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Revolution and Civil War, episode 13

The Red Republic

From 1929 Mao Zedong builds a Communist state in the hills of Jiangxi, some thirty counties and perhaps two million people, and beats off the armies Chiang Kai-shek sends to destroy it. The episode follows Mao through the price of that state, his wife Yang Kaihui executed in Changsha and his own purge of local Communists that ends in a massacre at Futian, through the founding of the Chinese Soviet Republic, to the party's new leaders who move into the base and condemn him at Ningdu in 1932, attacking Zhou Enlai as too soft on him; it gives real time to Futian and what it shows about Mao. It leans almost entirely on scholars, with a few of the Communists' own documents.

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Jiangxi Yeping Town
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Red Army Jinggang Mountains Ruijin Red Army
To Ruijin. Map drawn by Then and There from the episode's sources, on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines and rivers
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong. Chen Zhengqing (1917–1966), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, Chiang Kai-shek fought a war against his own generals and against his old rival in the party, Wang Jingwei, and won it. It was a costly war. In 1930 his enemies put six hundred thousand armed men in the field against him, and by the end some 240,000 men had been killed or wounded on both sides. Chiang's Central Army, with German-trained troops fighting for the first time, came out on top, and four years of fighting had made him a commander people had to take seriously. So by the end of 1930 the man who led the Nationalists, the Kuomintang, ruled from Nanjing over a country that was, at least on paper, united. But there was one enemy he had not yet dealt with, and it was not a general with a province. It was a small band of Communists in the hills of the south, who had been beaten so badly three years before that most people had stopped counting them. This episode is about them, and about the strange little state they built. We'll follow two men through it. One is the Communist who built that state. The other is the party man who was sent to take it out of his hands. The question hanging over it is a simple one. How does a party that has been all but wiped out in the cities survive at all, in the poorest hills of the south, with the government's armies coming at it year after year? And what does surviving cost, and who pays? Let me introduce the man at the centre of it, because the whole season turns on him. Mao Zedong was a Hunanese, the son of a farming family, who had studied in the provincial capital, Changsha, and come out of it a schoolteacher and a radical. In 1920 he decided that the Russian road, Bolshevism, was the one for China, and the next year he was one of the handful of men who founded the Chinese Communist Party. In 1927 the party's alliance with the Nationalists ended in a massacre, as Chiang turned on his Communist partners and many thousands were killed in a few days. At an emergency meeting of the party's leaders that August, Mao told his comrades something that sounded almost heretical for a Marxist: from now on they had to pay the greatest attention to military affairs, because political power is obtained from the barrel of the gun. He added a jab at his own party's leaders, who had ignored his reports from the countryside: he could not help wondering, he said, whether the leadership was counter-revolutionary, since the masses wanted to make revolution and the leaders did not. He was ordered to lead the peasants of Hunan in an attack on Changsha, and the attempt failed, and lost the party still more men and support. From then on Mao resisted, as best he could, every plan that came down to him from the party's leaders in the cities. That is worth remembering, because the whole of this episode is in that sentence. Late in 1927, like others in his position, Mao simply fled from the Nationalists, up to the Jinggang mountains, an isolated place about two hundred kilometres south of Changsha, on the border of Hunan and Jiangxi. In April 1928 a commander named Zhu De came over the hills with more than two thousand soldiers, and their two forces merged. Zhu recognised Mao's lead in politics, and Mao, at first, did not dispute Zhu on military matters. Chiang called them bandits, and he went on calling the Communists bandits to the end of his days. And there was something in it. The Communists recruited real bandits from the hills, and both bands did the same thing: they used armed gangs of poor men to swoop down on rich families and towns. It was hardly a happy marriage. Many bandits would not accept discipline, and once the fighting calmed down, the Communists executed them. But a bandit who could be remade into a disciplined soldier made a fine one, brave and used to hardship, and after all, he had come from the peasantry, not the landlords. Mao himself reported to the party that when there was fighting every day, these declassed men, the drifters and outlaws, were especially good fighters, and could not be done without. In the Jinggang mountains Mao had sealed an alliance with two outlaw chiefs, Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo, who had taken him in. In 1930, after Mao had moved on, both of them were killed by Communist troops. The party's leaders had a worry of their own: that the bandits might convert the Communists, rather than the other way round. Some peasants came to believe that a certain Zhu-Mao, who gave them land, was destined to hold the Mandate of Heaven. The Mandate of Heaven was the old idea that heaven grants the right to rule to a worthy dynasty and takes it away from an unworthy one. Notice that they thought Zhu-Mao was one man. How small was this movement? In the mountains between Jiangxi and Fujian, where the biggest Communist base would grow, Mao at first headed a force of only about fifteen hundred soldiers. And by 1930, across the whole of China, Communist power had shrunk to a few small bases in the countryside of the south and centre. But a bandit band moves on to escape pursuit and find new victims, and that was not what Mao wanted. What a rural Communist movement needed was a stable base. In January 1929, with Nationalist troops closing on the mountains, Mao and Zhu De took their men out of the Jinggang range and headed south and east. It was a bad few months. Pursued, the Red Army turned sharply north, then east, then south again, attacking small towns along the way. The hill country they came to was desperately poor: half-starved tenant farmers made up more than seventy percent of the people. And then, just as he was finding his ground, Mao nearly gave up. In 1929 Zhu De, his partner, unexpectedly complained that Mao was meddling in every detail of how the troops were run. A self-assured young man of thirty, just back from training in Moscow, waded into the quarrel and went after Mao viciously. He accused Mao of running the army's party branch as a patriarchal system, as if it were his family. By the middle of June 1929 the fight had grown so bitter that Mao announced he was resigning from the army's leading party committee. On 14 June he wrote to the party's leaders asking to be sent away. In his words, he was too weak physically and too poor in wisdom and knowledge, and he hoped the Central Committee could send him to Moscow to study and rest for a while. From June until November 1929, Mao was deeply depressed. He climbed out of it only when he learned that Moscow approved of his position. As for the young man from Moscow who had gone for him, he was mortally wounded in battle that October. Mao came back with a new confidence, and he came back to land. To understand why land mattered so much, you have to see what the Communists found when they counted it. Their first village surveys found that landlords and rich peasants, about ten percent of the people, owned about half the land. Another fifth was so-called public land, such as temple fields, often run by the landlords themselves. That left the poor and middle peasants, ninety percent of the population, with about thirty percent of the land, and in some places sharecropping rents ran as high as sixty percent of the harvest. A sharecropper farmed someone else's land and paid the owner with a share of the crop. The Communists sorted every family into a class: landlords, who lived off rents without working; rich peasants, who worked but hired labour; middle peasants, who had just enough; poor peasants, who had to rent or hire themselves out; and farm labourers, who owned nothing. Mao kept it simpler than that. A landlord, he declared, is a person who owns land. On paper, one thing had already been softened. The line about confiscating all land was replaced, and only public land and the landlords' land were to be taken. But it kept the ban on buying and selling land. On 7 February 1930, buoyed by the support from Moscow, Mao issued a new land law, the third of its kind. It kept the rule of equal shares: the land would be pooled and divided by the number of mouths in each family. Mao's own phrase for it was drawing on the plentiful to make up for the scarce. By May 1930, in one county, Xunwu, eighty percent of the land had already been redistributed. One report from the time describes what came first. Deeds, land titles, debt registers and tax rolls, it said, "all were completely burned". The old tax offices were destroyed, and the tax collectors killed. So that is the base, and here is how it grew. Mao led the Red Army east to the hill country on the border between Jiangxi and Fujian, around a town called Ruijin. It was still remote, but a little more hospitable than the mountains, and here the Communists stopped being a lair and became a government. Here, over the next five years, they tried out the mix that would keep them alive: guerrilla war fought by peasants, land reform to win the villages over, a professional army, and a willingness to leave the cities to their enemies for as long as it took. From late 1929 to late 1934 Mao built what the party called a revolutionary base area, which in the end covered more than thirty counties and perhaps two million people in southwestern Jiangxi and western Fujian. One of the first things the Communists did there was build a real army, and Zhu De, a former warlord commander who had trained in Germany, took the lead in training it. Zhu had been brought into the party years before, while both men were in Europe, by another young Chinese radical named Zhou Enlai, of whom more later. Now, it would be easy to tell this as the story of Mao bringing communism to the hills. He did not. Radical young men from the region, educated in the towns, had already brought it in the 1920s, many of them coming home to teach in the new schools. Mao's army protected these local radicals from the landlords and the Nationalists, but they did not necessarily agree with all of his policies. Hold on to that. What the Communists learned in Jiangxi came down to four lessons. First, they needed an army as well trained and armed as they could make it, though in the end politics mattered more than guns. Second, they needed a safe base, because no peasant would take the risk of helping them otherwise; and a base meant farming country, in remote and hard terrain, not a military camp. Third, the poorest peasants alone were not enough to hold a government up, because it rested on the middle peasants too, which made the most radical land policies self-defeating. And fourth, everything depended on a land reform moderate enough, and well enough judged, to keep the villages behind them. Keep that third lesson in mind, because the party took a long time to learn it, and Mao was not always on the right side of it. The land revolution let loose a great deal of energy. It released enough of it to fight off attack after attack for five years, and to build up an army and a civil government besides. Once a peasant had taken land, there was no going back; even accepting a plot meant punishment if the old order ever returned. And so peasant boys joined the army, and the base spread. The new government wiped out most debts and replaced the jumble of old taxes with a single tax that took more from those who had more. A party report of October 1931 claimed that the peasants "enthusiastically remitted taxes," knowing the money went to the Red Army and the soviet government. I leave you to judge how enthusiastic. The Communists left the markets alone. Mao said of private business that the soviets "shall not hamper it but rather shall promote and encourage it." The export of rice was banned, and salt, which the base could not make, was smuggled in through the Nationalist blockade. For the women of the base, something stranger happened. Marriage laws in 1931 gave people the right to choose their own spouse and to divorce, and banned polygamy, the sale of women into marriage, and child marriage. They were only partly enforced. Peasant men did not want their wives walking out, and the party ended up mediating quarrels rather than freeing anyone. Even so, women's associations brought women into public life, and a quarter or more of the delegates in town governments were often women. Women formed ploughing and planting brigades, and some even joined the army. But the land revolution had a darker side, and it was there almost from the start. Back in the mountains, Mao had already written that the strategy in the countryside was to "massacre the landlords and the despotic gentry as well as their running dogs without the slightest compunction". The rich peasants, he wrote, were to be threatened by means of the Red terror. Land reform grew much more violent, and it turned many middle peasants against the Communists. Under Mao's land law of 1930, even a peasant who owned and farmed his own fields could have anything beyond what his family needed to live on taken from him, if most of the village demanded it. And Mao and Zhu De raised a slogan that left very little room for doubt: "Complete physical extermination of the kulaks." Kulak was the Russian word for a rich peasant, the class Stalin was destroying in the Soviet Union at that very moment. As we are about to see, the first people to feel Mao's terror were not landlords at all.

Before that, though, I need to take you back to Changsha, and to a woman Mao had left behind. Yang Kaihui was the daughter of one of Mao's teachers, and she had married him in 1920; they had three sons. Her father, Yang Changji, had taught Mao ethics at his school in Changsha, and later helped the young man find work at the university in Beijing, where Mao first met radicals who would go on to found the Communist Party. She was an educated woman and a party member in her own right, and when Mao went off to the mountains she stayed behind near Changsha with the boys. At dawn on 31 August 1927, Mao had left their home in Changsha to lead the rising that would end with him in the mountains. Before they parted, she gave him a new pair of straw sandals and asked him to take care of himself. They never saw each other again. Keep her in mind, because the war he went off to fight was going to come back to her door. In the mountains Mao had already taken a new wife, a young revolutionary named He Zizhen. Then, in the summer of 1930, the party's leaders in Shanghai ordered the Red Armies to take the big cities, believing the hour of revolution had come. Communist troops seized Changsha itself, and pillaged it. And it was because of the pillaging of Changsha that Kaihui was arrested. In August 1930, soon after the Communists had taken the city, General He Jian, the Nationalist commander in Hunan, ordered her arrest, with a reward of a thousand yuan. The yuan was the Chinese silver dollar. By 24 October she was behind bars, together with her eldest son, Anying, and his nanny. When the soldiers came for them, one of them struck her middle son, Anqing, on the head with something heavy. The boy never fully recovered. He Jian asked very little of her. He knew exactly what her name was worth to his enemies. All she had to do was renounce her husband in public. She refused to betray him. Cai Yuanpei, one of the most respected scholars in China, appealed for her pardon, and it made no difference. The court deliberated for fewer than ten minutes. On the morning of 14 November 1930 they came to her cell to take her to her execution. She left two requests. The first was for her family: "I hope that after my death my relatives will not give me a bourgeois burial." The second was for her son, to pass on to his father: "tell papa not to grieve over my death. He should do everything to hasten the victory of the revolution!" She was shot by a firing squad in a cemetery at Shiziling, just north of the city gates, the same place where her cousin Kaiming had been killed nine months before. It was not quite over. When word reached the soldiers that she still showed signs of life, seven of the executioners went back to the execution ground and finished her off. She was twenty-nine. Soon afterwards, underground Communists in Changsha bribed the prison guards and got Anying and his nanny out. Mao sent his mother-in-law thirty silver yuan to put up a gravestone. The boys were taken away from Changsha, and in time Anying and Anqing were sent to the Soviet Union. Anying would die in Korea in 1950, in an American air raid. And Mao wrote that Kaihui's death "cannot be repaid even should I die a hundred deaths." It is worth sitting with that for a moment, because of what Mao was doing in those very weeks. While his wife sat in a cell in Changsha, his own men were filling cells of their own. I don't tell you that to say Mao felt nothing. He clearly felt a great deal. I tell you because the next part of the story is about the families on the other side of his revolution, and they had no one to write their epitaphs.

This is the story of Futian. Go back to those local radicals in Jiangxi, the schoolteachers and town-educated young men who had brought communism to the region before Mao ever arrived. They had their own ideas about land. The Jiangxi Communists wanted to divide only the landlords' land, not other peasants', and to share it out by how many working hands a family had, not by how many mouths. That is a policy that protects the peasant who already has a bit of land and a strong family to work it. At a party conference in February 1930 they were outvoted, and Mao's equal shares became law. Mao's army was mostly not from Jiangxi at all. Half the troops in his own corps were Hunanese like him, and only a fifth were men from southern Jiangxi and western Fujian. Over the Sixth Corps, made up of Jiangxi men, Mao placed a forty-year-old Hunanese as political commissar, to keep it in hand. A political commissar was the party's officer inside a military unit, watching its loyalty and with the power to overrule its commander. The local leaders complained to the party's leaders that Mao wanted to concentrate power in his own hands. So picture the situation that summer. An army of outsiders, mostly from the next province, led by a man who did not take advice well, holds a region whose own Communists think his land policy is wrong and his manner is worse. And all around them are Nationalist armies, and spies, and landlords waiting for their land back. In that atmosphere, a disagreement about land could very easily start to look like treason. In the summer of 1930 Mao began to purge the local cadres. A cadre was the party's word for one of its working officials, from a village secretary up. The charge against them was that they were secret agents of the AB Corps. The AB Corps, short for Anti-Bolshevik, was a group the Nationalists had set up in Jiangxi in the 1920s to fight the Communists. Mao claimed, with no foundation, that his opponents were counter-revolutionaries. By October 1930 more than a thousand members of the Jiangxi party, about one in thirty, had fallen victim to the terror. That month Mao reported to the Central Committee that the entire party in southwest Jiangxi was showing signs of a very serious crisis. He was right about that, though not in the way he meant. And then came December. Early on the morning of 7 December 1930, while Mao's main army was fighting a far larger Nationalist force, a company of Red Army troops under an officer named Li Shaojiu marched into the town of Futian, where the Jiangxi party's leaders were based. Li came with instructions from Mao. "Do not kill the important leaders too quickly," the orders said, but squeeze out of them as much information as possible. And from the clues they gave, Mao went on, "you can go on to unearth other leaders." It is the logic of every purge that has ever run out of control: each confession is a list of new names. And under torture, people will give names. Li arrested the local leaders, and when they denied their guilt, he ordered them tortured. He told the prisoners exactly what they were up against: "You should know that middle peasants always may rebel. Your only course is to confess." In all, 120 men were confined in bamboo cages. Years later Mao himself admitted what went on: "In 1930 beating was widely used during interrogation. I myself witnessed how the accused were beaten up." One eyewitness remembered that fifty people were taken off to be executed. Notice what Li told the prisoners. The crime was not a plot; the crime was being the kind of peasant who might rebel. The local party men who had argued for the middle peasants' land were now being treated as enemies for it. The Jiangxi men fought back. On 12 December an officer of the local Twentieth Corps named Liu Di attacked Futian at the head of four hundred men. After a battle that went on all day and all night, Liu Di's men seized the building where the prisoners were held and freed those who were still alive. More than a hundred guards were killed. Almost the whole of the Twentieth Corps, more than three thousand officers and men, came out for Liu Di. They shouted slogans for Zhu De, for Peng Dehuai, and for another commander, Huang Gonglue, and one against Mao: "Down with Mao Zedong who kills, deceives, and oppresses the workers and peasants!" Look at who they cheered. They were not rebelling against the revolution, or the Red Army; they were rebelling against one man. Peng Dehuai, whom they cheered, was a former Nationalist officer who had gone over to the Communists and brought his men up into the Jinggang mountains to join Mao. The rebels even let Li Shaojiu go, hoping the army's commanders would take it as a sign of goodwill. They were wrong: Zhu De, Peng and Huang Gonglue all sided with Mao. It was the first bloody struggle between rival factions in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. And both sides appealed upwards. Within days the Jiangxi Communists told the party what had happened and put the whole blame on Mao. Mao answered with a letter that turned the rebels into the enemy's tools: at this crucial moment of the class struggle, he wrote, Chiang Kai-shek was shouting down with Mao Zedong, and so was the AB Corps. To disagree with Mao, in other words, was to stand with Chiang. For a moment it looked as if cooler heads might win. A new party chief sent down from Shanghai, Xiang Ying, declared the whole thing an unprincipled squabble, and said both sides should be punished. The incident, he insisted, had to be settled peacefully. But in Shanghai the party's leaders, and the Comintern's man in China, Pavel Mif, took Mao's side unanimously in the middle of February 1931. The Comintern was run from Moscow as the headquarters of world communism, and it advised, funded and gave orders to Communist parties around the world, the Chinese one included. It probably did no harm that Mao's messengers had brought the Central Committee some fifty to sixty thousand silver dollars. So Xiang Ying's peace did not hold. In April 1931 a military tribunal, with Zhu De presiding, sentenced Liu Di to death, and he was beheaded. The rebels were massacred, and the hunt went on long after them. By the spring of 1932 more than ninety percent of the party's cadres in southwestern Jiangxi had been killed, locked up, or had simply stopped working. That is not a purge of a faction. That is the destruction of a whole local party. So what does Futian tell us about Mao? You can read it more than one way. From the long view of the party's history, it was a fairly small, if bloody, purge, at a desperate and frightening time, and the party learned from its mistakes. Enemies really were all around them, and a fear of traitors was not madness in a base surrounded by Nationalist armies. It may also have been, in part, an old local feud wearing new clothes: the settled clan villages of the fertile valleys against the poorer hill people Mao's army leaned on, though the evidence for that is far from clear. The hill people were often Hakka, a name that means guest people, newer settlers who rented land from the clan villages below and scraped a living on the poorer slopes. And Mao did later forbid killing in such hunts, so that the next one would not be so bloody. But Futian also shows a pattern that would come back again and again in his life. There were accusations and counter-accusations, and Mao branded his opponents as counter-revolutionaries without evidence. And every ambitious cadre learned the lesson that mattered: you would never be punished for being too hard on a suspect, so it was always better to err on the side of persecution than of mercy. By 1934 the base had a secret police. Remember Futian, because we will see it again, on a far larger scale.

Second campaign Chiang commands Red headquarters Jiangxi Nanchang Yeping Town Red Army Chiang Kai-shek's armies
The encirclement campaigns of 1931, 1931. Map drawn by Then and There from the episode's sources, on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines and rivers
Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now let's turn to the man Mao was really fighting. So far we've watched the Red Republic from the inside: the land, the women's brigades, the cages at Futian. But all of it was happening under the threat of something much bigger coming over the hills. Chiang ruled from Nanjing as chairman of the government of a republic the world recognised. But his control of the country was partial at best, and the further you went from Nanjing, the less secure it was. Through all the intrigue of those years, the young warlord of Manchuria, Zhang Xueliang, stayed loyal to him. And now, with the generals beaten, Chiang turned to the Communists in the south. His offensives against them were called bandit suppression campaigns. Year after year he sent army after army to encircle the base and crush it. Four of those campaigns were beaten back. The Red Army beat them with a formula, and it went like this. "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." The idea was to lure the enemy in deep. It was an old tactic of Mao's. It sounds simple. It is not, because it means giving up ground, and towns, and the people in them, to an advancing enemy, and trusting that you will get them back. A government cannot easily do that. A guerrilla army, with nothing much to lose but itself, can. And it fought among villagers who, as we saw, had taken land and would be punished if the old order ever came back. We'll go back to the first campaign in a moment, because it set the tone for all of them. The second came in April 1931, when Chiang sent his minister of defence, He Yingqin, into Jiangxi with 200,000 men. Many of them were veterans of Feng Yuxiang, one of the generals Chiang had just beaten, so the men sent to crush the Communists had been fighting Chiang himself a year before. They were not used to the climate or the food of the south, and they suffered another debacle. On 1 July 1931 Chiang came himself, with 130,000 of his best troops, including several of his own loyal divisions, in two columns driving into the guerrilla country. That one failed too. Think of what that meant to Chiang. He had just beaten six hundred thousand men in the war against the generals, and now he could not finish a few tens of thousands of peasants in the hills. The Communists would not stand and fight. They melted away in front of his columns, harassed them in camp, and struck when they tired. The Red Army paid for its victories; in the last battle of that campaign it lost a fifth of the twenty thousand men it put in. Chiang confided to his diary that this was "the toughest time" the republic had faced. The fourth campaign came early in 1933, and this time the Nanjing government threw half a million soldiers at the Communists. The situation was critical. It was defeated at the end of March, by Zhu De and Zhou Enlai, using the very same tactic of luring the enemy in deep. By then, as we'll see, Mao himself was nowhere near the front. So why did the Red Army keep winning? Part of it was the formula. Part of it was the land: peasants who had taken their fields had every reason to fight for them, and the base's whole economy was bent to feeding the army. And part of it was the country itself: Chiang's men in the second campaign had not been used to its climate or its food.

Chinese Red Army in the first anti-encirclement, 1930
Chinese Red Army in the first anti-encirclement, 1930. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But first, the first. In the autumn of 1930, Chiang appointed the governor of Jiangxi, Lu Diping, commander in chief of twelve divisions sent against the Communists. In all the offensive had a force of a hundred thousand men, and it was called the First Bandit Suppression Campaign. Even as Li Shaojiu's men were marching into Futian, Mao's main army was fighting Nationalist forces far larger than its own. The Red Army met them with the same formula: it retreated before them, harassed them in camp, and struck when they tired. About half of the Nationalist troops who marched into those hills were killed or captured. The Red Army destroyed more than fifteen thousand enemy officers and men, and took many prisoners, ten thousand rifles and a radio transmitter. And then there was the matter of Zhang Huizan. Zhang Huizan was a Nationalist division commander, and the Red Army took him prisoner. They did not keep him. They cut off his head, fastened it to a board, and floated it down the Hengjiang River, toward Chiang Kai-shek's headquarters at Nanchang. Nanchang, you may remember, was the city where the Communists had launched their first rising against the Nationalists in 1927, with Zhou Enlai at its head. Now it was Chiang's base against them, and the river carried the head of one of his generals down to it. It was a message, and it was received: this was going to be a ruthless struggle, a fight to the death, with no quarter on either side. The Communists counted the campaign as an impressive victory. It was. And it came in the same weeks as Futian, from the same small army, under the same leader.

A one yuan note of the National Bank of the Chinese Soviet Republic
A one yuan note of the National Bank of the Chinese Soviet Republic. National Bank of the Chinese Soviet Republic, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Less than a year later the Communists had enough territory, and enough nerve, to call themselves a state. Their congress opened on 7 November. It was the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The congress met in Yeping, a village near Ruijin, and more than six hundred delegates came, every one of whom had to be housed, fed and guarded. On Saturday 7 November, at seven in the morning, the delegates began to file into the hall to a volley of rifles and the crackle of firecrackers. And there was something the hill country had never seen. The Red Army had captured dynamos, generators, from the Nationalists, and the Communists rigged up electric lights. The peasants were astonished; some of the weaker peasant women fainted on the spot. Think about that for a moment. A hall in the hills flooded with light from hundreds of glass lamps, while crowds of peasants stood round, unable to believe it, and it was the revolution that had switched them on. If you wanted a picture of what the Communists were promising, you could hardly have staged a better one. Over a fortnight the delegates adopted a constitutional programme for what they called the Chinese Soviet Republic, along with a land law and a labour law. Soviet is the Russian word for a council, and the Communists used it for their governments of workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils. Ruijin was proclaimed the capital. With the Communists in it, it had some sixty thousand people. The new republic had ministers of everything, including foreign affairs, which was an ambitious post for a country that no one recognised. Zhu De, naturally, took military affairs. Education went to Qu Qiubai. Qu was a writer and translator who had briefly led the whole party after the disaster of 1927, and had been pushed out of the leadership when the risings he backed failed. A week after the congress, at the first session of the republic's Central Executive Committee, Mao was made its chairman, as planned. His two deputies were Zhang Guotao and Xiang Ying, the chief who had tried to calm things after Futian. Zhang Guotao ran another Communist base, further north, on the borders of Hubei, Henan and Anhui. Mao Zedong was now at the head of a government ruling perhaps two million people. It was a real government, too, not just a congress and a flag. Elections in 1931 gave a deliberately outsized share of the seats to workers and to poor and middle peasants. And the soviet government took on the farmers' needs: finding seed and fertiliser, keeping the irrigation working, getting peasants to share their scarce draught animals and pool their labour. It also had all the problems of a government run by people who had never run anything. Down at the bottom were rough and ready men who could fight but not persuade: commanders who went off on adventures of their own, and cadres who simply bullied the peasants. Many new party members could not read, and some of them fell into graft. What is striking is that these problems were discussed openly, and not, as in the Nationalist manner, simply ignored. The party taught reading and Marxism wherever it could, and Mao came to believe that education could change people, that with enough will a peasant or a scholar could be made into a good Communist. That faith in the power of will, to remake people and to beat impossible odds, became one of the keys to everything Mao would do. But that title was much less than it looked. Nobody has ever accused Mao of being clumsy at the game of party politics, but in Jiangxi his position was far from secure. The party's top leadership had been living underground in Shanghai, and it was being squeezed out of the city; in time the Central Committee moved down to Ruijin, and then Mao had to take orders from his superiors in person. And those superiors were a new generation. The top of the party was still in the hands of city intellectuals, and many of them were slow to grasp how the countryside actually worked. The man running the party in Shanghai was Bo Gu, twenty-four years old, who had joined it only six years before. He was one of a group of young men trained in Moscow, whom their rivals mocked as the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks. They were Pavel Mif's people, the Comintern's own men, and they were starting to dominate the party. In a letter dated 30 August 1931 they criticised Mao sharply. The main charge was that he was following a kulak line on land, going soft on the rich peasants. The new leaders wanted the rich peasants given only the worst land, and all the best land given to the poor. They wanted the Red Army to stop wandering the hills and take cities. And so, just as Mao became chairman of the new republic, he lost his army. Immediately after the congress, on 25 November, he was removed as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. He kept a seat on it, one of fifteen, and he still ran its political department. The army's headquarters, which he had run, was abolished, and its troops were split into army groups. It was a heavy blow, and it sharply cut Mao's influence in both the party and the army. The party still found him useful as an administrator. But from now on, other men decided where the Red Army fought.

One of them was Zhou Enlai, and it's time we met him properly. Zhou was always self-disciplined, energetic and businesslike. He had been in charge of political work at the Whampoa military academy in Guangzhou, where Chiang Kai-shek had been its head, so he and Chiang had once worked side by side. In 1927 he led the party's side of the rising at Nanchang, when Communist troops inside the Nationalist army seized the city. Back when Mao was holed up in the mountains, Zhou had dismissed his troops as bandits who roamed here and there. Now he was the new secretary of the party's bureau for the base, and Mao's superior. Zhou's first big idea was the city. He proposed that the Red Army take Ganzhou, the second largest city in Jiangxi. The plan to seize a city or two came from the leadership in Shanghai, and it was in line with what the Comintern wanted. Mao had a different idea, and it came out of an old novel. He wanted to do what his beloved heroes in the Water Margin did: swoop down on a small, poorly defended town, plunder it, and fall back to safety. The Water Margin is a classic Chinese novel of outlaws who gather in a marsh fortress and fight a corrupt government, and Mao loved it all his life. Zhou got his way. The siege of Ganzhou lasted two months, from January to March 1932, and it utterly failed. Peng Dehuai, the commander the Futian rebels had cheered, was there with his Third Army Group. He had fourteen thousand men, and he said afterwards they could never have overcome such a strong force behind fortifications. As he put it, "It was a grave error to attack a fortified city before finding out the real situation of the enemy troops holding it." Many commanders drew the obvious conclusion: Mao had been right. It was the kind of lesson that wins arguments for a while, and makes enemies for much longer. Being right, in front of men who had overruled you, is not always a safe thing to be. There was one more thing that spring, and it looked north. In the autumn of 1931 Japan had seized Manchuria, and China was in uproar about it. On 15 April 1932, after long arguments, the soviet republic declared war on Japan, and six days later the declaration appeared in the soviet's newspaper, Red China. Of course it was purely a gesture. The Red Army was hundreds of miles from the nearest Japanese soldier. But politically it was enormous, because it let the Communists look, to many Chinese patriots, like the true nationalists. The government at Nanjing, after all, was still busy fighting them. None of this saved Mao from his superiors. In September 1932 four party leaders in the base, headed by Ren Bishi, came to a blunt conclusion: Mao Zedong does not understand Marxism. They all attacked him for wanting to avoid big battles, to go off into the mountains, and to break the army up into small units. Their telegram to Shanghai piled on the charges: he wavered, he ignored the party's leadership, and he promoted officers for personal connections rather than the public good. What they wanted was for him to be called back to the rear, to work in the soviet government, far from the army. At the end of September, without waiting for approval from the Central Committee or the Comintern, they went to the front in Ningdu county to have it out. In early October they held their session in a village called Xiaoyuan, and they subjected Mao to withering criticism, for a guerrilla mentality and for what they called right opportunism. Right opportunism was party language for being too cautious, too ready to compromise with the class enemy. And they turned on Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Wang Jiaxiang too, whom they called appeasers. Think about where that left Zhou. He had pushed the city strategy, and he had watched it fail at Ganzhou. And now he was being attacked by his own side as an appeaser. It would not be the last time Zhou found himself caught between stronger men. From Shanghai, Bo Gu urged them on. He wrote that they must wage an active struggle inside the party against Mao's views. Another of the new leaders, Zhang Wentian, was gentler about it: it would be good to send Mao to the rear, to work in the soviet government. They were nervous about how Moscow would take it, so they wrote two versions. The one they sent to the Comintern said there must be no open campaign against Mao. The one they sent to Jiangxi said precisely the opposite. Mao was removed as general political commissar of the Red Army, and with that he lost any real say over it. Two weeks later Shanghai confirmed the decision. Mao lost his self-control. His wife, He Zizhen, recalled that he cried out, "Dogmatism ruins and destroys people! They have no idea about practical work; they have never had contact with a single worker or peasant". And then he left the front, once again, as the party put it, on account of illness. They sent him to a hospital more than ninety miles south of Ningdu. He was not forgotten. The Comintern's agent in Shanghai, Arthur Ewert, wrote to Moscow on 8 October 1932 with a warning: "Mao Zedong remains a popular leader." So Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian had to back down a little. He still had his post in the government, though he did not think it amounted to anything. But they would still not let Mao go back to military affairs. Mao kept a shaky personal hold on the region a little longer, until 1933, but it was slipping. And the men who had taken his army from him were the ones who would have to face Chiang's next blow. Step back for a moment and look at what this little republic was. In the hills it had built an army, a government and a land revolution, ruling perhaps two million people. It had beaten off army after army sent to destroy it. And it had done something else, too: at Futian, it had eaten its own local party alive. Hold both of those in your mind at once, because the rest of this season will ask you to. So here is where we leave the Red Republic. Its founder sat in a hospital far from the front, chairman of a government that no longer let him near its army. His comrades would beat the fourth campaign without him, with his own tactics. Mao spent those months in the rear, ill or saying he was ill, watching other men run the war he had shaped. But Chiang's early campaigns had failed, and he was reforming his army; by 1934 the reforms were beginning to tell. The fifth campaign, when it came, would destroy a soviet that had barely been able to grow in years. But to understand why Chiang could not finish the Communists sooner, we have to go north, and back a year. Because Chiang's war in the hills of Jiangxi was never his only war. On the night of 18 September 1931, Japanese officers blew up a stretch of railway outside Shenyang, in Manchuria. What they did next is the story of our next episode. It would leave Chiang with two enemies at once, the Communists in the hills and the Japanese in the north, and a choice about which to fight first that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

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