by Max Boot
Both Communists and Nationalists were prepared, however, to betray the other when the time was right. Chiang struck first. On April 12, 1927, his men, acting in cooperation with secret-society hoodlums, started killing and jailing Communists in Shanghai. Thus began China’s protracted civil war, which was to last, on and off, for twenty-two years. The Communists were caught unprepared and suffered heavy losses. A pivotal role in their counteroffensive was played by Zhu De, a former warlord general with a “pock-marked complexion and bull-dog figure”24 who was Kuomintang security chief in Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province. Zhu was among the renegade officers who led 20,000 troops in an uprising against the Nationalists on August 1, 1927. The revolt was quelled quickly, but it was to mark the birth of the People’s Liberation Army. Some of the defeated troops under Zhu wound up joining a guerrilla force being organized by Mao Zedong in rural Jiangxi.25
By this time, Mao had already shown considerable interest in employing China’s numerous peasants, rather than its tiny proletariat, as the instigators of revolution. “All imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, and bad gentry will meet their doom at the hands of the peasants,” Mao wrote in early 1927, predicting the country folk would rise “with the fury of a hurricane.”26 He did not know exactly how long it would take (“Marxists are not fortune-tellers”),27 but he knew that a peasant revolution could not be carried out as quickly as an urban uprising like the one that had brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. The task of organizing a peasant army was essential to the process because, in Mao’s view, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”28 This ran contrary to Marxist orthodoxy, which favored political organizing among urban workers, and Mao was for many years in disfavor with the Russian-dominated party apparatus. He was even expelled from the Politburo at one point for “rightism.”29
His doubters found vindication when Mao’s Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Army, organized from among Kuomintang defectors, peasants, and miners, failed miserably in its September 1927 assault on Changsha, known as the Autumn Harvest uprising. Mao himself was captured and barely escaped. Much as Osama bin Laden would do in the fall of 2001 when he eluded an American manhunt by escaping across the Hindu Kush into Pakistan, he retreated with the battered remnants of his force into the inaccessible Jinggang Mountains on the Hunan–Jiangxi border. Here he supplemented his army by recruiting local bandits who hid out in the pine and bamboo forests among the “wolves, boars, even leopards and tigers.”30 In January 1929, under attack by the Kuomintang, they were forced to move to a new base on the Jiangxi–Fujian border. There were a few other Red bases scattered around China, but this became the biggest—the Central Soviet Area. Leadership was shared by Mao and Zhu De, who was older and had the military experience Mao lacked.
Working together so closely that many peasants assumed they were one man—“Zhu Mao”31—they began to formulate the guerrilla-warfare strategy that eventually, thanks to his cult of personality, would become associated with Mao alone. The heart of their approach was summarized in a sixteen-character formula that echoed Sun Tzu: “the enemy advances, we withdraw; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.” In carrying out these classic guerrilla-warfare precepts, the Communists were always conscious of the need to win peasant support. In Mao’s famous formulation, “The people are like water and the army is like fish.” So as not to “dry up the water” as “undisciplined armies” did, Red soldiers were instructed to “replace all doors when you leave a house” (doors were often detached and used as beds), “be courteous and polite,” “pay for all articles,” and “establish latrines a safe distance from people’s houses.”32 Mao always stressed the need to “keep the closest possible relations with the common people.”33
To broaden their appeal, the Communists embarked on a massive land redistribution campaign, taking property from the “evil gentry,” “lawless landlords,” and “rich peasants” and giving it to the poor.34 Although he would be seen by credulous foreign sympathizers as someone carrying out a “moderate program of agrarian reform”—not “Communism as it is understood anywhere else in the world”35—Mao had not the “slightest compunction” about demanding, in his own words, the “massacre” of “the landlords and despotic gentry as well as their running dogs.”36 Like Stalin, he also lashed out ruthlessly against enemies, real or imagined, within the party in a prelude to the terrifying purges that would sweep China in the 1950s and 1960s.
Anyone who questioned Mao’s strategy was accused of membership in a Nationalist conspiracy called the AB (Anti-Bolshevik) League. Mao formed “committees for eliminating counter-revolutionaries” and told them to use “the most merciless torture” to ferret out supposed AB members. “Leniency toward the enemy is a crime against the revolution,” he proclaimed in words that echoed the fervor of French revolutionaries of the 1790s. One accused party official recalled how his interrogators “burned my body with incense sticks” and then broke his two thumbs; they were “just barely hanging together by the skin.” By such methods were phony confessions extracted that were used to round up more “traitors.” One security man explained the technique: “You force him to confess, then he confesses, you believe him and you kill him; or, he does not confess and you kill him.”
Thousands of cadres and soldiers perished in this internal bloodletting in 1930–31, which sparked a Red Army mutiny. The Nationalists, who, it should be noted, committed numerous massacres of their own, later claimed that 186,000 people had been killed altogether in the Jiangxi Soviet. Even if this figure was exaggerated, the reality was bad enough. Mao was not troubled in the least. He was, a confidant later wrote, “devoid of human feeling, incapable of love, friendship or warmth.” The only thing that mattered to him, another colleague said, was “the moving of people through the motions of carrying out his own grand designs.” All he would say about those who perished in the process was that “lives have to be sacrificed in the cause of the revolution.”37
CHIANG’S NATIONALISTS MOUNTED four unsuccessful “encirclement” campaigns against the Jiangxi Soviet with hundreds of thousands of troops. The Mao-Zhu strategy of “luring the enemy in deep” worked repeatedly. The Red Army would allow the better-armed Kuomintang forces to become overextended before counterattacking with devastating results. Yet Chiang did not give up. He mustered more than half a million troops for his fifth and final encirclement campaign beginning in August 1933.
This time the Nationalists adopted a new strategy at the urging of their German military advisers. Instead of blundering deep into Red territory, they advanced slowly, building thousands of blockhouses (“turtle-shells”) connected by new roads, telephone, and telegraph lines.38 This tactic, which had been employed by the British in the Boer War, strangled the Soviet base, reducing its defenders to starvation. Counterattacks against the well-entrenched Kuomintang troops were futile. The Communists were also hurt by a popular backlash against the terror they had inflicted on Jiangxi. This was one of the “methodological and technical errors” that caused the Politburo to strip Mao temporarily of most of his party posts.39
IN OCTOBER 1934 the senior Communist leadership—which did not include Mao, who was out of favor and suffering from malaria—decided to leave Jiangxi and find a new base that could be better defended and supplied. The result was the storied Long March. Leaving behind a doomed rear guard of 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers to wage guerrilla war behind enemy lines, 86,000 Red Army troops and Communist cadres set out from Jiangxi, in southeast China, lugging their documents, printing presses, treasury, radios, even an X-ray machine. Four thousand miles and twelve months later, in October 1935, 4,000 bedraggled survivors, along with a few thousand more recruited en route, arrived in northwestern China’s Shaanxi Province, across the border from Soviet-controlled Mongolia, after a long, circuitous trek that took them first west, then north. Along the way they had abandoned most of their equipment and experienced unimaginable trials and hardships not only fr
om enemy pursuit by Nationalist and warlord troops but, even more so, from numerous natural obstacles such as mountains and swamps.40
The Long March has become so encrusted in legend that it is difficult to figure out what actually happened. Communist historiography has depicted “an army of heroes” happily risking death out of love for Marx and Mao.41 The recent debunkers Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, authors of a best-selling Mao biography, on the other hand, have gone so far as to claim that the most storied battle of the march, at Luding Bridge, was a “complete invention” and that the march succeeded only because Chiang Kai-shek wanted it to. (Letting the Communists go was supposedly the price he had to pay to get his son back from the Soviet Union.)42
The available evidence hardly proves this conspiracy theory; Chiang surely wanted to eradicate the Communists, who threatened his rule. In fact he massacred many of them even while his son was studying in the USSR. It was true, however, that the marchers’ survival was due partly to the willingness of many of their pursuers—warlord armies loosely allied with the Kuomintang—to let them go. The warlords feared that if the Communists were defeated, Chiang would come after them next. The march could never have started if Zhou Enlai had not negotiated an accord with the warlord of neighboring Guangdong Province to let them go. “The Red Army,” wrote the journalist and historian Harrison Salisbury, “walked through Guangdong and the adjacent territory almost like tourists on a stroll.”43
There was a similar lack of fortitude among the defenders of the Luding Bridge, a narrow, swaying, three-hundred-foot span that crossed the swirling Dadu River in Sichuan Province. By the time the Communist vanguard arrived on May 29, 1935, the defenders had removed most of the planks laid over the nine heavy chains, “each big link as thick as a rice bowl,” which formed the bridge’s base thirty feet above the swirling water (not five hundred feet as later claimed by Zhu De). In Communist lore, twenty-two Red soldiers had to crawl a hundred yards along the chains stretched precariously over the “deafening . . . roar of the rushing torrent” while the defenders shot at them and set fire to the other planks. Eighteen of the attackers made it to the other side, and with Mausers and hand grenades cleared a path for the rest of the army to follow.
What this hagiography leaves out is that the defenders’ guns were so old and their cartridges so moldy that most of their bullets couldn’t reach across the river. This was no accident. One of Sichuan’s warlords had made a deal to let “the Red Army through without much of a fight.” Moreover, one witness claimed many years later that Communist casualties would have been higher if they had not forced local peasants, all of whom were killed, to lead the way across the bridge. The battle really happened, contra Chang-Halliday, but it was not as heroic as later claimed.44
Other parts of the Long March hardly fit Communist mythology. Conscription was supposed to be reserved for “feudal” armies; Mao always denied that his forces were “compulsorily impressing the people.”45 In reality families that refused to provide sons for the Red Army were denounced as “traitors and deserters,” which meant the loss of land, food, even their lives. One Long March veteran recalled, “The Party secretary in our village forced everyone with a dick to sign up.” Many of these unwilling enlistees picked the first opportunity to slip away. In the first forty-six days, from October 16 to December 1, 1934, the marchers lost two-thirds of their strength. Only one major battle occurred during that period: Chiang’s aircraft and troops caught part of the column while it was crossing the Xiang River. But it is estimated that only 15,000 marchers died here. Most of the other 30,000 must have deserted.46
Beyond desertion and defeat, the marchers suffered from the elements and lack of supplies. The Long March traversed twenty-four rivers and eighteen mountain ranges. Particularly difficult were the Great Snowy Mountains in western China, with their 14,000-foot peaks, which the marchers reached on June 12, 1935. The thin mountain air was tough on the wounded and ill; many expired en route.
Just as bad were the grasslands, an enormous stretch of water-logged tundra at an elevation of over 9,000 feet in northern Sichuan Province, where the marchers arrived three months later, on August 22, 1935. The few inhabitants of the grasslands were Tibetans who were hostile to these Han Chinese intruders trying to appropriate their meager food supplies. Employing guerrilla tactics of their own, the Tibetans would pick off isolated parties of Reds, “like vultures on a corpse.” (The Communists would exact a terrible revenge with their massacres of Tibetans in the 1950s and 1960s and an animosity that continues to the present.) The ground itself was so marshy that men or animals could disappear after taking a wrong step. The survivors were so hungry that they took to eating boiled animal hides, leather belts, even horses’ reins. Many drank the “bitter, black” swamp water even though there was “no wood to purify it by boiling.” Dysentery and typhus spread through the ranks. When the marchers finally emerged from the grasslands after a harrowing week, they found fields of unripened corn and eagerly consumed the crops. A few minutes later they collapsed, holding their stomachs, their bodies shaking, screaming in agony, because “their stomachs could not digest the sudden intake after starving for so long.”47
The Reds were lucky that even four thousand of them reached Shaanxi Province in the northwest, where another Communist group had already established a redoubt. They were luckier still that Mao had the wit to turn a catastrophic defeat into a public-relations victory. Mao and his crack team of propagandists created the myth of the “Long March,” a term coined, ironically, by Chiang Kai-shek,48 as a triumph of the spirit—“a new world record for military marches” by “brave heroes” intent on “going north to resist Japan.” Mao even had the gall to claim that the “Red Army has already become an invincible force.”49
In reality Mao was totally preoccupied with fighting the Nationalists, not the Japanese,50 and the Red Army was still weak in 1935. The Long March did not win China for the Communists. It did, however, win the Communist Party for Mao.
During the march, he painted his opponents, a clique of Moscow-trained cadres, as “opportunists,” “flightists,” and “deviationists” who had lost Jiangxi because of their “erroneous military leadership.”51 A shooting war almost broke out en route against the Fourth Front Army, a larger Communist formation commanded by one of Mao’s rivals, which linked up with his First Front Army in June 1935. But in September 1935 Mao was able to escape with his followers and consolidate power in his own hands with the assistance of the handsome and malleable Zhou Enlai, who had previously outranked Mao in the party hierarchy.
In Shaanxi he staged another reign of terror (the Rectification Campaign) to impose the “correct Marxist-Leninist line,” a.k.a. “Mao Zedong Thought,” and root out “spies” and “subjectivists.” In other words, to crush any possible opposition. Mao was well on his way to becoming the Red Emperor.52
FROM THE DAYS of America’s War of Independence to Ireland’s, public opinion had been growing in importance as a factor in guerrilla warfare. Twentieth-century insurgents could not undertake apolitical raids, like the nomads of old, and expect to be successful. A smart guerrilla leader, or for that matter a smart counterinsurgent, now had to harness the press for his own ends. Mao Zedong grasped that lesson from an early age when, as a twenty-six-year-old agitator, he had founded a radical newspaper and bookstore. Now as the unquestioned leader of the Communist Party of China, he unleashed a potent new weapon in his propaganda war against the Nationalist regime: an adventurous young reporter from the American Midwest named Edgar Snow.
Snow had been living in China since 1928 and, although not a party member, he was known to be sympathetic to the Communists—a “reliable” if “bourgeois” writer who could be counted on to recount the Communists’ story as they wanted it recounted.53 So in 1936 Snow was smuggled by the party underground past the Kuomintang blockade into the Red northwest. He traveled with George Hatem, a Lebanese-American doctor who was a committed communist, carrying what his wife described as
“his sleeping bag, his Camel cigarettes, his Gillette razor blades, and a can of Maxwell House coffee—his indispensable artifacts of Western civilization.”54 Four months later, after meeting virtually the entire Communist hierarchy, Snow returned to Peking with a sensational scoop—a book that would garner widespread attention not only in Britain and America, where it was first published in 1937, but in China itself, where it came out in translation.
Red Star over China, in fact, would do more than any volume other than Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth to shape Western impressions of China. It gave most Westerners, and for that matter most Chinese, their first account of the Long March and of the men behind it. Mao, with whom Snow formed a lifelong friendship, was painted in heroic hues as “a gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure . . . with a head of thick black hair grown very long . . . an intellectual face of great shrewdness . . . [and] a lively sense of humor.” Snow actually thought Mao, who would become one of history’s worst mass murderers, was “a moderating influence in the Communist movement where life and death were concerned.”55 Thanks in part to Red Star’s publication, fresh recruits were soon flocking from China’s cities to the Communist headquarters in Yan’an in Shaanxi Province.
The newcomers included Lan Ping (Blue Apple), the stage name of a twenty-four-year-old actress from Shanghai, Jiang Qing, who was “much better looking and more chic” than most of the other women in Yan’an. Mao had already been married three times. The first had been arranged for him at age fourteen by his parents but rejected by him. The second was to the daughter of one of his professors; he abandoned her in Changsha when he went to the mountains, and she was executed by Nationalist troops in 1930. His third wife, He Zizhen, accompanied him on the Long March even though she was pregnant and had to leave their toddler behind. (He was never heard from again.) She was wounded en route and gave birth to another baby, who was left with a peasant family and died. Mao lost interest in her after the march, and she left for Russia to receive medical treatment. While she was gone, Mao divorced her and married the alluring Blue Apple. She would become the notorious Madame Mao, who helped instigate the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and tried to seize power after Mao’s death in 1976. But she could not hold his attention for long.