by Philip Short
The challenge Wang Ming posed was none the less the most serious Mao had faced for almost two-and-a-half years. Zhang Guotao had ceased to be a threat since his army had been decimated in Gansu. He was still a member of the Politburo, but at Luochuan he had lost his last important post, as Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission. The following spring he would defect to the nationalists. Wang was the chief representative of the Soviet-trained cohort of the Chinese Party whose influence Mao was trying to break. He was ambitious; he had enormous prestige within the Party at large; and he had backers in Moscow. He viewed Mao as essentially a military figure, whose political mantle he could eventually draw to himself. Six years earlier, before his departure for the Soviet Union, Wang had been briefly the pre-eminent Party leader. He had not given up hope of becoming so again.
Initially, Wang's policies appeared to be paying off. In January 1938, German attempts to mediate between China and Japan collapsed, and relations between the CCP and the Guomindang began to show a marked improvement. A communist newspaper, Xinhua ribao, was authorised in Wuhan, giving the Party for the first time a legal means of propagating its ideas in GMD-ruled areas. CCP recruitment in the cities grew apace.42
But the Japanese advance continued.
Nanjing had fallen. By February, Xuzhou was threatened. The next major target would be Wuhan. The defence of that city, Wang now argued, must be the first priority. If the Japanese could be halted there, final victory would be assured. The united front must therefore be strengthened still further, by establishing ‘a unified national army … [with] a united command, a united establishment … united battle plans and united combat’, and by creating a ‘national revolutionary alliance’, in which all political parties – including the GMD and the CCP – would join together in the common cause.43
To Mao, Wang's call ‘to defend important positions to stop the enemy's advance’ recalled Bo Gu's disastrous slogan, ‘Defend every inch of soviet territory!’, which had led to the loss of the Red base area in Jiangxi four years earlier.
When the Politburo next met, at the end of February, he laid out his own, bleak analysis of the future conduct of the war. The Guomindang was corrupt, he said. The CCP lacked the strength to defeat Japan on its own; and the Japanese did not have enough troops to occupy the whole of China. In these circumstances, the conflict would not end soon. Far from defending Wuhan, the correct policy was a strategic withdrawal. To continue the bruising but indecisive battles of recent months was a mistake, Mao warned. China had to preserve its forces for the day when victory might finally be achieved.44 He did not actually, on this occasion, use the term, ‘luring the enemy in deep’, but none of his colleagues could have had any doubt as to his meaning: in resisting Japan, China should use the same strategy nationally as the communists had used in Jiangxi to defeat the Guomindang encirclement campaigns.
Three months later, Mao enlarged on these ideas in two essays which were to become military classics, setting out the guiding principles the Red Army would apply for the next seven years, until the end of the war in 1945.
In ‘Problems of Strategy in Guerilla War’, he argued that when a large, weak country (China) was attacked by a small, strong neighbour (Japan), part, or even the greater part, of its territory would fall into the enemy's hands. In these circumstances, the defenders should establish base areas in the mountains, as the Red Army had done in Jiangxi, and fight a war of mutual encirclement, resembling a game of chess,I in which each side moved out from its strongholds and tried to dominate ‘the spaces on the board’ – the vast areas of the countryside where the guerrilla war would be fought.45
In the second essay, ‘On Protracted War’, he tried to prepare the Party, and public opinion at large, now accessible through Xinhua ribao, for the long and arduous conflict that such a strategy would entail.
Capitulation, although still much discussed within the Guomindang, was unlikely, Mao argued, because of ‘the obstinate and peculiarly barbarous character’ of Japanese aggression, which had provoked the unremitting hostility of all sections of the Chinese population. Thus, even though ‘certain subjugationists will again crawl out and collude with [the enemy]’, the nation as a whole would fight on.II However, a speedy victory was equally improbable. In the initial stage of the war, which might last months or years, China would suffer partial defeats, and Japan would gain partial victories. But as Japan's supply lines became over-extended and war weariness set in, the balance of advantage would change. Subjective factors, Mao maintained, such as people's determination to fight for their homes, their culture and their land, would ultimately prevail:
The so-called theory that ‘weapons decide everything’ [is] … onesided … Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale …46
He went on to cite Clausewitz, whose writings on politics and war he had encountered for the first time that spring:
‘War is the continuation of politics.’ In this sense war is politics, and war itself is a political action. Since ancient times there has never been a war that did not have a political character … But war has its own particular characteristics and in this sense it cannot be equated with politics in general. ‘War is a special political technique for the realisation of certain political objectives.’ When politics develops to a certain stage beyond which it cannot proceed by the usual means, war breaks out to sweep the obstacles from the way … It can therefore be said that politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.
The key to victory, Mao concluded, lay in mobilising China's people, so as to create ‘a vast sea of humanity in which the enemy will be swallowed up’.
To Wang Ming, this was far too pessimistic.
Once again, the Politburo split. Wang, Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu and Kang Sheng (who would, however, shift his allegiance once he sensed which way the wind was blowing) lined up on one side; Mao, Chen Yun and Zhang Wentian on the other.47 Wang, evidently confident that Stalin would support him, agreed that Ren Bishi, now Political Director of the Military Commission, should go to Moscow to seek new instructions.48 He then infuriated Mao by claiming publicly, on his return to Wuhan, that his crusade for its defence had the communist leaders’ unanimous support.49
From then on, the leaders in Wuhan and Yan'an increasingly constituted two distinct loci of communist power, following conflicting policies and issuing contradictory instructions.
Where Mao in private denounced the nationalists as venal and compromising, Wang and Zhou Enlai called for closer ties with Chiang Kai-shek. Where Mao instructed them to relocate to the countryside, on the grounds that Wuhan was indefensible, they urged the city's inhabitants to emulate Madrid, where the Republicans were holding out heroically against the Spanish fascists.50
The military situation was becoming desperate. On June 6, Kaifeng, the then capital of Henan, had fallen and the Japanese were only twenty-five miles from the key rail junction at Zhengzhou. Three days later, on Chiang's orders, nationalist sappers breached the dykes of the Yellow River in the hope that the waters of China's Sorrow would succeed in stemming the enemy advance where his soldiers had failed. 21,000 square miles were flooded. At least half a million peasants drowned – the total may have been as high as 900,000 – and several million more were made homeless. For some weeks the Japanese halted. But by the end of summer they had begun moving forward again, this time along the Yangtse. GMD propagandists pretended that the dykes had been broken in Japanese bombing raids. But the peasants blamed the nationalists anyway. Wide swathes of Anhui and Henan became a no man's land, where Chiang's troops ventured at their peril and the communists found an inexhaustible source of new recruits.51
In these fraught circumstances, Wang Ming's appeals to the population to rise up in Wuhan's defence conjured up in Guomindang minds the spectre of communist insurrection. In August,
Chiang Kai-shek's police announced a ban on communist front organisations. The Yangtse Bureau's efforts to expand the Party's influence by legal means collapsed.52
By then, Wang's cause had suffered an even more serious blow from a quite different quarter. When Ren Bishi reached Moscow, he was welcomed by Mao's old ally, Wang Jiaxiang, who had gone to the Soviet Union to have his war wounds treated and had afterwards stayed on as the CCP's representative to the Comintern. Ren and Wang Jiaxiang had worked together before, as members of the Fourth Plenum delegation to the Jiangxi Soviet in 1931. Both had originally been close to Wang Ming. Both had watched Mao develop into a leader of national stature. Now, they decided to campaign together on Mao's behalf. By July, if not earlier – in any case, several weeks before Wang Ming's policies ran into trouble in Wuhan – Stalin and Dimitrov had agreed that Mao, not Wang, should receive the Kremlin's blessing as the new Chinese Party chief.53
In fact, Wang seems to have deluded himself all along about the extent of Soviet backing. Before his departure for China, Dimitrov had warned him not to try to supplant Mao, whose skills as a military leader had long been recognised in Moscow, and whom Stalin had viewed, at least since the Wayaobu meeting in December 1935, as the dominant Chinese Party figure. Ren Bishi did not find it difficult to convince the Comintern that the time had come to lift any ambiguity that remained.54
One morning in the second week of September 1938, Mao went to the South Gate of Yan'an to stand beneath the stone battlements of the massive city wall, waiting for Wang Ming to arrive by road from Xian for a Politburo meeting. He had done the same at Bao'an, two years earlier, when Zhang Guotao's defeated forces straggled in from Gansu. It was a gesture Mao would never need to make again. He knew, as Wang did not, that the game was finally over. As the meeting opened, Wang Jiaxiang read out a Comintern statement approving the CCP's efforts to manage the united front under ‘complex circumstances and very difficult conditions’, and then conveyed two verbal instructions, issued by Dimitrov himself.
In order to resolve the problem of unifying the Party leadership, the CCP leadership should have Mao Zedong as its centre.
There should be an atmosphere of unity and closeness.55
The two weeks of discussions that followed were devoted to preparing a Central Committee plenum, the first since January 1934, which Mao had decided to convene as soon as Wang Jiaxiang had arrived with the news of Moscow's decision.
Mao spoke twice, on September 24 and 27. As on earlier occasions when his policies had triumphed – at Zunyi, in January 1935; at Huili, after the successful crossing of the Yangtse, four months later; and at Wayaobu – he went out of his way to be magnanimous, insisting that the main point in the Comintern directive was the need to ‘safeguard intra-Party unity’. At the same time, he put down various markers. The Comintern's instructions, he said, set out ‘guiding principles’ not only for the forthcoming plenum but for the Seventh Congress (which, he indicated, would be charged with appraising the Party's past actions and electing a new leadership in accordance with the principles Dimitrov had laid down). The Party must prepare for a military stalemate – the ‘protracted war’ of which he had written that summer. The united front with the nationalists would be marked by growing struggle.
The Sixth Plenum, which opened on September 29, lasted more than a month.56
In his report, Mao developed the broad lines of his attack. Wang Ming and his followers, he implied, having been schooled in foreign Marxism, were out of touch with their own culture:
There is no such thing as abstract Marxism, but only concrete Marxism … If a Chinese communist, who is part of the great Chinese nation, bound to it by his own flesh and blood, talks of Marxism in isolation from Chinese characteristics, that Marxism is a mere abstraction. Consequently the sinification of Marxism – that is to say, making sure that its every manifestation has an indubitably Chinese character – is a problem which the whole Party must understand and solve without delay. Foreign stereotypes must be abolished, there must be less singing of empty, abstract tunes, and dogmatism must be laid to rest … In this matter there are serious shortcomings in our ranks which must be resolutely eliminated.57
Thus far, Mao's target was veiled. But to Party veterans, it struck a familiar chord. Years earlier, in Jiangxi, the Returned Students had been known contemptuously as yang fanƶi, ‘gentlemen from a foreign house’.
At the end of October, Wuhan fell, as Mao had predicted it would, dramatising the failure of Wang's strategy.58 By then, Wang Ming himself had departed to attend a GMD-sponsored conference on united front policy, leaving the plenum to conclude in his absence. It was the signal for Mao to press home his advantage. He ridiculed Wang's slogan, ‘everything through the united front’, as ‘simply binding us hand and foot’, and resurrected his own catch-phrase, ‘initiative and independence’. Anyone who failed to safeguard that independence, he declared – again sniping at Wang – deserved to be called a ‘right opportunist’. Far from demotivating the masses, a long-drawn-out guerrilla war, in which they would take up guns and fight, was precisely the means to awaken their political consciousness:
Every communist must grasp this truth: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organisations … We can create schools, create culture, create mass movements … All things grow out of the barrel of a gun … It is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and the landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war … but war can only be abolished through war. In order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun. (Emphasis supplied.)59
Here was the formula he had first coined at Hankou, in August 1927, which the Party leaders at that time had rejected. Now he charged Wang Ming and the Returned Students with neglecting the importance of military affairs, and with having caused ‘serious losses’ in the Central Soviet Base Area during the years when they held power.
For Mao, the autumn of 1938 was a watershed. Intellectually, his ideas had matured. His writings showed an ease and self-assurance in assimilating Marxist dialectics to the traditional patterns of Chinese thought that had earlier been absent. From now on, Mao would interpret the world in the same, distinctive, elliptical style, reasoning by opposites, analysing the innate contradictions which, in his words, ‘determine the life of all things and push their development forwards’. As he approached his forty-fifth birthday, the main lines of his thought were set: he would continue to refine his ideas, but there would be little more that was radically new.
Politically, his long campaign to dominate the Party had triumphed. Wang Ming was still a force to be reckoned with, but his challenge was at an end. Mao could live with that. In the meantime, he set about consolidating the new powers he had won.
Like Stalin, he chose as his instrument the Party Secretariat, which now took over the day-to-day running of the Party when the Politburo was not in session. Whoever controlled the Secretariat controlled the Central leadership's agenda. Mao became its head, with Wang Jiaxiang, who had done such sterling work for him in Moscow, as his deputy. He rejected a proposal that he become acting General Secretary, while awaiting the Seventh Congress, as Zhang Wentian had done after Zunyi. Mao wanted substantive control; the appearance could come later.60
Wang Ming's position was further undermined by a decision to dissolve the Yangtse Bureau, which he headed. Its responsibilities were divided between the Southern Bureau, under Zhou Enlai; a new Central Plains Bureau, headed by Liu Shaoqi; and an upgraded South-Eastern Bureau, under Mao's former adversary, Xiang Ying.
November 1938 saw other changes in Mao's life. Soon after the plenum ended, Japanese bombers, whose sorties against Yan'an had multiplied that year, scored a direct hit on Fenghuangshan. Mao's courtyard was badly
damaged. He and the rest of the leadership moved to a cave village at Yangjialing, a narrow valley about three miles north of the Yan'an city walls.61 But He Zizhen did not go with him. They had separated more than a year earlier. That month, Mao married a willowy young film actress from Shanghai, who had taken the stage name Blue Apple (Lan Ping), and would be known henceforward by the name he had chosen for her: Jiang Qing.62
The women who shared Mao's life all had their part of misfortune. Luo Yigu, the girl his parents chose, suffered the disgrace of rejection and died an early death. Yang Kaihui went to the execution ground proclaiming her loyalty to him, but spiritually crushed by the knowledge that he was living with He Zizhen. She, in her turn, endured extraordinary hardship – forced to abandon three of their six children, losing a fourth, stillborn, and sharing Mao's lot in the darkest periods of his political career; and being terribly wounded herself on the Long March – only to find that, when finally they were able to live normally again, they had grown apart.