by Philip Short
Meanwhile, the south Hunan expedition had revived tensions between himself and Zhu De that had been papered over when their forces had come together in April. Zhu had evidently relished the opportunity to break free from Mao's tutelage and resume his old role as sole military commander. Having tasted freedom anew – even though it had ended in defeat – he was now reluctant to allow Mao to regain the dominant position he had occupied during the summer.105 Moreover, some of Zhu's followers, and perhaps Zhu himself, privately attributed the debacle to Mao's refusal to let the 31st and 32nd regiments go with them, as the Hunan Committee had originally proposed.106
The formal division of powers between Mao and Yang Kaiming was confirmed at the Second Border Area Party Congress at Maoping in October. Yang remained head of the Border Area Special Committee – although soon afterwards he fell ill and a neutral figure, Tan Zhenlin, a former worker in his mid-twenties who had been head of the first soviet government Mao had set up at Chaling, was appointed in his place. Mao retained his ‘Action Committee’ post – which effectively made him the Army's Political Commissar. But, in the Committee ranking, which was based on a free vote of delegates, he finished near the bottom of the list. The explanation was provided by the Congress's political resolution. ‘In the past’, it stated, ‘the Party organs were all individual dictatorships, autocracies of the Party secretary; there was no collective leadership or democratic spirit whatsoever.’ Comrade Mao, it noted drily, was among the main offenders.107
His policies were still respected: the political strategy the Congress approved, based on the Comintern resolution of the previous February, details of which had reached the mountains that autumn, closely reflected Mao's ideas. But, his colleagues told him, his leadership style left much to be desired.108
This anomalous situation was brought to an end at the beginning of November, when, after a journey lasting nearly five months, the Central Committee directive which Li Weihan had drafted in June arrived on Jinggangshan.109
Mao could hardly contain his delight. It was, he declared, ‘an excellent letter … [which] has corrected many of our mistakes and resolved many controversial issues here’. A new Front Committee was organised as the ‘supreme Party organ’ in the border area, with Mao as Secretary. Its other leading members were Zhu De, who now replaced Chen Yi as head of the Military Committee, and Tan Zhenlin, who on Mao's proposal became substantive Special Committee Secretary, replacing Yang Kaiming.110 Not only did this re-establish the traditional hierarchy of powers, under which the Front Committee had jurisdiction over local Party organs wherever it happened to be, but it implied that the interest of the Fourth Army would have priority over those of the base area, which was to prove of crucial importance during the coming winter. For while Mao's personal position had been assured, the future of the base area had not.
In a report to the Central Committee three weeks later, Mao described in detail the difficulties he faced. One key problem, he wrote, was that the Party membership in the border area consisted almost entirely of peasants, whose ‘petty-bourgeois consciousness’ resulted in a lack of steadiness, causing them to swing violently between reckless courage and panic-stricken flight.
The long-term answer to that, Mao asserted, was to increase ‘proletarian consciousness’, by putting more workers and soldiers into the Party's leading bodies. This was not simply a genuflection to Marxist orthodoxy, inserted to please the ideologues in Shanghai. Having watched one peasant regiment after another fall to pieces under pressure – among them, his own 3rd Regiment at Sanwan, in September 1927, and Zhu De's 29th regiment at Chenzhou, in July – he now realised that ‘proletarian leadership’ was indeed a prerequisite for success, not for reasons of Party dogma but to put spine into the peasants’ revolt. In the short term, another remedy was available, which was likewise to have far-reaching implications for the Party's later development: the purge.111
In May and June, when the border area had reached its maximum extent, the communists were in firm control and joining the Party seemed to many a wise thing to do, membership had ballooned to more than 10,000. After the Red Army's setbacks during the summer most of the landlord and gentry members, and many rich peasants, turned their coats. Those regarded as unreliable were now weeded out, along with members who engaged in ‘card-playing, gambling, hooliganism and corrupt activities’. The result, Mao reported proudly, was a smaller Party but a much more combative one.
However, the core activity in the border area was not political but military. ‘Fighting’, Mao told the Central Committee, ‘has come to constitute our daily life.’ Professional soldiers who had come over to the communists at the time of the Nanchang and Autumn Harvest uprisings were the backbone of the Red Army. But only a third of their original number remained: the rest had been lost through death, injury or desertion. To fill the gaps, prisoners of war and ‘vagrants’ (i.e., bandits, vagabonds and thieves) had been recruited. Despite their unfortunate background, the latter, Mao maintained, were ‘particularly good fighters’, and the Red Army could not get enough of them. Most of the soldiers, he added, had developed class feelings; they knew what they were fighting for and endured the harsh conditions without complaint.112
None the less, as winter closed in, the mood was grim. An economic blockade had been imposed earlier in the year and several thousand government troops and militiamen were deployed to enforce it. An ounce of salt cost one silver dollar – a month's wages for a labourer; other daily necessities were not available at all. There was no cloth to make winter clothing, and no medicine for the sick. That autumn, to raise morale, Mao, Zhu and other leaders had joined in a laborious, month-long project to carry grain and other provisions from Ninggang on shoulder-poles up the mountain paths to Ciping. Attempts were made to recover salt from the residue inside wooden urine pails and to use local medicinal herbs. Mao admitted later that there was ‘an atmosphere of exhaustion and defeat’. Zhu De remembered that ‘the troops began to starve’.113
Because of the shortage of money, wages were abolished and a supply system instituted instead.114 Even so, it took 5,000 dollars a month to buy food, and every copper cash had to come from expropriating landlords and merchants. An ‘official fund-raising letter’, signed by Mao and Zhu De, explained politely:
The Red Army … makes every effort to protect the merchants … [However], because of the current shortage of food supplies, we are writing to you now to request that you kindly collect on our behalf 5,000 dollars, 7,000 pairs of straw sandals and 7,000 pairs of socks, [and] 300 bolts of white cloth … It is urgent that these be delivered … before eight o'clock this evening … If you ignore our requests, it will be proof that [you] merchants are collaborating with the reactionaries … In that case we will be obliged to burn down all the reactionary shops in [the town] … Do not say we have not forewarned you!115
The shopkeepers complied. However, as Mao noted, ‘you can only expropriate once in a given locality; afterwards there would be nothing to take.’ The longer the troops stayed in the base area, the further afield they had to go to find ‘evil gentry and local bullies’ who had not already been squeezed dry. Even then, it often happened that a landlord's only crop was opium, and the soldiers had to seize and sell that.116
That November, Mao raised for the first time the possibility that the base might have to be abandoned. A contingency plan was drawn up to move to southern Jiangxi, but only – he stressed – if ‘our economic situation worsens to such a degree that southern Jiangxi becomes the only place where we can survive’.117
A month later, two events occurred which suddenly brought that much closer. A force of about 800 ex-warlord troops, who had mutinied in Pingjiang, in northern Hunan, in July, arrived in the border area. Their commander, Peng Dehuai, a gruff, plain-spoken man just turned thirty, a soldier to his boots, was from Mao's home district of Xiangtan. His Fifth Red Army, as it called itself, was amalgamated with the Fourth Army and Peng became deputy to Zhu De. Meanwhile, reports began coming in
that the Jiangxi and Hunan provincial governments were preparing yet another encirclement campaign, this time on a far bigger scale than any attempted before.X Thirty thousand men from twenty-five regiments under the overall command of Mao's old nemesis, He Jian, were to converge on Jinggangshan along five different routes.118
The question of future strategy took on new urgency.
Peng's arrival evidently tipped the balance. It made it impossible to sit out the offensive, because there would not be enough provisions to last the new, enlarged force through the winter; and it opened up fresh possibilities for a co-ordinated riposte.
Just after the New Year, an enlarged meeting of the Front Committee, held in Ninggang, agreed that Peng's men and the 32nd Regiment of Wang Zuo and Yuan Wencai should stay behind to defend the fastness, while Mao and Zhu, leading the 28th and 31st regiments, broke out to attack the enemy's rear by besieging one of the prefectural cities in the east, Jian or Ganzhou.119
At dawn on January 14, the main force slipped away by a seldom-used route that led along the jagged crest of a mountain spur from Jinggangshan down to the foothills in the south. Zhu De described it: ‘There was no path, not even the trace of a trail … The stones and peaks were worn to slippery smoothness … Snow lay in pockets and an icy wind lashed the bodies of the column that inched forward, crawling over huge boulders and hanging on to one another to avoid slipping into the black chasms below.’ That night, they disarmed a Jiangxi army battalion near Dafen, some 40 kilometres to the south, and ate their fill from the enemy's field-kitchens.120 But next day, instead of swinging east to threaten Ganzhou, as they had agreed, they went on marching south until they reached the border town of Dayu. There they were heavily defeated by a Guomindang army brigade and retreated in disarray into Guangdong.121
Did Mao ever really intend to stage the diversion he had promised to relieve the pressure on Peng's few hundred troops, outnumbered by a margin of thirty to one? Or was it just a cynical manoeuvre to get the main force safely away? Peng himself felt that Mao had betrayed him. Forty years later, the memory still rankled.122
Peng held out, unaided, for almost three weeks. By then three of the five passes had been overrun. He gathered together his three surviving companies and, amid a heavy snowstorm, began the impossible task of trying to break through the enemy blockade, escorting several hundred sick and wounded soldiers whom Mao's forces had left behind. ‘For a whole day and a whole night’, he wrote later, ‘we followed goats’ trails and climbed sheer precipices in the lap of the highest peak of the Jinggangshan.’ Somehow they slipped through. But then, when they reached Suichuan, fate turned against them and they marched into an ambush. Peng's troops were able to break through, ‘but the enemy quickly sealed the gap and surrounded the wounded, sick and disabled, trailing behind’. There was no way to rescue them. After another battle a few days later, Peng held a roll-call: of the 800 soldiers who had accompanied him from Pingjiang, 283 remained.123
Mao's army fared somewhat better. In the first month, he and Zhu De lost 600 men out of the 3,500 who set out from Jinggangshan. Even so, it was a ghastly period, the worst, he wrote, since the Red Army's creation.124 For He Zizhen, who marched with Mao and the troops, it was still harder: she was five months pregnant with their first child.125 To Zhu De, it was simply ‘a terrible time’.126 They soon abandoned, at least temporarily, any hope of establishing a permanent new base area, and tried instead, wherever they went, to set up clandestine soviet governments and Party committees, capable of operating underground after the Red forces had moved on. A new kind of warfare began: no longer the defence of fixed positions, but flexible guerrilla war.127
Communications with the Party Centre, problematic on Jinggangshan, were now severed altogether. For the first three months of 1929, Mao's forces were out of contact not only with Shanghai but with the provincial Party authorities as well. Before leaving the mountains, he had sent four ounces of gold to Pingxiang to pay for the setting-up of a secret message centre; another, more ambitious effort later involved sending 5,000 dollars’ worth of opium to Fujian to finance a communications base in Amoy. None of it did any good. Mao's letters that year teem with reproaches about the absence of Central guidance and the incompetence of the Jiangxi committee in passing on documents.128
This was not without advantages. Mao and Zhu were left, alone to devise their own solutions to the problems they encountered without being forced to apply inappropriate tactics dreamed up elsewhere. Indeed, one of the lessons of the Jinggangshan period, Mao wrote to the Central Committee that winter, was that ‘future directives from higher levels regarding military action must, above all, not be too rigid’. Otherwise, the leaders in the field were put in the ‘truly difficult position’ of having to choose between ‘insubordination … [and] defeat’.129 Being out of contact removed that difficulty. But it also meant that for months on end, Mao, along with the leaders of other, smaller Red enclaves in southern and central China, struggled to survive in ignorance of each another, and of the policies of Moscow and Shanghai for which they were supposed to be fighting. Most of the time even newspapers were unobtainable.130
Communications problems formed the backdrop to a dispute between Mao and the Central leadership which would have far more serious repercussions than any of his earlier differences with the Hunan Party committee.
At the beginning of January 1929, when the main theses of the Sixth Congress, held in Moscow six months earlier, finally reached the Jinggangshan, they were received enthusiastically. ‘The resolutions … are extremely correct and we accept them with great joy,’ Mao wrote to Shanghai.131 He was no doubt delighted, too, to learn of his own re-election to the Central Committee, where he was listed twelfth out of the twenty-three full members, reflecting the Red Army's new-found prominence. What he did not know – and could not have guessed – was that the new General Secretary, Xiang Zhongfa, a former dock worker and labour union leader from Wuhan, was a figurehead, and that real power lay with Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan, both of whom were listed well after Mao in the official Central Committee ranking.132 Indeed, he remained in ignorance of Li's elevation until almost the end of the year.133
The Party Centre, for its part, was equally ignorant of Mao's situation. In February, when the first reports reached Shanghai that his forces had left the Jinggangshan, the Politburo had not had any word from him for almost nine months. In these circumstances, Zhou Enlai drafted a letter, urging Mao and Zhu De to take all possible measures to conserve their military strength. To that end, he proposed, they should scatter their forces in the villages, broken down into units of a few dozen, or at most a few hundred, men, in order to ‘mobilise the daily struggle of the peasantry’ and spread the Party's influence, while waiting for a more favourable revolutionary climate to emerge.134
Mao disliked this approach on principle. In his report to the Central Committee the previous November (which the Centre had still not received), he had written that, ‘in our experience, [it] has led almost every time to defeat’.135 This time it was made still more unacceptable by the sting in its tail: Mao and Zhu, the letter said, should both return to Shanghai.
Zhou Enlai, having tried, and failed, to detach Mao from his Hunan base in July 1927, was keenly aware of the difficulties this decision would entail, and mustered all the tact at his command to try to make it more palatable:
The two comrades might feel reluctant to leave the army since they have worked in it for over a year. However the CC believes that … Zhu's and Mao's departure will not cause the army any losses and will help it implement the plan to disperse its forces … When Zhu and Mao come to the CC, they can introduce to our comrades all over the country their precious experience in leading a ten-thousand-strong armed force in dealing with the enemy for over a year. This will make a [still] greater contribution to the whole revolutionary cause.136
This was not illogical: if the Red Army were dispersed, there would be no purpose in Mao and Zhu remaining. Had the directive reached
Mao at the time it was written, in early February, when the communist forces were on the run and, to all appearances, in imminent danger of being wiped out, there might well have been a majority of the Front Committee ready to accept it. But the letter took two months to travel the 600 miles from Shanghai to eastern Jiangxi, and by the time Mao and Zhu received it the situation had altered dramatically.
After the disorderly retreat into Guangdong, at the end of January, they had made their way north, along the Fujian–Jiangxi border, pursued by a brigade of Jiangxi government troops. At Dabodi, in the mountains fifteen miles north of Ruijin, on February 11, the Fourth Army decided to make a stand. Thanks largely to Lin Biao's regiment, which made a forced march through the night behind enemy lines, the pursuers were decisively defeated. Two hundred rifles, six machine-guns and about a thousand soldiers were captured. It was their first victory since leaving Jinggangshan four weeks earlier, and Mao reported afterwards that ‘the morale of our army was thereby greatly raised’. A month later they captured the prefectural city of Tingzhou, just across the border in Fujian. The local strongman, Guo Fengming, who commanded the Fujian Second Brigade, was killed, and his body exposed in the street for three days.
Elated by these successes, Mao sent off a long letter to Shanghai, announcing that the Fourth Army planned to conduct guerrilla warfare across an area of some twenty counties, centred on Tingzhou and Ruijin, and then, when the masses were sufficiently mobilised, to establish a new, permanent base area in western Fujian and southern Jiangxi.137
Two weeks later, Zhou Enlai's directive arrived, ordering the army to disperse.138
Mao's response, endorsed by the Front Committee and by Peng Dehuai, whose troops had now rejoined the main force, was remarkable both for the bluntness with which he rejected the new instructions, and for the standpoint of complete equality he assumed towards the Shanghai Centre. He replied, not as a dissident field commissar being summoned to headquarters, but as a ranking Party leader arguing a case before his peers: