16 A SINGLE SPARK CAN START A PRAIRIE FIRE
While Mao and Zhu De were implementing agrarian revolution in the Jinggang Mountains, Chiang Kai-shek was gradually consolidating his power in China. In mid-1928 the completion of the Northern Expedition resulted in the unification of the country under Guomindang rule. Nanjing became the capital of the Republic of China. Beijing, occupied by Yan Xishan, an ally of Chiang Kai-shek, was renamed Beiping.n27 Several days earlier, Zhang Zuolin, the head of the Beijing government and boss of Manchuria, was assassinated by the Japanese, who were unhappy with his passivity in the war against the Guomindang.1 His heir, twenty-seven-year-old Zhang Xueliang, became the new governor of Manchuria and formally recognized the authority of Chiang Kai-shek. On January 1, 1929, the period of military rule was terminated and a new stage of political tutelage proclaimed for the next six years. This was done in accordance with a gradual, three-step transition to genuine democracy—military rule, political tutelage, democracy—a concept developed by the late Sun Yat-sen. Thus the basic ideas of the revolution of 1925–27 had been formally achieved and an all-China government established. To be sure, warlord conflicts continued periodically and only by colossal efforts on the part of his forces did Chiang achieve victory in these internecine conflicts.
Meanwhile, China still remained dependent on foreign powers politically and economically. The unequal treaties, including the right of extraterritoriality, were not abolished, even though between 1928 and 1930 most major countries signed agreements with the Nanjing government, returning to China the right to set its own tariffs.
Significant changes were also taking place in the international communist movement and the CCP. In February 1928, the Ninth Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI convened in Moscow, recognized that the wave of revolution had receded, and declared its opposition to an adventurist policy of uprisings and in support of “painstaking work to win the masses” over to the Chinese Communist Party. Several months later, in June–July 1928, the Sixth Congress of the CCP was convened. Because of the white terror in China, the congress was held in the USSR, in Moscow province. Attending the conference were 118 delegates, of whom 84 were full delegates and 34 were alternates. Among the delegates were such familiar names as Qu Qiubai, Zhou Enlai, Li Lisan, Zhang Guotao, and Cai Hesen. Mao, of course, was not present. He was carrying on his war against “counterrevolutionary” peasants in the Jinggang Mountains. At that point there were no reliable statistics concerning party membership. By a resolution of an enlarged plenum of the Provisional Politburo in November 1927, the system of party membership cards and lists of party members was rescinded. The approximate number of party members was estimated at 40,000–50,000, which was far from reality.2
The congress expressed its solidarity with the Ninth Plenum of the ECCI, which had condemned “putschism.” The policy of uprisings that the CCP had pursued starting in late 1927 was condemned as “mistaken.” Naturally, responsibility for this defective course was placed upon the leader of the party, Qu Qiubai. Stalin and the Comintern again got off scot-free. Under Soviet dictation, the delegates adopted a resolution characterizing the present stage of the Chinese revolution as “bourgeois democratic,” notwithstanding the national bourgeoisie's “betrayal” of the revolutionary movement. The point was that in backward “semi-feudal” China, it was impossible to carry out a purely communist policy such as nationalizing the mills and factories, eliminating the petty bourgeoisie and wealthy peasants, “sharpening the struggle” against rich peasants, and so forth. The leaders of the CCP followed their Moscow bosses, who strived to demonstrate their devotion to historical materialism by asserting that a particular country's readiness to undergo communist reforms was determined by its level of socioeconomic development. By saying this they completely forgot that Lenin himself had rejected this interpretation of Marxism. They were fanatically observing a kind of sacramental religious ritual that had nothing in common with how communists acted in practice.
Consequently, delegates at the congress subjected Mao's radical ideas to a firestorm of criticism. One of the Hunanese delegates said,
In Hunan province, I must say …… there is a deviation, a special theory of Comrade Mao. He has an entire system of ideas. What has he told us? He said that we are now entering directly into the worker-peasant revolution, i.e. the socialist revolution, that the Guomindang banner has become a black banner, that now we must unharness our own red banner …… I must also say that Comrade Mao's views that the revolution is already a socialist one have been widely circulated among the masses.3
Qu Qiubai himself, most likely with Mao in mind, criticized the position of several “comrades” regarding the agrarian question. “Our slogan for the struggle should not be confiscation of the peasants' land. True, there were such mistaken ideas among our comrades last autumn, but the Central Committee was against this and issued its directives on this question indicating the incorrectness of this view.”4 Yet, the criticism of Mao was not politically destructive. The party leadership had not yet been informed of the policies that Mao was pursuing in Jinggang, and so they were excoriating him for past errors that seemed to be eliminated. “We still do not know,” said Zhou Enlai, “what is their [Mao's and Zhu De's] attitude to the agrarian reform and to the organization of the Soviets …… We also do not know what forms of struggle Mao Zedong and Zhu De adopted.” One delegate simply defended Mao: “At present, the situation regarding Mao Zedong has improved. Before he did not know the CC's line, but now the provincial [party] committee has gotten in touch with Mao Zedong and given him a directive, so they have already begun to do this work. As for the military, it, too, has changed its modus operandi and has begun to mobilize the masses.”5
This is why Mao not only was not expelled from the party at the Sixth Congress, but was elected in absentia as a full member of the Central Committee. After all, he was the organizer of the first CCP base area, and the Comintern recognized the importance of developing a Chinese Red Army. In addition to Mao, twenty-three others became full members and thirteen candidate members of the Central Committee. Upon the recommendation of the ECCI, forty-eight-year-old Xiang Zhongfa, a leader of the workers' movement, was chosen as general secretary of the Central Committee. He was never considered a leading political figure, but the Comintern supported him because Xiang Zhongfa came from a proletarian background, and at the time Moscow blamed all the disasters of the Communist Party on the fact that it had too many intellectuals among its leaders. Nevertheless, to assist Xiang, the ECCI included such major intellectuals as Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan in the party's top leadership. Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao retained their membership in the top party organs, but in punishment for their “putschism” they were made to stay in the USSR. Qu headed the newly reorganized CCP, Communist Youth League, and All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) delegation to the highest organs of the international communist movement. Zhang became his deputy.n28
Mao learned about the resolutions of the Ninth Plenum of the Sixth CCP Congress long afterward. Not until November 2, 1928, did he receive the letter from the Central Committee “On the February Resolutions of the Comintern,” which had been sent to him on June 4. Only in early January 1929, not long before his departure from the Jinggang region, did the basic resolutions of the Sixth Congress reach him. Despite the fact that the resolutions had repudiated his policies, Mao, politically savvy, simply pretended that he heartily approved of all the party's prescriptions. He had no intention of changing anything. He would continue to act this way vis-à-vis the Party bosses as long as he felt unable to oppose them directly.
He quickly replied to the Central Committee, “We agree completely with the International's resolution on China: at present, China is definitely still at the stage of bourgeois-democratic revolution …… [T]he revolutionary tide is ebbing daily in the country as a whole …… The resolutions adopted at the Sixth Congress are extremely correct, and we accept them with great joy.”6 He blamed all the excesses on others, of course, primarily on his deceased nemesis Zhou Lu, who, according to Mao, had forced him to adhere to a “leftist” course. “He criticized us,” Mao wrote to the committee, “for not burning and killing enough, for not carrying out the policy of ‘turning the petty bourgeois into proletarians and then forcing them to make revolution.' ” In this connection, Mao observed, “[a]s for not confiscating the land of owner-peasants, the whole of it has already been confiscated in the territory of the independent régime in the border area, so of course the problem will not arise again.”7 In other words, of course I agree with you, but it's too late to change anything.
Upon instituting a new land law in southern Jiangxi in April 1929, Mao introduced at least one basic change in comparison with the “Jinggangshan Land Law.” The sentence about the complete confiscation of land holdings was replaced by a thesis stating that only “public land and land belonging to the landlord class” would be expropriated. However, the stipulations banning the purchase or sale of land and requiring egalitarian redistribution of land based principally on the number of mouths in a family were preserved, despite the fact that they were not in accord with the principles of a bourgeois democratic revolution.
The decisions of the Ninth Plenum as well as the resolutions of the Sixth Congress were discussed at meetings of party activists, but Mao did not openly discuss points concerning CCP tactics vis-à-vis the forest brigands contained in two congress resolutions (“On the Peasant Question” and “On the Organization of Soviet Power”). They concerned how to win rank-and-file members of these bands over to the side of the party, while asserting that all of the leaders, including those who had assisted the communists during the uprising, should be liquidated.8 Mao could hardly announce these points in the presence of Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo.
Several months after Mao left the Jinggang region, Yuan Wencai somehow managed to get hold of copies of these two resolutions and read the most important points to the illiterate Wang Zuo. He said, “No matter how loyal we were to them, they didn't trust us.” Wang flew into a rage. In February 1930, both bandits attacked Peng Dehuai's units in Jinggang. Yuan and Wang engaged them on a pontoon bridge near town. Both bandits were beaten in the brief battle and tried to flee into the hills, but their luck ran out. One of them was killed on the bridge; the other jumped into the water and drowned. Several hundred bandits were taken prisoner by the communists.9 According to the beliefs of the Hakkas both their souls and their spirits (and each person has three souls and seven spirits) would not be able to find peace, because both Yuan and Wang had met unnatural deaths, and Heaven would not take them in.10
Conversing with Edgar Snow in 1936, Mao remembered them with contempt and falsely claimed that Yuan and Wang had been killed by peasants.11 Yet, many years later, in the early 1950s after the PRC was founded, Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo were rehabilitated and their names inscribed on the list of revolutionary heroes, which could not have happened without Mao's approval. It seems he still could not forget how much he owed them. On May 29, 1965, on a visit to the Jinggang Mountains, Mao met with Yuan Wencai's widow, Xie Meixiang, and with Luo Xiaoying, one of the widows of Wang Zuo, who had had three wives simultaneously. During this meeting he said, “Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo contributed to the victory of the Chinese revolution.” Afterward, Chinese historians began to write that Yuan and Wang had died as the result of a “traitorous plot.”12 Leaving Jinggang in January 1929, however, Mao could not have imagined that just a year later Yuan and Wang would encounter such a fate. They had parted warmly, on good terms.
Mao and Zhu's troops advanced south quickly. On February 1, 1929, they arrived at the mountainous region of Luofuzhang, located in the very heart of Hakka country, at the intersection of Fujian, Guangdong, and Jiangxi provinces. These were impoverished places where the half-starved tenants made up more than 70 percent of the population.13 To tarry there would mean an intolerable existence, and the Guomindang troops were following on the Red Army's heels. Trying to shake them, the Red Army turned sharply to the north, then east, and then again south, wandering through the counties of southern Jiangxi and northern Fujian, attacking small cities and settlements, robbing the local inhabitants, and torching their houses. They were unable to establish a permanent base.14 Everywhere they went the Red Army men, almost half of whom were party members, called upon vagabonds and poor tenants to seize and divide other people's land, not to pay their debts or rent, and to organize guerrilla detachments. They seized all the “reactionaries,” mocked and paraded them through the villages in dunce caps, or just killed them without mercy. To intimidate and educate the population, they publicly displayed the bodies of their dead enemies, following the custom of bandits. Other communists in Anhui, Hubei, Guangxi, and Guangdong did just the same. Many acted on the principle of “only killing and arson.” The destruction of the “exploiting elements” and the “burning of towns” turned into a kind of standard operating procedure.15
Paying no attention to the resolutions of the Sixth Congress, Mao and Zhu intensified the struggle against the petty bourgeoisie, rich peasants, and merchants under the pretext of rooting out “reactionaries.” They covered up their banditry with grandiloquent phrases. “The Red Army …… strives for the well-being of the workers and peasants,” Zhu De and Mao wrote in one of their appeals to the inhabitants of a commercial town they had seized.
It also makes every effort to protect the merchants. It exercises strict discipline and does not encroach upon anyone. Because of the current shortage of food supplies, we are writing to you now to request that you kindly collect on our behalf 5,000 big foreign dollars for the soldiers' pay, 7,000 pairs of straw sandals and 7,000 pairs of socks, 300 bolts of white cloth, and 200 laborers. It is urgent that these be delivered to our headquarters before eight o'clock this evening …… If you ignore our requests, it will be proof that the Ningdu merchants are collaborating with the reactionaries …… In that case we will be obliged to burn down all the reactionary shops in Ningdu as a warning against your treachery. Do not say that we have not forewarned you.16
As before, to fill their coffers, the communists were deeply involved in the opium trade.17
In late May 1929, He Zizhen gave birth to a daughter in the town of Longyan, which the Red Army was temporarily occupying but had no possibility of retaining. The enemy was swiftly approaching, and the Mao-Zhu forces had to leave at once. Mao had only enough time to name the newborn Jinhua (“Gold Flower”). Half an hour after she had given birth, at Mao's request He Zizhen handed the infant to a peasant family along with fifteen yuan. In her own words, she didn't even cry.18 She probably suffered, but she was tough and able to hide her feelings. Soon afterward she changed the character zi in her name Zizhen from one meaning “self” to one meaning “child,” so that her name now meant “Treasuring the Child.” “We will get her back after the victory of the revolution,” Mao told his wife, but he was unable to keep this promise. Neither Mao nor He Zizhen was ever able to find her.
Mao had no time for babies, especially when the Red Army was experiencing unprecedented difficulties.19 In constant battles with government troops and local peasant self-defense units, Red Army forces were quickly melting away. In two months the Fourth Corps lost more than six hundred men. Intraparty intrigues were also causing problems. In April, a letter from Shanghai composed in February by Zhou Enlai arrived unexpectedly, urgently recalling Mao and Zhu from the army, but without providing any reason. The Central Committee also demanded splitting the Fourth Corps into small groups and dispatching them to a large number of places to ignite the agrarian revolution everywhere.20 Of course, Mao resented the fact that the new leaders in the central party apparatus were afraid of his and Zhu's independence and of their armed forces. “Who knows what they're really up to,” was the implicit message in the letter. “Will they flare up and slip out of control? After all, they possess military power. It's better to cut them off at the roots before they turn into new militarists.”
Mao grasped this logic instantaneously; therefore, neither he nor Zhu obeyed the order. Dividing the Red Army into small units, he wrote with poorly concealed irritation, “results in weak leadership and organization and inability to cope with adverse circumstances, which easily lead to defeat.” In this same letter, Mao acquainted the Central Committee with the principles guiding the guerrilla tactics that he and Zhu had worked out:
(1) Divide our forces to arouse the masses, concentrate our forces to deal with the enemy; (2) The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue; (3) To extend stable base areas, employ the policy of advancing in waves; when pursued by a powerful enemy, employ the policy of circling around; (4) Arouse the largest numbers of the masses in the shortest possible time and by the best possible methods.
“These tactics,” Mao wrote, “are just like casting a net; at any moment we should be able to cast it or draw it in. We cast it wide to win over the masses and draw it in to deal with the enemy.”21
These were the principles he would follow for many years; later they were adopted by armed communists in Indochina and other colonial and dependent countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, under the name of People's War.
Surprisingly, Mao Zedong's reply did not lead to an intensified conflict with the Central Committee. Once again Mao was lucky. At the end of April, stunning news reached China from Moscow that temporarily softened the committee leaders' attitude. In April 1929, Nikolai Bukharin was fiercely criticized for his “rightist pro-kulak views” and a massive collectivization campaign commenced in the USSR whose main target was peasant-proprietors. Stalin was responsible for all these changes. The new Soviet course naturally influenced the Comintern's agrarian policy. In July Bukharin was dismissed from the Comintern, a month after Stalin had begun to change the CCP's “prokulak” policy. However, the Russian term kulak, signifying a specific social stratum (the rural bourgeoisie), had no equivalent in Chinese. In the CCP documents it was translated by the two-character phrase funong, which connoted only property, that is, “rich peasant.” Thus, identifying it as a separate category of the peasantry would inevitably lead to activating the communists' anti-peasant policy. On June 7, the Political Secretariat of the ECCI sent to the Central Committee of the CCP a letter on the peasant question that emphasized the importance of dealing correctly with the kulaks, the issue on which “the Chinese comrades have committed their gravest mistakes.” Because the kulaks frequently play an “open or covert counterrevolutionary role in the movement,” one must battle them decisively. This letter openly praised the activities of Mao Zedong and Zhu De, whose “guerrilla detachments …… despite repeated attempts to suppress them on the part of reactionaries, not only have managed to preserve their cadres, but have recently achieved notable successes in Fujian province.”22
The sharpening of Moscow's struggle against Chinese “kulaks” had far-reaching consequences. In other words, Moscow demanded struggle against not only the dizhu (landlords), but also the nong (peasants). Whether they were rich or poor was a different question. The Chinese communists themselves were the ones who defined what constituted “wealthy,” and we have already seen how they did this in practice.
A translation of this letter was published in China in November 1929, in the CCP journal Gongchan (Common property). Mao was ecstatic. On February 7, 1930, buoyed by support from Moscow, he promulgated a new land law, the third of its kind. It was adopted at a joint party conference of the Red Army in the village of Pitou, in central Jiangxi. In addition to the point about confiscating all the immovable property of the landlords, Mao included the following article: “Of land, hills, woods, ponds and houses belonging to owner-peasants, if there is a surplus in excess of what is needed for self-support, after the majority of local peasants demand its confiscation, the soviet should approve the peasants' demand, confiscate the surplus portion and redistribute it.” As before, the law established the principle of equal division of the land that Mao expressed in a vivid formula: “Drawing on the plentiful to make up for the scarce.” Six months later he added the following phrase: “Drawing on the fat to make up for the lean.”23
The poor Hakka naturally welcomed such a law, and many of them took part in the agrarian revolution. In Xunwu county in southern Jiangxi, where, by May 1930, 80 percent of the land had already been redistributed, the local activists even composed a song that was popular among the Hakka and others:
They put us down. So, let's rise up brothers,
Everyone as one, in a single upsurge
We join the Red Army right away.
Who can obstruct such a force?24
Moscow's support could not have been more timely. From June until November 1929, until Mao learned that the Kremlin approved his position, he had suffered from deep depression. He still had no regular contact with the Central Committee, and for a long time he remained ignorant of the fact that on June 12 the Politburo had repudiated the criticism of Mao it had leveled in its February letter.25 In June, in addition to all his other difficulties, Mao's relations with Zhu De sharply deteriorated. Zhu unexpectedly expressed his dissatisfaction with Mao's micromanagement of the actions of the armed forces entrusted to his command. The “patriarchal style” of the secretary of the Front Committee also began to irritate him. Several subunit commanders supported Zhu.
They were particularly unhappy with Mao's efforts to employ the officers and men in agitprop work among the people, an activity Mao deemed increasingly important. Unwilling to renounce his egalitarian views and acknowledge mistakes in the conduct of the agrarian revolution, he tried to shift responsibility for the failure of his radical policies onto the shoulders of the peasants, the “dimwitted” bumpkins. Mao was now energetically conducting revolutionary propaganda in southern Jiangxi and western Fujian. There were several hundred propagandists among his troops, but he also made the soldiers participate in this work. Injecting communist revolutionary ideas into the heads of the rural dwellers with the help of the Red Army, Mao hoped that the Jiangxi-Fujian experiment would be successful. He did not care that such propaganda activities were diverting the soldiers from their military tasks.
Mao and Zhu might have settled their differences, but in early May 1929 a special representative from the Military Department of the Central Committee from Shanghai crudely intervened in their slowly smoldering conflict. Liu Angong was a self-assured young man of thirty who had just returned to China from Moscow, where he had spent a year at the Infantry School. Therefore, he considered himself an expert in military affairs as well as a great Marxist theoretician. He acted viciously toward Mao. Without understanding the situation, he gave his unconditional support to Zhu De and affixed upon Mao the deadly political label of “factionalist.” Following the lead of several commanders, he accused Mao of propagating a “patriarchal system” in the party organization of the Fourth Corps. Obviously, his Soviet teachers had taught the Infantry School cadet how to struggle against “enemies.” As soon as he arrived, Liu Angong, appointed head of the Political Department of the corps, began to ramp up the conflict. What particularly galled Mao was that Liu constantly brandished his “Moscow” education but understood nothing about the situation in Jiangxi. To be sure, he did not bother Mao too long: in October 1929 Liu was mortally wounded in battle.26 Yet Mao retained hostile feelings to insolent Soviet graduates. He soon dedicated a small work, “Oppose Bookism,” to such people as Liu Angong. Written in May 1930, it was published as a pamphlet in August under a different title, “On the Work of Investigation.” “How can someone be a Communist, and yet go around with his eyes shut talking nonsense?” he asked, alluding not only to Liu Angong but also to many of the Shanghai leaders. He added, “Surprisingly, when problems are discussed within the Communist Party, there are also people who say, whenever they open their mouths, ‘Show me where it's written in the book.' ” Of course, he continued, “[w]e need Marxism in our struggle. If we welcome this theory, it has nothing whatsoever to do with any formalistic or even mystical notion of a ‘sage.' …… We must study the Marxist ‘books,' but they must be integrated with our actual situation. We need ‘books,' but we must definitely correct the bookism which departs from reality.”27
By mid-June 1929 the conflict had become so intense that Mao decided to announce his resignation from the Front Committee. On June 14, he irritably noted, “I myself am too weak physically and too poor in my wisdom and knowledge, so I hope that the Central Committee can send me to Moscow to study and rest for a while.”28
His strength really had been undermined by all these quarrels. Soon, physically and psychologically weakened, he contracted malaria. Setting his work aside, at the end of June he and Zizhen sequestered themselves in a small two-story house not far from Gutian in western Fujian, where they spent the remainder of the summer. There he convalesced, read, and wrote poetry. Only occasionally did he take part in party discussions. He remained in the Front Committee but was replaced as secretary by twenty-eight-year-old Chen Yi, an old friend of Zhou Enlai and a party member since 1923. In late July, Secretary Chen set out for Shanghai to report on the situation and seek instructions. At the end of August he reported to the Central Committee on how things were in the Zhu-Mao corps.29 By this time, as we now know, Zhou Enlai, Li Lisan, and other leaders were already on Mao's side, but Mao still didn't know this. So there was nothing for him to do but wait and worry.
Meanwhile, his troops continued to lord it over Hakka country. Everywhere they went they left a trail of fire and ashes. “Deeds, land titles, debt registers, tax rolls (lists and books), all were completely burned,” wrote a contemporary.
The slogans of “No rent (to the landlords), no taxes (to the Guomindang authorities), no debts (to the usurers)” were implemented. All of the old tax offices were destroyed and the tax collectors killed. During the uprising, the workers, peasants, and soldiers used their sharp knives to weed out the tuhao, the gentry [shenshi, rural intelligentsia], the militarists, the officials, the Guomindang committee members, and the agents of imperialism—priests and the missionaries.30
But Mao was still depressed. At the end of August, he and Zizhen moved to a bamboo hut in the mountains, where he continued to convalesce and meditate. Over the doorway of their isolated cottage he hung the words “The book lover's refuge.”31 There was melancholy and sadness; thoughts welled up of his great lost love for his faithful Kaihui. Zizhen, of course, was young and beautiful, but very obstinate. Hakka women were generally distinguished by their independent and proud temper, and she markedly so. “You are iron and I am steel,” Mao said to her. “If we clash it will sound like a gong!” Later he would tell their daughter Li Min, who was born in 1937, that their “arguments often escalated into clashes.” When this happened Mao “often stood on ‘positions of strength,'” trying to put Zizhen down by invoking his “political authority.” He shouted and cursed, threatened to expel his insubordinate wife from the party, gave her a “verbal dressing down,” but he was usually the first to seek reconciliation. He failed to break Zizhen's spirit.32
This is probably why in the wee hours thoughts about the obedient “Little Dawn” (Kaihui) and their sons gave him no peace. “I lost my proud Poplar,” he would write many years later in one of his verses.33 (Kaihui's family name Yang means “poplar” in Chinese.) At the end of November, he sent a letter to Li Lisan in Shanghai asking Li to tell his brother Zemin that he would like Kaihui's postal address. “[A]lthough I am better now,” he informed Li Lisan, “my spirits are not yet fully recovered. I often think of Kaihui, Anying, and the others, and I would like to communicate with them.”34 Despite the bitterness of the civil war, Mao was not able to jettison all of his human feelings. Did he have some sort of bad premonition? He remembered his former wife just one year before her tragic death.
Around this time Chen Yi returned from Shanghai with the long-awaited decision of the Central Committee: it recognized Mao's position, not Zhu's, as correct. Chen Yi and Zhu De asked Mao to return, but only after a month of negotiations did he finally leave his mountain hideaway. Once again he headed the Front Committee, and now he concentrated almost unlimited power in his own hands. His opponents were unhorsed, so he decided put the disagreements behind him. Zhu De resumed being obedient and the entire corps subordinated itself to Mao. Many trials lay before them. Revenge could wait. On November 28, 1929, Mao informed Shanghai, “There is absolutely no problem in uniting the Fourth Army [Corps] Party under the correct guidance of the Central Committee …… The only problem is that the basic theoretical knowledge of Party members is too low, and we must quickly carry out education.”35 In December 1929, in Gutian in western Fujian, he convened a party conference of the corps at which, even though he sharply criticized “the purely military viewpoint,” he at the same time hinted at a way out of the crisis.36 “Treat the illness to save the patient” is how he later described the method tested in western Fujian.
All this was done in a purely Chinese spirit. “Destroying an opponent does not prove him wrong” is a wise Chinese saying. “You need to make him ‘lose face.' If your enemy survives the shame, then you can do with him whatever you will. Only you will decide whether or not to restore his ‘face.' This is called giving someone a chance to rectify his ways.” For Chinese it was the most skillful method for dealing with opponents. Of course, Mao didn't always act this way; he was not just a Chinese, but also a member of the Communist Party, and as such, acknowledged the “correctness” of Bolshevik methods of bloody executions. But he mainly applied such methods only toward those whom he genuinely deemed “class enemies” beyond redemption. Or toward those who, from his perspective, were of no further use even “without face.”
This, incidentally, is also how the Guomindang operated. As a rule, the police who arrested communists always gave them a choice between death and public renunciation. They usually released their prisoner if he chose the shameful path. They might not even demand that the broken man turn in his former comrades.37 What the Chinese police required was not betrayal but for the communist to “lose face.” Many of those who repented were even given work, and even entrusted with very responsible positions. Everyone knew that the person who had shamed himself would serve with exceptional zeal.
After sorting out intra-army relations, Mao was able to concentrate on political questions. The sharpening of the struggle against the “rightists” in the Soviet Communist Party, connected with the full-scale collectivization in the Soviet Union, led the Comintern to radicalize its policy with respect to the worldwide national liberation movement. The resolutions of the Tenth Plenum of the ECCI held in Moscow in July 1929 targeted the “rightist danger” that supposedly threatened all communist parties. The main error of the “rightists” was that they refused to recognize “the symptoms of a new revolutionary high tide [pod'em in Russian]” in the world. In other words, they “lagged behind” the revolutionary masses. The Russian-language resolutions of the plenum, received in Shanghai in late September, caused confusion within the Central Committee of the CCP. According to an eyewitness, “At first a majority of the Central Committee inclined toward a cautious interpretation of this directive …… They were afraid that if they gave too leftist an interpretation to the phrase, they might end up cracking their heads against the wall again.”38 The Chinese were confused by the Russian word pod'em, with its dual meaning of “high tide” and “on the rise.” They wanted to be absolutely certain that this time their Russian bosses would not find fault with them. Suddenly the Comintern was criticizing them not for “putschism” but for passivity. The Tenth Plenum had clearly identified “the rightist danger” as the main one in the international communist movement.
Such was the situation that prevailed among the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1930s. One could simply not talk about any degree of independence on the part of the CCP. Complete financial dependence upon Moscow paralyzed the leaders of the communist movement. At most they might oppose Comintern representatives in China, but never the Kremlin itself. The funds transferred to Shanghai, mainly via the special International Liaison Department, grew steadily. By the late 1920s and early 1930s it was hundreds of thousands, even millions of rubles and dollars. Thus, by 1930, the Soviets spent five million rubles on training Chinese revolutionaries in the Communist University of the Toilers of China, which had been founded in 1925 under the name of the Sun Yat-sen University of the Toilers of China.39 For the seven months from February to September 1930, the CCP received more than 223,000 Mexican dollars from Moscow. (The Mexican dollar circulated in China on par with the yuan.) In October, it received another $10,000 in American dollars.40 (At this time an American dollar equaled 3.6 yuan.) At the same time, in 1930 the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League received 70,000 yuan from the same source, and the Chinese branch of the International Organization for Aid to Revolutionary Fighters (MOPR in Russian abbreviation), a special Comintern agency that provided support to the families of underground communists and incarcerated revolutionaries, received 11,400 yuan.41 How could there be any question of disobeying Moscow?
After a thorough discussion of the materials from the plenum on December 8, 1929, the Central Committee issued Circular No. 60, “Practical Implementation of Defense of the USSR,” which outlined the contours of a new, aggressive revolutionary policy. The CCP leaders obviously wanted to be “more Catholic than the Pope,” in this case, Stalin. They demanded that all party members work to “assist a high tide of revolutionary war” by combining armed struggle in the rural areas with new uprisings in the cities. The goal of these coordinated actions was the “seizure of the largest centers of the country.” Li Lisan and Zhou Enlai were chiefly responsible for drafting this circular.
Worldwide trends seemed to confirm the “correctness” of the resolutions of the Tenth Plenum. At the end of October 1929, the New York stock market crashed. The Great Depression, which soon engulfed the capitalist world, planted new hopes in all communists. It seemed that the inevitable downfall of world capitalism was fast approaching. The economic crisis had a direct impact on China's economy. Industrial enterprises shut down and unemployment skyrocketed. Catastrophic inflation occurred, poverty increased, and the gap between rich and poor widened. In addition, the struggle among various intra-Guomindang groups intensified. Wang Jingwei, who was a leader of the “Reorganizationists” group, urgently demanded the reform of the party. In this situation, the Comintern drew the conclusion that China was at “the initial moment of a revolutionary high tide.”
In mid-December Shanghai received a new directive from Moscow, a letter from the ECCI that had been drafted on October 26, just when the world financial market had begun to wobble. The new directive called upon party leaders to focus on “the exacerbation of all contradictions” in China. The country was entering a “period of the most profound national crisis,” whose special feature was the “revival of the workers' movement which was emerging from the state of depression following the serious defeats of 1927.” The authors of the document perceived in this “a true and vital sign of the growing high tide” of the revolutionary movement and therefore demanded that the CCP “begin to prepare the masses to bring about the revolutionary overthrow of the power of the bourgeois-landlord bloc, and look to the establishment of a dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry in the form of soviets, actively developing and constantly broadening revolutionary forms of class struggle such as massive political strikes, revolutionary demonstrations, guerrilla attacks, and so forth.” The letter concluded on a threatening note: “The main danger inside the party at present is the mood of right opportunism that …… underestimates the significance of peasant war, underestimates and applies the brakes to revolutionary energy and initiative, and belittles the independent and leading role of the proletariat and the communist party.”42
Zealously striving to execute these directives, the Central Committee of the CCP, however, overreached. At the end of February it released a new circular, No. 70, which asserted that “all of China, from Guangdong to Zhili [old name for Hebei], from Sichuan to Jiangsu, is gripped by crisis and by a revolutionary movement …… The mass struggle is developing evenly throughout the country …… In the present situation it is clear that victory is possible initially in one or several provinces, in particular in Wuchang and adjacent districts.” Therefore, the Central Committee considered it necessary to deploy the Red Army to attack and seize large cities.43
This resolution was elaborated in a letter from the Central Committee to the Front Committee of the Fourth Corps on April 3, 1930, that developed the idea that it was possible to conquer Jiangxi, Hubei, and Hunan provinces as well as the central city of Wuhan in the very near future.44 They all desperately wanted to appear as ultraleftists. This task resonated with the proposal that Mao Zedong himself had expressed more than a year earlier in his letter to the Central Committee: to seize Jiangxi and the contiguous western parts of Fujian and Zhejiang over the course of a year.45 At the time, the Central Committee, which was critical of Mao, did not respond to this idea. Now it not only returned to it, but expanded upon it. It still was unable to restrain itself from criticizing Mao and Zhu De for “peasant consciousness and banditism,” but weren't the leaders of the CCP who were hatching plans for a bloody nationwide slaughter themselves acting like bandits?
Mao was pleased with the new turn of events. He did not repudiate his previous year's intention to conquer Jiangxi, although he made certain changes. “This proposal to take Jiangxi within one year erred only in mechanically setting a time limit of one year,” he wrote in early January 1930 in a letter to the talented young commander Lin Biao, who some time back had come to the Jinggang Mountains with Zhu De. “As to the subjective and objective conditions in Jiangxi, they very much merit our attention.” In early February, almost three weeks before the appearance of Circular No. 70, and acting on his own initiative, Mao announced at a party conference of the Fourth Corps his decision to attack Ji'an, the largest city in western Jiangxi.46 Like Li Lisan, Zhou Enlai, and many others, he experienced an enormous rush of excitement, pleasurably anticipating the revolutionary explosion. “All China is spread with dry faggots which will soon be aflame,” he wrote to Lin Biao. “The saying ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire,' is an apt description of …… the present situation …… It is like a ship far out at sea whose masthead can already be seen at the horizon from the shore; it is like the morning sun in the east whose shimmering rays are visible from a high mountain top; it is like a child about to be born moving restlessly in its mother's womb.”47
Meanwhile, the leaders of the CCP continued their feverish preparations for revolution. In early March 1930, Zhou Enlai left for the USSR to deliver a report. In China, Li Lisan remained the de factor leader of the CCP. Lively, temperamental, and proactive, he also headed the Central Committee's Department of Agitation and Propaganda. It was at his initiative that an all-China conference of soviets was convened in Shanghai in late May 1930, attended by some forty delegates. By this time, in addition to Jiangxi and Fujian, soviet districts existed in Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, and Guangxi. Under Li Lisan's influence, the conference called upon Chinese soviet workers to “begin the struggle for socialism” against “counterrevolutionary kulaks”48 (in other words, the working peasantry). Mao Zedong did not attend the conferencen29 despite Li Lisan's importunate demands that he cast everything aside and come to Shanghai. A trip to the forum would have been risky. Could he be sure that Li Lisan would not try to detain him? Mao remembered how the Central Committee had tried to recall him and Zhu De from the army. Nevertheless, he had no objections to the conference resolutions.
Of particular significance was the decision to amalgamate individual units of the Red Army by reducing the number of corps and forming four army groups. The First Army Group was entrusted to the leadership of Zhu and Mao. Right after getting this news, Zhu and Mao unified on June 13 all the armed forces that were operating in southwestern Jiangxi and western Fujian. There were about twenty thousand officers and men under their command. Realizing that this was not enough for an army group, Zhu and Mao initially called their troops the First Field Army, but six days later, evidently not wishing to enter into a new conflict with Shanghai, they accepted the name the Central Committee had bestowed upon them: the First Army Group. In addition to the Fourth Corps, commanded by Lin Biao, the Sixth and the Twelfth Corps of the Red Army, which were conducting military actions not far from where the forces of Zhu and Mao were located, were amalgamated into the First Army Group.
Soon after, on June 21, Li Lisan's special emissary arrived in the Zhu-Mao region to inform the commanders of the First Army Group about a sensational new Politburo decision. The resolution, bearing the distinctive title “The New Revolutionary High Tide and an Initial Victory in One or More Provinces,” was drafted by Li Lisan and pointed the communists toward unleashing a revolutionary struggle for power in the near term. “China is the weakest link in the ruling chain of world imperialism; it is the place where the volcano of the world revolution is most likely to erupt,” the resolution stated.49
There was no time to waste. The next day Zhu and Mao issued an order for a campaign to attack Jiujiang and Nanchang, the largest cities in Jiangxi. The “Great Revolution” had begun. It need hardly be mentioned that it failed. They did not succeed in taking Jiujiang, let alone Nanchang. Only the small Third Army Group, commanded by Peng Dehuai and consisting of 7,000–8,000 officers and men, scored some success. They were able to seize Changsha and hold it for ten days, during which time they thoroughly looted it. It was because of the pillaging of Changsha that Kaihui would soon be arrested.
In late August–early September 1930, having linked his army group with Peng Dehuai's forces to form the First Front Army, numbering some 30,000 men,n30 Mao twice tried to repeat the success of the Third Army Group in the vicinity of Changsha, but neither he nor Peng was able to conquer the capital of Hunan again. The working masses of the city remained absolutely passive, withholding their support from the communists. The result was that the units of the First Front Army suffered enormous casualties.50
The leaders of the CCP, including Mao, completely miscalculated with respect to both political and military matters. There really was a crisis in China, but the CCP was still too weak to seize power. The party had grown in the past three years, boasting some 60,000 members, but this was obviously not enough. The entire Red Army numbered no more than 54,000 men, and only half of them were equipped with rifles.51 So for Mao, as for Li Lisan, it was too early to proclaim to the whole world that “the gunpowder of the revolution is already exploding, and the light of the dawn of the revolution will quickly arrive.”52 The world revolution was still some distance off. It was necessary to retreat yet again, to reorganize the troops, and, most of all, to shift to a strategy of protracted war. Once more a base area was needed, an inaccessible one like that in Jinggang, only much larger. There was no possibility of feeding themselves in a small territory.
Mao had long understood the need to establish such a base, but many of the field commanders did not support him. Their creed was that of the free-roaming bandit who adheres to a strategy of flying guerrilla raids. Their simple-minded military science consisted of attacking, looting, and burning everything and then going off to a new region. Lin Biao was one such commander. Mao lauded him as a brilliant officer but criticized him all the time for his unwillingness to waste time on building a secure soviet base.53 “[Y]ou seem to think that …… to undertake the arduous work of establishing political power would be to labor in vain,” Mao wrote to him.
Instead, you want to extend our political influence through the easier method of roving guerrilla actions and wait until the masses throughout the country have been won over, or more or less won over, before launching a nationwide insurrection which, with the participation of the Red Army, would become a great nationwide revolution. Your theory that we must first win over the masses everywhere on a nationwide scale, and then establish political power, is not, in my opinion, applicable to the Chinese revolution.
No, Mao asserted, only a policy that envisions the systematic creation of organs of soviet power in various parts of the country is correct in semi-colonial China, for which “imperialism is contending in its final stages.”54 Only then could a single spark ignite a prairie fire.
16. A SINGLE SPARK CAN START A PRAIRIE FIRE
1 See “Heben Dazuo wei cehua ‘Huanggutun shijian' zhi Jigu Lianjie deng han liangjian (1928 nian 4 yue)” (Two Messages from Komoto Daisaku to Isogai Rensuke Planning to Create the Huanggutun Incident [April 1928]),” Minguo dang'an (Republican Archives), no. 3 (1998): 3–5; Heben Dazuo (Komoto Daisaku) et al., Wo shasila Zhang Zuolin (I Killed Zhang Zuolin) (Changchun: Jilin wenshi chubanshe, 1986). A few years ago some Russian authors claimed that Zhang Zuolin indeed was killed by Stalin's secret agents, but their arguments seem unconvincing. See Dmitrii Prokhorov, “ ‘Liternoe delo' marshala Zhang Zuolinya” (The “Lettered File” of Marshal Zhang Zuolin), Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie (Independent military review), no. 21 (2003): 5.
2 See Grigoriev, Kommunisticheskaia partiia Kitaia v nachal'nyi period sovetskogo dvizheniia (The Communist Party of China in the Initial Soviet Movement Period), 107, 121.
3 Stenograficheskii otchet VI s”ezda Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia (Stenographic Record of the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of China), book 2 (Moscow: Institute of Chinese Studies Press, 1930), 80–81.
4 Ibid., book 1, 98.
5 Ibid., 13.
6 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 114, 151.
7 Ibid., 106, 115.
8 Stenograficheskii otchet VI s”ezda Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia (Stenographic Record of the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of China), book 1, 5–6, 8–10.
9 Peng, Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 274–76; Jinggangshan douzheng dashi jieshao (Survey of Main Events in the Struggle in the Jinggang Mountains) (Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 1985), 187–91.
10 See Léonard Lévesque, Hakka Beliefs and Customs, trans. J. Maynard Murphy (Taichung: Kuang Chi Press, 1969), 70.
11 Snow, Red Star Over China, 166.
12 See, for example, Liao, Zhongguo gongchandang lishi da cidian (Great Dictionary of the History of the Chinese Communist Party), 118, 405.
13 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 351.
14 Stenograficheskii otchet VI s”ezda Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia (Stenographic Record of the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of China), book 5, 12, 13.
15 Ibid., book 2, 151; book 4, 183; Zhou Enlai, Selected Works of Zhou Enlai, vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981), 195–96.
16 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 139.
17 Ibid., 173–74.
18 See Ma, Hongse diyi jiazu (The First Red Family), 54; Short, Mao, 254; Jiefang ribao (Liberation daily), March 7, 2005; Wen Fu and Zhang Haishen, Mao Zedong yu He Zizhen (Mao Zedong and He Zizhen) (Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 2004).
19 See Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 150.
20 See Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party, 471–72.
21 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 155–56.
22 Pavel Mif, ed., Strategiia i taktika Kominterna v natsional'no-kolonial'noi revoliutsii na primere Kitaia (The Comintern's Strategy and Tactics in National-Colonial Revolution, for Example, China) (Moscow: IWEIP Press, 1934), 236–44.
23 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 256, 257, 504.
24 Quoted from Mao, Mao Zedong wenji (Works of Mao Zedong), vol. 1, 206.
25 See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 278.
26 Lichnoe delo Liu Tsilana (Anguna) (Personal File of Liu Jilang [Angong]), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 1656; Liao, Mao Zedong baike quanshu (Encyclopedia of Mao Zedong), vol. 3 (Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe, 2003), 1401; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 274–77.
27 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 419, 420, 421.
28 Ibid., 188.
29 See Chen, “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), 176–93.
30 A. Ivin, Sovietskii Kitai (Soviet China) (Moscow: “Molodaia gvardiia,” 1931), 43–44.
31 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 285.
32 Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 169.
33 Mao Zedong, “Da Li Shuyi” (A Reply to Li Shuyi), in Mao, Mao Zedong shici duilian jizhu (Collection of Mao Zedong's Poems), 96.
34 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 192.
35 Ibid., 194.
36 Ibid., 195–230.
37 See, for example, Huang Ping, Wangshi huiyilu (Reminiscences of the Past) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1981).
38 Wang Fanxi, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary, trans. Gregor Benton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 109.
39 See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 457.
40 Ibid., 1048, 1075.
41 See Yang Kuisong, Zouxiang polie: Mao Zedong yu Mosike enen yuanyuan (Heading for a Split: Concord and Discord in Relations Between Mao Zedong and Moscow) (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1999), 189.
42 Pravda (Truth), December 29, 1929.
43 See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 482–88; Grigoriev, Kommunisticheskaia partiia Kitaia v nachal'nyi period sovetskogo dvizheniia (The Communist Party of China in the Initial Soviet Movement Period), 287–88.
44 See Hsiao Tso-liang, Power Relations within the Chinese Communist Party, 1930–1934, vol. 2 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 26–29.
45 See Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 157–58.
46 Ibid., 261.
47 Ibid., 240, 245, 246.
48 Quoted from Grigoriev, Kommunisticheskaia partiia Kitaia v nachal'nyi period sovetskogo dvizheniia (The Communist Party of China in the Initial Soviet Movement Period), 308, 309.
49 Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party, 429.
50 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 455–502, 508–23, 529–32; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 310–16.
51 See Grigoriev, Kommunisticheskaia partiia Kitaia v nachal'nyi period sovetskogo dvizheniia (The Communist Party of China in the Initial Soviet Movement Period), 338.
52 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 459.
53 Ibid., 234–36; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 275.
54 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 235.
n27 The Guomindang government followed the example of the first ruler of the Ming dynasty, which established its capital at Nanjing (Southern capital) and renamed the former capital Beiping (Northern peace).
n28 Eight persons made up this delegation. Three of them (Qu Qiubai, Zhang Guotao, and Huang Ping) were considered representatives of the CCP to the ECCI, two others (Lu Dingyi and Liu Mingfu) representatives of the Chinese Communist Youth League to the Youth Comintern, and another two (Deng Zhongxia and Yu Fei) representatives of the ACFTU to the Profintern, the international trade union organization. This was the first time such a delegation had been formed. Prior to this, the CCP had been represented in Moscow by unaffiliated individuals.
n29 Nevertheless, he and Zhu De, who likewise did not take part in the conference, were elected in absentia as honorary chairmen.
n30 Zhu became the commander of the First Front Army, Peng his deputy commander. Mao served as general political commissar.