MAO

The defeat of Chiang Kai-shek's third encirclement campaign in September 1931 saw the beginning of another and, this time, much more determined attempt by the Party Centre to bring Mao and the Jiangxi base area firmly under its control.

The devastation of the Party's urban networks after the defection of Gu Shunzhang had made the Red areas more important than ever. The Comintern had been insisting for over a year that it was there, rather than in China's cities, that the next stage of the struggle would be played out. The arrest and execution of Xiang Zhongfa, the Party's General Secretary, in June, had made leadership changes imperative, and the growing physical danger of operating in Shanghai argued for dispersal.

Already, in April, senior leaders had been despatched from Shanghai to run the Party committees at E-Yu-Wan and in He Long's west Hunan base area. Later that summer it was decided that Zhou Enlai should embark on his long-delayed journey to Jiangxi, to take over the running of the Central Bureau, while Wang Ming would return to the safety of Moscow as head of the CCP's Comintern delegation. Another Returned Student, Bo Gu, then aged twenty-four, would stay on in Shanghai as acting Party leader until a new congress could be convened.¹ At the same time, plans were set in motion to establish a communist government in the Red districts of Jiangxi (now renamed grandly the Central Soviet Base Area), as a first step towards the relocation of the whole of the Central leadership to the province.

Against this background, Wang Ming, Bo Gu and their allies launched a concerted campaign to undermine Mao's authority. At the end of August – even before the third encirclement had been defeated – the Party Centre fired off a long, ill-tempered directive, accusing him (though not by name) of lacking a clear class stand; being too soft on rich peasants; failing to develop the labour movement; ignoring repeated instructions to set up the planned soviet government; failing to expand the base area; and allowing the Red Army to engage in ‘guerrillaism’.² When this message reached the base area in October, it caused considerable puzzlement, as well as anger. Not only had Mao and his colleagues just successfully fought off an enemy force ten times stronger than their own, but the Returned Students themselves had earlier castigated Li Lisan for pretending that guerrilla warfare was outdated; and the Comintern that summer, in a highly unusual move, had praised Mao personally for his policies in the base area.

To Bo Gu in Shanghai, such niceties were of little account. His concern that autumn was not with doctrine but with power.

In mid-October, he agreed reluctantly that Mao could remain as acting Central Bureau Secretary (a post he had held informally since May) until Zhou Enlai's arrival, but rejected a proposal to promote several of Mao's allies. Shortly after this, when Mao asked for a Politburo member to be sent to head the new soviet government, Bo responded that Mao himself was to take that post.³ In other words, he was to be kicked upstairs – deprived of the major part of his influence in the Party and the army, and given instead a largely honorific administrative position. At the beginning of November, that was precisely what happened. A base area Party Congress was held, which dissolved the General Front Committee that Mao headed and established in its place a Revolutionary Military Commission, chaired by Zhu De, in which he was merely one of twelve members. For good measure he was roundly criticised (though, again, not by name) for ‘narrow empiricism’, which meant stressing practical factors at the expense of Party policy.⁴

Two days later, on November 7, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, 600 delegates from Jiangxi and the adjoining base areas gathered in the village of Yeping, about three miles east of the little market town of Ruijin, to proclaim the founding of the Chinese Soviet Republic. They met in the medieval splendour of the Clan Hall of the Xie (the common surname of all the village's inhabitants), amid a grove of ancient, gnarled camphor trees, some a thousand years old. Banners marked with the hammer and sickle were strung between the immense, lacquered wooden pillars. A Red Army parade was held, followed by a torchlit procession, punctuated by the deafening explosions and thick blue smoke of firecrackers.⁵ ‘From now on,’ Mao declared, ‘there are two totally different states in the territory of China. One is the so-called Republic of China, which is a tool of imperialism … The other is the Chinese Soviet Republic, the state of the broad masses of exploited and oppressed workers, peasants, soldiers and toilers. Its banner is that of overthrowing imperialism; eliminating the landlord class; bringing down the Guomindang warlord government … and striving for genuine peace and unification of the whole country.’⁶

The First National Congress of Chinese Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviets, as the new communist parliament was called, named Ruijin as the capital city of the twenty or so Red counties which made up the new Soviet Republic, and appointed Mao state chairman and head of government.⁷

To the uninitiated, it must have seemed he was in an enviable position. His new posts gave him a higher formal status than he had ever had before. The Comintern had made clear that it attached enormous importance to the new ‘state’ over which he presided. But Mao had seen off too many efforts to neutralise or control him – Zhou Enlai's attempt in July 1927 to send him to Sichuan; Qu Qiubai's proposal, a month later, that he become an apparatchik in Shanghai, Li Lisan's endeavours, in 1929, to make him leave the Fourth Army – to entertain any illusions about what was being done. True, he was now too important simply to be cast out, even by the Returned Students and their allies, who had the backing of the Kremlin. But they had been able to move him sideways, out of the main line of decision-making, amputating the roots from which his power stemmed.

In January, Zhou Enlai, in one of his first acts after replacing Mao as Central Bureau Secretary, called for a fresh attempt to occupy a major city, in pursuance of the oft-stated goal of ‘achieving initial victory in one or several provinces’.⁸

Mao was able to convince his colleagues that Nanchang was too difficult a target. But when the Bureau reconvened, after consultations with Bo Gu in Shanghai, a majority of its members favoured an attack on Ganzhou. This, too, Mao opposed, supported by Zhu De. Ganzhou, he argued, was well-defended, had water on three sides, and was regarded by the enemy as ‘a stronghold it cannot afford to lose’, while the Red Army still suffered from the same lack of heavy artillery and other siege equipment that had caused the failure of its attempts to take the city the previous year. This time his arguments were rejected. Peng Dehuai, who favoured the plan, was appointed Front Commander and made clear that he relished the prospect of proving Mao wrong.⁹

Ten days later, the Central Bureau held a third meeting, which, in Zhou's absence, Mao chaired. The discussion turned to Japan's invasion of Manchuria the previous September. Bo Gu had interpreted this as ‘a dangerous and concrete step towards an attack on the Soviet Union’. Mao begged to differ, arguing that the invasion had triggered a nationwide tide of anti-Japanese feeling which went beyond traditional class divisions and which the Party should try to exploit. This was the germ of an idea – the anti-Japanese united front, bringing together all classes in China in a patriotic effort of national defence – which, not many years later, would play a key role in the CCP's struggle for power. But, in January 1932, it was far ahead of its time. The whole thrust of the Centre's policies was for a sharpening of class struggle, not a blurring of class lines. Mao's colleagues insisted that the primary consideration, as it had been in 1929 during the Eastern Railway dispute, was the threat to Moscow. Tempers flared. Finally, someone told Mao to his face: ‘Japan occupied Manchuria to attack Russia. If you can't see that, you're a right opportunist.’^I There was a silence. Mao got up and stalked out.

The same day, or soon afterwards, he requested sick leave. It was granted. Wang Jiaxiang, another member of the Returned Student group, took over Mao's sole remaining military post, as head of the Front Army's General Political Department.¹⁰ A week later Mao set out with He Zizhen and a few bodyguards for an abandoned temple on Donghuashan, a low volcanic hill about five miles south of Ruijin, where he was to spend his ‘convalescence’.¹¹

It was an austere, lonely place, well suited to Mao's bleak frame of mind. The sanctuary, a single chamber hewn out of the smooth, black rock, with a stone façade and grey-tiled roof, was dark, cold and very wet, with moss growing from the floor. As so often when he was in political difficulties, Mao's depression affected him physically. He Zizhen found him suddenly older, and he started to lose weight. She worried that the damp would make him worse, and put the young bodyguards to live in the main temple, while she and Mao moved into a cave a few yards away, which was smaller but dry, and had a stone basin where they could wash. Water had to be brought up in wooden pails on a bamboo pole from the valley, a hundred feet below, along a narrow path of shallow steps, scooped out of the rock.

There was a fine view across the plain, and to the west three ancient pagodas stood like sentinels on the encircling hills. Mao tried to keep himself occupied by writing out poems he had composed on horseback in happier days in the base area. At irregular intervals, Party documents and newspapers were sent up from Ruijin. He could do nothing but wait, in enforced idleness, for his political wounds to heal.

The new ‘provisional Centre’ in Shanghai, as Bo Gu's leadership was known, was less irrational than it was afterwards made to appear. The fact that it survived at all was a remarkable achievement. At a time when the Comintern's China operation was completely paralysed following the arrest of its representative, Yakov Rudnik (also known as Hilaire Noulens), an Ukrainian intelligence operative who posed as a Belgian trades unionist, Bo and his colleague, Zhang Wentian, another Returned Student in his early thirties, managed to maintain a network of agents which was able successfully to infiltrate the highest levels of Chiang Kai-shek's military command, and to liquidate GMD special services’ operatives and the communist turncoats they recruited.¹²

If they were less successful in providing guidance to the communist base areas, which now had a claimed population of five million, it was mainly because of the continuing influence of the leftist thinking that had animated Li Lisan and, before him, Qu Qiubai. That was what had led Bo in January to raise anew the issue of attacking large cities:

We used to avoid attacking large cities. This strategy was correct in the past but is no longer correct because circumstances have changed. Our task now is to expand [our] territory, link up the separate soviet areas to form a single integrated area, and take advantage of the present favourable political and military conditions to seize one or two important central cities so as to win initial victory for the revolution in one or more provinces.

Bo's analysis was more sober than that of his disgraced predecessors. But he reached very similar conclusions. The Great Depression, he wrote, had brought the economy in the nationalist-controlled areas to ‘the verge of general collapse’, while the Red Army, having been ‘tempered on the bloody battlefield of the present civil war’ during Chiang's failed encirclement campaigns, was stronger than ever before. The ‘balance of domestic class forces’ had changed, and policy needed to change, too.¹³

In one sense, this was not unreasonable. For the past three years, Mao, too, had been calling for ‘victory in one province’. Doing nothing was not an option: an insurgency which rested on its laurels would quickly collapse. Linking up the different Red base areas, which would necessarily involve occupying cities, was as logical a policy as any. The problem was that Bo demanded rigid adherence to what he called the ‘forward, offensive line’,¹⁴ and to the overall goal that he had set of occupying Nanchang, Ji'an and Fuzhou (another Jiangxi city), regardless of tactical imperatives. In addition, there was the disparity of forces. The defeat of Chiang Kai-shek's third encirclement had given the Shanghai leaders a grossly inflated impression of the Red Army's strength. Mao and Zhu De knew that now, no less than a year earlier, they still lacked adequate forces to seize well-defended GMD strongholds, which was why they had opposed the attack on Ganzhou. Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian and their followers saw such doubts as proof of opportunism – a flaw, not in the policy, but in those who were reluctant to carry it out.

One afternoon at the beginning of March, just after the Lantern Festival, Mao's guards saw two horsemen approaching. They turned out be Xiang Ying, who was acting as head of government during Mao's ‘sick leave’, and a bodyguard.

The attack on Ganzhou, Xiang told him shamefacedly, had been a fiasco. Over a period of three weeks, starting in mid-February, Peng's forces had mounted four exhausting and unsuccessful assaults against the city's defences. Attempts to mine the walls had failed. Two days before, a sortie by nationalist soldiers, which had taken Peng by surprise, had barely been repulsed; and now four divisions of nationalist reinforcements were converging from Ji'an and Guangdong, threatening to cut off his escape. The Military Commission, Xiang said, wanted Mao to end his sick leave and come at once to give them advice.

Mao did not need to be asked twice. A heavy rainstorm had broken, and He Zizhen asked him to wait. ‘You haven't been well,’ she fussed. ‘If you go out in this, you'll be worse.’ He waved her aside. His ‘sickness’ had gone.¹⁵

By the time Mao reached the army at Jiangkou, a small market town fifteen miles upriver from Ganzhou, Peng had extricated himself from the trap. However, argument continued over where the Front Army should go next. Mao proposed that they make for north-east Jiangxi and develop a new base area along the northern part of the Fujian border, where the enemy was weak and the hill country favourable to the Red Army's style of warfare. But the majority of his colleagues felt this was too much of a departure from the objectives the Centre had set, which were to threaten Ji'an and Nanchang. Peng, still smarting from his defeat, supported them. In the end the meeting decided that the force should be divided: Peng's Third Army Group would head north along the west bank of the Gan River towards Ji'an, while the First Army Group, commanded by Lin Biao, tried to occupy a cluster of three county towns in central Jiangxi, about eighty miles south-east of Nanchang. Mao accompanied Lin's army in his new guise of unofficial adviser, and was soon able to persuade him and his commissar, Nie Rongzhen, that Fujian was a far better target. Lin sent a telegram to this effect to the Military Commission and then marched to Tingzhou, just inside the Fujian border, to await further orders. Mao returned to Ruijin where, at the end of March, he presented his case to the Central Bureau.¹⁶

This time Mao prevailed. Zhou Enlai, who chaired the two-day meeting, had seen his first military venture in the base area, which he had undertaken against Mao's advice, end in an ignominious defeat. Xiang Ying had had the thankless task of summoning Mao back in the midst of that debacle. Peng Dehuai, who might have objected, was absent.¹⁷

The personal chemistry between himself and Zhou Enlai, which was to be of such extraordinary importance for China over the next half-century, emerged clearly for the first time at this meeting in Ruijin.

Zhou, five years Mao's junior, was a leader of great finesse, cool, controlled, never excessive, always seeking to draw the maximum advantage from whatever the situation offered. He was infinitely malleable in the service of ultimate victory, which he regarded as the only worthwhile end.

Mao was often excessive, possessed of exceptional vision, strong convictions and unbounded self-confidence, great subtlety of thought and unerring intuition. After Zhou yielded at Ruijin, Mao probed relentlessly, presenting him with one fait accompli after another as Lin's forces, now effectively under Mao's command, marched further and further to the south-east, in a direction precisely opposite to that which the Centre had laid down. In the process he regained, although fleetingly, a good deal of the freedom of manoeuvre which the Returned Students had tried to remove.¹⁸

Their first goal was Longyan, halfway between Jiangxi and the Fujian coast. It was an area Mao knew well: the Gutian conference had been held there in the winter of 1929. On April 10, they defeated the two regiments garrisoning the town and took 700 prisoners. Ten days later Zhangzhou was taken, the first important city the Red Army had captured since the fall of Ji'an, eighteen months earlier.

Mao was elated. Soldiers who fought in the campaign remembered seeing him ride into the city on a white horse, wearing a pale grey peaked army cap, with the communists’ five-pointed red star. In a telegram to Zhou Enlai the day after, he described how the local people ‘rushed out like mad to welcome us’. Zhangzhou was a rich prize, a major trading centre, thirty miles from Amoy, with a population for more than 50,000. The spoils included half-a-million Chinese dollars in cash; arms and ammunition; two nationalist aircraft (which, unfortunately, the communists did not know how to use); and, almost equally valuable as far as Mao was concerned, a rich haul of books from a middle-school library, which were sent back by road to Ruijin in a requisitioned motor-car.¹⁹

As details of the Fujian expedition filtered back to Shanghai, the drumbeat of criticism, both of Mao himself, for upsetting the Centre's carefully laid plans for a concerted drive northward, and of the Central Bureau, for allowing it to happen, grew steadily more insistent.²⁰

The Bureau was contrite. At a meeting chaired by Zhou Enlai on May 11, which Mao, still in Zhangzhou, did not attend, it made a grovelling self-criticism, in which it admitted to ‘very serious mistakes’ and promised to ‘correct completely’ its doubts about the need to take big cities and, more generally, its ‘consistent right-opportunist errors’.²¹

This emollient approach typified Zhou's dealings with the Centre that spring, and set a pattern for the weeks that followed. Mao's reaction could hardly have been more different. ‘I have taken cognizance of your telegram,’ he wrote, after Zhou had passed on to him Bo's criticisms:

The political appraisal and military strategy of the Centre are wholly erroneous. In the first place, after the three [encirclement campaigns] and the Japanese attack, the ruling forces in China … have been dealt a great blow … We must absolutely not exaggerate the strength of the enemy … Secondly, now that the three campaigns are over, our overall strategy should absolutely never repeat the defensive strategy of fighting on interior lines [i.e., inside the Red base areas]. On the contrary, we should adopt the offensive strategy of fighting on exterior lines [in the White areas]. Our task is to take key cities and achieve victory in one province. One would have thought that destroying the enemy was the prerequisite for this … To propose using last year's strategy under present circumstances is right opportunism.²²

This was a very impudent message indeed. Mao was deliberately throwing back in Bo Gu's face the very reproaches the Centre had made to him. Shanghai had been complaining for months about ‘underestimating the revolutionary situation’; failing ‘to take advantage of opportunities to develop towards the exterior’; and ‘regarding outdated strategy as forever-correct dogma’, all of which it had condemned as serious right-opportunist errors.²³

Bo's reaction is not recorded, but it is safe to assume that he was not much amused. From then on, Mao's relationship with the ‘provisional Centre’ became increasingly envenomed.

After the foray into Fujian, the Central Bureau made greater efforts to restrain Mao, and he was bombarded with messages urging ‘an attacking posture’ and strict adherence at all times to the ‘forward offensive line’. Zhangzhou was abandoned at the end of May, and Mao's forces moved west to deal with warlord units from Guangdong, which had begun threatening the base area's southern flank. In west Fujian, in early June, he was joined by Zhu De and Wang Jiaxiang, who had been sent to ensure that, this time, he obeyed the Bureau's orders. They marched across southern Jiangxi towards Dayu, the tungsten-mining town near the Hunan border where the Zhu–Mao Army had stopped in January 1929 after its break-out from the Jinggangshan. However, despite Zhou Enlai's injunctions to ‘attack the enemy forcefully’, it was another month before the Guangdong regiments had been pushed back across the border.²⁴

By then, Bo and Zhang Wentian were beside themselves. For six months, they had watched their designs systematically frustrated. The failed attack in January on Ganzhou, then Mao's hijacking of the attempt to march north by taking his troops south to Zhangzhou, and now the Guangdong distraction, meant that the half-year from January to July 1932, arguably the best opportunity the communists would ever have for building the southern Red districts into one strong, integrated area, had achieved nothing. The reason, as the front leadership knew, was that to do more than resist incursions, and attack where the enemy was weakest, was beyond the Red Army's powers. But the Shanghai leaders would not believe that.

Between Bo Gu's rigidity and the imperatives of battlefield survival, dialogue had become impossible.

Against this unpromising background, Zhou Enlai, the eternal deal-maker, tried to engineer a trade-off. Bo would get the offensive he wanted against the northern Jiangxi cities, and Zhou himself would go to the front to lead it – but it would be waged as far as possible in accordance with the Front Army's real capabilities, and Mao would be brought onside by restoring him to his old position as General Political Commissar. Mao's ‘experience and strong points’ were needed, Zhou argued. If he were reinstated, he would be ‘encouraged to correct his mistakes’.²⁵

Wang Jiaxiang and Zhu De, who had been won over by Mao's arguments, agreed readily enough. But Ren Bishi and the other Bureau members, who had remained behind in Ruijin to take charge of rear echelon work, had serious misgivings. By the time Zhou secured their agreement, it was almost the middle of August. Bo Gu, ready to try almost anything to get the long-delayed offensive finally under way, gave his approval too.²⁶

Mao proposed that the entire Front Army, operating again as a single force, should march north to occupy the same small cluster of county towns, Le'an, Yihuang and Nanfeng, that were to have been attacked five months earlier, before the expedition into Fujian. They would then try to capture the slightly larger town of Nanchang, which would put them within striking distance of Fuzhou, and ‘in a more advantageous position for taking the key cities on the lower reaches of the Gan River and creating the conditions for seizing Nanchang’.²⁷

The first stage went like clockwork. Le'an, Yihuang and Nanfeng fell, bringing the Front Army 5,000 prisoners and some 4,000 guns. But the next target, Nanchang, was much more strongly defended. Zhu and Mao ordered a withdrawal while Zhou sent a wireless message to Ren Bishi's rear echelon committee, explaining that they intended to wait until the situation turned in their favour. The withdrawal continued, however, and despite more reassuring messages from Zhou, by early September they had retreated all the way to Dongshao, in Ningdu county, sixty miles to the south. The rear echelon committee, seriously alarmed at the turn events were taking, told them bluntly that this was a mistake and they must head back north without delay. That drew an unusually testy response from Zhou, who said the army was tired; that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ for it to rest; and that a move at this stage would open the way for an enemy attack on the base area itself.²⁸

So began a month of increasingly acrimonious exchanges between the two groups of Central Bureau leaders. No longer was it Mao against the rest. Now Zhou, Mao, Zhu and Wang, on one side, argued with Ren Bishi, Xiang Ying, the base area security chief, Deng Fa, and the Youth League leader, Gu Zuolin, on the other.²⁹

At the beginning of October, they gathered in a farmhouse in the tiny mountain village of Xiaoyuan, in northern Ningdu, with Zhou Enlai in the chair, to hammer out their differences. It was to be a traumatic and intensely confrontational four days.³⁰

The rear echelon accused the front leaders of ‘lacking faith in the victory of the revolution and the strength of the Red Army’. The front echelon replied that while the Centre's ‘forward offensive line’ was correct, it had to be carried out taking due account of practical conditions. Mao, in particular, was outspoken in his own defence. To Ren Bishi, Xiang Ying and the others, that merely confirmed what they had suspected from the start: Mao was the root of the problem and only his removal would solve it.

All the old charges levelled against him during the past year were then brought out again, along with a number of new ones. He was a right opportunist, stubbornly opposing the Centre's correct military line. He flouted organisational discipline (a reference to his outburst in May against the Centre's ‘erroneous views’). He had opposed the decision to attack Ganzhou; he had resisted orders to take Fuzhou and Ji'an; and when eventually he did capture Zhangzhou, he had shown his ‘guerrilla mentality’ by spending all his time raising money. Mao, the rear echelon charged, favoured a ‘pure defence line’ of ‘luring the enemy in deep’ and ‘waiting by a tree-stump for the rabbits to dash up and throw themselves against it’. He preferred fighting in remote areas, where the enemy was weakest.

Some of these charges had a basis. Mao did favour a military strategy which was in practice very different from that the Centre had laid down. But as the meeting dragged on, the fact that Mao's views might be correct and the Centre's might be mistaken ceased to be the point at issue. To Xiang Ying and his rear echelon colleagues, Mao was in breach of Party discipline. Therefore he was wrong.

Reaching an agreement on strategy turned out to be relatively simple. Everyone, including Mao, agreed that the Front Army should concentrate its forces against the enemy's weak points, and pick them off one by one so as to defeat the encirclement before the base area itself was threatened. To Mao, that meant fighting in Yihuang, Le'an and Nanfeng. Others favoured a battleground further west. But the principle was sufficiently flexible to accommodate both views.

The real problem arose over what to do about Mao himself. The rear echelon insisted that he be barred from the front altogether. Zhou argued that this was excessive. ‘Zedong’, he said, ‘has many years’ experience of warfare. He's good at fighting battles … and when he's at the front he makes a lot of useful suggestions which are helpful to our efforts.’ The answer, he suggested, would be either for Mao to retain the role of Commissar, but under his (Zhou's) supervision; or for Zhou himself to take over that post while Mao remained at the front as an adviser. Zhu De and Wang Jiaxiang concurred. But Mao was wary of taking responsibility for directing military operations without full power to do so, and the rear echelon also objected. Mao's unwillingness to recognise his errors, they said, meant that if he stayed at the front, he would relapse into his bad old ways. They might have added that Zhou's claimed ability to ‘supervise and control’ him was not particularly convincing given his track record so far.

In the end Zhou devised a masterly compromise. Mao would give up the Commissar's post and act as a military adviser; but, to mollify Ren Bishi and the other rear echelon leaders, he would take ‘indefinite sick leave’ until his presence was required. Then, Zhou hoped, once feelings had cooled, he could quietly resume his duties.

Next day, evidently feeling that the outcome might have been worse, Mao set out for the Red Army hospital at Tingzhou, where he arrived to find He Zizhen about to give birth to their second child, a baby boy.³¹ But his problems were not to be put behind him so easily. While the Ningdu meeting was in progress, Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian had also met to discuss the situation in Jiangxi. Mao's ‘conservatism and flightism’, they had ruled, were unacceptable. He must leave the front at once and confine himself to government work, and a resolute struggle would have to be waged against his views. Zhou was blamed for failing to stand up to him, and for not using his authority as Bureau Secretary to ensure that the correct line was carried out.

This bombshell reached Ningdu shortly after Mao left. The meeting immediately reconvened, overturned Zhou's compromise and endorsed the Centre's decisions. When Mao learned what had happened he was furious, accusing his colleagues of ‘a judgement in absentia’ undertaken in a ‘high-handed factional manner’. But there was nothing he could do. On October 12, it was announced that Zhou had been appointed General Political Commissar in his place. For the next two years, Mao was excluded from all significant military decision-making.³²

That winter, for the second year running, Mao celebrated the Chinese New Year in ill-health and political disfavour. His quarters in a small sanatorium, which he shared with two other senior Party officials who were also suffering from political ailments, were more comfortable than the damp temple at Donghuashan; and his standing among the Party at large was unaltered, for the Ningdu decisions were kept secret. But in other respects his situation was worse.³³

Six times, in the twelve years since he had become a communist, he had been pushed aside: once, of his own volition, when his faith in the movement faltered, in 1924; a second time in 1927, after the failure of the Autumn Harvest Uprising; again in 1928, when the newly formed Hunan provincial committee deposed him as Special Committee Secretary on the Jinggangshan; then in 1929, during the dispute over guerrilla tactics with Zhu De; the fifth time at Donghuashan in January 1932; and now, finally, at Ningdu. On all previous occasions, however, he had either had powerful friends, who eventually came to his aid, or he had withdrawn for tactical reasons, prefiguring a return in strength later on. This time he had been forced out by a Central leadership which was implacably hostile to him and which he had needlessly provoked, after a conflict which had seriously weakened those, like Zhou Enlai, who might otherwise have helped him.³⁴

Once again he grew very thin. He Zizhen was alarmed by his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. The story went round afterwards that he had contracted tuberculosis, but in fact it seems to have been the same neurasthenic depression that always afflicted him at such times. He told her bitterly: ‘[It's] as if they want to punish me to death.’³⁵

Soon after arriving at the hospital, Mao had an encounter which cast another long shadow over the year ahead. The acting Secretary of the Fujian provincial committee, Luo Ming, was also undergoing treatment there. Mao talked to him at length about the first three encirclement campaigns, and urged him on his return home to promote flexible guerrilla operations so as to help the Front Army break Chiang's fourth campaign, then about to get under way. Luo transmitted these proposals to his colleagues, and before long the Fujian committee began developing a Maoist guerrilla strategy.

The growing importance of the Central Soviet Base Area, coupled with intensified police surveillance in Shanghai, meanwhile convinced Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian that the time had come to join the rest of the leadership in Ruijin. While travelling through Fujian, Bo, too, encountered Luo Ming, who told him enthusiastically about the new tactics the provincial committee was now using, far better, in his view, than the ‘rigid and mechanical’ directives they had tried to follow in the past. Bo was the last person to appreciate a judgement of this kind. As soon as he reached Ruijin, one of his first acts was to launch a sweeping campaign to root out Mao's influence throughout the soviet districts. Luo's words were distorted to try to prove that he was ‘following an opportunist line’, had made a ‘pessimistic and defeatist appraisal’ of the revolutionary situation, and even ‘openly advocated the abolition of the Party’.³⁶

Soon thousands of officials were under investigation for ‘following the Luo Ming line’, among them four young men, all in their late twenties, who were especially closely identified with Mao: Deng Xiaoping, then Secretary of the Huichang County Committee in southern Jiangxi; Mao's brother, Zetan; his former secretary, Gu Bo; and Xie Weijun, commander of the locally recruited Jiangxi Fifth Independent Division, who had been with Mao since Jinggangshan. In April 1933, they were brought before a denunciation meeting, where they were taunted as ‘country bumpkins’ who did not understand that there was ‘no Marxism in the mountain valleys’. They, in turn, derided their tormentors as ‘gentlemen from a foreign house’ (in other words, from Moscow). All four were dismissed from their posts, along with many others of Mao's supporters.³⁷

By then Mao was back in Yeping, the small village near Ruijin where the leadership had established its headquarters.³⁸

His eminence as Chairman of the Republic meant that he himself was untouched directly by the ‘Luo Ming’ campaign. He also received support from the Comintern, which urged Bo Gu in March to ‘take a conciliatory attitude towards Comrade Mao’, use ‘comradely influence’, and give him full responsibility for governmental work.³⁹ One of the oddities of Mao's position in the late 1920s and early 1930s was that, while his relations with the Chinese leaders whom Moscow promoted to head the CCP were often extremely poor, the Russians themselves took an increasingly positive view of his role. From the Sixth Congress in 1928 onwards, Mao was the only major Chinese leader who was consistently in agreement with Stalin on all three of the key issues in the Chinese revolution: the primary role of the peasantry, of the Red Army and of the rural base areas. In the Kremlin, this had not gone unnoticed. As early as May 1932, the Comintern's Political Secretariat had warned Bo against criticising Mao publicly: disagreements should be aired within the Central Bureau, it said. Zhou Enlai acknowledged the directive and assured Moscow that it would be adhered to. Yet five months later, at the time of the Ningdu meeting which stripped Mao of his military responsibilities, the Comintern's new representative in Shanghai, a German communist named Arthur Ewert, learned that Bo had secretly given instructions for a full-scale public campaign against Mao's views. Ewert countermanded Bo's order, noting: ‘Mao Zedong remains a popular leader. [We] have demanded that disagreements within the leading organs be eliminated.’

In far-off Jiangxi, however, the practical effects of Moscow's support were diluted. Previously, Mao and He Zizhen had lived with several other Central Bureau leaders in a fine old stone-built mansion, with a sturdy tiled roof and soaring eaves at its four corners, which its landlord owner had abandoned – not to escape the communists but because a woman had died there and the place was considered unlucky. The leaders lived on the first floor in rooms opening on to a covered wooden gallery around a central inner courtyard, decorated with intricately carved beams and delicate latticed windows and screens. Zhou and Ren Bishi, the two full Politburo members, had the best accommodation; Mao had a slightly smaller room, with clay walls and a brick-tiled floor, next to Zhou's; while Zhu De and Wang Jiaxiang occupied the far end. Between them was a conference chamber where bureau meetings were held.⁴⁰

Bo Gu's arrival, and Mao's eclipse, meant all this now abruptly changed. While still a Bureau member, Mao was politically so isolated that sometimes days passed without him seeing his colleagues. Zhou and Zhu De were at the front, and that spring Wang was severely wounded by shrapnel from a mortar shell. The others ostracised him. ‘I was like a totem that stank, a wooden bodhisattva immersed in a cesspit,’ he said later. ‘All I was allowed to do was eat, sleep and shit.’⁴¹ In April, his exclusion became even more pronounced. The nationalists began regular air raids against Yeping, and Mao and other ‘non-essential personnel’ were ordered to move to Shazhouba, another village about ten miles to the west. There, his only social contact was with his brothers and with He Zizhen's sister and parents, themselves under political pressure as a result of their relationship with him.⁴²

Time weighed heavily on Mao's hands. In the rare intervals of calm on the Jinggangshan, he used to discuss poetry with Zhu De and Chen Yi. They would cap each other's quotations with lines they had learned by heart as young men from the works of the great Tang dynasty writers, Li Bai, Han Shan and Du Fu, in the golden age of Chinese poetry, a thousand years before. He Zizhen remembered how Mao's face would light up when literature was mentioned. Reading was such an addiction that he had especially large pockets made on his jackets, big enough to slip a book inside. Usually, she said, he spoke little, but when the subject turned to literary topics he would talk animatedly for hours on end. Once he sat up arguing all night with her about his favourite novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, which, characteristically, he interpreted as a struggle between two factions within a great and powerful household.⁴³

Through the summer of 1933 and most of the year that followed, Mao found himself with a surfeit of leisure in which to read and talk, but, beyond his immediate family, no companion with whom to share it. Once again, he could only wait, hoping for better days. This time there was less certainty than ever that better days would come.

As Head of State and government – Chairman of the Republic, and Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars – Mao had had overall responsibility, from November 1931 onwards, for civil administration in the base area. This involved the drafting and promulgation of immense numbers of laws and regulations, intended to endow the new Chinese Soviet Republic, notionally at least, with all the administrative machinery necessary for a modern state.⁴⁴

In practice, Mao's chief concern was with the economy. His speeches throughout this period were full of patriotic appeals to the peasantry to ‘carry out the spring vegetable planting well’, and warnings that ‘there must be absolutely no more opium cultivation; cereals should be planted instead.’⁴⁵ His job was to ensure that the base area provided the Red Army with food, clothing and other basic supplies, and to control the black-market trade with the White areas in essentials such as salt, which had to be smuggled in from outside. A Red postal service was set up. A People's Bank, headed by Mao's second brother, Zemin, issued banknotes denominated in guobi (‘national money’), printed in red and black ink on crudely made grass-paper, with an effigy of Lenin in the centre against a frieze of marching workers and peasants with carrying-poles, striding triumphantly forward to a bright, new communist future. The currency was backed by silver, initially expropriated from landlords but later increasingly derived from taxes, imposed on a sliding scale so that the brunt was borne by merchants and rich peasants, and from the forced sale of ‘revolutionary war bonds’.⁴⁶

The key economic issue was land reform. In rural China, the possession of land gave life: if you had fields, you could eat; without fields, you would starve. Among a nation of 400 million, 90 per cent of whom were peasants, land redistribution – taking from the rich and giving to the poor – was the primary vehicle carrying the communist revolution forward, the fundamental point of divergence between the CCP and the Guomindang.

Mao's views on this crucial topic were extremely radical. On the Jinggangshan, he had ordered the confiscation of all land without exception, even that owned by middle peasants. Everyone, child or elder, man or woman, rich or poor, including men who were absent serving in the Red Army, was then allotted an identical share, regardless of class background or any other factor. Ownership was held notionally by the state, and once the distribution had been made, the sale or purchase of land was forbidden.

The system of equal distribution according to the number of mouths to feed had the merit of simplicity, Mao argued, and ensured that even the poorest families could survive.⁴⁷ Li Lisan and Bo Gu both disagreed, one finding it too ‘leftist’, the other, not ‘leftist’ enough. Li called for land to be distributed on the basis of each family's labour power (which in practice favoured rich peasants). Bo wanted class origin to be the criterion (which had the contrary effect).⁴⁸

Both methods had disadvantages. The rich peasants, having more capital and farm animals, were the most productive villagers. Yet in class terms, they were landlords in the making, struggling (as Mao's father had done) to heave themselves one more rung up the ladder, to a more prosperous and, necessarily, more exploitative position. Politically they constituted, in Mao's phrase, ‘an intermediate class’ in the countryside, which, if squeezed too harshly, would instantly switch allegiance.⁴⁹ If the communists adopted moderate policies, the economy in the base area boomed, but class struggle faltered; if a class approach were followed, the economy faltered and food shortages ensued. Caught between these conflicting imperatives, policy lurched first one way, then the other, in accordance with the prevailing political wind.

If graduated policies were to be applied, as was the case from the end of 1928 onwards, a method of assessment had to be devised to distinguish poor, middle and rich peasants, and landlords. Was a rich peasant one who used hired labourers? Or was usury also a criterion? Should the whole of a rich peasant's land be confiscated? Or only that portion that he could not cultivate himself?⁵⁰

For hundreds of thousands of families, the answers to such questions were, in the most literal sense, the touchstone of survival. Slightly more flexibility here, a slightly harsher policy there, might require no more than a displaced comma in a Party document. In the villages it could make the difference between a family just managing to scrape by, and having to sell a child whom otherwise it could not feed. Mao himself reported, after an investigation in southern Jiangxi:

[In a] village consisting of 37 households … five households had sold sons … All five had become bankrupt; consequently they had to sell their sons to repay their debts and buy food. The buyer was either a member of the gentry … or a rich peasant [who wished to purchase a male heir]. There are more gentry buyers than rich peasant buyers. The price of a boy ranges from a minimum of 100 [Chinese] dollars to a maximum of 200 dollars. When making this transaction, neither the buyer nor the seller call this business ‘selling’; rather they call it an ‘adoption’. But the world in general calls it ‘selling a child’. An ‘adoption contract’ is also commonly called a ‘body deed’ …

[When the sale takes place] more than ten relatives and friends might be present [as go-betweens] and are paid a ‘signature fee’ by the buyer … The ages of the boys sold range from three or four years old to seven or eight, or [even] to 13 or 14. After the deal is made, the matchmakers carry the boy on their back to the buyer's house. At this moment the biological parents of the boy always weep and wail. Sometimes couples even fight with each other. The wife scolds the husband for his uselessness and his inability to feed his family, which have forced them to sell a son. Most of the spectators weep too …

A child of four or five brings the highest price because such a child can easily ‘develop a close relationship’. In contrast, the price of an older child … is lower, because it is difficult to develop such a relationship and the boy can easily escape from his adoptive parents …

On hearing that a borrower has sold a son, lenders will hurry to [his] house … shouting cruelly: ‘You have sold your son. Why don't you repay me?’ Why does the lender act like this? Because it is a critical moment for his loan. If the borrower does not repay [him] after selling a son, the lender knows that he will never have another chance to get his money back.⁵¹

The problems of China's peasants fascinated Mao. After his landmark survey of the peasant movement in Hunan in the winter of 1926, he returned to the subject again and again, on the Jinggangshan in 1927, and from 1930 onward in Jiangxi, when he was developing his arguments against the ‘rich peasant line’ advocated by Li Lisan and favoured by many provincial cadres. It was better, he wrote in May of that year, to investigate one place in depth, than to make a superficial study of a larger area, for ‘if one rides a horse to view the flowers … one cannot understand a problem profoundly even after a lifetime of effort’.⁵²

The most detailed of these rural investigations was carried out in 1930 in Xunwu, a border county at the junction of Jiangxi with Fujian and Guangdong.

The result was an astonishing document, 60,000 words long, which described in mesmerising detail the daily routine of rural life in the county town and surrounding areas.⁵³ Xunwu xian, a walled town with 2,700 inhabitants, had 30 or 40 brothels, 30 bean-curd stores, 16 general stores, 16 tailors’ shops, 10 inns, 8 barber shops, 7 food stores, 7 herb shops, 7 wineshops, 7 jewellery stores, 5 salt shops, 3 butchers, 3 blacksmiths, 2 tobacconists, 2 umbrella-makers, 2 coffin-makers, a furniture-maker, a fireworks maker, a tinsmith and a watch repairer as well as innumerable street stalls, tea-houses, restaurants and periodic markets. Mao omitted opium dens, presumably because they had been closed after the communists took over. He did include, however, a meticulous enumeration of all 131 different types of consumer goods available in the shops, from nightcaps to suspenders and safety razors to conch buttons; of the thirty-four kinds of cloth, from gambiered gauze to raw silk; and the dozens of different seafoods, fish and vegetables, some, like dried star-fruit and cloud-ear fungus, so rare that only a few pounds were sold each year. He listed the goods which the county exported to neighbouring districts – 200,000 US dollars’ worth each year of rice, tea, paper, timber, mushrooms and camellia oil – and the tracks and paths by which porters and mules transported them. Almost every shopkeeper was identified by name, and his family circumstances, political views and even social habits carefully itemised: thus, the owner of a certain food store ‘liked to whore in the past, but now he has stopped on account of his wife (her bride-price was 250 Chinese dollars)’; the proprietor of the town's largest general store ‘also likes to use his money for whoring and gambling’.

Prostitutes, who accounted for 6 per cent of the town's population, merited a section of their own. Mao listed the fourteen best-known by name. Most were young, he noted, and came from the district of Sanbiao: ‘The people of Xunwu have a saying: “Whores from Sanbiao; glutinous rice from Xiangshan.” This means that the women of Sanbiao are very pretty.’ The reason there were so many brothels, he explained, was that more and more sons of gentry families were being sent to the new Western-style schools: ‘The young masters break away from the warmth of their families when they go to town to study; so they feel quite lonely, and leave a lot of footprints leading to the brothels.’

In the county as a whole, 80 per cent of the inhabitants, including almost all the women, were either wholly illiterate or knew fewer than 200 characters. Five per cent were able to read a book. Thirty people had attended university. Six young men had studied abroad: four in Japan, two in Britain.

The most important section of the report dealt with land ownership. Mao listed twenty great landlords, commencing with Pan Mingzheng, known locally as ‘Uncle Shitcrock’, whose capital amounted to 150,000 US dollars, an astounding sum in so poor a region, and more than a hundred lesser landowners, each with a detailed note of their wealth, education, family connections and political standpoint. This last, Mao noted, was not wholly a function of class: some of the middle-ranking landlords were progressive, or at least ‘not reactionary’. At the top of the scale, the big landlords accounted for 0.5 per cent of the population; small landlords, 3 per cent; rich peasants, 4 per cent. Middle peasants made up 20 per cent, and poor peasants and hired hands the remainder. Later the same year Mao obtained similar figures from a survey in Xingguo county.⁵⁴

On that basis he could argue that the rich peasants were ‘an extremely isolated minority’ and that his opponents in the South-west Jiangxi Party, by exaggerating their importance (and demanding that they receive favourable treatment), were guilty of ‘right opportunism’. The rich peasants, he declared, were ‘the bourgeoisie of the countryside’ and ‘reactionary from start to finish’.⁵⁵ Not only should their surplus land be confiscated, but the Party must introduce a policy of ‘drawing on the fat to make up the lean’⁵⁶ – whereby rich households would have to give up some of their remaining good land in exchange for less fertile holdings owned by poorer families.

In the spring of 1931, however, when Wang Ming and his Returned Student allies started to become a major force, this was judged to be still far too moderate.

Stalin was then ratcheting up his anti-kulak campaign, which would lead to the physical extermination of 12 million Russian ‘rich peasants’. Accordingly, with the Comintern's blessing, it was decreed that all rich peasants’ land and property (not just the surplus) should be confiscated. When redistribution occurred, landlord families would receive nothing, which meant that many starved; rich peasants would get ‘relatively poor land’ in proportion to their labour power; poor and middle peasants would get the best land based on the number of mouths they had to feed.⁵⁷

To ensure that these harsh new standards had been properly applied, Bo Gu ordered a Land Investigation Movement and, in February 1933, shortly after his arrival at Ruijin, appointed Mao to head it.⁵⁸ There may have been an element in this of making the punishment fit the crime. Mao had been responsible for the previous policy, which was judged to have been too soft: let him now be the one to put it right. But he was in any case the obvious candidate to direct a movement of this kind, for the same reason that Wang Jingwei had chosen him to head the GMD Peasant Institute in 1926, and Chen Duxiu, a few months later, to head the CCP's first Peasant Committee. He knew more than any other Party leader about the dynamics of rural life and was better placed than anyone else to deal with the endless practical problems the land reform kept throwing up.

Rules were needed, for instance, for dealing with ponds; with buildings; with fallow land; with hills and forests; with bamboo thickets; with ‘green crops’, planted but not harvested, at the time of redistribution.

Then there was the question of whether redistribution should be conducted on the basis of the township, the village, or the district. If the village, clan loyalties overrode class and economic interests, and the reforms were blunted. But redistribution on the basis of a district, which might have a population of 30,000 or more, was too unwieldy to win the peasants’ support. And what happened when definitions clashed? What should be done with a small landlord who was recognised as a progressive? Or a poor peasant who abused his class status to become a local tyrant?

That autumn, Mao produced an encyclopaedic set of regulations, which sought to answer such questions. The key distinctions he drew were between landlords, rich and middle peasants. For a family to be classified as rich peasants, at least one person must take part in productive labour for a minimum of four months a year, whereas in a landlord household none did so; and it must obtain at least 15 per cent of its income from exploiting others – by hiring labour, letting fields, or from interest on loans. A middle peasant household was one that obtained less than 15 per cent from such sources. Schoolmasterly examples were given, to show how the sums should be worked out:

A family with 11 mouths to feed and two people working has 160 dan of fields yielding a harvest worth 480 dollars. They have two parcels of hillside tea-oil fields, which bring in 30 dollars a year. They have one pond, producing 15 dollars, while pig breeding and so on generate 50 dollars a year. For seven years, they have hired a farm labourer, the value of whose surplus labour amounted to 70 dollars a year. They made a loan at 30 per cent interest, bringing in 75 dollars a year. They have a son who is a scholar and who bullies people by relying on influence.

Assessment: This family has two people working itself, but hires a labourer and makes substantial loans. Its income from exploitation is more than 15 per cent of its income. Although there are many family members, they have a good deal of money left over after expenses are paid. They are therefore rich peasants and should be given poor land. The scholar, who is a member of the bad gentry, should be given no land at all.⁵⁹

Mao urged that the regulations be applied with ‘extreme caution’, since determinations of status were ‘life or death decisions’ for those involved.⁶⁰ This was a pious hope. As he well knew, the whole thrust of the movement militated against the rational, finely calibrated approach that he had laid down. Land reform, he wrote, was ‘a violent and ruthless class struggle’, the aim of which was ‘to weaken the rich peasants and wipe out the landlords’, and when necessary the ‘big tigers’ among them should be paraded before public meetings, sentenced to death by the masses and killed.⁶¹

In such circumstances caution was the exception. The poor peasants who sat in judgement knew that the more ‘landlords’ and ‘rich peasants’ they were able to winkle out, the more land they would have to ‘redistribute’ to themselves. In many districts, terror-stricken middle peasants fled to the mountains, for fear of being reclassified as rich peasants and rendered destitute.⁶²

In the event, the movement was cut short, for the entire area was reoccupied by the nationalists less than eighteen months later. But its effects would last far longer. After 1933, in the Red areas, class origin became the ultimate determinant of an individual's worth and fate. From that root grew a poisonous blight that China, was still trying to shake off more than half a century later. In many places, well into the 1980s, grandchildren of landlords and rich peasants found that family status still counted far more than ability, intelligence and hard work in deciding what opportunities were open to them, and what doors irrevocably shut. Even when class factors finally became less important, traces of the old hatreds lingered on.

The Land Investigation Movement was accompanied by a paranoid drive to wipe out what were termed ‘feudal and superstitious counter-revolutionary organisations’.⁶³ It had close parallels to the earlier campaign to eliminate AB-tuan elements. Mao was once again intimately involved. Large numbers of ‘alien class elements’, he declared, had concealed themselves within local soviet governments and the armed forces to carry out sabotage. ‘It is an urgent task that does not admit of the slightest delay … to launch a final attack on the feudal forces and wipe them out once and for all.’⁶⁴

The man chosen to direct the new campaign was the base area's head of Political Security, Deng Fa, a swashbuckling character with an infectious grin, whose twin passions were horse-racing and sharp-shooting. For all his mischievous smile, Deng Fa was a man much feared. His bodyguards carried curved, broad-bladed, executioner's swords, with red tassels on the hilts. In Fujian, in 1931, he had presided over a purge of Social Democrats in which thousands had perished.⁶⁵ Now, with Mao's approval, he laid the groundwork for many of the practices which would become indelibly associated with later communist political movements.

Lists of doubtful class elements, ‘landlords, local tyrants and evil gentry’, were circulated for reinvestigation. ‘Denunciation boxes’ were installed in towns and villages, where people could place anonymous notes, informing on their neighbours.⁶⁶ Legal safeguards were suspended: when people were ‘obviously guilty’, Mao said, they should be executed first and a report made later.⁶⁷ A still more sinister development, also undertaken with his approbation, was to claim that non-existent organisations had been discovered – such as the ‘Single-minded Society’, the ‘Extermination Brigades’ (at Yudu), and the ‘Secret Watch Brigade’ (at Huichang) – as a pretext for rounding up and interrogating those suspected of disloyalty in the areas where they supposedly operated.⁶⁸

Thirty years later, all these techniques, which Mao and Deng Fa pioneered in Jiangxi, continued to flourish under the People's Republic.

The laws drawn up under Mao's chairmanship proved equally enduring. The ‘Regulations for the Punishment of Counter-revolutionaries’, published in April 1934, listed more than two dozen counter-revolutionary offences, for all but one of which the penalty was death. The crimes listed included, ‘engaging in conversation … to undermine faith in the soviets’ and ‘deliberately transgressing laws’. As though that were not enough, a final catch-all clause specified that ‘any other counter-revolutionary criminal act’, not separately described, would be punished analogously.⁶⁹ That article remained part of the Chinese legal code until the early 1990s.

Such practices were not unique to Chinese communism. Catch-all statutes were a legacy of the Chinese Empire, from which the social controls of both the communists and the nationalists stemmed.⁷⁰ A Guomindang law of 1931 prescribed the death penalty for ‘disturbing the peace’.⁷¹ For both, the purpose of law was political: to uphold orthodoxy, not individual rights.

The election procedures codified at Ruijin at the end of 1931 likewise set a pattern that continued into the People's Republic. The voting age was fixed at sixteen, for both women and men. But the right to vote was limited to ‘correct’ class categories – workers, poor and middle peasants, and soldiers – while merchants, landlords, rich peasants, priests, monks, and other ne'er-do-wells were explicitly excluded. Candidates were nominated by local Party committees on the basis of class status and of ‘political performance’, which Mao explained meant having ‘the right kind of thinking’. Ability came a distant third. Voting was by a show of hands, and an election was considered successful if 90 per cent of the population took part.⁷²

A quarter of those elected, Mao insisted, must be women.⁷³ This was part of his assault on what he called the ‘feudal-patriarchal ideological system’ of traditional China. In Hunan, five years earlier, he had noted approvingly the prevalence of extra-marital affairs, and even ‘triangular and multilateral relationships’, among poorer women ‘who have to do more manual labour than women of the richer classes’ and therefore had more independence.⁷⁴ In his report from Xunwu, which was supposed to be about economic matters, he devoted an inordinate amount of space to changing sexual mores, describing at length how young women had become ‘more liberal in their behaviour’, staying out late in the mountains on the pretext of cutting firewood, while ‘affairs between them and their young male friends … increased. Couples “made free” with each other openly in the hills … There were married people in almost every township who had new lovers.’⁷⁵

The sensualist in Mao relished women's sexual liberation. But his stress on promoting women had a broader purpose. Half a century before it became a fashionable slogan among Western development theorists, Mao understood that to educate a man was to educate an individual, but to educate a woman was to educate a family.

Since the key to women's emancipation was a change in the marriage system, for which Mao had been campaigning ever since the May Fourth movement, the first law to be enacted in the new Chinese Soviet Republic – and the first law enacted by the People's Republic, nearly twenty years later – gave men and women equal rights in marriage and divorce.⁷⁶

Not everyone was pleased. Peasant husbands complained, ‘The revolution wants to get rid of everything, wives included.’ Some women were so intoxicated by their new freedom that they married three or four times in as many years.⁷⁷ To preserve military morale, a special clause was inserted for Red Army soldiers, whose wives could seek divorce only if their husbands agreed.⁷⁸ But the communists’ core constituency, young men from the poorest families, who, under the old system, would not have been able to buy a wife for years, if at all, were delighted with the new arrangements, as were most peasant women. Mao himself regarded it as one of his greatest achievements. ‘This democratic marriage system’, he affirmed, ‘has burst the feudal shackles that have bound human beings, especially women, for thousands of years, and established a new pattern consistent with human nature’.⁷⁹

While Mao wrestled with the land reform and his other governmental duties, he remained politically in a twilight zone, neither in power nor entirely in purgatory. In the early spring of 1933, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, ignoring the Centre's ‘forward, offensive line’, defeated Chiang Kai-shek's fourth encirclement campaign by using tactics broadly similar to those Mao had argued for. Several of Chiang's top divisions were severely mauled, and the Red Army took 10,000 prisoners. Encouraged, Mao attempted in March, a few weeks after leaving hospital, to resume a minor military advisory role, as a member of the rear echelon of the Central Bureau. Bo Gu immediately put a stop to it.⁸⁰

Three months later, Mao asked the Bureau to reconsider the decision it had taken at Ningdu to remove him from the military chain of command, arguing that it had been unjust. Bo retorted that the decision had been entirely correct and that without it, victory over the fourth encirclement would not have been achieved.⁸¹

During the autumn, Mao's position improved somewhat, as his role in the Land Investigation Movement gave him renewed prominence and the campaign against the ‘Luo Ming line’ waned. In September, soon after the start of Chiang Kai-shek's fifth encirclement campaign, he and Zhu De became involved in negotiations with the Fujian-based 19th Route Army, whose commanders had become disaffected by Chiang Kai-shek's refusal to take effective action against the Japanese in Manchuria. In October, a truce was agreed, and a secret communist liaison office was set up at the 19th Route Army's headquarters. Four weeks later, the Fujian leaders proclaimed the establishment of a People's Revolutionary Government, independent of Chiang's Nanjing regime.

This could, and should, have been a godsend for the Red Army. That summer, Bo Gu had insisted on an exhausting and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to try to expand the soviet base area northward. Chiang, meanwhile, had assembled a force of half-a-million fresh troops, including many of his crack divisions, with 300,000 auxiliaries. Zhu's men, dispersed, demoralised and weary, were no match for the nationalist onslaught. The town of Lichuan, near the Fujian border 120 miles north of Ruijin, which guarded the northern entrance to the base area, soon fell, and Zhu's attempts to recapture it were beaten off with heavy losses.

Thus, in November, 1933, when Chiang was compelled to withdraw parts of his main force to meet the threat posed by the Fujian rebellion, it seemed that the communists had been rescued in the nick of time.

However, the Party leaders were suspicious of their new allies’ motives and commitment. Even Mao, who, throughout the Jiangxi period, had urged his colleagues to exploit differences between the warlord forces, was wary about how much support the rebels should be given. The upshot was that when Chiang launched a full-scale invasion of Fujian at the end of December, far sooner than his adversaries had expected, the communist leaders hesitated. By the time the Red Army did finally start offering the 19th Route Army limited aid, it was already defeated, and the nationalists were able to return to the main task at hand, the encirclement campaign.

During the two months’ respite which the Fujian expedition provided, the Central Committee held its long-delayed Fifth Plenum, which underscored anew the ambivalence of Mao's position. He was elected a full member of the Politburo, a post he had last held in the Party's formative years nearly a decade earlier.^II The promotion could hardly have been denied him, given his role as ‘Head of State’ and the continued support he was receiving from Moscow.⁸² But he was admitted in eleventh and last place in the rank order. Throughout the four-day meeting, Bo Gu and other leaders criticised his ‘right-opportunist views’, and when it ended, it was announced that Zhang Wentian would replace him as head of government, leaving him only a figurehead role as Chairman of the Republic.⁸³

He showed his contempt for these proceedings, which took place in January 1934, by refusing to attend. This was on the pretext of illness – one of Mao's ‘diplomatic disorders’, Bo Gu mockingly remarked⁸⁴ – though ill-health did not stop him presiding over the base area's Second National Congress a few days later, at which he delivered a speech lasting nine hours.

Later Mao would argue that the Fifth Plenum marked the apogee of the Returned Students’ ‘left-deviationist line’.⁸⁵ Bo's report, which was adopted as the plenum's political resolution, cast caution to the winds, proclaiming that a ‘direct revolutionary situation’, the prerequisite for nationwide insurrection, now existed in China, and that ‘the flames of the revolutionary struggle are blazing across the entire country’.⁸⁶ Nothing could have been further from the truth. Even as he spoke, Chiang Kai-shek's troops were resuming their inexorable march south.

The ‘blockhouse tactics’ the nationalists employed in the fifth encirclement were quite different from those of earlier campaigns. This time they built long lines of stone forts, with crenellated battlements and walls up to 20 feet thick, like the watch-towers of medieval Europe, each able to hold a full company of troops and often only a mile or so apart, linked by newly made roads. These ‘turtle shells’, as the communists called them, stretched in a great arc, more than 200 miles long, along the northern and western sides of the base area. As the GMD armies inched forward, local troops consolidated their control of the areas in the rear, while the vanguard built a new line of blockhouses, a few miles in front of the old. Chiang's German military advisers ensured that the strategy was executed with teutonic thoroughness. In the year the campaign lasted, the nationalists built 14,000 blockhouses, hemming the Red Army and the population it defended into a steadily dwindling base.⁸⁷

The communists had a German adviser, too. Otto Braun, sent by the Comintern, reached the base area from Shanghai at the end of September 1933. He had spent three years studying conventional warfare at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow.⁸⁸ But the tactic he proposed, known as ‘short, sharp thrusts’, which called for lightning attacks on nationalist units whenever they left the blockhouses to move forward, proved a total failure.⁸⁹ It could hardly have been otherwise: Chiang had forced the communists to fight, on his terms, a positional war of attrition in which his forces had a numerical advantage of more than ten to one. Any tactic based on that premise had to fail. The alternative, which Mao suggested at least twice in 1934, was for the entire Red Army to break out to the north or west, and fight outside the blockhouse area, on terrain better suited to its mobile style of warfare, in Zhejiang or Hunan.⁹⁰ Whether, in the long term, given the nationalists’ overwhelming strength, that would have succeeded any better, is a moot point, for it was never tested. Bo Gu and Braun rejected not only Mao's ideas but all similar proposals as ‘flightist’ and defeatist.⁹¹

As the military pressures escalated, political paranoia resumed. In the army, security officers led execution squads on to the battlefield to ‘supervise’ the fighting. Geng Biao, a 25-year-old regimental commander, recalled what happened when his troops lost control of a key position. ‘I saw [Security Director] Luo Ruiqing coming up, with a Mauser pistol, at the head of an “action team”. My heart skipped a beat. Something nasty was going to happen! At that time … those suspected [of wavering] would be beheaded … Sure enough, [he] came straight up to me and pointed his pistol at my head, demanding loudly: “What the hell's the matter with you? Why did you withdraw?”’⁹²

Geng was in luck. He was allowed to fight on, and survived to become, years later, China's Ambassador to Moscow. Others were less fortunate. But it was a far cry from the principles of the all-volunteer army that Mao had proclaimed on the Jinggangshan seven years before.

Civilians fared still worse. Mao's land regulations were abandoned, and a Red pogrom was launched in which thousands of landlords and rich peasants were massacred.⁹³ Tens of thousands fled as refugees to the White areas. In April 1934, the Red Army suffered yet another disastrous defeat, at Guangchang, seventy miles north of Ruijin.⁹⁴ With military encirclement came economic strangulation. Newly recruited peasant conscripts deserted in droves. As signs of collapse multiplied, acts of sabotage, rumoured or real, by secret society members and clansmen hostile to the communist cause, fuelled new efforts to ‘ferret out counter-revolutionaries’, until the whole area was swept up in a vicious spiral of hatred and despair.

Soon after the Guangchang defeat, probably in early May, Bo Gu and Zhou Enlai realised that the base area might have to be abandoned. The Comintern was informed. Bo, Zhou and Otto Braun formed a ‘three-man group’ to draw up contingency plans.

Mao knew nothing of this. The Politburo was kept in the dark through the summer.⁹⁵ In any case, he wanted no part in decisions which he could not influence and with which he disagreed. After the Fifth Plenum, he stopped attending Military Commission meetings, and spent the whole of May and June on a visit to the base area's southern counties, as far away as possible from where the real battles were taking place.⁹⁶ At the end of July, when nationalist bombing raids forced the Party to evacuate Shazhouba, he and He Zizhen moved to an isolated Daoist temple on Yunshishan, ‘Cloud Stone Mountain’, set amid clusters of pine and bamboo in a landscape of fantastically weathered rocks, a few miles further west.⁹⁷ The Politburo and the Military Commission were installed in another village nearby, but his contacts with them were minimal.⁹⁸ He was ‘out of the loop’ because he wanted to be.

Yet already there were straws in the wind that the balance of forces was changing.

That autumn, Mao's political troubles began to affect his health again. Dr Nelson Fu, a mission-educated physician who headed the Red Army's primitive hospital service, was sufficiently concerned to assign him a permanent medical orderly. In September, in Yudu, he developed a high fever, and for several days was semi-conscious with a temperature of 105 degrees. Dr Fu made the sixty-mile journey there on horseback and diagnosed cerebral malaria, which he cured with massive doses of caffeine and quinine.⁹⁹

The man who ordered Dr Fu to go to Yudu was Zhang Wentian, Mao's successor as head of government and formerly Bo Gu's close ally. After the Guangchang defeat, he and Bo had had a fierce row over Otto Braun's military tactics, which Zhang said took no account of the terrain or the disparity of forces. Bo retorted that he was talking like a Menshevik. Over the next four months, as communist strength, dispersed across six fronts, bled away in a debilitating war of attrition, while Bo promoted the slogan, ‘Don't give up a single inch of Soviet territory!’, Zhang's disaffection deepened. When Mao was at Yunshishan, Zhang was the only senior leader to visit him. He no longer concealed his frustration with Bo's dogmatism and inexperience.¹⁰⁰

Wang Jiaxiang, who had been wounded during the fourth encirclement, and now had to be carried everywhere on a litter with mortar fragments embedded in his body, was another Politburo member sympathetic to Mao's cause.

Bo Gu at first gave instructions that the three men should be assigned to different units during the Red Army's ‘strategic transfer’, as the abandonment of the base area was euphemistically termed, but for reasons that are unclear, later relented and let them travel together.¹⁰¹ It was a political misjudgement which was to cost him dear.

But Zhang and Wang were essentially bit-players. The man Mao really needed to win over was Zhou Enlai. During the disastrous battles at Guangchang, Zhou had been pushed aside, and Bo himself had taken over as General Political Commissar.¹⁰² From then on, Mao cultivated him assiduously. During his tour of the southern counties in June, he sent Zhou a careful briefing on the military situation along the south Fujian front. That autumn, he compiled a handbook on guerrilla warfare, which Zhou arranged to have issued as a Military Commission directive. It was Zhou who had approved Mao's request to go to Yudu in September, where he drew up a security report on the districts which were to serve as the main staging area for the Red army as it gathered for the move west.¹⁰³ But Zhou was a cautious man. He had had his fingers burnt once before defending Mao. As long as Bo Gu had the Comintern's backing, he was not disposed to mount a challenge.

Thus, when Mao, accompanied by his bodyguards, set out from Yudu's East Gate, late on the afternoon of Thursday, October 18, 1934, for the crossing point on the Gan River, everything was still to play for.

After seven years of warfare, three of them as Head of State of the Chinese Soviet Republic, his future was as uncertain as ever. All his worldly possessions amounted to two blankets, a cotton sheet, an oilcloth, an overcoat, a broken umbrella and a bundle of books. He crossed the river by torchlight, as darkness was falling, with what mixed feelings at leaving the base area can only be imagined. An armada of small boats plied the wide, slow muddy waters. It took three days before the entire column, more than 40,000 troops and a similar number of officials and bearers, was safely on the other side.¹⁰⁴ He Zizhen, who was pregnant again, had left Ruijin earlier as part of the nurses’ contingent, one of only twenty women, all senior leaders’ wives, who were allowed to take part. In order to accompany Mao, she had had to steel herself to leave behind their son, now nearly two years old. Xiao Mao, as the little boy was called, was given to his old wet nurse to be looked after. But in the whirlwind of destruction that engulfed the area after the communists withdrew, he was moved for safety to another family. There, all trace of him was lost. After 1949, an exhaustive search was undertaken. Xiao Mao was never found.¹⁰⁵ With his abandonment, another small part of Mao's humanity withered on the vine.

I This was the term Stalin was then using against Bukharin and other members of the Soviet ‘anti-Party bloc’. It was therefore an extremely serious political accusation, implying systematic opposition to Party policy.

II Mao was one of the five members of the Bureau of the Central Committee, as the Politburo was initially called, from June 1923 to the end of 1924. He returned to the leadership as an alternate member of the CC in May 1927, and was a Politburo alternate from August to November of that year. In June 1928, he was re-elected a full CC member, a position he held continuously for the next forty-eight years. At the Third Plenum in September 1930, he rejoined the Politburo as an alternate member. From the summer of 1931, following the arrest and execution of Xiang Zhongfa, until the convocation of the Fifth Plenum, the Politburo ceased to function (although, confusingly, its members retained Politburo status). It was replaced by the provisional Centre, whose leaders, Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian, were not Politburo members. In the spring of 1933, they took charge of the base area's Central Bureau, which ceased to exist when the Politburo was formally reconstituted in January 1934.