17 UNDER THE COMINTERN'S WING

Mao decided to establish the secure base in northwestern Jiangxi. Located in the middle course of the Ganjiang River, this region occupied an advantageous strategic position. It was no farther from there to Nanchang—and in September–October 1930, Mao had not yet refused to attack the provincial capital—than it was from Jinggang, where units subordinate to the First Front Army still operated. The hilly and partially mountainous district was extremely well suited for guerrilla warfare. The densely forested mountains provided sanctuary from which one could emerge at will to strike at opponents who held rich commercial towns and settlements. The center of the region was Ji'an, a commercial city of about fifty thousand, the third largest in Jiangxi, and home to many wealthy people who were attractive targets for plunder. There were many small workshops where weapons could be forged. A powerful soviet area could be established there.

Mao took the town on October 4, 1930, and quickly announced the formation of a Jiangxi Provincial Soviet Government. Finally he could provide his officers and men with everything they needed. After seizing Ji'an, the Red Army extracted eight million Mexican dollars and a lot of gold from the townspeople.¹ It seemed that wonderful prospects opened up before the First Front Army, but Mao and his superiors in the Central Committee soon faced major problems.

In the autumn of 1930, Li Lisan and his colleagues learned that the Comintern was extremely dissatisfied with their adventurist policies. After conversations with Zhou Enlai in Moscow, the ECCI had already begun to suspect that the CCP Central Committee had “gone too far” to the left in interpreting Moscow's directives. Despite its doubts the ECCI did not react at all to the Chinese Politburo's ultraleftist resolution “The New Revolutionary High Tide and an Initial Victory in One or More Provinces.” In principle Moscow did not reject the idea of “seizing one or more industrial and administrative centers.” It merely saw that goal as dependent upon the strengthening of the Red Army.² It was the defeats suffered by the Chinese communists from late July through early September that radically altered the situation. Stalin was not fond of losers and never forgave them. Moreover, just then he was informed of several statements by Li Lisan regarding world revolution that contradicted his own conception about building socialism in one country. In early August, intoxicated with news of the seizure of Changsha, Li Lisan called for the USSR to become directly involved in the revolutionary events in China. His calculation was simple: provoke a world war in which, he was convinced, the Soviet Union would inevitably emerge victorious. Thus the Chinese revolution would serve as the fuse of the “great world revolution.” Stalin also learned that within the narrow circle of the party leadership Li had cursed the Comintern and counterpoised loyalty to Moscow against loyalty to the Chinese revolution, saying that “after the seizure of Hankou we'll be able to sing a different tune to the Comintern.”

Stalin scented Trotskyism and ordered Li Lisan “to come here [i.e., Moscow] immediately.”³ At the end of September 1930, on orders of the ECCI, an enlarged plenum of the CCP Central Committee was held in Shanghai to “correct its mistakes through collective self-criticism.” Qu Qiubai and Zhou Enlai guided the meeting, along with a representative of the Far Eastern Bureau in Shanghai, the German communist Gerhard Eisler. The plenum, however, did not unmask the Li Lisan platform; Li Lisan's authority in the party was so strong that neither Qu nor Zhou nor even Eisler was able to do anything. The plenum listened to Li's “unsparing” self-criticism but retained him as a member of the Politburo, although he was removed from the Politburo Standing Committee, which now consisted of only three persons: Xiang Zhongfa, Qu Qiubai, and Zhou Enlai. In the end the plenum admitted only “partial tactical and organizational errors” in implementing the Comintern's line.⁴

At this point Stalin lost all patience. He immediately dispatched Pavel Mif, whom the Soviet Politburo considered a great China expert, to Shanghai. Mif was a tough and brutal man who had become a China specialist on orders of the party. He was only twenty-nine in 1930, but he had already gained a reputation in the Comintern as well as in the CCP. He had risen rapidly through the ranks and by 1928 had been named rector of the Sun Yat-sen University of the Toilers of China (UTK) in Moscow, which in September 1928 was renamed the Communist University of the Toilers of China (KUTK). Less than a year later, Mif was named head of the Far Eastern section of the ECCI. Mif's rapid ascent went to his head. According to his contemporaries, “the Comintern's chief China specialist” behaved like a haughty, imperious, and self-assured bureaucrat. “He was a very ambitious person …… and adept in the technique of Stalin's strategy,” recalled Zhang Guotao, who branded him “unscrupulous and opportunistic.”⁵

Mif arrived in Shanghai in October 1930 under the guise of a German commercial traveler named Petershevskii. (He traveled via Germany, where in the interest of security he underwent plastic surgery.) He immediately assumed the leadership of the Far Eastern Bureau. Flagrantly intervening in the internal affairs of the CCP, he essentially renounced the decisions of the September plenum and in the absence of Li Lisan, who had gone to Moscow “to study,” he made active preparations to convene a new party forum. His task was facilitated by receipt on November 16 of a new anti–Li Lisan document, “Letter of the ECCI on Li Lisanism,” in which the political line of Li was condemned as “anti-Marxist,” “anti-Leninist,” “opportunistic,” and “in essence” Trotskyist. In contemporary communist parlance that sounded like a verdict. The Central Committee of the CCP was crushed. Mif could do with it whatever he willed.

Convinced that the “salvation” of the party was only possible by means of renewing its leadership, Mif convened a new enlarged plenum in Shanghai in early January 1931. On his own authority he added his former student Chen Shaoyu, who had previously not even been in the Central Committee, to the Politburo. Shen Zemin, another graduate of KUTK, was co-opted into the reconfigured Central Committee as an alternate member. To support these decisions, Mif invited a gaggle of his former Moscow students to the plenum. These young people, none of whom were members of the Central Committee, accounted for one-third of the participants in the forum. In addition to Chen Shaoyu and Shen Zemin they included among others Bo Gu (real name Qin Bangxian), Wang Jiaxiang, and Chen Yuandao.⁶ All of them would soon play an important role both in the CCP and in the life of Mao Zedong.

To the Standing Committee Mif added in absentia Zhang Guotao, who had long since opposed the Li Lisan line. Qu Qiubai was excluded from this highest party organ because he had stained his reputation by his “appeasement” of Li Lisan at the September plenum. Qu was also removed from the Politburo, as was Li himself, but both remained members of the Central Committee. Several days after the plenum, Mif, flouting all norms, placed Chen Shaoyu on the Standing Committee. Also, in March 1931, the leading organs of the Chinese Communist Youth League were reorganized at his insistence. Bo Gu became the secretary of the Central Committee of the youth league.

Mif's “revolution” produced far from favorable results for the CCP. The persons he trusted the most, Chen Shaoyu and Bo Gu, were constrained by their Moscow past, particularly the struggle against Trotskyism in the USSR, in which they had all actively participated. Most prominent among them was the broad-browed and stocky Chen Shaoyu, who like Mif was energetic, willful, and uncompromising. Gifted with a flair for foreign languages, Chen learned Russian tolerably just a few months after enrolling in UTK in late November 1925. This became his trump card. While other students were struggling with the Cyrillic alphabet, Chen gained favor with the teachers at the university who did not know Chinese. Despite his youth (he had been born in 1904) and his short time in the party (he joined the youth league in September 1925, and became a party member in 1926), Chen became the assistant to and interpreter for Mif, who was teaching a course on Leninism at the university. In September 1926, Mif nominated him for the post of chairman of the student commune and toward the end of that same year involved him in the struggle against Trotskyism.⁷ Ultimately, with Mif's help, Chen and his confederates succeeded in bringing the students at UTK under their sway.

In 1929 Chen went to China. He and his wife, Meng Qingshu, settled in Shanghai, where he got some low-level assignment, but then suddenly his luck turned. Mif, newly arrived in China, decided to rely upon Chen and other graduates of KUTK. The veteran party cadres were quite dissatisfied, but most kept their mouths shut. Those few who voiced their discontent were soon disciplined or even expelled from the party. The result was that the Comintern's power over the CCP peaked in 1931. “After Li Lisan's struggle against the Comintern and the condemnation of Li Lisan's anti-Comintern line,” Zhou Enlai recalled, “the Chinese communists considered every word of the ECCI emissaries as absolutely authoritative.”⁸

News of the September plenum reached Mao only in early December 1930. He learned about what had taken place at the new January plenum two weeks after it wrapped up, and not until March 1931 did he learn that “Comrade Li” was being subjected to a humiliating course of “study” in Moscow. Mao had his own take on all these events. He had never liked Li Lisan and had no reason to feel sorry for him. Mao remembered all the accusations that this “king for a day” had hurled at him over the past months. Nor had he forgotten Li's demand that he leave his army and come to Shanghai. Especially fresh in mind was the latest letter that Li had written him, dated June 15, 1930, in which Li, intoxicated with unlimited power, had indulged in such rude expressions that Mao naturally took offense. Li had accused Mao, one of the oldest members of the party, of possessing a “peasant mentality,” failing to understand the changing political situation, and being unable to follow the directives of the Central Committee. Mao was also heartened by the news that he himself had been made a candidate member of the Politburo at the September plenum and that he had been reelected to that position at the new, January plenum. He was pleased that Zhu De, who was now devoted to him, had been co-opted into the Central Committee, albeit as a candidate member.

But was Mao aware that the decisions of the plenums regarding him had been taken in response to pressure from Moscow? Did he understand that Stalin was beginning to look him over seriously as a possible future leader of the party? Probably not, but he might have guessed at it. At this time Moscow was beginning to give active support to Mao's advancement. Starting in the late 1920s, Stalin's Comintern began to support Mao and even periodically to rise to his defense when one or another CCP leader criticized the obstinate Hunanese. In its reports to the center, the Far Eastern Bureau highly praised the Zhu-Mao army as “the best” in all respects.⁹ Reading this information and observing the growth of the Soviet areas, Stalin concluded in July 1930 that under Chinese conditions “the creation of a battle worthy and politically mature Red Army …… is the first order of business the achievement of which will likely guarantee the powerful development of the revolution.”¹⁰ Precisely for that reason he increasingly fastened his attention on Mao. In the USSR there even began a campaign to glorify him, for the time along with Zhu De. This is what the Soviet press wrote about these “two heroes” at the time. These are “two communists, two guerrilla leaders whose names alone make thousands of distinguished Chinese turn pale from anger, indignation, and most frequently from panicky fear. They are also well-known outside of China.”¹¹

In the summer of 1930 it was Moscow in the form of the Far Eastern Bureau of the ECCI in Shanghai that supported the decision of the Politburo of the CCP to appoint Mao as political commissar of the First Army Group, the most powerful one, and then as general political commissar of the First Front Army. Subsequently, in mid-October, Moscow actively supported Mao's co-optation into the Central Committee Bureau for the Soviet areas, a new party structure that was intended to centralize all party work in rural districts under the control of the CCP.¹² Next, Moscow suggested that Mao be appointed either as chair or as a member of the Central Revolutionary Military Council (CRMC), a kind of provisional government of all of the Soviet areas.ⁿ³¹

This is what the Far Eastern Bureau of the ECCI wrote to the CCP Politburo on November 10, 1930:

The command of our Red Army (Mao Zedong, Peng Dehuai) had no connection with the government. The government is one thing, the army is another …… Needless to say, such a situation is unsuitable. We need to arrange things so that Mao Zedong has responsibility not only for the condition and operations of the army, but also participates in the government and has partial responsibility for the work of the latter. He must be appointed a member of the government (chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council). There is no need to discuss the advantages of such an arrangement; it is obvious.¹³

At first, until the arrival in Jiangxi of Zhou Enlai, who had been appointed secretary of the Central Committee Bureau for the Soviet areas, and Xiang Ying, another important party leader, Mao, on Moscow's initiative, was even entrusted with leadership of this organ. Naturally, he was gratified by such support and approved the decisions of the plenums.

On the other hand, as one of the founders of the party, Mao must have been hostile to Mif's “clever puppies,” who had advanced into the leadership while bypassing all the rules. He generally despised the overly educated graduates of the Soviet international schools. The dogmatic style of the insolent Muscovite students contrasted sharply with his own methods, based in the first instance on painstaking study of conditions in the locale where he was working. “Seek truth from facts,” he would write later, at the end of 1943, in effect summing up his entire rural research in the 1920s and 1930s. However, Mao always adjusted his conclusions to fit his radical views. The result was that it was not practice that served as the criterion of truth but rather leftist ideas that were the criterion of reality.

In 1930 Mao conducted seven field studies in villages in southern and western Jiangxi. The results, of course, were identical. The enemies of the revolution were not only the landlords, but also the well-to-do peasants, whom he categorized as those with an “excess of money and land.” He acknowledged that unlike the landlords, these peasants got by on their own; they did not force anyone to work for them, they did not rent out land, they got up early and went to bed late, working their small plots by the sweat of their brows. In general, they were very hardworking people. But this was precisely what was wrong with them. Mao believed that the industriousness of these “well-to-do peasants” resulted in their producing more than they needed for their own sustenance. Therefore, they sold surplus grain on the market or loaned it to their poor neighbors. In other words, they stood out from the mass of their half-starved poor fellow villagers, many of whom consequently hated them. “Most of the poor peasants cry out [slogans like] ‘equal land' and ‘tear up debts' in opposition to this kind of rich peasant,” Mao wrote.

If the Communist Party should stop this activity of the poor peasants, those poor peasants could not but hate the Communist Party. Because of this, we know that not only must we decide to strike down these half-landlord-like rich peasants, but moreover we must equalize the rich owner-peasants' land, cancel loans made by the rich owner-peasants, and divide the rich owner-peasants' grain—there is no doubt that we have to do this. We must do it, and then and only then can we win over the poor peasant masses.¹⁴

His new investigations “confirmed” his oft-repeated thesis about the enormous revolutionary potential of the rural lumpen proletarians, the “outcasts” who “had nothing to wear when it got cold” and who were “very ragged.”¹⁵ In the districts seized by the Red Army all these people, including criminals and beggars, “welcome the revolution,” Mao noted significantly. “They were extremely happy when they heard that the local bullies were to be overthrown and the land redistributed.”¹⁶

Not all communists shared his conclusion. In 1930–31 Mao confronted the most powerful opposition within the party in all of the time he had been dealing with the agrarian question. Members of the local Jiangxi CCP organization sharply disagreed with his pro-lumpen ideas aimed against the working peasantry. The disagreement became so intense that it led to open armed conflict, the first such bloody struggle between hostile factions in CCP history. This was the Futian Incident, named after the town where, in early December 1930, troops of the Jiangxi faction attacked representatives of Mao Zedong who were busy exposing “counterrevolutionary elements.”

The roots of the conflict were first exposed in February 1930, during the joint party conference of the Front Committee of the Fourth Corps, the Special West Jiangxi Committee, and the army committees of the Fifth and Sixth Corps of the Red Army. It was held in the village of Pitou, not far from the major population center of Donggu, in central Jiangxi. It was this conference that on February 7 adopted a land law that established the principle of equal division of the land. “Drawing on the plentiful to make up for the scarce, and drawing on the fat to make up for the lean.” That formula is what the local Jiangxi communists condemned as egalitarianism. They called for the division only of land belonging to the landlords, not to peasants, and even then not according to “the number of mouths” in a family, but according to the number of able-bodied laborers per household.¹⁷ Mao viewed this as an obvious “right-wing deviation” that had to be opposed vehemently. “[T]he local leading organs of the Party at all levels are filled with landlords and rich peasants,” he concluded, “and the Party's policy is completely opportunist.”¹⁸

He was convinced that he was right, especially since several weeks before the conference he had received the anti-kulak ECCI letter on the peasant question that had been sent to the CCP Central Committee in June 1929. The Jiangxi communists were represented at the conference by the Western Jiangxi Special Committee as well as a number of delegates from the Army Committee of the Sixth Corps. This corps itself included local guerrilla units that had been operating in the province prior to the arrival of Mao's troops. Reorganizing them into the Sixth Corps on instructions from the Central Committee, Mao appointed the forty-year-old Hunanese Liu Shiqi as the corps political commissar and as secretary of its Party Committee, and his own younger brother, Mao Zetan, as chief of the Political Department of the corps. He wanted to place the Jiangxi men, whom he did not fully trust, under reliable control. If the majority of peasants and party members had welcomed the troops of the Fourth Corps in “Hakka land,” where southern Jiangxi, western Fujian, and northeast Guangdong came together, the situation was different in the central districts of Jiangxi and the contiguous areas to the west and northwest. There the people considered themselves native Jiangxi people (bendi), and their hostility toward the Hakka in the south had persisted for generations. Men from this environment also dominated the local organizations of the CCP, the guerrilla units, and the Jiangxi branches of the Sandianhui (Three-Dot Society), a secret society supported by the communists. Fifty percent of the troops in the Fourth Corps were Hunanese, and another 20 percent men from southern Jiangxi and western Fujian, so the local people viewed them as outsiders, as Hakka, and did not trust them. This is why the Jiangxi party organization adamantly opposed the radical land law that Mao had proposed.¹⁹

At the conference in Pitou, however, the Jiangxi group was in the minority, the law passed, and Mao began to pursue agrarian revolution in the central and western districts of the province “with fire and sword.” He and Zhu De advanced the slogan “Complete physical extermination of the kulaks.”²⁰ This is what led to the exacerbation of the conflict.

The situation was aggravated by the existence of a secret anticommunist group, the AB Corps (AB tuan), which had been created by local Guomindang members in 1925–26 and was active in the province. (The letters “A” and “B” denoted different levels of membership at the provincial and district levels.) The main goal of the league was to unmask communist heresy, and they did not shy away from dirty methods, including infiltrating provocateurs and spies into CCP organizations to disrupt the communist movement.²¹ Their activity reached its apogee in October–December 1930, just when Chiang Kai-shek was unleashing a powerful offensive against the soviet areas in Jiangxi. This military operation, carried out by troops of the Ninth Corps of the NRA and supplementary units attached to it, with a total force of 100,000, was called the First Bandit Suppression Campaign. Agents of the AB Corps played an important role in it.

Of course, the provocateurs had to be unmasked, but how? It was practically impossible to distinguish friends from enemies. Ferreting out spies required time, but the mortal danger hanging over the Red Army required urgent action. Fear engendered by Chiang Kai-shek's offensive was mounting and relations between the “newcomer” and local communists worsening. Both factions, on the pretext of attacking the AB Corps, were fiercely attacking each other. A wide-scale purge was taking place in the army and the party during which both the innocent and the guilty were seized. Mao played the major role. The Jiangxi communists had no chances against him and his Hakka army. By October 1930, more than a thousand members of the Jiangxi party organization had fallen victim to the terror. One out of every thirty Jiangxi communists was destroyed.²² Mao believed he was not dealing with “sick” comrades in the party whose “illnesses” he was prepared to treat, but rather with Guomindang spies engaged in deep conspiracies. He began to imagine them literally everywhere. “Recently the entire Party in southwest Jiangxi has been showing signs of a very serious crisis,” he reported to the Central Committee in mid-October. “The entire Party leadership is dominated by the rich peasants' line …… A majority of the leading organs at all levels, both internal and external, are leading organs filled with AB Corps members and rich peasants.²³ …… Without a basic transformation of the Party in southwest Jiangxi, this crisis can assuredly not be overcome.”²⁴ The Jiangxi leaders resisted as best they could. “Mao wants to concentrate power in his own hands,” they complained to the Central Committee.²⁵

The Futian Incident flared up under these circumstances. Early on the morning of December 7, 1930, when the First Army Group was fighting numerically superior Guomindang forces, a company of Red Army troops under the command of Li Shaojiu, a Mao loyalist, entered Futian, a town in the rear area located a mile or so from the east bank of the Ganjiang River. Its assignment was to arrest several local communists suspected of ties to the AB Corps, including the head of the Political Department of the Red Army's Twentieth Corps, based in Futian. (This unit had been formed in June 1930, on the basis of the Sixth Corps, and consisted mostly of Jiangxi men.)²⁶ Mao's order had been rather laconic: “Do not kill the important leaders too quickly, but squeeze out of them [the maximum] information …… [Then], from the clues they give, you can go on to unearth other leaders.”²⁷

At first everything went smoothly. The headquarters of the Twentieth Corps was surrounded; the suspects were taken into custody and interrogation begun. Naturally, they all denied any guilt. Then Li Shaojiu ordered that they be tortured. Torture of those in detention happened all the time, and the Red Army was no exception. Mao himself later admitted, “In 1930 beating was widely used during interrogation. I myself witnessed how the accused were beaten up.”²⁸

The evidence extracted from those under arrest exceeded all expectations. It appeared as if many commanders of the Twentieth Corps as well as the entire Jiangxi party committee, the entire provincial committee of the Communist Youth League, and all of the leaders of the provincial soviet government were “members of the AB Corps.” Li, certain he had uncovered a huge plot, immediately ordered the arrest of all the delegates appointed to the Jiangxi party emergency conference, scheduled to begin in Futian on December 8. In all 120 men were confined in bamboo cages. The bacchanalia entered its final stage. An eyewitness recounted:

Li Shaojiu shouted out loudly “You should know that middle peasants always may rebel. Your only course is to confess …… The party, undoubtedly, will give you an opportunity to rectify your errors.” …… Then they were tortured with kerosene, lighted wicks, etc. They were being tortured and interrogated at the same time. No real interrogation could take place like this. It was simply torture. Moreover, they were asked, “Do you confess that you joined the AB Corps, when did you join, what kind of organization is it, what are its tactics, who are its leaders? Speak the whole truth.” If no confession was forthcoming during the interrogation and torture, then the tortures were intensified …… The fingernails of the comrades were smashed, their entire bodies burned …… All one could hear were the constant screams of the tortured …… They were subjected to the most barbarous tortures. The wives of several leaders were arrested, including the wife of Comrade Bai Fan, secretary of the Southwest Jiangxi Party Committee, and others. They were tortured, stripped naked, beaten on the arms with sharp instruments, burned all over their bodies, including their genitals, had their breasts sliced off with penknives, and generally subjected to inhuman tortures the mere recitation of which makes one recoil in horror. All of the arrested, those who had been interrogated as well as those who had not, were held separately, bound hand and foot. They were surrounded by guards holding rifles with fixed bayonets. A voice had scarcely rung out when the soldiers went to work with their bayonets. The arrested were fed with leavings …… Fifty people were taken off to be executed.²⁹

Afterward, Li Shaojiu set off for neighboring Donggu, where the purge continued, but his luck ran out. Among those arrested there was Liu Di, a political cadre of the Twentieth Corps, who somehow managed to convince the sadistic Li Shaojiu that he wasn't guilty. Li, displaying his humanity, released Liu. The moral of the story is do not act contrary to your own character. Having regained his freedom, Liu Di quickly rose in rebellion, arrested Li Shaojiu and his entourage, and attacked Futian on December 12 at the head of a detachment of four hundred men. After the all day and all night battle, Liu Di succeeded in seizing the building where those under arrest were being held and freeing those prisoners who were still alive. More than one hundred guards were killed.

Almost all the officers and men of the Twentieth Corps, more than three thousand in all, supported Liu Di's actions. The emergency conference adopted a resolution to quit Futian for a safer place west of the Ganjiang River. Slogans were put forth: “Down with Mao Zedong who kills, deceives, and oppresses the workers and peasants!” and “Long live Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, and Huang Gonglüe!” (The last was the commander of the Third Corps of the Red Army.) It is striking that they released the bloodthirsty Li Shaojiu and his fellows, evidently figuring that the leadership of the First Front Army would see this as a sign of goodwill.

Several days later the Jiangxi communists informed their party comrades about what had happened and placed the entire blame upon Mao, whom they accused of having “worked out a cunning plan to destroy comrades in the party.” Mao “has become a 100 percent rightⁿ³² opportunist and criminal in the unfolding class struggle,” they asserted. “Mao Zedong strives to achieve his right opportunist goals, his deserter's ideas, and other dirty and shameless objectives …… Mao Zedong has long opposed the Central Committee …… Desiring to preserve his position, he purposed to physically destroy the leading party and youth league cadres in Jiangxi province and establish a party bearing the exclusive stamp of the Mao Zedong group to use it as a weapon in his war struggle against the Central Committee.”³⁰

Mao viewed the events in Donggu and Futian as counterrevolutionary rebellion. Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, and Huang Gonglüe agreed. But the last word belonged to the leaders of the Central Committee and the representatives of the Comintern. Mao, of course, wasted no time in informing them. In January 1931, he sent the party leaders a letter of appeal, which said:

Their [the rebels'] plot is first to draw in Zhu [De], Peng [Dehuai], and Huang [Gonglüe] to overthrow Mao Zedong, first concentrating their forces to overthrow one person, and then overthrowing the others one by one. Comrades, at this crucial juncture of the decisive class struggle, Chiang Kai-shek is shouting loudly “Down with Mao Zedong” from without, and the AB Corps and the Liquidationists are shouting “Down with Mao Zedong” from within the revolutionary ranks. How they echo each other's voices and copy each other's tastes!³¹

A special delegation of pro-Mao communists from southeast Hunan, headed by Liu Shiqi, delivered this message to Shanghai. The documents that the Hunanese communists brought to Shanghai—including Mao's letter of appeal; a manifesto in Mao's defense by Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, and Huang Gonglüe; and their appeal to the Red Army men of the Twentieth Corps—as well as, no small matter, the 50,000–60,000 Mexican dollars (100,000 by one account) that Mao sent via the delegation to the Central Committee, produced the desired effect. Examining the “Futian issue” in mid-February 1931, the Politburo and Pavel Mif unanimously took Mao's side.³² A month later the Far Eastern Bureau of the ECCI and the CCP Politburo adopted resolutions regarding this issue.³³

The person who initially had to deal with the Futian Incident was Xiang Ying, a member of the Politburo who had arrived in the Central Soviet Area in October 1930. He had been dispatched to replace Mao as acting secretary of the Central Committee Bureau for the Soviet areas. (The head of the bureau, Zhou Enlai, remained in Shanghai since Mif and other officials of the Far Eastern Bureau believed that he was “simply indispensable for transforming party work.”)³⁴ Barely acquainting himself with the matter, the new chief declared that what was going on was an unprincipled squabble and that both sides should be punished. “The incident must be settled peacefully,” he insisted.³⁵

Xiang Ying's conclusion, naturally, could not satisfy Mao Zedong. The commanders of the First Front Army were likewise dissatisfied. Xiang, a thirty-two-year-old textile worker, generally had a very hard time asserting his authority among the troops of the First Front. Fortunately for Mao, a new representative of the Central Committee, Politburo member Ren Bishi, and Wang Jiaxiang, a pupil of Mif's, came to the Central Soviet Area in early April 1931, sent by Zhou Enlai “to sort out the situation.”³⁶ These two men, who along with Zhou Enlai, Zhang Guotao, and Shen Zemin were members of the special commission on the Futian Incident, joined the newly organized Standing Committee of the Central Committee Bureau for the Soviet areas, together with Xiang Ying and Mao Zedong. They strongly condemned the “rebels.” Soon the Politburo's decision on the Futian events was received in the Central Soviet Area. Once more Mao was the winner. On April 16 an enlarged conference of the bureau adopted a decision that fully satisfied him.³⁷ Later, in May 1931, Xiang Ying yielded the post of acting secretary of the bureau to Mao, and at the end of June handed over to Mao the chairmanship of the Central Revolutionary Military Council as well.³⁸

The purges continued but were directed now at the organizers of and participants in the “anti-soviet uprising.” By the spring of 1932 “over 90 percent of the cadres in the southwestern Jiangxi area were killed, detained, or stopped work.”³⁹ Liu Di suffered a terrible fate. In April 1931, a military tribunal presided over by Zhu De sentenced him to death and he was decapitated.

Naturally, Li Shaojiu emerged unscathed. In January 1932, the Central Committee Bureau for the Soviet areas, now under the leadership of Zhou Enlai, accused him of “going too far,” and limited itself to administering a party punishment. Li was demoted and placed under party supervision for the next six months. By June of the same year he was again given a responsible command position in the First Front Army, and in October he was reassigned to work in one of the soviet areas in western Fujian. There in the land of the Hakkas he died, “heroically sacrificing himself” in battle against the Guomindang army.⁴⁰

The higher tribunals could not forgive Liu Di and other rebels for splitting the forces of the Red Army at a moment of mortal danger for the soviet area in Jiangxi. Meanwhile, the First Front Army was successful in its battle against Chiang Kai-shek's punitive expedition. The proven tactics of Mao and Zhu—“the enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue”—demonstrated their effectiveness under new conditions. It was an impressive victory. The First Front Army annihilated more than fifteen thousand enemy officers and men and seized many prisoners, ten thousand rifles, and a radio transmitter, which, however, no one knew how to operate. Even one division commander, named Zhang Huizan, fell prisoner. They cut off his head, fastened it to a board, and floated it down the Hengjiang River, a tributary of the Ganjiang. They figured that the head would eventually float down to Nanchang, straight into the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, who was waiting there.⁴¹

Celebrating the victory, Mao poured out his joy in new verses:

Immense woods under frost sky,

all blazing red.

Anger of heaven's soldiers

soared up to heaven.

Fog over Lungkang [Longgang],ⁿ³³a thousand peaks darkened.

All shout with a single voice:

Far up ahead we captured Chang Hui-tsan [Zhang Huizan].

Two hundred thousand troops

break into Kiangsi [Jiangxi] again,

wind and dust rolling half way to heaven.

Millions of workers and peasants aroused,

all struggle with a single heart:

riot of flags around Puchou [Buzhou] Mountain.⁴²

渔家傲·反第一次大“围剿”
毛泽东
万木霜天红烂漫，天兵怒气冲霄汉。
雾满龙冈千嶂暗，齐声唤，前头捉了张辉瓒。
二十万军重入赣，风烟滚滚来天半。
唤起工农千百万，同心干，不周山下红旗乱。

After the first punitive expedition, the troops of the First Front Army succeeded in repelling two additional expeditions organized by Chiang Kai-shek in April–May and July–September 1931. Chiang Kai-shek threw his best forces against the “terrorists.” The second expedition was led by He Yingqin, the minister of defense; the third was led by Chiang himself, all to no avail. News of the victories of the “communist bandits” sowed terror among the peace-loving citizens, but the Nanjing government could do nothing. The protracted war that Mao had advocated had become a reality.

Yet Mao's socioeconomic policies failed among the hostile population of southwest Jiangxi. As in Jinggang, his new attempt to establish relations with the working peasantry turned into another catastrophe. Perhaps the collapse of the platform under Mao and Zhu De several days before they left Jinggang was a portent.

While the battle against the first punitive expedition was still raging and prior to the Futian Incident, Mao had suggested abandoning the Jiangxi base and heading southeast, in the direction of Fujian (Land of the Hakkas). But several commanders in the Third Army Group of Peng Dehuai opposed it. This began to change at the end of January, when the Central Committee recommended that Mao move “slightly to the south.”⁴³ However, until the Futian Incident was resolved in his favor, withdrawal would have signified Mao's capitulation to the “shameless” Jiangxi men. When Mao learned that the Politburo had ruled in his favor, he felt it was possible to move his headquarters toward the border with Fujian. This may have been when the Red Army men composed the following lively song:

The commissar leads us to grain

You may be sure that all will be well

We will still smash the foe

And break through all obstacles.⁴⁴

The Futian Incident demonstrated that Mao could count on victory only in a favorable social environment and, moreover, in a favorable ethnic setting. Hakka country was ideal on both counts. At the end of March 1931, just before Chiang Kai-shek's second punitive expedition, Mao, Zhu De, and Xiang Ying finally shifted to southeast Jiangxi, first basing themselves at a village with the poetic name of Qingtang (Azure pond). Situated in a deep valley, the village occupied an advantageous strategic position, surrounded on all sides by steep mountains covered with dense subtropical forests. During Chiang's second expedition, however, Mao and Zhu had to abandon it and changed their headquarters several times. After the defeat of the third expedition, in late September they settled in Yeping, a few miles north of Ruijin, one of the key trading centers of Hakka country.

Meanwhile, the situation in Shanghai was steadily worsening. After Mif's departure for Moscow in April 1931, a series of heavy blows fell upon the Politburo and the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern. An especially critical situation developed at the end of April with the arrest of Gu Shunzhang, a candidate member of the Politburo who was head of the secret (or special) section of the Central Committee. His department was responsible for organizing the red terror in cities controlled by the Guomindang. Gu, a pupil of the Soviet Union's secret police organs, was directly responsible for the elimination of provocateurs, traitors, and other enemies of the CCP who had been sentenced to death by the Central Committee. His section was also responsible for espionage and for protecting the top party leaders. Gu was arrested on April 24, 1931, in Hankou, where he had gone to prepare an assassination attempt against Chiang Kai-shek. He was recognized by a provocateur in one of the municipal parks, where he was passing himself off as an itinerant juggler named Li Ming. Terrified by a warning shot, this professional killer with the manners of a Shanghai playboy preferred to “lose face.”⁴⁵ He gave the police all the secret addresses of the Politburo and of the Jiangsu and Hubei party committees. From May to July more than three thousand Chinese communists were arrested and many of these were shot. Xiang Zhongfa, general secretary of the Central Committee, was among the victims. Unable to withstand torture, he gave testimony, although this did not save his life. The Guomindang preferred to execute a man of such distinction, broken as he was.

The communists took terrible revenge on Gu Shunzhang. Unable to punish him directly, they massacred almost his entire extended family, including his wife, father-in-law, and mother-in-law. According to one source, seventeen were killed; according to another the figure was thirty. Even the elderly nursemaid who lived with the family was not spared. This monstrously cruel and senseless order was given by Zhou Enlai, who not long before had condemned Mao and his “bandits” for engaging in “purposeless and indecent pogroms and murders.”⁴⁶ After the arrest of Gu Shunzhang, Zhou became the head of a newly formed Special Work Committee of the Central Committee; it amalgamated all of the secret services. The quintet of five killers he dispatched to do the deed spared only the twelve-year-old son of the traitor. They lacked the spirit to kill the child.ⁿ³⁴Gu Shunzhang himself was executed by the Guomindang in December 1934, when they suspected him of playing a double game.

As a consequence of Gu's betrayal, in mid-June the Shanghai municipal police arrested two key officials of the Far Eastern Bureau, both collaborators of the International Liaison Department of the ECCI: Yakov Rudnik and his wife, Tatiana Moiseenko-Velikaiia, who were living in Shanghai under the spousal name of Noulens. They were the conduit through which the Comintern supplied the Central Committee and the Far Eastern Bureau with money, via an account with the bogus Metropolitan Trading Company. Thus their arrest undermined the financial security of the party and the Communist Youth League, whose municipal organizations continued to depend upon Comintern funds. From August 1930 to May 1931, every month the ECCI had provided more than US $25,000 worth of gold dollars to the Central Committee.⁴⁷ (The monthly payment was raised by $5,000 over what it had been in 1929.)

After a while the Comintern found another means of renewing the cash payments. Just in the period from September to December 1931, the Shanghai party organization alone received US $10,300 from Moscow.⁴⁸ Overall until the end of the year direct payments from the ECCI to the Chinese Communist Party totaled more than one million yuan, or about US $280,000.⁴⁹ But the white terror totally paralyzed the Far Eastern Bureau, which in midsummer 1931 curtailed its operations. In mid-September, Moscow's main representative, Ignatii Rylsky, decided to reorganize the leadership of the CCP yet again. By then the majority of Politburo members were outside of Shanghai. Some were imprisoned; others were conducting underground work in the north. From early April Zhang Guotao was in the soviet area at the juncture of Hubei, Henan, and Anhui provinces north of Wuhan, where he headed the local bureau of the Central Committee. Another Politburo member, the former sailor Chen Yu, represented the CCP on the ECCI starting in June 1931 under the pseudonym of Polevoi. Fearing arrest, Chen Shaoyu tried to escape from China to Moscow. Zhou Enlai recalled, “By order of the ECCI representative a Provisional Central Committee was established in Shanghai to take charge of the work.”⁵⁰ Following the establishment of the Provisional Central Committee, at the end of September 1931, Chen Shaoyu and his wife quickly left for Moscow, where this “nestling of Mif” headed the new delegation of the CCP. He assumed a pseudonym under which he became well known in the history of the Chinese Communist Party and the Comintern, namely, Wang Ming. (In the coded correspondence with the CCP Central Committee and with other Communist Parties he sometimes used another pseudonym, Vancouver.) Sometime later, Zhou Enlai also left Shanghai, disguised as a priest, and set out to join Mao in southern Jiangxi, where, ultimately, he headed the Bureau of the Central Committee.⁵¹

While these events unfolded in Shanghai, Mao continued to gather his strength. Having dealt in Stalinist fashion with the “kulak scum” from the Western Jiangxi Special Committee of the CCP and having repelled three punitive expeditions by the Guomindang, he rapidly strengthened his position in the party. The only thing that he needed now was Stalin's blessing, but Stalin had not yet come out decisively in Mao's favor, although he continued to support him. With Machiavellian perspicacity, the master of the Kremlin established a combined leadership of the CCP on the foundation of three groups: homegrown guerrilla cadres (Mao and his supporters), Moscow graduates (Chen Shaoyu/Wang Ming, Bo Gu), and old Comintern cadres (Zhou Enlai, Zhang Guotao, Xiang Ying). None of these groups was given the opportunity to take the measure of the others.

So Mao had to wait, which he did patiently, like a real gambler. He had his own calculation, but unlike Stalin's it was more precise. He not only had to demonstrate that he was “the most loyal student of Comrade Stalin,” but also to push out of the way all his competitors, waiting only for an opportune moment to get rid of them. He was a master of intrigue down to the last detail.

His striving for unlimited dominance consumed him ever more, and his boundless energy pushed him forward. In this daily bloody battle for power he increasingly turned into a victim of his own passion. His struggles against Chiang Kai-shek, the intraparty opposition, class enemies, and “deluded” comrades were killing the last vestiges of human feeling in him. Love, goodness, loyalty, trust were vanishing, dissolving into the strongest emotions that smothered him. The result was that Mao's heart was hardening, and his life turned into the pursuit of a chimera.

His children were under the care of others. How were they faring? What were they feeling? He knew nothing of this. Meanwhile, it was his sons' fate to endure many hardships. After the death of Kaihui, the local underground communists secured the release of his eldest son, the eight-year-old Anying, through bribing his guards. He and his seven-year old brother, Anqing, and three-year old brother, Anlong, then lived with their grandmother in Bancang village, naturally under surveillance. The police hoped to capture Mao via his children, supposing that the father would be concerned about them.

But time passed and neither Mao nor his messengers appeared. Instead, on a Monday evening, right before the Lunar New Year (February 16, 1931), when everyone, including the gendarmes, were preparing for the holiday, a stranger knocked on the door of Grandma Xiang Zhenxi. He carried a letter from Zemin to Li Chongde, the wife of Kaihui's elder brother, who lived in the same house. Mao's brother requested that in the interest of their safety his nephews be brought to him in Shanghai. His wife, the childless Qian Xijun, was very worried about the fate of the children. It was she who persuaded Zemin to write the letter. Li Chongde recalled, “I unwrapped the parcel with a rapidly beating heart under the oil lamp and was astonished to see Mao Zemin's handwriting. He asked me to send Mao Zedong's three sons to Shanghai, giving me date, place and information on how to get in touch with people there.” After consulting her relatives, Li decided to comply. For security reasons the children were given new names, which the older boys had to memorize. Anying was called Yongfu (“Always Happy”), Anqing was called Yongshou (“Always Healthy”), and Anlong was called Yongtai (“Always the Utmost”). Their surname, too, was changed from their father's to their mother's, namely, Yang. Li Chongde then departed with the children for Shanghai, playing the role of their mother. Grandma Xiang Zhenxi accompanied them.

The difficult journey took several days, and when at last the exhausted children arrived at their uncle Zemin's house, they began to cry. They had thought they were being brought to their father, but instead they had to live in a clandestine kindergarten on the territory of the International Settlement. Zhou Enlai had made this decision. This Shanghai shelter, established for the children of CCP officials with funds from the Comintern International Organization for Aid to Revolutionary Fighters, was not exactly an ideal place for children, but there was no other option. At the time about thirty children lived there, including the daughters of Li Lisan and Cai Hesen. One of the governesses was the wife of Li Lisan. But Mao's sons did not want to go there. “I want to be with papa,” sobbed Anying. “I must get revenge for mama!” The children clutched Li Chongde's dress, begging her to take them home. “Their crying was like a knife piercing my heart,” Li recalled. She tried to calm them, but was crying herself as if possessed of a premonition that for her nephews the worst was yet to come.

Soon after arriving at the shelter little Anlong fell ill. He began to suffer from diarrhea and his temperature spiked. He was diagnosed with a case of dysentery and he soon passed away.ⁿ³⁵ Then, because of Gu Shunzhang's betrayal, the kindergarten was closed. Uncle Zemin and Aunt Xijun left town for one of the Soviet areas. The director of the kindergarten, Dong Jianwu (alias Pastor Wang), who was concurrently an official in the Special Work Committee of the Central Committee, took Mao's sons, whom nobody else wanted, into his own home for a time, but soon he too had to leave for Wuhan. The children remained under the guardianship of his ex-wife Huang Huiguang, who knew nothing of their background and paid little attention to them. She had four children of her own.

Anying and Anqing always hoped for news from their father. They sent a letter to him via Uncle Zemin when Zemin was preparing to leave Shanghai, but their father did nothing to save them even though he actually received their letter. At the end of the summer of 1932 they ran away from Auntie Huang. For four years they wandered the dirty streets, scavenging in garbage bins, collecting leftovers and cigarette butts, earning spare change from shopkeepers, and selling newspapers. They suffered beatings and insults. It was not until the spring of 1936 that members of the Shanghai party organization discovered them. Then the mighty Stalin took an interest in their fate. With his agreement, the Central Committee of the CCP arranged their travel to the Soviet Union via Hong Kong, Marseille, and Paris. By an irony of fate, it was the same familiar Pastor Wang who was in charge of these arrangements.⁵²

Meanwhile, Mao devoted himself entirely to party and military work. In the autumn of 1931, when he received the letter from his children, he simply set it aside. There was too much else to do. He had to strengthen the Central Soviet Area, and make preparations for the First All-China Congress of Soviets. This meeting was to be the venue for the founding of the Chinese Soviet Republic, uniting all of the “red” districts in the country. As chairman of the Central Revolutionary Military Council, Mao was directly responsible for convening and overseeing the congress. Yeping had been chosen as its locale. It was there that more than six hundred delegates assembled, all of whom had to be housed, fed, and guarded. Mao's forces had seized this village, which was located very close to the city of Ruijin, deep in the mountains of southeast Jiangxi and close to the border with Fujian, back in the spring of 1929. Control of the local population had passed back and forth between Guomindang and communists during the intervening two and a half years; now Mao was apparently firmly ensconced in these parts. It was he who, by agreement with Moscow, was slated to become the chairman of the Central Executive Committee and the head of the Council of People's Commissars or, in the terminology then current, People's Committee of the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Soviet Republic.⁵³

By November 7, the anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia, all was ready:

Over the Congress hall was hoisted the red flag with the hammer and sickle. Inside workers wired the building with electric wires and connected them with the dynamos captured from Kian [Ji'an] in the year before.

When the time came for the electric lights to be switched on, crowds of peasants gathered about, unbelieving …… The Congress hall became flooded with light from hundreds of glass lamps.

Some of the weaker peasant women fainted on the spot …… After the Congress hall was wired, it was richly decorated with pine boughs, with great banners brought by mass organizations, and with slogans of the Soviets hung on all the big pillars upholding the roof …… There were four entrances to the hall, one on each side of the building. The big main entrance was at the front. Outside, above the main entrance, were draped two big red silk banners embroidered with hammer and sickle, one for the soviets, one for the Communist Party. The entire outside front entrance was a mass of green boughs in which two huge five-pointed stars were embedded. The stars were of solid silver, for there was plenty of silver in the soviet regions.⁵⁴

On Saturday, November 7, at seven in the morning, delegates began to enter the hall to the sound of a volley of rifles and the crackle of firecrackers. “[T]he orchestra on the stage began to play the International.” Dressed in specially tailored suits—Red Army jackets with high collars and blue cotton trousers—the delegates looked very festive. They wore red stars on the left sleeve of their jackets and scarlet silk triangles on the right sleeve with their delegate number embroidered upon it. On the band of their service caps were ribbons inscribed, “First Congress of Chinese Soviets.”

Over a fortnight the delegates adopted the basic constitutional program of the Chinese Soviet Republic, a land law that strengthened the equal division of both movable and real property of landlords and the working peasantry,ⁿ³⁶ a law on labor, and several other documents, and chose a provisional All-China Central Executive Committee. A week later, at the first session of the CEC, according to plan, Mao became the chairman of this highest legislative organ. Zhang Guotao and Xiang Ying were designated his deputies. Mao also headed the Council of People's Commissars, in which the post of people's commissar for foreign affairs—an ambitious position for a country that no one recognized—was held by Mif's student Wang Jiaxiang. The post of people's commissar for military affairs, naturally, went to Zhu De, and the post of people's commissar of education to Qu Qiubai. (Qu, however, was still in Shanghai, burning up with tuberculosis, so in his absence, Mao's old teacher from Changsha, Xu Teli, directed people's education in the Chinese Soviet Republic.) Ruijin was proclaimed the capital of the CSR.

After the arrival of communist troops in this ancient city, the population numbered some sixty thousand. Stretching a mile or so from west to east, it was surrounded by mountains. There were several textile and machine workshops, a large market square where peasants from all points around sold their wares, and also numerous local temples that the communists took over to serve as their offices. Although Ruijin was no Shanghai, it was a suitable city for the seat of government.

It seemed that Mao had finally reached the pinnacle of power, but this was not so. A fierce struggle was just getting under way. Wang Ming's iron boys, Bo Gu most of all, who had become the de facto leader of the Politburo after other CCP leaders had gone away, did not wish to yield the victor's laurels to Mao. The twenty-four-year-old Bo Gu, who had joined the Communist Party just six years earlier, was no less ambitious than his friend Wang Ming. Very thin and tall, he embodied everything that Mao hated in the Moscow parvenus. Only superficially familiar with Chinese realities, Bo Gu, like other of Mif's people who had returned from Moscow, firmly believed in the all-powerful Soviet experience. Looking at his wild hair sticking up and his enormous eyeglasses, like wheels, that concealed his protruding eyes—he suffered from Basedow's disease—and listening to his nervous laugh and quavering voice, one might take him for a first-class grind who was exhausted from his constant studying, if not for his domineering character and coarse dictatorial manners. He worshipped Stalin, and imitating him, smoked a pipe. Like his Kremlin idol, he placed no value whatsoever on human life. Neither that of the “class enemy” nor of his own comrades in the Communist Party. Unable openly to dispute Moscow's policy of supporting Mao, through his supporters Bo Gu did everything he could to weaken the influence of his rival and lower him in the eyes of Stalin. Bo Gu was obsessed by Mao's aura as the great guerrilla leader.

¹ See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 1273.

² Titarenko, Kommunisticheskii Internatsional i kitaiskaa revoliutsiia (The Communist International and the Chinese Revolution), 204, 205.

³ Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 1019.

⁴ Ibid., 1029, 1037; Zhang Qiushi, Qu Qiubai yu gongchan guoji (Qu Qiubai and the Comintern) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 2004), 314–17.

⁵ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 2, 86.

⁶ See Wang, Zhongguo gongchandang zuzhi shi ziliao huibian (Collection of Documents on the History of the CCP Organizations), 145–46.

⁷ Meng Qingshu, “Vospominaniia o Van Mine” (Reminiscences of Wang Ming) (manuscript), 66–67. For more details, see Spichak, Kitaiskii avangard Kremlia (Chinese Vanguard of the Kremlin), 104.

⁸ “Zapis' besedy tt. Chzhou Enlaia, Chzhen Lina [Ren Bishi] i [G. I.] Mordvinova 16 noiabria 1939 goda” (Record of a Conversation between Zhou Enlai, Zheng Ling [Ren Bishi], and [G. I.] Mordvinov, November 16, 1939), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 1, sheet 35.

⁹ See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 817, 1079–80, 1139, 1323.

¹⁰ Titarenko, Kommunisticheskii Internatsional i kitaiskaia revoliutsiia (The Communist International and the Chinese Revolution), 205.

¹¹ A. Ivin, Ocherki partizanskogo dvizheniia v Kitae, 1927–1930 (Sketches of the Guerrilla Movement in China, 1927–1930) (Moscow and Leningrad: GIZ, 1930), 90.

¹² See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 48, 1067.

¹³ Ibid., 1108–9.

¹⁴ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 377–78.

¹⁵ Of course, for tactical reasons Mao might still on occasion renounce the rural lumpens. In June 1930, for example, at a joint conference of the Front Committee of the Fourth Corps and the Special West Jiangxi Committee, trying to shake off the repeated accusation that he adhered to a “lumpen proletarian ideology,” he secured passage of a resolution on the question of “drifters.” It said, “The Red Army and the Red Guard are the important tools of the revolutionary masses in seizing state power and protecting it …… No vagabonds can be allowed to penetrate into these organizations.” See ibid., 453. This thesis, however, was not worth the paper it was written on; it was impossible to implement. In 1930, according to estimates by the Far Eastern Bureau of the ECCI, the Red Army consisted basically of déclassé elements. See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 817.

¹⁶ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 636, 638.

¹⁷ [Liu Shiqi], Sovetskii raion iugo-zapadnoi Tsiansi v 1930 g.: Doklad instruktora TsK kompartii Kitaia ot 7 oktiabria 1930 g. (The Soviet District of Southwest Jiangxi in 1930: Report of a CCP Central Committee Instructor, October 7, 1930), in Mif, Sovety v Kitae (Soviets in China), 237.

¹⁸ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 269.

¹⁹ See [Liu Shiqi], Sovetskii raion iugo-zapadnoi Tsziansi v 1930 g. (The Soviet District of Southwest Jiangxi in 1930), 227–44; Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 1272–74; 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), 192; Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun zuzhi yange he geji lingdao chengyuan minglu (Organizational Evolution and Personnel of the Leading Organs at All Levels of the PLA) (Beijing: Junshi kexue chubanshe, 1987), 35; Erbaugh, “The Secret History of the Hakkas,” 937–38; Stephen C. Averill, “The Origins of the Futian Incident,” in Tony Saich and Hans J. van de Ven, eds., New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 79–115.

²⁰ Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 1349, 1368.

²¹ See Averill, “The Origins of the Futian Incident,” 83–84, 86–92.

²² See Short, Mao, 268.

²³ Several days later Mao asserted that “two-thirds of the personnel of the leading organs of the southwest Jiangxi soviet government and of the technical workers are AB Corps elements.” Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 560. Where he got this figure is a mystery.

²⁴ Ibid., 554.

²⁵ Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 2, sheets 257, 258.

²⁶ See Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun zuzhi yange he geji lingdao chengyuan minglu (Organizational Evolution and Personnel of the Leading Organs at All Levels of the PLA), 38.

²⁷ Quoted from Short, Mao, 273.

²⁸ Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 2, sheet 261.

²⁹ Ibid., 260–61; Titov, Materialy k politicheskoi biografii Mao Tsze-duna (Materials for a Political Biography of Mao Zedong), vol. 1, 310, 311.

³⁰ Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 2, sheets 258, 259, 261; vol. 3, sheets 18, 19; P. P. Vladimirov, Osobyi raion Kitaia, 1942–1945 (Special Region of China, 1942–1945) (Moscow: APN, 1975), 224, 225.

³¹ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, 713.

³² See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 1276–81.

³³ Ibid., 1348–52; Xu Zehao, ed., Wang Jiaxiang nianpu, 1906–1974 (Chronological Biography of Wang Jiaxiang, 1906–1974) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2001), 52; Ren Bishi nianpu, 1904–1950 (Chronological Biography of Ren Bishi, 1904–1950), 165–66; Zhou Enlai nianpu (1898–1949) (Chronological Biography of Zhou Enlai [1898–1949]), rev. ed. (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1998), 212.

³⁴ Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 1067.

³⁵ Titov, Materialy k politicheskoi biografii Mao Tsze-duna (Materials for a Political Biography of Mao Zedong), vol. 1, 329.

³⁶ See “Beseda [G. I.] Mordvinova s t. Chzhou Enlaem 4 marta 1940 g.” (Conversation Between [G. I.] Mordvinov and Comrade Zhou Enlai, March 4, 1940), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 1, sheet 32.

³⁷ See Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party, 530–35.

³⁸ See Wang, Zhongguo gongchandang zuzhi shi ziliao huibian (Collection of Documents on the History of the CCP Organizations), 159, 161.

³⁹ Quoted from Averill, “The Origins of the Futien Incident,” 108.

⁴⁰ Liao, Zhongguo gongchandang lishi da cidian (Great Dictionary of the History of the Chinese Communist Party), 260.

⁴¹ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 330–31; Short, Mao, 257.

⁴² Mao, Poems of Mao Tse-tung, 53. Buzhou (Imperfect) Mountain is a mythical mountain that was leveled by the ancient Chinese hero Gonggong.

⁴³ See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 3, 1147, 1258, 1273.

⁴⁴ Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 163.

⁴⁵ See Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 2, 175.

⁴⁶ Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 2, sheet 256.

⁴⁷ See Frederick S. Litten, “The Noulens Affair,” China Quarterly, no. 138 (1994): 492–512; Frederic Wakeman, Policing Shanghai 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 151–60, 253–54; Nie Rongzhen, Inside the Red Star: The Memoirs of Marshal Nie Rongzhen (Beijing: New World Press, 1983), 97–98, 104–6.

⁴⁸ See M. L. Titarenko et al., eds., VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 4 (Moscow: AO “Buklet,” 2003), 146.

⁴⁹ See Yang, Zouxiang polie (Heading Toward a Split), 189.

⁵⁰ “Zapis' besedy tt. Chzhou Enlaia, Chzhen Lina [Ren Bishi] i [G. I.] Mordvinova 16 noiabria 1939 goda” (Record of Conversation Among Comrades Zhou Enlai, Zheng Ling [Ren Bishi], and [G. I.] Mordvinov, November 16, 1939), 33–34; Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937, 156.

⁵¹ See Zhou Enlai nianpu (1898–1949) (Chronological Biography of Zhou Enlai [1898–1949]), 218.

⁵² See Li Chongde, “Escorting Mao Zedong's Sons to Shanghai,” in Mao Zedong: Biography—Assessment—Reminiscences, 222–26; Zhu Weiyang, “Qian Xijun he Mao Zemin” (Qian Xijun and Mao Zemin), in Mao Zedong de jiashi (Mao Zedong's Family Affairs) (Beijing: Chunqiu chubanshe, 1987), 14–15; “Zhongguo gongchandang chuangbande di yige youzhiyuan” (First Children's Home Organized by the CCP), Xinmin wanbao (The renovation of people evening newspaper), June 13, 2004; “Mao Anying san xiongdi zai Shanghai shide qingkuang” (What Happened to Mao Anying and His Brothers During Their Sojourn in Shanghai), ibid., December 23, 2004; Ma, Hongse diyi jiazu (The First Red Family), 136–37; Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 4, 1052.

⁵³ See Wang, Zhongguo gongchandang zuzhi shi ziliao huibian (Collection of Documents on the History of the CCP Organizations), 163.

⁵⁴ Agnes Smedley, China's Red Army Marches (New York: International, 1934), 314–15.

ⁿ³¹ The decision of the Chinese Politburo to establish the CRMC was adopted on October 17, 1930, the same date as the formation of the Bureau of the Central Committee. At that time, Mao Zedong’s district was called the Central Soviet Area. Until then, beginning in June 1930, a so-called Chinese Revolutionary Military Council had operated in the Soviet districts in Jiangxi; in August it was rechristened the Chinese Worker-Peasant Revolutionary Council. It functioned as the highest organ of military-bureaucratic power in the territories that Mao controlled, and all the local armed forces of the CCP as well as the Jiangxi Soviet government were subordinated to it. From the very beginning Mao served as chairman. However, he did not concern himself with administrative problems; rather he devoted all his attention to political and military questions.

ⁿ³² At the time, it was better to accuse your opponent of a “right” rather than a “left” deviation. It was more of a sure thing.

ⁿ³³ On December 30, 1930, near Longgang village, the decisive battle took place in which the Guomindang punitive forces were defeated and the division commander Zhang was taken captive.

ⁿ³⁴ Many years later one of these subordinates of Zhou gave a simple explanation of the crime. Prior to Gu Shunzhang’s betrayal many meetings of the top party leadership had taken place in his home, and so every one in his household knew the CCP leaders personally. It was impossible to rely upon their keeping silent.

ⁿ³⁵ It is interesting to note that in the mid-1960s in various provinces throughout China there suddenly appeared several dozen “Mao Anlongs.” These pretenders, however, were quickly unmasked by the all-knowing security organs.

ⁿ³⁶ The law did not talk directly about confiscating the land of peasants (other than that of “kulaks”), but that is the only way one can interpret the clause regarding the expropriation not only of dizhu land, but also that of “big private owners” who “engaged in working the land themselves.” Not a single dizhu worked his own land, only peasants did this. The definition of “big,” it will be recalled, could not confuse anyone. For the destitute rural lumpen proletariat anyone with land was a “big” landowner.