Revolution and Civil War, episode 23

Rectification

Through the war about a hundred thousand people make their way to Yan'an, the town in the northwest where Mao Zedong's party has its capital, and in 1942 Mao turns on them with the Rectification movement, a campaign of study, confession and fear meant to make the party his. The episode follows Mao from his promise of a New Democracy to his lectures telling writers to learn from workers and peasants, through the purges of 1942 to 1944 and the campaign against Chiang Kai-shek that breaks the spirit of the united front, to the moment Wang Ming, the Moscow-trained rival he has pushed aside, writes that he supports Mao wholeheartedly, and asks the season's question of why the Communists grew so fast in the war. It leans entirely on scholars, who quote the diary of the Soviet liaison in Yan'an, Pyotr Vladimirov, the one outside witness.

Listen in Apple Podcasts Spotify

Send feedback on this episode

Transcript

Last time, Joseph Stilwell went home. Chiang Kai-shek demanded his recall, and Roosevelt's own envoy, Patrick J. Hurley, sat up until two in the morning writing to the President that it had come down to a choice between the two men. Hurley told Roosevelt that Chiang reacted violently against any form of coercion, and that Stilwell was incapable of working with him. Roosevelt agreed, and Stilwell was called home at once. But a few months before that, something else had happened, far to the northwest. On 22 July 1944 an American plane came in to land on the yellow loess soil of Yan'an. It veered off the runway in a cloud of dust and stopped abruptly as its propeller fell off noisily. Nobody was hurt. Mao Zedong and Zhu De were waiting at the airfield in new matching uniforms, with martial music and a parade of soldiers. The Americans loved what they found. The man leading their political work, John S. Service, young and full of bounce, wrote that there were no bodyguards, no beggars and no desperate poverty, and that the leaders were approachable. "Morale is very high," Service wrote. "There is no defeatism, but rather confidence." One man at that airfield saw a different Yan'an. Pyotr Vladimirov was a Soviet military intelligence officer posted to the town, who doubled as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency and had been critical of Mao from the start. He was there with his camera to record the Americans' arrival. And in his own reports he described an "oppressive, suffocating atmosphere in the party", where people hurried to "redeem themselves from their nonexistent sins." So which was it? A town of confidence and plain living, or a town of fear? The answer is both, and to see how, we need to go back a few years, to the people who came to Yan'an to make a revolution, and to what Mao Zedong did to them. Yan'an sits in the north of Shaanxi province, in China's dry, hilly northwest. The Communists made it their capital after the Long March brought them there. Between 1937 and 1940, with Japan's armies pouring into eastern China, some 100,000 people made their way to Yan'an. That is a small number next to the millions who fled west to Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek's wartime capital. But the people who went to Yan'an were a particular kind. Perhaps 50,000 of them were middle class and educated: students, journalists and teachers. Many came looking for a new future for China. They felt the Nationalists had already disgraced themselves by how brutally their government had behaved before the war. To them Yan'an was a beacon of radical resistance, and the Communist Party perhaps a more effective force against Japan than the Nationalists. So what were they walking toward? The dream, in a word, was a new China. The reality was something else. For many of them, the reality of Yan'an did not measure up to the dream. The town sat in a region so poor and so backward that it made Chongqing look like a sophisticated metropolis. The country around it was almost entirely farmland, and desperately poor, which was one reason the Communist message had landed so well there. The whole region the party ruled from Yan'an held only 1.4 million people. It was prone to earthquakes and drought, to banditry and famine. The yellow soil there, called loess, had weathered into cliffs, and people lived in cave houses carved into them. Loess is a fine, wind-blown dust that packs hard enough to dig rooms into, and cave homes cut into loess hillsides were the ordinary housing of that part of China. For the newcomers, food was scarce and housing was basic. At the Yan'an College of Marxism-Leninism, the students lived in a hillside cave, with desks and lamps for studying in the evenings, but no chairs. One student, Duan Suquan, remembered it many years later. "Student life was very ordered." "We studied, went to class, discussed things, then ate and slept." There was strict order, and a whistle signalled what to do next. And yet, for all the order, it was hard to get anything moving. The founder of the Yan'an hospital, Chen Xuezhao, complained in the party newspaper about the meetings. "For a meeting that lasts two hours, you wait two hours". And by the time the reports began, the complaint went on, you were too exhausted to concentrate. Then there were the locals. The newcomers wanted a tidy, systematic revolution, and they ran straight into the habits of farmers who had worked that land for centuries. In the spring of 1938 a young worker activist named Yang Changchun joined a tree planting, and suggested lining the trees up to keep them neat. The official in charge, a veteran of the Long March, told him you shoved a tree into the ground and that was all there was to it. A shouting match broke out. Yang yelled that the man was "just an old peasant". The veteran shot back: "you people who've come from the Nationalist areas are disgusting—you look like foreigners!" Skilled industrial workers were so scarce in Yan'an that they could earn about twice what they had before the war, which did not help the mood either. And then there was the simple arithmetic of the place. In Yan'an men always outnumbered women. In 1938 there were some thirty men to every woman. Even by 1944 there were still eight men to each woman. For many of the women who did come, Yan'an was a chance to escape the roles they had been raised for. At the Women's University, revolutionary costumes with open, Lenin-style collars were the thing to wear. Men and women dressed alike, and the Americans who came later noticed that there were none of the couples spooning in the parks they had seen in Chongqing. As one activist put it, Yan'an "was really not a sexy town." And all the while, the war pressed in. In 1941 Japan answered a Communist offensive with a campaign whose orders were to kill all, burn all, loot all, and for three years the Communist bases across the north were ravaged. Villages were destroyed, crops ruined and grain seized, and then the Japanese came back again and again to make sure no resistance could grow. By the Communists' own count, the population of their bases shrank from some 44 million to 25 million, and many soldiers deserted. In most of the north the goal was no longer resistance but survival. The exception was Mao's own base around Yan'an. Neither the Japanese nor the Nationalists could easily reach it, while so many other Communist bases lay behind Japanese lines. An American Marine officer who toured China in the late thirties, Evans Carlson, called Chiang and Mao the twin stars of China. But the years of war wore Chongqing down, while the power of Yan'an grew. Meanwhile the party itself was swelling. From its low point in 1934, Communist membership grew to more than 700,000 by 1942. That is the raw material Mao Zedong had to work with: a flood of idealistic, educated, argumentative young people, and a countryside full of new peasant activists. Mao was the party's leader, a farmer's son from Hunan who had built a Communist state in the hills of Jiangxi and, when it fell, marched with the survivors to the northwest. In these years he set out to make all of them, the intellectuals and the peasants alike, into one disciplined party.

Before the fear, though, came a promise. By 1939 the wartime alliance between the Communists and the Nationalists was going sour. That year Chiang Kai-shek took the title of director-general of his party, which put him on a level with its founder, Sun Yat-sen. Sun had died in 1925, and every faction in China now wanted to be his heir. Sun's creed was the Three People's Principles: nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood. In the ten years the Nationalists ruled from Nanjing, those principles had been carried out patchily at best. But Chiang still wore them as his banner. And Mao decided to take that banner away from him. On 9 January 1940 he gave one of the most important speeches of his life, and soon published it as a longer article. Its title was On New Democracy. Even the word Mao chose for democracy was a shot at Chiang. Sun's word for it meant something like popular rights, a thing a government might hand down to its citizens. Mao used a word that meant popular rule, the people in direct control. Chiang's version of the Principles, Mao argued, was little more than a way to keep the economy as it was and push communism aside. So Mao offered what he called New Three People's Principles. They put an alliance with the Soviet Union ahead of unity with the imperialist powers, called for cooperation with the Communist Party, and promised help to the peasants and workers. It was a much more openly Communist programme. And yet Mao took care to say that it was "a development of the old Three People's Principles, a great contribution of Mr. Sun Yat-sen." He was not alone in this game. In Nanjing, Wang Jingwei, the Nationalist who had gone over to Japan, was building his own government on Sun's ideas too, pointing to Sun's dream of an Asia united. So in 1940 there were three governments in China, each claiming to be the true heir of the same dead man. What did Mao's New Democracy actually promise? Quite a lot, and almost all of it sounded reassuring. China, he said, was a colonial, semicolonial and semifeudal country. What it needed now was not a socialist revolution but what he called a new-democratic one. After the revolution, private property would be guaranteed. National business would be encouraged, under a policy of protection. He called for lower taxes, a multiparty system, a coalition government, and democratic freedoms. There was a catch, and Mao stated it openly. All this would happen under the leadership of the Communist Party. But the party no longer presented itself as the voice of the working class alone. It spoke for all the revolutionary people, and the future China would be, in his words, "a joint dictatorship of all revolutionary classes". Mao did not write it alone. His secretary, Chen Boda, who had come to Yan'an in 1937, helped him work out the theory. He had first laid out the idea in December 1939, in an article written with several comrades, Chen Boda and Zhang Wentian among them. In August 1940, in a Yan'an hospital, Mao's new wife, Jiang Qing, gave birth to a daughter, Li Na. Mao took the name from a saying of Confucius: a gentleman should be slow to speak and prompt to act. Jiang Qing had been a film actress in Shanghai before she made her way to Yan'an. Now think back to the students, journalists and teachers who had come to Yan'an. The educated class had grown up on the revolution of 1911, on the first parliament, on the May Fourth movement of 1919. They were the people expected to welcome New Democracy with open arms. Was it meant? Here the sources disagree. On one side, New Democracy was a mask. Mao built it on the instructions Stalin had given the Chinese Communists in 1937, and Stalin's own talk of a people's democracy was a deliberate deception, aimed at Chinese intellectuals, at Chiang, and at the whole capitalist West. On that reading, the moment was perfect for Mao, because he was offering Stalin exactly what Stalin wanted. On the other side, the language of pluralism was not simply a smoke screen for dictatorship. Before 1941 both the Communists and the Nationalists made real efforts to reach people outside their own parties. Both readings end in the same place, though. Neither Mao nor Chiang ever pictured a China with more than one dominant party, and neither believed that a modern state had to be a liberal one. None of China's three wartime governments was trying to build what Americans would call a democracy. And within two years, the tone in Yan'an would change completely.

On 1 February 1942, at the opening of the Party School in Yan'an, Mao stood up before more than a thousand party officials and gave them a stinging lecture. "There is something in the minds of a number of our comrades," he said, "which strikes one as not quite right, not quite proper." He went after what he called ill winds. He mocked the jargon-stuffed writing of some activists, comparing it to the eight-legged essay, the stiff, formal composition candidates once had to write in the imperial examinations. He went after the intellectuals who had come to join him: "Many so-called intellectuals are, relatively speaking, most ignorant and the workers and peasants sometimes know more than they do." And he reminded them that they had joined a Communist movement, and that the "Party not only needs democracy but needs centralization even more." That speech opened what came to be called the Rectification Movement. The word means setting right, correcting. The idea was to correct the party's style of work, its thinking and its habits. Mao could be very blunt about it. Some comrades, he said, treated Marxism as a ready-made cure for every ill. "Your dogma is of no use," he told them, or, to put it impolitely, "Your dogma is less useful than shit." Dog shit, he went on, can fertilize the fields. "And dogmas? They can't fertilize the fields, nor can they feed a dog." It was crude, and it was funny, and it was also a threat. The people it was aimed at knew exactly who they were. The immediate target was Wang Ming and the other Communist leaders who had spent time in Moscow, a group known as the 28 Bolsheviks. Wang Ming was a proud, power-hungry party leader, Stalin's best pupil, who had come back to Yan'an from Moscow in late 1937 presenting himself as the only true voice of Moscow's orders. For a while after he returned, Mao later admitted, his own authority did not reach beyond his cave. Mao won that contest in 1938, once Moscow let it be known that he was its choice. But winning was not enough for Mao. Wang Ming was the main target of the new campaign, though Stalin had already discarded him. Wang still had one powerful friend in Moscow: Georgi Dimitrov, who ran the Comintern and had grown close to him there. The Comintern was the organisation in Moscow through which the Soviet party directed Communist parties around the world, the Chinese party among them. Other old Moscow men, Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian among them, were targets too, and the campaign brushed against Zhou Enlai for having opposed Mao in the past. Zhou was the party's most polished negotiator, who had studied in Japan and France as a young man and had served beside Mao since the Long March. There was a deeper problem the campaign was meant to solve. When it began, Mao could still be accused of being a clever tactician and a poor Marxist, a man whose policies ignored the cities, and so the working class. Rectification was going to settle that. When it was over, Mao's word would be the final truth in the party, and what came to be called Mao Zedong Thought would be its creed. You could see it in the reading list. In April 1942 the party issued a list of twenty-two key texts that would-be members had to master. Eighteen of them were by Mao. Many were really written by Mao with his close helpers, men like Chen Boda, but they went out under his name. The heart of it was the study group. Small groups of officials met to examine Mao's documents and to criticise themselves. The sessions were part time and ran on rolling schedules so that the work of government went on. But once a group started, it could go on for weeks and months, and nobody quite knew what had to be achieved before it could stop. Seen from below, the campaign was less about Mao than about melting very different men and women into one cause, with its own language, symbols, rituals, sacred texts and stories, until they were true believers, sure they could change the world. The students were a particular problem. Their skills were valuable. Their independence of mind, and their habit of holding party leaders to the highest Communist ideals, were less so. The peasant activists had to be tamed too. Young village men suddenly holding power had to learn not to abuse it, not to favour their own relatives the old way, and above all to follow the party's changing orders even when they did not fully understand them. Many of them had come up through brutal struggles against landlords and found the milder policies of the alliance with the Nationalists hard to swallow. Some had to be taught to read. Mao insisted that the point was not to destroy anyone. Through self-criticism and repentance would come a new self. In his words, the aim was to cure the disease, not to kill the patient. Some who promptly confessed to working for the enemy were held up as models, almost heroes, for others to follow. But one group stayed especially suspect: the intellectuals and the artists, prone to sins the party called subjectivism and formalism. He told the party in January 1943 that the past purges in the Soviet Union had been a mistake. What China needed, he said, was a spiritual purge. One witness called it psychological calisthenics. Yan'an sank into endless meetings, where Mao's old opponents, now labelled dogmatists, confessed, criticised themselves, and praised the wisdom of the Leader. They wrote denunciations of themselves, and denunciations of their friends. And all of those papers went somewhere. A special commission ran the campaign, and at its head Mao placed Kang Sheng, who had them filed in the archives. Kang Sheng was Mao's security chief, and you should know where he learned his trade. In 1936 the party had sent him to Moscow, just as Stalin's purges reached their height. Trained by the Soviet secret police, he set up an office there to eliminate counterrevolutionaries, and sent out orders to execute Chinese Communists branded as renegades. Many of them were guilty of nothing more than knowing embarrassing things about Kang's own past. Kang had watched Mao's star rise through the thirties, and he had hitched himself to it. Rectification was his moment. But some of those who pushed back were not Moscow men at all. They were writers. Mao had a wider target than Wang Ming: the individualism and loose discipline of the party's prominent intellectuals. The romantic days of running off to Yan'an in protest were over. Party membership now meant building a machine to rule China. Among them was Ding Ling. In the 1920s her frank short story The Diary of Miss Sophie had caused a literary sensation in Shanghai. She reached Yan'an in January 1937 after a long and dangerous journey, and became one of the best known writers in the region. Her fiction mixed revolutionary conviction with doubts about whether the party really cared about freeing women, a cause that always seemed to come second to class struggle. Her story When I Was in Xia Village, published in 1941, was about a young woman who works as a prostitute behind Japanese lines as cover for spying, and comes home to be shunned by her village for it. Its power lay in refusing to say who was good and who was bad. After Mao's speech, Ding Ling answered him in print. In March 1942 she published an essay called Thoughts on March 8, the date of International Women's Day. Even in revolutionary Yan'an, she wrote, women were judged differently from men. "Women cannot transcend their times," she pleaded. "They are not ideal, they are not made of steel". She asked that men, especially men in power, see women's shortcomings in the context of the society around them. Another young writer and translator, Wang Shiwei, wrote an essay called Wild Lily, which attacked the smugness of Yan'an and accused senior officials of losing their revolutionary spirit. Mao did not take long to answer. In April, Ding Ling was fired as literary editor of the party newspaper, Liberation Daily.

On 2 May 1942, three months after the campaign began, more than a hundred writers and artists sat waiting on wooden benches in the Yangjialing district of Yan'an. They were waiting for Mao, who was to open what became known as the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art. Ever since they had come, these people had been pulled two ways: loyal to the revolution and the party they admired, and sure that as artists they had to be true to what they saw. They were about to be told which loyalty came first. As Mao began to speak, gunfire cracked from Nationalist positions nearby. He carried on, and he made himself perfectly clear. Art, he said, had to serve the war and the revolution. In Yan'an, its audience was workers, peasants, soldiers and revolutionary officials. Writers had to "learn the language of the masses", and stop turning out "insipid" and "nondescript" work. The practical demand was simple: make your work something ordinary people can understand, which, as it happened, might mean more of the old Chinese forms and fewer Western ones. But Mao wanted more than accessible art. Artists were to take the party's line and, in the end, remake themselves. And to show them how, he offered himself as the example. If you want to be one with the masses, he told them, "you must make up your mind to undergo a long and even painful process of tempering." Then he told them a story about himself as a young man, at school in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. "I began life as a student and at school acquired the ways of a student", he said. He had thought it beneath him even to carry his own luggage in front of his classmates. "At that time I felt that intellectuals were the only clean people in the world, while in comparison workers and peasants were dirty." He would wear another student's clothes, he said, believing them clean, but never a worker's or a peasant's. It was a true confession. As a young man in Changsha, Mao had leaned on his father's money rather than take any job beneath a student, because he felt himself above the soldiers, peasants and porters around him. Then, he said, he became a revolutionary, and lived among workers, peasants and soldiers, and came to know them, and they came to know him. And he came to feel that, in the last analysis, "the workers and peasants were the cleanest people," cleaner than the intellectuals, even with their hands soiled and their feet smeared with cow dung. That was what he meant by a change of feeling, a change from one class to another. It is worth hearing what Mao was promising here. You could be born into the wrong class and still be saved. You could learn the right consciousness, if painfully, the way a convert is reborn. At the meetings that followed over the next few weeks, the writers took the hint. Speaker after speaker stood up to harangue, repent and denounce. Hu Qiaomu, who would later run the party's propaganda, declared that Lu Xun, China's great modern writer, who had died in 1936, should have accepted the party's leadership, and that he had not was "not to his credit." The writer He Qifang, declaring "I urgently need to be reformed", made a powerful self-criticism, a plea for the party's forgiveness. At the end of the forum, on 23 May, Mao came back to say that this was the beginning of the change, not the end. "Intellectuals who want to serve the masses," he said, "must go through a process in which they and the masses come to know each other well." And then he added a warning: "This process may, and certainly will, involve much pain and friction." After the forum, Yan'an changed. It became much harder to get into the region, and very hard to leave. The openness of the early years gave way to all or nothing. Talk of many voices, and of new democracy, gave way to party control. The pain and the friction were Kang Sheng's work. He used an old Soviet method. Loyal party members were accused of being Nationalist spies, and once they confessed under torture, their confessions set off an avalanche of new accusations and arrests. In 1943, as the war worsened and the Communist region grew more isolated, Kang stepped up the speed and ferocity of the purges. Colleagues asked whether there could really be as many Nationalist agents in Yan'an as his roundups suggested. Kang replied: "We can talk about that after their arrest. When they're locked up, we can interrogate them." In public, in a speech of July 1943, he made it sound like rescue. The party took such pains, he said, "Simply because it wants you to be Chinese, and not be cheated into serving the enemy." But "leniency has a limit", he said, and those who would not admit their guilt had to be stamped out by stern methods. The pressure was psychological first. In one method, the accused was confined inside a circle and not allowed to leave it until there was a confession. A woman who went through it still remembered the terror more than half a century later. "Do you believe in the Party?" they asked her. She said she did. Then if the party says you're a problem, came the reply, you're a problem. She remembered feeling that she wanted to jump off a cliff. Some did not survive it. An intellectual named Shi Bofu was jailed as a spy, and his wife, Gao Luoying, confessed that she had meant to murder the party writer Zhou Yang. She then killed herself and her three children with carbon monoxide in their cave home. When he heard, Zhou Yang said that she had cut herself off from the party, and so from the people. Her act, he said, showed how much she hated the Communist Party. And it was not only fear. There was physical punishment, and often outright torture. At the Lu Xun Art Institute, a school with a cultured name, the methods included tying up and beating the ideologically stubborn. The institute even kept its own labour camp, which some inmates said was as bad as the Nationalists' camps. Wang Shiwei, the author of Wild Lily, was one of the victims. Posters went up denouncing him. He was expelled from the party as a Trotskyist and held where nobody could reach him. A Trotskyist was a follower of Leon Trotsky, Stalin's exiled rival, and in Communist parties loyal to Moscow the word had become the deadliest of insults. Wang Shiwei was executed in 1947. Ding Ling was criticised hard and forced to take back what she had written in Thoughts on March 8. She was sent to work in the countryside for two years. How far did the violence go? Here the sources disagree. One side sees a campaign in which a few people were beaten and driven to suicide, while most were redeemed and welcomed back, and the young officials came out of it welded into a tighter, more disciplined body. The other side sees torture as a method, an art school with a labour camp, and a blueprint for the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution a quarter of a century later. In that telling, it was the moment Mao's China came into being. Rectification, as one historian puts it, mixed cynical power politics with real faith that people could be remade. It joined coercion to redemption. And because no one could measure the sincerity of a conversion, the campaign could never formally end. It simply petered out.

While Yan'an was turning inward, it was also turning on Chiang Kai-shek. In the summer of 1943 Chiang wrote in his diary that he did not need to force the Communists to disband. His best strategy, he thought, was to use politics and propaganda to widen the rifts inside their party. And there were rifts, or so it seemed. Dimitrov had sent a Chinese agent of the Soviet secret police to Chongqing, Chiang's capital, to report on what was happening inside the Communist Party. The agent, Gao Dong, met several times with Zhou Enlai, who ran the Communists' liaison office in Chongqing. Gao reported that an anti-Chiang campaign was building in Yan'an, warning that a massive Nationalist attack on the Communist base was coming. The cartoons in the Communist papers and the wall posters, he reported, showed Chiang together with Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini. Tojo was Hideki Tojo, the general who was Japan's prime minister from late 1941 until 1944. The new slogan in Yan'an was an old one, from before the war: "Struggle against Japan and Chiang Kai-shek." In other words, the alliance with the Nationalists was still alive on paper, and dead on the walls. Vladimirov, the Soviet officer, reported that Mao took the credit for this vilification of Chiang, and said it should have been done much earlier. Stalin did not object, though it broke the principles of the alliance against Japan. After the great tank battle at Kursk, with the Germans in retreat, he was already thinking about China after the war, and about squeezing Chiang. Newspapers in Moscow took up the theme, charging that Chiang had given the Communists an ultimatum to surrender. The alarm spread. Hearing of a coming Nationalist attack, Stilwell and the American ambassador, Clarence E. Gauss, sent alarming messages to Washington, and General Marshall cabled T. V. Soong, to express grave concern. Chiang saw all of it as a Russian conspiracy. But he also suspected something subtler: that the attacks on him were really part of a big conspiracy against Zhou Enlai. Mao, Chiang guessed, wanted to provoke him into attacking Yan'an, and so give himself the excuse, among other things, to purge Zhou. Chiang may have been onto something. The Soviet agent reported that the campaign in Yan'an was now attacking Zhou and others as right opportunists and internationalists who had spread "illusions about Chiang Kai-shek." Mao himself told Vladimirov that the targets were defeatists, whose policy of giving in to the Nationalists had harmed the party. That pointed straight at Zhou. Chiang had hoped for a split. He did not get one. Instead, according to the reports reaching Moscow, Zhou was removed from the party's inner Secretariat, admitted his mistakes in accommodating the Nationalists, and brought his thinking back into line with Mao's. Soon afterward Chiang heard that Zhou had ordered a new drive to recruit Nationalist officials as secret Communist members. To Chiang, it was one more sign that Mao was getting ready for the struggle after the war. Chiang came close to striking. In September 1943 he mused that it would be best to have a military solution to the Communist problem, and to do it before the war between Germany and Russia ended. He told Soong he had decided on disciplinary punishment. Then he thought about it overnight, and the next day he wrote that "even disciplinary measures will not be taken." On 13 September the Nationalist Central Committee published an eighteen-page booklet on the Communists' crimes: attacks on Nationalist troops, illegal expansion of their armies, their own currency, and alleged opium smuggling. Five days later, despite all the harsh words on both sides, a Communist representative, Dong Biwu, sat down at a session of the wartime multiparty council in Chongqing. And the message Mao sent to the Americans, through Zhou and others, was soothing: whatever the noise, the Communists were still committed to the united front and to a democratic process. About this time Zhou met the American journalist Edgar Snow in Chongqing, and said he hoped American military officers and journalists would soon visit Yan'an. Snow passed it straight on to the Americans. So the same party that was purging its own ranks and painting Chiang as Hitler was also inviting the Americans in. Keep both of those in mind, because the Americans would only see one.

That leaves one man, the one this whole campaign had been aimed at from the start. Wang Ming was the only one of the party's leaders who refused to criticise himself. He had reported sick to stay out of the campaign, and in early 1943 Mao turned up the pressure on him. On 15 January 1943 a message from Yan'an reached Dimitrov in Moscow that Wang Ming was seriously ill. It came through Vladimirov. Wang needed treatment in Chengdu or the Soviet Union, the Soviet officer reported, but Mao and Kang Sheng supposedly did not want to let him leave, for fear he would talk about them. Dimitrov was in a bind. He was Wang's friend, but he was not free to act; he had to carry out Stalin's policy. So he stalled, and advised Soviet military intelligence not to meddle in the Chinese Communists' affairs. Wang did not wait. At the end of January 1943 he sent a long telegram to Stalin and Dimitrov, through his Soviet doctor in Yan'an, Andrei Orlov, and Vladimirov, accusing Mao of anti-Leninist and Trotskyite activity. It reached Moscow on 1 February. Two days later Dimitrov received a telegram from Mao, full of sharp accusations against Wang. Mao had evidently learned what his enemy was saying about him, and struck first. Liu Shaoqi was now rising fast at Mao's side. A thin, frail looking Hunan man with endless energy, an organiser who had backed Mao at the decisive meeting of the Long March, he had come to Yan'an at Mao's invitation in December 1942. In March 1943 Liu joined the party's reorganised Secretariat, and with Kang Sheng he ran the campaign for the delegates gathering for a long delayed party congress. Those delegates spent two to three years in study, criticism and confession. Then, on 11 February 1943, a senior Soviet security official, Vladimir Dekanozov, unexpectedly called Dimitrov about Wang Ming, and suggested that the Soviet ambassador ask Chiang Kai-shek to let Wang leave China. It was a strange move, perhaps a test of whether Dimitrov would put an old friend ahead of the movement. If so, Dimitrov passed it. He did nothing. Then, on 13 December 1943, he sent Wang a gloomy message about his party troubles: "do your best to settle them yourselves." It seemed that Wang's fate was sealed. Nine days later, Dimitrov wrote to Mao. "Persons such as Zhou Enlai and Wang Ming must not be severed from the party," he wrote, "but protected and used as much as possible for the good of the party." Coming so soon after his gloomy telegram, that letter must have carried Stalin's blessing. Why Stalin chose to shield Wang Ming that December, nobody knows. Mao answered with two telegrams. The first, on 2 January 1944, said that relations with Zhou were very good and that there was no thought of cutting him off. But on Wang Ming he did not give an inch. He wrote, "I consider Wang Ming unreliable." Wang, he wrote, had engaged in various antiparty activities, which the cadres knew about but the rank and file would not be told. And he repeated a story that Wang, arrested years earlier in Shanghai, had confessed in prison to being a Communist. Five days later Mao backed down. He had understood exactly who he was really writing to. With Wang Ming, he wrote, the party would pursue a policy of unity. "Please set your mind at ease." And he made a point of sending that second telegram through Vladimirov rather than his own channels, so Moscow would see it plainly. Mao had stayed loyal to Moscow, and Dimitrov, relieved, wrote back, "I was particularly heartened by your second telegram." Stalin did not want Wang Ming to lead the Chinese party. But he did not mean to let Mao tear him to pieces either. Wang understood that he could expect nothing more. It was time to give in. On 7 March 1944, Dimitrov received his reply. His relations with Mao were as before, Wang wrote, "inasmuch as I wholeheartedly support him as the leader of the party". Over the past year, he went on, the party had been reexamining its whole history on the basis of Mao's ideas, and he fully supported it. The struggle against the party's old left-wing errors, and the new policy of the united front against Japan, were, he wrote, "Mao Zedong's contribution, not mine as I had earlier believed." "I also renounced all political disagreements." And he closed by thanking Dimitrov and his wife for their long care and education of his daughter. Once, Mao had seen this man as his craftiest and most merciless rival. Now he was submitting in writing. The party was Mao's. So step back and ask the question this whole period raises. In 1934 the Communists had nearly been wiped out. By 1942 they had more than 700,000 members, and by 1945 more than a million. How? Part of the answer is where they went. Japan's armies held the cities and the railways but rarely the countryside, and Communist detachments moved into the gap; by 1940 there were more than ten Communist bases behind Japanese lines. Part of it is what they did not have to do. Mao fought a guerrilla war, so he did not need the huge standing armies Chiang had to pay for, and he could spend his taxes in other ways. Part of it is how they worked. The Communists armed as many peasants as they could, something the Nationalists could not imagine doing, and they drew villages into a real voice in their own affairs. And part of it is how bad things were on the other side. In Kunming, in December 1943, a couple working at an educational institution advertised in the newspaper to give away their child, due the next spring, because they could not bring it up. In a country where children carried on the family line, that was a sign the war had twisted life almost beyond recognition. And the last part is the one this episode has been about: a party that came out of Rectification tighter, more disciplined, and wholeheartedly believing in its leader. Those were the people the Americans met in the summer of 1944: high morale, no defeatism, no bodyguards. They saw the confidence. They did not see the circle. And the Americans were not finished with Yan'an. Next time, we see what the Americans wanted from Mao, and what he wanted from them. Stalin strikes his own bargain with Roosevelt at Yalta, Japan surrenders, and Mao and Chiang Kai-shek sit down across a table from each other in Chongqing.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 35-36, 36-38, 315-317, 318-319, 322-324, 330-331, 331-332, 335-336, 336-338, 338-339, 339-340
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 240-241, 241-243, 292-294
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 328-329, 329-330, 330-332, 335-336
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)