Mao

by Philip Short

  Two days later, on May 21, 1927, the Day of the Horse in the old calendar, the Changsha garrison commander, Xu Kexiang, after assuring himself of He's support, decided he had had enough.36

  The Hunan CCP leaders, unlike their colleagues in Shanghai, six weeks earlier, got wind of what was planned.37 But the 3,000 workers’ pickets they commanded were armed only with wooden sticks and spears, and no contingency plans had been made for resistance. That afternoon, emergency funds were distributed among the Party leaders, and women and children sent to places of safety. The shooting began at 11 p.m., and continued until dawn.38 ‘Flames lighted the heavens’, one leader's wife wrote later. ‘I heard shots coming from the [peasant association headquarters], machine-guns and rifles … Everyone in our house got up and sat quietly in the altar- room, all afraid. Our six-month-old boy lay on my lap sucking at my breast, but the milk would not come. He cried and cried.’39

  Xu Kexiang boasted later: ‘By dawn the Red fog of terrorism that had shrouded the city for so long was blown away by one puff of mine.’40

  In the course of the next three weeks, an estimated 10,000 people were killed in Changsha and its immediate vicinity. Groups of suspected communists were taken each day, at sunrise and at dusk, to the old execution ground outside the West Gate.41 Others died in an abortive uprising by members of the peasant self-defence forces, which the Hunan Party committee ordered to take place on May 31. At the last minute, instructions arrived from Hankou to cancel it. Two groups, attacking Changsha and Xiangtan, were not told of the change of plan and were annihilated.42

  From Hunan, the wave of conservative repression spread into Hubei, where Xia Douyin's defeated troops went on the rampage, slaughtering thousands of villagers. In Jiangxi, the peasant associations were dissolved, triggering a storm of gentry-sponsored revenge.43 All over central China, Red terror gave way to White, as the mintuan, the landlord militias, visited horrific reprisals on the peasants who had dared to rise against them. In an account prepared in mid-June for the All-China Peasants’ Association, Mao reported:

  In Hunan … they beheaded the chief of the Xiangtan general labour union and kicked his head about with their feet, then filled his belly with kerosene and burned his body … In Hubei … the brutal punishments inflicted on the revolutionary peasants by the despotic gentry include such things as gouging out eyes and ripping out tongues, disembowelling and decapitation, slashing with knives and grinding with sand, burning with kerosene and branding with red-hot irons. In the case of women, they pierce their breasts [with iron wire, with which they tie them together], and parade them around naked in public, or simply hack them to pieces …44

  In Liling in Hunan, 80,000 people were dead by the time the killing stopped. In the four counties of Chaling, Leiyang, Liuyang and Pingjiang, nearly 300,000 perished.45 The slaughter far exceeded anything that even Zhang the Venomous had done, when his troops had devastated Hunan, a decade earlier. There had been nothing like it in China since the blood bath the Taipings had created in the 1850s.

  The ‘Horse Day Incident’ and its terrible aftermath were a turning-point for the Communist Party. ‘From this bloody lesson,’ Zhang Guotao wrote later, ‘the CCP learned that “only armed force can deal with armed force”.’46

  But that was with the benefit of hindsight. The Party's response at the time was dilatory and confused. First reports of the massacre in Changsha reached Wuhan as the communists were still digesting Xia Douyin's failed rebellion, and concluding for the umpteenth time that the peasant movement would have to be damped down to prevent such things happening in future.47 Indeed, the Politburo's initial reaction, on May 25, was that the peasants, by their excesses, had brought it on themselves.48 Next day, with Wang Jingwei's approval, Borodin set out for Changsha at the head of a joint CCP–GMD Commission to try to establish what had really happened.49 As they left, Mao, on behalf of the All-China Peasants’ Association, sent a message to the Hunan leaders, urging them ‘to be patient and wait for the government officials in order to avoid further friction’.50 The commission never arrived. It was turned back at the Hunan border (according to some accounts, with a warning from Xu Kexiang that if it went on, its members would be killed).51 Only then did the Central Committee appeal to the GMD leadership to dissolve Xu Kexiang's ‘insurrectional committee’; to send a punitive expedition to Changsha, led by Tang Shengzhi, then regarded by the communists as an ally; and to supply arms to enable the peasantry to defend themselves. None of these demands was met.52

  At the end of May, Mao asked the Politburo to send him to Hunan to help rebuild the Party organisation there. Ten days later, he was instructed to go to Xiangtan, to organise a new provincial committee with himself as Secretary. The decision was rescinded almost at once. But from early June, Mao had substantial day-to-day responsibility for dealing with Hunan affairs, and for the next few weeks attempted with some success, in statements and directives, to conciliate the Party's demands that the peasantry be brought back into line with a robust defence of what he insisted were their legitimate ‘violent means of resistance’.53

  In the meantime, another blow descended on the beleaguered Chinese communists from a most unexpected quarter.

  Ever since Chiang's coup in April, Stalin had been locked in conflict with Trotsky over his responsibility for the Chinese debacle.54 As a result, the Chinese Party had been left to get on with things on its own. But on June 1, 1927, after an extended and unusually secretive Comintern plenum in the Kremlin, a telegram arrived in Hankou. In it Stalin instructed the Central Committee to start taking a much tougher line. They must promote the agrarian revolution ‘in every possible way’. Excesses were to be dealt with by the peasant associations themselves. The GMD must organise a revolutionary tribunal, which would mete out severe punishment to officers who maintained links with Chiang Kai-shek or used their troops to curb the masses. ‘Persuasion is not enough: it is time to act,’ Stalin declared. ‘The scoundrels must be punished’. A dependable new army should be formed ‘before it is too late’, by mobilising ‘about 20,000 communists and 50,000 revolutionary workers and peasants from Hunan and Hubei’, so as ‘to liquidate the dependence on unreliable generals immediately’. The GMD Central Executive Committee also needed an infusion of new blood. Bold new leaders must be brought in from the peasantry and the working class to stiffen the resolve of ‘certain of the old leaders’, who were now ‘vacillating and compromising’, or to drive them out altogether.55

  When this missive was read out, members of the Politburo, according to Zhang Guotao, ‘did not know whether to cry or laugh’. Chen Duxiu wrote later that it was ‘like taking a bath in shit’. Even Borodin and Voitinsky agreed that there was no way of implementing it.56

  It was not that Stalin's ideas were wrong. A year earlier the CCP leaders had begged Moscow for 5,000 rifles to arm an independent peasant force in Guangdong, but had been turned down on the grounds that it might create mistrust among the GMD army.57 Mao and Cai Hesen had long argued for peasant excesses to be handled within the peasant associations, not by outside forces.58 The problem lay elsewhere. Not only were the new orders too late. But Stalin's assessment of the balance of forces in the revolutionary movement might as well have come from another planet. Neither the Left-GMD, nor, still less, the CCP, had any power to discipline ‘unreliable generals’. Nor could the communists reorganise the GMD Central Executive Committee, which was shifting so rapidly to the right that it took all the CCP's energy just to keep the alliance intact.

  At this juncture, Roy, who had hoped the telegram would galvanise the Party into supporting the peasant movement more strongly, took matters into his own hands.

  Without consulting Borodin or any of the Chinese leaders, he showed the telegram to Wang Jingwei. His motives have never been adequately explained, but it appears that, like Stalin, he misjudged the balance of forces, believing that communist support was still so important to Wang that proof of Moscow's disillusionment with the Guomindang would shock him into
adopting more radical policies. As it turned out, the effect was precisely the reverse. Wang concluded that the CCP–GMD alliance was finished. Next day, June 6, he led a Left-GMD delegation to Zhengzhou in Henan, which had just fallen to Feng Yuxiang, ostensibly to discuss their alliance against Chiang Kai-shek, but actually to start putting out peace feelers for an eventual reconciliation with the right wing of the party in Nanjing.59

  Roy's blunder hastened the inevitable. The two madly galloping steeds the CCP was trying to ride – peasant revolt and bourgeois revolution – had been pulling apart for months. Even without his action, the Horse Day Incident had signalled the final parting of the ways.

  On June 15, Chen Duxiu sent Stalin the Politburo's response, which was as remarkable for its unconcealed exasperation at the Soviet leader's handling of affairs as for its sense of impending doom. Chen explained, as if to a child:

  The peasant movement showed a particularly rapid development in Hunan. Ninety per cent of the national army comes from Hunan. The whole army is hostile toward the excesses of the peasant movement … In such a situation, not only the Guomindang but the Communist Party, too, must decide on a policy of concessions … Otherwise … a split with the Guomindang will occur … [Indeed,] it is probable that it will be impossible [to prevent this] in the nearest future … Your instructions are correct and important. We express our full agreement … but it is impossible to achieve this in a short time … Until we find ourselves in a position to fulfil these tasks, it is necessary to maintain good relations [with the leaders of the Left-GMD and the national army].60

  The only one of the Russian leader's instructions to which Chen did not make a direct reply was the order to create ‘your own reliable army’. This was no accident. As late as May 26, less than a week before Stalin's telegram was received, the Politburo had still been insisting that armed conflict was to be avoided,61 indeed, this was why the planned May 31 attack on Changsha was called off. Now that was to change. However belatedly, the issue of an independent communist force was at last being seriously discussed.

  The enduring significance of Stalin's telegram, long after the immediate controversy which it provoked had been forgotten, was that it sowed the seed from which, in the months that followed, the Chinese Red Army would grow.62

  By the time Chen sent off the Politburo's response, a secret Central Committee commission had been established, headed by Zhou Enlai, then Secretary of the CC's Military Committee, which drew up a detailed plan to infiltrate into Hunan more than a hundred communist agents to organise armed peasant uprisings against Xu Kexiang's forces. At a meeting in Wuhan, shortly before they were to set out, Mao told them that their mission was to return to their home areas and ‘maintain the revolutionary struggle by armed force’. The calculation, apparently, was that if the insurrections succeeded, the communist-led peasant units would form the nucleus of the ‘reliable army’ that Stalin was calling for.

  On June 24, Mao's appointment as Hunan Party Secretary, which had been rescinded two weeks earlier, was confirmed, and he left immediately for Changsha to see what might be salvaged amid the continuing repression. A few days later, he told a group of surviving Party and Youth League officials in Hengshan that the time for hesitation was over. From now on, they must ‘counter guns with guns’.

  But even as Mao spoke, the ground was being cut from beneath the communists’ feet.63

  An open breach was imminent between Wang Jingwei and the Russians. The Soviet advisers themselves could see the writing on the wall and began quietly packing to leave. Not only was Wang wavering, but Moscow's other protégé, Feng Yuxiang, had switched sides, and was now supporting Chiang Kai-shek, in return for a subsidy of $2 million a month.64

  A mood of black pessimism settled on the Politburo. Cai Hesen remembered how ‘[we all] wandered aimlessly, looking depressed … and were unable … to agree upon a firm and definite stand on anything’.65

  Signs of desperation appeared. On June 23 the Central Committee Secretariat issued a melodramatic warning that ‘an immediate break with the Guomindang will mean the immediate liquidation of our Party’, and proposed creating a new ‘May 30 Incident’, like that which had set China on fire in 1925, to ‘lead us out of this dangerous crisis’. It was left to Roy to scotch such a lunatic venture. ‘The idea of collaboration with the Guomindang’, he told the leadership sternly, ‘is being converted into a real fetish to which everything must be sacrificed.’66 The warning was ignored. On June 30, in a last desperate effort to stave off final collapse, the Politburo approved a craven resolution, reaffirming the Guomindang's ‘leading position in the national revolution’, placing workers’ and peasants’ organisations – including peasant self-defence forces – under GMD supervision, restricting the role of workers’ pickets, and limiting strike demands.67

  At about the same time, Mao received an urgent summons to abandon the planned Hunan uprisings and return to Wuhan. Borodin had evidently concluded that the risk to what remained of the alliance with the Left-GMD outweighed any possible gains.68

  On Monday, July 4, Mao and Liu Zhixun, the head of the now-banned peasant association in Hunan, attended an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee in Wuchang to try to decide what to do next. The surviving minutes show a leadership grasping at straws.69 Much of the discussion concerned the relationship between He Jian, who was openly anti-communist, and his superior, Tang Shengzhi, who, while initially sympathetic to Wuhan, was now moving rapidly to the right. The meeting still wanted to believe that, in Mao's words, it might be possible to ‘promote dissension … between Tang and He [and] draw Tang to our side’. This was sheer wishful thinking. By July 1927, the communist leaders had lost the capacity to exert any political influence at all, and in their hearts they all knew it.

  The key question they faced was what to do with the local peasant self-defence units that had already been assembled before the uprisings were called off. Cai Hesen suggested they should ‘go up the mountains’ and launch the rebellion that way. Li Weihan objected that they might turn to banditry. He proposed that they should become an officially sanctioned local peace-keeping force. If that was not possible, he added, they should hide their weapons and wait. Chen Duxiu maintained that the peasants could form an effective armed force only after they had been trained by the (GMD-led) national army. Mao summed up:

  Apart from [a peace-keeping force, which in practice will be too difficult to establish legally], there are two lines: (a) to go up the mountains; or (b) to join the army. By going up the mountains, we can create a foundation for a real military force … If we do not maintain [such a] force, then in future, as soon as an emergency arises, we will be helpless.

  The discussion dragged on, and no decision was taken. But clearly in Mao's mind, and in that of Cai Hesen, the germ of a future strategy was beginning to form.70

  Even as they talked, however, events were moving to a conclusion.

  Stalin had not been pleased by Chen Duxiu's message of June 15. In a note to the Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, he complained of the ‘enormous shortcomings’ of the Chinese leadership and proposed that Soviet advisers be attached at every level of the CCP organisation. ‘The “nannies” are necessary at this stage,’ he went on, ‘because of the weakness, shapelessness and political amorphousness, and lack of qualification of the current Central Committee.’ The advisers were never sent, but the proposal reflected Stalin's contempt for Chen and his colleagues. From then on, Moscow's explanation of the tragedy which had befallen the Chinese revolution, relayed both by Pravda and in internal documents, was that Soviet policy had been completely correct but the Chinese communists had been incapable of either understanding or implementing it.71 It was time for Chen to go.

  Roy and Voitinsky were both recalled to Moscow. On July 12, after learning that his eldest son had been executed by the Guomindang in Shanghai, Chen submitted his resignation. A five-member CC ‘Provisional Standing Committee’ – comprising Zhang Guotao, Li Weihan, Z
hou Enlai, Li Lisan and Zhang Tailei – was formed to oversee day-to-day affairs while Borodin and Qu Qiubai, who was to be designated Chen?s successor, withdrew to Lushan to consider the Party's options.

  The following day the new Party Centre approved a manifesto accusing the Left-GMD leadership of ‘betraying the toiling masses’. On July 14 and 15, the Left-GMD leaders, meeting in closed session, retaliated by passing a resolution further restricting the communists' role. Finally, on July 16, both sides made these decisions public.

  The pretence was not quite over. On Moscow's instructions, the CCP tried to maintain the fiction that a united front with ‘progressive Left-GMD elements’ continued to exist. In reality, however, the alliance was at an end. Within hours of the July 16 announcements, He Jian's troops occupied the Labour Union and began rounding up communist suspects. Mao and the rest of the Party leadership went into hiding. Chen Duxiu, wearing a disguise, boarded a steamer for Shanghai.72 The remaining Soviet advisers departed. Borodin, who was among the last to leave, was given a ceremonial send-off by an assembly of Guomindang luminaries, headed by Wang Jingwei himself, at Hankou railway station. He eventually reached Siberia, after an exhausting motor journey across the Gobi, early in October.73 Moscow's influence in China, on which Stalin had spent millions of gold roubles, had been reduced to nothing.

  By the end of the year, the Left-GMD, too, would collapse, and Wang Jingwei would flee to Europe. By the end of the decade, Chiang Kai-shek would take Beijing and become China's new ruler.

  But all that still lay in the future. In the leaden heat of late July 1927, Yang Kaihui and her three small children made their way back for the last time to Changsha.74 The united front was over. The communist revolution was about to begin.

  I Zhou paid a heavy price personally for his leadership of the strike. He had left his wife, Deng Yingchao, then pregnant with their first child, in Canton. The delivery was botched and the baby boy died. When she tried to rejoin her husband in Shanghai, travelling clandestinely to avoid detection by the nationalists, she fell seriously ill. On arrival doctors found that she had suffered internal injuries, apparently due to the stress of the journey so soon after giving birth, and would be unable to have children again. In Yan'an, ten years later, the couple adopted Sun Weishi, the daughter of one of Zhou's companions who had been executed in 1927. Subsequently they also acted as foster-parents to Zhou's niece, Bingde, and her younger brother and sister (Zhou Bingde, interview with the author, Dec. 7 2004. See also Gao Wenqian, Zhou Enlai, The Last Perfect Revolutionary, Public Affairs, New York, 2007, pp. 47–8).