by Philip Short
72. Wilbur, pp. 669–70; Isaacs, p. 270; Nianpu, 1, p. 206; Zhang Guotao, 1, pp. 656–9.
73. Wilbur, pp. 671–2.
74. It is not known exactly when Yang Kaihui left Wuhan, but given Anlong's birth in April and the chaos in Hunan after May 21, it is unlikely that she departed before late July. According to the Nianpu (1, p. 209), Mao was briefly reunited with her in Changsha in August, when he was organising the Autumn Harvest Uprising, but the months in Wuhan would be the last time they lived together as a family.
CHAPTER 7 OUT OF THE BARREL OF A GUN
1. Zhang Guotao, Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, 1, pp. 669–72. I have substituted the word ‘spiv’ for the anachronistic ‘teddy boy’ which Zhang's English translator has employed.
2. They included Vladimir Kuchumov, who acted as Soviet consul and Comintern representative in Changsha, and Heinz Neumann, 26, a German who worked for the Youth International (Ristaino, Marcia R, China's Art of Revolution: The Mobilization of Discontent, 1927 and 1928, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1987, pp. 41 and 103–4; Pantsov and Levine, p. 194). Both shared Lominadze's strongly leftist views.
3. Zhang Guotao, 1, pp. 657–60.
4. Schram, Mao's Road, 3, pp. 13–19.
5. Nianpu, 1, p. 206. This was a re-run on a larger scale of the aborted Hunan uprising project in which Mao had been involved.
6. See Zhang Guotao, 1, pp. 660–76 and 2, pp. 3–16; Hsiao Tso-liang, Chinese Communism in 1927, City vs Countryside, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1970, pp. 81–90; Ristaino, pp. 21–38; Guillermaz, Jacques, ‘The Nanchang Uprising’, CQ, 11 (1962), pp. 161–8; and Wilbur, C. Martin, ‘The Ashes of Defeat’, CQ, 18 (1964), pp. 3–54. Initial discussion of the Nanchang Uprising, involving Li Lisan in Jiujiang and Zhou Enlai in Wuhan, was under way by July 20 if not earlier.
7. Quoted by Zhang Guotao in Wilbur, CQ 18, p. 46.
8. Presumably on the strength of the reports from Nanchang, the Soviet Politburo on August 11 and 18 approved the despatch of an agent to Shanghai with US $300,000 (equivalent to more than $3 million in today's terms) for the CCP, and the shipment of 15,000 guns, 30 machine guns and 10 million cartridges (Taylor, Jay, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China, Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 72 & 611 n. 99). Whether the weapons were ever sent is doubtful: there is no record of them having been received.
9. Schram, 3, p. 25 (Aug. 1 1927). The Nianpu says the decision to make Guangdong the final destination was taken by the Standing Committee on July 24 or 25 (1, p. 206).
10. Goodman, David S. G., Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Revolution, Routledge, 1994, p. x; Evans, Richard, Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1995, p. 44; and Saich, Rise to Power, p. 308.
11. Ristaino, p. 41. Two foreigners were present: Lominadze, and a ‘representative of the Youth International’, whom Li Yuning suggests was Chitarov (Biography of Ch'u Ch'iu-p'ai, p. 227, n. 4).
12. Li Ang, Hongse wutai, Chongqing, 1942 [no page number]. ‘Li Ang’ (a pseudonym for Zhu Xinfan) did not attend the conference and later defected to the Guomindang. None the less, in 1927 he was in a position to know what transpired there so his account is not to be dismissed out of hand.
13. ZZWX, 3, p. 302.
14. Saich, pp. 296–313.
15. Ibid., pp. 296–308. The resolution censured, for example, a directive which had been drafted by Mao on May 30 1927 for the All-China Peasants’ Association (Schram, 2, p. 506).
16. Brandt et al., Documentary History, p. 119.
17. Schram, 3, p. 33 (Aug. 9 1927).
18. History of the CCP, Chronology, pp. 52–3.
19. That Zhou Enlai was responsible may be inferred from Zhang Guotao's account (1, p. 659) and is consistent with Mao's later blame of Chen Duxiu (Snow, Red Star over China, p. 189). In 1936, after all, he could hardly have named Zhou as the culprit. Mao was not a native of Sichuan and had had no experience in that province (see also Nianpu, 1, p. 206).
20. See Qu's comment on 28 September 1927: ‘We must have Zedong … If you're looking for someone who is independent-minded in our Party, it's Zedong’ (Nianpu, 1, p. 221). After the August 7 Conference, Qu had thought of assigning Mao to work for the Centre in Shanghai. But Mao had demurred, claiming whimsically that he did not like tall buildings and preferred a life in the countryside among ‘the heroes of the greenwood?. The idea was quickly dropped (Saich, Rise to Power, p. 209).
21. Nianpu, 1, p. 206; Schram, 3, pp. 27–8.
22. Saich, pp. 317–19.
23. See ibid., pp. 319–21; Nianpu, 1, pp. 207–9; and Schram, 3, pp. 33–4 (Aug. 9 1927). From the fragmentary evidence available, it seems that on August 3, only hours after the Standing Committee issued the new ‘Outline … of the Autumn Harvest Uprising’, Mao was told he would not be returning to Hunan after all but should stay in Wuhan (possibly in connection with Qu's suggestion that he should be assigned to Shanghai). He apparently had no input into the revised proposal drafted by the Hunan committee. Kuchumov is referred to in Party documents as ‘Comrade Mayer’ (or, incorrectly, ‘Meyer’); his Chinese name was Ma Kefu (Pantsov and Levine, p. 194).
24. Mao's outspokenness was all the more striking because, as Lominadze hinted and Peng Gongda later confirmed, Yi Lirong was really being punished for demanding that the Comintern take part of the blame for the ‘opportunist errors’ of the past (Schram, 3, pp. 33–4 and Saich, p. 322).
25. Nianpu, 1, p. 209.
26. Schram, 3, pp. 39–40 (Aug. 20 1927).
27. Ibid., and Nianpu, 1, p. 210. See also Li Lisan's vitriolic comments on the Nanchang rebels’ continued use of ‘the flag of the White Terror’ (Wilbur, CQ, 18, p. 23). Qu Qiubai later admitted that the initial decision in August to keep the flag had been wrong (Chinese Studies in History, 5, 1, p. 53).
28. ZZWX, pp. 369–71. See also Stalin's speech to the Comintern of Sept. 27 (Eudin and North, Soviet Russia and the East, p. 307).
29. ZZWX, 3, pp. 294–7; and Schram, 3, p. 32 (Aug. 7 1927).
30. Schram, 3, p. 35 (Aug. 18) and p. 40 (Aug. 20 1927).
31. Pak, Hyobom (ed.), Documents of the Chinese Communist Party, Union Research Institute, Hong Kong, 1971, pp. 91–5.
32. Schram, 3, pp. 30–1 (Aug. 7 1927).
33. Saich, Rise to Power, p. 310. A week earlier, the Standing Committee had approved Mao's proposal that a regiment of regular troops be the core force in the southern Hunan uprising (Schram, 3, p. 28).
34. Saich, pp. 319–21; Qu Qiubai, pp. 21 and 70; Nianpu, 1, p. 212. For a similar debate over the use of military forces in the Hubei uprisings, see Roy Hofheinz, ‘The Autumn Harvest Insurrection’, in CQ, 32, 1967, p. 47.
35. Saich, p. 315.
36. Ibid., p. 324; Hofheinz, CQ, 32, p. 48; Schram, 3, p. 36 (Aug. 18 1927).
37. Nianpu, 1, p. 212; Schram, 3, pp. 37–8 (Aug. 19 1927).
38. Zhongyang tongxin, 3, pp. 38–41 (Aug. 30 1927). Differing translations appear in Pak, pp. 91–2, and Hofheinz, p. 65.
39. Nianpu, 1, p. 213. See also Saich, p. 504, n. 90.
40. Hofheinz, pp. 49–57.
41. Nianpu, 1, p. 213; Schram, 3, pp. 41–2 (Aug. 30 1927).
42. Pak, pp. 99–101.
43. Ibid., pp. 60–6; Hofheinz, pp. 37–87. An almost complete Chinese text is in Zhongyang tongxin (December 1927). In Hunan, four centres were specified: Changsha, Hengyang, Changde in the west and Baoqing in the south-west. Hofheinz mistakenly dates Qu Qiubai's plan to the beginning of August, which invalidates much of his chronology. See also Hsiao Tso-liang, pp. 44–80, and Ristaino, pp. 56–74.
44. Nianpu, 1, p. 213; Saich, p. 504, n. 90.
45. Nianpu, 1, p. 214.
46. Ibid., p. 215; Hofheinz, pp. 67–70.
47. Nianpu, 1, p. 216; Hofheinz, pp. 71–2.
48. Snow, p. 193.
49. Nianpu, 1, pp. 217–18; Hsiao Tso-liang, pp. 67–77; and Hofheinz, pp. 72–9.
50. Nianpu, 1, pp. 218–20; Schram, 3, p. 34
(Aug. 9 1927). See also He Changgong, ‘The deeds of Jinggangshan will be remembered for thousands of years’, BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, June 18 1981, FE/6752/BII/1.
51. Hofheinz, pp. 51–60.
52. Wilbur, CQ, 18, pp. 33–4; Ristaino, p. 35.
53. Ristaino, pp. 127–9.
54. Saich, pp. 331–41; ZZWX, 3, pp. 478–84. See also Zhou Enlai, SW1, p. 194.
55. Ristaino, pp. 97–108; Hsiao Tso-Liang, pp. 135–48; Wilbur, ‘The Nationalist Revolution’, CHOC, 12, pp. 692–5; Isaacs, Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, pp. 282–91; and North, Moscow and Chinese Communists, p. 120. History of the CCP, Chronology, lists some twenty-five uprisings, almost all of them short-lived, between November 1927 and June 1928 (pp. 56–9).
56. History of the CCP, Chronology, pp. 56–9, and Ristaino, pp. 126–39.
57. Most Chinese accounts, including the Nianpu, place Mao's enunciation of the ‘Three Rules’, as they became known, at Sanwan at the beginning of October. Stephen Averill, relying on two accounts by local writers, suggests that it came 10 days later, after the failure of Mao's probe into southern Hunan, when his troops stole food from peasant families along the route of their retreat (Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Md, 2006, p. 163).
58. Schram, 3, p. 59. The dating of the letter in which Mao refers to these changes appears to be incorrect; it was probably written early in June 1928, not in August.
59. This section is drawn largely from the Nianpu (1, pp. 220–44) – which itself is based on oral accounts given to a CCP CC Commission which visited the Jiangxi base areas in 1951 (Grigoriev, Revolyutsionnoe Dvizhenie, p. 62), on later researches by Party historians, and on memoir material; from my own visits to the area in 1979/80, 1997 and 2004; from Stephen Averill's Revolution in the Highlands, especially pp. 155–330; and from four major monographs on the period: Gui Yulin, Jinggangshan geming douzheng shi (History of the Revolutionary Struggles on Jinggangshan), Jiefangjun chubanshe, Beijing, 1986; Jinggangshande wuzhuang geju (The Armed Independent Regime on Jinggangshan), Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, Nanchang, 1979; Jinggangshan geming genjudi shiliao xuanbian (Selected Historical Materials on the Jinggangshan Revolutionary Base Area), Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, Nanchang, 1986; and Jinggangshan geming genjudi (The Jinggangshan Revolutionary Base Area), Vols 1 & 2, Zhonggong dangshi ziliao chubanshe, Beijing, 1987. See also Averill's introduction to Stuart Schram's ‘Mao's Road to Power? (3, pp. xxiv–xxix).
60. The text of this letter, like all of Mao's speeches and writings between September 1927 and April 1928, has been lost.
61. Schram, 3, p. 102 (Nov. 25 1928).
62. Ibid., p. 119.
63. Qu told a Jiangxi Party official on February 17 1928 that the development of the revolution in south-western Jiangxi would have a ‘very important’ knock-on effect in Hunan, so ‘should Mao, then, be [Party] secretary in southwestern Jiangxi?’ (Nianpu, 1, p. 234). In the end, nothing came of this proposal, but it showed the way Qu was thinking.
64. Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 3, pt 3, p. 867 (quoting Stenograficheskii Otchet VI Siezda KPK, vol. V, Moscow, 1930, pp. 12–13.)
65. Schram, 3, p. xxvi; ZZWX, 4, pp. 56–66.
66. Nianpu, 1, p. 229 (31 Dec. 1927). As head of the CC's Military Committee, Zhou was responsible for enforcing the Centre's military policy, and quickly developed a reputation as a stickler for Party discipline. It is tempting to see Zhou's attacks on Mao in the winter of 1927 as an early instance of his lifelong practice of seeking the winning side (in this case, the Qu–Lominadze military line) and aligning himself behind it. But the fact that he was still criticising Mao in June 1928, when the line had already changed, suggests a deeper animus, perhaps reflecting earlier clashes, either in Canton at the time of the March 20 Incident in 1926, or in Wuhan in June 1927, when they worked together on the first, aborted Hunan uprising plan.
67. Schram, 3, p. 52 (May 2 1928).
68. Ibid., p. 84.
69. History of the CCP, Chronology, p. 58. Agnes Smedley's account (The Great Road, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1956, pp. 212–25) conveys vividly the reality of the struggle but makes the Party's efforts seem far better organised than they actually were. Contemporary documents show that most of the time the Party leaders in Shanghai did not know even in which province Zhu's forces were operating (Pak, pp. 183–94).
70. Smedley, p. 2 (Mao) and 226 (Zhu).
71. Ibid., pp. 9–186. See also Jin Chongji, Zhu De zhuan, Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, Beijing, 1993.
72. Zhu brought with him a copy of the November plenum's resolution (Schram, 3, pp. 83–4). See also ibid., pp. 52 and 54, and Nianpu, 1, pp. 236, 238 and 240.
73. In a report to the Jiangxi Party Committee, Mao said they had altogether 18,000 soldiers, of whom 10,000 were ill-disciplined peasant troops from southern Hunan who had accompanied the Red Army when it returned to the Hunan-Jiangxi border region (Schram, 3, pp. 49–52, May 2 1928). The latter soon returned to their home villages, and in the second half of 1928, the core of the Zhu-Mao Army was gradually whittled down by deaths, injuries and desertions to some 6,000 men.
74. He Changgong, FE/6752/BII/1.
75. The text of Mao's speech at the 1st Border Area Party Congress has never been published (and may have been lost). He dealt with the same theme twice later in the year, on both occasions in very similar terms. This and the following extracts are from the resolution he drafted for the Second Congress on October 5 1928 (Schram, 3, p. 65).
76. Averill, Revolution in the Highlands, pp. 66–7 & 72; Nianpu, 1, p. 229; Smedley, pp. 232–3. His real name was Zhu Kongyang. A former army officer, he deserted from a warlord unit in 1920, taking with him a dozen of his men. They extorted money from landlord families and engaged in what was known locally as ‘lamb-hanging’ – kidnapping for ransom. According to Averill, he was ‘a laconic, somewhat hard-of-hearing man with chronic habits of womanizing and conspicuous consumption but also a crack shot and an effective leader’. His fate is not known, but he had evidently left Jinggangshan long before Mao arrived in the winter of 1927.
77. According to the Nianpu, Mao put forward a twelve-character formula – ‘[When the] enemy advances, we withdraw; enemy rests, we harass; enemy withdraws, we attack’ – in mid-January 1928 (1, p. 232). The full sixteen-character version appeared in May that year.
78. Schram, 3, p. 85 (Nov. 25 1928).
79. Averill, Revolution in the Highlands, pp. 202–14.
80. Mao began to formulate these rules in October 1927 (Nianpu, 1, pp. 222 and 226). The first formal version of the ‘Six Points’ appeared on January 25 1928 (ibid., p. 233). It was modified on April 3 (ibid., p. 238), to avoid overlap with the ‘Three Rules’. The orthodox rendering of the ‘Eight Points’ is given in SW4, pp. 155–6.
81. Schram, 3, pp. 93, 104 and 115 (Nov. 25 1928) and 173 (June 1 1929). Nianpu, 1, p. 231.
82. Nianpu, 1, p. 236; see also Schram, 3, p. 115 (Nov. 25 1928).
83. Chinese Studies in History, 5, 1, pp. 69–70. Although Qu's speech was delivered in June, it was evidently prepared two months earlier (see p. 53).
84. Saich, pp. 322–3. Nianpu, 1, pp. 209–10 and 243; Schram, 3, p. 5.
85. Letters between Jinggangshan and Shanghai passed through Anyuan, where a young Hunanese cadre on the local party committee was charged with liaison. Documents from Shanghai usually arrived hidden in a wine bottle or a phonograph record carrier and were then transcribed onto rice paper and carried to Jinggangshan in the bamboo handle of an umbrella. From June 1928, the new Hunan provincial committee, which the previous month had moved from Changsha to Xiangtan to escape the authorities’ repression, based itself at Anyuan.
86. Useful accounts of the congress in English include Grigoriev, A. M., ‘An Important Landmark in the History of the Chinese Communist Party’, in Chinese Studies in History, 8, 3 (1975), pp. 18–44; Carr, 853–75; and Ristaino, pp. 199–214.
87. ZZWX, 4, pp. 71
–5 and 239–57; Pak, Documents, pp. 371–2; and Nianpu, 1, p. 244.
88. Grigoriev, Revolyutsionnoe Dvizheniye, p. 81; Zhongguo gongchangdang huiyi gaiyao, p. 79; Zhang Guotao, 2, pp. 68–9; Saich, pp. 341–58. See also pp. 358–86; and Chinese Studies in History, 4, nos 1–4 (1970 and 1971).
89. Thornton, Richard, The Comintern and the Chinese Communists, 1928–31, University of Washington, Seattle, 1969, pp. 32–8. Although approved in Moscow on February 25 1928, the Qu Qiubai leadership began publicising the new strategy only on April 30, and the Party journal, Buersheweike (which had replaced Xiangdao in October 1927) did not publicise it until July (Grigoriev, Revolyutsionnoe Dvizhenie, p. 78).
90. Nikolai Bukharin, speech to the Sixth Congress, in Chinese Studies in History, 4, 1 (1970), pp. 19–22.
91. Saich, pp. 374 and 355–7.
92. Bukharin, speech, p. 21.
93. Ibid., p. 13: ‘It is the peasants themselves who are just now rising up, and it is the workers who are oppressed and blocked, who still cannot straighten their backs.’ The theme of proletarian leadership, with the peasants as the main revolutionary force, runs through all the resolutions.
94. Mao Zedong, SW1, p. 196 (December 1936).
95. The following account is drawn from Wang Xingjuan, He Zizhende lu, Zuojia chubanshe, 1988, pp. 1–23, 44–5, 60, 67–9, 78–9 and 87–8; and from Liu Xianong ‘Mao Zedong dierci hunyin neiqing’ (‘Inside Information on Mao Zedong's Second Marriage’), Jizhe xie tianxia, no. 21, May 1992, pp. 4–11.
96. Other local sources offer a more prosaic account of how they came together. That autumn Yuan Wencai's concubine, a woman in her mid-twenties, convinced (wrongly) that her partner was falling in love with He Zizhen, started making jealous scenes whenever she saw them together. After one particularly ugly incident, in December 1927, Yuan and Wang Zuo decided that the best way of dealing with the situation would be to encourage a romance between He and Mao, which would have the further advantage of forging a longterm commitment between him and the base area's inhabitants. The following month Yuan, acting as a traditional go-between, suggested to Mao that He would make a good partner. Mao initially demurred, but in February she began working as his secretary. In late May or early June, they married in a small ceremony at Xiangshan'an, a nunnery near Maoping. Wang Zuo, Yuan Wencai and a dozen or so local people attended, and Yuan afterwards cooked them a nuptial supper (see Averill, Revolution in the Highlands, pp. 179–81 and 188 nn. 40–41; Wang Xingjuan, p. 90.)