Mao

by Philip Short

  In a country which lived by the aphorism ‘Do not waste good iron making nails, nor good men as soldiers’, where a ‘good’ army merely took what it wanted and a ‘bad’ army marauded, looted, burned, raped and killed, and where officers routinely employed barbaric methods of discipline, this was a genuinely revolutionary concept.

  The question remained, however, where Mao's forces should go next.

  The area in which they found themselves, on the border between Hunan and Jiangxi, was riven by conflict between the descendants of early Han settlers, who had arrived in the lowland valleys during the Tang and Song dynasties, and Hakka – ‘guest people’ – from Fujian and Guangdong, who had occupied the highlands several centuries later.59 On that basic fault-line were superimposed a culture of banditry, the depredations of government troops and militias, struggles for influence among local satraps and their sworn followers, and, in the early 1920s, the arrival of large numbers of deserters from warlord forces in the region. Every landlord and family of substance had armed retainers to defend its property. In 1926, local communists had begun setting up peasant associations and succeeded in co-opting two prominent bandit leaders, Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo, whose men – members of a gang known as the Horse-knife (or Sabre) Detachment – were then reorganised into peasant self-defence units. By the time Mao arrived, however, the collapse of the united front had triggered a White Terror which had left both the peasant associations and local Party organisations in disarray.

  In these unpropitious circumstances, Mao sent a messenger from Sanwan with a letter to Yuan Wencai, whose forces were at Ninggang, fifteen miles to the south.60 By a stroke of luck one of Yuan's aides had met Mao at the GMD Peasant Training Institute in Wuhan. Through his good offices, aided by a gift of rifles from Mao to Yuan's emissaries, it was agreed that the communist army could proceed to the small town of Gucheng in Ninggang, where a two-day meeting was held with local Party officials and Yuan's representatives. Both sides were at first extremely wary. Mao's colleagues – though not, apparently, Mao himself – were reluctant to ally themselves with bandits; the local Jiangxi communists worried that the arrival of Mao's troops would erode their own power; and Yuan and his followers feared, not unreasonably, that in the end they risked losing their independence and being assimilated into Mao's larger and better-armed force. None the less, on October 6, the two leaders met face to face and worked out a modus vivendi. Mao offered Yuan's men a hundred rifles; Yuan furnished provisions and money; and the newcomers were allowed to establish a hospital to treat their wounded and a headquarters base at Maoping, a small market town in a river valley, encircled by low hills, from which the main western route into Jinggangshan, a narrow, sandy track, no wider than a footpath, wound its way up through the forest to the heights, 1,500 feet above.

  For the next ten days, Mao hesitated. The alternative was to go further south, to the Hunan–Guangdong border, and to try to link up with Zhu De and He Long, who should have arrived there from Nanchang. But an initial probe into southern Hunan ended with Mao's troops being mauled near the village of Dafen. Then, in mid-October, he learned from a newspaper that He's forces had been defeated and scattered. He no longer had any choice.

  Militarily, Jinggangshan, if properly defended, was all but impregnable. It lies at the junction of four counties – Ninggang, Yongxin, Suichuan and Lingxian – in the heart of the Luoxiao range, which follows the Hunan–Jiangxi border southward as far as Guangdong. The massif itself consists of a swathe of louring black mountains, wreathed in cloud, with blade-sharp ridges, thickly forested with Chinese larch, pine and bamboo, where waterfalls cascade down sheer gorges to lose themselves in thin, blue torrents, far below, and tall pinnacles of bare rock jut from unseen cliffs behind an impenetrable weft of subtropical vegetation. It is a poet's landscape, majestic but desperately poor.

  On the heights there was barely enough farmland, carved from the hillsides and small areas of plateau, to support the population of just under 2,000, who lived in ramshackle wooden houses and small, almost windowless stone huts, scattered between the main settlement, Ciping, where half-a-dozen merchants had built shops and a weekly market was held, and the five villages – Big Well, Little Well, Middle Well, Lower Well and Upper Well – from which Jinggangshan (Well Ridge Mountain) took its name.61 The villagers ate a local variety of red-coloured wild rice, and trapped squirrels and badgers for food. Grain for the troops had to be brought up the mountain on men's backs from the more fertile counties in the plains.

  Maoping became Mao's main forward base. For the next twelve months, whenever the military situation stabilised, the army made its headquarters there. He set the troops three main tasks. In battle, Mao said, they must fight to win. In victory, they must expropriate the landlords, both to provide land for the peasantry and to collect funds for the army's own needs. And in peacetime they must strive to win over ‘the masses’, the peasants, workers and petty bourgeoisie. In November, the army occupied Chaling, thirty miles to the west, and proclaimed the setting-up of a ‘Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviet Government’, the first in the border area. It was overthrown a month later, when government forces returned, but other border soviets soon followed, in Suichuan in January 1928, and in Ninggang in February. Even though such successes were ephemeral, they procured badly needed supplies and symbolically they showed the local population that the existing power structure was fragile and could be changed.V

  When the pressure from government troops became too great, Maoping was abandoned and they withdrew up the mountain to Wang Zuo's stronghold at Dajing (Big Well), about twelve miles to the south, from which they could control the passes. Wang lived in a former landlord's house which his men had commandeered, a palatial residence for that poor place, with whitewashed walls and gables, delicately upturned eaves beneath roofs of slate-coloured tile, ornamented ridgework, and more than a dozen wood-panelled rooms, furnished with tables and four-poster beds, built around three large inner courtyards, each open to the sky with a sunken well in the middle to drain away rainwater. Mao had approached Wang Zuo, as he had Yuan Wencai, with a large gift of rifles and the offer of communist instructors to give his force military training. Wang was initially wary, but after the training group's leader, He Changgong, helped him defeat a landlord militia unit which had been harassing his men, he, too, was won over.

  That winter gave Mao a breathing space to start learning his new military trade. He had grasped the importance of leading by example, compelling exhausted men to follow him by sheer force of will. Since most of the soldiers were illiterate, he started using folk-tales and graphic images to get his points across. ‘The God of Thunder strikes the beancurd’, he told them, explaining why they should concentrate their forces to attack the enemy's weak points. Chiang Kai-shek was like a huge water-pot, while the revolutionary army was just a small pebble. But the pebble was hard, and by dint of constant tapping, one day the pot would break.

  The lull could not continue indefinitely. In mid-February, Yuan Wencai's and Wang Zuo's forces were combined to form the army's 2nd Regiment, with He Changgong as Party representative and a leaven of communist cadres down to company level. Ten days later, news came that the Jiangxi Army had despatched a battalion to occupy Xincheng, about eight miles north of Maoping. During the night of February 17, Mao led three battalions of his own men to surround them. At dawn, as the enemy troops were at their morning exercises, he gave the order to attack.

  The fighting lasted several hours. When it was over, the enemy commander and his deputy were both dead and more than a hundred prisoners had been taken. After they had been escorted back to Maoping, Mao told them, to their amazement – as he had his own men at Sanwan, five months earlier – that anyone who wished to leave would be given money and allowed to depart. Those who decided to stay would be enrolled in the revolutionary army. Many did stay. The technique proved so effective that later some nationalist commanders began setting free communist prisoners in an attempt to emulate
it.62

  Mao's victory had its price. As the Hunan and Jiangxi commanders realised the nature of the enemy they were dealing with, they began assembling stronger forces to attack the Jinggangshan redoubt, and imposed an economic blockade. But his concerns on that score were soon to be overshadowed by problems of a very different kind.

  Since October 1927, Mao had been trying to get in touch with the Hunan provincial committee, the hierarchical superior of the Front Committee he now headed. Some of his messages evidently got through, for in mid-December the Party Centre was sufficiently informed of his activities to write to Zhu De, who was then in northern Guangdong, suggesting that he link up with Mao. Unknown to the leaders in Shanghai, Zhu had already made contact with the Jinggangshan base some weeks earlier, sending as a messenger none other than Mao's youngest brother, Zetan, who had accompanied Zhu's forces from Nanchang. From then on the two armies were in sporadic communication. But the Politburo was divided in its appraisal of Mao's conduct. Qu Qiubai, who recognised and admired Mao's independent spirit, was ready, within limits, to let him act as he saw fit.63 Zhou Enlai, who remained in charge of military affairs and had become one of Qu's most powerful colleagues, strongly disapproved of Mao's tactics. His troops had ‘a bandit character’, Zhou argued, and were ‘continually flying from place to place’.64 In a CC circular on armed insurrection issued in January 1928, he cited Mao's leadership of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan as an example of how not to behave:

  [Such leaders] do not trust in the strength of the masses but lean towards military opportunism, they draft their plans in terms of military forces, planning how to move this or that army unit, this or that peasant army, this or that workers’ and peasants’ armed suppression group, how to link up with the forces of this or that bandit chieftain … and in this way how to unleash an ‘armed uprising’ by a plot masquerading as a plan. Such a so-called armed uprising has no relation whatever to the masses.65

  Zhou was almost certainly responsible for another CC directive, which also reached Changsha in January 1928, accusing Mao of ‘serious political errors’ and authorising the Hunan provincial committee to remove him as Party leader in the border area and to draw up a new work plan for the army which would ‘accord with practical needs’.66

  The bearer of these tidings, Zhou Lu, a junior member of the South Hunan Special Committee,VI arrived at Maoping in the first week of March. He went to work with a vengeance, not only telling Mao that he had been dismissed from the Politburo and the Hunan provincial committee – which despite his rows with the Party Centre six months earlier must have come as a bolt from the blue – but also informing him, falsely, that he had been expelled from the Party. Whether this was a simple mistake, or a deliberate manoeuvre to destroy Mao's authority, is unclear. But, coming as it did, after months of hardship, just as the army had won its first victory and the base area was at last beginning to take shape, it must have been a crushing blow. The injustice of the rebuke, Mao wrote later, had been intolerable.67

  In his new, ‘non-Party’ role, Mao became divisional commander (a post which had been left vacant when the 2nd Regiment was formed in February). The Front Committee was abolished, and Zhou Lu acted as Party representative.68

  At this point, local rivalries intervened. The prime concern of the provincial Party committee was to promote the revolution in its own area. The previous December, Zhu De's force had left its base in Guangdong and marched north into south-eastern Hunan, where it sponsored peasant uprisings in the border town of Yizhang, and at Chenxian and Leiyang, further north, and set up ‘Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviets’.69 But the economy of the area was in ruins and Zhu's troops had to resort to selling opium in order to feed themselves. Zhou Lu's first action on taking charge at the beginning of March was to order Mao's division to Hunan to link up with Zhu so as to strengthen the forces under the Hunan Party committee's control. Mao complied, but hurried slowly. Two weeks later his forces were still only a few miles from the Jiangxi border. But when Zhu's troops were attacked by regular Hunan and Guangdong government forces, Mao's 2nd Regiment had to rush to their aid. By the time they had extricated themselves, Zhou Lu had suffered the ultimate penalty for the Hunan committee's mischief-making: he had been captured and executed. Mao marched north to Linxian, where the pursuing forces were repulsed. The base area, which had been overrun by landlord militia, was reconquered, and either in Linxian or Ninggang – recollections differ – he and Zhu met for the first time towards the end of April 1928.

  Zhu was forty-one, seven years Mao's senior. Agnes Smedley, who spent several months with him in the 1930s, wrote that where Mao, with his ‘strange, brooding mind, perpetually wrestling with the … problems of the Chinese revolution’, was essentially an intellectual, Zhu was ‘more a man of action and a military organiser’:

  In height he was perhaps five feet eight inches. He was neither ugly nor handsome, and there was nothing whatever heroic or fire-eating about him. His head was round and was covered with a short stubble of black hair touched with grey, his forehead was broad and rather high, his cheekbones prominent. A strong stubborn jaw and chin supported a wide mouth and a perfect set of white teeth which gleamed when he smiled his welcome … He was such a commonplace man in appearance that had it not been for his uniform [which was worn and faded from much wear and long washing], he could have passed for almost any peasant in any village in China.70

  Yet Zhu's life encapsulated, even more than Mao's, the welter of contradiction and change that had swept across China at the end of the old century and the beginning of the new. Born into a Sichuanese peasant family so poor that his father had drowned five of his children with his own hands because he was unable to feed them, he had advanced to win a degree as a xiucai, the first step towards becoming a mandarin. Instead, he became a petty warlord and an opium addict. In 1922, after a cure in Shanghai, he took ship to Europe. There he met Zhou Enlai, who inducted him into the Communist Party. For four years he studied in Berlin, before returning to China to resume his military career – this time on the communists’ behalf – in the Guomindang's crack Fourth Army, the proudly named ‘Ironsides’.71

  The partnership between Mao and Zhu De marked the heyday of the Jinggangshan base area, which rapidly expanded to include, at its peak that summer, parts of seven counties with a population of more than 500,000.

  Mao's political fortunes also improved. He learned from Zhu in April that his expulsion from the Party had never happened. Then, in May, word came from the provincial Party leadership that the establishment of a Hunan–Jiangxi Border Area Special Committee, which Mao had been urging since December, had at last been authorised, and that he should be its secretary.72

  The two armies merged to form the Fourth Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army (so numbered after the GMD Fourth Army, from which Zhu and most of his officers had come), soon afterwards rechristened – with the Politburo's blessing – the Fourth ‘Red Army’, a name-change of no small importance for it signalled the beginning of the end of the long and sterile debate over the respective roles of the army and the insurrectionary masses. A ‘Red Army’ was by definition insurrectionary, so no such distinction could arise.

  The Zhu–Mao Army, as it became known, comprised four regiments, totalling about 8,000 men: the 28th, which had, as its core, the ‘Ironsides’ troops Zhu had brought from Nanchang; the 29th, composed mainly of Hunanese who had taken part in the uprising at Yizhang; the 31st, which was Mao's old 1st Regiment; and the 32nd (the former 2nd Regiment) under Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo. Although they had only 2,000 rifles, it was far and away the biggest communist force in the country. In the interest of unity, the divisional commands were abolished. Zhu became Army Commander; Mao, Party representative; and Chen Yi, formerly Zhu's deputy, Secretary of the Party's Military Committee.73

  On May 20, sixty delegates from the Red Army and from six county Party committees gathered in the Clan Hall of a wealthy landlord family in Maoping for the Firs
t Congress of Party Organisations of the Hunan–Jiangxi Border Area. After three days of debate, the Congress confirmed Mao's appointment as head of the Border Area Special Committee and elected him Chairman of the Border Area ‘Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Government’ with Yuan Wencai as his deputy.74

  Despite the junction with Zhu De, it was a time of considerable pessimism. The defeat of Zhu's forces in Hunan, and the ease with which landlord forces had regained control of the base area as soon as the Red Army left, had raised doubts in many minds about the validity of the insurrectionary strategy. In his speech, therefore, Mao posed the question: ‘How much longer can the Red flag be upheld?’ It was a theme to which he would return repeatedly as the year wore on:

  The prolonged existence inside a country of one or more small areas under Red political power, surrounded on all sides by White political power, is something which has never occurred anywhere else in the world. There are special reasons for the emergence of this curious thing … It occurs solely in [semi-colonial] China, which is under indirect imperialist rule … [and where there are] prolonged splits and wars among the White political forces … [Our] independent regime on the borders of Hunan and Jiangxi is one of many such small areas. In difficult and critical times, some comrades often have doubts as to the survival of such Red political power and manifest negative tendencies … [But] if only we know that splits and wars among the White forces will continue without interruption, we will have no doubts about the emergence, survival and daily growth of Red political power.75