Mao

by Philip Short

But soon there were alarming signs that the peace process was starting to unravel.

  At the beginning of March, Winston Churchill gave his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri. Global tensions between the US and the Soviet Union were rising. As American pressure grew for the Soviet army to withdraw from Manchuria, Stalin increased support for the Chinese communists. On March 13, as the Russian pull-out began, Soviet units handed over their positions to Lin Biao's forces, allowing them to consolidate their control of the one major area of China which, because of the Soviet occupation, the nationalists had not been able to take back. Chiang convinced the White House that, ceasefire or no ceasefire, it was imperative that the government intervene lest the whole of Manchuria fall under the communists’ sway. Mao initially interpreted the nationalist troop movements as the Generalissimo trying to strengthen his negotiating position. But when the advance continued, he was forced to recognise that Chiang was serious. A week later, he instructed Lin Biao to launch a counter-offensive, regardless of the effect on the peace talks. Changchun fell to Lin's forces on April 18; Harbin, ten days later.179

  The battle for Manchuria was underway, but not yet a general conflict. For another month, Mao continued to urge communist commanders in other areas to hold their fire unless the nationalists attacked first.

  ‘The GMD is actively preparing to start a nationwide civil war,’ he wrote in a CC directive on May 15, ‘but the US is not in favour of it … Our Party?s policy should [therefore] be … to prevent, or at least postpone, it.’180 Three weeks later, Marshall forced Chiang to accept a new ceasefire in Manchuria, but not before his troops had clawed back most of the communists’ gains. Mao agreed to give the negotiations one last chance. They soon collapsed again. Marshall's mediation effort had been a failure, the Central Committee declared. The ‘GMD reactionaries’ were ruling China by terror, and the United States was supporting them. Marshall himself was frustrated and disillusioned by what he called the nationalists’ ‘rottenness and corruption’.181

  At the end of June, fresh clashes broke out as the nationalists attacked communist base areas in the Yangtse Valley and in Hebei and Shandong. A month later the fighting spread to engulf the whole of central and northern China.182

  In retrospect, Mao had had a profoundly unsatisfactory year.

  His leadership was intact. To the Party at large, and to the peasantry who made up the bulk of its following, he was still the ‘star of salvation’, the Red Sun in the East. His colleagues might grumble, out of earshot, over the bewildering zigzags in policy – from war to peace, and back to war again – but no one challenged him. Mao had become indispensable, the irreplaceable guide and symbol of the future of the communist cause.183

  But his inexperience in dealing with the Powers, which led him to make mistake after mistake the previous autumn and spring, had left him mortified.

  Chiang Kai-shek, who headed a recognised government, had had fifteen years to learn how to play them off against each other, and even he did not do it very well. Mao led a rebel movement. He had never met a foreign leader, not even from his closest ally, the Soviet Union. Until the arrival of the Dixie Mission, eighteen months before, he had never dealt with a Western official. His naivety in believing that the Americans would force the nationalist government to compromise still rankled, twenty years later,184 and was among the reasons for his caution in contacts with the Western powers when the question of diplomatic relations arose after Chiang's defeat.

  Once the foreign-policy fog had cleared, the Soviet withdrawal was complete and the focus of Great Power rivalry switched to Europe, Mao's old sureness of touch returned. Facing an enemy he knew well – the Guomindang – on terrain he knew well – the Chinese countryside – he was back in his element. In a succession of Central Committee directives, he reiterated the old, tried and tested battle principles which had worked so well in Jiangxi and against the Japanese – luring the enemy in deep, and concentrating strong forces against weak ones. Abandoning territory to preserve troop-strength was ‘not only unavoidable but necessary’, he told his colleagues that summer, ‘otherwise final victory will be impossible’.185 Almost alone among the leadership, Mao was convinced that the tide would turn and that China's fate would be decided not by political means but militarily. He told Zhou Enlai that winter that it might take another year, perhaps even a little longer, before the CCP could go on the offensive. A protracted war would follow, he said, but the Red Army – or as it was now called, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) – would win.186

  Next spring, when Yan'an itself was threatened, his interpreter, Shi Zhe, asked him despondently what they could do to stop the town falling. Mao burst out laughing. ‘That's not clever,’ he said. ‘We should not try to stop them … Chiang thinks when he has seized the devils’ lair, he will win. In fact, he will lose everything. [It is written in the Analects:] “If a thing comes to me, and I give nothing in return, that is contrary to propriety.” We will give Chiang Yan'an. He will give us China.’187

  Two weeks later, at dusk on March 18, 1947, the column escorting Mao and other Central Committee leaders left the Red capital, heading north. The Yan'an interlude was over. The final battle had begun.188

  Plate 17 Yan’an in the late 1930s, with its distinctive Song dynasty pagoda.

  Plate 18 Zhang Guotao, whose challenge to Mao collapsed after the destruction of the Fourth Army in Gansu in 1937.

  Plate 19 Wang Shiwei, the gifted young writer whose persecution in the Yan’an Rectification Campaign set the pattern for all Mao’s subsequent efforts to crush intellectual dissent.

  Plate 20 Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, as an actress in Shanghai.

  Plate 21 From left: Zhou Enlai, Mao and Zhu De, in Yan’an in 1946.

  Plate 22 Mao reviewing Lin Biao’s victorious army after the surrender of Beijing in March 1949.

  Plate 23 A landlord in North China, on trial before fellow villagers during the land reform after the communist takeover.

  Plate 24 Mao proclaiming the People’s Republic from Tiananmen on October 1, 1949.

  Plate 25 Gao Gang, Party boss of Manchuria, purged in 1954.

  Plate 26 From left: Mao, Bulganin, Stalin and the East German Party chief, Walter Ulbricht, celebrating the Soviet leader’s 70th birthday at the Kremlin in December 1949.

  Plate 27 Mao relaxing with his nephew, Yuanxin, and his daughters Li Min and Li Na at Lushan in 1951.

  Plate 28 From left: Jiang Qing; Li Na; Mao; his oldest son, Anying, soon to die in Korea; and Anying’s wife, Liu Songlin.

  Plate 29 Mao with the Dalai Lama (right) and the Panchen Lama in Beijing in 1954.

  Plate 30 A struggle meeting to criticise bourgeois intellectuals at the start of the anti-Rightist campaign in July 1957.

  Plate 31 The parting of the ways: Mao and Khrushchev meet for the last time in Beijing in October 1959.

  Plate 32 Peng Dehuai (second from left) talking to peasants in Hunan during the Great Leap Forward in 1959.

  I Mao was referring here to weiqi, or Chinese chess, in which the object is to safeguard one's own pieces by maintaining blank spaces on the board into which an adversary's pieces cannot penetrate. So long as a player dominates these blank spaces, his pieces cannot be captured even if they are surrounded.

  II These turned out to be prophetic words. Six months later, in December 1938, Wang Jingwei, Mao's former patron and Chiang Kai-shek's onetime rival to inherit Sun Yat-sen's mantle, broke with the GMD and fled to Hanoi. The following spring, he set up a puppet government, based in Nanjing, and afterwards signed a treaty of alliance with Japan.

  III This begs the question of whether Mao and Lily Wu were in fact having an affair. The evidence is inconclusive. In her diary, Helen Snow described Lily ‘leaning on Mao's knee in a familiar way’. Agnes Smedley let slip that the actress had been giving Mao ‘mandarin lessons’. He Zizhen, while never formally accusing Mao of adultery, charged Ms Wu with ‘alienating Mao's affections’.

  IV Anying and his
younger brother, Anqing, had been sent to Moscow in 1936 after the reconstituted Shanghai Party organisation managed to resume contact with them. There Anqing, then aged thirteen, was diagnosed as mentally ill. Li Min joined her mother in Moscow in 1941. Anying returned to China in December 1945, followed by Li Min; Anqing came back with He Zishen eighteen months later.

  V Despite Soviet aid, the economy of the Border Region was in crisis from 1941 to 1943. In each of those years the price of millet, the staple foodstuff, increased by between 50 and 130 per cent. Contrary to communist legend, which held that Yan'an had prospered by adopting policies of self-sufficiency and ‘reliance on the masses’, Mao resorted to the same methods that the First Front Army had used to survive after abandoning Jinggangshan: trade in opium. It was referred to in communist documents as ‘special product’, ‘a certain thing’ or simply, ‘soap’, and was not sold in the communist controlled areas, where opium smoking was strictly prohibited, but smuggled out to Japanese-occupied or nationalist-ruled regions. From 1942 to 1945 these exports brought in roughly 40 per cent of the Border Region's revenue. Both the nationalists and the warlords also relied on opium sales to augment their revenue.

  VI The Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin) met at the Crimean resort of Yalta in February 1945, to define the shape of post-war Europe and to delineate their respective spheres of influence in Asia.

  VII Three years later, in a rare admission of error, Stalin acknowledged to a group of Bulgarian and Yugoslav leaders that discouraging the Chinese communists from launching the civil war after Japan's defeat had been a mistake. ‘We told them bluntly that we considered the development of the uprising in China had no prospects, that the Chinese comrades should join the government of Chiang Kai-shek and dissolve their army … Now … we admit we were wrong’.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Paper Tigers

  The conflict that raged across China from the summer of 1946 to the spring of 1950 was fundamentally different from any earlier war Mao had fought. On the Jinggangshan, in Jiangxi and in the north-west, the aim had been for the Red Army to secure and defend rural base areas. During the years at Yan'an, it had been, ‘70 per cent expanding our own forces, 20 per cent resisting the Guomindang and 10 per cent fighting Japan’. Now, for the first time, Mao's objective was not to dominate the countryside but to seize control of China's cities, the teeming proletarian centres from which the communists had been brutally excluded twenty years before.

  For the first nine months, the People's Liberation Army steadily retreated.1 In Manchuria, where Chiang had deployed the cream of his troops, the communists lost almost all their earlier gains, retaining only Harbin, close to the Soviet border. In east China, they were driven out of northern Jiangsu. The base areas that had been painstakingly reconstituted in the old E-Yu-Wan districts, north of Wuhan, were overrun, and nationalist forces took control of parts of the Shansi–Hebei–Shandong–Henan border region. By the end of 1946, the communist armies had ceded 174,000 square kilometres and 165 towns. The Generalissimo was convinced that he had them on the run and most foreign governments agreed with him. Even Stalin grew concerned that Mao's forces risked annihilation (though not to the point of increasing the still-meagre military aid that Moscow was providing). In December, Chiang told Marshall that the military threat from the communists would be neutralised by the following autumn, an assessment, which he repeated publicly, with great fanfare, after the fall of Yan'an. The American envoy's admonition that Mao's forces, while retreating, showed no inclination to surrender, fell on deaf ears.

  Chiang's strategy was to recapture the main cities and railway lines, north of the Yangtse, and only after these had been secured to move out into the rural areas to occupy county towns, finally using landlord militias to regain control of the villages. Mao ordered his forces to avoid battle unless they were certain of victory, and then to seek the swift annihilation of the forces they attacked:

  When we have encircled … one of the enemy detachments (a brigade or regiment), [we] should not attempt to wipe out all the encircled enemy simultaneously … and thus divide ourselves … making it hard to get results. Instead we should concentrate … a force six, five, four or at least three times [larger than] that of the enemy, concentrate the whole or the bulk of our artillery, select one (not two) of the weak spots in the enemy's positions, attack it fiercely and be sure to win … When we wipe out one regiment, [the enemy] will have one regiment less. When we wipe out one brigade, he will have one brigade less … Using this method we shall win. Acting counter to it we shall lose.2

  By February 1947, more than fifty nationalist brigades (out of 218 taking part in the campaign) had been put out of action in this way.3 As in Jiangxi, fifteen years earlier, most GMD troops who surrendered were absorbed into communist units, becoming the PLA's main source of new manpower.

  As a security precaution, after leaving Yan'an, the Party leaders divided into two groups. Mao headed what was known as the Front Line Committee, which remained in northern Shaanxi. Liu Shaoqi took charge of a CC Work Committee in the Jin-Cha-Ji base area, in present-day Hebei, 250 miles to the east.4 Sidney Rittenberg, who marched with Mao's column, marvelled at the Chairman's tactics but found them terrifying:

  Mao [played] … a sardonic cat-and-mouse game with his adversary. [He] deliberately telegraphed his moves, and … made it a point never to be more than one day's march ahead of the GMD. He knew that the [nationalist commander] Hu Zongnan would be Chiang's hero if he were able to capture Mao Zedong in person, and Mao played that card for all it was worth. At every encampment he would wait until the scouts brought him the news that the enemy was only an hour's march away before he would methodically put on his coat, mount his horse and lead his little headquarters column off down the trail … [Then], when the GMD troops were exhausted … and sick of the whole campaign, Peng Dehuai selected the most vulnerable cul-de-sac … and hurled [his men] against them.5

  The lore of Zhu the Deaf, which Mao had learned on the Jinggangshan, and which had served him so well on the Long March, still had its uses. In a telegram to Peng in April, he called it ‘the tactics of wear and tear’,6 designed to fatigue the enemy and deplete his food supplies.

  By this time the nationalist offensive was beginning to bog down. Mao (and, quite separately, the Americans) had predicted as much the previous autumn.7 Chiang's forces were spread too thin, his communications lines were over-extended. The Generalissimo later acknowledged that sending his best troops to the north-east, without first securing the intermediate provinces in north and central China, had been a major strategic error.8 Matters were not helped by his distrust of native Manchurians. When the nationalists brought in outsiders to administer the region, they lost the support of the local elite.9 But the key factor in turning the tide was the ease with which the PLA adjusted from guerrilla tactics to the use of large mobile formations. The experience gained in the war with Japan, and the heightened discipline and ‘uniformity of purpose’ instilled during the Rectification Campaign, now paid off handsomely.

  That summer, the communist retreat ended, and the counterattack began.

  Lin Biao launched a three-pronged offensive which severed the rail-links between Manchuria's main cities and pushed back the nationalist front line 150 miles to the south. Liu Bocheng, the ‘One-eyed Dragon’, attacked across the Yellow River into Hebei, while Chen Yi did the same in Shandong. Further north, Nie Rongzhen seized Shijiazhuang, the first major nationalist-held city to fall in China proper, giving the communists control of the main north–south railway from Beijing to Wuhan.10 By December 1947, Mao was able to announce that 640,000 nationalist soldiers had been killed or wounded, and more than a million had surrendered.

  The war, he exulted, had reached a turning-point. ‘[A year earlier] our enemies were jubilant … [and] the US imperialists, too, danced with joy … Now [they] are gripped by pessimism. They heave great sighs [and] wail about a crisis.’11

  All through the spring and summer
of 1948, Mao's forces pressed home their advantage. By the end of March, most of Manchuria, apart from Changchun and Shenyang, was in Lin Biao's hands, and the nationalists were cut off both from reinforcement and from the possibility of withdrawal. Further south, PLA commanders recovered much of Shanxi and Hebei, all of Shandong and large parts of Henan and Anhui. In an important symbolic victory, Yan'an fell to communist forces on April 25.12 Mao began to calculate the number of GMD brigades that would have to be eliminated before final victory could be won. In March 1948, he predicted that nationalist rule would be overthrown by mid-1951.13 Eight months later, he brought that forward to the autumn of 1949.14

  The speed with which nationalist resistance crumbled astonished even him.15

  One factor was the deterioration in the quality of the GMD armies in the last three years of the war against Japan.16 After America joined the conflict, nationalist generals became more interested in defending their own turf than in driving out the Japanese, figuring that, sooner or later, their allies would do it for them. In the words of one of Chiang's commanders: ‘Our troops … became soft and concerned only with pleasure … [They] lacked combat spirit and there was no willingness to sacrifice.’ Incompetent leadership made matters worse. The US commander in China, General Wedemeyer, called Chiang's officer corps ‘incapable, inept, untrained, petty [and] … altogether inefficient’. The head of the US Military Advisory Group, David Barr, found ‘a complete loss of will to fight’ under generals whom he considered ‘the world's worst’. The Generalissimo himself admitted: ‘I have to lie awake nights wondering what fool things they may do … They are so dumb … that you must imagine everything they can do that would be wrong and warn them against it.’ But Chiang's own constant interventions simply stripped his commanders of what little initiative they had.