by Philip Short
The struggle within China was subsumed into a larger conflict with a multitude of players whose motives and interactions were often opaque.
Mao's principal ally, Stalin, had made clear that Moscow's over-riding priority was to use Chiang's forces to tie down the Japanese army in order to prevent it attacking Russia. Soviet military aid went primarily to the GMD and the communists were put on notice to do nothing which might encourage Chiang to accept a ‘Far Eastern Munich’ and sign a separate peace with Tokyo. But when Chiang cut off aid to the communists, Moscow promptly took up the slack, sending Yan'an a monthly subsidy of 300,000 US dollars.V Chiang, on his side, had to juggle the competing pressures of the Axis powers, the Russians, and Britain and America, whose attitudes to the nationalists, to Japan and to each other, were in a state of constant flux. Both men had to deal with unforeseeable, tectonic shifts in the relations between the warring powers.
Mao, who had never travelled abroad and had little experience of foreigners, found it especially hard to read these developments correctly. When Britain and France declared war on Germany, he saw it as essentially a replay of the First World War. ‘The old distinction91 between fascist and democratic states no longer holds,’ he wrote. ‘It's simply a robber war with justice on neither side.’92 That had to be abruptly jettisoned when, in June 1941, Russia entered the war. Pearl Harbor was equally unexpected and had no less momentous consequences: Britain and America, which until then Mao had regarded as hostile imperialist powers, joined the USSR and China in a global anti-Axis alliance.
While Mao grappled with the implications of these far-away events, his strategy at home was to push the united front to the limit in order to maximise communist gains while stopping just short of an open break.
It was a delicate exercise. By the autumn of 1940, what were euphemistically termed ‘frictions’ between the two sides were accumulating in both north and south China.93 Whether because Mao's attention was distracted by the constantly changing international environment, or for other reasons, he failed to notice that Chiang's patience was fraying. The stage was being set for the worst communist military setback of the war.
During the summer the nationalists had suffered a series of defeats at the hands of the communist New Fourth Army in Anhui and Jiangsu. One of Mao's goal was to link the areas controlled by the New Fourth, which had been formed by guerrillas who had stayed behind in southern and central China at the time of the Long March, with the northern Chinese bases held by the Eighth Route Army. Chiang decided this must be prevented at all costs. In July he ordered the communist forces to withdraw north of the Yellow River within a month – an injunction repeated publicly and in stronger terms in October. Xiang Ying, the political commissar of the Fourth Army headquarters detachment in southern Anhui, was reluctant to move because his troops would have to make their way through Japanese lines. Mao procrastinated, issuing conflicting instructions as his reading of Chiang's mood changed. Finally, at midnight on January 4, 1941, Xiang's detachment set out along a route which Mao had approved. Two days later they walked into a nationalist ambush. After a week of fierce fighting – in which aircraft, both nationalist and Japanese (who were delighted to see their opponents at each other's throats), bombed and strafed the villages where the communist remnants were trying to regroup – some 9,000 soldiers and non-combatants, including nurses, doctors, officers’ families, porters and stretcher-bearers, were killed or taken prisoner. A thousand others escaped and made their way in small groups to safe areas north of the Yangtse.
Mao was not solely responsible for the debacle. But his indecision was a major factor in it. As usual in such situations – regardless of the political system – the leadership moved with unseemly haste to find a suitable scapegoat. Barely 24 hours after the fighting ended, a secret Central Committee resolution designated Xiang Ying as the culprit. Xiang had survived the bloodbath but soon afterwards was murdered by a communist renegade, which conveniently laid the matter to rest.94
The South Anhui Incident, as it came to be known, brought relations between the communists and the GMD to breaking point. Mao threatened ‘a nationwide political and military counter-offensive’.95 Direct contacts between Yan'an and Chiang Kai-shek's headquarters in Chongqing were suspended, CCP liaison offices closed in other provincial cities and communist forces in the North placed on high alert. But, before long, both sides began to row back. Even in this extremity, the united front was too valuable for the communists to give up. Party membership was rising so fast that the Politburo had to halt new admissions because the existing structure could no longer cope with them. To Mao, the front had become a ‘magic weapon’, smoothing the communists’ path to power.96 Chiang Kai-shek knew that. But his hands were also tied. The war with Japan, which had brought the alliance into being in the first place, meant that he could not unilaterally end it without reviving charges that he was more interested in fighting the Reds than fighting the Japanese.
In the end,[Q1] the tragedy that had befallen Xiang Ying's men worked to the communists’ advantage. Chiang's Western allies were exasperated to find him attacking forces which were supposed to be on his side. Roosevelt personally signalled his displeasure. Within China there were protests from liberals and progressives, and even from some of Chiang's own commanders.97
By February, Mao was able to write: ‘Chiang has never been so besieged with reproach[es] from within and without; we have never won such extensive support from the people (both at home and abroad) … This is our greatest victory.’98
None the less, the affair left scars. A week after the South Anhui incident, Mao grumbled to Zhou Enlai that Moscow's policy towards the Guomindang was ‘the opposite of ours [and has been] for several months now’, but that there was nothing they could do about it.99 Between the CCP and the GMD, military cooperation was effectively at an end. Chiang, Mao concluded, had shot his bolt: the nationalists had put the united front in jeopardy to try to halt communist expansion – and they had failed. They would not attempt to do so again.100
Henceforward the two sides would hold their fire, conserve their forces, and prepare for the final battles which each knew had to follow Japan's still distant but now foreseeable defeat.
For Mao, that meant a new drive to bend the Party to his will.
The method, this time, was to be a reappraisal of Party history, designed to prove even to the most sceptical that Wang Ming and his allies had been wrong, not just over united-front policy, but ever since 1931, while Mao alone had been consistently correct.
In the four years since the war with Japan had begun, a good deal of groundwork had already been laid. Stalin had signalled confidentially at the beginning of 1940 that Wang's fate no longer concerned him. The previous October, Pavel Mif, the former rector of the Sun Yat-sen University, who had been the Returned Students’ main Soviet backer, had been shot as an ‘enemy of the people’. That same month Mao had written of the need to achieve a common understanding of Party history, in order to consolidate the Party ‘ideologically, politically and organisationally’, and ‘avoid repeating historical mistakes’. Only since Zunyi, he claimed, had the Party been ‘soundly on the Bolshevik road’.101 To Wang Ming, whose supporters had been in power for the four years before Zunyi, the writing was on the wall: Mao wanted nothing less than a wholesale, repudiation of the policies they had stood for.
To try to head off this challenge, Wang sketched the basis for a trade-off. He would not dispute Mao's present primacy. But neither should Mao try to negate Wang's own past contributions.102
For a time, this compromise seemed to hold. But then, in December 1940, Mao issued a comprehensive list of what he considered to be the Wang Ming group's ‘ultra-leftist errors’ in Jiangxi:
There was the economic elimination of the capitalist class (the ultra-Left policies on labour and taxation) and of the rich peasants (by allotting them poor land); the physical elimination of the landlords (by not allotting them any land); the attack on the intellectuals; th
e ‘Left’ deviation in the suppression of counter-revolutionaries; the monopolising by communists of the organs of political power …; the ultra-Left military policy (of attacking the big cities, and denying the role of guerilla warfare) …; and the policy within the Party of attacks on comrades through the abuse of disciplinary measures. These ultra-Left policies … caused great losses to the Party and the revolution.103
Still Mao named no names. And when Liu Shaoqi urged him to characterise the errors as ‘mistakes of political line’, he prudently refused. ‘Melons ripen,’ Kang Sheng quoted him as saying. ‘Don't pick them when they are not yet ripe. When they are ready, they will just drop off. In struggle, one mustn't be too rigid.’104
In the autumn of 1941, as the CCP and the Guomindang drew back from the brink after the New Fourth Army incident, Mao decided the time had finally come to launch the great political offensive that he had been so carefully preparing.
The Yan'an Rectification Campaign, as it would be called, would last nearly four years. By the time it ended, Mao would no longer head a collective leadership. He would be the one man who decided all – a demiurge, set on a pedestal, towering above his nominal colleagues, beyond institutional control.
He opened his attack at an enlarged Politburo meeting, which began on September 10, 1941, with a critique of ‘subjectivism’, meaning the failure to adapt Party policies to the reality of Chinese conditions. As a general proposition, this had been a theme of Mao's speeches since the spring. Now he became more specific. The ‘Li Lisan line’ in 1930 had been one such instance, he said. The policies of the Fourth Plenum leadership, from 1931 to 1934, had been still more damaging. Moreover, the problem was not yet over. Subjectivism, sectarianism and dogmatism were still doing a great deal of harm, and a mass movement must be launched to fight them.
When the meeting concluded, six weeks later, Mao had got almost everything he wanted. Wang Ming and Bo Gu had been condemned for their ‘erroneous leftist line’ in Jiangxi, and many of their former associates, including Zhang Wentian, had made self-criticisms. The one residual disagreement was over exactly when the Returned Students’ errors had begun – at the Fourth Plenum itself, in January 1931, as Mao argued; or, as Wang Ming preferred, the following September, after Wang had returned to Moscow, leaving Bo Gu in charge? But even that had the happy result of dividing the two principal Returned Student leaders.
Several factors had combined to make this breakthrough possible. By sheer force of repetition, Mao's calls over the previous five years for a distinctively Chinese way had finally instilled themselves into the Party's collective consciousness. He himself exemplified that approach, and by 1941 his record spoke for itself. Since Zunyi, the Party had prospered; before, under the Returned Students, it had come to the brink of destruction. Moreover, Mao promised his colleagues that the coming movement would be aimed at ‘rectifying’ mistaken ideas, not the people who held them. The guideline would be ‘curing the sickness to save the patient’, not the ‘harsh struggle and merciless blows’ that had characterised previous political campaigns.
Mao would later describe this Politburo meeting in September 1941 as one of the half-dozen crucial steps in his rise to supreme power. It lined up the rest of the leadership behind him (except Wang and Bo, who refused to admit their errors), and endorsed the practical arrangements for the rectification movement he was about to unleash.105
Up to this point, all Mao's manoeuvring had been confined to the uppermost echelons of the Party elite. Probably fewer than 150 people, in a Party which by then had 800,000 members, were aware of the struggle that was unfolding. Even Peng Dehuai, a full Politburo member, admitted afterwards that he did not really grasp what was involved until more than a year later. Rank-and-file members had no inkling of what was going on.106
But in February 1942, rectification moved into the public domain.
That month Mao gave two major speeches to the Central Party School in which he set out the movement's goals. ‘We are communists’, he told them, ‘so we must keep our ranks in good order, we must march in step.’107 Then he explained the nature of the music he wanted them to march to:
As an arrow is to the target, so is Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese revolution. Some comrades, however, are ‘shooting without a target’ … at random … Others merely stroke the arrow fondly, exclaiming, ‘What a fine arrow! What a fine arrow!’ but never want to shoot it … The arrow of Marxism-Leninism must be used to shoot at the target … Why otherwise would we want to study it? We do not study Marxism-Leninism because it is pleasing to the eye, or because it has some mystical value, like the doctrines of the Daoist priests who ascend Maoshan to learn how to subdue devils and evil spirits. Marxism-Leninism has no beauty, nor has it any mystical value. It is only extremely useful … Those who regard Marxism-Leninism as religious dogma show … blind ignorance. We must tell them openly, ‘Your dogma is of no use,’ or, to speak crudely, ‘Your dogma is of less use than dogshit.’ Dogshit can fertilise fields and man's shit can feed dogs. But dogmas? They can't fertilise fields and they can't feed dogs. What use are they?108
In future, he declared, Party officials would be judged by whether they could apply ‘the standpoint, concepts and method of Marxism-Leninism’ to solve practical problems, not on their ability to ‘read ten thousand volumes by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and … recite every sentence from memory’.109
Book-learning in general, ever one of Mao's bêtes-noires, came in for a memorable drubbing:
Cooking food and preparing meals is truly one of the arts. But what about book-learning? If you do nothing but read, you have only to be able to recognise three to five thousand characters … [and] hold some book in your hand, and the public will provide you with a living … But books cannot walk … [Reading them] is … a great deal simpler than for a cook to prepare a meal, far easier than for him to slaughter a pig. He has to catch the pig. The pig can run. (Laughter in the hall) He slaughters him. The pig squeals. (Laughter) A book placed on a desk cannot run, neither can it squeal … (Laughter) Is there anything easier? Therefore, I advise those of you who have only book-learning and as yet no contact with reality … to realise your own shortcomings and make your attitudes a bit more humble.110
There was much more in the same vein. Empty, abstract speeches which were ‘like the foot-bindings of a slattern, long and foul-smelling’, ‘individualism’ which violated Party discipline, and ‘foreign formalism’ were vigorously denounced:
We must plant our backsides on the body of China. We must study world capitalism and socialism, but if we want to be clear about their relations to the history of the Chinese Party, it's all a matter of where you put your bottom … When we study China, we must take China as the centre … We have some comrades who have a malady, namely that they take foreign countries as the centre and act like phonographs, mechanically swallowing whole foreign things and transporting them to China.111
These strictures were directed less at Wang Ming and his remnant followers, already broken reeds, than at the mind-set they represented. Over the next twelve months, as the Party rank and file, at lecture meetings and in small group discussions, absorbed Mao's ideas and the view of Party history that flowed from them, the intellectual centre of gravity of the Chinese Party shifted. The fount of Marxist-Leninist wisdom was no longer in Moscow but in Yan'an.
In March 1943, the composition of the Party's ruling organs was belatedly brought into line with the new political reality which the Rectification Campaign had produced. Mao was named Chairman of the Politburo, and of a new three-man Secretariat, in which he was joined by Liu Shaoqi, now confirmed, in fact if not yet in name, as second-ranking Party leader, and by Ren Bishi, Wang Jiaxing's partner in promoting Mao's cause in Moscow five years earlier. Wang himself became deputy head of the Propaganda Department under Mao, while Kang Sheng, whose career had also taken off since he had aligned himself with Mao in 1938, became deputy head, under Liu, of the other key Central body, the Organisation D
epartment. Wang Ming, who had been a member of the top leadership since 1931, was excluded from any decision-making role.112
The real innovation, however, lay in the fine print. As before, the Secretariat was empowered to take decisions when the Politburo was not in session. But this time it was explicitly stated that, should its members fail to agree, Mao would have the final say. This was much more than just a matter of giving him a casting vote, or even veto power. It meant that even if both the other members of the Secretariat disagreed, Mao's views would prevail.
In wartime, perhaps, such an extraordinary concentration of authority in the hands of one man may have seemed justified. Mao's colleagues could reassure themselves that the Politburo and the Central Committee, both collegiate institutions, retained ultimate power. But the truth was that a bandwagon was rolling. By then, even Bo Gu had capitulated. Wang Ming, alone, remained the last, defiant hold-out, an example for others to avoid. The rest of the leadership, having watched Mao's rise, and knowing that their own futures would depend on how they handled their relations with him, had little interest in making a stand against what most of them regarded anyway as an inevitable accretion of power.