by Philip Short
It was not Mao's only triumph that week. While he was negotiating with Director Wu at the Governor's yamen on October 24, Yang Kaihui, who had gone for her confinement to her mother's home in the suburbs, gave birth to a son.64
The strike epidemic spread quickly to other trades. Garment-makers struck twice in September. They were followed by barbers, rickshaw-pullers, dyers and weavers, cobblers, typesetters and writing-brush makers.65 By the beginning of November, when the All-Hunan Federation of Labour Organisations was established, with Mao as its general secretary, fifteen unions had been formed, including the country's first inter-provincial association, the Canton-Hankou General Rail Union, with headquarters at Changsha's main railway station. By the following summer, the number would grow to 22 with 30,000 members. Mao himself served as nominal leader of eight of them.66
In December, as head of the new Federation, he took a joint delegation of union representatives to meet Governor Zhao, the Changsha police chief and other top provincial officials, to discuss the government's intentions in view of the workers’ growing demands. According to Mao's minutes, published afterwards by the Dagongbao, Zhao assured them that constitutional guarantees protecting the right to strike would be maintained, and that his government ‘had no intention of oppressing them’. In reply, Mao explained that what the unions really wanted was socialism, but ‘because this was difficult to achieve in China at present’, their demands would be limited to improvements in wages and working conditions. The Governor agreed that ‘while socialism might be realised in the future, it would be hard to put it into practice today’.
The delegation did not get all it wanted. The administration refused to give an undertaking never to intervene in labour conflicts; nor would it register the Federation as a legally constituted body. But the two sides did agree to have regular contact to ‘avoid misunderstandings’.67
December 1922 marked the peak of the labour movement in Hunan, and a highpoint in Mao's own life. He was Secretary of the provincial Party committee; a highly successful trade union organiser, whom even Governor Zhao had to listen to; and the father of a two-month-old baby boy. On his twenty-ninth birthday, the last of the great wave of strikes he had orchestrated in the province that year, at the Shuikoushan lead and zinc mines near Hengyang, came to a successful conclusion.68
Yet amid the movement's triumphs, there were warning signs as well. Shanghai, the biggest industrial centre of all, was so tightly controlled by an alliance of Western and Chinese capitalists, foreign police and triad labour recruiters, that the Party's Labour Secretariat found it impossible to operate there and in the autumn moved to Beijing.69 Even in Hunan, where the movement was strongest, some prominent sympathisers within the provincial elite were beginning to ask themselves whether the agitation was not going too far.70
In the end it was from Beijing that the fatal blow descended. The Labour Secretariat had gone there partly because the dominant northern leader, Wu Peifu, who early in 1922 had strengthened his position by defeating the Manchurian warlord, Zhang Zuolin, was seen as a relatively liberal figure. Wu liked to play up the contrast between his new government and that of the hated pro-Japanese Anfu clique that had preceded it, and proclaimed that the protection of labour was one of his priorities.71 The communists took note, and that summer the Secretariat and its provincial heads, Mao among them, petitioned the Beijing parliament to enact a labour law providing for an eight-hour workday, paid holidays and maternity leave, and an end to child labour.72 In a separate move, Li Dazhao reached agreement with Wu's officials for six Party members to act as ‘secret inspectors’ on the Beijing–Hankou railway, the main north-south artery for troop movements. Wu's interest was to eliminate Zhang Zuolin's supporters from the railwaymen's labour associations. But the result was that, by the end of the year, most of the railway workforce had been reorganised into communist-led workers’ clubs.
Meanwhile Soviet Russia had sent a new emissary, Adolf Joffe, for fresh talks on the thorny problem of diplomatic recognition. Russian diplomats began to dream of an alliance between Wu and Sun Yat-sen, which would combine northern power with southern revolutionary credentials. But Joffe could not give Beijing what it wanted – the restitution of the Russian-administered Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria and an acknowledgement of Chinese interests in Mongolia – and Wu's interest in the Russians and their local protégés waned.73
Against this background, the communist-led railway workers’ clubs on the Beijing–Hankou line called a founding congress, to be held in Zhengzhou on February 1, to establish a General Rail Union, similar to the one Mao had founded in Hunan the previous autumn. A few days before the meeting was to open, Wu Peifu ordered it banned. When the delegates went ahead anyway, troops occupied the union headquarters and a national rail strike was declared. On February 7, 1923, Wu and other warlords cracked down simultaneously in Beijing, Zhengzhou and Hankou. At least forty men were killed, including the branch secretary in Hankou, who was beheaded in front of his comrades on the station platform. More than 200 others were wounded.74
The ‘February Seventh Massacre’, as it became known, punched a huge hole in the communists’ ambitions to use the labour movement as the motor of political change. Work stoppages fell by half, and those that did take place were brutally suppressed. Labour activism was further reduced by rising unemployment as Chinese manufacturers cut back in the face of increased foreign competition.75
In Hunan, where Zhao Hengti was continuing his efforts to keep north and south at arms’ length, the clampdown was initially muted. Mao's Labour Federation sent off angry telegrams, denouncing the ‘unspeakably evil warlords’, led by Wu and his nominal ally, Cao Kun, and warning graphically: ‘Every compatriot who has seen these traitors … regrets that he cannot devour their flesh and make a bed of their skins.’76 The registration of new unions continued and, in March, Mao sent his brothers, Zemin and Zetan, to Anyuan and Shuikoushan to help run the workers’ clubs there. Shortly afterwards Li Lisan left for Wuhan, to be replaced by Liu Shaoqi, a dour, orthodox young Leninist who found it difficult at first to assume the mantle of his charismatic predecessor but was well-placed to continue the cautious reformist policies which Mao had laid down. By then, Anyuan had earned the soubriquet ‘Little Moscow’ and was described by the Party Centre as its ‘great fortress of the proletariat’. After the ‘February Seventh Massacre’, Mao once more underlined the need for restraint, quoting a line from the Tang poet, Han Yu: ‘The drawn bow must await release’.77 He visited the coalmines again in April and then helped to organise a gigantic demonstration in Changsha, which brought 60,000 people onto the streets, as part of a nationwide campaign to demand that Japan return Port Arthur (Lushun) and Dairen (Dalian).78 But that was the last hurrah. Two months later, during a general strike to protest the deaths of two demonstrators killed by marines from a Japanese gunboat, Zhao declared martial law, filled the streets with his troops and issued arrest warrants for union leaders.79
By that point, however, Mao had already left Hunan. In January 1923, Chen Duxiu had invited him to come to Shanghai to work for the Party Central Committee. Li Weihan, three years Mao's junior, a former First Normal student and an early member of the New People's Study Society, was named to succeed him as provincial Party Secretary. The communist rail union leader, Guo Liang, became head of the Labour Federation; and another former New People's Study Society member, twenty-year-old Xia Xi, became secretary of the provincial Youth League. For Mao, it was a substantial promotion. But he was evidently in no hurry to depart, and delayed until mid-April before bidding farewell to Yang Kaihui and his baby son, and boarding the Yangtse steamer which was to take him to the coast.80
The row between Chen Duxiu and Hendricus Sneevliet, over the Party's relations with Moscow, had been more or less papered over. But a second, much more serious, dispute had arisen over the relationship between the CCP and Sun Yat-sen's Guomindang (GMD). It dated from the winter of 1921, when Sneevliet had met Sun in Guilin. The old
revolutionary flummoxed him by declaring that there was ‘nothing new in Marxism. It had all been said 2,000 years ago in the Chinese Classics.’ None the less, Sun's revolutionary credentials, and the Guomindang's effectiveness in supporting the seamen's strike in Hong Kong, which Sneevliet witnessed for himself in Canton, convinced him that a Communist–Guomindang alliance was highly desirable.81
The Chinese comrades strongly disagreed. The Guomindang might be less reactionary than the government in Beijing, but it was still a patriarchal, pre-modern party, with its roots in the secret societies, the dynastic struggle against the Manchus, and the diffuse, shadowy world of literary and intellectual cliques mobilised by the cultured elite. Sun, who was known simply as ‘the Leader’, ran it as a personal fiefdom, requiring his followers to swear an oath of allegiance. It was profoundly corrupt. Its core support was limited to Guangdong and the other southern provinces. It was not, and had no ambition to be, a mass party, capable of mobilising China's workers and peasants, its merchants and industrialists, to struggle against the warlords and imperialists. In Sun's scheme of things, the warlords were not so much enemies as potential partners in future deal-making.
In March 1922, Zhang Guotao, just back from Moscow, where he and Mao's Hunanese colleague, He Shuheng, had attended the Congress of Toilers of the Far East, reported that at a private meeting he held with Lenin, the Soviet leader had been ‘emphatic’ that the communists and the GMD must work together.82 Chen Duxiu's response was to convene a meeting at the beginning of April with Mao, Zhang and members of three other provincial Party branches who happened to be in Shanghai at the time, which ‘passed a unanimous resolution expressing total disapproval’ of any alliance. Afterwards Chen fired off an angry note to Voitinsky, who had become head of the Comintern's Far Eastern Bureau, informing him of this decision, and declaring that the Guomindang's policies were ‘totally incompatible with communism’; that, outside Guangdong, it was regarded as ‘a political party scrambling for power and profit’; and that whatever Sun Yat-sen might say, in practice his movement would not tolerate communist ideas. These factors, Chen concluded, made any accommodation impossible.83
The signatories, Mao included, returned to their home provinces, assuming that that was an end to the matter. However, Sneevliet, knowing that he had Lenin's backing, was not so easily discouraged. Over the next few months, the Party leaders in Shanghai found themselves under conflicting pressures from the Comintern, the Russian government, Guomindang leftists and sympathisers within the Party's own ranks, and from the complex interplay of warlord rivalries. By early summer, when Sun was expelled from Canton in a palace coup by his erstwhile military supporters – and became notably more receptive to the idea of co-operation with Moscow and its allies – the CCP was ready to signal grudging acceptance of the idea of a common front, so long as the GMD changed its ‘vacillating policy’ and took ‘the path of revolutionary struggle’.84
The Second CCP Congress, in July, confirmed the change in policy. A resolution was passed, acknowledging the need for ‘a temporary alliance with the democratic elements to overthrow … our common enemies’.
But the Guomindang was not mentioned by name, and the resolution insisted that ‘under no circumstances’ should the proletariat be placed in a subordinate position. If the communists joined a united front, it was to be for their own benefit, not anyone else's.85 That message was reinforced by the Party's new constitution, which proclaimed its adherence to the Comintern and warned that CCP members could not join any other political party without express authorisation from the Central Committee itself.86 This was slightly less harsh than the policy of ‘exclusion and aggression’ that the First Congress had laid down, but it was hardly extending a welcome to the Guomindang's 50,000 members to join the common cause. Coming from a minuscule political grouping, which at that time, in all of China, had a paid-up membership of 195, it showed astonishing gall.87
Mao did not attend the Second Congress. He claimed later that when he arrived in Shanghai, he ‘forgot the name of the place where it was to be held, could not find any comrades and missed it’. But it seems more likely that he stayed away because he disagreed with the compromise being fashioned.88 If so, he was not alone: the representatives of the Canton Party committee, who were likewise hostile to an alliance with Sun, also failed to attend.89
In August, Sneevliet returned from Moscow, armed with a directive from the Comintern that the Guomindang was to be viewed as a revolutionary party. Two weeks later, at a Central Committee meeting at Hangzhou, he invoked Comintern discipline to ram through, against the vigorous opposition of all the Chinese who attended, a new strategy known as the ‘bloc within’, under which CCP members would join the Guomindang as individuals, and the Party would use the resulting alliance as a vehicle to advance the proletarian cause. Shortly afterwards, a small group of CCP officials, including Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, were inducted into the Guomindang at a ceremony presided over by Sun Yat-sen himself. A new Party weekly, Xiangdao zhoubao (The Guide Weekly), edited by Mao's old friend, Cai Hesen, was set up to promote the alliance, and to try to nudge the Guomindang towards a more revolutionary course. Then, in January 1923, Sun met Adolf Joffe in Shanghai, signalling the start of a closer relationship with Moscow, and – despite reservations from the party's right wing – the first steps were taken towards reorganising the Guomindang on what would eventually be Leninist lines.90
To many communists, however, the ‘bloc within’ strategy remained anathema, and vigorous opposition continued.91
There were other reasons, too, that spring, for the Party leadership to be demoralised. Their one great success, the labour movement, had been smashed. The Party had no legal existence, and was forced to operate underground. Internal divisions had become so acute that, at one point, Chen Duxiu had threatened to resign.92 Sneevliet himself acknowledged that the CCP was an artificial creation, which had been ‘born, or more correctly, fabricated’ before its time, while Joffe had stated publicly that ‘the Soviet system cannot actually be introduced into China, because there do not exist here the conditions for the successful establishment of communism’.93
Even Mao, whose work in Hunan had been singled out for special praise,94 was, according to Sneevliet, ‘at the end of his Latin with labour organisation, and so pessimistic that he saw the only salvation for China in intervention by Russia’. China's future, Mao told him gloomily, would be decided by military power, not by mass organisations, nationalist or communist.95
In this depressed mood, forty delegates, representing 420 Party members, twice as many as the previous year, gathered in Canton for the CCP's Third Congress,96 where once again the relationship with the Guomindang became the dominant issue. The crux of the dispute this time was over Sneevliet's insistence that all Party members should join the Guomindang automatically. Mao, Cai Hesen and the other Hunanese delegates, who voted as a bloc, opposed him.97
Unlike Zhang Guotao, who held that the very principle of collaboration with the Guomindang was wrong, Mao's assessment was pragmatic. After the February incident in Zhengzhou, his thinking about a tactical alliance had changed. The Guomindang, he concluded, represented ‘the main body of the revolutionary democratic faction’, and communists should not be afraid to join it. But the proletariat would grow stronger as China's economy developed, and it was essential that the Party guard its independence so that, when the moment came, it could resume its leading role. The bourgeoisie, Mao argued, was incapable of leading a national revolution; the Comintern's optimism was misplaced:
The Communist Party has temporarily abandoned its most radical views in order to co-operate with the relatively radical Guomindang … in order to overthrow their common enemies … [In the end] the outcome … will be [our] victory … In the immediate future, however, and for a certain period, China will necessarily continue to be the realm of the warlords. Politics will become even darker, the financial situation will become even more chaotic, the armies will further prolifera
te … [and] the methods for the oppression of the people will become even more terrible … This kind of situation may last for eight to ten years … But if politics becomes more reactionary and more confused, the result will necessarily be to call forth revolutionary ideas among the citizenry of the whole country, and the organisational capacity of the citizens will likewise increase day by day … This situation is … the mother of revolution, it is the magic potion of democracy and independence. Everyone must keep this in mind.98
The prospect of another decade of warlord rule, even leavened by Mao's insistence on the unity of opposites, was too grim for most of his colleagues, and Sneevliet was moved to remark that he did not share his pessimism.99
When the vote was taken, the Comintern line was narrowly approved. But the Party's rank and file, like most of the leadership, remained extremely reserved, and the Congress resolutions were unable to conceal the latent conflicts enshrined in the new policy. The Guomindang, the delegates declared, was to be ‘the central force of the national, revolution and assume its leadership’. Yet, at the same time, the Communist Party, which was assigned the ‘special task’ of mobilising the workers and peasants, was to expand its own ranks at its ally's expense by absorbing ‘truly class-conscious, revolutionary elements’ from the GMD's left wing; while in policy terms its goal was to ‘force the Guomindang’ to move closer to Soviet Russia.100
If the communists were determined to act as a ginger group, the Guomindang was no less determined not to let the tail wag the dog. And so the stage was set for a bruising struggle of wills, and ultimately of arms, which would dominate communist strategy for the rest of the decade and beyond.