by Philip Short
It was one of the most obscure events in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. The only written trace of the Red Army's passage is an old photograph of a faded slogan, chalked up by the troops on a wall: ‘Everyone should take up arms and fight the Japanese!’2 All the participants are now dead. No one knows exactly who was present, or even where the meeting took place. Premier Zhou Enlai, years later, recalled that it had been in a farmhouse, somewhere outside the town, where a wedding party was in progress.3 Mao was two weeks short of his forty-first birthday, a thin, lanky man, hollow-cheeked from lack of food and sleep, whose oversize grey cotton jacket seemed perpetually about to slide from his shoulders. He was still recovering from a severe bout of malaria, and at times had to be carried in a litter. Taller than most of the other leaders, his face was smooth and unmarked, with a shock of unruly black hair, parted in the middle.
The left-wing American writer, Agnes Smedley, who met Mao not long afterwards, found him a forbidding figure, with a high-pitched voice and long, sensitive woman's hands:
His dark, inscrutable face was long, the forehead broad and high, the mouth feminine. Whatever else he might be, he was an aesthete … [But] despite that feminine quality in him he was as stubborn as a mule, and a steel rod of pride and determination ran through his nature. I had the impression that he would wait and watch for years, but eventually have his way … His humour was often sardonic and grim, as though it sprang from deep caverns of spiritual seclusion. I had the impression that there was a door to his being that had never been opened to anyone.4
Even to his closest comrades, Mao was hard to fathom. His spirit, in Smedley's words, ‘dwelt within itself, isolating him’. His personality inspired loyalty, not affection. He combined a fierce temper and infinite patience; vision, and an almost pedantic attention to detail; an inflexible will, and extreme subtlety; public charisma, and private intrigue.
The nationalists, who had put a price on his head, executed his wife and sent soldiers to vandalise his parents’ tomb, viewed Mao throughout the early 1930s as the dominant Red Army political chief. As so often, they were wrong.
Power was in the hands of what was known as the ‘three-man group’ or ‘troika’. Bo Gu, the 27-year-old acting Party leader (or, as he was formally known, ‘the comrade with overall responsibility for the work of the Party Centre’) had graduated from the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. He had the face of a precocious schoolboy, with bulging eyes and black-rimmed spectacles, which a British diplomat said, unkindly but accurately, reminded him of a golliwog. The CominternI had parachuted him into the leadership to ensure loyalty to the Soviet line. The second member, Zhou Enlai, General Political Commissar of the Red Army and the real power behind Bo Gu's throne, also had Moscow's trust. The third, Otto Braun, a tall, thin German with a prominent nose and horsey teeth, set off by a pair of round spectacles, was Comintern military adviser.
Over the previous twelve months, these three men had presided over a shattering series of communist military reverses. The nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, had consolidated his hold over most of the rest of China and was determined to extirpate what he rightly saw as a potentially fatal long-term challenge to his rule. With the help of German military advisers, he began building lines of fortified blockhouses around the region the communists controlled. With excruciating slowness, the lines were pushed forward, the vice around the base area tightened, the communist forces hemmed in. Very gradually, the Red Army was being strangled. It was a strategy to which the troika could find no adequate response.
Mao might have been no more successful. But Bo Gu had sidelined him more than two years before. Mao was not in power.
In October 1934, after months of agonised debates among the Party leadership, the Reds abandoned their base area in a last despairing gamble to ward off total defeat as Chiang's forces closed in for the kill. Their 6,000-mile trek across China would later be celebrated as the Long March, an epic symbol of courage in adversity, selfless discipline and indomitable will. At the time it was called, more prosaically, the ‘strategic transfer’, and a little later, the March to the West. The plan, in so far as there was one, was to make for north-west Hunan, where the local warlords were wary of Chiang's ambitions and reluctant to make common cause with him, and there to link up with other communist forces to create a new central Red base area to replace the one they had just lost.
It started well enough. The Red Army slipped through the first line of blockhouses, meeting little resistance. The next two lines also fell. More than three weeks passed before nationalist intelligence realised that its prey had escaped.5 But Chiang's fourth line, on the Xiang River, was different.
The battle lasted more than a week, from November 25 to December 3.6 When it ended, the Red Army had lost between 15,000 and 20,000 combat troops. Up to 40,000 reserves and bearers had deserted. Of the 86,000 men and women who had set out in October, not many more than 30,000 were left. The baggage train, which had stretched for fifty miles, a serpentine leviathan which, Mao said later, resembled a house-moving operation more than an army on the march,7 had its back broken at the Xiang River. Scattered in the mud and littering the hillsides were the office furniture, the printing presses, the Party archives, the generators – all the paraphernalia that the communists had amassed in three years’ rule of a region bigger than Belgium – which had been lugged painfully on the backs of porters over mountain paths and paddy fields for hundreds of wearisome miles. Artillery pieces, heavy machine-guns, the one X-ray machine the communists possessed, all were jettisoned. But not before they had so slowed the army's progress that, bloated and weak, it had dragged itself into the trap which Chiang Kai-shek had set.
It was a worse disaster than even the most phlegmatic Red Army leaders were prepared for. In October, the base they had spent years building had been abandoned; now two-thirds of their army had been lost as well.
A week later, having thrown off their pursuers, the remnants of the communist forces crossed into southern Hunan. They had regrouped and were in good order. But among the senior leadership, mutiny was in the air. The time was fast approaching when the troika would be called to account.
But not quite yet. The eight or nine weary men who met that afternoon at Tongdao faced a much more pressing question: where to head next? Bo Gu and Otto Braun insisted they keep to the original plan and make for north-west Hunan. The military commanders refused. Chiang Kai-shek had 300,000 troops blocking the route north. To try to force a passage was to court annihilation. A decision had to be made fast. Word came that Hunan warlord troops were closing in from the east.
After a tense, hurried debate, it was agreed as an interim measure that the army would go west, into the mountain fastness of Guizhou.8 There a full meeting of the Politburo would be called to discuss future strategy. The compromise proposal came from Mao. It was the first time since his dismissal from the military command in 1932 that his views had been heard and accepted in the inner circle of power. His presence was due only to the gravity of the Xiang River defeat. But a journey of 10,000 li, say the Chinese, starts with a single step. For Mao, Tongdao was that step.
Guizhou is, and has been for centuries, one of the poorest of China's provinces. In the 1930s, the villages were opium-sodden, the people illiterate and so impoverished that whole families possessed only a single pair of trousers. Girls were frequently killed at birth; boys were sold to slave-merchants for resale in richer areas near the coast. But it was a place of exquisite natural grandeur: the countryside that unrolled before the Red Army, as it marched west, was drawn from the fantastic landscapes of a Ming scroll.
Beyond Tongdao the hills grow steeper, the mountains wider and more contorted: great conical limestone mounds, thousands of feet high; mountains like camels’ humps, like giant anthills; plum-pudding mountains like ancestral tumuli. Miao villages perch on the bluffs – clusters of thatched roofs and ochre walls, with overhanging eaves and latticed paper windows, standing out dark ag
ainst a yellowish-green carpet of dead winter grasses and early shoots of spring. Hawks circle above; frost lies white on the rice stubble below. Guizhou people say: ‘No three days without rain; no three li without a mountain.’ In this part of the province there are only mountains and, in December and January, perpetual drizzle and fog. The higher slopes, wrapped in mist, are thick with pine forests, golden bamboo and dark green firs, while far below, the valley bottoms are filled with bright lakes of white cloud. Chain bridges are slung across the rivers, and alongside the torrents that cascade down from the heights are pocket-handkerchief sized patches of cultivated land, where a peasant works on a fifty-degree slope to coax a few poor vegetables from the dark red soil.
The soldiers remembered only the rigours of the journey. ‘We went up a mountain so steep that I could see the soles of the man ahead of me,’ one army man recalled. ‘News came down the line that our advance columns were facing a sheer cliff, and … to sleep where we were and continue climbing at daybreak … The stars looked like jade stones on a black curtain. The dark peaks towered around us like menacing giants. We seemed to be at the bottom of a well.’9 The cliff, known locally as the Thunder God Rock, had stone steps a foot wide carved into its face. It was too steep for stretcher-bearers: the wounded had to be carried up on men's backs. Many horses fell to their deaths on the rocks below.10
The Red Army Commander, Zhu De, remembered the poverty. ‘The peasants call themselves “dry men”,’ he noted. ‘They are sucked dry of everything … People dig rotten rice from the ground under a landlord's old granary. The monks call this “holy rice”, Heaven's gift to the poor.’11
Mao saw these things too. But he wrote instead of the power and beauty of the country through which they were passing:
Mountains!
Surging waves in a tumultuous sea,
Ten thousand stallions
Galloping in the heat of battle.
Mountains!
Blade-sharp, piercing the blue of heaven.
But for your strength upholding
The skies would break loose and fall.12
These short poems, composed in the saddle, were not simply a celebration of the elemental forces of nature. Mao had reason to exult.
*
On December 15, the Red Army reached Liping, a county seat in a valley surrounded by low, terraced hills, and the first level ground they had seen since leaving Tongdao. Military headquarters were set up in a merchant's house, a spacious, well-appointed place with a small inner courtyard, ornamented by Buddhist motifs and emblems of prosperity. It had four-poster beds and a tiny Chinese garden behind, and opened on to a narrow street of wood-fronted shops and houses with grey-tiled roofs and upturned bird's-wing eaves. A few doors further down stood a German Lutheran mission. The missionaries, like the merchant, had fled at the communists’ approach.
It was here that the Politburo met for its first formal discussion of policy since the Long March began.13 There were two main issues: the Red Army's destination, which was still unresolved; and military tactics.
Braun and Bo Gu wanted to join up with the communist forces in northern Hunan. Mao proposed heading north-west, to set up a new Red base area on the border between Guizhou and southern Sichuan, where, he argued, resistance would be weaker. He was supported by Zhang Wentian, one of the four members of the Politburo Standing Committee, and Wang Jiaxiang, Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission, who had been gravely wounded in battle a year earlier and spent the whole of the Long March in a litter with a rubber tube sticking out of his stomach. Both were Moscow-trained. Both had initially backed Braun and Bo Gu but had grown disillusioned. Mao had been cultivating them ever since the march began. Now they swung the balance in his favour. Sensing the mood of the meeting, Zhou Enlai added his voice and most of the rest of the Politburo fell in behind. Bo Gu's proposal was rejected. Instead they resolved to set up a new base area with its centre at Zunyi, Guizhou's second city, or, if that proved too difficult, further to the north-west.
But Mao did not have it all his own way. On tactics, the resolution was more even-handed. It warned against ‘underestimating possible losses to our own side, leading to pessimism and defeatism’ – an implicit reference to the rout on the Xiang River and thus a criticism of the military line of the three-man group of Zhou, Bo Gu and Braun; in the same vein, it ordered the army to refrain from large-scale engagements until the new base area had been secured. But it also spoke of the danger of ‘guerrillaism’, a codeword for the ‘flexible guerrilla strategy’ associated with Mao. Zhou Enlai evidently was not prepared to yield to Mao without a fight.14
Next day, December 20, the Red Army resumed its march. Bo Gu and Otto Braun were fatally weakened. The real conflict shaping up was now between Mao and Zhou.
They had so little in common, these two men: Zhou, a mandarin's son, a rebel against his class, supple, subtle, the quintessential survivor, who had learned the cheapness of life as a communist working underground in Shanghai, where death was never more than a whisper of betrayal away; Mao, a peasant to his roots, earthy and coarse, his speech laced with picaresque aphorisms, contemptuous of city-dwellers. One was urbane and refined, the indefatigable executor of other men's ideas; the other, an unpredictable visionary. For most of the next forty years they would form one of the world's most enduring political partnerships. But as 1934 drew to a close, that was far from both their minds.
On December 31, the army command halted at a small trading centre called Houchang (Monkey Town), twenty-five miles south of the River Wu, the last natural barrier before they reached Zunyi.15 That night the Politburo met again. Otto Braun proposed that the army make a stand against three warlord divisions which were reported to be closing in on them. The military commanders reminded him that they had agreed at Liping to avoid large-scale set-piece battles and give priority to securing the new base area. After a furious argument lasting late into the night, Braun was suspended as military adviser. To underline the importance of the change, the Politburo resolution approving it included a ringing endorsement of one of Mao's cardinal principles, which had been ignored for the previous two years. ‘No opportunity should be missed,’ it declared, ‘to use mobile warfare to break up and destroy the enemy one by one. Then we shall certainly gain victory.’
The tide had turned. The old chain of command under the troika had broken down. As a temporary measure, it was agreed that all major decisions would be referred to the leadership as a whole. The old strategy had been abandoned. A new one had to be worked out to replace it. In the early hours of New Year's Day, the Politburo agreed to convene an enlarged conference at Zunyi. It was to have three tasks: to review the past, determine what had gone wrong, and chart a course for the future. The stage was set for a showdown.
Deng Xiaoping was thirty years old, a stocky man, very short, with a close-shaven bullet head. As a teenager in Paris he had learned how to produce a news-sheet for the local branch of the Chinese Communist Youth League, scratching characters on to a waxed sheet with a stylus and rolling off copies in black Chinese ink, made from soot and tung oil. His reputation as a journalist had stuck. Now he was editor of the Red Army newspaper, an equally crude mimeographed one-page broadsheet called Hongxing (Red Star).
The issue of January 15, 1935, related how the people of Zunyi had welcomed the communist forces after they had taken the city without a shot being fired: the advance guard had persuaded the defenders to open the city gates by pretending to be part of a local warlord force. Other articles described in glowing terms ‘the Red Army's image in the hearts of the masses’, and recorded the establishment of a Revolutionary Committee to administer the city.16
Nowhere did it give the slightest hint that the Politburo was about to hold the most important meeting in its history, which Deng himself would attend as note-taker – a meeting so sensitive that, for almost a month after, senior Party officials were kept in ignorance of its decisions, until the leaders had met again to decide how the news should be
broken to them.
Twenty men gathered that night on the upper floor of a handsome, rectangular, two-storey building of dark-grey brick, surrounded by a colonnaded veranda.17 It had been the home of one of the city's minor warlords until Zhou and the military commanders took it for their headquarters. Bo Gu and Otto Braun were billeted close by, along a lane leading to the Roman Catholic Cathedral, an ornate, imposing structure with a fanciful three-tiered roof, more chinoiserie than Chinese, set amid flower gardens where the Red Army detachment escorting the leadership was encamped. Mao and his two allies, Zhang Wentian and Wang Jiaxiang, with six bodyguards, were in another warlord's house, with art-deco woodwork and stained-glass windows, on the other side of town. Ever since they had arrived, a week earlier, Mao had been canvassing support. Now the preparations were over. The two sides were ready to do battie. In Otto Braun's words:
It was obvious that [Mao] wanted revenge … In 1932 … his military and political [power] had been broken … Now there emerged the possibility – years of partisan struggle had been directed at bringing it about – that by demagogic exploitation of isolated organisational and tactical mistakes, but especially through concocted claims and slanderous imputations, he could discredit the Party leadership and isolate … Bo Gu. He would rehabilitate himself completely [and] take the Army firmly into his grasp, thereby subordinating the Party itself to his will.18