Mao
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Personal considerations must have played a part too. Mao was still an alternate member of the Guomindang Central Executive Committee; in the CCP, he no longer held any official position. Moreover, the GMD, with its roots in the secret societies and the anti-dynastic struggle, had from the start shown more interest in the peasantry than the urban-based Communist Party. By the autumn of 1925, it had set up a Peasant Department and a Peasant Movement Training Institute for rural organisers.163 The CCP had done nothing.
In short, Canton, rather than Shanghai, had become the fulcrum of the revolutionary struggle. So when Mao slipped out of Changsha at the end of the first week in September, it was to travel south. He was evidently uncertain how he would be received. One of his companions on the journey remembered that he was suddenly seized by panic, burning all his notes for fear that they run into a patrol of Zhao Hengti's troops. His neurasthenia returned, and on arrival he spent several days in hospital.164
Yet he had been right to go to Canton. He recalled years later that ‘an air of great optimism pervaded the city’. At Guomindang headquarters, he secured an appointment with Wang Jingwei, the head of the newly formed national government, who was then consolidating his position as the most powerful man in the party. It was Wang who had been so impressed with Mao's youthful enthusiasm at the First GMD Congress in January 1924. Now he proposed that, to lessen his own workload, Mao stand in for him as acting head of the GMD Propaganda Department. Two weeks later, the appointment was formally confirmed.165
As a senior GMD official, Mao was now a man of substance. Yang Kaihui, her mother and the two children came from Changsha to join him. They rented a house in the pleasant tree-lined suburb of Dongshan, where the Russian military advisers and many of the Guomindang leaders, including Chiang Kai-shek, had their homes.
For the next eighteen months, Mao devoted himself to the two issues he now regarded as crucial to the revolution's success: the consolidation of the Guomindang Left and the mobilisation of the peasantry. His first action, that winter, was to start a new party journal, Zhengzhi zoubao (Political Weekly), to counter the challenge to the united front being mounted by the right-wing Western Hills Group and to stiffen the resolve of those ‘whose revolutionary convictions are wavering’.166 The first issue proclaimed:
Uniting with Russia and accepting communists are important tactics of our party in pursuing the goal of victory in the revolution. The late Director-General [Sun Yat-sen] was the first to decide on them, and … they were adopted at the First National Congress … Today's revolution is an episode in the final decisive struggle between the two great forces of revolution and counter-revolution in the world … If our party's revolutionary strategy does not take as its starting point union with Soviet Russia; [and] … if it does not accept the communists, who advocate the interests of the peasants and workers; then the revolutionary forces will sink into isolation and the revolution will not be able to succeed … He who is not for the revolution is for counter-revolution. There is absolutely no neutral ground.167
The choice, Mao argued, was between a ‘Western-style, middle-class revolution’, urged by the GMD right; and the formation of a broad left-wing alliance, leading to the joint rule of ‘all revolutionary forces’. Those who tried to wear ‘the grey mask of neutrality’ would soon be forced to decide on which side they would stand.168
Exactly which forces could be counted as revolutionary was the subject of a long article entitled ‘An Analysis of All the Classes in Chinese Society’, which Mao published on December 1, 1925, in Geming (Revolution), the magazine of the new National Revolutionary Army. It set out in magisterial fashion the results of the long months of reflection he had spent in Shaoshan:
Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? He who cannot distinguish between enemies and friends is certainly not a revolutionary, yet to distinguish between them is not easy. If the Chinese revolution … has achieved so little, [the] … strategic error has consisted precisely in the failure to unite with real friends in order to attack real enemies.169
Mao went on to enumerate no fewer than twenty different social strata in China, divided into five main classes. They ranged from the big bourgeoisie, which was ‘a deadly enemy’, and its allies on the right; to the left-wing of the middle bourgeoisie, which ‘absolutely refuses to follow imperialism’ but ‘is often seized with terror when faced with “Red” tendencies’; and the three categories of petty bourgeoisie (comprising rich peasants, merchants, craftsmen and professional people), whose degree of revolutionary awareness was in direct proportion to their poverty. In addition, there were six categories of semi-proletariat (mainly poor and middle peasants, shopkeepers and street vendors), and four categories of urban, rural and lumpen-proletariat. Of these, the urban workers and coolies were described as the revolution's ‘main force’; the agricultural proletariat, the poor peasants and street vendors were ‘extremely receptive to revolutionary propaganda’ and would ‘struggle bravely’; and the lumpenproletariat[Q2], made up of bandits, soldiers, robbers, thieves and prostitutes, would ‘fight very bravely … if we can find a way to lead them’.
Accordingly, Mao concluded, out of China's 400 million people, one million were irredeemably hostile; four million were basically hostile but might be won over; and 395 million were revolutionary or at least benevolently neutral.
All the objective conditions for revolution were therefore present, Mao wrote; the only thing missing was a way to mobilise the masses. Through all the years that followed, he never wavered in this belief. It would sustain him in the darkest moments, when all hope seemed to be lost. But it offered scant comfort to the Guomindang centrists, the representatives in the party of the ‘vacillating middle bourgeoisie’, to whom Mao's homilies that winter were constantly addressed. The choice that was bearing down on them would come sooner than anyone imagined.
By the end of 1925, Chiang Kai-shek had become the most powerful leader of the Guomindang after Wang Jingwei.170 As commander of the First Corps of the National Revolutionary Army, he had directed a series of successful military campaigns that autumn which effectively secured Guangdong for the GMD government against attacks by local warlords. He controlled the Canton garrison, and headed the Whampoa Military Academy, which became his headquarters. His loyalty seemed beyond question: when the Western Hills Group had challenged Wang Jingwei's leadership the previous November, he had immediately issued a statement of support. But during the Second GMD Congress in January 1926, Chiang grew restive. The meeting saw a further sharp lurch to the left, both in the make-up of the CEC Standing Committee – where Chiang was one of only three moderates, sharing power with three members of the GMD-Left and three communists – and in its policy pronouncements, which were far more radical than anything the Party had approved before. The ‘Resolution on Propaganda’, which Mao drafted, warned ominously: ‘Only those who endorse the liberation movement of the Chinese peasants are faithful revolutionary members of the party; if not, they are counter-revolutionaries.’171 The notion that the peasant movement was central to the revolution was widely accepted by GMD moderates. But the use of the term, ‘liberation’, signifying social revolution in the countryside, was not. The Guomindang was still a bourgeois party, and much of its support came, directly or indirectly, from members of landowning families. Such people favoured reform, but the violent overthrow of the existing rural order was not part of their agenda.172
To Chiang, like many others, the new radicalism was unnerving.173 It came, moreover, at a time when his own position was suddenly under pressure. Stalin, the dominant figure in the new Soviet collective leadership formed after Lenin's death, had come out in favour of the CCP trying to win control of the GMD from within, the same idea that the Comintern had rejected a year earlier when the Chinese had first proposed it. The new head of the Soviet military adviser group, General N. V. Kuibyshev, who had arrived two months before and used the improbable codename, Kisanka (Pussycat), was an arrogant, inflexible man, whose contempt for
the Chinese generals, and Chiang in particular, was matched only by his determination to bring the National Revolutionary Army firmly under Soviet control. Chiang soon came to hate him and, on January 15, resigned in disgust as First Corps commander. The main area of disagreement was the timing of the long-awaited Northern Expedition, which was to carry out Sun Yat-sen's dream of unifying the whole of China under a GMD government, crushing the warlords and humbling their imperialist allies. Kuibyshev, on Stalin's instructions, argued that more preparation was needed (a view shared by the CCP leaders in Shanghai). Chiang wanted to press ahead. In fact Stalin opposed the expedition because he feared it would strengthen the GMD conservatives at the very moment when, or so he hoped, the communists and the GMD's left wing were poised to win control of the party. In February, the GMD formally applied for affiliation to the Comintern. Soon afterwards Wang Jingwei joined his voice to those calling for the expedition to be delayed, and the battle lines were drawn.174 The situation was neatly summed up by Vera Vishnyakova-Akimova, one of the Russian mission's interpreters. ‘Everyone knew’, she wrote, ‘that a hidden struggle for power was going on between Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei. On one side was political prestige; on the other, military force.’175
Yet when Chiang struck, in the early hours of March 20, it came in a way no one had expected.176 He declared martial law; ordered the arrests of all communist officers and political workers in the Canton garrison, and of the commander of a gunboat, the Zhongshan, which he said was acting suspiciously; and sent troops to surround the residences of the Soviet military advisers and to disarm their guards. Chiang claimed afterwards to have evidence that Wang Jingwei, with Kuibyshev's backing, was planning to have him kidnapped by a communist-led naval unit and banished to Moscow. This may well have been true. But even if it were not, a confrontation was by then inevitable.
Chiang's ‘coup’, as it was afterwards called, was over almost as soon as it began. No one was injured, much less killed. Next day he was already apologising that his subordinates had exceeded their orders. But by then his point had been made. He did not oppose Russia, or the CCP, he explained, but ‘certain individuals’ had overstepped their powers. Seventy-two hours later, Kuibyshev and two other senior Soviet advisers boarded a ship for Vladivostok. Wang Jingwei was given ‘sick leave’ and departed quietly for Europe. The Russians tried to smooth things over and the Party leadership in Shanghai decided, apparently without Comintern prodding, that it had no choice but to do the same.
As so often, Mao disagreed. The most senior communists in the GMD army were Zhou Enlai, then aged twenty-eight, and a young Hunanese named Li Fuchun, a former New People's Study Society member married to Cai Hesen's sister, Cai Chang. Both men had come to Canton in 1924 after studying in France. Zhou was Director of the Political Department at the Whampoa Academy, and Deputy Commissar of Chiang Kai-shek's First Corps; Li held the same post in the Second Corps under the command of Tan Yankai. A few hours after the coup, Mao met Zhou at Li Fuchun's home. According to Zhou, Mao argued that Chiang was isolated; four of the other five Corps commanders were hostile to him; and in both the First Corps and the Academy, communists held most of the key posts. If the Left-GMD acted decisively, he asserted, Chiang's support would crumble.177 Other Canton CCP leaders reportedly reached similar conclusions. But when Zhou put this to Kuibyshev, the Russian vetoed the idea, apparently on the grounds that Chiang's forces were too strong.178
That led to further recriminations, with Mao and others complaining that Zhou, who was responsible for military affairs under the Canton CCP committee, had spent too much time infiltrating Chiang's First Corps and the Whampoa Academy, while neglecting to place communist cadres in other sections of the Revolutionary Army.179 But by then such questions were academic. What mattered was that Chiang had won hands down and was well on the way to establishing himself as the indispensable Guomindang leader, a role he would continue to play, in and out of office, for the next forty-nine years.
Mao was now in a delicate position. Wang Jingwei had been his principal patron. Thanks to him he had been reappointed as acting head of the Propaganda Department after the Second Congress, and in February and early March had acquired several other key posts.180 But his relations with the CCP remained problematic. There is no record of the Party leaders’ reaction when they learned in October 1925 that Mao had secured this plum assignment, which the CCP had been angling for ever since the spring of 1924.181 Of all possible communist candidates, he was certainly the last person they would have chosen. He was unruly; heterodox in his ideas; held no CCP office; and had had no contact with the Party Centre for the best part of a year.182
Mao's determination to think for himself had been shown by his call that winter for ‘an ideology that has been produced in Chinese conditions’, and by his emphasis on the primacy of the masses:
Academic thought … is worthless dross unless it is in the service of the demands of the masses for social and economic liberation … The slogan for the intelligentsia should be, ‘Go among the masses.’ China's liberation can be found only among the masses … Anyone who divorces himself from the masses has lost his social basis.183
To the Party Central Committee, imprisoned in a straitjacket of Comintern orthodoxy, the notion of an ideology ‘produced in Chinese conditions’ was utterly heretical. China's salvation, they held, would come not from ‘the masses’, amorphous and undefined, but from the urban proletariat whose mission was to lead them.
These differences had come to a head in December when Mao submitted to the Party journal, Xiangdao, his article, ‘Analysis of All the Classes in Chinese Society’, summarising the lessons he had drawn from his sojourn in Hunan. Chen Duxiu had refused to allow its publication on the grounds that it laid too much stress on the role of the peasantry, which was why it had appeared in the GMD journal, Geming.184
Mao's estrangement from the Shanghai leadership was less damaging than it might have been had the Party Centre been united. But by the beginning of 1926 the CCP was riven by internecine squabbles, in which policy and personalities were inextricably mixed. Peng Shuzhi and Chen Duxiu were on one side, and Qu Qiubai on the other. Cai Hesen hated Peng, who had recently seduced his wife, while Zhang Guotao hovered in the middle. If that were not enough, the Centre and the Canton Party committee followed such different policies that, as Borodin later acknowledged, at times they seemed two different parties. One more dispute, with Mao, not even a member of the Central Committee, was simply not that important. Indeed, to the Party leaders, Mao's only real significance was that he had managed to amass a number of powerful GMD jobs.185
In April 1926, as the communists waited uneasily for Chiang Kai-shek to make his next move, Mao deliberately kept in the background. Zhang Guotao, who had been sent to Canton as the Central Committee's plenipotentiary, remembered how ‘from beginning to end, [Mao] stayed away from the dispute and remained a bystander’, adding perceptively: ‘He seemed to have gained considerable experience from it.’186
After a month of acrimonious bargaining between Chiang (who held in reserve the possibility of a complete break with the Russians) and Borodin (who controlled the flow of Russian arms Chiang needed) a compromise was reached, heavily weighted in Chiang's favour. The Guomindang Central Executive Committee met in plenary session on May 15 and passed a series of resolutions, barring communists from heading GMD departments or from holding more than a third of the posts in high-level GMD committees; banning communist fractions in GMD organisations; prohibiting GMD members in future from joining the Communist Party; and requiring the CCP to provide a complete list of existing GMD members with dual-party allegiance. In return, Chiang agreed to a crackdown on the GMD-rightists, many of whose leaders were arrested or sent into exile (a move which was in his own, as much as the CCP's, interests), and to preserve the status quo ante of GMD–CCP relations. The Russians, for their part, while still opposing the Northern Expedition, reluctantly approved an initial move northwards, into Hunan, with the ai
m of creating a defensive shield for Guangdong, but with the proviso that ‘the troops not disperse themselves beyond the borders of this province’.187
This time the CCP leadership was, for once, unanimous in its disapproval. Chen Duxiu proposed (yet again) an end to the ‘bloc within’ strategy and the reassertion of the Party's independence. But Stalin insisted that the deal with Chiang must go through.188 From then on, in Borodin's sardonic phrase, the CCP was ‘fated to play the role of coolie in the Chinese revolution’. Though not seen as such at the time, Chiang's coup had marked a turning-point in the Chinese communists’ relations with Moscow. Until March 1926, the Comintern's advice to the Chinese Party was on the whole well-intentioned and well-informed, and frequently more realistic than the views of the inexperienced CCP leaders in Shanghai. After the coup, Moscow's China policy became the prisoner of Kremlin politics. Stalin, engaged in a struggle for power with Trotsky – who now belatedly proposed that the CCP should break with the GMD – could never admit that he had been wrong about the CCP-GMD alliance. For two more years he would maintain that the united front was justified and that, even if the communists had to make temporary concessions to the Guomindang rightists, the overriding need was for all ‘revolutionary forces’ to remain united against the northern warlords and their imperialist allies. Eventually, he argued, the CCP would succeed in converting the GMD into a ‘genuine people's party’ which would establish a revolutionary regime.189
Mao came out of all this far better than he might have expected. Along with other communist GMD officials, on May 28 he resigned as head of the Propaganda Department. But he retained his other key posts, as principal of the Peasant Movement Training Institute, which was then growing rapidly in size and importance, and as a member of the GMD Peasant Movement Committee, which dealt with policy matters.190
These decisions reflected Chiang's recognition of the role the peasantry could play during the Northern Expedition, which he was determined to pursue, notwithstanding Russian reticence.191 In 1926, Mao was one of the few real authorities on peasant matters the Guomindang could turn to. He had given lectures on the subject at the officers’ training school of the Second (Hunanese) Corps of the National Revolutionary Army; at the GMD's provincial Youth Training Institute; and at a middle school attached to Guangdong University; as well as at the Peasant Movement Institute itself. Moreover, his expertise was in the central provinces of China through which the Northern Expedition would pass.192 Even Chiang's Russian advisers, once it became clear that the offensive would go ahead, agreed that it would succeed only if the peasantry along the way were mobilised to support it. Mao shared that view. Since March he had been urging the GMD Peasant Movement Committee to ‘pay the utmost attention to the areas the revolutionary armies will traverse’.193