21 THE FLIRTATIOUS PHILOSOPHER
The move to Yan'an brought major changes to Mao Zedong's daily life. He could now enjoy the comforts of real city life. The new “red” capital was nothing like Baoan, a dusty and desolate hamlet where most of the buildings lay in ruins. Yan'an was a very lively place. “Farmers and small vendors sold meat, eggs, vegetables, and other edibles in the open-air market,” Otto Braun recalled. “The small shops and restaurants, even some very respectable establishments, remained open to business. In short, Yenan [Yan'an] reflected nothing less than peace and normalcy. We watched what to us was unaccustomed civilian activity.”1
Located in a long mountain valley, on the south bank of the wide but shallow and rocky Yan River, the city was surrounded by loess hills. Massive fortress walls ran along almost its entire circumference and from these walls jagged rectangular towers thrust upward into the sky. They housed the city gates: northern, southern, and two eastern gates (large and small). There were no gates on the west or southwest sides. There the fortress wall ran along the ridge of the hills, securing the city from any unwanted guests.
The city was an ensemble of narrow and lively streets, long blocks of houses with curved tile roofs, luxurious estates, and private homes that belonged to members of the local elite, but which had been abandoned by their owners. Soaring into the sky above everything else was a graceful nine-story pagoda located on one of the surrounding heights. Yan'an (literally “Long peace”), it seemed, held the promise of a long-awaited respite for Mao and his comrades. Peace with the Guomindang was gradually becoming a reality.
More than three thousand people lived in the town, but there were more than enough empty dwellings so that most of the party leadership were able to find satisfactory accommodations. Mao and He Zizhen, along with other members of the Central Committee and their wives, settled into the western part of town, at the foot of Fenghuangshan (Mount Phoenix), a prestigious neighborhood of wealthy merchants and landowners who, naturally, had fled at the first rumors of the approach of the CCP army. Mao and his wife occupied the home of a well-to-do merchant. The light and spacious rooms were remarkably clean. The yellow loess hills that stretched in humpbacked waves beyond the horizon were clearly visible. Next to one of the windows in a room that served as a combined living room and bedroom stood a large wooden bed and beside another a traditional kang heated by smoke from the hearth. A table, some chairs, bookshelves, and an enormous wooden bathtub completed the furnishings. All that was lacking was sufficient cabinets for papers, but Mao improvised with several empty oil drums that his bodyguards brought in for him. (The barrels turned out be from the Standard Oil Company, adding an American touch to the Chinese décor.)2 Luo Fu, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, and Peng Dehuai settled into the neighboring houses.
Not far from town, numerous caves were cut into the steep slopes of the loess mountains along both sides of the river. They stretched in long rows north out of the city, and from a great distance they looked like swallows' nests or bats' caves.3 Most of the officers and soldiers of the Red Army lived there. In addition, several high-ranking leaders of the CCP preferred a spartan existence in the caves to the relative luxury that Mao, Zhou, and others had chosen. Among them was Zhang Guotao, who increasingly sensed the ill will of Mao and his colleagues toward him.
The extreme left-wing American journalist Agnes Smedley, a masculine-looking suffragette of forty-five who despised bourgeois morality and worshipped Stalin, arrived in Yan'an in late January or early February 1937 and was also living in one of the caves. She was not formally a member of any communist party, but prior to her arrival in northern Shaanxi she had maintained secret connections with the Comintern and the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA). In the early 1930s she played the role of an unofficial representative of the ECCI in China and served as a channel through which Comintern agents occasionally passed money and directives to the Chinese communists. Under the alias of Anna she was also enmeshed in the Soviet spy ring in Shanghai involving the Soviet military intelligence agent Richard Sorge, then living under the alias of Johnson. In 1930, Smedley became one of his many lovers, referring to him as this “handsome Hercules” in a letter to a woman friend. Soon after her arrival in Yan'an, Smedley formally applied for admission to the Chinese Communist Party, but she was politely rejected. This came as a blow, although she accepted the arguments of her Chinese friends who explained that it would be better for the talented journalist to remain formally outside the CCP so she could be of greater use to the communist movement.4
In the cave next to Smedley lived her interpreter, Wu Guangwei, an attractive stage actress who had also just recently come to Yan'an. Agnes called her Lily and this name suited her perfectly. With a face like the full moon and elegant as a flower floating on a lake, the twenty-six-year-old Lily was as different from Smedley as she was from all the other inhabitants of Yan'an. Alone among all the women in Yan'an, she used cosmetics, large quantities of which she had brought from Xi'an. She twisted her long black hair, which cascaded down her shoulders in luxuriant strands, and she took meticulous care of her skin and her nails. Not surprisingly, many men, including married ones, began to take notice of her.
Mao, too, would succumb to her charms. At first, his relations with Lily were innocent. He would occasionally call on her and her neighbor, to chat, play cards, drink coffee and sometimes sip rice wine, and munch on soda crackers, which Smedley, who suffered from ulcers, always tried to keep in stock. Several times he stayed on for dinner. By all appearances he simply valued her as a talented actress who was making a noticeable contribution to the revolutionary struggle. At the time Lily was starring on the Yan'an stage in the role of Nilovna in a theatrical adaptation of Maxim Gorky's Mother.
As time passed, however, rumors began floating around town. Women, most of them married, were particularly upset. As active party members, they, along with their husbands, had experienced the difficult trials of civil war, the Long March, the Guomindang blockade, hunger, bombardment, and separation from their children. For the most part they considered themselves revolutionary moralists. “Charm” and “femininity” were not in their vocabulary. Colorful clothing, cosmetics, and styled hair evoked their contempt. They looked upon casual conversation with unfamiliar men as akin to adultery. They related to men, including their own husbands, as comrades in the struggle; they dressed like them, cut their hair short, and behaved with extreme modesty and independence—all in all it amounted to a strict guerrilla-style puritanism.
The women of Yan'an also didn't have much time for Agnes Smedley, and not only because she had befriended Lily. Smedley's personal style was not that different from the other women: she never used cosmetics, dressed simply in masculine style, was unpretentious, and passionately loved the Communist Party. But she was rather crude, self-assured, and much too independent. She believed in free “revolutionary” love, rejected marriage, declaring it a means of enslaving women, and campaigned for birth control. (Smedley had had to stop a campaign for douching that she had initiated among local peasant women. The women in Yan'an drank the lemon-scented liquid instead of using it for its intended purpose.) At public meetings, Smedley was excessively outspoken and spent hours on end in her cave interviewing men. Zhu De's wife, the willful and energetic Kang Keqing, particularly despised her, and for good reason. Scarcely had she arrived in Yan'an when Smedley began to work on a biography of Zhu, with whom she had fallen in love. She did not even try to conceal her feelings to Zhu, her “best friend on earth.”
Kang Keqing and He Zizhen organized against Smedley and Lily, and soon all of the revolutionary women in Yan'an joined in. Agnes and Lily took little notice, continuing their tête-à-têtes with Zhu and Mao respectively. Two other women joined their dangerous game, the well-known communist writer Ding Ling, also a thoroughly emancipated woman; and, upon occasion, Helen Foster Snow, Edgar Snow's wife, who was known as Peg or Peggy among her circle of friends. (Her nom de plume was Nym Wales.) Helen, like her husband an American journalist, had come to Yan'an at the end of April. She was as enchanting as any Hollywood beauty, but rather modest. Still, she showed up at Smedley's soirées because she saw nothing wrong with them.
Mao's and Zhu's meetings with Lily, Smedley, Ding Ling, and Peggy Snow were not always innocent. Sometimes, in Mao's presence, the women would lightheartedly discuss which of the local men they considered the most handsome (Smedley and Snow could speak a little Chinese). Laughingly, they would reject this one as too fat, that one as too thin, another one as too small. They agreed that the most attractive were Lin Biao, a “classical Adonis,” and Xu Haidong, a military cadre whose muscular figure captivated them. They also considered Mao handsome, comparing him to Lincoln. At this moment, they would usually spread their hands apart and say, “These are good men, but alas, we cannot compete with their wives!” Smedley would joke, “If you, the leaders of the CCP, cannot free yourselves from under the heel of women, how can you possibly liberate China?”
Apparently tired of sharing his bed with his wife, Mao was barely able to restrain himself. His rendezvous with the women became more frequent. Almost every evening Mao went to see them, read aloud lyrical verses that he had again begun to compose, and conversed with Smedley about romantic love. (Usually it was Lily who brought them together.) Soon he and Smedley conceived the idea of organizing a dance school. They got hold of an old gramophone and several foxtrot records, and they arranged a musical evening at a church that had been abandoned by missionaries who had fled the city. Scandalized by such overt “debauchery,” the wives of the CCP leaders boycotted the dance lessons, but their husbands happily took part. Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, and He Long were especially keen to master the American dances. Even the ascetic Peng Dehuai showed up to observe the goings-on. These lessons continued for several weeks, bringing Mao and Lily even closer together.5
Helen Foster Snow recalled what followed:
On May 31, I was invited to visit the American journalist, Agnes Smedley, in her spacious and comfortable cave on the hillside …… I roasted two potatoes in a small fire outdoors and ordered my bodyguard to buy two tins of pineapple. Lily Wu cooked peppers and eggs. Agnes Smedley ordered cabbage soup and other dishes from the restaurant.
Mao Tse-tung [Mao Zedong] arrived …… He was in high spirits that evening. Mao had a most attractive quality which does not show in photographs, an expressiveness and aliveness …… Agnes looked up at Mao worshipfully, with her large blue eyes—which at times had a fanatical gleam. Lily Wu was also looking at Mao with hero-worship. A bit later, I was stunned to see Lily walk over and sit beside Mao on the bench, putting her hand on his knee (very timidly). Lily announced that she had had too much wine …… Mao also appeared startled, but he would have been something of a cad to push her away rudely, and he was obviously amused. He also announced that he had had too much wine. Lily then ventured to take hold of Mao's hand, which she repeated from time to time during the evening.6
The next day Zizhen learned what had happened. Most likely Mao's bodyguards, who respected Comrade He and detested Lily, who they thought was a bad influence upon Mao, informed Zizhen of Mao's behavior. At the time in China, where social norms were somewhat puritanical, a man and a woman were not supposed to touch each other in public, and yet Lily was openly flirting with a married man, obviously trying to seduce him. Zizhen knew her husband too well to remain unruffled. Mao was complaisant when it came to female caresses. He valued beauty and loved willing women. All this he found in abundance in Lily. Smarting from the insult, Zizhen rushed out of her house and headed straight for the cave section of town.
Night had long since fallen when she arrived at Lily's cave. Zizhen had no doubt she would find her unfaithful husband there. This is how Edgar Snow subsequently described the scene from Smedley's report:
Late one evening after Agnes had already gone to bed …… she heard the sound of footsteps rushing excitedly up the hill. Then the door of Lily's cave was pushed open and a woman's shrill voice broke the silence. “You idiot! How dare you fool me and sneak into the home of this little bourgeois dance hall strumpet.” Smedley leapt out of bed, threw on her coat, and ran next door. There was Mao's wife standing beside the seated Mao beating him with a long-handled flashlight. He was sitting on a stool by the table, still wearing his cotton hat and military coat. He did not try to stop his wife. His guard was standing at attention at the door looking perplexed. Mao's wife, crying in anger, kept hitting him and shouting until she was out of breath. Mao finally stood up. He looked tired and his voice was quietly severe. “Be quiet, Zizhen. There's nothing shameful in the relationship between comrade Wu and myself. We were just talking. You are ruining yourself as a communist and are doing something to be ashamed of. Hurry home before other party members learn of this.”
Suddenly Mao's wife turned on Lily, who was standing with her back against the wall like a terrified kitten before a tiger. She railed at Lily, saying, “Dance-hall bitch! You'd probably take up with any man. You've even fooled the Chairman.” Then she drew close to Lily and while brandishing the flashlight she held in one hand, she scratched Lily's face with the other and pulled her hair. Blood flowing from her head, Lily ran to Agnes and hid behind her. Mao's wife now directed her anger against Agnes.
“Imperialist,” she shouted. “You're the cause of all this. Get back to your own cave.” Then she struck the “foreign devil” with her flashlight. Not one to turn the other cheek, Smedley flattened Mrs. Mao with a single punch. From the floor, Mao's wife, more humiliated than hurt, shrieked, “What kind of husband are you? Are you any kind of man? Are you really a communist? You remain silent while I'm being struck by this imperialist right before your eyes.”
Mao rebuked his wife, saying, “Didn't you strike her even though she had done nothing to you? She has a right to protect herself. You're the one who has shamed us. You're acting like a rich woman in a bad American movie.” Furious but restraining himself, Mao commanded his guard to help his wife up and take her home. But she made a fuss and refused to cooperate, so Mao had to call two more guards, and they finally led Mao's hysterical wife from the room. As they proceeded down the hill, Mao followed in silence, with many surprised faces watching the procession from their caves.7
In just a few hours the whole town and certainly all the cave-dwellers knew what had happened. As Smedley and Edgar Snow reported, Mao quickly convened a meeting of the party leadership at which it was resolved to keep this matter secret, forbidding anyone to speak of what had happened. But it was hardly possible to calm He Zizhen. She demanded that the Central Committee punish Smedley, Lily, and Mao's bodyguard, who had been present during the incident. She also accused a bodyguard of plotting against her; after all, he had seen everything, but had not intervened. For days on end she complained to her friends, the wives of the party leaders, about her unfaithful husband, the “shameless hussy” Wu Guangwei (Lily), and the “imperialist procuress” Smedley. Naturally, they were sympathetic, shaking their heads while examining the black bruise about her right eye that Smedley had inflicted upon her.8
To cool the anger of his wife, Mao was forced to send Lily away. On a rainy morning in July, she rode off with her theatrical troupe and Ding Ling into Shaanxi province. Before her departure, choking back tears, in the courtyard in front of her cave she burned the papers with Mao's poems that he had presented to her on the happier evenings.
Mao also asked Agnes Smedley to leave Yan'an. Rumors were circulating around town that Zizhen had incited her bodyguards to shoot Smedley, and Mao, unable to quell the rumor, tried to get Smedley to leave town. But he was unsuccessful. Soon after their conversation Smedley injured her spine when her horse stumbled, fell down, and badly crushed her. Confined to six weeks on the kang, she was physically unable to leave town until September 10. Three days earlier Peggy Snow had departed the city.9
Unable to forget what had occurred, and despite Mao's efforts to stop her, He Zizhen left him and their young daughter, who was just starting to speak, and moved from Yan'an to Xi'an on the pretext that she was in need of qualified medical assistance. The shrapnel she carried in her from the bomb was bothering her, but removing it was not likely the main reason for her leaving; Mao's romantic escapades were.
Meanwhile, political events in the country and in the world were unfolding at a feverish pace. Throughout the first half of 1937, Stalin assiduously pursued the goal of officially establishing a new united front between the CCP and the Guomindang. This required substantial financial sums, and he was not at all stingy as he sought ways to transmit large sums to the Chinese Communist Party. One link in Stalin's financial supply chain was the widow of Sun Yat-sen, Song Qingling, who became involved in the clandestine financial operations of the Comintern. Under the names of Madame Suzy and Leah, she acted as an intermediary, transmitting large sums of money from the Comintern to the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. She was not an official member of the CCP, but being quite leftist (“almost a communist” in Dimitrov's words),10 she had maintained unofficial ties with the leaders of the Communist Party from the period of the revolution in 1925–27.n42 In November 1936, for example, in response to a letter addressed to her from Mao Zedong in which he referred to the financial difficulties of the CCP, she helped Comintern representatives send US $50,000 via the communist Pan Hannian, one of the leaders of the Central Committee Special Sector who conducted secret intelligence operations in the Guomindang territory.11 A subsequent telegram from the ECCI to the CCP Central Committee, dated November 12, 1936, informed it of the decision to provide the Chinese Communist Party financial aid worth approximately $550,000. The initial part of this sum, $150,000, was transferred to Pan Hannian in Shanghai at the end of November, again via Song Qingling. Then in early March 1937, Moscow promised to increase financial assistance to the CCP in the current year to $1.6 million. All told, the amount of Comintern assistance to the CCP in 1937 approached $2 million.12
On March 10, 1937, Stalin ordered Dimitrov to recall to Moscow Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, a political émigré then living in Sverdlovsk in the Urals where he worked in the local city soviet. He had lived in the Soviet Union under a Russian name, Nikolai Vladimirovich Elizarov, since 1925 when he enrolled at Sun Yat-sen University. He joined the Bolshevik party and even married a Russian woman. Stalin had decided to send him to his father, assuming that Chiang Ching-kuo would have some influence and could convince his father of the need to establish contact with the communists in the interest of repelling Japanese aggression.13
An agreement between the Guomindang and the Communist Party was spurred not by Chiang Ching-kuo's return to China, however, but by the domestic political situation. In the spring of 1937, the Japanese increased their forces just a few miles from Beiping. Concerned about this development, Chiang Kai-shek held face-to-face talks in Hangzhou in late March with CCP representatives Zhou Enlai and Pan Hannian. It was agreed that the CCP would maintain control over its own armed forces, consisting of three divisions numbering just over forty thousand troops. As before, the communists would control the government of the region they occupied, but they would obey orders from Chiang's government in Nanjing.14 In early April, after lengthy consideration, the Politburo of the CCP Central Committee approved this decision.
In exchange for an alliance with the CCP, Chiang wanted to obtain an agreement with the government of the USSR to supply war matériel to the Guomindang. So, on April 3, 1937, Chiang Kai-shek held secret talks in Shanghai with Soviet ambassador Dmitrii Bogomolov.
On May 29, a semi-official delegation from the Guomindang Central Executive Committee visited Yan'an. At a reception in their honor, Mao said, “During the past ten years our parties were not united; now the situation has changed. Now if our parties do not unite, the country will perish.”15 Following a suggestion by the head of the Guomindang delegation, representatives of both groups made a pilgrimage to the grave of Huang Di, the legendary ruler of ancient China, some sixty miles south of Yan'an. Together they cleaned the dust from Huang Di's gravestone as a symbolic gesture that henceforth all the differences between the hostile parties would be ignored. Mao, satisfied with the gesture, said that the visit had given him hope.16
The graveside visit marked the formal end of clashes between CCP and Guomindang forces. On June 8, direct talks between Chiang and Zhou Enlai resumed in the resort town of Lushan, in Jiangxi province. The conversations continued until June 15. An agreement was reached on ending the civil war. Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles were accepted as the basis of cooperation.17
But only after the outbreak of the full-scale Sino-Japanese War on July 7, 1937, was an anti-Japanese united front finally established. The proximate cause of this unification was Japanese bombardment on August 13 of Shanghai, the center of Chiang Kai-shek's and Anglo-American investors' economic interests. Several days later, on August 22, the generalissimo, whom the Japanese had pushed to his limits, concluded a nonaggression treaty with the Soviet Union, which promised to help China in its struggle against the Japanese onslaught.18 At the same time he issued an order to include the Red Army in the table of organization of his National Revolution Army. The Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Army was renamed the Eighth Route Army and consisted of three divisions: the 115th under the command of Lin Biao, the 120th under He Long, and the 129th under Liu Bocheng. Zhu De was appointed commander of the army and Peng Dehuai his deputy. Soon the government of the so-called Special Border Region of the Chinese Republic, as the Northwest Office of the Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic now came to be called, was confirmed. The region included eighteen counties in Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia provinces.19 Chiang Kai-shek confirmed Lin Boqu as its chairman. Lin had already been fulfilling this responsibility in place of Bo Gu, who had been transferred to work as the director of the Organizational Department of the Central Committee of the CCP.20 A month later, on September 22, the Communist Party published a declaration recognizing the leading role of the Guomindang, and on the next day Chiang Kai-shek's statement regarding the establishment of an anti-Japanese united front of all political parties in the country was issued. Stalin had cause to celebrate. Even if only formally, China was now united in struggle against Japan, and this substantially diminished the likelihood of Japanese aggression against the USSR.
There continued to be problems, however, with genuine unification. Neither Chiang Kai-shek nor Mao Zedong trusted the other and neither of them in fact wanted any part of a real united front. Mao agreed to negotiations with Nanjing only under the Stalinist whip. He accepted the policy of the anti-Japanese united front reluctantly, and he acquiesced to it only after he figured out that he could wrest some advantage from it. Some other party leaders shared a different perspective on the united front. Indeed, disagreements within the party were expressed in the varying approaches concerning how to fight Japanese aggression. Mistrusting Chiang Kai-shek and wishing to husband his forces for the coming postwar struggle with the Guomindang for leadership of the democratic revolution, Mao was loath to engage not only in positional or static warfare, in other words, direct confrontation on the battlefield, but generally in any kind of regular or mobile warfare against the Japanese under the leadership of the generalissimo. He did not refuse to assist “friendly regular forces,” but from his perspective the Eighth Route Army could and should engage only in purely guerrilla or mobile-guerrilla military actions (what he called “sparrow” war) in the Japanese rear independent of the Guomindang, taking “the initiative into its own hands.” Such a method of warfare, he believed, would be “freer, livelier, and more effective.” Moreover, he insisted that no more than 75 percent of the main forces of the former Red Army be sent to fight the Japanese, and that the remaining 25 percent be retained in the Special Region to defend against a possible attack by Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang was not to know about this percentage.21 Luo Fu, who again became Mao's main ally, completely shared his views.22
Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu, Zhu De, Zhang Guotao, and Peng Dehuai viewed the problem differently; they believed that guerrilla warfare alone would not suffice to repel the attacks of the Japanese military machine. They favored close cooperation with the forces of the Central Government, and asserted that the Eighth Route Army was capable of engaging in mobile warfare and inflicting significant losses upon Japanese forces.23
An enlarged Politburo meeting convened by Luo Fu and Mao Zedong on August 22, 1937, in a small village near the district town of Luochuan, fifty-five miles south of Yan'an, played an important role in debating the tactics for conducting the war. Twenty-two people took part in the meeting, including important army commanders as well as party leaders. After four days of debates, Mao emerged victorious. A resolution drafted by Luo Fu was adopted pledging that the Eighth Route Army would initially conduct mobile guerrilla warfare in cooperation with other Chinese units in order to win “the trust” of the Nanjing government and the approval of public opinion. In the event of a possible breach in the front by the Japanese, forces under the control of the communists were directed to switch over to independent, guerrilla operations, expanding the scope of their military activities throughout Japan-occupied territory in north China.24
Elated by his victory, Mao soon tried to consolidate it further. At a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee just two days after the Luochuan Conference, he asserted,
While conducting a joint war of resistance [with the Guomindang] against Japan, we need to combine the national and the social revolutions. During the long period of the united front the Guomindang will try to exert systematic and all-around pressure on the communist party and the Red Army, trying to win them over to its side. We must increase our political vigilance. We must make sure that the peasantry and the petit bourgeoisie follow us. There are some elements inside the Guomindang that waver between the GMD and the CCP. This creates favorable conditions for us to win the Guomindang over to our side. The question of who will win over whom will be decided in a struggle between the two parties.
In conclusion, Mao warned that the main danger within the CCP was now that of “right opportunism.”25 (What he meant was “capitulation” to the Guomindang and a retreat from the struggle for a socialist revolution.)
He repeated the basic theses of this speech several days later at a meeting of higher-level party activists in Yan'an, emphasizing the idea that during the course of the war communists, “after establishing a democratic republic of workers, peasants, and bourgeoisie, must prepare for the transition to socialism.” Apparently it was this question rather than the war with Japan that occupied most of his thoughts at this time. “Either we will overcome them [the Guomindang], or they us,” he asserted. He never tired of arguing that the CCP troops must engage only in guerrilla warfare in the mountainous areas, “independently and autonomously,” husbanding their strength and never becoming puppets in the hands of Chiang Kai-shek. The anti-Japanese war would be protracted, he explained, so it was necessary to be patient and wait until the Japanese army lost its strength.26 “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue,” he continued, invoking his favorite formula, which later became a maxim of People's War.
Of course, his words made a lot of sense. Like any other militarist in China, Mao understood that his power and even his very existence wholly depended on the strength of his army. As before, political power grew from the barrel of a gun. In such circumstances, how could he risk subjecting his armed forces to the blows of the Japanese? If he should lose them, Chiang Kai-shek would immediately end the united front and send his troops to crush Mao. It was simply astounding that his opponents did not want to acknowledge the obvious.27 Following the Luochuan Conference, however, the numbers of his opponents diminished considerably. Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, and many others accepted his “guerrilla” ideas.
Meanwhile, the Guomindang army was retreating, suffering one catastrophic loss after another. In July 1937, Japanese troops took Beiping and Tianjin. In November they captured Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, and then Shanghai. The offensive of the Japanese Imperial Army continued, and it seemed that nothing could stop it. The USSR fulfilled its agreement by providing enormous amounts of aid to Chiang Kai-shek, sending advisers, money, and arms. It did all that it could do, just as it had during the Great Revolution of the mid-1920s. But to no avail. Chiang Kai-shek's army retreated. The only thing that Stalin achieved was Chiang's pledge that he would not sign a separate peace with the Japanese. Chiang was prepared to wage a protracted war.
At this point Stalin, who closely followed the dramatic development of events on the Chinese fronts, understood that it was necessary once again to rethink the CCP's tactics. On November 11, 1937, he met with members of the CCP delegation to the ECCI. Wang Ming, Kang Sheng, and Wang Jiaxiang had requested to see him in connection with Wang Ming's and Kang Sheng's departure for their homeland. Wang Jiaxiang, who had come to Moscow to recuperate from a wound he had suffered in April 1933, remained as the acting head of the CCP delegation to the Comintern under the alias of Zhang Li. Dimitrov also took part in the conversation.
Stalin gave detailed instructions to the departing Chinese. The issues of the anti-Japanese united front and the anti-Japanese war were the first order of business. Judging from Dimitrov's diary, Stalin emphasized that the CCP should play a leading role in a common national resistance war, suspend its revolutionary program, and focus on fighting the external enemy—Japan—rather than domestic opponents. He said that because Chinese were united in opposition to Japan, China was in a more favorable position than Russia had been in 1918–20, when the Bolsheviks were engaged in battling foreign interventionists during the Russian civil war. Therefore, he was confident of China's victory. Stalin promised to help China develop war industry: “If China has its own military industry, no one can defeat it.”
He also expressed his thoughts concerning the CCP's military tactics, advising the Chinese communists to avoid frontal attacks inasmuch as the Eighth Route Army lacked artillery. “Its [Eighth Route Army] tactics,” Stalin said, “should be …… harrying the enemy, drawing him into the interior of the country, and striking at the rear. It is necessary to destroy communication, railroads, and bridges [used by] the Japanese army.” He demanded expansion of the CCP army to thirty divisions. In conclusion, Stalin said, “At the Chinese party congress it is counterproductive to engage in theoretical discussions. Leave theoretical problems for a later period, after the end of the war. The odds of speaking about a noncapitalist [i.e., socialist] path of development for China are worse now than they were before. (After all, capitalism is developing in China!)”n4328 In other words, Stalin demanded that the CCP formulate a new political line that excluded a path to socialism until after the war against Japan had been won. The members of the CCP delegation were obliged to report this to their Central Committee and to Mao in person.
On November 14, Wang Ming and his wife, Meng Qingshu (alias Rosa Vladimirovna Osetrova), and Kang Sheng and his wife, Cao Yi'ou (Russian pseudonym Lina), flew from Moscow through Xinjiang and arrived in Yan'an on November 29. Traveling with them from Xinjiang was Chen Yun, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee who had taken part in the Long March and was considered an energetic comrade. He had worked in Xinjiang from April 1937, as the chief representative of the Comintern and of the CCP Central Committee. It was Wang Ming who, with Dimitrov's blessing, had sent Chen Yun there.
Mao Zedong, Luo Fu, and other party leaders warmly welcomed the guests at the airport, and Mao even called Wang Ming “a blessing from the sky,”29 but none of this meant anything. Mao understood that Wang Ming was the craftiest, most vicious, and most merciless rival for power of all those he had thus far encountered.
Proud, egotistical, and power-hungry, Wang was truly Stalin's best pupil. And that is just how he perceived himself. Three days prior to his departure for China, on November 11, 1937, he received direct instructions from Stalin to “take measures” to eradicate “manifestations of Trotskyism in the actions of the CCP leadership.” “Using all available means, intensify the struggle against Trotskyites,” he suggested to Wang. “Trotskyites must be hunted down, shot, destroyed. These are international provocateurs, fascism's most vicious agents.”30 Stalin entrusted Wang to inform him directly about all questions pertaining to the possibility of a “Trotskyite” degeneration of the communist movement in China, and with Stalin's blessing, Wang had no doubts that he could succeed in bringing the entire party under his control.
As soon as he arrived in Yan'an, Wang Ming informed Mao and the leaders of the CCP of Stalin's latest military and political directives. He demanded an immediate special session of the Politburo to discuss the situation. Mao, Luo Fu, and the others were forced to submit. The meeting lasted six days, from December 9 through 14, and took place under Wang's de facto leadership. How could it be otherwise? After all, he was Stalin's envoy!
Wang unequivocally condemned the decisions of the Luochuan Conference, thereby coming out against Mao's policies. If the war was the main concern of the CCP and the “fight for national independence and freedom, and the unity of the country and the people” was the order of the day, then it followed that all work should be subordinated to the united front.31 Wang asserted the need to cooperate as closely as possible with Chiang Kai-shek “to mobilize the strength of the Chinese people,” avoiding any independent actions that might harm the unity of China in the struggle against the Japanese aggressors.32
Wang Ming and Dimitrov were not thinking of the CCP; their main objective was that active resistance to the Japanese in China would, ultimately, help make the Soviet Union more secure. Mao objected and tried to ground his position philosophically. Two months before he moved to Yan'an, he had begun to show a lot of interest in the subject of Bolshevik philosophy, and up till early July 1937, in addition to his beloved poetry, he continued to study it, mainly relying on Chinese translations of two Soviet textbooks and one article published in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. These works were written by officials of the Communist Academy, the Leningrad philosophers Ivan Shirokov and Arnold Aisenberg, as well as the Moscow “leading lights” Mark Borisovich Mitin and Isaak Petrovich Razumovskii.n44 33 All were dyed-in-the-wool Stalinists who, in the words of Mitin, the most distinguished of them, were “guided by one idea: how best to understand each word and each thought of our beloved and wise teacher Comrade Stalin and how to convert them and apply them to the solution of philosophical problems.”34
Two textbooks and one article, albeit a very long one, were hardly enough to turn Mao into a great philosopher. But he was a diligent student. He studied the works attentively and appreciated their categorical logic and politicized and didactic method of expression, typical of Stalinist social science. He was particularly impressed by the law of unity and the struggle of opposites that Soviet philosophers defined as the foundation of materialist dialectics.35 The conclusions that he drew from his reading were entirely in the spirit of Marxism: “The purpose of studying philosophy is not to satisfy one's curiosity but, rather, to change the world.”36 He applied this Marxist formula to the realities of his own country.
In the spring and summer of 1937, Mao even gave a series of lectures on dialectical materialism to the students of the Anti-Japanese Military-Political University, which had opened in Yan'an not long before. Sticking closely to the text and borrowing the basic propositions of the Soviet philosophers entirely without attribution, he again related these to the tasks of the Chinese revolution. “The Chinese proletariat, having assumed at the present time the historical task of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, must make use of dialectical materialism as its mental weapon,” he said.37
His expansive presentations (each lecture lasted for four hours, and the entire course took more than 110 hours) left an enormous impression on his listeners. Mao gained tremendous respect from his students as a man who had grasped the unfathomable, and soon parts of his lectures were published in the university journal.38
Proceeding from his new dialectical propositions, at the December plenum Mao also tried to prove that, “In the united front ‘peace' and ‘war' represent the unity of opposites …… There is a question of who will win over the other, the Guomindang or the communist party. The Guomindang has been politically influenced by the communist party …… Speaking in general terms, [we must conduct] an independent and autonomous guerrilla war in the mountainous area under the comparatively centralized command [of the Guomindang].”39 But Wang Ming's demagogy won the day.40 With support from Kang Sheng, Chen Yun, and several other members of the Politburo, Wang presented himself as the only true interpreter of Moscow's directives, thereby undercutting Mao's position. Later, Mao recalled that after Wang Ming's return, his own “authority didn't extend beyond” his “cave.”41 (After He Zizhen's departure, Mao often lived in his cave home even though he still had his house in Yan'an.)42
Mao noted sarcastically in January 1938, “I am just starting to study military questions, but for the time being I cannot write an article in this domain. It would be somewhat better [for me] to study philosophical works a while longer before writing anything, and there would seem to be no immediate urgency.”43
Of course, this did not mean that Mao was conceding the argument to Wang Ming. Quite the opposite. Throughout the winter of 1937–38 and all of the following spring he prepared his counterattack. One reason Mao could focus on intraparty struggles was that Zizhen was far away. In January 1938, she traveled to the Soviet Union via Gansu and Xinjiang. There, under the pseudonym of Wen Yun, she was enrolled in the Chinese party school of the Central Committee of the International Organization for Aid to Revolutionary Fighters of the USSR, located in Kuchino, a little town outside Moscow. At the same time, she underwent a series of tests at the First Kremlin Polyclinic, but the doctors decided that the shrapnel from her Long March wounds was lodged too deeply in her bones and tissue to extract.44 Moreover, she was expecting another child. She had conceived in August 1937, shortly before her departure from Yan'an. At the time she left town she was unaware she was pregnant.
The baby, a boy named Lyova, was born on April 6, 1938, in the Sechenov Maternity Hospital in Moscow.45 It was Zizhen's sixth child.46 Ten months later he died of pneumonia. Grief-stricken, Zizhen had him buried in a common grave in a cemetery near Moscow.47 All her life she was tormented by the fact that she had been unable to save him. He would prove to be her last child from Mao Zedong.
Mao's thoughts were elsewhere. The struggle for power against Wang Ming fully consumed him. Wang, speaking in Stalin's name, had won the first round, but Mao was determined to subdue this enemy as he had already subdued so many others. Only in late 1937 and early 1938 did he seem to grasp the real meaning of the Stalinist united front policy expressed by the Kremlin dictator on November 11, 1937, in his directives to the CCP leadership. As usual, Stalin's tactics were based upon deception. Stalin wanted the CCP to conduct guerrilla warfare in the Japanese rear and lure the aggressor deep into the interior of China in order to tie down his forces. At the same time the party should propagandize a new path of postwar development for China, namely, a moderate democratic one rather than a radical leftist one that would not be supported by the majority of the population. After all, Stalin plainly asserted that “the odds of speaking” about a socialist path of development for China were “worse” now than ever before. Such a policy would enable the Communist Party to expand its mass base significantly by attracting the many Chinese who opposed any sort of dictatorship, whether communist or Guomindang. Naturally, such a zigzag presupposed that the CCP would ostensibly distance itself from the USSR, which stood for proletarian dictatorship.
Mao correctly understood Stalin and laid out the initial elements of the new CCP theory in early March 1938 in an interview with the English writer and fellow traveler Violet Cressy-Marcks, whom he received in his house in Yan'an. To her question of whether the Chinese Communist Party was modeled on Russian lines, Mao replied, “On Marx-and-Lenin principles, but it is quite separate from Russia …… Sun Yat-sen's principles and Lenin's and Marx's doctrines were for the betterment of the people, and so far in China the two principles coincide.”
“And if in working out the experiment it was found later that they didn't?” probed Cressy-Marcks.
“Later it must be left to the people to say what they want,” Mao replied, for the first time not referring to the development of the democratic revolution into a socialist one.
“Do you think collective farming good?” Cressy-Marcks continued.
“Yes, it would be bound to be good if we had the implements to give the people as in Russia,” Mao explained, obviously suggesting that China had a long way to go before it would reach socialism.48
Then, at the beginning of May, Mao expressed himself on this subject more definitively in a conversation with an official of the American embassy, the Marine officer Evans Carlson, who was visiting Yan'an. This is what Carlson reported to President Franklin Roosevelt:n45
I had two long talks with Mao Tse-tung [Mao Zedong]. He is a dreamer, of course; a genius. And he has an uncanny faculty of piercing through to the heart of a problem. I questioned him especially about the plans of the Chinese Communist Party when the war shall be over. He replied that the class struggle and the agrarian revolution as such would be given up—until the nation has passed through the preparatory stage of democracy. He felt that the state should own the mines, railways and banks, that cooperatives should be established, and that private enterprises should be encouraged. With regard to foreign capital he felt that those nations which are willing to meet China on a basis of equality should be encouraged to invest. He was very friendly and cordial.49
Recalling his conversations with Mao two years later, Carlson added, “[H]e said, ‘Communism is not an immediate goal, for it can be attained only after decades of development. It must be preceded by a strong democracy, followed by a conditioning period of socialism.' ” In this connection Carlson wrote: “There was certainly nothing very radical about these points.”50
Prior to his meeting with Mao, from December 1937 until February 1938, Carlson inspected the troops of the Eighth Route Army that were operating in the Japanese rear in Shanxi province. There he spoke with Zhu De and others close to Mao. He drew just one conclusion from all these meetings: “The Chinese Communist group (so-called) is not communistic in the sense that we are accustomed to use the term …… I would call them a group of Liberal Democrats, perhaps Social-Democrats (but not the Nazi breed). They seek equality of opportunity and honest government …… [I]t is not Communism according to the connotation with which they are familiar.”51 We do not know if Roosevelt believed his former bodyguard, but it is obvious that a new conception of the Chinese revolution was beginning to take final shape. Along with Zhu De and several other CCP leaders who shared his view, Mao began to disseminate it effectively.
Meanwhile, the situation on the battlefronts continued to deteriorate. On December 13, Nanjing, the capital of the country, fell. Over the next several days more than 300,000 people were killed by Japanese soldiers. Twenty thousand women were raped. The Central Government evacuated to Wuhan.
Soon after, on December 17, Wang Ming, whom the Politburo had chosen to head the Changjiang (Yangzi River) Bureau of the Central Committee, flew to Wuhan as well, creating a power base parallel to that in Yan'an. There he advocated a version of the united front that stressed cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang rather than Mao's version, which paid lip service to unity but emphasized the domestic struggle for power.52 Flexible as ever, Zhou Enlai, who had been tasked since 1936 with establishing and strengthening cooperation with the Guomindang, instantly came over to Wang's side, as did Kang Sheng, Zhang Guotao, and Bo Gu. At Yan'an in late February–early March 1938, the members of Wang's faction waged open battle at a meeting of the Politburo against the supporters of Mao Zedong. Neither side, however, was able to best the other. For a time the balance of forces within the party leadership was approximately even.
At this point Mao decided to send one of his closest confidants to Moscow to explain the situation and request instructions. Apparently acting on the rule that “failures add to experience,” he chose Ren Bishi. The eternally gloomy Ren, who was always complaining about his health, felt guilty toward Mao for having taken part in the merciless persecution against him in the early 1930s. On March 5, along with his wife, Chen Congying (also known as Zheng Song), and the sister of the deceased Cai Hesen, Cai Chang (Russian name Rosa Nikolaeva), Ren left for Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, and from there flew to Moscow in mid-March via Xinjiang. Mao Zedong's fight for undivided power in the CCP had entered its final stage.
1 Braun, A Comintern Agent in China 1932–1939, 190.
2 See Cressy-Marcks, Journey into China, 156–59; Nym Wales, My Yenan Notebooks (Madison, CT: n.p., 1961), 135; Helen Foster Snow, My China Years (New York: Morrow, 1984), 231–32.
3 See Evans Fordyce Carlson, Twin Stars of China: A Behind-the-Scenes Story of China's Valiant Struggle for Existence by a U.S. Marine Who Lived and Moved with the People (New York: Hyperion Press, 1940), 162.
4 See “Pis'mo Agnes Smedli I. A. Piatnitskomu ot 1 marta 1935 goda” (Letter from Agnes Smedley to I. A. Piatnitsky, March 1, 1935), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 74, file 287, sheets 1–14; MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley, 146–49, 182–87; Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorievich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 60–70.
5 See Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (New York: Knopf, 1943), 170–71; Nym Wales, My Yenan Notebooks, 62–63; Snow (Wales), Inside Red China, 186–87; Snow (Wales), The Chinese Communists, 250–61; Snow, My China Years, 265, 274–76, 278–79; MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley, 182–89, 192; Wen and Zhang, Mao Zedong yu He Zizhen (Mao Zedong and He Zizhen), 110–20.
6 Snow (Wales), The Chinese Communists, 252.
7 Quoted from MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley, 190.
8 Ibid., 190–91; Wen and Zhang, Mao Zedong yu He Zizhen (Mao Zedong and He Zizhen), 121–22.
9 See Smedley, China Fights Back, 4, 8–10; Snow (Wales), The Chinese Communists, 254; Snow, My China Years, 281–82.
10 Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 40.
11 See Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 4, 1092; Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 4, 356–57.
12 See Yang Kuisong, “Sulian da guimo yuanzhu zhongguo hongjun de yici changshi” (Large-Scale Efforts of Soviet Aid to the Chinese Red Army), in Huang Xiurong, ed., Sulian, gongchanguoji yu zhongguo geming de guanxi xintan (New Research on [the History of] Relations Between the Soviet Union, the Comintern, and the Chinese Revolution) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1995), 324–26.
13 Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 36, 57.
14 Zhou Enlai nianpu (1898–1949) (Chronological Biography of Zhou Enlai [1898–1949]), 366–67.
15 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 677.
16 Quoted from Wales, My Yenan Notebooks, 63.
17 Zhou Enlai nianpu (1898–1949) (Chronological Biography of Zhou Enlai [1898–1949]), 373–74.
18 According to Chang and Halliday, it was Stalin who unleashed the Sino-Japanese War by making use of General Zhang Zhizhong, “a long-term Communist agent in the heart of the Nationalist army” who provoked the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai. General Zhang supposedly had become a mole of the CCP starting in the summer of 1925, when he was teaching at the Whampoa Academy. Chang and Halliday consider this school the seedbed of communism in China inasmuch as it was organized by Russians. Chang and Halliday, Mao, 208–9. On this basis, one should also deem Chiang Kai-shek himself an “agent” of the communist party since he was head of the school.
19 See Vladimirov, Osobyi raion Kitaia 1942–1945 (Special Region of China, 1942–1945), 239–40.
20 See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 654–55; Lin Boqu zhuan (Biography of Lin Boqu) (Beijing: Hongqi chubanshe, 1986), 195; Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949, vol. 6 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), xxxv.
21 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, 11, 12, 14; see also Vladimirov, Osobyi raion Kitaia 1942–1945 (Special Region of China 1942–1945), 519, 600.
22 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, 11, 12; Braun, A Comintern Agent in China 1932–1939, 212.
23 Braun, A Comintern Agent in China 1932–1939, 211–13; Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 2, 533–41; A. V. Pantsov, “Obrazovaniie opornykh baz 8-i Natsional'no-revoliutsionnoi armii v tylu iaponskikh voisk v Severnom Kitae” (Establishment of Eighth Route Army Base Areas in the Japanese Rear in North China), in M. F. Yuriev, ed., Voprosy istorii Kitaia (Problems of Chinese History) (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo MGU, 1981), 39–41.
24 See Wang Shi, ed., Zhongguo gongchandang lishi jianbian (Short History of the CCP) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1959), 178–79.
25 Pang Xianzhi, ed., Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 2 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2002), 17.
26 Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong wenji (Works of Mao Zedong), vol. 2 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1993), 8–10.
27 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, 43, 44–45, 51–52, 57.
28 Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 67–69.
29 Quoted from Short, Mao, 360.
30 Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 67.
31 Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1893–1949) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1893–1949]), 521.
32 Ibid., 522–23.
33 See I. Shirokov and A. Aizenberg, eds., Materialisticheskaia dialektika (Materialist Dialectics) (Moscow, 1932); M. Mitin and I. Razumovskii, eds., Dialekticheskii i istoricheskii materialism v dvukh chastiakh. Uchebnik dlia komvuzov i vuzov (Dialectical and Historical Materialism, in Two Parts. Textbook of Communist Higher Educational Institutions and Higher Educational Institutions) (Moscow: Partiinoe izdatel'stvo, 1932); M. B. Mitin, ed., “Dialekticheskii materialism” (Dialectical Materialism), Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (Large Soviet Encyclopedia), vol. 22 (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1935), 45–235. Mao read translations of the following Chinese texts: Shiluokefu (Shirokov), Ailunbao (Aizenberg), Bianzhengfa weiwulun jiaocheng (Textbook on Dialectical Materialism), trans. Li Da and Lei Zhujian, 3rd ed. (Shanghai: Bigengtang shudian, 1935) and 4th ed. (Shanghai: Bigengtang shudian, 1936); Mitin deng (Mitin et al.), Bianzheng weiwulun yu lishi weiwulun (Dialectical and Historical Materialism), trans. Shen Zhiyuan, vol. 1 ([Changsha], 1935); Mitin, Xin zhexue dagang (Outline of New Philosophy), trans. Ai Siqi and Zheng Yili (Shanghai: Dushu shenhuo chubanshe, 1936).
34 M. B. Mitin, “Predislovie” (Preface), in M. B. Mitin, Boevye voprosy materialisticheskoi dialektiki (Urgent Problems of Materialist Dialectics) (Moscow: Partizdat TsK VKP(b), 1936), 3.
35 See Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, 672, 729, 741; Nick Knight, ed., Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism: Writings on Philosophy (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 17.
36 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, 673.
37 Ibid., 580.
38 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 671–72; Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, 573.
39 Quoted from Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 2, 41.
40 See Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1893–1949) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1893–1949]), 522–26.
41 Quoted from Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, xl.
42 See Cressy-Marcks, Journey into China, 162–63.
43 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, 193.
44 See Lichnoe delo Ven Yun (Personal File of Wen Yun), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 420, n.p.
45 Ibid.
46 See Kong Dongmei, Ting waipo jiang neiguoqude shiqing—Mao Zedong yu He Zizhen (Listening to Grandmother's Stories About Her Past—Mao Zedong and He Zizhen) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2005), 172; Kong, Fankai wo jia laoyingji (Opening the Old Photo Albums of My Family), 67, 106, 189.
47 See Wen and Zhang, Mao Zedong yu He Zizhen (Mao Zedong and He Zizhen), 127.
48 Cressy-Marcks, Journey into China, 165.
49 Evans Fordyce Carlson, Evans F. Carlson on China at War, 1937–1941 (New York: China and US Publications, 1993), 37–38.
50 Carlson, Twin Stars of China, 168, 169.
51 Carlson, Evans F. Carlson on China at War, 1937–1941, 22, 49.
52 See Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, “From a Leninist to a Charismatic Party: The CCP's Changing Leadership, 1937–1945,” in Saich and van de Ven, New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, 343.
n42 In 1926–27 Borodin even referred to Song Qingling as “the only man in the entire left-wing Guomindang.”
n43 Stalin supposed that the Chinese communists would convene their regular Seventh Congress of the CCP in the coming months.
n44 It is interesting that most scholars erroneously identify the editor of one of the philosophical works that influenced Mao as one M. Shirokov, even though it was the rather well-known philosopher and party official Ivan Mikhailovich Shirokov (1899–1984), who, subsequently, in 1945–46, served as the acting head of propaganda for the Leningrad municipal party committee.
n45 In the mid-1930s Captain Carlson served as one of Roosevelt’s bodyguards and became a friend to the president. Before his departure for China in July 1937, he received a letter from the president requesting that he inform him privately (“just between us”) about everything going on in China. For reasons of confidentiality, Carlson had to address his correspondence to the president’s secretary, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand.