Mao

by Philip Short

  Having been given a mandate to purge, Liu Shiqi worked with a will. Hundreds of cadres of landlord and rich peasant origin were expelled from the South-West Jiangxi Party over the next few months. In May, internal Party documents began referring for the first time to a mysterious ‘AB-tuan’ which had allegedly infiltrated local committees, especially in Ji'an and neighbouring Anfu, Yongfeng and Xingguo. This group, often referred to as the Anti-Bolshevik League (the letters A and B actually denoted the tuan's senior and junior levels of membership), was a right-wing clique within the Guomindang. It had been established in Ji'an in 1926, and while moribund elsewhere in China, remained a significant presence in south-west Jiangxi, along with other reformist movements like the Reorganisationists (supporters of the former Left-GMD leader Wang Jingwei), the Third Party and the Social Democrats.11 In an area where communists, reformists and Guomindang supporters all came from the same social strata, often from the same families and clans, and might well have divided loyalties, the idea of an AB-tuan fifth column was not inherently improbable. But the sheer number of agents claimed to have been found did strain credulity.

  By October, when Mao's forces took Ji'an, more than a thousand South-West Jiangxi Party members – one in thirty of the total – had been executed as AB-tuan members.12

  The degree of Mao's personal involvement up to this point is uncertain. There is a prima-facie case that he must have been implicated to some extent. Even without his ties to Liu Shiqi, the Front Committee was ultimately responsible for the South-West Jiangxi Special Committee's work. Mao was informed of the alleged AB-tuan connection as soon as it was discovered, and he would have received a detailed briefing when the Red Army passed through the area in July on its way north to Nanchang. Yet at that stage, while large numbers had been arrested, relatively few people had been killed. The blood-purge began in earnest only after the Red Army had moved on.13

  The trigger was the return of one of the Jiangxi leaders who had been passed over when Liu Shiqi was appointed. Li Wenlin, a thirty-year-old intellectual who, like Mao, was of rich peasant origin, had been among the founders of the Donggu base area, and had impressed Mao by his leadership when the Red Army had sought refuge there in the spring of 1929.14 A year later, he had gone to Shanghai to attend the Soviet Areas Conference, where he established good relations with Li Lisan. On his return, in August 1930, while Mao was away in Hunan, he persuaded the Special Committee to call an enlarged plenum, which dismissed Liu Shiqi; endorsed Li Lisan's policy of using the Red Army to attack cities; and rescinded the radical land law which had been approved, at Mao's insistence, that spring.15 Li Wenlin himself was named Special Committee Secretary, and soon afterwards became head of the Provincial Action Committee established on Li Lisan's orders.16

  As one of its first acts, this new leadership ordered ‘the most merciless torture’ to ferret out AB-tuan members, warning that even ‘those people who seem very positive and loyal, very left-wing and straightforward in what they say’ must be doubted and questioned.17 The numbers being killed rose steeply, as each confession produced a new clutch of victims, and each victim a new confession. When Mao arrived in Ji'an in October, he therefore found himself confronted with a much bigger, more complex problem than he had imagined when the South-West Jiangxi purge had been launched. Then it had simply been a matter of local Party committees being filled with ‘landlords and rich peasants’. Now, he told the Central Committee, they were ‘filled with AB-tuan members’, who were ‘carrying out assassinations,I preparing to make contact with the [White] army, and plotting a revolt to eliminate the soviet base areas and the various revolutionary organisations’.18

  Mao's answer was to intensify the purge still further. On October 26, he and Li Wenlin issued a joint statement calling for the removal of ‘rich peasant counter-revolutionaries’ from local soviet governments; the ‘execution of all AB-tuan activists’; and the launching of a campaign against the AB-tuan in the Red Army.19

  Four days later, this appearance of unity within the leadership was shattered by Mao's proposal to ‘lure the enemy in deep’, a strategy which the Jiangxi cadres adamantly opposed. To men whose villages were on the enemy's line of march, the new policy was a matter of life or death: it meant their womenfolk risked being raped and killed, their children and old people butchered, their homes burned down, and all that they possessed destroyed. As the Red Army retreated southward before Chiang Kai-shek's advancing armies, then beginning their first encirclement campaign, mutiny was in the air.20

  When the troops reached Huangpi, where they were to regroup and prepare for the coming battles, the Political Departments launched what was euphemistically called ‘a consolidation campaign’ to weed out doubtful elements. The first man to crack was a regimental cadre named Gan Lichen, who confessed after being severely beaten that he was a member of an AB-tuan network. That was all that it needed. Under extraordinary strain, facing an enemy many times stronger, the Red Army ignited.

  The flames that had devoured the Party in south-west Jiangxi now began, with fine impartiality, to consume officers and men, as regiment after regiment turned inwards in a fury of self-destruction.21 Every unit, down to company level, established a ‘committee for eliminating counter-revolutionaries’. Twenty-one-year-old Xiao Ke, already a division commander, later one of China's top generals, recalled in his memoirs:

  In that period, I spent all my time on the AB-tuan problem. Our division had killed 60 people … Then one night in our Divisional Party Committee, it was decided to kill 60 more. Next morning, I went to report … But at the Fourth Army Military Committee, [they] said: ‘You're killing too many. If they are from worker and peasant backgrounds, you can just let them confess …’ After that, I went back at once. The prisoners had already been taken to the execution ground. I said, ‘Don't kill them. The Divisional Party Committee must discuss this again.’ Afterwards, they decided to release more than 30 of them. But more than 20 were still killed. Altogether in the Fourth Army, 1,300 or 1,400 out of 7,000 men were struck down.

  Political officers tried to outdo each other for fear of being thought weak. One ordered the execution of a fourteen-year-old ‘little Red devil’ for taking food to officers who, unknown to the child, were AB-tuan suspects. He was saved by the intervention of an army commissar. Elsewhere, an entire company was slaughtered after its commander questioned the need for the purge. In little more than a week, 4,400 officers and men of the First Front Army confessed to links with the AB-tuan. More than 2,000 were summarily shot.

  What had begun nine months before as a simple dispute over land reform, fuelled by rivalry between Jiangxi natives and Hunanese, had taken on a monstrous life of its own.

  The designations, ‘rich peasant’, ‘AB-tuan member’ and ‘counter-revolutionary element’, became inextricably confused.22 Local differences were coloured by national disputes as the South-West Jiangxi Party leaders, for their own purposes, championed Li Lisan's policies as a counterweight to Mao's.23 Amid deepening paranoia as the GMD encirclement tightened, the charge of AB-tuan membership became a bludgeon to strike down anyone who questioned Mao's strategy. The purge grew into a blood-bath in which his opponents perished. The stage was set for ‘the Futian events’.

  *

  The small market town of Futian lies on the Fushui, a tributary of the Gan River, at the western edge of the White Cloud Mountains, which separate it from Donggu, ten miles to the east. Beside an old stone bridge, women squat, beating washing against flat stones. A few shops, a warren of crooked streets, and a jumble of grey-tiled houses with whitewashed antler-eaves, spread back, higgledy-piggledy, from the banks.II

  The landscape is Pyrenean. From the peaks, thickly covered with pine forest, fir and bamboo, and overgrown with creepers, the view extends across four counties. There are ferns underfoot, and rushing mountain torrents. In summer, the piercing green rice-paddies are worked by small, thin, bony men, with ragged blue jackets, baggy shorts, and wide-brimmed straw hats as big as d
ustbin lids to protect them against the blinding glare of the sun. In winter, the approaches turn to a sea of mud. The track from Donggu is impassable, and the only access is across the plain from the west, or at high water, by boat along the river.

  After the Red Army abandoned Ji'an, in mid-November, Futian became the headquarters of the Jiangxi Provincial Action Committee.

  On Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1930, shortly after lunch, a member of Mao's political staff named Li Shaojiu arrived from Huangpi at the head of a company of troops.24 With him he carried two letters from Mao's General Front Committee, addressed to the provincial government leader, Zeng Shan, and the head of the Action Committee's Propaganda Department, Chen Zhengren, both Mao loyalists. The letters ordered the arrests of Li Bofang (alleged to be the head of a secret AB-tuan headquarters inside the Action Committee); Duan Liangbi (an alleged AB-tuan section chief); and Xie Hanchang (Head of the Political Department of the 20th Army at Donggu, also allegedly an AB-tuan agent). Their names and supposed links to the AB-tuan had been revealed under torture by Red Army men who had confessed to being their accomplices.

  Li Shaojiu took no chances. He ordered the Committee's offices surrounded by three rings of troops, before entering with an escort of ten soldiers, rifles at the ready. Li, Duan, Xie and five other Action Committee members were seized and bound hand and foot. Most of them were in their early to mid-twenties. When they asked for an explanation, Li merely took out his pistol and pointed it at their heads.

  From the Committee's headquarters, the eight officials were taken to the former magistrate's yamen, an immense white-walled building, pierced by a massive central archway opening on to a spacious inner courtyard. Sweet-scented osmanthus trees grew from the raised stone terraces, and covered wooden walkways ran along each side. At the eastern end, a cantilevered grey-tiled roof, with delicately flaring eaves, formed an immense canopy, supported by four huge wooden pillars on carved stone pedestals, covering a raised dais where, in imperial times, the magistrate held court. A gilt signboard suspended from the ceiling proclaimed: ‘The Hall of Sincerity and Respect’.

  Behind the dais stood a large wood-panelled torture chamber, where for centuries yamen runners had applied the rigour of imperial law. There Li commenced his interrogation. Duan Liangbi was questioned first:

  Li Shaojiu asked me [he wrote later]: ‘Duan Liangbi, are you an AB-tuan member? Are you going to confess? If you do, you will avoid the torture.’

  I replied sternly: ‘Look at my history, and my work … Please go ahead and investigate. If I were an AB-tuan member, it would be a crime against the proletariat. Then I wouldn't need you to touch me. I'd take a gun and kill myself.’

  But Li answered: ‘As far as your history is concerned … I haven't the ability to debate theories with you. I have only seven kinds of tortures to punish …’

  After he had described to me all the seven punishments, I said: ‘So be it. But why should I be afraid? Whatever you do, I …’ Before I had finished my sentence, Li ordered the soldiers to take off my clothes. I was made to kneel naked on the floor. They subjected me to the torture called ‘blowing the landmine’,III and burned my body with incense sticks … I thought at first: ‘Well, let them burn me to death. In this world death is inevitable, the only question is how.’ My two thumbs were almost broken through, just barely hanging together by the skin. My body was already burned into a festering mess, not a single place was good. I was cut and bruised all over.

  Then suddenly they stopped beating me, and Li Shaojiu said: ‘Liangbi, you want to die, but this is not what I want. Whatever happens, you will have to confess that you are in the AB-tuan and to tell us about your network. Otherwise, I will keep you in a state where you are neither living nor dead.’

  This was not something that Li Shaojiu, murderous thug that he was, had thought up on his own. He was simply following the instructions of the Front Committee, that Mao personally had approved, which stated: ‘Do not kill the important leaders too quickly, but squeeze out of them [the maximum] information … [Then], from the clues they give, you can go on to unearth other leaders.’25

  The same crude methods were applied everywhere. Eighteen months later a CCP investigation concluded:

  All the AB-tuan cases were uncovered on the basis of confessions. Little patience was shown in ascertaining facts and verifying charges … [The] method used … was the carrot and stick. The ‘carrot’ meant … extracting confessions by guile … The ‘stick’ meant thrashing suspects with ox-tailed bamboo sticks after hanging them up by their hands. If that had no effect, next came burning with incense or with the flame of a kerosene lamp. The worst method was to nail a person's palms to a table and then to insert bamboo splints under the fingernails. The methods of torture were given names like … ‘sitting in a sedan chair’; ‘airplane ride’; ‘toad-drinking water’; and ‘monkey pulling reins’ … Torture was the only method of dealing with suspects who resisted. Torture ceased only after confession.26

  Like all the others, Duan eventually did confess, but salved his conscience by naming as his accomplices only the seven men who had been arrested with him. Li Bofang, who had a photographic memory, took the opposite tack, trying to confuse his tormentors by writing down almost a thousand names.

  Next morning, December 8, Li Shaojiu made further arrests on the basis of the previous night's confessions. Zeng Shan and Mao's secretary, Gu Bo, who now arrived from Huangpi, joined in the interrogations. Before the week was out, 120 people were being held in cells along each side of the courtyard, concealed behind a lattice of narrow wooden slats, about an inch apart, which reached from floor to ceiling like the bars of a cage. Among them were the wives of Li Bofang and two other suspects, who came to the yamen to seek news of their husbands. They were tortured even more brutally than the men: the soldiers cut open their breasts, and burnt their genitals.

  Li Shaojiu then left for Donggu, as the Front Committee had instructed, to begin a purge of the 20th Army. There he made a fatal error. One of the men Xie Hanchang had denounced as a fellow AB-tuan conspirator was a battalion commander named Liu Di. Liu, like Li Shaojiu, was from Changsha, and managed to convince Li that he had been framed. As soon as he was free, however, he led a mutiny and set out for Futian at the head of a relief column of 400 men. After a battle the following night, in which a hundred of Li's troops were killed, the heavy wooden gates of the yamen were forced open, and the badly injured Action Committee leaders released.

  An emergency meeting of the survivors resolved to take the 20th Army across the Gan River to Yongyang, where it would be safe from Mao's reprisals. Banners were put up in the square outside the yamen, declaring: ‘Down with Mao Zedong! Support Zhu [De], Peng [Dehuai] and Huang [Gonglue]!’ – and an appeal was sent to the Party Centre to remove Mao from all his posts.27 When news of this reached Huangpi, the three army commanders issued statements, declaring their solidarity with Mao and denouncing the rebels.28 But the attempt to split the leadership continued by more devious means, when copies of an incriminating letter were circulated, in which Mao had supposedly instructed Gu Bo to gather evidence that Zhu, Peng and Huang were also AB-tuan leaders. The forgery was too crude to be credible, and the Front Committee issued a long, rambling rebuttal, charging the leaders at Yongyang with rebellion against the Party and with conspiring to sow discord among the revolutionary forces.29 A stalemate then set in: the 20th Army on one side of the Gan River, Mao's forces on the other, both claiming to be the loyal executors of Party policy.

  Neither the events at Futian, nor the horrific blood-letting the Red Army had suffered, stopped Mao decisively defeating Chiang Kai-shek's first encirclement campaign. In fact, they may have helped. Bonded by the fury of the purge, those who had withstood it were fused into a tightly disciplined, steel-willed force with extraordinary motivation.30

  None the less, the existence of a dissident force in Yongyang could not be tolerated indefinitely. When Xiang Ying reached the base area at the beginning of 1
931, his first task was to try to lay to rest the demons that Futian had conjured up. By now Mao, too, his prestige bolstered by the latest victory, felt that the killing had gone too far.31 Li Wenlin, who had been arrested at Huangpi, was released, albeit on probation, and Li Shaojiu was reprimanded for excessive zeal.32 On January 16, 1931, the newly formed Central Bureau announced the expulsion of Liu Di and four other rebel leaders, and declared that what had happened in Futian was an ‘anti-Party incident’. But it noted that there was as yet no proof that the rebels were all AB-tuan members.33 Over the next six weeks, Xiang Ying began to put out peace feelers, dropping cautious hints that an accommodation might be reached with those who had been misled.34

  To Mao, these overtures were an implicit disavowal, and he bridled at Xiang's suggestion, the more infuriating because it was so clearly well-founded, that the problem at Futian was partly a factional struggle. On the essential question, however, of whether the campaign against the AB-tuan had been justified, Xiang supported Mao, as did the majority of the Party.35 Throughout January and February, arrests of suspects continued.36 Even the rebels at Yongyang, while proclaiming their own innocence, agreed that this was correct:

  We do not deny [they wrote] that the AB-tuan has a widespread organisation in Jiangxi and that it has penetrated into the Soviet areas, for we have been active fighters against the AB-tuan ourselves … Comrade Duan Liangbi was the first to combat the AB-tuan in the Jiangxi Special Committee … [But now] he too is branded a member of the AB-tuan.37

  That the former leaders of the Action Committee, despite the tortures they had endured, could still endorse the purge, spoke volumes for the state of mind in the base areas at that time. In March 1931, most of them laid down their arms and returned to face the music, having been assured, or so they believed, that they would be treated with clemency.