by Jung Chang
Mao’s next move was to prevent the troops actually going to Changsha, and instead have them muster at a place where he could abduct them. This place had to be far enough away from Changsha that other Party or Russian representatives could not easily reach it. There was no telephone or radio communication with these forces.
On 31 August, Mao left the Russian consulate, saying that he was going to join the troops. But he did not do this. Instead, he made his way to a town called Wenjiashi, 100 km east of Changsha, and there he stayed. On the launch day set for 11 September, Mao was not with any of the troops, but lying low in Wenjiashi. By the 14th, before the troops had got anywhere near Changsha or suffered serious defeats, he had ordered them to abandon the march on Changsha and converge on his location. As a result, the Party organization in Changsha had to abort the whole design on the 15th. The secretary of the Soviet consulate, Maier, referred to the retreat as “most despicable treachery and cowardice.” Moscow called the affair “a joke of an uprising.” It does not seem to have realized that Mao had set the whole thing up solely in order to snare the armed units.
The operation appears in history books as “the Autumn Harvest Uprising,” portrayed as a peasant uprising led by Mao. It is the founding moment of the international myth about Mao as a peasant leader, and one of the great deceptions of Mao’s career (to cover it up he was to spin an elaborate yarn to his American spokesman, Edgar Snow). Not only was the “uprising” not an authentic peasant undertaking, but Mao was not involved in any action — and actually sabotaged it.
But he got what he was after — control of an armed force, of some 1,500 men. Due south about 170 kilometers from Wenjiashi lay the Jinggang Mountain range, traditional bandit country. Mao had decided to make this his base of operations. The lack of proper roads meant that many of China’s mountain areas were largely out of reach of the authorities. This particular place had an added advantage: it straddled the border of two provinces, and so was on the very outer edge of both provinces’ control.
Mao had a link with a successful outlaw in the area, Yuan Wen-cai. Yuan and his partner Wang Zuo had an army of 500 men and controlled most of one county, Ninggang, which had a population of 130,000. They lived by collecting rents and taxes from the local population.
Mao anticipated problems getting the commanders of the force he had hijacked to go to the bandit country without explicit Party orders, so at Wenjiashi he first sought out a few men he knew already and secured their support, before he called a meeting of the commanders on 19 September. He arranged for his supporters to serve tea and cigarettes so that they could come into the room and keep an eye on things. The argument was fierce — the main commander demanded that they proceed with the old plan and go for Changsha. But Mao was the only Party leader present (the others and the Russians were 100 km away in Changsha), and he prevailed. The force set off for Jinggang Mountain. At first, Mao was such a stranger to the troops that some thought he was a local and tried to grab him to carry guns.
Mao was dressed like a country schoolteacher, in a long blue gown, with a homespun cotton scarf around his neck. Along the way, he talked to soldiers, assessing their condition and gauging their strength—“as if counting family treasure,” one soldier recalled.
When Mao first told the troops that they were about to become “Mountain Lords”—bandits — they were dumbfounded. This was not why they had joined a Communist revolution. But, speaking in the name of the Party, he assured them that they would be special bandits — part of an international revolution. Banditry was also their best chance, he argued: “Mountain Lords have never been wiped out, let alone us.”
Still, many were depressed. They were exhausted, and malaria, suppurating legs and dysentery were rife. Whenever they stopped, they were swamped by their own thick stench, so foul it could be smelled a couple of kilometers away. Sick and wounded would lie down in the grass, and often never get up again. Many deserted. Knowing that he could not force his men to stay, Mao allowed those who wanted to leave to do so, without their guns. Two of the top commanders opted to leave, and went to Shanghai. Both of them later went over to the Nationalists. By the time he reached the outlaw land, Mao had only about 600 men left, having lost well over half his force in a couple of weeks. Most of those who stayed did so because they had no alternative. They became the nucleus from which Mao’s force grew — what he later called the “single spark that started a prairie fire.”
ARRIVING IN BANDIT COUNTRY at the beginning of October Mao’s first step was to visit Yuan, accompanied by only a few men, so as to reassure the bandit chief. Yuan had some armed men hidden nearby in case Mao brought troops. Finding Mao apparently no threat, Yuan had a pig slaughtered for a banquet, and they sat drinking tea and nibbling peanuts and melon seeds.
Mao got his foot in the door by pretending he was only pausing en route to the coast to join the Nanchang mutineers. A deal was struck. Mao could stay temporarily, and would feed his own troops by staging looting expeditions. But to start with, they would be looked after by the outlaws.
By February 1928, four months later, Mao had become the master of his hosts. The finale of this takeover took place after Mao’s men captured the capital of Ninggang county from the government on 18 February, in what was, by the bandits’ standards, a sizable military victory. This was also the first battle that Mao was involved in commanding — watching through binoculars from a mountain opposite.
Three days later, on the 21st, Mao held a public rally of an organized crowd of thousands of people to celebrate the victory. The climax was the killing of the county chief, who had just been captured. An eyewitness described the scene (in cautious language, as he was telling the story under Communist rule): “A fork-shaped wooden frame was driven into the ground … onto which Chang Kai-yang [the county chief] was tied. The whole place was ringed with ropes from one wooden pole to another for hanging slogans. People thrust their spears, suo-biao, into him and killed him that way … Commissar Mao spoke at the rally.” Mao had earlier expressed a special fondness for this weapon, suo-biao. Now, under his very eyes, it pierced the life out of the county chief.
Public execution rallies had become a feature of local life since Mao’s arrival, and he had demonstrated a penchant for slow killing. At one rally, staged to celebrate a looting expedition at the time of the Chinese New Year 1928, he had written couplets on sheets of red paper, which were pasted onto wooden pillars on both sides of the stage. They read:
Watch us kill the bad landlords today.
Aren’t you afraid?
It’s knife slicing upon knife.
Mao addressed the rally, and a local landlord, Kuo Wei-chien, was then put to death in line with the prescriptions of Mao’s poetry.
Mao did not invent public execution, but he added to this ghastly tradition a modern dimension, organized rallies, and in this way made killing compulsory viewing for a large part of the population. To be dragooned into a crowd, powerless to walk away, forced to watch people put to death in this bloody and agonizing way, hearing their screams, struck fear deep into those present.
The traditional bandits could not match Mao and his orchestrated terror, which frightened even them. Yuan and Zuo submitted to Mao’s authority; soon after this they allowed themselves and their men to be formed into a regiment under him. Mao had out-bandited the bandits.
AS SOON AS he had reached the bandit land, Mao had sent a messenger to Party headquarters in Changsha. Contact was established within days, in October 1927, by which time Shanghai had received reports about the events surrounding the Autumn Harvest Uprising. What could not have failed to emerge was that Mao had aborted the venture, and had then made off with the troops without authorization. Shanghai sent for Mao (along with others) to discuss the fiasco. Mao ignored the summons, and on 14 November he was expelled from his Party posts.
The Party made a determined effort to get rid of him. On 31 December, Shanghai told Hunan that “the Centre” considered that “the … army le
d by comrade Mao Tse-tung … has committed extremely serious errors politically. The Centre orders [you] to dispatch a senior comrade there, with the Resolutions [expelling Mao] … to call a congress for army comrades … to reform the Party organization there.” Clearly anticipating trouble from Mao, the message added: “assign a brave and smart worker comrade to be the Party representative.”
The banner of the Party was critical to Mao, as he had little personal magnetism. His solution to the Party order was simple: prevent the news of his expulsion from ever reaching his men.
A week after Shanghai issued its order, the entire Hunan committee was conveniently — some might say suspiciously — arrested by the Nationalists. Mao’s troops never learned that the Party had withdrawn its mandate from him. It was not until March 1928 that the first Party envoy was allowed to appear in Mao’s base, bringing the message that expelled him. But Mao outsmarted the Party by ensuring that the envoy could only deliver the message to a few hand-picked lackeys, and then pretending to submit by resigning his Party post, which he passed on to a stooge. He awarded himself a new title, Division Commander, and continued to control the army.
THIS BANDIT COUNTRY made an ideal base, well supplied with food. The mountains, though rising to only 995 meters, were steep, and gave excellent security, being ringed by precipices, with dense forests of fir and bamboo that were permanently shrouded in mist, and teemed with monkeys, wild boar, tigers and all sorts of poisonous snakes. It was easy to defend, and to get out of in an emergency, as there were hidden byways leading out to two provinces — narrow mud paths buried under masses of vegetation, impossible for strangers to spot. For outlaws, it was a safe haven.
Mao and his troops lived by staging looting sorties to neighboring counties, and sometimes farther afield. These forays were grandly called da tu-hao—literally, “smash landed tyrants.” In fact they were indiscriminate, classic bandit raids. Mao told his troops: “If the masses don’t understand what ‘landed tyrants’ means, you can tell them it means the moneyed, or ‘the rich.’ ” The term “the rich” was highly relative, and could mean a family with a couple of dozen liters of cooking oil, or a few hens. “Smash” covered a range of activities from plain robbery and ransom to killing.
These raids made frequent headlines in the press, and greatly raised Mao’s profile. It was now that he gained notoriety as a major bandit chief.
But his bandit activities garnered little support from the locals. One Red soldier recalled how hard it was to persuade the population to help them identify the rich, or to join in a raid, or even share the loot. Another described one night’s experience:
We usually surrounded the house of the landed tyrant, seizing him first and then starting to confiscate things. But this time as soon as we broke in, gongs sounded all of a sudden … and several hundred enemies [villagers] emerged … They seized over forty of our men, locked them up in the clan temple … beat them and trussed them up, the women stamping on them with their feet. Then grain barrels were put over them, with big stones on top. They were so badly tortured …
Although Mao claimed an ideological rationale — fighting the exploiting classes — the fact that his incursions were virtually indistinguishable from traditional bandit behavior remained a permanent source of discontent in his own ranks, particularly among the military commanders. In December 1927 the chief commander, Chen Hao, tried to take the troops away while on a looting expedition. Mao rushed to the scene with a posse of supporters, and had Chen arrested, and later executed in front of the entire force. Mao almost lost his army. In the space of the few months since he had snatched the force away, all its main officers had deserted him.
As a means to curry favor with the troops, Mao set up “soldiers’ committees” to satisfy their wish for a say in the proceeds of looting. At the same time, secret Party cells were formed, answering only to Mao as the Party boss. Even ranking military superiors did not know who was a member of the Party, which amounted to a secret organization. In this way Mao used the control mechanism of communism, as well as its name, to maintain his grip on the army.
But as his grip remained far from iron-clad, and he himself was certainly not popular, Mao could never relax his vigilance about his personal safety, and it was from now that he began to perfect the security measures that developed in later life into a truly awesome — if largely invisible — system. To begin with, he had about a hundred guards, and the number grew. He picked several houses in different places in bandit country, and had them fully rigged for security. The houses invariably had escape exits such as a hole in the wall, usually at the back, leading into the mountains. Later, on the Long March, even when he was on the move, most of his houses had one notable characteristic: a special exit leading to an emergency escape route.
Mao lived in style. One residence, called the Octagonal Pavilion, was of great architectural distinction. The spacious main part, opening onto a large courtyard set beside a river, had a ceiling consisting of three layers of octagonal wooden panels that spiraled into a little glass roof, like a glass-topped pagoda. It had belonged to a local doctor, who was now moved to a corner of the courtyard but continued to practice — most convenient for Mao, as he was never quite free of some ailment or other.
Another house that Mao occupied, in the big town of Longshi, was also a doctor’s, and also magnificent. It had a strange beauty that bespoke the former prosperity of the town. The enormous house was half a European masonry villa, with an elegant loggia above a row of Romanesque arches, and half a brick-and-timber Chinese mansion, with layers of upturned eaves and delicate latticed windows. The two parts were grafted together by an exquisite octagonal doorway.
Mao’s actual HQ in Longshi was a splendid two-story mansion set in 2,000 square meters of ground, once the best school for young men from three counties — until Mao came. The whole top floor was open on three sides and looked out onto a vista of rivers and clouds. It had been designed for the pupils to enjoy the breeze in the stifling days of summer. Mao’s occupation of this building was to set a pattern. Wherever he went, schools, clan temples and Catholic churches (often the sturdiest buildings in many parts of remote rural China) were commandeered. These were the only buildings large enough for meetings, apart from being the best. School classes, naturally, were shut down.
During his entire stay in the outlaw land, which lasted fifteen months, Mao ventured into the mountains only three times, for a total period of less than a month. And when he did go, he was not exactly traveling rough. When he went to call on bandit chief Zuo, he stayed in a brilliantly white mansion known as the White House, formerly owned by a Cantonese timber merchant. He was entertained lavishly, with pigs and sheep slaughtered in his honor.
The contours of Mao’s future lifestyle in power were already emerging. He had acquired a sizable personal staff, which included a manager, a cook, a cook’s help with the special duty of carrying water for Mao, a groom who looked after a small horse for his master, and secretaries. One errand boy’s “special task” was to keep him supplied with the right brand of cigarettes from Longshi. Another orderly collected newspapers and books whenever they took a town or looted a rich house.
MAO ALSO ACQUIRED a wife — his third — almost as soon as he settled in outlaw country. A pretty young woman with large eyes, high cheekbones, an almond-shaped face and a willowy figure, Gui-yuan was just turning eighteen when she met Mao. She came from the rich county of Yongxin at the foot of the mountain, and her parents, who owned a teahouse, had given her the name Gui-yuan (Gui: osmanthus, and yuan: round) because she was born on an autumn evening when a round moon shone above a blossoming osmanthus tree. She had attended a missionary school run by two Finnish ladies, but was not content with being brought up as a lady. Her restless, fiery temperament rejected the traditional claustrophobic life prescribed for women, and made her yearn for a wider world, enjoyment, and some action. So, in the stirring atmosphere of the Northern Expedition army’s entry into her town in summe
r 1926, she joined the Communist Party. Soon she was making speeches in public, as a cheerleader welcoming the troops. At the age of only sixteen, she was appointed head of the Women’s Department in the new government for the whole county, starting her job by cutting off her own long hair, an act that was still revolutionary and eyebrow-raising.
A year later, after Chiang Kai-shek’s split, Communists and activists were on the run, including her parents and younger sister, who had also joined the Party. Her elder brother, also a Communist, was thrown into prison, along with many others, but the outlaw Yuan was a friend of his, and helped to break him out of jail. Gui-yuan and her brother escaped with the outlaws, and she became best friends with Mrs. Yuan. Zuo, the other outlaw, who had three wives, gave her a Mauser pistol.
When Mao came, Yuan assigned her to act as his interpreter. Mao did not speak the local dialect, and he never learned it. Here, as in his later peregrinations, he had to communicate with the locals through an interpreter.
Mao at once began to court her, and by the beginning of 1928 they were “married”—with no binding ceremony but a sumptuous banquet prepared by Mrs. Yuan. This was barely four months after Mao had left Kai-hui, the mother of his three sons, the previous August. He had written to her just once, mentioning that he had foot trouble. From the time of his new marriage, he abandoned his family.
Unlike Kai-hui, who was madly in love with him, Gui-yuan married Mao with reluctance. A beautiful woman in a crowd of men, she had many suitors and considered Mao, at thirty-four, “too old” and “not worthy” of her, as she told a close friend. Mao’s youngest brother, Tse-tan, handsome and lively, also fancied Gui-yuan. “My brother has a wife,” he said. “Better to be with me.” She chose the elder Mao because she felt the “need for protection politically in that environment,” as she later conceded.
In a world of few women and a lot of sexually frustrated men, Mao’s relationship with Gui-yuan caused gossip. Mao was careful: he and Gui-yuan avoided appearing in public together. When the couple walked past the building that housed wounded soldiers, he would ask Gui-yuan to go separately.