Himself locked in a struggle for supreme power with Leon Trotsky, who denounced the Stalinist strategy in China, Joseph Stalin was grandly unconcerned with the fate of the Chinese Communist Party. His chosen instrument for attaining domination over China was, in any event, not that small Party, but, despite its inherent weakness, that left-wing Nationalist Government at Wuhan under President Wang Ching-wei. Stalin’s monstrous blunder in sacrificing his Chinese comrades was compounded by those naive Communists. Despite Chiang Kai-shek’s ruthless persecution and Wang Ching-wei’s obvious ineffectiveness, they slavishly strove to comply with Moscow’s instructions to work with the left-wing Kuomintang. In any event, they saw no other possible course.
Only one contender in the triangular power struggle was effective in the early summer of 1927, the right-wing Nationalist Government just established at Nanking. His confidence and his resources bolstered by his alliance with the Shanghai commercial community, Chiang Kai-shek appeared on the verge of making himself the undisputed master of China. It seemed he need only negotiate with those warlords who would negotiate and crush those warlords who would not negotiate. He was actually amused when, on April 17, the left-wing Wuhan Government formally relieved him of command of the National Revolutionary Army and expelled him from the Nationalist Party.
“Wang Ching-wei’s running true to form,” he observed to Thomas. “He’s always confused words with realities. Now he’s freed me to form my own government. I imagine your uncle protested. But what could he do? Wang’s a puppet of the Communists.”
“Yes, Sir!” Thomas encouraged his leader’s confidences. The political and military situation was so confused it was almost impossible to comprehend. Each day’s reports appeared to contradict the previous day’s. Yet the General, adroitly maneuvering to consolidate his power and unify China, obviously saw the entire picture clearly.
“Ah, Tom,” Chiang added, “it’s as complicated as a fortune-teller’s predictions. But one thing’s obvious: Whoever keeps his head clear and his armies intact will inherit the Mandate of Heaven. By the way, when did you last read the San-kuo Chih Yen-yi, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms?”
Thomas was disappointed and baffled when the General thereupon ended the discussion by opening a bulky file on his desk. If Chiang Kai-shek could contribute no more to his enlightenment than an oblique reference to China’s most popular folk novel of intrigue, treachery, and war, how could he hope to comprehend the events unfolding around him? He wished fleetingly he were back in the field. Tactical problems were much more easily solved than grand political-strategic riddles.
Thomas suddenly saw that the General had indeed given him the key: China remained China despite the invasion of Western technology and Western ideology. The Three Kingdoms told the tale of triangular contention for power in a China splintered by the collapse of the great Hart Dynasty in the third century A.D., and the parallel with the present situation was obvious. The General had also referred to the Mandate of Heaven that legitimized all Chinese governments. Not only the lao paihsing, but the rival politicians believed that successive dynasties were created by Heaven’s express decree. The century of famines, floods, pestilence, droughts, and rebellion preceding the fall of the Ching Dynasty had conclusively demonstrated the Manchus’ loss of the Mandate of Heaven. Chiang Kai-shek’s victory would prove that he had legitimately inherited that Mandate.
Other similarities with the past were as striking. Even the intrusion of greedy barbarians armed with novel weapons was an ancient and often-repeated threat to the Central Realms. Why else had China’s First Emperor built the Great Wall to protect the north in the third century B.C., or the Ming Dynasty sent fleets south to counter sea-borne intruders in the fifteenth century A.D.?
One great difference would, however, prove decisive this time. Since Chinese were themselves using the technology and tactics of the West, China would not again be over-run by rapacious foreigners. Thomas feared no repetition of the catastrophic defeats that had brought the Mongol Kublai Khan to the Dragon Throne in 1280 and permitted the Manchu Nurhachi to establish the long-lived Ching Dynasty in 1644. The Communists were the vanguard of a new barbarian invasion from north of the Great Wall by the Russians. In enlightened 1927, the Mandate of Heaven would, however, pass to a Chinese leader, and that leader would be Chiang Kai-shek.
General Chiang Kai-shek confidently moved northward, while President Wang Ching-wei was irresolute. He had entrapped himself by reassuming the Presidency. He could neither command the Communist-officered troops who were the core of his army nor control the Communist-influenced officials who were the framework of his tottering administration. He made a desperate cast on April 18, the same day Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed his own right-wing National Government in Nanking. Again allied with the Christian General Feng Yü-hsiang, President Wang Ching-wei accepted the pressing advice of the Comintern’s representative, Mikhail Borodin, to launch his own Northern Expedition. After he had taken Peking, he planned an Eastern Expedition to crush Chiang Kai-shek’s Nanking Government.
The incongruous alliance of Social Democrats, Communists, and the Christian Warlord advanced into Honan Province, which lay just south of Hopei Province where the glittering prize, Peking itself, was situated. The old Northern Capital was the ultimate objective of all the contenders for power. Both the Chinese people and the foreign powers assumed that he who held Peking legitimately ruled China, and both still tendered formal recognition to the crumbling warlord government in the Northern Capital. Nonetheless, the conquest of Honan and its vital railroad plexus at Chengchow, only four hundred and seventy-five miles south of Peking, proved a political disaster for Wang Ching-wei. The new satrap of Honan, the ambitious Christian General Feng Yü-hsiang, insisted that Peking would fall only to an allied expeditionary force composed of his own forces and the reunited armies of the reconciled Wuhan and Nanking Nationalist Governments. On June 2, Chiang Kai-shek had taken Hsüchow, four hundred and fifty miles from Peking, and the road to the north was also open to him.
Mikhail Borodin and the Chinese Communists rejected the Christian General’s strategy. They denounced his proposal as “not a joint attack upon the Peking warlords, but a joint extermination of the Chinese Communist Party.” When President Wang Ching-wei in Wuhan therefore demurred at undertaking a joint Northern Expedition with Chiang Kai-shek in Nanking, the Christian General, realistically expecting no further aid from Moscow, renounced his alliance with Wuhan. His new price for reconciliation was Wang Ching-wei’s expelling the Communists from his government—and Mikhail Borodin from China.
While the rivals maneuvered, a time bomb was ticking in the desk drawer of M. N. Roy, a Bengali dispatched to Wuhan by the Communist International to assist Borodin. Joseph Stalin had sent Roy a telegram ordering the Comintern representatives and the Chinese Communists to recast their strategy. The Bengali was appalled by Stalin’s instructions, which were, in any event, impossible of fulfillment. Even attempting to carry them out would, he knew, infuriate President Wang Ching-wei. Obeying Stalin would destroy all the Communists’ hopes in China, and Borodin had in disgust disavowed all responsibility. After pondering for a week, the Bengali finally acted—foolishly and self-destructively. “In order to show my complete trust and confidence,” as he said, Roy gave a copy of Stalin’s telegram to Wang Ching-wei—and effectively destroyed the alliance of the left-Kuomintang and the Communists.
The President was as brilliant as he was erratic. Yet he had never quite grasped the essential fact that armed force was the key to power. His fingers irritably stroked the hand-written copy of Stalin’s telegram when Harry Sekloong entered his office on the morning of June 6, 1927.
“Have a look at this, lao-hsiang,” the President said.
The intimate salutation, lao-hsiang, “old fellow,” surprised Harry no more than his chief’s manner. They had so long shared both defeat and triumph that the son of the Sekloong dynasty and the nervous political firebrand reacted almost with a single w
ill. But Harry was astonished when he read the text, turgid with Marxist rhetoric. His soft whistling as he reread the telegram irritated his volatile chief.
“Na chiu shih-la, Lao-pan!” Harry said. “That does it, Chief! Stalin wants to take us over, lock, stock, barrel—and troops.”
“We can’t go along, can we?” Wang Ching-wei feared an affirmative almost as much as a negative reply. “He wants to squeeze us dry.”
“Can a dog read Confucius?” Harry characteristically masked his own dismay with the old peasant saw. “Just look at what they want! How can we possibly let the Communists organize their own independent army and militia? How could we conceivably help them take over the Kuomintang, our party? Their own land reform, for God’s sake! Giving our blessing to Communist courts that would execute our own friends! And that’s only the half of the Russian bastard’s demands.”
“What can we do, old fellow?” Wang Ching-wei appealed.
“Do? Why nothing. The Communists have their orders. Let them try to carry them out. I can’t see why we should sharpen a knife and hand it to them to cut our throats.”
“Doing nothing means we lose Soviet support. What then?”
“I don’t really know. We’ve tried for years to organize our own army, but always failed. No guns of our own means no power.”
“I suppose,” Wang Ching-wei reflected, “I could talk to that son of a turtle-bitch Chiang Kai-shek again. That buffoon, the Christian General, still insists he can heal the breach—if we get rid of the Communists.”
“No harm in trying, though it won’t work. I’ll be packing my bags again. Hong Kong’s too hot this time of year. Perhaps Paris or London?”
Harry’s pessimism was wholly justified, though slightly premature. More than six months were to elapse before he was forced to set out on his travels again in company with an embittered, vengeful Wang Ching-wei. Nonetheless, the isolated Wuhan Government was virtually powerless in mid-July 1927, and Chiang Kai-shek would not even negotiate with Wang’s left-wing Kuomintang. A disgusted Mikhail Borodin was motoring across the Gobi Desert toward Moscow, after having told the Chinese Communists to withdraw from the Wuhan Government while remaining members of the Nationalist Party, which was equivocal advice at best. President Wang Ching-wei vacillated, first exhorting the same Chinese Communists to obey his orders as loyal members of the disintegrating left-wing Kuomintang and, two days later, expelling the same Communists from the Wuhan Government, the Kuomintang, and the few military units he still controlled. It was, as James Sekloong observed, “like being expelled from a cemetery.”
Abandoned by all their friends and mentors, the Chinese Communists, of necessity, went their own way. They formally—and pointlessly—proclaimed their own provisional government of the Republic of China in Kiukiang, eighty miles north of the stronghold of Nanchang, whose capture in November 1926 had precipitated the totally destructive crisis. The demoralized native Communists were merely rearranging the stage furniture for the next act of their own particular tragedy, any realistic hope of their attaining even a share of power having been blasted by Joseph Stalin’s clumsiness and Wang Ching-wei’s indecisiveness. As if determined to immolate themselves they next threw their few intact military units at China’s cities.
Major Lin Piao briefed his officers on the evening of July 31, 1927. They were tense and impatient, for the battalion had seen little action since April, when it was relegated to the backwater of Nanchang.
General Chiang Kai-shek’s apparent lack of interest in discovering who had snatched Chou En-lai from his grasp was actually a politic expedient. Relieved by the hapless Kwangsi major’s execution, the devoted Thomas had for once underrated his Commander-in-Chief’s astuteness and tenacity. Already suspicious of Lin Piao, the General had surmised that the captain with the light eyes who freed Chou En-lai was James Sekloong. But he wanted no quarrel with the Sekloongs who, with their foreign and Chinese associates, were providing him with essential financial support. He had therefore sent the battalion into safe-keeping to garrison the walled city of Nanchang and help train the cadets of the Nanchang Branch of the Whampoa Academy. Even Chiang was, however, not omniscient. He did not know that the school’s Commandant, Chu Teh, a warlord turned patriot, was also a secret Communist.
James lingered when the other officers dispersed. Despite official denunciation, kwan-hsi, connections, were still the essential mortar that bound the clandestine Communist organization. James had enjoyed a special relationship with his battalion commander since his rescue of Chou En-lai.
“Comrade Lin,” he asked, however reluctantly determined to use that kwan-hsi, “is this move necessary? Do you think it wise?”
Lin Piao’s dark brows drew together in the scowl that rebuked any subordinate who questioned his will. A tight smile illuminated his sallow face in the next instant, for James Sekloong’s family connections made him important to the cause. Lin Piao had also learned to avoid personal confrontation when his rough-edged charm might prevail.
“Necessary, Comrade?” he drawled. “Necessary? The question is not pertinent. We have our orders.”
“But we can’t possibly win,” James persisted. “We’ll merely throw away our advantages. Even if we do succeed, it can only last a few days.”
“The Party Center has spoken, Comrade. Do you question their wisdom?”
“But, Comrade Battalion Commander,” James insisted doggedly, “we are on the scene—and they’re not. How can impractical intellectuals judge the military situation?”
“And if we do not obey, Comrade? What then? A Party without discipline, I’ve told you a hundred times, is no more than a heap of dog turds.”
“I understand, Comrade, but a hundred tactics and a thousand stratagems are still untried.” James unconsciously dropped into the Communists’ stylized rhetoric, which was an unstable compound of classical quotations and Marxist jargon. “A frontal assault is unwise.”
“You are either a Communist or a running-dog of the imperialist, capitalist exploiters,” Lin Piao snapped. “You either obey the orders of the Party Center or …”
His commander’s reiterated indirect threat had already passed from James’s mind as he lay unsleeping on his grass mat on the floor of the Buddhist temple that sheltered his company. He respected Battalion Commander Lin Piao, but he no longer feared him. A man incapable of making his own decisions was not truly formidable. The twenty-year-old James refused to surrender his will to the enfeebled Central Committee of a blundering Communist Party that had withdrawn his candidate-membership after his attack on the landlord-usurer Squire Lee—and restored it after he rescued Chou En-lai in Shanghai. How, he wondered, could Lin Piao render unquestioning obedience to such doddering fools?
The still night was humid. The odor of unwashed bodies mingled with garlic fumes exhaled through rotting teeth by the snoring men around him. Neither the heat nor the stench disturbed James; he was resigned to the one and accustomed to the other. But he was not resigned to the action planned for the morning. Lin Piao’s exhortations had neither intimidated nor impressed him; he was determined to make his own decisions. Since Shanghai, James had given his considerable leisure to analyzing his country’s predicament—and his own. He could slip away that night and alert the Nanchang Garrison Commander or he could blindly obey the Party’s orders. He knew he had come to a decisive fork in his life, but he still did not know which road he would take.
Taking the left fork could mean outlawing himself indefinitely among men who floundered in the political morass. The commanding presence, incisive logic, and bright courage of a single Chou En-lai could not counterbalance the blatant ineptitude of the Party Center. James was impressed by the personal force of the Party’s most prominent dissident, but he had little faith in the practical judgment of the monomaniacal Mao Tse-tung who was obsessed with the fancied revolutionary potential of the peasants. He further acknowledged that even the bumbling Party Center did at least see its goal clear—a united China, strong
and self-sufficient, where all men and women lived in dignity. But could that vision ever become reality? Was the remote possibility of its realization worth passing decades as a hunted outlaw?
All his experience before his introduction to Marxism at the Whampoa Academy impelled James to the center road. Although his Uncle Harry and Wang Ching-wei proceeded with unerring instinct from disaster to disaster, they were at least free men trapped in an impossible predicament. They had not become automata like Lin Piao, who obeyed mechanically and demanded the same reflex obedience of his subordinates. Besides, there was the family, and he owed the family loyalty, perhaps a greater loyalty than he owed the Communists’ illusory and probably unattainable vision. If he rose from his grass mat and gave the alarm, he would serve the House of Sekloong well and become a hero to the center and the right. He would, however, insure a great career for himself by betraying the peasant and worker soldiers who lay sleeping around him. He would condemn them to the certainty of execution, rather than the possibility of death in battle they faced gladly because—false modesty could not obscure the reality—because he led them.
Still pondering his dilemma, James Sekloong slid into deep slumber at two in the morning. When he was awakened at six, his decision had been taken—almost in spite of himself. The throat-rasping hawking and guttural spitting of his soldiers confirmed that decision. His loyalty, he realized, was pledged to the ninety-seven men with whom he had served for fourteen months and whom he had commanded for four months. Abstract visions like perfect social justice in the Marxists’ earthly paradise-to-come or a strong, independent, respected China could not assert the primary claim upon his own life. Nor could the profits of the House of Sekloong.
His allegiance was already given to Ox Woo, the plowboy from Kweichow who, at the siege of Nanchang, had shot a warlord private just before the private’s raised bayonet plunged into his lieutenant’s chest; to Ferret Yang, the gutter fighter from Swatow who sustained the company by his endless stock of dirty jokes and his uncanny ability to forage food in the barest countryside; to his First Sergeant, Old Baldy Chang, their only veteran professional soldier, who had become a dedicated Communist under his company commander’s tutelage. His was, James concluded as he checked his Mauser before turning out his company, by no means an ignoble loyalty. It was certainly no less noble than the ambitious Lin Piao’s unquestioning obedience to the Communist Central Committee or his brother Thomas’s slavish devotion to General Chiang Kai-shek. Besides, Uncle Harry would approve of his decision. Harry Sekloong, too, had given up a life of ease and pleasure because of his concern for the lao pai-hsing, the common people.
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