MAO

On Friday, 3 June, 1921, the Lloyd Triestino steamer, the Acquila, docked at Shanghai after a six-week voyage from Venice. Among the passengers who disembarked was a Dutchman. Powerfully built, in his late thirties, with close-cropped dark hair and a swarthy moustache, he reminded those who met him of a Prussian army officer.¹ He had had a trying journey. Even before he took ship, he had been arrested in Vienna, where he had gone to obtain a Chinese visa. A week later the Austrian police released him, but not before notifying the governments of all the countries for which he had entry permits in his passport. At Colombo, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong, the British posted police guards at the docks to prevent him going ashore. The Dutch Legation in Beijing asked the Chinese government to deny him entry too, but received no reply.² Shanghai was a law unto itself, where Beijing's writ did not run. It was the soft, wet maw of China, which, with each new tide, sucked in the dispossessed, the ambitious and the criminal – ruined White Russian families, Red adventurers, Japanese spies, stateless intellectuals, scoundrels of every stripe – and sent out in return idealistic youths, seeking foreign learning in Tokyo and Paris. The Chinese called the city a ‘hot din of the senses’. To foreigners, it was ‘the Whore of the East’. The aesthete, Sir Harold Acton, remembered it as a place where ‘people had no idea how extraordinary they were; the extraordinary had become ordinary; the freakish commonplace’. Wallis Simpson was rumoured to have posed nude, with only a lifebelt round her, for a local photographer.

Eugene O'Neill, accompanied by a Swedish masseuse, had a nervous breakdown in Shanghai. Aldous Huxley wrote of its ‘dense, rank, richly clotted life … nothing more intensely living can be imagined.’ The journalist, Xia Yan, saw ‘a city of 48-storey skyscrapers, built upon 24 layers of hell’.³

Mr Andresen, as the Dutchman called himself, proceeded along the bund, past the towering, granite-built citadels of British capitalism – the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Customs House with its mosaic ceiling of Yangtse river junks, Jardine & Matheson, and the East Asiatic Company – past the park with its apocryphal sign, ‘Chinese and dogs not allowed’,⁴ past the Seamen's Hostel and Suzhou Creek, to take a room at the Oriental Hotel.⁵

As he looked around him, at the pavements crowded with Chinese men, wearing long gowns and Panama hats; immaculately dressed taipans in chauffeur-driven sedans; nightclubs full of Eurasian taxi-dancers, where young expatriates caroused through the night; ragged coolies, glistening with sweat, straining at huge loads; the textile mills, in which women and children worked fourteen-hour shifts; and the filthy slums across the river, where this emerging new proletariat lived, he might have been forgiven for feeling a surge of missionary zeal. For Hendricus Sneevliet, to give him his real name, also known as Martin Ivanovich Bergman, Comrade Philipp, Monsieur Sentot, Joh van Son and Maring, amid a host of other aliases, was a missionary of a kind. He had been sent to China by Lenin as the first representative of the Comintern, the Communist International, to help the Chinese comrades organise a party which would give fraternal support to the Bolshevik leadership in ‘Mekka’, as he referred to Moscow, and help spread the worldwide revolution in which they all fervently believed.⁶

Sneevliet was not the first Russian emissary to China. Initial contact had been made in January 1920. Then in April, with the Comintern's approval, Grigorii Voitinsky had been sent on a fact-finding visit by the Vladivostok branch of the Bolshevik party's Far Eastern Bureau. Its headquarters were at Chita (Verkhneudinsk), the capital of the Soviet Far Eastern Republic, a vast territory nominally independent from Moscow which extended from the Chinese border to southern Siberia. The Bureau engaged in constant turf battles with the Far Eastern Republic's Foreign Ministry, with the ‘Eastern People's Section’ of the Russian party's Siberian Bureau, based at Irkutsk, and occasionally, for good measure, with the Comintern itself. The result was that more than a dozen Russian agents, often at cross purposes with each other, were active in China that year, as well as a number of Korean communists, some of whom claimed to represent the Comintern and who were also divided among themselves. The Chinese were equally disorganised. Voitinsky found himself confronted by a range of Chinese claimants to Soviet support. Most were anarchists who saw the Comintern as a potential source of money and recognition. One such movement, the Great Unity Party (Datongdang), succeeded for a time in gaining acceptance by the Bureau in Vladivostok as an authentic ‘socialist, communist’ organisation. Another briefly existed as a Chinese branch of the Russian Communist Party. It was not until after Sneevliet's arrival that the Comintern, at its Third Congress in Moscow in June 1921, recognised Chen Duxiu's movement as the only legitimate communist force in China, rejecting the claims of four other self-proclaimed Chinese communist organisations. By then the Russians had got their own act together, having amalgamated the Chita and Vladivostok operations into the Comintern's Far Eastern Secretariat which replaced the ‘Eastern People's Section’ in Irkutsk.⁷

Voitinsky's arrival had been skilfully timed to coincide with the upsurge of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union triggered by Moscow's announcement that it would renounce its extraterritorial rights. He was a man of great tact and charm, and the Chinese with whom he had dealings saw him as the perfect example of everything a revolutionary comrade should be. During the nine months he spent in China, he helped Chen Duxiu organise the ‘communist group’ in Shanghai, the Socialist Youth League and the communist journal, Gongchandang, and drafted the Party Manifesto, which Mao and others received that winter, as a preliminary to holding a founding Congress to bring the provincial groups together to form a full-fledged Communist Party.

Hendricus Sneevliet was a man of a very different stamp. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, and had already spent five years in Asia as an adviser to the Communist Party of Dutch-ruled Indonesia. He exuded a mixture of obstinacy and arrogance which signalled not only that he knew better than any of the Chinese comrades, but that it was his bounden duty to bring them into line. Zhang Guotao, a Beijing graduate who had helped Li Dazhao set up the North China ‘communist group’, recalled their first meeting, shortly after the Dutchman's arrival:

This foreign devil was aggressive and hard to deal with; his manner was very different indeed from that of Voitinsky … He left the impression with some people that he had acquired the habits and attitudes of the Dutchmen that lived as colonial masters in the East Indies. He was, he believed, the foremost authority on the East in the Comintern, and this was a great source of pride to him … He saw himself coming as an angel of liberation to the Asian people. But in the eyes of those of us who maintained our self-respect and who were seeking our own liberation, he seemed endowed with the social superiority complex of the white man.⁸

At the end of June 1921, Mao and He Shuheng left Changsha by steamer, amid great secrecy, to join eleven other delegates, representing Beijing, Canton, Jinan, Shanghai, Tokyo and Wuhan, to attend the founding Congress which Voitinsky had initiated.⁹ It began on Saturday July 23 – three days later than planned because some of the delegates were delayed – in a classroom at a girls’ school in the French concession which had closed for the summer holidays. Neither Chen Duxiu nor Li Dazhao was present, apparently because the Congress had been called at short notice and they had other commitments. In their absence the proceedings were chaired by Zhang Guotao, whom Mao had met in Beijing two-and-a-half years earlier when he had worked as a library assistant there. Sneevliet and a colleague, Nikolsky, who represented the newly established Far Eastern Secretariat in Irkutsk, led the initial proceedings, but then the meeting recessed for two days to allow a drafting committee to produce texts of a Party programme, Party rules and a statement of Party policy.

When it resumed the following Wednesday, the discussion turned on three points: what kind of party they should create; what stance it should adopt towards bourgeois institutions, specifically the National Parliament and the Beijing and Canton governments; and its relationship with the Comintern.

Sneevliet, in his opening address, noting that all those present were students or teachers, had stressed the importance of forging strong links with the working class. The Marxist scholar, Li Hanjun, who represented the Shanghai group, immediately disagreed. Chinese workers, he retorted, understood nothing of Marxism. It would take a long period of education and propaganda work before they could be organised. In the meantime, Chinese Marxists needed to decide whether their cause would best be served by an organisation propagating Russian Bolshevism or German-style Social Democracy. To rush headlong into building a working-class party, dedicated to proletarian dictatorship, would be a serious mistake. Sneevliet was scandalised. On this issue the Dutchman carried the day, and in its first formal statement, the new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared in true Bolshevik fashion:

The programme of our party is as follows: With the revolutionary army of the proletariat, to overthrow the capitalistic classes and to reconstruct the nation from the working class until class distinctions are eliminated … To adopt the dictatorship of the proletariat … To overthrow the private ownership of capital, to confiscate all the means of production, such as machines, land, buildings … and so on, and to entrust them to social ownership … Our party, with the adoption of the soviet form, organises the industrial and agricultural labourers and soldiers, propagates communism, and recognises the social revolution as our chief policy; it absolutely cuts off all relations with the yellow intellectual class and other such groups.¹⁰

On the other two points in dispute, the outcome was less satisfactory to Moscow. This was partly because of the way the Congress ended. On July 29, when it became clear that serious disagreements remained, Sneevliet said he wished to put forward some new ideas and asked that the next session take place not at the school but at Li Hanjun's house, which was also in the French Concession. Soon after the meeting began, a man looked through the door, muttered something about having come to the wrong house and hurriedly departed. On Sneevliet's instruction, the delegates immediately dispersed. A group of Chinese detectives, led by a French officer, arrived a few minutes later, but despite a four-hour search, found nothing. After that, it was thought too dangerous to hold further meetings in Shanghai, and the final session was held some days later on a pleasure boat on the reed-fringed South Lake at Jiaxing, a small town on the way to Hangzhou, sixty miles to the south. There, too, Sneevliet was unable to speak: it was felt that the presence of foreigners would make the group too conspicuous, so he and Nikolsky did not take part. As a result, when the boat trip ended at dusk, and the delegates shouted in unison, ‘Long live the [Chinese] Communist Party, long live the Comintern, long live Communism – the Emancipator of Humankind’, they had taken what one of them called ‘many furious and radical decisions’, not all of them to the Comintern's liking.¹¹

They had resolved, for instance, to adopt ‘an attitude of independence, aggression and exclusion’ towards other political parties, and to require Communist Party members to cut all ties with non-communist political organisations.¹² This sectarian stance was at odds not only with Sneevliet's hopes for a tactical alliance with Sun Yat-sen's Guomindang, which he rightly saw as the strongest revolutionary force in China at that time, but also with Lenin's thesis, approved by the Second Comintern Congress in Moscow a year earlier, that communist parties in ‘backward countries’, in so far as they were able to exist at all, would have to work closely with national-revolutionary bourgeois democratic movements.¹³

Had the Congress[Q1] been able to continue until August 5, as originally planned, Sneevliet might have been able to convince them to adopt a programme better suited to China's conditions. As it was, the delegates approved virtually unchanged the drafting committee's proposals – made without Sneevliet's participation – which were modelled on the programme and manifesto of the United States Communist Party, translations of which had been printed in Gongchandang in December, and the statutes of the British Communist Party.¹⁴

No less troubling, the delegates failed to reach agreement on the respective merits of the Beijing and Canton governments. In Sneevliet's eyes, as in Chen Duxiu's, the southern regime was much more progressive.

Still worse, from the Dutchman's perspective, the delegates refused to acknowledge Moscow's supremacy. Although the Party programme spoke of ‘uniting with the Comintern’, the Chinese Party saw itself as an equal, not a subordinate.¹⁵ The Russians were not happy. Nikolsky's boss in Irkutsk, Yuri Smurgis, spoke dismissively of a Congress of ‘Chinese who fancied themselves communists’.¹⁶

When Chen Duxiu took up his responsibilities as Secretary of the provisional Central Executive Committee in September, he found that Sneevliet, as Comintern representative, was not only issuing orders to Party members on his own authority, but expected him to submit a weekly work report.¹⁷

For several weeks, Chen refused to have anything to do with the Dutchman. The Chinese Party was in its infancy, he told members of the Shanghai group. China's revolution had its own characteristics, and did not need Comintern help. Eventually a modus vivendi was realised, mainly because, Chen's disclaimers notwithstanding, the Comintern provided the money, upwards of 15,000 Chinese dollars a year, which the Party needed to survive.¹⁸ But bad blood remained, and not only because of Sneevliet's authoritarian style. He was to be the first in a long line of Soviet advisers to offend Chinese sensibilities, reflecting a cultural and racial divergence which the internationalism of the communist movement initially papered over, but which forty years later would exact its own revenge.

Mao played a minor role in the First Congress. He made a report (which has been lost) on the work of the Hunan group,¹⁹ which by July accounted for ten of the fifty-three members of the communist movement in China;²⁰ and he and Zhou Fuhai, a Hunanese student representing the Tokyo group, which boasted all of two members, were appointed official note-takers.²¹ Zhang Guotao remembered him as a ‘pale-faced youth of rather lively temperament, who in his long gown of native cloth looked rather like a Daoist priest out of some village’. Mao's ‘rough, Hunanese ways’, Zhang wrote, were matched by a fund of general knowledge but only a limited understanding of Marxism.²² None of the participants recall him having contributed much to the debates.²³ He evidently felt intimidated by his more sophisticated companions, most of whom, he told his friend Xiao Yu, who was visiting him in Shanghai at the time, ‘are very well-educated, and … can read either Japanese or English’.²⁴ That brought back all his old feelings of inadequacy about languages, and as soon as he returned to Changsha, he plunged into his English lessons again.²⁵ Two months later, the Hunan branch of the CCP was established, with Mao as its Secretary, on the symbolic date of October 10, the anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution launched ten years before.²⁶

For the next few months, Mao devoted himself to building up the Party's tiny following. In November, the provisional Party Centre issued a directive, requiring each provincial branch to have at least thirty members by the summer of 1922.²⁷ Mao's branch was one of three to meet the target, the others being Canton and Shanghai.²⁸ The same month he organised a parade to celebrate the Bolshevik Revolution. This became an annual event, drawing coverage from the Republican daily, Minguo ribao, in Shanghai:

An immense red flag fluttered from the flagpole on the esplanade in front of the Education Association building, with on each side two smaller white banners, bearing the slogan: ‘Proletarians of the World, Arise!’ Other small white flags were inscribed, ‘Long live Russia! Long live China!’ Then came a multitude of small red flags, on which were written: ‘Recognise Soviet Russia!’ … ‘Long live socialism!’ and ‘Bread for the workers!’ Tracts were handed out to the crowd. Just as the speech-making was about to begin, a detachment of police appeared, and the officer in charge announced that, by order of the Governor, the meeting must disperse. The crowd protested, invoking Article 12 of the Constitution, which gave citizens the right of free assembly … But the officer refused to discuss it, and said the Governor's order must be obeyed. The crowd grew angry and shouted: ‘Down with the Governor!’ At that, the police set about their business. All the flags were torn down and the demonstrators forcibly dispersed. It was 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and torrential rain began to fall, preventing any farther resistance.²⁹

Such tensions with Governor Zhao notwithstanding, Mao was able to win enough support from his allies in the provincial elite to establish the ‘Self-study University’ of which he had written a year earlier, financed by an annual local government grant of some 2,000 Chinese dollars, a substantial sum for the time.³⁰

The school's stated objectives were ‘to prepare for reforming society’ and ‘to bring together the intellectual class and the working class’.³¹ In practice it served as a training ground for future Party activists, numbering at its peak some two dozen full-time students. At first, the fact that it was sponsored by the Wang Fuzhi Society, and was housed in the former Wang Fuzhi Academy, obscured this political purpose, but with time it came closer to Mao's original concept of an academic commune, where teachers and students ‘practised communist living’. Mao gave up his job at the primary school to serve as the university's director, while also teaching Chinese at First Normal.³² He Shuheng was academic dean. He Minfan acted as Principal, until Mao's unconventional ideas about health and fitness caused them to fall out. In the sweltering heat of the Changsha summer, Mao encouraged the students to attend classes in what by the standards of the time was considered a scandalous state of undress. He Minfan, who was of an earlier, more conservative generation, was deeply offended, and after other disagreements they parted on bad terms.³³

The main thrust of Mao's activities over the next two years, however, was as a labour organiser. Bolshevik orthodoxy held that the revolution must be built by the proletariat, and the First Congress had laid down that the ‘chief aim’ of the Party was to establish industrial unions.³⁴ There were then about one-and-a-half million industrial workers in China, as against 250 million peasant farmers.³⁵ Conditions in the factories were Dickensian. The noted American labour campaigner, Dr Sherwood Eddy, reported after an investigation in China on behalf of the YMCA:

At the Beijing match factory, there are 1,100 workers, many of them boys between 9 and 15 years old. Work starts at 4 a.m. and stops at 6.30 p.m. with a few minutes rest at midday … seven days a week … The ventilation is inadequate, and the vapour from the low-grade phosphorus damages the lungs. After thirty minutes, my throat was burning. The workers breathe it all day long … On average, 80 fall ill each day. [I also visited] a Beijing textile plant. It employs 15,000 young people. The workers are paid nine [silver] dollars a month for an 18-hour workday, seven days a week. Half are apprentices, who receive no training and are paid no wages, but are simply given food … Their families are too poor to feed them, and are glad to give them to the factory …

In a lodging house I visited, each room, no more than seven feet square, was occupied by 10 workers, half of whom worked by day and half by night. In the whole of that house there was no stove, not a stick of furniture, no fireplace and no lavatory … Nearby, belonging to the same owner, is a sort of windowless cavern with a single door. A group of girls, aged between 10 and 15, sleep there during the day. At night they work in the factory, earning 30 cents a shift. They sleep on a wooden board under a pile of rags. Their biggest worry is that they won't hear the factory siren, and if they arrive late they'll lose their jobs. These people do not live. They exist.³⁶

In Hunan, female and child labour was less common than in the coastal settlements, but otherwise conditions were little different. Until 1920, workers and artisans were organised, as they had been since medieval times, by the traditional trade guilds. But in November of that year two young anarchist students, Huang Ai and Pang Renquan, had established an independent body, the Hunan Workingmen's Association. By the following August, when the Party, at Sneevliet's suggestion, set up a Labour Secretariat under Zhang Guotao, with Mao as head of its Changsha branch, the association had some 2,000 members and had already led a successful strike at the city's Huashi cotton mill.³⁷

Pang was a Xiangtan man, from a village about ten miles from Shaoshan. In September 1921, Mao accompanied him on a visit to the Anyuan coal-mines, part of a big Chinese-owned industrial complex on the border of Hunan and Jiangxi, to see what possibilities might exist for organising the workers there.

He stayed with a distant relative, Mao Ziyun, who worked as a supervisor at the mine. At first his appearance – he wore a traditional blue scholar's gown and carried an oiled-paper umbrella – left the workers perplexed. Despite the May Fourth movement, there was still an almost unbridgeable chasm between mental and manual labour. Gradually, however, the fact that Mao spoke the same dialect and had the same rural origins allowed them to make contact. Exchanging his gown for trousers, he went down into the pits, where he found the miners worked twelve-hour shifts in a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, naked except for a piece of cloth tied into a turban as protection against head injuries. There was no safety equipment. Gas explosions were common – on average 30 miners died each year – and 90 per cent suffered from hookworm, black lung disease or both.³⁸

This first trip was inconclusive, but in December Mao returned, and shortly afterwards agreed that Li Lisan – who, six years earlier, had sent ‘half a reply’ to his appeal for members for the New People's Study Society – should be based there permanently to establish a school for the workers and their children. Li had studied in France and, on his return, had joined the Party in Shanghai. The non-committal schoolboy Mao remembered had grown into a flamboyant and often impulsive Party militant. Mao advised him to proceed cautiously, first to win the workers’ trust as a teacher, operating, as Li wrote later, ‘under the banner of mass education’, and only later attempting to organize them politically and to set up a Communist Party branch.³⁹

Meanwhile in Changsha in November Mao contributed an article to the Workingmen's Association's newspaper, the Laogong zhoukan (Workingmen's Weekly). ‘The purpose of a labour organisation’, he wrote, ‘is not merely to rally the labourers to get better pay and shorter working hours by means of strikes. It should also nurture class consciousness so as to unite the whole class and seek the basic interests of the class. I hope that every member of the Workingmen's Association will pay special attention to this very basic goal.’⁴⁰ Soon afterwards, Huang and Pang secretly joined the Socialist Youth League, and in December helped to organise a mass rally, which drew 10,000 people, in protest against manoeuvres by the Powers to extend their economic privileges in China.⁴¹ Mao's strategy of co-opting the anarchists, and gradually shifting their focus towards a more Marxist agenda, seemed to be succeeding.

But then, in January 1922, disaster struck. After the New Year holiday, 2,000 workers at the Huashi mill downed tools when the management announced that it was withholding their annual bonus. Equipment and furniture were smashed, and fights broke out with the company police in which three workers were killed. On January 14, Zhao Hengti, who was a major shareholder in the company, declared the strike to be ‘an anti-government act’ and sent in a battalion of troops. After handing out random beatings, they forced the men to resume work by training machine-guns on them. Next day, the 15th, a plea for help was smuggled out. The Workingmen's Association sprang into action. A message came from Governor Zhao asking the two young organisers to come to the mill to negotiate. When they arrived, at nightfall on January 16, they were detained and taken to the Governor's yamen, where Zhao questioned them at length. The workers were granted their bonus. But Huang and Pang were brought to the execution ground by the Liuyang Gate and beheaded, and the Workingmen's Association was banned.⁴²

Their deaths, coming less than three weeks after Zhao had promulgated an ostensibly liberal provincial constitution, enshrining the principle of Hunanese autonomy, sent shock waves across China. Sun Yat-sen urged that Zhao be punished. Cai Yuanpei, at Beijing University, and other eminent Chinese intellectuals, sent telegrams of protest.⁴³ Mao spent most of March and part of April in Shanghai, fanning a virulent campaign against Zhao in the Chinese-language press.⁴⁴ Even the North China Herald declared the Governor's methods to be ‘inexcusable’.⁴⁵

On April 1, Zhao issued a long, extremely defensive statement, justifying his conduct:

Unfortunately the general public does not seem to know the correct reasons for the executions, and has mixed them up with matters of the Workingmen's Association in such a way as to bring a charge against me of injuring the association … The two criminals Huang and Pang … [colluded with] certain brigands … in a plot to get arms and ammunition … Their plan was to overturn the government and spread their revolutionary ideas by causing trouble at the time of the Lunar New Year … On me rests the burden of the government of the 30,000,000 people of Hunan. I dare not allow myself to be so confused as to exhibit kindness to merely two men at the peril of the province. Had I not acted as I did, disaster could not have been averted … From the first I have always protected the interests of the workers … I look for Hunan labour to flourish and prosper.⁴⁶

No one believed these assertions. But, by denying that the executions were linked to the activities of the Workingmen's Association, and explicitly affirming that the pursuit of the workers’ interests was legitimate, Zhao opened the way for the labour movement to resume.

By then Li Lisan's workers’ nightschool at Anyuan was already well-established. Li proved to be a first-rate labour organiser and, in May, persuaded the Anyuan magistrate to authorise the establishment of a ‘Miners' and Railwaymen's Club’ – a covert trade union – which soon boasted its own library, schoolroom and recreation centre. Four months after its inauguration, it had 7,000 members and opened a cooperative store to provide low-interest loans and basic necessities to the workers at substantially lower prices than any of the local merchants.⁴⁷

All through the spring and summer of 1922, Mao, sometimes accompanied by Yang Kaihui, now pregnant with their first child, travelled to factories and railway depots in Hunan and western Jiangxi – which the Party had placed under the leadership of a newly formed Xiang District Special Committee,⁴⁸ of which he had been named secretary – to assess the prospects for opening more schools and clubs. The Party Centre in Shanghai had given instructions that labour agitation among railway workers must have top priority. A Railwaymen's Club was established in Changsha, followed in August by one in Yuezhou, on the main line north to Hankou.⁴⁹

On September 9, a Saturday, groups of workers blocked the line by sitting on the rails, demanding higher wages and modest welfare improvements. Troops were sent to disperse them, killing six workers and seriously injuring many more, together with women and children who had come to support their menfolk. When the news reached Changsha, Mao sent an incendiary telegram to other workers’ groups, seeking their support:

Fellow workers of all the labour groups! Such dark, tyrannical and cruel oppression is visited only on our labouring class. How angry should we be? How bitterly must we hate? How forcefully should we rise up? Take revenge! Fellow workers of the whole country, arise and struggle against the enemy!⁵¹

Governor Zhao let it be known that he would stay neutral. Yuezhou was garrisoned by northern troops loyal to Wu Peifu, the head of the Zhili warlord clique in Beijing, whom at this point Zhao viewed as an adversary; any disruption of the rail link to the north could only be to his advantage.⁵²

Word of these events reached Anyuan late on Monday night.⁵³ For some time, trouble had been brewing there over the mining company's refusal to pay back-wages. Now, Mao urged, the moment had come for the Anyuan men to strike too. Drawing on a classical Daoist phrase, he proposed that the guideline for the struggle should be to ‘move the people through righteous indignation’. Li Lisan drew up a list of demands, and forty-eight hours later, at midnight on September 13, the electricity supply to the mineshafts was cut; the mine entrance barricaded with timbers, and a three-cornered flag planted in front of it, bearing the defiant legend: ‘Before we were beasts of burden. Now we are men!’

The miners left two generators running, to prevent the mine flooding. But the following weekend, with negotiations going nowhere, there were calls for them to be switched off. At that, the mine directors capitulated, approving an across-the-board payrise of 50 per cent; union recognition; improved holidays and bonus conditions; the payment of back-wages; and an end to the traditional labour contract system, under which middlemen creamed off for themselves half the annual wage bill. A few days later, more than a thousand delegates from the country's four main rail systems met in Hankou, and threatened a national rail strike unless immediate wage increases were granted. Their demands, too, were met.⁵⁴

In both the railwaymen's and the miners’ strike, Mao's role was indirect. As CCP Secretary in Hunan, he had guided the strike movement and acted as its political spokesman, but he played no active part in the conflict. A dispute among masons and carpenters, which began a week later in the provincial capital itself, involved him much more closely.⁵⁵

All through the summer, a row had been simmering in the ancient trade guild of the Temple of Lu Ban, the patron saint of journeymen builders. Their earnings had been eroded by inflation of the paper currency, and in July they asked the Temple Board to persuade the District Magistrate to approve a wage increase.⁵⁶ But the pressures of the market economy had eroded guild solidarity, too, and contrary to custom, the board insisted that the guild members subscribe 3,000 Chinese silver dollars to finance the negotiation.

‘They went off to all the fancy restaurants, like the Cavern Palace Spring, the Great Hunan and the Meandering Gardens, and held sumptuous banquets,’ one guild member recalled. ‘These bloodsuckers managed to fill their bellies with food and wine, but they didn't come up with a penny for us.’

The stalemate was broken by a man named Ren Shude. The orphaned son of a poor peasant-farmer, he had joined the guild twenty years before as a thirteen-year-old carpenter's apprentice. The previous autumn he had done some work for the Wang Fuzhi Society, helping to get its premises ready for the new Self-Study University. Mao had befriended him, and at the beginning of 1922 he had become one of the first Changsha workers to join the Communist Party.

Ren now proposed that the men go to the Temple and demand an explanation. About 800 did so, but the board's negotiators fled to an inner sanctum, known as the Hall of Five Harmonies, where the workers dared not follow. At his suggestion, a small group then met Mao, whom Ren introduced as a school-teacher involved in the workers’ night-school movement. He advised them to create an independent organisation, with a system of ‘10-man groups’, or cells, like that used by the railwaymen's and miners’ unions. Three weeks later, on September 5, Ren presided over the founding congress of the Changsha Masons’ and Carpenters’ Union, with an initial membership of nearly 1,100 men. Mao himself drafted its charter, and appointed another Party member to act as union secretary.⁵⁷

For the next month, as the mine and rail strikes unrolled at Anyuan and Yuezhou, Ren and his colleagues carefully laid their plans. Activists surreptitiously handed out pamphlets and, late at night, went to the barracks where, after the officers had retired, they fired arrows with tracts tied to them over the walls, to get the workers’ case across to the soldiers. Mao mobilised the sympathies of liberals within the provincial elite, former associates of Tan Yankai and members of the Hunan autonomy movement. The editor of the Dagongbao, Long Jiangong, inveighed against the very principle of the government regulating wages, noting that there was no comparable restriction on landlords raising rents. ‘In the provincial constitution,’ he wrote, ‘free enterprise is guaranteed. If employers object that [workers’] wages are too high, they should just refuse to hire them. Why do you want to restrict their demands and stop them raising the price of their labour?’

On October 4, the magistrate announced that the wage increase had been rejected.⁵⁸ Next day, which was a local holiday, the union leaders met at Mao's home at Clearwater Pond, outside the Small East Gate, and resolved to launch a strike for more money, and for the right to free, collective bargaining. This was underlined in the strike declaration that Mao wrote, which was pasted up on walls in the city:

We, the masons and carpenters, wish to inform you that for the sake of earning our livelihood, we demand a modest pay increase … Workers like us, engaged in painful toil, exchange a day of our lives and of our energy for only a few coppers to feed our families. We are not like those idlers who expect to live without working. Look at the merchants! Hardly a day goes by without them raising their prices. Why does no one object to that? Why is it that only we workers, who toil and sweat all day long for a pittance, have to go through such an ordeal of being trampled on? … Even if we cannot enjoy our other rights, we should at least have the freedom to work and to carry out our business. On this point we will make our stand, and go to our deaths if need be. This right we will not surrender.⁵⁹

The following day, all construction work in the city ceased. The magistrate, supported by the guildmasters, hoped to sit out the dispute. But winter was approaching. The authorities encountered growing public pressure for a rapid end to the strike, so that people could get repairs done to their homes before the cold weather arrived. On October 17, the magistrate appointed a mediation committee, and ordered the strikers to settle quickly: ‘If you refuse to listen, you will be bringing bitterness on yourselves,’ he warned. ‘You should all think long and hard. Do not wait till it's too late and you regret it!’ But the committee's offer, though more generous than earlier proposals, would have ended the traditional craft distinction between older and younger workers’ wages. It, too, was rejected, and the union announced that the workers world march en masse to the magistrate's yamen on Monday, October 23, to deliver a petition. The march was promptly banned, and doubts began to surface among the union leaders. The banning order described them as ‘fomenters of violence’, a term which had last been used to justify the executions of Huang Ai and Pang Renquan in January. By the weekend, the future of the strike was in the balance.

Mao spent much of Sunday night talking to Ren Shude and other members of the union committee. The situation, he argued, was totally different from that of January. Strikes were now occurring in many parts of China, and in this particular dispute, the masons and carpenters had widespread public support. Zhao Hengti had no direct interest in the outcome, as he had had at the Huashi cotton mill, of which he had been a shareholder. Moreover he was now politically isolated, having close relations neither with Sun Yat-sen in the south nor Wu Peifu in the north.

Next morning, almost all the 4,000 masons and carpenters in the city assembled in the square outside the former imperial examination hall, and marched in good order to the District Magistrate's yamen. There they found the main gate blocked by a table. On top of the table were two benches, on which stood a broad arrow, symbol of the military's right to carry out summary executions. Next to it was a board setting out the mediation committee's last offer.⁶⁰

Mao had marched in the ranks with them, wearing workman's clothes. A union delegation went inside, but emerged some hours later saying that the magistrate refused any concessions. Then a second delegation was admitted. Mao remained outside. At dusk, when extra troops appeared to reinforce the yamen guards, he led the workers in chanting slogans to keep their spirits up. Darkness fell with still no agreement. Supporters brought lanterns, and they prepared to settle in for the night.

The prospect of several thousand angry men on the loose in the centre of Changsha overnight did not please Governor Zhao, who sent a staff officer to try to persuade them to leave. A missionary, who acted as an occasional correspondent for the North China Herald, happened to be on hand:

About 10 p.m. I wandered across to the precincts of the yamen, and found myself just in time to witness a most interesting interview … The staff official … was well-matched in the 10 representatives of the workmen … On both sides there was perfect courtesy. The staff official ‘mistered’ each of the representatives, and used not only the ordinary terms of respect but maintained the bearing of ordinary intercourse among gentlemen. The workmen, while speaking with complete ease and fluency, made no slips in etiquette …

The staff officer mounted a table … After [he had exhorted] the men to return to their homes … one of the ‘ten’, not the acknowledged leader, asked permission to put the officer's suggestion to a vote. ‘Will you go home? Those who are willing to do so, hold up their hand.’ Not a hand was held up. ‘Those who intend to stay holdup their hands.’ Not a hand was wanting. ‘You have your answer,’ was all that the representative commented …

The staff officer … openly admitted not only that the District Magistrate, but that even the Governor, had no right to fix the rate of wages by proclamation without the agreement of both sides … Now and again things became lively; but the workmen paid pretty good attention to the commands for order and silence from their own delegates. After an hour's enjoyment of as well-conducted debate as I have ever listened to, I left the disputants at it. It was 2 a.m. before, tired out and hungry (the soldiers prevented anyone from carrying in either food or clothing), the workmen agreed to go back to their headquarters.⁶¹

The ‘acknowledged leader’ whose debating skills so impressed the worthy prelate was Mao. The union representative who called the vote was probably Ren Shude. Before the workers left, they had extracted a promise that talks would resume at the Governor's yamen next morning. For two days more, Mao and the union leaders negotiated with Governor Zhao's deputy, Wu Jinghong. If a businessman could stop selling goods because it was no longer profitable, Mao argued, why could a worker not stop work? If a merchant could raise the price of a product, why could a worker not raise the price of his labour? The right to petition, he noted, was laid down in the provincial constitution. ‘What law, then, are we breaking? Please inform us, honourable Director, sir!’ In the end, the Governor's decision not to use force, and the administration's concern lest the strike trigger civil disorder, left it no way to resist. Director Wu, Mao, Ren Shude and a dozen other union delegates signed an accord, to which the official seal was solemnly affixed, acknowledging that ‘all wage increases are a matter of free contractual relations between labourers and employers’.

With that, the power of the guilds, which had lasted almost unchanged since the Ming dynasty, 500 years earlier, was effectively destroyed in Changsha. The daily rate for the masons and carpenters was raised from 20 to 34 silver cents. It was still ‘not much more than the barest living wage, [on which] no man could support a family of two adults and two children’, the missionary noted.⁶² But for Mao, for the Party, and for all the city's workers it was a resounding success, and next day some 20,000 of them marched through a cannonade of firecrackers to the yamen to celebrate. ‘Organised Labour's Victory’, the Herald's headline proclaimed:

The government capitulated completely to the express wish of the strikers’ delegates … It is the first encounter of the new form of Workmen's Union with the officials … They gained all they asked; the officials gained nothing in their attempts to compromise. In as much as the workmen's demands were moderate, that is all to the good, but the precedent gives the workmen an enormous power of leverage.⁶³

It was not Mao's only triumph that week. While he was negotiating with Director Wu at the Governor's yamen on October 24, Yang Kaihui, who had gone for her confinement to her mother's home in the suburbs, gave birth to a son.⁶⁴

The strike epidemic spread quickly to other trades. Garment-makers struck twice in September. They were followed by barbers, rickshaw-pullers, dyers and weavers, cobblers, typesetters and writing-brush makers.⁶⁵ By the beginning of November, when the All-Hunan Federation of Labour Organisations was established, with Mao as its general secretary, fifteen unions had been formed, including the country's first inter-provincial association, the Canton-Hankou General Rail Union, with headquarters at Changsha's main railway station. By the following summer, the number would grow to 22 with 30,000 members. Mao himself served as nominal leader of eight of them.⁶⁶

In December, as head of the new Federation, he took a joint delegation of union representatives to meet Governor Zhao, the Changsha police chief and other top provincial officials, to discuss the government's intentions in view of the workers’ growing demands. According to Mao's minutes, published afterwards by the Dagongbao, Zhao assured them that constitutional guarantees protecting the right to strike would be maintained, and that his government ‘had no intention of oppressing them’. In reply, Mao explained that what the unions really wanted was socialism, but ‘because this was difficult to achieve in China at present’, their demands would be limited to improvements in wages and working conditions. The Governor agreed that ‘while socialism might be realised in the future, it would be hard to put it into practice today’.

The delegation did not get all it wanted. The administration refused to give an undertaking never to intervene in labour conflicts; nor would it register the Federation as a legally constituted body. But the two sides did agree to have regular contact to ‘avoid misunderstandings’.⁶⁷

December 1922 marked the peak of the labour movement in Hunan, and a highpoint in Mao's own life. He was Secretary of the provincial Party committee; a highly successful trade union organiser, whom even Governor Zhao had to listen to; and the father of a two-month-old baby boy. On his twenty-ninth birthday, the last of the great wave of strikes he had orchestrated in the province that year, at the Shuikoushan lead and zinc mines near Hengyang, came to a successful conclusion.⁶⁸

Yet amid the movement's triumphs, there were warning signs as well. Shanghai, the biggest industrial centre of all, was so tightly controlled by an alliance of Western and Chinese capitalists, foreign police and triad labour recruiters, that the Party's Labour Secretariat found it impossible to operate there and in the autumn moved to Beijing.⁶⁹ Even in Hunan, where the movement was strongest, some prominent sympathisers within the provincial elite were beginning to ask themselves whether the agitation was not going too far.⁷⁰

In the end it was from Beijing that the fatal blow descended. The Labour Secretariat had gone there partly because the dominant northern leader, Wu Peifu, who early in 1922 had strengthened his position by defeating the Manchurian warlord, Zhang Zuolin, was seen as a relatively liberal figure. Wu liked to play up the contrast between his new government and that of the hated pro-Japanese Anfu clique that had preceded it, and proclaimed that the protection of labour was one of his priorities.⁷¹ The communists took note, and that summer the Secretariat and its provincial heads, Mao among them, petitioned the Beijing parliament to enact a labour law providing for an eight-hour workday, paid holidays and maternity leave, and an end to child labour.⁷² In a separate move, Li Dazhao reached agreement with Wu's officials for six Party members to act as ‘secret inspectors’ on the Beijing–Hankou railway, the main north-south artery for troop movements. Wu's interest was to eliminate Zhang Zuolin's supporters from the railwaymen's labour associations. But the result was that, by the end of the year, most of the railway workforce had been reorganised into communist-led workers’ clubs.

Meanwhile Soviet Russia had sent a new emissary, Adolf Joffe, for fresh talks on the thorny problem of diplomatic recognition. Russian diplomats began to dream of an alliance between Wu and Sun Yat-sen, which would combine northern power with southern revolutionary credentials. But Joffe could not give Beijing what it wanted – the restitution of the Russian-administered Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria and an acknowledgement of Chinese interests in Mongolia – and Wu's interest in the Russians and their local protégés waned.⁷³

Against this background, the communist-led railway workers’ clubs on the Beijing–Hankou line called a founding congress, to be held in Zhengzhou on February 1, to establish a General Rail Union, similar to the one Mao had founded in Hunan the previous autumn. A few days before the meeting was to open, Wu Peifu ordered it banned. When the delegates went ahead anyway, troops occupied the union headquarters and a national rail strike was declared. On February 7, 1923, Wu and other warlords cracked down simultaneously in Beijing, Zhengzhou and Hankou. At least forty men were killed, including the branch secretary in Hankou, who was beheaded in front of his comrades on the station platform. More than 200 others were wounded.⁷⁴

The ‘February Seventh Massacre’, as it became known, punched a huge hole in the communists’ ambitions to use the labour movement as the motor of political change. Work stoppages fell by half, and those that did take place were brutally suppressed. Labour activism was further reduced by rising unemployment as Chinese manufacturers cut back in the face of increased foreign competition.⁷⁵

In Hunan, where Zhao Hengti was continuing his efforts to keep north and south at arms’ length, the clampdown was initially muted. Mao's Labour Federation sent off angry telegrams, denouncing the ‘unspeakably evil warlords’, led by Wu and his nominal ally, Cao Kun, and warning graphically: ‘Every compatriot who has seen these traitors … regrets that he cannot devour their flesh and make a bed of their skins.’⁷⁶ The registration of new unions continued and, in March, Mao sent his brothers, Zemin and Zetan, to Anyuan and Shuikoushan to help run the workers’ clubs there. Shortly afterwards Li Lisan left for Wuhan, to be replaced by Liu Shaoqi, a dour, orthodox young Leninist who found it difficult at first to assume the mantle of his charismatic predecessor but was well-placed to continue the cautious reformist policies which Mao had laid down. By then, Anyuan had earned the soubriquet ‘Little Moscow’ and was described by the Party Centre as its ‘great fortress of the proletariat’. After the ‘February Seventh Massacre’, Mao once more underlined the need for restraint, quoting a line from the Tang poet, Han Yu: ‘The drawn bow must await release’.⁷⁷ He visited the coalmines again in April and then helped to organise a gigantic demonstration in Changsha, which brought 60,000 people onto the streets, as part of a nationwide campaign to demand that Japan return Port Arthur (Lushun) and Dairen (Dalian).⁷⁸ But that was the last hurrah. Two months later, during a general strike to protest the deaths of two demonstrators killed by marines from a Japanese gunboat, Zhao declared martial law, filled the streets with his troops and issued arrest warrants for union leaders.⁷⁹

By that point, however, Mao had already left Hunan. In January 1923, Chen Duxiu had invited him to come to Shanghai to work for the Party Central Committee. Li Weihan, three years Mao's junior, a former First Normal student and an early member of the New People's Study Society, was named to succeed him as provincial Party Secretary. The communist rail union leader, Guo Liang, became head of the Labour Federation; and another former New People's Study Society member, twenty-year-old Xia Xi, became secretary of the provincial Youth League. For Mao, it was a substantial promotion. But he was evidently in no hurry to depart, and delayed until mid-April before bidding farewell to Yang Kaihui and his baby son, and boarding the Yangtse steamer which was to take him to the coast.⁸⁰

The row between Chen Duxiu and Hendricus Sneevliet, over the Party's relations with Moscow, had been more or less papered over. But a second, much more serious, dispute had arisen over the relationship between the CCP and Sun Yat-sen's Guomindang (GMD). It dated from the winter of 1921, when Sneevliet had met Sun in Guilin. The old revolutionary flummoxed him by declaring that there was ‘nothing new in Marxism. It had all been said 2,000 years ago in the Chinese Classics.’ None the less, Sun's revolutionary credentials, and the Guomindang's effectiveness in supporting the seamen's strike in Hong Kong, which Sneevliet witnessed for himself in Canton, convinced him that a Communist–Guomindang alliance was highly desirable.⁸¹

The Chinese comrades strongly disagreed. The Guomindang might be less reactionary than the government in Beijing, but it was still a patriarchal, pre-modern party, with its roots in the secret societies, the dynastic struggle against the Manchus, and the diffuse, shadowy world of literary and intellectual cliques mobilised by the cultured elite. Sun, who was known simply as ‘the Leader’, ran it as a personal fiefdom, requiring his followers to swear an oath of allegiance. It was profoundly corrupt. Its core support was limited to Guangdong and the other southern provinces. It was not, and had no ambition to be, a mass party, capable of mobilising China's workers and peasants, its merchants and industrialists, to struggle against the warlords and imperialists. In Sun's scheme of things, the warlords were not so much enemies as potential partners in future deal-making.

In March 1922, Zhang Guotao, just back from Moscow, where he and Mao's Hunanese colleague, He Shuheng, had attended the Congress of Toilers of the Far East, reported that at a private meeting he held with Lenin, the Soviet leader had been ‘emphatic’ that the communists and the GMD must work together.⁸² Chen Duxiu's response was to convene a meeting at the beginning of April with Mao, Zhang and members of three other provincial Party branches who happened to be in Shanghai at the time, which ‘passed a unanimous resolution expressing total disapproval’ of any alliance. Afterwards Chen fired off an angry note to Voitinsky, who had become head of the Comintern's Far Eastern Bureau, informing him of this decision, and declaring that the Guomindang's policies were ‘totally incompatible with communism’; that, outside Guangdong, it was regarded as ‘a political party scrambling for power and profit’; and that whatever Sun Yat-sen might say, in practice his movement would not tolerate communist ideas. These factors, Chen concluded, made any accommodation impossible.⁸³

The signatories, Mao included, returned to their home provinces, assuming that that was an end to the matter. However, Sneevliet, knowing that he had Lenin's backing, was not so easily discouraged. Over the next few months, the Party leaders in Shanghai found themselves under conflicting pressures from the Comintern, the Russian government, Guomindang leftists and sympathisers within the Party's own ranks, and from the complex interplay of warlord rivalries. By early summer, when Sun was expelled from Canton in a palace coup by his erstwhile military supporters – and became notably more receptive to the idea of co-operation with Moscow and its allies – the CCP was ready to signal grudging acceptance of the idea of a common front, so long as the GMD changed its ‘vacillating policy’ and took ‘the path of revolutionary struggle’.⁸⁴

The Second CCP Congress, in July, confirmed the change in policy. A resolution was passed, acknowledging the need for ‘a temporary alliance with the democratic elements to overthrow … our common enemies’.

But the Guomindang was not mentioned by name, and the resolution insisted that ‘under no circumstances’ should the proletariat be placed in a subordinate position. If the communists joined a united front, it was to be for their own benefit, not anyone else's.⁸⁵ That message was reinforced by the Party's new constitution, which proclaimed its adherence to the Comintern and warned that CCP members could not join any other political party without express authorisation from the Central Committee itself.⁸⁶ This was slightly less harsh than the policy of ‘exclusion and aggression’ that the First Congress had laid down, but it was hardly extending a welcome to the Guomindang's 50,000 members to join the common cause. Coming from a minuscule political grouping, which at that time, in all of China, had a paid-up membership of 195, it showed astonishing gall.⁸⁷

Mao did not attend the Second Congress. He claimed later that when he arrived in Shanghai, he ‘forgot the name of the place where it was to be held, could not find any comrades and missed it’. But it seems more likely that he stayed away because he disagreed with the compromise being fashioned.⁸⁸ If so, he was not alone: the representatives of the Canton Party committee, who were likewise hostile to an alliance with Sun, also failed to attend.⁸⁹

In August, Sneevliet returned from Moscow, armed with a directive from the Comintern that the Guomindang was to be viewed as a revolutionary party. Two weeks later, at a Central Committee meeting at Hangzhou, he invoked Comintern discipline to ram through, against the vigorous opposition of all the Chinese who attended, a new strategy known as the ‘bloc within’, under which CCP members would join the Guomindang as individuals, and the Party would use the resulting alliance as a vehicle to advance the proletarian cause. Shortly afterwards, a small group of CCP officials, including Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, were inducted into the Guomindang at a ceremony presided over by Sun Yat-sen himself. A new Party weekly, Xiangdao zhoubao (The Guide Weekly), edited by Mao's old friend, Cai Hesen, was set up to promote the alliance, and to try to nudge the Guomindang towards a more revolutionary course. Then, in January 1923, Sun met Adolf Joffe in Shanghai, signalling the start of a closer relationship with Moscow, and – despite reservations from the party's right wing – the first steps were taken towards reorganising the Guomindang on what would eventually be Leninist lines.⁹⁰

To many communists, however, the ‘bloc within’ strategy remained anathema, and vigorous opposition continued.⁹¹

There were other reasons, too, that spring, for the Party leadership to be demoralised. Their one great success, the labour movement, had been smashed. The Party had no legal existence, and was forced to operate underground. Internal divisions had become so acute that, at one point, Chen Duxiu had threatened to resign.⁹² Sneevliet himself acknowledged that the CCP was an artificial creation, which had been ‘born, or more correctly, fabricated’ before its time, while Joffe had stated publicly that ‘the Soviet system cannot actually be introduced into China, because there do not exist here the conditions for the successful establishment of communism’.⁹³

Even Mao, whose work in Hunan had been singled out for special praise,⁹⁴ was, according to Sneevliet, ‘at the end of his Latin with labour organisation, and so pessimistic that he saw the only salvation for China in intervention by Russia’. China's future, Mao told him gloomily, would be decided by military power, not by mass organisations, nationalist or communist.⁹⁵

In this depressed mood, forty delegates, representing 420 Party members, twice as many as the previous year, gathered in Canton for the CCP's Third Congress,⁹⁶ where once again the relationship with the Guomindang became the dominant issue. The crux of the dispute this time was over Sneevliet's insistence that all Party members should join the Guomindang automatically. Mao, Cai Hesen and the other Hunanese delegates, who voted as a bloc, opposed him.⁹⁷

Unlike Zhang Guotao, who held that the very principle of collaboration with the Guomindang was wrong, Mao's assessment was pragmatic. After the February incident in Zhengzhou, his thinking about a tactical alliance had changed. The Guomindang, he concluded, represented ‘the main body of the revolutionary democratic faction’, and communists should not be afraid to join it. But the proletariat would grow stronger as China's economy developed, and it was essential that the Party guard its independence so that, when the moment came, it could resume its leading role. The bourgeoisie, Mao argued, was incapable of leading a national revolution; the Comintern's optimism was misplaced:

The Communist Party has temporarily abandoned its most radical views in order to co-operate with the relatively radical Guomindang … in order to overthrow their common enemies … [In the end] the outcome … will be [our] victory … In the immediate future, however, and for a certain period, China will necessarily continue to be the realm of the warlords. Politics will become even darker, the financial situation will become even more chaotic, the armies will further proliferate … [and] the methods for the oppression of the people will become even more terrible … This kind of situation may last for eight to ten years … But if politics becomes more reactionary and more confused, the result will necessarily be to call forth revolutionary ideas among the citizenry of the whole country, and the organisational capacity of the citizens will likewise increase day by day … This situation is … the mother of revolution, it is the magic potion of democracy and independence. Everyone must keep this in mind.⁹⁸

The prospect of another decade of warlord rule, even leavened by Mao's insistence on the unity of opposites, was too grim for most of his colleagues, and Sneevliet was moved to remark that he did not share his pessimism.⁹⁹

When the vote was taken, the Comintern line was narrowly approved. But the Party's rank and file, like most of the leadership, remained extremely reserved, and the Congress resolutions were unable to conceal the latent conflicts enshrined in the new policy. The Guomindang, the delegates declared, was to be ‘the central force of the national, revolution and assume its leadership’. Yet, at the same time, the Communist Party, which was assigned the ‘special task’ of mobilising the workers and peasants, was to expand its own ranks at its ally's expense by absorbing ‘truly class-conscious, revolutionary elements’ from the GMD's left wing; while in policy terms its goal was to ‘force the Guomindang’ to move closer to Soviet Russia.¹⁰⁰

If the communists were determined to act as a ginger group, the Guomindang was no less determined not to let the tail wag the dog. And so the stage was set for a bruising struggle of wills, and ultimately of arms, which would dominate communist strategy for the rest of the decade and beyond.

When the Third Congress ended, Mao was elected one of nine members of the Central Committee (CC) and, more significantly, Secretary of the newly established Central Bureau, which was responsible for day-to-day Party affairs,^I and comprised himself, the General Secretary, Chen Duxiu, and three others: Mao's fellow Hunanese (and fellow founder members of the New People's Study Society), Cai Hesen and Luo Zhanglong; and the head of the Canton Party committee, Tan Pingshan (soon to be replaced by Wang Hebo, a Shanghainese railwayman and union organiser). Mao was put in charge of personnel work, a key post which made him notionally second only to Chen himself.¹⁰¹

The Party had emerged from its tribulations stronger, more centralised, and more Leninist, at least in the organisational sense, than in its first two years. The struggle to overcome the divisions which had driven Chen Duxiu to threaten resignation the previous autumn had tempered the leadership. Being forced to accept Comintern instructions and to submit to the will of the majority had confronted them for the first time with the principles of democratic centralism on which all Bolshevik parties had to operate. Some, like the Marxist scholar, Li Hanjun, who had argued at the First Congress for a loose-knit, decentralised Party, resigned in disgust. But the outline of an orthodox Party structure was now in place, and Chen Duxiu could no longer complain that ‘the Central Committee internally is not organised … [Its] knowledge is also insufficient … [and its] political viewpoint is not sufficiently clear’.¹⁰² Even though the new leadership had no more real grasp of Marxist theory than the old, the basis of a common ideology, guiding and uniting its action, was at last discernible.¹⁰³

For Mao, these few months in the late spring and summer of 1923 marked a turning-point. At the provincial level, in Hunan, he had been able to influence events as a labour leader and a progressive intellectual with close links to the liberal establishment. Except to a small circle of initiates, his role in the Party had been secret. Now he became a full-time cadre, still operating clandestinely, but with a commanding position in the Party's national leadership. His ties to labour, and to the liberal elite, were abandoned.

Intellectually, too, it was a time for exploring new possibilities. The lesson of the ‘February Seventh Massacre’, that the working class alone could not open the road to power, led him for the first time to consider other options: the military route, which he had discussed with Sneevliet in July and mentioned again, a few weeks later, in a letter to Sun Yat-sen, in which he called for the creation of a ‘centralised national-revolutionary army’;¹⁰⁴ and the peasant route, which involved mobilising the most numerous and oppressed sections of China's vast population.

For the time being, however, such thoughts were purely speculative, for the route that the Party had chosen was the ‘united front’. Shortly after the Third Congress, Mao joined the Guomindang.¹⁰⁵ He would spend the next year and a half trying to make the front succeed.

In the first weeks, the learning curve was steep for both sides. Sun rejected virtually every proposal the communists made. At a meeting in mid-July, Chen, Mao and the other members of the Central Bureau complained: ‘Nothing can be expected [in terms of] the modernisation of the Guomindang … so long as Sun keeps [to] his [present] notion of [what] a political party [should be], and so long as he does not want to make use of the communist elements [to carry out] the work.’ Sneevliet, as the architect of the front, was especially frustrated. Supporting Sun, he grumbled to Joffe, was simply ‘throwing away money’.¹⁰⁶

At the same time, having finally accepted the Comintern's thesis that the way to the future lay through a GMD-led national revolution, the CCP leaders seized on every twitch and whimper that seemed to comfort this strategy. Even Mao, who, a few weeks earlier, had derided the very notion that the bourgeoisie would play a leading role, now lauded the Shanghai business community for supporting the anti-militarist cause:

This revolution is the task of all the people … But … the task that the merchants should shoulder in the national revolution is more urgent and more important than the work that the rest of the Chinese people should take upon themselves … The Shanghai merchants have risen and begun to act … The broader the unity of the merchants, the greater will be their influence, the greater their strength to lead the people of the entire nation, and the more rapid the success of the revolution!¹⁰⁷

To some extent this must have been tongue-in-cheek. Mao did not really believe, as he claimed, that of all the Chinese people the merchants suffered ‘most keenly, most urgently’ from warlord and imperialist oppression. Nor did he have much confidence that their new-found revolutionary spirit would last. On the other hand, so long as the warlords were the main enemy, the bourgeoisie had to be an ally. For the moment Mao was ready, like the rest of the Party leadership, to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The key issue remained, however, how to force the Guomindang to change its traditional, elitist ways and become a modern party with a genuine mass base.

At the end of July, after the Central Bureau returned to Shanghai, it was decided to employ a Trojan Horse strategy: Party activists would build up from scratch networks of GMD organisations in northern and central China (where none currently existed), so that these new, communist-dominated regional branches could serve as pressure groups to swing the whole party to the left.¹⁰⁸ Li Dazhao was charged with carrying out this mission in north China, and in September Mao went secretly to Changsha to do the same in the central provinces.¹⁰⁹

Hunan was once again in the throes of civil war. That summer, one of Zhao Hengti's commanders had mutinied. The former Governor, Tan Yankai, who had been biding his time in the south, where he had established links with Sun Yat-sen, seized the opportunity to invade at the head of a ‘bandit-suppressing army’ bent upon Zhao's overthrow. At the end of August, Tan's allies seized Changsha and Governor Zhao was forced to flee for his life. It was this that persuaded Chen Duxiu to grant Mao leave of absence from his new responsibilities as Secretary, naming Luo Zhanglong to act for him while he was away. Mao was evidently delighted. He did not relish the dry, administrative work which was the Secretary's daily fare. Shanghai, a city created by imperialists and capitalists, would always be foreign to him; and back home in Changsha, Yang Kaihui, whom he had not seen since April, was expecting their second child. But even as he travelled up on the steamer, the tide of warfare turned and when he arrived at Changsha he found it once more in Zhao's hands.¹¹⁰

For the next month, the city was under siege and intermittent bombardment. Tan's allies held the west bank of the Xiang River, Zhao's forces the east. To the foreigners, safe in their consular residences, it seemed ‘an opéra-bouffe war’, with the odd, jagged moment of danger to relieve the tedium. For the Chinese it was very different:

In the city the big shops never took down their night shutters, rich men fled or lay in hiding. All feared the officers who walked or rode through the streets carrying the red paddles [the ‘broad arrows’] of life or death, under the power of which they commandeered rice and money. None dared say nay … [for] those who did … were in danger of being marched to the open space near the Customs House where the executioner stood with a long knife to behead them.¹¹¹

In the countryside, the villages were subjected to an orgy of rape, plunder and arson reminiscent of the worst days of Zhang Jingyao.¹¹² Mao still thought Tan would win, and wrote to the Guomindang's General Affairs Department in Canton that Zhao would be unable to hold his ground.¹¹³ Then, one sunlit morning, came the sound of distant gunfire. Wu Peifu had sent troops to shore up Zhao's support, and Tan's men had been routed. The foreigners watched through binoculars as the victorious force returned, ‘carrying-coolies, machine-guns borne in chairs like invalids, soldiers swinging lanterns and straw shoes, officers shielding themselves from the sun with paper parasols’.¹¹⁴

Zhao's victory came at a price. Hunan's role as a buffer between north and south was at an end. Changsha once more felt the heel of northern soldiers’ boots. The liberal elite allied with Tan, on whose protection Mao had relied, were deprived of power and scattered. On Zhao's orders, the Self-Study University was closed, the Labour Federation and the Students’ Union banned, and a warrant issued for Mao's arrest. Two months earlier he had published a long inventory of Zhao's crimes, describing him as ‘an outrageously and unpardonably wicked creature’. From then on he lived under an assumed name, Mao Shishan (‘Mao the Stone Mountain’).¹¹⁵

There could hardly have been a worse moment to try to launch a nationalist party linked to Zhao's defeated adversary. Mao and the Socialist Youth League leader, Xia Xi, who, on his recommendation had been named the Guomindang's preparatory director in Hunan, were able to establish a provisional Party headquarters for the province, with clandestine branches in Changsha, in Ningxiang (through He Shuheng) and at the Anyuan coalmines, where Liu Shaoqi was still in charge. But they were little more than empty shells, operating in total secrecy.¹¹⁶ Mao remained in Hunan until late December, and celebrated his thirtieth birthday with Yang Kaihui, Anying and their second son, Anqing, born six weeks before.¹¹⁷ That his staying on had more to do with his family than any political commitments is clear from a love-poem he wrote for her soon after his departure, which was evidently marred by a quarrel:

A wave of the hand, and the moment of parting has come.
Harder to bear is facing each other dolefully,
Bitter feelings voiced once more.
Wrath looks out from your eyes and brows,
On the verge of tears, you hold them back.
We know our misunderstandings sprang from that last letter.^II
Let it roll away like clouds and mist,
For who in this world is as close as you and I?
Can Heaven fathom our human maladies?
I wonder.
This morning frost lies heavy on the road to East Gate,
The waning moon lights up the pool and half the sky – How cold, how desolate!
One wail of the steam whistle has shattered my heart,
Now I shall roam alone to the furthest ends of the earth.
Let us strive to sever those threads of grief and anger,
Let it be as though the sheer cliffs of Mount Kunlun collapsed,
As though a typhoon swept through the universe.
Let us once again be two birds flying side by side,
Soaring high as the clouds¹¹⁸

While Mao had been in Hunan in the autumn and early winter of 1923, the relationship between the Guomindang and the Russians had undergone a transformation. The Soviet leadership had decided that, given Moscow's international isolation, a progressive Chinese regime, even led by a bourgeois party, would be a valuable ally. Mikhail Borodin, a highly regarded revolutionary who had worked with Lenin and Stalin, was named special envoy to Sun Yat-sen. The Guomindang Chief of Staff, Chiang Kai-shek, a slim, slightly cadaverous man in his mid-thirties, went to Moscow to learn about the Red Army, and was treated royally. Although Sun's quixotic proposal for a Russian-led force to attack Beijing from the north – ‘an adventure doomed in advance to failure’, as the Soviet Revolutionary Military Council put it – was firmly rejected, the Russians agreed to finance a military training school and, at a meeting in November, Trotsky himself promised ‘positive assistance in the form of weapons and economic aid’.

Meanwhile in Canton, Counsellor Bao, as Borodin was called, was deftly working his way around the sensitivities of the two Chinese parties over the triangular alliance Moscow was determined to build.

A thoughtful, patient man, nearly forty years old, Borodin was in many respects the opposite of the domineering Sneevliet. He managed to win Sun's trust while persuading both the Guomindang and the communists that each had most to gain from the new relationship that was being put in place. In October, while Borodin was preparing to help Sun fight off yet another attempt by local warlords to unseat him, the old conspirator cabled Chiang in Moscow: ‘It has now been made entirely clear who are our friends and who are our enemies.’¹¹⁹

On that note, the Guomindang convened its first National Congress in Canton on January 20, 1924. Mao had arrived via Shanghai two weeks earlier with a six-member delegation representing the still largely notional Hunan GMD organisation, including Xia Xi and the provincial CCP leader, Li Weihan.¹²⁰

The congress approved a new constitution, drawn up by Borodin on Leninist lines, emphasising discipline, centralisation and the need to train revolutionary cadres to mobilise mass support; it adopted a more radical political programme, denouncing imperialism as the root cause of China's sufferings; and it called, for the first time, for the development of workers’ and peasants’ movements to promote the revolution.¹²¹ The communists, mostly younger, livelier spirits than the nationalist party veterans, made a strong impression. At one session, Mao and Li Lisan reportedly so dominated the proceedings that the older men ‘looked askance, as if to ask, “Where did those two young unknowns come from?”’ The radical leader, Wang Jingwei, one of Sun's companions from the early days of the Tongmenghui, the Revolutionary Alliance, commented afterwards: ‘The young people of the May Fourth movement are something to be reckoned with, after all. Look at the enthusiasm with which they speak, and their energetic attitude.’¹²²

The new GMD Central Executive Committee (CEC), elected by acclamation on Sun Yat-sen's proposal, included three communists among its twenty-four full members: Li Dazhao; Yu Shude from Beijing; and the Canton CCP leader, Tan Pingshan, who was also named Director of the Organisation Department, one of the most powerful positions in the party, and in that capacity became one of the three members of the CEC's Standing Committee, together with the party Treasurer, Liao Zhongkai, representing the left wing of the Guomindang, and Dai Jitao, representing the right. Mao was appointed one of seventeen alternate (or non-voting) CEC members, seven of whom were communists, including Lin Boqu, a fellow Hunanese who became Director of the GMD Peasant Department; a young literary lion named Qu Qiubai, who had worked in Moscow as correspondent of the progressive Beijing newspaper, Chenbao, and was now Borodin's assistant in Canton; and Zhang Guotao, who had apparently put aside his reservations about the two parties’ unnatural alliance.¹²³

In mid-February Mao moved back to Shanghai, where he shared a house in Zhabei, not far from Bubbling Well Road, in the northern part of the International Settlement, with Luo Zhanglong, Cai Hesen and Cai's girlfriend, Xiang Jingyu.¹²⁴ For the rest of the year he had a double workload, serving as Secretary for the CCP Central Bureau, which operated from the same address under cover of being a Customs Declaration Office, providing secretarial services for Chinese businesses which had to deal with the foreign-controlled Customs Administration;¹²⁵ and carrying out similar duties for the Guomindang's Shanghai Executive Committee, with an office in the French concession. The latter was responsible for the work of GMD branches in the four provinces of Anhui, Jiangxi, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, as well as in the city itself.¹²⁶

This was not the easiest of roles. Despite the best efforts of Borodin in Canton, and of Voitinsky, who was now back in Shanghai as Comintern representative, replacing Hendricus Sneevliet, friction between the two parties intensified. GMD conservatives, not without reason, saw the CCP as a fifth column. In late April or early May 1924, they obtained a copy of a secret Central Committee resolution, ordering communists within the Guomindang to establish a system of tight-knit ‘party fractions’, to transmit and implement Party directives and to prepare for an eventual communist takeover of the party. The right-wing GMD Control Commission began moves to impeach the communist leadership.¹²⁷ Mao, Cai Hesen and Chen Duxiu argued that the alliance with the GMD had failed and the united front should be broken, but were told by Voitinsky that this was unacceptable to Moscow. The Comintern ordered the resolution annulled, and Sun Yat-sen eventually ruled in favour of maintaining the status quo, but even Borodin grew concerned that an anti-communist coalition was forming which was only deterred from taking action by the fear of losing Russian aid.¹²⁸

In July, Chen and Mao issued a secret Central Committee circular, reaffirming the ‘bloc within’ strategy laid down by the Third Congress a year earlier, but noting that it was proving ‘extremely difficult’ to carry out:

Overt and covert attacks on us and attempts to push us out have been mounting daily on the part of a majority of Guomindang members … Only a very few Guomindang leaders, such as Sun Yat-sen and Liao Zhongkai, have not yet made up their minds to break with us, but they, too, certainly do not wish to offend the right-wing elements … For the sake of uniting the revolutionary forces, we must absolutely not allow any separatist words or actions to emerge on our side, and we must try our best to be tolerant and co-operate with them. [At the same time] … we cannot tolerate non-revolutionary rightist policies without correcting them.¹²⁹

That set the tone for communist tactics throughout the next three years. So long as the united front held, the CCP would not be permitted to reject it. Rather, at the Comintern's behest, it would increasingly bend over backwards to accommodate its nationalist partners. But not all of them. The most important decision to emerge during the summer of 1924 was that the Guomindang must be treated as a divided party, having a left wing, with which the communists could ally themselves, and a right wing, which could not be won over and must be fought by all means at their disposal.

The problem with this approach was summed up by Mao in a pithy Chinese folk-saying, ‘Chongshuang diehu’, meaning literally, ‘duplicate bed, duplicate household’.¹³⁰ In other words, if the front were simply a means for the Party to associate itself with a pro-communist Guomindang Left which shared the same ideas and goals, one or the other was redundant. The question was, which one?

The CCP seemed to be going nowhere. Recruitment was painfully slow. The labour movement was at a standstill. Despite all the Comintern's propaganda depicting the proletariat as thirsting after communist policies, Chinese workers had little interest in politics and communist energies were being dissipated in sterile turf battles for survival. Some prominent communists that summer decided their own Party was the one bed too many and resigned to pursue Guomindang careers. Mao never quite took that step. But as the year wore on he became increasingly despondent. A young Hunanese communist named Peng Shuzhi, visiting Shanghai after three years spent studying in Moscow, found him morose and apathetic:

He looked in a pretty bad way. His thinness seemed to make his body even longer than it actually was. He was pale, and his complexion had an unhealthy, greenish tinge. I was afraid that he had contracted tuberculosis, as so many of our comrades had done, or would do, at one time or another in their lives.¹³¹

During the autumn, from Mao's point of view, the situation went from bad to worse. Money stopped arriving from GMD headquarters, and work at the Shanghai committee ground to a halt.¹³² He began to suffer from neurasthenia – a form of depression, marked by chronic insomnia, headaches, dizziness and high blood pressure – which would plague him for the rest of his life.¹³³ His relations with the rest of the CCP leadership, which had rarely been easy, deteriorated further.¹³⁴ The Fourth Congress, which he was organising, was postponed until the following January because Voitinsky was away in Moscow.¹³⁵ Finally, in October, there was yet another political shift in Beijing, which brought to power Feng Yuxiang, an independent warlord known as the Christian General because he baptised his troops with a fire hose. Feng appointed the hated Anfu leader, Duan Qirui, as head of government, and invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing for talks on national reconciliation.

To Mao, Sun's acceptance of this invitation was the last straw. Over the previous two years, he had seen the labour movement collapse; the liberal, progressive elite, silenced; and the CCP locked into policies which appeared to have no chance of success. Now the Guomindang was reverting, in the Central Committee's words, to ‘the same old game of militarist politics’ that had failed so often in the past.

Towards the end of December, barely a fortnight before the CCP's Fourth Congress was to open, Mao set out for Changsha, accompanied by Yang Kaihui, her mother and their two children, who had joined him in Shanghai in the summer.¹³⁶ Officially, he had been granted leave of absence due to ill-health. But, as his doctor, Li Zhisui, would note many years later, Mao's neurasthenia was always political in nature: ‘The symptoms became much more severe at the beginning of a major political struggle.’¹³⁷ Only this time it was a different kind of struggle: Mao was undergoing a crisis of faith.

As 1925 began, and his erstwhile comrades met to chart the future of a Party which now boasted 994 members, Mao celebrated the Chinese New Year at the Yangs’ old family home where, ten years earlier, as a student at First Normal, he had come to sit at the feet of his beloved ethics teacher, Kaihui's father. The wheel seemed to have turned full circle. He had no contact with his old friends in Changsha, or with the provincial CCP or Guomindang committees there. When the Fourth Congress met, he was not re-elected to the Central Committee and he no longer played any role in the Hunan provincial committee. To all intents and purposes, his withdrawal from politics was complete. In February he set out with the family for Shaoshan, taking with him several crates full of books. He was sick, Kaihui told their neighbours. For three months, from winter until late spring, Mao saw no one except members of his family and fellow villagers.¹³⁸ It was a return to the beginning, to the peasant roots from which, as an ambitious young intellectual, he had tried to free himself. Yet it was there, among the companions of his childhood, that he discerned the first glimmerings of a new, and more hopeful, way forward.

To the Chinese communists, in the first half of the 1920s, the peasants barely existed. They were, as they had been for centuries, part of the background of Chinese life, an unvarying yellow wash against which great events, and great men, were depicted, larger than life, on the endless scroll of Chinese history.

When Lenin, at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920, derided as utopian the idea that a proletarian party could win power in a backward country without forging a strong relationship with the peasantry,¹³⁹ the urban intellectuals who would form the future leadership of the Chinese party responded with stony silence. Two years later, under the prodding of the Comintern, the Second CCP Congress acknowledged that China's 300 million peasants were ‘the most important factor in the revolutionary movement’, but made clear that the CCP had no intention of leading them. Its task was to organise the workers; the peasants must liberate themselves.¹⁴⁰ Chen Duxiu, the Party's General Secretary, was persuaded during a visit to Moscow in November 1922 that the peasants were potentially ‘a friendly army … which the CCP cannot afford to ignore’,¹⁴¹ and at the Third CCP Congress, the following summer, the Party's thinking had evolved sufficiently for ‘workers and peasants’ to be bracketed together as the two classes whose interests the CCP must at all times support.¹⁴²

By then, a young man named Peng Pai, the scion of a wealthy landlord family, had led the peasants in a successful seizure of power in Hailufeng, in eastern Guangdong, which would defy all the authorities’ attempts to suppress it for the next five years.¹⁴³ But Peng was not yet a Party member and had carried out his activities entirely alone.¹⁴⁴ His movement, in full spate only 150 miles from where the Congress was meeting, did not get a mention.¹⁴⁵

Mao had shown interest even earlier in the role the peasantry might play. In April 1921, he had written an article for Gongchandang entitled ‘An Open Letter to the Peasants of China’, describing a revolt the previous autumn in the area around the Anyuan mines, where the peasants had broken into landlords’ dwellings, feasting on the delicacies they found there, seizing grain and in some cases torching the buildings afterwards. ‘It is exactly like the first rays of sunshine from the East after a pitch-black night,’ he had declared. If peasants all over China would follow their example, ‘Communism will release you from all suffering so that you may enjoy unprecedented good fortune.’¹⁴⁶ Two years later, in the spring of 1923, he had sent two communists from the Shuikoushan lead-mine back to their home villages to investigate the prospects for peasant associations in Hunan.^III Zhang Guotao remembered him telling the Third Congress that in Hunan there were ‘few workers and even fewer GMD and CCP members, whereas the peasants there filled the mountains and fields’.¹⁴⁷ With their long history of revolt and insurrection, Mao argued, the peasants could become a powerful ally in the national revolution. Chen Duxiu agreed, and a decision was taken to try to unite ‘tenant-peasants and rural labourers to … oppose the warlords and strike down corrupt officials and local tyrants’.¹⁴⁸ But no attempt was made to put it into practice.

The Comintern's frustration at the obtuseness of the Chinese comrades where the peasants were concerned was shown vividly in a directive which reached Shanghai shortly after the Congress ended:

The National Revolution in China … will necessarily be accompanied by an agrarian revolution among the peasantry … This revolution can only be successful if the basic masses of the Chinese population, the small peasants, can be attracted to take part. Thus, the central point of all policy is precisely the peasant question. To ignore this fundamental point for any reason whatsoever means to fail to understand the whole importance of the socioeconomic basis upon which alone a successful struggle … can be carried out.¹⁴⁹

There were reasons for the CCP's obstinacy. To the young, mostly bourgeois intellectuals who made up the Party leadership, industry, however primitive, was by definition modern. The new working class in the cities, exploited and downtrodden though it might be, was the proper standard-bearer for the bright new society this modern world would engender. The peasants, in contrast, represented all that was most backward and benighted in China. Mao himself, despite his rural origins, confessed that as a young man he regarded them as ‘stupid and detestable people’. Their revolts, even when successful, as at the end of the Yuan and the Ming dynasties, were capable of producing a new emperor but never a new system. Party workers, one report noted in 1923, ‘do not like the rural areas. They would rather starve than return to the villages.’¹⁵⁰ Far from being the wave of the future, the peasantry were the amorphous core of the dark legacy of Confucian empire that the revolution had to sweep away.

At first, Mao was so lacking in energy that he did little except read books and receive social calls from neighbours, who discussed ‘family matters and local events’. But a few weeks later, through the intermediary of a young clansman named Mao Fuxuan, he encouraged some of the poorer peasants to form an association. Yang Kaihui set up a peasant night school, a pared-down version of the workers’ school Mao had organised as a student at First Normal, to teach reading, arithmetic, politics and current events.¹⁵¹ Three months later, in another village in the same county, a former Anyuan coalminer named Wang Xianzong formed a second peasant association.¹⁵²

These small-scale, grass-roots experiments might have continued indefinitely, and probably inconclusively, had it not been for the actions of a unit of British-officered settlement police, 600 miles down the Yangtse in Shanghai.¹⁵³

There, on May 30, 1925, an incident occurred that set off an explosion of nationalist fervour not seen since the May Fourth movement six years before. The fuse had been lit two weeks earlier when Japanese guards fired on a group of Chinese workers during a strike at a textile plant, killing a communist organiser. In the protests which followed, six students were arrested, triggering more marches and rallies urging their release. The British Police Commissioner ordered that the demonstrations be stopped before the authorities lost control. Further arrests were made. Each day the crowds grew angrier, and the atmosphere more menacing. Shortly after half past three on a warm, muggy Saturday afternoon, in the city's main shopping street, Nanking Road, the officer-in-charge at the central police station, a British inspector, fearing that his men were about to be overrun, ordered Chinese and Sikh constables to open fire. The volley left four demonstrators dead and upwards of fifty wounded, of whom eight later succumbed to their wounds. Rioting followed, in which ten more Chinese died, and a general strike was declared.

Anti-British and anti-Japanese demonstrations broke out all over China. In Canton, troops in the foreign concession opened fire on the protesters with machine-guns, killing more than fifty, winding still tighter the spiral of anger and hatred, and provoking a sixteen-month-long strike against the British authorities in Hong Kong, which by the time it ended had crippled the colony's trade.

When the news reached Changsha that weekend, workers and students poured on to the streets and began chanting anti-foreign slogans. The Dagongbao rushed out a special edition. On Tuesday, 20,000 people attended a rally at which an All-Hunan ‘Avenge the Shame’ Association was founded and a boycott of British and Japanese goods declared. Three days later, a reported 100,000 people marched through the city, plastering every wall with posters calling for the expulsion of the imperialists, the abrogation of the unequal treaties and, most disturbing of all for the provincial authorities, an end to warlord rule. It was the biggest demonstration Changsha had ever seen. Governor Zhao Hengti responded as he usually did, sending troops with loaded weapons to quarantine the schools, imposing a 24-hour curfew and putting up notices warning that ‘disturbers of the peace’ would be shot. But the ‘Avenge the Shame’ Association was able to maintain its activities, and when the students left for the summer holidays, they continued the campaign in their home districts.¹⁵⁴

In mid-June, he founded a CCP branch in Shaoshan, with Mao Fuxuan as Secretary. Socialist Youth League and Guomindang branches followed. The peasant night-school movement spread rapidly. Peasant ‘Avenge the Shame’ branches were formed. A young GMD provincial committee staff member named He Erkang (an ex-student of the preparatory school attached to Mao's old Self-Study University and, like many Hunanese GMD activists, also a CCP member) came down from Changsha to help, and on July 10, the inaugural meeting of the grandly named ‘Xiangtan County West Second District “Avenge the Shame” Association’ was held in Shaoshan. Mao made a speech denouncing British and Japanese imperialism, and afterwards the meeting resolved to boycott all foreign goods. Officially sixty-seven delegates attended, but virtually the entire adult population of Shaoshan and of several neighbouring hamlets, some 400 people in all, came along to watch.

Finally, in early August, all this patient spadework began to pay off. A drought had set in, and, as always, the local landlords were hoarding rice in order to create a shortage. After a meeting at Mao's house, the Shaoshan peasant association sent two of its members to petition for the granaries to be opened. Not only was their plea rejected, but they were told that the grain was to be shipped to the city where it would command higher prices, just as Mao remembered his own father doing. On his instructions, Mao Fuxuan and another local CCP member led several hundred peasants, armed with hoes and bamboo carrying-poles, who forced the landlords to sell the grain locally, and at a fair price.¹⁵⁵

In the epic scale of the Chinese revolution, it was a minimal event, seemingly of no consequence whatever in the greater scheme of things. But it was the first such movement in Hunan since the smashing of the Yuebei association two years earlier. Within days similar conflicts broke out in other villages. Before the month was out more than twenty peasant associations had been formed in Xiangtan county and the surrounding area.¹⁵⁶ At that point, word of Mao's activities reached Zhao Hengti, who sent a terse secret telegram to the Xiangtan County Defence Bureau: ‘Arrest Mao Zedong immediately. Execute him on the spot.’ The order was seen by a clerk who knew Mao's family, and a messenger was sent post-haste to warn him. With that, Mao's days as a peasant organiser came to an abrupt end. He set out the same afternoon for Changsha, disguised as a doctor, travelling in a closed sedan chair.¹⁵⁷

With him went the conviction that the Comintern had been right: China's peasants were a force the nationalist movement would neglect at its peril. The revolution would succeed, Mao concluded, once it was able to mobilise the huge, untapped reservoir of peasant discontent against the classes which oppressed them.

In a poem written while in hiding in Changsha at the beginning of September, he reflected sombrely on the magnitude of the task that lay ahead:

A hundred boats battle the current.
Eagles strike at the endless void,
Fish hover in the shallow bottoms,
All creatures strive for freedom under the frosty sky.
Baffled by this immensity,
I ask the vast expanse of earth,
Who, then, controls the rise and fall of fortunes?¹⁵⁸

In a strikingly nostalgic passage, he went on to lament the passing of those ‘glorious years’ when he and his student companions, ‘with the scholar's idealistic fervour, upright and fearless, spoke out unrestrainedly’ and ‘counted as dung and dust the high and mighty of the day’. Then they had been convinced they had the answers to all of China's problems. Now, at the age of thirty-one, the blithe certitudes of youth were gone.

In the seven months Mao spent at Shaoshan, the complexion of Chinese politics changed dramatically. Sun Yat-sen had died in March 1925, leaving behind a testament urging his followers to uphold the decisions of the First Guomindang Congress, which had underwritten the united front, and to support the alliance with Russia. Wang Jingwei, who headed the party's left wing, emerged as Sun's likely successor, triggering a conservative backlash which before the year was out would see the right-wing rump, known as the ‘Western Hills Group’, mount a failed leadership challenge. Wang's support surged with the great wave of anti-imperialist fervour provoked by the May 30 Incident, which sent young radicals flocking to join both the Guomindang and the Communist Party. Soon afterwards his chief rival, Hu Hanmin, was banished to Moscow, allegedly suspected of complicity in the assassination that summer of the veteran GMD radical, Liao Zhongkai; while Chiang Kai-shek, now Canton garrison commander, began to build a base of support in the newly created National Revolutionary Army. The result was a party that was not only much more powerful than it had been when the year began, but which had also moved sharply leftward.¹⁵⁹

That alone would have been enough to commend the GMD to Mao, living clandestinely in Changsha, as he conferred with Xia Xi and other former protégés, and pondered what to do next.¹⁶⁰ But other factors were pushing him the same way. At Shaoshan, Mao had become convinced that his political instincts a year earlier had been correct. Ultimately China's salvation would come through class struggle, waged by the Communist Party leading the country's workers and peasants in the violent overthrow of their oppressors. But until that day dawned, the Guomindang, which could operate legally where the communists could not, which had its own army, trained and paid for by the Russians, and a secure territorial base in Guangdong, was far better placed than the CCP to carry the revolution forward. Accordingly, Mao's peasant night schools did not try to teach Marxism, they taught Sun Yat-sen's ‘Three Principles of the People’ – nationalism, democracy and socialism. Mao's efforts at party-building, after he resumed political activity in June, were geared more to helping the Guomindang than the CCP or the Youth League.¹⁶¹ His new political creed was set out in a resumé he wrote later that year.

I believe in Communism and advocate the social revolution of the proletariat. The present domestic and foreign oppression cannot, however, be overthrown by the forces of one class alone. I advocate making use of the national revolution in which the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie [the peasantry] and the left-wing of the middle bourgeoisie co-operate to carry out the Three People's Principles of the Chinese Guomindang in order to overthrow imperialism, overthrow the warlords, and overthrow the comprador and landlord classes [allied with them] … and to realise the joint rule … [of these three revolutionary classes], that is, the rule of the revolutionary popular masses.¹⁶²

Personal considerations must have played a part too. Mao was still an alternate member of the Guomindang Central Executive Committee; in the CCP, he no longer held any official position. Moreover, the GMD, with its roots in the secret societies and the anti-dynastic struggle, had from the start shown more interest in the peasantry than the urban-based Communist Party. By the autumn of 1925, it had set up a Peasant Department and a Peasant Movement Training Institute for rural organisers.¹⁶³ The CCP had done nothing.

In short, Canton, rather than Shanghai, had become the fulcrum of the revolutionary struggle. So when Mao slipped out of Changsha at the end of the first week in September, it was to travel south. He was evidently uncertain how he would be received. One of his companions on the journey remembered that he was suddenly seized by panic, burning all his notes for fear that they run into a patrol of Zhao Hengti's troops. His neurasthenia returned, and on arrival he spent several days in hospital.¹⁶⁴

Yet he had been right to go to Canton. He recalled years later that ‘an air of great optimism pervaded the city’. At Guomindang headquarters, he secured an appointment with Wang Jingwei, the head of the newly formed national government, who was then consolidating his position as the most powerful man in the party. It was Wang who had been so impressed with Mao's youthful enthusiasm at the First GMD Congress in January 1924. Now he proposed that, to lessen his own workload, Mao stand in for him as acting head of the GMD Propaganda Department. Two weeks later, the appointment was formally confirmed.¹⁶⁵

As a senior GMD official, Mao was now a man of substance. Yang Kaihui, her mother and the two children came from Changsha to join him. They rented a house in the pleasant tree-lined suburb of Dongshan, where the Russian military advisers and many of the Guomindang leaders, including Chiang Kai-shek, had their homes.

For the next eighteen months, Mao devoted himself to the two issues he now regarded as crucial to the revolution's success: the consolidation of the Guomindang Left and the mobilisation of the peasantry. His first action, that winter, was to start a new party journal, Zhengzhi zoubao (Political Weekly), to counter the challenge to the united front being mounted by the right-wing Western Hills Group and to stiffen the resolve of those ‘whose revolutionary convictions are wavering’.¹⁶⁶ The first issue proclaimed:

Uniting with Russia and accepting communists are important tactics of our party in pursuing the goal of victory in the revolution. The late Director-General [Sun Yat-sen] was the first to decide on them, and … they were adopted at the First National Congress … Today's revolution is an episode in the final decisive struggle between the two great forces of revolution and counter-revolution in the world … If our party's revolutionary strategy does not take as its starting point union with Soviet Russia; [and] … if it does not accept the communists, who advocate the interests of the peasants and workers; then the revolutionary forces will sink into isolation and the revolution will not be able to succeed … He who is not for the revolution is for counter-revolution. There is absolutely no neutral ground.¹⁶⁷

The choice, Mao argued, was between a ‘Western-style, middle-class revolution’, urged by the GMD right; and the formation of a broad left-wing alliance, leading to the joint rule of ‘all revolutionary forces’. Those who tried to wear ‘the grey mask of neutrality’ would soon be forced to decide on which side they would stand.¹⁶⁸

Exactly which forces could be counted as revolutionary was the subject of a long article entitled ‘An Analysis of All the Classes in Chinese Society’, which Mao published on December 1, 1925, in Geming (Revolution), the magazine of the new National Revolutionary Army. It set out in magisterial fashion the results of the long months of reflection he had spent in Shaoshan:

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? He who cannot distinguish between enemies and friends is certainly not a revolutionary, yet to distinguish between them is not easy. If the Chinese revolution … has achieved so little, [the] … strategic error has consisted precisely in the failure to unite with real friends in order to attack real enemies.¹⁶⁹

Mao went on to enumerate no fewer than twenty different social strata in China, divided into five main classes. They ranged from the big bourgeoisie, which was ‘a deadly enemy’, and its allies on the right; to the left-wing of the middle bourgeoisie, which ‘absolutely refuses to follow imperialism’ but ‘is often seized with terror when faced with “Red” tendencies’; and the three categories of petty bourgeoisie (comprising rich peasants, merchants, craftsmen and professional people), whose degree of revolutionary awareness was in direct proportion to their poverty. In addition, there were six categories of semi-proletariat (mainly poor and middle peasants, shopkeepers and street vendors), and four categories of urban, rural and lumpen-proletariat. Of these, the urban workers and coolies were described as the revolution's ‘main force’; the agricultural proletariat, the poor peasants and street vendors were ‘extremely receptive to revolutionary propaganda’ and would ‘struggle bravely’; and the lumpenproletariat[Q2], made up of bandits, soldiers, robbers, thieves and prostitutes, would ‘fight very bravely … if we can find a way to lead them’.

Accordingly, Mao concluded, out of China's 400 million people, one million were irredeemably hostile; four million were basically hostile but might be won over; and 395 million were revolutionary or at least benevolently neutral.

All the objective conditions for revolution were therefore present, Mao wrote; the only thing missing was a way to mobilise the masses. Through all the years that followed, he never wavered in this belief. It would sustain him in the darkest moments, when all hope seemed to be lost. But it offered scant comfort to the Guomindang centrists, the representatives in the party of the ‘vacillating middle bourgeoisie’, to whom Mao's homilies that winter were constantly addressed. The choice that was bearing down on them would come sooner than anyone imagined.

By the end of 1925, Chiang Kai-shek had become the most powerful leader of the Guomindang after Wang Jingwei.¹⁷⁰ As commander of the First Corps of the National Revolutionary Army, he had directed a series of successful military campaigns that autumn which effectively secured Guangdong for the GMD government against attacks by local warlords. He controlled the Canton garrison, and headed the Whampoa Military Academy, which became his headquarters. His loyalty seemed beyond question: when the Western Hills Group had challenged Wang Jingwei's leadership the previous November, he had immediately issued a statement of support. But during the Second GMD Congress in January 1926, Chiang grew restive. The meeting saw a further sharp lurch to the left, both in the make-up of the CEC Standing Committee – where Chiang was one of only three moderates, sharing power with three members of the GMD-Left and three communists – and in its policy pronouncements, which were far more radical than anything the Party had approved before. The ‘Resolution on Propaganda’, which Mao drafted, warned ominously: ‘Only those who endorse the liberation movement of the Chinese peasants are faithful revolutionary members of the party; if not, they are counter-revolutionaries.’¹⁷¹ The notion that the peasant movement was central to the revolution was widely accepted by GMD moderates. But the use of the term, ‘liberation’, signifying social revolution in the countryside, was not. The Guomindang was still a bourgeois party, and much of its support came, directly or indirectly, from members of landowning families. Such people favoured reform, but the violent overthrow of the existing rural order was not part of their agenda.¹⁷²

To Chiang, like many others, the new radicalism was unnerving.¹⁷³ It came, moreover, at a time when his own position was suddenly under pressure. Stalin, the dominant figure in the new Soviet collective leadership formed after Lenin's death, had come out in favour of the CCP trying to win control of the GMD from within, the same idea that the Comintern had rejected a year earlier when the Chinese had first proposed it. The new head of the Soviet military adviser group, General N. V. Kuibyshev, who had arrived two months before and used the improbable codename, Kisanka (Pussycat), was an arrogant, inflexible man, whose contempt for the Chinese generals, and Chiang in particular, was matched only by his determination to bring the National Revolutionary Army firmly under Soviet control. Chiang soon came to hate him and, on January 15, resigned in disgust as First Corps commander. The main area of disagreement was the timing of the long-awaited Northern Expedition, which was to carry out Sun Yat-sen's dream of unifying the whole of China under a GMD government, crushing the warlords and humbling their imperialist allies. Kuibyshev, on Stalin's instructions, argued that more preparation was needed (a view shared by the CCP leaders in Shanghai). Chiang wanted to press ahead. In fact Stalin opposed the expedition because he feared it would strengthen the GMD conservatives at the very moment when, or so he hoped, the communists and the GMD's left wing were poised to win control of the party. In February, the GMD formally applied for affiliation to the Comintern. Soon afterwards Wang Jingwei joined his voice to those calling for the expedition to be delayed, and the battle lines were drawn.¹⁷⁴ The situation was neatly summed up by Vera Vishnyakova-Akimova, one of the Russian mission's interpreters. ‘Everyone knew’, she wrote, ‘that a hidden struggle for power was going on between Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei. On one side was political prestige; on the other, military force.’¹⁷⁵

Yet when Chiang struck, in the early hours of March 20, it came in a way no one had expected.¹⁷⁶ He declared martial law; ordered the arrests of all communist officers and political workers in the Canton garrison, and of the commander of a gunboat, the Zhongshan, which he said was acting suspiciously; and sent troops to surround the residences of the Soviet military advisers and to disarm their guards. Chiang claimed afterwards to have evidence that Wang Jingwei, with Kuibyshev's backing, was planning to have him kidnapped by a communist-led naval unit and banished to Moscow. This may well have been true. But even if it were not, a confrontation was by then inevitable.

Chiang's ‘coup’, as it was afterwards called, was over almost as soon as it began. No one was injured, much less killed. Next day he was already apologising that his subordinates had exceeded their orders. But by then his point had been made. He did not oppose Russia, or the CCP, he explained, but ‘certain individuals’ had overstepped their powers. Seventy-two hours later, Kuibyshev and two other senior Soviet advisers boarded a ship for Vladivostok. Wang Jingwei was given ‘sick leave’ and departed quietly for Europe. The Russians tried to smooth things over and the Party leadership in Shanghai decided, apparently without Comintern prodding, that it had no choice but to do the same.

As so often, Mao disagreed. The most senior communists in the GMD army were Zhou Enlai, then aged twenty-eight, and a young Hunanese named Li Fuchun, a former New People's Study Society member married to Cai Hesen's sister, Cai Chang. Both men had come to Canton in 1924 after studying in France. Zhou was Director of the Political Department at the Whampoa Academy, and Deputy Commissar of Chiang Kai-shek's First Corps; Li held the same post in the Second Corps under the command of Tan Yankai. A few hours after the coup, Mao met Zhou at Li Fuchun's home. According to Zhou, Mao argued that Chiang was isolated; four of the other five Corps commanders were hostile to him; and in both the First Corps and the Academy, communists held most of the key posts. If the Left-GMD acted decisively, he asserted, Chiang's support would crumble.¹⁷⁷ Other Canton CCP leaders reportedly reached similar conclusions. But when Zhou put this to Kuibyshev, the Russian vetoed the idea, apparently on the grounds that Chiang's forces were too strong.¹⁷⁸

That led to further recriminations, with Mao and others complaining that Zhou, who was responsible for military affairs under the Canton CCP committee, had spent too much time infiltrating Chiang's First Corps and the Whampoa Academy, while neglecting to place communist cadres in other sections of the Revolutionary Army.¹⁷⁹ But by then such questions were academic. What mattered was that Chiang had won hands down and was well on the way to establishing himself as the indispensable Guomindang leader, a role he would continue to play, in and out of office, for the next forty-nine years.

Mao was now in a delicate position. Wang Jingwei had been his principal patron. Thanks to him he had been reappointed as acting head of the Propaganda Department after the Second Congress, and in February and early March had acquired several other key posts.¹⁸⁰ But his relations with the CCP remained problematic. There is no record of the Party leaders’ reaction when they learned in October 1925 that Mao had secured this plum assignment, which the CCP had been angling for ever since the spring of 1924.¹⁸¹ Of all possible communist candidates, he was certainly the last person they would have chosen. He was unruly; heterodox in his ideas; held no CCP office; and had had no contact with the Party Centre for the best part of a year.¹⁸²

Mao's determination to think for himself had been shown by his call that winter for ‘an ideology that has been produced in Chinese conditions’, and by his emphasis on the primacy of the masses:

Academic thought … is worthless dross unless it is in the service of the demands of the masses for social and economic liberation … The slogan for the intelligentsia should be, ‘Go among the masses.’ China's liberation can be found only among the masses … Anyone who divorces himself from the masses has lost his social basis.¹⁸³

To the Party Central Committee, imprisoned in a straitjacket of Comintern orthodoxy, the notion of an ideology ‘produced in Chinese conditions’ was utterly heretical. China's salvation, they held, would come not from ‘the masses’, amorphous and undefined, but from the urban proletariat whose mission was to lead them.

These differences had come to a head in December when Mao submitted to the Party journal, Xiangdao, his article, ‘Analysis of All the Classes in Chinese Society’, summarising the lessons he had drawn from his sojourn in Hunan. Chen Duxiu had refused to allow its publication on the grounds that it laid too much stress on the role of the peasantry, which was why it had appeared in the GMD journal, Geming.¹⁸⁴

Mao's estrangement from the Shanghai leadership was less damaging than it might have been had the Party Centre been united. But by the beginning of 1926 the CCP was riven by internecine squabbles, in which policy and personalities were inextricably mixed. Peng Shuzhi and Chen Duxiu were on one side, and Qu Qiubai on the other. Cai Hesen hated Peng, who had recently seduced his wife, while Zhang Guotao hovered in the middle. If that were not enough, the Centre and the Canton Party committee followed such different policies that, as Borodin later acknowledged, at times they seemed two different parties. One more dispute, with Mao, not even a member of the Central Committee, was simply not that important. Indeed, to the Party leaders, Mao's only real significance was that he had managed to amass a number of powerful GMD jobs.¹⁸⁵

In April 1926, as the communists waited uneasily for Chiang Kai-shek to make his next move, Mao deliberately kept in the background. Zhang Guotao, who had been sent to Canton as the Central Committee's plenipotentiary, remembered how ‘from beginning to end, [Mao] stayed away from the dispute and remained a bystander’, adding perceptively: ‘He seemed to have gained considerable experience from it.’¹⁸⁶

After a month of acrimonious bargaining between Chiang (who held in reserve the possibility of a complete break with the Russians) and Borodin (who controlled the flow of Russian arms Chiang needed) a compromise was reached, heavily weighted in Chiang's favour. The Guomindang Central Executive Committee met in plenary session on May 15 and passed a series of resolutions, barring communists from heading GMD departments or from holding more than a third of the posts in high-level GMD committees; banning communist fractions in GMD organisations; prohibiting GMD members in future from joining the Communist Party; and requiring the CCP to provide a complete list of existing GMD members with dual-party allegiance. In return, Chiang agreed to a crackdown on the GMD-rightists, many of whose leaders were arrested or sent into exile (a move which was in his own, as much as the CCP's, interests), and to preserve the status quo ante of GMD–CCP relations. The Russians, for their part, while still opposing the Northern Expedition, reluctantly approved an initial move northwards, into Hunan, with the aim of creating a defensive shield for Guangdong, but with the proviso that ‘the troops not disperse themselves beyond the borders of this province’.¹⁸⁷

This time the CCP leadership was, for once, unanimous in its disapproval. Chen Duxiu proposed (yet again) an end to the ‘bloc within’ strategy and the reassertion of the Party's independence. But Stalin insisted that the deal with Chiang must go through.¹⁸⁸ From then on, in Borodin's sardonic phrase, the CCP was ‘fated to play the role of coolie in the Chinese revolution’. Though not seen as such at the time, Chiang's coup had marked a turning-point in the Chinese communists’ relations with Moscow. Until March 1926, the Comintern's advice to the Chinese Party was on the whole well-intentioned and well-informed, and frequently more realistic than the views of the inexperienced CCP leaders in Shanghai. After the coup, Moscow's China policy became the prisoner of Kremlin politics. Stalin, engaged in a struggle for power with Trotsky – who now belatedly proposed that the CCP should break with the GMD – could never admit that he had been wrong about the CCP-GMD alliance. For two more years he would maintain that the united front was justified and that, even if the communists had to make temporary concessions to the Guomindang rightists, the overriding need was for all ‘revolutionary forces’ to remain united against the northern warlords and their imperialist allies. Eventually, he argued, the CCP would succeed in converting the GMD into a ‘genuine people's party’ which would establish a revolutionary regime.¹⁸⁹

Mao came out of all this far better than he might have expected. Along with other communist GMD officials, on May 28 he resigned as head of the Propaganda Department. But he retained his other key posts, as principal of the Peasant Movement Training Institute, which was then growing rapidly in size and importance, and as a member of the GMD Peasant Movement Committee, which dealt with policy matters.¹⁹⁰

These decisions reflected Chiang's recognition of the role the peasantry could play during the Northern Expedition, which he was determined to pursue, notwithstanding Russian reticence.¹⁹¹ In 1926, Mao was one of the few real authorities on peasant matters the Guomindang could turn to. He had given lectures on the subject at the officers’ training school of the Second (Hunanese) Corps of the National Revolutionary Army; at the GMD's provincial Youth Training Institute; and at a middle school attached to Guangdong University; as well as at the Peasant Movement Institute itself. Moreover, his expertise was in the central provinces of China through which the Northern Expedition would pass.¹⁹² Even Chiang's Russian advisers, once it became clear that the offensive would go ahead, agreed that it would succeed only if the peasantry along the way were mobilised to support it. Mao shared that view. Since March he had been urging the GMD Peasant Movement Committee to ‘pay the utmost attention to the areas the revolutionary armies will traverse’.¹⁹³

Less than two months after the May plenum, on July 9, 1926, the Revolutionary Army, numbering about 75,000 men, set out on the long-awaited campaign which was to crush the warlords and finally reunify China under the Guomindang flag.¹⁹⁴

It had been launched hurriedly to take advantage of events in Hunan, where the local army commander, Tang Shengzhi, who had staged a successful rebellion and declared in favour of the south, was facing attack from Wu Peifu's northern troops. The decision to back Tang proved well-founded (at least in the short term), for by the end of the month Hunan was in southern hands, and Chiang, as Commander-in-Chief, resplendent in a light grey military cloak and a panoply of new titles and powers, installed himself in Changsha.¹⁹⁵ With him went the Soviet advisers, now led by General Vasily Blyukher, the original head of the Soviet military mission, who had returned to replace Kuibyshev. He and Chiang got on well, and the ‘Generalissimo’, as he would later be known, whose military skills were limited, was wise enough to leave questions of tactics in Blyukher's experienced hands.

Mao, along with other Central Executive Committee members, went to the parade ground to see the troops depart, but otherwise he stayed aloof from GMD politics.¹⁹⁶

Instead, he immersed himself in his work with the peasantry, who, as he had anticipated, soon began playing a significant part in the southern forces’ advance. After the Revolutionary Army passed through Xiangtan, he sent fifty students from the Training Institute to Shaoshan, to see the peasant associations in action.¹⁹⁷ A month later, he published an article in the GMD Peasant Committee journal, Nongmin yundong (Peasant Movement), where for the first time he explicitly identified the landlords as the principal obstacle to revolutionary change, and the peasants as the principal instrument by which they would be overthrown:

Right down to the present day, there are still a number of people, even within the revolutionary party, who do not understand … that the greatest adversary of revolution in an economically backward semi-colony is the feudal-patriarchal class (the landlord class) in the villages … [This] class constitutes the only solid basis for the ruling class at home and for imperialism abroad. Unless this basis is shaken, it will be absolutely impossible to shake the superstructure built upon it. The Chinese warlords are merely the chieftains of this rural feudal class. To say that you want to overthrow the warlords but do not want to overthrow the feudal class in the countryside is quite simply to be unable to distinguish between the trivial and the important, the essential and the secondary.¹⁹⁸

For the revolution to succeed, Mao argued, the peasants had to be liberated and the power of the landlords smashed.

The implication was that all else, including the proletariat, was secondary. Far from trying to disguise this, Mao offered a robust defence. The class struggle of the peasantry, he wrote, was ‘different in nature from the workers’ movement in the cities’. The latter was at that stage directed not at destroying the political position of the bourgeoisie but merely at obtaining trade union rights. The peasants, on the other hand, were locked in an elemental battle for survival:

Hence, although we are all aware that the workers, students and middle and small merchants in the cities should rise and strike fiercely at the comprador class and directly resist imperialism, and although we know that the progressive working class in particular is the leader of all revolutionary classes, yet if the peasants do not rise and fight in the villages to overthrow the privileges of the feudal-patriarchal landlord class, the power of the warlords and of imperialism can never be hurled down root and branch.

Mao had developed this analysis gradually over a period of many months. The notion that the peasantry were, as he now put it, ‘the central problem of the national revolution’, dated back to the previous December.¹⁹⁹ In January he had described the big landlords as ‘the real foundation of imperialism and the warlords, the only secure bulwark of feudal and patriarchal society, the ultimate cause for the emergence of all counter-revolutionary forces’²⁰⁰ – a phrase which Borodin had seized on and used in a report to a high-ranking Soviet mission a month later.²⁰¹

But if Mao was not alone in concluding that the feudalism of the Chinese countryside was the chief obstacle to change, no one else had tried, as he now did, to explore the implications of this thesis and take it to its logical conclusion – which was as unacceptable ideologically to the CCP as it was, on practical grounds, to the Guomindang.

The Nongmin yundong article was omitted from the official canon of Mao's works, when compilations began to appear in the 1940s and 1950s; it was simply too unorthodox. Yet beneath the subsequent veneer of ideological rectitude, the communist triumph, more than twenty years later, did come, as he had described, through mobilising the peasantry, not the urban proletariat.

While Mao was thus engaged in fashioning the intellectual underpinnings of his future strategy, the peasant organisers which his institute had trained – most of them CCP members using the Guomindang's name as a cover – fanned out into the countryside to foment rural revolts. In many areas, they found the ground already well prepared. A year earlier, the owners of the Anyuan coalmines had finally lost patience with the labour movement which Li Lisan and Liu Shaoqi had built up and ordered an assault on the Workers Club by 1500 garrison troops armed with machineguns. A number of miners were killed, their leader was executed and most of the rest of the workforce dismissed and forced to return to their villages. They included some 300 communists – at that time almost a third of the Party's national membership – who set up peasant associations in their home areas. In Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi, these groups played a vital role in opening the way for the nationalist armies.

Events moved swiftly, too, on the battlefield.²⁰² On August 12, Chiang Kai-shek convened a military conference in Changsha at which it was decided that Tang Shengzhi, now installed as Hunan's GMD Governor, should lead a mixed force of his own and Chiang's units against the expedition's next target, Wuhan. Wu Peifu himself took command of the northern forces, but his men were no match for the southerners and Tang captured Hankou and Hanyang on September 6 and 7. The third of Wuhan's three cities, Wuchang, held out against the besiegers until October 10, when Chiang's men suborned one of the defending commanders. Then, for two nerve-racking weeks, the southern offensive stalled, until finally, in November, the city of Nanchang fell, giving the southern armies and their allies a clean sweep of Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi. Guangxi was already part of the nationalist camp and Guizhou had switched sides in July. Of all the provinces contiguous to Guangdong, only the northern half of Fujian was still in hostile hands, and that fell in December.

Throughout this period, the CCP leadership had been well and truly marginalised. In September, the Canton Party committee, arguing that the success of the Northern Expedition showed that the real power in the Guomindang was held by the conservatives, called for a reappraisal of the Centre's policy of uniting with the GMD-Left, arguing (correctly, as events turned out) that its leaders were an unprincipled congeries, without ideological unity, banding together to defend their own interests only because they ‘could not co-operate with the [GMD-] Centre and Right’.²⁰³ Chen Duxiu found himself yet again in the invidious position of having to defend a united front which privately he detested, but which the Comintern insisted must continue.²⁰⁴

Mao's sympathies were with the Canton group. Like them, he had seen at first-hand how supine and self-interested the GMD leftists really were. Like them, too, he saw the Northern Expedition as a huge step forward for the revolutionary cause.²⁰⁵ At a GMD conference in October, called to approve the move of the nationalist capital from Canton to Hankou, he despaired at the hypocrisy of men who in one breath solemnly promised an end to the extortion of land taxes years in advance, and in the next confessed apologetically that this year, exceptionally, because the party had run out of funds, it would have to continue after all.²⁰⁶ By then, he already knew that Canton held no future for him. His stint at the Training Institute had ended, and he was effectively out of a job.

The explosion of peasant activism that followed the Northern Expedition had finally made the CCP leaders realise that the peasant movement was important, and that it was being led entirely under the Guomindang banner. On November 4, Chen Duxiu proposed that the Central Bureau draw up a rural work programme that would meet peasant demands without creating ‘too great a distance’ over the issue between the CCP and the Left-GMD and risking ‘a premature split’.²⁰⁷ The question, as it had been for Chiang Kai-shek, six months earlier, was who should be put in charge? In September, Mao's article in Nongmin yundong, calling for class war against the landlords, had caught the eye of Qu Qiubai who, despite its departures from Leninist orthodoxy, read it with approval.²⁰⁸ Qu was close to Voitinsky, and counted as one of the most influential members of the Shanghai leadership. He apparently concluded that Mao would be a useful ally.

A few days later, Mao took ship for Shanghai, while Yang Kaihui, now pregnant with their third child, returned with the family to Hunan. On November 15, 1926, the Central Bureau announced that he had been appointed Secretary of the CCP CC's Peasant Movement Committee.²⁰⁹

So ended twenty-three months of political self-exile. It had been a fruitful period. Mao had acquired an undying belief in the revolutionary power of the peasantry, as well as vital skills in operating within the top leadership of a big, complex party machine, learning how to manipulate committees and to haggle over the fine print of party resolutions. Yet after his long dalliance with the effete charms of the Left-GMD, it must have been a relief to discover that he could still find himself a niche, albeit a narrow one, within the Party fold. From now on his primary loyalty would be not just to ‘communism’, in the abstract, as he had written in 1925, but to the growing body of Chinese men and women who, notwithstanding hesitations and setbacks, were attempting to bring it about.

Ten days after his appointment, Mao set out for Wuhan, which the GMD-Left, advised by Borodin, had designated the nationalists’ new provisional capital and where the CPC Peasant Movement Committee would be based. He travelled via Nanchang, which Chiang Kai-shek had made his headquarters, and there witnessed the first storm-clouds gathering in the protracted struggle that was to develop between Chiang and the GMD-Left for control of the party and its strategy.²¹⁰

During the autumn, Chiang's position as Commander-in-Chief had come under pressure from Tang Shengzhi, whose stature had been bolstered by his successes in Hunan and at Hankou and Hanyang. At the beginning of December, Tang's challenge had receded. None the less, Chiang felt obliged to agree to a new modus vivendi with the Left, whereby his military leadership would be confirmed, but his political role would be restricted and Wang Jingwei would be invited to return as head of government.²¹¹

The Communist leaders – most of whom had now grudgingly accepted that the alliance with the Guomindang had in fact strengthened their cause – saw the split between Nanchang and Wuhan as an opportunity to draw closer to the GMD-Left. At a CC plenum in Hankou in mid-December, Chen Duxiu argued that the Nationalist Party's left wing was an essential buffer, preventing direct conflict breaking out between the communists and the GMD-Right. The Left, he acknowledged, was often ‘weak, vacillating and inconsistent’. But negating it in the hope that something better would providentially appear was like ‘refusing to eat bean curd and vegetables because next week there might be meat and fish’. The Party's strategy, Chen argued, was correct. Communists must work discreetly in the background, bolstering the GMD-Left's support against what was now termed the ‘new right’ (the former GMD-Centre), led by Chiang Kai-shek; and, as the Comintern insisted, they must avoid controversial measures – such as the forced redistribution of land to the peasantry – which might impair the alliance. ‘The [GMD] Left's existence’, the plenum declared in its final resolution, ‘is the key to our co-operation with the Guomindang.’²¹²

This cautious optimism stemmed in part from the phenomenal growth in the CCP's membership over the previous two years. From fewer than a thousand at the time of the Fourth Congress in January 1925, this had jumped to 7,500 a year later (in the wake of the May 30 Incident); and to 30,000 by December 1926, thanks largely to the Northern Expedition. Equally important, about 1,000 unit commanders, political workers and staff officers in the National Revolutionary Army were Communist Party members, whom the CCP Military Committee, headed by Zhou Enlai, was now beginning to organise into regimental ‘nuclei’, or secret Party cells.²¹³

The trouble with the strategy which Chen Duxiu, at the behest of the Comintern, had espoused – ‘playing the coolie’, in Borodin's phrase; ‘Right-capitulationism’, as Chen's critics would call it – was that it assumed that the GMD-Left, with no army of its own and, at best, notional support from Tang Shengzhi, could somehow compel Chiang Kai-shek to submit to its control. Mao put his finger on it during the plenum debate, in which he participated as a non-voting member in his capacity as head of the Peasant Committee. ‘The Right has troops,’ he said, ‘the Left has none; even with a single platoon, the Right would be stronger than the Left.’ That observation earned him a stinging rebuke from Chen, who said the remark was ‘absurd’ but offered no substantive rebuttal.²¹⁴

As the weeks passed and the nature of the split became clearer, the Party Centre acknowledged that its hopes of a left-wing resurgence were not being realised, and that instead the GMD-Right was becoming ‘more and more powerful’.²¹⁵ But the only answer it could suggest was for the Party to make even greater efforts to reassure the Guomindang, and especially the GMD-Left, that the CCP was a loyal and harmless ally.

Mao, too, in public, hewed closely to this ultra-cautious, conciliatory line. Soon after the December plenum, he left Hankou for Changsha to attend the first Congress of the Hunan Provincial Peasants’ Association. There he assured his audience that ‘the time for us to overthrow the landlords has not yet come’. Rent reductions, a cap on interest rates and higher wages for rural labourers were legitimate demands, he said. But beyond that the national revolution must take priority, and the landlords should be allowed some concessions.²¹⁶

Then he would proclaim, in messianic tones, that the peasant movement was a ‘colossal event’, which would alter the face of China, and that the Party must change its policy completely – or become irrelevant:

In a very short time, several hundred million peasants in China's central, southern and northern provinces will rise like a fierce wind or tempest, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it. They will break through all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will, in the end, send all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local bullies and bad gentry to their graves. All revolutionary parties and all revolutionary comrades will stand before them to be tested, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. To march at their head and lead them? To stand behind them, gesticulating and criticising them? Or to stand opposite them and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose … [but] you are fated to make the choice quickly.²¹⁷

The extraordinary change in Mao's views – even allowing for hyperbole, the picture he painted was utterly different from anything any Party official had written before – was the result of a month-long journey he made through Xiangtan and four other rural counties in January and early February 1927.

It was a revelation. The reality of the peasant movement, he told the Central Committee on his return, was ‘almost totally different from what we have seen and heard in Hankou and in Changsha’.²¹⁸ He set out his conclusions in a document which was to become famous as the ‘Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan’. It was an intellectual tour de force, nearly 20,000 words in length and, like Mao's subsequent rural investigations, in Jiangxi in the early 1930s, based on meticulous field research. ‘I called together fact-finding conferences in villages and county towns, which were attended by experienced peasants and by comrades in the peasant movement,’ he reported. ‘I listened attentively … and collected a great deal of material.’²¹⁹ That autumn and winter, after the passage of the Northern Expedition, the countryside had risen in revolt. The membership of the peasant associations, which stood at 400,000 in late summer, shot up to two million.²²⁰ All over central Hunan, the old feudal order collapsed:

The main targets of their attack are the local bullies, the bad gentry and the lawless landlords, but in passing they also hit out against patriarchal ideas and institutions of all kinds … The attack is quite simply tempestuous; those who submit to it survive, and those who resist, perish. As a result, the privileges the feudal landlords have enjoyed for thousands of years are being shattered to pieces … The peasant associations have now become the sole organs of authority … Even trifling matters, such as quarrels between husband and wife, must be brought before [them] for settlement … If a member of a peasant association so much as farts, it is [regarded as] sacred. The association actually dictates everything in the countryside … Quite literally: ‘Whatever it says, goes’.²²¹

Mao defended the movement against those in the Left-GMD, and even in the Communist Party, who argued that it had become too extreme and too ‘terrible’, and ought to be reined in:

The fact is that the broad peasant masses have risen to fulfil their historical mission … It is fine. It is not terrible at all. It is anything but ‘terrible’ … To give credit where credit is due, if we allot 10 points to the accomplishments of the democratic revolution, then the achievements of the city dwellers and the military rate three points, and [those of] the peasants the remaining seven … True, the peasants are in a sense ‘unruly’ in the countryside … They fine the local bullies and bad gentry, they demand contributions from them and they smash their sedan chairs. Should [such individuals] oppose the peasant association, a mass of people swarm into their houses, slaughtering their pigs and consuming their grain. They may even loll on the ivory-inlaid beds belonging to the young ladies in the households of the local bullies and evil gentry. At the slightest provocation they make arrests, crown the arrested with tall paper hats and parade them through the villages … They have even created a kind of terror in the countryside.

This is what ordinary people call ‘going too far’, or ‘going beyond the proper limits in righting a wrong’, or ‘really too much’. Such talk may seem plausible, but in fact it is wrong …

A revolution is not like inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so ‘benign, upright, courteous, temperate and complaisant’. A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another … If the peasants do not use extremely great force, they cannot possibly overthrow the deeply rooted power of the landlords, which has lasted for thousands of years … All the [peasants’] excessive actions were extremely necessary … To put it bluntly, it is necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror in every rural area … To right a wrong, it is necessary to exceed the proper limits; the wrong cannot be righted without doing so.

What this ‘terror’ should consist of, Mao discussed in the last section of his report. Declaring the smashing of the landlords’ power and prestige to be the central task of the peasants’ struggle, he listed nine different methods they could use, ranging from public denunciation and fines to imprisonment and death: ‘The execution of one … big member of the local gentry or one big local bully reverberates through a whole county and is very effective in eradicating the remaining evils of feudalism,’ he asserted. ‘The only effective way of suppressing the reactionaries is to execute at least one or two in each county … When [they] were at the height of their power, they killed peasants without batting an eyelid … How [then] can one say that the peasants should not now rise and shoot one or two?’

The aims of the revolt were multiple: to reduce land rents and interest rates on debt; to end hoarding so as to bring down grain prices; to disband the landlord militias and replace them with peasant spear corps, equipped with ‘pointed double-edged blades mounted on long shafts … the mere sight of which makes the local tyrants and evil gentry shiver’; and to create a new rural administration, based on village assemblies, which Mao and the provincial party leaders hoped would become the building blocks of a rural front between the peasant associations and the Guomindang. Beyond these economic and political goals, there was also a social agenda. The associations, Mao noted approvingly, opposed opium-smoking and gambling – and also clan and religious authorities:

A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of authorities: (1) the state system (political authority) … (2) the clan system (clan authority) … and (3) the supernatural system (religious authority) … As for women, in addition to being dominated by these three, they are also dominated by men (the authority of the husband). These four authorities – political, clan, religious and male – are the embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideological system, and are the four thick ropes binding the Chinese people, particularly the peasants … The political authority of the landlords is the backbone of all the other systems of authority. [Once it is] overturned, the clan authority, the religious authority and the authority of the husband all begin to totter … [The collapse of] the clan system, superstitious ideas and one-sided concepts of chastity will follow as a natural consequence … It is the peasants who made the idols with their own hands, and when the time comes they will cast the idols aside with their own hands; there is no need for anyone else to do it for them prematurely.

The intensity of Mao's experiences during those few weeks in Hunan was such that the lessons he drew from them would stay with him all his life. Revolution, he now understood, could not be micro-managed. In any revolutionary venture, there would always be excesses, just as there would always be those who lagged behind. He quoted Mencius: ‘Our policy in such matters is, “Draw the bow, but do not release the arrow, having seemed to leap.”’ The leadership could point the direction, but then it was up to the people to carry the revolution forward. Only when disaster threatened (as, in the end, it almost always did) would the leaders have to slam on the brakes.

No less important, and outwardly more dramatic, was Mao's open espousal of violence. When Mao had formed the peasant association at Shaoshan in the summer of 1925, he still believed that change could best be obtained by the cautious, reformist methods that he had advocated at Anyuan. The bankruptcy of that strategy had been shown spectacularly that autumn when the miners’ union had been crushed. By January 1926, Mao was ready to concede that ‘in special circumstances, when we encounter the most reactionary and vicious local bullies and evil gentry … they must be overthrown completely’, but without specifying what that meant. Six months later, he spoke for the first time of using ‘brutal methods’ against counter-revolutionaries, if there were no other way to deal with them.²²² Now, in the opening months of 1927, the last ambiguities were removed. If the landlords were the chief obstacle to the revolution and the peasantry the chief instrument for removing them, he concluded, the appropriate method was revolutionary violence – the same violence that, seven years earlier, a younger, more idealistic Mao had rejected when choosing between Marx and Kropotkin. Revolutionary violence was qualitatively different from the violence of war, which was fought over territory and power. It was aimed at men who were enemies not because of what they did, but because of who they were. It came from the same deep well of class hatred which the Bolsheviks had tapped to overthrow the Russian bourgeoisie, and would have similar results.

Mao's report was incendiary, and when it was received at Party headquarters in the last week of February 1927, there was sharp disagreement over whether it should be made public. Qu Qiubai was strongly in favour. Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi had reservations. Mao himself had admitted that the peasant associations, and all other forms of local authority, had been overwhelmed by the force of the movement, and that the countryside was, in his own words, ‘in a state of anarchy’. The Guomindang, Left and Right, was appalled by the reports of blind Red Terror, spiralling out of control, and held the communists responsible. Moreover, it quickly became clear that the killings were not as isolated and exemplary as Mao had claimed: at one point the Party leaders were dismayed to learn that the elderly father of Li Lisan, now a CCP Central Committee member, had been summarily executed by villagers despite a letter from his son to the local peasant association. Only much later did it become known that the report was false.²²³

Meanwhile, unexpected new instructions arrived from Moscow. Until then the Comintern line, laid down by Stalin himself, had been to hold back the peasant movement, for fear it would undermine the united front with the GMD. Now the Russian leader declared that this had been ‘a profound mistake’.²²⁴ The theses of the Comintern's Seventh Plenum, approved in Moscow in mid-December, which were received in Shanghai shortly before Mao's report, insisted on the contrary: ‘The fear that the aggravation of the class struggle in the countryside will weaken the anti-imperialist front is baseless … The refusal [to promote] the agrarian revolution … for fear of alienating the dubious and indecisive co-operation of a section of the capitalist class, is wrong.’²²⁵ Although the theses also made clear that the united front was to be maintained (Stalin, as ever, wanted to have his cake and eat it), the thrust was now much more aggressive, and the Chinese leaders were unsure how to respond.²²⁶

In the end, a bastard compromise was reached. The first two parts of Mao's report were published in Xiangdao in March (and reprinted widely by the Comintern, which shared none of the Chinese comrades’ inhibitions about revolutionary violence). But the final section – in which Mao referred to execution rallies and peasants beating landlords to death, and mocked the GMD-Left for ‘talking of arousing the masses day in and day out, and then being scared out of their wits when the masses do arise’ – was omitted. The following month Mao was able to arrange for the full text to be published as a pamphlet in Wuhan, to which Qu Qiubai contributed an enthusiastic preface. The incident solidified his political alliance with Qu, while his relations with Chen became increasingly embittered. ‘If this peasant movement had been more thoroughly organised and armed for a class struggle against the landlords,’ he told Edgar Snow ten years later, ‘the [communist base areas] would have had an earlier and far more powerful development throughout the whole country. But Chen Duxiu violently disagreed. He did not understand the role of the peasantry in the revolution, and greatly underestimated its possibilities.’²²⁷

It is true that Chen and the Central Bureau had more pressing problems to contend with. On February 17, 1927, nationalist troops had seized Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang. Next day their advance units were at Songjiang, only twenty-five miles from Shanghai. Believing the city's fall to be imminent, the communist-backed labour unions declared a general strike. But the nationalist advance never came. The Shanghai garrison commander, Li Baozhang, sent execution squads on to the streets to hunt down activists. An American correspondent watched them at work, only a few minutes’ walk from the city's fashionable thoroughfares:

The executioners, bearing broadswords and accompanied by a squad of soldiers, marched their victims to a prominent corner where the strike leaders were forced to bend over while their heads were cut off. Thousands fled in horror when the heads were stuck on sharp-pointed bamboo poles and were hoisted aloft, and carried to the scene of the next execution.²²⁸

By this time the Central Bureau and the Soviet advisers had concluded, apparently independently, that compromise with Chiang Kai-shek was impossible, and that the CCP and the GMD-Left, backed by Tang Shengzhi's forces in the army – which the Russians now supported – would have to find a way to ease him out of power. Such an outcome, moreover, appeared feasible. Chiang's own supporters were wavering. His vanity and personal ambition, his ‘Napoleon complex’, as his critics called it, his hostility to Borodin and, most damning of all, reports, which were widely believed, that he was preventing Wang Jingwei's return, cost him crucial moderate support. There was a sense abroad that the focus of the revolution was shifting from Nanchang to Wuhan, and that there was nothing Chiang could do to stop it.²²⁹

The balance seemed to tip irrevocably on March 6, 1927, when five of the eight GMD CEC members in Nanchang boarded a steamer for Wuhan. Four days later the GMD's long-awaited Third Plenum opened in Hankou. It was dominated by the GMD-Left and the communists.

Chiang himself and the CEC Standing Committee Chairman, Zhang Jingjiang, refused to attend. In their absence, a new leftist-dominated GMD Political Council was established as the supreme organ of party power, and new measures were promulgated to subordinate the military to civilian control. The Left-Guomindang–CCP alliance started to look like a genuine coalition. Two communists, Tan Pingshan and Su Zhaozheng, a seamen's leader who had helped organise the Hong Kong–Canton strike, were given ministerial portfolios in the new nationalist government, a step which Borodin (and Moscow) had been urging since the beginning of the year. The Northern Expedition resumed. Shanghai surrendered with hardly a shot being fired, and Chiang moved his headquarters there from Nanchang on March 26. Wang Jingwei returned from his exile in Europe. There were widespread hopes that the two men would resume the military–civilian duumvirate that had been shattered by Chiang's coup a year earlier.²³⁰

Mao spoke at length at the GMD's Third Plenum, which approved (more readily than his own party) many of the ideas he had brought back from his rural investigation in Hunan, including the establishment of village governments, protected by peasant defence forces; the death penalty or life imprisonment for tyrannical landlords; and, for the first time, the confiscation and redistribution of land belonging to ‘corrupt officials, local bullies, bad gentry and counter-revolutionaries’.

Land, the plenum declared, was ‘the core issue’ for the poor peasants who were the motive force of the revolution, and the party would support their struggle ‘until the land problem has been completely solved’.²³¹ This sounded more radical than it was. The crucial question – how the land issue was to be dealt with – was not addressed. But at least it was now on the agenda, and afterwards Mao threw himself into preparations for launching an All-China Federation of Peasant Associations, a GMD Land Committee, and other bodies which were to be charged with putting the new policies into effect.²³²

By now Yang Kaihui and the children had joined him. They rented a house in Wuchang, where the Peasant Training Institute had reopened with Mao, once again, as principal. At the beginning of April, their third child, another boy, was born. Mao gave him the name Anlong.²³³ Life, it seemed, was finally returning to normal.

The same day, April 4, 1927, Wang Jingwei and Chen Duxiu issued a joint statement in Shanghai, affirming their common cause. The declaration, Zhang Guotao wrote later, had a ‘slightly hypnotic effect’, producing a warm glow of nostalgia for CCP–GMD amity.²³⁴ True, the air was thick with rumour. The foreign newspapers in the treaty ports bubbled with speculation about a communist coup against Chiang, or a coup by Chiang against the communists.²³⁵ Wang and Chen, in their joint statement, dismissed the rumours as fabrications.²³⁶ Bukharin wrote in Pravda that while differences were inevitable, there was ‘no place for pessimism’, and Stalin told a closed meeting in Moscow that Chiang Kai-shek had no choice but to support the revolution. Once he had played his role, he would be ‘squeezed out like a lemon and then flung away’. Until that day, communists in both countries would give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘The peasant keeps his old worn-out jade as long as she is necessary,’ Stalin said laconically. ‘He does not drive her away. So it is with us.’²³⁷

I The First and Second Central Committees had consisted of three and five members respectively, with no Central Bureau. The Second Congress, which urged ‘centralisation and iron-like discipline’ to prevent individualism and anarcho-communism, laid down detailed organisational rules, but for the most part these remained a dead letter until the Third Congress, which expanded the CC to nine full members and five alternates.

II Nothing more is known about this letter, or the nature of the quarrel it evoked, but given Mao's references to misunderstandings in the plural and ‘bitter feelings once more’, it was plainly not something his wife easily forgave.

III As a result of their efforts, the Yuebei Peasants' and Workers' Association, the first of its kind in Hunan, was inaugurated in September 1923, just as the former Provincial Governor, Tan Yankai, was mounting an invasion from the south. The association, led by a militant former Anyuan miner, Xie Huaide, attracted more than 10,000 members and campaigned for lower grain prices, rent reductions, and an end to the usurious rates of interest which local landlords extorted for peasant debts. Tan's presence gave the peasants some protection against the landlords’ initial reprisals. But the area was part of the home district of Governor Zhao Hengti, and when at the end of November Tan's men were defeated, Zhao's troops set fire to the peasant association headquarters and the homes of many of its supporters. At least four peasants were killed and dozens more arrested, and the movement soon collapsed.