CHAPTER SEVEN

Out of the Barrel of a Gun

Besso Lominadze did not hit it off with his Chinese charges. He was young, inexperienced, knew little about the world beyond the Soviet Union's borders and appeared to care less. Zhang Guotao remembered meeting him the day he arrived in Wuhan, July 23. It was, he wrote later, ‘the worst conversation in my memory … His character seemed to be that of a spiv after the October Revolution, while his attitude was that of an inspector-general of the Czar … [treating] the intellectuals of the CCP … as serfs.’¹

Besso Lominadze was Stalin's man. At the age of twenty-eight, he had been sent to ram down the throats of the Chinese leaders the Comintern's new line, and to ensure that they, not Stalin, were blamed for the egregious failures of the recent past. To Lominadze, Moscow was the fount of all possible wisdom. He came, in Zhang's words, bearing ‘an imperial edict’: all that the vacillating, petty-bourgeois leaders of the Chinese Party had to do was to apply Soviet experience and Comintern directives correctly and the Chinese revolution would triumph, to the greater glory of Russia and those who ruled it. Unlike Borodin, who had spent a lifetime subtly fomenting revolution abroad, or Roy, who had debated agrarian policy with Lenin, Lominadze and the small group of arrogant and insecure young men who came to China with him were simply cogs in Stalin's personal power machine.² In the second half of 1927, the master of the Kremlin was far less concerned with the future of the Chinese revolution than with being able to show that Trotsky's views were wrong and his own, correct.

The Chinese communists were by this time just starting to pull themselves together after Chen Duxiu's enforced resignation and the united front's collapse.³ The massacre of Party cadres that had begun in Jiangxi in March, accelerated in Shanghai in April and reached its zenith in Hunan in May, was now seen clearly for what it was: the fate of a parasite party which, when its host organism turns against it, has neither the means nor the will for self-defence. Very quickly, therefore, after the July 15 break with the Guomindang, the CCP's new provisional leadership, basing itself on Stalin's order to build a communist-led peasant army, began to sketch out guidelines for an independent strategy.

On July 20, a secret directive on peasant movement tactics, which Mao almost certainly helped to draft, asserted that ‘only if there is a revolutionary armed force can victory be assured in the struggle of the peasants’ associations for political power’, and called on association cadres to give ‘120 per cent of [their] attention to this issue’. It went on to discuss in detail the different means the Party could use to assemble such a force. These included seizing weapons from landlord militias; sending ‘brave and trained members of the peasants’ associations’ to act as a fifth column inside the warlord armies; forming alliances with secret society members; the clandestine training of peasant self-defence forces; and, if all else failed, then, as Mao and Cai Hesen had urged two weeks earlier, ‘going up the mountains’.⁴

At the same time, the Politburo Standing Committee began preparing for a wave of peasant insurrections in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Guangdong, to be staged during the Autumn Harvest Festival in mid-September, when land rents fell due and seasonal tensions between peasants and landlords would be greatest,⁵ and for a military uprising in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi, where several communist-officered units in the Guomindang's National Revolutionary Army were based.⁶

Moscow knew nothing of these plans, and when consulted by an anxious Lominadze, who had no desire to be crucified for yet another débâcle, responded with a delphic double negative: ‘If the uprising has no hope of victory, it would be better not to start it.’⁷ But by then the Chinese leaders had had enough of the Comintern's studied ambiguities. After the long months of humiliating retreat under Borodin and Chen Duxiu, they were determined to act at almost any price. Ignoring Moscow's reservations, Zhou Enlai, at the head of a specially constituted Front Committee,^I ordered the insurrection to commence in the early hours of August 1. Nanchang fell with hardly a shot fired and remained in communist hands for four days – delighting Stalin, for whom it provided a victory to flaunt before the Trotskyist opposition.⁸

The list of participants read like the Almanac de Gotha of the Communist revolution. Zhu De, afterwards the Red Army's Commander-in-Chief, was Chief of Public Security in Nanchang. He Long, a moustachioed Sichuanese with a colourful history of secret society allegiance, later a communist marshal, commanded the main insurrectionary force. Ye Ting, then a divisional commander, would go on to head the communist New Fourth Army during the war with Japan. Ye's Political Commissar, Nie Rongzhen, and Chief of Staff, Ye Jianying, were also future marshals. So was one of the youngest officers to take part, a slim, rather shy graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy named Lin Biao. He had just turned twenty.^II

The communist force, some 20,000 strong, left Nanchang on August 5, heading south, where they hoped, as a communist-inspired proclamation put it, to establish ‘a new base area … outside the spheres of the old and new warlords’, in Guangdong.⁹

While these events were unfolding, Mao remained in Wuhan, where, on the Comintern's instructions, Qu Qiubai and Lominadze, helped by a young member of the Secretariat named Deng Xixian, subsequently better known by his nom de guerre, Deng Xiaoping, were preparing an emergency Party conference. Its declared purpose was to ‘reorganise [the Party's] forces, correct the serious mistakes of the past, and find a new path’.¹⁰

Two days later, twenty-two CCP members, all men, gathered in the apartment of a Russian economic adviser on the upper floor of a large European-style house in the consular district in Hankou. They were told not to leave while the conference was in progress, for fear of attracting unwelcome attention, and to say, should anyone come to the door, that they were holding a shareholders’ meeting.¹¹ Qu was dressed incongruously in a loud flannel shirt. He was ravaged by tuberculosis, and the swollen veins on his face stood out in the suffocating August heat.¹² Because of the haste with which the conference had been organised, the need for secrecy and the absence of many leaders in Nanchang, fewer than a third of the Central Committee attended, which, under Party rules, fell short of a quorum. But Lominadze insisted that, in the emergency the Party was now facing, the meeting could take interim decisions, which would be ratified by a congress to be held within the next six months.¹³

The new strategy which the August 7 Conference endorsed reflected Stalin's instructions of the previous winter and spring, in which he had laid down that there was no contradiction between class struggle against the landlords and national revolution against the warlord regime. The revolution's centre of gravity, Lominadze argued, should shift to the labour unions and the peasant associations; peasants and workers should play a greater role in the Party's leading organs; and a co-ordinated strategy should be developed of armed workers’ and peasants’ insurrections. In this respect, he said, the Nanchang uprising marked ‘a clear turning-point’. The old, irresolute policy of compromise and concessions, followed by the outgoing leadership of Chen Duxiu, had been abandoned.

Lominadze hammered home two other lessons from Moscow. The Comintern's instructions must always be obeyed: by rejecting its guidance in June, the Party leadership had committed not just a breach of discipline but ‘a criminal act’. And since the Party could no longer function openly, even in GMD-ruled areas, it must be refashioned into a militant, clandestine organisation with ‘solid, combative secret organs’.¹⁴

Ostensibly to unify thinking, but equally to save Stalin's face, the conference issued a ‘Circular Letter to All Party Members’, containing a lengthy self-criticism which left few of the former leaders unscathed. Chen Duxiu, whom Lominadze (like Roy) charged with Menshevism,^III was denounced by name for ‘standing the revolution on its head’, restraining the peasant and labour movements, kowtowing to the Guomindang and abandoning the Party's independence. Tan Pingshan was castigated for his conduct as GMD Minister for Peasant Affairs, when he allegedly ‘abandoned the struggle’ and ‘shamefully … refused to support the rural revolution’. Li Weihan, though not named, was blamed for countermanding the peasants’ attack on Changsha in late May, and Zhou Enlai was reproached for having approved the disarming of workers’ pickets in Wuhan in June. Even Mao was implicitly criticised for having omitted to protest against the GMD's failure to implement land redistribution, and for not having taken a radical enough line in the directives he had drafted for the All-China Peasants’ Association.¹⁵

None the less, he found the new team of Lominadze and Qu Qiubai much more to his liking than the Borodin–Chen Duxiu leadership it had replaced. Their explicit stress on class struggle, on the primacy of the peasants and workers as the main engine of revolt, and on the use of armed force, was music to his ears. He also approved of the connection which Lominadze drew between imperialism abroad and feudalism at home.¹⁶

Lominadze, in turn, found Mao ‘a capable comrade’, and when the new provisional leadership was announced, he was rewarded by being made a Politburo alternate (returning to that body for the first time since his withdrawal to Shaoshan in January 1925).¹⁷ Of the nine full members of the Politburo, four were new appointees with working-class backgrounds, one of whom, Su Zhaozheng, was named to the three-man Standing Committee, together with Qu Qiubai and Li Weihan, in line with Lominadze's insistence that workers play a larger role. Peng Pai, who was with the Nanchang rebels, represented the peasant movement, and Ren Bishi, the Youth League. Zhang Guotao and Cai Hesen, both regarded as moderates, were demoted. Zhang hung on for a few months as an alternate member, while Cai, who had been part of the top leadership since 1922, left to become Secretary of the CCP Northern Bureau.¹⁸

Why was Peng Pai, rather than Mao, chosen for full Politburo membership as peasant movement representative? One factor may have been the leadership's hopes of re-establishing a strong base in Guangdong, Peng Pai's home territory. But there was also the problem of Mao's character. He was unconformable. Immediately after Chen Duxiu's fall, Zhou Enlai had tried unsuccessfully to reassign him to Sichuan, partly, it seems, to detach him from his Hunan power base.¹⁹ Qu, who had worked with him on the Peasant Committee earlier in the year, had had plenty of opportunity to observe how headstrong and stubborn he could be: a good man to have as an ally – but not as a rival, or a subordinate to try to control.²⁰

Shortly before Lominadze's arrival, Mao had been given responsibility for planning the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan. His first proposal, approved by the Standing Committee on August 1, envisaged the creation of a peasant army, comprising a regiment of regular soldiers from Nanchang, and two regiments, each of about a thousand peasant self-defence force troops, from eastern and southern Hunan. They were to occupy five or six counties in the south of the province, promote agrarian revolution and set up a revolutionary district government. The aim was to destabilise the rule of Tang Shengzhi and He Jian and create ‘centres of revolutionary force’ from which a province-wide peasant uprising would be launched to overthrow them.²¹

On August 3, the Standing Committee incorporated this plan into its outline for the full four-province Autumn Harvest Uprising, now defined as an ‘anti-rent and anti-tax’ revolt, which it hoped would ultimately lead to the formation of a new revolutionary government covering both Hunan and Guangdong.²²

The success of the Nanchang uprising, however, persuaded Qu and Lominadze that the action in Hunan should not be limited to the south but should cover the entire province. Two days later, a revised plan was sought from the Hunan Party committee.

Apparently it was unsatisfactory, for on August 9, Lominadze, acting on advice from the new Soviet consul (and Comintern agent) in Changsha, Vladimir Kuchumov, who had accompanied him from Moscow and used the alias Mayer, declared that the committee – headed by Yi Lirong, Mao's old friend and a former New People's Study Society colleague – was incompetent and needed to be reorganised.²³ To Mao's credit, when this issue was raised before the Politburo, he defended Yi and his team, arguing that they had been trying courageously ‘to pick up the pieces in the tragic situation after the [Horse Day Incident]’. But to no avail. Lominadze named another Hunanese, Peng Gongda, who was a Politburo alternate, to be the new provincial Party Secretary.²⁴

On August 12 Mao was appointed Central Committee Special Commissioner for Hunan, and set out for Changsha to begin preparing to get the uprising under way.²⁵ A week later the new, ‘reorganised’ Hunan Party committee, which included, as Lominadze had instructed, ‘a majority of comrades with worker-peasant backgrounds’, held its first meeting, in the presence of Kuchumov, at a house in the countryside near Changsha, to discuss its plan of campaign.

At this point, three problems emerged. The first was relatively minor. Kuchumov briefed the meeting on the latest messages from Hankou, transmitted while Mao was en route, and either he or Mao, or both, concluded – mistakenly, as it turned out – that Stalin had at last authorised the setting-up of worker-peasant soviets on the Russian model as organs of local power. Mao was ecstatic, and wrote to the Central Committee at once:

On hearing this, I jumped for joy. Objectively speaking, the situation in China has long since reached 1917, but formerly everyone held that we were in 1905. This has been an extremely great error. Soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers are wholly adapted to the objective situation … As soon as [their power] is established [in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Guangdong], [it] should rapidly achieve victory in the whole country.²⁶

It followed, he argued, that the time had come for the Party to act in its own name, rather than maintaining the pretence of being in a revolutionary alliance with progressive elements of the discredited GMD. ‘The Guomindang banner has become the banner of the warlords,’ Mao wrote. ‘[It] is already nothing but a black flag, and we must immediately and resolutely raise the Red flag.’

In a province where the peasantry associated the Guomindang emblem, a white sun on a blue ground, with the terrible massacres perpetrated by Xu Kexiang, this was no more than common sense.²⁷ But the issue was politically sensitive because it had become enmeshed in the ongoing dispute between Stalin and Trotsky. In the event, Mao was four weeks ahead of the game. The setting-up of soviets, and the abandonment of the Guomindang flag, were finally approved a month later. In Stalin's Russian paradigm, it was indeed 1917, as Mao claimed, but April, not October.²⁸

The second problem had to do with the perennial question of land confiscation. The August 7 Conference had skirted round this issue.²⁹ Mao had spent several days, after his return to Changsha, canvassing peasant views. He now put forward a far-reaching proposal, which sought to reconcile the Party's policy of ‘land nationalisation’ and the land hunger of the poor. ‘All the land,’ he told the provincial committee, ‘including that of small landlords and owner-peasants … [should be taken] into public ownership’ and redistributed ‘fairly’ (a demand for which, afterwards, endless ink and blood would be spilled) on the basis of each family's labour power and the number of mouths it had to feed. Small landlords and their dependents (but not big landlords) should be included in the share-out, he added, ‘for only thus can the people's minds be set at ease’.³⁰

The question of definitions was of more than passing interest. It was to be the anvil on which argument about land reform, the very core of the Chinese communist revolution, would be hammered out ceaselessly right up to the eve of victory in 1949.

In August 1927, however, Mao's proposals were more radical then even Qu Qiubai's Politburo was ready to accept. In a detailed reply sent off on August 23, the Party Centre told him that, while not wrong in principle, on this issue – as on the question of forming soviets, and not using the GMD flag – he was, at the least, premature. Confiscating small landlord holdings was bound to occur at some point, it declared; but to raise it as a slogan immediately was tactically unwise.³¹

The third problem to emerge from the debates in Changsha was still more fundamental, and far less easily disposed of, for it went to the heart of the entire strategy of armed insurrection on which Qu Qiubai and his colleagues were counting to revive the communist cause. Since Stalin's telegram in June, a broad consensus had developed that, to carry forward the revolution, the Party would have to use armed force. But that was as far as the analysis went. Such questions as the form this force would take; the role it should play; how it might be combined with the peasant and worker mass movements and how it should be harnessed to promote the Party's political power, had not been addressed at all. Mao had set out the issue succinctly on August 7 in Hankou:

We used to censure [Sun] Yat-sen for engaging only in a military movement, and we did just the opposite, not undertaking a military movement, but exclusively a mass movement. Both Chiang [Kai-shek] and Tang [Q1][Shengzhi] rose by grasping the gun; we alone did not concern ourselves with this. At present though we have paid some attention to it, we still have no firm concept about it. The Autumn Harvest Uprising, for example, is simply impossible without military force … From now on we should pay the greatest attention to military affairs. We must know that political power is obtained out of the barrel of a gun.³²

At the time, nobody objected to this memorable formulation. Lominadze himself acknowledged that the Nanchang insurrection had put army units at the Party's disposal which would help ‘assure the success’ of the Autumn Harvest Uprising.³³ Very quickly, however, that judgement was revised. The Hunanese leaders were warned against ‘putting the cart before the horse’. Popular insurrection must come first, the Politburo ruled; military force, second. Mao's dictum about political power – ‘gun-barrel-ism’, as it would later be called – was viewed more sceptically. It ‘did not quite accord’ with the opinion of the Centre, the Standing Committee decided ten days later. The masses were the core of the revolution; the armed forces, at most, auxiliary.³⁴

For young Chinese radicals in the 1920s, this was no idle debate. Throughout the last decade, China had been devastated by men for whom political and every other kind of power grew from the barrel of a gun: the warlords. How a political force could control a military one was a burning issue, made fiercer by the communists’ recent experience with the Guomindang, whose civilian leadership had signally failed to master its own generals. Added to that was the insurrectionary myth of 1917, which held that popular uprisings were somehow more ‘revolutionary’ than military conquest; that military power could be used to defend revolutionary gains, but the initial spark must come from the peasants and workers themselves throwing off their chains. Moreover, Qu Qiubai maintained, this was precisely what the peasants were waiting for: all the Party had to do was ‘light the fuse’, and unquenchable rural revolution would explode across southern China.³⁵

The provincial leaders charged with carrying out the insurrection knew better. Local Party officials in Hubei sent in a steady stream of discouraging reports about peasant demoralisation. In Hunan, one committee member said bluntly that the peasants had no stomach for a fight; all they wanted was good government, whatever its political complexion. Mao agreed. Had the communists acted in the spring, the situation would have been different. But after three months in which their rural networks had been driven underground or dismantled, and the peasants had been bludgeoned into submission through a general blood-letting of appalling ferocity, to stage uprisings without military support was to court disaster. ‘With the help of one or two regiments, the uprising can take place,’ Mao warned. ‘Otherwise it will inevitably fail … To [think otherwise] is sheer self-deception.’³⁶

Unsurprisingly, given this divergence of views. Mao's revised plan, which was presented to the Standing Committee in Wuhan on August 22, fell far short of the Centre's expectations.

In his written proposals, he tried to disguise his intentions, assuring his Politburo colleagues that although the uprising would need to be ‘kindled’ by two regiments of regular troops, the workers and peasants would be ‘the main force’; that while it would ‘start’ in Changsha, ‘southern and western Hunan would rise up simultaneously’; and that ‘if by any chance it should prove impossible to take [all of] southern Hunan at present’, a fall-back plan was in place for an uprising in just three southern counties.³⁷ But either they saw through him, or the young provincial committee member who had brought the Hunan documents to Wuhan, along with a verbal proposal that the uprising begin on August 30 – ten days earlier than planned – spilled the beans. In any event, the plan was rejected. Changsha was a legitimate starting-point, the Standing Committee acknowledged, but:

First, both your written report and the verbal report … reveal that your preparations for a peasant uprising in the [surrounding] counties are extremely feeble, and that you are relying on outside military force to seize Changsha. This sort of one-sided emphasis on military strength makes it appear that you have no faith in the revolutionary strength of the masses. This can only lead to military adventurism. Secondly, in your preoccupation with Changsha work, you have neglected the Autumn Harvest Uprising in other areas – for example, your abandonment of the plan for south Hunan … Furthermore, as events have turned out, you will not have two regiments [of regular troops] at your disposal [because they will not be available].³⁸

The Politburo's reading of Mao's intentions was absolutely correct. He had indeed abandoned the idea of a province-wide uprising, being convinced that the whole venture would fail unless all available forces were concentrated on Changsha.³⁹ The news that regular troops would not after all be available for the attack on the provincial capital merely strengthened that conviction. In Hubei, the provincial leadership, faced with a similar dilemma, bent reluctantly to the Centre's will.⁴⁰ Mao, who had seen the Chen Duxiu leadership wrongly reject his views on the peasant movement in the spring, was not about to yield in the autumn to what he saw as the wrong views of Qu Qiubai. After a week spent bolstering the courage of the provincial committee, including a reluctant Peng Gongda, he penned a robust reply – stating in effect that Hunan would do as it saw fit – and despatched the unfortunate Peng to deliver it:

With regard to the two mistakes pointed out in [your] letter, neither facts nor theory are at all compatible with what you say … The purpose in deploying two regiments in the attack on Changsha is to compensate for the insufficiency of the worker-peasant forces. They are not the main force. They will serve to shield the development of the uprising … When you say that we are engaging in military adventurism … this truly reflects a lack of understanding of the situation here, and constitutes a contradictory policy which pays no attention to military affairs while at the same time calling for an armed uprising of the popular masses.

You say that we pay attention only to the work in Changsha and neglect other places. This is absolutely untrue … [The point is that] our force is sufficient only for an uprising in central Hunan. If we launched an uprising in every county, our force would be dispersed and [then] even the [Changsha] uprising could not be carried out.⁴¹

No record has survived of the Standing Committee discussion when Peng arrived with this message of defiance. But on September 5, the Party Centre gave vent to its frustration in an angry counterblast:

The Hunan Provincial Committee … has missed a number of opportunities for furthering insurrection among the peasantry. It must [now] at once act resolutely in accordance with the Central plan, and build the main force of the uprising on the peasants themselves. No wavering will be permitted … In the midst of this critical struggle the Centre instructs the Hunan Provincial Committee to implement Central resolutions absolutely. No wavering will be permitted.⁴²

By then, however, as the Standing Committee well knew, this was too late to have the slightest effect. The ‘Central plan’ it spoke of, which had been sent to Changsha a few days earlier, had laid out an even more elaborate programme, drawn up by Qu Qiubai, for a general insurrection in which co-ordinated popular uprisings, carried out in the name of a so-called ‘Hunan and Hubei Sub-Committee of the Revolutionary Committee of China’, would lead to the capture, first of county towns, then of provincial capitals, and finally the whole of China.⁴³ To Mao, it bore no relation to the available resources, and he simply ignored it.⁴⁴

While Peng was in Wuhan, he left for Anyuan, where he established a Front Committee and began gathering his forces for the assault on Changsha, the centre-piece of the limited action the provincial Party committee had approved.⁴⁵

These comprised a regiment of about a thousand regular troops, formerly part of the GMD's National Revolutionary Army (renamed by Mao the 1st Regiment), which had defected to the communists and was now based at Xiushui, near the Jiangxi–Hubei border, 120 miles north-east of Changsha; a poorly armed peasant force (the 3rd Regiment), at Tonggu, a small town in the mountains on the Jiangxi–Hunan border; and, at Anyuan itself, a mixed unit of about a thousand unemployed miners (who had lost their jobs when the labour movement was crushed in 1925), and members of the local West Jiangxi Peasant Self-Defence Force (the 2nd Regiment). Together they made up the 1st Division of what the Politburo had agreed should be called the 1st Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army.⁴⁶

By September 8, the timetable for the insurrection had reached the different units (and had also, unknown to Mao, been betrayed to the Changsha authorities). At his orders, the Guomindang banner was discarded. Local tailors in Xiushui worked through the night making what the troops called ‘axe and sickle’ flags, the first ever carried by a Chinese communist army. Next day, the railway lines to Changsha were sabotaged and the 1st Regiment set out for Pingjiang, fifty miles north-east of the capital.⁴⁷

At that point an event occurred which might have changed not just the course of the uprising but the future of China. As Mao and a companion were travelling from Anyuan to Tonggu, they were captured by Guomindang militiamen near the mountain village of Zhangjiafang:

The Guomindang terror was then at its height and hundreds of suspected Reds were being shot [Mao recalled years later], I was ordered to be taken to the militia headquarters, where I was to be killed. Borrowing several tens of dollars from [my] comrade, however, I attempted to bribe the escort to free me. The ordinary soldiers were mercenaries, with no special interest in seeing me killed, and they agreed to release me. But the subaltern in charge refused to permit it. I therefore decided to attempt to escape, but I had no opportunity to do so until I was within about 200 yards of the militia headquarters. At that point I broke loose and ran into the fields.

I reached a high place, above a pond, with some tall grass surrounding it, and there I hid until sunset. The soldiers pursued me, and forced some peasants to help them search. Many times they came very near, once or twice so close that I could almost have touched them, but somehow I escaped discovery, although half-a-dozen times I gave up hope, feeling certain I would be recaptured. At last, when it was dusk, they abandoned the search. At once I set off across the mountains, travelling all night. I had no shoes and my feet were badly bruised. On the road I met a peasant who befriended me, gave me shelter and later guided me to the next district. I had seven dollars with me, and used this to buy some shoes, an umbrella and food. When at last I reached [Tonggu] safely, I had only two copper [cash] in my pocket.⁴⁸

This episode seemed to exhaust whatever good luck Mao had left. The 1st Regiment marched into an ambush set by a local force which coveted its superior weapons, and two of its three battalions were wiped out. The following day, September 12, Mao's 3rd Regiment occupied the small town of Dongmen, ten miles inside the Hunan border. But there the advance stalled. Provincial government troops counter-attacked, and the insurgents were driven back into Jiangxi where, two days later, Mao learned of the disaster that had befallen the 1st Regiment. That night he sent a message to the provincial committee, recommending that the workers’ insurrection which was to have been launched in Changsha on the morning of September 16 be called off.

Next day, Peng Gongda endorsed his proposal, and to all intents and purposes the uprising was over. There was still one last piece of bad news to come. The 2nd (Anyuan) Regiment, after seizing Liling, a small county seat on the railway line, just inside the provincial border, proceeded as planned to Liuyang to await Mao's forces. When they failed to appear, it attacked alone on September 16 but was repulsed. The following day the regiment was surrounded and wiped out to the last man.

The failure could hardly have been more complete.

Of the 3,000 men who had started out eight days earlier, only half remained, the rest lost through desertion, treachery or combat. Mao himself had been captured and barely escaped with his life. The insurgents had managed to occupy two or three small towns along the provincial border, but none for more than twenty-four hours. Changsha itself had never been remotely threatened.⁴⁹

For three days, they argued over what to do next. Yu Sadu, the 1st Regiment's deputy commander, wanted to regroup and make a fresh attempt to seize Liuyang. But Mao and Lu Deming, the most experienced military officer in the force, disagreed. Early in August, when Qu Qiubai's newly elected Politburo had met for the first time in Wuhan, Mao had told Lominadze that if the insurrection in Hunan were defeated, the surviving forces ‘should go up the mountains’. On September 19, the Front Committee, after an all-night meeting in the border village of Wenjiashi, approved this course. Next day, Mao called a meeting of the whole army outside the local school, where he announced that the attack on Changsha was being abandoned.^IV The struggle, he told them, was not over. But at this stage their place was not in the city. They needed to find a new rural base where the enemy was weaker. On September 21, they set out, heading south.⁵⁰

In Hubei and elsewhere, the uprisings were equally unsuccessful. The insurrectionary army that left Nanchang lost 13,000 of its 21,000 men in two weeks, mostly through desertion. By the time the survivors reached the coast, their spirit had been broken. At the beginning of October, most of the leaders, including He Long, Ye Ting, Zhang Guotao and Zhou Enlai (who by then had to be carried on a stretcher), made their way to a fishing village, ‘hired boats and simply fled to Hong Kong’ – even in those days a refuge for rebellious Chinese.⁵¹ The expedition, Zhang acknowledged later, was ‘politically and militarily very juvenile’ and had pitiful results.⁵² Only two small military units survived more or less intact: one linked up with Peng Pai's forces in Hailufeng; the other, under Zhu De and his young deputy, Chen Yi, reached an accommodation with a local warlord and based itself in northern Guangdong.⁵³

In November, the Politburo met in Shanghai to take stock. The Party's ‘general line’ and insurrectionary strategy, it declared, had been ‘entirely correct’. The uprisings had failed only because they had been carried out from ‘a purely military viewpoint’ and insufficient attention had been paid to mobilising the masses.

Punishments were then announced. The Hunan leaders were held to have relied excessively on ‘local bandits and a handful of motley troops’. At Lominadze's insistence, Mao was dismissed from the Politburo, although he was apparently allowed to retain his membership of the Central Committee. Peng, whom the Comintern's Changsha agent, Kuchumov, accused of ‘cowardice and deception’, lost all his posts and was only allowed to remain in the Party ‘on probation’. Blame for the collapse of the Nanchang forces was attributed to Zhang Guotao, who was also removed from the Politburo, and to Tan Pingshan, the Chairman of the Nanchang Revolutionary Committee, who was expelled from the Party. Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan were let off with reprimands.⁵⁴

It was the Chinese leaders’ first experience of Bolshevik discipline, Stalinist-style.

Because the basic policy was held to be correct, these decisions paved the way for another round of doomed uprisings, which reached its climax in Canton in December. There the insurrectionist forces, backed by 1,200 cadets from a Guomindang officers’ training unit, commanded by Ye Jianying, held out for nearly three days. But in the massacre that followed, thousands of Party-members and sympathisers were killed. To save bullets, groups of them were roped together, taken out to sea on barges and thrown overboard. Five Soviet officials at the consulate were put up against a wall and shot. Soon afterwards, all Soviet missions in China were ordered to close.⁵⁵

Yet even this was not enough to deter the Politburo. In a year which had seen Party membership collapse from 57,000 in May to 10,000 by December, each new setback became cause to stoke still higher the fires of militancy and revolutionary ardour. Stalinists like Lominadze, Kuchumov in Changsha and Heinz Neumann in Canton, added fuel to the flames. But the underlying reason was frustration with the failed alliance with the Guomindang, which caught up the Party's leaders and rank and file alike in a furious spiral of ever-increasing radicalisation.

The following spring, all that remained from this explosion of pent-up revolutionary fervour were a few isolated communist hold-outs in the poorest and most inaccessible regions, many of them situated along the fault-lines where two or more provinces met and the authorities’ writ did not run: in northern Guangdong; on the Hunan–Jiangxi border; in north-eastern Jiangxi; on the Hunan–Hubei border; in the Hubei–Henan–Anhui border triangle; and on Hainan Island in the far south.⁵⁶

For the next three years, the politics of the Chinese Communist Party would be forged through a quadrilateral struggle between Moscow, the Politburo in Shanghai, the provincial Party committees, and the communist military leaders in the field, over two key issues: the relationship between rural and urban revolution; and between insurrection and armed struggle.

Mao would play a key role in these crucial debates. But in the autumn of 1927, his immediate concern was survival.

On September 25, four days after setting out from Wenjiashi, his little army was attacked in the hill country south of Pingxiang. The divisional commander, Lu Deming, was killed. The 3rd Regiment was scattered, and two or three hundred peasant troops and a quantity of equipment were lost. The remainder regrouped in the mountain village of Sanwan, twenty-five miles north of the massif of Jinggangshan.

There Mao reorganised his forces, consolidating the remnants of the division into a single regiment – the ‘1st Regiment, 1st Division, of the First Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army’ – and appointing political commissars, modelled on the system which General Blyukher's Soviet military advisers had developed for the GMD army, based on Russian practice. Each squad had its Party group; each company, a Party branch; and each battalion, a Party committee.⁵⁷ All were under the leadership of the Front Committee, of which Mao remained Secretary.

But the originality of the changes made at Sanwan lay elsewhere. Most of Mao's previous experience had been as a political theorist. His only direct exposure to mass struggle had been as a labour organiser in Changsha, and as an observer of the Hunan peasant movement. Now, for the first time in his life, he found himself having to motivate and lead a ragged, undisciplined band of some 700 Guomindang mutineers, armed workers and peasants, vagabonds and bandits, which somehow had to be transformed into a coherent revolutionary force capable of resisting a vastly superior enemy.

To that end, he announced two policies which laid the basis for a very different army from any other existing in China at that time. In the first place, it was to be an all-volunteer force. Any man who wished to leave, Mao told them, was free to do so and would be given money for the journey. Those who stayed were promised that officers would no longer be permitted to beat them, and that soldiers’ committees would be formed in each unit to ventilate grievances and ensure that democratic practices were followed. Secondly, Mao said, the soldiers would be required to treat civilians correctly. They must speak politely; pay a fair price for what they bought; and never take so much as ‘a solitary sweet potato’ belonging to the masses.⁵⁸

In a country which lived by the aphorism ‘Do not waste good iron making nails, nor good men as soldiers’, where a ‘good’ army merely took what it wanted and a ‘bad’ army marauded, looted, burned, raped and killed, and where officers routinely employed barbaric methods of discipline, this was a genuinely revolutionary concept.

The question remained, however, where Mao's forces should go next.

The area in which they found themselves, on the border between Hunan and Jiangxi, was riven by conflict between the descendants of early Han settlers, who had arrived in the lowland valleys during the Tang and Song dynasties, and Hakka – ‘guest people’ – from Fujian and Guangdong, who had occupied the highlands several centuries later.⁵⁹ On that basic fault-line were superimposed a culture of banditry, the depredations of government troops and militias, struggles for influence among local satraps and their sworn followers, and, in the early 1920s, the arrival of large numbers of deserters from warlord forces in the region. Every landlord and family of substance had armed retainers to defend its property. In 1926, local communists had begun setting up peasant associations and succeeded in co-opting two prominent bandit leaders, Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo, whose men – members of a gang known as the Horse-knife (or Sabre) Detachment – were then reorganised into peasant self-defence units. By the time Mao arrived, however, the collapse of the united front had triggered a White Terror which had left both the peasant associations and local Party organisations in disarray.

In these unpropitious circumstances, Mao sent a messenger from Sanwan with a letter to Yuan Wencai, whose forces were at Ninggang, fifteen miles to the south.⁶⁰ By a stroke of luck one of Yuan's aides had met Mao at the GMD Peasant Training Institute in Wuhan. Through his good offices, aided by a gift of rifles from Mao to Yuan's emissaries, it was agreed that the communist army could proceed to the small town of Gucheng in Ninggang, where a two-day meeting was held with local Party officials and Yuan's representatives. Both sides were at first extremely wary. Mao's colleagues – though not, apparently, Mao himself – were reluctant to ally themselves with bandits; the local Jiangxi communists worried that the arrival of Mao's troops would erode their own power; and Yuan and his followers feared, not unreasonably, that in the end they risked losing their independence and being assimilated into Mao's larger and better-armed force. None the less, on October 6, the two leaders met face to face and worked out a modus vivendi. Mao offered Yuan's men a hundred rifles; Yuan furnished provisions and money; and the newcomers were allowed to establish a hospital to treat their wounded and a headquarters base at Maoping, a small market town in a river valley, encircled by low hills, from which the main western route into Jinggangshan, a narrow, sandy track, no wider than a footpath, wound its way up through the forest to the heights, 1,500 feet above.

For the next ten days, Mao hesitated. The alternative was to go further south, to the Hunan–Guangdong border, and to try to link up with Zhu De and He Long, who should have arrived there from Nanchang. But an initial probe into southern Hunan ended with Mao's troops being mauled near the village of Dafen. Then, in mid-October, he learned from a newspaper that He's forces had been defeated and scattered. He no longer had any choice.

Militarily, Jinggangshan, if properly defended, was all but impregnable. It lies at the junction of four counties – Ninggang, Yongxin, Suichuan and Lingxian – in the heart of the Luoxiao range, which follows the Hunan–Jiangxi border southward as far as Guangdong. The massif itself consists of a swathe of louring black mountains, wreathed in cloud, with blade-sharp ridges, thickly forested with Chinese larch, pine and bamboo, where waterfalls cascade down sheer gorges to lose themselves in thin, blue torrents, far below, and tall pinnacles of bare rock jut from unseen cliffs behind an impenetrable weft of subtropical vegetation. It is a poet's landscape, majestic but desperately poor.

On the heights there was barely enough farmland, carved from the hillsides and small areas of plateau, to support the population of just under 2,000, who lived in ramshackle wooden houses and small, almost windowless stone huts, scattered between the main settlement, Ciping, where half-a-dozen merchants had built shops and a weekly market was held, and the five villages – Big Well, Little Well, Middle Well, Lower Well and Upper Well – from which Jinggangshan (Well Ridge Mountain) took its name.⁶¹ The villagers ate a local variety of red-coloured wild rice, and trapped squirrels and badgers for food. Grain for the troops had to be brought up the mountain on men's backs from the more fertile counties in the plains.

Maoping became Mao's main forward base. For the next twelve months, whenever the military situation stabilised, the army made its headquarters there. He set the troops three main tasks. In battle, Mao said, they must fight to win. In victory, they must expropriate the landlords, both to provide land for the peasantry and to collect funds for the army's own needs. And in peacetime they must strive to win over ‘the masses’, the peasants, workers and petty bourgeoisie. In November, the army occupied Chaling, thirty miles to the west, and proclaimed the setting-up of a ‘Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviet Government’, the first in the border area. It was overthrown a month later, when government forces returned, but other border soviets soon followed, in Suichuan in January 1928, and in Ninggang in February. Even though such successes were ephemeral, they procured badly needed supplies and symbolically they showed the local population that the existing power structure was fragile and could be changed.^V

When the pressure from government troops became too great, Maoping was abandoned and they withdrew up the mountain to Wang Zuo's stronghold at Dajing (Big Well), about twelve miles to the south, from which they could control the passes. Wang lived in a former landlord's house which his men had commandeered, a palatial residence for that poor place, with whitewashed walls and gables, delicately upturned eaves beneath roofs of slate-coloured tile, ornamented ridgework, and more than a dozen wood-panelled rooms, furnished with tables and four-poster beds, built around three large inner courtyards, each open to the sky with a sunken well in the middle to drain away rainwater. Mao had approached Wang Zuo, as he had Yuan Wencai, with a large gift of rifles and the offer of communist instructors to give his force military training. Wang was initially wary, but after the training group's leader, He Changgong, helped him defeat a landlord militia unit which had been harassing his men, he, too, was won over.

That winter gave Mao a breathing space to start learning his new military trade. He had grasped the importance of leading by example, compelling exhausted men to follow him by sheer force of will. Since most of the soldiers were illiterate, he started using folk-tales and graphic images to get his points across. ‘The God of Thunder strikes the beancurd’, he told them, explaining why they should concentrate their forces to attack the enemy's weak points. Chiang Kai-shek was like a huge water-pot, while the revolutionary army was just a small pebble. But the pebble was hard, and by dint of constant tapping, one day the pot would break.

The lull could not continue indefinitely. In mid-February, Yuan Wencai's and Wang Zuo's forces were combined to form the army's 2nd Regiment, with He Changgong as Party representative and a leaven of communist cadres down to company level. Ten days later, news came that the Jiangxi Army had despatched a battalion to occupy Xincheng, about eight miles north of Maoping. During the night of February 17, Mao led three battalions of his own men to surround them. At dawn, as the enemy troops were at their morning exercises, he gave the order to attack.

The fighting lasted several hours. When it was over, the enemy commander and his deputy were both dead and more than a hundred prisoners had been taken. After they had been escorted back to Maoping, Mao told them, to their amazement – as he had his own men at Sanwan, five months earlier – that anyone who wished to leave would be given money and allowed to depart. Those who decided to stay would be enrolled in the revolutionary army. Many did stay. The technique proved so effective that later some nationalist commanders began setting free communist prisoners in an attempt to emulate it.⁶²

Mao's victory had its price. As the Hunan and Jiangxi commanders realised the nature of the enemy they were dealing with, they began assembling stronger forces to attack the Jinggangshan redoubt, and imposed an economic blockade. But his concerns on that score were soon to be overshadowed by problems of a very different kind.

Since October 1927, Mao had been trying to get in touch with the Hunan provincial committee, the hierarchical superior of the Front Committee he now headed. Some of his messages evidently got through, for in mid-December the Party Centre was sufficiently informed of his activities to write to Zhu De, who was then in northern Guangdong, suggesting that he link up with Mao. Unknown to the leaders in Shanghai, Zhu had already made contact with the Jinggangshan base some weeks earlier, sending as a messenger none other than Mao's youngest brother, Zetan, who had accompanied Zhu's forces from Nanchang. From then on the two armies were in sporadic communication. But the Politburo was divided in its appraisal of Mao's conduct. Qu Qiubai, who recognised and admired Mao's independent spirit, was ready, within limits, to let him act as he saw fit.⁶³ Zhou Enlai, who remained in charge of military affairs and had become one of Qu's most powerful colleagues, strongly disapproved of Mao's tactics. His troops had ‘a bandit character’, Zhou argued, and were ‘continually flying from place to place’.⁶⁴ In a CC circular on armed insurrection issued in January 1928, he cited Mao's leadership of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan as an example of how not to behave:

[Such leaders] do not trust in the strength of the masses but lean towards military opportunism, they draft their plans in terms of military forces, planning how to move this or that army unit, this or that peasant army, this or that workers’ and peasants’ armed suppression group, how to link up with the forces of this or that bandit chieftain … and in this way how to unleash an ‘armed uprising’ by a plot masquerading as a plan. Such a so-called armed uprising has no relation whatever to the masses.⁶⁵

Zhou was almost certainly responsible for another CC directive, which also reached Changsha in January 1928, accusing Mao of ‘serious political errors’ and authorising the Hunan provincial committee to remove him as Party leader in the border area and to draw up a new work plan for the army which would ‘accord with practical needs’.⁶⁶

The bearer of these tidings, Zhou Lu, a junior member of the South Hunan Special Committee,^VI arrived at Maoping in the first week of March. He went to work with a vengeance, not only telling Mao that he had been dismissed from the Politburo and the Hunan provincial committee – which despite his rows with the Party Centre six months earlier must have come as a bolt from the blue – but also informing him, falsely, that he had been expelled from the Party. Whether this was a simple mistake, or a deliberate manoeuvre to destroy Mao's authority, is unclear. But, coming as it did, after months of hardship, just as the army had won its first victory and the base area was at last beginning to take shape, it must have been a crushing blow. The injustice of the rebuke, Mao wrote later, had been intolerable.⁶⁷

In his new, ‘non-Party’ role, Mao became divisional commander (a post which had been left vacant when the 2nd Regiment was formed in February). The Front Committee was abolished, and Zhou Lu acted as Party representative.⁶⁸

At this point, local rivalries intervened. The prime concern of the provincial Party committee was to promote the revolution in its own area. The previous December, Zhu De's force had left its base in Guangdong and marched north into south-eastern Hunan, where it sponsored peasant uprisings in the border town of Yizhang, and at Chenxian and Leiyang, further north, and set up ‘Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviets’.⁶⁹ But the economy of the area was in ruins and Zhu's troops had to resort to selling opium in order to feed themselves. Zhou Lu's first action on taking charge at the beginning of March was to order Mao's division to Hunan to link up with Zhu so as to strengthen the forces under the Hunan Party committee's control. Mao complied, but hurried slowly. Two weeks later his forces were still only a few miles from the Jiangxi border. But when Zhu's troops were attacked by regular Hunan and Guangdong government forces, Mao's 2nd Regiment had to rush to their aid. By the time they had extricated themselves, Zhou Lu had suffered the ultimate penalty for the Hunan committee's mischief-making: he had been captured and executed. Mao marched north to Linxian, where the pursuing forces were repulsed. The base area, which had been overrun by landlord militia, was reconquered, and either in Linxian or Ninggang – recollections differ – he and Zhu met for the first time towards the end of April 1928.

Zhu was forty-one, seven years Mao's senior. Agnes Smedley, who spent several months with him in the 1930s, wrote that where Mao, with his ‘strange, brooding mind, perpetually wrestling with the … problems of the Chinese revolution’, was essentially an intellectual, Zhu was ‘more a man of action and a military organiser’:

In height he was perhaps five feet eight inches. He was neither ugly nor handsome, and there was nothing whatever heroic or fire-eating about him. His head was round and was covered with a short stubble of black hair touched with grey, his forehead was broad and rather high, his cheekbones prominent. A strong stubborn jaw and chin supported a wide mouth and a perfect set of white teeth which gleamed when he smiled his welcome … He was such a commonplace man in appearance that had it not been for his uniform [which was worn and faded from much wear and long washing], he could have passed for almost any peasant in any village in China.⁷⁰

Yet Zhu's life encapsulated, even more than Mao's, the welter of contradiction and change that had swept across China at the end of the old century and the beginning of the new. Born into a Sichuanese peasant family so poor that his father had drowned five of his children with his own hands because he was unable to feed them, he had advanced to win a degree as a xiucai, the first step towards becoming a mandarin. Instead, he became a petty warlord and an opium addict. In 1922, after a cure in Shanghai, he took ship to Europe. There he met Zhou Enlai, who inducted him into the Communist Party. For four years he studied in Berlin, before returning to China to resume his military career – this time on the communists’ behalf – in the Guomindang's crack Fourth Army, the proudly named ‘Ironsides’.⁷¹

The partnership between Mao and Zhu De marked the heyday of the Jinggangshan base area, which rapidly expanded to include, at its peak that summer, parts of seven counties with a population of more than 500,000.

Mao's political fortunes also improved. He learned from Zhu in April that his expulsion from the Party had never happened. Then, in May, word came from the provincial Party leadership that the establishment of a Hunan–Jiangxi Border Area Special Committee, which Mao had been urging since December, had at last been authorised, and that he should be its secretary.⁷²

The two armies merged to form the Fourth Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army (so numbered after the GMD Fourth Army, from which Zhu and most of his officers had come), soon afterwards rechristened – with the Politburo's blessing – the Fourth ‘Red Army’, a name-change of no small importance for it signalled the beginning of the end of the long and sterile debate over the respective roles of the army and the insurrectionary masses. A ‘Red Army’ was by definition insurrectionary, so no such distinction could arise.

The Zhu–Mao Army, as it became known, comprised four regiments, totalling about 8,000 men: the 28th, which had, as its core, the ‘Ironsides’ troops Zhu had brought from Nanchang; the 29th, composed mainly of Hunanese who had taken part in the uprising at Yizhang; the 31st, which was Mao's old 1st Regiment; and the 32nd (the former 2nd Regiment) under Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo. Although they had only 2,000 rifles, it was far and away the biggest communist force in the country. In the interest of unity, the divisional commands were abolished. Zhu became Army Commander; Mao, Party representative; and Chen Yi, formerly Zhu's deputy, Secretary of the Party's Military Committee.⁷³

On May 20, sixty delegates from the Red Army and from six county Party committees gathered in the Clan Hall of a wealthy landlord family in Maoping for the First Congress of Party Organisations of the Hunan–Jiangxi Border Area. After three days of debate, the Congress confirmed Mao's appointment as head of the Border Area Special Committee and elected him Chairman of the Border Area ‘Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Government’ with Yuan Wencai as his deputy.⁷⁴

Despite the junction with Zhu De, it was a time of considerable pessimism. The defeat of Zhu's forces in Hunan, and the ease with which landlord forces had regained control of the base area as soon as the Red Army left, had raised doubts in many minds about the validity of the insurrectionary strategy. In his speech, therefore, Mao posed the question: ‘How much longer can the Red flag be upheld?’ It was a theme to which he would return repeatedly as the year wore on:

The prolonged existence inside a country of one or more small areas under Red political power, surrounded on all sides by White political power, is something which has never occurred anywhere else in the world. There are special reasons for the emergence of this curious thing … It occurs solely in [semi-colonial] China, which is under indirect imperialist rule … [and where there are] prolonged splits and wars among the White political forces … [Our] independent regime on the borders of Hunan and Jiangxi is one of many such small areas. In difficult and critical times, some comrades often have doubts as to the survival of such Red political power and manifest negative tendencies … [But] if only we know that splits and wars among the White forces will continue without interruption, we will have no doubts about the emergence, survival and daily growth of Red political power.⁷⁵

A number of other conditions were also necessary, he maintained. Red areas could exist only in provinces like Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Guangdong, where strong mass movements had developed during the Northern Expedition, and only if ‘the revolutionary situation in the nation as a whole continues to move forward’ (as Mao insisted was the case in China). They required regular Red Army forces to defend them, and a strong Communist Party to lead them. Even then, he acknowledged, there would be times when it was difficult to hold out: ‘Fighting among the warlords does not go on every day without ceasing. Whenever the White political power in one or more provinces enjoys temporary stability, the ruling class … will surely exert every effort to destroy Red political power.’ But, Mao declared, among the White forces, ‘all compromises can only be temporary; a temporary compromise today prepares the ground for a bigger war tomorrow.’

The correct course at this stage, therefore, Mao argued, was not to career about the country, setting off uprisings which collapsed as soon as the army left, but to concentrate on deepening the revolution in a single area.

When the Congress ended, Mao's policy was approved.

At a time when Jinggangshan was under constant enemy pressure – in the three weeks since Zhu De's arrival, two more sizeable enemy offensives had been thwarted – such a strategy required solid nerves. But Mao was growing more confident in his new role as a military tactician. During the winter Wang Zuo had told him stories about Zhu the Deaf, an old bandit leader whose maxim was: ‘You don't need to fight, all you need to do is circle around’.⁷⁶ The moral, Mao told his troops, was to stay clear of the enemy's main forces; lead them in circles; and when they were confused and disoriented, strike where they were weakest.

This was summed up in a pithy folk-rhyme, which conveyed the essence of the Red Army's future strategy. In its final form, drawn up by Mao and Zhu, and popularised throughout the army in May, it contained sixteen characters:

Di jin, wo tui,	[When the] enemy advances, we withdraw,
Di zhu, wo rao,	[When the] enemy rests, we harass,
Di pi, wo da,	[When the] enemy tires, we attack,
Di tui, wo zhui.	[When the] enemy withdraws, we pursue.77

In the months following, two further principles were laid down:

Concentrate the Red Army to fight the enemy … and oppose the division of forces so as to avoid being destroyed one by one.
In expanding the area under [our control], adopt the policy of advancing in a series of waves and oppose the policy of rash advance.⁷⁸

The Zhu–Mao Army was still of very uneven quality.[Q3] Zhu's 28th regiment and Mao's 31st were a match for the best warlord units. The tactics they developed, employing speed and mobility to make feints to deceive the enemy, followed by surprise attacks from the rear or on the flanks, won them such a fearsome reputation that their adversaries would often withdraw without giving battle. Notwithstanding Mao's attempts to tighten discipline, gambling, opium use, desertion and pillaging remained widespread problems. But the men had an esprit de corps and cohesiveness which their opponents lacked. The 32nd regiment, based on Yuan Wencai's and Wang Zuo's bandit troops, was less effective but still able to play a defensive role. Only the 29th, composed of homesick Hunanese peasants, was unreformable.⁷⁹

Meanwhile the guidelines for the army's treatment of civilians, which Mao had first issued after the halt at Sanwan in September 1927, were expanded into what became known as the ‘Six Main Points for Attention’. Soldiers were urged to replace straw bedding and wooden bed-boards after staying at peasant homes overnight; to return whatever they borrowed; to pay for anything they damaged; to be courteous; to be fair in business dealings; and to treat prisoners humanely. Later, two further ‘Points for Attention’ were added by Lin Biao: ‘Don't molest women’ (in early versions, ‘Don't bathe in sight of women’); and, ‘Dig latrines well away from homes and cover them before leaving.’ At the same time, ‘Three Main Rules of Discipline’ were issued: ‘Obey orders’; ‘Don't take anything belonging to the masses’ (the original phrase, ‘not so much as a sweet potato’, was amended to ‘not even a needle or thread’); and, ‘Turn in for public distribution all goods confiscated from landlords and local bullies.’⁸⁰

The thrust of Mao's revolutionary strategy was thus fundamentally different from the insurrectionary approach of Qu Qiubai. Where Qu believed the old system could be overthrown by the raw fervour of untrained peasants and workers, rising to seize power with their own hands, Mao saw the peasantry as a reservoir of sympathy and support – a ‘sea’, as he would later describe it, in which the ‘fish’ (the Red guerrillas) could swim. Even on Jinggangshan, he noted soberly, few local people volunteered for the Red Army. As soon as the landlords had been toppled and their fields had been divided up, all the peasants wanted was to be left in peace to farm. For the same reason he urged moderation towards the urban petty bourgeoisie, the stall-holders and traders in the small market towns, in order to avoid driving them to oppose the revolution. Excesses were often unavoidable, he acknowledged, and could be a useful means of radicalising public opinion. But, in practice, they were frequently counter-productive: ‘In order to kill people and burn houses, there must be a mass basis … [not just] burning and killing by the army on its own.’ Revolutionary violence was helpful, he argued, only when it had a clear purpose and was backed by a movement strong enough to resist the retribution which would inevitably follow.⁸¹

When Zhou Lu had arrived in March, Mao had been severely criticised for these views. His work was ‘too right-wing’, he had been told. He was ‘not killing and burning enough, [and] not carrying out the policy of “turning the petty bourgeois into proletarians and then forcing them to make revolution”.’⁸² But by then, unknown to Zhou (let alone to Mao), the Politburo in Shanghai was also having second thoughts:

The peasant movement throughout the country [Qu Qiubai wrote in April] seems to feel that, besides killing the gentry, it ‘must’ set houses on fire … Many villages in Hubei have been reduced to ashes. The leader of a certain locality in Hunan proposed burning down an entire county town, taking with him only the things the peasant insurgents needed (stencil machines and so forth), and to kill everyone unless they joined the revolution … This [is a] petty bourgeois tendency … The proletariat was not leading the peasants, but the peasants were leading the proletariat.⁸³

The moderate policies Mao put forward at the First Border Area Party Congress in May came, therefore, at an opportune time. Less than a week later, the new Hunan provincial committee,^VII apparently chastened by the fiasco of Zhu De's expedition that spring, agreed that the Zhu–Mao Army should remain based at Jinggangshan, and warned indignantly of the foolishness of ‘burning whole cities’, which allowed Mao to reply, tongue firmly in cheek: ‘The provincial committee points out that it is wrong to burn cities. We shall never commit this mistake again.’⁸⁴

Soon afterwards the Central Committee approved Mao's strategy too. At the beginning of June, a letter from the base area finally reached Shanghai – the first direct communication since its creation the previous October.⁸⁵ Most of the leadership was away in Moscow, preparing for the Sixth Party Congress, which the Comintern had decided should be held not in China, where Chiang Kai-shek's ‘White terror’ was in full flood, but in the Soviet Union (where the Russians could also exert tighter control).⁸⁶ It fell to Li Weihan, Mao's friend from New People's Study Society days, who had been left in charge, to draft the Central Committee's reply. He enthusiastically supported Mao's leadership; proposed that the Front Committee, which Zhou Lu had abolished, be restored; and endorsed Mao's decision to focus on building up the Jinggangshan base as a centre from which to propagate the revolution in both Hunan and Jiangxi – decisions in keeping with the new spirit of realism which would mark the Congress proceedings.⁸⁷

Two weeks later, the 118 delegates who gathered in a dilapidated old country house near Zvenigorod, forty miles north-west of Moscow, frankly acknowledged that there was no ‘revolutionary high tide’ in China, and no sign that one was imminent.

The Party, they declared, had overestimated the strength of the peasants and workers, and underestimated the forces of reaction. China was still engaged in a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the main tasks were to unify the country against the imperialists; to abolish the landlord system; and to set up soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers, in order ‘to induce the vast, toiling masses to participate in political rule’. Socialist revolution could come later.⁸⁸

These themes had already been sounded (and in Shanghai had been largely ignored) in a Comintern resolution the previous February, which had also stressed the importance of co-ordinating rural revolution with uprisings in the cities.⁸⁹ But Bukharin, who was overseeing the proceedings on Stalin's behalf, now introduced an important qualification. ‘[We may] maintain [the slogan of] carrying out uprisings,’ he said. ‘[But] this does not mean that in a country as large as China … the innumerable masses will suddenly rise up in an extremely short period of time … That cannot happen.’ The Chinese leaders needed to steel themselves for an uneven, protracted struggle, in which victories in some areas would be offset by defeats in others. Even then, a long period of preparation was essential before province-wide uprisings could occur.⁹⁰

Accordingly, the Congress approved a strategy of guerrilla warfare to weaken the Guomindang's hold on the rural areas, and establish local soviets, even if initially only ‘in one county or several townships’. Military power, it declared, was ‘highly significant’ in the Chinese revolution, and the development of the Red Army must be the ‘central issue’ in the countryside.⁹¹ By contrast, the doomed heroics of small groups of fanatics, acting with no mass base, were sharply condemned, especially in urban areas. In Bukharin's words:

If uprisings directed by the Party fail once, twice, three times, four times, or are crushed 10 or 15 times, then the working class will say: ‘Hey, you! Listen! You are probably excellent people; nevertheless, please get out of here! You do not deserve to be our leaders.’ … This [kind of] excessive showing off is of no use to a Party, however revolutionary.⁹²

Urban uprisings were not explicitly ruled out. But the whole thrust of Bukharin's speech, and of the Congress resolutions, was that, at this stage at least, the peasantry, not the workers, were the main revolutionary force – the only proviso being that the peasants should be under proletarian leadership to restrain their anarchistic, petty-bourgeois leanings.⁹³

These decisions, Mao wrote later, provided ‘a correct theoretical basis’ for the base areas and the Red Army to develop.⁹⁴

Neither the Central Committee's letter of early June, nor the Congress resolutions, reached Jinggangshan until several months later. But there were enough straws in the wind to indicate that the Party line had changed. Mao's life changed, too, that summer, but in a different way: he acquired ‘a revolutionary companion’.⁹⁵

She was eighteen years old, and her name was He Zizhen. A lively, independent-minded young woman, with a slender, boyish figure, the fine features and winning smile of her Cantonese mother, and the literary bent of her father, a local scholar, she had joined the Party at the age of sixteen, becoming the first and for some time the only female Party member in that area while still a student at the local mission school, run by Finnish nuns. As Mao would later find to his cost, she was tough and strong-willed. Zizhen had been the first young woman in the county to cut her hair short, in what was then regarded as a scandalous affront to traditional values; she had mobilised fellow students to burn the statue of the City God in the local temple; and in the summer of 1926, she had fought alongside Yuan's men in a battle against a landlord militia, earning herself the nickname, ‘The Two-Gun Girl General’.

Yuan, who had been a classmate of her elder brother, had introduced her to Mao soon after his arrival, and the following spring she began working as his assistant. She wrote later that when she realised she was falling in love with him, she had tried to hide her feelings. But, one day, Mao caught her gazing at him longingly and realised what had happened. He pulled up a chair, asked her to sit down, and then talked to her of Yang Kaihui and the children whom he had left behind in Changsha. Shortly after that conversation, they started living together.⁹⁶ Mao had long since declared his disdain for marriage conventions, and on the Jinggangshan there seemed even less reason to heed them. Wang Zuo had three wives. Zhu De, who had left his own wife and small son in Sichuan, six years earlier, also began living with a much younger woman.⁹⁷

None the less, Mao evidently felt a twinge of guilt at his disloyalty to Yang Kaihui. To justify himself, he told He Zizhen that he had had no news from her and thought she might have been executed. In fact he had made no attempt since the uprising to contact his family in Changsha.⁹⁸ His decision to take the young woman as his partner seems to have been an almost conscious step in a gradual cutting of the ties that bound him to the world outside, the ‘normal’ world that had been his before the revolution claimed him.

When word reached Kaihui in the winter of 1928 that Mao had acquired a new ‘wife’, she became deeply depressed.^VIII In the first years of her marriage, she had been consumed by jealousy of his old flame, Tao Yi, with whom she suspected (apparently wrongly) that he was carrying on an affair. Now, she wrote bitterly, he had abandoned her completely. She had contemplated suicide, she added, but had held back for the sake of their children.

The political respite was soon over. Once more, the cause lay in provincial rivalries. The Jiangxi Party committee had been badgering Mao to attack the city of Jian, seventy miles to the north-east. Now a succession of envoys arrived from Hunan, demanding, each more insistently than the last, that the Fourth Red Army send its main forces to the districts south of Hengyang, for a further attempt at insurrection in the same area where Zhu De had been defeated in March.⁹⁹

This was not as illogical as it might sound. Hengyang controlled the main corridor from central to southern Hunan. A successful uprising in the area would make it possible to link Hunan and Guangdong – traditionally the two ‘most revolutionary’ provinces – by establishing a new base area in the region where Tan Yankai had stationed his southern armies, a decade earlier, while waiting his chance to attack Changsha. But precisely for that reason, as Mao and Zhu well knew, it was far too well-defended for the Fourth Army to attack.

The Hunan Provincial committee plainly expected Mao to resist, for it informed him that a special emissary, 23-year-old Yang Kaiming,^IX was on his way to Jinggangshan to take personal charge of the Border Area Special Committee, adding peremptorily: ‘You must carry out [our instructions] immediately without any hesitation.’ Shortly before he arrived, however, a joint meeting of the Special Committee and the fourth Army's Military Committee, held under Mao's chairmanship on June 30, in the presence of another, even younger, provincial committee representative, twenty-year-old Du Xiujing, voted against the plan to strike into Hunan. In a message to the provincial leadership in Anyuan, Mao warned that, if they went ahead, the entire Fourth Army might be lost.¹⁰⁰ Yang evidently did not feel himself strong enough to countermand this decision and for the next two weeks there was an uneasy stand-off.

Word then came that elements of the Hunan and Jiangxi armies were preparing another attack on Jinggangshan. It was decided that Zhu's 28th and 29th regiments should cross into Hunan, to attack the Hunan army's rear. Mao's troops, the 31st and 32nd, would block the Jiangxi units’ advance until Zhu's men could return.

The first part of the battle plan went well enough. But as Zhu was about to march back to link up with Mao's troops, as arranged, Du Xiujing, who was accompanying Zhu's forces, invoked superior Party authority to insist that the provincial committee's original orders must now be carried out. After some discussion, Zhu's two regiments set off for Chenzhou, ninety miles south of Hengyang. The result was exactly as Mao had foreseen. After initial successes, they were routed by Hunan government troops and retreated in disarray into the hills. With the Red Army's main force absent, Ninggang and two neighbouring counties in the plain were overrun. Yet another letter from the provincial committee then arrived urging Mao to take his remaining forces to support Zhu in southern Hunan. But even as the Border Area Special Committee was discussing this latest instruction, a messenger burst into the meeting room with the news that Zhu had suffered a crushing defeat. The 29th regiment had disintegrated: its Hunanese peasant troops had deserted and fled to their home villages in the region. The 28th was limping back to Jinggangshan.¹⁰¹

The Fourth Army's troubles were not yet over. When Mao set out to join Zhu at Guidong, south-west of Jinggangshan, government troops took advantage of their disarray to launch another attack. This time they came perilously close to occupying the fastness itself.

On August 30, a young communist officer named He Tingying led a single under-strength battalion to hold the narrow pass of Huangyangjie, commanding the heights above Ninggang, against three regiments of the Hunanese Eighth Army and one regiment of Jiangxi troops. The Hunanese units suffered heavy casualties, and by nightfall, when the attack was abandoned, their morale had been broken.¹⁰² Mao was moved to take up his writing brush to commemorate the event:

Our defence is like a stern fortress,
Our wills, united, form a yet stronger wall.
The roar of gunfire rises from Huangyangjie,
Announcing the enemy has fled in the night.¹⁰³

Mao's position was ambiguous. Yang Kaiming had taken over in mid-July as acting Secretary of the Border Area Special Committee. But at Guidong, Mao had engineered the creation of a rival ‘Action Committee’, representing the army, with himself as Secretary.¹⁰⁴

Meanwhile, the south Hunan expedition had revived tensions between himself and Zhu De that had been papered over when their forces had come together in April. Zhu had evidently relished the opportunity to break free from Mao's tutelage and resume his old role as sole military commander. Having tasted freedom anew – even though it had ended in defeat – he was now reluctant to allow Mao to regain the dominant position he had occupied during the summer.¹⁰⁵ Moreover, some of Zhu's followers, and perhaps Zhu himself, privately attributed the debacle to Mao's refusal to let the 31st and 32nd regiments go with them, as the Hunan Committee had originally proposed.¹⁰⁶

The formal division of powers between Mao and Yang Kaiming was confirmed at the Second Border Area Party Congress at Maoping in October. Yang remained head of the Border Area Special Committee – although soon afterwards he fell ill and a neutral figure, Tan Zhenlin, a former worker in his mid-twenties who had been head of the first soviet government Mao had set up at Chaling, was appointed in his place. Mao retained his ‘Action Committee’ post – which effectively made him the Army's Political Commissar. But, in the Committee ranking, which was based on a free vote of delegates, he finished near the bottom of the list. The explanation was provided by the Congress's political resolution. ‘In the past’, it stated, ‘the Party organs were all individual dictatorships, autocracies of the Party secretary; there was no collective leadership or democratic spirit whatsoever.’ Comrade Mao, it noted drily, was among the main offenders.¹⁰⁷

His policies were still respected: the political strategy the Congress approved, based on the Comintern resolution of the previous February, details of which had reached the mountains that autumn, closely reflected Mao's ideas. But, his colleagues told him, his leadership style left much to be desired.¹⁰⁸

This anomalous situation was brought to an end at the beginning of November, when, after a journey lasting nearly five months, the Central Committee directive which Li Weihan had drafted in June arrived on Jinggangshan.¹⁰⁹

Mao could hardly contain his delight. It was, he declared, ‘an excellent letter … [which] has corrected many of our mistakes and resolved many controversial issues here’. A new Front Committee was organised as the ‘supreme Party organ’ in the border area, with Mao as Secretary. Its other leading members were Zhu De, who now replaced Chen Yi as head of the Military Committee, and Tan Zhenlin, who on Mao's proposal became substantive Special Committee Secretary, replacing Yang Kaiming.¹¹⁰ Not only did this re-establish the traditional hierarchy of powers, under which the Front Committee had jurisdiction over local Party organs wherever it happened to be, but it implied that the interest of the Fourth Army would have priority over those of the base area, which was to prove of crucial importance during the coming winter. For while Mao's personal position had been assured, the future of the base area had not.

In a report to the Central Committee three weeks later, Mao described in detail the difficulties he faced. One key problem, he wrote, was that the Party membership in the border area consisted almost entirely of peasants, whose ‘petty-bourgeois consciousness’ resulted in a lack of steadiness, causing them to swing violently between reckless courage and panic-stricken flight.

The long-term answer to that, Mao asserted, was to increase ‘proletarian consciousness’, by putting more workers and soldiers into the Party's leading bodies. This was not simply a genuflection to Marxist orthodoxy, inserted to please the ideologues in Shanghai. Having watched one peasant regiment after another fall to pieces under pressure – among them, his own 3rd Regiment at Sanwan, in September 1927, and Zhu De's 29th regiment at Chenzhou, in July – he now realised that ‘proletarian leadership’ was indeed a prerequisite for success, not for reasons of Party dogma but to put spine into the peasants’ revolt. In the short term, another remedy was available, which was likewise to have far-reaching implications for the Party's later development: the purge.¹¹¹

In May and June, when the border area had reached its maximum extent, the communists were in firm control and joining the Party seemed to many a wise thing to do, membership had ballooned to more than 10,000. After the Red Army's setbacks during the summer most of the landlord and gentry members, and many rich peasants, turned their coats. Those regarded as unreliable were now weeded out, along with members who engaged in ‘card-playing, gambling, hooliganism and corrupt activities’. The result, Mao reported proudly, was a smaller Party but a much more combative one.

However, the core activity in the border area was not political but military. ‘Fighting’, Mao told the Central Committee, ‘has come to constitute our daily life.’ Professional soldiers who had come over to the communists at the time of the Nanchang and Autumn Harvest uprisings were the backbone of the Red Army. But only a third of their original number remained: the rest had been lost through death, injury or desertion. To fill the gaps, prisoners of war and ‘vagrants’ (i.e., bandits, vagabonds and thieves) had been recruited. Despite their unfortunate background, the latter, Mao maintained, were ‘particularly good fighters’, and the Red Army could not get enough of them. Most of the soldiers, he added, had developed class feelings; they knew what they were fighting for and endured the harsh conditions without complaint.¹¹²

None the less, as winter closed in, the mood was grim. An economic blockade had been imposed earlier in the year and several thousand government troops and militiamen were deployed to enforce it. An ounce of salt cost one silver dollar – a month's wages for a labourer; other daily necessities were not available at all. There was no cloth to make winter clothing, and no medicine for the sick. That autumn, to raise morale, Mao, Zhu and other leaders had joined in a laborious, month-long project to carry grain and other provisions from Ninggang on shoulder-poles up the mountain paths to Ciping. Attempts were made to recover salt from the residue inside wooden urine pails and to use local medicinal herbs. Mao admitted later that there was ‘an atmosphere of exhaustion and defeat’. Zhu De remembered that ‘the troops began to starve’.¹¹³

Because of the shortage of money, wages were abolished and a supply system instituted instead.¹¹⁴ Even so, it took 5,000 dollars a month to buy food, and every copper cash had to come from expropriating landlords and merchants. An ‘official fund-raising letter’, signed by Mao and Zhu De, explained politely:

The Red Army … makes every effort to protect the merchants … [However], because of the current shortage of food supplies, we are writing to you now to request that you kindly collect on our behalf 5,000 dollars, 7,000 pairs of straw sandals and 7,000 pairs of socks, [and] 300 bolts of white cloth … It is urgent that these be delivered … before eight o'clock this evening … If you ignore our requests, it will be proof that [you] merchants are collaborating with the reactionaries … In that case we will be obliged to burn down all the reactionary shops in [the town] … Do not say we have not forewarned you!¹¹⁵

The shopkeepers complied. However, as Mao noted, ‘you can only expropriate once in a given locality; afterwards there would be nothing to take.’ The longer the troops stayed in the base area, the further afield they had to go to find ‘evil gentry and local bullies’ who had not already been squeezed dry. Even then, it often happened that a landlord's only crop was opium, and the soldiers had to seize and sell that.¹¹⁶

That November, Mao raised for the first time the possibility that the base might have to be abandoned. A contingency plan was drawn up to move to southern Jiangxi, but only – he stressed – if ‘our economic situation worsens to such a degree that southern Jiangxi becomes the only place where we can survive’.¹¹⁷

A month later, two events occurred which suddenly brought that much closer. A force of about 800 ex-warlord troops, who had mutinied in Pingjiang, in northern Hunan, in July, arrived in the border area. Their commander, Peng Dehuai, a gruff, plain-spoken man just turned thirty, a soldier to his boots, was from Mao's home district of Xiangtan. His Fifth Red Army, as it called itself, was amalgamated with the Fourth Army and Peng became deputy to Zhu De. Meanwhile, reports began coming in that the Jiangxi and Hunan provincial governments were preparing yet another encirclement campaign, this time on a far bigger scale than any attempted before.^X Thirty thousand men from twenty-five regiments under the overall command of Mao's old nemesis, He Jian, were to converge on Jinggangshan along five different routes.¹¹⁸

The question of future strategy took on new urgency.

Peng's arrival evidently tipped the balance. It made it impossible to sit out the offensive, because there would not be enough provisions to last the new, enlarged force through the winter; and it opened up fresh possibilities for a co-ordinated riposte.

Just after the New Year, an enlarged meeting of the Front Committee, held in Ninggang, agreed that Peng's men and the 32nd Regiment of Wang Zuo and Yuan Wencai should stay behind to defend the fastness, while Mao and Zhu, leading the 28th and 31st regiments, broke out to attack the enemy's rear by besieging one of the prefectural cities in the east, Jian or Ganzhou.¹¹⁹

At dawn on January 14, the main force slipped away by a seldom-used route that led along the jagged crest of a mountain spur from Jinggangshan down to the foothills in the south. Zhu De described it: ‘There was no path, not even the trace of a trail … The stones and peaks were worn to slippery smoothness … Snow lay in pockets and an icy wind lashed the bodies of the column that inched forward, crawling over huge boulders and hanging on to one another to avoid slipping into the black chasms below.’ That night, they disarmed a Jiangxi army battalion near Dafen, some 40 kilometres to the south, and ate their fill from the enemy's field-kitchens.¹²⁰ But next day, instead of swinging east to threaten Ganzhou, as they had agreed, they went on marching south until they reached the border town of Dayu. There they were heavily defeated by a Guomindang army brigade and retreated in disarray into Guangdong.¹²¹

Did Mao ever really intend to stage the diversion he had promised to relieve the pressure on Peng's few hundred troops, outnumbered by a margin of thirty to one? Or was it just a cynical manoeuvre to get the main force safely away? Peng himself felt that Mao had betrayed him. Forty years later, the memory still rankled.¹²²

Peng held out, unaided, for almost three weeks. By then three of the five passes had been overrun. He gathered together his three surviving companies and, amid a heavy snowstorm, began the impossible task of trying to break through the enemy blockade, escorting several hundred sick and wounded soldiers whom Mao's forces had left behind. ‘For a whole day and a whole night’, he wrote later, ‘we followed goats’ trails and climbed sheer precipices in the lap of the highest peak of the Jinggangshan.’ Somehow they slipped through. But then, when they reached Suichuan, fate turned against them and they marched into an ambush. Peng's troops were able to break through, ‘but the enemy quickly sealed the gap and surrounded the wounded, sick and disabled, trailing behind’. There was no way to rescue them. After another battle a few days later, Peng held a roll-call: of the 800 soldiers who had accompanied him from Pingjiang, 283 remained.¹²³

Mao's army fared somewhat better. In the first month, he and Zhu De lost 600 men out of the 3,500 who set out from Jinggangshan. Even so, it was a ghastly period, the worst, he wrote, since the Red Army's creation.¹²⁴ For He Zizhen, who marched with Mao and the troops, it was still harder: she was five months pregnant with their first child.¹²⁵ To Zhu De, it was simply ‘a terrible time’.¹²⁶ They soon abandoned, at least temporarily, any hope of establishing a permanent new base area, and tried instead, wherever they went, to set up clandestine soviet governments and Party committees, capable of operating underground after the Red forces had moved on. A new kind of warfare began: no longer the defence of fixed positions, but flexible guerrilla war.¹²⁷

Communications with the Party Centre, problematic on Jinggangshan, were now severed altogether. For the first three months of 1929, Mao's forces were out of contact not only with Shanghai but with the provincial Party authorities as well. Before leaving the mountains, he had sent four ounces of gold to Pingxiang to pay for the setting-up of a secret message centre; another, more ambitious effort later involved sending 5,000 dollars’ worth of opium to Fujian to finance a communications base in Amoy. None of it did any good. Mao's letters that year teem with reproaches about the absence of Central guidance and the incompetence of the Jiangxi committee in passing on documents.¹²⁸

This was not without advantages. Mao and Zhu were left, alone to devise their own solutions to the problems they encountered without being forced to apply inappropriate tactics dreamed up elsewhere. Indeed, one of the lessons of the Jinggangshan period, Mao wrote to the Central Committee that winter, was that ‘future directives from higher levels regarding military action must, above all, not be too rigid’. Otherwise, the leaders in the field were put in the ‘truly difficult position’ of having to choose between ‘insubordination … [and] defeat’.¹²⁹ Being out of contact removed that difficulty. But it also meant that for months on end, Mao, along with the leaders of other, smaller Red enclaves in southern and central China, struggled to survive in ignorance of each another, and of the policies of Moscow and Shanghai for which they were supposed to be fighting. Most of the time even newspapers were unobtainable.¹³⁰

Communications problems formed the backdrop to a dispute between Mao and the Central leadership which would have far more serious repercussions than any of his earlier differences with the Hunan Party committee.

At the beginning of January 1929, when the main theses of the Sixth Congress, held in Moscow six months earlier, finally reached the Jinggangshan, they were received enthusiastically. ‘The resolutions … are extremely correct and we accept them with great joy,’ Mao wrote to Shanghai.¹³¹ He was no doubt delighted, too, to learn of his own re-election to the Central Committee, where he was listed twelfth out of the twenty-three full members, reflecting the Red Army's new-found prominence. What he did not know – and could not have guessed – was that the new General Secretary, Xiang Zhongfa, a former dock worker and labour union leader from Wuhan, was a figurehead, and that real power lay with Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan, both of whom were listed well after Mao in the official Central Committee ranking.¹³² Indeed, he remained in ignorance of Li's elevation until almost the end of the year.¹³³

The Party Centre, for its part, was equally ignorant of Mao's situation. In February, when the first reports reached Shanghai that his forces had left the Jinggangshan, the Politburo had not had any word from him for almost nine months. In these circumstances, Zhou Enlai drafted a letter, urging Mao and Zhu De to take all possible measures to conserve their military strength. To that end, he proposed, they should scatter their forces in the villages, broken down into units of a few dozen, or at most a few hundred, men, in order to ‘mobilise the daily struggle of the peasantry’ and spread the Party's influence, while waiting for a more favourable revolutionary climate to emerge.¹³⁴

Mao disliked this approach on principle. In his report to the Central Committee the previous November (which the Centre had still not received), he had written that, ‘in our experience, [it] has led almost every time to defeat’.¹³⁵ This time it was made still more unacceptable by the sting in its tail: Mao and Zhu, the letter said, should both return to Shanghai.

Zhou Enlai, having tried, and failed, to detach Mao from his Hunan base in July 1927, was keenly aware of the difficulties this decision would entail, and mustered all the tact at his command to try to make it more palatable:

The two comrades might feel reluctant to leave the army since they have worked in it for over a year. However the CC believes that … Zhu's and Mao's departure will not cause the army any losses and will help it implement the plan to disperse its forces … When Zhu and Mao come to the CC, they can introduce to our comrades all over the country their precious experience in leading a ten-thousand-strong armed force in dealing with the enemy for over a year. This will make a [still] greater contribution to the whole revolutionary cause.¹³⁶

This was not illogical: if the Red Army were dispersed, there would be no purpose in Mao and Zhu remaining. Had the directive reached Mao at the time it was written, in early February, when the communist forces were on the run and, to all appearances, in imminent danger of being wiped out, there might well have been a majority of the Front Committee ready to accept it. But the letter took two months to travel the 600 miles from Shanghai to eastern Jiangxi, and by the time Mao and Zhu received it the situation had altered dramatically.

After the disorderly retreat into Guangdong, at the end of January, they had made their way north, along the Fujian–Jiangxi border, pursued by a brigade of Jiangxi government troops. At Dabodi, in the mountains fifteen miles north of Ruijin, on February 11, the Fourth Army decided to make a stand. Thanks largely to Lin Biao's regiment, which made a forced march through the night behind enemy lines, the pursuers were decisively defeated. Two hundred rifles, six machine-guns and about a thousand soldiers were captured. It was their first victory since leaving Jinggangshan four weeks earlier, and Mao reported afterwards that ‘the morale of our army was thereby greatly raised’. A month later they captured the prefectural city of Tingzhou, just across the border in Fujian. The local strongman, Guo Fengming, who commanded the Fujian Second Brigade, was killed, and his body exposed in the street for three days.

Elated by these successes, Mao sent off a long letter to Shanghai, announcing that the Fourth Army planned to conduct guerrilla warfare across an area of some twenty counties, centred on Tingzhou and Ruijin, and then, when the masses were sufficiently mobilised, to establish a new, permanent base area in western Fujian and southern Jiangxi.¹³⁷

Two weeks later, Zhou Enlai's directive arrived, ordering the army to disperse.¹³⁸

Mao's response, endorsed by the Front Committee and by Peng Dehuai, whose troops had now rejoined the main force, was remarkable both for the bluntness with which he rejected the new instructions, and for the standpoint of complete equality he assumed towards the Shanghai Centre. He replied, not as a dissident field commissar being summoned to headquarters, but as a ranking Party leader arguing a case before his peers:

The Central Committee's letter makes too pessimistic an appraisal … The [January] campaign against Jinggangshan represented the high-water mark of the counter-revolutionary tide. But there it stopped, and since then [it] has gradually receded while the revolutionary tide has gradually risen … In the present chaotic situation, we can lead the masses only if we have positive slogans and a positive spirit.¹³⁹

Dispersing the army, Mao said, was ‘an unreal view’ and smacked of ‘liquidationism’, which was as grave an error as the adventurism of Qu Qiubai. He and Zhu De would of course accept new assignments, if needed, but in that case ‘capable replacements’ must be sent. In the meantime, they intended to press on with their plans for guerrilla warfare in Jiangxi and Fujian, for which the prospects, Mao declared, were so bright that there was even a realistic hope of ‘closing in on [the Jiangxi capital] Nanchang’. The current rifts between the warlords, he argued, portended the disintegration of Guomindang rule, and the Red Army should aim to establish an independent soviet regime in Jiangxi and the adjacent regions of western Fujian and Zhejiang ‘within a time-limit of one year’.

This proposal would soon provoke charges that Mao, too, harboured ‘adventurist’ tendencies, and he later acknowledged that setting a time-limit had been a mistake.¹⁴⁰ But while he was over-optimistic, his analysis was not fundamentally wrong. An independent soviet regime far bigger than any other in China would indeed be set up in Jiangxi, although it would take more than a year to do it.

Mao's belief that he was a better judge of policy than the leadership in Shanghai was reflected in his rebuttal of another key point in Zhou Enlai's letter. ‘The Party's major task at present’, Zhou had written, ‘is to establish and develop the Party's proletarian foundations, chiefly among the … industrial workers.’¹⁴¹ This was true, Mao replied, but

the struggle in the countryside, the establishment of soviets in small areas and … the expansion of the Red Army are prerequisites for aiding the struggle in the cities and hastening the revolutionary upsurge. [While] therefore it would be the greatest mistake to abandon the struggle in the cities and sink into rural guerrillaism, it would also, in our opinion, be a mistake – should any of our Party members hold such views – to fear the development of the power of the peasants lest it outstrip the workers’ leadership … For the revolution in semi-colonial China will fail only if the peasant struggle is deprived of the leadership of the workers; it will never suffer just because the peasant struggle develops in such a way as to become more powerful than the workers. The Sixth Congress has pointed out the mistake of neglecting the peasant revolution.¹⁴²

A year later, the argument over rural versus urban revolution would become another major source of discord between Mao and the Party leadership. But, for now, Zhou let it pass. As reports of the Red Army's new victories came in, the recall order was also rescinded, and in June, when Mao's letter finally arrived, the Politburo acknowledged that the dispersal plan had been a mistake.¹⁴³

However, there was a sequel.

Mao's personal belief in dialectics as the motive force of history, in which the blackest part of the night always comes just before dawn, had been strengthened in the traumatic months following the abandonment of Jinggangshan, when the Red Army had appeared on the verge of collapse, only to pull itself together and emerge from the ordeal stronger, and in a more favourable position, than before. But not everyone in the Fourth Army had rationalised the loss of the border area so easily. Many shared the Centre's bleak assessment of the prospects for the revolution, and argued that the army should continue to wage flexible guerrilla warfare, as it had since the end of January, rather than try to set up a permanent base.

At Yudu, in mid-April, these issues were debated at an enlarged leadership meeting. With support from Peng Dehuai, Mao's line carried the day. It was agreed that the Fourth Army would try to establish itself in west Fujian, while Peng's forces returned to west Jiangxi to reoccupy the Jinggangshan. The target of creating an independent soviet regime in Jiangxi within a year was overwhelmingly approved.¹⁴⁴

But the appearance of unity was deceptive. Over the course of the next month, a deep cleavage developed between Mao and his supporters, on the one hand, and the majority of army commanders, most of whom identified themselves with Zhu De, on the other.

The rift sprang in part from the different histories of the two forces which had come together to form the Red Army a year earlier. Mao's troops had learned their military skills building up the Jinggangshan base area. Zhu De's men had been constantly on the move, from Nanchang to Swatow; then in northern Guangdong; and finally in southern Hunan. Their origins predisposed them to different forms of warfare. But it also reflected Mao's firm belief, proclaimed in his very first political address on the Jinggangshan – when he posed the question, ‘How much longer can the Red flag be upheld?’ – that setting up Red base areas was the only realistic route to nationwide revolution.¹⁴⁵

The disagreement over strategy was fundamental. But other, more personal, quarrels also played the part. Mao was an autocrat, as even He Zizhen admitted.¹⁴⁶ Now, as on Jinggangshan the previous autumn, complaints were heard about his ‘patriarchal style of rule’, ‘the dictatorship of the Secretary’ and ‘excessive centralisation of power’. This time Mao's opponents were more circumspect. Rather than attacking him directly they focused on the role of the Party in military affairs, arguing that ‘[it] is running too many things’, and that, with the growth of the Red Army since the fall of Tingzhou in March 1929, ‘the Front Committee cannot keep track of everything’.¹⁴⁷

This was a problem of Mao's own making. At the beginning of February, in the darkest days after the flight from Jinggangshan, the Military Committee, which Zhu De had headed, had been abolished. Not long afterwards, at Mao's suggestion, the regiments had been replaced by columns. The result was to reduce very markedly the power of the military headquarters. Zhu and his colleagues had no wish to be reduced to ciphers in Mao's political machine, and began demanding loudly that the Military Committee be restored.¹⁴⁸

Into this political snakepit walked a naive, highly opinionated, young communist named Liu Angong, who had been sent by Zhou Enlai to act as liaison officer to the Fourth Army, with a request that he be given a suitably responsible post. Liu had just returned from the Soviet Union, where he had learned that Leninist theory held the answers to every possible Chinese problem.¹⁴⁹

Mao may at first have seen Liu as a potential ally, or at least as a potential tool. After a rancorous meeting near Yongding, in Fujian, at the end of May, he informed Zhou that the Military Committee was being re-established with Liu as Secretary and head of the army's Political Department. The advantage of this to Mao was that it prevented Zhu De from taking back the secretaryship. Increasingly, in Mao's eyes, the contest was becoming a power struggle between Zhu, whom he accused privately of harbouring ‘long-suppressed ambitions’, and himself.¹⁵⁰

But Mao's attempt to finesse the dispute backfired. Liu's first act, when the new committee was set up, was to enlarge its role at the expense of the Front Committee. By the time the leadership next met, at Baisha on June 8, Mao had concluded that a full-scale confrontation was inevitable. The Front Committee, he said bitterly, was ‘neither living nor dead’; it was expected to take responsibility for the Fourth Army, but without the power to direct it. In these circumstances, Mao announced, they must find someone else to be Secretary. He intended to resign.¹⁵¹

This was bluff – and, at first, it seemed it would succeed. The meeting resolved, by thirty-six votes to five, to abolish the Military Committee which had been re-established only a week before. However, it decided that the broader issues of strategy and leadership should be left to a full-scale Fourth Army Party Congress, the first to have been convened for eight months. When this body met, two weeks later, in a local school, requisitioned for the purpose, it was chaired not by Mao but by Chen Yi.

Mao was accused of ‘patriarchal tendencies’ and his work style vigorously criticised. Zhu De's conduct was likewise censured. Mao's counter-charge that the army was lapsing into a ‘roving bandit mentality’, by persisting in guerrilla warfare without trying to consolidate fixed base areas, was dismissed as ‘not a real issue’; and his proposal of two months earlier, to try to occupy the whole of Jiangxi ‘within a year’, was now held to be a mistake. When the new Front Committee was elected, Mao and Zhu both remained members, Mao as Party Representative and Zhu as Army Commander. But Chen Yi took the post of Secretary. For the third time since retreating to the mountains, twenty-one months before, Mao had gone into eclipse.¹⁵²

While the political row was coming to a head, He Zizhen, then nineteen, gave birth to a daughter. As they could not keep the baby with them, she did as other women in the Red Army had to, and half an hour after the infant was born, gave it to a peasant family to look after, with a packet containing fifteen silver dollars. She wrote later that she did not weep.¹⁵³

For the next five months, Mao stood aside from the work of the Fourth Army leadership. The pretext was ill-health, but it was more psychological than physical. As He Zizhen put it: ‘he was sick – and he was upset, which made him sicker.’¹⁵⁴ That did not stop him spending July with the West Fujian Special Committee, advising them how to build up their new base area, which he hoped to link with south Jiangxi to form the core of the province-wide soviet that he had spoken of at Yudu.¹⁵⁵ But he refused to have anything to do with the Front Committee's plans for a renewed guerrilla campaign, provoking a spectacular row with Chen Yi, which ended with them both, pale with rage, screaming at each other.¹⁵⁶

Faced with Mao's intransigence, the Front Committee decided at the end of July that Chen should go to Shanghai to ask the Centre to arbitrate, leaving Zhu as acting Secretary in his place.¹⁵⁷

A few days later, Mao contracted malaria, and withdrew to a remote hamlet in the mountains. There he and He Zizhen lived in a small bamboo hut, which he arranged as a scholar's retreat, naming it the ‘Hall of the Wealth of Books’, written on a wooden board suspended over the door.¹⁵⁸

His decision to remove himself from the fray, a tactic he would use often in his career, quickly proved its value. Even before Chen Yi reached Shanghai, the Politburo had received copies of the Congress resolutions, together with a letter Mao had written setting out his view of the dispute – and had concluded that the delegates had acted wrongly. On August 21, a directive was sent to Zhu's headquarters, emphasising the importance of centralised Party leadership, implicitly approving Mao's efforts to expand the Party Secretary's role, which, it declared, was ‘absolutely not a patriarchal system’, and pointing out that ‘the Red Army is not just a fighting organisation, but has propaganda and political responsibilities’.¹⁵⁹

The chief blame for the mess was attributed to the unfortunate Liu Angong, who was accused of stirring up factionalism and told to return to Shanghai, only to die in battle before the order could be carried out.¹⁶⁰

At the end of September, when Zhu received this missive, he called another Army Congress and sent word to Mao to attend. Mao refused, saying: ‘I cannot just casually return.’ The Congress then sent him a letter, formally requesting him to return as Front Committee Secretary. This time he came, but had himself carried in on a stretcher to show he was in no state to work – an incident which had unintended consequences, for garbled reports of his condition reached Moscow the following spring, prompting the Comintern to publish his obituary. Three weeks later, Chen Yi returned, with yet another Central Committee document, which he himself had drafted and Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan had approved. This condemned ‘the narrow view of those military comrades who think that in the revolution the Red Army is all that matters’, but held that Mao was wrong to want to build up fixed base areas immediately and criticised his plan to seize the whole of Jiangxi within a year. On the crucial question of his relationship with Zhu, the Central Committee refused to take sides, blaming them equally for their ‘mistaken work methods’. These consisted, it said, of ‘adopting positions opposite in form and debating with each other’; ‘doubting each other, and assessing each other from a standpoint that is far from a political standpoint’; and ‘not being open in what they do’ – in plain language, squabbling like children. Mao, it said, should remain Front Committee Secretary; but he and Zhu must correct their errors and learn to work together sensibly.¹⁶¹

This letter, together with a note from the Front Committee, asking him to return at once, reached Mao in West Fujian in the last week of October. He ignored it.

That had nothing to do with his malaria; by then the local county committee had managed to get him some quinine, and he was cured. He was making a political point. Three times in the past two years his colleagues – first the Central Committee; then, the Hunan provincial leadership; and now, the Front Committee – had cast him into political limbo. This time they would have to be sure that they wanted him before he would agree to come back. For the next month he spent his days discussing land reform with local peasants, and the evenings in another of his episodic attempts to learn English.

On November 18, after a disastrous campaign in Guangdong in which the army lost a third of its strength, Zhu De and Chen Yi wrote to him a second time. Again, he did not respond. A week later, the entire Front Committee formally requested him ‘kindly to come back and take charge of our work’, and sent a detachment of troops as an escort. This time, he relented. On November 26, he resumed work.¹⁶²

Although Mao had assured the Party Centre that there would be ‘absolutely no problem’ in unifying the Fourth Army's thinking ‘under the Central Committee's correct guidance’ (implying that he would work to reconcile differing points of view),¹⁶³ he proceeded ruthlessly to consolidate his own position, hammering home his personal interpretation of the Central documents and omitting what he did not like.

The conference he called in December 1929 at Gutian, a village in western Fujian, would serve as a model for the ‘rectification campaigns’ which in later years were Mao's preferred method of fashioning the Party's collective mind in the image of his own. For ten days, the participants met in small groups, guided by branch secretaries and political commissars, to ‘dig out the roots of different mistaken ideas, discuss the harm they had caused and decide how to correct them’. Mao, as Secretary, had the main role in deciding which ideas were ‘mistaken’ and which ‘correct’. Unsurprisingly, those of Zhu De and his followers were mostly in the former category.¹⁶⁴

The opening section of Mao's political report, entitled ‘The Problem of Correcting Erroneous and Non-Proletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party’, set the tone for all that followed. It castigated ‘the purely military viewpoint’; the ‘pernicious root of ultrademocracy’, which showed up as ‘an individualistic aversion to discipline’; and the need for ‘military comrades’ at all times to be guided by, and to report to, the Party.¹⁶⁵ Nine years later, Mao would make the same point more succinctly: ‘the Party commands the gun: the gun shall never be allowed to command the Party.’¹⁶⁶

Without mentioning Zhu by name, Mao flayed the army leaders unmercifully for tolerating feudal practices, and for ‘grossly deficient military skills’. Corporal punishment, he complained, was still rampant, especially among officers of the Second Column (formed from Zhu's old 28th Regiment), where brutality had reached such a point that there had been three suicides, and the men said bitterly: ‘Officers do not beat soldiers; they beat them to death.’ Prisoners were maltreated; deserters, shot; and sick and wounded Red Army men left to die – all in flagrant violation of Party principles.¹⁶⁷

The Central directive made Mao's leadership unassailable. But it did nothing to change his views on the issue which had triggered the dispute in the first place – whether to wage guerrilla warfare, or to secure fixed revolutionary bases – as he made clear a few days later in a private letter to Lin Biao. The Central Committee, he argued, was too pessimistic, just as it had been a year earlier when it had proposed that the Red Army be dispersed. The contradictions in Chinese society in general, and between the warlords in particular, were growing so acute that ‘a single spark can start a prairie fire’ – and this would happen ‘very soon’:

Marxists are not fortune-tellers … But when I say there will soon be a high tide of revolution in China, I am emphatically not speaking of something which, in the words of some people ‘is possibly coming’, something illusory, unattainable, and devoid of significance for action. It is like a ship far out at sea, whose masthead can already be seen at the horizon from the shore; it is like the morning sun in the East whose shimmering rays are visible from a high mountain top; it is like a child about to be born, moving restlessly in its mother's womb.¹⁶⁸

In writing these lines, Mao was totally at odds with Party policy, which held that no new revolutionary upsurge was discernible.¹⁶⁹ The same Central directive that had restored him to power had warned the Front Committee specifically against reading too much into contradictions between the warlords. But, unknown to him, in the intervening two months, Party policy had changed.

*

All through 1929, China and Russia had been at loggerheads over the status of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, which was under joint Russian and Chinese administration. Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government in Nanjing, backed by the new Manchurian leader, Zhang Xueliang, wanted this dual system ended. In May, Chinese police raided the Soviet consulates in Harbin, Tsitsihar and other Manchurian cities (which had continued operating after those in China itself were closed), and seized documents showing that Soviet officials were continuing to promote communist subversion. In July, a number were deported, and soon afterwards all remaining consular ties were broken.

After some hesitation, Moscow decided to teach the Chinese a lesson. In October, the Comintern wrote to the CCP, asking it to ‘strengthen and expand guerrilla warfare’, especially in Manchuria and in Jiangxi and north-western Hunan, where Mao and He Long were active, to coincide with a punitive expedition by Russian army units across the Chinese border.¹⁷⁰ By the time this message reached Shanghai, at the beginning of December, the Nanjing government had backed down and was earnestly suing for peace. But the political analysis the letter contained quickly took on a life of its own.

To justify the call for a guerrilla offensive, Moscow had proclaimed that China had ‘entered a period of deep national crisis’, characterised by ‘a rising revolutionary tide’ and ‘an objective presupposition that the revolutionary high tide will surely arrive’.¹⁷¹ The language was deliberately ambiguous, but its tone was strikingly different from the caution of previous Comintern pronouncements, and it convinced Li Lisan, now emerging as the dominant figure in the Central leadership, that he could at last assert that the long-awaited revolutionary upsurge was at hand.¹⁷²

This he did in a Central Committee directive issued on December 8, which called for a rapid expansion of the Red Army through the incorporation of peasant self-defence units; improved co-ordination among different communist military forces, with concentration, rather than dispersion, as the guiding principle; and a unified strategy for rural and urban areas. It was in this last connection that the most startling policy reversal occurred:

The previous tactics of avoiding the capture of major cities must be changed. So long as there is a possibility of victory, and so long as the masses can be aroused, attacks should be launched against them and they should be occupied. Rapidly taking possession of major cities would have the greatest political significance. This strategy, if co-ordinated with the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ struggle throughout the entire country, will promote the great revolutionary tide.¹⁷³

When this document reached Jiangxi towards the end of January 1930, Mao had the agreeable surprise of learning that the Central Committee's estimate of revolutionary prospects was now much closer to his own. A few days later, at an enlarged Front Committee conference at Pitou, near Jian, he was able to savour the spectacle of his comrades, one after another, humbly acknowledging the correctness of his analysis of the previous summer and pledging themselves once more to ‘liberate the whole of Jiangxi province’, starting with Jian itself.¹⁷⁴

To that end, a General Front Committee was established, with Mao as Secretary, to act as the ‘supreme leading organ’ of his own Fourth Red Army; of Peng Dehuai's Fifth Army, now 3,000-strong and based in the area north of Jinggangshan; and of the newly formed Sixth Army, headed by Peng's colleague, Huang Gonglue, which was operating along the southern reaches of the Gan River; as well as of the base areas in south-west Jiangxi, west Fujian and northern Guangdong.

The meeting issued a final statement, which Mao drafted, brimming with revolutionary fervour:

A high tide of world revolution will burst forth! The high tide of the Chinese revolution will arrive very soon, Chinese soviets will appear as successors to the Russian soviets and they will become a powerful branch of the world soviet [system]! Within China, a Jiangxi soviet will appear first, because the conditions … are more mature in Jiangxi than in other provinces … The [final outcome of our] struggle will inevitably be that … the revolutionary forces in the south will merge together with the revolutionary forces in the whole country to bury the ruling classes completely.¹⁷⁵

But rhetoric was one thing; reality, another. When it came to putting these plans into practice, Mao proceeded with great caution. Even the decision to attack Jian was not quite what it seemed. ‘This call to action is entirely correct,’ he wrote. ‘The first step, however, is not to strike at the town, but rather to encircle it, with the object of making life even more difficult [for those] inside, and sowing panic … After that, we will go on to the [next stage].’ In the event, even the first step was aborted when the Guomindang went on to the offensive, and in March the attack was called off altogether. A few days later, an attempt to take Ganzhou was likewise abandoned. Instead, the General Front Committee decided to spend the next three months developing and expanding the existing rural base area, on the grounds that expansion without consolidation was ‘serious opportunism’.¹⁷⁶

This circumspection did not pass unnoticed in Shanghai, where Li Lisan quickly realised that there was a fundamental divergence over what a ‘revolutionary high tide’ entailed.

Li's ‘high tide’ was grounded in theory. It originated in a Comintern document, written in Moscow to suit the requirements of Soviet national interests, which Li then bent to his own purposes. Mao's was a matter of practical politics. For the past year he had argued that the only correct way forward was to build up the rural base areas. The Central Committee's directive of September had held that this required a ‘rising revolutionary tide’. To Mao, Li Lisan's affirmation that that condition had now been met simply gave added legitimacy to the policies he would have carried out anyway.

If, as part of the deal, Mao had to pay lip-service to the idea of capturing cities, he was quite willing to do so, provided it did not expose the Red Army to unnecessary risk. Moreover even the lip-service, to start with, was minimal. The Pitou meeting stated explicitly that the Party's ‘main task’ was ‘to expand the territory of the soviet [base] areas’. The taking of cities, as a generic policy (as distinct from the specific plan to take Jian), was not even mentioned.¹⁷⁷ Indeed, only a few weeks earlier, at Gutian, Mao had derided those who wanted to ‘march into big cities’ as being only interested in pleasure-seeking, and ‘eating and drinking to their hearts’ content’.¹⁷⁸

To Li, on the other hand, urban revolution was primordial. Most of his career had been spent with organised labour, from his apprenticeship, under Mao, among the Anyuan miners, to the May 30 movement in 1925, where he had gained national prominence. Just as Mao believed fervently that rural revolution held the key to China's future, so Li was convinced that the proletariat would be its salvation.

To this deep political divide was added a personal dimension. Li was six years younger than Mao. When they had worked together on the labour movement at Anyuan, they had got on well enough. But they had never been close, and the younger man had not forgiven Mao for his indifference to the reported execution of Li's landlord father during the ‘red terror’ in Hunan two years earlier. The rather awkward note that Mao addressed to ‘Brother Li’ in October 1929, when he finally learned of his promotion, asking him to ‘write me a letter with your excellent guidance’, made plain the misgivings which this news had inspired.¹⁷⁹

Even putting personal factors aside, Mao's political differences with the Centre over the ‘revolutionary high tide’ would not have stayed hidden for long. In late February 1930, Zhou Enlai drafted a much fuller and more detailed exposition of the leadership's new strategy, issued as CC Circular no. 70, which criticised Zhu and Mao by name for ‘persisting in concealing and dispersing their forces’. The Party's objective, it declared, was to achieve ‘preliminary victory in one or several provinces’, and to that end the Red Army's entire strategy must be geared to seizing key cities on major transport routes, in co-ordination with local uprisings, political strikes by workers and mutinies by nationalist garrisons. Two weeks later, on March 10, the Politburo again criticised Mao's forces for aimlessly ‘circling around’. Another Central directive charged that he was acting ‘counter to his Party duty and the national revolutionary situation’.¹⁸⁰ Zhou then departed for Moscow, not to return until August, leaving Li Lisan in sole charge of Central policy.¹⁸¹

Throughout the spring and early summer of 1930 Mao resisted these instructions.

His forces refused to budge from the Jiangxi–Guangdong border, where they skirmished with small nationalist units and built up their military strength. Mao himself ignored Li's demands that he come to Shanghai for a ‘Conference of Representatives from Soviet Areas’, which, as a result, in mid-May, was convened in the absence of the most important of them. Carrying out mistaken directives, he told the Front Committee airily, was actually ‘a form of sabotage’, and he would have no part in it.¹⁸²

Meanwhile Li's own thinking – ‘the Li Lisan line’, as it was later known – came increasingly to resemble the radical views espoused by Qu Qiubai, three years earlier. Like Qu, Li declared that it was wrong to rely on the Red Army alone to carry out the revolution; army units must operate in tandem with workers’ insurrections. Like Qu, he insisted that there must be ‘only attack, not withdrawal’. Mao's tactics of flexible warfare were ‘no longer suited to modern requirements … now that we need to take key cities’, and he and Zhu must ‘change their ways’, and rid themselves of their guerrilla mentality. Mao's concept of ‘using the countryside to encircle the city’, which had appeared explicitly for the first time in his plan for the attack on Jian, was likewise ‘highly erroneous’; and his notion that ‘rural work comes first, and urban work, second’ was an even more serious mistake.¹⁸³

Matters came to a head in June. After a series of blistering criticisms, in which Mao was accused of being ‘terrified of imperialism’; exhibiting a peasant viewpoint and ‘roving bandit ideology’; and persistently disobeying Central Committee instructions, the Politburo passed a resolution rejecting his proposal to set up a revolutionary regime in Jiangxi alone, and holding out instead a far more apocalyptic prospect:

China is the weakest link in the ruling chain of world imperialism. It is the place where the volcano of the world revolution is most likely to erupt … The Chinese revolution may even possibly … set off the world revolution and the final, decisive class war worldwide … Therefore the immediate task of the Communist Party is to call on the broad masses … to prepare resolutely for the concerted general uprising of all revolutionary forces … [and] actively to prepare from now on for armed insurrection … For the present, while the new revolutionary high tide approaches day by day, our general tactical policy is to prepare ourselves for winning preliminary successes in one or more provinces and for setting up a national revolutionary regime.¹⁸⁴

The plan which Li Lisan drew up on the basis of this assessment envisaged an initial attack by Mao's units on Jiujiang and Nanchang, followed by a concerted Red Army offensive against Wuhan.¹⁸⁵

To bring the communist forces more firmly under his own control, Li ordered an extensive political and military reorganisation. A network of Action Committees was set up, to serve as emergency organs of political power in each province, answering directly to the Centre (which meant in practice to Li himself). In the army, a Central Revolutionary Military Commission was established, also answerable to Li, to direct the work of four new army groups which replaced the existing military structure.¹⁸⁶ Ten days later, a Central Committee special envoy, Tu Zhennong, reached Mao at Tingzhou, and handed him and Zhu De a direct order to begin moving their forces north. To sweeten the pill, Mao was offered the chairmanship of the new Military Commission. Zhu was made Commander-in-Chief. There was no choice but to obey.¹⁸⁷

A poem Mao wrote soon afterwards betrayed his ambivalence towards the whole venture:

A million workers and peasants rise eagerly together,
Rolling up Jiangxi like a mat, striking straight at Hunan and Hubei,
Yet the ‘Internationale’ sounds a melancholy note,
A raging tempest falls upon us from the heavens.¹⁸⁸

As though to underline Mao's doubts, the army moved extremely slowly. It left Tingzhou on June 28. Ten days later it had still not reached Xingguo, less than a hundred miles to the west. Two more weeks would elapse before it first engaged enemy troops at Zhangzhu, seventy miles further north. Then Mao and Zhu decided that Nanchang was too well-defended to risk a frontal attack, and that a symbolic gesture would have to suffice. Accordingly, on August 1, a detachment was sent to the railway station on the river-bank opposite the city, where they fired shots into the air to mark the anniversary of the Nanchang Uprising three years earlier.¹⁸⁹ ‘Since we had fulfilled our task of holding an August 1 demonstration,’ Mao explained to the Central Committee shortly afterwards, ‘we scattered in the area around Fengxin [on the far side of the mountains, fifty miles to the west] to mobilise the masses, raise funds, make propaganda and so on.’¹⁹⁰

So much for Li Lisan's grand design of a quick, co-ordinated drive against Wuhan. But by then, in any case, Li had other problems. His insurrectionary zeal had set off alarm bells in Moscow. In May the Comintern had ordered a letter to be drafted, underlining that ‘no nationwide revolutionary high tide has yet appeared’. The strength of the revolutionary movement, it went on, ‘is not sufficient to overthrow the rule of the GMD and the imperialists … [But while] it cannot dominate China, it can take control of a number of major provinces.’¹⁹¹ This was quite different from the line which Li Lisan had evolved. He had consistently argued that independent provincial regimes, or, for that matter, permanent base areas of any kind, could survive only in the context of a national uprising, and that to assert, as Mao had done, that individual local regimes could precede the nationwide upsurge was ‘extremely erroneous’.¹⁹² Yet that was precisely what Moscow now required him to believe.

The letter arrived in Shanghai on July 23. At that point, it must have been clear to Li that the offensive he was planning did not have Moscow's backing and ought to be called off. Instead, no doubt hoping that victory would provide its own justification, he concealed it from the rest of the Politburo.¹⁹³

Two days later, Peng Dehuai made a surprise advance on Changsha, defeating a GMD force under He Jian four times bigger than his own and taking the city on July 27. After holding out for nine days – and provoking alarmist headlines in newspapers all over Europe – he was compelled to withdraw.¹⁹⁴ Nevertheless, Li Lisan was ecstatic, and Mao, too, was evidently persuaded that seizing power in Hunan might, after all, be a realistic proposition.¹⁹⁵ The two forces linked up in mid-August, and at a meeting near Liuyang on August 23, it was agreed that they should combine to form the First Front Army, with Zhu as Commander-in-Chief and Mao as Political Commissar and Secretary of the General Front Committee. A Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Committee, with Mao as Chairman, was also established, to act as the supreme organ of power in the battle zone, with authority over both the Front Committee and local and provincial Party authorities.

The same meeting decided, after considerable debate, to make another attempt to take Changsha, and, this time, to hold it.¹⁹⁶

Mao himself appears to have had mixed feelings. He Jian's units had been severely shaken, and the Red Army's morale was high. On the other hand, the element of surprise had been lost. His misgivings were reflected in a letter the following day, in which he underlined the ‘extreme importance’ of large numbers of reinforcements being sent from Jiangxi – ‘10,000 men within two weeks, and another 20,000 within a month’ – adding prudently that while it ‘should be possible’ to capture Changsha, ‘an intense campaign’ would be necessary.¹⁹⁷

Those caveats proved well-justified. The nationalists put up stubborn resistance, and the communist attack bogged down a few miles south-east of the city. On September 12, with fresh Guomindang forces closing in, Mao gave the order to withdraw.¹⁹⁸

Twenty-four hours later, the troops were told they were going back to Jiangxi. The rhetoric was maintained about ‘winning initial victory in Wuhan and seizing political power in the whole country’, but the next target was much more modest. After three weeks for rest and re-equipment an attack would be made on Jian. It was the third-ranking city in the province, with a population of 40,000. Local communist forces had tried to capture it eight times, but each time had been driven back.¹⁹⁹

On the night of October 4, however, the defenders slipped away without a fight, and Mao was able to announce the ‘first seizure of a major city by the Red Army and the masses [in Jiangxi] in several years of fighting … [and] the beginning of victory in the whole of Jiangxi province’.²⁰⁰ That was laying it on a bit thick: the communists actually held Jian for just six weeks. But it reflected well enough the jubilation among the Party leadership and the rank and file. Hyperbolic proclamations were issued, calling for the strength of the Red Army to be increased to one million men; pledging eternal solidarity with the Soviet Union and the world proletariat; and predicting that, in the current ‘global revolutionary situation’, soviet power would ‘undoubtedly burst forth’ in China and throughout the world.²⁰¹

Mao set up his headquarters in a landlord's house, a comfortable stone-built dwelling in the middle of the city. He and He Zizhen lived behind the inner courtyard, amid the red-lacquered splendour of what had been the women's quarters, while Zhu De and his young partner, Kang Keqing, occupied the outer rooms. For all Mao's warnings at Gutian about the snares of city life, everyone, himself included, was glad of the respite it offered.

In Shanghai, meanwhile, Li Lisan was in deep trouble.

In July, a Soviet military adviser had installed a secret radio transmitter, for use by the Central Committee to communicate with Moscow. Li's freedom of manoeuvre, which had been based on the months it used to take for letters to go back and forth to the Comintern, disappeared overnight. One of the first messages received, on July 28, forcefully restated Soviet opposition to his plans for urban uprisings.²⁰² Once again, Li concealed it. But a month later, after Moscow had condemned his plans as ‘adventurist’ and told him bluntly there was ‘no serious chance of capturing big cities’, he was forced to countermand planned insurrections in Wuhan and Shanghai.²⁰³

By then, Zhou Enlai and Qu Qiubai were both back, and Li was no longer able to dissimulate Moscow's views.²⁰⁴ Even so, he refused to cancel the order to retake Changsha, and when, in September, a Central Committee plenum was held, he insisted that, all along, he had merely been following the Comintern's lead.²⁰⁵

For a while, Li's defiance paid off. The Third Plenum, as it was known, concluded that, despite ‘ambiguities and mistakes’, stemming from excessive optimism, ‘the Politburo's [general] line is correct’. But the reprieve was short-lived. In October, Moscow received details of some of Li's wilder statements that autumn, when he had proposed, among other things, an uprising in Manchuria to set off a war between Russia and Japan, and had spoken disparagingly of the Russians’ understanding of Chinese affairs.²⁰⁶

Stalin's patience snapped.

In a stinging letter of denunciation, which reached Shanghai in mid-November, the Comintern accused Li Lisan of having implemented an anti-Marxist, anti-Comintern, un-Bolshevik, un-Leninist line. Recalled to Moscow in disgrace, he made an abject and well-publicised confession, not to be heard from again for another fifteen years.

Mao's own views during this period are not easy to fathom. He plainly did believe that the revolution was gaining ground, both at home and abroad. The newspapers that fell into the communists’ hands spoke of the Great Depression in the United States, a surge of industrial unrest in Europe and anti-imperialist uprisings in Asia and Latin America. On the other hand, his public insistence that autumn that ‘the revolutionary upsurge in the entire nation is rising higher every day’²⁰⁷ was belied by his prudence in action. After the capture of Jian, he repeatedly held back colleagues who were convinced that Li Lisan was right and that their first duty was to seize Nanchang and then press on to Wuhan.²⁰⁸ Their first task, Mao countered, was to seize power in one province, Jiangxi: the rest would follow later.²⁰⁹

The debate over Li's dream of nationwide conquest was cut short when Chiang Kai-shek announced that he would crush the ‘Red menace’ in Jiangxi, once and for all, in the coming six months. He planned to use 100,000 men, a vastly greater force than the Guomindang had ever assembled for an anti-communist campaign before. However, he now faced a very different army from the war-weary contingent of half-starved guerrillas who had been driven in disarray from Jinggangshan in the winter of 1928. Then Mao's and Peng Dehuai's men together numbered fewer than 4,000, only half of whom had guns; the rest had carried spears, or fought with staves and cudgels. Now the First Front Army had 40,000 troops, most of whom were equipped with modern rifles.²¹⁰

From a conventional military standpoint, their quality left a good deal to be desired. Most were illiterate peasants. Orders had to be posted: ‘Don't shit all over the place!’ and ‘Don't rifle the pockets of prisoners!’²¹¹ Yet, from this primitive material, in the year since the Gutian conference, Red Army political workers had forged a highly motivated and increasingly sophisticated fighting force.

Literacy campaigns were conducted. Discipline was strengthened. A system of appraisal and promotion was introduced for the officer corps. Recruits had to be ‘between 16 and 30 years old; at least 4 feet 11 inches tall; and in good health with no serious diseases.’²¹² It was a measure of the difficulty of the task that Mao found it necessary to explain:

The reason [for these requirements] is that those with eye ailments are unable to aim and shoot; those who are deaf are unable to distinguish orders; those with a collapsed nose mostly have hereditary syphilis and are susceptible to [other] contagious diseases; those who stutter are unable to carry out the communications tasks of a soldier. As for those with [other] ailments, not only does their weak physical condition make them unable to fight, but there is a danger that they will spread their diseases to others.²¹³

On the battlefield, first-aid stations were set up and auxiliary units charged with burying the dead. Supply and transport departments were formed, responsible for the baggage trains and field kitchens. Reconnaissance, map-making, intelligence and security sections were established.

From June 1930 onwards, detailed military orders were issued by Zhu De and Mao once or several times a day, setting out the order of battle; marching plans; instructions for posting sentries; arrangements for river crossings; and all the other paraphernalia needed to keep twenty regiments on the move. Senior officers were assigned aides-de-camp, and field telephones began to replace the couriers and flag-signallers that had been the only means of battlefield communication before.²¹⁴

Only in one respect was the Red Army still desperately inferior to its Guomindang adversaries: military technology. After the failed assault on Changsha, Mao issued standing instructions for the capture of enemy radio sets (and operators, to train Red Army signallers in how to use them); and machine-gun and mortar sections were set up with captured enemy weapons. But as the Comintern noted, it remained ‘poorly armed; extremely feebly supplied with war matériel; and exceptionally badly off when it comes to ordnance and artillery’.²¹⁵

In 1930, thanks partly to ‘the Li Lisan line’, the Red Army's tactics had begun to shift from guerrilla to mobile warfare. But to meet the challenge posed by Chiang's proposed encirclement campaign, a new strategy was needed. On October 30, at an enlarged meeting of the Front Committee in a small village near Luofang, on the Yuan River, seventy-five miles south-west of Nanchang, Mao outlined for the first time the principle of ‘luring the enemy in deep’. Like many profound ideas, it was in essence extremely simple – little more than an extension of the tactic Mao had devised on the Jinggangshan: ‘When the enemy advances, we withdraw; when the enemy tires, we attack.’ In its new form, this became: ‘Lure the enemy deep into the Red Area, wait until they are exhausted and annihilate them!’²¹⁶ The corollary, Mao explained later, was ‘the tactic of protracted war’:

The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we just will not do it. The enemy has internal conflicts. He just wants to defeat us and then to return to his own internal battles … We will let him stew, and then, when his own internal problems become acute, we will smite him a mighty blow.²¹⁷

The new strategy did not lack critics. Some argued that it was a negation of the offensive policy advocated by Li Lisan (as, indeed, it was), incompatible with the idea of a ‘rising revolutionary tide’ – which Mao continued to proclaim – and with the directive to attack key cities. Others, with good reason, feared the havoc the nationalists would wreak in the areas they overran. However, Zhu De supported Mao, and, with some misgivings, the Front Committee approved the plan, which was conveyed to military commanders next day.²¹⁸

For six weeks, Chiang's armies, harassed by local Red Guards, trailed the communist forces as they withdrew across the rugged hill country of central Jiangxi, never giving battle, abandoning one after another the counties they had occupied during the summer – first Jishui and Jian, then Yongfeng, Le'an and Donggu – in a slow, zigzag retreat towards the south, where peasant support for the Red forces was strongest.

At the beginning of December, Chiang himself arrived in Nanchang. Two additional divisions were despatched to seal the Fujian border, while the main force, in four columns, formed a slowly tightening arc, 150 miles long, across the middle of Jiangxi, in the centre of which, near the village of Huangpi, less than ten miles from the nationalist front line, the communist forces silently waited.

Their first chance came on Christmas Eve, two days before Mao's thirty-seventh birthday. Peng Dehuai's forces (now the Third Army Group) were sent north to lie in wait for Chiang's 50th Division, commanded by Tan Daoyuan. But Tan's men, sensing a trap, halted their advance. After four days, the plan was abandoned.

The entire Front Army then wheeled left towards Longgang, a small town thirteen miles to the south-west, where the other nationalist vanguard unit, Zhang Huizan's 18th Division, had arrived on the 29th. The communist forces moved into position that night, and at 10 a.m. next morning, a general offensive began. Five hours later it was all over: Zhang himself and his two brigade commanders were captured, along with 9,000 other prisoners, 5,000 rifles and thirty machine-guns.²¹⁹ When the news reached Tan Daoyuan, he ordered a hasty retreat. But on January 3, the Front Army caught up with him, and at Dongshao, thirty miles to the north-east, took another 3,000 prisoners and large quantities of arms and equipment, including, to Mao's delight, a complete signals unit, which two weeks later became the basis of the Red Army's first radio section. It relied on hand-cranked generators and cat's-whiskers, but it was the most advanced technology of the day.²²⁰

Zhang Huizan was executed and his head placed on a wooden board, to be floated down the Gan River to Nanchang, to taunt Chiang Kai-shek.²²¹

Mao, more than anyone, had reason to be pleased. Not only had his new strategy of ‘luring the enemy in deep’ succeeded better than anyone had dared hope, but in December he had learned that the Third Plenum had restored him to alternate membership of the Politburo, a position he had last held at the time of the Autumn Harvest Uprising, three years before.²²²

It was too good to last.

In the middle of January 1931, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, Xiang Ying, by far the most senior leader ever to visit the base area, arrived unannounced at Mao's headquarters at Xiaobu, in the mountains north of Huangpi, to inform him that a new Central Bureau, headed by Zhou Enlai, had been established, with supreme authority over the soviet base areas not just in Jiangxi but all over China. The good news was that Mao, who had known nothing of this decision, had been appointed acting Secretary of the Central Bureau two months earlier. The bad news was that Xiang was now going to replace him.²²³

Xiang was a former labour organiser, four years older than Mao. He had been elected a Standing Committee member at the Sixth Congress as part of the drive to increase the number of workers in the leadership. His mission was simple: to bring the base area back under direct Central Committee control. On January 15, Xiang ordered the dissolution of the Front Committee, which was Mao's principal power base, and of the Revolutionary Committee, which Mao also headed, and removed or replaced him in his other main posts.²²⁴

However, the changes were deceptive. Xiang had seniority on his side, Mao had the Front Army behind him. The result was a compromise. Xiang assumed the appearance of power but Mao retained a good part of its substance.

The situation was complicated further by developments in Shanghai, where Stalin had sent his China specialist, Pavel Mif, to convene another Central Committee plenum to expose and denounce the disgraced Li Lisan. Unknown to both Xiang and Mao, this Fourth Plenum had approved a resolution, which soon became required reading for all Party members, condemning Li's errors in extremely harsh terms. It had also made personnel changes. Mao was not affected. Nor was the Party's nominal leader, Xiang Zhongfa, who remained General Secretary. Zhou Enlai, too, had survived, not for the last time, by deftly switching sides. But Qu Qiubai had been dismissed, and Xiang Ying, while remaining in the Politburo, lost his post on the Standing Committee.

The key appointment, however, was of a stocky, rather jowly young man named Wang Ming, who was catapulted to full Politburo membership without having previously been even a member of the Central Committee.²²⁵

Wang, then aged twenty-six, was the leading figure among a group of Chinese students who had graduated from Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, where Mif was Rector, and returned to Shanghai the previous winter. Others in the group were appointed to head key Central Committee departments. Variously known as the ‘28 Bolsheviks’, ‘Stalin's China Section’, or simply the ‘Returned Students’, they were to become the dominant force in the leadership for the next four years.²²⁶

The first reports of Li Lisan's disgrace reached the base area in March 1931, followed, three weeks later, by a Central delegation led by Ren Bishi, whom Mao's Russian Studies Society had sent, a decade earlier, as a sixteen-year-old student to Moscow.²²⁷ Ren, who had joined the Politburo in January, brought with him the texts of the Fourth Plenum resolutions and a directive from the new Party Centre stating that the General Front Committee, with Mao as Secretary, should remain the supreme Party organ in Jiangxi pending a review of the Central Bureau's activities. The Revolutionary Committee was also reinstated, giving Mao, as Committee Chairman, and Zhu De, as Commander-in-Chief, nominal authority over soviet and military work not only in Jiangxi, but in all the Red base areas.²²⁸ This was not because the new leadership in Shanghai had any special regard for Mao; indeed, it would quickly become clear that the reverse was true. But it distrusted Xiang Ying, who was too closely associated with Li Lisan and the old Third Plenum group. By elevating Mao, it sought to curb Xiang's powers.²²⁹

At this juncture, Chiang Kai-shek launched his second encirclement campaign. This time he had assembled 200,000 troops, twice as many as in the winter. The strategy was much the same as before. The nationalists’ main army, Chiang's ‘hammer’, advanced towards the base area from the north-west, planning to crush the Red Army against the ‘anvil’ of warlord forces, pre-positioned on the Guangdong and Fujian borders to block escape routes to the south and east. This time, however, the nationalist commanders moved more cautiously, reinforcing the areas they occupied before each new advance.²³⁰

Mao and Zhu De had been observing these preparations since February.²³¹ But there had been disagreement with Xiang Ying over whether the tactic of ‘luring the enemy in deep’ was feasible when the disparity in numbers was so great, and since neither side could prevail, no clear counter-strategy was defined. The arrival of the ‘Fourth Plenum Delegation’, as Ren Bishi's group was known, muddied the waters further. They proposed that the Red Army should abandon the base area altogether and withdraw into southern Hunan. Mao and Zhu De disagreed. The other leaders were divided, some resurrecting the old argument that the Red forces should be dispersed.²³²

As the debate continued, Chiang's columns rolled inexorably south. Already, in late March, the Red Army had pulled back its main forces to Ningdu county, not far from the area where the decisive battles of the first encirclement had been fought.²³³ There, in the village of Qingtang, matters came to a head.

On April 17, 1931, an enlarged meeting of the Central Bureau passed a series of resolutions harshly criticising Xiang Ying's leadership, and praising Mao's efforts to oppose ‘the Li Lisan line’. Next day, Mao got his way on military strategy, too. Withdrawal was ruled out, and the meeting resolved ‘to make the Jiangxi base area the foundation of a national soviet area’.²³⁴ The Front Army began moving northward, to confront the enemy where Chiang's deployment was weakest, in the hill country near Donggu, while Mao began drawing up plans for an ambitious counter-offensive to punch through enemy lines and march north-east towards Fujian.

Almost exactly a month later, he watched from a white-walled Buddhist temple on the highest peak of the Baiyunshan, the White Cloud Mountains, ten miles west of Donggu, as units of Zhu De's First Army Group poured down the hillsides to attack two Guomindang divisions. After an hour, at a prearranged signal, Peng Dehuai's troops struck at their flanks. More than 4,000 prisoners were taken, along with 5,000 rifles, fifty machine-guns, twenty mortars, and another nationalist signals unit, complete with operators. Over the next two weeks, the Red Army fought four more large-scale engagements, culminating, at the end of May, in the capture of Jianning, in Fujian, a hundred miles to the east. By then altogether 30,000 nationalist troops had been put out of action and 20,000 rifles had been captured. The second encirclement had been torn to shreds, and Chiang's commanders ordered a general retreat.²³⁵

After this, there was no more argument about the tactics the Red Army should follow. Mao and the military commanders were given a free hand.

However, the very scale of their success nearly proved their undoing. As long as ‘the Reds’ could be dismissed as just another group of bandits, Chiang was not too concerned if, for a while, they went unpunished. But a Red Army capable of defeating his best generals was a very different matter. While the nationalist high command in Nanchang continued to trumpet ‘military successes’, Chiang hastily brought in reinforcements. By the end of June, he had amassed 300,000 men, half as many again as in April, for a third ‘communist suppression campaign’.²³⁶

Mao and the rest of the leadership were now caught wrong-footed. He had known since the end of May, when the second campaign was defeated, that a third offensive would follow. But he grossly underestimated the speed with which Chiang would turn his men round. In late June, the Red Army was scattered all across western Fujian, where it had been sent to ‘mobilise the masses and raise funds’, a task that became ever more important as the communist forces expanded. On the 28th, Mao was still counting on having another two or three months for fund-raising and laying in provisions. On the 30th, this was cut to ten days, and before the week was out, an ‘emergency circular’ had been issued, warning that the third campaign was imminent, that it would be ‘extremely cruel’, and that everyone would have to work ten times harder than before if victory was to be achieved.²³⁷

In the next two months, the Red Army came close to total destruction.

The nationalists, this time under Chiang Kai-shek's personal command, advanced very slowly southwards in a vast pincer movement, consolidating the areas they occupied with defensive fortifications and taking pains to ensure that no division became isolated and thereby vulnerable to communist attack.²³⁸

For the first ten days, the Red Army command scrambled to get its forces together and into some kind of battle order. In mid-July, they began withdrawing southward, hoping to persuade Chiang's eastern column, which followed them down the Fujian border, that they were fleeing into Guangdong. Then at Rentian, just north of Ruijin, the main force doubled back and headed west into northern Yudu county, trying to stay out of sight of Chiang's reconnaissance planes by using village paths and barrow-tracks, far from the main highways. Mao's plan was to lie in ambush and hit the weakest of Chiang's western units near Donggu, forcing the eastern column to come to their aid while the Red Army headed for Fujian, attacking the enemy's rear. Given the lack of preparation, it was probably the best Mao could do. But it was too similar to his strategy during the second campaign. This time Chiang was not fooled so easily.

After occupying Ningdu and Ruijin, the nationalist eastern column halted its southward march and began moving west. As they moved deeper into the base area, they were harassed constantly by local Red Guards, who blew bugles and fired old-fashioned muskets to prevent them sleeping at night, set booby-traps along the mountain trails, sabotaged communications lines and ambushed the sick and wounded. The nationalist commanders responded in kind. Zhu De remembered ‘finding villages burned to ashes, and the corpses of civilians lying where they had been shot, cut down or beheaded; even children and the aged. Women lay sprawled on the ground where they had been raped before or after being killed.’

In the last week of July, the communists, exhausted from 300 miles of forced marches through the sweltering heat of the southern summer, stopped to rest in northern Xingguo. There, on the 31st, the main force was ordered to circle round under cover of darkness, get behind the enemy's front-line and launch a night assault on the rearguard of Chiang's western column about fifty miles away. After two gruelling night marches, the men were moving into position when Mao learned that the nationalist commanders had summoned reinforcements and the attack had to be called off.

As the Red Army headed back to Xingguo, nine enemy divisions converged from the north, east and south, hemming them into a narrow salient along the Gan River.

On August 4, Mao and Zhu De decided there was no choice but to try to break out while they still could. One division, accompanied by local Red Guards and peasant militiamen, made a dash westward, as though trying to cross into Hunan, drawing off four nationalist divisions in pursuit. That night, the Red Army's main force squeezed through a gap about twelve miles wide in the ring of encircling forces that had opened up as a result. Two days later, in the first major engagement of the campaign, they defeated two pursuing enemy divisions, and soon afterwards at Longgang, the site of the great communist victory in December, wiped out another large force, taking more than 7,000 prisoners.

But Chiang was getting better at anticipating the Red Army's manoeuvres. Now he sent eight divisions to envelop the communists in a much tighter ring. This time there was no gap.

Again, Mao tried a feint. Part of the First Army Group, pretending to be the main force, made a sortie towards the north. But the ring stayed sealed. The one possible escape route was blocked by a 3,000-foot mountain rearing up between the encampments of two nationalist divisions. The mountain had been left unsecured because it was judged impassable.

That night, under cover of darkness, the entire Red Army, more than 20,000-strong, climbed its precipitous flanks, less than three miles from nationalist sentries, and then raced to find safety in the hill country north of Donggu.

It was an extraordinary feat. But their escape, by a hair's breadth, from complete annihilation, made Mao realise that he was dealing with a much more redoubtable foe than in either of the earlier campaigns. He gave orders for all the heavy baggage to be jettisoned, and for the number of horses to be sharply reduced. The enemy had developed ‘highly mobile forces’, he warned. The Red Army had to be ready for a long, hard struggle involving frequent night marches, where victory would depend on its own mobility surpassing the enemy's ‘not just ten but a hundred times’.

Salvation, however, was at hand. During the summer Chiang Kai-shek's old rivals, Hu Hanmin and Wang Jingwei, had formed an alliance with the Guangdong and Guangxi warlords to set up a government in Canton in opposition to Chiang's regime in Nanjing. At the beginning of September, this new southern government sent troops into Hunan, as ever the pivotal province in any north–south conflict. The threat could not be ignored. The ‘suppression campaign’ in Jiangxi was abandoned to allow Chiang's forces to meet the new menace from the west.

On September 6, Mao and Zhu De watched as the nationalists began to pull out of Xingguo, heading north. In a parting gesture, Chiang announced that he was doubling the rewards on their heads from 50,000 to 100,000 dollars, dead or alive.²³⁹

Mao could claim that, once again, his strategy had proved victorious. Seventeen nationalist regiments had been demolished, and 30,000 enemy troops wounded, killed or taken prisoner. The communists had been left in possession of parts of twenty-one counties in southern Jiangxi and west Fujian with a combined population of over two million people. But, unlike the first two campaigns, communist losses this time had also been heavy. Chiang's forces had not been defeated. The Red Army had won by default.²⁴⁰

On September 18, 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria. For the next year Chiang's attention would be occupied elsewhere. But he had unfinished business in Jiangxi. He and the communists both knew that in due course he would return.

Four years had elapsed since the united front with the Guomindang had sundered and the Communist Party had embraced a policy of armed insurrection. The four main players in the communist revolution in that time – Qu Qiubai, Li Lisan, Zhou Enlai and Mao – had in common an unswerving belief that the revolution would succeed, and China would one day be a communist state.

Their differences had been over method and timing. But in a revolution, method and timing are all.

Qu, the consumptive young writer, lover of Tolstoy and Turgenev, and Li Lisan, whose whole life was communism, both believed in an imminent revolutionary firestorm. Qu, in a memorable letter from a Guomindang prison in 1935, shortly before his execution, wrote that had he remained Party leader, he would have committed the same errors as Li. ‘The only difference’, he declared, ‘would be that I could not have been so reckless as he was; that is, I would not have had his courage.’²⁴¹

Li's misguided obsession with ‘the revolutionary high tide’ left the communists far stronger than they were before he took power. Zhou Enlai, already emerging as the indispensable executive, served with discrimination and skill whatever Moscow ‘line’ happened to prevail at the time. Mao, while not immune to romantic visions, as witness the ‘prairie fire’ he conjured up before the young Lin Biao, was the most down-to-earth of the four and it was his views which prevailed.

By 1931, the two major strategic issues they had argued over – the primacy of the Red Army in the revolutionary struggle, and the relationship between city and countryside – had both been resolved in Mao's favour. The Fourth Plenum vindicated his opposition to Li Lisan just as the Sixth Congress, two-and-a-half years earlier, had vindicated his opposition to Qu Qiubai. Li's (and Zhou's) policies, the plenum acknowledged, had ‘totally overlooked the necessity of consolidating the base areas’. They had ‘considered guerrilla warfare outdated’, and ‘issued premature, adventurist and dogmatic orders to the Red Army to attack big cities’.²⁴² Mao could not have put it better himself.

In future, the Comintern decided that summer, the Red Army would be the principal motor of the revolution, ‘the core around which the revolutionary forces of workers and peasants are … consolidated and organised’. The Party's chief tasks, it added, were to strengthen the army still further, to expand and consolidate the Red base areas, to set up a Chinese soviet government, and to organise the workers and peasants in the Guomindang-ruled ‘white areas’.²⁴³ Since the peasant movement had ‘far outstripped’ the revolutionary movement in the cities, urban work was to be geared to supporting the soviet districts in the countryside.

Workers’ uprisings no longer got even a mention.²⁴⁴

I A CCP Front Committee was the supreme Party organ providing overall guidance to the military units under its control. It had authority over the Military Committee, responsible for military strategy and tactics, and over the local Party committee (at county or special district level) in its area of operations. It was, itself, however, subordinate to the provincial committee in the province where it operated. Thus in Nanchang, Zhou’s Front Committee was (theoretically, at least) under the authority of the Jiangxi Party committee. In Guangdong, it had to answer to the Canton Party committee.

II Seven of the ten marshals of the People's Liberation Army named in 1955 were veterans of the insurrectionary force at Nanchang. The anniversary of the uprising is now celebrated in China as marking the PLA's foundation.

III The Mensheviks (literally, ‘minority faction’) split from the Bolshevik majority of the Russian communist movement in 1902 over the issue of class violence. Soviet communists used the term ‘Menshevism’ to denote any form of right-wing opposition or advocacy of class reconciliation.

IV There was a curious postscript. He Jian, who, in Tang Shengzhi's absence, was acting GMD commander in Hunan, sent soldiers to Shaoshan soon afterwards to desecrate the graves of Mao's parents, in the belief that if Mao were shown to be an unfilial son, whose actions had brought shame on his ancestors, the Red Army would suffer defeat. According to local legend, a peasant took them to the graves of a landlord's parents, which they dug up instead.

V The loyalties of the troops and militias who fought against the communists at this time were frequently blurred, and to describe them simply as ‘nationalist’ or ‘GMD’ forces would be misleading. In the late 1920s, and in some cases well into the 1930s, most such units obeyed local or provincial warlords who, while broadly supporting Chiang Kai-shek, retained considerable independence, allowing them to ignore and, on occasion, directly to oppose, the policies of Chiang and his national army commanders.

VI In January 1928, the CCP Hunan provincial committee had been subjected to such severe repression that it had virtually ceased to exist, so, faute de mieux, the South Hunan Special Committee (even though its members were then under criticism for ‘incorrect and unproletarian political tendencies’) was acting in its place. The repeated physical liquidation of CCP committees in the provinces during this period, and the dearth of qualified senior officials to replace them, meant that Party veterans like Mao often worked under hierarchical superiors who were inexperienced, incompetent, or both. Zhou Lu, despite his grand title of ‘Head of the Military Affairs Department of the South Hunan Special Committee’, was a nonentity. ‘Special committees’ had been set up in all the southern provinces to guide Party work (especially the fomenting of insurrections) in their geographical areas. They were subordinate to the respective provincial committees (where these existed), but had a measure of operational autonomy as well. In theory, Hunan, early in 1928, had Southern and Eastern special committees; Jiangxi had South-Western, Eastern and Northern committees. Some existed only on paper and others operated sporadically.

VII The provincial committee was re-established in March and thereafter reclaimed from the South Hunan Special Committee its authority over the border area. Unfortunately, as Mao was to discover, his new masters were even younger and less experienced than the old.

VIII In 1972, a cache of documents was found at the former home in Changsha of one of Yang Kaihui's aunts. Among them was a letter from 1929 in which Kaihui wrote of learning of Mao's infidelity. Parts of the letter, the original of which is held in the Central Party Archives, have been damaged by damp and insects and are illegible. Its existence has never been officially disclosed.

IX Yang Kaiming was Yang Kaihui's cousin. It was through him, on his return to Changsha in the winter of 1928, that she learned of Mao's relationship with He Zizhen. He was arrested the following year and executed in February 1930.

X Mao set great store by the intelligence he obtained from government newspapers, perhaps a throwback to his newspaper reading habits as a schoolboy and subsequently an editor during the May Fourth movement. He Zizhen recalled Red Army expeditions into enemy territory whose sole aim was to procure newspapers for Mao. In the winter of 1928, during the blockade he paid peddlers to bring in newspapers disguised as wrapping paper for their wares.