand troops. Against this background, Mao decided to undertake wide-scale socioeconomic reforms or, to put it more precisely, agrarian revolution. Until then, starting in October 1927, Mao's soldiers along with Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo's bandits had used old-fashioned means of procuring what they needed. They levied taxes on the inhabitants of the valley and they confiscated from the homes of tuhao and lieshen everything they could get their hands on. But even by such pillaging Mao was unable to pay his soldiers more than three copper coins a day. This was very little; therefore, new means were essential.

Finally he was able to implement his long-percolating ideas about a just Chinese society. These views were radically egalitarian and, in essence, anti-peasant. In Jinggang all the land belonging to peasants as well as to landlords was confiscated and handed over to the “Border Area Soviet Government of Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers,” which, incidentally, was headed by the bandit Yuan Wencai. The land was then distributed among rural inhabitants-supporters of the regime in a strictly egalitarian fashion, according to the number of mouths in a household. The buying and selling of land was prohibited and those who received land “must be compelled to work.” All this was done in accordance with personal directives from Mao. A quasi-legislative basis for these measures was provided only one month prior to the departure of the Fourth Corps from Jinggang, in December 1928, when the regional Soviet government retroactively adopted the “Jinggangshan Land Law” that Mao had drafted. Here, too, Mao remained faithful to himself. On April 12, 1927, he had openly asserted, “It is first necessary to solve the agrarian problem in reality and then work out the legal framework.” This is just what he did.³²

Mao's report to the Central Committee of the CCP on November 25, 1928, indicated that by June 1928, most of the land in the region had already been confiscated and redistributed. The remainder continued to be divided through the late fall. Such rough and ready redistribution naturally evoked considerable resistance. It was not only the landlords who loathed egalitarianism, but also the great mass of the peasantry, first of all the peasant proprietors who belonged to the wealthier native clans (bendi). Mao acknowledged that “[i]n the countryside, where clan organizations prevail, the most troublesome are not the despotic gentry, but the intermediate classes.” It was they who most actively obstructed the redistribution that began only after Red Army soldiers had shot several local people. After that the peasants could either flee from Jinggang or sabotage the implementation of the agrarian revolution. Most of them fled, because they were terrified that the Hakka, aided by the Red Army, would kill all of the indigenous population. “[M]ost of the native peasants defected, put on white ribbons, and led the army to burn down houses and comb the mountains,” Mao noted gloomily in his report to the Central Committee. In response, “the settlers hastened to confiscate the pigs, cattle, clothes, and other property of the native peasants.”³³ Thereafter, those who remained in the valley cut back on trade and ceased handicraft production. Practically all the markets shut down and daily necessities including salt, cloth, medicines, and many other commodities virtually disappeared. The communists resorted to requisitioning. A political economy based on plunder and murder precluded the possibility of leading a normal life. To supply soldiers the three to five coins they needed daily for food, more than ten thousand yuan per month was required. And “[i]f the captured despotic gentry do not send us money, we have no money to use,” Mao reported to the Central Committee. After all, money could be “obtained entirely from expropriating the local bullies, but …… you can expropriate only once in a given locality; afterward, there would be nothing to take.”³⁴

The result was that “the struggle in the border area,” in Mao Zedong's words, “is almost purely military. Consequently, the Party and the masses must both be militarized …… and the fighting has come to constitute our daily life.”³⁵ Thus terror became the sole means of survival. “Our overall strategy in the rural struggles now on is: …… massacre the landlords and the despotic gentry as well as their running dogs without the slightest compunction; threaten the rich peasants by means of the Red terror so that they will not dare to assist the landlord class,” Mao wrote. To implement terror in a timely fashion, special “red execution teams” were established from the “bravest workers and peasants” and carried out nighttime guerrilla raids on the villages.³⁶ Naturally, the Red Army soldiers, who were mostly paupers, rural lumpen proletarians, and Hakka, greeted this policy enthusiastically. “The vagrants are after all particularly good fighters,” Mao enthused in his report. “Consequently, not only can we not diminish the vagrants now in our ranks but it is difficult to find more for reinforcements.”³⁷ The Hakka, who were generally a warlike group, fought especially bravely.

As a result of the militarization of life in the region, by late summer the Red Army was even beginning to achieve small victories over individual Guomindang units. The battle of Huangyang Pass, northwest of Ciping, in which the Red Army routed a regiment of the Eighth Corps of the NRA, was particularly impressive. Mao was ecstatic. Looking out over the eternally green mountains, he composed some new verses:

Below the mountain, their flags flying,

High on the mountain, our bugles blowing:

A thousand circles of the enemy around us:

We will stand unmoved.

Defense is deadly, trench and wall,

The strongest fort is our will.

From Huang-yang-chieh [Huangyangjie] cannon roar,

Crying: the enemy runs away in the night.³⁸

But he celebrated too soon. Despite the terror, the problem of acquiring provisions remained acute. The Red Army men ate mostly pumpkin or squash, rice was considered a delicacy, and there was practically nothing else. Accustomed to spicy dishes, the southerners suffered. The fighters unhappily shouted, “Down with capitalism, and eat squash!” Many of them developed stomach problems from such a diet. According to his daughter, Mao himself suffered from constipation. He couldn't stand bland food, and there was none of the red peppers that he loved. He was saved by warm, soapy enemas that He Zizhen administered to him.³⁹

This totally anti-peasant policy finally led to a profound crisis. By late autumn, the attempt to introduce “war communism” into Chinese society had isolated Mao's corps and placed it in opposition to the majority of the population. Mao certainly understood what was happening, but he did not want to reexamine his extremist views. His great energy drove him forward. The goal and the romance of struggle blinded him, and his enormous will compelled him to overcome all obstacles while his faith in the power of dictatorship kept him from veering off the path. The difficulties he encountered only strengthened his resolve to carry out his plans to the end, no matter the cost.

For a long time he had felt that he was exceptional and infallible. Was there no basis for this? A peasant's son from the Hunanese boondocks, he had already been able to accomplish so much. He was able not only to make his way in the world, but to compel many of the leading sons of the nation to respect and even fear him. How could he not have faith in himself?

He did not want to leave Jinggang. The region was ideal in a strategic sense, surrounded on all sides by tall, steep mountains and connected by road to two provinces—Hunan and Jiangxi. Here one could defend oneself successfully for a long time without fear of being surrounded by the enemy. In any other place, Mao thought, “a tiger [i.e., the Fourth Corps] on the plain may be attacked by a dog.”⁴⁰ Nevertheless, in the end he had to leave. By early December 1928, the economic resources of Jinggang were almost completely exhausted. The Fifth Corps of the Red Army, which had been formed several months earlier, arrived in Jinggang in early December. Its soldiers were struck by what they saw. Peng Dehuai, the commander of the Fifth Corps, recalled that at that time “the men of the Fourth Army [Corps] of the Red Army still wore summer clothes and straw sandals. They had no winter clothing, no salt to prepare food, and no money to provide individual soldiers with the three coppers needed for daily meals.”⁴¹ Of the eighteen thousand soldiers under Mao's command in May 1928, no more than six thousand remained. It became clear to Mao, Zhu De, and Peng Dehuai that only by leaving this ruined place and finding new places to pillage “could they overcome their difficulties.”⁴²

In early January 1929, Mao and Zhu resolved to switch their base to southern Jiangxi province, along the Fujian border. Although Mao deemed the new region a remote place, he could not have failed to consider that the Jiangxi-Fujian border region promised the communists numerous advantages. This was a territory more densely populated with newcomers. In China it was even called “Hakka country.” There, in the forested districts with a mild and favorable climate, far from the industrial centers that were controlled by the Guomindang, the body of Mao's troops had an excellent chance at creating a strong base area. A majority of the poor local Hakka was sympathetic to the communist revolution; many of them even saw the Red Army as a sort of kindred clan.

On January 14, 1929, Zhu and Mao's troops, numbering barely more than 3,600 men, headed south from Jinggang.⁴³ They were dispirited and exhausted. They knew that the Jinggang experiment had been a failure. Mao himself acknowledged this in a letter to the Central Committee.⁴⁴ At the old base there remained only five companies of Peng Dehuai's Fifth Corps, reorganized as the Thirtieth Regiment of the Fourth Corps; wounded and ill soldiers of the Fourth Corps; and the troops of Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo. The overall command of these remaining troops was given to Peng, who was appointed as the deputy commander of the Fourth Corps.

Several days prior to the departure of Zhu and Mao's troops from the Jinggang region, during a celebratory meeting dedicated to the unification of the Fourth and Fifth Corps an unpleasant event occurred that many interpreted as a bad omen. A platform that had been hastily constructed for the meeting turned out to be flimsy and collapsed when Mao, Zhu, and other leaders climbed onto it. The people exclaimed, but Zhu De tried as best he could to calm them down. “Never mind! If we fall, we shall rise and fight again. Let's rebuild it.”⁴⁵ The meeting proceeded, but an unpleasant feeling lingered among the soldiers. New trials awaited them, and now this bad luck seemed to spite them.

He Zizhen accompanied Mao on the campaign. To part would have been dangerous. The sad fate of Kaihui spoke for itself. Later, it is true, in conversations with a friend Zizhen asserted that she had supposedly tried unsuccessfully to remain in Jinggang, since she had long felt that Mao “was unworthy of her.” According to her, Mao simply ordered his guards to take her “at any cost”; she sobbed uncontrollably the entire way.⁴⁶ This assertion is doubtful. She said this to her friend after she and Mao had separated (their split came in 1937). In January 1929, she was five months pregnant. In such a condition she had no reason to leave her husband.

¹ Mao, Oblaka v snegu (Clouds in the Snow), 23.

² Snow, Red Star Over China, 164.

³ Peng, “Report on the Progress of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan,” 328–29.

⁴ See Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 2, 3–35; Grigoriev, Kommunisticheskaia partiia Kitaia v nachal'nyi period sovetskogo dvizheniia (The Communist Party of China in the Initial Soviet Movement Period), 39.

⁵ Snow, Red Star Over China, 164.

⁶ Ibid., 167.

⁷ Liu Xing, “Do i posle ‘vosstaniia osennego urozhaia'” (Before and After the “Autumn Harvest Uprising”), in Vsiudu krasnye znamena (Red Banners Everywhere), 26.

⁸ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 216–20; Wu, Mao Zedong guanghui licheng dituji (Atlas of Mao Zedong's Glorious Historical Path), 39–40; Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 155, 162.

⁹ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 109.

¹⁰ See Chen Yi, “Chen Yi tongzhi guanyu Zhu Mao jun de lishi ji qi zhuangkuang de baogao” (Comrade Chen Yi's Report on the History of the Zhu-Mao Army and Its Present Situation), in Jinggangshan geming genjudi shiliao xuanbian (Collection of Selected Materials on the Revolutionary Base Area in the Jinggang Mountains) (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1986), 176; [Chen Yi], Istoriia boevykh deistvii 4-go korpusa (History of the Military Engagements of the Fourth Corps), in Pavel Mif, ed., Sovety v Kitae: Sbornik materialov i dokumentov (Soviets in China: Collection of Materials and Documents) (Moscow: Partizdat, 1934), 187.

¹¹ Wu, Mao Zedong guanghui licheng dituji (Atlas of Mao Zedong's Glorious Historical Path), 40.

¹² Quoted from Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 236.

¹³ See Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 147–61; Short, Mao, 225–27; Ma, Hongse diyi jiazu (The First Red Family), 39–45; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 223–26.

¹⁴ Zheng, An Oppositionist for Life, 137.

¹⁵ Ren Bishi nianpu, 1904–1950 (Chronological Biography of Ren Bishi, 1904–1950) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2004), 78; see Ristaino, China's Art of Revolution, 71–72.

¹⁶ Gongfei huoguo shiliao huibian (Collection of Materials on the History of the Communist Bandits Who Brought Misfortune to the Country), vol. 1 (Taipei: Zhonghua minguo kaiguo wushinian wenxian biancuan weiyuanhui, 1964), 568–70; Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian xuanji (Collection of CCP CC Selected Documents), vol. 3 (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1989), 481, 483–84.

¹⁷ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 226; Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 51; John E. Rue, Mao Tse-tung in Opposition, 1927–1935 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), 84.

¹⁸ Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 2, sheet 256.

¹⁹ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 94.

²⁰ See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 333.

²¹ See Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 84; Liao Gailong et al., eds., Zhongguo gongchandang lishi da cidian. Zengdingben. Zonglu. Renwu (Great Dictionary of the History of the Chinese Communist Party. Expanded edition. General section. Personnel) (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 2001), 277.

²² Quoted from Titov, Materialy k politicheskoi biografii Mao Tsze-duna (Materials for a Political Biography of Mao Zedong), vol. 1, 166.

²³ See Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 84; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 227–28; 236–40.

²⁴ See Lois Wheeler Snow, Edgar Snow's China: A Personal Account of the Chinese Revolution Compiled from the Writings of Edgar Snow (New York: Random House, 1981), 72.

²⁵ Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1956), 10.

²⁶ Helen Foster Snow (Nym Wales), Inside Red China (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 113, 116.

²⁷ Snow, Edgar Snow's China, 73.

²⁸ See Snow (Wales), Inside Red China, 110–12.

²⁹ Snow, Red Star Over China, 166.

³⁰ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 57.

³¹ Ibid., 51.

³² Ibid., 128–30.

³³ Ibid., 104, 111.

³⁴ Ibid., 104, 96.

³⁵ Ibid., 92.

³⁶ Ibid., 74.

³⁷ Ibid., 94.

³⁸ Mao, Poems of Mao Tse-tung, 38.

西江月·井冈山
毛泽东

山下旌旗在望，山头鼓角相闻。
敌军围困万千重，我自岿然不动。
早已森严壁垒，更加众志成城。
黄洋界上炮声隆，报道敌军宵遁。

³⁹ See Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 162.

⁴⁰ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 57.

⁴¹ Peng Dehuai, Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal: The Autobiographical Notes of Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), trans. Zheng Longpu (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), 231.

⁴² Ibid.; see also Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 149.

⁴³ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 149–51; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 261–62; Ma, Hongse diyi jiazu (The First Red Family), 48.

⁴⁴ Quoted from Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 151.

⁴⁵ Quoted from Peng, Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 228–29.

⁴⁶ Chang and Halliday, Mao, 61.

ⁿ²³ At the time the hammer on the flag of the CCP was indeed commonly mistaken for an axe.

ⁿ²⁴ Later, Mao, recalling this time, observed ironically, “So, as soon as I became a democratic figure [i.e., not a communist], they could appoint me division commander.”

ⁿ²⁵ It is worth noting that Zhao Xiangui, Zetan’s first wife, at just this time was risking her life by engaging in underground work in Changsha. Returning from Moscow in the spring of 1927, she began to put into practice in Hunan what she had learned in Moscow, organizing a peasant movement or, to be more precise, a movement of paupers and rural lumpen proletarians. After Xu Kexiang’s mutiny in Changsha on May 21, 1927, she was put behind bars, but she was freed the following January. In early 1931 she left for Wuhan, where for security reasons she changed her name to Zhao Lingying. Subsequently she was sent to work in Shanghai, then in Nanjing, and finally in Jinan, the provincial capital of Shandong. There she married the secretary of the Shandong party committee, but in the summer of 1932 first her husband and then she was seized by the Guomindang and executed.

ⁿ²⁶ She survived until the victory of the revolution. For a while she worked in the Mao Zedong Museum in Shaoshan, and then she moved to Changsha. There she died of illness in July 1964, at the age of sixty-eight.