THIRTEEN
“Political Power Grows Out of the Barrel of a Gun”: Mao and the Red Army
That Mao Zedong was a military genius is a myth, although a powerful one. It is one that has been embraced by many people, from those seeking to explain how the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949 to those seeking to emulate them. Intimately associated with this Maoist myth is the image of a Red Army invincible once it had subscribed to Mao's military ideas. Accordingly, Mao's military writings have come to serve as the blueprint for many liberation movements in the so-called Third World. For example, Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general responsible for defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu, acknowledged Mao's contribution to his army's victories: “We educated ourselves according to the military thought of Mao Zedong. That was the important factor that allowed our army to mature and that led to our successive victories.”1
In fact, Mao was principally a political leader rather than a military commander, even though he served in that capacity on several occasions, and the Red Army was far from invincible, having suffered many reverses before its ultimate triumph during the Chinese Civil War (1946-1949). In the beginning, Mao was the political commissar of the Central Soviet base area in the Jiangxi-Fujian border region; only later did he become one of the major leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. Paradoxically, Mao owed his rise to political prominence in part to Red Army defeats rather than victories, and to the support of Red Army commanders who were actually ambivalent about his military capabilities.
THE MAKING OF A MAOIST MYTH
Mao's reputation as a brilliant strategist and tactician is mainly a retrospective view resulting from the triumph of the Chinese Communists in 1949 and the cult of personality that developed around him (with an assist from his own talent for self-promotion). His image as a military leader evolved from that of a gallant guerrilla chieftain who started an insurgency in the countryside in 1927 to that of the head of the Red Army during the famous Long March. It was based in small part on the romantic appeal of his underdog status (and his poetry) and in large part on the incompetence of his Nationalist opponents and the competence of his partner Zhu De, an experienced military commander and former warlord. Later, as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao was given credit for the victory against the Nationalist Party, a triumph that was achieved largely on the battlefield. And as the ruler of China, he was traditionally accorded both civil and martial virtues.
Given the popular “great man” approach to history, it was a matter of convention as well as convenience to attribute martial sagacity to Mao. Journalists, scholars, and others who have delved into his early years point out that while other children were studying the Confucian canon to prepare themselves to be mandarins in the Chinese establishment, Mao was reading picaresque novels about righteous rebels who sought to overthrow the establishment. Among his favorites was The Water Margin (Shui hu zhuan), whose heroes fought corrupt and greedy officials in the timeless tradition of social bandits around the world. Harrison Salisbury, an American journalist, would refer to the novels as Mao's manuals for conducting guerrilla warfare, pointing specifically to The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San guo yanyi) as his “military text” for the Long March.2
But Mao's reading of historical romances is hardly unique; many of his contemporaries, including Communist military leaders such as Zhu De, read them as well. In any case, the historical references and literary allusions in Mao's essays testify that he was equally familiar with the traditional Confucian literature. Whatever else Mao was, he was unquestionably a Chinese intellectual. And like intellectuals the world over, Mao felt that he knew what was best in any area he chose to take an interest in, including military matters. Indeed, he was fond of “philosophizing” about war: War was the supreme test of the human spirit, and the human spirit was the decisive factor in the outcome of a war.
Supporting the image of Mao as a military wizard is the cult of his personality, which began in response to the perceived need for a symbol of unity around which to rally the Chinese people. In China's authoritarian political culture, the people needed to be able to identify with someone representing the power of the state. Mao himself advanced this idea in an “anonymous article urging his compatriots to follow Mao's way.”3 “Mao's way” was codified in April 1945, when the Seventh Congress of the CCP adopted a new constitution containing a preamble in which the “Thought of Mao Zedong” was deemed an essential guide to the work of the party. With that, Mao became the party's ideological spokesperson, setting its goals and values. His “words of wisdom” would be encapsulated in the Quotations from Chairman Mao (popularly known as “the Little Red Book”), which was widely disseminated thoughout the military and then society in general beginning in 1964.
As the object of veneration, Mao subsumed the accomplishments of other leaders so that he became a composite figure incorporating the achievements of Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao, and other Communist military leaders. After 1949, when Zhu sought to commission a biography, Mao prevented it from being published because “it might have suggested that not every single victory on the Long March and at other moments of the Communist struggle was due to the genius of the Chairman.”4
Those of Mao's writings that analyze the CCP's military situation and present his theories on the role of the military in the Communist revolution are referred to collectively by hagiographers as “The Glorious Military Thought of Comrade Mao Zedong.” Lin Biao even elevated Mao's military thought to the level of revolutionary dogma. In “Long Live the Victory of the People's War” (September 1965), Lin advanced the thesis that just as the Chinese Communist revolutionaries in the countryside had encircled and captured the cities, so would the underdeveloped Third World countries surround the advanced capitalist countries.5
Ironically, Mao's knowledge of military strategy and tactics was initially slight. It was only in 1936-1938, when preparing to write essays on military tactics, that he finally read Sunzi's Art of War, the Chinese classic on warfare. Furthermore, questions have been raised about the authorship of some of the writings published in his name. His work Basic Tactics, for instance, may have been plagiarized from a treatise on guerrilla warfare written earlier by Zhu De and other military commanders. Unlike his political essays, which can be “amateurish, verbose, tendentious, repetitious,” this book on the operational principles of the Red Army is “thoroughly professional, usually laconic, objective, and to the point.”6 In other words, it is suspiciously unlike his usual work.
MAO THE SOLDIER
In any case, it is evident that Mao had limited experience in military affairs before his arrival at Jinggangshan, Jiangxi, in the autumn of 1927. According to Mao himself, during the 1911 Revolution he decided to join the army of the Republican leader Li Yuanhong after listening to him speak, and while in Changsha, Hunan, Mao enlisted in the Hunan Revolutionary Army. Considering the Chinese armies of the period, he probably received very little if any “training”; he also did very little “soldiering,” performing garrison duty for six months before resigning. Mao had hardly anything to say about this experience. Except for learning about and developing an enthusiasm for Socialism (that is, social reform) from reading newspapers and other publications, and writing letters for his fellow soldiers, Mao accomplished hardly anything at all.
Mao's lack of education and training in this area showed in his poor military management style. On more than one occasion, military commanders criticized him for his ineptitude. During the Jinggangshan period, Zhu expressed dissatisfaction with Mao's approach to guerrilla warfare; during the Long March, Lin Biao proposed that Mao confine himself to overall policy and planning, and leave military matters to Peng Dehuai. Liu Bocheng castigated “Mao's rhetorical style of combat instructions, which were often delivered with passion but were couched in such general language as to either confuse subordinate commanders or suggest that Mao was not clear about phasing, objectives, coordination, and other matters of modern military management.”7
By temperament and experience, Mao preferred political to military battles. His métier was maneuvers in the periodic intraparty conflicts that plagued the CCP: He paid particular attention to the ideological disputes that were the staples of such struggles, and assiduously built coalitions with other Communist leaders, including the military commanders. His political style was to criticize the ideas and policies of others while promoting his own in party forums. He was quite adept at capitalizing on the misfortunes of others. In the wake of the disintegration of the “first united front” in 1927, he would challenge Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy by advocating the establishment of a Red Army that would lead a protracted, peasant-based revolutionary movement to victory. In effect, the Red Army would become the revolutionary movement. To Mao, the military would always be a means to political ends.
In 1923, out of a common commitment to anti-imperialism and anti-warlordism, the Communists joined the Nationalist Party. Together, the Nationalists and Communists undertook the Northern Expedition (1926-1928), a military campaign to overcome the warlords and unify the country. The “united front” alliance collapsed when Chiang Kai-shek, commander-in-chief of the Northern Expedition, launched the “White terror” on April 12, 1927. With the assistance of Shanghai gangsters, Chiang used his army to purge the Communists from the Nationalist Party. As a result of this disaster, Mao realized that the CCP needed its own army, a disciplined and politicized military force that would not only defend it against counterrevolutionaries but would also be in the vanguard of the revolutionary struggle.
In an effort to salvage something from the Nationalist-Communist split, the CCP initiated urban and rural insurrections in the spring and summer of 1927. Assuming that they were in the midst of a so-called revolutionary high tide that would sweep them to power, Communist leaders adhered to the Marxist-Leninist political strategy of seizing urban centers through primarily proletarian uprisings, with the peasantry and military serving in an auxiliary capacity. However, after conducting an investigation (January 4 to February 5,1927) of a peasant uprising occurring in his native Hunan province, Mao conceived the “heretical” idea that it was the peasantry rather than the proletariat that would lead the revolution. At the August 7, 1927, emergency conference of the CCP's Central Committee, using his now famous aphorism, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” Mao argued that the proposed Autumn Harvest Uprising (September 12, 1927) required an armed peasantry. Presumably, this is why he was designated a special commissioner and sent to eastern Hunan, where the provincial committee appointed him a division commander of the Worker and Peasant Army then being organized. Meanwhile, the agrarian revolution he envisioned started without him.
THE ORIGINS OF THE RED ARMY
Mao never had a chance to participate actively in the Autumn Harvest Uprising. However, he did arrive in time to organize its survivors into the 1st Division of the Worker and Peasant Revolutionary Army. In October 1927 he led them to Jinggangshan, a remote, mountainous region along the Jiangxi-Hunan border that would serve as a secure rural base from which to renew the Communist movement. It was there that he employed hit-and-run guerrilla tactics against his enemies and became known as a veritable Chinese Robin Hood who robbed from the rich to give to the poor. This behavior is an essential component of his myth, but it did not make him unique. While he did expropriate and redistribute the property of the rich, so did Peng Pai and other Communist leaders waging an armed struggle in the countryside. During this period, Mao's reputation as a daring guerrilla chief was further embellished by his poetry. When he was not outwitting his enemies in the field, Mao was composing poems commemorating the exploits of his troops. His most famous work, however, is “The Immortals,” a paean to his beloved wife, Yang Kaihui, who was executed by the Guomindang in 1930. In recent memory, the only person who has ever rivaled Mao's reputation as a romantic revolutionary was Che Guevara, the Argentine-born theoretician and tactician of Marxist guerrilla warfare in Latin America. In reality, Mao was more like Che's comrade Fidel Castro, the political leader of Cuba.
In the following spring, Mao was joined by Zhu De and the remnants of the Nanchang Uprising, a failed urban insurrection by pro-Communist military forces that had taken place on August 1, 1927 (now celebrated as the founding day of the Chinese People's Liberation Army). In Zhu De, a former warlord who became an ardent Communist, Mao found a brilliant military tactician who was known as the Chinese Napoleon. Perhaps even more important from his perspective, Mao had found a military commander who truly believed in subordinating the army to political direction. Zhu De's willingness to defer to political authority would allow Mao eventually to take credit for the Red Army's victories.
Until 1931, when the CCP's Central Committee moved from Shanghai to Jiangxi, Mao Zedong and Zhu De had considerable local autonomy in the supervision of Communist revolution. They had time to regroup and to rethink the CCP's revolutionary strategy, with the immediate aim of taking control of Jiangxi province. They began to develop what might be called a “Communist revolution with Chinese characteristics,” to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping's approach to economic reform in the 1980s. At Jinggangshan, they established a rural base area, mobilized the peasantry, and organized a Red Army that fought a guerrilla war. From 1927 to 1929, under the leadership of Zhu and Mao, the Red Army defended the Jinggangshan base area against Nationalist army attacks. After being driven out, Zhu and Mao reestablished themselves along the Jiangxi-Fujian border, which became the Central Soviet, the most important of the several Communist base areas to emerge in various parts of China. Only the Eyuwan Soviet base area (located in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui border region) rivaled it in scope and influence. In April 1931 the Eyuwan base would be placed under the direction of Zhang Guotao, who would become Mao's arch rival.
Together, Zhu De and Mao Zedong made a formidable team. Because of the close working relationship between them, they were often mistaken for a single individual named “Zhu Mao.” However, despite their close collaboration, the two men maintained a clear division of responsibility: Zhu De served as the military commander and Mao Zedong as the political commissar of the newly organized Red Army.
As commander, Zhu De was in charge of organizing and training an effective military force and conducting military operations. It was during the Jiangxi Soviet period that Zhu developed several innovations for which the Red Army is known. First of all, out of his experience in fighting the Nationalist army's first three encirclement and suppression campaigns, he evolved the operational principles of mobile warfare summed up in the famous quatrain:
When the enemy advances, we retreat.
When the enemy halts and encamps, we harass them.
When the enemy seeks to avoid battle, we attack.
When the enemy retreats, we pursue.
Zhu also instituted the after-action debriefings in which Red Army officers and troops had an opportunity to critique the battle they had just fought. Finally, to instill personal discipline in his soldiers, he instituted the “The Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention”:
Three Rules
1. Obedience to orders.
2. Take not even a needle or thread from the people.
3. Turn in all confiscated goods.
Eight Points
1. Replace all doors and return all straw on which you sleep before leaving a house. [The doors were used as improvised beds.]
2. Speak courteously to the people and help them whenever possible.
3. Return all borrowed articles.
4. Pay for everything damaged.
5. Be honest in business transactions.
6. Be sanitary—dig latrines a safe distance from homes and fill them up with earth before leaving.
7. Never molest women.
8. Do not mistreat prisoners.
Adherence to these commandments would make the Red Army markedly different from the existing Chinese armies, particularly the predatory warlord armies that mercilessly victimized the populace. The comparatively good behavior of the Red Army in part explains how Communist soldiers won the “hearts and minds” of the Chinese people.
As the commissar, Mao had an equally important role to play and a significant contribution to make. He was responsible for raising the political consciousness of the troops through indoctrination in CCP principles, ensuring loyalty to the Communist cause, and instilling in them an esprit de corps. Besides fighting their enemies, the troops were expected to work with the peasant masses in order to develop the popular support that was necessary for their survival. The Red Army's relationship to the people was summed up in the saying “the soldiers are fish and the people water.” Popular support was generated through such techniques as the “mass line,” which involved consulting the people and drawing them into the political process. When done effectively, the mass line motivated and transformed people, and made them amenable to the party's aims. Even more important, Mao also sought to mobilize the masses through social and economic reforms, particularly redistribution of land. It was through the sympathy and support of the peasantry that he was able to set up an intelligence and logistical system that proved indispensable in defeating Chiang Kai-shek's encirclement and suppression campaigns.
THE ENCIRCLEMENT AND SUPPRESSION CAMPAIGNS
Chiang Kai-shek sought to destroy the resurgent Communist movement in Jiangxi once and for all with a major campaign to envelop and eliminate the main Red Army units. But to Chiang's chagrin, the Red Army defeated not only his first but also his second, third, and fourth encirclement and suppression campaigns. There were several contributing factors. During the first three campaigns (December 1930-September 1931) Zhu De and Mao Zedong effectively used a defensive-offensive strategy of “luring the enemy deep.” They allowed the enemy forces to enter the base area, even at the expense of the people that the CCP was obligated to defend, trading space for time and forcing the Nationalist army to overextend its communication lines and supply routes. At the appropriate time and place, the Red Army then initiated a counterattack, concentrating its main forces against selected enemy units and annihilating them. Politically, the Communists involved the people in the base area in their own defense. By exposing them to the depredations of enemy troops, they alienated them from the Nationalist government and drew them closer to the Communist cause.
In the first two campaigns, Chiang Kai-shek unwittingly contributed to his own defeat by sending expeditionary forces consisting mainly of assorted former warlord troops that had defected to the National Revolutionary Army during the Northern Expedition. Conflicting interests made them incapable of cooperating in the implementation of the plan to envelop and destroy the numerically inferior Red Army. Instead, the Red Army, taking advantage of its superior military intelligence and employing greater mobility, was able to concentrate its forces on isolated Nationalist units and destroy them.
For the third campaign, Chiang Kai-shek mobilized men and units that were personally loyal to him. Once again, his forces were defeated. However, this defeat was due less to the lack of cooperation among the warlord troops in his army (though that continued to be a factor) than to external distractions: the Canton Secessionist Movement (May 1931) and the Mukden Incident (September 1931), which resulted in the loss of Manchuria to the Japanese.
After the third campaign (July-September 1931), the Chinese Communist Party experienced significant leadership changes. In the CCP's intraparty power struggles, Zhu De was able to retain his power and was even elevated to the position of chairman of the Central Soviet's Revolutionary Military Council because of his military expertise. Mao, however, lost power, presumably because of his unorthodox ideas and political ambitions. At the Ningdu Conference in August 1932, Mao was replaced by Zhou Enlai as the general political commissar and lost his influence in the Red Army.
Under the leadership of the “28 Bolsheviks,” a group of young Chinese Communists who had been trained in the Soviet Union, and of Otto Braun, the Comintern military adviser, the Red Army's organization, strategy, and tactics were changed to deal with Chiang's fourth campaign (July 1932-April 1933). The Red Army was transformed into a conventional fighting force capable of engaging in positional warfare. Under the slogan, “Lose no inch of soviet territory to the enemy,” the CCP abandoned the previously successful Zhu-Mao strategy of “luring the enemy deep” into the base area in favor of an offensive strategy of attacking the enemy outside the base area. The Red Army launched successful preemptive strikes against Nationalist army units, thus ending Chiang Kai-shek's fourth campaign.
But the fifth campaign (October 1933-October 1934) proved markedly different. Reacting to their repeated failures, the Nationalists changed to a “strategically offensive but tactically defensive” strategy. Synthesizing some of the methods that they had used against the Communists previously, the Nationalists imposed a stringent economic and communications blockade, destroying the self-sufficiency of the Central Soviet base area. The blockade consisted chiefly of a network of mutually supporting blockhouses and trenches built at key points on the periphery of Communist territory. Nationalist forces methodically moved into the base area, building blockhouses and interdicting the flow of goods as they advanced, eventually strangling the Central Soviet base.
Understandably, given their success against the fourth campaign, the Communists at first responded by continuing with their positional warfare strategy, thus playing into the hands of the Nationalists. But the Communists quickly realized that they had insufficient manpower and firepower to prevent the Nationalists from penetrating the base area. They tried Otto Braun's plan of building their own blockhouses in the most vital sectors, only to discover that enemy artillery and air bombardment readily destroyed them. Red Army efforts to lure the enemy out of the blockhouses and ambush them proved fruitless: The Nationalist army declined to engage directly and continued its gradual, inexorable advance, constricting the base area with a wall of steel and concrete. After losing the Battle of Guangchang (April 11-28, 1934), the Communists realized that their situation was becoming increasingly untenable. By the fall, the Red Army had suffered a loss of about 60,000 men, and the base area had been reduced by more than half, now encompassing only six counties. For the CCP leadership, the time had come to abandon the Central Soviet.
Mao later claimed that if the Red Army had continued using mobile warfare and had breached enemy lines to attack from the rear, it could have defeated the Nationalist army once again, but this is questionable. Frankly, it is improbable that the Red Army could have accomplished this feat because the blockade-blockhouse line allowed the Nationalists to apply their superior material strength without exposing themselves to yet another demoralizing defeat. In other words, as long as the Nationalists refused to be lured into Communist territory and fight a battle under unfavorable circumstances, they could not be defeated. For the Nationalists, in the final analysis, not losing was the equivalent of winning.
From a historical perspective, the Jiangxi Soviet period was a watershed in the Chinese Communist revolutionary movement. First, the Communists moved the theater of operations from the urban to the rural areas; second, they founded base areas from which to engage in a protracted armed struggle against their enemies; and third and most important, they had organized, trained, and indoctrinated a formidable military force: the Red Army. Nevertheless, during the “strategic withdrawal” from Jiangxi, the Communists almost lost that army.
THE LEGENDARY LONG MARCH
On October 16, 1934, under the cover of darkness, approximately 86,000 Communist army, party, and government personnel began what was to be known as the Long March, a year-long organized retreat that at times degenerated into an outright flight. They marched in three columns, two main ones and a heavily burdened headquarters column in the center (which was later dropped). Because of the ponderous nature of the fifth campaign and the secrecy shrouding the departure of the Communists, it took the Nationalists a month to realize that their foes had literally stolen a march on them.
By the time the Long March was completed, the Communists had covered about 6,000 miles, from Jiangxi province in the south to Shaanxi province in the north, over some of the most rugged, least explored territory in the country. The worst came toward the end, when they began to cross the Grasslands, a vast marsh that swallowed many a Red Army soldier during the week-long traverse. Altogether, the Red Army soldiers had to go across eighteen mountain ranges and twenty-four rivers, all the while fending off hostile forces. Often marching twenty to forty miles a day, sometimes for several days straight, the underequipped and under-supplied soldiers fought warlord troops who sought to drive them from their territory; minority peoples, such as the Yi and Tibetans, who ambushed them; and, of course, the Nationalist army, which tried to intercept and destroy them, nearly succeeding on more than one occasion.
In Chinese Communist history, the Long March has attained legendary status. Paradoxically, it represented both the lowest and highest points of the Chinese Communist movement. Even though they left Jiangxi in defeat, the Communists arrived in Shaanxi a year later ready for victory, for the Long March served as the crucible that forged an indestructible Red Army, or so the story goes. The Long March has been idealized as a triumph of revolutionary will over extreme hardship, the Chinese equivalent of Valley Forge.
Unquestionably, the Long March was an unprecedented epic in human survival, and the veterans of the Long March provided living proof that determined people willing to engage in unending struggle and self-sacrifice could prevail even under the most desperate conditions. The Chinese Communists like to claim that the men and women of the Long March were able to survive because they were imbued with a political conciousness that made it possible for them to overcome every natural and man-made obstacle they encountered. That is the essential lesson they passed down to later generations of Chinese. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Red Guards, young Chinese students, sought to test their own revolutionary resolve by going on their own version of a Long March.
The Long March began with the Red Army heading westward, aiming to cross the Xiang River and join other Communist forces in Hunan province. After arranging a “neutrality pact” with Chen Jitang, the Guangdong warlord, the Red Army successfully penetrated the southwest zone of the Nationalist blockade-blockhouse line. There they met only token opposition from Guangxi and Guangdong provincial troops manning the defense networks. Facilitating their escape was a Communist rear-guard force whose mission was to distract and delay the Nationalists. Most of this “death legion” would later be captured or killed, though enough of them survived to form the nucleus of the New Fourth Army during the War of Resistance against Japan.
The Nationalists nearly destroyed the Communists at the Battle of the Xiang River (November 25-December 3,1934), when they caught the Red Army divided, with one half on each side of the river. Though the Red Army escaped, it lost more than half of its troops. By the time it finally arrived at Zunyi, Guizhou, a month later, the Red Army was down to about 30,000 soldiers.
On January 15-18, 1935, at Zunyi, the Communist leaders held a conference to evaluate their defeat during the fifth campaign and their retreat from the Central Soviet base area. This proved to be a historic event resulting in a change in the leadership as well as the direction of the Long March. Since Mao was out of favor politically, no one could blame him for the recent debacles that they had sufffered. However, he was in a position to criticize severely CCP leaders for losing the Central Soviet base area by following the erroneous policy of “pure defense” rather than “mobile warfare,” and for failing to exploit the rebellion by Chiang Kai-shek's Nineteenth Route Army that had erupted in Fujian during the fifth campaign. And, of course, he reproached them for the recent disaster at the Xiang River. In this Mao was supported by others, most notably the senior military commanders, whose voices were particularly influential since the problems during the Long March were mainly military ones.
Map 13.1 The Long March, 1934-1935, showing route of the Communist First Front Army. Adapted by Don Graff based upon Cambridge History of China, vol. 13: Republican China, 1912-1949, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 210.
As a result of the Zunyi Conference, Mao's political stock went up. As Benjamin Yang observes, he developed a “reputation as the only man who had represented a correct Party line in the past and who had the potential to lead the Revolution to victory in the future.”8 Mao became a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and strategic adviser to Zhou Enlai, who along with Zhu De was now in charge of the Long March. Taking advantage of Zhou's illness and Zhu's deference to political authority, Mao became the de facto leader of the Long March within weeks following the Zunyi Conference. By March 1935, Mao became political commissar and Zhu De commander-in-chief of the Long March. Mao had come full circle, returning to where he started at Jinggangshan, with considerable authority to make decisions. As a result of his leadership during the Long March, Mao would eventually rise to become the preeminent leader of the CCP.
Under Mao's general direction, the Red Army sought to cross the Yangzi River and head north, with the objective of joining Zhang Guotao's forces from the Eyuwan Soviet and establishing a new base area in the Yunnan-Guizhou-Sichuan border area. But the marchers were ignorant of Zhang's exact whereabouts; all they knew was that he was somewhere in the northern part of Sichuan province. Depending on how one interprets Mao's leadership during this period, either he engaged in some ingenious maneuvers, using feints to confuse the enemy, or himself was confused, leading the Red Army aimlessly across southwest China. In either case, Mao had the initiative, forcing the Nationalists to guess his next move. In what was later regarded as a stroke of genius, he ordered the Red Army to go south toward Yunnan province as a prelude to heading north. Finally, the Red Army crossed the River of Golden Sands, a western extension of the Yangzi, into Sichuan.
It was in Sichuan that Red Army soldiers performed their most famous act of courage, the capture of Luding Bridge. In order to escape the pursuing Nationalist army and avoid the fate of the Taiping army that had been destroyed there a century earlier, the Red Army had to take the bridge spanning the raging Dadu River below. Enemy troops held the opposite end of the chain suspension bridge and had removed most of the wooden planks that formed a catwalk across it. Twenty-two Red Army soldiers volunteered to be members of an assault team to take the bridge. Under enemy machine-gun fire, they crawled 100 yards hand over hand across the swaying bridge chains to reach the remaining planks and attack enemy positions. Capturing the bridge enabled the Red Army to cross the river safely and continue the march to northern Sichuan.
After crossing the Great Snowy Mountains, the Red Army finally found Zhang Guotao and his troops. Instead of the expected happy reunion, it proved to be a problem-riddled meeting, marred by policy disputes, personality conflicts, and power rivalries. The major problem was Zhang's rivalry with Mao and his desire to take control of the entire Communist force. It is alleged that at one point Zhang even threatened to attack Mao's forces unless he complied. The Mao camp wanted to continue north and then east to join Communist forces in the Shaanxi-Gansu border region, ostensibly for the purpose of fighting the Japanese, who continued to encroach on Chinese territory. But the Zhang camp had other ideas. They wanted to head south to establish a soviet base in the Sichuan-Xikang border region. In a compromise brokered by Zhu De, Mao and Zhang agreed to reorganize their combined forces and go their separate ways. As part of the deal, Zhu accompanied Zhang as his hostage.
After crossing the deadly Grasslands of the Qinghai-Gansu border region, Mao's ragtag force of about 4,000 finally met up with Communist forces in north Shaanxi on October 20, 1935, ending the Long March. A year later, after suffering defeats in western China, Zhang Guotao and his forces rejoined Mao.
While the Long March was a victory of the human will, it was also a defeat for the Chinese Communist movement. After all, it began as a military retreat and ended up as a military disaster, with over nine-tenths of the Red Army lost along the way. To the veterans of the Long March, the future must have appeared rather bleak indeed. The Nationalists had defeated the Communists repeatedly, decimating the early revolutionary movement, devastating the Central Soviet base area, and nearly destroying the Red Army during the Long March. After unparalleled hardship, the remnants of the Red Army had reestablished themselves in a new base area at Yan'an, Shaanxi, only to be blockaded once again by the Nationalist army.
RED ARMY REDUX
The Nationalists were poised to defeat the Communists and probably would have done so if not for a significant external factor: Japanese aggression. In 1937 the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of China as the first step in their effort to establish a so-called new order in Asia under their domination. In the face of a common enemy, Chinese closed ranks. Chiang Kai-shek reluctantly forged a “second united front” with the Communists to oppose the invading Japanese. Under the nominal command of its erstwhile enemies, the Red Army was designated the Eighth Route Army, with Zhu De as commander-in-chief and Peng Dehuai as deputy commander. Until the New Fourth Army Incident (1941)—when the Nationalist army attacked Communist troops in southern Anhui, killing 3,000 of them—both sides cooperated, more or less, in the war against the Japanese.
During the War of Resistance against the Japanese (1937-1945), Nationalist forces shouldered the heaviest burden and suffered the severest losses. In the summer and fall of 1937, for example, the Nationalist army sustained as many as 250,000 casualties, almost 60 percent of its finest forces, in the heroic defense of Shanghai. Eventually, Chiang Kai-shek and his army were forced to retreat to Chongqing (Chungking), Sichuan, where he set up his wartime capital. With American assistance, Chiang's armies fought the Japanese in the western and southern parts of China. In fleeing west, Chiang left behind a political vacuum that would be filled by the Communists. Led by the survivors of the Long March, the Communists entered the northern and eastern areas abandoned by the Nationalists to wage a guerrilla war against the Japanese. Their greatest offensive was the “Hundred Regiments Campaign” (1940) in north China. Under the command of Peng Dehuai, Communist forces attacked enemy strong points and lines of communication, losing about 100,000 men. Together, the Nationalist and Communist armies succeeded in inflicting severe losses on the Japanese army and tying down at least two-fifths of its available troops during World War II. In fighting a land war in Asia, the Japanese army foolishly found itself in a quagmire from which it could not extract itself.
At Mao's direction, Communist cadres went behind enemy lines to organize the people against the Japanese. Under their political leadership, the Chinese populace learned to survive the chaotic wartime conditions and to defend themselves against marauding Japanese troops who treated the areas they controlled as a vast “free fire zone.” Employing such cruel measures as the “Three-Alls” policy—“kill all, burn all, destroy all”—Japanese soldiers committed countless atrocities, with the worst being the infamous Rape of Nanjing (1937). By implementing select socioeconomic reforms that had been developed earlier in the Jiangxi Soviet base area and mobilizing the peasants to resist the Japanese, the Communists were able to build political legitimacy in the countryside. By the tens of thousands, peasants joined the CCP, enrolled in the mass organizations, and, most important, enlisted in the Red Army. By the end of the War of Resistance (August 1945), the Communists had about 2 million in militia units and over 900,000 regular troops under their command, placing them in a postion to defeat the Nationalists in the civil war that ensued.
At the beginning of the Civil War (1946-1949), the Nationalists were quite successful. In the first year, they seized key cities and towns; in the second year, they were even able to capture the Communist capital of Yan'an. It was all for naught. Using mainly guerrilla warfare, the Communist forces gained control of the countryside and began surrounding the cities occupied by the Nationalists. By 1948, Communist forces were strong enough to shift to conventional warfare against the Nationalists. At the Battle of Huai Hai (November 7, 1948-January 10,1949), Communist forces decisively defeated the Nationalists, forcing Chiang Kai-shek to resign the presidency of the country and flee to Taiwan, where he established a government in exile.
CONCLUSION
Mao's personality cult portrays him as the all-knowing, all-wise leader who led the party through “storm and stress,” overcoming every sort of difficulty to achieve final victory in 1949. This is far from the truth, certainly when it comes to his military role. Mao's military role in CCP history has been much exaggerated by the party as well as by others. The Communist preference for making political theory paramount ensured that Mao as the party leader would be given credit for the party's military triumph. Without much regard for historical truth, the party promoted his cult by rewriting its history in such a manner as to establish the supremacy of Mao and his thought. It has placed him at the center of the revolutionary movement while relegating other Communist leaders to subsidiary roles as either supporters or opponents of his “correct” policies. For the sake of group solidarity and to present a unified front to the outside world, none of the other leaders opposed Mao's personality cult, at least in the beginning. This facade would eventually fall apart and the military commanders would be among those to challenge him publicly. In July 1959, Peng Dehuai reproved Mao for undertaking the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), which led to a famine resulting in an estimated 30 million deaths, and implicitly questioned his concept of “people's war.” For his temerity, Peng suffered demotion and imprisonment.
In reality, Mao was essentially a political leader. He was, however, an exceptionally effective politician, persistent in his pursuit of power and magisterial in his manipulation of others. He first attained prominence in Jinggangshan, but was later forced to share the limelight with others, such as the 28 Bolsheviks, who eventually eclipsed him politically toward the end of the Jiangxi Soviet period. On the Long March, he regained political power and attained a high position in the CCP largely because his rivals were held responsible for the loss of the Jiangxi Soviet base area. He was able to carry out this coup only because he had the support of the senior Red Army military commanders, who had reservations about Mao's military ability but thought he had a better grasp of China's political situation than his rivals did. Besides, Mao gave the Red Army a place of prominence in the revolutionary movement, and they returned the compliment. Mao's symbiotic relationship with the Red Army's military commanders would serve as the foundation of his political power for years to come. For Mao, the aphorism “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” would have a dual meaning: The Red Army would prove to be indispensable in his own quest for political power as well as the party's.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cold War politics has produced quite a number of works on or about Maoist military strategy, especially as it pertains to insurgency or counterinsurgency in the Third World. None of them, however, is a substitute for Mao's original essays. His most important works are conveniently compiled in Mao Zedong, Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1963). Two books provide informative commentaries in addition to translations of some of Mao's essays: Mao Tse-tung, Basic Tactics, trans. and with an introduction by Stuart R. Schram (New York: Praeger, 1966), and Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare, trans. and with an introduction by Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Praeger, 1961).
Since Mao was more a politician than a warrior, perhaps it should not be surprising that there is so little on him as a soldier. Jacques Guillermaz, “The Soldier,” in Mao Tse-tung in the Scales of History, ed. Dick Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) remains the only evaluation of Mao as a military man. But as Guillermaz cautions, it is only a preliminary assessment. What is remarkable is that except for Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1956) there is no study of Zhu De, the father of the Chinese Red Army. For the other military commanders, the situation is equally bleak; except for Lanxin Xiang, Mao's Generals: Chen Yi and the New Fourth Army (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998), existing works focus on their political lives.
As a real or potential adversary during the Cold War, the Chinese Red Army has been much written about. But as Edward J. M. Rhoads, The Chinese Red Army, 1927-1963: An Annotated Bibliography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964) shows, not many of these works pertain to the Jiangxi Soviet period and the Long March. Since the publication of Rhoads's bibliography, there have been few additions. For the Jiangxi Soviet period, the only monograph-length study available is Peter W. Donovan, The Red Army in Kiangsi, 1931-1934 (Ithaca, NY: China-Japan Program, Cornell University, 1976). Most other works tend to treat the Jiangxi period as part of a larger study on Chinese Communist military forces or military doctrine. Among them, one of the most analytical is William W. Whitson with Chen-hsia Huang, The Chinese High Command: A History of Communist Military Politics, 1927-71 (New York: Praeger, 1973). Focusing on Chinese Communist military politics, it discusses three competing models of military “ethics” and “style” in the history of the Red Army, beginning with the Jiangxi Soviet period.
There are related works that offer important insights into Chinese Communist policy issues and power disputes that affected the Red Army during the Jiangxi Soviet period, such as Ilpyong J. Kim, The Politics of Chinese Communism: Kiangsi under the Soviets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), which recounts the development of Chinese Communist mass-mobilization policies and techniques. No discussion of the Red Army would be complete without a consideration of its opponents, for which see William Wei, Counterrevolution in China: The Nationalists in Jiangxi during the Soviet Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), which provides a comprehensive analysis of Chiang Kai-shek's political, socioeconomic, and military policies and programs to eliminate the Red Army from Jiangxi.
The Long March has attracted more studies. For readability and drama, the journalistic accounts by Dick Wilson, The Long March 1935: The Epic of Chinese Communism's Survival (New York: Avon Books, 1971) and Harrison E. Salisbury, The Long March: The Untold Story (New York: Harper and Row, 1985) are still the best. Benjamin Yang, From Revolution to Politics: Chinese Communists on the Long March (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990) is a much-needed scholarly treatment of this legendary episode in modern Chinese history. On the basis of new documents, Yang corrects previous explanations of Mao's rise to power during the Long March. Lest it be forgotten, the Communist forces left behind had a hard time of it. Gregor Benton, Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992) is an encyclopedic treatment of the fate of those left behind in Jiangxi as well as other Communist base areas in south China.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
Since so little scholarly work has been done on Mao and the Red Army during the Jiangxi Soviet period and the Long March, the field is more or less wide open. Certainly, a comprehensive assessment of Mao as a military man and military thinker is long overdue. Such an evaluation, of course, would have to get beyond his cult of personality and the a priori assumption of his “military genius.” A natural corollary would be studies on Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao, and the other Chinese military commanders who conducted the Red Army operations. For these studies to be complete, it would be necessary to consider the challenge their enemies posed, so a parallel set of studies on the Nationalist generals and their armies is in order.
The Chen Cheng Collection, a large body of primary sources on the Jiangxi Soviet Republic, enables scholars to reconstruct the history of the Red Army.9 In addition to studying the usual military topics, such as the strategy and tactics that the Red Army employed against its enemies, it is essential to examine its interaction with the local population. After all, it has been an article of faith that the success of the Red Army depended heavily on the people's willingness to provide military intelligence and logistical support. An analysis of the socioeconomic and other effects that the Red Army had on the people living in Jiangxi would prove immensely valuable in understanding the significance of “People's War.”
The Long March warrants a similar analysis, and also deserves to be studied as a major military event rather than as a vehicle for the playing out of intraparty struggles or a test of the participants' commitment to the Communist cause. A study of the effect that the Red Army had on the people it encountered on the Long March would help explain the Chinese Communist Party's subsequent relationship with the minority peoples whose territories the Red Army crossed.
NOTES
1. Stéphane Coutois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 465.
2. Harrison E. Salisbury, The Long March: The Untold Story (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 172.
3. Dick Wilson, The Long March 1935: The Epic of Chinese Communism's Survival (New York: Avon Books, 1971), 55.
4. Ibid., 63.
5. Lin Piao, “Long Live the Victory of People's War!” Peking Review (September 3, 1965) : 9-30.
6. Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, “Foreword,” in Mao Tse-tung, Basic Tactics, trans. and with an introduction by Stuart R. Schram (New York: Praeger, 1966), 7.
7. William W. Whitson with Chen-hsia Huang, The Chinese High Command: A History of Communist Military Politics, 1927-71 (New York: Praeger, 1973), 64.
8. Benjamin Yang, “The Zunyi Conference as One Step in Mao's Rise to Power: A Survey of Historical Studies of the Chinese Communist Party,” China Quarterly, no. 106 (1986): 258.
9. The Chen Cheng Collection is held by the Hoover Insititution at Stanford University; microfilm copies of many of these materials can be found in other major research libraries. See Tien-wei Wu, The Kiangsi Soviet Republic, 1931-1934: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of the Ch'en Ch'eng Collection (Cambridge: Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University, 1981).