by Philip Short
After some hesitation, Moscow decided to teach the Chinese a lesson. In October, the Comintern wrote to the CCP, asking it to ‘strengthen and expand guerrilla warfare’, especially in Manchuria and in Jiangxi and north-western Hunan, where Mao and He Long were active, to coincide with a punitive expedition by Russian army units across the Chinese border.170 By the time this message reached Shanghai, at the beginning of December, the Nanjing government had backed down and was earnestly suing for peace. But the political analysis the letter contained quickly took on a life of its own.
To justify the call for a guerrilla offensive, Moscow had proclaimed that China had ‘entered a period of deep national crisis’, characterised by ‘a rising revolutionary tide’ and ‘an objective presupposition that the revolutionary high tide will surely arrive’.171 The language was deliberately ambiguous, but its tone was strikingly different from the caution of previous Comintern pronouncements, and it convinced Li Lisan, now emerging as the dominant figure in the Central leadership, that he could at last assert that the long-awaited revolutionary upsurge was at hand.172
This he did in a Central Committee directive issued on December 8, which called for a rapid expansion of the Red Army through the incorporation of peasant self-defence units; improved co-ordination among different communist military forces, with concentration, rather than dispersion, as the guiding principle; and a unified strategy for rural and urban areas. It was in this last connection that the most startling policy reversal occurred:
The previous tactics of avoiding the capture of major cities must be changed. So long as there is a possibility of victory, and so long as the masses can be aroused, attacks should be launched against them and they should be occupied. Rapidly taking possession of major cities would have the greatest political significance. This strategy, if co-ordinated with the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ struggle throughout the entire country, will promote the great revolutionary tide.173
When this document reached Jiangxi towards the end of January 1930, Mao had the agreeable surprise of learning that the Central Committee's estimate of revolutionary prospects was now much closer to his own. A few days later, at an enlarged Front Committee conference at Pitou, near Jian, he was able to savour the spectacle of his comrades, one after another, humbly acknowledging the correctness of his analysis of the previous summer and pledging themselves once more to ‘liberate the whole of Jiangxi province’, starting with Jian itself.174
To that end, a General Front Committee was established, with Mao as Secretary, to act as the ‘supreme leading organ’ of his own Fourth Red Army; of Peng Dehuai's Fifth Army, now 3,000-strong and based in the area north of Jinggangshan; and of the newly formed Sixth Army, headed by Peng's colleague, Huang Gonglue, which was operating along the southern reaches of the Gan River; as well as of the base areas in south-west Jiangxi, west Fujian and northern Guangdong.
The meeting issued a final statement, which Mao drafted, brimming with revolutionary fervour:
A high tide of world revolution will burst forth! The high tide of the Chinese revolution will arrive very soon, Chinese soviets will appear as successors to the Russian soviets and they will become a powerful branch of the world soviet [system]! Within China, a Jiangxi soviet will appear first, because the conditions … are more mature in Jiangxi than in other provinces … The [final outcome of our] struggle will inevitably be that … the revolutionary forces in the south will merge together with the revolutionary forces in the whole country to bury the ruling classes completely.175
But rhetoric was one thing; reality, another. When it came to putting these plans into practice, Mao proceeded with great caution. Even the decision to attack Jian was not quite what it seemed. ‘This call to action is entirely correct,’ he wrote. ‘The first step, however, is not to strike at the town, but rather to encircle it, with the object of making life even more difficult [for those] inside, and sowing panic … After that, we will go on to the [next stage].’ In the event, even the first step was aborted when the Guomindang went on to the offensive, and in March the attack was called off altogether. A few days later, an attempt to take Ganzhou was likewise abandoned. Instead, the General Front Committee decided to spend the next three months developing and expanding the existing rural base area, on the grounds that expansion without consolidation was ‘serious opportunism’.176
This circumspection did not pass unnoticed in Shanghai, where Li Lisan quickly realised that there was a fundamental divergence over what a ‘revolutionary high tide’ entailed.
Li's ‘high tide’ was grounded in theory. It originated in a Comintern document, written in Moscow to suit the requirements of Soviet national interests, which Li then bent to his own purposes. Mao's was a matter of practical politics. For the past year he had argued that the only correct way forward was to build up the rural base areas. The Central Committee's directive of September had held that this required a ‘rising revolutionary tide’. To Mao, Li Lisan's affirmation that that condition had now been met simply gave added legitimacy to the policies he would have carried out anyway.
If, as part of the deal, Mao had to pay lip-service to the idea of capturing cities, he was quite willing to do so, provided it did not expose the Red Army to unnecessary risk. Moreover even the lip-service, to start with, was minimal. The Pitou meeting stated explicitly that the Party's ‘main task’ was ‘to expand the territory of the soviet [base] areas’. The taking of cities, as a generic policy (as distinct from the specific plan to take Jian), was not even mentioned.177 Indeed, only a few weeks earlier, at Gutian, Mao had derided those who wanted to ‘march into big cities’ as being only interested in pleasure-seeking, and ‘eating and drinking to their hearts’ content’.178
To Li, on the other hand, urban revolution was primordial. Most of his career had been spent with organised labour, from his apprenticeship, under Mao, among the Anyuan miners, to the May 30 movement in 1925, where he had gained national prominence. Just as Mao believed fervently that rural revolution held the key to China's future, so Li was convinced that the proletariat would be its salvation.
To this deep political divide was added a personal dimension. Li was six years younger than Mao. When they had worked together on the labour movement at Anyuan, they had got on well enough. But they had never been close, and the younger man had not forgiven Mao for his indifference to the reported execution of Li's landlord father during the ‘red terror’ in Hunan two years earlier. The rather awkward note that Mao addressed to ‘Brother Li’ in October 1929, when he finally learned of his promotion, asking him to ‘write me a letter with your excellent guidance’, made plain the misgivings which this news had inspired.179
Even putting personal factors aside, Mao's political differences with the Centre over the ‘revolutionary high tide’ would not have stayed hidden for long. In late February 1930, Zhou Enlai drafted a much fuller and more detailed exposition of the leadership's new strategy, issued as CC Circular no. 70, which criticised Zhu and Mao by name for ‘persisting in concealing and dispersing their forces’. The Party's objective, it declared, was to achieve ‘preliminary victory in one or several provinces’, and to that end the Red Army's entire strategy must be geared to seizing key cities on major transport routes, in co-ordination with local uprisings, political strikes by workers and mutinies by nationalist garrisons. Two weeks later, on March 10, the Politburo again criticised Mao's forces for aimlessly ‘circling around’. Another Central directive charged that he was acting ‘counter to his Party duty and the national revolutionary situation’.180 Zhou then departed for Moscow, not to return until August, leaving Li Lisan in sole charge of Central policy.181
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1930 Mao resisted these instructions.
His forces refused to budge from the Jiangxi–Guangdong border, where they skirmished with small nationalist units and built up their military strength. Mao himself ignored Li's demands that he come to Shanghai for a ‘Conference of Representatives from Soviet Areas’, wh
ich, as a result, in mid-May, was convened in the absence of the most important of them. Carrying out mistaken directives, he told the Front Committee airily, was actually ‘a form of sabotage’, and he would have no part in it.182
Meanwhile Li's own thinking – ‘the Li Lisan line’, as it was later known – came increasingly to resemble the radical views espoused by Qu Qiubai, three years earlier. Like Qu, Li declared that it was wrong to rely on the Red Army alone to carry out the revolution; army units must operate in tandem with workers’ insurrections. Like Qu, he insisted that there must be ‘only attack, not withdrawal’. Mao's tactics of flexible warfare were ‘no longer suited to modern requirements … now that we need to take key cities’, and he and Zhu must ‘change their ways’, and rid themselves of their guerrilla mentality. Mao's concept of ‘using the countryside to encircle the city’, which had appeared explicitly for the first time in his plan for the attack on Jian, was likewise ‘highly erroneous’; and his notion that ‘rural work comes first, and urban work, second’ was an even more serious mistake.183
Matters came to a head in June. After a series of blistering criticisms, in which Mao was accused of being ‘terrified of imperialism’; exhibiting a peasant viewpoint and ‘roving bandit ideology’; and persistently disobeying Central Committee instructions, the Politburo passed a resolution rejecting his proposal to set up a revolutionary regime in Jiangxi alone, and holding out instead a far more apocalyptic prospect:
China is the weakest link in the ruling chain of world imperialism. It is the place where the volcano of the world revolution is most likely to erupt … The Chinese revolution may even possibly … set off the world revolution and the final, decisive class war worldwide … Therefore the immediate task of the Communist Party is to call on the broad masses … to prepare resolutely for the concerted general uprising of all revolutionary forces … [and] actively to prepare from now on for armed insurrection … For the present, while the new revolutionary high tide approaches day by day, our general tactical policy is to prepare ourselves for winning preliminary successes in one or more provinces and for setting up a national revolutionary regime.184
The plan which Li Lisan drew up on the basis of this assessment envisaged an initial attack by Mao's units on Jiujiang and Nanchang, followed by a concerted Red Army offensive against Wuhan.185
To bring the communist forces more firmly under his own control, Li ordered an extensive political and military reorganisation. A network of Action Committees was set up, to serve as emergency organs of political power in each province, answering directly to the Centre (which meant in practice to Li himself). In the army, a Central Revolutionary Military Commission was established, also answerable to Li, to direct the work of four new army groups which replaced the existing military structure.186 Ten days later, a Central Committee special envoy, Tu Zhennong, reached Mao at Tingzhou, and handed him and Zhu De a direct order to begin moving their forces north. To sweeten the pill, Mao was offered the chairmanship of the new Military Commission. Zhu was made Commander-in-Chief. There was no choice but to obey.187
A poem Mao wrote soon afterwards betrayed his ambivalence towards the whole venture:
A million workers and peasants rise eagerly together,
Rolling up Jiangxi like a mat, striking straight at Hunan and Hubei,
Yet the ‘Internationale’ sounds a melancholy note,
A raging tempest falls upon us from the heavens.188
As though to underline Mao's doubts, the army moved extremely slowly. It left Tingzhou on June 28. Ten days later it had still not reached Xingguo, less than a hundred miles to the west. Two more weeks would elapse before it first engaged enemy troops at Zhangzhu, seventy miles further north. Then Mao and Zhu decided that Nanchang was too well-defended to risk a frontal attack, and that a symbolic gesture would have to suffice. Accordingly, on August 1, a detachment was sent to the railway station on the river-bank opposite the city, where they fired shots into the air to mark the anniversary of the Nanchang Uprising three years earlier.189 ‘Since we had fulfilled our task of holding an August 1 demonstration,’ Mao explained to the Central Committee shortly afterwards, ‘we scattered in the area around Fengxin [on the far side of the mountains, fifty miles to the west] to mobilise the masses, raise funds, make propaganda and so on.’190
So much for Li Lisan's grand design of a quick, co-ordinated drive against Wuhan. But by then, in any case, Li had other problems. His insurrectionary zeal had set off alarm bells in Moscow. In May the Comintern had ordered a letter to be drafted, underlining that ‘no nationwide revolutionary high tide has yet appeared’. The strength of the revolutionary movement, it went on, ‘is not sufficient to overthrow the rule of the GMD and the imperialists … [But while] it cannot dominate China, it can take control of a number of major provinces.’191 This was quite different from the line which Li Lisan had evolved. He had consistently argued that independent provincial regimes, or, for that matter, permanent base areas of any kind, could survive only in the context of a national uprising, and that to assert, as Mao had done, that individual local regimes could precede the nationwide upsurge was ‘extremely erroneous’.192 Yet that was precisely what Moscow now required him to believe.
The letter arrived in Shanghai on July 23. At that point, it must have been clear to Li that the offensive he was planning did not have Moscow's backing and ought to be called off. Instead, no doubt hoping that victory would provide its own justification, he concealed it from the rest of the Politburo.193
Two days later, Peng Dehuai made a surprise advance on Changsha, defeating a GMD force under He Jian four times bigger than his own and taking the city on July 27. After holding out for nine days – and provoking alarmist headlines in newspapers all over Europe – he was compelled to withdraw.194 Nevertheless, Li Lisan was ecstatic, and Mao, too, was evidently persuaded that seizing power in Hunan might, after all, be a realistic proposition.195 The two forces linked up in mid-August, and at a meeting near Liuyang on August 23, it was agreed that they should combine to form the First Front Army, with Zhu as Commander-in-Chief and Mao as Political Commissar and Secretary of the General Front Committee. A Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Committee, with Mao as Chairman, was also established, to act as the supreme organ of power in the battle zone, with authority over both the Front Committee and local and provincial Party authorities.
The same meeting decided, after considerable debate, to make another attempt to take Changsha, and, this time, to hold it.196
Mao himself appears to have had mixed feelings. He Jian's units had been severely shaken, and the Red Army's morale was high. On the other hand, the element of surprise had been lost. His misgivings were reflected in a letter the following day, in which he underlined the ‘extreme importance’ of large numbers of reinforcements being sent from Jiangxi – ‘10,000 men within two weeks, and another 20,000 within a month’ – adding prudently that while it ‘should be possible’ to capture Changsha, ‘an intense campaign’ would be necessary.197
Those caveats proved well-justified. The nationalists put up stubborn resistance, and the communist attack bogged down a few miles south-east of the city. On September 12, with fresh Guomindang forces closing in, Mao gave the order to withdraw.198
Twenty-four hours later, the troops were told they were going back to Jiangxi. The rhetoric was maintained about ‘winning initial victory in Wuhan and seizing political power in the whole country’, but the next target was much more modest. After three weeks for rest and re-equipment an attack would be made on Jian. It was the third-ranking city in the province, with a population of 40,000. Local communist forces had tried to capture it eight times, but each time had been driven back.199
On the night of October 4, however, the defenders slipped away without a fight, and Mao was able to announce the ‘first seizure of a major city by the Red Army and the masses [in Jiangxi] in several years of fighting … [and] the beginning of victory in the whole of Jiangxi province’.200 Tha
t was laying it on a bit thick: the communists actually held Jian for just six weeks. But it reflected well enough the jubilation among the Party leadership and the rank and file. Hyperbolic proclamations were issued, calling for the strength of the Red Army to be increased to one million men; pledging eternal solidarity with the Soviet Union and the world proletariat; and predicting that, in the current ‘global revolutionary situation’, soviet power would ‘undoubtedly burst forth’ in China and throughout the world.201
Mao set up his headquarters in a landlord's house, a comfortable stone-built dwelling in the middle of the city. He and He Zizhen lived behind the inner courtyard, amid the red-lacquered splendour of what had been the women's quarters, while Zhu De and his young partner, Kang Keqing, occupied the outer rooms. For all Mao's warnings at Gutian about the snares of city life, everyone, himself included, was glad of the respite it offered.
In Shanghai, meanwhile, Li Lisan was in deep trouble.
In July, a Soviet military adviser had installed a secret radio transmitter, for use by the Central Committee to communicate with Moscow. Li's freedom of manoeuvre, which had been based on the months it used to take for letters to go back and forth to the Comintern, disappeared overnight. One of the first messages received, on July 28, forcefully restated Soviet opposition to his plans for urban uprisings.202 Once again, Li concealed it. But a month later, after Moscow had condemned his plans as ‘adventurist’ and told him bluntly there was ‘no serious chance of capturing big cities’, he was forced to countermand planned insurrections in Wuhan and Shanghai.203
By then, Zhou Enlai and Qu Qiubai were both back, and Li was no longer able to dissimulate Moscow's views.204 Even so, he refused to cancel the order to retake Changsha, and when, in September, a Central Committee plenum was held, he insisted that, all along, he had merely been following the Comintern's lead.205
For a while, Li's defiance paid off. The Third Plenum, as it was known, concluded that, despite ‘ambiguities and mistakes’, stemming from excessive optimism, ‘the Politburo's [general] line is correct’. But the reprieve was short-lived. In October, Moscow received details of some of Li's wilder statements that autumn, when he had proposed, among other things, an uprising in Manchuria to set off a war between Russia and Japan, and had spoken disparagingly of the Russians’ understanding of Chinese affairs.206