22 CONSOLIDATING CONTROL OVER THE CCP

Despite Wang Ming's ambition, Mao was hardly perturbed. The wily Wang knew how to produce an impression by playing on his Moscow connections, but Stalin did not envision him as the leader of the CCP. The propaganda campaign to exalt Mao in the Soviet Union continued. Still, relations between Mao and Stalin were not always smooth, and during the Xi'an Incident they had even become rather tense. Moreover, Wang Ming skillfully presented himself as the Kremlin's man. Thus, when dispatching his emissary to Moscow, Mao naturally wondered how the “great” Stalin would react to the CCP's intraparty problems.

Ren Bishi was engaged in a delicate mission in Moscow. He could not openly oppose Wang Ming, since he was not certain that Mao's understanding of Stalin's tactic was correct, but he needed to secure decisive recognition of Mao as the main leader of the CCP. He began by stepping cautiously. Shortly after his arrival in mid-April, he presented an extensive report on China to the Presidium of the Comintern. He said that after the arrival of “Comrade Wang,” who transmitted the Comintern's instructions, the CCP corrected all its errors and now the Central Committee, represented by Mao, was doing everything right.

He received no reply to his presentation. In mid-May, feeling quite anxious, he delivered a lengthy report to a session of the Presidium of the ECCI in which he increased his praise of Wang Ming and again strived to dissipate any possible doubts of the Comintern leaders regarding Mao Zedong. He conveyed the message that Mao was no less faithful to Moscow than Wang; that he had no problems with the united front; therefore, it was best to make no changes in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Let Mao remain at the helm!¹

The result of his efforts was that the Comintern ultimately adopted the resolution that Mao needed. After Dimitrov consulted with Stalin in mid-June the ECCI declared “its full agreement with the political line of the [Chinese] communist party,” and on this occasion even supported Mao Zedong's policy to pursue guerrilla warfare in the Japanese rear and preserve the complete political and organizational autonomy of the Communist Party in the united front.² It also approved the choice of Mao as general secretary of the Central Committee, in place of Luo Fu. In early July 1938, Dimitrov transmitted this resolution to Wang Jiaxiang, acting head of the CCP delegation to the Comintern, who was intending to return to China. Ren Bishi, who was succeeding Wang Jiaxiang, was present at the conversation.³ Dimitrov said,

You must tell everyone that it is necessary to support Mao Zedong as the leader of the Communist Party of China. He has been tempered in practical struggle. Such persons as Wang Ming should no longer fight for the leadership …… Only by unifying the CCP can a [unified] faith be created. In China the key to national resistance to Japan is the anti-Japanese united front and the key to the united front is the unity of the CCP. The victory of the united front depends upon the unity of the party and the cohesion of [its] leadership.⁴

After returning to China, Wang Jiaxiang reported Moscow's decision at a Politburo meeting on September 14.⁵ Li Weihan, a participant in the meeting, recalled that “[a]t the meeting Wang Jiaxiang conveyed …… Dimitrov's point of view [actually, it was Stalin's point of view, Dimitrov only acted as his mouthpiece] which incontrovertibly indicated that the leader of the Chinese people was Mao Zedong. Dimitrov's words produced an enormous impression upon those present. From that time on our party had a better and clearer understanding of Mao Zedong's leading position; the question of a united party leadership was resolved.”⁶ Mao was pleased. Several years later, in June 1945 at the Seventh Congress of the party, he acknowledged that “[i]f it had not been for the Comintern's instruction it would have been very difficult to solve the problem [of the leadership].”⁷ At this time, supporting Wang Jiaxiang's election to the Central Committee, Mao reminded the delegates that “[u]pon his return from Moscow, he succeeded in perfectly conveying the Comintern's line.”⁸

At long last he was able to celebrate victory. Thereafter Mao had no more serious rivals in the party. Six months earlier, in April 1938, unable to bear his isolation, Zhang Guotao had fled from Yan'an to Hankou and quit the CCP. Mao, Luo Fu, and other party leaders formally ratified his expulsion from the party and accused the deserter of “opportunism.” The Presidium of the ECCI affirmed this decision.⁹

After making his choice in the mid-1930s in favor of Mao Zedong, Stalin continued his efforts to strengthen the vertical control of his favorite over the Chinese Communist Party. Only by transforming the CCP into a Russian-style, leader-focused party (that is, by Stalinizing the party) could its victory in the future civil conflict with the Guomindang be assured. The Stalinization of the CCP required intensification of the cult of the leader-thinker and the complete suppression of intraparty opposition, even if it had to be fabricated in the event that no real opposition existed. In all of this Stalin could help Mao greatly.

In 1938 a campaign to propagate Mao's cult of personality unfolded with renewed vigor in the USSR. The leader of the CCP was presented as a “wise tactician and strategist” who had enriched world military thought with his “brilliant theory” of anti-Japanese guerrilla war. Mao's formula of “the enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue” was even accorded a kind of mystical significance.¹⁰ An abridged translation of Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, from which Mao's self-critical comments about his childhood and adolescence had been excised, was rushed into print. The text of the book was edited to bring out more clearly Snow's main point: Mao Zedong is

an accomplished scholar of Classical Chinese, an omnivorous reader, a deep student of philosophy and history, a good speaker, a man with an unusual memory and extraordinary powers of concentration …… It is an interesting fact that many Japanese regard him as the ablest Chinese strategist alive …… He appears to be quite free from symptoms of megalomania, but he has a deep sense of personal dignity, and something about him suggests a power of ruthless decision when he deems it necessary.¹¹

Several months earlier, a translation of Mao's autobiography from Snow's book was published in the journal Internatsional'naia literatura (International literature).¹² In 1939, the State Publishing Association issued a canonical biographical sketch of Mao, based on newly edited notes of Snow that were partially supplemented by information from the ECCI.¹³ A brochure titled “Mao Zedong, Zhu De (Leaders of the Chinese people)” also appeared on Moscow bookshelves. This booklet, written by Emi Siao (Xiao San), Mao's fellow student in Changsha who was then living in Moscow, presented Mao as the “model” leader of the anti-Japanese struggle and of the Chinese communist movement.¹⁴

Almost immediately after receiving news of Stalin's blessing, Mao engaged in propagating his own cult of personality. An important milestone was the convening in September 1938 of the Sixth Enlarged Plenum of the Central Committee, a prolonged forum that stretched from September 29 to November 6, at which Mao spoke at great length. Numerous problems had to be resolved, foremost among them the task of laying an ideological foundation for his dictatorship. Mao wholly accomplished this task. His lengthy report, which he read over the course of three days, stunned his audience. Everyone was particularly struck by the seventh section, “The Place of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War,” in which Mao sketched what was to become the canonical history of the party:

Broadly speaking, in the last seventeen years our Party has learned to use this Marxist weapon—the method of struggle on two fronts in ideology, in politics, and in work, opposing Right opportunism, on the one hand, and opposing Left opportunism, on the other.

Before the Fifth Plenum, our Party fought Chen Duxiu's Right opportunism and Li Lisan's Left opportunism …… After the Fifth Plenum, there were two further historic inner-Party struggles, namely, at the Zunyi Conference and in connection with the expulsion of Zhang Guotao.

Because the Zunyi Conference corrected serious errors of a Left-opportunist character—errors of principle committed in the fight against the enemy's Fifth Encirclement and Suppression campaign—and united the Party and the Red Army, it enabled the Central Committee and the main forces of the Red Army to bring the Long March to a triumphant conclusion.¹⁵

In sum, the numerous mistakes committed within the party prior to Mao's ascension had now been corrected and the CCP under Mao's leadership was now united around the correct line.

What was demanded now of the party members, in the first instance of the cadres (ganbu)? Study, study, and study some more. “Once the political line has been laid down, cadres are the decisive factor,” Mao said, quoting Stalin.ⁿ⁴⁶“We should not forget this truth …… Therefore, it should be our fighting task to train large numbers of new cadres in a persistent and planned way.”¹⁶ What should one study? The theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. But—and here Mao was paraphrasing Lenin—one must bear in mind that “[w]e should not regard their theories as dogma, but as a guide to action.” This was the main idea in his report. Mao formulated a thesis about the need to “sinify Marxism,” that is, to adapt it to Chinese realities. “The history of this great nation of ours goes back several thousand years,” he said, “we must sum it up critically, and we must constitute ourselves the heirs to this precious legacy …… There is no such thing as abstract Marxism, but only concrete Marxism …… Marxism applied to the concrete struggle in the concrete conditions prevailing in China …… Marxism apart from Chinese peculiarities …… is merely an empty abstraction.”ⁿ⁴⁷ Mao further asserted, “We must put an end to foreign formalism. There must be less repeating of empty and abstract refrains; we must discard our dogmatism and replace it with a new and vital Chinese style and manner, pleasing to the eye and to the ear of the Chinese common people.”¹⁷

The text of the report quickly became known in Moscow (at the end of January 1939, Lin Biao, who had come to the Soviet Union for medical treatment and study, brought it with him),¹⁸ but no negative reaction ensued. Nor could it have. Mao's policy regarding the ideological foundation of “Chinese Marxism” corresponded to Stalin's tactical line. Moreover, it expressed the desire of the newly blessed leader of the CCP to present himself to the members of his party as a great theoretician, something Stalin understood.

Mao's personal life, like his political life, gradually began to fall into place. The harsh winter of 1937–38 passed and with it the bitter aftertaste of his quarrel with his wife, who had left him. What sense was there in crying over the past or passing the days in solitude? Dozens of young women were streaming into Yan'an from every corner of the country, attractive women who were revolutionary-minded and devoted to the party's cause. Among the newly arrived beauties two stood out: the Shanghainese film star Lan Ping (“Blue Apple”) and the Cantonese singer Li Lilian. They had come to Yan'an in late August 1937, not long before Zizhen's departure. Mao had paid no attention to them, because he was too deeply immersed in his family drama. Kang Sheng and Otto Braun, however, took advantage of this opportunity. The former already knew Lan Ping; in the early 1930s she had even been his lover. Meeting her in Yan'an awakened old feelings, and Kang began to drop in on his old flame. Braun was interested in Li Lilian. She was married, but this did not bother him. Throughout his sojourn in Yan'an, he suffered terribly from loneliness. He was bitter after his defeat at the Zunyi Conference. Mao, Luo Fu, and the army commanders openly despised him. He shared a small house with the American doctor George Hatem (Ma Haide), who had come to Shaanxi in July 1936 with Edgar Snow and then stayed on with the Chinese communists.¹⁹ It is hard to imagine two people more different than Hatem and Otto Braun, yet the friendly doctor sympathized with his lovestruck housemate. Hatem was sociable and good-hearted with large, “sad, Semitic eyes that were as black as olives.”²⁰ Braun, a typical Aryan, was not known for his complaisance. He spurned all foreigners who came to Yan'an, including Agnes Smedley and Peggy Snow, as agents of the bourgeois special services. The only exception he made was George, with whom Braun not only shared lodging, but also went hunting. He wanted to return to the USSR but Moscow denied him permission. Then he met the lively Li Lilian, who loved good food, Ping-Pong, dancing, and talking about politics and art. In 1938 she deserted her husband and married Otto Braun, who stunned her with his charm offensive.²¹

Lan Ping had her own dreams. She knew she had no future with Kang Sheng, who was married and had no intention of getting divorced. She needed to find something more permanent. The young but already experienced woman decided to go for broke. Her objective was Chairman Mao himself. Lan Ping was ambitious, vain, and purposeful. She was born in March 1914 in Zhucheng, a small town in Shandong province, in the family of Li Dewen, a wealthy carpenter. Her father bestowed her first, child's name, Shumeng, meaning “pure and unsophisticated,” but the life that awaited her was neither simple nor serene. Her alcoholic father mercilessly beat her mother until finally mother and daughter fled their home. After ten years of just scraping by, they went to live with the girl's maternal grandfather in Jinan, the large and bustling provincial center of Shandong. The young girl, who at the age of seven had been given a new, grown-up name, Yunhe (“Crane in the Clouds”), retained only one good memory of Zhucheng. The young director of the elementary school where she had studied Confucius for a while was very thin and tall and wore big round eyeglasses. She remembered how he had looked at her, how he had spoken to her, which for some reason made him very anxious, and how he had once invited her and her mother to his house. He needed a housemaid, and after hemming and hawing a bit, he offered the job to Yunhe's mother. The young girl's heart melted from his glances and his words, and her temples throbbed. The director was named Mr. Zhang. Many years later she would meet him in Qingdao, and an irresistible force would fling them together. The former director would then bear a different name, Zhao Yun, which he would soon change again to Kang Sheng. By then Yunhe had turned into a beautiful woman, left home with a theatrical company, and, by the early 1930s, became a well-known provincial actress. She had married, gone through a platoon of lovers, and had been living a Bohemian life. She had only one physical defect—six toes on her right foot.²² But this seems not to have repelled any of her many admirers.

In Qingdao, Kang Sheng brought Yunhe into the unfamiliar world of revolutionary politics and introduced her to members of underground organizations. She soon remarried, this time to a colleague of Kang's. Under the influence of her communist husband, she became a member of the Communist Party in February 1933. Two months later, when her husband was imprisoned, she fled Shanghai in a panic, and attempting to cover her traces she changed her name again, to Li He. But in the fall of 1934 she, too, was arrested, then released three months later under still mysterious circumstances. Either they “believed in the innocence” of a beautiful woman, as she asserted subsequently, or they received from her the required confession. In any case, she was let go and soon became known on the Shanghai stage and in film by the name of Lan Ping. Her greatest triumph came from her portrayal of Nora, the destroyer of bourgeois values, in Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House. Her cinematic roles also gained her considerable attention, including in such strikingly anti-Japanese films as Old Bachelor Wang and Twenty Cents. It seemed that everything was going well for her: she had a new husband, a string of lovers, crowds of admirers, and a splendid lifestyle. But in August 1937, the Japanese attacked Shanghai.

Moved by the patriotic upsurge, the effusive, passionate, and romantic Lan Ping took off for Yan'an with her latest lover, the director of A Doll's House. The Communist Party's appeals to organize an anti-Japanese united front resonated with her, as they did with other leftist Chinese artists. In Yan'an she was destined to play her greatest role, as the devoted, tender, and solicitous new lady friend of the Leader. She was a formidably clever and crafty woman, delicate and elegant as a mountain bloom but possessing enormous inner strength and indomitable energy.

Her old friend Kang Sheng greatly assisted her in this undertaking. Soon after Ren Bishi's departure for Moscow, Kang began to build bridges to Mao, and toward this end he decided to make use of his faithful woman friend. At the end of April, a favorable opportunity presented itself. Mao gave a talk at the Lu Xun Academy of the Arts, a new educational institution established to train politically reliable cultural workers. Lan Ping, newly signed up as an instructor at the academy, arrived in time to take a seat in the front row, sporting a thick notebook. She listened avidly to every word spoken by the Chairman, and rapidly wrote everything down in her notebook at almost stenographic speed. Naturally Mao noticed her. Among the sunburned peasant faces her tender little white face stood out clearly.

After the lecture she approached him.

“I still have so much to learn,” she said timidly. “But thanks to you, I know that I can deepen my knowledge.”

“Well, if there's anything you don't understand, don't be shy. Come visit me, and we'll talk it over,” he replied, looking her up and down. She was slender, very modest, wearing two braids tied in back of her head with a ribbon.

Then Kang Sheng took over. Taking advantage of the fact that he and Lan Ping were from the same town, he began praising the excellence of Zhucheng women to Mao Zedong. Several days later he invited Lan Ping to meet with the Leader. But it was not until September 1938, four months later, that Lan Ping became Mao's lover and one of his secretaries. Soon afterward she decided to change her name again. The past was over, and she asked Mao to pick out some characters that he liked. He chose Jiang Qing (“Azure River”).ⁿ⁴⁸ Mao's latest romance, however, engendered terrible gossip in Yan'an. Naturally, the puritanical wives of party officials were scandalized. Again they pitied Zizhen, who had gone through fire and flood with them, immediately conceived a hatred for Jiang Qing, and began to bad-mouth her. A report that the Central Committee received from Liu Xiao, one of the leaders of the party organization in Shanghai, added fuel to the fire. He reported that Yunhe/Lan Ping had behaved “in an unworthy fashion” in prison, and that she might possibly be a “Guomindang spy.”

Kang Sheng once again intervened, assuring everyone of Jiang Qing's political reliability. The Chairman himself finally put an end to the dispute. “I will marry her,” he said to his comrades in the party. The wedding took place on November 19, 1939.²³ Kang Sheng celebrated: having betrayed Wang Ming, he had now gained the Chairman's full trust via Jiang Qing. He would soon become one of the persons closest to Mao and the man Mao entrusted with leadership of the party's secret services.

Poor Zizhen! Only now did she have to drain the same bitter cup that Kaihui had earlier. When she learned of her husband's new passion, she was stunned. Mao sent her a formal notice of divorce and two years later sent their daughter to her in Moscow. Thus their rupture was now complete. All her hopes were gone. She was overjoyed to meet with her daughter, whom she hadn't seen in three and a half years, but it was a bitter sort of joy. Initially, she and Jiaojiao lived in a rest home belonging to the International Organization for Aid to Revolutionary Fighters in the village of Monino, near Moscow, where Zizhen had been undergoing treatment. She had grown weary of political study as well as with public work, and she didn't want to do anything. Therefore, she only managed a grade of C in her elementary exam on the foundations of Marxism-Leninism.

In the fall of 1941, after World War II had begun, she and her daughter were transferred to the International Orphanage in Ivanovo, where Zizhen started working as a governess and Jiaojiao studied. (In the children's home Mao's daughter was called Tanya Chao Chao.)²⁴ There too were both of Mao's sons, Anying and Anqing, who had come to Moscow in the fall of 1936. They had traveled for almost six months from Shanghai to the USSR via Hong Kong, Marseille, and Paris. Both of these “heroes” had finally reached “the shores of socialism” in November 1936 and were enrolled in the Ivanovo orphanage under the names of Sergei Yunfu [Yongfu] and Nikolai Yunshou [Yongshou] respectively.²⁵ They became acquainted with Zizhen in the spring of 1938, and thereafter generally got along well with her. They even began to call her “Mother.” Then they too received news of their father's new marriage, but didn't know whether these rumors were true or not. In any case they tried not to ask Mama He about them. “We tried to distract her in whatever ways we could,” Anying and Anqing recalled later. “We told her all kinds of stories and anecdotes and spoke about the situation in the country and events abroad. But in these conversations there was one name we never mentioned, but which we thought of all the time, namely, Mao Zedong.”²⁶

Via their sister Jiaojiao, their father sent them a letter dated January 31, 1941. After lamely excusing himself for not having replied to their letters, Mao urged his children to focus their studies on the natural sciences rather than politics. This would earn them the respect of others and make them happy. Perhaps the veteran of bruising intraparty conflicts wanted to spare his own offspring the psychological traumas he himself had endured in the political arena. Asserting that he had no wish “to interfere in your affairs,” a rather curious wish for a father who, in the same letter, claimed that he worried a lot about his children, Mao wrote that they were responsible for determining their own futures. With his own father, of course, Mao had had to struggle to escape the orbit of Confucian filial piety, but that was hardly the case with his own children whom he had virtually abandoned to a harsh fate. In place of parental love, of which the letter reveals few traces, Mao promised to send them more books, the treasured companions of his own youth.²⁷

This was the second letter from the father to his sons since he had left them early on the morning of August 31, 1927. The first, a brief note of seven lines, he had sent a year and a half earlier, on August 26, 1939.²⁸ He had sent that one via Zhou Enlai, who had flown to Moscow for medical treatment along with his wife and their adopted daughter.

This was hardly a very warm letter, and it said nothing about his new marriage despite the fact that Jiang Qing had given birth five months earlier to a daughter. On August 3, 1940, Li Na (Li “Slow”) was born in a Yan'an hospital. As he did for his older daughter Jiaojiao, Mao gave Li Na the surname of his own pseudonym Li Desheng. He took her personal name from the same Confucian quotation, “A gentleman should be slow to speak and prompt to act” (junzi yu na yu yan er min yu xing).²⁹

By the time of Li Na's birth, Mao already had complete power over the CCP and his armies controlled several guerrilla areas behind Japanese lines. Almost two years earlier, the Japanese Imperial Army had seized large parts of northern, eastern, and central China as well as several ports in the south and southeast of the country. In late October 1938, both Canton and Wuhan fell, and the Guomindang government moved to Chongqing, in Sichuan province. It had no intention of surrendering but lacked the strength for a large offensive. Mao took advantage of the fact that the front had stabilized to establish communist power in a number of districts located deep in the Japanese rear. The Japanese Imperial Army was only able to occupy the cities and other important strategic objectives as well as the lines of communication. The Japanese only rarely foraged in the countryside for provisions, and Guomindang officials had completely lost control. Mao began to send armed detachments into these rural areas to fill the power vacuum. His strategy was successful. By 1940, more than ten CCP base areas had been established behind Japanese lines—for propaganda purposes, the communists called these “liberated areas”—and new ones were quickly being added.³⁰

In Yan'an, meanwhile, Mao formulated the idea of the “New Democratic revolution” as a special stage in the development of the liberation movement in China. He was aided in this effort by his capable secretary Chen Boda, who had come to Yan'an in 1937. In 1938, on Mao's instructions, this “plump, clumsy man in glasses with disproportionately large ears and deeply set eyes”³¹ had begun to deal with theoretical questions concerning the Chinese communist movement. Mao first set forth his new theory in mid-December 1939, in an article titled “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party,” coauthored with “several comrades,” including Luo Fu and Chen Boda. Later, he developed this theme in January 1940, in a special brochure, On New Democracy. Mao started with the proposition that because China was a “colonial, semicolonial, and semifeudal” country (the phrase was Luo Fu's),³² what China needed to achieve was not a socialist but rather what he called a “new-democratic” revolution. Appealing more to the nationalist sensibilities than to the social strivings of his fellow countrymen, he talked about the need for social reforms in the spirit of Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People. He interpreted these principles very broadly, promising to guarantee the right of private property after the revolution, to stimulate national entrepreneurship, and pursue a policy of protectionism, that is, to attract foreign investors under strict state control. He called for tax reduction, the development of a multiparty system, the organization of a coalition government, and the implementation of democratic freedoms. The theory of New Democracy differed from old-style Western democracy, according to Mao, because it would be implemented under the leadership of the Communist Party. However, the party was no longer presenting itself as the political organ of the working class, but rather as the organization of the united revolutionary front striving to unite “all the revolutionary people.” The future China, Mao asserted, would not be a dictatorship of the proletariat but “a joint dictatorship of all revolutionary classes”; in the economy of the new country, state, cooperative, and private capitalist property would coexist.³³

In his struggle with the Guomindang, then, Mao was beginning to lean on the democratic traditions of Chinese society. In the first half of the twentieth century, democracy was hardly an unknown concept in China. At that time, among the many factors stimulating a significant revitalization of Chinese political culture were the victory of the antimonarchical 1911 Revolution, the proclamation of a republic on January 1, 1912, the adoption of the Constitution of 1912, elections to the first parliament and parliamentary debates, Sun Yat-sen's struggle against Yuan Shikai and his plans to restore the monarchy, the New Culture movement of 1915, the anti-Japanese May Fourth Movement of 1919, the collaboration and confrontation between the CCP and the GMD during the first united front of 1924–27, and much else. All these events strengthened the democratic inclinations of the Chinese intelligentsia, the segment of society that was expected to accept New Democracy enthusiastically.³⁴

As the foundation of his concept Mao used Stalin's November 1937 directives that he himself had developed in a series of talks in 1938. His new works expanded upon those talks but contained nothing new in principle. His new policy fully corresponded with Stalin's geopolitical strategy. It is worth noting that just when Mao was elaborating his conceptual foundation, Stalin began to think about dissolving the Comintern.³⁵ This was not a coincidence.

In the second half of the 1930s, Stalin himself was working very hard to develop new tactics for the international communist movement. His conversation with Wang Ming and Kang Sheng in November 1937 is just one bit of evidence. He aimed at deceiving not only the Chinese intelligentsia and Chiang Kai-shek, but the entire bourgeois West. He wanted them to believe that with the exception of the CPSU, of course, beginning with the Seventh Comintern Congress, communist parties had dropped the struggle for socialism and had substituted the idea of building a humanitarian society of “popular democracy.” (There was no essential difference between what Stalin and Mao stood for since the former spoke of “people's democracy” and the latter of “new democracy.”) In their quest to seize power in the postwar period, communist organizations posing as national “democratic” parties would improve their chances of gaining control of a broad coalition of nationalist forces. It was precisely because he wanted to “dupe” the capitalists that Stalin finally dissolved the Comintern. He did this in May 1943, but the idea had germinated already in 1940.³⁶ It was deception that constituted the foundation of Stalin's “people's democracy,” and in his private talks with his comrades in arms the Bolshevik leader made no secret of it.³⁷ As always, Mao was in luck. He proposed his idea of New Democracy at just the right moment, which further commended him to the Kremlin leader.

Meanwhile, in the early 1940s, Mao was able to return to intraparty matters. He had already established himself as the party's main theoretician, and now he had to suppress the “opposition” and consolidate his cult. Otherwise, in the tradition of Stalin, he would not feel that he was a full-fledged dictator.

The easiest thing was to settle accounts with the Trotskyites, but they had no significance in China. In the late 1930s and 1940s there were only a few Trotskyist organizations in China, the largest of which, the Chinese Revolutionary Party, numbered all of twenty to thirty persons. Since an actual Trotskyite enemy was illusory, Wang Ming's assignment as Stalin's emissary on Trotskyite matters in China made no sense. The career of “Pavel Mif's fledgling” was nearing its end. Now it became his fate to become the leader of the “opposition” that the new “Great Leader” of the CCP had to crush.

Without Stalin's approval, Mao could not have initiated a campaign against Wang, but soon he received the go-ahead to proceed. In late 1939 and early 1940, the ECCI prepared recommendations regarding the organizational question for the Central Committee of the CCP at the forthcoming Seventh CCP Congress. Zhou Enlai was supposed to deliver these recommendations orally to Mao Zedong and the other members of the Central Committee at the end of March 1940.ⁿ⁴⁹ In a telegram to Mao dated March 17, 1940, the Comintern chief Dimitrov wrote: “Zhou Enlai will personally inform you about everything we discussed and agreed upon regarding Chinese affairs. You need to seriously consider everything and take decisive measures completely on your own. In case of disagreement with us on some questions, please inform us promptly and tell us your reasons.”³⁸

A memorandum from the Personnel Department of the ECCI to Dimitrov addressed personnel matters in the CCP:

One must bear in mind that Wang Ming possesses no authority among the old cadres of the party …… He was promoted to the leadership of the party at the Fourth Plenum of the CC [January 1931] under the influence of Mif [at the time of the composition of this memorandum Mif had been arrested by the NKVD (Soviet security police, a successor of OGPU) and shot as an “enemy of the people”] …… [I]t is recommended that the leadership of the CCP not place Wang Ming in leading roles and leading positions within the leadership of the party. It is recommended that the leadership of the party not include [current] Politburo member Kon Sin [Kang Sheng] and alternate Politburo member Fang Ling [Deng Fa] as well as Central Committee members Guan Xiangying and Yang Shangkun in the Politburo or the Secretariat and not use them for personnel, organizational, or secret service work.

It is recommended that Politburo and Secretariat member Bo Gu, Central Committee members Luo Man [Luo Mai, Li Weihan], Chen Changhao, Zhang Hao [Lin Yuying], and Kong Yuan not be placed on the Central Committee and not be used in personnel, organization work or in the central organs of the party …… From material supplied by the Personnel Department of the ECCI and from conversations with Zhou Enlai, Zheng Ling [Chen Lin, Ren Bishi], Mao Zemin and others, assessments have been compiled of 26 leading members of the CCP (these are attached) who may be promoted to the leading organs of the party at the Seventh Congress. Basically, these are the most trustworthy, experienced, and tempered cadres of the party who have survived difficult underground work and civil war and who are now conducting party, military, and military-political work. Of these 26 comrades the following stand out: Lin Biao, He Long, Liu Bocheng, Nie Yongcheng [Nie Rongzhen], Xiao Ke, Xu Xiangqian, Chen Guang, Deng Xiaoping, and Ye Jianying, all of whom are well-known not only in the party, but throughout the country as leaders and commanders of Eighth Route Army units; Deng Yingchao (female) [the wife of Zhou Enlai], Mao Zemin, Gao Gang, Xu Teli, Chen Yi, Liu Xiao, Zhang Qiqi, and Zeng Shan are all wholly tested and experienced party officials ……

Mao Zedong is certainly the most important political figure in the CCP. He knows China better than the other CCP leaders, knows the people, understands politics and generally frames issues correctly.³⁹

The overwhelming majority of those recommended were supporters of Mao Zedong. Those whom Moscow turned thumbs down on were deemed followers of Wang Ming. Once again, the ECCI and, standing behind it, Stalin himself, helped Mao to consolidate his power. This time they even overdid it. Mao did not view Kang Sheng, who had already openly switched to his side, nor several others of these party officials as his foes. He even tried to defend Kang Sheng in one of his letters to Dimitrov. “Kon Sin [Kang Sheng],” Mao wrote, “is reliable.”⁴⁰

Soviet money also assisted in strengthening Mao's authority in the CCP. At the end of March 1940, Zhou Enlai brought Mao US $300,000 from Moscow.⁴¹ But this was far from the final gift. The USSR continued to help the Chinese Communist Party even after Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In the Russian archives, a striking document has been preserved in the special files of the Politburo of the CPSU: a decision of the Politburo from July 3, 1941, to release to the ECCI $1 million in American dollars for assistance to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.⁴² The ECCI had asked the Politburo for $2 million, but had to settle for $1 million.⁴³ On the very day, July 3, that Stalin first publicly acknowledged the extent of the German onslaught, the Politburo decided to send $1 million to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.⁴⁴

Meanwhile, in 1941 Mao persisted in rewriting party history to make it serve his cult of personality. The infallible Leader must appear as a kind of savior of the nation, a prophet and a teacher at the most critical moment for the CCP. The advent of the Great Helmsman must be presented as an epochal event for which the entire course of the communist movement served as preparation. Here Mao, as always, followed the bidding of his teacher. “History sometimes demands that it be corrected,” Stalin said, letting the cat out of the bag one day.⁴⁵ Mao had no doubts on this score. The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Short Course, a translation of which was done in Yan'an in late 1938 and 1939, served as his model.⁴⁶

On September 8, 1941, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, under Mao's leadership, adopted a resolution to organize serious research on problems of party history. The main focus was on the period that had been the most difficult for Mao, namely, from the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee (January 1931) to the Zunyi Conference (January 1935).⁴⁷ Two days later, at an enlarged plenum of the Politburo, Mao delivered a report on the history of intraparty struggle with the focus on dogmatists, subjectivists, and “left opportunists” during the period 1931–34. (Although he did not mention Wang Ming by name, everyone knew whom he had in mind.) In this connection, Mao emphasized, “Only those teachers who can sinify Marxism are good teachers …… The study of method of thought of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, the study of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, will constitute the heart of our studies, and we should read more antisubjectivist writings.”⁴⁸ Then he prepared a long article on the theme of “left opportunism” that was so critical that even he dared not risk publishing it. Only his closest confidants became acquainted with the article.⁴⁹

Mao's speeches launched a campaign to reexamine party history with the objective of firmly inculcating the cult of the Leader. This campaign in February 1942 developed into a broad-scale “purge” of the party (zhengfeng). Its main target was Wang Ming, whom Stalin threw into the trash. Wang still enjoyed the trust of Dimitrov, who had become good friends with Wang during his work in Moscow. Therefore, the general secretary of the ECCI worried a great deal about the fate of this friend who had been transformed into Mao's main antagonist, but without Stalin's approval, Dimitrov could do nothing to help him.

Bo Gu, Luo Fu, and the other pupils of the “enemy of the people” Mif were targets as well of zhengfeng, which also touched Zhou Enlai for his past opposition to Mao. The campaign, however, was nothing like the Soviet purge of 1937. “The present leadership of the CCP,” Mao said in January 1943, “considers the past purges in the CPSU mistaken. What is needed is a ‘spiritual purge' like that now going on in the Special Region.”⁵⁰ True to his principle of “treating the illness to save the patient,” he didn't initiate arrests and executions, but rather ideological study (one of the witnesses called it “psychological calisthenics”).⁵¹ Yan'an was immersed in endless meetings, gatherings, and conferences at which Mao's former opponents, labeled as “dogmatists,” engaged in confessions and self-criticism while unrestrainedly praising the “wisdom” of the Leader. They wrote self-denunciations and denunciations of their friends. A special commission to conduct zhengfeng, at the head of which Mao placed Kang Sheng, filed and arranged these in the archives.

Liu Shaoqi, who had come to Yan'an at the invitation of the Chairman in December 1942, also played a major role in the new ideological campaign. Mao had long known him but had not had close contacts with him until the early 1940s. They had first met in the summer of 1922, when the twenty-four-year-old Liu, who had just completed his six-month course at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow, came to Changsha to do trade union work. Mao sent him to Anyuan, the mining town in western Jiangxi, to serve as Li Lisan's chief assistant in running a workers' club. Liu was just five years younger than Mao and his equal in organizational abilities. Very thin and frail-looking, he had inexhaustible energy, determination, and courage. Like Mao, he came from a peasant family in Hunan. He joined the party in December 1921 in Moscow, while studying there. Liu quickly became one of the major leaders of the national workers' movement and in 1925 he was chosen deputy chair of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. In 1927 he became a member of the Central Committee of the CCP. At the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee in January 1931, on Mif's recommendation he became a candidate member of the Politburo. This sponsorship, however, was not reflected in his political positions. In January 1935, during the Zunyi Conference, he supported Mao Zedong, from which time Mao had his eye upon him and appointed him to several responsible positions. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Mao sent him to southeast China to conduct political work among communist guerrillas in the Japanese rear there. In July 1939, during one of his visits to Yan'an, Liu delivered two lectures at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism on “How to Be a Good Communist.” Like Mao, he called upon all party members to engage in daily self-education, emphasizing that “[t]he test of a Party member's loyalty to the Party, the revolution, and the cause of communism is whether or not he can subordinate his personal interests absolutely and unconditionally to the interests of the Party, whatever the circumstances.”⁵² Two years later, in July 1941, Liu delivered a report to the party school of the Central China Bureau of the Central Committee titled “On Intra-party Struggle,” which was directed against dogmatism. This report elicited special praise from Mao.⁵³

It was as a “specialist” in party affairs that Mao invited Liu to Yan'an. In March 1943 his new favorite joined the newly reorganized Secretariat of the Central Committee, along with Ren Bishi. Liu also was appointed Mao's deputy on the Revolutionary Military Council and likewise headed the Organizational Department and the Investigation Bureau of the Central Committee.⁵⁴ His influence in the party grew rapidly even though formally he was not a full member of the Politburo. Mao entrusted Liu Shaoqi with major responsibility for preparing for the Seventh Congress of the CCP, originally scheduled for the spring of 1941 but repeatedly delayed and finally convened in April–June 1945. The delegates who arrived in Yan'an in 1941 had to take part over a period of two to three years in all of the activities of the zhengfeng movement under the control of Liu Shaoqi and Kang Sheng. The only one who refused to engage in self-criticism was Wang Ming.⁵⁵

In early 1943 Mao increased the pressure on Wang, who had reported sick in order to avoid participating in zhengfeng. On January 15, 1943, Dimitrov received a disturbing message from Yan'an that Wang Ming was seriously ill.⁵⁶ The message relayed by Soviet intelligence officer Petr Vladimirov reported, “He needs treatment in Chengdu or the USSR, but Mao Zedong and Kon Sin [Kang Sheng] supposedly do not want to let him leave Yan'an, for fear that he will give out unfavorable information about them.”⁵⁷

But what could Dimitrov do? He was not an independent actor and he had to carry out Stalin's policy. Was there any way he could risk exacerbating relations with Mao on his own initiative? Trying to stall, he advised the Red Army Intelligence Directorate not to interfere in the internal affairs of the Chinese communists.⁵⁸ This, however, could not satisfy Wang Ming. At the end of January 1943, Wang sent a detailed telegram via his Yan'an-based Soviet physician, Dr. Andrei Orlov, and Vladimirov to Stalin and Dimitrov on the theme of Mao Zedong's “anti-Leninist” and “Trotskyite” activity. It was received in Moscow on February 1.⁵⁹ On February 3, however, Dimitrov also received a telegram from Mao containing sharp accusations against Wang.⁶⁰ Evidently, Mao had learned of his enemy's slanders and hastened to counterattack. The best defense was to attack.

The conflict grew sharper. On February 11, NKVD commissar Vladimir Dekanozov unexpectedly called Dimitrov to talk about Wang Ming. Dekanozov advised Dimitrov to tell Wang he should immediately contact the Soviet ambassador, Alexander Panyushkin, who could ask Chiang Kai-shek to permit Wang to leave China.⁶¹ Apparently Dekanozov had learned through his own sources of Dimitrov's friendship with Wang Ming, and hastened to attend to this matter. Or was this a sudden provocation? It is just too strange a demarche. Why was it necessary to ask permission from Chiang rather than Mao? Most likely Dekanozov was putting Dimitrov to the test: would Dimitrov place his personal relations above the interests of the international communist movement? Dimitrov would have to sacrifice his old friend. He did nothing. Finally, on December 13, 1943, he sent Wang a pessimistic message: “As for your part[y] affairs, do your best to settle them yourselves. Intervening from here is for now inexpedient.”⁶² It seemed that Wang's fate was sealed.

Literally just days after this pessimistic telegram, on December 22, 1943, Dimitrov sent a personal letter to Mao urgently recommending that he not persecute Wang and requesting that he not touch Zhou Enlai. “I consider politically incorrect the campaign being waged against Zhou Enlai and Wang Ming,” he wrote. “Persons such as Zhou Enlai and Wang Ming must not be severed from the party, but protected and used as much as possible for the good of the party.”⁶³ Dimitrov must have received a directive from Stalin, or at least Stalin's approval.

What had happened in these nine days? Why did Stalin decide to protect Wang Ming? Might he have desired to use him as a counterweight against Mao in the future? Or did he recall his “merits” in the struggle against “Trotskyism”? No one knows what moved the Kremlin dictator during these cold days in late December 1943.

Dimitrov's letter of December 22 did not pass unnoticed. Mao dispatched two telegrams in reply, on January 2 and January 7, 1944. In the first he said, “Our relations with Zhou Enlai are very good. We have no intention whatsoever of cutting him off from the party. Zhou Enlai has had great success and made progress.” But Mao was unwilling to retreat on the matter of Wang Ming.

Wang Ming has engaged in various antiparty activities. This has been brought to the attention of all party cadres. But we do not want to make this known to the masses of party members …… Among the higher-ranking party cadres the result of studying Wang Ming's errors is that these cadres have rallied even closer together and are more united …… I consider Wang Ming unreliable. Wang Ming was arrested earlier in Shanghai. Several persons said that when he was in prison, he confessed to belonging to the communist party. Afterward he was released. They also spoke of his dubious ties with Mif. Wang Ming engaged in a great deal of antiparty activity.

Five days later, however, Mao retreated. He understood very well with whom he was really corresponding.

Intra-party issues: Policy in this area is aimed at unification, at achieving unity. With respect to Wang Ming we will pursue just such a policy. As a result of the work carried out in the second half of 1943, the situation inside the party, the unity of the party has improved significantly.

Please set your mind at ease. All of your thoughts and all of your concerns are close to my heart, because my thoughts and my feelings are essentially the same.⁶⁴

After receiving the January 7 telegram, which, incidentally, Mao demonstratively sent via Vladimirov rather than his own channels, Dimitrov was finally able to relax. Mao had remained loyal to Moscow. Dimitrov wrote to him on February 25. “I was particularly heartened by your second telegram. I had no doubt you would devote the needed serious attention to my friendly observations and would take the appropriate measures dictated by the interests of the party and our common cause.”⁶⁵

On January 19, Dimitrov also sent a telegram to Wang Ming on the subject of his relations with Mao, informing his persecuted friend of his successful negotiations with his enemy.⁶⁶ One cannot say that Wang was entirely satisfied. He understood, however, that he could expect nothing more from Stalin and Dimitrov. The Kremlin chieftain did not want to see him as the leader of the CCP, but neither did he intend to let Mao tear Wang to pieces. It was time for him to submit. On March 7, Dimitrov received a reply from his old friend:

Dear G.M. [Dimitrov]!

In December and January I was given your two telegrams.

Thanks for your concerns about the CCP and about me. My relations with Mao Zedong remain as before, inasmuch as I wholeheartedly support him as the leader of the party, regardless of the personal disagreements between us in the past concerning specific aspects of the policy of the anti-Japanese united front and of the most serious campaign conducted against me during the past year on questions of intraparty life.

A comrade told me that he informed you in detail about all these issues.

I don't know what might be of interest to you in this sphere and what questions might be unclear.

Please let me know and I will respond. During the past year a campaign has been going on in the party to reexamine its entire history on the basis of the ideas and activities of Mao Zedong.

He is presented as the main representative of Chinese Bolshevism and of sinicized Marxism-Leninism.

Recognizing that you may be able to elevate the authority of the party, which is particularly important in the absence of the Comintern, I fully support this campaign in a situation in which the emphasis is on the CCP as a national proletarian party.

Toward this end I have already informed Mao Zedong and the CC both orally and in writing that the struggle against Li Lisanism and the advancement of the new policy of the anti-Japanese united front is Mao Zedong's contribution, not mine as I had earlier believed.

I also renounced all political disagreements.

I wholeheartedly thank you and dear Roza [Dimitrov's wife] for your longterm care and education of my daughter.⁶⁷

At the Seventh Congress of the CCP, which finally took place in Yan'an from April 23 to June 11, 1945, both Zhou Enlai and Wang Ming were included as members of the Central Committee, and Zhou Enlai even strengthened his position in the upper echelons of the party. Characteristically, Mao did not open the Seventh Congress until, on his personal orders, the “ill” Wang Ming had been carried into the conference hall on a stretcher. Only then did he open the party forum with these words: “I have invited Comrades Wang Ming and Wang Chia-hsiang [Wang Jiaxiang, who had again fallen ill, was also brought to the hall on a stretcher]. This makes our congress truly a congress of unity!”⁶⁸

The inclusion of Wang Ming and Zhou Enlai did not mean that Mao's power had been curtailed in the slightest. The disgraced Wang was no longer a significant political figure, while Zhou Enlai demonstrated such complete submission that the Great Leader of the CCP had long since realized the value of Zhou's abilities. Mao's victory was complete and decisive. He had attained a height to which no other leader in the CCP could aspire. His cult had fully matured.

It was Mao himself who chose the members of the Central Committee at the Seventh Congress, dominated all of the sessions, and defined the direction of its work and its decisions. He delivered the main report “On Coalition Government,” in which he again expounded his program of New Democracy.⁶⁹ With the exception of Wang Ming, it seemed that all of the other 754 delegates representing 1.2 million party members sincerely viewed Mao as the conscience of the party. They wholeheartedly believed in their Leader and were ready to die for him.⁷⁰

On the eve of the congress Mao successfully concluded another important forum, namely, the Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the Central Committee, which on his bidding adopted a “Resolution on Certain Historical Questions.” In this new, canonical history of the party the chief role, of course, was given to Mao, and the entire course of the CCP prior to the Zunyi Conference was depicted as a chain of continuous deviations from Mao's correct line, first to the right and then to the left. In this connection, all of his real and supposed adversaries (Chen Duxiu, the “putschists,” Li Lisan, Wang Ming, Bo Gu, Zhang Guotao, and even his former friend Luo Zhanglong, who in 1931 opposed not Mao but the Politburo) were stigmatized.⁷¹

An important measure undertaken at the congress was the adoption of a new party constitution. Liu Shaoqi delivered a report on this matter in which he surpassed all the other delegates in his unrestrained exaltation of Mao. The text of the constitution was itself remarkable in naming “Mao Zedong Thought” as the ideological foundation of the CCP. “The Communist Party of China,” it read, “guides its entire work by the teaching which unites the theories of Marxism-Leninism with the actual practice of the Chinese revolution—the Thought of Mao Tse-tung [Mao Zedong].”⁷²

The term “the Thought of Mao Tse-tung” or “Mao Zedong Thought” (in Chinese Mao Zedong sixiang) had first been advanced by Wang Jiaxiang at the beginning of July 1943. It appeared in Wang's article “The Chinese Communist Party and China's Path to Liberation,” published in the newspaper Jiefang ribao (Liberation daily). Prior to this, beginning in September 1940, various terms appeared in the party lexicon of the CCP including, for example, “the theories of Comrade Mao Zedong,” “the ideas of Comrade Mao Zedong,” “the theory and strategy of Mao Zedong,” “the theory and strategy of Comrade Mao Zedong,” “the viewpoints of Comrade Mao Zedong,” “the views of Comrade Mao Zedong,” “the policy of Comrade Mao Zedong,” “the line of Comrade Mao Zedong,” “the path of Comrade Mao Zedong,” “the style of Mao Zedong,” and even “Mao Zedongism.” Wang's formula, however, was the one that took hold, despite the fact that many of the toadies preferred the term “Mao Zedongism.”

Four years later, at the Second Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee on March 13, 1949, Mao himself touched upon the question of why the “ideas of the Chinese communists” should not be called an ism:

Some people say that the ideas of Stalin are called a teaching rather than an ism because of Stalin's modesty …… [but] modesty is not the explanation …… [I]n the Soviet Union there already exists Leninism, and the ideas of Stalin are congruent with this ism, they are its systematic embodiment in practical politics. It is wrong to say that both Leninism and Stalinism exist, that there are two isms. It would be precisely the same if the ideas, line, and policies of the Chinese revolution were seen as an ism …… It is better for us to be a branch of Marxism-Leninism.⁷³

Of course, another reason was that as long ago as 1927, the term “Mao Zedongism” had been used in the Chinese Communist Party with a very negative connotation as a synonym for military opportunism. The dissident communist Ye Qing had likewise employed the term with a negative meaning when he attacked the CCP in the 1940s from the position of classical Marxism. In his work “The War of Resistance and Culture,” Ye Qing asserted there was not an iota of Marxism-Leninism in Mao Zedong, but only one ism, namely, Mao Zedongism, “an ism that represented the peasant petit bourgeoisie.”⁷⁴ Ye Qing's work was well-known among Chinese communists, and Mao could not ignore this.

The main point, however, was that the final choice of the term reflected the attempt of Mao and his supporters to create a purely Chinese ideology expressing equally the interests of all strata in Chinese society, from the proletariat to a segment of the landlords and of the national bourgeoisie, a kind of ideology of the united front. The term “thought” (sixiang) in contradistinction to “ism” (zhuyi) perfectly fitted this supraclass Chinese national ideology. In fact, unlike zhuyi this term was Chinese in origin. It was borrowed by the Japanese in the nineteenth century from classical Chinese, in which it was used to express “to comprehend,” “to think,” and “to recollect.” The Japanese used it to signify the new Western concepts of “ideology” and “ideas.” Enriched by its new content, the term sixiang returned to China from Japan. The term zhuyi, however, had no roots in Chinese tradition. In the nineteenth century the Japanese concocted the word zhuyi from the Chinese characters zhu (foundation) and yi (meaning) to convey the idea of the Western concepts “doctrine,” “principles,” and “cause.” The term zhuyi was transmitted to China as something that was previously unknown. It was natural that sixiang (thought) would be much more comprehensible and closer to the broad masses of the Chinese people, who had experienced the heavy burden of the past even in recent times, than the foreign term zhuyi (ism).

In China even sacred views that were disseminated and expressed with the aid of new or little-known terminology elicited negative reactions and resistance. At the same time, innovative concepts and doctrines that relied upon a traditional lexicon were recognized and supported by the broad masses. Mao, as we know, had a profound understanding of Chinese political culture. Moreover, as a rule he spiced his works, especially those dealing with New Democracy, with a large number of quotations from the ancient classics that were prized and respected by the Chinese people.⁷⁵

Mao's modus operandi was fully congruent with Stalin's policy and therefore could not evoke any dissatisfaction from that quarter. Quite the contrary. The all-powerful chief of the world communist movement must have been impressed that the Chinese Communist Party was now united around this Leader who loyally grasped his “wise” tactical line and imitated it so faithfully in all respects.

At the First Plenum of the Central Committee following the Seventh Congress, Mao was elected chairman of the Central Committee, of the Politburo, and of the Secretariat, and at the end of August 1945, at an enlarged plenum of the Politburo, he was also elected chairman of the newly reorganized Military Council of the Central Committee. He concentrated all power in his own hands. In early August 1945, the Second Session of the First Plenum of the Central Committee adopted new versions of “The Resolution on Certain Questions of History,” and also of the party constitution, in which the role and significance of Mao were presented in an even more vivid fashion.⁷⁶ The Chinese Communist Party entered the final phase of the Sino-Japanese War fully armed ideologically, politically, and organizationally.

¹ See Ren Bishi, Ren Bishi xuanji (Selected Works of Ren Bishi) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1987), 164–207; Gao Hua, Hong taiyang shi zen me yang shengqi de: Yan'an zhengfeng yundong lailong qumai (How the Red Sun Rose: Analysis of the Yan'an Rectification Movement (Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 2000), 164–66.

² See Titarenko, Kommunisticheskii internatsional i kitaiskaia revoliutsiia (The Communist International and the Chinese Revolution), 283; Ren Bishi nianpu, 1904–1950 (Chronological Biography of Ren Bishi, 1904–1950), 370–72.

³ See Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 1, sheet 185; Ren Bishi nianpu, 1904–1950 (Chronological Biography of Ren Bishi, 1904–1950), 372; Xu, Wang Jiaxiang nianpu, 1906–1974 (Chronological Biography of Wang Jiaxiang, 1906–1974), 190.

⁴ Quoted from Xu, Wang Jiaxiang nianpu, 1906–1974 (Chronological Biography of Wang Jiaxiang, 1906–1974), 190; Ren Bishi nianpu, 1904–1950 (Chronological Biography of Ren Bishi, 1904–1950), 372; Yang, Zouxiang polie (Heading for a Split), 76.

⁵ Xu, Wang Jiaxiang nianpu, 1906–1974 (Chronological Biography of Wang Jiaxiang, 1906–1974), 196; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 2, 90; Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1893–1949) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1893–1949]), 531.

⁶ Li, Huiyi yu yanjiu (Reminiscences and Studies), vol. 1, 415–16.

⁷ Quoted from Teiwes and Sun, “From a Leninist to a Charismatic Party,” 344.

⁸ Quoted from Vladimirov, Osobyi raion Kitaia 1942–1945 (Special Region of China, 1942–1945), 603.

⁹ See Titov, Iz istorii bor'by i raskola v rukovodstve KPK 1935–1936 gg. (From the History of Struggle and Split in the Leadership of the CCP, 1935–1936), 140–43.

¹⁰ See M. I. Kalinin, “O Kitae” (On China), in Kitai: Rasskazy (China: Stories) (Moscow and Leningrad: Detgiz, 1938), 34–35.

¹¹ E. Snow, Geroicheskii narod Kitaia (The Heroic People of China), trans. L. Mirtseva (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1938), 72, 74; Snow, Red Star Over China, 69, 70.

¹² Mao Zedong, “Moia zhizn' ” (My Life), Internatsional'naia literatura (International literature), no. 11 (1937): 101–11; no. 12 (1937): 95–101.

¹³ Mao Tsze-dun: Biograficheskii ocherk (Mao Zedong: Biographical Sketch) (Moscow: OGIZ, 1939).

¹⁴ Emi, Mao Tszedun, Chzhu De (Mao Zedong, Zhu De).

¹⁵ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, 534–35.

¹⁶ Ibid., 529.

¹⁷ Ibid., 538–39.

¹⁸ See “Doklad tov. Mao Tsze-duna na VI rasshirennom plenume TsK kompartii Kitaia ot 12–14 oktabria 1938 goda: O novom etape razvitiia antiiaponskoi natsional'noi voiny i edinogo antiiaponskogo natsional'nogo fronta” (Report of Comrade Mao Zedong at the Sixth Enlarged Plenum of the CC of the Chinese Communist Party, October 12–14, 1938: On the New Stage of Development of the Anti-Japanese National War and the Anti-Japanese National United Front), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 1, sheets 66–215; see also Lichnoe delo Lin Biao (Personal File of Lin Biao), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 53, vol. 1, sheet 207.

¹⁹ On Hatem see Sidney Shapiro, Ma Haide: The Saga of American Doctor George Hatem in China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2004).

²⁰ R. Karmen, “God v Kitae” (A Year in China), Znamia (Banner), no. 8 (1940): 75.

²¹ See Braun, A Comintern Agent in China 1932–1939, 248–50; Shapiro, Ma Haide, 55–57; Roxane Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch'ing (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 145; Helen Foster Snow, My China Years, 262–63.

²² See Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 175.

²³ See Lichnoe delo Mao Tsze-duna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 1, sheet 17; Karmen, God v Kitae (A Year in China), 77; Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 6, 297–300; Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch'ing, 155; Wen Songhui, “Mao Zedong chushi Jiang Qing” (Mao Zedong's First Meeting with Jiang Qing), Renmin zhengxie bao (Newspaper of the Chinese people's political consultative conference), September 10, 2004; Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service, trans. Christine Donougher (New York: Morrow, 1989), 14–15, 81–83, 122–28; John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng—The Evil Genius Behind Mao and His Legacy of Terror in People's China (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 145–49; Ross Terrill, Madam Mao: The White-Boned Demon, rev. ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 14–142; Braun, A Comintern Agent in China 1932–1939, 250.

²⁴ See “Vypiska iz materiala vkh. no. 8497 ot 10 Dekabria 1949 g. (Doklad t. Terebina, nakhodivshegosia v Kitae v kachestve vracha pri rukovodstve TsK KPK s 1942 po 1949 g.” (Excerpt from Material Incoming No. 8497, December 10, 1949 [Report of Comrade Terebin, Who Was in China as a Physician Attached to the Leadership of the CC CCP from 1942 to 1949), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 4, sheet 71; I. V. Kovalev, “Rossiia v Kitae (s missiei v Kitae)” (Russia in China [My Mission to China]), Duel' (Duel), November 5, 1997.

²⁵ See Lichnoe delo Ven Yun (Personal File of Wen Yun), n.p.; Lichnoe delo Mao Anyina (Yun Fu) (Personal File of Mao Anying [Yong Fu]), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 10, sheets 2–17.

²⁶ Quoted from Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 15.

²⁷ Lichnoe delo Mao Anying (Yun Fu) (Personal file of Mao Anying [Yong Fu]), 27–28; Lichnoe delo Yun Shu (Personal file of Yong Shu), 23; Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong shuxin xuanji (Selected Letters of Mao Zedong) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1983), 166–67.

²⁸ See Mao, Mao Zedong shuxin xuanji (Selected Letters of Mao Zedong), 157.

²⁹ Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 40; Ma, Hongse diyi jiazu (The First Red Family), 70; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 2, 201.

³⁰ See Pantsov, “Obrazovanie 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), 41–48.

³¹ Vladimirov, Osobyi raion Kitaia (Special Region of China), 77–78.

³² See Zhang, Zhang Wentian nianpu (Chronological Biography of Zhang Wentian), vol. 1, 624.

³³ Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, vol. 7 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), 330–69.

³⁴ Ibid., 262–64.

³⁵ Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 33.

³⁶ Ibid. See also Vladimir Dedijer, The War Diaries of Vladimir Dedijer, vol. 3 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 313.

³⁷ See Djilas, Conversations with Stalin.

³⁸ Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 3, sheet 189.

³⁹ Ibid., 186–89; RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 74, file 314.

⁴⁰ Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 295.

⁴¹ See Pantsov and Levine, Chinese Comintern Activists: An Analytic Biographic Dictionary (manuscript), 302.

⁴² RGASPI, collection 17, inventory 162, file 36, sheet 41.

⁴³ Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 172, 176.

⁴⁴ To be sure, such generosity after the Nazi attack on the USSR might be explained by Stalin's gratitude to Mao, who on June 15, 1941, had informed the Kremlin leader via the Soviet military attaché Nikolai Roshchin of the forthcoming invasion, giving the precise date, June 22. Mao had received this information from his secret agent in Chongqing, Yan Baohang. In his return telegram after the outbreak of the war, Stalin thanked Mao, emphasizing that his accurate information had helped the Russians initiate their supposed military preparations on time. “Letter from Yan Mingfu, a son of Yan Baohang, to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 9, 2005,” Alexander V. Pantsov's private archives.

⁴⁵ Dimitrov, Dnevnik (Diary), 101.

⁴⁶ See Raymond F. Wylie, The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch'en Po-ta, and the Search for Chinese Theory 1935–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 227; Li Hua-Yu, “Stalin's Short Course and Mao's Socialist Economic Transformation of China in the Early 1950s,” Russian History 29, nos. 2–4 (Summer–Fall–Winter 2002): 357–76.

⁴⁷ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 2, 326.

⁴⁸ Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 7, 810.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 826–32; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 2, 349–51.

⁵⁰ Quoted from Vladimirov, Osobyi raion Kitaia 1942–1945 (Special Region of China, 1942–1945), 123.

⁵¹ Ibid., 40, 41.

⁵² Liu Shaoqi, Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), 136.

⁵³ See Liu Chongwen and Chen Shaochou, eds., Liu Shaoqi nianpu, 1898–1969 (Chronological Biography of Liu Shaoqi, 1898–1969), vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1998), 360.

⁵⁴ See Li Min et al., eds., Jenshide Mao Zedong: Mao Zedong shenbian gongzuo renyuan de huiyi (The Real Mao Zedong: Reminiscences of Persons Who Worked by Mao's Side) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2004), 2; Wang, Zhongguo gongchandang zuzhi shi ziliao huibian (Collection of Documents on the History of CCP Organizations), 424–26.

⁵⁵ See Zhou Guoquan et al., Wang Ming nianpu (Chronological Biography of Wang Ming) ([Hefei]: Anhui renmin chubanshe, 1991), 121, 123.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 120.

⁵⁷ Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 256.

⁵⁸ Ibid.

⁵⁹ See Lichnoe delo Van Mina (Personal File of Wang Ming), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 6, vol. 2, sheet 6.

⁶⁰ Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 259.

⁶¹ Ibid., 260.

⁶² Ibid., 288.

⁶³ Titarenko, Kommunisticheskii Internatsional i kitaiskaia revoliutsiia (The Communist International and the Chinese Revolution), 296.

⁶⁴ RGASPI, collection 146, inventory 2, file 13, sheets 4, 5.

⁶⁵ Ibid., sheet 16; see also Vladimirov, Osobyi raion Kitaia 1942–1945 (Special Region of China 1942–1945), 251–53.

⁶⁶ RGASPI, collection 146, inventory 2, file 13, sheet 8.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 26–27. Wang Ming's daughter who lived in Moscow was adopted by Dimitrov.

⁶⁸ Quoted from Wang Ming, Mao's Betrayal, trans. Vic Schneierson (Moscow: Progress, 1979), 157.

⁶⁹ See Mao Zedong, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1969), 205–70.

⁷⁰ See Vladimirov, Osobyi raion Kitaia 1942–1945 (Special Region of China 1942–1945), 487.

⁷¹ See “Resolution of the CCP CC on Certain Historical Questions,” in Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party, 1164–79.

⁷² Liu Shao-chi, On the Party (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1950), 157.

⁷³ Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong wenji (Works of Mao Zedong), vol. 5 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1996), 260–61.

⁷⁴ Quoted from Mao, “Qida gongzuo fangzhen” (Work Report at the Seventh Congress), 8.

⁷⁵ See A. V. Pantsov, “K diskussii v KPK vokrug ‘idei Mao Tsze-duna' ” (On the Discussion Within the CCP of “Mao Zedong Thought”), Rabochii klass i sovremennyi mir (The working class and the contemporary world), no. 3 (1982): 61–64.

⁷⁶ See Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 2, 607, 617; vol. 3 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2002), 10–12.

ⁿ⁴⁶ In a translation of this sentence into Chinese from the late 1940s and early 1950s, this statement is not in quotation marks, that is, it is presented as Mao Zedong’s own revelation. In what became the classical formulation, it goes as follows: “Once the political line is established, the decisive factor is cadres.”

ⁿ⁴⁷ It is worth noting that just a year before the Sixth Plenum, in his lectures on dialectical materialism, Mao expressed precisely the opposite thought. “[We] must,” he said then, “struggle with all the outworn philosophies now existing in China, raise the flag of criticism on the ideological front throughout the whole country, and thereby liquidate the philosophical heritage of ancient China.” Evidently he did not stay in one place.

ⁿ⁴⁸ Many years later, in a conversation with the American writer Roxane Witke, Jiang Qing denied that Mao had thought up her new name. She claimed to have invented it herself. Jiang Qing’s assertion, however, contradicts other sources.

ⁿ⁴⁹ Ren Bishi and his wife returned to Yan’an along with Zhou and his wife. Lin Biao (under the pseudonym of Li Ting), who had come to the USSR for medical treatment in January 1939, stayed on as acting representative of the CCP to the Comintern. He discharged this responsibility until August 1941, after which he too returned to Yan’an. Subsequently, by agreement with the ECCI, the Central Committee of the CCP sent no more representatives to Moscow.