by Edgar Snow
2. Yang had an even greater influence on Mao’s early interest in philosophical idealism than is acknowledged here. He was familiar with both Oriental and Western cultures, to a degree then rare among Chinese savants. His family were wealthy landowners of Hunan who could afford to give him a good education in the Chinese Classics and then send him to study for six years in Japan. At the age of thirty he went to Europe for another four years of study in Britain and Germany. That he chose to accept a post in a secondary institution indicated the high standing of the First Teachers’ Training School. He went on to a professorship at Peking National University, where he continued to befriend Mao. Versed in Kant, Rousseau, and Spencer, Yang was also a follower of the Hunanese hero-patriot, Wang Fu-chih, a pragmatist philosopher as well as a warrior. Wang’s seventeenth-century writings strongly appealed to Mao and other students of Yang who later became Communists, including Ts’ai Ho-sen (see BN). Yang is credited with having introduced Mao to Friedrich Paulsen’s A System of Ethics. A copy of Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei’s translation of that book still exists, with 12,000 words of marginal notes in Mao’s handwriting which reveal his admiration of Paulsen’s emphasis on discipline, self-control, and will power (Ch’en, ibid., p. 44).
3. Hsiao Yu (Siao Yu) wrote Mao Tse-tung and I Were Beggars. See Bibliography.
4. Yi gave Mao, his former student, a job as principal of his “model” primary school, a satellite of the Hunan Normal School. Mao taught Chinese literature there until 1922. In 1965 Mao told me that at that time he really had had no ambition in life other than to be a teacher.
5. Yi Pei-ch’i was himself “responsible” for the theft. He was director of the museum at the time the treasures disappeared, and Hsiao was his assistant. The treasures were later sold in Europe.
6. In 1966–67, Mao encouraged the Red Guards of the GPCR to emulate such boyhood experiences, and to sally forth on “little Long Marches” of their own.
7. Mao Tse-tung published an article in New Youth, April, 1917, under the pseudonym Erh-Shih-Pa Hua Sheng or “Twenty-eight-Stroke Student.” (The three characters of Mao’s full name are written with twenty-eight brush strokes.) His article, “A Study of Physical Education,” offers interesting insights into Mao’s character at the age of twenty-four. Since the body itself “contains knowledge and houses virtue,” Mao saw perfect physical fitness as the foundation of mental perfection and, above all, will power. His article also glorified “military heroism.” See Stuart Schram’s translation, Une étude de l’éducation physique.
Chapter 3: Prelude to Revolution
1. Ch’en supported Wang Ching-wei’s puppet government under the Japanese, became its premier after Wang’s death, and was executed as a traitor by Chiang Kai-shek in 1946.
Chapter 4: The Nationalist Period
1. Sneevliet had a long Indonesian background, and was a veteran member of the Second International. He supported Lenin’s break with the older European Socialist International, to form the Third International. He was active in prewar revolutionary agitation in Indonesia and helped found a Social Democratic Party there. Back in Holland during the Second World War, he perished under the Nazi occupation.
2. Chou Fu-hai ended by collaborating with the Japanese under the puppet premier, Wang Ching-wei (see BN).
3. The Third CCP Congress confirmed the Sun-Joffe agreement, whereby Communists were to join the KMT, but the demand of Sneevliet, the CMT representative, that control of the labor movement should be shared with the KMT, was opposed by Chang Kuo-t’ao, then chief of the Orgburo and the Trade-Union Secretariat. Mao at first supported Chang Kuo-t’ao, but after the resolution was passed, by one vote, Mao adopted the Comintern view. Chang lost his post in the Orgburo, Mao succeeded him, and antagonism between the two men increased (Rue, Mao Tse-tung in Opposition, p. 38).
4. In fact Mao’s “coordinating” activities were so successful that he was attacked for “rightism” and expelled (for the first time) from the CC. His return to Hunan, “for a rest,” coincided with a reversal in CMT policy, now favoring separate CCP organization of labor. Mao was re-elected to the CC but Chang also recovered Party face (Rue, ibid).
5. Official English translations of both works (FLP, Peking) show a few differences from the originals in Chinese, especially marked in the analysis of Chao Heng-t’i.
6. Mao’s Report, now a scriptural classic, stressed that “without the poor peasant there can be no revolution.” Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society opens Mao’s Selected Works, and is followed by the above Report (SW, Vol. I).
Chapter 5: The Soviet Movement
1. Several important research studies of this period in recent years (see Bibliography) have assessed, in varying degrees, Stalin’s responsibility for the “1927 debacle,” but Chinese historiography has yet to produce a documented analysis even from the official CCP point of view. Ch’en, Roy, and Borodin certainly followed directives from Stalin, who had taken control of the Executive Committee of the Comintern from Zinoviev in 1926. Thus it was Stalin’s line which Mao here criticized by implication. Was Ch’en merely a scapegoat for Stalin’s mistakes? In his own defense before the Emergency Party CC meeting of August 7, 1927, Ch’en asserted that he had opposed the CMT line in the spring of 1927, but that his protests were rejected; after that he had followed CMT discipline to enforce Stalin’s directives despite his better judgment. (He had distrusted both Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei.) After he was dropped from the PB, Ch’en circulated a letter to the CC in which he objected to its adoption of “defense of the U.S.S.R.” as a duty taking primacy over all other revolutionary considerations.
In 1929 the issue had become critical when Chang Hsueh-liang seized the Russian-administered sections of the jointly owned Chinese Eastern Railway in Chinese Manchuria and declared them “nationalized.” In retaliation, Moscow moved Red Army troops into Manchuria to restore Russian rights, while the Comintern demanded that the CCP (and all Communist parties) support Russian policy against the Chinese Nationalists. Ch’en was expelled from the Party in November, 1929, and later organized a “left opposition” party with Trotsky’s support. That did not save him from arrest (and five years of imprisonment) by the Kuomintang authorities. Released in 1937, he died in 1942.
Borodin was recalled to Moscow in 1927 and for some years edited the English-language Moscow Daily News, with Anna Louise Strong as a coeditor. After the Second World War, Stalin had Borodin incarcerated and he died in Siberia. Stalin’s police also imprisoned Anna Louise Strong, then deported her as an “American spy.” Khrushchev ordered Borodin posthumously rehabilitated. He also ordered the rehabilitation of Miss Strong, who soon went to live in Peking, which became anti-Khrushchev headquarters. Roy remained in Stalin’s good graces until 1929, when he suddenly left Moscow under an assumed name, and shortly afterward was officially expelled from the Comintern. (During the Second World War he led a pro-Hitler faction. in India.) Besso Lominadze and Heinz Neumann succeeded Roy and Borodin as Stalin’s agents in China. Following Stalin’s ambivalent orders, Neumann called for the Canton Commune (December, 1927), a failure for which Stalin held him personally responsible. He returned to Russia and was last seen there in 1931. In 1930 Lominadze joined the Opposition and tried to remove Stalin from CMT leadership. Stalin had him exiled to Magnitogorsk, where he soon committed suicide. Adolf A. Joffe, a veteran of the October Revolution who had served Lenin in arranging the Brest-Litovsk treaty before he negotiated the Sino-Soviet pact with Sun Yat-sen, committed suicide (1927) in protest against Stalin’s expulsion of Trotsky from the Bolshevik Party.
Lominadze had been Li Li-san’s strongest supporter in the Comintern. His attacks on Stalin were only partly connected with Chinese affairs but they coincided with a crisis in the “Li Li-san line” in China and helped influence Stalin to discredit Li and back a new leadership for the Chinese Politburo. Among Stalin’s Comintern functionaries in China during this fateful period was Earl Browder, who was recalled from China by Pavel Mif. Browder was n
ot expelled from the Comintern, however, which Stalin himself abolished with a stroke of his pen, in 1943.
2. An interesting account of this incident, and the whole period, from the Left Kuomintang point of view, is given by T’ang Leang-li in The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution (London, 1930).
3. Mao was not present during the Uprising but General Chu Teh credited Mao with having helped to plan it (Smedley, The Great Road, p. 200). A poster commonly sold throughout the PRC showed Mao speaking at a meeting (July 18, 1927) held near Nanchang, where decisions were made for the Uprising. Leading participants in the Nanchang Uprising included Chu Teh, Ho Lung, Chang Kuo-t’ao, Chou En-lai, Fang Chih-min, Li Li-san, Lin Tsu-han, Lin Piao, Liu Po-ch’eng, P’eng P’ai, Su Yu, Ch’en Keng, Ch’en Yi, Su Chao-cheng, Nieh Ho-t’ing, Nieh Jung-chen, T’an Chen-lin, T’an Ping-shan, Yeh Chien-ying, Hsu T’eh-li, and Teng Ying-ch’ao (Mme. Chou En-lai). The August 1 (Nanchang) Uprising came to be celebrated as the birthday of the PLA.
4. Chingkangshan was a nearly impregnable mountain stronghold, formerly held by bandits, on the Hunan-Kiangsi border. For an account of the Communists’ seizure of this mountain and their subsequent experiences there, see Smedley, The Great Road, pp. 225ff.
5. Mao may have meant that he agreed with the “line” of the CCP Sixth Congress, while reserving for himself the thought that he did not agree with the Politburo’s interpretation of it. In any case his statement to me was directly contradicted by his 1945 “Report on Some Questions in the History of Our Party,” made at the Seventh Congress of the CCP. In that long critique he identified three main mistakes of the Sixth Congress. The fundamental one was its failure to recognize that the “Chinese bourgeois democratic revolution is in essence a peasant revolution…” (SW, III, 177).
6. The Ku-t’ien Conference, called by Mao when he was convalescing from a severe illness (he was at the time reported dead by the CMT), resulted in agreements which gave Mao’s “Front Committee” political command over the entire Fourth Army. Mao’s basic theses of revolutionary strategy and aims were: principal reliance on the support of the poor peasantry; the establishment of rural soviet bases; and the development of political and military organization and tactics learned from experiences on Chingkangshan which Mao had formulated at the two conferences held at Maoping. From this time on the Politburo opposition to Mao never quite succeeded in separating Mao from army and peasant support in the rural soviets.
Chapter 6: Growth of the Red Army
1. Mao’s sons were united with him at a later date. Yang K’ai-hui reportedly was offered the choice of repudiating the Party or death; she refused to recant. See Mao An-ch’ing, Mao An-ying, BN.
2. As head of the General Front Committee, backed by army commanders Chu Teh and P’eng Teh-huai, Mao opposed the orders of the PB, headed by Li Li-san, to lead the second attack on Changsha. Mao was overruled by the Revolutionary Military Committee, and the September attack began. After a week of heavy reverses, Mao, Chu Teh, and P’eng “repudiated the Li Li-san … policy of the CC” and ordered a general retreat. See Smedley, The Great Road, pp. 278–279.
3. In Mao’s published writings one finds only a few references to the Li Li-san period—which was really only one phase of a struggle for power between the urban-based CC and the rural-based soviets where Mao won a dominant position. Mao’s laconic comment may now be supplemented, however, by much material uncovered concerning the whole series of differences (1927’35) within the Chinese leadership and between its various personalities and the Comintern under Stalin.
Generally, Mao’s disputes with Moscow-oriented PB leaders revolved around his conviction that the land-hungry poor peasants were the “main force” of the revolution and that rural bases had to be built before the metropolitan areas could be encompassed and held. Those opposed to him tended to share Stalin’s view of the peasants as primarily auxiliaries to be manipulated by the urban proletariat, the true “main force” of the revolution.
Fragments of the story may be found in the Biographical Notes about Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Ch’u Ch’iu-pai, Hsiang Chung-fa, Yang Shan-k’un, Li Li-san, Wang Ming, Po Ku, Lo Fu, Liu Shao-ch’i, Chou En-lai, Chang Kuo-t’ao, and Li Teh (Otto Braun). See also Ch’en Po-ta, to help fill out this brief summary.
From its inception the CCP accepted the discipline of a “democratic centralism” principle (acknowledged in the Party constitution) which re-required obedience to CMT directives on matters of overall strategy or “line.” Within that concept the Chinese rural soviets and Red Army “combat Communists” under Mao’s influence increasingly differed with the “dogmatists” and “theorists” trained in Moscow. It was not until January, 1935, that Mao finally won PB leadership from them when he delivered his Tsunyi critique of Po Ku, general secretary of the PB, and of Lo Fu, then chairman of a “council of commissars” of the Soviet Government. Po Ku and Otto Braun (CMT delegate) were downgraded by the revolutionary military affairs council, and the PB (under “Chairman” Mao) called for an anti-Japanese “united front,” with patriotic elements of all classes, seven months before the CMT did so. In 1936, however, Mao glossed over bitter intraparty quarrels when, in his interviews with me, he spoke of the “extraordinary ability and courage and loyalty” of such “revolutionary cadres” as Po Ku, Lo Fu, Teng Fa, Wang Ming, P’eng Teh-huai, and even Chang Kuo-t’ao. (See Appendices, p. 449.)
In 1927 Ch’en Tu-hsiu (see note 1, Chapter 5, above) had been found culpable for mistakes made by him under CMT directives. After the defeat of the Nanchang Uprising an ad hoc session (Emergency Conference) of the CC was called August 7. Held under the domination of a twenty-nine-year-old Georgian Russian CMT agent, Lominadze, the conference replaced Ch’en as general secretary with Ch’u Ch’iu-pai. New disasters then occurred at Swatow and in the December uprising in Canton. The latter was called by Stalin’s CMT “expert” on uprisings, the German agent Heinz Neumann, aged twenty-six. Meanwhile, Mao Tse-tung had been expelled from the Central Committee and the Hunan Front Committee for “deviations” during and after the August uprising in Hunan.
In July, 1928, the CCP Sixth Congress was called in Moscow, under the wing of the CMT, also then holding its own Sixth Congress. Now Ch’u Ch’iu-pai was denounced and replaced by Hsiang Chung-fa, another choice of Lom-inadze’s. Hsiang was a poorly educated Shanghai worker whom Lominadze used as a “proletarian” front man for Li Li-san, the “intellectual” who became chief of labor organization. With the backing of the CMT, Li Li-san returned to Shanghai, to find that Mao and Chu Teh were entrenched with their own peasant armed forces in rural soviets.
“The Sixth Congress recognized,” Li wrote to Mao (who had been restored to the Front Committee), “that there is a danger that the base of our Party may shift from the working class to the peasantry and that we must make every effort to restore the Party’s working-class base.”
Li’s directives obliged Mao and Chu to try to use the infant Red Army to seize large urban areas, including an attack on Nanchang and two costly attempts to take and hold Changsha (1930). Mao and Chu Teh disobeyed Li’s second order to attack Changsha. An anti-Mao clique in the Kiangsi provincial committee engaged in maneuvers to overthrow Mao. One eventual result was the Fu T’ien Incident (December, 1930), which Mao alleged was traceable to the “Li Li-san line.” A brief and bloody localized intraparty war followed, coinciding with Mao’s suppression of an “Anti-Bolshevik Corps.” A number of Communists were killed and many alleged anti-Maoists reportedly were imprisoned. Most of them were “thought-remolded”—an early Maoist technique—and released.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, the CMT had prepared a younger generation of cadres to take over the leadership of Eastern revolutions. In 1925 the CMT had set up the Sun Yat-sen University. Among hundreds who studied there, only twenty-eight Chinese consistently supported Stalin during his struggles with Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin. These were proteges of Pavel Mif, whom Stalin made director of the university and chief of the CMT Far Eastern Section, after
1927. By 1930 Mif had built them into a hard-core “professional Bolshevik” elite schooled to take over China. Once called “Stalin’s China Section” by their opponents, they later came to be known as the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks.” In 1930 their leader was a youth of twenty-four named Wang Ming (Ch’en Shao-yu), and his closest comrade was Po Ku (Ch’in Pang-hsien), aged twenty-three. Others of importance were Lo Fu (Chang Wen-t’ien), Shen Tse-min, Yang Shan-k’un, Ch’en Chang -hao, Chu Jui, Tso Ch’uan, and Teng Fa. Through the influence of the CMT they eventually exercised discipline over most of the “returned students” from Russia.
In mid-1930 Pavel Mif secretly returned to the sanctuary of the foreign-ruled International Settlement of Shanghai with Wang Ming, Po Ku, Lo Fu, Teng Fa, and other Stalinist disciples, who were introduced into the CCP CC. When they opposed Li Li-san, however, Li resisted Mif’s maneuver and he and Hsiang Chung-fa dismissed Wang Ming and others from the PB, with the support of Chou En-lai. Mif secured Li’s recall to Moscow, where Li confidently expected support from Lominadze. Unknown to him, Lominadze had become involved in a move to oust Stalin from the leadership of the CPSU and CMT. Li therefore found himself arbitrarily classified with the opposition and was silenced with it, by Stalin. He remained in disgrace and was not to return to China for some years. Although Hsiang Chung-fa remained nominal general secretary, Ch’u Ch’iu-pai was expelled from the PB and Chou En-lai retained his position only after a confession of error in supporting Li Li-san.
In July, 1936, at Pao An, Po Ku told me of Li Li-san: “His mistake was putchism. He favored armed uprisings in the cities, attempts to seize factories through armed struggle of the workers, collectivization in the soviet districts, capture of big cities by armed attack. … Basically he denied the practicability of rural soviets; he considered that the Red Army should mobilize for storming of cities. … He wanted Outer Mongolian forces to join in and support uprisings and civil war in Manchuria and North China. … His mistake was that he insisted that China was, in 1930, … the ‘center of the world revolution,’ denying the Soviet Union as that center.” Po Ku said that only he, Wang Chiahsiang, and Ho Meng-hsiung originally supported Wang Ming in his attempts to capture the PB leadership from Li Li-san (RNORC p. 16).