Revolution and Civil War, episode 11
Into the Mountains
Driven out of both Nationalist governments, the Communists turn to the gun: Zhou Enlai helps lead an army rising at Nanchang on 1 August 1927, and Mao Zedong, who tells the party that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, leads a peasant rising in Hunan that fails and takes what is left of it into the Jinggang mountains. The episode follows Mao and Zhou through the risings, the massacre after the Canton Commune and Zhu De's arrival in the mountains in April 1928, while Chiang Kai-shek resigns, goes to Japan and marries Soong Mei-ling, and asks how a beaten party found a way to survive. It leans almost entirely on scholars, with a little of the Communists' and the Nationalists' own words.
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Transcript
Last time, the alliance that had carried the Nationalist revolution from Guangzhou to the Yangtze tore itself apart. At four in the morning on 12 April 1927, Green Gang gunmen and Nationalist troops fell on the labour unions of Shanghai, and for weeks afterward Communists and anyone suspected of being one were hunted through the city. Within days Chiang Kai-shek had a government of his own at Nanjing, and it ordered the arrest of two hundred Communists, among them Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. In Hunan the killing ran into the tens of thousands, as officers, militia and secret societies took their revenge on the peasant unions. On 12 July, under pressure from Moscow, Chen Duxiu stepped down as the head of the Communist Party, and three days later Wang Jingwei, who led the rival Nationalist government at Wuhan, broke with the Communists too. By the end of July the Soviet adviser Mikhail Borodin was gone, racing across the Gobi with his wife, who had escaped a Beijing jail dressed as a nun. So as this episode opens, the Chinese Communists have been thrown out by both halves of the Nationalist party, their Soviet patron has gone home, and the men who hunt them are everywhere. What does a beaten party do when it has nowhere left to stand? This time, they reach for the gun. On the night of 31 July 1927, in the city of Nanchang in Jiangxi province, a carefully prepared Communist rising broke out among the Nationalist troops quartered there. These were units of the Nationalist Second Front Army, under the overall command of a general of the party's left, Zhang Fakui. Zhang himself took no part. Just two days earlier he had sat in a meeting of the left Nationalists where it was decided to purge the Communists from his army. The man running the rising for the party was Zhou Enlai. Zhou is one of the two people this episode follows. A young Communist who had studied in France, he had taught politics to the cadets at the Nationalist military academy, and now, at twenty nine, he headed the party's Military Committee. Zhou was, as ever, disciplined, energetic and businesslike, and at his side were the labour organiser Zhang Guotao, the peasant leader Peng Pai and others. The troops themselves were led by three commanders. He Long was an ex-bandit from western Hunan who now sympathised with the Communists and commanded a whole corps. Ye Ting was a Communist who had commanded a famous regiment. And Zhu De, a Communist officer, commanded a training regiment and the city's public security bureau. Hold on to that last name, Zhu De. We will meet him again at the end of this episode, in the mountains. The twenty thousand or so insurgents seized the city. In the Nationalist telling, the rebels declared their independence from Wuhan in the name of a Revolutionary Committee, then looted the banks and exchange offices and set whole sections of the town on fire. That is the account of their enemies, written to show the Communists at their worst, and the Communists' own side remembered the night very differently. Either way, the rebels never meant to stay. Their plan, drawn up by the party's leadership, was to march at once on Guangdong in the far south and proclaim a new revolutionary government there. On 3 August, reorganised as a new revolutionary army under He Long's overall command, they marched out of Nanchang. Zhang Fakui, technically responsible for the rebel units and embarrassed that he had been slow to expel the Communists from his armies, sent every soldier he had after them and chased them into Guangdong. The march south was hard. In late September and early October, near the port of Shantou in eastern Guangdong, where they had gone to collect arms from the Soviet Union, the rebels suffered a crushing defeat, and their army fell apart. He Long fled to Hong Kong. Ye Ting and Peng Pai escaped to a county in Guangdong to try to build a base. And Zhu De led a thousand men on a difficult march toward the border of Guangdong and Jiangxi. The Nanchang rising failed. But the Communist Party would later count its army's birthday from that night, and the first of August is still Army Day in China. At the time, though, it looked like what it was: one more defeat, and a heavy one, for the man who had planned it.
While Zhou Enlai's army marched south, Mao Zedong was stuck in Wuhan. Wuhan is three cities on the Yangtze, Hankou among them, and until July it had been the seat of the left Nationalist government. Mao is the other person this episode follows. The son of a prosperous peasant from Hunan, he had been a teacher and a student radical, and by 1927 he was the party's leading expert on the peasants, the man who had watched the peasant unions rise in his home province. He had not taken part in planning Nanchang, but once he heard of it he was eager to join, and he even proposed raising a peasant army under his own command to help He Long. The party's new leader, Qu Qiubai, appointed him to a southern Hunan committee on 3 August and then, later the same day, took the appointment back. On reflection, Mao's plan looked unrealistic. Qu Qiubai was a literary critic, and once Chen Duxiu stepped down he had been named the new head of the party. Mao was shocked by how fast it had all come apart. Only that spring, when Nationalist troops took Shanghai and Nanjing, everything had seemed possible. He had climbed the Tower of the Yellow Crane near his home in Wuhan and gazed for a long time at the flood tide of the Yangtze. The poem he wrote there ends: "Lifting the cup of wine to the pouring River, my heart's tide surges wave-high." For weeks Mao had been arguing for something nobody else wanted to hear. At a meeting of the party's leaders in Hankou on 4 July, just back from Hunan, he had suggested ordering the Hunan peasant union to go to the mountains, where it would be possible to set up a military base. As soon as the situation changes, he had warned, we will be powerless if we do not have armed forces. The leaders took up his idea of going to the mountains only as a fallback. Moscow had other plans. Stalin needed victories in China to show that he led the world Communist movement, and so the Comintern ordered uprisings. The Comintern was the Moscow headquarters that directed Communist parties around the world, and in China its envoys had the final word over the Chinese leaders. In August 1927 it sent an agent to Shanghai with three hundred thousand American dollars for the Chinese party, and Stalin approved a shipment of 15,000 guns, ten million cartridges and thirty machine guns. Stalin laid most of the blame on the Chinese party's leaders. "There is not a single Marxist mind in the Central Committee", he wrote to two of his comrades in early July. The party's leaders, still seething with anger, wanted action, however foolhardy, and by mid-August they had settled on a series of armed risings in the countryside of Hunan, Hubei, Guangdong and Jiangxi. And on 7 August they met in an extraordinary conference of the Central Committee. The place was the flat of a Soviet adviser to the Wuhan government, Mikhail Razumov, who lived with his wife in the old Russian concession of Hankou, in a quiet neighbourhood where mostly foreigners lived. It was chosen for secrecy. The flat was on the second floor of a big three-storey European house, and Mao arrived early that morning. Twenty-five people crowded into the room, which was stuffy and hot. Qu Qiubai, who ran the meeting, looked unwell. He had long suffered from tuberculosis, and when he was agitated he sprayed saliva as he spoke, so that one man recalled the room filled with "a thick mist of tuberculosis bacteria." Those present were less than a third of the party's leadership. And one man was missing on purpose. Chen Duxiu, the party's founder, was still in town, but nobody invited him. Among those who did come was a young man nobody much noticed: the new head of the Central Committee's technical secretariat, so small that at scarcely five feet he came up only to Mao's shoulder. He had worked and studied in France as a youth and then in Moscow, and on coming to Wuhan for underground work he had taken the plain, forgettable name of Deng Xiaoping. Mao probably paid him no attention. But after Mao's death, that small man would play a decisive part in the fate of Mao's great creation. The meeting opened with Moscow's envoy, Lominadze, who sharply criticised the Chinese Communists for "major errors" whose roots went "very deep." Then the Chinese had their turn, and Mao rose in support of Moscow's man. "The broad masses inside and outside the Party want revolution," he said, "yet the Party's guidance is not revolutionary". He went further: there was, he said, a hint of something counterrevolutionary about it. To his credit, he never named Chen Duxiu. None of the Chinese in the room did; only Moscow's envoy attacked the old man by name. Chen's fall was not finished. He would later be expelled from the party as a supposed follower of Trotsky, Stalin's great rival, though he had carried out the very alliance with the Nationalists that Trotsky had argued against. Then Mao said what had been worrying him most. The Communists, he said, used to scold Sun Yat-sen for running nothing but a military movement, and then they had done the opposite, running nothing but a mass movement. "From now on," he told them, "we should pay the greatest attention to military affairs. We must know that political power is obtained from the barrel of the gun." It sounds like the obvious lesson of that bloody summer. But in that room it was not obvious at all. Moscow had always taught that a revolution rests on the masses, first the factory workers and then the poor peasants, and Mao's words even sounded somewhat un-Bolshevik. Later that day Mao spoke again, for only about five minutes, and laid out what he wanted done with the land. Take everything above fifty mu, about eight acres, he said, fertile or barren. Deal with the small landlords too, since in many places there were no big ones. And treat the bandits and secret societies as brothers, because once the land revolution was carried through, the party would be able to lead them. Put plainly, he meant to build an army out of bandits, the poorest peasants and the drifting poor of the countryside, and to win them by taking land from landlords and peasants alike. Even Moscow's envoy thought that went too far. If we start to confiscate all the land, he warned, the townspeople will turn against us, and the party would not make use of the secret societies. But the criticism was friendly. Mao's childhood friend, Cai Hesen, gasping through an attack of asthma, spoke up for him as a man who had always demanded a real agrarian revolution. So Mao was elected a candidate member of a new, provisional Politburo, the small committee meant to run the party until a proper congress could meet. Zhou Enlai was voted onto it too, though he was far away with the army. Yet many of those present could not shake their reverence for the party's founder, and unknown to Moscow's envoy, Qu himself slipped round late at night to ask Chen Duxiu's advice. After the meeting Qu asked Mao to move to Shanghai and work at headquarters. Mao asked to be sent home to Hunan instead. "I don't want to go off to a big city and live there in a big hotel," he said. "It's better if I go to the countryside, climb up a mountain, and make friends with the forest brothers." Forest brothers meant outlaws, the bandit bands that lived in the hills. One of his comrades thought Mao ran a great risk in volunteering for Hunan. Most of the party's leaders had no wish to go anywhere near it. On 9 August Qu sent him there as the Central Committee's special representative, to organise what was to be called the Autumn Harvest Uprising.
Mao was not the only one leaving the stage that August. Chiang Kai-shek, too, was about to walk away. Chiang had led the Nationalist army north from Guangzhou the summer before, and in April he had broken the Communists in Shanghai. But in the summer of 1927 his campaign north of the Yangtze went badly wrong. A northern warlord's army beat the Nationalists at the railway city of Xuzhou, and Chiang insisted on leading the counterattack himself. It failed miserably, and several corps fell back all the way to the north bank of the Yangtze. On 5 August Chiang got back to Nanjing unshaven and unbathed, furious at the defeat. He ordered the forward commander executed, a punishment he usually kept for officers who retreated without orders, and in private he wrote that one reason for the failure was that he had underestimated the enemy. Now he faced enemies on every side. Wang Jingwei's government at Wuhan had broken with the Communists too, so in principle the two Nationalist governments could make up. But when Chiang sent emissaries proposing a reconciliation, Wang refused any settlement until Chiang resigned. Chiang sent for Li Zongren, the general from Guangxi province whose troops now counted for more around Nanjing than his own, and told him he had decided to step down. Li begged him to reconsider. Without Chiang, Li feared, the Nanjing camp might break into warring factions, Wang could not hold the party together, and the march north would sputter out. In the Nationalist account written by a man of Wang's camp, it was the other way round: Li and his fellow Guangxi general Bai Chongxi, knowing Chiang was the man Wuhan hated, pushed him out in the hope that the talks would go more smoothly. Whoever pushed, on 12 August 1927 Chiang handed in his resignation, calling on the party to unite and finish the capture of North China and Beijing. "Comrades in Wuhan," he implored, "Why do you hesitate?" Then he cleaned out his desk and took a warship down the Yangtze to Shanghai. From there, with a bodyguard of two hundred men, he went home to his village of Xikou and walked up the steep trail to the Xuedou monastery. He rose at five each morning to the chanting of the monks and the beating of the temple drums, and he read and meditated. Dressed in a traditional long grey gown, he told two American reporters that he planned to spend the next five years abroad, studying the customs of the other great nations of the world. Chinese reporters sent the picture to every major city: the benevolent, principled general in self-exile, sitting among pious monks on a mountaintop. It was a lovely picture. It was also, very probably, theatre. His resignation was a ploy to show that he could not be done without. And it worked. Without him the Nationalist party was starved of money and could not find new leaders. The money mattered most. Since the spring, Chiang had raised funds from Shanghai's businessmen by having his Green Gang allies arrest or simply kidnap leading bankers, and by issuing bonds they were required to buy. The American consul called it "a veritable reign of terror among the money classes", and perhaps fifty million yuan was raised that way for the march north. With Chiang gone, the Shanghai bankers were no longer under pressure from the Green Gang to lend and give, and the Nanjing government ran short of money at once. Chiang expected to be called back. But to win the moral high ground he had put himself in a position he could not fully control. And he did not spend his exile meditating. He went to Japan. There, he told Japan's prime minister, Tanaka Giichi, that he meant to reassert China's sovereignty over all its lands, Manchuria included. Tanaka urged him to stay south of the Yangtze and keep out of the north, which Japan regarded as its own sphere. Chiang asked instead that Japan not interfere with his march north, and even help it. Remember that conversation. We will come back to it next time. And while still out of office, he welcomed a military adviser he had sought from Germany, Max Bauer, once chief of operations for the German general Erich Ludendorff. Over the next ten years Bauer and forty-six other German officers would draw up plans to modernise Chiang's army. But Chiang had not gone to Japan for the prime minister. He had gone to court a woman.
Mao reached Changsha, the capital of Hunan, on 12 August. He found the city in the grip of Xu Kexiang, the officer whose bloody coup had broken the peasant unions. Xu was busy rooting out Communism. Of three thousand members of the local party organisation, no more than a hundred were still alive. Many years later Xu would still say that there was only one way to deal with the Communists: "force is the only thing they understand and of which they are really afraid." Mao had no time to feel his way. He also had a family. His wife, Yang Kaihui, was the daughter of a respected teacher, Yang Changji, and they had three sons. Mao went first to the village where she and the children were living, and stayed longer than he should have. When he came back to Changsha his wife, the boys and their old nanny came with him. This time she did not want to let him go alone. They all settled into her father's old house. The party's leaders had planned a rising against the landlords at harvest time, and Mao had taken part in the planning. The plan was for poor peasants to rise just when, in theory, tenants had to settle their accounts with their landlords, and the party hoped to win them with a simple idea: stop paying your debts. Mao wanted more. He told the Hunan committee to take all the land, even from small landlords and peasant owners, and share it out, though he knew that most peasants were not demanding land at all. The party's leaders turned his land plan down again, and only when they insisted did Mao and his supporters give way, and then only on paper. At the end of August the Hunan committee settled its plan. The main blow would fall in the middle of the province, by a peasant army whose remnants were hiding east of Changsha, a regiment of Nationalist troops commanded by a party member, and jobless miners from the Anyuan coal mines. Its slogans were simple: "Execute local reactionaries, confiscate their property, burn down their houses, and destroy traffic and communication services." And the main goal was to seize Changsha. Most of the Communists, schooled in the Russian example, could not imagine a revolution without a city. Did Mao himself want to attack the provincial capital? Most probably not. By one of his comrades' memories he pressed to keep the rising small. He had long since understood that this phase of the revolution had failed, and that it was time to gather what forces remained and head for the hills. But he had to obey. At dawn on 31 August Mao left Changsha for the border country between Hunan and Jiangxi, where the rising was to begin. In a rush, he embraced his wife. They agreed that she, the children and the nanny would go back to her mother's village. Before they parted she gave him a new pair of straw sandals and asked him to look after himself. She was worried. A few days earlier Mao had hurt his leg, and he was still limping. She did not go with him to the station. A young cousin of hers walked him there instead. They would never see each other again. For a while she and the boys lived in comparative safety in her old village, protected by her respected clan. No local official or officer dared touch the daughter of Yang Changji. She had little money, and now and then a remittance came from Mao's brother in Shanghai. On the train Mao went first to the town of Zhuzhou, south of Changsha, where the local Communists were to open the rising by blowing up a railway bridge over the Xiang River. Then at a village near Anyuan the activists formed the First Division of the First Corps of the Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Army, about five thousand men. Mao, overflowing with heroic feelings, set off to tell the rebel soldiers and peasants of one of its regiments the news. He was writing poetry in his head. "When we gather the harvest, autumn clouds will thicken," ran one line, "thunderbolts will herald the uprising." Then, on the road, a patrol of local militia stopped him and the county party secretary. Militia like these, the village self-defence corps, had fought on the side of the white terror. The militiamen had no idea whom they had caught, but they decided to take the two men to their chief. With the white terror still raging, they might simply be shot. Years later, Mao told the story to an American journalist. He was ordered to be taken to the militia headquarters to be killed, he said. He borrowed several tens of dollars from a comrade and tried to bribe the escort to free him. The ordinary soldiers were hired men with no special interest in seeing him dead, and they agreed. But the officer in charge refused. "I therefore decided to attempt to escape," Mao recalled, but he had no chance until he was within about two hundred yards of the militia headquarters. "At that point I broke loose and ran into the fields." He reached a high place above a pond, ringed with tall grass, and hid there until sunset. The soldiers came after him and forced some peasants to help them search. "Many times they came very near," he said, "once or twice so close that I could almost have touched them". Half a dozen times he gave up hope. But at dusk they abandoned the search. He set off at once across the mountains and walked all night with no shoes, his feet badly bruised. A peasant on the road befriended him, sheltered him and guided him to the next district. He had seven dollars, and he spent them on shoes, an umbrella and food. "When at last I reached the peasant guards safely, I had only two coppers in my pocket." That, at least, is how Mao told it. The rising itself began on 9 September. It ended, as anyone could have expected, in a crushing defeat. The rebel bands, army deserters, village militiamen, bandits and the unemployed, killed local officials and landlords and attacked a number of towns. But neither the peasants nor the demoralised railway workers and miners lifted a finger to help the rebel soldiers. "The peasants did not rise up, as their leaders lacked determination," the Hunan party secretary, Peng Gongda, wrote. By the middle of September provincial troops had all but destroyed the ragged Communist forces. On 15 September Mao and the Hunan committee decided, on their own authority, not to attack the provincial capital. Going on promised nothing but more dead. It was time to retreat, and not play at being heroes. The attempt on Changsha had only lost more men and more support. Moscow's man in Changsha, the Soviet consul, did not see it that way. He called the committee's inaction an "exceptionally shameful betrayal and cowardice", and said the rising could have succeeded had Peng and Mao not shown a "monstrous example of Chinese-style philistinism." Mao was already gone.
Mao gathered what was left of his men in a small town, Wenjiashi, about sixty miles east of Changsha. There he told them that they would strike south along the border of Hunan and Jiangxi, toward the high mountains of Jinggang. The name means wells and ridges. It was a wild massif in the Luoxiao range, about two hundred kilometres south of Changsha, astride the provincial border. Peaks jutted into the sky, precipices plunged straight down, and for a long time it had been a refuge for rebels and bandits. Mao thought it "an excellent base for a mobile army." On 21 September the fifteen hundred exhausted fighters who were all that remained of the First Division set out, with red ribbons tied round their necks as the sign of rebellion. "Discipline was poor," Mao remembered. "There were many desertions". A soldier in the ranks recalled fevers, marching in the hottest time of the year, and no base to rest in. Not until 27 October did they reach Ciping, the main settlement of the Jinggang region, having lost a third of their men on the way. They stopped in a wide valley criss-crossed with rice paddies, at the foot of a 5,700-foot peak called Five Peaks Mountain, with evergreen slopes all around them. This was poor country, far from any provincial government, where people lived by their own laws. In the mountains, Mao wrote later, the economy was still in the age of the mortar and pestle: people hulled their rice by hand, and only down in the valleys were there hand mills. And the mountains already had rulers. Two outlaw chiefs, Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo, held the region. Their six hundred cutthroats, armed with ancient pistols, rifles and swords, dominated a whole county of a hundred and fifty thousand people. Both men came from poor Hakka clans whose ancestors had arrived from Guangdong or Fujian after the fertile valleys were already taken. The Hakka were Chinese whose ancestors had migrated south over the centuries, speaking their own dialect, and in many places the older settlers treated them as outsiders. Though Yuan and Wang were born in Jinggang, the valley people never counted them as natives, and treated families like theirs with contempt. So as young men they had joined a bandit band of outsiders like themselves, the Sword Society, risen to lead it, and taken tribute from the valleys. They beheaded those who resisted and displayed the skulls on poles. Mao, before he could live in the mountains, had to make friends with them. In early October he sent Yuan Wencai a respectful letter proposing a meeting, and offered him a hundred rifles as a mark of respect, if Yuan would let him settle there. Yuan had only sixty decrepit rifles of his own. He could hardly say no. But his pride would not let him take the guns without paying, and when they met he gave Mao a thousand silver yuan. Custom demanded that a host repay tribute many times over, or lose face. Mao understood that, and his simple, courteous manner pleased the bandit. Yuan was so flattered to be courted by one of the leaders of the Communist Party that he told Mao he had joined the party himself the year before. There was no way to know whether that was true, and Mao pretended to believe it. Through Yuan, Mao made friends with Wang Zuo too, and gave him seventy rifles and plenty of ammunition. The poorly educated Wang was dazzled by Mao's learning. "Commissar Mao is the most educated man," he said. "Just speak with him once and you get the feeling that you spent ten years doing nothing but reading books!" Since Mao was five years older than either of them, they called him Mao dage, Elder Brother Mao. According to custom, the new brotherhood was sealed with wine and roast pork. Mao later boasted that he had become king of the mountain. It was not all brotherly. Mao's soldiers and the bandits clashed, and the suspicious Wang Zuo worried aloud to Yuan. "What if Mao robs us of our power," he said. "He will swallow us and not even notice." So Yuan found a way to tie Mao to them. He introduced Mao to an eighteen-year-old woman in his band, He Zizhen, the sister of an old friend, as an interpreter of the local dialect. She had joined the Communist Party at sixteen, she was well read, and Wang Zuo had given her a pistol. She knew Mao was married and had three sons, because he had told her so himself. In the early spring of 1928 he asked her to help him with some manuscripts, and from then on they lived together. At the end of May there was a kind of wedding, with Yuan Wencai as matchmaker, sweets and nuts and tea. Yang Kaihui, back in her old village, was still alive. When she heard, the blow was so hard that she thought of killing herself, and probably would have but for the children. Up in the mountains, Mao began to build a government. A month after he arrived he set up an assembly of worker, peasant and soldier deputies and a people's government beside it. He did not yet use the word soviet, but that is what they were. Soviet is the Russian word for council, and to Communists it meant a government of workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils on the Russian model. It was hard going. Many of his soldiers, Mao included, could not understand the local dialect, and the people of the valleys were often hostile to their uninvited guests. The land revolution came at gunpoint. Redistribution only began after Red Army soldiers had shot several local people, and most of the valley's native peasants fled, terrified that the Hakka, with the Red Army behind them, would kill them all. Most of the native peasants, Mao reported, had "defected, put on white ribbons, and led the army to burn down houses and comb the mountains". The markets shut, and salt, cloth and medicine all but disappeared. Every soldier needed a few coins a day for food, and the only money came from seizing it from the local rich, which, as Mao admitted, can be done only once in a given place. So terror became the means of survival. Mao wrote that the strategy now was to "massacre the landlords and the despotic gentry as well as their running dogs without the slightest compunction", and to frighten the rich peasants with the Red terror. Red execution teams raided the villages by night. And Mao made a virtue of the men he had. The army should be made of peasants and workers, he told the Central Committee, but they were not to be had, and when fighting is going on every day, the drifting poor and the bandits are "after all especially good fighters." Far away in Shanghai, the party's leaders did not like what they heard of Mao's army. And in November, they punished him.
Before we follow that punishment into the mountains, let us go back to Chiang Kai-shek, who had gone to Japan to court a woman. Her name was Soong Mei-ling. She was a daughter of Charlie Soong, a well-heeled Shanghai merchant who had backed Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Nationalist party, since the revolution of 1911. Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Ching-ling, was Mei-ling's older sister. Mei-ling had been educated in America, at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and she spoke fluent English. Chiang had first proposed to her in 1920, as he was beginning to rise in the party, and she had turned him down. He seemed undistinguished then, he had little small talk, and he was already married. By 1927 he was the strongest man in the party, and the two had been writing to each other for a year. This time she was pleased to accept. She was twenty nine, a worrying age for an unmarried Chinese woman of the day. Her mother was not pleased. One of her daughters had already run off to marry a divorced party leader decades older, and at least Sun Yat-sen had been well educated and a Christian. Chiang was neither. Worse, he had been married at least once and had kept several concubines. In his diary there was little about Mei-ling that summer. Then, on 1 October 1927, he wrote that night and day there was nothing in his heart but her. In late September he had put aside his monk's gown, come down from the mountain and sailed to Shanghai, telling reporters his only purpose was to win her family's consent. But Madame Soong was at a health resort in Japan, with Mei-ling and her older sister. Chiang caught up with her in the city of Kamakura, declared his intentions and showed papers proving his divorce from his first wife. Mei-ling had set two conditions: that he get a divorce, and that he agree to study the Bible and think about becoming a Christian. He promised her mother that he would read the Bible and study Christianity, but said he could not guarantee he would convert. Madame Soong finally agreed. There remained his other women. Chiang told the press that he had "paid off" Chen Jieru, as he had an earlier concubine. Chen Jieru was a young woman who had lived with Chiang for some years. On 1 December 1927, Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling were married in what was Shanghai's social event of the year. First came a small Christian ceremony in the Soong home in the French Concession, then a Chinese ceremony in the grand ballroom of the Majestic Hotel. The bride wore a beaded gown of silver and white, and the groom wore a morning coat and tails, striped trousers and a wing collar. The couple bowed three times to a portrait of Sun Yat-sen draped in Nationalist flags. Then Chiang read a statement declaring, grandly, that the wedding was "a symbol of the reconstruction of Chinese society". A tea party for several thousand guests followed, and then the couple left for their honeymoon at a borrowed villa in the mountains of Zhejiang. What had Chiang gained? A family tie to Sun Yat-sen, for one thing. Access to the money sense of his new in-laws, for another. Mei-ling's brother, the Harvard-educated T. V. Soong, would soon be his minister of finance. And a wife who spoke perfect English and could speak for him to the foreigners. For the rest of his life, diplomats who called on the Generalissimo would find themselves dealing with Madame Chiang as well. She was everything he was not. He was shy, stuffy and humourless, and went to bed early and rose before dawn; she was talkative and easygoing, read and wrote until midnight, liked Western music and cigarettes, and was by all accounts a devout Methodist. She kept a full-time tailor who made her a new dress every three or four days, and she sometimes travelled with an entourage of sixty or more. Here the sources disagree. To Chiang's rivals on the Nationalist left, the wedding was a cold political move. T'ang Leang-li, a writer of the Nationalist left, wrote that Chiang aspired to the presidency of the party and of the republic, "to the undivided succession" of Sun's heritage, and that this "matrimonial alliance" was his first step, for which he had to turn Christian and send his third wife away. In that telling, Chiang hired the biggest hotel in Shanghai, invited every foreign dignitary he could find, the commander of the British troops in Shanghai among them, and spent "some hundred thousand dollars on the show." But others close to the couple saw something real. Mei-ling's sister Soong Ching-ling, who disliked Chiang, said the marriage became a love match. Mei-ling called him Darling, and he picked flowers for her and held her hand in public, which shocked most Chinese who saw it. Politics or love, it was probably some of both, and the politics came due at once. Chiang, who had officially resigned, was called back urgently from his honeymoon. A flurry of cables from warlord and academy officers called on him to take up his office again. In Shanghai, the leaders of the quarrelling Nationalist factions had gathered for preliminary meetings, and on 10 December Wang Jingwei himself moved that Chiang be urged to resume command of the army and carry on the march north. Wang's motion was carried unanimously, and Wang announced his own resignation. At the same meeting Chiang proposed breaking off relations with Russia, saying the Russian consulates had become centres of Communist intrigue. Wang at first wanted more evidence. He had already ordered a search of the Russian consulate in Guangzhou, and he was waiting for the report. Before that search could be made, events overtook it.
The next day, Guangzhou rose. Guangzhou, the great port of the south, was where the Nationalist revolution had begun. That winter the city was in the hands of Zhang Fakui, the general whose troops had mutinied at Nanchang in August. Zhang commanded the Nationalist army there, with Chen Gongbo, a leader of the party's left, beside him. Both men belonged to Wang Jingwei's wing of the party. The Comintern had sent a new envoy to prepare the rising, a German Communist named Heinz Neumann, who came to Guangzhou by way of Hong Kong. The plan was to strike on 15 December. But while Zhang and Chen were working out how to carry out Wang's order to search the Soviet consulate, word that the Communists were about to be arrested leaked out, and to avoid arrest the Communists decided to act at once. They struck on 11 December. In the Nationalist account, they had only one regiment of 1,100 men, a specially trained unit of the army. They armed the rickshaw pullers, opened the prisons and gave the prisoners weapons. Communist soldiers and workers seized the city and declared a soviet, a Communist government of their own. Perhaps 20,000 workers fought for it, a small share of the city's people. On the second day some eight hundred bandits arrived to join them, stayed eight hours, plundered the banks and exchange offices, and left with what they had come for. Zhang Fakui's main army was away, campaigning in the west and south of the province against a rival Guangxi general. So Zhang and Chen Gongbo fled across the river to an island, where a friendly commander lent them his troops and his gunboats patrolled the water. They ordered every unit in the south and west to march on the city. There was heavy fighting on the twelfth and thirteenth. On 14 December, Zhang Fakui's troops took Guangzhou back. The Guangzhou soviet had lasted about sixty hours. In the fighting the rebels had set fires at ten different points, and whole streets burned. And then came the reckoning. Many of the rebels were arrested and executed on the spot. The same Nationalist writer put it this way: "The anger of the population against them was beyond measure, and no doubt in the quelling of the rebellion many innocent persons were sacrificed." Many innocent persons is a mild phrase for what happened. Guangzhou's own white terror lasted five days and slaughtered about six thousand people. For two years afterward the arrests, torture and executions of anyone linked to the soviet went on. Among the dead was Zhang Tailei, who had once interpreted for Borodin. Afterward Zhang Fakui and Chen Gongbo offered themselves to the local political council for punishment, taking full responsibility for the rising. But Guangzhou was in chaos, and when the rival Guangxi general attacked the city in turn, they fled. In Shanghai the rising became a weapon in the Nationalists' own quarrel. The Guangxi generals and the party's right had been whispering that Wang's left wing were Communists in disguise. When news came that Zhang Fakui had driven the Communists out, that story died, so they found a new one: Wang, they said, had knowingly let the rising happen. The commander of the Shanghai garrison had even asked the foreign settlements to hand over left-wing members of the party's Central Executive Committee as Communists, and the settlement police paid some of them a visit. On 17 December Wang Jingwei sailed from Shanghai for France. The next month Chiang rode back to Nanjing in an armoured train with his new bride, and five days later he was commander in chief of the Northern Expedition once more. With new prestige and power in hand, he admonished himself to be "tolerant and magnanimous." For the Communist Party, the year ended in ruin. The white terror and the party's own reckless risings had cost it about four-fifths of its members, from almost 58,000 down to about ten thousand. One of the party's leaders, Deng Zhongxia, insisted afterward that "one might say that the numbers were too few, but not that there were no masses." It was a brave thing to say. But the Communists who were still alive at the end of that year were learning a different lesson. The key to the party's survival was turning out to be in the field, not at party headquarters.
The Communists' headquarters, for its part, had moved back to Shanghai, where the leaders lived deep underground. In September Stalin had finally decided that the Chinese Communists should leave the Nationalist party altogether and fight to set up soviets in China. And now the leaders in Shanghai turned on the man who had refused to attack Changsha. At a meeting held from 7 to 14 November 1927, with two envoys from Moscow presiding, they looked for scapegoats for the failed risings. Mao was dismissed as a candidate member of the Politburo, and the Hunan committee was blamed for military opportunism, for trusting soldiers instead of the peasant masses. Around the Central Committee, Mao's name became an insult. They spoke of Mao Zedongism as another word for military opportunism. On 31 December the leaders in Shanghai demanded that Mao be removed as head of his own front committee. And the sharpest voice against him belonged to the other man this episode has followed, Zhou Enlai. Zhou, the usually restrained secretary of the party's Military Committee, was particularly scornful, perhaps because he himself had led the failed rising at Nanchang. "Mao's troops are just bandits who roam here and there," Zhou said. Such leaders, he added, do not believe in the strength of the popular masses. An agent of the Comintern in Shanghai reported the same to Moscow: part of this army, he wrote, is "semi-bandit in its origins, for example Mao Zedong's units," and such armies leave the peasants to pay for their attacks. News travelled slowly to the mountains. Mao learned of his dismissal only four months later, in early March 1928, when a special envoy from the party's southern Hunan committee, a self-assured young man named Zhou Lu, arrived in Jinggang. Zhou Lu, trying to destroy Mao altogether, told him the Central Committee had expelled him from the party. It was a bald lie, but Mao had no way to check it. Zhou Lu stripped him of all his party work and demoted him to commander of the First Division, and he dissolved Mao's front committee. As a commander outside the party, Mao could decide nothing at all, since only the party could lead. Zhou Lu handed party authority in the division to a twenty-two-year-old regimental commissar, expecting him to be putty in his hands. He was wrong. The young man had marched with Mao from the Autumn Harvest rising to Jinggang, and he treated Mao as the leader he was. Zhou Lu then ordered Mao's men out of the mountains into southern Hunan, to support a peasant movement there. Mao obeyed. He did not feel strong enough to defy the party's envoy openly. There was no peasant movement in Hunan. But in eastern Hunan, Mao heard a rumour that changed everything: Zhu De's troops were on the move, coming toward the edge of the Jinggang mountains. Remember Zhu De, the officer at Nanchang, last seen leading a thousand men toward the border of Guangdong and Jiangxi? Mao had wanted to join forces with him since December. Zhu De was a professional soldier and a long-time party member, and he now commanded a strong force of more than two thousand soldiers. He had come a long way to get there. Zhu was born to a peasant family in Sichuan so poor that his father, unable to feed them, drowned five of his own children in a pond. "I loved my mother, but feared and hated my father," Zhu later told an American journalist. A well-to-do relative took him in at six, and he got a good education. At twenty three he entered the Yunnan Military Academy, joined Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary society, fought in the revolution of 1911 against the Qing dynasty, and rose to command a brigade for one of the Yunnan warlords. By 1921 he was police commissioner of Yunnan province, with several wives and concubines and a palatial house. An American writer who came to know him summed up that life: "He had, in fact, only one really bad habit, but it was to prove his downfall. He liked to read books." He read his way to Bolshevism, gave everything up and went to Europe, first France and then Germany, where he studied military science. And in Europe he met Zhou Enlai, who persuaded him to join the Communist Party in October 1922. So Zhou Enlai, who now called Mao's army a band of roaming bandits, had himself recruited the soldier who was marching to join Mao. In 1925 he went on to Moscow, studied under the name Danilov, passed through a secret Soviet military school, and came home in 1926 to march north with the Nationalists and help his old friend Zhou organise the rising at Nanchang. The two men met on 21 or 22 April 1928, in the hamlet of Linxian, west of Jinggang. After three or four days their forces were completely merged and given the name of the Fourth Corps of the Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Army. In June the Central Committee renamed it the Red Army. Zhu De, just seven years older than Mao, was the perfect partner. He was physically strong, he loved to play basketball, and he slept beside his soldiers on the damp ground. He dressed and lived plainly, and everyone who knew him remarked on his modesty. Above all, he had no political ambition. Zhu accepted Mao's lead in everything political, and Mao, at first, did not argue with Zhu on military matters. And from Zhu, Mao learned that nobody had expelled him from the party. Soon word came that he had been named secretary of a new party committee for the whole border region. Once again, all political and military power in Jinggang was in his hands. As for Zhou Lu, he was captured by the Nationalists and executed. Their army was, in one description, "a band of soldiers, bandits, robbers, beggars, and prostitutes". Their aim, as Mao put it, was "to divide the land, and to establish Soviets." And they worked out a way of fighting that a weak army could survive. "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." Life in the mountains stayed hard. Rice was a delicacy, and the men ate mostly pumpkin and squash. By late summer the Red Army was even winning small victories, and when it routed a Nationalist regiment at Huangyang Pass, Mao wrote: "A thousand circles of the enemy around us: We will stand unmoved." But some peasants in the hills came to believe that a figure called Zhu-Mao, who gave them land, was destined to hold the Mandate of Heaven. The Mandate of Heaven was the old Chinese idea that Heaven grants the right to rule to a worthy dynasty and takes it away from an unworthy one. They were not alone. In the wake of the white terror about a dozen small soviets took root in the no-man's-lands of mountainous provincial borders, the same remote country where bandits had long fled beyond the reach of imperial armies. In all, some 300 of China's 1,800 counties came under some degree of Communist influence, though most of the people in them remained beyond it. Moscow's money kept coming, too: from August 1927 to the end of 1928, the Soviets gave the Chinese Communists about 1.8 million Chinese dollars. And Chiang gave them time. Zhang Guotao, one of the party's leaders, later judged that the main reason the bases grew was that Chiang was busy fighting the warlords, in wars that left wandering bands of beaten soldiers easy to recruit. The party's leaders feared these rural bases would sink into mere banditry. But with nowhere else to turn, the party had to shift from the cities and the workers to the countryside and the peasants. That is how a beaten party survived: not in Shanghai, but in the hills, with a gun. And down on the plains, Chiang Kai-shek, back in command, with a new wife and new money, was turning north to finish his march on Beijing. Next time, Chiang finds the Japanese army camped across his road at the city of Jinan, and in Manchuria a train blows up with a warlord inside it.
Sources
- Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 183-185, 185-186, 186-188, 189-190, 190-191, 191-193, 193-194, 194-196, 197-198, 199-201, 201-202, 202-203, 203-204, 204-206, 206-207, 209-210, 210-211, 212-214
- Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 66-68, 70-72, 72-73, 73-74, 74-77, 77-78, 86-88, 88-90
- Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 238-239, 241-242, 242-243, 274-275, 278-279, 328-329
- Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)
- T'ang Leang-li, The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution (1930), pp. 287-288, 290-292, 316-318, 318-320, 344-346, 370-372, https://archive.org/details/innerhistoryofch0000unse