Revolution and Civil War, episode 15
The Long March
In 1934 Chiang Kai-shek's fifth campaign closes a ring of roads and fourteen thousand blockhouses around the Jiangxi soviet, and the party's leaders, guided by the German Comintern adviser Otto Braun, lose battle after battle until they decide to break out. The episode follows Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on the march west, through the meeting at Zunyi where Mao turns on Braun and the leadership, the birth and abandonment of Mao's baby daughter by his wife He Zizhen, and the split with Zhang Guotao's larger army, to the arrival in northern Shaanxi in October 1935, and gives real time to how much of the march's later legend is history. It leans almost entirely on scholars, with a little of the Communists' own testimony.
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Transcript
Last time, Chiang Kai-shek set out to remake his own people from the skin inward. His New Life movement told the Chinese that virtue had to come before food and clothing. Under its banner, police closed dance halls, and Blue Shirt thugs ripped up dangerous journals and poured acid on people they thought dressed immodestly. The Blue Shirts were officers who had studied under Chiang at his military academy, and they called him leader, a title borrowed from the Führer. And the New Life movement was not born in a lecture hall. It began in Jiangxi province, as part of a military campaign. This episode is about that campaign, and about the people it was aimed at. Deep in the mountains of southeast Jiangxi, the Chinese Communists had built a state of their own, the Chinese Soviet Republic, with its capital at Ruijin. A soviet, in the language of the time, was a territory run by councils under the Communist Party, on the model of revolutionary Russia. The man who had built it was a guerrilla leader named Mao Zedong. But by now he was no longer running it. In October 1932, at a meeting at Ningdu, the party's leaders had stripped him of his posts, and he had not won them back. Over him stood a party leadership trained in Moscow. And at the front, running the war, was Zhou Enlai, the Red Army's chief political commissar. A political commissar was the party's officer in an army: no military order was valid without his signature beside the commander's. Mao and Zhou are the two people we follow this time. One is out of power and the other is very much in it, and by the end of this episode their places will have changed. But first, the man who set all of it in motion was Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang had sent four armies against the Jiangxi soviet, and every one of them had failed. The last, in the spring of 1933, threw half a million men at the Communists and was beaten back at the end of March. The Communists won that one the old way. When the enemy advanced, they retreated; when he camped, they harassed; when he tired, they attacked; when he retreated, they pursued. Chiang knew what he was up against. In June 1932 he told a military conference that the roots of the Communist Party lay in the inefficiency and corruption of his own government's machine. And he spelled out why the Communists had to come first. If they were not beaten decisively this time, he said, "we will be in trouble because we cannot fight a resistance war" against Japan while being attacked from behind. He had an old phrase for it, and he would repeat it again and again over the next four years: first pacify the interior, then resist the enemy outside. He did not think he had long. In March 1934 he told senior party leaders that fewer than eleven hundred days remained before war with Japan began. He was off by only about six weeks. Meanwhile he forbade the building of new factories on the coast, and ordered plans to move heavy industry inland. So to Chiang, the Communists in Jiangxi were not a sideshow. They stood between him and the war he could see coming. In late May 1933, Chiang took personal command of a fifth campaign, and this time he changed the game. He had learned it from a fight elsewhere. Around another Communist base, on the borders of Hubei, Henan and Anhui, his troops had built rings of fortifications, and the Communists there, under a commander named Zhang Guotao, had been forced to break out and march west into Sichuan. Remember that name. Chiang personally led some seven hundred and fifty thousand troops to surround the Jiangxi soviet. Most of them were not fighting at all. They were building, supplying and manning a ring of mud and brick outposts, each covered by the machine guns of the next. They were called blockhouses, and the plan for them was drawn up with Chiang's German military advisers. The forts stood a mile or two apart, close enough to see one another, so that Communist guerrillas could neither pick them off nor slip between them. By 1934 there were fourteen thousand of them, joined by fifteen hundred miles of new road. It was slow. Chiang's soldiers moved into the red zone at barely a mile a day, stopping at each new line to consolidate before they tightened the ring again. One of his generals summed up the method in a phrase: "Drain the pond to catch the fish." And Chiang did not think the fight would be won by soldiers alone. He told his officers that the struggle against the Communists was "70 percent political and 30 percent military." Battles would be fruitless, he said, if the Communists' propaganda won the people. So he trained teams of propagandists and civic workers, at a special camp on Mount Lu, a mountain resort in northern Jiangxi. He even called land reform the life and death issue for the country. But like his promises against corruption, it ran into a wall: how to carry it out without upsetting his own officers and his own party. In the villages he took back, he revived an old system of mutual responsibility called the baojia. Under the baojia, households were grouped together and each group answered for the behaviour of its members, so neighbours watched neighbours. Large rewards were posted for Communist leaders. For Mao's head, the price was a quarter of a million yuan. The yuan was China's silver dollar, the basic unit of its money. And around the soviet, the people who counted in the countryside chose their side. The rural elites sided with the Nationalists, and the economic blockade grew tighter. Chiang also had more men to spend. Earlier in this season we met Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal, who had lost Manchuria to Japan. When Japan overran the province of Rehe, the Young Marshal resigned his posts, cured himself of opium in a Shanghai hospital, and sailed off to Europe. His army did not go with him. Chiang sent the hundred and thirty thousand soldiers left of it south to Jiangxi, to join the campaign against the Communists. Keep an eye on those Manchurian soldiers. They are a long way from home, and they will matter. Chiang was paying for all of this himself, buying his weapons and his training from Germany with no foreign aid at all. He admired the Germans. Before sending his adopted son to the military academy in Munich, he told him that Germany was the only country China could learn from. But he showed no interest in the heart of Nazi ideas, racial supremacy and conquest, and his diary never so much as mentions the milestones of Hitler's rise. The Communists, for their part, were not as alone as they looked. Moscow sent money through Shanghai, and in November 1933 the party's office there reported three million Mexican silver dollars received. Mexican silver dollars had circulated in the China trade for generations, and the Communists used them as ready money. Moscow even talked of buying an airplane that could reach the soviet, to be flown by an American pilot, and told its people in Shanghai to buy heavy airplanes, gas masks and medicines. Even so, the soviet was shrinking. Communist soldiers began to desert in growing numbers, slipping quietly through the blockade. Inside the ring, the Red Army tried to meet Chiang head on, in regular, positional war. And it lost battle after battle. Why it fought that way is the story of one man.
In the autumn of 1933 a German Communist named Otto Braun arrived in the Jiangxi soviet. He was tall and thin as a lath, with big round glasses, light hair and blue eyes. He had the air of a sergeant major in the old German army, and he did not tolerate dissent. He was, among other things, a secret agent of Soviet military intelligence, and a member of the Comintern's Far Eastern Bureau, and he came to Jiangxi as military adviser to the Chinese party's leaders. The Comintern was the organization in Moscow that guided Communist parties around the world, the Chinese party included. Braun had studied for four years at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, where he learned to plan offensives, and it left him with a faith in lightning attacks. He spoke no Chinese and knew little of how the Red Army had fought in China. He kept company with the men he could talk to in Russian, the party leaders who had studied in Moscow. Chief among them was the party's leader, Bo Gu, who looked rather like Braun and soon became his friend. Bo Gu was one of a group the Moscow office of the Comintern had pushed into the top posts of the Chinese party, young men with Soviet schooling and very little practical experience. Bo Gu had already filled the German's head with hostile feelings toward Mao. Braun had come only as an adviser. But he considered himself the main authority on the Red Army's strategy and tactics, and with Bo Gu's support he took over command of the army, as he himself admitted years later. That was bad news for Mao, because tactics were exactly where Mao and the party's leaders disagreed. The two ways of fighting could not have been further apart. Mao's way was the guerrilla's way: wait for the enemy's mistakes, retreat when he is strong, attack when he is weak, mass your men to surprise his smaller units, and use the local people and the ground. Lure the enemy in deep, went the rule, and when he comes into the red areas, "he will be like a shrimp washed up on the beach." Mao had built a different kind of army. Its soldiers, more and more of them peasant volunteers, were taught why they were fighting and given a sense of discipline. Mao wrote that "the officers do not beat the soldiers; officers and soldiers have the same food and clothing and receive equal treatment". That set the Red Army apart from the warlords' troops and from Chiang's. And there was never any question whom it served: the party. But Mao's way had a cost the party never solved. Guerrilla war meant giving up ground when a stronger enemy came, and every time the army fell back, it left local peasants and party workers at the enemy's mercy. Holding a safe base and fighting like guerrillas pulled in opposite directions. Braun's way was to hold ground. The Red Army's slogan now was "Do not yield an inch of ground!" And so, again and again, he threw Red Army troops against well fortified enemy positions, into a hail of machine gun fire, achieving nothing. Bo Gu backed him. The Red Army was bled white. Imperious and strict, Braun gave advice on every question, political as well as military. Years later he admitted that other opinions were suppressed, and that the initiatives of the commanders at the front were often ignored. He confessed that he had been "extraordinarily stubborn and rigid". Mao watched it happen and could do nothing. He had lost his voice in the leadership. He had graduated from no academy except the hard school of guerrilla war, and he knew Braun was wrong. Later he put it plainly: without more troops and more ammunition than the enemy, positional warfare "is basically useless to us." Bo Gu and Braun paid him no attention. They would have liked to finish him off politically, and they failed only because the army commanders and local party secretaries quietly but clearly stood by him. Moscow, too, was not interested in throwing Mao out. In January 1934, on Moscow's insistence, he was raised to full member of the Politburo, the party's ruling committee. But at the same meeting, held in Ruijin, Bo Gu's people arranged for someone else to give the report on the soviet's government, a report Mao as its head would normally have given. Mao stayed away, pleading illness. Bo Gu told Braun, with some sarcasm, that Mao had a periodic attack of diplomatic illness. Soon afterwards the post went too. Zhang Wentian, the party's second man, replaced Mao as head of the soviet's government, leaving him a chairmanship that by now meant nothing. Mao felt it. The man who had built the soviet was, for the moment, a spectator.
By early summer of 1934 the situation was hopeless. Arthur Ewert, the Comintern's representative to the Chinese party, wrote to Moscow: "Our losses have been enormous. Desertion is growing." Military supplies, he reported, had dwindled badly, because there were constant battles and too little captured booty to make up for them. Of the seventy counties the party had once held in Jiangxi, it had lost all but six. When the party asked Moscow for more money, Moscow had ideas. One was to set up a firm that could specialize in selling opium from Sichuan. In May the party's Secretariat decided to begin preparing the Red Army's main forces to leave the soviet. A telegram went to Moscow saying that what remained was to defend the soviet to the last possible moment while preparing to move the main forces in a different direction. Another asked for a million Mexican dollars to buy medicine and uniforms. Moscow sent about a seventh of that. On the eighth of June the Comintern approved the plan. The departure, Moscow stressed, should be seen as temporary, a way of preserving the army's vital strength from attack. Who decided all this? Officially, a trio was set up to run the operation: Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian and Zhou Enlai. In practice, by Braun's own account, all the basic problems were settled in private conversations between Bo Gu, Zhou and Braun himself. So Zhou Enlai was inside the room. And this is where we meet him properly. He was the Red Army's chief political commissar, running the war at the front with its commander, Zhu De, and between them they had ninety thousand rifles and a few hundred machine guns to break the blockade with. He was on good terms with Mao, or seemed to be. Yet Zhou breathed not a word to him about the plan to leave. Zhou always held a finger to the wind, and in those days the wind was not blowing Mao's way. The trio kept the evacuation secret from Mao until early October, shortly before the withdrawal from Ruijin. When they finally told him, Mao was some sixty miles west of the capital, at the village of Yudu, with the troops of the First Corps. Since late September he had been down with malaria. He looked thin and worn out. They gave him the rest of the news, too, all of it decided without him. Thirty women, the wives of the top leaders, would be allowed to go with the army, along with about twenty others, most of them nurses. Mao's wife, He Zizhen, was one of the thirty. She was enrolled in a medical brigade. But there was a rule, and the trio would not bend it: no children on the march. Mao and He Zizhen had a two year old son, Anhong. They called him the hairy little one. Mao sent word to his wife by special messenger. She was living with the boy in an old mountain monastery about twelve miles from Ruijin, where officials had gone to escape the air raids. There was no time to take the child to his wet nurse in the countryside. So He Zizhen turned to her sister, He Yi, who was married to Mao's younger brother Mao Zetan and was staying behind. "Go away and don't worry about anything," her sister told her. "I will take care of our parents and my nephew." Neither He Zizhen nor Mao ever saw their son again. Mao Zetan, staying behind to fight in the hills, grew afraid for the boy's safety and secretly had him handed to the family of one of his guards in Ruijin, to be brought up there. In April 1935, Mao Zetan was ambushed and killed. He took to his grave the secret of where the boy was living. After the revolution won, in the autumn of 1949, He Zizhen and her family tried to find the boy, and failed. He Yi searched hardest, because she felt guilty toward her sister. And on her search, in the very place where her husband had died, her jeep overturned on a mountain road, and she died without regaining consciousness. That is one family's price for the decision taken in secret that spring.
In October 1934, some eighty-six thousand Communist troops pulled out of the Jiangxi soviet. At the time it was called a strategic transfer. Only later would it be known as the Long March. They went west, and nobody knew where they would end up. Maybe they would double back to Jiangxi if Chiang's armies could be drawn away. Maybe they would join up with smaller Communist bases or armies in the interior. There had been no radio contact with Moscow since early October, when Nationalist police raided the party's secret office in Shanghai and seized its radio set. There was no contact with the other Communist bases either. Only one thing was more or less clear: they had to move west, toward the borders of Guangxi, Hunan and Guizhou, where there were said to be no enemy forts. Picture the column. There were five army groups and two field columns, the first holding the military council, Mao included, and the second the party and government staff, with a medical company in which He Zizhen was a nurse. The staff column had a secret code name: Red Star. Behind came a reserve division of unemployed peasants, drafted as porters for half a yuan a day. In Braun's words, they carried "hundreds of bundles of leaflets, chests of silver bullion, and arsenal machinery." For all practical purposes, he added, they were unarmed. For every three fighters there was roughly one man who was not. All the soldiers together had forty thousand rifles and more than a thousand machine guns. They also had a few pieces of heavy artillery, which were soon thrown away, since they slowed the march and there were no shells for them. Each soldier carried rice and salt for two weeks. And Mao himself rode out with an umbrella and a bag of books on a dun coloured horse. Like everyone else, he had a blanket. The march also carried trunks of Mexican silver dollars, to buy food along the way and to pay warlords large bribes to let the army pass. Without that money, the march might not have got very far. Getting out of the ring turned out to be the easy part. Earlier that year Chiang had pressed the generals who held the southern provinces to join the campaign. But those generals were afraid. They suspected that Chiang wanted to drive the Red Army into their provinces, so that his own Central Army could follow it in and occupy them. One of those generals, Bai Chongxi, said years later that he advised the southerners to pretend to join the encirclement and keep their own forces at home. So the Communists slipped out of Jiangxi unopposed, between the staggered positions of the Guangdong army that was supposed to be holding them in. On the twenty-fifth of October the army broke through the first ring and moved into southern Hunan. Then the fighting started. In late November, when Mao's army reached the Xiang River, Chiang himself rushed to Hunan to direct the battle. After a week of heavy losses on both sides, the Red Army crossed the river under withering fire. Their route ran through country thickly settled by the Hakka, who greeted the Red Army as liberators. With their help, the army reached Guizhou in December. The Hakka are a Han Chinese people of the south with their own dialect and customs, long treated as outsiders by their neighbours. The Nationalist forces did not dare attack the main column among them, for fear of a Hakka rising. Chiang's Central Army followed them, and here we see what the march did for him. When the Communists crossed into Guizhou, Chiang wrote in his diary that it gave him a chance to take the province from its warlord governor. He flew to its capital, Guiyang, and replaced the governor with a loyal general. That is how it went all along the route. The Communists' retreat let the pursuing Nationalist armies win at least some control over Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan, drawing them into Nanjing's orbit. And the chase planted an idea in Chiang's mind. Sichuan, high above the great gorges of the Yangtze, could be the redoubt where his government and army withdrew in a future war with Japan. Hold on to that thought. It will come back. On the march itself, morale sank. The troops had broken through line after line of forts, and yet they were depressed. Officers and men grumbled, the hardships fed their anger, and every day there were more deserters and stragglers. For Mao, that mood was an opening. He had prepared for it. Several months before the march, back in Jiangxi, he had begun to court Zhang Wentian, a former journalist and novelist who had gone to school in China, Japan and America and then studied in Moscow. Zhang Wentian had grown nervous as the war went wrong, and unhappy with the high-handed ways of Braun and Bo Gu. One day he dropped in to consult Mao about military affairs, just the two of them. After that, Mao began to promote him. The other ally was Wang Jiaxiang, a Moscow-trained leader who had been badly wounded by shrapnel in the stomach and was in constant pain. When the march began, Mao suggested the three of them travel in the same column, and his new friends readily agreed. Braun later called them conspirators. Each of the three worked on the army commanders and the party leaders. By the time the army reached Guizhou, Mao had won over a majority of the leadership, and almost all the commanders were on his side. And Zhou Enlai? For now he stayed with Bo Gu. But Mao had no doubt that this flexible and cautious man would go with whoever was stronger. In Liping, the first town the Red Army took in Guizhou, Zhou sided with Mao, Zhang Wentian and Wang when they demanded that Bo Gu call a full meeting of the leadership to look at why the fifth campaign had been lost. Bo Gu had to agree, though he knew the meeting would be aimed at him and at Braun.
They chose to hold it in Zunyi, the second biggest commercial town in Guizhou, which looked easy to take, so that the soldiers could rest while their leaders fought it out. Zunyi fell early on a rainy morning, Monday the seventh of January 1935. By now the army that had left Jiangxi with eighty-six thousand men was down to about forty thousand. The soldiers were tired, wet and starving. Their two weeks of rice had run out long before, after a march of fifteen hundred miles. Guizhou was a poor, mountainous, rain-soaked province, and it had a saying about itself: not three days without rain, not three li of level ground, and nobody with three copper coins. A li is a traditional Chinese measure of distance, about a third of a mile. While the soldiers gorged themselves on spicy cabbage, boiled meat, chicken and red peppers in the little restaurants of Zunyi, the three conspirators planned their meeting in a spacious house outside town. Bo Gu was preparing too. One of his last loyalists, Kai Feng, sounded out an important political commissar named Nie Rongzhen, and Nie flatly refused to back Bo. On the eve of the meeting, Mao gathered his supporters in secret. Wang Jiaxiang put it bluntly: "We shall throw them out when we meet". Early on the morning of the fifteenth of January, nineteen men gathered in a small room on the second floor of a house belonging to a divisional commander of the Guizhou army. There were Politburo members and the army's commanders and commissars. Braun was there with his interpreter. So was a young man named Deng Xiaoping, head of the Central Committee's technical staff. Everyone but Braun and his interpreter sat around a big rectangular table with an old kerosene lamp on it. Dim light came through a tinted window, and outside, as usual, it was drizzling. Bo Gu spoke first, with a report on why the fight against the fifth campaign had been lost. Zhou Enlai followed with a report of his own. Both of them defended what they had done. Bo Gu blamed circumstances; Zhou blamed mistakes. Then Zhang Wentian took the floor, for Mao and Wang as well as himself, and tore into Bo Gu's military and political line. And then Mao spoke, for a full hour. Unusually for him, he read from a carefully prepared manuscript. This meeting was everything. He took Bo Gu's and Zhou's arguments apart, and he laid the main responsibility for losing the soviet on them and on Braun. First, Mao said, they had used purely passive defence. Then they switched to positional warfare. And at the decisive moment, they "turned and ran." He called it a "childish game of war." Otto Braun said little. He sat quietly near the door, chain smoking, sick with an attack of malaria. But he "turned white when Mao began to attack him." As the speeches went on, he looked more and more depressed and gloomy. Bo Gu felt no better, though he was not ill. He kept flashing a nervous smile, baring his large teeth, and looking around the room with a venomous stare. Wang Jiaxiang jumped up to back Mao the moment he finished. Many wanted to speak, and the meeting ran for three days. The army's commanders turned on Braun's methods one after another. The sharpest was the commander Lin Biao, who called Braun's tactics simply "clumsy and stupid." Only Kai Feng stood up for Bo Gu. He accused Mao of not understanding Marxism, and he mocked Mao's way of war as based on two books, the old novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Sun Zi's Art of War. Mao remembered the moment with relish. He had read the novel, he said, but not The Art of War. So he asked Kai Feng how many chapters it had and what the first one said, and Kai Feng could not answer. "Afterwards, setting aside other things, I made it my business to read The Art of War." And Zhou Enlai? He read the room in an instant. He took the floor a second time and accepted that Mao and his supporters were right. Braun said nothing in his own defence. He asked permission to spend some time with the First Corps, so that he could learn at first hand about the Chinese civil war that Mao praised so highly. Zhang Wentian drafted the resolution: Bo Gu's report was basically incorrect, and the soviet had been lost through mistakes in military leadership. It was adopted. Mao had won. But what exactly had he won? At a separate session afterwards, Mao was brought onto the Standing Committee, the inner core of the Politburo, and made deputy to Zhou Enlai as chief political commissar. Bo Gu kept his post as the party's leader, for now. But the new trio of Mao, Zhang Wentian and Wang Jiaxiang was the strongest force in the room. The meeting also turned the party away from the set-piece warfare the Comintern had backed and toward Mao's war of movement. Here the sources disagree on how far Zunyi raised him. One side has the conference electing Mao as the party's senior military and political authority there and then. The other has him rising to the top table but not yet to its head, with Zhou Enlai and others still above him, and Zunyi as the moment he began to emerge as the party's dominant leader rather than the day he became it. Either way, the momentum was now his. The Communists were on their own now. They had lost contact with the Comintern, which could not have helped them much anyway. After the session Mao hurried to He Zizhen, his heart pounding. "Is the meeting over? How are you?" she asked. He broke into a smile. "Everything went not badly. Now I have the right to speak." Years later he told their daughter how they celebrated. Playing a trick on his wife, he paced the room with his hands behind his back and told her that the meeting "figured that a Buddha like me might still prove useful". "This means they still respect old Mao," he went on, "and suppose that he is still good for something." That evening, he said, "we were enormously happy".
In telling that story to his daughter, Mao left one thing out. He Zizhen was expecting another baby. The march and Mao's struggle for power had worn her down, and she was due in a month. She knew she could not keep the child. The march was going on, and children were a burden it would not carry. Mao, it seems, did not think about it. He was drunk on his victory. In February 1935 she gave birth in a small village in northern Guizhou, in a straw hut that belonged to a poor peasant family of the Yi people. The Yi are one of China's non-Han peoples, living in the mountains where Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan meet. The Yi hated the Han Chinese, saw no difference between the Nationalists and the Communists, and often attacked small groups of Red Army soldiers. When a big column came near, they gathered their cattle and their goods and went off into the forests and mountains, leaving only empty houses. It was in one of those empty houses that He Zizhen had her baby. The baby girl cried long and loud. Her exhausted mother tried not to look at her. The head of the medical brigade remembered: "After the baby was washed off, we wrapped her in a white cloth." The brigade's commander turned to an older comrade, a man named Dong, and Dong wrote a note and attached thirty yuan to it. As the commander remembered it, the note said: "The army on the march cannot take with it this newly born child. We are leaving it for you to bring up." The note went on, "Let it be like your granddaughter. When she grows up, she will look after you." They laid the baby, covered in rags, on the sleeping bunk where she had been born, with the note and the money beside her. Then everyone, He Zizhen included, left the house. The column flowed on west. There was no time for feelings. Her mother had not even named her. What became of the little girl is not known. The story goes that the family took her in after the Communists left and named her Wang Xiuzhen, Beautiful Treasure, and that three months later she died of a tumour. No one knows if that is true. Mao never saw his new daughter. He had no particular interest in her. In the space of a few months, He Zizhen had given up two children to this march. And the struggle for power went on. In early February, at a meeting of the Standing Committee, Zhang Wentian suddenly demanded that Bo Gu hand over the post of party leader to him. Mao backed him, and Zhou Enlai did not object. Bo Gu, losing his self-control, gave way. A month later Mao was named political commissar of a new front command, with Zhu De as commander. Most of the army's power was now in Mao's hands. He had got back what he lost at Ningdu. And then he did something careful. He proposed a new military trio to run the army, with Zhou Enlai as chairman and Mao and Wang Jiaxiang as the other members. Zhou had the title. Mao had the decisive voice. And both men's vanity was soothed. Zhou stayed, on paper, the army's general political commissar. But Mao now held most of its power, and Zhou could still prove useful to him.
Behind them, Zunyi lay ruined and deserted. An eyewitness said the town "presented a desolate sight." What counted for Mao was that his army had rested there and filled its stores. Somewhere in late February or early March, Mao wrote a poem about crossing a mountain pass. It begins, "Keen is the west wind; In the endless void the wild geese cry at the frosty morning moon." "The clatter of horses' hooves rings sharp, And the bugle's note is muted." It ends with the hills blue like the sea, and the dying sun like blood. The march was now moving fast, twenty-five to thirty miles a day, and it had a goal at last: to join up with Zhang Guotao's army in northwestern Sichuan. And the way there was terrible. They marched at night, Braun remembered, because the Nationalist air force flew sortie after sortie by day, bombing and strafing them. In one of those raids, He Zizhen was badly wounded. Shrapnel stayed in her body and tormented her. Years later, when she was X-rayed, seventeen pieces were found. She made the rest of the march on a stretcher. On the border of Guizhou and Yunnan the path ran up and down sheer cliffs. Many horses fell and broke their legs; only the mules kept their footing. There was almost nothing to eat in the mountains, and soldiers sliced the flesh from dead horses until only the skeletons were left. More men died from disease and exhaustion than from wounds, and the ranks visibly thinned. In Yunnan, the provincial strongman, Long Yun, let the Red Army pass through peacefully, probably after receiving a gift of silver. Chiang flew to Sichuan's capital, Chengdu, to take command of the chase in person. He never caught them, but once again the pursuit let him bring a province's capital under his control. In early May the army crossed the broad, stormy Jinsha River, as the upper Yangtze is called there. A month later, along the edge of Tibet, came the Dadu River. It was squeezed between mountains, and a single narrow chain bridge, built in the early eighteenth century, spanned the torrent. When the Red Army came near, enemy soldiers pulled up the plank roadway halfway across, and when the Communists started over, Nationalist planes bombed them without mercy. But the Red Army fighters got across. Remember that bridge. It would have a long life after the march was over. Beyond the river lay trackless, empty mountains. The soldiers wore light slippers or straw sandals, and every day it got colder. Braun remembered rivers in spate to be forded, forests and moors to be crossed, and mountain passes four or five thousand metres high. He wrote, "More and more, our route was lined with the bodies of the slain, frozen or simply exhausted. All of us were unbelievably lice-ridden." Of the eighty-six thousand who had started out from Jiangxi, barely twenty thousand were left by the time they reached Sichuan. In mid-June, in western Sichuan, the vanguard came to one more narrow chain bridge with wooden planks, over a small mountain stream, and there it met the advance guard of Zhang Guotao's army. Zhang himself was two days away. When he heard, he hurried to meet them. Zhang Guotao was one of the founders of the party, a former student of the Communist Li Dazhao at Beijing University, and now thirty-eight years old. He was tall, with high cheekbones and a jutting jaw that made him look ready for a fight, and he had an explosive temper. He had been in opposition inside the party more than once. Moscow thought well of him; it had even given him a Soviet medal. And he had his own march behind him. Driven out of his old base on the borders of Hubei, Henan and Anhui, he had built a new soviet in the mountains of the Sichuan borderlands. On the twenty-fifth of June, Mao and Zhang Guotao embraced. That night there was a dinner. Nobody talked about the Long March, or Zunyi, or what Zhang's army had been through. Instead Mao, a Hunanese who loved chili, held forth on the theme that people who ate chili were revolutionaries. Bo Gu, who came from Jiangsu and did not eat chili, argued the other side. It was fun, and it kept the mood light. But the numbers said everything. Mao had about fifteen thousand troops. Zhang Guotao had eighty thousand. Zhang's soldiers were better armed, better fed, better clothed and better shod. They still had their fighting spirit, and their commanders looked up to him without question. Mao's men were exhausted and ragged, and they had almost lost the ability to fight. And the men around Mao, the Moscow students, had long called Zhang Guotao an old opportunist. Zhang, a founder of the party, looked on them as upstarts and barely hid it. The outpouring of joy fooled no one.
The friendship lasted a matter of weeks. Zhang Guotao began to demand power. In July his troops pressed his claims by provoking a series of armed clashes with Mao's units, and Mao and the other leaders had to back off. In mid-July Zhang Wentian was ready to hand Zhang Guotao the party leadership. Zhang Guotao wanted something more useful: command of the army, as its chief political commissar. So Zhou Enlai stepped down, and Mao gave up his post as front commissar. Control of the army passed to Zhang Guotao. His commanders demanded that he also chair the military council. He graciously left Zhu De in that chair, but the power on the council was now in Zhang Guotao's hands. Mao did not let it rest. Around the twentieth of July the march halted and the Politburo met, and Zhang Wentian calmly asked Zhang Guotao to account for everything he had done in his old base. Then Mao attacked him for giving that base up. Zhang Guotao denied it all, and the meeting ended without a result. Two weeks later Zhang Wentian accused Zhang Guotao of abandoning his new base in Sichuan as well, and Zhang Guotao finally exploded. "And how is it that you, who lost the entire Central Soviet Area, consider your line correct?" It was a fair question. The march went on north, toward the borders of Gansu and Shaanxi, where the Politburo meant to build a new base. They could not stay where they were. The local hill peoples hated the Communists, who had taken their food, and they attacked the soldiers more and more often. Zhang Guotao proposed splitting the army into two columns, one on each side of the great swamp that lay ahead, to meet again in Gansu. Around the tenth of August the left column, under Zhang Guotao and Zhu De, set off first. The right column, with Mao and most of the Politburo, waited. Zhou Enlai had caught malaria in July and was very ill. It took days for the crisis to pass. At the end of August, the right column set out into the grasslands. Before them stretched an endless green steppe, surprisingly beautiful. Braun remembered what it hid. "A deceptive green cover hid a black viscous swamp," he wrote. It swallowed anyone who broke through the thin crust or strayed off the narrow path, and he watched a mule die that way. They drove cattle and horses ahead of them to find the safest way. Cold rain fell several times a day, and at night it turned to wet snow. There was not a house, a tree or a bush as far as the eye could see. They slept squatting on the little hillocks above the bog. "Some did not awaken in the morning, victims of cold and exhaustion." They ate hoarded grain and, as a rare treat, a scrap of dried meat hard as stone. The swamp water was not fit to drink, and they drank it anyway, because there was no wood to boil it. Dysentery and typhus came back. The one mercy, Braun wrote, was that the enemy could attack them neither from the air nor on land. When the worn out men finally reached firm ground, an order was waiting for them from Zhang Guotao and Zhu De: turn back. The left column had got stuck at a flooded mountain stream, and they had decided to head south again. They demanded that Mao's column do the same. On the eighth of September Mao, Zhou, Zhang Wentian and the right column's commanders replied, politely. They hoped that their elder brothers would think it over carefully, change course and march north. In other words: no. Then Zhang Guotao made a fatal move. He sent a secret telegram to his own former officers, now commanding units in Mao's column, asking them to "initiate a struggle" against the Politburo. Mao learned of the telegram at once and called an emergency meeting of the Standing Committee. They decided to march north to Gansu immediately. In an appeal to all comrades, in the name of the Central Committee, they called on the soldiers of both columns to obey no order to go south, and to march only north. Neither side would give way. Furious, Zhang Guotao turned south, and Mao's column marched into southern Gansu. The Red Army, and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, had split in two. On the Gansu border Mao's men were reorganized into a single brigade of about six thousand, with Peng Dehuai in command, Lin Biao as his deputy and Mao as political commissar. And the march had a new goal: not just northeastern Gansu, but on to the Soviet border, where they could get help. They still had no link with Moscow. On the twentieth of September it was decided to send two men all the way to Xinjiang to reach the Comintern, and one of them was Mao's brother Zemin. Mao put a brave face on it. Zhang Guotao, he said, "has gone south, thus causing rather heavy losses to the Chinese revolution", but they were not going to be downhearted. Zhang Guotao did not stop at going south. On the fifth of October he set up his own Central Committee, his own government and his own military council, and declared Mao, Zhou, Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian expelled from the party. He punished, and even shot, the commanders and commissars in his column who opposed him. It did him no good. He lost almost all his army in the swamps and mountains of the west, and a year later he turned up in northern Shaanxi, asking for reconciliation. In the spring of 1938, seeing his hopes of leading the party fade, he went over to the Nationalists. That was later. For now, Mao was marching north with about six thousand men, bound for the Soviet border.
Then came news that changed everything. Mao learned, to his surprise, that there was a sizeable Communist base in northern Shaanxi, near the border with Gansu, where Red Army units under a Communist named Liu Zhidan were active. It was no more than two hundred and fifty miles away, and the journey to Xinjiang was put on hold. That was a gift. And Mao saw at once what it could be made to mean. By the autumn of 1935 Japan was pressing hard on north China. After Manchuria it had taken the province of Rehe, and then pushed into eastern Hebei, within striking distance of Beijing and Tianjin. Anger against Japan across China was greater than ever before. Mao calculated that the whole Long March could now be presented as a plan made in advance: to carry the Communist bases toward the areas Japan threatened. It would strengthen the Communists against Nanjing, and it would finish Zhang Guotao, who, after all, had not wanted to go north. On the twenty-second of September he told his brigade's leaders: "We intended to march north, but Zhang Guotao wanted to go south." The Japanese imperialists were invading China, he said, and they were going north to resist them. A month later, in mid-October, Mao's troops crossed into the northern Shaanxi base and entered a village called Wuqizhen, in a narrow mountain valley. Local people told them the Red headquarters was at Bao'an, fifty miles to the east, and a detachment went off to find Liu Zhidan. On the twenty-second of October the Politburo met, and Mao announced that the Long March was over. It had been almost exactly a year since the eighty-six thousand had left Jiangxi. They had crossed eleven provinces and more than six thousand miles, climbed over five mountain ranges and forced their way across twenty-four large rivers. Along the way they had averaged roughly a skirmish every day and a full battle every two weeks. And of those who set out from Jiangxi, about eight thousand reached northern Shaanxi, along with a few more who had joined on the way. Mao wrote a poem about it, proud and triumphant. It begins, "The Red Army does not fear", and it calls thousands of rivers and hundreds of mountains easy. So this is where we have to stop and ask what the Long March was. In reality, it was a desperate retreat, forced by the growing strength of Chiang's campaigns and by the party leadership's vicious infighting in Jiangxi. And even when it was over, it still looked likely that the Nationalists, with their ever more effective tactics, would finish the Communists off. But it became something else: a glorious founding myth of the Chinese Communist Party. Its real importance lay in the myth and the legitimacy it gave. The people who survived it became the fathers of the Chinese revolution, and their deeds were remembered as a victory. Those stories were moral dramas of courage and self-sacrifice. One of them is the bridge whose planks the enemy had torn up, and the soldiers who crawled across it under heavy fire to lay new ones. The crossing itself was real. In the story the party told, the marchers suffered in order to lead China to a promised land. The legend also grew around one man. Later accounts would play down the other Communist leaders, some of whose feats of bravery on the march equalled or outdid Mao's. And Mao's own version was already taking shape. A retreat with no known destination became, in the party's memory, a planned march north to fight Japan. That is not the whole truth, and it is not a lie either. The Communists had ended up far closer to Japan's armies than they had been in Jiangxi, and that would matter very much. Here is what the march really did for Mao. Zunyi, and even more the break with Zhang Guotao, had put him in a position where everyone saw him as the party's authoritative leader. He was not yet the party's master, and he still had rivals. But the march to the northwest was a key stage in his rise. His new home was hard country. Northern Shaanxi was endless narrow ravines and yellow plains cut by deep canyons, and the survivors of war and famine lived in caves dug into the soft yellow earth of the hills. Between 1928 and 1933, more than half of the local people had died of famine. In many villages every child under ten was dead. That kind of poverty, as in the Hakka country of the south, was fertile ground for the Communists. Mao and He Zizhen moved into a cave of their own. In mid-December the leaders settled at Wayaobao, the only district town, in Braun's words, that was "firmly in the hands of the Red Army." Mao spent the autumn and winter building a government and, above all, an army. He set up a military council to run the new soviet area, with himself as chairman. One of his two deputies was Zhou Enlai, recovered now from his malaria. And he mended fences. Bo Gu, who had been made to give up the party leadership that February, was given the lofty title of chairman of the new regional government, and was glad to serve. Mao forgave Zhu De for staying with Zhang Guotao, reasoning that the old soldier was used to obeying the party and could not have stood up to Zhang. He had a phrase for it: treat the illness to save the patient. Mao's men joined with the local Communist forces and with another Red Army that had wandered all the way from Anhui, and together they made an army of about twenty thousand. Mao told them the goal was to keep expanding until their territory touched the Soviet Union and Mongolia. For a party at the far edge of China, with its main force a fraction of what it had been, that was a bold thing to say. The Communists had survived. Chiang Kai-shek had won back Jiangxi and a hold on the southwest, and finishing off the Red armies was still his highest priority. To do it, he would send an army that had no wish to fight them. Next time: the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, the man who lost Manchuria, is in command of Chiang's troops in the northwest, and he and his men would rather fight Japan. As students march and Moscow calls for a united front, an American journalist goes looking for Mao in his caves. And at dawn one December morning, the Young Marshal's soldiers come for Chiang Kai-shek.
Sources
- Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 251-252, 252-254, 268-269, 269-270, 272-273, 273-274, 274-276, 276-277, 277-278, 278-279, 279-281, 281-282, 282-283, 283-285, 285-286, 286-287, 287-289, 289-290
- Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 98-100, 100-101, 108-109, 109-111, 111-112, 114-115
- Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 248-249, 254-255, 257-258, 279-280, 287-288, 297-299, 299-301
- Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)