MAO

While the Red Army marched and fought its way across southern China, half a world away in Europe, the cockpit of the Powers, the dread forces that had emerged from the carnage of the Great War were making the opening moves, during that baleful autumn of 1934, in a brutal quest for power that would soon ignite a human holocaust on an altogether different scale. In the elegant spa of Bad Wiessee, an hour's drive from Munich, the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, chose the pre-dawn hours of June 30 to launch a blood-purge of the Sturm Abteilung, the brown-shirted storm-troopers who had helped him to power but had since become an obstacle, arguably the final obstacle, to uniting the Nazis, and the nation, behind the Führer and his ideas. From the murderous seeds sown that night grew the practice of the Nazi extermination camps where more than six million Jews, gipsies, homosexuals, communists and other ‘undesirables’ perished.¹ Five months later, Stalin followed suit. On the afternoon of December 1, a lone assassin entered the Communist Party's regional headquarters in Leningrad and shot dead Stalin's putative, and too popular, rival, Sergei Kirov. It was the signal for the Great Purge, which, over the next five years, swept away in a cleansing fire more than a million old Bolsheviks, Trotskyists, Bukharinites, Red Army commanders, party functionaries, secret police, and opponents, real and presumed, of every political stripe, and sent ten times that number into labour camps, where many also perished. On that scale of things, Mao's campaign against the AB-tuan in Jiangxi four years earlier was but a distant foretaste, an amuse-gueule before a blood-feast.

But the event for which 1934 is remembered above all, the trigger for the infernal machinery of the far greater slaughter to come, occurred in a much more remote land. On December 5, fighting broke out between Ethiopians and troops from Italian Somaliland in a dispute over water wells at Walwal, a small oasis in the Ogaden Desert. Six days later, as Mao and his comrades gathered for the fateful meeting at Tongdao that paved the way for his resumption of power, Mussolini presented an ultimatum demanding reparations. The Walwal Incident, as it was known, became the pretext for Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, which led in turn to the formation of the Axis linking Italy, Germany and later, Japan, and put the last nail in the coffin of the League of Nations, created a decade earlier expressly to prevent such crises escalating into war.

Neither the communists, in China or in Moscow, nor the imperialist Powers themselves, saw clearly where these shifts were leading. But ever since Japan's occupation of Manchuria, in which the other Powers had acquiesced, Russia had felt menaced. It had already been defeated once by Japan, in 1905, and memories were still fresh of the depredations of the Japanese army in Siberia after 1918. From 1931 onward, Moscow and its acolytes began chanting a new tune. The main danger now, they declared, was not that contradictions within the imperialist camp would lead to a new world war, but that the Powers, led by Japan, would wage an imperialist war against Russia. This was the basis for the Comintern slogan, ‘Defend the Soviet Union!’, which Bo Gu and Li Lisan had echoed so faithfully. It was to be realised by creating a ‘united front from below,’ in which the world communist movement was to mobilise non-communist support for an anti-imperialist, anti-Japanese crusade, while refraining from formal alliances with bourgeois political parties, regarded as irredeemably compromised.

In the world beyond the base area, the Western democracies’ appeasement of Germany, Italy and Japan continued until the underlying political realities had become so hideously distorted by the triumph of fear and greed over principle that communist Russia and Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression pact.

In Ruijin, it was all far simpler. For the next five years, the Party's propaganda to the White areas was dominated by the claim that the communists would fight Japan, but Chiang Kai-shek would not. That was untrue: Chiang had begun preparing for war with Japan as early as 1932. But he was determined to finish off the communists first, and while he did so, he made concession after humiliating concession to the Japanese aggressors.² That allowed Mao to say that the Guomindang was acting as the ‘running dog of imperialism,’ selling out China's national interests by ‘shameless non-resistance.’³ So long as Chiang and his allies were in power, opposing Japan would be impossible; therefore the first task of all true patriots was to overthrow the GMD regime. In April 1932, the Chinese Soviet Republic issued a formal declaration of war against the Tokyo government and called for the formation of an ‘anti-Japanese Volunteer Army’. Mao and Zhu De offered to sign a truce with any nationalist commander who agreed to stop fighting the communists and oppose Japan instead. In August 1934, when Red Army units broke out of the base area for a diversionary operation in Zhejiang, the Party described them as an ‘anti-Japanese vanguard’ on their way to fight the invaders in the north.⁴

Among educated Chinese, these gestures, empty though they were, struck a chord. That Japan's aggression had gone unpunished was a terrible humiliation. However much Chiang Kai-shek might argue that the communists were the greater threat, he had failed to defend the country's honour.

On the other hand, Chiang held power. The communists did not. As they marched out of Jiangxi, and out of the newspaper headlines, to become little more than a footnote to the great events elsewhere, their calls for unity against the Japanese menace seemed to many increasingly irrelevant. ‘Communism in China is dying,’ wrote Chiang's amanuensis, Tang Leang-li. The treaty-port press agreed. ‘If the government follows up the campaign along the lines adopted in Jiangxi,’ the Shanghai China Weekly Review concluded, ‘the whole thing will collapse into plain banditry.’⁵

Only the Japanese correspondents took a more sombre view, arguing that from the safety of the remote interior, the communists would pose a far more formidable challenge than they ever had from the coast.⁶ Japan, of course, had its own agenda. Anything that made the Guomindang's hold on China seem more tenuous comforted its imperial ambitions. Yet the Japanese were right about the communists, just as the communists would prove right about Japan.

When the Red Army halted at Zunyi, in January 1935, Mao achieved for the first time a dominant position in the Party leadership because his colleagues recognised that he had been right when everyone else (Bo Gu, Zhou Enlai and Otto Braun, in particular) had been wrong. Had the base area not fallen; had Bo Gu been less insecure and more willing to heed advice; had the Red Army not been so badly mauled in the botched crossing of the Xiang River; had Braun been less of a dictator, Mao's hour might not have come. They turned to him because every other recourse had failed.

Unlike the many earlier occasions when he had languished in disgrace, to find himself resurrected almost overnight, this time his eclipse had been partial and his return was similarly veiled. Officially, he was, and remained, Chairman of the now abandoned Chinese Soviet Republic. The only formal change in his position was his promotion to the Standing Committee of the Politburo, and his designation as chief military adviser to Zhou Enlai (the role that Zhou had tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain for him at the Ningdu conference, two years earlier). There was also a second, more important, difference. This time he was competing not for a subordinate position, as political commissar of an army or secretary of a border region. Now at the age or forty-one, he was aiming for the top.

If Tongdao was the first step, Zunyi and the meetings that followed in the spring of 1935 were the first stage in a conquest of power which Mao had the good sense to realise could only be accomplished slowly. Between Standing Committee member and leader of the Party yawned a political gulf which others had tried to cross and failed. Between Zunyi and the north-west, the communists’ eventual destination, lay a desperate military campaign that none of them could be confident of winning.

The Red Army, in Zunyi, was down to 30,000 men, from 86,000 who had set out three months earlier. It had not gained a major victory for more than a year. That it had survived at all was due less to its own military prowess than to the instinct for self-preservation of the warlords along the way, who had preferred to stand aside and let the communists pass, rather than risk their strength for their nominal ally, and real rival, Chiang Kai-shek.⁷

This proved even harder than he had thought. The Zunyi meeting itself came to an abrupt end when the military commanders had to race back to their units to fend off an attack by warlord troops advancing from the south.⁸ In the next five weeks, the Red Army suffered a further series of dismal reverses. An attempt to cross the Jinshajiang, the River of Golden Sand, in the upper reaches of the Yangtse, to set up a new base area in Sichuan, almost turned into a disaster on the scale of the Xiang River defeat. The army marched into an ambush by combined Sichuan and Guizhou warlord units. By the time it had fought its way out, another 3,000 men had been lost.⁹

As the army retreated, with the enemy in hot pursuit, a moment came that He Zizhen had been dreading. She went into labour with her fourth child. They stopped at an abandoned hut and she gave birth in the litter in which she was being carried. The baby, a girl, was left with a peasant family nearby. Knowing this time that the separation would be final, she did not even pause to give the child a name.¹⁰

Finally, at the end of February, the communists’ luck turned. The battle of Loushan Pass allowed them to retake Zunyi, capturing 3,000 prisoners and routing two Guomindang divisions led by one of Chiang's top commanders.¹¹ Mao's relief, and exultation, produced one of his loveliest poems:

The west wind blows cold. From afar,
In the frosty air, the wild geese call in the morning moonlight,
In the morning moonlight,
The clatter of horses’ hooves rings sharp,
And the bugle's note is muted.

Say not the strong pass has an iron guard,
Today, with a single step, we shall cross the summit,
We shall cross the summit!
There the hills are blue as the sea,
And the dying sun like blood.¹²

That spring, the Red Army became once again the ‘Zhu–Mao Army’, with Zhu De as Commander-in-Chief, Mao as Political Commissar, and a new ‘three-man group’ of Zhou, Mao and his ally, the wounded Wang Jiaxiang, still carried on a litter, providing strategic guidance.¹³ Its old designation, the First Front Army, was restored.¹⁴ Orthodox military tactics were abandoned. For the next two months, Mao engaged in a dazzling, pyrotechnic display of mobile warfare, criss-crossing Guizhou and Yunnan, that left pursuing armies bemused, confounded Chiang Kai-shek's planners and perplexed even many of his own commanders. Four times they crossed the Chishui, the Red River, between Guizhou and Sichuan, before marching south in a vast arc, passing within a few miles of the provincial capital, Guiyang, where Chiang had established his headquarters, and then threatening Yunnan's chief city, Kunming, 400 miles away in the south-west, only to swing north again, finally crossing the Upper Yangtse where it was least expected, at the beginning of May.¹⁵

Mao himself called the Guizhou strategy the proudest moment of his military career.¹⁶ In Shanghai, the China Weekly Review admitted: ‘The Red forces have brainy men. It would be blind folly to deny it.’¹⁷ A Guomindang garrison commander said tersely: ‘They had Chiang Kai-shek by the nose.’¹⁸

Chiang's spokesmen scrambled to cover up the government's embarrassment. It was announced that Zhu De had been killed; that his men were guarding his body, wrapped in a shroud of red silk; that the ‘notorious chieftain, Mao Tse-tung’ was gravely ill, being carried on a stretcher; that the ‘Red remnants’ had been smashed.¹⁹ But by then the Red Army was already out of reach, encamped outside the walled county town of Huili, thirty-five miles north of the river, secure in the knowledge that every boat for a hundred miles had been made fast on the northern bank, and that Chiang's Yunnanese troops had neither the means nor the will for pursuit.

There, at an enlarged Politburo meeting, Mao berated those who had doubted him: Lin Biao and his commissar, Nie Rongzhen, who had complained that Mao's tortuous odyssey was exhausting their men to no purpose and had suggested that Peng Dehuai should take operational command instead; Peng himself, always itching for a fight, who had accepted that idea rather too readily; Liu Shaoqi and Yang Shangkun, who had proposed that the army should stop wandering and try to set up a fixed base; and no doubt others besides. Lin Biao, the youngest, still only twenty-seven, was let off with a scolding. ‘You're nothing but a baby!’ Mao told him. ‘What the hell do you know? Can't you see it was necessary for us to march along the curve of the bow?’ Peng, as usual, got most of the blame, and made a mild self-criticism. But, in his hour of triumph, Mao could afford to be magnanimous. His aim at Huili was to unite the Party and military leadership behind him for the trials yet to come. They, on their side, had to recognise that, once again, he had been proved right and they had been proved wrong.²⁰

The campaign had not been without cost. The Red Army now numbered little more than 20,000 men.²¹ Yet Mao had extricated them from a situation which many had felt was hopeless. Never again, after Huili, would the corps commanders and the Party leaders accompanying the First Front Army challenge Mao's strategic judgements, or his leadership.

The problem remained, however, where the Red Army should go next. As the ‘March to the West’ had become the ‘Long March’, one improvised destination after another had been jettisoned. The Politburo's plans to link up with He Long in north-west Hunan; to set up a new base around Zunyi; to establish soviet areas in southern Sichuan, in the Yunnan–Guizhou–Sichuan border region and now in south-west Sichuan, all had been found wanting. The soldiers, and their officers, needed reassurance that their leaders knew where they were headed. At Huili, at long last, a clear decision was taken. They were to go due north, to link up with Zhang Guotao's Fourth Front Army, which had set out three years earlier from E-Yu-Wan and was now based in northern Sichuan.²²

In the process, they would perform feats of courage and endurance of which epics are made, weaving a dense myth of invincibility and heroism that their nationalist opponents would try in vain to unravel.

After leaving Huili in mid-May, Mao's forces climbed from the lush subtropical plains of the south into broken, high plateau country, never lower than 6,000 feet, where the hillsides were ablaze with Tibetan roses, pink and yellow oleander, azaleas, rhododendrons, and all the other exotic plants which nineteenth-century botanists had brought back from the Himalayas to grace English country gardens. This was the land of the Yi, a fierce Sino-Burmese hill tribe who waged an endless war against encroachments by Han settlers from the plains. The Red Army's Chief of Staff, Liu Bocheng, known as the One-Eyed Dragon, having lost the sight of the other in battle, had grown up in the region, and won safe passage by swearing an oath of brotherhood with the Yi paramount chief, sealed by a libation of chicken's blood. Even with this protection, Yi tribesmen picked off Red Army stragglers, taking their weapons and clothes, and leaving them to starve.²³

Once that gauntlet had been run, they made for the Dadu River, sixty miles further north. There, seventy years earlier, Shi Dakai, the last of the Taiping princes, had been trapped by the armies of the Qing Viceroy and surrendered. Prince Shi was executed by slicing. His 40,000 troops were slaughtered. For days after, the waters ran crimson with their blood. Chiang Kai-shek, like Mao, knew his history: he ordered his commanders in Sichuan to race to secure the crossing points, so that the communist forces could be hemmed in on the right bank.

By then the Red Army had reached Anshunchang, where there was a ferry. But the river was in spate and there were only three small boats, barely enough to get the vanguard across. Mao ordered Yang Chengwu, a regimental political commissar, to make for Luding, a hundred miles upstream, where an ancient chain bridge spanned the river.²⁴

The town lay on the old imperial tribute route from the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, to Beijing. But from Anshunchang there was no road, not even a track. Yang's men went by narrow cliff-paths, which, he wrote later, ‘twisted like a sheep's gut around the mountains’, while the river seethed menacingly hundreds of feet below. It was slow going, and they had to stop to fight an enemy battalion which was defending a high pass. When it rained, the paths were ‘slippery as oil,’ Yang remembered, and for much of the time there was thick fog. After they broke camp, at 5 a.m. next day, a courier arrived from the Military Commission. Nationalist troops had been reported on the opposite bank, hurrying northward. They would have to reach Luding, still eighty miles away across trackless mountain ranges, within twenty-four hours.

The stupendous forced march that took them there, and the battle that followed, forged a legend which seared itself into the consciousness of a generation of Chinese. Later it would justly be called ‘the most critical single incident of the Long March’.²⁵ Failure would have meant the Red Army's annihilation.

The bridge, a single span of thirteen iron chains, with open sides and a floor of irregularly laid planking, a ‘tenuous cobweb of man's ingenuity’ linking China to High Asia, as one early traveller called it,²⁶ was 120 yards long. On the western side, the nationalist commander had ordered the wooden floor-planks removed, leaving only the bare chains swinging free. At the eastern end stood the town gate, set in a 20-foot-high stone wall on which machine-guns had been mounted, commanding the approaches. In Yang's own understated words, ‘we were taken aback by the difficulties to be overcome.’²⁷

Twenty-two men volunteered for the assault. Edgar Snow, a year later, based his classic account of what followed on the stories of the survivors.

Hand grenades and Mausers were strapped to their backs, and soon they were swinging out above the boiling water, moving hand over hand, clinging to the iron chains. Red machine-guns barked at enemy redoubts and spattered the bridgehead with bullets. The enemy replied with machine-gunning of his own, and snipers shot at the Reds tossing high above the water, working slowly towards them. The first warrior was hit, and dropped into the current below; a second fell, and then a third … Probably never before had the Sichuanese seen fighters like these – men for whom soldiering was not just a rice bowl, and youths ready to commit suicide to win. Were they human beings, or madmen or gods? …

At last, one Red crawled up over the bridge flooring, uncapped a grenade, and tossed it with perfect aim into the enemy redoubt. Nationalist officers ordered the rest of the planking torn up. It was already too late … Paraffin was thrown on to the planking, and it began to burn … But more Reds now swarmed over the chains, and arrived to help put out the fire and replace the boards … Far overhead angrily and impotently roared the planes of Chiang Kai-shek …²⁸

The reality was slightly more prosaic than the myth which Snow created. The assault force did not ‘swing out … hand over hand’; they crept crabwise along the chains at each side of the bridge, while a second group laid an improvised floor of planks and branches behind them.²⁹

But by whatever means, the miracle was that they crossed. History did not repeat itself. Where the Taipings had perished, the communists broke free. By the beginning of June, the whole army was safely on the eastern bank. Chiang Kai-shek's efforts to bottle them up in the mountains had been foiled.^I

Luding lies at the eastern edge of the Himalayas, in the vast icy shadow of Gongga Shan, which soars up 25,000 feet, thirty miles to the south. The easiest route, eastward towards the plains, was ruled out because it lay too close to Guomindang troop concentrations. Another possibility was to follow the Dadu River to the north-west, which would eventually lead them to the Qinghai–Gansu border region. The problem there was that it lay through hostile country, thickly populated by Tibetans who bore no love for Chinese soldiers.

Mao chose the third way, which led across a series of 14,000-foot passes in the Jiajinshan, the Great Snowy Mountains, to the north-east.

It started badly. In the foothills, Guomindang aircraft spotted the column with which Mao and other Politburo members were travelling, and strafed and bombed it. None of the leaders was hurt, but one of Mao's bodyguards was killed.³¹ From then on, it got worse. Otto Braun remembered:

We went up over the mountain ridge, separating the Tibetan highland from China proper, on steep, narrow paths. Rivers in full spate had to be forded, dense virgin forests and treacherous moors crossed … Although summer had already begun, the temperature seldom rose above 50 F. At night it sank almost to freezing. The sparse population was made up of … national minorities of Tibetan extraction, traditionally called manzi (savages) by the Chinese, [ruled by] … Lama princes … They lay in wait to ambush small groups and stragglers. More and more, our route was lined with the bodies of the slain … All of us were unbelievably lice-ridden. Bleeding dysentery was rampant; the first cases of typhus appeared.³²

For the rank and file, the crossing of the snow-bound peaks was the hardest part of the whole march. They wore only straw sandals and the thin summer clothing they had brought from the south. Mao remembered one unit losing two-thirds of its baggage animals. They fell, and could not get up.³³ Dong Biwu, the Hubei Party leader, who climbed the mountains in the same group as Mao, remembered that men, too, fell and were unable to get up:

Heavy fog swirled about us, there was a high wind and half-way up it began to rain. As we climbed higher and higher, we were caught in a terrible hailstorm and the air became so thin that we could hardly breathe at all. Speech was completely impossible, and the cold so dreadful that our breath froze and our hands and lips turned blue … Those who sat down to rest or to relieve themselves froze to death on the spot. Exhausted political workers encouraged men by sign and touch to continue moving … At midnight [we] began climbing the next peak. It rained, then snowed, and the fierce wind whipped our bodies … Hundreds of our men died there … All along the route we kept reaching down to pull men to their feet only to find that they were already dead.³⁴

On the worst stretches the going was too rough even for stretcher-bearers, and the wounded had to be carried on men's backs. Among them was He Zizhen. Two months after her baby was born, she had been with the nurses’ unit, escorting wounded men, when three Guomindang planes appeared. As they began strafing, she ran to help an injured officer to take cover. She was hit in fourteen places. Mao was told that she would probably die. Tenaciously, He Zizhen survived. But several pieces of shrapnel, including one in her head, were too dangerous to remove, and for weeks she was on the brink of death, drifting in and out of a coma.³⁵

Mao's decision to take the back route, the deserted trail across the high peaks, proved well-founded. On June 12, when the First Front Army's vanguard reached the valley beyond, it encountered, near the village of Dawei, in Maogong county, an advance unit of Zhang Guotao's Fourth Army. Initially they took each other for warlord troops and shots were exchanged before they recognised each other's bugle calls. Neither army had had any reliable information about the position of the other.³⁶

Mao, Zhu De and the headquarters staff arrived five days later, and a great torchlit rally was held to celebrate the two armies’ union. There were folk-dancing and theatricals, and Li Bozhao, the pretty, 24-year-old wife of Yang Shangkun, then a regimental political commissar, later to become China's President, entranced everyone with the Russian sailors’ dance, the yablochka, which she had learned as a student in Moscow. Mao made a speech and the troops feasted on provisions the Fourth Army had expropriated from local landlords. Over the next few days, other Fourth Army commanders gathered, followed, on June 24, by Zhang Guotao himself. A powerfully built, stately man, four years Mao's junior, he rode in with a large cavalry escort in the middle of a rainstorm to find Mao and the rest of the Politburo waiting by the roadside to greet him. Another welcoming rally was held, and that night, in Lianghekou, an opium-sodden hill village, even smaller and poorer than Dawei, the leaders held a banquet to mark the joyful occasion.³⁷

After eight months of continuous fighting, the exhausted soldiers of the First Front Army were ecstatic over the junction with Zhang Guotao's forces. At last they would be able to rest, and rebuild their depleted strength.

The problem was not ideological or political. It was not that they had different visions of the Chinese revolution, or that they favoured different methods for carrying it out. It was a matter of raw power.

Of the 86,000 men who had set out with Mao the previous October, fewer than 15,000 now remained. Zhang Guotao had four times more.³⁸ Mao's men were in summer rags. Zhang's were warmly clothed. Mao's men were combat-weary southerners, unused to the cold mountain climate, underfed and, even when they could get food, unable to digest the local Tibetan tsampa, made from barley flour. Zhang's troops were Sichuanese, fighting on their home terrain, well-provisioned, rested and fit.

This might not have mattered if the Party had had a properly constituted leadership, with a clear chain of command. But in 1935 it did not.

The decisions taken at Zunyi were all open to challenge because only six of the twelve full Politburo members had been present. Zhang Wentian, who had become the provisional Party leader, had never been formally elected to the Central Committee, any more than had his predecessor, Bo Gu: both had originally been co-opted by an emergency procedure in Shanghai, in defiance of normal Party rules. In practice, moreover, since the Huili meeting in May, Mao, not Zhang Wentian, had been the dominant Politburo figure.

Zhang Guotao was Mao's equal in seniority. He too was a founder member of the Party. He, too, had been in and out of the top leadership since 1923. If Mao could achieve de facto primacy, what was to stop Zhang Guotao, a no less ambitious man, from trying to do the same?

In the past, the ultimate arbiter of such matters had always been the Comintern. But for most of the last eight months, the Comintern had been silent. A few days before the evacuation of Ruijin, police in the French concession in Shanghai had raided a CCP safe house and seized the Party's one short-wave radio transmitter. Direct contact with Moscow would not be re-established until the summer of 1936.³⁹

The two men began manoeuvring, very cautiously, from the moment they learned that their forces had made contact on June 12. Zhang made discreet overtures to Mao's military commanders. Mao, with breathtaking cynicism, played up the role of Otto Braun as proof of Comintern support.⁴⁰ In the ten days before they met at Lianghekou, there was a long exchange of probing telegrams, in which the Politburo, at Mao's urging, proposed setting up a base area in the Sichuan–Gansu–Shaanxi border region, between the Min and Jialing rivers. When Zhang begged to disagree, Mao politely rejoined: ‘Please think it over again.’⁴¹ Face to face, each man invariably referred to the other by the honorific, ‘elder brother’. But behind the façade of courtesies, the calculus was brutally simple. Zhang was determined to parlay his overwhelming military strength into political power. Mao had a majority in the Politburo, which meant he could block him. But at what cost?

After three days of talks, culminating in a formal meeting on June 28, chaired by Zhou Enlai in the lamasery of Lianghekou, its walls black with the smoke of yak's butter from Buddhist votive lamps, a compromise was patched together to which Zhang reluctantly assented. The main forces would head north to set up a base area in southern Gansu, as Mao had proposed, and they would wage an offensive campaign of mobile warfare so as not to become ‘turtles in an urn’, victims once again of the blockhouse strategy that the nationalists had used to such devastating effect in Jiangxi. Zhang was appointed Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission, under Zhu De. But the crucial issue of unifying the command of the two armies, to which all agreed in principle, was left in practice for another day.⁴²

However, the agreement quickly proved hollow. When the First Front Army set out for Maoergai, a small settlement a hundred miles to the north, to prepare for an attack on Songpan, the garrison town which controlled the main pass to Gansu, Zhang's Fourth Army dragged its feet. On July 18, another Politburo meeting was held. Zhou Enlai, now seriously ill with hepatitis, resigned his post as General Political Commissar, which Zhang agreed to take over. Yet still the Fourth Army held back. The attack on Songpan failed. As the communist forces crawled northward, more crisis meetings were held and more concessions offered. But never quite enough.

On both sides, suspicion and resentment thickened. The nub of their disagreements was over where the Red Army should go next (and, by inference, who had the power to make that decision). Mao continued to advocate going north. Zhang wanted to go west, or south.

To prevent an open split, the Politburo agreed, at a series of meetings in the Tibetan village of Shawo at the beginning of August, that Zhang's powers should be further enhanced. He and Zhu De would take overall command of the entire Red Army, which would be divided into two columns. They would travel, with the GHQ staff, in the left column, comprising mainly Fourth Army troops. Mao and the rest of the Politburo would move with the much smaller right column, of mixed First and Fourth Army units, led by Zhang's deputy, Xu Xiangqian. In return, Zhang agreed that the army should continue to head northward, across the grasslands, a treacherous expanse of marsh and bog, which, after the failure at Songpan, was now the only route open to them if they wished to reach Gansu.⁴³

These arrangements were less of a gamble on Mao's part than they might appear. Ultimate control still rested with the Politburo, in which he had the dominant voice. In any case, they were not intended as a permanent solution, but merely to stave off for a time the showdown which they all knew was coming.

Ten days later, at a meeting at Maoergai held in Zhang's absence, the Politburo Standing Committee gave instructions to begin secretly collecting evidence for the eventual case against him, and approved (but did not circulate) a Central Committee resolution, describing Zhang's proposal to move west, into the isolated high plateau of Qinghai and southern Ningxia, as ‘dangerous and flightist’. It added menacingly: ‘This policy stems from fear, exaggeration of the enemy's strength and loss of confidence in our own forces and our victory. It is right opportunism.’⁴⁴

For a while, it seemed the new arrangements would pay off. Despite the Centre's harsh language, and Zhang's continuing reservations, the two columns began moving north along separate routes about fifty miles apart. The stage was being set for what Mao would call, years later, ‘the darkest moment of my life.’⁴⁵

The grasslands lie at 11,000 feet in an immense basin, ‘an inland Sargasso Sea’, as one writer has called it,⁴⁶ spreading for 5,000 square miles along a vast horseshoe bend in the Yellow River, as it descends from the Himalayas in the west to turn north towards Inner Mongolia. Otto Braun remembered:

A deceptive green cover hid a black viscous swamp, which sucked in anyone who broke through the thin crust or strayed from the narrow path … We drove native cattle or horses before us, which instinctively found the least dangerous way … Cold rain fell several times a day, and at night turned to wet snow or sleet. There was not a dwelling, tree or shrub as far as the eye could see. We slept in squatting positions … Some did not awaken in the morning, victims of cold and exhaustion. And this was August! Our sole nourishment came from the grain kernels we had hoarded or, as a rare and special treat, a morsel of stone-hard dried meat. The swamp water was not fit to drink. But it was drunk, because there was no wood to purify it by boiling. Outbreaks of bloody dysentery and typhus … again won the upper hand.⁴⁷

Some died because their bodies could not assimilate the raw, unmilled grain. Later units, maddened by hunger, picked the undigested kernels from the bloody faeces of those who had gone before, washed them as best they could and ate them.⁴⁸

The rank and file, southern plainsmen, brought up in the bustling villages of the coast, had the will to live sucked out of them by the paralysing emptiness of the place. Ji Pengfei, later China’s Foreign Minister, then a young medical orderly, recalled: ‘Every morning we had to take a count to see how many were left. We found some who were not dead. Their eyes were open. But they could not rise … We got them to their feet, and they slumped back into the bog, dead.’⁴⁹ In the crossing of the grasslands, the First Front Army lost as many men as it had in the Snowy Mountains, three months before.

Mao's right column crossed first, taking six days to get from Mowe, at the southern edge of the basin, to Baxi, forty miles across the swamp to the north. Back on dry land, they decisively defeated a Guomindang division which had come over the mountains from the east to block their path, inflicting several thousand casualties.⁵⁰

By then it was the end of August. Mao's troops halted to rest, while Zhang's left column, sixty miles away on the western edge of the basin, launched its own attempt to cross the morass. But when they reached the Gequ, a tributary of the Yellow River, they found it was in flood and decided to turn back. Zhang announced the decision in a fretful, oddly childish wireless signal, in which he blamed Mao for their plight and ordered both columns to head back towards the south: ‘Facing the endless grasslands and unable to go forward, we will die here if we do nothing. This place is misery … You insisted that we make for [Baxi]. Now look at the result! Going north is not only inopportune, but it will cause all kinds of difficulties.’⁵¹

That triggered a furious exchange of radio messages. The Politburo insisted that the original plan be respected. Zhang insisted that it be abandoned. Then, on September 8, he issued an order to Fourth Army officers seconded to the First Army to return to their original units.

The Politburo met that night. Zhou Enlai, still laid low by illness, joined the discussion from his litter. They approved a telegram, pleading in the most conciliatory terms for Zhang to reconsider: ‘We, your brothers, hope that you will think it over again … and go north. This is a critical moment for the Red Army. It demands that all of us be prudent.’⁵²

But something about Zhang's message did not quite ring true. Mao's old rival from Jinggangshan, bull-headed Peng Dehuai, sensed a trap and deployed troops secretly in a protective shield around Politburo headquarters. He asked Mao whether they should take the Fourth Army cadres hostage, in case they were attacked. Mao pondered the question, but said no. Two hours later, the Chief of Staff, Ye Jianying, intercepted a second, secret, message from Zhang. It ordered the commander, Xu Xiangqian, and his commissar, Chen Changhao, both Fourth Army stalwarts, to lead the right column back to the south. Between the lines it was implied that if necessary they should use force against anyone who might try to stop them.⁵³

Mao, Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian and Zhou Enlai met again at Peng's First Army headquarters. They agreed that there was now no choice but to strike out on their own. Lin Biao, whose men were at Ejie, twenty miles to the north-west, was ordered to stay where he was, and await developments.

Later Mao would remember that night as a time when the fate of the Red Army hung by a thread.⁵⁴ In the year that had passed since they left Yudu, they had marched nearly 5,000 miles, fighting more than two hundred battles, across some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world. Their illiterate peasant troops had endured hardships that no other modern army had survived. Conventional military science holds that a unit which loses a quarter of its men is finished as a fighting force. By the time the Red Army emerged from the grasslands, more than nine-tenths of those who had set out had been lost. Yet now, just as the end seemed in sight, the pitiful remnants of this extraordinary sacrifice were about to complete their own destruction by unleashing a bloody conflict among themselves.

At 2 a.m., in pitch darkness, Peng's forces silently moved out. Ye Jianying and Yang Shangkun stole away from Xu's front headquarters to join them, bringing with them a set of maps.

Their flight was soon discovered. Chen Changhao proposed impetuously that troops be sent in pursuit. Xu, dour military man that he was, refused. Instead, another of Zhang's supporters, a brash Returned Student named Li Te, set off with a cavalry escort to try to persuade them to return. Otto Braun, who was with Mao, pulled Li from his horse. The Politburo looked on, bemused, as they screamed at each other in Russian. Mao punctured the tension with an aphorism: ‘You don't tie the bride and groom at the altar,’ he told Li, ‘and you don't stop a family feuding.’ Any Fourth Army man who wished to stay behind could do so, he added, but the First Army would go north.⁵⁵

Mao and his colleagues sent one last message to Zhang, ordering him to follow them. It concluded: ‘No objections! No delay! No disobedience!’ There was no response.⁵⁶

While Xu Xiangqian and the rest of the right column made their way back across the grasslands to meet Zhang and a deeply unhappy Zhu De, who would spend the next year with the Fourth Army as a semi-hostage,⁵⁷ the First Army leaders had other, more pressing concerns. Nationalist troops were advancing in strength from the east. Peng took Zhu's place as commander, while Mao returned to his old post of Political Commissar.⁵⁸ They now had fewer than 10,000 men. If they allowed themselves to be hemmed in against the marshes, they would risk complete destruction.

At Ejie the situation had become so desperate that Mao revived an idea he had first raised in Sichuan. If they could break through to the north, they would head for the Soviet Union, and try to set up a new base area, with Russian support, on the border of Outer Mongolia or Xinjiang. ‘In the past,’ he acknowledged, ‘the Party Centre opposed such a policy … But things are different now …. We must … break through … and obtain guidance and assistance from the [Communist] International … We are not an independent communist party. It is wrong to refuse absolutely to ask for help … Otherwise we will have to fight a guerrilla war endlessly.’⁵⁹

It was the first time since the earliest days of the Chinese Party – and it would be the last – that Mao spoke openly of turning to the Soviet Union to save the Chinese revolution from destruction.

In the end, it did not come to that. Two days’ march to the east, at Lazikou Pass, an impregnable, heavily fortified nationalist choke-point on the Bailongjiang, the White Dragon River, where the valley narrowed to a defile only a few yards across, between sheer cliffs more than a thousand feet high, the Red Army scored another of the astonishing military tours de force that would make its name a legend. A twenty-man commando group from Yang Chengwu's regiment climbed the precipitous crags behind, and hurled down grenades from the heights, taking the defenders by surprise. It was the last major battle of the Long March.⁶⁰ Four days later, on September 21, the First Army entered Hadapu, in southern Gansu, the first Han town they had seen since leaving Yunnan four months earlier. There, from a GMD newspaper, they learned that a communist base area existed in Shaanxi. The plan to make for the Soviet Union was shelved. Instead, the army headed east across Ningxia, to Wuqi, near Bao'an, in the parched highlands of China's far north-west.⁶¹

For the next month, they marched 600 miles across a lunar landscape of great conical hills of bare cappucino-coloured soil, as fine as talcum powder, carved like tiered wedding cakes into high terraces, so smooth they seemed to have been cut with a knife, and scarred with huge keyhole-shaped ravines, plunging down hundreds of feet into wide flat canyons below. It was poorer than any part of Han China they had seen before. Every two or three years, the harvest failed from drought or floods. The people lived in caves, cut into the soft loess cliffs. But to the Red Army, it seemed like a rest-cure. There were skirmishes with Moslem cavalry, but after the breakthrough at Lazikou the main GMD armies held back. Messengers went ahead to the new base area, which was led by two local men, Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang. They had both been arrested in a purge of suspected counter-revolutionaries, launched by Xu Haidong, a Red Army leader who had reached Shaanxi a few weeks earlier after fighting his way north from the old E-Yu-Wan base area. The Politburo arrived just in time to order their release.⁶²

In this arid, desert country, Mao would spend the next twelve years. On October 22, 1935, a year and four days after he had left Yudu, the March was formally declared to be at an end. Of those who had set out with him, fewer than 5,000 remained.⁶³

During this immense peregrination, the wider world beyond China's borders was not entirely forgotten. In the south-west, the army had put up slogans, calling on Chinese to unite against Japan.⁶⁴ In June, Mao had learned from the Fourth Army that Japanese forces had moved into Inner Mongolia, and the Politburo had issued a statement condemning Chiang Kai-shek's failure to stop them.⁶⁵ But it was not until the First Front Army reached Hadapu, in late September, that Mao became aware that the mood in the country was beginning to change, and Chiang's policy of appeasement was finally wearing thin.

That summer, Japan had forced the Guomindang government to withdraw Chinese troops from the vicinity of Beijing and Tianjin; to dismiss provincial officials regarded as hostile to Japan; and to promulgate a humiliating ‘goodwill mandate’, banning expressions of anti-Japanese sentiment. Widespread public anger had resulted.⁶⁶

Most of this Mao could only guess at. But what he did learn was enough to convince him that the decision to make for Shaanxi had been correct. ‘Zhang Guotao calls us opportunists,’ he told a meeting of regimental commanders in mid-September. ‘Well, who are the opportunists now? Japanese imperialism is invading China, and we are going north to resist Japan.’ A week later the Politburo Standing Committee declared that north Shaanxi would become ‘a new anti-Japanese base.’⁶⁷ To Mao, that decision was a beacon. After a year of haphazard retreat, the Party finally had a new purpose. His instinct to go north, even if for the wrong reasons, had been proved right. Zhang's decision to go south had been wrong. Mao had matured since the day, eight years earlier, when, in a letter to the Politburo, he had written of ‘jumping for joy’ at a decision which had pleased him. But his elation at the Party's renewed mission, to subdue the Grey Dragon of the East, Japan, was just as strongly felt. In the mountains of southern Ningxia, as he looked out for the first time across the highlands that would take the Red Army to its new home, he expressed his feelings in a poem.

High on the crest of Liupan Mountain,
Our banners flap idly in the western breeze.
Today we hold fast the long cord,
When shall we bind the Grey Dragon?⁶⁸

Mao was not alone in turning his thoughts to Japan in the autumn of 1935. Stalin was watching the rise of European fascism, and the fledgeling alliance between Berlin, Rome and Tokyo, with growing alarm. At the Comintern's Seventh Congress in July 1935, a new strategy was unveiled: the anti-fascist united front, in which communists and social democrats, formerly deadly rivals, were to join together directly in a common struggle to defend the proletariat, and its champion, the Soviet Union, against the fascist Powers.

In France and Spain, the new policy produced Popular Front governments, bringing together heterogeneous coalitions of anarchists, communists, liberals, socialists and syndicalists.

For the Chinese Party, the road was less clear. On August 1, Wang Ming, the CCP's representative in Moscow, issued a declaration calling for the establishment of a ‘unified government of national defence’ to resist Japan. In China, however, there were no anarchists, liberals and socialists with whom the communists could make common cause. There was only Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang; and Chiang, in Wang Ming's words, was a traitor, a ‘scum with the face of a man and the heart of a beast’, as much an enemy as the Japanese themselves. So while Wang's Moscow declaration reiterated the CCP's long-standing offer to join forces with any White army, including Chiang's own GMD troops, provided they stopped attacking the soviet areas and agreed to fight Japan, in practice it appeared no more likely than before that the offer would be taken up.⁶⁹

News of these developments reached Shaanxi in mid-November. By then the Red Army had moved south to fight off a Guomindang force from Xian. Another month would elapse before the Politburo met at Wayaobu, a walled county town of one-storey grey-brick houses, fifty miles west of the Yellow River, to discuss the implications of the new strategy.⁷⁰

There, on Christmas Day, 1935, it passed a resolution marking a shift in political line every bit as dramatic as the change in military strategy approved a year earlier. At Zunyi, the conventional warfare tactics of the Returned Student leadership had been jettisoned. Now at Wayaobu, the Russian-inspired dogmatism that had dominated Party decision-making since the Fourth Plenum in January 1931 was swept aside as well.

In its place came pragmatic, flexible policies, designed to win maximum public support with a minimum of ideological baggage.

The CCP, the resolution declared, could not lead the struggle against Japan and Chiang Kai-shek by relying on the working class alone. The rich peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, even the national bourgeoisie, all had their role to play too. Leftism, not rightism, it went on, was now the main danger to the communist cause. Left ‘closed-doorism’ manifested itself in a reluctance to change tactics to cope with new situations; clinging to policies which were divorced from practice; and ‘an inability to apply Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism to the specific, concrete conditions of China, thus turning them into rigid dogmas’. Party members needed to understand that victory would be achieved when people became convinced that they represented the interests of the majority of Chinese, not by slavishly following ‘empty, abstract communist principles’. To that end, the land and property of rich peasants would no longer be confiscated. Shopkeepers, small capitalists and intellectuals would enjoy the same political rights as workers and peasants, and their economic and cultural freedoms would be protected. Large-scale capitalists would be treated favourably. The ‘Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviet Republic’ would be renamed ‘the Soviet People's Republic’, to signify that all citizens had a place in it.⁷¹

The Wayaobu meeting was chaired, and the resolution drafted, not by Mao but by Zhang Wentian. This reflected the formal power structure: Zhang was still acting Party leader. But it was also a political manoeuvre, of the kind at which Mao excelled. As a member of the old Fourth Plenum leadership, who better than Zhang to unveil policies which implicitly condemned everything he and his colleagues had once stood for?⁷²

Approved on the eve of Mao's forty-second birthday, the Wayaobu resolution marked the start of his ideological ascendancy in the Party. Two days later, at a rally of activists, he savoured his success:

The advocates of closed-door tactics say the … forces of the revolution must be pure, absolutely pure, and the road of the revolution must be straight, absolutely straight. Nothing is correct except what is literally recorded in Holy Writ. [They say] the national bourgeoisie is entirely and eternally counter-revolutionary. Not an inch must be conceded to the rich peasants. The yellow trade unions must be fought tooth and nail … Was there ever a cat that did not eat fish [they ask,] or a warlord who was not counter-revolutionary? … It follows, therefore, that closed-doorism is the sole wonder-working magic, while the united front is an opportunist tactic. Comrades, which is right? … I answer without a moment's hesitation: the united front, not closed-doorism. Three-year-olds have many ideas that are right, but they cannot be entrusted with serious national or world affairs because they do not understand them yet. Marxism-Leninism is opposed to [such] ‘infantile disorders’ found in the revolutionary ranks. Like every other activity in the world, revolution always follows a tortuous road, not a straight one … Closed-doorism just ‘drives the fish into deep waters and the sparrows into the thickets’, and it will drive the millions upon millions of the masses … over to the enemy's side.⁷³

There was no open criticism at Wayaobu of Bo Gu, Zhou Enlai, or any of the other former leftists. Mao's interest was not to alienate those who had been his adversaries, but to win them over. Zhang's role was to help build a consensus for the hard slog that lay ahead.

Hard slog it was. The Shaanxi base might be a haven of peace after the hardships of the Long March, but it was so poor that even the wretched hill villages of Guizhou and south-west Sichuan looked rich and fertile by comparison, and it was ringed by enemies. Moslem cavalry patrolled the western marches, towards Ningxia and Qinghai. Yan Xishan's White armies held Shanxi, to the east. Zhang Xueliang's North-East Army, which had been expelled from Manchuria by the Japanese, had just been sent to garrison the south. If the Red Army was to survive, let alone prosper, in its new home, it would have to find provisions and recruits, and to neutralise at least one of the hostile forces encircling it.

Even before the Wayaobu conference, Mao had concluded that the weakest point in Chiang's armoury was Zhang Xueliang's Manchurian force.⁷⁴ Zhang was in his early thirties, the son of a bandit leader who in the early part of the century had fought and killed his way to become one of the most powerful warlords in China. The Young Marshal, as he was widely known, to distinguish him from his father, the Old Marshal, was a ruthless, often devious, sometimes naive young man, who had recently kicked a powerful opium habit. But he was also a patriot. The Old Marshal had been assassinated by Japanese agents. Zhang himself had lost his country to the Japanese, partly because Chiang Kai-shek had encouraged him not to resist them. Zhang's troops had lost their homes. They had no interest in fighting communists. They hated Japan.

From late November 1935, Mao deluged the Young Marshal's commanders with offers of a truce and a joint campaign against the Japanese invaders. ‘We are Chinese,’ he wrote. ‘We eat the same Chinese grain. We live in the same land. The Red Army and the North-East Army are from the same Chinese earth. Why should we be enemies? Why should we kill each other? Today I propose to your honourable army that we cease fighting … and sign a peace accord.’⁷⁵

Red Army units were instructed to release captured White officers, and to care for the enemy's wounded. In line with this directive, at the beginning of January 1936, Peng Dehuai released an officer named Gao Fuyuan, who had been captured two months earlier. Gao had been a schoolmate of Zhang Xueliang, and when he returned to Zhang's headquarters at Luochuan, a hundred miles south of Wayaobu, he convinced the Manchurian leader that the communists’ offers of co-operation were sincere. A week later, Gao arranged for a message to be dropped to Peng from a nationalist aircraft on a supply run to a Guomindang garrison the communists were besieging. On January 19, Mao's envoy, Li Kenong, arrived at Luochuan to begin negotiations.⁷⁶

It turned out to be surprisingly easy. The Young Marshal received Li next day, and agreed at once to adopt a ‘passive’ stance in the civil war. The only sticking point concerned Chiang Kai-shek. In Li's negotiating brief, Mao had argued that resisting Japan and opposing the ‘national traitors’ were two sides of the same coin; one was not possible without the other. This the Manchurian leader adamantly rejected. He was ready for a truce with the communists, but not to come out openly against his own Commander-in-Chief.⁷⁷ By the time the year was out, both men would change their stance, with momentous consequences. But for the time being, they agreed to differ. At the beginning of March, Mao told the Politburo that a verbal accord had been reached on a ceasefire, and Zhang's forward garrisons at Yan'an and Fuxian, south of Wayaobu, were to be treated as friendly forces.⁷⁸

Five weeks later, Zhou Enlai slipped into Yan'an to talk to the Young Marshal face to face. The meeting, held in a Christian church, lasted most of the night. When Zhou left, just before dawn, they had agreed that the formation of a national government and a unified anti-Japanese national army was the only way forward. Zhang was not yet ready to take an anti-Japanese stand in public, nor would he defy Chiang Kai-shek if he received a direct order to enter areas under Red Army control. But, short of that, the truce would be strictly observed; permanent liaison officers would be appointed; trade between the Red and White areas would be permitted; and the Young Marshal would use his influence with fellow nationalist commanders to secure safe passage for communist units. He even agreed, Zhou reported, to supply the Red Army with arms and ammunition.⁷⁹

With his southern flank thus secured, Mao was free to pursue the other main task that had been decided at Wayaobu: rebuilding the communists’ military strength after the attrition of the Long March.⁸⁰

In December 1935, the First Front Army had barely 7,000 men. The local Shaanxi forces, led by Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang, and Xu Haidong's E-Yu-Wan army, each had 3,000. Mao's target was to recruit another 40,000, a quarter of them the following spring. The only realistic way to do this was to mount an expedition across the Yellow River to Shanxi. That carried the risk, as Peng Dehuai pointed out, that they might not be able to get back. Mao went ahead anyway, leaving behind Zhou Enlai and Bo Gu to watch over the Shaanxi base.⁸¹

The venture was christened the ‘Eastern Expedition to Resist Japan and Save the Nation’.⁸² It made good propaganda. But for all Mao's stirring talk of marching to Hebei to confront the invaders, its objectives were much more limited.

The communists did not come within 200 miles of Japanese units during the two-and-a-half months, from late February to early May 1936, that they spent in Shanxi, Instead, they skirmished with Guomindang troops in a narrow area, no more than fifty miles from the river, where they raised 300,000 silver dollars by expropriating landlords, and gained about 8,000 men, half of them peasants recruited from the Shanxi villages, the remainder prisoners of war. That brought Mao's forces back to 20,000 men, about the same number as he had had a year earlier, but still far fewer than there would have been had the communist leadership remained united. The irony of the CCP's position in the spring and summer of 1936 was that, even as it successfully pursued a united front with the Young Marshal's North-East Army, its own forces remained irrevocably split. Zhang Guotao was still in Sichuan, and the bulk of the Red Army was with him.

Here, too, however, there were signs of change. In the first weeks after the separation, Zhang had orchestrated a series of Fourth Army political conferences, which ‘expelled’ Mao, Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian from the Party and elected a new ‘Central Committee’ and ‘Politburo’ with Zhang himself as General Secretary. A message was then sent to Wayaobu, ordering the Shaanxi-based leaders to cease using the ‘false title’ of Party Centre, and to refer to themselves in future as the CCP Northern Bureau.⁸³

Mao, in contrast, acted with great prudence. At Ejie, the day after the split, he had resisted calls for Zhang's expulsion. Though a resolution was passed, denouncing Zhang for ‘crimes of splitting the Red Army’ and ‘right-opportunist and warlord tendencies’, it was not published. When the Long March ended, and Mao consolidated his own position, it was as Chairman of the North-West Bureau of the Military Commission (and, concomitantly, CC Secretary for Military Affairs), with Zhou and Wang Jiaxiang as his deputies, not as Commission Chairman per se. Even after the announcement that Zhang had set up a rival leadership, Mao took no action for more than a month. Only in January 1936, when it became clear that Zhang would not retract, did he finally authorise the release of the Ejie resolution, making the break official.⁸⁴ By then the Comintern had made clear that it supported the Central Committee based at Wayaobu, that it regarded Mao as one of the ‘standard-bearers’ of world communism and that it rejected Zhang's claim to have set up a rival leadership.⁸⁵

That spring Zhang's star was already on the wane. The Fourth Army's southern campaign had at first been highly successful. But during the winter, Chiang Kai-shek's forces had counter-attacked and the tide began to turn. While Mao was off on his ‘eastern expedition’, Zhang had suffered two crushing defeats. The Fourth Army had been forced back from the fertile Chengdu plain into the barren, isolated regions bordering Tibet.⁸⁶

In May, when Mao returned to Wayaobu, he made fresh efforts to woo back the errant force, promising to let bygones by bygones if only Zhang and his men would come to join them in the north. ‘Between you, Comrade Guotao, and we, your brothers, there are no political or strategic differences,’ one emollient Politburo telegram declared. ‘There is no need to discuss the past. Our only duty now … is to unite against Chiang Kai-shek and Japan.’⁸⁷

Soon afterwards, Zhang's troops were joined by the Second Front Army, formed from units led by Ren Bishi and He Long, who had come together in northern Guizhou two years earlier.^II The result was to increase Zhang's military strength, but to dilute his political authority. Gradually the pressure to move north grew stronger. At the beginning of July, the new, combined force reluctantly set off across the grasslands, following the same path to Shaanxi that Mao's First Army had followed a year earlier, with the same terrible losses. There at last, in October 1936, they were met by First Army troops under Peng Dehuai, who had penetrated into Gansu almost as far as Lanzhou. Yet still the deadly game was not quite over. The Fourth Army's main force, more than 20,000-strong, became stranded on the west bank of the Yellow River, cut off by a GMD army which seized the ferry points. Zhang, in his role of General Political Commissar, ordered it to strike out to the west on a suicidal march through the Gansu corridor, where it was cut to ribbons by Moslem cavalry. A year later, the exhausted remnants of that carnage returned to Shaanxi. More than half had perished. The headquarters group, led by Li Xiannian, had been reduced to 400 men.⁸⁸

A month after Zhang's fateful order, on December 6, 1936, he and Zhu De joined Mao and the rest of the leadership at the Politburo's headquarters in north Shaanxi for a triumphal celebration of unity restored. Next day, Mao was named Chairman of the Military Commission, with Zhang and Zhou Enlai as his deputies.⁸⁹

The mise-en-scène was fictive. Zhang's challenge to Mao was over. So was his political career. For the last year, since the meeting at Wayaobu, Mao had had the final word in the Politburo. Now he had final control, too, over all 40,000 Red Army men who remained after the great migration from south China to the north. The destruction of the flower of the Fourth Army in the Gansu corridor hastened Zhang's political demise. But he was finished anyway. Fifteen months earlier, at Maoergai, Mao had already warned that when the time was right, Zhang would be required to answer for the errors that he had made.⁹⁰

While the long struggle with Zhang Guotao was fitfully played out, Mao was stalking a bigger quarry. At the beginning of March 1936, a few days after Zhang Xueliang agreed to a truce, the Politburo authorised peace feelers to the government in Nanjing.⁹¹

The purpose, at that stage, was not to try to win over Chiang Kai-shek. He was still counter-revolution personified, the ‘chief traitor and collaborator’, to be opposed no less fiercely than Japan. One inner-Party directive stated bluntly: ‘everyone wants to see traitor Chiang die a terrible death.’⁹² The aim of the communist proposals was rather to undercut Chiang's policy of ‘internal pacification first, resistance to Japan second’; to strengthen the hand of the anti-Japanese faction of the Guomindang, led by Chiang's brother-in-law, the former Finance Minister, T. V. Soong; and last, but not least, to satisfy Moscow's demands that no stone be left unturned in the search for united front allies. Russia had re-established diplomatic relations with nationalist China in 1933. As the anti-Comintern Axis strengthened, Russian national interests – as distinct from the interests of Russia's CCP allies – made Chiang a potential partner whose armies, in a future war, were not to be ignored.

Mao's proposals were an artful mixture of substance and spin. He laid down three basic conditions: an immediate end to the civil war and free passage for the Red Army through Hebei so that it might ‘check the advance of Japanese imperialism’; the release of political prisoners; and the restoration of political freedoms. To these would later be added internal reforms and the establishment of a government of national defence.⁹³

All over China, hatred of Japan was intensifying. That winter, in what became known as the December Ninth movement, tens of thousands of students, infuriated by Japanese demands for recognition of their conquest of north China, had staged violent demonstrations in Beijing and other cities. The communists compared it to the May Fourth movement, sixteen years before. In the provinces, angry mobs lynched Japanese travellers. Intellectuals flocked to join national salvation associations. For months, the two countries were close to war. Mao calculated that in these circumstances, if the communists talked to the Guomindang, they had nothing to lose. If the talks made progress, the split between the pro- and anti-Japanese factions of the Guomindang would widen. If they broke down, they would be made public, which would enhance the communists’ standing with an urban opinion increasingly enraged by Chiang's policy of appeasement.⁹⁴

But they did not break down. By the summer, a bewildering array of back channels and secret negotiating mechanisms was in place. In Moscow, nationalist diplomats held discreet meetings with Wang Ming at the CCP's Comintern mission.⁹⁵ In Nanjing, a communist envoy, disguised as a priest, made contact with Chen Lifu, one of the most powerful men in the Guomindang after Chiang himself. Later Mao sent another, more senior, emissary for talks with Chen in Nanjing and Shanghai. The two sides discussed the possibility of the GMD leaders meeting Zhou Enlai in Hong Kong or Canton.⁹⁶

As the negotiations progressed, Mao's attitude to Chiang Kai-shek, and to the wider implications of Japanese aggression, underwent a gradual change. By April 1936, he had concluded that the old slogan, Fan-Ri tao-Jiang, ‘Resist Japan, Oppose Chiang’, was counter-productive. ‘Our stand is to oppose Japan and stop the civil war,’ he told Zhang Wentian. ‘Opposing Chiang Kai-shek is secondary.’ A month later he was wondering aloud whether it made sense to go on lumping together all the imperialist powers as a single bloc, when there were obviously growing strains between Japan, on the one hand, and Britain and the United States on the other.⁹⁷

That led to the decision to allow Edgar Snow to visit the base area, in order to publicise the communist cause in the West. In June, the Red Army gave up Wayaobu, and the Politburo moved its headquarters to Bao'an, a still more remote and impoverished county town in the very heart of the loess country, where the leaders lived in cave-dwellings, cut into a weathered red sandstone cliff overlooking a muddy river.⁹⁸ There Mao told Snow, in a prophetic interview on July 16:

Those who imagine that by further sacrifices of Chinese sovereignty … they can halt the advance of Japan are only indulging in utopian fancy … The Japanese navy aspires to blockade the China seas, and to seize the Philippines, Siam, Indochina, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. In the event of war, Japan will try to make them her strategic bases … [But] China is a very big nation, and it cannot be said to be conquered until every inch of it is under the sword of the invader. If Japan should succeed in occupying even a large section of China, getting possession of an area with as many as 100 or even 200 million people, we would still be far from defeated … The great reservoirs of human material in the revolutionary Chinese people will still be pouring men, ready to fight for their freedom, into our front lines, long after the tidal flood of Japanese imperialism has wrecked itself on the hidden reefs of Chinese resistance.⁹⁹

A few days earlier, Chiang had given the first public intimation that his patience with Japan might finally be running out. If Japan tried to force his government to recognise the puppet states it was setting up in North China, adjacent to Manchuria, he warned, the ‘moment of final sacrifice’ would have arrived. The language was prudent, but it marked a change of tone.¹⁰⁰

All through the summer and autumn of 1936, the CCP multiplied public and private appeals to the Guomindang and its leaders to sign a truce and join forces against Japan.¹⁰¹ In August, under pressure from Stalin – who by now had belatedly decided that an anti-Japanese alliance between the communists and the Guomindang was vital to Soviet interests – Mao proposed that the CCP–GMD united front that had existed in the 1920s be revived, and that an ‘All-China United Democratic Republic’ be set up, incorporating the Red base areas, which would be subject to the same parliamentary system as the rest of the country.¹⁰² ‘For a people being deprived of its national freedom,’ he told Snow, ‘the revolutionary task is not immediate socialism, but the struggle for independence. We cannot even discuss communism if we are robbed of a country in which to practise it.’¹⁰³ Mao even agreed to change the designation of the Red Army, so as to make it formally part of the nationalist armed forces, under nominal nationalist command. So long as the reality of the Party's control over communist troops and territory was preserved, almost any concession was possible. At the same time, however, he expressed doubts that Chiang's strategy had really changed and predicted that he would continue to waver.¹⁰⁴

Mao's reservations proved justified. In October, Chiang reiterated that ‘resistance against Japan requires the suppression of the communists first’. The end of that month saw Mao speaking of the negotiations taking ‘a critical downward turn’.¹⁰⁵ Then, at a secret meeting in Shanghai in November, Chen Lifu upped the ante. There would have to be a ceiling on communist troop strength, he said. At first he proposed 3,000 men; then 30,000. Beyond that he would not budge. At a second meeting in Nanjing, Zhou indicated that the communists might be prepared to accept even that condition. But the accord remained stalled.¹⁰⁶

The reason soon became clear. Chiang had become convinced that one last push would rid him of the communists, once and for all. On December 4, traffic was cleared from the highway to Xian's well-guarded aerodrome, and police lined the roadside. The Generalissimo was arriving in state to begin final preparations for what was to be his sixth and last, communist encirclement campaign.¹⁰⁷ For the previous three months, Zhang Xueliang had been imploring him to end the civil war and allow the North-East Army to fight Japan instead. Now Zhang was given an ultimatum: either fight the Reds, or face immediate transfer to the south.¹⁰⁸

On Tuesday, December 8, the Japanese War Minister warned that unless China was more accommodating, fresh conflict was inevitable. Next day, thousands of students marched in protest to Lintong, a hot springs resort near Xian where Chiang had set up his headquarters. The police opened fire, and several young people were injured.¹⁰⁹ On Thursday, the 10th, Mao telegraphed Zhang that negotiations with the nationalists had broken down because of Chiang's ‘excessive demands’. Twenty-four hours later, Mao's secretary, Ye Zilong, received Zhang's reply. It was quite short, he recalled, but when he decoded it he came across a phrase, in classical Chinese, containing two characters whose meaning neither he nor anyone else in the Secretariat could work out. He took it to Mao, who looked at it quickly and smiled. ‘There's good news on the way’, he remembered Mao saying.¹¹⁰

Otto Braun, who lived nearby, awoke next morning, a Saturday, to find Bao'an abuzz with excitement. The field telephone, linking Mao's office to the Politburo and the Military Commission, rang incessantly. Mao himself, who normally worked at night and slept until midday, was already up. A bodyguard told Braun the news, the incredible, sensational news that was spreading through Bao'an like wildfire: Chiang Kai-shek had been arrested shortly before dawn, and was being held at the headquarters of the North-East Army in Xian on the orders of Zhang Xueliang.¹¹¹

The story, as they gradually pieced it together in the hours that followed, was this. On Friday night, after despatching his mysterious secret telegram to Mao, Zhang had summoned a meeting of about a dozen senior commanders. He ordered them to arrest Chiang's General Staff; to take over the Governor's office; to disarm the police and the Blueshirts, a GMD paramilitary force; and to seize the airport. The head of Zhang's personal bodyguard, a 26-year-old captain, then set off with 200 men for Lintong, where, at 5 a.m., he led the assault on Chiang's quarters. The Generalissimo's guards resisted long enough for him to flee up the rocky, snow-covered hillside behind the resort. There, two hours later, he was discovered in a narrow cave, shivering from the cold, dressed only in a nightshirt, and barely able to talk, having left behind his false teeth in the panic of his flight. From this undignified hiding-place, he was carried down on the young captain's back and driven into the city, where Zhang Xueliang apologised profusely for the treatment he had been made to suffer, assured him of his personal safety, and then repeated the demand that he had been making since the summer: that Chiang change his policy, and resist Japan.¹¹²

The communists, leaders and soldiers alike, received the news rapturously. At a mass rally that evening, Mao, Zhu De and Zhou Enlai demanded that he be brought before the masses and put on trial. ‘[It was] an occasion to stand up and cheer,’ Zhang Guotao wrote later. ‘It seemed that all of our problems could be resolved at the drop of a hat.’¹¹³

At a Politburo meeting on Sunday morning, Zhang Guotao and others in the leadership called for the overthrow of the nationalist government and for the captive Generalissimo to be executed. Not only had he instigated an atrocious civil war and collaborated treasonably with Japan in a shameful policy of appeasement, they said, but only days earlier he had rejected communist offers of an accommodation, preferring continued ‘bandit suppression’ to national resistance. Mao was more prudent, or perhaps more devious. Chiang, he declared, had shown himself to be objectively pro-Japanese. His arrest had ‘revolutionary significance’ and the Party should support it. However, the communists should not take the lead in opposing him. The proper course was to bring Chiang before ‘the judgement of the people’ so that his crimes might be publicly exposed – a formulation which Zhang Guotao would later claim was designed to encourage the Young Marshal to dispose of ‘the prime culprit’, as Mao called Chiang, while keeping the Party's hands clean.¹¹⁴ At the same time, strenuous efforts should be made to gain backing from the left-wing and centrist factions of the Nanjing government for a national anti-Japanese united front, while guarding against moves by right-wing GMD leaders to put down the Xian mutiny by force.

The Party's position was conveyed to Zhang Xueliang in a series of telegrams that weekend, in which Mao and Zhou Enlai stressed the Red Army's solidarity with the Young Marshal's actions and their determination to make the north-west the main base for a future anti-Japanese war.¹¹⁵

Zhang had made clear from the start that his aim was not to punish Chiang Kai-shek, but, as he put it in a ‘Telegram to the Nation’, addressed to the Nanjing government on the morning of the coup, to make him ‘remedy past mistakes’.

Ever since the loss of the north-eastern provinces, five years ago, our national sovereignty has been steadily weakened and our territory has dwindled day by day. We suffered national humiliation [again] and again … There is not a single citizen who does not feel sick at heart because of this … Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, surrounded by a group of unworthy advisers, has forfeited the support of the masses of our people. He is deeply guilty for the harm his policies have done the country. We, Zhang Xueliang, and the others undersigned, advised him with tears to take another way. But we were repeatedly rejected and rebuked. Not long ago the students in Xian were demonstrating [for the] National Salvation movement, and General Chiang set the police to killing these patriotic children. How could anyone with a human conscience bear to do this? … Therefore we have tendered our last advice to Marshal Chiang, while guaranteeing his safety, in order to stimulate his awakening.¹¹⁶

This implied that once the Generalissimo had accepted the mutineers’ demands, which echoed those the communists had been making – namely that the government should be enlarged to include representatives of all patriotic parties; the civil war should end; political freedoms should be restored; and future policy should be based on ‘national salvation’ (i.e. resistance against Japan) – he should continue as China's leader.

In Nanjing, meanwhile, his detention had triggered a fierce struggle between his supporters, led by his redoubtable wife, Soong May-ling, who urged a peaceful resolution, and a loose alliance of right-wing and pro-Japanese leaders, headed by the War Minister, He Yingqin, who wanted bombing raids against Xian and a full-scale punitive expedition, not necessarily to rescue Chiang but rather, if he succumbed during the conflict, to put a more reliably pro-Japanese leader in his place. Soong May-ling narrowly prevailed, but it was clear that if peace efforts stalled a military offensive would follow.

Thus, by the time Zhou Enlai reached Xian four days later, on Thursday, December 17, after a wearisome journey on horseback from Bao'an, followed by a lengthy wait at Yan'an while Zhang sent a plane to fetch him, the situation had already changed. The balance of forces in Nanjing was turning out to be less favourable than the CCP leaders had hoped. The idea of putting Chiang on trial, as Mao had urged earlier, was beginning to look much less attractive.¹¹⁷

At this point Stalin intervened – in such a casual, chauvinistic manner, so contemptuous of Chinese communist interests, that Mao was left speechless with rage.¹¹⁸

Far from being a ‘revolutionary event’, the Soviet leader held, Zhang's mutiny was ‘another Japanese plot … [whose] purpose is to obstruct the unification of China and sabotage the rising anti-Japanese movement.’ This, on the face of it, was asinine. Mao dismissed it at a Politburo meeting the following day as being no less absurd than Japan's claim that Chiang's arrest was a Soviet plot, and in subsequent statements he insisted that the Xian Incident had been extremely positive and had ‘caused the Guomindang to put an end to ten years of erroneous policies … [It] marks the transition between two eras and the beginning of a new stage.’ However, Stalin had his reasons. As Comintern's Secretary-General, Georgi Dimitrov, explained in a telegram shortly afterwards, Zhang's action was ‘objectively detrimental’ to anti-Japanese solidarity because it torpedoed Stalin's hopes of an anti-Japanese front being formed in China under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership. In November, unknown to Mao, the Russians had made a fresh attempt to enrol the nationalist government as an ally, to counter the anti-Comintern Pact that had just been established by Japan and Germany, and secret talks were under way in Moscow on a Sino-Soviet security treaty. Chiang's arrest put all that in doubt. To Stalin, nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of the overriding national interests of the world's leading socialist power. That the Chinese Party might see things differently was not his concern.¹¹⁹

Friction between Moscow and the CCP leadership was hardly new. But in the Party's early years, the question of blame had been obscured. Who could say for certain if Moscow had been at fault, or if successive Chinese leaders had misinterpreted Moscow's line?

Stalin's ukase of December 1936 was different. For the first time since Mao had become the leading figure in the Politburo, Moscow had issued a direct order, telling him what to do. It was all the more galling because he had already accepted by December 16 that, given Zhang Xueliang's stance and developments in Nanjing, there was no choice but to seek a peaceful outcome.¹²⁰ The previous July, in an interview with Edgar Snow, he had bridled at the suggestion that Red China might become merely an extension of the Soviet Union. The Comintern did not ‘dictate’ to member parties, he said, and China was not ruled by Russia: ‘We are certainly not fighting for an emancipated China in order to turn the country over to Moscow!’¹²¹ Now, barely five months later, that was exactly what had happened. The lesson – that Soviet ‘internationalism’ was a one-way street and China would have to get used to it – would not be forgotten.

By then, however, events had developed a momentum of their own. The Generalissimo himself had come round to the idea of mediation.¹²² Soong May-ling arrived on the 22nd and, with her brother, T. V. Soong, held talks with Zhang and Zhou Enlai. As suddenly as it had begun, it was all over. On Christmas Day, Chiang flew back to Nanjing. The Young Marshal, to show loyalty, went with him.¹²³ Although the principle of his release had been agreed, Zhou was not forewarned, and when Mao learned of it he had mixed feelings. ‘There are advantages to releasing Chiang,’ he noted, ‘but whether [they] have been realised is a matter that remains to be confirmed’.¹²⁴

What had happened behind the closed doors of the Generalissimo's captivity? Both more and less than met the eye.

In his public statements afterwards, Chiang maintained he had steadfastly refused to enter into political negotiations and had signed nothing. Technically this was true. Zhou Enlai told Mao that the negotiations had been with the Soongs, and that only after agreement had been reached on Zhang Xueliang's main demands had the Generalissimo agreed to meet him and given him a verbal undertaking that he would abide by what had been decided.¹²⁵ Mao's judgement was that Chiang remained ‘ambiguous and evasive’, and that there was no way of knowing whether he would honour an accord which he now denied ever making, and which, even if he had, was obtained under duress.¹²⁶

The first signs were uniformly bad. The Young Marshal, the sacrificial lamb whose bold gesture had made the agreement possible, was court martialled, sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, amnestied, and then placed under house arrest (from which he would not be freed until his ninetieth birthday, more than fifty years later, on Taiwan). Far from pulling back, as Chiang had promised, the nationalists sent up reinforcements. In Nanjing, pressure resumed for a punitive expedition. Zhang's troops began building defensive fortifications, and in January 1937, Mao told the Red Army it must ‘firmly prepare for war’.¹²⁷ Once again, the Comintern intervened. After condemning ‘the erroneous nature of your Party's previous orientation, which [aimed at] eliminating Chiang Kai-shek and overthrowing the Nanjing government’, Moscow demanded that Mao ‘openly proclaim and resolutely carry out’ a policy of enhanced cooperation with the Guomindang.¹²⁸ Mao appears to have ignored these messages but they cannot have pleased him.

Two months later, the crisis had passed. Chiang and Zhou Enlai resumed contact, at first indirectly, then face-to-face.¹²⁹ Mao knew as well as Stalin that if the whole Chinese nation were to be mobilised against Japan, it would have to be at least nominally under Chiang's leadership, although he differed over the extent of the concessions the communists should make in order to bring that about. But the hoped-for united front proved as elusive as before. All through the spring and early summer, the two sides argued over issues ranging from the number of divisions the Red Army should have to the kind of badge they should wear on their caps.¹³⁰

Later, communists and nationalists alike would claim that the Xian incident was a turning-point, a pivotal moment which changed the course of Chinese history. Mao was closer to the truth when he told the Politburo, shortly after Chiang's release, that if a truce with the nationalists came about, it would not be because the Generalissimo had given his word but ‘because the situation would leave him no choice’. The events at Xian were a vital catalyst. But they were not the deciding factor.¹³¹ That came on July 7, when Japanese troops occupied a key railway junction by the Marco Polo Bridge at Lugouqiao, five miles south-west of Beijing. The Pacific War had begun.

Even then the Generalissimo hesitated. Mao, Zhu De, Peng Dehuai and other commanders ‘respectfully implored’ him to decree nationwide mobilisation and authorise communist forces to move towards the front. But a week after the Japanese attack, he was still unwilling to do so.¹³² In a telegram to the CCP Military Commission, Mao urged caution:

Don't let Chiang get the feeling he's being pushed into a corner. [Our] duty now is to encourage him to take the final step of setting up the united front – and there may still be problems over this. We have reached the moment of truth, which will decide whether our country will live or die. This is the crucial time when Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang must change their policy totally. Everything we do must accord with this general line.¹³³

The day after Mao signed that telegram, July 15, 1937, Zhou Enlai went to Lushan, the hill resort where the Generalissimo was staying near Nanchang, for their third meeting that year. He handed over a draft declaration, reiterating earlier communist undertakings and pledging the Party's support for the democratic revolution launched by the GMD's founder, Sun Yat-sen. In return, he said, the CCP had only two substantive demands: war against Japan; and ‘democracy’, a code-word for the legalisation of communist activities.¹³⁴

On July 28, Mao issued an ultimatum: The Red Army, with Zhu De as Commander-in-Chief and Peng Dehuai as his deputy, would begin moving towards the front on August 20, whether the Guomindang agreed or not.¹³⁵

Next day, Japanese troops occupied Beijing, followed on the 30th by Tianjin. Ten more days passed. Then, on August 13, they attacked Shanghai, directly threatening Chiang's own power base. The choice could be put off no longer. ‘Go and tell Zhou Enlai’, he instructed one of his aides, ‘[the communists] should send their troops at once. They need not wait any more.’ Soon afterwards it was announced that the Red Army had been redesignated the Eighth Route Army of the (GMD) National Revolutionary Army.¹³⁶

Finally, on September 23, the Guomindang published the declaration which Zhou had submitted two months before, and the Generalissimo himself announced that, in the national interest, the united front was being revived.¹³⁷

Chiang's reluctance to cut a deal was understandable. For ten years, he had succeeded in keeping the communists in the wilderness, on the margins of Chinese political life. Now they were back on centre stage, a legal party with a national constituency, a national platform, and a recognised national role. For Mao, the highroad to power was open. As he told a bemused Kakuei Tanaka, Japan's Prime Minister several decades later, it had been opened by the Japanese.

I For a discussion of the claims of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday that the battle never occurred, see the afterword of this book, Mao: Western Judgements.

II In October 1934, to escape nationalist encirclement, Ren Bishi abandoned the base area he had set up in eastern Hunan and marched west to join He Long in the Hubei–Hunan–Sichuan–Guizhou border region. The following year they began their own Long March, which led them further into the Tibetan borderlands than Mao's route, allowing them to reach Shaanxi with far fewer casualties than the First Army. Of the three forces which eventually reached the north-west, He's forces took the longest route. Zhang Guotao's Fourth Army, which was already in northern Sichuan in 1935, took the shortest.