MAO

The reappraisal of strategy that was forced on the Chinese leadership after 1927 by the practical needs of the revolution and the imperatives of survival was accompanied by fundamental change in the nature of the Party itself.

They described this process, approvingly, as ‘Bolshevisation’, and to an extent, the label was apt: they did make a conscious attempt to emulate Bolshevik practices; to instil Leninist discipline; to create an effective, centralised, political machine. But other factors were at work, too. Stalin's campaigns against Trotsky and Bukharin offered a model of intra-party strife which the Chinese Party dutifully replicated, expelling Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi as Trotskyists in late 1929; and He Mengxiong and Luo Zhanglong (Mao's close friend since their student days in Changsha), as rightists fifteen months later.¹ These tendencies were reinforced by the brutality of the Chinese revolution: White terror in the cities (where, from mid-1927 on, communists were mercilessly hunted down and killed); White terror in the countryside (where warlord soldiers and landlord militias routinely torched villages suspected of harbouring communist sympathisers); and the constant threat, in the Red areas, of nationalist encirclement and destruction.

In the early years, the violence fostered by Guomindang reprisals and Party sectarianism was usually directed outwards. The ‘black-gowned gunmen’ brought in to act as enforcers during the Shanghai strikes of 1927 were ostensibly acting against ‘yellow union leaders’, who advocated class compromise; the widespread ‘burning and killing’ which accompanied Qu Qiubai's armed uprisings was, in theory, designed to force waverers to come over to the communist side.

By the time of the Sixth Congress, in mid-1928, such coercive tactics were condemned as counter-productive.² When Mao's forces took Tingzhou in April 1929, he reassured the Central Committee that news reports of the Red Army burning down 500 houses and killing more than a thousand townspeople were ‘all nonsense and unworthy of credence’, that in fact ‘only five people were killed, all of them most reactionary’ and five houses had been burned down. Terror, Mao argued (as he had in his report on Hunan in the winter of 1926), was indispensable to the communist cause, and Red execution squads must be formed ‘to massacre the landlords and the despotic gentry as well as their running dogs without the slightest compunction’. But the use of terror should be directed exclusively against class enemies.³

Notwithstanding such caveats, the distinction between enemy and friend gradually became blurred. Inevitably, sooner or later, the methods applied to the one would be used against the other.

The flashpoint was reached in February 1930, at the enlarged Front Committee conference at Pitou. It had been called by Mao primarily to discuss Li Lisan's decision to launch attacks on cities, but a good part of the meeting was spent considering a much more parochial issue: the state of the Party in the adjacent districts of Donggu and Ji'an. A notice issued by Mao a week later, in the name of the Front Committee, explained:

There is a severe crisis in the Party in western and southern Jiangxi. It consists in the fact that the local leading organs of the Party at all levels are filled with landlords and rich peasants, and the Party's policy is completely opportunist. If we do not thoroughly clean up this situation, not only will it be impossible to carry out the Party's great political tasks but the revolution will suffer a fundamental defeat. [We] call on all revolutionary comrades … to overthrow the opportunist political leadership, eliminate the landlords and rich peasants … and see to it that the Party is rapidly Bolshevised.⁴

The problems concealed behind this jargon were twofold. The local leaders resented Mao's efforts to impose the centralised control of a Front Committee dominated by non-Jiangxi men, mainly Hunanese; they were also unenthusiastic about the harsh new land reform policies which Mao and the other outsiders were promoting to the detriment of their own families and clans.⁵

To Mao, they were ‘mountaintop-ists’, who put the interests of their small area ahead of those of the Party as a whole, and they had to be brought into line.

The meeting therefore decreed the dissolution of the existing Party hierarchy in the area, and the formation of a new South-West Jiangxi Special Committee, headed by Liu Shiqi, a young Hunanese communist who was married to He Zizhen's sister, He Yi (and was therefore Mao's brother-in-law).⁶ A second, secret directive ordered the execution of four of the founders of the South-West Jiangxi Party, known locally as the ‘Four Great Party officials’, to serve as an example to others.⁷

Why did Mao decide that the unwritten rule against killing Party comrades must be broken? There is a clue in the resolution he wrote at Gutian, six weeks earlier, when he warned that those in the Party and the Red Army who manifested an ‘individualistic aversion to discipline’ were acting in a manner that was ‘objectively counter-revolutionary’.⁸ This was a pure Stalinist notion, which Mao would subsequently develop into a subtler, more flexible theory of ‘contradictions between the enemy and ourselves’ (antagonistic contradictions) and ‘contradictions among the people’ (which were non-antagonistic).⁹ But in 1930 it was already ample justification for considering that communists who obstructed the policies that the Party laid down, whatever their reason for doing so, had become part of ‘the enemy’ and should be treated as such. Since their guilt was political, the judicial process was irrelevant except as theatre to educate the masses. In such cases Party leaders, Mao included, would proclaim that the accused should be ‘openly tried and sentenced to death by execution’ (no other verdict being possible since that was what had already been decided).¹⁰

Judicial independence had never been a strong point in China, but whatever little there might have been, Bolshevism now extinguished.

In this sense, Mao's espousal of revolutionary violence within the Party was just one more step on the road he had begun travelling a decade earlier, when he had concluded that Marxism – the same political philosophy that, as an idealistic young student, he had rejected as too extreme and too violent – could alone save China. The taboo against killing had been eroded in stages: first in theory, when Mao had defended the peasant jacqueries in Hunan; then in practice, a year later, when he had to lead troops into battle. Now, in 1930, the definition of ‘enemy’ became more diffuse and malleable.

That ‘one more step’ for Mao was to have extraordinary consequences for the Party and army organisations that he led.

Having been given a mandate to purge, Liu Shiqi worked with a will. Hundreds of cadres of landlord and rich peasant origin were expelled from the South-West Jiangxi Party over the next few months. In May, internal Party documents began referring for the first time to a mysterious ‘AB-tuan’ which had allegedly infiltrated local committees, especially in Ji'an and neighbouring Anfu, Yongfeng and Xingguo. This group, often referred to as the Anti-Bolshevik League (the letters A and B actually denoted the tuan's senior and junior levels of membership), was a right-wing clique within the Guomindang. It had been established in Ji'an in 1926, and while moribund elsewhere in China, remained a significant presence in south-west Jiangxi, along with other reformist movements like the Reorganisationists (supporters of the former Left-GMD leader Wang Jingwei), the Third Party and the Social Democrats.¹¹ In an area where communists, reformists and Guomindang supporters all came from the same social strata, often from the same families and clans, and might well have divided loyalties, the idea of an AB-tuan fifth column was not inherently improbable. But the sheer number of agents claimed to have been found did strain credulity.

By October, when Mao's forces took Ji'an, more than a thousand South-West Jiangxi Party members – one in thirty of the total – had been executed as AB-tuan members.¹²

The degree of Mao's personal involvement up to this point is uncertain. There is a prima-facie case that he must have been implicated to some extent. Even without his ties to Liu Shiqi, the Front Committee was ultimately responsible for the South-West Jiangxi Special Committee's work. Mao was informed of the alleged AB-tuan connection as soon as it was discovered, and he would have received a detailed briefing when the Red Army passed through the area in July on its way north to Nanchang. Yet at that stage, while large numbers had been arrested, relatively few people had been killed. The blood-purge began in earnest only after the Red Army had moved on.¹³

The trigger was the return of one of the Jiangxi leaders who had been passed over when Liu Shiqi was appointed. Li Wenlin, a thirty-year-old intellectual who, like Mao, was of rich peasant origin, had been among the founders of the Donggu base area, and had impressed Mao by his leadership when the Red Army had sought refuge there in the spring of 1929.¹⁴ A year later, he had gone to Shanghai to attend the Soviet Areas Conference, where he established good relations with Li Lisan. On his return, in August 1930, while Mao was away in Hunan, he persuaded the Special Committee to call an enlarged plenum, which dismissed Liu Shiqi; endorsed Li Lisan's policy of using the Red Army to attack cities; and rescinded the radical land law which had been approved, at Mao's insistence, that spring.¹⁵ Li Wenlin himself was named Special Committee Secretary, and soon afterwards became head of the Provincial Action Committee established on Li Lisan's orders.¹⁶

As one of its first acts, this new leadership ordered ‘the most merciless torture’ to ferret out AB-tuan members, warning that even ‘those people who seem very positive and loyal, very left-wing and straightforward in what they say’ must be doubted and questioned.¹⁷ The numbers being killed rose steeply, as each confession produced a new clutch of victims, and each victim a new confession. When Mao arrived in Ji'an in October, he therefore found himself confronted with a much bigger, more complex problem than he had imagined when the South-West Jiangxi purge had been launched. Then it had simply been a matter of local Party committees being filled with ‘landlords and rich peasants’. Now, he told the Central Committee, they were ‘filled with AB-tuan members’, who were ‘carrying out assassinations,^I preparing to make contact with the [White] army, and plotting a revolt to eliminate the soviet base areas and the various revolutionary organisations’.¹⁸

Mao's answer was to intensify the purge still further. On October 26, he and Li Wenlin issued a joint statement calling for the removal of ‘rich peasant counter-revolutionaries’ from local soviet governments; the ‘execution of all AB-tuan activists’; and the launching of a campaign against the AB-tuan in the Red Army.¹⁹

Four days later, this appearance of unity within the leadership was shattered by Mao's proposal to ‘lure the enemy in deep’, a strategy which the Jiangxi cadres adamantly opposed. To men whose villages were on the enemy's line of march, the new policy was a matter of life or death: it meant their womenfolk risked being raped and killed, their children and old people butchered, their homes burned down, and all that they possessed destroyed. As the Red Army retreated southward before Chiang Kai-shek's advancing armies, then beginning their first encirclement campaign, mutiny was in the air.²⁰

When the troops reached Huangpi, where they were to regroup and prepare for the coming battles, the Political Departments launched what was euphemistically called ‘a consolidation campaign’ to weed out doubtful elements. The first man to crack was a regimental cadre named Gan Lichen, who confessed after being severely beaten that he was a member of an AB-tuan network. That was all that it needed. Under extraordinary strain, facing an enemy many times stronger, the Red Army ignited.

The flames that had devoured the Party in south-west Jiangxi now began, with fine impartiality, to consume officers and men, as regiment after regiment turned inwards in a fury of self-destruction.²¹ Every unit, down to company level, established a ‘committee for eliminating counter-revolutionaries’. Twenty-one-year-old Xiao Ke, already a division commander, later one of China's top generals, recalled in his memoirs:

In that period, I spent all my time on the AB-tuan problem. Our division had killed 60 people … Then one night in our Divisional Party Committee, it was decided to kill 60 more. Next morning, I went to report … But at the Fourth Army Military Committee, [they] said: ‘You're killing too many. If they are from worker and peasant backgrounds, you can just let them confess …’ After that, I went back at once. The prisoners had already been taken to the execution ground. I said, ‘Don't kill them. The Divisional Party Committee must discuss this again.’ Afterwards, they decided to release more than 30 of them. But more than 20 were still killed. Altogether in the Fourth Army, 1,300 or 1,400 out of 7,000 men were struck down.

Political officers tried to outdo each other for fear of being thought weak. One ordered the execution of a fourteen-year-old ‘little Red devil’ for taking food to officers who, unknown to the child, were AB-tuan suspects. He was saved by the intervention of an army commissar. Elsewhere, an entire company was slaughtered after its commander questioned the need for the purge. In little more than a week, 4,400 officers and men of the First Front Army confessed to links with the AB-tuan. More than 2,000 were summarily shot.

What had begun nine months before as a simple dispute over land reform, fuelled by rivalry between Jiangxi natives and Hunanese, had taken on a monstrous life of its own.

The designations, ‘rich peasant’, ‘AB-tuan member’ and ‘counter-revolutionary element’, became inextricably confused.²² Local differences were coloured by national disputes as the South-West Jiangxi Party leaders, for their own purposes, championed Li Lisan's policies as a counterweight to Mao's.²³ Amid deepening paranoia as the GMD encirclement tightened, the charge of AB-tuan membership became a bludgeon to strike down anyone who questioned Mao's strategy. The purge grew into a blood-bath in which his opponents perished. The stage was set for ‘the Futian events’.

The small market town of Futian lies on the Fushui, a tributary of the Gan River, at the western edge of the White Cloud Mountains, which separate it from Donggu, ten miles to the east. Beside an old stone bridge, women squat, beating washing against flat stones. A few shops, a warren of crooked streets, and a jumble of grey-tiled houses with whitewashed antler-eaves, spread back, higgledy-piggledy, from the banks.^II

The landscape is Pyrenean. From the peaks, thickly covered with pine forest, fir and bamboo, and overgrown with creepers, the view extends across four counties. There are ferns underfoot, and rushing mountain torrents. In summer, the piercing green rice-paddies are worked by small, thin, bony men, with ragged blue jackets, baggy shorts, and wide-brimmed straw hats as big as dustbin lids to protect them against the blinding glare of the sun. In winter, the approaches turn to a sea of mud. The track from Donggu is impassable, and the only access is across the plain from the west, or at high water, by boat along the river.

After the Red Army abandoned Ji'an, in mid-November, Futian became the headquarters of the Jiangxi Provincial Action Committee.

On Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1930, shortly after lunch, a member of Mao's political staff named Li Shaojiu arrived from Huangpi at the head of a company of troops.²⁴ With him he carried two letters from Mao's General Front Committee, addressed to the provincial government leader, Zeng Shan, and the head of the Action Committee's Propaganda Department, Chen Zhengren, both Mao loyalists. The letters ordered the arrests of Li Bofang (alleged to be the head of a secret AB-tuan headquarters inside the Action Committee); Duan Liangbi (an alleged AB-tuan section chief); and Xie Hanchang (Head of the Political Department of the 20th Army at Donggu, also allegedly an AB-tuan agent). Their names and supposed links to the AB-tuan had been revealed under torture by Red Army men who had confessed to being their accomplices.

Li Shaojiu took no chances. He ordered the Committee's offices surrounded by three rings of troops, before entering with an escort of ten soldiers, rifles at the ready. Li, Duan, Xie and five other Action Committee members were seized and bound hand and foot. Most of them were in their early to mid-twenties. When they asked for an explanation, Li merely took out his pistol and pointed it at their heads.

From the Committee's headquarters, the eight officials were taken to the former magistrate's yamen, an immense white-walled building, pierced by a massive central archway opening on to a spacious inner courtyard. Sweet-scented osmanthus trees grew from the raised stone terraces, and covered wooden walkways ran along each side. At the eastern end, a cantilevered grey-tiled roof, with delicately flaring eaves, formed an immense canopy, supported by four huge wooden pillars on carved stone pedestals, covering a raised dais where, in imperial times, the magistrate held court. A gilt signboard suspended from the ceiling proclaimed: ‘The Hall of Sincerity and Respect’.

Behind the dais stood a large wood-panelled torture chamber, where for centuries yamen runners had applied the rigour of imperial law. There Li commenced his interrogation. Duan Liangbi was questioned first:

Li Shaojiu asked me [he wrote later]: ‘Duan Liangbi, are you an AB-tuan member? Are you going to confess? If you do, you will avoid the torture.’

I replied sternly: ‘Look at my history, and my work … Please go ahead and investigate. If I were an AB-tuan member, it would be a crime against the proletariat. Then I wouldn't need you to touch me. I'd take a gun and kill myself.’

But Li answered: ‘As far as your history is concerned … I haven't the ability to debate theories with you. I have only seven kinds of tortures to punish …’

After he had described to me all the seven punishments, I said: ‘So be it. But why should I be afraid? Whatever you do, I …’ Before I had finished my sentence, Li ordered the soldiers to take off my clothes. I was made to kneel naked on the floor. They subjected me to the torture called ‘blowing the landmine’,^III and burned my body with incense sticks … I thought at first: ‘Well, let them burn me to death. In this world death is inevitable, the only question is how.’ My two thumbs were almost broken through, just barely hanging together by the skin. My body was already burned into a festering mess, not a single place was good. I was cut and bruised all over.

Then suddenly they stopped beating me, and Li Shaojiu said: ‘Liangbi, you want to die, but this is not what I want. Whatever happens, you will have to confess that you are in the AB-tuan and to tell us about your network. Otherwise, I will keep you in a state where you are neither living nor dead.’

This was not something that Li Shaojiu, murderous thug that he was, had thought up on his own. He was simply following the instructions of the Front Committee, that Mao personally had approved, which stated: ‘Do not kill the important leaders too quickly, but squeeze out of them [the maximum] information … [Then], from the clues they give, you can go on to unearth other leaders.’²⁵

The same crude methods were applied everywhere. Eighteen months later a CCP investigation concluded:

All the AB-tuan cases were uncovered on the basis of confessions. Little patience was shown in ascertaining facts and verifying charges … [The] method used … was the carrot and stick. The ‘carrot’ meant … extracting confessions by guile … The ‘stick’ meant thrashing suspects with ox-tailed bamboo sticks after hanging them up by their hands. If that had no effect, next came burning with incense or with the flame of a kerosene lamp. The worst method was to nail a person's palms to a table and then to insert bamboo splints under the fingernails. The methods of torture were given names like … ‘sitting in a sedan chair’; ‘airplane ride’; ‘toad-drinking water’; and ‘monkey pulling reins’ … Torture was the only method of dealing with suspects who resisted. Torture ceased only after confession.²⁶

Like all the others, Duan eventually did confess, but salved his conscience by naming as his accomplices only the seven men who had been arrested with him. Li Bofang, who had a photographic memory, took the opposite tack, trying to confuse his tormentors by writing down almost a thousand names.

Next morning, December 8, Li Shaojiu made further arrests on the basis of the previous night's confessions. Zeng Shan and Mao's secretary, Gu Bo, who now arrived from Huangpi, joined in the interrogations. Before the week was out, 120 people were being held in cells along each side of the courtyard, concealed behind a lattice of narrow wooden slats, about an inch apart, which reached from floor to ceiling like the bars of a cage. Among them were the wives of Li Bofang and two other suspects, who came to the yamen to seek news of their husbands. They were tortured even more brutally than the men: the soldiers cut open their breasts, and burnt their genitals.

Li Shaojiu then left for Donggu, as the Front Committee had instructed, to begin a purge of the 20th Army. There he made a fatal error. One of the men Xie Hanchang had denounced as a fellow AB-tuan conspirator was a battalion commander named Liu Di. Liu, like Li Shaojiu, was from Changsha, and managed to convince Li that he had been framed. As soon as he was free, however, he led a mutiny and set out for Futian at the head of a relief column of 400 men. After a battle the following night, in which a hundred of Li's troops were killed, the heavy wooden gates of the yamen were forced open, and the badly injured Action Committee leaders released.

An emergency meeting of the survivors resolved to take the 20th Army across the Gan River to Yongyang, where it would be safe from Mao's reprisals. Banners were put up in the square outside the yamen, declaring: ‘Down with Mao Zedong! Support Zhu [De], Peng [Dehuai] and Huang [Gonglue]!’ – and an appeal was sent to the Party Centre to remove Mao from all his posts.²⁷ When news of this reached Huangpi, the three army commanders issued statements, declaring their solidarity with Mao and denouncing the rebels.²⁸ But the attempt to split the leadership continued by more devious means, when copies of an incriminating letter were circulated, in which Mao had supposedly instructed Gu Bo to gather evidence that Zhu, Peng and Huang were also AB-tuan leaders. The forgery was too crude to be credible, and the Front Committee issued a long, rambling rebuttal, charging the leaders at Yongyang with rebellion against the Party and with conspiring to sow discord among the revolutionary forces.²⁹ A stalemate then set in: the 20th Army on one side of the Gan River, Mao's forces on the other, both claiming to be the loyal executors of Party policy.

Neither the events at Futian, nor the horrific blood-letting the Red Army had suffered, stopped Mao decisively defeating Chiang Kai-shek's first encirclement campaign. In fact, they may have helped. Bonded by the fury of the purge, those who had withstood it were fused into a tightly disciplined, steel-willed force with extraordinary motivation.³⁰

None the less, the existence of a dissident force in Yongyang could not be tolerated indefinitely. When Xiang Ying reached the base area at the beginning of 1931, his first task was to try to lay to rest the demons that Futian had conjured up. By now Mao, too, his prestige bolstered by the latest victory, felt that the killing had gone too far.³¹ Li Wenlin, who had been arrested at Huangpi, was released, albeit on probation, and Li Shaojiu was reprimanded for excessive zeal.³² On January 16, 1931, the newly formed Central Bureau announced the expulsion of Liu Di and four other rebel leaders, and declared that what had happened in Futian was an ‘anti-Party incident’. But it noted that there was as yet no proof that the rebels were all AB-tuan members.³³ Over the next six weeks, Xiang Ying began to put out peace feelers, dropping cautious hints that an accommodation might be reached with those who had been misled.³⁴

To Mao, these overtures were an implicit disavowal, and he bridled at Xiang's suggestion, the more infuriating because it was so clearly well-founded, that the problem at Futian was partly a factional struggle. On the essential question, however, of whether the campaign against the AB-tuan had been justified, Xiang supported Mao, as did the majority of the Party.³⁵ Throughout January and February, arrests of suspects continued.³⁶ Even the rebels at Yongyang, while proclaiming their own innocence, agreed that this was correct:

We do not deny [they wrote] that the AB-tuan has a widespread organisation in Jiangxi and that it has penetrated into the Soviet areas, for we have been active fighters against the AB-tuan ourselves … Comrade Duan Liangbi was the first to combat the AB-tuan in the Jiangxi Special Committee … [But now] he too is branded a member of the AB-tuan.³⁷

That the former leaders of the Action Committee, despite the tortures they had endured, could still endorse the purge, spoke volumes for the state of mind in the base areas at that time. In March 1931, most of them laid down their arms and returned to face the music, having been assured, or so they believed, that they would be treated with clemency.

Unfortunately for them, their return coincided with the news of Li Lisan's disgrace. The new leaders in Shanghai took an extremely harsh attitude towards the Futian events, which were now seen as a manifestation of the ‘anti-Comintern, anti-Party Li Lisan line’, aimed at ‘wiping out the Red Army and destroying the base area’. In April, Liu Di was brought before a court martial, chaired by Zhu De, sentenced to death and beheaded. He was in his early twenties. Li Bofang and two others were also executed.³⁸

The new approach was confirmed at an enlarged Central Bureau meeting, held under the authority of the Fourth Plenum delegation:

The AB-tuan has become a small party within the Communist Party, [carrying out] … counter-revolutionary activities under the flag of revolution. Why has [it] been able [to do this] recently? The main reasons are: [Firstly,] landlords and rich peasants have found it easy to infiltrate the CCP … As the revolution develops … these elements are bound to betray us … [Secondly,] the Party followed the mistaken political line of Li Lisan … [Thirdly,] in the past, we did not pay sufficient attention to the work of purging subversive elements. Captured members of the AB-tuan were shot on the spot instead of being used to dig up further clues … [This] also made it possible for the AB-tuan to expand.³⁹

The Front Committee (under Mao) was praised for following a ‘generally correct’ political line and adopting a class standpoint towards the Futian rebellion. The Central Bureau (under Xiang Ying) was fiercely condemned for its ‘conciliation of the Li Lisan line’, and for its ‘completely wrong’ approach to the Futian events, which had been ‘divorced from a class standpoint’ and had led ‘Party organisations at all levels to relax, soften and diminish the struggle against the AB-tuan’.

Its conclusion that the leading Futian rebels were all ‘important members of the AB-tuan … who carried out a counter-revolutionary rebellion under the flag of the Li Lisan line’ (rather than just misguided comrades, as Xiang Ying had tried to suggest), and the corollary – that the Li Lisan line and the AB-tuan were different sides of the same coin – had enormous advantages for Mao and for the new Party Centre. Mao could now legitimately argue that the purge, far from being directed against factional opponents, was a principled defence of the Party line. The Returned Students in Shanghai, who had been far more influenced by Stalinist practices than previous CCP leaders, saw their priority as the further Bolshevisation of the Party, by which they meant, above all, the rooting out of Li Lisan's supporters and the crushing of localism and dissent – in short, the transformation of the Party into a loyal and obedient Leninist tool. Being able to lump together all forms of opposition under a generic AB-tuan label made that task far easier.

The result was that, from April onwards, the purge resumed more ferociously than ever.⁴⁰ Despite repeated efforts to centralise investigations through Political Security departments, uneducated, often illiterate, officials in village and township purge committees wielded enormous power.⁴¹ Death came on a whim, at the slightest pretext or no pretext at all. A CCP investigator reported:

Those who complained about the Party in their sleep, those who refused to help carry provisions on carrying-poles, those who stayed away from mass rallies, those who failed to show up for Party meetings … were all arrested as AB-tuan members. So great was the terror that most people refused to go to a new job even if the transfer were a promotion … because the risk of being accused of AB-tuan membership was higher if you had newly arrived … In the peak period of [the purge], even talking to another person might lead to suspicion of being an AB-tuan member. Therefore Party members refused to attend meetings unless some higher officials were there to witness what was discussed.

[In the late summer] the Jiangxi Political Security Department proposed arresting every rich peasant [in the base area] for investigation on the grounds that they were probably AB-tuan members … They said quite openly that it was better to kill a hundred innocent people than to leave a truly guilty one at large … On account of such weird views, all organs and revolutionary groups won the freedom to arrest, interrogate and execute counter-revolutionaries. The prevailing mood was to hunt down the AB-tuan in order to prove your loyalty to the revolution.⁴²

When suspects were tortured to reveal details of the ‘networks’ to which they supposedly belonged, they either denounced acquaintances or tried to remember the names of people they had seen working in Party offices. To protect themselves, officials blackened their name-badges, or stopped wearing them altogether. During the third encirclement campaign, there was no time even to carry out interrogations. In some units, a roll-call was taken: those who confessed to being AB-tuan members were granted an amnesty; those who denied any connection were killed.⁴³

In July, the 20th Army units which had fled to Yongyang after the Futian events (and had remained there after the Action Committee leaders gave themselves up in March) were summoned back in extremis to the central base area, to help fight off Chiang Kai-shek's pincer movement. On the 23rd they linked up with Mao's forces at Ping'anzhai, about twenty miles north of Yudu. Their commander, Zeng Bingqun, had been in touch with the Central Bureau, and evidently believed that the political cloud over the contingent had been lifted. Instead, his force was surrounded and disarmed as soon as it arrived. Every officer, from Zeng himself to the humblest assistant platoon leader, was arrested. Ordinary soldiers were dispersed among other Red Army units. In the space of a few hours, the 20th Army ceased to exist. The designation would never be used by a Chinese communist army again.⁴⁴

A month later Li Wenlin and the other remaining Action Committee leaders, together with Zeng and most of his officer corps, were sentenced to death before a crowd of several thousand people at Baisha, by a tribunal which Mao himself chaired.⁴⁵

The overall death-toll from the purge in the summer and early autumn of 1931 can only be guessed at. Four hundred officers and men from the 20th Army perished, and probably several hundred from the 35th Army, also locally recruited in Jiangxi, which was purged at about the same time. From other Red Army units, there were many more. In the local Jiangxi Party, 3,400 people were killed in just three of the more than twenty counties. By the beginning of September, a CCP Central Inspector reported that ‘95 per cent of the intellectuals in the south-west Jiangxi Party and Youth League’ had confessed to AB-tuan connections. Today the best-informed Chinese historians say merely that ‘tens of thousands’ died.⁴⁶

As the year drew to a close, and the tensions generated by the nationalist encirclements eased, the purge subsided and Mao's role in it diminished. In December, renewed and, this time, much more serious efforts were made to impose realistic, institutional controls. A ‘Provisional Procedure for Handling Counter-revolutionary Cases and Establishing Judicial Organs’, intended among other things to ‘safeguard the rights of the masses’, was promulgated in Mao's name. Low-level officials were deprived of the power to order executions, a system of appeals was instituted and the use of torture was condemned. The new rules were often honoured in the breach, and in any case contained plenty of loopholes. Moreover, it was expressly stipulated that class background should be the determining factor in deciding punishment, an approach which would remain ever after a fundamental fault-line in the Chinese communist legal system. Landlords, rich peasants, and those of ‘capitalist origins’ were to be sentenced to death; the ‘masses’ could make a fresh start.⁴⁷

Then Zhou Enlai arrived from Shanghai to take up his post as substantive Central Bureau Secretary, and in January 1932, for the first time, the scale and conduct of the purge was officially called into question:⁴⁸

Killing people was regarded as a trifle [the Bureau acknowledged]. The most serious effect of this was that it caused panic in the Party. Even leading organs were affected. This was not a policy … of isolating the [Party's] opponents and winning over the masses who had been deceived by their counter-revolutionary influence – it was just the opposite. It damaged our own revolutionary forces and made those on the class battlefront waver. This was a most serious mistake.⁴⁹

But the complaint was merely against unorganised killing. Both the Bureau and Zhou Enlai himself continued to insist that the campaign against counter-revolutionaries per se remained ‘completely correct’.⁵⁰ The method needed to be changed, not in order to end it but to make it more efficient.

That spring, executions continued, albeit at a slower pace. In May 1932, Li Wenlin, Zeng Bingqun and three other supposed AB-tuan leaders – who, since their ‘trial’ the previous August, had been paraded before mass meetings in villages all over south-west Jiangxi – were publicly beheaded. Over the next two years, while the purge was idling to a close, the Political Security departments still dealt with 500 cases a month resulting, on average, in 80 to 100 people being shot.⁵¹

The killings in Jiangxi were part of a wider pattern. In west Fujian, more than 6,000 Party members and officials were executed on suspicion of being covert Social Democrats. At Peng Dehuai's old base on the Hunan-Jiangxi border, 10,000 were killed.⁵² In E-Yu-Wan, in the Dabie Mountains about seventy miles north-east of Wuhan, the urbane Beijing University graduate, Zhang Guotao, now a Politburo Standing Committee member and, like Mao, one of the founders of the Party, presided over a purge in which 2,000 ‘traitors, AB-tuan members and Third Party elements’ lost their lives. Chen Changhao, his political commissar, explained:

The revolutionary tide is surging ahead every day … The enemy has already seen how useless its airplanes, guns and machine-guns are. Therefore it is making use of the Reorganisationists, the AB-tuan and the Third Party to infiltrate our soviet area and the Red Army … This is a very vicious plot. It is easy for us to see the enemy attacking with airplanes and guns, but it is not easy for us to see the Reorganisationists, the AB-tuan and the Third Party. How vicious the enemy is.⁵³

After several thousand counter-revolutionaries were purged in the north-east Jiangxi base area, the leftist leader responsible, Zeng Hongyi, moved to north Fujian, where he killed 2,000 more as ‘reformists and AB-tuan’.⁵⁴

Slowly the purge mentality spread its poison throughout the communist areas. Until 1937, when the political situation changed nationally, beleaguered groups of Red Army men, battling against overwhelming odds, often in unimaginable conditions of deprivation and hardship, turned in on themselves in periodic bouts of blood-letting which, in some cases, killed more of their own comrades than the nationalist armies had.

The pretexts for the purges were always the same: differences over land reform; local or ethnic rivalries; and political issues linked to ‘the Li Lisan line’. So were the techniques: ‘You force him to confess,’ the head of the east Fujian security bureau explained, ‘then he confesses, you believe him and you kill him; or, he does not confess and you kill him.’⁵⁵ The ultimate cause of the purges was always the same, too. They were always about power – the power of individual leaders to enforce their will, and to ensure that followers followed.

The example of Stalinism, and the influence of Stalinist rhetoric, are part of the explanation for what happened in the Chinese Red base areas in the early 1930s, but only a small part. The great blood-purges in Russia did not start until four years after Futian, with the murder of Kirov in Leningrad. The way in which the CCP leadership was transformed from an idealistic, ineffectual coterie of well-meaning intellectuals, which had fallen apart at the first push from the Guomindang little more than three years before, into a hardened Bolshevik core-group which, in exceptional times, ordered an exceptional slaughter of men and women who later proved to have been perfectly loyal, had far more to do with the situation within China itself.

The crucial factor was the civil war. In most wars, deserters are shot; prisoners are maltreated to obtain information; basic rights are suspended. In the war between the communists and the nationalists, no rules were honoured.

Early in 1931, the head of the Chinese Politburo's security service, Gu Shunzhang, a formidably effective agent who had been trained by the Russian secret police in Vladivostok, was sent to Wuhan to try to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek. He was disguised as a magician. But the GMD special services identified him from a photograph, and in April he was arrested and persuaded to defect. The French intelligence bureau in Shanghai estimated that as a result of his betrayal, several thousand communists were arrested and executed over the next three months. Among them was the Party's figurehead General Secretary, Xiang Zhongfa, who was shot in June.

It was not all one-sided, however. The day after Gu's defection, his family disappeared. Five months later, their naked, headless bodies were discovered, buried under ten feet of earth and concrete, at an empty house in the French concession. The communist agent who had killed them told his GMD captors that they had been executed as a reprisal on the orders of Zhou Enlai. Gu's small son alone had survived, the man said, because he had been unable to bring himself to carry out Zhou's order to kill the child. He then took them to five more houses where further corpses were unearthed, this time of communist cadres whom Zhou had ordered killed to maintain Party discipline. After some three dozen bodies had been disinterred, the settlement police had had enough and ordered the search halted.⁵⁶

Zhou Enlai's extermination of the family of Gu Shunzhang was the rule, not the exception, in a conflict without quarter.

The Guomindang was just as barbarous. In Hubei, the wife of the Red Army leader, Xu Haidong, was seized by the nationalists and sold as a concubine. More than sixty other members of Xu's clan, including children and infants, were hunted down and killed.⁵⁷ In November 1930, two months after Mao led the communists’ failed attack on Changsha, his wife, Yang Kaihui, was taken to the execution ground outside the city's Liuyang Gate and shot on the orders of the GMD governor, He Jian. Her family were able to bribe the guards to free Mao's eldest son, Anying, then aged eight, who had been held in prison with her, and he and his two brothers were sent secretly to Shanghai. Anqing, a year younger, was beaten about the head by a soldier during his mother's arrest and suffered permanent brain damage. Soon after they arrived, the youngest boy, Anlong, who had been four when his mother was killed, died of dysentery. Two years later, when the Shanghai Party network was destroyed, the two older boys were left to fend for themselves, living by their wits on the streets.⁵⁸

In Xu Haidong's base area, E-Yu-Wan, where, in Edgar Snow's phrase, the slaughter attained ‘the intensity of religious wars’, and in other Red areas in the south, the nationalists followed a policy which they called ‘draining the pond to catch the fish’: all the able-bodied men were killed, the villages burned and available grain supplies seized or destroyed. Great swathes of forest were cut down, to hem the guerrillas into mountain fastnesses where whatever moved was shot on sight. Villagers who survived were herded into stockaded settlements of wooded huts in the plains, guarded by soldiers and landlord militia. Women and girls were sold as prostitutes or slaves, until foreign missionaries complained and Chiang Kai-shek banned the practice.

Initially, nationalist troops used their victims’ heads to keep tally; when this proved impracticable (because of the weight), they cut off ears instead. One division was reported to have collected 700 pounds of ears ‘to show its merit’. In Huang'an county, in Hubei, more than 100,000 villagers were killed; in Xin county, in Henan, 80,000. In Peng Dehuai's old base area, on the Hunan–Hubei border, once home to a million people, only 10,000 remained. Twenty years later, ruined villages and human bones were still scattered through the mountains.⁵⁹

Mao himself saw little of such extremes of devastation. By the time the worst butchery reached Jiangxi, the Red Army had moved on.⁶⁰ But it informed the social context in which he, and all the communist leaders, moved.

All through Chinese history, which, as Mao knew from his reading of the Song dynasty scholar, Sima Guang, was but ‘a mirror of the present’, rebellions had been suppressed with extraordinary ferocity. Chiang Kai-shek's slaughter in the Red areas was a pale reflection of the bloodshed that took place during the Taiping Rebellion. Chiang's troops collected ears; the seventeenth-century general, Li Zicheng, pacified Sichuan by collecting feet, and when his favourite concubine protested at his cruelty, hers were added to the pile. The nationalists exterminated the families of communist leaders; under the Qing, the families of rebellious scholars and generals were slaughtered up to the ninth degree of consanguinity. Even the use of quotas for purge victims, for all its apparent resemblance to later NKVD^IV practices in Russia, had a long history in China.⁶¹

The vortex of blood and fear in which the communist struggle was played out was the fruit of this legacy. Separated from wives, families, children (when they were not, like Mao, the indirect cause of their deaths), the young men who headed the Party, none more than forty years old, focused all their energies and allegiance on a single goal: the cause. From this remorseless single-mindedness came a fanatical commitment which left no place for the morality of the normal world outside. In the Red Army, whole regiments were made up of communist orphans whose one desire was for class revenge. Hatred was a powerful weapon, whether directed outwards or at enemies within.

Not every leader responded in the same way. Some, like Gao Jingtang, in E-Yu-Wan, took to the purge like ducks to water, generating a climate of isolation and paranoia so extreme that, in 1937, when the Central Committee tried to renew contact with the guerrillas in the base areas, the first communist envoys to reach them were arrested and shot as spies. Others, like Zhu De's former commissar, Chen Yi, made use of terror sparingly if at all.⁶²

Mao's reaction was more complex. On the one hand, he wanted ‘iron discipline’; on the other, he continued to hold that the Red Army should be an all-volunteer force, actuated by correct ideas, good leadership and example.⁶³ To Mao, Bolshevism was far more than simply a means to win power; it was also an ideological, in a sense, a moral force for China's renewal. Intellectually, he came to terms with the contradiction this posed – between discipline and freedom, force and voluntarism – by affirming the unity of opposites (as he had in his student essays, and would again in Yan'an). But in practice they would always be in conflict. That was as true in Jiangxi in the early 1930s as in every other purge and rectification campaign that he would launch during his long life.

At such times, Mao fell back on the lesson he had drawn from the peasant movement in Hunan in the winter of 1926. ‘To right a wrong,’ he had written then, ‘it is necessary to exceed the proper limits; the wrong cannot be righted without doing so.’ From that standpoint, the blood-purges were regrettable, in future better avoided, but necessary all the same.

The same was true of the elastic uses to which the term ‘AB-tuan’ was bent. Initially Mao may well have believed, as all the other leaders clearly did, that the AB-tuan posed a genuine threat. But he was not so gullible as to go on believing it when no evidence was ever found (other than confessions obtained under torture) that even one of the tens of thousands who were executed was a real AB-tuan member. ‘Social democrat’, ‘Reorganisationist’, ‘Third party’ – in the end it no longer mattered: they were just names, capable of being stretched to accommodate whatever kind of political deviance the Party leaders wished to attack. The Central Bureau acknowledged as much when it conceded that there had been what it called ‘a mistake in terminology’ during the campaign against AB-tuan.⁶⁴ That, too, Mao must have concluded, was necessary. At any rate, similar ‘mistakes’ would occur in every political movement that followed.

I The reference to ‘assassinations’ was not explained, but Mao may have had two incidents in mind: the deaths, that spring, of his old allies from the Jinggangshan, Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo, who were shot in obscure circumstances, allegedly while trying to rebel; and the murder of another long-time supporter, Wan Xixian, some months earlier. In both cases, Jiangxi Party officials were alleged to have been implicated.

II This was still true in 1999, when the original edition of this book appeared. It is reprinted here because the town was then much as it was in Mao's day. Twenty years later, that is no longer the case: like the rest of China, Futian has changed.

III This apparently involved a severe beating to the lower part of the body. Such methods were employed not only by the communists, but also in nationalist-ruled areas well into the 1930s. Even modern terms like ‘airplane ride’ (or ‘jetplane ride’, as it was called, thirty-five years later, during the Cultural Revolution), which involved tying a person's hands behind the back, and then hanging him, or her, by the arms from a wooden beam, referred to tortures that had been in use for centuries.

IV The NKVD was the immediate predecessor of the Soviet KGB (Committee for State Security). During Stalin's purges in the 1930s, NKVD regional directorates were assigned targets for the numbers of ‘enemies of the people’ to be arrested and shot.